Contemporary Writers Research Articles

Gheorghe Grigurcu’s Exegesis. Some Opinions

Gheorghe Grigurcu is known as a literary critic of poetry, while the position of poet was the writer’s first vocation. We identify the marginalization of the poet both geographically, being isolated in “Amarul Târg” (Târgu Jiu), and literary, by imposing some malicious restrictions: all this placing him under the badge of suspicion. Regarding the exegesis of Gheorghe Grigurcu, it is appropriate to selectively inventory some opinions belonging to contemporary literary critics or writers who have asserted themselves and capitalized on the status of a literary critic, but also a poet, as the writer Grigurcu himself wanted to be received. The dual nature of the writer, critic and poet, makes it impossible to analyze the two vocations separately, a fact that requires their twin research. Nonconformist, awkward, atypical, formidable polemicist, judicial spirit, corrosive is just some of the defining attributes that highlight the personality legitimized by the book universe. For the literary critic, poet, polemicist and author of aphorisms of the same name, to give up writing is to deny oneself.

«Что в имени тебе моем?»: функции антропонимов в китайско-американском транскультурном художественном тексте

The article deals with the problem of anthroponyms as a means of creativity in transcultural literature. The analyzed material was taken from “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” novel written by a contemporary Chinese American writer Amy Tan. The author of the article comes to a conclusion that anthroponyms can be a very effective and bright means of creativity, a kind of intersection of cultures, reflecting an author’s individuality. The norms and traditions of such different languages and cultures are so tightly interwoven and create an absolutely new transcultural narration. In this connection it is absolutely impossible to consider anthroponyms just a mere means of nomination, lacking any cultural connotation and value for the reader. Thus, anthroponyms create not only the nominative function but also the aesthetic function as well as the function of ethnic coloring.

​​Negotiating Hospitality in Pat Mora's "Bilingual Christmas" and Sandra Cisneros's "It Occurs to Me I Am the Creative/Destructive Goddess Coatlicue"

This article explores the link between hospitality and power in two poems by contemporary Chicana writers Pat Mora and Sandra Cisneros, reflecting on how these two poems denounce the complicity of certain discourses and practices of hospitality with oppression and exclusion. Both poems explore the intersection between hospitality, power and inequality, highlighting the power differentials at play beneath relationships of hospitality. Hospitality appears in the two poems as a cover-up for marginalization and exploitation, the exclusion of migrants and post-migrants and the subjugation of women through norms of self-sacrifice. However, the two poems also reclaim hospitality and offer textual forms of generosity and care, or poetic hospitality in the way they welcome in voices, readers, and stories.

Del's Growth: A Typical Example of Construction of Female Self-consciousness—A Postmodern Feminist Analysis of Lives of Girls and Women

Alice Munro is a famous contemporary Canadian women writer and the winner of 2013 Nobel Prize in literature. She is known as the ""master of contemporary short stories"". Munro is very concerned about the life experience of ordinary women. She always focuses on the daily trifles and details of ordinary women and describes their journey from a girl to a wife in detail, especially focusing on the psychological fluctuations and twists and turns of women. They seem fragile, but they are persistent. Munro's works are full of postmodern feminism, focusing on women's self-awareness and subjective conscious construction.
 From the perspective of postmodern feminism, the thesis focuses on the gradual formation and evolution of the heroine's self-consciousness in Alice Munro's only ""full-length"" novel Lives of Girls and Women in the process of growing up from a girl to a woman, and how female images to jump out of the hierarchy, logical structure and linear narrative surrounded by men's words and begin to express own world.
 The introduction gives an overview of Alice Munro and the novel Lives of Girls and Women, literary reviews at home and abroad, some key elements in postmodern feminism, and the significance of this thesis.
 The body section consists of three chapters: Chapter One focuses on ""Del observes the adult life"". Through Del's observation, the life of Uncle Benny's wife, two aunts, her mother and the teacher unfolded. Chapter Two analyzes ""Self-consciousness of Del begins to construct"". Del gradually began to grow up. The awakening of sexual consciousness, the doubt of belief and the excavation of herself have gradually become the theme of this adolescent girl's life. Chapter Three revolves around ""Establishment and Perfection of her self-consciousness"". Finally, she got rid of her fantasy and self-deception, her past mistakes and perplexity, and left home to start her real life.
 The conclusion part summarizes that from the perspective of postmodern feminism, the self-growth and consciousness awakening of Del is how women break away from the role of ""good women"" who meet the social expectations and find their own real nature. Munro challenges the forces we take for granted and shakes the foundations of our lives. Women perceive the world in a way different from men and resist the grandeur of history with daily trivialities. Munro constructs women's value expresses her voice and embodies her choice of will by transcending feminism and returning to women's ontological experience.

