A ‘Palimpestuous’ Reading of Lisa Strøme’s The Strawberry Girl

This reading of Lisa Strømme’s debut novel The Strawberry Girl (2016) is informed by Gérard Genette’s approach to literature as ”hypertextual,” by which the literary theorist means that any text evokes “some other literary work” (Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree 9). To weave the story of how Munch painted the first version of his iconic Skrik (The Scream) at Åsgårdstrand, Strømme read Munch’s journals, newspaper archives, an old memoir by a local woman, Inger Alver Gløersen, whose stepfather was a friend of Munch’s, she explored Munch events and exhibitions, Munch’s paintings, and she had talks with local people. Aside from these non-literary sources, the writer referenced Goethe’s Faust, the legend of Peer Gynt, the Poetic Edda, Dostoevsky, and she prefaced each chapter of the novel with a quote from Goethe’s Theory of Colours. This kind of multi-layered writing lends itself to what Genette calls, using Philippe Lejeune’s coinage, “a palimpsestuous reading” (399) done by readers whose barthesque “jouissance” leads them into the temptation of loving “(at least) two [texts] together” (399), and, in this case, a lot more than two, and not just texts, but also the enthralling art of painting, in a synesthetic experience.

Continuity of Womanist Ethos: Intertextuality in Select Novels of Alice Walker

This study uses the relational content analysis method and theories of intertextuality, intersectionality, and womanism to explore the continuity of womanist ethos in select novels of the African-American novelist Alice Walker. It attempts to explore Walker’s use of womanism as an intertextual trope in The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992); Walker’s portrayal of Celie-Shug as a perfect womanist couple in Color Purple and their reappearance in Temple as mother trees; foremothers as role models in Third Life and Temple; Walker’s telling and retelling of Tashi’s life-long suffering from female genital mutilation (FGM) in Color Purple, Temple, and Possessing – the subject of this paper.

Memory and nostalgia: pre-reform Russia in the minds of the Russian nobility of the second half of the 19th century

This article is devoted to the study of the perception of the pre-reform era by the upper class in the second half of the 19th century, after several years thereof, then decades after the abolition of serfdom. Initial assessments of the peasant reform carried out among the nobility were quite contradictory. They ranged from total rejection and denial to approval of government policies. But all in all, the abolition of serfdom was a turning point in history. The post-reform period of "impoverishment" of the Russian nobility is associated with a rethinking of the place and role of the upper class in society and the state. Not all landowners managed to adapt to the conditions of the post-reform village, they left for the capital, abroad. The diminution of privileges and the loss of the exclusive status of the upper class fueled the mood of nostalgia. The article uses the concept of nostalgia, developed by Svetlana Boym, which provides for the identification of two types of nostalgia: restorative and reflective. Restorative nostalgia manifested itself not only in the collective consciousness of the upper class but became one of the motivations of the conservative policy of Alexander III. Reflective nostalgia was expressed in the growing interest in the study of the culture of noble manors, determined the identity of the upper estate. Overall, it can be argued that nostalgia has become not only an important feature of the collective consciousness of the nobility, but influenced state policy, shaped the image of the future based on the lost past.

Revising the Black decolonialization process: Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. and the poetics of violence

Frantz Fanon’s writings on decolonization have constantly been read as a call for violence against oppressive colonial rulings. The choice that the subjugated individual must make between remaining a victim or using the colonial violence against those who originally initiated it represents one of Fanon’s main arguments in The Wretched of the Earth. Drawing on Kendrick Lamar’s music album DAMN. (2017), this article aims to show how the rapper rewrites the decolonization process in a poetic way, using metaphors, hyperboles and allegories. The interactions between white and Black individuals that Lamar examines in his songs provide an answer to Fanon’s urge to choose. Moving beyond the Fanonian binary thinking (Black/white, colonizer/colonized), DAMN. provides an insight on how whiteness and Blackness co-inhabit a space full of violent encounters. While presenting an X-ray image of the present-day United States of America, Lamar does not offer an answer on the questions on racism, but he delivers a vivid picture of the outcomes of personal choices, collective failures and perpetual violence.

From the Time of Troubles to the Unity Day: Memory, Forgetting and Re-imaging the Past in Russian History

This article examines how the memory of one of the largest sociopolitical crises in the history of Russia (called the Time of Troubles) modified over 400 years. This process is considered as an example of rethinking the traumatic experience of the past and forming a national-patriotic myth on its basis. Several stages of the evolution of the memory of the Time of Troubles are issued: the XVII century – when the interpretation of these events was mainly religious; the XVIII century – when heroic and patriotic ideas about the time of troubles were formed in accordance with the ideals of classicism; the XIX century – the time of the development of the monarchical myth of the Romanov dynasty coming to power; the XX century – when the peasant war and the struggle against foreign intervention became the main dominant in the understanding of events; Modern Russia and the annual celebration of the National Unity Day – a public holiday established in 2005 in memory of the liberation of Moscow in 1612, the main idea of which is the unification of all peoples on the territory of the Russian Federation. It is noted that for centuries in the cultural memory of Russian society, two layers of ideas about the Time of Troubles coexisted. One of them – negative – was the memory of social upheavals and civil war, the other – positive – the memory of victory and overcoming the Troubles, evoking a sense of national pride and hopes for the future.

