Confluências plásticas e intersemióticas em Água viva

Clarice Lispector's Água viva [1973] can be read as a project of a linguistic resignification. For this, it is necessary to understand the context in which it is set, the third phase of literary Modernism in Brazil. The movement, not only in its literary segment, influenced by European vanguards such as abstractionism (and the denial, too, of the discursive figure in the text), surrealism etc., found new incorporations in Latin America, resulting in genuine productions which were consolidated, breaking away from mimetic Romanticism and establishing the mark of a production that incorporated elements of Brazilianness. The enunciation in Água viva brushes up effects of musical intonation and iconographic plasticity to address the form and the non-form, on the threshold between them, in the construction of this iconoclastic project permeated by moments sometimes of abstraction, sometimes of figurativity. We present some keys for this reading of the book in this paper.

Materialism, autonomy, intersectionality: revisiting Virginia Woolf through the Wages for Housework perspective

Virginia Woolf's 1938 essay Three Guineas contends that the material basis is indispensable for women not only to survive but also to voice their political opinions. Woolf proposes three strategies for women to take. First, women should assert their right to have access to independent income, and for this purpose they should demand that the state pay for their reproductive work that often limits their opportunity to do waged work. Second, they must object to the very wage system which is indeed in complicity with patriarchy, and through which women are doubly exploited as unwaged or under-waged workers. And third, women must remain outside male-dominated movements and must organise an autonomous group even if they share the same cause with male workers; intersectional association will be possible only when each exploited group empowers itself and regains its own voice. This article examines how this highly materialist aspect of Woolf's feminism was revisited by the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s. By so doing, it argues that despite its facade of literary modernism and alleged elitism, Woolf's text contributes to real-life movements and continues to inspire people of different class backgrounds in different times. Discovering the connection between Woolf and Marxist feminism alters our way of seeing the history of feminist theory: the history is never a linear progress from one wave to another but a complex and interwoven narrative, in which once-forgotten ideas can travel across time and space, resurging as new ideas in different contexts.

A Missed Opportunity? Transylvania as a Virtual Central Europe

The article focuses on the analysis of the ideas of Aladár Kuncz, a writer, literary critic and editor who defined Transylvanian Hungarian literature after 1918 in a European context. The concept of Transylvanism is discussed through the debates of the interwar period, and is situated within the context of Hungarian literary modernism. In the light of the Transylvanian literary ideas of the 1920s and 1930s, minority / regional literatures would have been directly related to a new concept of European and world literature beyond national literatures, along a line of thought that acknowledged the deterministic character of regionalism, and prioritized it also at the level of cultural memory, considering it to be primary over linguistic, national, and the changing geographical boundaries. These endeavours sought to revive an emphatic idea of Central Europe with its strict ideals of quality besides strong local, decentralized, yet transnational aspirations, while making them compatible with the preservation of linguistic and cultural ties with the three traditional Transylvanian nations. The article also discusses the reasons why, in the midst of the 1930s, facing political restrictions, the literary form of Transylvanism became outdated in the eye of the younger generations of the Hungarian community.

THE POLEMIC CONTEXT OF THE “SICK CHILD” IMAGE BY A. A. BLOK

This study examines the early phase of the self-defining process in Russian literary modernism, which demonstrated a desire to establish clear demarcation between “decadence” and “symbolism” on one hand and to be free from the psychopathological discourse in the evaluation of new artistic phenomena, thereby shifting the conventionally recognized border between “norm” and “pathology.” This paper analyses Aleksander Blok’s own views on “decadence” and “decadents” on the basis of his ego-documents (his diary and notebooks), discusses “decadents” and “symbolists” in the press, and, finally, the poet’s response to them and its literary embodiment — the poem “A. M. Dobrolyubov” (1903). In this poem Blok represents the image of one of the first Russian decadents A. Dobrolyubov, whose life became a legend, giving rise to a certain narrative. The basic concepts of the image created by Aleksander Blok in this poem are investigated, in particular, the image of a “sick child”: its sources, which date back to the polemics of the early 1900s and to a corpus of articles written by Z. Gippius, are identified along with a number of intertextual parallels (D. Merezhkovsky, F. Dostoevsky, A. Dobrolyubov). The article traces the poem’s textological history (from a note in the autograph book and the first publication to the inclusion in the “lyrical trilogy”) and reveals the functions of the epigraph as a marker of the “Petersburg text.”

Modernism, Inflation and the Gold Standard in T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound

The great inflation of the 1920s had a dramatic effect on Anglophone literary modernism. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway all recognized that financial signs had come unmoored from any objective reference, and their work explores the literary implications of representation's newly autonomous, performative power. Pound blamed the economic and cultural crisis on ‘usury.’ Following Aristotle, he conceived of usury as the unnatural reproduction of autonomous representation, and thus as the antithesis of natural sexual and semiotic fertility. He particularly deplored the historical role played by Samuel Loyd, the Victorian head of Lloyds Bank, who had cunningly manipulated the gold standard in order to give control of the economy to ‘usurers.’ In his financial journalism for Lloyds Bank Monthly, Eliot used the gold standard as an economic logos in order to facilitate usury. Pound saw that Eliot's theory of the ‘objective correlative’ was incompatible with the referential model of representation assumed by the gold standard.

Modernistyczna obsceniczność w przekładzie: ukraińskie i rosyjskie tłumaczenia Kochanka Lady Chatterley D.H. Lawrence’a u schyłku ZSRR

The paper focuses on Ukrainian and Russian translations of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, published in 1989 and 1990. The framework for the analysis is provided by Loren Glass’s idea of a significant role of obscene vocabulary in the aesthetics of the twentieth-century Anglo-American literary modernism. The comparison of the two translations shows significant differences in the translators’ approaches to rendering Lawrence’s sexual-based language.

Bulgarian Modernist Publications in the Database “Books in Russian Published Abroad, 1927—1991”

The article is devoted to the reflection of Bulgarian literary modernism of the 20th century in Bulgarian publications in Russian. The relevance of the article is supported by the fragmentary assimilation of Bulgarian modernism by Russian literary studies, which is insufficient to carry out the necessary completeness of the intercultural dialogue, given that the Bulgarian modernists largely focused in their work on the achievements of Russian symbolism and the Silver Age as a whole. The author traces the local features of the development of modernism in Bulgaria, which determine the validity of including in it the trends of symbolism and expressionism, often appearing in Bulgarian literature in syncretism. The article concretizes the stylistic and thematic uniformity of a number of Bulgarian literary phenomena of the 20th century, which proves the self-sufficiency of Bulgarian modernism as a full-fledged trend. Based on the material of Russian-language publications issued in Bulgaria and reflected in the database of the Bibliography Department of the Russian State Library “Books in Russian Published Abroad, 1927—1991”, the article identifies the main representatives of Bulgarian literary modernism: P. Todorov, P. Yavorov, A. Dalchev, A. Strashimirov, N. Furnadzhiev, A. Karalichev, D. Debelyanov, G. Milev, N. Rainov, T. Trayanov. The author attempts to determine a specific place for each of them within the framework of the considered trend. On the basis of individual and collective publications identified when accessing the specified database, the article outlines the main features of the creative method and style of each of the authors under consideration, which are supported by examples from the texts. The author draws conclusions about the degree of completeness of Bulgarian modernism adaptation for Russian-speaking readers, which remains insufficient due to the limited number of translations, the tendentious selection of works for translation in the light of the ideological restrictions of the Soviet era, the disregard of a number of leading authors, and the lack of modern reprints and popularization of the accumulated body of translations.