THE DIFFERENT TIME OF THE KISELYEVS (ON THE MATERIALS OF UNPUBLISHED LETTERS TO CHEKHOV)

The article deals with the letters of A. Chekhov’s friends, the writer M. Kiselyeva and her husband A. Kiselyev, Head of Zvenigorod zemstvo, to Chekhov. In chronological order this collection covers the most significant period of Chekhov’s biography, from 1886 to 1900, and unfolds many aspects of his life in the Babkino area and Zvenigorod zemstvo. There were many persons who came into different contacts with Chekhov (their notes, though not found and studied so far, do wait in the wings; in particular, one source is P. Arkhangelsky’s memoirs). There were many epistolary and memoir documents (contemporary writers’ letters, the young Chekhovs’ letters, N. Golubeva’s (M. Kiselyeva’s sister) notes, and many others). The Kiselyevs’ 109 letters can be regarded valuable in terms of their deliberate mundane character as there are more ‘non-literary’ letters but at the same time they are not trivial at all. This fact enables the researcher to have a different perspective on somewhat pragmatic (A. Kiselyev’s stories about the zemstvo’s everyday routine; M. Kiselyeva’s stories about her mystical visions; their complaints about their financial and health problems) and linguistic (word play, puns, vivid descriptions, life events presented as jokes) character of the Kiselyevs’ correspondence with Chekhov, and to extend the borders of the writer’s biography. Thus a different understanding of Chekhov’s storylines can be suggested. These letters also reveal some aspects of the life of Chekhov and his family members; they enable the author to interpret variously literary legacy of various writers, to consider the stories of their works’ creation, the characters’ prototypes and artistic forms from a different angle.

Teaching Fairy Tales Old and New: Revisiting Andersen via Emma Donoghue

ABSTRACT Fairy tales have been an essential ingredient in children’s literature. Canonical fairy tales passed down from generation to generation not only enrich children’s imagination but connote significant values typical of the community. However, as time passes, contemporary writers often challenge these traditional values when they work on the same topic. This changing face is evidenced by Emma Donoghue’s rewriting of classical tales. Based on my teaching of Donoghue’s story ‘The Tale of the Bird’ alongside Andersen’s ‘Thumbelina’ at a university in Hong Kong, this paper discusses the ever-evolving cultural values and the benefit of reading Donoghue via Andersen or vice versa in the literature class and beyond.

“We” versus “others” in Estonian fiction: the question of national identity in the works of contemporary women writers

ABSTRACT This article uses a postcolonial approach and the concept of Orientalization to uncover hierarchies in Estonian national identity construction. We examine the change in the articulation of the ‘other’ in the context of identity discourses of Estonians and Estonian Russian-speakers using literature by women authors in Estonia. We show how the interest of Estonian writers in the Russian community changed over time and then practically disappeared. We also demonstrate how, reflecting on their new post-imperial status, Estonian Russian-language literature eventually came to see Russians from Russia, rather than Estonians, as the key significant ‘other.’

