Poetic Prose Research Articles

The Literary Experience of God in Death’s Vicinity in the Works of Freedom Fighter Bronius Krivickas

Bronius Krivickas (1919–1952), a Lithuanian poet and fiction writer, a fighter against the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, reflects carefully the main ideas of existentialism: Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of individual freedom, Martin Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death, the concept of a limiting situation developed by Karl Jaspers. In the worldview of B. Krivickas’s literary works, these ideas are associated with the context of Catholic philosophy and theology.This article investigates the notion of God within the existential limiting situation (especially the situation of death) in the literary works by B. Krivickas. The main critical perspective is the theology of literature.
 In the context of the dramatic experience of World War II, B. Krivickas’s short stories, a symbolist play A Tale About a Princess, and poetical prose works interpret God as being perceived through human conscience and a human longing for spiritual harmony. God is being thought of as the ultimate metaphysical mystery.In the period of Lithuanian fights for freedom, B. Krivickas’s poetry reveals an intense partisan self-consciousness. The poetry interprets the fight against the Soviet aggressor as a sacrifice for the nation’s freedom and compares it indirectly with the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ. According to the logic of existentialism, B Krivickas’s poetry claims that a human being is absolutely free, even if this means to choose freedom at the cost of life.God becomes the personal you for the fighter seen in B. Krivickas’s poetry. The main theme of the fighter’s dialogue with God is an existential complaint. The fighter experiences deep theodic dilemmas. He has no doubts about the righteousness of the war against the Soviet occupation, but he has deep doubts about the divine permission for evil to exist in the world. The faith of the poetic fighter is just his will to believe, his desire to believe. Thus the poetic figure of the fighter acquires both patriotic and religious heroism.

Bruno Schulz – Hidden and Obvious – in Yuri Andrukhovych’s Texts (on the example of the poetic Cinnamon project)

The article investigates connections between the poetic prose of Bruno Schulz and the poetic Cinnamon cycle of Yuri Andrukhovych, a contemporary writer and poet, implemented by the au-thor in 2008–2011 as a musical and poetical project in conjunction with the musical „Karbido” band (Wroclaw). It is a lyrical and epic cycle consisting of ten parts: two essays from the book, My Europe (2001, co-authored with Andrzej Stasiuk) and selected poems from Andrukhovych’s poetic collection, Exotic Birds and Plants (translated into Polish by Jacek Podsiadło, 2007). The cycle has a secondary origin: it is a poetic integrity that arose as a result of the intentionally outlined-by--the-poet search for those texts (written before) in his own oeuvre, which built a new, regenerated integrity Bruno Schulz became a pretext and foundation for. Schulz is not present in the cycle directly, obviously – he is hidden there, metonymic and signifi ed by Andrukhovych (according to the termi-nology of Roland Barthes where the signifi ed is secret, deep and needs to be searched). By creating Cinnamon, Andrukhovych is reborn from the author-creator to the author-reader/author-interpreter so the original author’s intention-birth becomes an intention-search which is also used by the author of the given article while reading Schulz’s poetic codes encrypted in the texts of the cycle.

These lips that are not (d)one: Writing with the ‘pash’ of translation

Taking up the embodied erotics of translation put forward by Aarón Lacayo and drawing on Luce Irigaray’s figure of the lips as meeting the other at the threshold of their irreducible becoming, this paper presents the make-out session, or ‘pash’ of translation, as a framework for producing multilingual writing that preserves the messy, multidirectional movement of interlingual translation on the page. Close textual analysis of Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote and Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing! serves to demonstrate that such a mode of translative writing defers textual closure so as to facilitate the emergence of a multiplicity of textual resonances and highlight the asymmetries and discomfort of the interlingual encounter. An accompanying creative text, also published in this edition of TEXT (Fisher 2020), experiments with the application of such multidirectional and ‘suspended’ translation techniques to produce a response to a poem by the Argentinian author Alejandra Pizarnik, moving between Old Provençal, Castellano and English to produce a piece of poetic prose that interrogates the frustration of displaced infatuation, the ethically questionable state of travelling ‘for pleasure’ and the embodied resonances between material discursive bodies in various states of becoming and becoming undone in desire.

