Collection Of Short Stories Research Articles

Motivation and Self Actualization in ‘Mayhew’ by Somerset Maugham

The current paper aims to take up the textual analysis of the short story Mayhew by W. Somerset Maughamfor the modern elements of motivation and self-actualization. Maugham has often been criticised for his cynical views and the negative projections of his leading protagonists, yet a closer analysis and interpretation of his characters can offer positive and redeeming characteristics which can be emulated. Most of the readings and interpretations of Maugham’s works have found the element of cynicism to be a common threadin his writings;yet on closer textual analysis of his short story ‘Mayhew’, the two elements of motivation and self-actualizationrelated to modern concepts of behavioural science can be discerned in this story, which is a part of Vol III of Maugham’s collection of short stories.

МОРСКИЕ ПРОФЕССИОНАЛИЗМЫ В ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ БОРИСА ШЕРГИНА

The aim of the paper is to give a linguostylistic analysis of marine professional vocabulary in the collection of short stories and novellas “Gandvik - the icy sea” (1977). The author applied a descriptive method, consisting in the classification, linguistic generalization, systematization and description of the material as part of the fishermen and sailors’ professional vocabulary in the Arkhangelsk North. As a result of the research, the semantic space of the fishermen and sailors’ professional vocabulary in the works of B. V. Shergin was analyzed. The paper also presents a lexicographic and etymological description of the words under consideration, as well as their classification according to various parameters. The results of the research contribute to the study of professional vocabulary in a literary text and B. V. Shergin’s creative heritage. The practical significance of the work consists in the possibility of teaching lexicology, dialectology and local literature studies.

Bizarne opowieści Dominiki Słowik

“Samosiejki” by Dominika Słowik is a collection of short stories which belongs to recent realist prose that willingly uses the fairy-tale convention. The category of bizarreness plays a key role in this collection, as it is closely related to the world of nature. The protagonists become witnesses to weather anomalies and aberrations in nature, which brings to mind pessimistic visions of an impending ecological disaster. The protagonists are not only observers of the changes taking place in the natural environment, but they also notice the anomalies in themselves. In “Samosiejki” the blurring of the boundary between what is real and what is fairy-tale also includes the boundary between species.

Die Kunst der Einfachheit: Standortbestimmungen in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur: Judith Hermann — Peter Stamm — Robert Seethaler by Nadine Wisotzki