Evelyn Waugh’s War Novels in Francoist Spain

Evelyn Waugh’s experiences as captain in the Second World War represented the raw material for several novels, such as Put out More Flags (1942), Men at Arms (1952) and Brideshead Revisited (1945). These novels depict, on the one hand, the experiences of once immature bright young people who are now confronting the war reality, and, on the other, they satirize the military bureaucracy and portray the nostalgia for the conservative age of Catholic English nobility, which disappeared during the war. It could be assumed that these three novels might have been well received in Franco’s Spain as the Catholic theme as well as Waugh’s right-wing conservative beliefs could have influenced the censors’ approval or disapproval. Thus, the present paper will analyse the reception in Spain of Put out More Flags, Men at Arms and Brideshead Revisited considering the reports enclosed in the censorship files guarded at AGA (General Archive of the Administration) in Alcalá de Henares, Madrid. These documents reveal that Waugh’s novels were not easily approved by the Spanish censors during the Francoist dictatorship.

Remembering and Memorializing German-Romanian Gulag Victims in the USSR through Historical Documents and Historical Fiction

This paper examines the memory of the Romanian-German victims of the Soviet Gulag as recorded in recent collections of testimonies and interviews, a museum exhibition, an audio-visual documentary project, and Herta Müller’s 2009 novel Atemschaukel. It employs Alexander Etkind’s notions of “soft memory” and “hard memory” to discuss some of the key historical and political events that have impeded the establishing of consensual remembrance policies of the Soviet Gulag in communist Romania. I show how both German and Romanian communities since 1990 have memorialized the Gulag and discuss Atemschaukel as a legitimate impulse to document both personal and collective trauma of the second and subsequent generations. I argue that in the absence of a crystallized, hard memory, the historical documents and the historical fiction analyzed serve as viable examples of soft memory that succeed in memorializing the forced labor camps experience in its collective and individual forms.

Public Performance of Private Interviews: Reinserting the Self into the Family Narrative

Serban Oliver Tataru and Alfred Guzzetti are filmmakers that investigate on camera the role of memory in the construction of family history. They interview family members, gather old home movies and family photographs, and dig for public archival footage, in an effort to assume their position within a personal historical continuum, and to affirm their agency within their familial community. In their creative affirmation of generational subjectivity, they push against accepted familial narratives, and use the camera as a surgical tool that troubles lingering wounds beyond the surface of old images. In Anatomy of a Departure (2012), Romanian-German filmmaker Serban Oliver Tataru interviews his parents about their decision to emigrate from Ceausescu’s Romania while he was a teenager, scrutinizing on camera the conditions and consequence of a life-changing decision. While the dynamic of filming one’s own family is reminiscent of home movie tropes, and the tension built around sharing delicate memories reveals an intimacy usually intended to remain private, the film proposes a multilayered performance of the authorial self. As the film reveals a self-portrait set against the familial portrait (Marianne Hirsch), an inherent performative element acts as the necessary mediator between private and public, between ethic, aesthetic and politic. Negotiating between a restorative and a reflective nostalgia (Svetlana Boym), Tataru proposes a live performance of homecoming.

The Prisoner of Gender: Panopticon, Persuasion, and Surveillance of Women in Kavita Kané’s Menaka’s Choice

In the mythology-inspired novel Menaka’s Choice (2016), Kavita Kané discovers that the female body is continuously perceived both as an object of sexual desire and as an individual being by disrupting the conventional understanding of Apsara Menaka. Using Foucault’s concept of docile bodies and organic individuality the paper studies how power, in the form of ‘system’, imposes docility on women’s bodies. The paper weaves the potential for feminist thought as the novel rediscovers the recondite experiences that have been shrouded for centuries by giving central position to silent agents of Hindu mythology. Eventually, it attempts to analyse the act of seduction from the context of gender and how the individual tries to resist that disciplinary system.

Supernatural Characters in the Quasi-Historical Discourse of Modern Ukrainian Literature: Specificity and Functions

: The article is aimed at the study of Ukrainian quasi-historical novels of the early 21st century, characterized by the renunciation of “objectivity” of the narrative and emphasized the role of imagination. These are the pieces by Bakalets and Yarish (“From the Seventh Bottom”), Vynnychuk (“The Pharmacist”, “Lutetia”), and by Yatsenko (“Nechui. Nemov. Nebach”). The study reveals the features and functions of fantastic characters in the abovementioned novels. These fictional images of modern Ukrainian quasihistorical literary discourse are characterized by infernality, grotesque anthropomorphism, destruction of traditional antinomy “otherworldly– earthly/human”, philosophical and ironic coloring. Interpreting the fantasy in quasi-historical novels is expedient in the context of the global problem of perception of historical past by people of the 21st Century, with an emphasis on significant changes in public consciousness motivating writers to “Re-write/Reimagine the past”. The spread of this phenomenon reveals public distrust of the authorities, offering “correct” answers to the questions about past events, protest against permanent manipulation of historical facts (the tendency of growing consciousness and intellectualization of society).