Słowa kluczowe

physics and religion |Robert Oppenheimer |Los Alamos |Manhattan Project

Streszczenie

The aim of this paper is to present the religious and the literary inspirations of the Los Alamos narratives by focusing on Oppenheimer,who both provides the literarycontexts for the story of the bomb and becomes a hero of the tales that emerge. My principal sources are Richard Rhodes’s Making of the Atomic Bomb, a Pulitzer-winning detailed factual accountof how the nuclear weapon was conceived and produced, as well as fictionalor semi-fictional depictions of the life Oppenheimer and his men ledin the New Mexico desert. The latter include Principles of American Nuclear Chemistryby MIT graduate professor-turned-novelist Thomas McMahon; Los Alamos, a thriller by Joseph Kanon; and Atomic Dreams. The Lost Journal of Robert Oppenheimer, a graphic novel by Jonathan Elias and Jazan Wild.

Słowa kluczowe

Caryl Phillips |humanism |multiculturalism |migrants |Migrations

Streszczenie

The paper presents a critical rereading of Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground(1989), which tells the (hi)stories of a West African man, an African-American teenager and a Polish war refugee who set themselves against hostile socio-political systems. Originally published in 1989, but reprinted in 2006,the novel is an exemplary piece of Phillips’s fiction that embodies all the characteristic elements of his writing: fragmentary narration, deep intertextuality and, most importantly, a purely humanist message that enables one to place the novel beyond the Black Atlantic or Afro-Caribbean canon, as Caryl Phillips is customarily read. The paper revolves around the issues of cultural identity, intercultural migrations, political radicalism and social exclusion, showing that Phillips’s fiction constitutes a timeless and valuable source of knowledge about the socio-cultural condition of the contemporary West and thus deserves wider recognition on the European literary scene.

Słowa kluczowe

trauma |the Syrian war |political and moral intervention |colorsand symbolism |‘personal testimony’

Streszczenie

This article is devoted to Sumia Sukkar, a young British author, whose debut novel The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the Warseems an important voice in debates on the repercussions of the Syrian conflict. The novelist’s decision, due to her national descent(she is of Syrian origin), to createa fictional narrative, which serves more as a moral intervention in mattersof public concern, derives from Sukkar’s personal conviction that one cannot hold aloof from the carnage going on in Syria. Although written in 2013,the book, with its emphasis on the unending war ‘games’ and unrelenting violence in the Middle East, turns out to be even more validtoday than before. With this voice of moderation, Western readers have been given yet another chance to delve into the nature of the Syrian conflict, presented fromthe position of a devout Muslim believer as well as a person of ethical integrity. Hers is the narrative in which changing colors symbolically reflect a slow deterioration of individual mindsets. In this sense, Sukkar’s novel seems more like an important attempt to ‘find an adequate objective correlative’ thatin a comprehensive way enables one to gain insight into traumas of the local conflict/war.

Słowa kluczowe

Ireland |Anglo-Irish identity |19thcentury |Protestant Ascendancy

Streszczenie

The common perception of the Anglo-Irish, or the Protestant Ascendancy –the Anglophone, predominantly Church-of-Ireland, and essentially Britocentric aristocracy, gentry, and professional class, which playeda dominant role in the social, economic, political, and cultural life of Ireland from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century –is of a community which, despite its privileged position in Irish society, was nonetheless, in consequence of its colonial roots and its isolation from and distrust of the country’s Catholic majority, paradoxically always a community in decline, passively clingingto the memories of the past and unable to play a constructive role in the formation of the cultural identity of a modern, independent Ireland. The paper takes an issue with this interpretation of the contribution of the Ascendancyto Irish culture, particularly in the nineteenth century; taking the examplesof three Romantic and Victorian Ascendancy writers, Lady Morgan, Sir Samuel Ferguson, and George Moore, it argues that their vision of Ireland was much more open-minded, inclusive, and progressive than the popular mythsof the Ascendancy, such as in particular the tradition of Big House fiction, would lead most readers to believe.