scholarly journals “Sarajevo. Plan grada”: the specifics of the chronotope

2020 ◽  
pp. 412-422
Author(s):  
Evgeniia V. Shatko

The scene of the novel written by M. Jergović “Sarajevo. Plan grada” (2015) — the writer’s hometown, the key space for all his writing. It’s some sort of a fl uid romanized map. The novel describes several cultural and historical Sarajevoes at the same time, such as an Ottoman city, and Austro-Hungarian, and Sarajevo during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and a city of the Tito era, and then Sarajevo before and after the war of the 1990s. in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The space of the city in the novel is the past of the today’s city, marked for the author by political and ideological attempts to recode and even erase the historical memory. The fragmented text of the novel consists of personal memories, literary plots, the history of the city, refl ections on memory and obliteration — it is a monument dedicated to the old, disappearing or even already dis-appeared Sarajevo. According to E. Kazas, Jergović created the most voluminous, comprehensive and most reliable image of Sarajevo in Bos-nian literature.

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 202-227
Author(s):  
Linda Istanbulli

Abstract In a system where the state maintains a monopoly over historical interpretation, aesthetic investigations of denied traumatic memory become a space where the past is confronted, articulated, and deemed usable both for understanding the present and imagining the future. This article focuses on Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr (As a river should) by Manhal al-Sarrāj, one of the first Syrian novels to openly break the silence on the “1982 Hama massacre.” Engaging the politics and poetics of trauma remembrance, al-Sarrāj places the traumatic history of the city of Hama within a longer tradition of loss and nostalgia, most notably the poetic genre of rithāʾ (elegy) and the subgenre of rithāʾ al-mudun (city elegy). In doing so, Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr functions as a literary counter-site to official histories of the events of 1982, where threatened memory can be preserved. By investigating the intricate relationship between armed conflict and gender, the novel mourns Hama’s loss while condemning the violence that engendered it. The novel also makes new historical interpretations possible by reproducing the intricate relationship between mourning, violence, and gender, dislocating the binary lines around which official narratives of armed conflicts are typically constructed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-152
Author(s):  
Michael Kuhn

German Kazan”: Imagological Analysis of Guzel Yakhina’s Literary Works| The capital of the Republic of Tatarstan is a multicultural city. It is a combination of “Russian,” “Tatar” and, not least, “German elements”. The writer Guzel Yakhina has repeatedly addressed this cultural diversity in her literary works. In them a native of Kazan explores the past and present of the city. Excellent knowledge of German language and culture allows her to study in detail the “German trace” in the history of the capital of Tatarstan to determine its status. The article offers a brief imagological analysis of the images of “German Kazan” presented in the novel Zuleikha and the essay Garden on the Border, or the Garden “Russian Switzerland”. The imagological study conducted at the macro-, meso- and micro-levels shows that in Yakhina’s literary works the images of “German Kazan” are equivalent to the images of “Russian Kazan” or “Tatar Kazan.” The “German elements” are firmly rooted inthe texture of the city and have been an integral part of its cultural code for several centuries. At the same time, following the novel and the essay, they do not have the status of an exotic “foreign,” but a familiar “other.” „Niemiecki Kazań”: imagologiczna analiza utworów Guzel Jachiny Stolica Republiki Tatarstanu to miasto wielokulturowe. To połączenie „rosyjskiego”, „tatarskiego” i, co nie mniej ważne, „niemieckiego” pierwiastka. Pisarka Guzel Jachina wielokrotnie odnosiła się do tej różnorodności kulturowej w swoich tekstach literackich. Rdzenny mieszkaniec Kazania odkrywa w nich przeszłość i teraźniejszość miasta. Doskonała znajomość języka i kultury niemieckiej pozwala autorce na szczegółowe zbadanie „niemieckiego śladu” w historii stolicy Tatarstanu w celu określenia jego statusu. Artykuł zawiera krótką analizę imagologiczną obrazów „niemieckiego Kazania”, przedstawionych w powieści Zulejkaotwiera oczy i eseju Ogród na granicy, czyli Ogród „Rosyjska Szwajcaria”. Badania imago-logiczne, przeprowadzone na poziomach makro-, mezo- i mikro-, pokazują, że w dziełach literackich Jachiny obrazy „niemieckiego Kazania” są równoważne obrazom „rosyjskiego Kazania” czy „tatarskiego Kazania”. „Elementy niemieckie” są mocno zakorzenione w strukturze miasta i od kilku stuleci stanowią integralną część jego kodu kulturowego. Jednocześnie, w powieści i eseju, nie mają one statusu egzotycznego Obcego, ale znajomego Innego.


2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Igor Maver

The novel Open City (2011) by the Nigerian-born and raised author Teju Cole isset in New York City, where he has lived since 1992. The narrator and protagonist of the book, the young Nigerian doctor Julius in is a veritable flâneur in the Big Apple, who is observing the rapidly changing multiethnic character of the city and meditating on (his) history and culture, identity and solitude, and the world beyond the United States, with which it is interconnected through the global history of violence and pain. He is juxtaposing the past and the present, the seemingly borderless open city of New York, Nigeria, and the various European locales, particularly Brussels.Thenovel, although set in the United States, is constantly interspersed with his recollections of his past experiences conditioned by hiscomplex hybrid Nigerian-European-American identity.


