Literary Category Research Articles

The Celtic Strobe Light: Thomas Kinsella, Trevor Joyce and the Translation of Nationalist Residues in the Mid-Twentieth Century

According to John Goodby and Marcella Edwards, ‘many Irish poets in the 1960s and 1970s turned to translation from Irish in a way that suggests the difficulty of coming to terms with rapid modernization’. Although this may sound like a reasonable conclusion to make of a period of significant social, cultural and economic upheaval, Goodby and Edwards rely on a false binary in their assertion. Referred to by Joe Cleary as the ‘repression-modernization dyad’ through which ‘all sorts of things get drastically simplified’, this is the notion that a clean break was effected by the transfer of power from Éamon de Valera to Seán Lemass in the late 1950s; that traditionalism and economic nationalism were replaced wholesale by dynamism and economic progressivism. According to such an unnuanced view of mid-century Ireland, then, the ‘difficulty’ faced by those poets who turned to translation from Irish appears to be the difficulty of reconciling traditional literary categories with the onslaught of a modernising agenda which apparently reserved no space for them. This article problematises such a ‘drastically simplified’ account by arguing that poetic translations from Irish in the Lemass years and shortly thereafter played a variety of conflicting cultural roles, as opposed to merely articulating the complexities of rapid economic and social change. The crux of such a claim revolves around a paradox in mid-century Ireland: namely, the persistence of what Raymond Williams would call ‘residual’ nationalism, which jarred with the expansionist economic agenda of the Lemass government. As such, this article juxtaposes Thomas Kinsella’s Tain (1969) with Trevor Joyce’ The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976) to illustrate how some texts proved amenable to the state’s newfound ‘paradoxical conflation of the “economy” and the “nation”’, as Conor McCarthy puts it, while others sought to expose the ‘contradictions and gaps within Irishness as it is now’.

The Genre and Trends of Crime Fiction in Nigeria

The field of crime fiction in Nigeria remains under-explored in scholarly discourse. This lacuna is particularly notable given the absence of comprehensive academic works dedicated to this genre. Crime fiction, which delineates narratives surrounding criminals, their crimes, detection and investigation processes, and underlying motivations, has been a prolific subject in Nigerian creative literature. Despite the substantial body of Nigerian literary works delving into themes of crime, punishment, and motivation, it is intriguing that the genre has not garnered significant critical analysis. This study adopts a diachronic approach to trace the historical evolution of crime fiction in Nigeria. It further investigates various sub-genres within this literary category and examines how a multitude of socio-political dynamics have influenced the thematic focus of Nigerian crime fiction. The study posits that crime fiction is gaining relevance in contemporary Nigerian society. It reveals that a significant corpus of these narratives grapple with issues such as colonialism, militarism, corruption, government apathy towards human and national development, and other opaque political and economic elements that perpetuate Nigeria’s precarious journey towards democratic stability.

Gender balance: A new lens for reading and studying the Bible, Part 1

This two-article submission suggests a new lens through which to read and study the Bible. This lens generates new perspectives for teaching, preaching, and writing about the Bible. Called gender balance, the lens applies to both the Old and New Testament.Gender balance not only is simple, but also is in plain sight. If there is a story, passage, theme, or text about a man, look for a similar one about a woman; if there is a story, passage, theme, or text about a woman, look for a similar one about a man. The accounts often not only complement each other, but also provide additional details and insights.Combining canonical and literary methodologies, these two articles acknowledge the preponderance of biblical references to men. However, they show that a similar reference to a woman can usually be found quickly.Given that these two articles represent a survey with examples, an extensive exegesis is not provided. Comments on each gender balance entry are brief and framed in supplemental scholarship. The examples incorporate a conscious choice of looking for a similar story, passage, theme, or text about the opposite gender. The examples illustrate the premise that gender balance is clearly within the Scriptures.While a new way, a new lens of looking at the Bible, is presented, the first article supplies an extensive literature review showing it is a new idea. It then proceeds with examples of gender balance from the Old Testament and ends with a short conclusion and a bibliography. The second article contains New Testament examples of gender balance, a longer conclusion, and a bibliography.Contribution: The concept of looking at the Bible through a new lens – that of gender balance – may be both revolutionary and revitalising. It may be a tool for evangelism (for it consciously seeks to show stories about men and women); it may prove a more effective way to teach, preach, study, and write about the Bible (for it seeks complementary passages for both genders). These articles – by illustrating the concept through literary tools such as round and flat characterisation and literary categories such as epic tale – offer more ways to address the Bible’s wonderful diversity. These two articles advocate making gender balance a standard practice in reading the Bible. They illustrate that the lens of gender balance offers new perspectives and insights on the Bible. After all, it is in plain sight! Gender balance affirms the Bible’s glorious, wide-armed, concluding invitation to all – Jew or Greek, slave or free, rich or poor, male or female – ‘Come’ (Rv 22:17a).

