Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre
Analyses/Rereadings/Theories (A/R/T Journal) is a peer-reviewed journal that has been created with a view to providing a forum for analyzing and discussing issues of immediate relevance for contemporary literary and cultural studies. The journal espouses the belief that academic criticism should be readily accessible worldwide. In view of this fact, each of the issues will be published online and will be available for download, free of charge. We hope that such a solution will present an exciting opportunity to respond to the contributions, and will enrich our understanding of the problems tackled in the journal.
Charles Dickens and Colonial Expansionism ‘Obscured’ in "When We Were Orphans" by Kazuo Ishiguro
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.
Copyright (c) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Transformative Potential of Trauma in “Waiting for the Barbarians” by J.M. Coetzee
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.
From a Botched Body without Organs to a Plastic Brain. A Reading of P.K. Dick’s "A Scanner Darkly"
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"
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.
Of Monsters, Myths and Marketing: The Case of the Loch Ness Monster
This paper examines the status of the Loch Ness Monster within a diverse body of literature relating to Scotland. Within cryptozoology this creature is considered as a source of investigation, something to be taken seriously as a scientific or quasi-scientific object to be studied and known, particularly in light of its elusive nature. In terms of mythology the creature is bound up with Scottish cultural identifications through references to a rugged wilderness landscape and to iconic, if stereotypical, images of tartanry, bygone castles, and folklore. Both sets of ideas have been used with great effect to generate a diversity of literature: from books and scientific papers that chronicle the sightings and “hunt” for the creature as well the possible case for it being a line of long-surviving plesiosaurs, through to children’s literature that deals with the mythic element that is so often used to appeal to childhood imagination, and on to a plethora of tourist marketing booklets and brochures.
Copyright (c) 2023 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/pl/
Threats or Victims: The Ambiguous Nature of Supernatural Creatures in Andrzej Sapkowski’s and George R. R. Martin’s Fantasy
Many postcolonial readings of fantasy fiction focus on exploring complicated relationships between different fantastic races that inhabit a certain secondary world. However, such studies often overlook interactions of these races with the supernatural animals and beasts that live alongside them. Fantasy narratives like Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher Saga and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire depict fantastic settings where the relationship between the inhabitants of the world and the supernatural creatures is just as important as the interracial relations because it is based on similar principles of interaction between the Familiar and the Other and can be used to characterize them. Therefore, this article will address the following issues: how the supernatural creatures are perceived in their respective secondary worlds; what attitude prevails in this perception; and why it prevails above other reactions.
The Ambiguous Identity of a Dog as a Mongrelized Storyteller in John Berger's King (1999)
The dog named King, the central character and narrator of John Berger’s “King” published in 1999, is the offshoot of many apparently incongruent genre conventions as well as the offspring of the ambivalent prejudice and praise of the species encoded in the English idioms. This presentation aims to overview the contributing elements which gave rise to the Bergerian shift in character-narrator shaping and to discuss the function of such perspective for the novelistic format adopted. The discussion points out the central role of the ambiguity of King as a dog, demonstrating the post-fantastic nature of his characterisation rooted in the conventions of magic realism. The patterns used to shape King, the dog, as one of the community and at the same time the Other are discussed. He is a befriended dog who becomes almost a family member for the beggars and, at the same time, he is the other, different species. He is both one of the homeless and at the same time the independent one, the stranger who sees more because of the distance inscribed into his nature of a rambling dog. Such is also the function of the fantastic in his shaping, as it is sometimes not quite clear that he is just a talking dog, derived from the tradition of animal fable. He might as well be taken as a mentally challenged human being who lost his identity. The merging of perspectives on all levels of the novel contributes to the dialogic quality of the narration in the Bakhtinian sense, to which the central ambiguities inscribed in the shaping of the quasifantastic dog add the quality of uncertainty and polyvalence.