On the Candlemas of the Symbol and the Reality (Once Again on <i>Doctor Zhivago</i>)

The article discusses the problem of a literary method that was used by B.L. Pasternak in the novel Doctor Zhivago. The author examines the relation of this method with the ideas of symbolism and post-symbolism. In the novel, symbolist motives take new forms. Pasternak establishes a “live” connection between heroes and events, which symbolize “prime causes” of the taking place events and destinies. They belong to two worlds that are not separated from each other by borders between essential levels (from the lowest to the highest). The reality of life stops being a shadow of the highest reality, but the former is penetrated by the latter. Symbols do not indicate “prime causes” and “prime senses,” but become their “live” mediums. In space of the novel there is a “Candlemas” of the reality that shows itself through symbols and the reality of life, with all its secrets and solutions, happiness and grief, absurdity and clear sense. The literary method that make possible such Candlemas can be determined as “symbolist realism.” The Candlemas does not create harmony, it leaves all contradictions not resolved, all questions – without answer, expectation – without hope. His heroes symbolize the highest realities, and at the same time they live and die. It allows the reader simultaneously to be both the contemplator of game of the highest forces (as envisioned by symbolism) and the compassionate participant of vital tragedies of heroes of the novel (as in realism). B.L. Pasternak created a genre of novel-poem that by the means of poetic prose puts and solves deep philosophical problems of the philosophy of history and philosophical anthropology.

Функциональная специфика скульптурного экфрасиса в романе Р. Д. Харриса «Очищение»

The article is devoted to analysing functional specificity of the nature of sculptural ekphrasis in R. D. Harris’s novel “Lustrum”, whose object was the Venus de Milo’s statue. Scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that there are no studies related to analysing the functional nature of ekphrasis in R. D. Harris’s creative work both in the western and Russian literary criticism. In this respect, the aim of the study is to uncover the role played by the stylistic devices used by the author in the chosen ekphrastic description and determined in the course of the analysis. The attained results have shown that the statuary image of the Venice de Milo, adding to the historical portrait of Aurelia Cotta, reveals behavioural particularities of a woman’s image in the context of postmodernist prose poetics.

The Historically Changing Notion of (Female Bodily) Proportion and Its Relevance to Literature

Abstract Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909) was an early modern Japanese novelist, translator, and critic. He wrote what is now generally conceived of as the first Japanese ‘modern’ novel, Drifting Clouds (1887-89). He translated works by Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Garshin, Gorky, and others. He also published a number of critical essays, treatises on literary theory, political papers, and so forth. His early translation of Turgenev’s short stories: Aibiki (Rendevous, 1888) and Meguriai (Three Trysts, 1889) were extremely influential on the contemporary literati, who were amazed at the fresh, poetic prose used in stark contrast to the traditional Japanese fiction in the pre-Reformation period. These translations, seen in the light of the present-day readers, were unique in what we might term today ‘foreignizing translation’. Lawrence Venuti in Invisibility of the Translator argues that the ideal of (English) translation has been to conceal itself as a translation, i.e. to present itself as an original text (chap I and passim). In that sense, Futabatei’s translations, scandalously presenting itself as a translation, that is to say, as an alien text, is extremely ‘foreignizing’.

David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet, by Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: A Christian Modernist?, ed. by Jamie Callison, Paul S. Fiddes, Anna Johnson, and Erik Tonning

David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet, by Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: A Christian Modernist?, ed. by Jamie Callison, Paul S. Fiddes, Anna Johnson, and Erik Tonning

Terror and Tremors: Earthquakes and Terrorism in Maïssa Bey’s Surtout ne te retourne pas 1

