NEW BOOKS ON METATEXTUALITY

The review considers recent scholar publications of foreign researchers devoted to the phenomenon of metatextuality, in particular “Metafiction Short Story Writers” (2016) by G. Brand, the chapter “World Building and Metafiction in Contemporary Comic Books” by D. Mellier in the collective monograph “World Building. Transmedia, Fans, Industries” (2017), as well as A. Macrae’s monograph “Discourse deixis in metafiction” (2019). G. Brand’s book presents itself as a kind of compendium of short prose by those authors who, in one way or another, have thematized the creative process. In reviewing the work by D. Mellier, emphasis is laid on the subgenre of meta-comics identified by the scholar. The monograph by A. Macrae can become a solid foundation for a linguistic interpretation both postmodernist metafiction and textual experiments of high modernism (S. Beckett, A. Artaud, T. Bernhard, etc.). The review concludes that research in recent years is helping to fill gaps in the description of narrative and linguistic markers and tools of metatextuality.

Small Socialism: The Scales of Self-Management Culture in Postwar Yugoslavia

During the early 1950s the Federative Peoples Republic of Yugoslavia underwent a series of radical politico-economic reforms that created the system of socialist self-management. Although scholars have long acknowledged that these reforms liberalized the field of cultural production, the precise ways in which self-management shaped Yugoslav culture during this period remains under-examined. Drawing from Daniel Immerwahr's concept of “thinking small,” this paper contends that self-management be thought of as an effort to rescale the horizons of socialist modernity. As Yugoslav reformers diverged from the Soviet model of Stalinist high modernism, they descaled state power to local sites of administration. This turn towards “small socialism” was recorded in certain conceptual and methodological trends in the cultural production of this period. This paper explores this recalibration of the scales of socialist culture in three examples from the 1950s: the urban theory of Bogdan Bogdanović, the revival of dialect poetry in Croatia, and the proliferation of domestic travelogues that emphasized the diversity of local cultures. As these examples demonstrate, the ambivalence that many Yugoslav intellectuals felt with regards to the high modernist scales of Stalinism prompted them to redirect the focus of socialist culture towards the marginal, the minor, or the minute.

Urban Ingenuity in the System

This chapter shows how a cast of young architects and their reform-minded older colleagues strove to save the city by correcting the mistakes of high modernism and imbuing the urban core with humane proportions and highlights. It describes urban ingenuity that meant working within a layered, diverse, and at times chaotic bureaucracy that is laden with jaded and corrupt offices. It also refers to Leipzig's young chief architect Dietmar Fischer, who spearheaded a campaign to reconcile modern methods with historical substance. The chapter discusses preservationists that sought to save architectural relics as landmarks for local identity, such as their own offices in the mid-1970s. It examines financial, material, and labor shortfalls inherent in East Germany's industrialized mass-production economy that helped ensure Fischer's fusion of small-scale Plattenbau to remain a prototype without successors.

Bird Girls

This chapter examines the gendered nature of the Joycean epiphany, and its refashioning by Irish women writers in the aftermath of high modernism. Turning to Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices (1941), Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River (1996), and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the chapter argues that these works stage an epiphany that signals a perceived rite of passage promising to move the protagonist into some new form of understanding and experience—though importantly, these epiphanies and what unfolds in their wake are not necessarily characterized strictly by good feeling for female protagonists. Taking the ethics of close reading trauma as its central case in point, the chapter argues that slowly reading difficult texts like McBride’s trains readers to sit patiently not only with the discomfort generated by the intellectual challenges posed by modernist innovation but also with the suffering generated by human failing.