A review of Emma Wilby’s The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Sussex University Press, 2010)
Secularism and Its Discontents: The Moor’s Last Sigh and Riot
The recurrent theme of dropping frontiers in a world which has become increasingly heterogeneous but intolerant is the leitmotif of Sashi Tharoor’s Riot and Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. The figure of the Moor and his hybrid genealogy is central to Rushdie’s vision, as he reconstructs a syncretic, tolerant Moorish Spain and juxtaposes it with Bombay, his haven of pluralism. He celebrates Nehru’s vision of a new Indian nation which, in keeping with the traditions of western modernity, promised to be above religion, clan, and narrow parochial considerations. With the vanishing of such ideals and hopes, as boundaries and religious communalism are getting intensified these diasporic cosmopolitan writers make a case for a boundless world. Their response is a human subjectivity which transcends color, class, narrow parochialism, tribalism and fundamentalism. Secularism is the very base of their humane approach. This essay, therefore, analyzes the theme of secularism and its discontents, particularly in the context of the coexistence of Hindus and Muslims in India, as it runs through Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh and Tharoor’s Riot by exploring the various layers of allegories related to pluralism and the critique of fundamentalism in them. Toward this end, it will focus on the recent debates on Indian secularism by scholars to interrogate the relevance of the European model of secularism which argues for the separation of state and religion.
The Narrator’s Identity and the Pursuit of Trespassing Boundaries in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
The article focuses on the problem of the narrator’s and the author’s identity in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. According to Charles Taylor’s philosophy of subjectivity in order to have an identity we have to know what kind of good we would like to fulfil in our life. Such an orientation to the good (an orientation in moral space) and an endeavour after realizing this main value defines us as ourselves. In the paper it is argued that the pursuit of trespassing boundaries is constitutive to the narrator’s identity in the novel as it is such kind of an aim without which they could not have been themselves. It is also the key to the author’s identity. Through the medium of the stories of her male story-tellers she confronts her own demons, explores the territories of the subconscious beyond the bounds of understanding and depicts her struggle with the limitations she overcame as a woman in a patriarchal society and as a person who invented a new literary genre – science-fiction literature.
Ambiguous Bodies, Biopower and the Ideologies of Science Fiction
Contemporary Hollywood film narrates the fear of monstrous science; attending to the modulations of medicine, capital and the body. The filmic body is employed to illustrate the power of the new biotechnologies to create and sustain life and the new sets of social relations which are a consequence of the marriage of capital and medicine. In the Hollywood film, persons who do not fit the ideal healthy persona have a moral duty to pursue repair and transformation. Constructed as inherently lacking, the unhealthy body becomes a repository for social anxieties about control and vulnerability, vis-à-vis the enormous and exponentially expanding science and technology fields. Hierarchies of embodiment are played out on the Big Screen as imperfect bodies are excluded from public life, power and status and urged to strive for “optimization”. Late modern societies present the possibility of new technologies which have the potential to radicalize bodies. However, these potential modulations are ultimately derived from a set of ideologies around the body and the power of the individual to enact an individualized solution. Contemporary narratives circulate around ownership of capital and the price of “repair.” This marriage of science and capital in popular narratives may be indicative of concerns for our future, as the power to make and repair life seems to rest increasingly in the hands of an elite.
“Reread me backwards”: Deciphering the Past in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day
Set during the midst of the London Blitz, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day revolves around a narrative of espionage, but unlike many novels from the spy genre, it refuses to disclose all of its secrets. Instead, the novel’s dense and complex language, which so effectively expresses the dislocating effects of a city under attack, resists an easy or uncomplicated reading. This article examines the motif of reading within the novel, which manifests when its protagonist, Stella Rodney, learns her lover Robert is a Nazi spy. In her efforts to locate proof of his defection, Stella becomes caught in a recurrent but indeterminable task of rereading past events, a movement which attempts to remember the past but also foregrounds a fundamental inability to ever wholly resolve its enigmas. When Stella fails to read her past for lost clues, she is prevented from viewing the events of her life as a coherent and meaningful narrative. The novel’s difficult language reflects this lack of resolution, refusing to assimilate the events it depicts into a straightforward account. With its wartime setting as a disorienting backdrop, The Heat of the Day undermines the purpose of reading as the discovery of sense and meaning, producing instead only more questions and mysteries.