After the 2015 terror attacks in France, historian Pascal Ory explained that although “terrorism” and “earthquakes” share a common etymology and seem to shock societies in similar ways, they are essentially opposite—the former is absolutely intentional, while the latter is purely accidental. Yet, an Algerian novel from 2005 invites us to rethink this dialectic: in Maïssa Bey’s Surtout ne te retourne pas, earthquakes in Algiers can be read as aftershocks and metaphors of the Black Decade. Bey paints an Algeria that has become fragmented and superstitious, with horrors of the past re-emerging through the cracks of the dismantled city space. Through her poetic prose, we see terror and tremors comparably disrupting social relations. After the initial trauma, ideologies and identities shift like tectonic plates, clashing and sliding on top of one another. From this subduction zone of ongoing tensions, the novel itself becomes a meta-textual earthquake: after exposing how crimes and disasters have flipped Algeria upside down, Maïssa Bey flips her own world inside out by transgressing Michel Foucault’s “sacred” space. Through the agency of her female protagonists, she fights back against radical Islamism by breaking taboos and shaking institutions.

Review: Mountain Temples and Temple Mountains: Architecture, Religion, and Nature in the Central Himalayas, by Nachiket Chanchani

Nachiket Chanchani Mountain Temples and Temple Mountains: Architecture, Religion, and Nature in the Central Himalayas Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019, 288 pp., 5 maps, 80 color and 26 b/w illus. $70 (cloth), ISBN 9780295744513 When scholars think of architecture in the Himalayas, what most readily come to mind are the Buddhist monasteries or wooden “pagoda-like” shrines of Tibet, Nepal, and the western Himalayas. Older stone temples are rarely considered, and the central Himalayas are often completely ignored. Unlike the adjacent kingdoms of Kashmir and Chamba or the Kathmandu Valley, the central Himalayas suffer from poor infrastructure that restricts travel, as well as a paucity of textual sources that could contextualize material culture. This is in contrast to the region's vast traditions of pilgrimage, which have been of great interest to anthropologists and scholars of religion. What makes Nachiket Chanchani's new book Mountain Temples and Temple Mountains such a monumental achievement, however, is not merely the fact that it brings to light a remarkable range of unknown monuments but also that it so convincingly asserts their centrality within the broader history of temple architecture on the Indian subcontinent. At the heart of Chanchani's book is the argument that the emergence of the central Himalayas as a crucial sacred landscape and “enduring abode of the gods” (173) was the result of dynamic interactions between the mountains and the plains of northern and central India. Using lively and often poetic prose, Chanchani demonstrates how the grand yet challenging topography did not segregate the region but rather fostered the formation of new settlements, encouraged travel, and reinforced an enduring sense of sacrality. Patrons and religious communities capitalized on both the transregional idealization of the Himalayas and the specificities of local landscapes in order to transform the region systematically into a pan-Indic pilgrimage zone. Throughout the book, Chanchani combines rigorous fieldwork and close visual analysis with theoretical sophistication. He draws upon phenomenological approaches to landscape and poststructuralist approaches to premodern material, as represented in publications by Robert Harrist and …

Becoming Backpack: Towards a Counter-Inscription of Young Adult Collegian Identity Work

This article invites readers to encounter the author’s early attempts at engaging creatively with data produced during a research project called Life Lines: The Art of Being Alive to Young Adulthood. Launched in January 2019, the Life Lines project was conceived as a critical participatory arts-engaged research endeavor aimed at opening up conventional theoretical wisdom about the nature of young adult college student identity formation. In addition to providing details of the inquiry project’s design and aims, a series of visual and poetic prose narratives open and become threaded throughout the article. These multimodal expressive forms function as a type of creative counter-inscription device, working both to complicate identity development models that limit subjectivity to human consciousness and agency, and to illustrate a more expansive, somatically attuned, and materially-entangled set of practices and productions of young adult identity work’s work and its study.

