Contemporary Literary Studies Research Articles

FOTOGRAFSKI APARAT BEZ DUŠE: PERCEPCIJA ITALIJANSKOG FUTURIZMA U RANOJ KINESKOJ MODERNISTIČKOJ POEZIJI

Considering the fact that there are certain similarities between the cultural endeavours of the early Chinese modernists and Italian futurists, at first glance, it seems strange that futurist ideas mostly failed to take root in Chinese literary modernism. From the outset, Chinese literary modernism was a heterogeneous movement, but the common denominator in these different movements in post-dynastic China was a radical antitraditionalism that bears similarities to the goals of Italian futurism that was often called the down-with-the-past movement (antipassatismo). Contemporary literary studies usually recognize three distinct waves of Chinese modernism: the first wave refers to the new literary scene in China’s Republican era (1911-1949), but due to the eclecticism of early Chinese modernists who were deriving inspiration and ideas from a broad and diverse range of sources, this initial stage of Chinese modernism includes the authors whose work was inspired by the pre-modern Western movements such as romanticism, symbolism etc. The second wave of Chinese modernism emerged on Taiwan in the 1950s, and the final wave brought modernism back to mainland China at the end of the 1970s. This paper attempts to examine the reception of Italian futurism in early Chinese modernist literature, therefore our research is chronologically focused on the first wave of Chinese modernism.

Poetyka kognitywna dwie dekady później. Rozważania wokół drugiego wydania Cognitive Poetics Petera Stockwella (2020)

The article discusses cognitive poetics as an important theoretical framework in contemporary literary studies, in the context of the publication of the second, revised edition of Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (2020). First, the authors discuss critical comments put forward by scholars with respect to Stockwell’s earlier studies in cognitive poetics, and next, from a literary-studies perspective they carry out an overall assessment of the revisions and modifications introduced in the book’s current edition. Irrespective of some critical remarks, there is no doubt that thanks to the changes, the inspirational value of Stockwell’s book has been enhanced.

Mapowanie kanonu. Literatura polska w perspektywie światowej

The article discusses the research proposal presented in Światowa historia literatury polskiej. Interpretacje [World History of Polish Literature. Interpretations], edited by Magdalena Popiel, Tomasz Bilczewski and Stanley Bill. Mikołajczak contrasts the research concept of world literature with the dominant approaches to the world literature in the area of contemporary literary studies and the traditional model of the history of literature. She reflects on the situation of Polish literature in the world, taking into account the ways in which Polish works circulate in other cultural circles, the possibilities and limitations of translation as well as shifts within the canon. She also indicates the opportunities that open up for Polish literature in the global context.

Ambient Avant-Gardes in Sophie Seita’s Provisional Avant-Gardes

Sophie Sieta has filled an important gap in scholarship surrounding both theories of the avant-garde and material textual studies with her first monograph, Provisional Avant-Gardes (2019). From ‘Dada to Digital’, Sieta navigates a ‘diachronic’ investigation of the relationship between avant-garde literary communities and the print formats in which they have often published their work. In doing so, she expands the historical range within which considerations of the avant-garde and little magazines are usually framed (the Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines ends in the 1960s) and intersects both areas of study with the digital turn. Sieta thus offers a fascinating and dynamic discussion of the relationship between expressive, formal innovation and the material text, which illuminates this issue’s theme of ‘ambience’. Rigorously engaging with the entanglement and the permeability of boundaries between text, form, and self-definition, this study places increasingly ripe and timely elements of ambient literature towards the forefront of modern and contemporary literary studies’ concerns.

Hermeneutics and its New Tendencies: to the Question of Aesthetic Paradigm Change

