Borderland Anxieties: Brexit, Upper Silesia and Irish Partitions in Recent Novels by Glenn Patterson and Szczepan Twardoch

Northern Ireland owes its existence to a partition of Ireland that took place a century ago. The knottiest problems involved in the UK’s recent divorce with the European Union can be traced back not only to the Belfast Agreement of 1998 but also to the establishment of a new border, and a new borderland, in the island of Ireland in 1922. The same year (1922) saw the coming into effect of a partition of Upper Silesia, which was triggered by the events and political decisions taken in 1921. The primary focus of this essay is on literary representations of crises and anxieties connected with the transformations of the geopolitical statuses of the two provinces (i.e. Northern Ireland and Upper Silesia) and selected historical, political and cultural parallels between them. Those anxieties are exemplified and illustrated by the leading characters of Glenn Patterson’s Where Are We Now? (2020) and Szczepan Twardoch’s Pokora (2020). Both novels yield to provincial readings that explore basic aporias of uprootedness, displacement, deterritorialization and identity crises, collectively identified here as borderland anxieties. In consequence, transnational and postnational perspectives that emerge from Patterson’s and Twardoch’s works count as proactive responses, encoded in literary texts, to current geopolitical crises in Europe.

Misrepresentation of the Other: A Postcolonial Study in Selected Arab and American Novels

The paper sheds light on one of the important concepts in contemporary literature which tackles the representation of the Other in selected Arabic and American literary products. The representation of the other holds many misrepresentations and stereotypes, both varying and fixed; as such, the study of the literary representations of the other which comes as a remedy many fixed and prevalent frameworks between the self and the other which deals with the construction of an individual on cultural, political and social levels. The study tackles a topic of great importance for contemporary literary studies and critiques, especially at the level of national literature. The research aims to discuss how Arab writers envision the concept of the Other, on one hand; and it argues how American writers projects the concept in their novels, on the other hand. It also gives an insight about Arabs and Americans viewing the term the self and other or utilize the term Imagology which is very significant because it differentiates between the Oriental and Western points of view. The paper is restricted to argue the representation of the other in these four novels. Finally, the research ends up with conclusion and recommendations for further researches.

Hospitable Friendship

Chapter 1 sets up the theoretical questions of female friendship across race, nationality, and gender. It establishes exclusivism in the philosophical discourses of friendship and hospitality and their political and ethical implications demonstrated by Jacques Derrida. It then discusses the practical challenges the three Victorian women travellers to Meiji Japan—Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes—pose to the male homosocial model of friendship with their praxis of friendship and hospitality through their writing. It highlights the aporias of male philosophical theorizations and addresses them with female literary representations of real-life instances of cultural exchange and congress in a non-Western context. Drawing on feminist theorizations of open subjectivity and affective relationality, it presents alternative models and paradigms of friendship, which the book terms hospitable friendship, and argues for particular political affordances of literature for cross-racial female solidarity.

Het geheimzinnige spijkerschrift van de doofstomme analfabete dichter: het beeld van mindervaliditeit in Kader Abdolahs proza

When commenting on his literary work, Kader Abdolah regularly links it to his biography, his novels and short stories becoming an important part of his self-representation as a writer. One of the prominent motives in this self-representation is the story of his deaf father, which appears repeatedly in interviews as well as in his literary work, the most significant example being the novel Spijkerschrift [Cuneiform, 2000]. The purpose of this article is to investigate how the deaf father is being portrayed here and what implications this image has for the way Abdolah presents himself to his readership. The analysis is anchored in the theoretical framework provided by disability studies, focusing on literary representations of disability.

On the move in the (post)colonial metropolis: The Paris Metro in Francophone African and Afrodiasporic fiction

Literary texts convey the complexities of the urban experience in a tangible way. While there is a wide body of work on literary representations of Paris, the role of public transport as part of the (postcolonial) urban experience has not received much attention. This article sets out to analyse the meanings of the mobile public space comprising the Paris Metro in Francophone African and Afrodiasporic literary texts from the mid-20th century to the 2010s. The reading demonstrates how the texts represent the public space of the Metro as a symbol of modernity, a space of disappointment and alienation, an embodiment of social inequalities and as a site of convivial encounters and claims of agency. Through this analysis, the article highlights the role of literature in elucidating the intertwinement of mobility, public space and postcolonial urbanity.