Time as a literary category (based on the stories by O.N. Ermakov)

Time as a literary category (based on the stories by O.N. Ermakov)

Introduction: Ihara Saikaku and Eighteenth-Century Studies

Abstract: This introduction offers Ihara Saikaku's work as a prime example of the need to globalize eighteenth-century studies and briefly sketches some of the challenges of such a task, focusing particularly on how emerging frameworks of world literature engage existing literary categories, particularly realism. Though reading Saikaku's work as realist makes sense in many ways and facilitates his inclusion into existing paradigms of the field, it also risks flattening his work or only engaging aspects of it that would accord with those categories.

REPRODUCING THE ATMOSPHERE OF SUSPENSE IN LITERARY TRANSLATION (A STUDY OF D. BROWN’S NOVEL “ANGELS AND DEMONS” AND ITS UKRAINIAN TRANSLATION)

This paper focuses on the ways of reproducing the phenomenon of suspense in Ukrainian translation. Suspense is a multifaceted literary category, which can be defined via multiple approaches: genre, motivic, component, semantic-cognitive, stylistic-textual, and translational. Suspense can be interpreted as a category that is actualised in text to create the atmosphere of tension and anxious anticipation to maintain the readers’ constant interest in the events described. The analysis proved that the key role in creating the atmosphere of suspense in literary text belongs to figurative and narrative means. Figurative means of suspense creation embrace descriptions of tense situations, associative lexical units, metaphors, personifications, wordplay, and stylistic graphemics. Among the narrative tools of suspense, the following ones are distinguished: the violation of literary text structure, aposiopesis, the technique of thought interruption, narrativized cinematographic techniques, playing with time, and increasing the pace of the story unfolding. As a literary category, suspense has its ways of reproduction in translation, which envisage the usage of a wide spectrum of translation transformations. The paper, taking as a case study the novel "Angels and Demons" by the American writer Dan Brown and its Ukrainian translation, singles out key imagistic and narrative means of creating suspense in the original novel as well as the specificity of their translation into Ukrainian. The analysis proved that such stylistic means as metaphors, descriptions fraught with tension, and wordplay are the most difficult for literary translation aimed to reproduce suspense. Therefore, multifarious translation transformations are applied to them against the background of searching for analogies in the target language. Translating narrative means of creating suspense heavily relies upon the author’s individual style and genre specificity of the original text.

THE BORDER AS A FORM- AND MEANING-FORMING PRINCIPLE OF THE LYRICAL WORLD OF J. BOBROVSKY («DIE JUNGE MARFA»)

The study is devoted to the problem of the artistic language of verbal art, in particular, the German-language lyrics of the 20th century. The article notes that changes in the consciousness of a person at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries led to a change in the role of the author in the poetic statement. The experience of the border in its various manifestations finds its realization in the languages of the arts of the twentieth century. The purpose of the work is to study the phenomenon of the boundary in verbal art, its functions and forms of implementation at the level of the structure of the artistic image and the organization of the poetic statement. The material was a poem by the German-speaking poet Y. Bobrowski as a typical example of conscious creative work to create a new artistic language. In the article the main literary categories are presented as a border and as a result of the meeting of the individual and the supra-individual in the dialogue of the creative subject with universal human experience. Such an approach from the standpoint of the author’s theory and the problem of artistic activity makes it possible to discover the form and meaning-forming mechanism of the border. The example of analysis shows how a creative subject in a dialogue with genre structures and other poetological categories, challenging or confirming their boundaries, creates new boundaries that give them life in new material.