Introduction. The work examines the main vector of development of contemporary literary and hermeneutics studies. The main aim is to show how the view of the text has changed and what are the important tools in the process of its interpretation.Methodology and sources. Firstly, various philosophical and literary approaches to texts are considered. One of the main ideas behind the research method is the comparison of the modernist, post-modernist and meta-modernist paradigm in the process of text interpretation. Another important aspect is the consideration of symptomatic and surface reading, as an important tool in the discussion of whether the text bears any meaning apart from the directly deducable and what is the most contemporary if not the best way of interpreting it. Most texts analyzed are literary examples, mainly taken from Anglophone literature.Results and discussion. The results of the research state a number of tendencies in the view of contemporary hermeneutics. Among the general conclusion of the shift from modernist to post-modern and meta-modern patterns in the narrative. Regarding the process of text interpretation what is stated is a general tendency to see the surface l evel of the text as bearing all the necessary and important meanings. The older and more conservative approach of bringing meaning into the text is also at work, depending on the traditions. Elimination of text interpretation (or denying it its original im portance) is also an important point of view, as it states that a literary text explains more than any supporting attempt of its explanation. Another important feature is a tendency of a modern literary text to adopt characteristics of poetry. The psychoanalytic view is competing with post-modernist or meta-modernist view.Conclusion. Metamodernist tendency, surface reading and attention to the literary text itself, and not its further explanation seems to be the core of a contemporary view of literary texts, their interpretation and, hense, meaning.

Современная драматургия

The article discusses the book entitled Modern Dramaturgy: Genre Transformation, Modifications, Innovations by a well-known Ukrainian author, Evgueni Vassiliev. The reviewer considers the monograph to be an important contribution to the development of dramaturgy of contemporary literary studies; therefore, it is highly rated. Evgueni Vassiliev died in 2021, so the article also includes his biography, which shows a considerable number of research achievements of the author, a literary critic, a researcher of contemporary drama and theatre, a director of the youth theatre in Rivne, and an initiator of numerous conferences (Kondratievski’s Readings).

Beyond Belief

Abstract Over the last decade, esotericism studies has witnessed a distinct literary turn, as more and more of the field’s primarily religious studies-based researchers have recognized the value, and indeed, centrality, of imaginative literature to the transmission of occult and new religious ideas. Although welcome, this impetus has sometimes taken an anti-aesthetic shape, reducing the texts it incorporates to little more than empirical evidence of authorial belief or practical occult experience. Accompanying this tendency has been a suspicion of the formalist, post-modern, and/or political forms of interpretation common within contemporary literary studies as being ideologically tainted or even wilfully perverse in their resistance to surface meaning. My article uses a case study of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Land of Mist (1926), a seemingly straightforward example of an emic novel whose author’s spiritualist belief and conversionist intentions are well known, to demonstrate the limitations of such a biographically reductionist hermeneutic, and to call for a greater diversity of approach within literary esotericism studies.

The Mosaics of National Identity in the Arab American Diaspora: Exploring Long-Distance Nationalism in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent

Abstract Carol Fadda-Conrey (2014) points out that Arab American literature emerged remarkably in the early years of the 21st century, accompanying various political events and turmoil in either the USA or the Arab world, particularly the Middle East. One of the key aspects of this ethnic literature is the manifestation of the Arab national identity and the call for unity and solidarity among kin Arab communities, whether locally or across borders. This paper, as such, by taking Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel Crescent (2003) as an example of the Arab American fiction produced in the contemporary era, examines the components of nationalism as expressed from afar – long-distance nationalism. This type of national propensity has received little attention in contemporary literary studies. In addition to using critical and analytical approaches to the novel, this paper basically relies on a socioconceptual framework based on the perspectives of prominent theorists and critics, such as Carol Fadda-Conrey, Nina Glick Shiller, Gabriella Elgenius, and Tololyan Khachig, to name a few.

Renewing the coal mining past

Abstract This article examines how inhabitants of Heerlen, a town in the province of Limburg in the southeast of the Netherlands, renew the cultural memory of coal mining in the area through parodic linguistic and cultural practices linked to the (re)articulation of collective local and social identities. Heerlen became a center for the coal mining industry in the Netherlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The closure of the mines between 1965 and 1974 had devastating consequences for the economic, social, and cultural developments of the area. Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the region’s mining past, creating new momentum for Heerlen in its transition from a struggling former mining area to a city focusing on long-term socio-economic development and cultural innovation. In this context, new practices of cultural memory are emerging through local performances of language and culture that operate to reconstruct Heerlen’s coal mining past through parodic repetition. By discussing two case studies exemplifying the creative ways in which dominant accounts of the mining past are being rearticulated, we explain how the use of parody may serve to undermine the interacting social norms, identities, and hierarchies that have come to shape cultural memories of mining in communities historically defined by working-class and male-dominated labor. The article integrates linguistic and sociolinguistic research, studies of regional history, and theories of parody rooted in contemporary literary criticism and gender studies, to demonstrate the importance of place-bound practices of languageculture as a compelling force of linguistic and socio-cultural renewal.