Reviewed by: Die Kunst der Einfachheit: Standortbestimmungen in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur: Judith Hermann — Peter Stamm — Robert Seethaler by Nadine Wisotzki Heide Kunzelmann Die Kunst der Einfachheit: Standortbestimmungen in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur: Judith Hermann — Peter Stamm — Robert Seethaler. By Nadine Wisotzki, Transcript Verlag, 2021. 224 pp. €40. ISBN 978–3-8376–5832–3. This book by literary and cultural historian Nadine Wisotzki concentrates on Einfachheit, simplicity, as an aesthetic currency and strategy for re-evaluating a problematic struggle against ambiguity identified in contemporary cultural criticism (see for example Thomas Bauer, Die Vereindeutigung der Welt, 2018). The study takes a focused approach by looking at selected fiction in German in the new millennium. Wisotzki posits with Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, one supervisor of this doctoral thesis-turned-book, that the present, fragmented and oddly removed from a human experience, is defined by latency, a curious delay between an event and our reaction to it. As a result of this, ontologically essential concepts like complexity or simplicity require a more differentiated, deeper exploration before we can discuss our present times with the heightened sense of an 'offene Zukunft' that Wisotzki claims they might provide (p. 47). Consequently, Wisotzki attempts a cultural-historical survey of the usage of the term Einfachheit in recent aesthetic history, with the aim of developing 'eine Ästhetik für die Gegenwart' (p. 77) that is based on artistic representation of Einfachheit as a central paradigm. Literature, as so often, serves as a third space where an exemplary analysis of Einfachheit as a cultural, socio-philosophical concept and aesthetic strategy becomes possible. The study consists of five chapters and is generally well-balanced in its presentation of the historical aesthetic usage of the term Einfachheit and its three main semantic applications in public cultural discourse. This is [End Page 216] complemented by analysis and close readings of three contemporary authors, Judith Hermann, Peter Stamm and Robert Seethaler. Chapter 1 provides an illuminating panoramic view of the way the term 'simplification' figures today in Western European intellectual and aesthetic discourse. The author highlights its use in the context of lifestyle ('Rustikalität', p. 19), values ('Idee des Unverfälschten und Wertstabilen', ibid.) and the existential authenticity for which humans strive. Here, Wisotzki formulates her main goal, which is to examine simplicity as a topos that is no longer too vague for rigorous literary criticism. Chapter 2 pursues this goal convincingly with a highly condensed yet inspired summary of how the term Einfachheit has been employed in the arts either to celebrate order, clarity and modesty or, conversely, to scorn banality and stupidity. Wisotzki's lexical and semantic overview of the term's usage (pp. 43–47) and her pairing of typologies of Einfachheit ('einfach-vielfach'/'eindeutigmehrdeutig'/'klar-undurchsichtig', p. 49) are particularly useful. Chapter 3 is meant to offer the bridge between cultural history and the close reading in the following chapters and provides my only point of criticism of an otherwise excellently executed study. Wisotzki's approach here is somewhat reductive in parts and too much interdisciplinary referencing (from Bauhaus via Voltaire to Malewitsch) is packed into too few pages. Also, the rather broad reach from Kafka's 'littérature mineure' (Guattari/Deleuze) via an excursion into Englishspeaking short story writing (E. A. Poe, Hemingway, Carver) to a summative critique of postmodern superficiality and the verdict that 'Einfachheit hat offensichtlich ganz unterschiedliche Qualitäten' [simplicity clearly has very different qualities, p. 75] could have been refocused on German-language writing traditions for more stringency. Ingo Schulze's eponymous novel Simple Stories (1998) should at least have been mentioned and could have been used as a segue into a more detailed discussion of the conflation of genres which characterizes German writing at the intersection of complex historical developments and social utopias of simplicity. What follows is a varied discussion of aspects of reduction, silence and linguistic austerity as narrative strategy in Judith Hermann's novels and short story collections (Chapter 4). By analysing the mixed reception of Hermann's work, Wisotzki emphasizes our society's inability to cope well with the absence and withholding of explanations and reasoning. The insightful reading of Peter Stamm's novels or stories through the...

Significance of Short Story Cycle in Rachel Joyce’s A Snow Garden and Other Stories: An Analytical Study Using Complexity Theory

Rachel Joyce’s short story collection A Snow Garden and Other Stories (2015) is composed of seven stories which occur during a fortnight of the holiday, Christmas season. The collection uses narrative techniques which make it a unique set of stories. The stories have an urban setting and examine the intricacies of human relationships. The sense of interconnection highlighted by Joyce in the stories elevates it to a short story cycle. A short story cycle consists of individual stories which can stand on their own as complete narratives while also maintaining fictional links running through all the stories. The paper is an attempt to establish A Snow Garden and Other Stories as a short story cycle. It also argues that by narrating the interconnected nature of human lives Joyce’s work is exploring life as a complex system. As a scientific philosophy complexity theory explores the behavior of complex systems including human societies. Complex systems are self-organizing, dynamic, evolving networks that operate without any centralized control; similar to human societies. This paper will apply the principles of complex systems to reveal patterns of human behavior represented in Joyce’s work. .

Babizna? Babcie jako bohaterki rodzimej prozy kobiet po 2010 roku

The text was conceived as a review, combined with an analysis and interpretation, of texts written by Polish women authors after 2010, especially novels and short story collections in which the grandmother is an important character. Women authors from the 1970s and 1980s, who in creating various herstories, make the eldest women in the family the disposers of narratives, responsible for building specific bridges between the past and the present, as well as the guardians of memory and guides through the labyrinth of interpersonal relations. The numerous representations of grandmothers in post-2010 literature is directly related to the ‘family turn’ in domestic prose announced over a decade ago, as well as to the transforma­tions within women’s literature, in which the mother-daughter relationship is being replaced by a granddaughter (rarely grandson) — grandmother relationship. Granddaughters become narrators, through them the grandmothers’ stories taking verbal shape. The established bond enables the creation of alternative versions of herstories in which grandmothers, as delegates of the past, teach granddaughters in the present how to cope with the future. “The grandmo­therly turn”, however, marks above all the emergence of the figure of the Polish grandmother, enabling granddaughters to speak about themselves (and them also) in their own voice.