E. N. Tsimbaeva. Women and men in the history and literature of the mid-18th — early 20th centuries: Behind the stage of a literary text

E. Tsimbaeva’s monograph analyzes the literature of the mid-18th — early 20th cc. in comparison with the realia of the everyday that were omitted from books by contemporary writers as too obvious and have become obscure and unknown to present-day readers. Notably, the book suggests that the commonly accepted rules and conventions of a period would often determine the plots of contemporary works of literature and shape the images and psychology of their characters, whereas new generations of readers may have trouble understanding their seemingly random and strange behaviour. The scholar argues that the bygone realia of the everyday and customs left behind the scenes of a literary text may not be deduced by the modern reader and therefore provide material for studies by present-day historians. Tsimbaeva’s study focuses on this missing knowledge and its cultural and literary significance.

The documentary nature of A. Gelasimov’s novel “Pure High”

The article is devoted to the work of the notable contemporary writer A. Gelasimov. Over the past two decades, domestic literature has reflected a steady interest in the category of documentaries, resorting to various genre forms of nonfiction, style dominants, narrative strategies, etc. A. Gelasimov’s novel “Pure High” is largely organized based on the documentary principle, which manifests itself in the text at different levels of the whole: in the genre form of a biography, narrative, method of collecting information, adventurousness of the plot, stylized documents, language manner, etc. The document is used in the design of the publication, the section “Acknowledgements” correlates the names of the people from the environment of rapper Basta with the details of the novel, direct quotes from his songs are given, the biography is based on real facts. This use of documentary elements allows the author to actualize the tragic nineties of Russian history in the reader’s mind, to raise the issue of “the lost generations”, the forms and the causes of their destructive behavior and to show a possible experience of overcoming “the historical trauma”. Touching upon important social problems of our time, A. Gelasimov rediscovers the value of such categories as home, family, love, loyalty and friendship in the present.

L’Assommoir and Zola’s Nuanced Vision of Nineteenth-Century Alcoholism

This article examines depictions of problem drinking in Emile Zola’s 1877 L’Assommoir, situating the novel within contemporaneous writings about alcoholism. While criticism has long found in Zola’s novel the ruinous effects of hereditary degeneration, I propose that L’Assommoir also illuminates the flaws in nineteenth-century French medical thinking about alcoholism. One curious point about L’Assommoir is that this most famous work of French literature to deal with alcoholic drinking never uses the word alcoholism or alcoholic. Underneath that very elision, though, is a surprising amount of clarity and modern nuance about the realities of the disease. In the context of a contemporaneous French medical discourse that argued for the feasibility of moderation in drinking, that overwhelmingly counted wine as part of the solution, and that underscored the damning role of heredity, this novel is clear about the variance among constitutions, even among people in the same demographic and with similar family histories. It indicates that individual compulsion, not solely choice, and not solely heredity, drives the problem drinker. It also indicates that an alcoholic compulsion can be nourished through wine. In this manner, Zola was more aligned with the modern disease model of alcoholism than the prevailing French wisdom of his time.

Plural perspectives and new media voice: a research review of contemporary NigerianAmerican writer Teju Cole

Teju Cole is one of the influential contemporary African American writers in the literati. The thesis focuses on a comprehensive review of the academic studies of Teju Cole at home and abroad from three main aspects: multi-perspective interpretation of Cole’s novels and his anthologies of essays, new-media voices of Cole's other works, and the comparative studies on Cole's writings; exploring the limitations of existing studies and significant dimensions that ought to be considered in future research, including the innovation of research points of view and insights on Cole’s oeuvre, the introduction and translation in China of Cole’s works and important research monograph and articles by overseas scholars on Cole.

