Adaptation or escapism? The British Royals’ tribulations and the crisis of personal identity in Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I

In The Queen and I (1992), English writer Sue Townsend (1946-2014) satirically imagines the abolition of the British monarchy and the subsequent social, political and even personal trials generated by their new situation. This paper1 focuses on the hardships experienced by the royal family in their demoted condition, with special focus on aspects related to personal identity, such as emotional remoteness, displacement, disputes over the reputation of the (royal) name, re-naming, falsifying one’s name and the invention of another identity, illness, escape mechanisms and struggles to adapt to a new life - all of these fictitious tribulations depicting the royal family in a state of crisis

Mimesis, interpretation and the human condition

One of the most fundamental questions in the discourse on artistic creativity and interpretation is that of mimesis or representation; the relation and the ‘tension’ between experiential reality on one hand and an artistic construct on the other hand. In the present study, mimesis and the discussion about the connection between the experiential and the imaginary are understood as major characteristics by which man and the human condition are defined. From the context of the visual arts, the study proceeds to literature and, specifically, to an analysis of the novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) by Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). The main aim of the study is to show the questions of representation and interpretation as part of the universal inquiry about humanity and the human condition.

Documentary film as historical narrative

The submitted study describes the documentary film as a historical narrative that carries within it problems documented by historians such as Paul Veyne and Hayden White. It argues on behalf of the thesis that a documentary film in itself does not classify historical clues according to historical truth but according to a selected purpose (e.g. despite aesthetic conventions or in the case of a narrative film - according to the story). The study refutes the argument of Noël Carroll, who deals with the popularizing documentary film - specifically, connecting scientific “truth” with the tropological character of a documentary film narrative can create at best an approximate picture of a historical event.

Pictures in Words – Kanji, Images in Literature – Sōshi

From ancient times, the Japanese have been exploiting the image in as many ways as possible. They have used it in linguistics, literature, art - and the list is certainly much longer. Thus, the first part of my work tries to explain the importance of the kanji writing system and the “image” of a kanji, so that readers who do not understand the Japanese language can become familiar with it (origin, structure, mnemotechnics etc.). The second part of my work explains that later, in the 14th century, when “sōshi”or “zōshi” literature was born, n all of its books the relation between the text and the image was more than important. In the end, I conclude that the “image” is a defining element in understanding Japanese language and literature even in the 21st century.

The Individual and the Nation in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s Early Writing

In its essence, postcolonial literature evolved as an opposition to colonial discourse and ideological representation of the colonized subject inherent in colonial narratives. Springing out of the need to reconceptualize and reconstitute their communities, postcolonial writers often addressed the pressing historical and political issues of that time in their writing. In its early stages, postcolonial literature was therefore often marked by a strong sense of nationalism, interweaving fictional stories with the public narrative of pre-independence ideology. The paper seeks to explore the border between the public and the private in the early novels of the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Just as his contemporaries in other colonized countries, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o tends to utilize literature as a powerful tool for raising national awareness. The pre-independence period, in which Ngũgĩ’s novels are set, is marked by a certain degree of romanticism and idealism, yet there is also an underlying sense of doom. Drawing on the cultural roots and mythology of his community, the writer steers his narrative in the direction of a larger, public discourse, suggesting that “the individual finds the fullest development of his personality when he is working in and for the community as a whole”. Therefore, the public/private dichotomy stands at the very centre of his writing, proving the rootedness of the individual in the public space.

Imaginative Communities: The Role, Practice and Outreach of Community–Based Theatre

In recent years, the artistic representation of communities (e.g. in community-based theatres) has found its source in the realm of the imagination (documentary drama, verbatim theatre, post-dramatic performance, etc.), addressing issues that are important and relevant not only for the communities themselves but also for the wider society. In this presentation I will use Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of the “seductive lightness of being” - or the transitory nature of our virtual experience - to talk about the role of selected community-based theatres in the United States and about their imaginative depiction and discussion of issues which are of vital importance for any community: identity, the personal vs. the political, a sense of belonging, progressiveness, social awareness and the capability of coexistence.

Poe’s Vision of Atonement: The Anthropic Principle in Eureka

I will focus on the imaginative contribution that Edgar Allen Poe brought to scientific debates regarding the fate of our universe. At the basis of many a nightmarish vision of apocalyptic destruction, there lies the unwillingness of the human mind to make allowance for divine intervention or to make an imaginative appeal to the soothing power of such a morally superior instance. For all his avantgardistic vision, Poe insists upon and constructs his cosmological model around the principle of a Divine Essence, which initially created the universe and which is omnipresent, being embodied and living through all God’s creatures. As the instrument to detect this force, Poe proposes intuition and, empowered by it, he is able to state “calmly” an “absolute truth” - confirmed by present-day cosmology - namely that our universe is evolving, its existence a mere cycle in the beating of the Divine Heart. The cornerstone of Poe’s visionary cosmology consists of what is known as “the anthropic principle”, which will be used in the present paper as a possible key to achieving a dialogic interface between Science and Religion at a time when such an opportunity constitutes a rather stringent necessity.

Simulacra in Science Fiction

The paper examines the concept of simulacra, focusing on their employment in contemporary science fiction. It provides examples from literature as well as from popular cinematography, in order to present the topic in a more familiar context. These examples include Wachowski’s The Matrix, Gibson’s Neuromancer and Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht reflected in the light of ideas of theorists such as Baudrillard and Deleuze. The purpose of this paper is to provide the basic notion of the concept in connection with the science fiction genre, while also offerring a wide range of subject-related material

“Because Slovaks are the best people in the world and the Slovak language is the most beautiful language in the world”: Defamiliarising the Slovak “Imagined Community” in Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book

National identity and language have been understood to be inseparable. This claim is supported by the history of the Slovak language, notably the codification attempts made by Anton Bernolák and Ľudovít Štúr as part of the Slovak National Revival Movement. National community tends to be perceived as being defined and categorized by a unified language, or by a homogenous grammar and lexicon shared equally among the community members. This concept of speech-national communities, I propose, is deconstructed in Daniela Kapitáňová’s Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book (Kniha o cintoríne), published in Slovak in 2000 and translated into English by Julia Sherwood in 2010. Through Samko’s pedantic engagement in Aristotelian categorization of knowledge, in his obsessive attempt to illustrate his (antilogical) logic of what it means to be a Slovak and to be part of a community which has gone through dramatic changes in history, tenets and beliefs which are unquestioningly accepted as truth are mercilessly defamiliarized, or “made strange”. Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book corresponds with Benedict Anderson’s notion of human communities as imagined entities in which people “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”.

Ethnic Literature and Slovak American Research

The article outlines the beginnings of ethnic literature research in the United States of America with regards to its reception from the 1960s to the 1980s. Aesthetic merit as a leading consideration in the evaluation of literary works, in view of the opinions of numerous critics, is quite problematic to apply in the case of Czech and Polish literature. Considering the output of Slovak-American research in the field of literary criticism and literary history, the results are not satisfactory either. There are a few works that provide valuable insight into the literature of the Slovak diaspora.