Shakespeare’s Exceptional Violence: Reading Titus Andronicus with Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben
In this paper I explore the multifaceted relationship between violence, speech and power in the most graphic of Shakespeare’s plays, Titus Andronicus. I take my cue from Hannah Arendt’s reflections on violence as opposed to power, and as something “incapable of speech,” but I read the play through the lens of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of sovereignty as the suspension of the law. I consider the dichotomy speech/muteness as an example not only of the dichotomy power/violence (Arendt) but also of the opposition between bios and zoe, that is the difference between a life worth to be included in the political realm and a life understood as the mere condition of being alive, a condition common to human beings and beasts (according to classical philosophy). In Titus Andronicus, these distinctions are blurred, and zoe becomes fully exposed to the sovereign decision. While the image of a mutilated and mute body cannot match Arendt’s idea of politics as the combination of speech and action bereft of violence, Agamben has developed the notion of a politics that renders life disposable, mute, bare, and can still be called politics or power, and precisely biopower. From this perspective, I argue, Lavinia and the other characters of Titus Andronicus are the embodiment of the concept of “bare life” as developed by Agamben, and Shakespeare’s Rome is a State of exception and of exceptional violence.
Communality and the Individual in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
The subject of the article is the analysis of the notion of communality in the relation between the two protagonists of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Traversing the post-apocalyptic landscape populated mostly by wretched savages harbouring ill intent towards other human beings, the heroes ostensibly seek a place where establishing a sustainable society composed of the “good guys” can still be possible. However, while for the young son this goal implies the necessity of maintaining a sense of openness and hospitality towards the other, for the father it is the matter of day-to-day survival that takes precedence, which leads to repeated instances of withdrawing help from destitute survivors and avoiding human contact. The boy objects to this behavior, despite being wholly dependent on his father, as his sense of responsibility seems innate and unconditional. The man, on the other hand, gradually recognizes that he was so profoundly afflicted by the experience of losing his world that he cannot overcome his radical pessimism and distrust of the other. Therefore, when the man arrives at the end of his life, he comes to understand that it is only without him at his side that the son can enter a larger community.
A Sociosemiotic Analysis of Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!
This essay presents a sociosemiotic analysis of My Children! My Africa! (1989) by Athol Fugard. By considering the characters’ views about self, community, education, and time, it points to the Fugard’s anxious attempt to offer liberalism as the solution to apartheid in South Africa instead of oppositional politics, especially blacks’ calls for activism and communalism. Sociosemiotics is suitable to plays overtly political; it holds that political writers are troubled by political changes that do not correspond to a firmly held ideology—a tension between what a playwright believes is absolute and what s/he senses and perhaps fears is happening. Keys to the analysis are contemporary texts, including essays from leading Black writers and journalists and from studies and essays from attendees of a 1986 conference on liberal solutions to the unrest in South Africa.
The Power of Poetic Praxis in the Literature of Pat Mora and Ana Castillo
Chicana literary work is predominantly characterized by poetry. Lyrical poetic phrases are interwoven into Chicanas’ short stories, novels, theoretical, and critical essays. Why poetry? What is distinct about poetry as a literary genre or the process of writing poetry that facilitates Chicanas’ self-expression? Various Chicana writers refer to the process of writing poetry as essential to the (trans)formation of identity and society. Poetry allows Chicanas to transform their own identities and to re-define the contours of the world by creating a new or distinct reality from which to act. Collectively, Chicana writers produce a corpus of literary work that is characterized by the commingling of poetry, theory, and criticism. In this article I illustrate that these three phenomena are inextricably linked and that theoretical and critical essays written by and about Chicanas often grow out of and through their more creative, poetic literary work. My analysis focuses primarily on two Chicana authors, Pat Mora and Ana Castillo, and examines how their poetry exemplifies and contextualizes some of their abstract claims and critical theories, as well as how the blending of poetry, theory, and criticism functions as a powerful tool to create socio-political change both in the academy and beyond.