Neoliberalism and the (Im)possibility of the Affective Novel

ABSTRACT This paper begins by mapping what it calls the ‘affect-neoliberal’ debate in contemporary literary studies. This debate, centred on the relationship between the personal-affective novel and neoliberalism, contains two dominant positions, termed capitulationist and subversion views. The former asserts that the personal novel form, as tied to the particular, fails to represent late capitalism; the latter argues that affective literature is always-already social, potentially offering a poignant critique of neoliberal individualism. Yet instead of favouring one position over the other, this paper claims that each view is ultimately one-sided: capitulationists fail to see how the social mediates the personal, thus missing the possibility of self-critical affective novels; the subversion view fails to see how the social is caught up in the personal and neoliberal, thus missing the capitulatory aspect of so-called ‘impersonal’ affect. Ultimately, this paper argues that the task is not to think the affective novel in its purely personal (capitulatory) or social (subversive) dimension, but to see it as antagonistically situated between the two. This perspective entails thinking the impossibility of the affective novel, or the way such novels may think the personal-affective as disruptively mediated by neoliberalism, a position derived from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Race at the Centre: The Ramifications of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Sociology in Contemporary Literary Studies

Starting from José Itzigsohn and Karida L. Brown’s 2020 book, The Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois, this article discusses the contribution of Du Boisian sociology to the field of postcolonial literary studies, arguing that his main concepts and his methodology might help untangle some of postcolonialism’s current debates.

Potencias afectivas de la poesía catalana contemporánea: exposición y propuestas de un proyecto de investigación

El propósito de este artículo es dar cuenta de los planteamientos iniciales del proyecto de investigación “La poesía catalana contemporánea desde la perspectiva de los estudios afectivos” (PoAf), vinculado al grupo Literatura Contemporània: Estudis Teòrics i Comparatius (LiCETC) de la Universitat de les Illes Balears. Partiendo de una concepción de lo afectivo como categoría que atiende a la capacidad transformadora de la literatura y determina su relevancia social, el trabajo describe los antecedentes del proyecto y plantea un estado de la cuestión sobre el impacto de las aproximaciones afectivas en los estudios literarios catalanes. Reflexiona también sobre las aportaciones esperables del cruce entre, por una parte, la especificidad del corpus (delimitado por vectores geoculturales) y, por otra, la amplitud transdisciplinaria del concepto de afectividad.

ИМПЛИЦИТНОЕ ВЫРАЖЕНИЕ АВТОРСКОГО САМОСОЗНАНИЯ У ФРАНЦИСКА СКОРИНЫ

The aim of the article is to substantiate the presence of implicit forms expressing the author's self-awareness in the works of Francysk Skaryna, the most prominent representative of the 16th century Belarusian culture. The choice of this personality is connected with the fact that the earliest manifestations of the author's self-awareness in Belarusian literature can be found in his works. The analysis is preceded by an introductory section, which provides a brief overview of the extent to which the concept of «the author's self-awareness» has been developed in contemporary literary studies. In the first part of this article we consider the problems through the prism of F. Skaryna's poetic experiments, which were found in the prefaces to his translations of the Bible. Poetry as a specific field of creativity allows us to most accurately reveal the hidden signs of the author's self-awareness. In the second part the author’s self-awareness is regarded through a popular genre of church lyrics – the akathist, namely, its kontakion part. Despite the canonical status of the akathist, due to its poetic and melodic nature, it allowed a certain freedom in organizing the material. The author comes to a number of conclusions. The author of the article made a number of conclusions. First-ly, the implicit manifestations of the author's self-awareness in F. Skaryna's works are dualistic in nature, their adequate interpretation is only possible in combination with extra-textual information of the cultural context. Secondly, in his prefaces F. Skaryna uses the methods of tonic and syllabic verse which not only allows him to focus the reader's atten-tion on the important meanings, but also reveals the author's attitude to spoken accented verse, traditional for common people. Thirdly, in the kontakion verse of acathistus F. Skaryna deals exclusively with the rhythmic experiments.