Yiyun LiMust I Go

a proper burial, just a vague monument, about which Herrera has the most to say. It’s a powerful story and also a metaphor for working people and people of color all throughout the history of Mexico and the US. Herrera is one of the best writers of our time, and his decision to give us this stripped-down account of the tragedy in Pachuca is smart and devastating. It rolls in quickly and leaves you reeling. J. David Osborne Norman, Oklahoma Yiyun Li Must I Go New York. Random House. 2020. 368 pages. YIYUN LI, ONE OF THE MOSTacclaimed contemporary American writers, continually reinvents herself. Her last novel, The Kindness of Solitude, solved a mystery by following a love triangle from China to America. She sets her most recent novel in Bayside Garden, a retirement home in California, where Lilia Liska, eighty-one, begins a memoir for her granddaughter and her great-granddaughter. She pauses to read portions from the diary of Roland Bouley, a lover from her youth. Two narrators split into four. Lilia and Roland each have a voice for others and one for themselves. Lilia asks herself what she should include in her story while Roland invents episodes for dramatic effect. Memory itself undergoes revision. Li takes the novel seamlessly across alternate storylines as Lilia recounts the history of her family, settlers who went west to follow the Gold Rush. Lilia’s family history merges with the greater history of America. As Lilia writes, the insubstantial, rootless quality of words disturbs her, yet they are still “the most useless things you cannot afford to lose.” She thinks happy people have no need for words. For her, “a story is not always a love story. A book is much more than just pages of words.” Regrets are like weeds. “Kill them before they spread.” If disappointment breeds in a porous heart, hers is flint. She claims she has no need for love or hate. She wonders if some mathematical formula exists to measure how fast a person is forgotten. Literacy gives her power but dilutes her identity as her race is erased. Conversant in two tongues, she’s at home in neither. Portuguese writer José Saramago’s epigraph underscores this linguistic point. Couto illustrates how crying “Mine!” while pushing others aside, claiming what they have, generates a schism. Imani’s mother counsels her on racial insults. Polarization begins by debasing others, chipping away languages or traditions—until the Other materializes. Us cannot occur without establishing Them. As Couto notes, wars need enemies, and walls are built around fear of the unrecognizable. Must the world be homogenized? Ngungunyane, like Claudius in Hamlet, killed his brother to become king, resulting in nightmares. During an eleven-year rule, Ngungunyane resisted Portuguese colonization . His story symbolizes a global saga— another empire grabbed by greed from afar. Recall the Spanish in Peru when Pizarro executed Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor. Consider Apache leader Geronimo surrendering to the US military. Four different world powers claimed Micronesia’s 2,100 islands over the centuries. In The Dancing Other, Suzanne Dracius addresses Caribbean issues in Martinique, governed by France (see WLT, Spring 2019, 104). Couto’s trilogy explores imperialism, identity confusion, and cultural miscommunication between colonizers and indigenous peoples anywhere. Literary and psychological symbols abound in The Sword and the Spear, from the Holy Grail to feverish Freudian dreams. Even if readers already know Africa, the novel enlarges worldviews—and Couto does so in lovely (at times witty) poetic prose. His themes are reminiscent of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (inspired by Jonathan Kwitny’s Endless Enemies) and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. As the nineteenth century draws to a close, so too does the seventy-eightyear -old State of Gaza. The Sword and the Spear ends as it began: people in a boat on “The Last River.” Mouzinho is taking the conquered Ngungunyane, his seven wives, and his son Godido to Lisbon—with Imani as interpreter. Alas, Germano is not going. “Everything always begins with a farewell.” That’s both the initial and the final sentence of The Sword and the Spear, a bridge connecting all three volumes in the...

O Quimono Preto: imaginário de uma heroína olímpica brasileira

The conquest of women for the right to experience the sport in all its nuances, was due to the result of struggles that in many cases were circumscribed to the life trajectory of athletes in solitary pioneering and protagonist actions. With this panorama in view, this article aims to narrate the pioneering and leading actions in the journey of the Olympic judoka Soraia Andre. The instrument for presenting this journey is the biographical tale O Quimono Preto - methodological heuristics that illuminates literary images inspired by the apprehension of the athlete's autobiographical narrative. The biographical tale presented in the body of this work, illuminates the imaginary constituted around a Brazilian black judoka, who challenged and transgressed the hegemonic paradigms present in the sport, configuring and enhancing the process of struggle for the participation and representation of women in the sports field. Poetic prose scripting also brings the Olympic judoka's life trajectory closer to the imaginary of the hero's myth journey.