Subversive literary representations of 1821 in the Metapolitefsi (1974–81)

The article examines the afterlife of the Greek War of Independence during the Transition period in Greece (1974–81), focusing on literature. The military dictatorship (1967–74) presented itself as the heir of this national revolution. Representations of the 1821 were popularized and mediatized through film, paintings and the public spectacles organized by the regime, culminating in the 150-year anniversary in 1971. This triggered an alternative use of these representations, by songwriters, playwrights and writers who aimed to subvert them through mimicry. Focusing on three novels by young writers of the period, Yoryis Yatromanolakis’s Leimonario (The Spiritual Meadow) (1974), Nikos Platis’s Gkount mpai mister pap (‘Goodbye Mr. Pap’) (1976) and Takis Theodoropoulos’s Ο vios stin politeia tou Thodori Kotronithodorikolou (‘Life in the times of Thodoris Kotronithodorikolos’) (1977), the article examines how these young writers subverted the representations of heroism constructed by the dictatorship through the use of surrealist and avant-garde techniques. The use of pastiche, the corporeal and the fantastic by Yatromanolakis creates an alternative discourse of heroism. In the case of Platis and Theodoropoulos, surrealist techniques, and images of transgressive sexuality create a grotesque gallery of heroes, by emphasizing the hybridity and performativity of their identities. These writers also experimented with the ways in which history is represented in narrative, through reversal of temporality, the nightmarish, corporeality and the private. The article also examines the texts’ reception, at a time when new grand narratives of national history were being shaped.

Fetal Personhood and Voice in Medieval French Literature

This essay examines medieval French literary representations of fetal speech and proposes a new understanding of medieval conceptions of personhood. Placing passages from the Roman de Fauvel, Histoire de Marie et de Jésus, Pelerinage de Jhesucrist, and Tristan de Nanteuil in conversation with elements of thirteenth-century theological, encyclopedic, and scientific discourses, as well as with contemporary sound studies and theories of the voice, this essay shows that emergent human personhood is constructed in medieval texts as an audible social phenomenon. Medieval personhood is a notion reliant on sound and speech, and thus on the presence of an audience: a person is a composite of body and soul occupying a social and vocalic space shared with other persons. This relational understanding allows for a redefinition of personhood: not as a quality originating at a fixed point in human development but as a social and sensory experience.

“Addiction is a strange bastard”: Alcohol(ism) in Irish Fiction

Although it is hard to challenge the claim that alcohol can be considered inherent in Irish culture, the common perception of the fact often feeds on clichés. What helps understand this question is Irish literature. On the one hand, it portrays jubilant festivity to be found in many literary works; on the other, it renders the drama behind alcohol dependency, shifting the focus from joviality towards the more murky aspects of drink consumption, mostly thematised in contemporary literature. This article takes a closer look at how Irish literature renders alcohol use and abuse, and how the literary representations offer a broader perspective, allowing to reconsider some of the stereotypical notions of the proverbial Irish propensity for drink.

Epidemic as Metaphor: the Allegorical Significance of Epidemic Accounts in Literature

"Epidemic as Metaphor: The Allegorical Significance of Epidemic Accounts in Literature. Our paper searches for those common elements in selected literary representations of the plagues that have affected humanity. As a theoretical framework for our research, we have considered the contributions of Peta Michell, who equals pandemic with contagion and sees it as a metaphor; Susan Sontag views illness as a punishment or a sign, the subject of a metaphorization. Christa Jansohn sees the pest as a metaphor for an extreme form of collective calamity. For René Girard, the medical plague is a metaphor for the social plague, and Gilles Deleuze thinks that fabulation is a “health enterprise.” From the vast library of the pandemic, we have selected examples from Antiquity to the 19th century: Thucydides, Lucretius, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jack London. For Camus, the plague is an allegory of evil, oppression and war. Our paper explores the lessons learned from these texts, irrespective of their degree of factuality or fictionality, pointing out how the plague is used metaphorically and allegorically to reveal a more profound truth about different societies and humanity. Keywords: epidemic, plague, The Decameron (Boccaccio), A Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe), King Pest (Edgar Allan Poe), The Last Man (Mary Shelley), The Nature of Things (Lucretius), The Plague (Albert Camus), The Scarlet Plague (Jack London), The War of the Peloponnesians (Thucydides) "

The Australian Reifungsroman: Reading women’s ageing in Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection and Dorothy Hewett’s Neap Tide

Women’s ageing processes raise important questions about the relationship between the body, the self, and society, but this topic has been widely ignored in Australian literature. The Australian Reifungsroman, through nuanced articulations of ageing women’s experiences of being doubly othered, shows itself to be a critical discourse that helps to break the cultural silence accorded to ageing women. This article aims to acknowledge the existence of the Reifungsroman in Australian literature while addressing questions around how this genre is employed in the Australian context, in order to actively engage with the topic of women’s ageing. Drawing on literary gerontology, this article examines Australian novelist Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection (2000) and Dorothy Hewett’s Neap Tide (1999) from a feminist perspective, focusing on the literary representations of ageing women offered by these novels. In so doing, this article contends that the Australian Reifungsroman unsettles the dominant ideas about women’s ageing as negative and declining. Indeed, narratives such as these help to articulate ageing women’s agency by reconstructing new images of older womanhood.