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• The Written Self in the Age of Reason

  Krisztina Kaló

  Views:

  162

  Book review:

  Baker, John, Marion Leclair, and Allan Ingram, eds. Writing and Constructing the Self in Great Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2019. xiii + 288 pages. ISBN 978-1-5261-2336-7. Hb. £80.00.

• The Hunger Games Trilogy as a Text for Education

  Ildikó Limpár

  Views:

  272

      

• Honoring Professor Mária Kurdi

  Lívia Szélpál

  Views:

  214

  Book review:

  Csikai, Zsuzsa, and Rouse, Andrew C., eds. Critical Essays in Honour of Mária Kurdi. Tanulmányok Kurdi Mária tiszteletére. Martonfa: SPECHEL e-editions, 2017. 243 pages. ISBN 978-963-12-9291-6. E-book. 747 HUF.

• The Doctor’s Anatomy: The Androgynous Performance of Gender and (Neo-)Victorian Sexual Politics in Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry

  Eszter Ureczky

  Views:

  203

  Patricia Duncker’s 1999 neo-Victorian novel is a fictional biography of the legendary Victorian military surgeon, James Miranda Barry, rumored to be a hermaphrodite. Duncker’s postmodern feminist fiction recreates the medical discourse, as well as the body and sexual politics of the Victorian era by writing these nineteenth-century somatic ideologies onto the ambiguously gendered body of Barry. Interrogating the poetic and political strategies of creating medicine as a masculinized profession from a cultural studies point of view, the essay argues that Duncker’s novel can be contextualized within a recent tendency in contemporary British fiction that could be hypothesized as medico-historical metafiction, indirectly addressing twenty-first-century biopolitical questions about the cultural inscription of gender roles and bodily normality by (re)telling a Victorian narrative. These questions are examined from three aspects: the neo-Victorian historical novel as a feminist genre, the androgyne as a late-Victorian subtype of the grotesque freak, and nineteenth-century female identities as the reservoir of disempowering pseudo-choices.  (EU)

• The Murdochian Moral Vision and the Art of Contemporary Cinema

  Dávid Szőke

  Views:

  154

  Book review:

  Bolton, Lucy. Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019. 228 pages. ISBN 9781474416399. Pbk. £75.00.

• “No country, this, for old men”: A View of the Aging Artist through Intertexts in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

  Angelika Reichmann

  Views:

  388

  J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) features two emblematic modernist representations of the aging artist, William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” and T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which have not been given enough critical attention. Focusing on the Romantic notions underlying David Lurie’s worldview, current critical discourse, with the notable exception of Mike Marais, suggests that Lurie’s career follows the patterns of the Bildungsroman. Taking its cue from Marais, the present intertextual reading discusses Lurie’s “anti-Bildungsroman” in the light of the novel’s non-Romantic intertexts. It argues that they highlight, on the one hand, Lurie’s chiastic thought-processes, which are likely to bracket any progress or development. On the other hand, they reveal his (self)-ageism and the entrenched ageism of the literary tradition he relies on. Those, in turn, also give a pessimistic prognosis of his discovering a protective discourse or worldview which would allow him—and post-apartheid South Africa—to “age gracefully.” Likewise, they manifest yet another aspect of the novel’s unreliable narration, which—unlike Lurie’s sexism and racism—is rooted in so universal fears that, instead of alienating readers from his perspective, it makes his bleak  vision of post-apartheid South Africa even more compelling. (AR)

• Coming of Age and Urban Landscapes in Edward P. Jones’s “Spanish in the Morning” and “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons”

  Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka

  Views:

  533

  This analysis of “Spanish in the Morning” (2009) and “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” (1992) by Edward P. Jones offers a preliminary (re-)interpretation of the urban imaginary in Jones’s oeuvre by focusing on how urban places interact with the protagonists’ coming-of-age process. Detailed descriptions of routes, references to exact locations in the city, spatial relations, and changes of place run through both stories. Relying on trauma theory and Jon Anderson’s conceptualization of places, the essay argues that the geographical landscape is in the forefront in these narratives, but not as a means of emphasizing, matching, or complementing the emotional one, but rather to hide it from view. The protagonists’ memories and identities gain expression in spatial terms, but foregrounding the city is posited as a hindrance to their coming-of-age process insofar as it prevents them from accepting the reality of their loss and from facing and coping with trauma. (ZsLM)

