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• Editor's Notes

  Éva Mathey

  Views:

  108

  Editor's Notes

• “The Third Image”: Ekphrasis and Memory in Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell

  Paulina Ambroży

  Views:

  59

  In his collection of prose-poems, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell, Charles Simic evokes the American artist’s aesthetic practice as a form of meditation on the heterosemiotic nature of the artistic imagination. Cornell’s art, often described as “visual poetry,” becomes for Simic a pretext for exploring the multimodal and interconnected spaces of the verbal and the visual. Simic describes his creative rereading of Cornell’s work as “the third image” in which art historical discourse and ekphrasis are reinvented and transformed into a new poetic rhythm. The poet’s engagement with Cornell is also of an intensely personal character: the encounter with the artist’s work enables Simic to revisit his own past, that is, that of a lonely Manhattan flaneur whose imagination is haunted by traumatic childhood memories from war-torn Serbia. With the aid of Jacques Lacan’s concepts of the gaze and the screen, the article examines the ways in which Simic’s texts and visual intertexts probe generic boundaries and discursive identifications, showcasing the significance, function, and creative value of cross-influence between heterogeneous discourses and media. As shown, Simic’s concept of “the third image,” which finds its inspiration in the tension between containment and freedom in Cornell’s shadow boxes, offers readers a rich and personal insight into the complex interplay between discursivity, visuality, figurality, as well as personal and collective memory. (PA)

• The Birth of Imperial Race Medicine

  Eszter Ureczky

  Views:

  96

  Book 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.

• “Close your eyes. Picture a character. . .”: A Route to Imagery and Creativity

  Lenke Németh

  Views:

  50

  Book review:

  García-Romero, Anne. The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2016. xiii + 240 pages. ISBN 978-0816531448. Pbk. $24.95.

• After the “Post,” in the Present: New Perspectives on Nationhood

  Judit Szathmári

  Views:

  297

  Review essay:

  Charles, Mark, and Soong-Chan Rah. Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2019. Print.

  Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism. Routledge Advances in American History 8. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2018. Print.

• Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Home Planet: The “Other” in Robert Heinlein’s Juvenile Science Fiction

  C. W. Sullivan III

  Views:

  276

  This essay examines Heinlein's Young Adult (YA) stories—commonly referred to as his “juveniles”—and argues that Heinlein's "Others" are not defined by race, gender, or planet of origin but by their inability to understand and deal with the changes that inter-planetary travel will bring. (CWS)

• The Architecture of the Self

  Zsuzsanna Nagy-Szalóki

  Views:

  50

  Book review:

  Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Narratives: The House as Subject. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. xiii + 246 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-53681-5. Hb. $90.

• Surveil and Let Surveil

  Barnabás Baranyi

  Views:

  51

  Book review:

  Flynn, Susan, and Antonia McKay, eds. Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves. London: Palgrave, 2017. 278 pages. ISBN 9783319490847. Hb. $139.99.

• Editor's Notes

  Éva Mathey

  Views:

  110

  Editor's Notes

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

  József Pap

  Views:

  90

  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)

• "The Very Seeds of Fire”: Chris Lee’s The Map Maker’s Sorrow

  Donald E. Morse

  Views:

  56

  Chris Lee’s The Map Maker’s Sorrow (1999), produced at the Abbey Theatre only six years after Ireland decriminalized suicide, proved prescient in focusing on this national health problem among the young. The very structure of the play mirrors the fragmentation and messy aftermath that suicide almost inevitably produces. The abrupt beginning, where a character that the audience does not know and cannot know kills himself, leaves the audience in a position similar to that of survivors who find a suicide. Drawing on the work of Ludwig Binswanger, Kay Renfield Jamison, and national studies of suicide the essay argues that young Jason’s suicide represents a direct challenge to life understood as an orderly progression from birth to death and as an attempt to deny the very premise of lived life itself. (DEM)

• Ali Smith’s How to be Both and the Nachleben of Aby Warburg: “Neither here nor there”

  Robert Kusek

  Wojciech Szymański

  Views:

  107

  This paper offers a reading of Ali Smith’s 2014 novel, How to Be Both, in the context of Aby Warburg’s iconological interpretation of the frescoes by Francesco del Cossa in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara. Having reconstructed the story behind the creation, attribution, and reading of the frescoes, the paper argues for recognizing them as a major source of inspiration for Smith’s narrative. Furthermore, the principle of “bothness” is recognized as the novel’s foremost concern; both formal—pertaining to paratextual, graphic, and typeset solutions employed by the narrative—and thematic. With the help of Warburg’s concept of Nachleben and his proposition of traveling forms and images, How to Be Both is ultimately identified as a novel vitally indebted to Warburg’s theoretical and interpretative model. Last but not least, it testifies to the “after-life” of Warburg’s ideas. (RK, WSZ)

• Utopian Horizons in Hungary

  Joachim Fischer

  Views:

  79

  Book review:

  Czigányik, Zsolt, ed. Utopian Horizons: Ideology, Politics, Literature. Budapest, New York: Central European UP, 2017. viii + 256 pages. ISBN 978-963-386-181-3. Hb. Npr.