A Study of Trauma Writing in Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead, a well-known contemporary African American writer, who has won the Pulitzer Prize twice. The Nickel Boys won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, and the novel takes the tragic experience of black teenagers in the Nickel Academy Reformatory School as the main line of the story. This paper applies Judith Herman’s trauma theory to analyze the physical and psychological trauma faced by the characters in the novel, as well as the causes of this trauma. The racism and prejudice that the black people suffered have been deeply affecting their living and mental state. At the same time, this paper discusses the possible ways to realize the recovery of trauma with the theory of trauma and recovery. Through the trauma study, we can see that under the combined stress of these traumas, African Americans suffer from a great blow in their body and spirit. The causes of the trauma are multidimensional and are the result of a combination of historical and social factors. For example, the segregation system is responsible for the trauma of African Americans. At the end of the paper, it discusses ways for black people to come out of trauma. Trauma recovery is a complex and difficult process in which black people must rely on their own efforts and help from the black community to achieve trauma recovery. It can be said that Whitehead’s exploration of the trauma recovery in the novels shows his realistic concern for African Americans and even human beings.

REFRACTION OF THE IDEA OF IMAGINARY SPACES AND SUPRA-INDIVIDUAL MYTHS OF P.A. FLORENSKY IN THE WORKS OF THE WRITERS AT THE TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Despite the fact that the main ideas of P.A. Florensky were formulated more than a hundred years ago, they remain relevant to this day. Their great influence on his contemporary writers is therefore obvious. Among those, we are primarily interested in writers such as D.S. Merezhkovsky, whose work is largely congruent with the religious tenets of the philosopher, and M.A. Bulgakov, who dedicated his “cherished novel” to Yeshua Ha-Notsri, but was not considered a religious writer either in the 30s of the 20th century, or today. It is known that the two pillars of Pavel Florensky’s work were religion and mathematics, but he wasn’t the pioneer of the idea of a scientific approach to the study of the foundations of Christianity; even Nicholas of Cusa, a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, a theologian and mathematician of the 15th century, was sure that it was possible to learn to understand the grand design with the help of the exact sciences. The report attempts to reveal the manifestation (consonance) of the ideas formulated by P.A. Florensky in his books “Imaginaries in Geometry” and “Iconostasis” in the works of D. Merezhkovsky and M. Bulgakov.

Abuse of Women in Nineteenth Century Asylums: Past and Present Representations in English Literature

Madness has been frequently represented in English literature since it was an issue concerning not only medical practitioners and social control but also the role of women in society and the exertion of men’s will over wives, sisters, daughters and other female relatives. In this paper, the condition of nineteenth century women confined to the madhouses or asylums is discussed in relation to the different representations made by two Victorian novelists, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and a contemporary writer, Sarah Waters. Theories of insanity and the motives of women abuse are widely introduced followed by some reflections on the representation of abuse in three novels: The Women in White, Lady Audley’s Secret and Fingersmith. A substantial difference between the first two novels and the modern one is the portrayal of sexual orientation, masochism and pornography.

A Comparative Analysis of Two Translation Versions of Biancheng from the Perspective of Domestication and Foreignization

Biancheng, translated as Green Jade, Border Town, The Border Town, The Frontier City, is a masterpiece of Chinese contemporary writer Shen Congwen that has enjoyed a worldwide reputation since its publication in 1934. Among the translations of the masterpiece, the versions of Gladys Yangs and Kinkleys are more praised and influential. Hence, by making a comparative analysis of Gladys Yangs and Kinkleys versions from the perspective of domestication and foreignization, this article aims to discuss how the two versions differ in translation strategies and translation methods. Through the analysis, it is found that Yang tends to apply the domestication strategy while Kinkley prefers to adopt the foreignization strategy. Meanwhile, by analysing the concrete examples in the source language and target language on word level and sentence level, the paper points out that the differences are a reflection of translators identities, translation styles and aims.

Black Festive Practices in the Early Modern Iberian World: Sources and Challenges

In the early-modern Iberian world, people of African descent engaged in festive practices both in isolation and as part of wider religious and civic communities. Based on contemporary chronicles, festival accounts and visual sources, our knowledge of these practices remains partial, both because contemporary writers and artists were largely non-Black and because these authors and artists inscribed these traditions within the Eurocentric exotic genre. In this article, I turn to festival accounts, government reports and visual sources, discuss the challenges and opportunities they present and develop diasporic, transgeographic and transtemporal methodologies allowing us to identify continuities across the Afro-Iberian diaspora.

