“How Does The Never To Be Differ From What Never Was?” The Importance of Dreams and Memory in The Road

Thehaunting presence of memories and dreams from an unregenerate past society thoroughly permeate the action of Cormac McCarthy’s vision of the post-apocalypse in The Road. Besides the intention of contrasting the barrenness of the world that the protagonists inhabit with the livelyimagery of the old world, the recollections that invade the father’s inner self provide a clash between personal and collective narratives which push him to struggle for survivaland protect his son in an effort to “carry the fire” of humanity. Parallelly, the symbolism of the dreams that we encounterthroughout the novel hold valuable clues that can be accessed to resolve the ambiguous closure to The Road. Inthefirst part of this paper, Iwillrevisitthe field of memory studies to reveal the importance that memory holds as a provider of meaning for life in the apocalypse. The second part of the article develops a theory that absolutely disregards any optimistic reading of the end of the novel, as itpresents us with the possibility that what we read in the last pagesof the bookconstitutes the wish-fulfilment produced by the boy’s dying dream. To investigatethis enticing theory that was furthered by Jacob M. Powning, I will assessthis hypothesis through the lenses of Psychoanalysis. McCarthy’s interest in the psychoanalytic studies, and his fascination with the dream world will help to develop a pertinent proposition that seeks to ultimately resolve the enigmatic Deus Ex-Machina that closes the novel

Almost the same but not quite Mimicry e Subversão em Youth e Foe de J. M. Coetzee

This article analyzes, througha postcolonial perspective, the literary works Foeand Youth, both written by J. M. Coetzee. It problematizes the concept of mimicry as presented by Homi K. Bhabha in his essay “Of mimicry and man: The ambivalenceof colonial discourse”. Analyzing the actions of the characters John and Friday, it becomes possible to perceive how they resort to strategies of mimicry and attempt to resist Western discourses of power. Consequently, they present themselves as disruptiveand subversivein a cultural space traditionally imbedded with colonial authority.

Mundus Vult Decipi RuPaul’s Drag Race as Part of the Culture Industry

In this article I examine the ways in which the competitive reality television franchiseRuPaul’s Drag Race(RPDR), immensely popular withWestern LGBTQ+-communities, can be considered a product of what Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer identified as the Culture Industry (CI). On the one hand,this allows for a concrete application of the CI-thesis and the exploration of possible lines of critique concerning RPDR and its effects on its viewership, while,on the other hand,it is an opportunity to evaluate the aptitude of the CI-thesis for critical analysis in the 21st century. While the concepts related to the CI-thesis turn out to be remarkably productive, its latent totalitarian and pessimistic framework tends to skew any analysis. This may warrant supplementing its coarse-grained perspective with a more fine-grained empirical investigation

Breaking the Borders of Fantasy Travelling through the Stillness in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy

As the genre of fantasy literature continues to grow, new authors strive to innovate and stray from the traditional principles that ruled it for many decades when epic fantasy was more prominent. Though epic features still remain a great part of the genre,the characteristics that rule fantasy worlds, stories, and characters have changed over time, bringing new aspects into the fold and introducing new voices. As academics attempt to categorize a genre as diverse as fantasy to better understand it and define it, authors continue to expand and mingle fantasy elements with components from other genres, especially science-fiction. The aim of this article is to identify how a taxonomy of fantasy can be used to understand the relation between the fantastic and the narrative. By analyzing N. K. Jemisin’s novels in the Broken Earthtrilogy throughFarah Mendlesohn’s categorization of fantasy proposed in Rhetorics of Fantasy(2008), the goal is to discover the aspects in which Jemisin brings innovation into the fantasy genre by applying elements from various categories.