Literary text as a place of archiving the past in M. Shishkin’s short story collection “The Half-Belt Overcoat”

We analyze the principles of working with memory and elements of the past in the stories of M. Shishkin from the collection "Coat with a strap", which using intertextual, contextual, structuralist methods, the method of holistic analysis of a literary text, are considered. The notions of narrative, montage, memory, punctum, stadium are used for the analysis, the specificity of photography as a cultural fact is considered. It is proved that within the framework of small prose, the prose writer arranges a narrative, which in one way or another integrates the elements of the past and the motives of memory. Appealing to the things as facts of everyday life, the narrator constructs a specific scheme “thing – image – space” within the text. This creates a specific catalogue of things, archiving experiences and memories. This catalogue helps to go from loss of some facts of the past (photographs) through the act of memory to fixation of this past in the text, thus contributing to “resurrection” and salvation of the past through the Word. In addition, the role of the corpus of photographs in the collection is examined. It is revealed that the photographs not only serve as a reference point for the act of remembering and restoring the past, confirming what is described, but also include the reader in the fact of text unfolding. The materials of the study and its conclusions can be used not only for the analysis of other works by M. Shishkin, but also in the analysis of modern domestic and world literature in the context of memory studies.

A Marriage between Tricksters: Literary Heritage in Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth"

A Marriage between Tricksters:Literary Heritage in Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth" Yuki Miyazawa Charles W. Chesnutt expresses his outlook on creativity very clearly in the essay "Superstitions and Folk-Lore of the South" (1901). He notes that his knowledge of conjuration, a folk belief prevalent among African Americans in the southern US, provided "literary value" instead of a "sociological bearing" for his stories in The Conjure Woman (1899): Imagination . . . can only act upon data—one must have somewhere in his consciousness the ideas which he puts together to form a connected whole. Creative talent, of whatever grade, is, in the last analysis, only the power of rearrangement—there is nothing new under the sun. I was the more firmly impressed with this thought after I had interviewed half a dozen old women, and a genuine "conjure doctor;" for I discovered that the brilliant touches, due, I had thought, to my own imagination, were after all but dormant ideas, lodged in my childish mind by old Aunt This and old Uncle That, and awaiting only the spur of imagination to bring them again to the surface. (865) Here, "data" signifies the knowledge of African American folklore that Chesnutt acquired during his stay in North Carolina. In his short story collection, Chesnutt uses his knowledge of folklore to directly address the African American conjure tradition as noted by many scholars.1 He employs this mechanism in "Stories of the Color Line" and in the novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Eric J. Sundquist argues in his extensive study of ethnicity in American literature that although Chesnutt mentions his "curt personal belief that conjure [is] 'superstition'" (295), [End Page 271] he simultaneously "circles back, by the path of personal and historical memory, to merge his narrative art with the stories of the black ancestors" (297). It seems that writing fiction functioned as a way for Chesnutt to preserve racial memory. Chesnutt writes about the African American culture of the South, using features such as dialect and a folklore-based plot. Yet, he writes in a form adopted from European culture, sometimes quoting English and American writers such as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Lincoln. Considering his statement that "one must have somewhere in his consciousness the ideas which he puts together to form a connected whole" (865), the European elements to which the characters sometimes refer, together with the African American elements, must be contemplated. An appropriate example of this notion can be found in "The Wife of His Youth" (1898), a well-known story that represents the African American and European sides of Chesnutt's own background. In this story, the protagonist Ryder is a mixed-race man who escapes from the South and becomes a member of a progressive society in the North by virtue of his pale skin and acquisition of knowledge about English literary culture. Later, he reunites with a black woman who used to be his wife back in the South. As Sundquist notes, English literary culture, which is evident from Ryder's direct quotations of Shakespeare and Tennyson, and, in a broader sense, his cultivated character, might be no more than something "laden with idealized notions borrowed from European culture" (301). The simultaneous use of the African American folklore of the southern US and European texts in "The Wife of His Youth" reflects Chesnutt's origins as a product of an environment filled with diverse cultures. Chesnutt's utilization of the two cultures as a cornerstone of his fiction evokes the concept of "double consciousness" proposed by W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois, Chesnutt's colleague at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), states in "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" (first published in 1897 as "Strivings of the Negro People"), Chapter 1 of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), that an African American is born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, [End Page 272] this sense of always looking at one's...