THREE SETS OF SHACKLES AT OLD SARUM, THE ‘ARREST OF THE BISHOPS’ IN 1139 AND THE POWER OF SHAMING IN THE ANGLO-NORMAN WORLD

In 1913 a set of leg shackles was recovered among skeletal remains during excavations at the east end of the ruinous cathedral of Old Sarum, Wiltshire. A recent examination of the excavation’s photographic record indicates that two further similar examples were recovered at the same time. Since the early twentieth century a body of scholarship has refined our understanding of the arrangement of the east end of the cathedral, and a closer examination of the archive in the light of this work allows for both skeletal remains and shackles to be confidently located in an archaeological context related to the tomb of Bishop Roger. This paper explores the value this evidence has for our understanding of the so-called ‘Arrest of the Bishops’, an event of notable constitutional significance in the tumultuous reign of King Stephen. It goes on to examine the shock with which the event was recalled by contemporary writers to reflect on the power of shaming and incarceration as a device of extortion, political manipulation and the infliction of social death. The integral nature of iron bonds in these strategies lends them a socio-symbolic role and the reception of their use in this well-recorded episode may facilitate the interpretation of such items from early and high medieval contexts when, frequently, primary provenance is lacking.

Introduction to the Après Coup of “Deconstructing Difference: Gender, Splitting, and Transitional Space”

ABSTRACT With the republication of Muriel Dimen’s classic essay, “Deconstructing difference: Gender, splitting, and transitional space” (Dimen, 1991), Psychoanalytic Dialogues launches a new feature, Après Coups. By putting a paper from the early years of the journal in conversation with contemporary readers and writers, we hope to dial into the ways psychoanalysts forge relationality in spaces of complexity and contradiction over time. In this dialogue, we see queerness speaking in and to the psychoanalytic frame. The Après Coups includes commentaries from Virginia Goldner, Ph.D., Ann D’Ercole, Ph.D. & Jack Drescher, M.D., Ph.D., Stephen Hartman, Ph.D., June Lee Kwon, Ph.D., and Julie Leavitt, M.D.

Tessa Hadley and William Wordsworth: Literary Lineage and Patriarchal Legacy in The Past

ABSTRACT In Tessa Hadley’s The Past (2016), a ruined cottage evokes the dilapidated structure featured in William Wordsworth’s poem “The Ruined Cottage” (1797–98), a poem that privileges the male gaze and male Romantic imagination. I argue Hadley subverts the Romantic tropes bound up in these patriarchal structures by deploying the tropes in such a way as to transfer the powers of perception and imagination to female characters. Through this gynocentric redeployment, Hadley suggests how modern women might surpass Wordsworth’s Margaret in their potential to construct realities in which they have agency while simultaneously reminding us how women remain oppressed by male conceptions of reality. Reading “The Ruined Cottage” alongside The Past also reveals poetry as an under-recognized element of Hadley’s literary lineage and illuminates how this contemporary fiction writer approaches the modernist dual imperative of innovation and inheritance. Reading Hadley’s examination of Romanticism’s androcentric poetic legacy in the context of her modernist heritage positions her as a metamodernist writer. My reading of The Past suggests that a full consideration of modernist continuities and metamodernist practice in contemporary fiction should include poetry, as well as prose, and lineages that predate the twentieth century.

Essaying Pain.

Narrative has long been central to the study of literature about illness, but we err if we assume that memoir and fiction alone depict the embodied experience of physical suffering. Contemporary writers also turn to the essay. In French, essayer means to attempt, and writing essays requires facing difficult questions and predicaments, confronting uncertainty and the unknown. Among recent literary essays, many are about women in pain. These include Eula Biss's "The Pain Scale" (2005) and Leslie Jamison's "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain" (2014). Each of these writers asks: How, when, and why do we suffer? Why is women's pain so often diminished, dismissed, and misunderstood? And why, in response to the suffering of others, do we regularly fail to provide what is needed?