• Migrants and Disaster Subcultures in the Late Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Reading of Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels

  Éva Federmayer

  Views:

  515

  Affected by a shocking concatenation of ecological, economic, and political disasters, black, white, and multiracial characters in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) seek to cope with apparently insurmountable difficulties. These Afrofuturist Parable novels render a disintegrating US society in the 2020s-2090s, which is torn by internal and external chaos: it shows visible signs of pandemonium involving the crisis of individual, communal, and ecological survival. This ecocritical reading seeks to explore how Butler’s novels make up the fictional tapestry of an evolving human risk narrative whose anthropogenic effects on the planet might threaten an “ecological holocaust” (Charles Brown) unless fundamental green changes spur radically alternative modes of thinking and living. Throughout this paper, I am interested in how Butler’s texts address and construct the interaction of the human and the non-human world to create a storyworld in which distinct characters operate not only according to the logic of the narrative in their local places and (semi)private/communal spaces, but also as distinct configurations of the Anthropocene, that is, as agents of a larger story of humans. (EF)

• Predatory Neo-Victorian Novels

  Krisztina Jilling

  Views:

  158

  Book review:

  Ho, Tammy Lai-Ming. Neo-Victorian Cannibalism: A Theory of Contemporary Adaptations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 150 pages. ISBN 978-3-030-02558-8. Hb. €58.84.

• Stephen Daldry’s The Reader in Chekhov’s Mirror

  Angelika Reichmann

  Views:

  261

  This essay is devoted to a discussion of Stephen Daldry and David Hare’s film adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s critically acclaimed but controversial Holocaust novel, The Reader (1995; 2008), through one of the film’s many intertexts—Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Little Dog” (1899). The scenes related to this short story are crucial to the understanding of Daldry and Hare’s filmic reinterpretation of Schlink’s novel, since they form the mise en abyme of Hanna and Michael’s ambiguous story and stalled self-reflection. The parallels and contrasts of Chekhov’s and the filmmakers’ narratives call viewers’ attention to the ambivalences inherent in the main characters’ representation. Inspired by a passing reference to Chekhov in Schlink’s novel, the scenes alluding to “The Lady with the Little Dog” provide a metanarrative in The Reader, and, as such, reflect the adaptors’ heightened sensitivity to the ambivalences and complexities of reflecting the trauma of the Holocaust—not only for “the second generation” of Germans after World War II.  (AR)

• Crime Fiction Reloaded

  Renáta Zsámba

  Views:

  132

  Book review:

  Edwards, Martin. The Golden Age of Murder. London: Harper Collins, 2015. 528 pages. ISBN 0008105960. Hb. £16.59.

• Unpacked Cases: Migratory Aesthetics as a Mode of Participation and Agency

  Gabriella Moise

  Views:

  345

  The manifold notion of migratory aesthetics serves as the critical grounding for this analysis focusing on Mohamad Hafez’s and Ahmed Badr’s multimedia installation, UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage (2017-2020), a socially and politically committed artistic project. Migratory aesthetics as a conceptual frame can encompass artifacts reflecting upon the experience of forced migration, displacement, and uprootedness. However, the concept also proposes the engendering of a platform for the confluence of art and the political. In accordance with the theories of Mieke Bal, Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, and Jacques Rancière, “political” is meant to signify a space of generative conflict, an active, communal, participatory encounter between sentient bodies and artworks. UNPACKED confronts the audience on many levels: physically, by leaving them in limbo, suspended between the inside and the outside, the private and the public, safety and threat; conceptually (owing to the phenomenal, embodied experience of the viewers), by provoking a sense of dislocation and homelessness, resulting in the potential for identification with the status of being a refugee, a migrant, and an asylum seeker. UNPACKED encapsulates, both spatially and temporally, the invisible and silenced trauma of forced migration, eventually effectuating collective understanding in the constitutive political space of art. (GM)

• “Life Is a Terminal Illness”: The War against Time and Aging in David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks

  Noémi Albert

  Views:

  254

  David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) centers on Holly Sykes, the main character whom the novel follows from her youth into old age, thus witnessing the major events of a lifetime through her. This recounting serves as the traditional plotline that is intertwined with a fantastic story of two warring organizations of quasiimmortals and a narrative of climate change that ultimately leads to “Endarkenment,” the environmental catastrophe that hits the globe in Holly’s lifetime. These three distinct stories converge on the novel’s protagonist, through whom the reader encounters questions about aging, time, and mortality. The war between two atemporal factions, the Horologists and the Anchorites in particular, sheds light on humankind’s aspirations for immortality and focuses on present society’s conceptualization of old age. The paper analyzes these three distinct but tightly connected issues for a complex view both on the aging process itself and on society’s reaction and relation to it, that is, ageism. Mitchell’s novel—fantastic and realistic at the same time—becomes an intricate statement about aging, one of the most pressing issues facing humankind. (NA)

• Dramaturgical Roles of Present and Past Teenage Characters in Post-Agreement Northern Irish Drama

  Mária Kurdi

  Views:

  305

  The Good Friday Agreement (1998) has set in motion significant changes in Northern Ireland, generating new conditions which, however, also brought numerous problems to the surface on various levels of society. Sociologists have called attention to how intensely the persistent afterlife of sectarian hostilities affect especially teenagers who are often unable to see their goals clearly. Several contemporary Northern Irish playwrights have relied on young characters to pinpoint timely and pressing social and cultural issues as well as to throw light on the precarity of the post-Troubles environment. This essay discusses three plays from different decades of the post-Agreement period: Gary Mitchell’s Trust (1999), Lucy Caldwell’s Leaves (2007), and Owen McCafferty’s Quietly (2012). Their respective dramaturgies showcase the long-lasting influence of the historical burden of the Northern Irish conflict on young peoples’ subjectivities as well as demonstrate how middle-aged characters are still haunted by memories of the psychic wounds they suffered during the most formative years of their lives. Through their underage protagonists, each playwright suggests that members of this generation might not be able to further strengthen the peace they have formally inherited. (MK)

• The Art of Erasure: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Olympias

  Réka M. Cristian

  Views:

  398

  This essay discusses the visual shift of race and gender representation in a selection of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings. The Brooklyn graffiti artist, who was known for elevating the street energy of vernacular inscriptions into high art, reinterpreted Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) in Three-Quarters of Olympia Minus the Servant (1982) by erasing racial difference and challenging gender stereotypes in a work devoid of gender markers. In Untitled (Maid from Olympia) (1982), another version of the modernist painting, Basquiat places the figure of the black servant, formerly a colonized subject, in the center of the work; as a result, the servant “talks back” in a visual narrative functioning as a critique of colonization. Both paintings thus recast and reinterpret Manet’s Olympia and her world in a contemporary signification of race and gender by emphasis, or lack thereof, of such markers. (RMC)

• The Petrified Men and the Scarecrow: Substance, Body, and Self-image in Seamus Heaney’s Bog Poems

  József Pap

  Views:

  196

  Seamus Heaney’s poetry was engaged with violence for decades. His artistic exploration of land and fossils revolved around the same questions: to what extent can a human being move himself away from an inherent “tribalism”? To what extent is identity inherited through history and what rights, responsibilities come with it? These questions arose in the author's oeuvre when the horrors of civil war reached their peak in Northern Ireland. The issues of shared community not only played a significant role in the development of self-identification, they also meant the survival of the sectarian conflict. Starting with the first bog-poems, Heaney was keen on producing a mythology to serve identity, and sometimes allowed his political opinion to filter through the images of Stone Age remains from the bog. For scientists, the investigation of archeological finds means relying on methods such as the necessary carbon analysis and careful identification of evidence, as to who these bodies were, when they lived, what characterized their daily routines, and the times they lived in. The same findings, however, had a different impact on Heaney. He used the metaphor of the land of these ancient bodies, and of history, to engage with the question of identity, but criticism made him reconsider what position he should take on the morality of the given past society. At the same time the poet, who voluntarily shared common roots with these long-forgotten forbears, was the one who started deconstructing their moral heritage in the works written towards the end of his poetic oeuvre. In contrast to earlier poems on bog-bodies, “Tollund” from the 1996 collection, The Spirit Level, and “Tollund Man in Springtime” from 2006, reflect a forward-looking attitude in which Heaney left behind an apologist viewpoint for sectarian violence. (JP)

• In Memoriam Tom Murphy (1935-2018)