De quoi aimer vivre by Fatou Diome

Reviewed by: De quoi aimer vivre by Fatou Diome Rosemary Haskell Fatou Diome De quoi aimer vivre Paris. Editions Albin Michel. 2021. 240 pages. “AH, LOOK AT all the lonely people!” The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” refrain captures the essence of Senegalese writer Fatou Diome’s 2021 short-story collection De quoi aimer vivre (Enough to make us love life). It is peppered with characters on the edge of society, longing for human connection and fulfillment. Their lonely exclusion is frequently explained through their remembered pasts, while the book’s title unites the stories’ characters: we must all have something that makes us want to live. Bread alone is not enough. Disabled Andy, D. D. the washed-up boxer, divorced Octave, refugee Samira, the poor Senegalese fishing family: all frequent the typically Diomien liminal or marginal spaces, such as the café, the empty apartment, the mountain cabin, and the coastal fringe. Varying her trademark focus on the Black woman migrant, Diome still pursues her key themes of the quest for personal fulfillment and social integration. All but two of the stories are set in Europe, the exceptions returning us to Senegal with “La Marmite du Pêcheur” (The fisherman’s stewpot) and to the beloved navigator grandfather, represented here by “Le Vieil Homme sur la Barque” (The old man on the boat), a 2010 story. The two opening pieces stamp the collection’s identity. “Une Fenêtre pour les Anges I – Présence, II – Absence” (A window for angels: I – presence, II – absence) richly configure the fragile relationship between Andy, a disabled white French man and the Black Senegalese woman narrator, charting the ultimately successful achievement of unconventional friendship while illuminating Andy’s experiences of disability as he counters others’ repulsion with resilience and forgiveness. “Le Bleu de la Roya” (Roya’s blue) and “Le Vieil Homme sur la Barque” explore the figure of the man-savior: the Italian shepherd shelters the Libyan refugee, and the fisher-grandfather guides the little Senegalese girl—in the present and in memory. A welcome reprint of a 2002 story, “Ports de Folie” (Ports of madness), traces a woman’s obsessive dramatization of places where her absent lover is traveling. “Indémodable!” (Timeless), whose talking dress recalls the speaking objects of Diome’s novel Kétala, also enacts the longing for the absent beloved. De quoi aimer vivre reminds us of the strengths of Diome’s earliest work, the 1990 short-story collection La Préférence Nationale (National preference). This 2021 volume illustrates how the novelist flourishes within the story genre’s tighter formal framework. Rosemary Haskell Elon University Copyright © 2022 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

POETICS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THE EARLY PROSE OF STEPAN PROTSYUK

The article is dedicated tothe poetics of psychoanalysis in the early prose works of S. Protsyuk. The system of psychoanalytic codes in the collections of novels and short stories “The Gallows for Tenderness”and “Seraphimsand Misanthropes”consists of categories of destruction, immorality, neurosis, conflict, fear, the presence of which allows to interpret the early prose of Ukrainian writers by psychological works. It is revealed that S. Protsyuk’s early prose works significantly influenced the formation of the author’s unique poetics and style, built on the principles of psychoanalysis in his great epic (“Infection”, “Totem”, “Sacrifice”, “Doll Destruction”, “Fingers between the sand”etc.). It is investigated that psychoanalytic constructs in the collections “Gallows for Tenderness”and “Seraphimsand Misanthropes”are not presented systematically and quite heterogeneously, which indicates the process of development and formation of the author’s style. Techniques of self-knowledge, self-copying, insight, self-criticism and honesty with oneself are naturally reinforced by complex categories of fear, insecurity, destruction, immorality, despair, psychosis, neurosis, perverted fantasies and suicidal thoughts of early epic characters. Psychoanalytic typification of characters is facilitated by the introduction into the structure of the text of psychiatric terms that form thebackground of psychoanalysis, motivating some of the actions of the characters in the works. S. Protsyuk’s early work is marked by anti-imperial motives as one of the basic factors in the formation of dissatisfaction, resistance, unconscious resistance and resistance to the system, devaluation of social values and more. Psychoanalytic sounding in the works is acquired by neurotic love (“Gallows for Tenderness”), undivided love (“Drop of Beresh”), mental and psychological vicissitudes of the participants of the love triangle (“Red Rose”, “Black Rose”), “Self-destruction and Monologues”). Psychoanalytic constructs of novels form a new type of hero in the literature of the late XX–early XXI centuries the writer skillfully characterizes the mental organization of a number of psychoanalytic tools, techniques and tools.

Caroline Macé and Jost Gippert, The Multilingual Physiologus: Studies in the Oldest Greek Recension and its Translations. Turnhout: Brepols, 2021, 661 pp.