Roll a Hard Six: Losing Your Noodle in Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing
Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing is a convoluted representation of the mentallyunstable mind existing as a series of six characters that are at once separate and conjoined: the horrors and traumatic events of the narrative past dismantle the unified subject into a series of schizophrenic sub-personalities, parts of the destabilized Author’s psyche, existing as separate fragments that eventually collide. Further, the imaginary room emerges as the Fifth Person, promising, but failing, to be a central stabilizer of the other fractured selves. Finally, the design of the text echoes the patterns of the traumatized mind, illustrating the inability of a narrative to construct a stable, unified subject and demonstrating the inadequacy of traditional narrative forms. The text, with its obliterations, cropped phrases, and pictorial manifestations, becomes the Sixth Person. However, in the end, the text shows that the past cannot be erased, explained, or reversed; neither can the experimental nature of the novel reach beyond the traumatized, schizoid subject to represent the horrors of the past that caused the Author’s psychotic breach. Federman has rolled a hard six that will repeatedly fragment and unite, just as the traumatic past continues to repeat itself as one that defies representation.
Breaking the Hard Limits: Romance, Pornography, and the Question of Genre in the Fifty Shades Trilogy
The Fifty Shades series has brought erotic fiction to a broader and more mainstream audience than ever before. In its wake, a number of erotic romance series have achieved unprecedented popularity, such as Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series and Lisa Renee Jones’ Inside Out series. These books do not fit comfortably into the genres of romance or pornography: rather, they fuse the romantic and pornographic together. This locates the multiple climaxes of pornography within the overarching emotional climax of romance and creates a structure that is both finite and infinite, allowing the books to create both instant and delayed gratification. This article examines The Sheik as a textual forebear to Fifty Shades before moving on to examine the ways in which romance and pornography are fused, overcoming the limits of serialization in romance, and creating a romantic “pornotopia.”
Towards a Non-hierarchical Space of Thought: Reading Roland Barthes’ The Neutral
The article is devoted to The Neutral: the 1977-1978 lecture course developed and taught by Roland Barthes at the Collège de France. I argue that The Neutral is firmly rooted in the tradition that Brian Massumi defined as “nomad thought” in his foreword to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. The essay traces the genealogy of this tradition and the term of the neutral, beginning with Maurice Blanchot’s work and his own concept of the neutral and ending with Barthes’ so far largely unexplored engagement with the texts of Deleuze. Elusive as the neutral figure is meant to remain, it emerges as a theorist’s effort to exercise a form of non-dualistic and non-hierarchical thinkin
Vision and Violence in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
Virginia Woolf describes her artistic goal in The Waves as an attempt to create “an abstract mystical eyeless book.” Yet, in creating her eyeless book, one that eschews a single narrative perspective, Woolf amasses abundant visual details. For each of her six characters, visual images mark significant moments of being. In fact, Woolf emphasizes the characters’ capacity for sight as a vulnerability that allows them to be violated and wounded over and over. This article analyzes connections between visual imagery and themes of violence in the novel to demonstrate how they cohere into an extended metaphor for the ways in which acts of looking can elicit powerful emotions that threaten to fragment individual identity in painful ways. While Woolf’s novel has received critical commentary that focuses on the role of vision in the narrative and critics have also noted how violence in the text supports other themes, the explicit relationship between sight and violence has not yet been fully explored. A close examination of the visual imagery in key scenes of the novel demonstrates how Woolf engages the reader to participate in the characters’ deepening sense of fragmentation as they are repeatedly assaulted by experience, as the eyes themselves become symbols of the twin dynamics of desire and destruction.
Laying Bare: Agamben, Chandler, and The Responsibility to Protect
This paper demonstrates the hidden similarities between Raymond Chandler’s prototypical noir The Big Sleep, and the United Nations Responsibility to Protect (R2P) document. By taking up the work of philosopher Giorgio Agamben, this paper shows that the bare life produces the form of protection embodied by Philip Marlowe in Chandler’s novel and by the United Nations Security Council in R2P. Agamben’s theorizing of the extra-legal status of the sovereign pertains to both texts, in which the protector exists outside of the law. Philip Marlowe, tasked with preventing the distribution of pornographic images, commits breaking-and-entering, withholding evidence, and murder. Analogously, R2P advocates for the Security Council’s ability to trespass laws that safeguard national sovereignty in order to prevent “bare” atrocities against human life. As Agamben demonstrates, the extra-legal position of the protector is made possible by “stripping bare” human life. This paper also gestures towards limitations of Agamben’s thought by indicating, through a comparison of these two texts, that bare life produces states of exception as the object of protection rather than punishment.
