Numer 6.1 (2020)
Redaktorzy: Jacek Fabiszak, Krzysztof Fordoński
Spis treści
Strony
Pobierz
Jacek Fabiszak,
Krzysztof Fordoński
From the Editors
5 – 6
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Jacek Fabiszak
Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu

Krzysztof Fordoński
Uniwersytet Warszawski
Ema Jelínková
From Silence to Dialogic Discourse in Selected Short Stories by Ali Smith
7 – 21
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Słowa kluczowe

Ali Smith |Scottish literature |Bakhtin |dialogism |silence

Streszczenie

This paper focuses on the contemporary Scottish writer Ali Smith, specifically on the motifs of silence, voice, and Bakhtinian dialogism in her short stories “The Hanging Girl” and “The College”. A brief introduction to the relevant history, traditions, and concepts in Scottish writing in general and Scottish women’s writing in particular is provided to contextualise Smith’s fiction and illustrate how the author engages with her cultural heritage and how she updates it to address current issues. The selected stories are representative of Smith’s work in that they deal with the recurrent themes of loss, death, and longing for a genuine human connection. Smith explores manifestations of otherness in all senses of the word and pushes the possibilities of heteroglot interillumination of perspectives to give a voice to those who have been silenced, forgotten, or repressed by the dominant monoglot discourse. The stories in question, as well as Smith’s other fiction, include multiple voices and juxtapose different views while refraining from allowing any single of them to dominate the others. Ultimately, Smith’s forceful stories of human interest establish conditions of dialogic heteroglossia to draw attention to what we share as human beings rather than what makes us different from one another.


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Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, Czechy
Ewa Kowal
Immense Risks: the Migrant Crisis, Magical Realism, and Realist “Magic” in Mohsin Hamid’s Novel Exit West
22 – 42
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Słowa kluczowe

migrant crisis |immigrant novel |magical realism |postcolonial literature |socioliterature

Streszczenie

The aim of this paper is to analyse Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 Exit West as a literary response to the 2015 migrant crisis. Hamid’s fourth novel will be shown as, on the one hand, a formal departure from his previous works, but on the other, a continuation of the most important thematic threads in the author’s output. The paper demonstrates how Hamid takes on the risky challenge of capturing the migrant experience by offering a nuanced response to the refugee crisis, which opens up the novel to interpretations from the perspectives of postcolonial studies, trauma theory, and socioliterature. Furthermore, Hamid’s use of the technique of magical realism will be examined as a metaphor and an ellipsis; however, it will be argued that the novel’s politically subversive potential lies elsewhere: in the formally realist vision of an optimistic resolution to the migrant crisis. This ending, for many readers unrealistic and fantastical, if not “magical,” offers a “radical political engagement with the future,” as it provides the author’s unflagging expression of support for what he calls “impurity,” as well as his appeal for strategic hope and optimism in the face of the currently dominant political discourse of fear and division.


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Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie
Tuhin Shuvra Sen
Summoning the Voices of the Silenced: Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, a Feminist Retelling of Homer’s The Iliad
43 – 55
PDF

Słowa kluczowe

silence |myth |The Iliad |feminist retelling |female perspective

Streszczenie

The Western literary tradition since its beginning has invariably foregrounded the experiences and perceptions of men suppressing the voices of women and, thus, relegated women’s voices to the margins of history. In the male-written and male-dominated accounts of the ancient world, we do not get access to women’s feelings and desires, their struggles and anguishes, and their dreams and accomplishments. Likewise, while Homer’s The Iliad recounts the incidents of the mythic Trojan War lionizing the valiant and valorous feats of larger than life heroes, women in this timeless epic are reduced to objects, primarily sex-objects, used by conquering men to appease their overriding sense of masculinity and heroism. In essence, women in The Iliad are denied the opportunity to articulate their voices on the harrowing pretext that “Silence becomes a woman” (Barker 2018, 294). The Booker Prize winning author Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls is a sincere attempt to break that tradition of silence by retelling the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of the female voice of Briseis, a war prize and a sex slave. Barker’s feminist revisionist mythological fiction allows the muted and undermined women of Homer’s The Iliad to speak out, to make choices, to act, and to assert their feelings and opinions about their own lives. Offering a textual analysis of The Silence of the Girls, this paper aims at explaining how Barker, focusing on the depiction of feminine perspective and female experience, attempts to challenge the age-old patriarchal bias which suppresses the female voice and to provide a new representation of female subjectivity that counteracts the misogynist depiction of women in literatures based on myths.


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University of Chittagong (চট্টগ্রাম বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়), Bangladesz
György Borus
Political Instability and Whig Inefficiency in Britain in the Post-Pitt Era
56 – 67
PDF

Słowa kluczowe

political instability |Whigs |Catholic emancipation |Napoleonic Wars |parliamentary politics |party development

Streszczenie

The years from 1806 to 1812 were remarkably unstable in British politics. The beginning of this period saw one of the few occasions during the reigns of George III and his two sons (1760-1837) when the Whigs tried to provide stable government, but the Ministry of All the Talents managed to remain in power only for little more than a year. The special character of the political system, the deaths of two great leaders, the difficulties of fighting the war against France, personal rivalries, divisive political issues and George III’s illness all combined to make this era utterly unstable. This article seeks to explain the reasons for the ineffectiveness of the Whig-dominated administration and discusses the factors that contributed to the failure of the Tory governments up to 1812.


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Debreceni Egyetem, Węgry
Wojciech Drąg
Book Review: Magda Dragu, Form and Meaning in Avant-Garde Collage and Montage
68 – 71
PDF

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Uniwersytet Wrocławski
Anna Kwiatkowska
Book review: Emma Sutton and Tsung-Han Tsai (eds.), Twenty-First-Century Readings of E.M. Forster’s “Maurice”
72 – 80
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Uniwersytet Warmińsko-Mazurski w Olsztynie
Pobierz cały numer
1 – 90
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Polish Association
pjes@pjes.edu.pl
ISSN 2543-5981
for the Study of English