«Средиземная война» Андрея Левкина. О словах любого языка на границах молчания

Throughout the 20th century, under the influence of the preceding tradition, the line that once clearly divided the artistic and the so-called “non-artistic” reality, various arts, literature for experts and for all, poetry and prose, genres and figures in literary works was getting blurred. This statement is now inherent to the standard repertoire of studies in contemporary culture. Yet, no one has given a definitive answer to where this path is taking literature. Obviously, verbal art, thanks to the ongoing changes, is capable of detecting and eroding all kinds of boundaries. It does not only highlight its own potential and expose it to reflection, but also expands its capabilities. Thus, fiction is trying to get back to the essentials that previously eluded verbalization, which may also explain why these essentials are still very relevant. In the 20th/early 21st century, these concepts would be consistently supported by individual works of different years. Some of these texts were written by the Latvian-Russian prose writer, critic and journalist Andrei Levkin (b. 1954), winner of the Andrei Bely Prize (2001). This article focuses on his story, The Mediterranean War, written in the 1990s and published in 2002 in the book “Golem, Russian Version: Novel, Stories, Tale”. The study explores a single, very small narrative work (close to poetic prose) by a modern author and sets it in the broad context of literary attempts to approach the sphere of the ineffable, which has been especially attractive to writers since the last third of the 19th century. A detailed analysis of the text allows us to consider a variety of correspondences and ties that unite The Mediterranean War with a number of works created by authors of different countries and historical periods — from Virginia Woolf to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Kurt Vonnegut. As we may witness the construction of artistic reality at the borders of linguistic capabilities, we may also compare the Russian flash fiction of the 21st century with the previous traditions of world literature and thus come closer to comprehending the fundamental trends uniting different European cultures.

Gherasim Luca’s short prose: The objects of prey (first chapter)

The paper continues “object-oriented” analysis of the most inspiring experiments in the Romanian Surrealism’s repertoire, notably in the short stories by Gherasim Luca, one of the movement’s leading representatives. His two books of poetic prose, published originally in the 1940s, could be interpreted as the emblematic example of Surrealist revolutionary tendencies in the field of new materialism. Such texts as The Kleptobject Sleeps or The Rubber Coffee become the laboratory of the object itself, gaining a new, unlimited identity in the platform of Surreality, where the human-like subject loses its status. Objects possess quasi-occult powers to initiate and control human’s desires. Therefore, Breton’s “revolution of the object” could concretize as literary praxis showing the way how contemporary “materialist turn” in anthropology deals with avant-garde theories.

Her Grief, and: Mother Sits in Front of Her Friend's Painting of the Sea of Galilee

Her Grief, and: Mother Sits in Front of Her Friend's Painting of the Sea of Galilee Paul Dickey (bio) Her Grief The moment happens, you know.A butter knife dropped to the floor.Time that once moved got slow.Everyone stared at the door. We thought maybe it would notif only we'd saidthe right thing, held that thought.No one could have read her mind. We stayed awayas long as our travels could.Adults don't know what to say.It was a child who would. Grandma, did the cuckoo stop?I looked at my sister,her face a wrinkled mop.My wife looked at my brother. Mother never looked back,turned to Dad who wasn't there,we dead in our track,and proceeded to tell him where the neighbor's rosebush laysome thirty-seven years ago, [End Page 53] beside the berries and the compost hay.Jack, where did all those good people go? Oh, but you never listen to me.Mom recited a lineage of dogsscaring her new blue-eyed baby.It was as if she'd kept logs of cats prowling the neighborhoodfor fifty—maybe seventy—yearsfar back into Dad's boyhood,kids ringing doorbells and her young "dears" selling candy for a band trip.But it was later that evening,insisting she never once broke her hip,that Mother's words lost their meaning. Mother Sits in Front of Her Friend's Painting of the Sea of Galilee Note the precise Dali-like detail of her, unlike the painting—how the baby fat of her arm rests on the flabby,cushioned faux-velvet chair, alligator-scaled tributariesof the Jordon River running through her hands.She balances herself as a White-faced Whistling Duckand yet she prepares for battle like an Egyptian Goose.When she speaks, she swallows spittle and her voice soundslike a White-winged Tern flying in low for the dinner at duskthat I have brought her from Kentucky Fried Chicken,until we no longer can live in the current centurybut in a past when men were clothed in simple linen,fished for extinct Tilapia, and walked in dust with God. [End Page 54] She is such a fisher of men, mostly though now only for me,who cannot believe in even one miracle, though I come herereligiously every evening to visit her, living and dyingby this sea. She expects to sleep again in the Holy Landany night now, though she has not traveled there for years. [End Page 55] Paul Dickey Paul Dickey won an award from the Nebraska Arts Council. Dickey's first full-length poetry manuscript, They Say This Is How Death Came into the World, was published by Mayapple Press in January 2011. His poetry and flash have appeared in Verse Daily, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Southern Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Pleaides, 32Poems, Bellevue Literary Review, and Cider Press Review, among other online and print publications. A second book, Wires Over the Homeplace, was published by Pinyon Publishing in October 2013. Copyright © 2020 University of Nebraska Press