• Editor's Notes

  Lenke Németh

  Views:

  41

      

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

  Mária Kurdi

  Views:

  98

  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)

• “No Country for Old Men”: A Poignant Portrayal of Aging and Ageism in Arthur Miller’s Mr. Peters’ Connections

  Ambika Singh

  Views:

  146

  Mr. Peters’ Connections (1998) is often viewed as Arthur Miller’s most experimental late play. Yet, despite its uniqueness and evident dramatic value, scholarly
  commentary usually focuses on its likeness with Pinter and Beckett plays and sometimes on how it is an apt product of an “octogenarian” mind. Although the
  play is also an apropos depiction of the dilemma of aging in ageist America, no scholarly work has analyzed it through the lens of critical gerontology or age studies. Drawing on gerontological studies and research, the essay sheds light on the meaninglessness and disillusionment suffered by elderly adults every day of their lives—the struggles whose apt embodiment we find in Mr. Harry Peters, the central character of Miller’s play. (AS)

• J. M. Coetzee, the Craftsman

  Ottilia Veres

  Views:

  42

  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.

• Critical Wounds, Sutured

  Imre Olivér Horváth

  Views:

  102

  Book review:

  Veprinska, Anna. Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 203 pages. ISBN 978-3-030-34319-4. Hb. €74.89.

• Policing the Boundaries: The “Mission Street Station Scene” in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

  Dániel Panka

  Views:

  144

  The essay focuses on the “Mission Street Station” episode in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). The episode revolves around two central problems: the human/android divide and fake realities. The first part of the paper concentrates on theories of classification and analyses the problems of the Voigt-Kampff test understood as a classificatory apparatus. The second part focuses on the Mission Scene as a fake reality and identifies a potentially problematic race-focused reading. Dick, a prolific essayist and public speaker, expressed his preoccupation with questions that constitute the conceptual core of the scene on several occasions. Therefore, the essay also relies on the author’s nonfiction to discover and establish the importance of the oft-neglected Mission Scene in the novel’s critical reception. (DP)

• Celestial Democracies

  Sándor Kiss

  Views:

  70

  Book review:

  Tamás, Nyirkos. The Tyranny of the Majority. New York: Routledge, 2018. vi + 154 pages. ISBN 978-1-351-21142-0. E-book. $56.20

• 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:

  397

  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)

• The Female Gentleman and the Myth of Englishness in the Detective Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham

  Renáta Zsámba

  Views:

  433

  Golden Age detective fiction by women offers insights into the competing gender ideologies of the 1930s and early 1940s. The female protagonist these novels delineate is called “the female gentleman” by Melissa Schaub, who describes her as the detective’s equal based on her intellectual abilities and independence. Although the female gentleman seems a revolutionary figure as she is forward-looking in gender politics, her strong belief in class hierarchy, her Victorian morals and relationship with the gentleman detective relocate her in the heritage of the English pastoral. This essay focuses on the female gentleman as a bridge figure whose marriage to the detective not only restores him to his masculinity but also portrays the woman embedded in the pastoral idyll of the English landscape. Her decision to accept traditional femininity reinforces the female gentleman’s role in the recreation of the stability and security of pre-war England. (RZs)

• In Memoriam: Sam Shepard

  Donald E. Morse

  Views:

  59

  In Memoriam: Sam Shepard

• Nature (as) Language in the Poetry of Seán Lysaght

  Wit Pietrzak

  Views:

  55

  The article focuses on a selection of poems by the Irish poet Seán Lysaght to demonstrate that in his work, Lysaght looks to explore nature’s intricate design, its pre-human and pre-linguistic layers of significance through investigations of birds, arguing that rather than offering culturally or politically inflected images of wildlife and landscape, as Irish poets from W. B. Yeats through Patrick Kavanagh all the way to Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley have been wont to do, Lysaght sets the vast natural world, which eludes apprehension in language, against the modern world and its obsession with material productivity and pragmatic efficiency. This aspect of Lysaght’s poetry is discussed against the background of Heaney, Yeats, and William Wordsworth, who are shown to share some insights with Lysaght, but from whose influence he strives to steer away.  (WP)

• Beckett’s Politics of Space

  Shaun Richards

  Views:

  103

  Book review:

  Little, James. Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. 235 pages. ISBN 978-1-3501-123-2. Hb. $115.