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• 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)

• Nature, the Picturesque and the Sublime in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Travel Narratives

  Antonella Braida

  Views:

  235

  The article explores Mary Shelley’s approach to the sublime and the picturesque in her two travel narratives, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour and Rambles in Germany and Italy. These two accounts of her travels through France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany reveal her debt to a variety of contemporary sources aimed at exploring the nature of a sublime or picturesque experience. The analysis illustrates the complexity of Mary Shelley’s approach: while moving beyond the “egotistical sublime” typified by some key passages from William Wordsworth’s Prelude, her travel narratives reveal a variety of approaches to nature and the landscape, aimed at bridging present and past, personal experience and recent historical events.  Thus, while in History, the experience of the landscape offers a way out of the suffering caused by the Napoleonic Wars, in Rambles, Mary Shelley turns to poetry and painting, this way transforming the eighteenth-century aesthetic appreciation of landscape based on the pictorial categories of the sublime and the beautiful, and embracing a modern, cultivated sensibility nourished by guidebooks and art history manuals.  (AB)

   

• Vonnegut Reinvented

  Rita Nandori

  Views:

  123

  Book review:

  McInnis, Gilbert. Kurt Vonnegut, Myth and Science in the Postmodern World. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2020. 184 pages. ISBN 978-1-4331-7435-3. Hb. CAD 42.08.

• What Makes the Genre of Lyric Compelling?

  Katalin Pálinkás

  Views:

  61

  Book review:

  Culler, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015. x + 391 pages. ISBN 978-0-674-74426-4. Hb. $41.

• 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)

• Irish Native Autobiography: Tomás O’Crohan’s The Islandman

  Joanna Jarząb-Napierała

  Views:

  66

  The paper addresses Tomás O’Crohan’s The Islandman (1929) as a representative of Irish native autobiography. The genre, it is argued, best defines the specificity of O’Crohan’s work, since it well delineates the complexity of its creation process involving an author, an editor, and a translator. Furthermore, the reading of The Islandman as Irish native autobiography sheds a new light on the text as capturing Walter Benjamin’s media shift from oral to written tradition observable at the beginning of the twentieth century. Tomás O’Crohan manages to converge the art of storytelling with a new genre of autobiography thanks to many foreign influences, especially Maxim Gorky’s life-narratives. Consequently, The Islandman, contrary to the traditional understanding of the work as purely Irish, thus free of any outside leverage, emerges as a cosmopolitan text which, similarly to other European literary works of the time, successfully adapts the oral heritage to a new form of autobiography.  

• “What stood in the Post Office / With Pearse and Connolly?”: Heroism, Timeliness, and Timelessness in Some of Yeats’s Plays

  Edit Bődy

  Views:

  308

  The essay discusses a frequently recurring type of hero found in William Butler Yeats’s plays, including the last one, The Death of Cuchulain (1939). This hero-figure occurs quite early in Yeats’s oeuvre: The Green Helmet (1910), for example, already focuses on the definition of hero and heroism and different versions of this hero type also occur in other plays, such as The King’s Threshold (1904) and The Player Queen (1922). In dramas, where this motif plays an important role, his source is in part Nietzsche’s tragic hero completed with other features. As early as The Green Helmet, Yeats defines what makes a hero: apart from bravery, also gaiety, a kind of ecstasy is needed. Cuchulain’s goal to become the hero, smiling even in the shadow of death, is achieved in Yeats’s last play, and the Cuchulain-image emerging from the Anima Mundi binds past and present. (EB)

• 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:

  84

  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)