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• Telling the Untellable: Trauma and Sexuality in Big Little Lies

  Zsófia O. Réti

  Views:

  589

  The problem of sexual violence, including rape, domestic assault, sexual harassment, and molestation has recently become a topical issue both in public discourse and popular culture. The unspoken individual traumas have found their way to the world of TV series, such as HBO’s mini-series Big Little Lies. The essay explores the unique ways in which the television series treats sexuality and personal traumas. It argues that while by no means can it be regarded as a soap opera, Big Little Lies occasionally uses and rewrites the genre-specific codes of this traditionally low-prestige television genre intended for women to alter the representation of individual traumas in popular culture. The use of flashbacks and involuntary repetition as narrative elements along with the retrospective framework of a criminal investigation make the serial form much suited to examine individual traumas. The television series attempts the almost impossible: to speak of the trauma’s unspeakability, and simultaneously it seeks to maintain its high viewership. (ZsOR)

• The Memory of Land in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints

  Katarína Havranová

  Views:

  121

  Chicana playwright Cherríe Moraga attributes healing power to memory, which has an important geographical dimension in her play Heroes and Saints (1994). The play dramatizes the suffering of a community of Mexican Americans in California, whose women and children are affected by toxic poisoning as a consequence of agriculture’s overt reliance on pesticides. Whereas critical discussions have dealt extensively with the representation of the body in the play, this study argues for the recognition that the land and the particular places the individual characters inhabit have a decisive impact on the formation of the body. The memory of the land—the Mexican homeland of the immigrant people and the lands of a transnational Latino imagination—is a transformative force in the play, which impels the community to recognize the need to stand up for their rights.

• 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)

• The "Burden” Or What It Means to Be Black in America Today

  Yesmina Khedhir

  Views:

  89

  Book review:

  Riley, Rochelle, ed. The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2018. 178 pages. ISBN 978-0-8143-4514-6. Hb. Npr.

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

  Noémi Albert

  Views:

  159

  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)

• “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 Murdochian Moral Vision and the Art of Contemporary Cinema

  Dávid Szőke

  Views:

  71

  Book review:

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

• 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)

• Never Letting Go: Ways of (Mis)remembering and Forgetting in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels

  Anna Petneházi

  Views:

  68

  Book review:

  Drąg, Wojciech. Revisiting Loss: Memory, Trauma and Nostalgia in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. 211 pages. ISBN 1-4438-6057-3. Hb. £47.99.

   

• Bridging the Narrative Gap: The Ghost Narrator in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)

  Anna Maria Tomczak

  Views:

  320

  The essay reads Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) in the context of Walter D. Mignolo’s discussion on “border thinking” and “border gnosis” in Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000). Through introducing the narrative voice of Sir Arthur Jennings Marlon James creates a link between past and present, between Caribbean and European tradition of cultures of orality and literacy, and between pre- and post-colonial times, critically engaging in the erasure of thresholds of epistemological location. Specific attention is paid to Sir Arthur’s role as a “duppy” (a ghost or spirit in the religious practice of Obeah) and as a “griot” (an African/Caribbean bard and story-teller) whose function is to narrate and document local histories and guard verbal art traditions of the community. (AMT)

• Nixon, Ford, Kissinger, and the Holy Crown of Hungary in Bilateral Relations

  Tibor Glant

  Views:

  146

  The Holy Crown of Hungary spent thirty-three years in American custody between the end of World War II and its repatriation in January 1978. Open hostility between the US, the leader of the Free World, and Hungary, a Soviet colony in the middle of Europe, prevented any discussion about its return between 1947 and 1970. The normalization of bilateral relations (1969-78) opened up new possibilities, and the Nixon White House considered the return of the Hungarian coronation regalia briefly in 1970-71. Spirited protests by Congressmen and East European immigrants convinced National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and President Nixon that they could lose more by returning the Crown than by keeping it in American custody (in Fort Knox, KY), so the issue was dropped. Yet the press continued to discuss the possibility of its return and the White House had to deny any such plans again and again. As normalization ground to a halt after 1973, Budapest exerted more and more pressure and the matter was on President Ford’s desk one last time in December 1976, right after he had lost the election. Ford accepted the advice of his foreign policy team and “sleeping dogs” were left alone. It was the next president who decided to “face the goulash hitting the fan” and the Holy Crown of Hungary and the assorted regalia were returned by the new Carter administration on January 6, 1978. (TG)

• “Fun, disturbing and ultimately forgettable”? : Notes on the Royal Court Theatre Production of Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen

  Ondřej Pilný

  Views:

  53

  The essay compares the reflections of a translator on the text of Martin McDonagh’s latest play, Hangmen (2015), with the impact of its first production by the Royal Court Theatre in London. It considers the response of multiple reviewers and of the Royal Court and West End audiences and argues that while this may be the first work by McDonagh that features a serious concern—this being the practice of capital punishment and its effect on society—the Royal Court production unduly obscured this aspect of the drama by mostly playing it only for the laughs. (OP)

• From Heroic Soldiers to Geometric Forms and Suffering Wrecks: The Transformation of the Male Body in the Art of World War I

  Eszter Edit Balogh

  Views:

  72

  Mechanized 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)

• Sexual Violence Tells Stories

  Anxhela Filaj

  Views:

  133

  Book review:

  Taylor, Dianna. Sexual Violence and Humiliation: A Foucauldian-Feminist Perspective. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. 128 pages. ISBN 9781138581432. Pbk. N.p.

• Editor's Notes

  Csilla Bertha

  Views:

  41

  Editor's Notes

• The Curious Case of the British Avant-Garde

  Wojciech Drag

  Views:

  55

  Book review:

  Mitchell, Kaye, and Nonia Williams, eds. British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019. 272 pages. ISBN 978147443619 9. Hb. £80.00.

• In Memoriam Tom Murphy (1935-2018)

  Csilla Bertha

  Views:

  67

      

• Fame at Last! : Belated Experimentalist Revisited

  Wojciech Drąg

  Views:

  129

  Book review:

  Jordan, Julia. Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel: Oblique Strategies. Oxford UP, 2020. 256 pages. ISBN 9780198857280. Hb. $80.00.

• The Middle Passage in Black Expressive Culture

  Dorottya Mózes

  Views:

  143

  Book review:

  Wilker, Frank. Cultural Memories of Origin: Trauma, Memory, and Imagery in African American Narratives of the Middle Passage. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017. 302 pages. ISBN 9783825361921. Hb. $49.05.

• Representation of Young People in British Films Set in Coastal Resorts

  Ewa Mazierska

  Views:

  136

  This article examines representations of young people in three recent films set in British seaside resorts: Jellyfish (2018), directed by James Gardner Vs. (2018), directed by Ed Lilly, and Eaten by Lions (2018), directed by Jason Wingard, in light of the fact that in the past few decades resorts have been seen as places from which young people try to escape, rather than go to.  My essay shows how the experience of those who visit the resorts is different from that of those who live there. It considers the production values, characters, stories, and locations of these films, drawing on secondary research on coastal resorts and their cinematic representations, Erving Goffman’s taxonomy of spaces into “front” and “back regions,” and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. The article also links the representation of the resort itself to wider discourses about England, class, and race. (EM)

• Immigrant Memories of Healing: Textual and Pictorial Images in Erika Gottlieb’s Becoming My Mother’s Daughter

  Mária Palla

  Views:

  120

  Erika Gottlieb’s narrative is a transgenerational family memoir, a search for identity, and also the testimony of the protagonist Eva Steinbach, the thinly disguised authorial self, a child survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary, which provides a larger historical perspective for the personal narrative written in Canada. The satisfactory completion of the tasks involved in these three strands of Gottlieb’s life writing depends on how successfully memories can be preserved without allowing them to paralyze the remembering subject. Since these three themes are inseparable from each other, they can only result in self-understanding and healing for the author/protagonist if they evolve together. At the same time, Gottlieb’s narrative is intricately linked to her artwork, which calls for an intermedial discussion of the book to reveal how the graphic images further enhance the protagonist’s struggle to comprehend herself. While the multi-layered text is constructed in a non-linear structure, the sketches and paintings incorporated in it are employed to fulfill various functions. They serve both as illustrations of characters and locations at times, while on other occasions they are made to serve as structural devices. When describing or representing existing artwork, the text also turns into ekphrastic writing at certain points, thus multiplying the interpretative possibilities opened up and the aesthetic impressions created. (MP)

• Levels of Discomfort: Paul Beatty’s The Sellout as the First American Novel to Win the Man Booker Prize

  Judit Friedrich

  Views:

  171

  The 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.

• Crime Fiction Reloaded

  Renáta Zsámba

  Views:

  65

  Book review:

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

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

  Joakim Wrethed

  Views:

  111

  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)

• Introduction

  Ewa Mazierska

  Zsolt Győri

  Views:

  111

  Introduction to the Special Thematic Block: British Seaside Resorts and Their Representation in Literature and Cinema