The American Dream and American Greed in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: Sentimental and Satirical Christian Discourse in the Popular Domestic Tale
Although Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time originally was a widely popular book in the nineteenth century, Fern and Ruth Hall were criticized after readers learned about the similarities among Fern’s life and book. Contemporary critics have recovered Ruth Hall from the literary margins and situated Ruth’s story in the context of the popular American dream story while emphasizing the book’s satirical elements. Reexamining the novel’s originally popular sentimental elements alongside the novel’s more recently popular satirical elements expands the literary critical focus from Ruth’s sentimental struggles and Fern’s satirical accomplishments to Ruth Hall’s equally important critique of American greed, especially among wealthy and socially-conscious Christians.
Phonaesthetic Phonological Iconicity in Literary Analysis Illustrated by Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”
The article offers a phonosemantic analysis of Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber.” The phonosemantic investigation has been based on the corpus of nineteen relevant sound-related descriptions of the sea. Although most excerpts identified contain aural metaphors and are not phonologically iconic per se, there seem to exist at least three fragments which are particularly interesting from a phonosemantic point of view. Most notably, phonaesthemes /gl/, /l/, /r/ have been found to carry substantial meaning contributing to the overall interpretation of the story in question. Accounting for the inevitable subjectivity concerning iconicity, and in this case phonological iconicity, a few theories are presented in order to support the author’s reading of each phonaestheme’s contextual significance. The paper briefly reviews the chronological development of the field of phonosemantics and then combines the aural images theory (proposed by Richard Rhodes) with the “aural semiotic process” theory (the term coined by the author). Each analysis is further supplemented with scholarly views on respective phonaesthemes. On the whole, the paper does not aim to polemicize with the well-established definition of a phoneme and its generally accepted arbitrariness. Nevertheless, it has been observed that a speculative phonosemantic analysis of a literary work may yield noteworthy results.
The Power of Music in the Tale of Beren and Lúthien by J.R.R. Tolkien
Tolkien valued music in his private life, and this is mirrored in his works about Middle-Earth, which owes its very existence to music. It is born out of the song of the Ainur. But the role of music does not end with this creative act, rather, it continues to influence the history of Middle-Earth. The paper aims to analyze the role of music in the tale of Beren and Lúthien in the published Silmarillion. The tale of Beren and Lúthien was of personal significance to Tolkien himself. It also includes numerous allusions to music. It is the language of love for both Beren and Lúthien, who make their own songs. Lúthien’s music has power which allows her to overcome Sauron and Morgoth and to win a second life for Beren from Mandos, while Finrod uses music in his duel with Sauron. Music affects both positive and negative characters, including Sauron and Morgoth. Its importance is also emphasized by the existence of professional musicians, such as Daeron, Thingol's minstrel. The story "Of Beren and Lúthien" demonstrates the power of music, which has a huge impact on the entire history of Middle- Earth. Without it, many events would never have happened.
The Transformation of the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter’s Daughter
The mother/daughter bond is the central subject of Amy Tan’s two powerful books, The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Tensions that arise in the novels between a Chinese mother and her Chinese-American daughter are often described by the critics as being the result of two important factors. One is based on the misunderstandings caused by the generational gap, while the other comes from the cultural gap. For a Chinese-born mother the American reality instigates various confusions, as she still views her life with the eyes of her traditional Chinese upbringing. On the other hand, her daughter lacks any profound knowledge about her Chinese ethnicity, which makes her unable to recognize the influences of her mother’s Chinese past over their relationship. But in her novels Tan portrays also the relationship between the Chinese immigrant mother and her mother in China. Their relationship, which grew up exclusively on the grounds of the Chinese culture, is characterized by empathy and appreciation. In this paper I am going to discuss the change that occurred to the mother-daughter relationship after it has been replanted into a different cultural context. The line of argument will reveal in what ways the mother-daughter relationship underwent a significant transformation.