The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Sarah Blackwood

Reviewed by: The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Sarah Blackwood E. Thomas Finan Sarah Blackwood. The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States. U of North Carolina P, 2019. xi + 201 pp. $27.95 (Paperback). Sarah Blackwood'sThe Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States is a study of tensions—between invention and discovery, between inner and outer, and between mind and body. Blackwood surveys how various modes of portraiture (broadly understood) both responded to and influenced evolving notions of selfhood in the United States during the nineteenth century. This cross-disciplinary volume attends to a number of types of portraits: the literary portrait, the printed icon, the photograph, the painted picture, and the X-ray. As Blackwood notes, the relationship between photography and the self has preoccupied many critics, including Walter Benjamin in the twentieth century and the photographer and scholar Shawn Michelle Smith today. Smith's work also explores the role of narratives of gender and race for portraiture, a major theme of Blackwood's own study. Blackwood's expansive approach to portraiture—considering it as a mode across genres—illuminates the stakes of portraiture in the nineteenth century. Incorporating multiple genres strengthens her argument about the intellectual-historical stakes of portraiture. One of the conceptual motifs of The Portrait's Subject is the historical contingency of the "psychological." Rather than taking "psychology" as a timeless given, Blackwood instead offers it as an invented "form of inner life" drawing from trends in literature, art, philosophy, and science in the nineteenth century (10). In examining evolving accounts of inner life, Blackwood discusses a variety of writers and artists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Thomas Eakins, and Henry James. For a book about the anatomy of inner life, it is perhaps appropriate that the chapters themselves should trace an anatomy of a person, with each chapter organized around a different part (face, head, limbs, mind/brain, and bones, respectively). In a brief introduction, Blackwood outlines the importance of historical and aesthetic analysis. The historical contingency of the inner life runs throughout this book, but the aesthetic also plays a role; the subjects of this book "believed that selves, like [End Page E-1] E-2 portraits, are aesthetic objects" (15). Examining the historical inflections of certain concepts is a popular scholarly method in contemporary literary studies, as seen in Christopher Castiglia's historical interrogation of interiority in Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States. Blackwood complements this mode of analysis by continually returning to aesthetic texture. Historical narrative and attention to form reinforce each other. The first chapter uses Hawthorne as a "case study" for revealing the evolving notions of portraiture and selfhood in the 1840s and 1850s. Blackwood observes that these years saw an explosion in portrait technologies, to which Hawthorne's work responded. Examining actual portraits of Hawthorne as well as his reflections on portraits in his works, Blackwood offers Hawthorne as a key pioneer for imagining literary portraiture as a mode of exploring the "inner life" of a subject. Hawthorne's portrayals of these portraits are conflicted, befitting fraught narratives of portraiture during this time period: "these tales that indulge dramas about finding a true, inner self are always … also engaged in making the sorts of selves they purport to find" (42). The second chapter further complicates the tensions of portraiture by turning to the intersection of race and portraiture. African American writers faced a powerful duality for portraiture, which could be a vehicle for situating black Americans within an oppressive racial hierarchy but could also be a vehicle for expressing self-ownership and inner depths. Thus portraiture could both reinforce derogatory racial stereotypes and afford a means of rebuking reductionist racial narratives. To explore these complexities, Blackwood examines nineteenth-century newspapers, Frederick Douglass's reflections on portraiture, and works by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, and Frank J. Webb. Blackwood notes the pervasiveness of portraiture in nineteenth-century texts by African Americans, and she reveals how portraiture in these texts can serve multiple (and sometimes competing) purposes. For...

