Słowa kluczowe

biblical drama |mystery cycle |Reformation |Chester cycle |Norwich cycle |John Bale |Lewis Wager |Jacob and Esau

Streszczenie

The aim of the article is to pinpoint how 16th-century biblical drama tried to appropriate its genre and medium to carry the reformist message and in what sense the project turned out to be a self-defeating one. The analysis of selected plays from reformed biblical cycles (The Chester Mystery Cycle, play iv; and “The Norwich Grocers’ Play”) and newly composed drama (John Bale’s plays, Lewis Wager’s Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene, the anonymous “History of Jacob and Esau”), supported with an overview of the criticism on the matter, reveals some common tensions in the dramatic texts which may have had their roots in the reformist need to eliminate any room for doubt that a theatrical performance could leave. The conclusion is that, in its attempts at striking the right balance between dramatizing and overt sermonizing, engaging and distancing, as well as providing an immersive experience and discouraging it, post-Reformation Scripture-based drama oscillated between being more effective as a performance or as a carrier of the doctrinal message, with the resulting tendency to subvert either the former or the latter.

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cognitive obstacle |cultural materialism |radium |radioactivity |popular science

Streszczenie

At the beginning of the 20th century, the radical paradigm shift in atomic physics and chemistry attracted attention from non-scientific culture, and provided a new set of imagery in literary representation of matter, particularly in popular fiction. The article presents a number of texts whose themes and plots were rooted in a peculiar manner of writing, featuring a radical and consistent projection of emotions and desires onto literary representation of matter. The theoretical background has been derived from recent discussion of cultural materialism, and from Gaston Bachelard’s psychoanalysis of the scientific mind. The selection of literary texts covers popular novels and short stories published in Britain and the United States between 1880 and 1918. The conclusions present a somewhat surprising link between the new developments in atomic theory, and the tradition of frontier settings in the American adventure romance.

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human rights |Immigration |Refugees |speculative fiction |Herbert Read |modernist novel |George Orwell

Streszczenie

Modernist author Herbert Read was best known as an art critic, anarchist, and poet, but one of the few works of his which remains in print is his little understood only attempt at fiction: his novel, The Green Child (1935). The novel updates a medieval tale about mysterious green-hued children who suddenly appear in a village, and in Read’s work, the so-called Green Children set off a narrative where, I argue, that individual liberties like freedom of movement and political debates around human rights and refugees are staged and thought through. In reapproaching this semi-fantastical tale, I analyse how Read imagines a form of social utopia and also offers commentary on the mid-20th century refugee crisis.

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fake news |George Orwell |mass communication theories |The Loudest Voice |simulacra

Streszczenie

Drawing upon mass communication theories, with special emphasis on Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra and simulacrum, we will examine distortion of information practices in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and in the American TV miniseries The Loudest Voice (2019). Even though there is nearly a century between both works, socio-politically speaking, the control of information dissemination is equally important in both narrative products: in the maintaining of the status quo in an authoritarian system in 1984 and in the process of undermining the current US democratic system in The Loudest Voice. With this, we will argue that these literary and audiovisual texts are key for citizens to develop critical thinking skills and to question their worldviews, or, in Orwell’s own words, to exercise an uncommon common sense, which entails independence of thought and integrity of mind.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein |autobiography |Vladimir Nabokov |autobiographical memory |hermeneutic remembering |narrating the self

Streszczenie

As best evidences of our narrative identity language-games, autobiographies unveil the illusive power of language in purporting a unitary self. Drawing upon Ludwig Wittgenstein’s no-reference view of “I” and studying its use as a necessary formal tie in autobiographical memory, it is contended that sense of self through time is constituted in narrating and being narrated in memories. It is argued that Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory illustrates the lack of reference of the first-person pronoun in autobiographical memory, its formal and inventive emergence, and its diversity in narrative compositions. As the title hints, the self does not speak in memory; it is spoken in autobiographical language-games of composition.

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autobiography |trauma |Jamaica Kincaid |(auto)pathography |narrative temporality |postcolonial palimpsest

Streszczenie

This article analyses Jamaica Kincaid’s autobiographical novel See Now Then through the metaphor of the palimpsest with the aim of exploring the frictions between the different generic and thematic layers that make up the text. It argues that despite the novel’s generic openness, its thematic concerns, most notably its treatment of time and narrative temporality, encourage a backward-looking stance that reasserts the past. The theories of Sarah Dillon and Lene Johannessen on the nature of palimpsests, especially the difference between the palimpsestic and the palimpsestuous and the interaction between the horizontal and the vertical, the new and the old, will be drawn upon in conjunction with Leigh Gilmore’s investigations into limit case autobiographies – works, like Kincaid’s, that question the borders between fiction and life-writing under the pressure of traumatic experiences.

Słowa kluczowe

film studies |film genre |teen film |adolescence |youth |emerging adulthood |emerging adult film

Streszczenie

In the past decades, the transition to adulthood in post-industrial countries has become longer, giving rise to emerging adulthood, a new life stage between adolescence and adulthood (Arnett and Taber 1994, Arnett 2000, 2004). Cinema has reflected this change, with a growing number of narratives exploring the challenges of this life stage. Through a comparative analysis of Say Anything (Cameron Crowe, 1989) and High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000), this article seeks to establish the emerging adult film as a youth film subgenre of its own by outlining some of the generic conventions that make it different from teenage films.