Approaching Transhumanism: On How Human Beings Transform in the 21st Century
The following article is to introduce the reader into a cultural and intellectual movement whose aim is to identify the need for improvement in human life in the sphere of physicality as well as mentality with the aid of modern technologies – transhumanism. With the dramatic change in the perception of technology, transhumanist welcome the opportunity to improve cognitive skills, help to perpetuate human happiness, or increase longevity. Although the opponents of the transhumanist thought dismiss it as “the world’s most dangerous idea,” the adversaries advocate that the alternation of human form is both practical and reasonable. With the use of modern technology, enthusiasts of transhumanism try to prove that the human body needs to be re-invented in order to transcend the natural limitations. In my work I will try to tackle the problem of human body being currently subject to gradual transition from Homo Sapiens to Robo Sapiens, the process of ‘becoming’ a cyborg. By incorporating bodily augmentation, contemporary artists such as Stelarc or Neil Harbisson cast a light on the change of physical form, as well as the definition of being human. Evoking much controversy, transhumanism brings a completely new dimension to the understanding of the current human condition.
Retelling Orpheus: Orpheus in the Renaissance
This paper examines the importance of the Orpheus myth during the English Renaissance. The Orpheus myth was one of the most common mythic intertexts of the period due to the fact that we could see the very story of Orpheus as being imbedded within the idea of the Renaissance itself. The main ambition of the Renaissance humanist was to bring the literature of the ancients back to life via the means of education. In other words, they attempted to bring the dead back to life and Orpheus serves as an embodiment of this ambition due to his ability to bring inanimate objects to life and in his journey to the underworld to rescue Eurydice. We find many different aspects of the Orpheus myth dealt with in Renaissance writing, for example Orpheus as poet, Orpheus as lover and the death of Orpheus being some of the key focal points. This paper, however, will focus specifically on the role of Orpheus as Poet as, due to the Renaissance love for art, rhetoric and eloquence, this seems to be the most popular dimension of the Orpheus myth at that time. We will see how Renaissance writers reinterpret the story of Orpheus, as originally told by Ovid and Virgil, in the “Metamorphoses” and the “Georgics” respectively, to show Orpheus as not only as being an archetypal poet but in fact the very first poet whose art is not only responsible for the civilisation of man, but also for the creation of a “Golden Age” in Renaissance England.
Subverting the Gaze, Seducing with the Bible: A Study of Oscar Wilde's Salomé
The present article engages with the eponymous character of Oscar Wilde’s “Salomé” and focuses on her subversion of the patriarchal rules, and on her attempts at seducing the prophet Jokanaan. Wilde’s “Salomé” becomes “an erotic symbol of daring, transgression, and perversity” (Sloan 112). She wants to look at Jokanaan, as well as to be touched by him and openly states her great desire for him, using the imagery taken from the biblical “Song of Songs” to express her passion. Moreover, the Princess skillfully adopts and reverses the male gaze to manipulate others and go beyond the patriarchal constraints at Herod’s court. She becomes aware that the only way to reach her goals is to look actively and evade being a mere object of the male gaze. The article shows that the imagery employed in the eponymous character’s speeches contributes to her portrayal as a seductress, also accentuating her rebellion, and analyzes how the Princess transgresses the patriarchal constraints through appropriating the male gaze.
Women and Intertextuality: On the Example of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad
The aim of the study is to consider feminist retellings of myths and legends. As an example, Margaret Atwood’s book The Penelopiad is analyzed. The interpretation is situated in a broader context of intertextual practices characteristic of the feminist vision of literature. I present the ideas which Atwood shares with authors engaged in women’s movement. Among these there is Atwood’s understanding of intertextuality (noticeable especially in The Penelopiad). Bibliographical basis of the study comprises books which are fundamental to feminist and gender criticism (e.g. Poetics of Gender, ed. by N. Miller, New York 1986; S. M. Gilbert, S. Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth- Century Literary Imagination, New Haven and London 1984). What is more, the study refers to the books which allow considering the notion of intertextuality (G. Allen, Intertextuality, London and New York 2010, J. Clayton. E. Rothstein (eds.), Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, Wisconsin 1991) and connecting the interpretation with the problems crucial to contemporary literary studies (L. Hutcheon L. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction, New York and London 1988, B. Johnson, A World of Difference, Baltimore and London 1989).