Abstract Scholars of the European Middle Ages are well acquainted with bestiaries. These compendia of pithy stories about animal lore told in the service of catechetical instruction were especially popular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Manuscripts of them survive in the dozens, many of them with lavish illustrations of the animals, plants, and fantastical beasts described therein. A recent exhibition of medieval bestiaries at Getty Museum in Los Angeles yielded a sumptuous catalogue (Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World, edited by Elizabeth Morrison and published in 2019) that provides an ideal starting point for anyone interested in this fascinating genre and its stunning illuminations. Underlying the success of the bestiary in the medieval Latin tradition is a modest Greek text from late antiquity: the Physiologus. Dating from the second or third century, this collection of forty-eight short and strange animal stories with Christian messages was probably composed in Alexandria. Untitled in the manuscript tradition, it takes its name from the anonymous natural scientist – Physiologus – whose authoritative voice narrates the text. As the volume under review makes clear, the Latin tradition was by far the most successful legacy of the Physiologus, but its reach and influence were surprisingly broad owing to the universal appeal of its charming contents, which is evident in the richness of the vernacular translations derived from the original Greek text.

From Communicative Minimum to Intertextuality and Symbolism: Peter Svetina’s Children’s Literature

From Communicative Minimum to Intertextuality and Symbolism: Peter Svetina’s Children’s Literature Igor Saksida (bio) Peter Svetina’s children’s literature begins with easily understandable, sometimes explicit patterns of communication: his first two animal fairy tales, The Walrus Who Didn’t Want to Cut His Nails (O mrožku, ki si ni hotel striči nohtov; 1999) and The Little Walrus Gets Glasses (Mrožek dobi očala; 2003), deal with the issue of difference and acceptance, establishing a sort of inter-textual dialogue, with older texts focusing on similar problem-oriented topics. After his first forays into children’s literature, Svetina’s poetry and stories developed along two distinct paths: toward language play on the one hand, and toward realistic topics on the other. However, both developments reflect the author’s distinctive poetics of combining nonsense and realism, including problem-focused fiction. Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Svetina’s collections of poetry are extremely varied and represent one of the high points of contemporary Slovenian poetry. Svetina’s first book of verse, By-World (Mimosvet; 2001), could be labeled as a collection of problem poetry, although growing up is not shown against a background of symbolic concepts, typical of children’s and young adult poetry at the time; instead, the poems show the reality as childlike and playful. Svetina’s return to the flashes from the uncomplicated (but not naive or idealized) children’s world is one of the foremost characteristics of his poetics of the “communicative minimum,” which transcends the tradition of the complex linguistic innovation of late modernist poetry. On the other hand, language play is the basis of the brilliant Poems from the Washing Machine (Pesmi iz pralnega stroja; 2006), wherein Svetina combines nonsense with taboo words and a lyrical attitude toward nature; many of the texts in the book are also visual poems, meaning that the collection provides the youngest readers with a glimpse of the possibilities of poetic expression without ever being pushy about it. Even in Svetina’s mixed-genre collection of poems and short stories, The Lumber Room (Ropotarna; 2012), nonsense can be [End Page 47] sensed as the common creative basis. As the award justification by the jury for the 2013 Večernica Award explained, “The Lumber Room is an organised chaos of tiny treasures, patiently waiting for the reader to pick them up and blow the dust off them. The writer’s skilful navigation between poetry and prose, between the conscious and the subconscious, is merely playful fluctuation, full of rhetorical figures that with a particular dynamics take the reader from the real to the irrational, from the mighty to the nonsensical…. A ramble through Svetina’s Lumber Room leads to a more creative read, full of elusive twists and turns” (Haramija 85). Svetina’s Homework (Domače naloge; 2014), another collection of poetry, moves away from the poetics of language play; although one can still detect wordplay typical of nonsense poetry (e.g., play with letters, unusual neologisms), the poems are predominantly based on the real world of the modern child, who is not just playful and appreciative of the wonders of nature, but also sometimes lonely: For Grandma to Come for us to school,for kitty to wait for uson our doorstep. For someone to be homewhen we come from school,for us not to be alone, I ask you, our Father,I ask you, mom. (“Homework on Prayer”) and aware of impermanence: On a white fielda crow pecksforgotten autumn’sbreadcrumbs. From afar, it lookslike a breadcrumbitself. Will it be peckedas well? (“Homework on Crows”) Click for larger view View full resolution A similar topic is at the center of Prayers from the Steps (Molitvice s stopnic; 2016), a book based on a rarely touched-upon theme of children’s poetry, a child’s reflections on God. The collection also deals with gratitude but also fear, aging, and intergenerational dialogue. As such, the collection could easily slip into moralization or idealization; however, Svetina avoids both pitfalls. His reflections are not pre-abstract and allow young readers a chance to...