Spiderwebs of Mental Gum Arabic: The Modernist Machines of Elmer Diktonius

Abstract This article examines Elmer Diktonius's avant-gardist poetry, prose, and literary criticism, published between 1921 and 1951. Diktonius often entangles Swedish and Finnish in his writing, inducing a disorienting effect that contributes to his avant-garde agenda and separates him from the literary establishment of his day. Looking at his Swedish-language poetry and personal letters illustrates a viscous material poetics fashioned by the author's soldering of languages, genres, rhythms, and sounds. Considering the skillful ways Diktonius processed language reveals how the author challenged literary categories separating poetry from prose and epistle from art.

Fiction and reality in Musa Akhmadov’s novel “Trees at Dusk”

The article presents an analysis of the novel “Trees at Dusk” by the Chechen prose writer Musa Akhmadov from the perspective of implementing the method of fantastic realism in the text space as an artistic way of depicting reality and expressing the author’s worldview. An attempt is presented to demonstrate the connection of this method with the conflict, plot and problems of a work of art. The authors seek to identify both the plan for the content of this literary category and the plan for its implementation, determine the stylistic devices characteristic of Musa Akhmadov’s creative manner, and understand how they contribute to the translation of the author’s ideas to the reader, how they participate in the formation of the figurative system of the work, what role they play in the philosophical concept of the writer. The subject of the study is the philosophical and ideological aspect of the symbolic-fantastic way of dissecting reality in the space of a literary text.

Dispatches from the home front: Violet Hunt as war writer and reluctant modernist

ABSTRACT The life and work of Violet Hunt showcases the tension between modernism's challenges to Victorian and Edwardian literary and social traditions, and the conservatism, particularly with regard to gender norms, of many of the modernist canon's key figures: institutions, writers and critics alike. Although her work was well-regarded during her lifetime, and she was a central figure in London's literary scene in the early-twentieth century, Hunt is now best known for her long, and ultimately disastrous, relationship with Ford Madox Ford. Her copious literary oeuvre, comprising seventeen novels, three collections of short stories, and several works of biography, translation and criticism, is now largely neglected. Hunt's exclusion from the modernist canon mirrors that of many other women writers of the period; however, Hunt's “recovery” remains a difficult case. Her numerous affairs, suffragettism, blending of Victorian, Edwardian and modernist styles, and authorial focus on the lives of women, all challenge conventional cultural and literary categories. Yet Hunt's work, especially during and after World War I, is important, as it offers an alternative not only to the male-centric war canon, but also to more traditional understandings of modernism, which is often presented as a break from the past.

BİR ROMANIN TÜRKÇE ÇEVİRİ YOLCULUĞU: İŞLEVSEL ÇEVİRİ ELEŞTİRİSİ ALANI OLARAK DR. JEKYLL VE MR HYDE ÖRNEĞİ

The translation is a multi-layered text production practice that is governed by various determinants. The rich textures of translated texts are evaluated under the title of “translation criticism” based on varying criteria. Practical conceptual designs and concerns over objectivity constitute the primary elements of translation criticism that are conducted on case studies. This study elaborates on the translation Dr. Jekyll ve Mr. Hyde (2009) by Öznur Ayman and the original text Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885) by Robert Louis Stevenson. Emerging as one of the most retranslated works in Turkish literature, this work has several versions in the Turkish repertoire. This study aims at providing a detailed comparative analysis of the target and the source text on the basis of the postulate designed by Katherina Reiss (2000). With a preliminary focus on the text typology in the literary category, the evaluation is conducted through the language category which includes semantic, lexical, grammatical, and stylistic elements; and the pragmatic category which consists of the immediate situation, subject matter, time, place, audience, speaker factors respectively. It should be noted that the design incorporates the black box of the translation process, the translator, into the scheme of translation criticism. The ideal behind the efforts in this paper is to (re)test the potentials and limitations of translation criticism on a case study and contribute to the existing literature on one of the rather ignored fields of translation studies, “translation criticism”.

Against Prose: Poetry's Defense, Definition, and Dichotomization

Abstract Uses of “poetry” and “prose” as literary categories have shifted dramatically over the last two or three centuries: a dichotomy emerged between these two that had not existed before, at least not in quite the same way. Attention to this shift has focused primarily on the rise of prose fiction, especially the novel, leading many to overemphasize the role prose genres played in this paradigm shift. In fact, an emergent poetry-prose dichotomy enabled and was enabled by a wide range of discourses about art, culture, politics, and ethics as well as sciences. Exploring a range of such discourses, this essay argues that the modern poetry-prose dichotomy facilitated several key debates focused less on prose and more on poetry's cultural value, ultimately enabling some of poetry's defenders to project their anxieties about Western cultural decline on the perceived deteriorating status of what's classed as “poetry.”