Sønnetapene

In 2015 and 2016, the sons of Australian singer and songwriter Nick Cave and of the Danish author Naja Marie Aidt both died in fall accidents related to substance-induced psychosis. Subsequently, Cave released the album “Skeleton Tree” (2016) and Aidt published the book “Har døden taget noget fra dig så giv det tilbage” (If death has taken something from you, then give it back) (2017), which can both be linked to how they worked through the deaths of their sons. This article discusses how texts with a similar topic can appear so different in form, and how they portray different ways of coping with the grieving process. Neither of the texts are poetry per se, but both use lyrical forms of expression that make it pertinent to use a poetic analysis approach. Cave’s song lyrics and Aidt’s poetic prose both express experiences where the use of various lyrical effects in a musical and visual context reveals different ways of dealing with grief. In both cases, repetition is a key aspect. This article shows how Skeleton Tree and If death has taken something from you, then give it back represent the elasticity of contemporary poetic writing that makes the genre suitable to render strong emotional experiences.

Invisible Belfast: Flat ontologies and remediation of the post-conflict city

[in]visible belfast was a research-driven indie alternate reality game (ARG) that ran for 6 weeks during the spring of 2011 in Belfast and was subsequently adapted, 5 years later into a fictional documentary for BBC Radio 4. The ARG is a participatory and dispersed narrative, which the audience play through. The text expands outward across both physical and digital platforms to create a mystery for the players using everyday platforms. The ARG is a product of media convergence and at its heart transmedial, defined by its complexity and modes of participation. The fictional radio documentary which remediated the ARG into a more simple linear structure, but possibly a more complex narrative form, retells parts of the story for new audiences. The premise of [in]visible belfast – the game and later the documentary – is itself an adaptation of writer Ciaran Carson’s novel The Star Factory (1997): a postmodern adventure through the complex psychogeography of Belfast. A trail through the labyrinthine text, which paints the history of Belfast in poetic prose. This article will map the concept’s journey from novel to game to radio, contextualising its development within its political and urban landscape and charting the remediation of the narratives as they fold out across multiple media and complex story arches. The article will draw together ideas from previous publications on ARG, transmediality and complex textualities from the authors and reflect on the textual trajectories that the remediation of the narrative has taken from the original book, through the ARG, into the radio documentary. Building upon recent approaches from environmental philosopher Tim Morton and games theorist Ian Bogost, the authors argue that Belfast’s history propels medial adaptations of a particular kind, characterised by a ‘flat’ ontology of space and time and a sort of diffuse and dark urban experience for designers/producers and players/listeners.

