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• Drink and Alcohol Literature: Two Critical Perspectives

  Wojciech Klepuszewski

  Views:

  423

  The essay discusses two contrasting critical perspectives on the intersection between drink/alcohol and literature, claiming that criticism concerning the literature of the British Isles (English, Scottish, and Irish authors’ work) is generally text-oriented, that is, targets literature per se and the way writers thematize drink, while criticism concentrating on the American literary scene focuses on the alcohol-dependence of writers, and/or the way their alcohol-dependence affects their work, or the way alcoholism is portrayed in literary works. Whereas the criticism on authors in the British Isles emphasizes conviviality as a key trait of the way drink/drinking is represented in literature, studies on American authors often highlight drinking alcohol as a pathology, a physical, mental, and social malfunction. Thus, the former can be labeled drink/drinking literature, and the latter can be framed as what Marcus Grants has dubbed “alcoholism literature.”  (WK)

• Journeying Across Languages, Cultures, and Literatures: The Poetry of Mervyn Morris

  Pavlína Flajšarová

  Views:

  129

  The West Indian poet Mervyn Morris (1937-) is renowned for espousing the importance of a national language in creating national literature as well as for integrating European poetic heritage with Caribbean literary traditions. Through an exploration of Morris’s selected poems, the paper discusses the role language plays in shaping the themes of diasporic writing and of postcolonial identity, and argues that his works show a deep awareness of the fundamental aspects of West Indian and British culture. Since Morris “refuses to be trapped in the excesses of post-modern Romanticism or political propaganda parading as nationalism” (Thompson), the paper also looks at the presentation of eternal values like love and humanity celebrated in his poems. By foregrounding the frequent use of epiphanies in his poetry, Morris conveys human affection in the frame of colonial and postcolonial history. (PF)

• Transgressions and Reterritorializations as Markers of Minor Literature in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick, or Lonesome no More!

  Meryem Mengouchi

  Wassila Hamza Reguig Mouro

  Views:

  185

  Deterritorialization and reterritorialization are transgressive techniques in literature that characterize subversive literature. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest that questions about marginal literature or other forms of peripheral literatures must all be covered within the designation and definition of minor literature, not only if they are written in the language of the mainstream. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick, or Lonesome no More (1976) is a set of deterritorializations and reterritorializations made possible through creative assemblage, a technique that allows a continuous flow of meaning, that is, meaning is not fixed, as language moves from one territory to another, constructing new assemblages and acquiring new meanings. Meaning changes each time a new assemblage is composed. Through the re-construction of family, love, and human relationships, the novel defies the alienating practices of the American society as presented in Vonnegut’s novel. (MM and WHRM)

• John Williams’s Stoner and Literature as Dark Matter in the Age of Educational Managerialism

  Joakim Wrethed

  Views:

  122

  The tension between Bildung and more utility-oriented dimensions of education is nothing new. For instance, Friedrich Nietzsche addressed the issue in a series of lectures despising nineteenth-century tendencies to let education be controlled by external forces. The contemporary literature teacher may feel inclined to endorse some of Nietzsche’s sentiments. What will remain of the subject of literature in the age of massification, learnification, and criterion-referenced teaching in secondary and tertiary education? Through an analysis of certain aspects of John Williams’s Stoner, the article considers a few central questions: why is the devoted literature teacher forced into a hypocritical position, pretending to do a set of stated things (learning outcomes), while actually doing (or wanting to do) something completely different? Is it not precisely what cannot be put into words that is the actual driving force of the study of literature? The article suggests that this Gordian knot cannot be untied and should not be cut, but also that the attempts to untie it are in themselves vitalizing forces that ought not to be neglected within literary studies and teaching. (JW)

• Netflix and the American Prison Film: Depictions of Incarceration and the New Prison Narrative in Ava DuVernay’s 13th (2016)

  Beatrice Melodia Festa

  Views:

  452

  The essay examines the complexities of America’s penal system through the lens of prison films and the recurrent representations of incarceration on screen. Following an introduction about America’s penal system, Mass Incarceration, and the enforcement of systemic racism through the Prison Industrial Complex, the analysis focuses on the images of confinement in movies. An overview of traditional narratives on prison is offered to highlight the main characteristics of the ambiguous and challenging genre of the prison film, while a closer look at one of its contemporary examples, Ava DuVernay’s 13^th (2016), sheds light on how the presence of Netflix and the innovative narrative strategy employed to portray the complexities of confinement represent a new form of prison film—one that abandons a Hollywoodesque approach in favor of a documentaristic strategy, and, through its distribution on Netflix, reaches its target audience. The analysis conclusively demonstrates how Netflix has changed and challenged the way we see prisons on screen, and how, as DuVernay’s docufilm shows, it has posited the tangled question of race so that the viewer can understand the functioning of the modern prison. By way of conclusion, the essay demonstrates that the new prison film, shifting toward distribution on Netflix as a mode of audience registration, clearly manifests a strategy to instruct American public opinion on race and the criminal justice system. (BMF)

• The “Latina Madwoman” at the Crossroads of Harm and Hope

  Babett Rubóczki

  Views:

  55

  Book 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.

• Reading in the Dark, Sleeping with the Lights On: Uses and Abuses of Horror in Children’s Literature

  Anna Kérchy

  Views:

  210

  Book 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.

• The Lucky Leaf Casino: A Retroscape in Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox

  Huseyin Altindis

  Views:

  75

  Representations of the American South and the southern sense of space have been changing rapidly due to transnational effects of colonialism, globalization, and the rise of technologies. Due to such factors, unprecedented numbers of people now travel to more distant and less visited places. One consequence of such changes is that place and spatiality represent multicultural and global perceptions and experiences rather than being uniquely and distinctively local. Market economies exploit the space and create retroscapes to serve the economic aims of various industries. Within this context, drawing on the aesthetics of space, memory, and nostalgia, the paper focuses on the Lucky Leaf Casino in Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox to discuss how the text challenges and problematizes plantation nostalgia and labor exploitation through which power structures continue to restrict, disrupt, and exploit space, people, and history. (HA)

• Chronotopes of the City: Spatial Injustice and Narrative Form in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them

  Babett Rubóczki

  Views:

  360

  Combining Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope and Sarah Dillon’s notion of the palimpsest, the essay highlights the dialogic relationship between narrative time and space in Chicana author Helena María Viramontes’s novel, Their Dogs Came with Them (2007). Set in East Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s—the heyday of urban renewal projects and the rapid spread of freeways—the novel registers the geographical displacement and constrained socio-economic mobility of Mexican Americans whose homes are demolished by the freeway building bulldozers. The spatial form of intersectionality characterizing the architectural structure of the freeways also describes the narrative form of the novel. The non-linear narrative is structured upon multiple intersecting plotlines, each of which portrays the social struggles of a young Chicana woman inhabiting the city. Focusing on the interplay of environmental theme and narrative form, the paper explores the narrative representation of East Los Angeles as a spatially and temporally multilayered landscape that palimpsestously overlays and interconnects the personal memory of the characters and the collective history of Mexican Americans’ socio-political oppression in North America. (BR)

• Slum or Arcadia? Hungary as “Other Space” in Imre by Edward Prime-Stevenson

  Zsolt Bojti

  Views:

  100

  This essay substantiates the reasons why Edward Prime-Stevenson’s novelette, Imre (1906), which is considered to be the first openly gay novel in English with a happy ending, is set in an imaginary Budapest called Szent-Istvánhely. The paper suggests that there is a list of references to Hungary in late-Victorian gay literature that Prime-Stevenson builds upon. Another common element in these works is that the location, more specifically, the city landscape, plays an important role that maps the gay city and reflects on the English slumming culture in the East End. The paper substantiates the claim that Prime-Stevenson’s fictional Budapest functions as a Foucauldian heterotopias, which can juxtapose and reconcile oppositions coming from associations with Western and Eastern cultures, the slum and an Arcadia, respectively. (ZsB)

• Competing Traditions: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Irish Literatures between Realism and Experimentation

  Katarzyna Ojrzyńska

  Wit Pietrzak

  Views:

  104

    

• Beyond the “Raked Gardens”: Female Identity in American Suburban Poetry

  Jiří Flajšar

  Views:

  178

  The article analyzes an overlooked aspect of American suburban poetry—the writing of American women poets who deal with the problem of how to represent female identity. Drawing on the existing criticism of women’s poetry, a comprehensive survey of the suburban poems by American women poets, from the 1940s to the 2000s, is provided. The article documents the various approaches that these poets adopt in order to explore identity while resisting the gender stereotypization in American suburbia. These approaches include either embracing the suburban ideal of domestic conformity or attempting to present women suburbanites who reject the socially prescribed roles forced upon them and develop new identities of their own. (JF)

• What Makes the Olfactif of Victorian Literature?

