Abenteuer Männlichkeit. Adoleszenz in Wolfgang Herrndorfs Roman «Tschick»

This article deals with literary constructions of masculinity in Wolfgang Herrndorf’s novel Tschick. The focus is on male adolescence as represented by the characters in the text. The study is guided by the question of how the male socialisation of adolescents is narrated in the novel. Themes such as the search for identity, friendship, sexuality and being an outsider are addressed. The analysis is based on theoretical perspectives offered by masculinity studies, intersectional approaches of identity research as well as genre-related reflections on young adult fiction.

Margaret Atwood and Monstrous Vegan Words

Chapter 3 positions Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003‒13) as the culmination of the trajectory built across the previous two chapters, drawing directly on the monstrous vegans of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau. The chapter argues that Atwood’s vegan monsters are presented as overdetermined literary constructions and signal the impossibility of connecting to a ‘pure’ or inherent vegan identity. Unpacking allusions to a wide body of vegetarian and vegan philosophy and thought within the texts, this chapter re-thinks ideas about narrative transmission and the reproduction of literary veganisms. The chapter ultimately argues that the recognition of historic vegan words, in the service of greater visibility and recognition, risks circumventing the complications and contradictions inherent to their transmission.

Triclinium Trialectics: The Triclinium as Contested Space in Early Roman Palestine

This study draws on critical spatial theory to analyze the earliest archaeological and literary evidence of the triclinium, or Roman dining room, in Early Roman Palestine. It begins by examining the archaeological evidence of triclinia and similar banqueting spaces in Palestine, addressing their dating, their differing settings, and how their appearance and diffusion reflects socioeconomic and cultural changes under Roman influence. Next, it examines literary constructions of banqueting spaces in the Parables of Enoch, Testament of Moses, and “Q Sayings Gospel.” It demonstrates that these sources all seem to envision a triclinium setting in which elites eat, drink, and engage in all sorts of revelry while reclining on couches. The final section is devoted to critical spatial analysis of both the archaeological and literary data. It argues that these sources all evince, in varying ways, the interpenetration of local and global spaces rather than the unilateral “Romanization” of provincial space.

Between the Broad Daylight and the Shadow: Metamorphoses of the Bakhtiar Tale in Persian and Malay

Barthes defined the literary text as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”. Developing this statement, we can postulate two forms of existence of the literary text. On the one hand, it may exist as a holistic entity in which all components are interlinked so that they can bear an integral meaning. This is a “syntagmatic” existence of the literary work as a “tissue”, or a certain structure. On the other hand, the literary text may exist as a destructuralised set of the same components isolated from each other—its “paradigmatic” existence as a sum total of quotations that contribute to the all-embracing repository of “quotations”, which makes up the intertext of a particular literature. This intertext provides “building blocks” for the construction of new literary pieces. In this article I shall discuss the two forms of existence of literary works on the basis of one piece of Persian literature translated into Malay. The example chosen is Hikayat Bakhtiar (Tale of Bakhtiar), and its transformations and diverse literary constructions that were built of “quotations” from it over more than two centuries. This discussion, among other things, will help us to explain the strong Persian influence on Malay traditional literature, despite the relatively small number of Persian writings translated into Malay. Keywords: traditional Malay literature, persian influence, Hikayat Bakhtiar , quotation, recension, intertext, Hikayat Maharaja Ali , Syair Bidasari