A Moon for the Misbegotten

A Moon for the Misbegotten opened in Columbus, Ohio, in 1947, under the auspices of the Theatre Guild as part of an abortive national tour meant to culminate on Broadway. The play soon came under assault from critics and spectators who lambasted it as a crude valorization of a libidinous drunkard wallowing in a sexually charged relationship with an unmarried woman even as he mourned the passing of his mother. The Detroit venue canceled its engagement following the police department's denunciation of the play as “obscene” and “a slander of American motherhood” (qtd. in Gelb and Gelb, By Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O'Neill [2016], 644).Controversy was of course not new for O'Neill, whose work had long been under attack from reviewers, peers, and audiences but whose nuanced investigations of the psychological and emotional complexity of his characters remain the signature attribute of his dramaturgy. The Kansas City Actors Theatre's production generated a bit of controversy from a local reviewer who branded the production “troubled” in the context of misogyny and the ethics of high-canonical scheduling (Liz Cook, The Pitch, Sept. 20, 2018); but the company honored and illuminated O'Neill's complexity, thanks to a strong cast, an excellent design team, and the poignant direction of Mark Robbins. Ashley Pankow and Brian Paulette brought an electric connection to the play's central characters. Their Josie Hogan and Jamie Tyrone were deeply human and commanded the stage with all the subtlety that the play warrants. Pankow struck an uncanny balance between Josie's “brazen and brass” exterior and the vulnerability and sensuality lurking beneath: she weaponizes drink and sexuality while casting a spell over her counterpart. Indeed, Pankow anchored the production with a mix of power and grace that proved to be a fitting complement to Paulette's wonderfully understated Tyrone, whose distraught amalgam of self-loathing, drunken shame, and emotional emptiness was palpably apparent. Nowhere was this complexity more beautifully presented than the self-punishing aria in which Tyrone searches for psychological and emotional resolution after his “Mama's” death: “I know I ought to be heartbroken but I [can't] feel anything …. She's dead. What does she care now if I cry or not, or what do I do?” Paulette weaved his way through Tyrone's pained remembrance with ease and dignity while Pankow cradled him in her arms under an appropriately rendered moonlit set, the work of designers Shane Rowse (lighting) and Gary Mosby (scenic), whose contributions supported the performances through a poetic realism that echoed the dramatic imagination of O'Neill's erstwhile collaborator Robert Edmond Jones. Jon Robertson's haunting soundscape and Emily Stovall's detailed costumes completed KCAT's fully realized production.Robbins's staging was telling in its simplicity, as allowing the actors to command the space through organically expressed action. Victor Raider-Wexler's charming Hogan led a strong supporting cast. The troupe's mastery of Irish dialects and O'Neill's poetic prose was especially impressive. From Pankow's opening moments with Charlie Spillers (Mike Hogan) to Raider-Wexler's lighthearted exchanges with Chris Roady's T. Stedman Harder, the evening was steadily paced to Josie's final—if problematic—offering to her beloved Tyrone: “May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace.” A Moon for the Misbegotten's ending suggests redemption for O'Neill's emotionally torn protagonist. Yes, as the aforementioned reviewer charged, Tyrone is a “philanderer” and perhaps “a sad-sack aspiring rapist with Mommy issues.” And I concur in the critic's observation that theatre professionals bear responsibility for selecting and presenting material that reflects the values and identities of our increasingly diverse population. But the winner of four Pulitzers and a Nobel is not so easily dismissed, and balancing contemporary and familiar offerings is surely part of a repertory theatre's charge. Locals can take pride in the fine work being offered by the Kansas City Actors Theatre, of which this production provided a splendid instance.

Nine Meditations on Difference and Repetition

In the spirit of Gilles Deleuze, who sought to interrogate the presuppositions of the ideas and concepts we assume as a function of our education and social existence, this essay uses poetic prose to reflect upon nine quotations from Difference and Repetition as they are relevant to questions of merit and distinction. Like Deleuze, the author assumes that allusive and even metaphysical prose employing neologisms and creative (re)interpretation of language can be especially helpful when critiquing and seeking to understand repetition, tradition, and hierarchies that have been locked in place by disciplined styles of expression.

Ugniatanie materii słownej „jak ogromnej dzieży ciasta”, czyli schulzowskie porównania w tłumaczeniu na język hiszpański

One of the markers of Bruno Schulz’s style is the simile. It plays two roles in the poetic prose of the author: on the one hand, it confronts two phenomena in a concise and conventional manner; on the other, it compares, quite unexpectedly, two events, living creatures or objects, which seem to have nothing in common. In this article I analyze excerpts of three Spanish translations in order to identify techniques used to render this trope, to verify the consequences of the omission of the linking words, and to investigate whether Spanish readers will be able to recreate the same or a similar image to the one evoked in the original.