  Csilla Bertha

  Views:

  172

      

• Cultural Visions and Constitutional Reforms in Canada in the 1980s and 90s

  Gabriella T. Espák

  Views:

  163

  On the occasion of the 150^th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, this essay surveys the various visions of society Canada has lived through until recently. Monocultural, bicultural and multicultural models of political identity alternated to clash over the constitution, thereby making it impossible for Aboriginal peoples and the Québécois to deliver nationalist arguments through the wall of liberal egalitarianism. The failure of the Meech Lake Accord (1987) pushed the country towards a federal and identity crisis inasmuch as it failed to reconcile the interests of national minorities with the interest of the nation as a whole within one legal framework. Continuing clashes over the constitution, especially in the Charlottetown Accord (1992), show that inherent cleavages in the body politic have survived, so multiculturalism has only been a partial solution to a population management problem. (GTE)

• Dissolving Boundaries in the Anthropocene

  Zsolt Tóth

  Views:

  158

  Book review:

  Kérchy, Anna, ed. Interspecies Dialogues in Postmillenial Filmic Fantasies, special issue of AMERICANA E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary. 13.2 (2017)

  Kérchy, Anna, ed. Posthumanism in Fantastic Fiction. AMERICANA eBooks, 2018. 237 pages. ISBN 978-615-5423-46-8. EPUB. Open Access.

• Parkinson’s Law and an Ironic Rhetoric of Management

  Attila Sebestyén

  Views:

  332

  Cyril Northcote Parkinson, British historian, fiction writer, and, so to say, management guru, in Parkinson’s Law created his own successful way of critiquing organizational bureaucratization. Parkinson’s work falls under the Burkean category of “literature for use,” in which affectivity becomes guaranteed by the peculiarity of irony. As Wayne C. Booth suggested, even in the case of “stable irony” there may often be some possibility of further considerations (that is, the factor of uncertainty), despite all the efforts to rhetorically control this type of irony. Booth, however, also noted that a paradoxical situation may arise in which “unstable” irony, intended to be open-ended, becomes capable of creating possibilities for referential reading and practical application. Thus, Parkinson’s Law provides the duality of entertainment through its satire and the seriousness of its management thoughts (for instance, the relationship of work and time, work and headcount, workforce selection methods, and the extension of committees or departments). These two aspects, constantly intermingling, are examined through the rhetoric of irony working in Parkinson’s Law and the practical influences it may exert. (AS)

• J. M. Coetzee, the Craftsman

  Ottilia Veres

  Views:

  108

  Book review:

  Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-to-Face with Time. New York: Viking, 2015. xxiii + 248 pages. ISBN 978-0-525-42961-6. Pbk. $27.95.

• Chimeric Visions: Posthuman Somaesthetics and Interspecies Communication in Contemporary Humanimal Body Art Performances

  Anna Kérchy

  Views:

  527

  Body art performances experiment in provocative, transgressive ways with the human body that becomes, simultaneously, an instrument, a medium, an agent, and an end product of artistic creation. They invite calculated corporeal reactions from audiences in a multitude of affectively, perceptually, and politically engaging ways. A brief overview is given of the evolution of body art from its roots in avant-garde performance arts to current trends of carnal art to shed light on the changing cultural-historical interpretation of human embodiment. It reveals how body art’s growing dissatisfaction with anthropocentrism entails an inevitable move toward humanimal poetics and politics. The shift of focal point from humanoid embodiment to interspecies relationalities and posthuman enworldedness marks a major paradigm shift of body art. Mapping the aesthetic manifestations, ethical stakes, and corporeal experience of this shift—that extends the notion of subjectivity beyond the human species—is the main aim of the essay. (AK)

• Normative Senses of Spaces, Radical Places of Genders

  Andrea Tóth

  Views:

  158

  Book review:

  Kovács, Ágnes Zsófia, and László B. Sári, eds. Space, Gender, and the Gaze in Literature and Art. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2017. 232 pages. ISBN 9781443831550. Hb. £52.99.

• Iterations of Silence

  Leila Pintér

  Views:

  314

  Book review:

  Fadem, Maureen E. Ruprecht. Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019. 310 pages. ISBN 978-1-7936-0707-2. E-book. $115.

• Editor's Notes

  Csilla Bertha

  Views:

  114

  Editor's Notes