Rebalancing the extra-judicial scales: Documentary aesthetics and the legacy of the Central Park Five

The Central Park jogger case has returned to news headlines with the 2019 Netflix mini-series When They See Us, a dramatised account of the original trials. It has reignited debate over the injustices faced by the Black community in the United States, and led to lawsuits and job resignations on the part of former police investigators and prosecutors. Since the case’s inception, issues of race, media reporting, economics, and the identity of New York City have influenced the trial and its aftermath and have inspired documentaries, books, and the landmark 1990 essay “Sentimental Journeys” by Joan Didion. In this article, I argue that the creators of two of these works, by testing the boundaries of narrative, demonstrate that the case was inexorably tainted by a pervasive feeling of social precarity and racial prejudice which cost five young men several years of their lives, and offer a productive line of enquiry for acknowledging such factors and their influence, if not resolving them.

Fragmentation and Isolation---On the Narrative Analysis of Joan Didion’s On Going Home

In On Going Home, Joan Didion demonstrates her deep concern and melancholy towards the 1960s’ American society and describes a fragmented and isolated mental landscape of that time. She skillfully employs the narrative skills which include the collage, the foregrounding language, the confusion of tenses and repetition. In this way, the theme hidden in the essay is portrayed and resonate with the contemporary readers.

DIFFICULTIES IN TRANSLATING AN ESSAY FROM ENGLISH INTO RUSSIAN

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of translating the genre of essays from English into Russian. Translated essays are works written at different times and by different authors. In the course of the research, essays by very popular authors and less well-known ones were translated. The first group of authors includes: Mark Twain, Langston Hughes, Alan Paton, and Joan Didion. The second group of writers includes: William Zinser, May Sarton, Euell Gibbons, Richard Selzer, Richard Howe, and Jow Goodwin Parker. The paper deals with the topical issues of proper nouns in translation. They require special attention, as errors in translation can cause misunderstandings. It should not be forgotten that the translator must have sufficient information about the events, phenomena and people described, because extralinguistic factors have a great influence on translation adequacy.

Time and the Hydroelectric Dam

The hydroelectric dam is an interface in which contrasting temporalities converge and undergo transformation. Its massive wall sits at the center of operations where age-old ecosystems clash with rapid modernization, white water turns into a placid lake, and dynamos convert the lake’s gravitational pull into high-voltage electrical current. The hydroelectric dam exploits and exacerbates differences among the temporalities distinguishing these operations to generate power. In doing so, it has rendered the variance of time more perceptible. To support this claim I focus on the iconic Hoover Dam and on the works of Oskar J. W. Hansen, Joan Didion, Allen Tupper True, Francis Ponge and Fabrice Gobert. The main themes I examine in their works pertain to the notion of temporal interface and to the conceptions of deep, nested and haunted time.

Writing in the Dust

In this elegant and insightful piece of literary journalism, Alan Rifkin offers a sweeping account of how John Fante’s Ask the Dust has come to be a touchstone among contemporary writers in Los Angeles and southern California and a wellspring of the region’s literature. Combining his own personal journey as a writer of fiction and non-fiction with a survey of the works of such authors as Steve Erickson, Carolyn See, Joan Didion, Salvador Plascencia, Kate Braverman, and others, Rifkin traces a line connecting all of them to Fante’s signature work and its dreamlike image of the metropolis: “Every Los Angeles writer at the outskirts of vision feels a connection to Ask the Dust, the 1939 novel that, more than any other, seems to weep over this city’s corpse in the ecstasy of possessing it.”