  Zsolt Bojti

  Views:

  71

  Book review:

  Maxwell, Catherine. Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017. xviii + 361 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-870175-0. Hb. £30.00.

• The Fabulous Adventures of Alice with Fashion, Science, and Pinocchio

  Anna Kérchy

  Views:

  406

  The 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.

• “Literature on the Edge”: Austro-Modernism of the Long War

  Enikő Bollobás

  Views:

  72

  Book review:

  Perloff, Marjorie. Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016. 204 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-05442-1. Hb. $23.98.

• Of Monsters and Migrants: On the Loss of Sanctuaries in Literature as a Parable of Biopolitics in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

  Peter Arnds

  Views:

  153

  To understand the cultural predecessors to the dehumanizing metaphors found in current populist rhetoric, it is beneficial to revisit some of the literary uses of such metaphors in the context of migration, xenophobia, and the notion of sanctuary. By rereading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1830), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in light of these paradigms, the article explores the links between the monster and the city as sanctuary: while Mary Shelley’s novel shows us the classical scenario of the undesirable being banned from human community, Stoker’s vampire breaks into the sanctuary of both city and nation state, reflecting time-worn fears of invasion and contamination by the racial Other. Hugo demonstrates a third common form of undesirability within the sanctuary, calling into mind Foucault’s concept of inclusion within the city/nation state while also being excluded from it. This article bridges between these texts and prominent scenarios in the treatment of migrants today. (PA)

• Sage, Hero, Ironist: Sublimity and Irony in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Lectures on Heroes

  Nataliya Novikova

  Views:

  59

  The paper focuses on the complex interplay between sublimity and irony, explored through a parallel reading of Sartor Resartus and On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History by the Victorian philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle. The essay shows how a common philosophical framework, firmly based on a sublime principle, is affected by the style and structure of the analyzed works: it finds total affirmation in one case (On Heroes), while it undergoes ironic subversion in the other (Sartor Resartus). Carlyle’s transcendental ideal is dramatically at odds with what he identifies as the delusions of language and history, therefore, it requires an unusual agency and extraordinary cognitive powers defined as “heroic” to transform the common individual and ordinary collective being. The “hero” in Sartor Resartus, however, is radically different from those in the lectures On Heroes: the value of his sublime experience is repeatedly questioned through the intervention of an editorial persona and the fragmentation of the text.  (NN)

• Between Addiction and Cultivation: Coleridge’s Modern Turn

  Annalisa Volpone

  Views:

  64

  Book review:

  Timár, Andrea. A Modern Coleridge: Cultivation, Addiction, Habits. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 264 pages. ISBN 9781137531452. Ppk. £55.

• A Train to Castle Von Aux: Patrick deWitt’s Fiction and the Transnational Paradigm

  Krzysztof Majer

  Views:

  121

  While deWitt’s writing enjoys commercial and critical success, it has inspired very little academic scrutiny. This is perhaps due to deWitt’s avoidance of Canadian settings and themes in favor of motifs from American popular culture or European folktales. Just as The Sisters Brothers (2011) relied on deWitt’s ironic use of the Western formula, so Undermajordomo Minor (2015) constitutes a playful attempt at rejuvenating several tired genres. In the story of young Lucy Minor’s acquisition of a dubious post at the eerie Castle Von Aux there are unmistakable elements of the Gothic romance, the fable, and the Bildungsroman, all spiced up with a quirky cinematic aesthetic. Equally strong are the echoes of Walser’s Jakob von Gunten, Kafka’s The Castle, and Bernhard’s Gargoyles, themselves richly interconnected. Through these diverse allusions and a curious blurring of geographical and historical boundaries, deWitt creates transgeneric fiction, which may be understood as transnational in the sense assumed by Kit Dobson or Peter Morgan.

