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“Outsider”: The Influence of Migration Experience on the Life and Work of Hungarian-Canadian Songwriter B.B. Gábor
Views:362This paper examines the life and work of Gábor Hegedűs, whose family escaped from the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, and settled in Toronto, Canada. Under the stage name B.B. Gábor, he wrote and released several successful songs and albums, many of which drew on his experience as a refugee, and were broadcast around the world, as well as in Canada. His most popular songs were satiric commentaries on culture and politics, comparing life in the USSR and in Canada. These were the themes that drew the most attention from audiences and critics, and earned them international airplay, most notably on Radio Free Europe. His difficulties coping with life as a refugee and as an immigrant to Canada resulted in personal tragedy, yet his ability to express these difficulties in his songs left a lasting legacy in both Canada and his native Hungary. (VK; KK; NBN)
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Women in Contemporary Irish Theatre: Widening the Space
Views:113Book review:
Haughton, Miriam, and Mária Kurdi, eds. Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2015. 251 pages. ISBN 978-1-909325-75-3. Pbk. €20.
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“Holding so Much of the Mind of Ireland” and Writing Modernist Drama: Celebratory Thoughts on the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of John Millington Synge
Views:288Celebratory Thoughts on the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of John Millington Synge
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Shaping Destinies: Women and the Hungarian Refugee Movement to Canada (1956–1958)
Views:296By December 1958, Canada had admitted almost 38,000 Hungarian refugees, forced to flee their country after Soviet forces crushed the October 1956 uprising. A rich historiography has examined this migration from a range of perspectives, but an analysis of women’s actions and attitudes represents an uncharted approach. Archival research reveals that Canadian women expressed opinions and took on a variety of roles related to the refugee movement. Examining those opinions and roles not only offers a novel perspective on Canada’s response to the refugee crisis, but it also provides insights into the evolving roles of women in Canadian society. The weight of intersectionality often muted the voices of women of Hungarian origin, both Canadians and refugees. Yet, refugee women were accorded a symbolic power that played its own role in the movement, and they found ways to exercise their agency to achieve their desired admission and settlement outcomes. (ST)
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The “Latina Madwoman” at the Crossroads of Harm and Hope
Views:99Book review:
Halperin, Laura. Intersections of Harm: Narratives of Latina Deviance and Defiance. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2015. xii + 238 pages. ISBN 978-0-8135-7036-5. Pbk. $29.95.
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Reading in the Dark, Sleeping with the Lights On: Uses and Abuses of Horror in Children’s Literature
Views:299Book review:
McCort, Jessica R., ed. Reading in the Dark. Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. pp. 256. ISBN 978-1496806444. Hb. $56.99.
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Sexual Violence Tells Stories
Views:218Book review:
Taylor, Dianna. Sexual Violence and Humiliation: A Foucauldian-Feminist Perspective. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. 128 pages. ISBN 9781138581432. Pbk. N.p.
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The Birth of Imperial Race Medicine
Views:168Book review:
Seth, Suman. Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. Cambridge: CUP, 2018. 324 pages. ISBN 978-1-108-41830-0. Pbk. £29.99.
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Dramaturgical Roles of Present and Past Teenage Characters in Post-Agreement Northern Irish Drama
Views:259The 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)
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Chimeric Visions: Posthuman Somaesthetics and Interspecies Communication in Contemporary Humanimal Body Art Performances
Views:496Body 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)
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Alternative Readings of J. M. Synge’s Drama Predicated on Archival Material
Views:142Book review:
Collins, Christopher. Theatre and Residual Culture: J. M. Synge and Pre-Christian Ireland. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 301 pages. Hb. ISBN 978-1-349-94871-0. €106.99.
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Blending Beauty and the Beast: Metamorphic Body Regimes of a Somatic Society
Views:349Book review:
Steinhoff, Heike. Transforming Bodies: Makeovers and Monstrosities in American Culture. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. ix + 267 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-49378-1. Hb. €85.59.
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Anglo-Saxon and Arab Encounters
Views:190Book review:
Stampfl, Tanja. A Century of Encounters: Writing the Other in Arab North Africa. New York: Routledge, 2019. 197 pages. ISBN 9781138363106. Pbk. $155.
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The Murdochian Moral Vision and the Art of Contemporary Cinema
Views:132Book review:
Bolton, Lucy. Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019. 228 pages. ISBN 9781474416399. Pbk. £75.00.
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Emotional Urban Spaces: Atmosphere, Fascination, and Phantasmagoria in Sunetra Gupta’s The Glassblower’s Breath (1993)
Views:124Investigating the literary representation of urban spaces and identities the essay untangles the complex psychological and emotional relationship between the heroine and her beloved and hated cities in Sunetra Gupta’s The Glassblower’s Breath (1993). Drawing on Gernot Böhme’s (1993) theory of the atmospheric qualities of space, Steve Pile’s psychogeographical approach to reading cities, Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria, and various interpretations of fascination, it explores the creation of atmospheres in the novel and the role of fascination in the perception of London and Gupta’s female protagonist as phantasmagorias. I argue that—as urban imaginaries—the emotional fabric and atmosphere of the cities portrayed are as much created by their spaces and places, their inhabitants and visitors, as they are manifested and formulated in emotional states of being, whether real or fictional, phantasmagoric or imaginary. (ÉP)
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Memorials of the Irish West: John McHugh, Paul Durcan, and Harry Clifton
Views:158The article examines John McHugh’s sculpture (1950s Boat, 2009), Paul Durcan’s poem which it inspired “1950’s Boat (after John McHugh)” (2009)—both focusing on the Achill island—and another poem referring to the Blaskets, Harry Clifton’s “The Year of the Yellow Meal” (2012), trying to answer the question in what respect they stay close to realism and in what they approach experimentation. McHugh’s sculpture takes on an experimental form made of fragments of real stories, Durcan’s poem begins with this experimental sculpture and drifts towards realistic details but triggers experimental speculations, while Clifton’s poem mediates the Blasket biography through a style akin to magical realism in prose. All three palimpsestic works investigate issues of parochialism and marginalization faced with migration and cosmopolitanism, touch on the ethics (or rather, the lack) of gender policy and globalization, and by doing so, enquire about the Irish West’s disappearing culture.