Život a tvorba Františka Listopada ve třech nesvobodných systémech

František Listopad was a Czech poet, novelist, essayist, theatre and television director. In 2021, the Czech Republic together with the entire Portuguese-speaking world commemorated the centenary of his birth. In addition to his extensive work in several languages, he also played a crucial role in a historic revival of Czech-Portuguese cultural relations, for which we are indebted to him. Listopad was a man of three names and several homes. He was born in 1921 in Prague as Jiří Synek. He published his first short stories under this name. During World War II, he was persecuted for his Jewish origins. However, he avoided deportation to a Nazi camp, hid with friends and was active in the resistance as a member of the illegal organization “For Freedom” (Za svobodu). For reasons of secrecy, he changed his name to František Listopad. At the same time he also began to write poetry and literary reviews. After the war, he became a co-founder of the daily Mladá fronta. After initial enthusiasm, he began to criticize the communist regime, mainly for restricting human freedoms. In 1947, he was sent to Paris as an editor of the weekly Parallele 50. After February 1948, he was ordered to come back to Czechoslovakia, but he did not return. In France, he focused mainly on writing essays and working for the emerging local television. In 1958, he moved to Portugal, where he lived until his death in 2017. Here he chose a different name – Jorge Listopad. Listopad considered Salazar’s authoritarian right-wing regime to be very restrictive, but much freer in many ways than Czechoslovakia of the time; for example, it did not prohibit citizens from travelling abroad. In Portugal, in addition to significant literary work, Listopad devoted himself mainly to theatrical productions. He also became a university teacher. He never moved back to his original homeland to stay there permanently, but after the 1989 Velvet Revolution he often travelled there. He presented his plays there and published collections of poems and short stories. In his literary and theatrical works, František Listopad often existentially reflected the life in three unfree systems: the period of Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, communism and Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal.

Before

Before Joy Baglio (bio) Let’s talk about the fairy godmother, before. At this point, she is just a woman, still relatively young, approaching her life’s precipice, fairy-status undiscovered, role of godmother yet realized. It doesn’t matter how all that will come to be, only that right now she works at a diner, spends the day penciling people’s orders on a notepad and running back and forth from the kitchen to her tables, carrying plates of eggs and buttered toast, a practiced smile on her face. On her breaks, she smokes outside on the picnic table by the road, or calls her children, who are with her ex-husband this week, and at night she watches TV with her mother, who lives with her and is slowly forgetting most things, including the plots of her favorite movies, which they now watch over and over. That weekend the fairy godmother takes her sister’s children to the water park so her sister (who is going through a divorce of her own) can have a break from it all. The water park is in a strip mall surrounded by desert. It is full of screaming children and depleted mothers and overpriced junk food. The fairy godmother thinks it might be the closest place to Hell she’s ever been. Tomorrow after work, she’ll help a friend pick out a dress for the friend’s wedding, then she’ll make dinner for her mother and watch Moonstruck for the third time that week, and she has to schedule an appointment with the dermatologist at some point because a strange rash has emerged across her shoulder blades and back like something is trying to crawl out of her skin. She doesn’t know yet that she has wings, or fairy blood, and what is magic anyway except wishful thinking, a dream that is not really her own? She has not met the girl she will save yet, who at this point is still only a baby, still loved and happy, but perhaps the two are already merged, connected across time and space, opposite sides of the same coin. Perhaps every fairy godmother who crystalizes carriages from garden vegetables, who breaks open the sealed shutters of someone else’s dead-end life, first sits on the ledge of her own transformation, a starved hope inside her, a dream of [End Page 19] her own, and wonders what she needs to become herself, wonders when she’ll have the courage to leap. [End Page 20] Joy Baglio JOY BAGLIO is a fiction writer and the founder of the Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by Yaddo, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. She is working on a collection of fabulist short stories and a novel about ghosts. The first book I was obsessed with was a book of Russian fairy tales by renowned folklorist Alexander Afanasyev, collected in the mid 19th century and accompanied by striking Bilibin illustrations: Baba Yaga, Ivan Tsarevitch and the Firebird, Koschei the Deathless. But it was Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid” that helped me realize the kind of stories I loved most: stories where the longing leaps off the page, where defiance and striving in the face of the impossible somehow—through pure determination—lead to transformation. Copyright © 2022 Wayne State University Press, Leonard N. Simons Building

