Motivos quijotescos y metaficción cervantina en el «Tríptico del carnaval» de Sergio Pitol

Specialised critics have dealt extensively with the influence that Mikhail Bakhtin had on Sergio Pitol through the concept of carnival. They have neglected, however, the aesthetic debt that the Mexican writer owes to Miguel de Cervantes. This kind of influence can be seen not only in the quixotic topics recreated in Pitol’s production but also in his metafictional conception. This article offers an approach to the narrative series called “Tríptico del carnaval” – perhaps the most popular by Pitol – and explains some of Cervantes’s metafictional strategies, such as the breaking of the fourth wall, autobiographical fiction, and parodic intertextuality.

Cervantes y la escritura de senectute (en torno al Viaje del parnaso)

This article applies the critical concept of de senectute writing, coined by Rozas, to Lope’s work, in the analysis of Viaje del Parnaso as the axis of a cycle and an authorial posture. It starts from the textual references to the old age in this autobiographical fiction and its creative environment. These are related to a sense of melancholy, which also connects the Viaje character with the attitude of the author. This attitude manifests itself in the revision of his work and life; a revision through which Cervantes contemplates the literary field, and sorts the narrative movement of the text. The round trip reveals his intent to recover a lost splendour, which materialises on the lyrical level in Naples, and is evoked, in the epic, with Lepanto, both key moments in Cervantes’s biography. Following the features pointed out by Rozas, this study shows that those features are present in the Cervantine cycle before they make their appearance in Lope.

Od kulturowego pojmowania przestrzeni ku rozważaniom o wieczności. Dyskurs przestrzenny w powieści Brisbane Jewgienija Wodołazkina

This article deals with different aspects of space in the text of Eugene Vodolazkin’s novel Brisbane as well as in its studies and reception. Successive parts of the research are devoted to lieux de mémoire in autobiographical fiction, cultural understanding of the space of the home and places which traditionally create the image of Kiev and the individual mythology of this city. Space perceived in the way modified by culture is a certain frame in which both the hero of Vodolazkin lives and a receiver reads the novel. It is also an important component of the work’s internal structure, the factor responsible for certain genre associations that determine the direction of the reading process. In all these forms of functioning, space is thematically related to the reflection on death. The author concludes that the understanding of space leads to the rejection of the physical future and the affirmation of eternity understood in a religious way, in line with medieval tradition.

Karaktermord i 10’ernes danske skønlitteratur

In the 2010s, Danish literature triggered heated debates about the relationship between artistic freedom, defamation, responsibility, guilt and shame, and initiated negotiations of collective norms and values in connection with testimonies in autobiographical fiction. The article establishes that there is a need to consider how differently character assassinations appear in and outside autobiographical fiction, taking into account that autobiographical fiction establishes ambiguous statements that are not found in the media coverage.

Introduction

Beginning with a discussion of partisan politics in Catharine Sedgwick’s juvenile letters and her autobiographical fiction, the introduction makes a case for considering five prominent New England women authors (Sedgwick, Judith Sargent Murray, Sally Sayward Wood, Lydia Sigourney, and Harriet Beecher Stowe) as profoundly influenced by and invested in a Federalist understanding of religion in a republic. This investment, which treats Protestant Christianity as a force necessary for public morality in democratic life, shaped their writing careers and forms an unacknowledged contribution to political and religious debates about church and state in the early republic and nineteenth century. Situating this argument as a contribution to scholarship in literary studies, postsecular studies, and political history, the introduction explains contributions to each area.