Roman Poets in Modern Guise: The Reception of Roman Poetry since World War I by Theodore Ziolkowski

MLR, .,   engage with terms in the original language, revealing their multiple or shiing meanings). Overall, however, the collection demonstrates the importance of poetry to modern continental thinkers and offers a valuable study of their responses. U  B E W Roman Poets in Modern Guise: e Reception of Roman Poetry since World War I. By T Z. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) Rochester, NY: Camden House. . xiv+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. It is sad to think that eodore Ziolkowski, a faithful contributor to this journal, will never see this review. His death in December  means that, as this publication makes clear, we have lost someone who remained an active and stimulating author to the end. Potential readers of this wide-ranging study should not be misled by the title of the series in which it has been published, which suggests a specifically Germanic focus. As Ziolkowski points out, it concentrates at least as much on his other area of specialization, the anglophone literature of the United States and of the United Kingdom and Ireland, with a particular focus, where appropriate, on contrasts between the two. In addition, figures such as Gide, Valéry, Calvino, Kristeva, and others outside those two linguistic areas make appearances where appropriate. Although both wide-ranging and extremely erudite, the study does not seek to be exhaustive, but instead looks at a selection of key Roman authors in chronological order, relating them to the period in which they were writing. Hence Part : ‘Augustan Echoes’ is devoted to Virgil, the Eclogues rather than the Aeneid, and Horace, Part : ‘Republican Counterpoints’ to Lucretius, Catullus, and Propertius, and Part : ‘Imperial Dissonances’ to Ovid, Seneca, and Juvenal. e influences explored are literary, be it poetry, novels, plays, or essays, and the nature of the in- fluences ranges from quotation, adaptation, and translation to the use of biography as a plot device. A key feature of the study, and perhaps its most interesting aspect, is the way in which Ziolkowski relates the response to the various authors at different periods to political and cultural developments and changes which influence the interest in specific authors and works, and also the national differences, which mean that these differ from country to country. Although there is no shortage of examples of British and Irish authors or, as we have seen, those from other European countries being influenced by these classical authors, the rise of National Socialism and its aermath in Germany and the presidential nature of US politics seem to have made authors from these countries particularly ready to identify with the Roman model. Some authors have functioned as repositories of quotations either to be embraced with pleasure or to be disagreed with (Wilfred Owen, as Ziolkowski shows, was not the only writer to take issue with Horace’s ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’), others, such as Catullus, provide material for speculative biographical fiction, although he also, from the s on, provides an  Reviews excuse for otherwise respectable translators to talk dirty. A particularly interesting pattern emerges in the case of Ovid, whose popularity not only alternates with that of Virgil, but in different periods homes in either on the works dealing with exile or on those dealing with love and metamorphosis. ere will be few, if any, readers of this study who are familiar with all the twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors evoked here, and so a degree of summary is oen required, something that is more successful in the case of the poetic works than the more narrative texts, which require lengthier exposition, but the ground covered remains impressive. is is a rewarding study which inspires regret for the passing of the age of the classical education. S U D C e Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural eory. Ed. by J R. D L. London: Bloomsbury. . xiii+ pp. £. ISBN ––– –. e Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural eory is the latest in a long line of texts aiming to introduce students to the body of theoretical work that underpins contemporary literary and cultural studies. is has always been a difficult task, drawing as it does on so...