Translating Modern Greek poetry of the 2008 financial crisis

ABSTRACT Since Greece’s 2008 economic collapse, four poetry anthologies on the financial crisis have been published. Editors, translators, publishers, and writers involved in the production and sale of poetry of the financial crisis for an Anglophone market benefit from the construction of this new literary category – be it financially or in terms of acquiring or consolidating cultural capital. However, these anthologies function within a language landscape in which Greek and English occupy different positions of power. This article argues that although the anthologies’ editors are largely conscious of the uneven power dynamic between Greek and English, some of the translation strategies adopted in the anthologies do not serve to create an equal playing field between the two languages. The use of a poststructuralist approach is specifically critiqued, based on the assertion that it loses sight of the ethical complexity of translating from a marginalized language into a dominant tongue.

Author's strategies and tactics of Catherine II in the comedy "Seduced"

The article is devoted to the study of the poetics of drama by Catherine II, the purpose of the work is to consider the author's strategies and tactics in the comedy "Seduced." Research interest in this play increased at the beginning of our century, which is confirmed by relevant publications, as well as attention to the terms "author's strategy" and "author's tactics." The concept of the author's strategy was substantiated by us in the work "Author's strategy as a literary category: methodological aspect" (2015). Three author's strategies were identified: bringing ideological opponents to clean water; protecting the younger generation from being seduced by Freemasons; the return of the owner of the house to the bosom of the family, his recognition of his ideological delusion, which, in turn, imply the use of author's tactics: A look at events from the outside - through the vision of what is happening by servants, Illogical behavior, Self-exposure, the Open Noble House, built on the rules of sincere communication, Trusting communication with the servant, Obedience of young heroines to the elders, Image of the head of the noble family as smart due to leaving the noble circle and neglect of noble duties, Showing the result of reading incorrect books, Showing the result of reading wrong books.

The Notion of the “Subaltern” and the Drone Victim Subjectivities in Pakistani Anglophone Fiction

This research proposes a new approach to study fictional representation of drone victims in contemporary Anglophone Pakistani novels by examining the inevitable onto-epistemological relation between the notion of the “subaltern” and its possible implications for fictional drone subjectivities. By drawing insights from the newly emerging drone fiction literary theory and re-examining the already well-established tradition of Subaltern Studies, I demonstrate in this essay that the drone fiction written by Pakistani authors is a distinct literary category which configures drone victims as voiceless. I argue that by incorporating the impunity, inhumanity, and injustice inherent in the perpetration of drone warfare, Pakistani authors reimagine the drone victims as mute spectators of their devastation. The essay considers the narrative implications of drone technology’s orientalist, racist, and imperialist rubric in the selected works. A critical analysis of the selected textual excerpts unpacks the socio-political discursive subaltern formations of the fictional drone victim subjectivities such as dead bodies, widows, orphans, and disabled individuals. By unraveling the multiple layers of subjugation and repression embedded into the fictional representations of the drone victims, this essay proposes a possibility to study the precariousness of their situation under the praxis of Subaltern Studies. Moreover, different contexts and types of drone victims unravel the harsh conditions of the groups living under drone surveillance. The motif of drone target strikes allows Pakistani writers to explore the voicelessness of the dronized communities. Hence, in reading drone sufferers as subalterns (a subjugated mute political non-entity), the essay highlights the predicament of the marginalized dronized groups and foregrounds the possible expansion of Subaltern Studies in connection with the exploration of drone victim subjectivities.