Autobiography in the Anthropocene. A Geological Reading of Alice Munro

In the autobiographical stories of Nobel Prize award-winning author Alice Munro, questions of ontology and mortality are inextricably connected to matters of space and place. Fundamental existential dilemmas expressed in Munro’s corpus – signaled by the title of her second short story collection Who Do You Think You Are? – are linked to basic questions concerning orientation. Although autobiographical fiction frequently interweaves concerns about identity and deceased parents with recollections of ancestral spaces, as the literary critic Northrop Frye famously stated, the question ‘Where is here?’ is characteristic of the Canadian imagination. It is now also fundamental to the epoch of the Anthropocene. Although critics frequently praise Munro for her skill in presenting haunting, epiphanic moments, she is less often credited for her far less conventional tendency to tell stories covering years, even decades. My paper explores Munro’s preoccupation with these vast temporal arcs and their impact on her recursive autobiographical fiction. I argue that Munro’s penchant for ‘return and revision’ in her non-fictional works affords an opportunity for her protagonists and, by extension, her readers to revisit and ponder ancestral connections and the non-human dimensions of existence, which include sublime geological features and deep time.

The Creative Indifference of a “Shifter of Registers” (Epochenverschleppe) – Gregor Von Rezzori

The body of the article goes on to highlight the problem of Gregor von Rezzori’s extravagant, lavish and idiosyncratic style entwined with his innate exquisite irony and scepticism, sometimes sarcasm, which can be inferred from his stance of indifference to social norms and trends.In the given context, the most expressive and illustrious are Rezzori’s novels “Oedipus Prevails at Stalingrad” (1954) and “On My Own Traces” (1997), which reflect the author’s ambitious venture into his autobiographical mythologizing from a perspective of the category of time and shed the light on how the artist’s negative experience can be turned into creative indifference. Of particular value, for our research, is the convergence of timeless themes and the ideological intertextuality created in two different surroundings, and provoked by fateful historical events. Rezzori’s irony of his own search for self-identity, a distinguishing feature for postmodern poetics, is one of the most critical topics to perceive the author’s personal experience. Transforming his childhood memories of his lost homeland into the imaginative artistic style, the author succeeded in creating a mythical topos, derived from the personal author’s mythologies (his autobiographical fiction “An Ermine in Czernopol” serves as an excellent example). It should be articulated, that pervasive irony and self-irony are key features of the author’s style. With his novel “Oedipus at Stalingrad”, Rezzori prior to postmodernism in art, foreshadowed his conceptual principles, philosophical fundamentals and worldview. In time, his fiction “On My Own Traces” picked up the threads of the ideas of “Oedipus” quintessence. To conclude, Rezzori’s mystical experiences of his childhood are preserved in his fiction like the most precious treasures that reveal the childish fragile soul seeking for its recognition. To grasp Rezzori’s philosophy, we should realize the author’s key concept – the category of time, which enables him to recognize himself as “Epochenverschlepper”: in his fiction, time lines are blurred, to some extent they become meaningless and functionally typify human history continuity. Consequently, in periods when everything seems rickety and unsettled: the past, the present, and the unpredictable future, the author dares to delve into in-depth psychology of human feelings and knowing thy-self.

Patricia López-Gay. Ficciones de verdad. Archivo e narrativas de vida

Some of the most interesting narrative literature recently produced in Spain is distinguished by the incorporation of auto- or bio-fictional elements (for instance, Miguel Ángel Hernández, El dolor de los demás [2018]; Pablo Martín Sánchez, Diario de un viejo cabezota [2020]). Not surprisingly, this ‘trend’ has already led to many academic studies on different aspects of autobiographical fiction. The new book by Patricia López-Gay is an extremely valuable contribution to this field, since it charts in a convincing and sophisticated manner the specifically Spanish genealogy and phenomenology of this literary tendency, covers the work of representative writers in a synthetic fashion, and develops an original argument about the intersection of auto-fictional prose and the narrative configuration of the archive.

Childhood Trauma in Maya Angelou’s Autobiographical Fiction – Abuse and Displacement

The article discusses how trauma is represented in Maya Angelou’s autobiographical fiction, one of the most important themes in all her seven autobiographical novels and an African American feminist marginalized experience that speaks about the intensity and effects of women’s oppression. It explores how the novelist locates traumatic affects in the protagonist, and suggests that Frantz Fanon’s model of racial trauma in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth remains essential for the interpretation of postcolonial texts. My purpose is to explore the different juxtapositions that the story offers between individual and collective experiences of