Playing out the unspeakable: the rhetorics of trauma in The Day the Laughter Stopped digital game

The article undertakes a detailed analysis of The Day the Laughter Stopped – a simple text-based browser game about rape, told from the perspective of a young teenage girl. While seemingly straightforward, the game uses choice poetics to build expectations of agency on the side of the player, only to subvert them at the most climactic moment, provoking emotional responses and serving as a commentary on the experience of loss of control and loss of words in the face of a traumatic event. Following existing approaches to rhetorical, emotion-evoking qualities and capabilities of digital games, the article explores the potential of the digital medium to communicate the unspeakable, overwhelming dimension of trauma, as illustrated by the game. The analysis not only explores the medium-specific means of expression which the game utilizes to encourage the audience to explore the perspective of a rape victim in an engaging way, but also leads to the conclusion that in doing so, the game aims to make persuasive statements about the social and cultural discourse around rape trauma and its representations, and therefore contributes to the larger socio-cultural discourse. As such, the article aspires to add to pre-existing studies on the specific rhetorical means of digital fiction, as well as on the approaches to cultural renditions of trauma.

Сучасна українська література в об’єктиві студій пам’яті: жіночі виміри

The article is dedicated to a very important topic, which belongs not only to literature but also to Ukrainian history, culture and social life. Speaking about memory, we mean the experience of the past, which very often influences the main aspects of our modernity, in particular, if we are talking about traumatic experience of the history, which was not rethought and did not become a socio-cultural discourse. In the context of the mentioned research problem, the fact that women experience cruelty, humiliation, and injustice is one of those questions, which were not solved during the last decades of developing of democratic societies. Contemporary Ukrainian literature tries to find a solution of unfair reception of the past using a very important method of rethinking traumatic memory. That is why it becomes the subject of different researches, one of which is in the suggested article.

Russian First World War Propaganda Literature through Its Anthologies. Some Observations on Russian Soldier-Literature and Journalistic Reporting

In the Soviet era, Russian involvement in WWI long represented an ostracised and even forgotten event. This very attitude is reflected by Soviet literary criticism of WWI war literature. Taking into account both the studies which re-examined this part of Russian literature in a less ideologically biased manner and the stances that major writers of that period took towards the war, the aim of this paper is to investigate Russian Soldier-literature as presented in anthologies published in the wake of the First World War. The publishing of short stories, journalistic reporting and poems actually (or allegedly) composed by soldiers themselves can be interpreted as a symptomatic expression of a broader cultural discourse that was common at that time, and of which state propaganda publications often availed themselves.

Embodying Disney Dreams: the Representation of Femininity and Whiteness in Recent Disney Animated Films

<p>This thesis proposes to critically examine the ways in which whiteness and femininity are represented in recent Disney animated films. It will be contended that the Disney text is an influential part of the popular cultural discourse on femininity and whiteness but this is often obscured or made invisible by the ways in which the films work to naturalise these constructions. The work of this thesis will be to unpack the constructions of femininity and whiteness through an analysis of the figuration of the Disney heroine. This thesis will argue that idealized whiteness and femininity are discursively embodied in these Disney heroines in complex and contradictory ways, and that Disney works on and through these bodies to fix and contain the ideological constructions of gender, race, and sexuality.</p>

Embodying Disney Dreams: the Representation of Femininity and Whiteness in Recent Disney Animated Films

<p>This thesis proposes to critically examine the ways in which whiteness and femininity are represented in recent Disney animated films. It will be contended that the Disney text is an influential part of the popular cultural discourse on femininity and whiteness but this is often obscured or made invisible by the ways in which the films work to naturalise these constructions. The work of this thesis will be to unpack the constructions of femininity and whiteness through an analysis of the figuration of the Disney heroine. This thesis will argue that idealized whiteness and femininity are discursively embodied in these Disney heroines in complex and contradictory ways, and that Disney works on and through these bodies to fix and contain the ideological constructions of gender, race, and sexuality.</p>

The Problem of Writing and Representations of Modernity, Postmodernism and Beyond: A Critical Reading in the Novel “Mao II” by Don DeLillo

The American novelist, Don DeLillo, wrote the novel, Mao II (1991), which uses selfhood and identity to foreground the modern/postmodern vision of human nature as a tabula rasa that is constructed by language, society, and culture. This study argues that while the novel’s protagonist, Bill Gray, represents DeLillo’s modernist tendencies, as the character desires to maintain authentic individualism during a fierce struggle with his culture’s collective mindlessness, DeLillo also describes an ambiguous character, whose life and works complexly exhibit and engage with postmodernist features. Jeffry Nealon’s approach to post-postmodernist literature and post-humanist scholarship are utilized in this analysis to provide a clearer understanding on the convergence of these components. Gray is examined as a manifestation of post-postmodernist tendencies, who ultimately reflects the emerging role of embodiment in contemporary cultural discourse. This study not only elucidates the fundamental changes that society currently faces but also provides a closer reading of the novel and its protagonist by incorporating forms of selfhood and identity that extend beyond reductive modernist and postmodernist conceptions to carry elements of post-postmodernist literature.

The concept of "conscience" as an ethical category

The concept of “conscience” is one of the oldest components in the axiosphere and the central factor in the moral self-awareness of the individual. This phenomenon is closely related to the features of a person’s existential position in the world. The study presents an associative model of the concept of “conscience” in the biblical cultural discourse. The semantic components of the concept are determined and its biblical meanings are considered.

D. H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places. A Modernist Revaluation of Temporality

The article deals with the literary modes of constructing temporality in D. H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places (1932), a travel book written in 1927 and published posthumously. Typically for the first decades of the twentieth century, the work reflects the writer’s anxieties about war force, scientific discoveries and cultural exhaustion in a series of interrelated essays on the remnants of ancient Etruria and the powerful memory of Etruscan civilization. In this article, Etruscan Places is read like a subjective re-creation of a lost civilization; it is interpreted as the writing of an imaginary philosophy attributed to an ancient people and modelled on Lawrence’s personal engagement with the renewal of life potentialities. Patterning his book on the past-present opposition, the author recuperates the Etruscan past within the mythical framework of modernist coherence. The repeated movements between the lost Etruscan world and the writer’s mostly disappointing contemporary age reveal the possibility of establishing continuities not only on an anthropological plane, but also on a philosophical-aesthetic one. The Etruscans’ narrative of death brings to light an art of living; the historical perspective blends with existential and artistic considerations. Lawrence’s exploratory technique is based on similitudes and antitheses, being literarily rendered by a cross-cultural discourse that combines the factual with the fictional, and the epic with the lyric. The British author’s style puts forward repetition as a modernist rhetorical achievement that indirectly questions the validity of literary tradition. Furthermore, the explicit intertextuality of the book completes the writer’s modernist perspective, authenticating the cultural substance of the temporal links that Lawrence seeks to uncover.