The Protean Masculine: A Study of the Male Characters in Selected Short Stories of Damodar Mauzzo’s The Wait and Other Stories

Studying the female, the feminine and the feminist has been a part of literature for quite some time now but the study of men, male and masculinities is a novel field in literature which is gaining popularity lately. The idea of masculinity studies is to provide a firm platform to the masculine and male ideologies that have been relegated to the back owing to the ever-increasing feminist studies and prevalence of feminist ideologies in the field of literature. Just like the female identity, masculinity or masculine identity is a construct and mostly a probe into studies of men and male principles. Such studies reflect that masculine representations in literature are now open to ideas of alternative masculinities that do not essentially reinforce the existing patriarchal image. The fictional world sends out ideas about the existence of the protean nature of masculine and the male. It can be understood that the male identity is not restricted to the patriarchal masculine but branches into other forms like romantic masculine, lustful masculine, new masculine, and cathectic masculine. The current paper explores this concept of alternative masculinities and the protean nature of the male and the masculine as reflected in the works of Damodar Mauzzo, a Goan writer. His short story collection The Wait and Other Stories presents a gamut of male characters who represent alternative masculinities ranging from patriarchal to the egalitarian.

Odakle izviru priče? - identitet i poetika

We use Andrić's posthumously published short story collection The House on Its Own (1976) to illustrate how the questions of artistic creation and identity are connected in this writer's work. We interpret the collection in the context of Jung's analytical psychology, Bakhtin's idea of the polyphonic character of truth, Andrić's own poetic writings from The Signs by the Road, and his short story Conversations with Goya whose theme and structure had already announced the narrative technique in The House on Its Own. We focused on this collection's dominant narrative technique and its purpose. Each of the stories emerges from the meeting of two individuals: the writer/narrator and the character that confides in him. The writer embraces the characters, empathizes and comprehends through emotion the other and the different in them. At the same time, the characters resemble the narrator in having multilayered identities and feeling the need for overcoming their trivial everyday life. The narrator's truth is subordinate to the characters' stories: the validation of someone else's words about oneself is simultaneously a validation of their personality and a form of self-validation. In The House on Its Own, the reader receives insight into the creative process itself and the role it plays in keeping these complex identities consistent. We point to the relation between Andrić's creative technique in this collection and Jung's technique of active imagination and we interpret the house on Alifakovac, in the spirit of Jungian analysis, as a metonymy for the narrator himself.

ANALISIS KESALAHAN BERBAHASA ASPEK EJAAN PADA KUMPULAN CERPEN KARYA SISWA SMP IT NURUL ISLAH

This study aims to classify and explain the spelling aspects of a collection of shortstories by students of SMP IT Nurul Islah. The object of research, namely the analysis of spellingerrors in a collection of short stories by students of SMP IT Nurul Islah.The method used in this research is descriptive analysis method. The analysis in thisstudy is based on PUEBI. The error aspects analyzed include the use of capital letters, the use ofpronouns, the use of conjunctions, the use of prepositions, the use of loan words, and the use ofpunctuation marks.The number of errors in short stories written by students is as follows: 16 errors in theuse of capital letters, 5 errors in the use of pronouns, 15 uses of conjunctions, 15 uses ofprepositions, 2 uses of absorption words, and 11 uses of punctuation marks.

Viriloid Women and Bodiless Men: On Modern Sexualities in the Oeuvre of Johannes Semper

Abstract. This article studies how the profound changes in theorizing human sexualities in the fin-de-siècle and early 20th century were used and re-used in the oeuvre of Estonian cultural moderniser Johannes Semper (18 92–1970). In his texts, two modern discourses of sexuality appear in highly telling ways: sexology and psychoanalysis, with which Semper mainly familiarises himself respectively through the works of Otto Weininger and Sigmund Freud. Taking a feminist standpoint to analyse the thoroughly male-centred sexuality discourses of the abovementioned thinkers, this article sets out to study how sexuality and gender are articulated in Semper’s oeuvre, both within a heteronormative and queer framework. Two literary texts are closely examined. The first, the short story collection Ellinor (1927), depicts the world entirely through the eyes of an emancipated woman who encounters a lesbian character – the first in Estonian literature. This encounter begins the discussion of various desires as the protagonist tries to explain her ‘femininity’ in contrast to the queer character Madame Liibeon’s ‘inversion’. The second, Semper’s novel Jealousy (1934), is used for comparison, as sexual Bildung and desires are mediated through the eyes of a male heterosexual protagonist.