• Multiple Contexts: English and Jewish Aspects of Howard Jacobson’s Novels

  Katalin Szlukovényi

  Views:

  94

  Book review:

  Anténe, Petr. Howard Jacobson’s Novels in the Context of Contemporary British Jewish Literature. Olomouc: Palacký University, 2019. 166 pages. ISBN 978-80-244-5651-5. Pbk. N.p.

• Experiments with Realism in Irish Language Short Stories by Daithí Ó Muirí

  Sorcha de Brún

  Views:

  156

  Relying on Joseph McMinn’s statement that the connection between realist and non-realist fiction is not a hierarchical relationship, this essay maintains that realism in Irish language fiction is, and has always been, an energizing force for experimentation. This is nowhere more evident than in the work of writer Daithí Ó Muirí (1954-), a native English speaker now residing in an Irish speaking area in Ireland. Much of Ó Muirí’s work is experimental due to his use of allegory and fantasy, yet many of the stories remain rooted in the realities of the world, particularly in his representations of masculinities and in works concerning the impact of war, violence, and displacement on men’s lives. The essay examines Ó Muirí’s first three collections, Seacht Lá na Díleann (1998), Cogaí (2002), and Uaigheanna agus Scéalta Eile (2002), in which he explores subjects that are classically realistic: war, death, religion, and relationships between men and women. The essay explores how Ó Muirí’s work often combines realism and magic realism, and shows that Ó Muirí’s fiction provides a fresh if somewhat bleak narrative of 21^st century realism in Irish language prose fiction.

• “. . . one part life and nine parts the other thing”: Painters and the Stage

  Teresa Botelho

  Views:

  87

  Bringing the act of artistic creation to the stage involves a multiplicity of strategies and interrogations that are not easily contained within the boundaries of the “drama of the artist” as understood in its quasi-biographical sense. This is especially true of visual art which cannot be represented by words only but requires a different kind of presence on stage. In many Künstlerdramas the biographical presence tends to impose recognizable limits to the fictionalization exercise, which frequently turns to the individual creator as the center of an inquiry into the problematics of artistry. This paper discusses how two contemporary Künstlerdramas, John Logan’s Red (2009) and John Murrell’s The Far Away Nearby (1996), attempt to reinvent the trope by weaving the biographical record with the performative presence of acts of staged visuality that re-center the act of artistic creation. (TB)

• Novel Approaches to Understanding and Conceptualizing Diaspora

  Éva Pataki

  Views:

  116

  Book review:

  Ilott, Sarah, Ana Cristina Mendes, and Lucinda Newns, eds. New Directions in Diaspora Studies: Cultural and Literary Approaches. London, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018. xxxiii + 165 pages. ISBN 978-1-78660-516-0. Hb. £85.

• An Encore of the Greatest Show on Earth: Victorian Marvels and Monsters Revamped for the Postmillennial Times

  Anna Kérchy

  Views:

  318

  Book review:

  Davies, Helen. Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 239 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-40255-4. Hb. $90.

• From Achilles’s Tent to a San Francisco Restaurant: Imaginations of the Closet in Thom Gunn’s Poetry

  Imre Olivér Horváth

  Views:

  110

  This essay examines Thom Gunn’s key poems, chronologically mapping Ruth E. Fassinger’s model of gay and lesbian identity development onto it. Gunn’s poetry gradually changed in terms of how he addressed his homosexuality: whereas in his early work his sexual orientation was concealed, later it became increasingly visible, to the point of unambiguously referring to himself as “queer” in a poem from the 1980s. The poems discussed in this article—“The Wound” (1954), “The Secret Sharer” (1954), “The Corridor” (1957), “The Monster” (1961), “Bravery” (1967), “Behind the Mirror” (1976), and “Talbot Road” (1982)—address the split self of the speaker accompanied by spatial division. The poems with this leitmotif form a corpus characterized by a gradual change in terms of the rigidity of the division. Identifying the spatial division as the closet and the split self as the closeted subject, the article argues that Gunn’s coming out of the closet is a recurring poetic device deliberately developed throughout his oeuvre, which demonstrates his growth as an artist. (IOH)