2020 ◽  
pp. 67-76
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kwiatkowska

The article attempts to interpret the novel Mirabelle in the light of hauntology, taken from Jacques Derrida’s works, existing in the Polish literary studies first and foremost thanks to the works of Jakub Momro and Andrzej Marzec. Harasimowicz’s novel recounts the history of Warsaw from the 1920s until the present-day period. The mirabelle plum tree growing on one of the backyards in Warsaw tells the story of the following generations of the city dwellers who fade away and fall into oblivion. The Holocaust, depicted in the beginning of the novel, does not, however, become the past. The recollection of the genocide is inscribed in contemporary Warsaw, in the city space and the consciousness of its inhabitants. The phantoms of the former dwellers of Nalewki, the Jewish district in Warsaw, visit their homes, little stores, and workshops, trying to end unfinished businesses and engaging with the representatives of the present-day citizens. The gesture of remembrance, which is the replanting and redeveloping a new mirabelle tree in the place of the damaged one, gives people hope for the restoration of balance and strengthens the bonds between the living and the dead.


Author(s):  
К.А. Панченко

Abstract The article examines the conquest of the County of Tripoli by the Mamelukes in 1289, and the reaction of various Middle Eastern ethnoreligious groups to this event. Along with the Monophysite perspective (the Syriac chronicle of Bar Hebraeus’ Continuator and the work of the Coptic historian Mufaddal ibn Abi-l-Fadail), and the propagandist texts of Muslim Arabic panegyric poets, we will pay special attention to the historical memory of the Orthodox (Melkite) and Maronite communities of northern Lebanon. The contemporary of these events — the Orthodox author Suleiman al-Ashluhi, a native of one of the villages of the Akkar Plateau — laments the fall of Tripoli in his rhymed eulogy. It is noteworthy that this author belongs to the rural Melkite subculture, which — in spite of its conservative character — was capable of producing original literature. Suleiman al-Ashluhi’s work was forsaken by the following generations of Melkites; his poem was only preserved in Maronite manuscripts. Maronite historical memory is just as fragmented. The father of the Modern Era Maronite historiography — Gabriel ibn al-Qilaʿî († 1516) only had fragmentary information on the history of his people in the 13th century: local chronicles and the heroic epos that glorified the Maronite struggle against the Muslim lords that tried to conquer Mount Lebanon. Gabriel’s depiction of the past is not only biased and subject to aims of religious polemics, but also factually inaccurate. Nevertheless, the texts of Suleiman al-Ashluhi and Gabriel ibn al-Qilaʿî give us the opportunity to draw conclusions on the worldview, educational level, political orientation and peculiar traits of the historical memory of various Christian communities of Mount Lebanon.


PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”


1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis

Reflection on the history of the novel usually begins with consideration of the social, political, and economic transformations within society that favored the “rise” of a new type of narrative. This remains true even with the numerous and important studies appearing during the past ten years, which relate the novel to an everbroadening spectrum of ideological issues—gender, class, race, and, most recently, nationalism. Yet a history of the genre might reflect not just on the novel’s national, but also its transnational, trajectory, its spread across the globe, away from its original points of emergence. Such a history would take into account the expansion of western markets—the growing exportation of goods and ideas, as well as of social, political, and cultural forms from the West—that promoted the novel’s importation by nonwestern societies. Furthermore, it could lead one to examine the very interesting inverse relationship between two kinds of migration, both of which are tied to the First World’s uneven “development” of the Third. In a world system that draws out natural resources in exchange for technologically mediated goods, the emigration of laborers and intellectuals from peripheral societies to the centers of power of the West and the immigration of a western literary genre into these same societies must be viewed as related phenomena.


2021 ◽  
Vol 201 (3) ◽  
pp. 534-545
Author(s):  
Janusz Zuziak

Lviv occupies a special place in the history of Poland. With its heroic history, it has earned the exceptionally honorable name of a city that has always been faithful to the homeland. SEMPER FIDELIS – always faithful. Marshal Józef Piłsudski sealed that title while decorating the city with the Order of Virtuti Militari in 1920. The past of Lviv, the always smoldering and uncompromising Polish revolutionist spirit, the climate, and the atmosphere that prevailed in it created the right conditions for making it the center of thought and independence movement in the early 20th century. In the early twentieth century, Polish independence organizations of various political orientations were established, from the ranks of which came legions of prominent Polish politicians and military and social activists.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-19
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Michalski

In the context of reflections on the breakthrough moments in the history of Poland in the first half of the 20th century, the content of the volume of the journal “Nauki o Wychowaniu. Studia Interdyscyplinarne” (Nowis. Interdisciplinary Studies) which testifies to the preservation of their historical memory, is discussed.


2019 ◽  
pp. 57-90
Author(s):  
Marissa K. López

In Cecile Pineda’s novel Face (1985), protagonist Helio Cara loses his face in a tragic accident. The novel documents the aftermath of his misfortune, as Helio grapples with his changing social world and strives to remake himself, piecing together both his face and the story of his life. In Face, Pineda works through the complex nexus of visible and invisible, focusing on the present absence of the human body and how Helio is variously seen and obscured as he moves through the city after his accident. In tracing Helio’s path from seen to unseen and back again, Face documents how community gathers around and through the human body, how Helio’s face galvanizes different groups into action. In this chapter, the author argues that contemporary photographers Stefan Ruiz and Ken Gonzales-Day deploy the body similarly to emphasize not the unique histories attached to individual bodies but rather the communal networks gathered around the bodies featured in their photographs. Like Face, the two photographers’ work can be seen as an extended project of reintegrating the brown body into historical memory and rescripting its political future away from subjectivity and rights and toward networks, institutions, and issues.


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