Northern Soulscapes: Writing through Brexit in the work of Gerald Dawe, Angela Graham and Dara McAnulty

At a time of when the global crises of pandemic and climate change could be said to offer sufficient challenges to life in the British and Irish Isles, the implementation of Brexit provides a further gargantuan difficulty. Borders, bureaucracies and belief systems dissolve like the certainty that subjects once felt to their connection to states or Unions. Or new borders and systems appear, bringing with them unwieldy new protocols and practices. Shelves empty, goods sit locked in containers; caught up in the holding pattern of another new normal of online retail inertia. Dislocation, fear and anger rise. The epicentre of the Brexit shambles can be said to be located in the ever betwixt and between location of Northern Ireland. Here with its newly imposed sea border with Great Britain and its maintenance of European Union relations with the Republic of Ireland we see a fractured and fractious society struggling as ever to come to terms with how to balance the aspiration of opposing ideologies and national ambitions with an additional level of chaos. In a time of catastrophe what can literature do? This question, often posed during “The Troubles” has very much come back to be painfully reiterated to writers, readers and critics at a time of multiple lockdowns. However, if an examination is made of publishing in Ireland in the last couple of years, we see a buoyant press offering a number of intriguing responses to the significance and efficacy of literature to respond to the current human predicament. In this article I will examine the work of three contemporary writers, Gerald Dawe, Angela Graham, and Dara McAnulty. I will argue that their use of genre (memoir, short story, nature diary) provides a fresh and robust response to the chaotic present of Northern Irish political life. In their separate ways they contest the fixed, static and impermeable political echo chamber of Northern Ireland. Dawe, I contend, seeks a means through his autobiographical work to retrace time and space in the history of the province and articulate alternative ways of interpreting the past. He is able to draw sustenance and restoration from often overlooked times of possibility in his own and the wider story of Belfast. In Graham’s case, I would suggest that her bold and assertive first collection of short stories provides an acerbic and raw inspection of the past but one that also provides glimpses of reconciliation and genuine hope in the face of trauma. I conclude by exploring the work of McAnulty. Ostensibly a diary that traces his engagements with nature, his book is a tour de force that reimagines Ireland as a location gripped in the ravages of the Anthropocene startlingly brought to life by a young man faced with the challenges of autism. Part memoir, part praise poem to nature, it is a remarkable coming of age non-fiction work, which along with Dawe’s and Graham’s writing suggests that Northern Irish literature offers a broad and brilliant retort to the current local and global calamities that we face.

Verbal Indicators of Personal Identity in The Road Past Altamont by Gabrielle Roy

The present paper explores personal identity linguistic indicators detected in The Road Past Altamont by Gabrielle Roy. Works by this Canadian writer, public personality, and significant figure in French Canadian literature are of interest to a broad audience today in Canada, where almost all her books have been translated into English, and abroad. Written in a fluid, spare style, they are distinguished by lively narration and a keen sense of observation. Her literature approaches the world and people with clear sight and compassion. The Road Past Altamont (1966) by Roy is one of the most original in Canada, as varied as it is cohesive. The novel is dedicated to the coverage of the autobiographical narrative, the peculiarities of the personal identity crisis for different age groups, the succession of generations. These existential problems are actualized in crisis life situations. Despite containing four independent texts, the Road Past Altamont, each of which tells a finished story, is not a collection of short stories but a novel-saga. Its genre is both fragmented and unified, and it has a flexible structure based on the concept of the human life course. The four stories in this novel are connected not only by the main character at different points in her life but also by the themes that explore the changes, ageing, and society’s relation to the elders. The study aims to single out verbal indicators of personal identity obtained from the second part, “The old man and the child” of the Roy’s novel and the music album of the same name, created on its basis in 2021. Among the main findings are the defining psycholinguistic markers of time and space in the discourse of “The old man and the child” that encompass personal identity cognitive component. Hence, it is possible to treat the transformation of identity in the modern world in terms of constructing “self” as a reflexive project - implementing an integral, biographical story being changed in a polyvariant context of choice.