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory by Jeffrey R. Di Leo

 Reviews excuse for otherwise respectable translators to talk dirty. A particularly interesting pattern emerges in the case of Ovid, whose popularity not only alternates with that of Virgil, but in different periods homes in either on the works dealing with exile or on those dealing with love and metamorphosis. ere will be few, if any, readers of this study who are familiar with all the twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors evoked here, and so a degree of summary is oen required, something that is more successful in the case of the poetic works than the more narrative texts, which require lengthier exposition, but the ground covered remains impressive. is is a rewarding study which inspires regret for the passing of the age of the classical education. S U D C e Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural eory. Ed. by J R. D L. London: Bloomsbury. . xiii+ pp. £. ISBN ––– –. e Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural eory is the latest in a long line of texts aiming to introduce students to the body of theoretical work that underpins contemporary literary and cultural studies. is has always been a difficult task, drawing as it does on so many other disciplines; any appraisal of scholarship relevant to the study of culture is necessarily commodious. is volume, edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo, gamely takes on the task with a two-pronged approach: twentyseven essays devoted to different topics in theory, and an encyclopedia. is takes in well-known ‘major’ thinkers in the field (from eodor Adorno to Raymond Williams) as well as key concepts. Some of these concepts are well known and expected in such a context—intertextuality, negritude, patriarchy, and so on. At other moments, this handbook takes the opportunity to challenge more basic concepts that theory previously took for granted or erased, for example with an entry on the ‘Professor’ (founded, essentially, in the welcome addition of ‘University Studies’ to the roster of relevant subdisciplines). Di Leo also includes theory which has become widely popular only in the last ten or fieen years, such as Object-Oriented Ontology and Actor-Network eory. A close study of this book should certainly prepare students with the background knowledge generally required to rub along in even a graduate seminar in the literary and cultural disciplines. However, for all that it effectively maps the state of the art as it is widely perceived , the volume does miss other opportunities to shape the discourse of theory for the better, and remains relatively conservative in terms of the discussion it admits and what is therefore marked as important. Despite the protestations in the Introduction that there are new communities of theory which ‘may not go by recognizable names like the feminism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis of the last century’ (p. ), there remains a great deal of work to be done on the ways we conceive of theory as a terrain. For instance, only one essay is set aside for ‘Race and Postcolonial Studies’; in an era of thriving decolonization movements, MLR, .,   and conversely of resurgent public displays of white supremacy both without the academy and within, it is disappointing that the editors have chosen to collapse a nuanced and vital field of study into a single chapter. Its author, Nicole Simek, takes on the Herculean task with aplomb, sweeping from the historical origins of race as a construct through the place of culture in resistance, and the role of neo-liberalism in suppressing liberation movements, finally ending with Édouard Glissant’s concept of the donner-avec. But there is only so much one essay can do, and to collapse generations of thought across the world into a few pages is a poor showing; a better volume would have seen chapters on ‘Black Radical ought’, ‘Decolonization’, ‘Whiteness’, and so on, and a greater integration of these ideas into the other chapters as well. While concepts key in critical race studies, such as thanatopolitics and diaspora, are covered in the encyclopedia section, one feels that they are relegated there, while the more prominently placed essays most oen do not examine their own whiteness and that of the field they are designed...

Od Saida do filologii i z powrotem

Form Said to Philology and Back Again The article presents the relationship between Edward W. Said’s thoughts and a specific philological tradition in the context of the reception of postcolonial theory in the area of Polish literary research. The author demonstrates that philology in the sense given by Said can support postcolonial studies as well as constitute an inspiring tradition for contemporary literary studies. In the first part of the article the author presents how the attitude of the American humanist to philology was changing. In Orientalism, Said criticizes Renan’s scientist practice, but in all his works he highly values this discipline and perceives it as an emancipatory, humanistic activity that transcends the dynamics of knowledge and power. Author of the article shows that the concepts of Giambattista Vico and Erich Auerbach are extremely important for the Palestinian-American critic. The next part of the article presents that Said uses methods characteristic of philology in his works, often in spite of the methodological declarations attributed to him (discourse theory).

Genre Blindness in the New Descriptivism

Abstract This essay considers the “descriptive turn” in literary studies from the vantage point of poetics, arguing that the history of Western poetry, from the Greeks to the present, offers through the category of epideixis a theory and practice of description that illuminates some of the methodological impasses of contemporary literary studies. Epideixis, a basic mode of pointing or linguistic ostension, confers value, often by way of praise or blame, without trying to persuade its audience with the practical immediacy of political or forensic rhetoric. Drawing on the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, the essay suggests that praise constitutes a philosophically rigorous alternative to critique. This argument is exemplified via the work of Mark Doty, a contemporary poet of description-as-praise.

The scientific review – a Distinct Genre. A Descriptive Attempt with References to the Book Review

The article tries describes the characteristic features of the scientifi c review on the example of reviews of critical literary studies published in 2002–2019. The research perspective takes into account typical and variable properties of the review. The typical features: the composition corre-sponding with the composition of the work under discussion, the scientifi c style and the methods of evaluation, have been compared with selected cases where the unusual features of the meta-scientifi c text have been employed. The article takes into account the following atypical features: the violation of the stylistic convention of scientifi c discourse, the insertion of unusual components into a typical composition, the exposition of the reviewer’s research perspective on the subject. The article also identifi es the dominant models of scientifi c criticism in contemporary literary studies.

The Midrashic Impulse

The Midrashic Impulse