Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre

Introduction

Magdalena Cieślak, Agnieszka Rasmus — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0100

The Transformative Potential of Trauma in “Waiting for the Barbarians” by J.M. Coetzee

Agnieszka Jagła — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This article analyses the novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) by the South African author J.M. Coetzee from the perspective of the transformative potential of trauma. Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel centred around the conflict between the Empire and the Barbarians, which prompts the active participation of the individual. The trauma in the protagonist’s life becomes the motivator of the dramatic change in his humanist mindset. In my paper, I discuss the manifestations of indirect and direct trauma experience of the protagonist, which transform his attitude towards his personal situation, as well as the situation of “the other.” The resulting perspective is compared to the concepts of posthumanist philosophy outlined by Rosi Braidotti. The article expands the viewpoint on the possibility of reading Coetzee’s novels in the light of posthumanism. Through the analysis of the text, the article creates the interpretative framework linking the author with the fields of trauma theory and posthumanism.

Charles Dickens and Colonial Expansionism ‘Obscured’ in "When We Were Orphans" by Kazuo Ishiguro

Rafał Łyczkowski — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0100

The intertextual associations with Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations in When We Were Orphans seem unobvious. In this paper I will show that Dickensian motifs are nonetheless noticeable in Ishiguro’s novel and, relating to Dickens’s fictionalised biography by Peter Ackroyd, some events from his turbulent life can also be recognised. The concept of “obscurity” of the image that derives from Emanuel Levinas, and which was later elucidated by Homi K. Bhabha, will be employed in my analysis. Ishiguro seems to conceal a true picture of British colonialism, drawing the reader’s attention to Christopher Banks’s futile mission to find his missing parents, remaining myopic to the real evil around him. The enunciation of “the unspoken,” that is to say, the history of colonial power dynamics will be particularly clear while elaborating on the story of Christopher’s mother, Diana Banks. I will also demonstrate that When We Were Orphans accentuates the issue of the binary opposition between the West and the East, which explicitly alludes to Edward Said’s politics of bipolarity.

From a Botched Body without Organs to a Plastic Brain. A Reading of P.K. Dick’s "A Scanner Darkly"

Piotr Płomiński — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0100

This article analyzes the 1977 science-fiction novel A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, and focuses on the split personalities of the main character: Bob/Fred/Bruce. The reading is supplemented by the use of the concepts of Line of Flight and Body without Organs introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia as well as Catherine Malabou’s concept of brain plasticity. The article argues that the progressing deterioration of the protagonist’s mental state caused by drug abuse and social environment may be seen as a representation of a “botched BwO” – a body that has lost its productive potential and cannot be reintegrated into a stable territory. At the same time, I contend that the final chapter of the novel depicts a reparative transformation in which, thanks to brain plasticity, he is integrated into an autopoietic system of his environment.

Teaching about the Discourse of Otherness in "The King of Tars"

Joanna Matyjaszczyk — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0100

The present article is a teaching guide for a class or a series of classes about the discourse of Otherness, as employed in the medieval romance The King of Tars. It proposes an in-class discussion that reveals how the romance tells a story of an encounter with the Other and how it perpetuates the discourse of Otherness while doing that. Various strategies used in the tale to perform Othering are analyzed. These include the presentation of Muslims as a dehumanized outgroup, with its main representative – the Sultan – being portrayed as a beast missing the rational part of the soul; contrasting the said presentation with that of the rational Christian Princess; employing and modifying the motif of monstrous birth to define the Sultan further through his failure as a father and through the absence of what the tale sees as the essence of the human soul; setting the transforming power of the dominant group’s rituals against the ineffective, empty rituals of the out-group; the use of the rhetoric of proximity, i.e. pointing to certain similarities between “us” and “them” only to make the differences even more pronounced. The analysis of these strategies helps to recognize that while the characters within the represented world of the romance other Muslims through their actions, the narrator does the same through the use of the discourse of Otherness. The article is also devised as a review of criticism on the romance in the context of Otherness, so it can be useful as a starting point for those willing to research this matter further.