Changing Pieces

The article deals with the Japanese poetic and conceptual terms kire and kireji, situating them within Croatian literary theory and practice. It consists of three parts: the first is titled “Signifier” and it focuses on the delimitation of both key terms and their reception in Croatia. Based on the analysis of the current situation, a suggestion to use „usjek” and „usječnica” as translations is made, while elaborating on the link of both terms with caesura as a close literary phenomenon. The second part (“Signified”) discusses the specifics of the kire with examples selected from Japanese literature. Special attention is paid to contemporary cognitive-literary theories and the characteristics which kire shares with metaphor and blending. The final part (“Corpus Analysis”) uses examples selected from three anthologies of Croatian haiku poetry to demonstrate some possibilities of distant reading (searching for kire, vector word models) in order to completely define and rehearse kire with...

This paper sets out to explore a notion of freedom that Hanif Kureishi articulates in his short stories, focusing particularly on the collections Love in a Blue Time (1997) and Midnight All Day (1999). Kureishi’s stories almost always narrated from the point of view of a middle-aged man are here analysed in the light of Zygmunt Baumann’s theories of liquid modernity and liquid love. The paper attempts to demonstrate that these men are confined to a sort of a perpetual treadmill of misery. It is argued that most protagonists of his stories are largely unable to manage their lives and relationships, living in a contemporary world that allows individuals to enjoy excesses of freedom and infinite possibilities. Keywords: Hanif Kureishi, short story, middle-aged, freedom, liquid modernity, liquid love, familySomewhere towards the end of Hanif Kureishi’s 1995 novel The Black Album, the main protagonist, twenty-year-old Shahid Hasan, enthusiastically embraces the prospect of breaking free fro...

Three decades after American author Edgar Allan Poe laid down the foundations for the detective genre in the 1840s with his “tales of ratiocination,” native detective stories began to appear on Russian literary scene. Among them were those written by Aleksandr Andreevich Shkljarevskij today known as “the father of Russian detective fiction.” This article provides a short overview of Poe’s literary influence as well as of the conditions that brought about the onset of Russian detective fiction. It offers an extensive comparative analysis of short stories by the mentioned “fathers” and identifies many similarities in their poetics. Finally, by looking into the characteristics of American Romanticism and Russian Realism that constitute the sociocultural backgrounds of the authors, it proposes answers to questions stemming from the difference in the aspect of analysis they emphasize. Keywords: 19th century Russian detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, Aleksandr Andreevich Shkljarevskij, soci...

Australian literature, as one of the vital constituents of English-speaking literature, boasts a rich diversity of themes and style, as does the society and continent on which it is located. It is rooted in an ancient landscape, which carries some of the oldest cultural traditions, as well as a mixture of numerous cultural immigrants. Ever since Patrick White received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, the literary critical public has turned its attention to the South, toward a distant and mystical land where contemporary writers who play with the aesthetic principles of the Western Circle have begun to emerge and remain loyal to Australia, attempting to understand and, at the same time, defining Australian culture – or a variety of its cultures. Until recently, a small number of scholars from Serbia and the neighboring countries approached the study of Australian literature. Theoretical concern for the Australian literature never substantially advanced our understanding of this r...

NOTE: Due to a possible editorial conflict of interest author Tijana Parezanović did not participate in the editing/publishing process of this issue of the journal.This article deals with the spatial aspect of texts about World War II and the post-war period, analyzing Muriel Spark’s 1963 novella The Girls of Slender Means as an example. It observes the novella as a realistic work narrated in the fantastic mode, and the analysis is primarily informed by Patricia García’s concepts of the fantastic of space and the fantastic hole. The article argues that the temporal disruption made by World War II is reflected in texts about the war as spatial perforation. As The Girls of Slender Means is carefully structured around the firmly ordered and intact space of the May of Teck Club, the one location that triggers the major event of the novella is a hole in the building’s structure, the heterotopic perforation conceived as fantastic because it is hidden from sight in the otherwise shattered lan...