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Down to Earth, Up for Democracy
Views:236Book review:
Gregory, Elizabeth. Apparition of Splendor: Marianne Moore Performing Democracy through Celebrity, 1952–1970. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2021. 264 pages. ISBN 9781644531969. Hb. $34.95.
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Experimental Dramaturgy, Intellectual and Art-related Subjects in Irish Theatre
Views:128Book review:
Woodward, Guy, ed. Across the Boundaries: Talking about Thomas Kilroy. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2014. 112 pages. ISBN 978-1-909325-51-7. Pbk. €25.00
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The Fabulous Adventures of Alice with Fashion, Science, and Pinocchio
Views:511The three scholarly monographs published between 2017 and 2020 by Laura White, Laura Tosi and Peter Hunt, and Kiera Vaclavik, are recent contributions to Lewis Carroll scholarship. They belong to what Michael Heyman calls “the sense school” of nonsense literary criticism in so far as they attribute a specific agenda, a systematic structure, a decipherable message, and a homogenised reading to the Alice tales (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass). Each re-explores a well-known children’s classic from fresh new perspectives by relying on interdisciplinary methodologies, mingling the literary historical approach with insights of critical fashion studies, evolutionary biology, and comparative cross-cultural analysis (translation studies), respectively. Like adaptations, these critical theoretical interpretations of the Alice books are in a constant dialogue with one another within a Genettian transtextual network of multimodal narratives.
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Crime Fiction Reloaded
Views:112Book review:
Edwards, Martin. The Golden Age of Murder. London: Harper Collins, 2015. 528 pages. ISBN 0008105960. Hb. £16.59.
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Reframing the New Mestiza: Identity Politics and Social Commitment in Chicana Art
Views:301This article offers an interdisciplinary approach to some of the most iconic pieces of Chicana Art using Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Parallels between the textual and visual representations of identity politics and social commitment in Chicana feminist art and Anzaldúa’s work, respectively, will be established through the concepts of “Borderlands” and “New Mestiza” as interpretation keys. The article begins by addressing representations of geographical borders as a unifying theme; then, it establishes a correlation between the concepts “Borderlands” and “New Mestiza,” and the reformulation of female identity represented in Chicana visual art. Finally, it will explore the purpose of the social commitment of the author/artists and how it is represented in their literary/artistic productions. The visual art of the selected Chicana visual artists, including Ester Hernández, Yolanda M. López, Alma López, Santa Barraza, and Judith Baca, accurately portray the experience of Chicana women theorized in Borderlands/La Frontera. (PAL)
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From Heroic Soldiers to Geometric Forms and Suffering Wrecks: The Transformation of the Male Body in the Art of World War I
Views:141Mechanized and trench warfare, which dominated World War I representations and made millions of soldiers suffer, challenged the rigid gender ideals and hierarchies in the Europe of the time. As the destruction of the traditional manly ideal ran parallel with the destruction of male bodies in the war, the hegemony of traditional representational modes of soldiers was also gradually replaced by more innovative strategies both in poetry and painting. The essay analyzes such works of art with a focus on the crisis of masculinity, manifested quite tangibly in new strategies and representations of visual art. Similarly to soldiers’ written reminiscences, works of visual art depict a sense of emasculation, powerlessness, physical and mental breakdown, testifying that the masculine ideal, which was in large part defined by the chivalric heroic tradition, became anachronistic and unattainable. The figure of the physically or mentally disabled, disempowered soldier as a new phenomenon gained a central position during and after World War I, questioning the validity of the old patriarchal order. Previously marginalized masculinities, for example, the masculinity of homosexual men, and traits previously associated exclusively with femininity such as sensitivity, found their way to open up the borders and shape the Modernist discourse of European masculinity, changing it once and for all. (EEB)
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Levels of Discomfort: Paul Beatty’s The Sellout as the First American Novel to Win the Man Booker Prize
Views:246The essay explores the context in which the first American novel won the British Booker Prize. Paul Beatty’s novel was hailed as a comic masterpiece. The essay discusses how comedy works in this novel, how the book fits the profile of the Man Booker Prize, and how the work reads against the tradition of the English comic novel. The Sellout (2015) shows elements of standup comedy, delivered in a deadpan voice, yet referencing the latest social and intellectual theories. The topic is the silent erasure of a predominantly black community in the greater Los Angeles area, and its politically incorrect resuscitation. The novel creates an eerie feeling of being set in a vast emptiness, yet indicates a recognizable location in the congested Los Angeles area, moving between desperate satire and magic realism, with an intellectual freedom created by the level acceptance and unflinching description of the cognitive dissonances of the world depicted.
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Iterations of Silence
Views:272Book 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.