Słowa kluczowe

colonial writing |forest life |Leonard Woolf |Modernist writing |Sri Lankan studies |postcolonial literature

Streszczenie

This paper addresses a gap in literary research in the scholarship on Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle: a lack of demonstrated understanding on the part of major critics as to what constitutes a village-jungle in the early-20th-century Ceylonese context and, as a result, misunderstanding of the novel’s main characters and events. By drawing on comparative and indigenous sources by writers like R.L. Spittel and Mayaran- jan, the paper calls attention to narratives on forest-life as representing a sensibility that is experientially derived; this – in contrast to the claims of Woolf’s critics – brings on a sensibility that lies beyond simplistic claims to “orientalism” and endorsement of colonial views. The discussion centrally draws on the significance of comparative local sources in framing insights to forest life in Ceylon, as the absence of such comparisons hinders the understanding of a novel like The Village in the Jungle to the point of producing readings that prove incomplete and even misleading.

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South Africa |Damon Galgut |South African literature |postcolonial short story |apartheid

Streszczenie

This article is a critical discussion of Damon Galgut’s Small Circle of Beings (1988) from the perspective of Elleke Boehmer’s postcolonial poetics. The discussion concentrates on the story “The Clay Ox” and the eponymous novella of the collection. It is argued that both the story and the novella convey a tension between the personal and the political by describing the subtleties of human relationships while at the same time showing that even this intensely private dimension of the characters’ existence is shaped by forces that affect the entire nation. As it is shown, Galgut’s collection of stories is rep- resentative of white writing in the times of the interregnum insofar as it depicts isolated, conflicted protagonists, includes the theme of physical and mental disintegration, and ex- plores the state of personal and political precarity.

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tourism |global travel |international theme |Dave Eggers |backpackers |travel writing

Streszczenie

Dave Eggers’s You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002) can be read as a (post) modern voice in the ongoing debate on educational, transformative and redemptive potential of foreign travel for the young Americans in the late 1990s. The article focuses on representation of global travel experience in the novel employing American Old World journey conventions on the one hand and tourism-travel dichotomy on the other. The backpackers in Eggers’s novel can be characterized as drifters. Their encounters with otherness most often result in confusion. All in all, the novel downplays the role of travel in the globalized, homogenized world at the turn of the 21st century.

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Nostalgia |comedy |film studies |national identity |Englishness |pastiche

Streszczenie

This article explores the ways in which pastiche, the past, and national iden- tity are portrayed and navigated in the concluding film of Edgar Wright’s The Cornetto Trilogy: The World’s End (2013). By focusing on the relationship between the use of the past and pastiche, it will be considered how they are employed to negotiate the notion of national identity. Through its comedic strategies and tropes, the film rebels against a homogenised version of Englishness based on mythical assumptions of the past and striving toward perfection. The dissection of the cinematic structure of pastiche will reveal a tem- poral framework questioning contemporary narratives of national identity. Moreover, the exploration of nostalgia and the past as places of retreat, as well as pastiche as a device of comedic criticism, enable Wright to offer a portrait of Englishness as struggling to recover its identity amidst a turbulent and apocalyptic time.

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identity |literature |community |migrants |plural identities |cancel culture

Streszczenie

This paper explores the complexity of plural identities of the characters living within the sociocultural space of a London community, who define themselves as being from “here” and “elsewhere,” in Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City (2018). First-generation and second-generation migrants, originally from Ireland, Pakistan, Jamaica, as well as other nations referred to in the novel, give life to the community at the Ends, a housing estate in Northwest London. On the one hand, in this suburban space, fury, neglect and powerlessness are deeply felt by the locals. However, the community also becomes the location for the creation of social habits, cultural patterns, forms of ex- pression and group unity through the interaction and shared experiences of the locals. This dichotomy reveals underlying anxieties that raise questions about otherness, marginalisa- tion and belonging, and how these aspects intersect in the construction of cultural identity. As characters struggle for meaning against a “cancel culture,” their individual experiences are what constitutes their plural and fluid identities.

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Chinese Canadian poetry |queerness |Grace Lau |diasporic queer experience |diasporic literature |Asian Canadian literature

Streszczenie

The intersection of migrant and queer experiences constitutes one of the core motifs of The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak (2021), the debut poetry collec- tion by Grace Lau, a Chinese Canadian poet. Through a series of interconnected vignettes, Lau provides an insight into her experiences as both a Canadian and a Chinese immigrant, a lesbian and a failed model child, an aficionado of traditional Chinese culture and an en- thusiast of contemporary Western popular culture. The mosaic of experiences illustrates the complexity and intricacy of the author’s identity/ies. Through the analysis of three poems (“The Levity,” “The Lies That Bind,” and “My Grief Is a Winter”), supported with references to the theoretical works on Asian North American writing and queer Asian mi- grant experience, the article discusses Lau’s depictions of queerness and her experiences as a Chinese immigrant in relation to the Canadian LGBTQ+ community, white queer liberalism, and internal politics of the Chinese diaspora. It proposes to see Lau’s poetry as an example of biomythography, a form of autobiographical writing showcasing how encounters with different communities shape the subject. In the process of disentangling her complex ties with the Chinese diaspora, the white Canadian LGBTQ+ community and her own family, Lau reveals the impact of her interactions with those different groups as she can finally express her identity as a queer Chinese Canadian.