THE FUNCTIONAL-SYNONYMIC PECULIARITY OF FRENCH LITERARY ONYMS

The literary onym is one of the main structural elements of the onomastic space of a literary text. The problem of studying this literary category is to identify their main features, features of functioning in the structure of a literary text, as well as to study the role of contextual synonymy in creating images of literary characters. The article analyzes the views of researchers on the problems of literary onomastics, clarifies the terminological apparatus. The article analyses the main distinguishing features of onyms, such as their secondary nature, as well as semantic load. Literary onyms are characterized by a number of functions in a work of fiction. They can perform nominative, ideological, characterizing, aesthetic, symbolic functions. The study revealed that the main functions of proper names in the analyzed works are recognized as nominative and characterizing, and in some cases symbolic. Creating a literary image of a character, the author uses a variety of linguistic means, in particular contextual synonymy based on metaphorical transfer. The conclusion confirms the idea that literary onyms are an additional mechanism in a work of fiction, which is designed to create a more capacious, versatile image of literary characters

Jonah—A Quest to Identify its Genre

Considering the brevity of Jonah, or perhaps because of it, it is remarkable that the literary genre of the book remains an enigma. This is not the result of a lack of attempts to classify it. Most scholars agree that Jonah is a narrative, but what type of narrative? This article proposes that Jonah is a narrative about a specific episode in a prophet’s life, namely his flight from an assignment. To verify the possibility of such a literary category, one must find similar incidents in other known prophets’ lives and compare Jonah with those episodes. Consequently, a comparison is made with the story of Moses in Exodus and Elijah in 1 Kings 19.

Area Studies: From “Global Anglophone” to Afropolitan Literature

African Literature has gone through many phases: from its being denied a literary category to becoming Third World, Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature respectively and to its latter categorization as a “Global Anglophone Literature” subsumed under an overarching “Area Studies” American academic quota. This essay examines these shifts between categorizations and focalizes the politics, both professional and disciplinary, that undergirds such unstable and sliding nomenclature. It proceeds to tease out, within a postcolonial framework, the Euro-American empire-building imperatives of such naming. While some of these questions are not necessarily completely new, what is unique here is that this reflection concludes by suggesting Afropolitanism as a possible alternative discourse for reading postcolonial African and African diasporic culture.

Romantic fantasy and the grotesque in John Keats’s “Lamia”

The present article examines the notions of fantasy, illusion and logic in Keats’s romance Lamia (1819) from the perspective of the aesthetic and literary category of the grotesque. In his text Keats puts the grotesque to two uses. First, it serves to mark his ambiguous attitude to both reason and imagination as two exclusive modes of cognition; secondly, it records his uneasiness in relation to the romantic ideal of love. Two conflicting points of view inform and battle in the poem: one might be called Romantic, as it endorses imagination and beauty as values per se; the other invites an interrogation of the idealistic approach. Neither of these two perspectives is unequivocally applauded in the text, and the Romantic grotesque appears a perfect vehicle for expressing this incongruity.

Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name as a Feminist Bildungsroman

In accordance with the increasing confirmation within feminist literary and cultural studies on women’s literature and the rumination of its social function to provide a sympathetic as well as a critical analysis of contemporary feminist fiction, this paper explores the attempt of women writers to reconfigure and reformulate established fictional genres to create more responsive genres that better represent the heterogeneity of women’s experiences. Focusing on the way Audre Lorde incorporates individual and collective memories as well as erotic and traumatic memories in her literary works, I use the literary category of feminist Bildungsroman to examine her biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name in which she presents an alternative model of female development. The paper traces the strenuous personal development and transformation of Audre as a black woman endeavouring to challenge marginalization and resist the various forms and layers of abuse and subjugation practiced against her in a racist and sexist society. Taking into consideration that the political implications of women’s writing can only be theorized when it is related to the cultural and ideological processes that shape it, I employ Rita Felski’s analysis of women’s modern writing as a area where female political identities and collective consciousness are treated and depicted.
 In accordance with the increasing confirmation within feminist literary and cultural studies on women’s literature and the rumination of its social function to provide a sympathetic as well as a critical analysis of contemporary feminist fiction, this paper explores the attempt of women writers to reconfigure and reformulate established fictional genres to create more responsive genres that better represent the heterogeneity of women’s experiences. Focusing on the way Audre Lorde incorporates individual and collective memories as well as erotic and traumatic memories in her literary works, I use the literary category of feminist Bildungsroman to examine her biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name in which she presents an alternative model of female development. The paper traces the strenuous personal development and transformation of Audre as a black woman endeavouring to challenge marginalization and resist the various forms and layers of abuse and subjugation practiced against her in a racist and sexist society. Taking into consideration that the political implications of women’s writing can only be theorized when it is related to the cultural and ideological processes that shape it, I employ Rita Felski’s analysis of women’s modern writing as a area where female political identities and collective consciousness are treated and depicted.