Crafted Memories

Emancipation narratives in the U.S. feminist literature of the late 1960s and 1970s constructed the female identity in line with the feminist slogan "the personal is political." The heroine, constrained by gender roles in the private sphere, realizes that her personal problems have broader social causes, so she changes her life to create a new self that conflicts with traditional female roles. The emancipation of the protagonist Mira of The Women's Room written by Marilyn French, follows the genre conventions of the feminist Bildungsroman which shows Mira’s journey from a mad housewife to a Harvard graduate. Even though the novel shows that the personal becomes political in the emancipation of the heroine from the constraints of the female private sphere, the novel fails to convey the optimism of broader change in the depiction of Mira’s friends whose lives show that emancipation is a long and difficult journey indeed.Keywords: emancipation narratives, feminist Bildungsroman, The Women...

The Blue Street owed its name to the sapphire fumes of opium and calm-fruit coming out of the pipes of glass hookahs. The buildings were colourful and winding, and everybody seemed to be high or drunk. Or both. Violence was almost unheard of, as the guilds of thieves kept a close eye on everything, well aware that blood would only draw in the city guard, giving the trade council the reason to jump up on their feet and begin preaching about the decay of civil virtue, of which Silktown, of course, had none. “Does Oak know we’re leaving?”“Only Crow and Blackbird know,” he smirked. “So, it’s only a matter of time when all the crew, together every drunkard in the docks, finds out.” “Don’t you trust our brothers?”“Crow I trust, I trust Blackbird too, but I trust his love for mead more.”“Who taught you to be so vicious?”“Why, you, of course.”“You couldn’t have learned anything nice from me, could you?” Needle looked at her with a hint of gentleness and curiosity. “Only the bad stuff?”“Like wh...

The article will read the biracial Korean American Michelle Zauner’s grief memoir, Crying in H-Mart (2021), which is suffused with raw articulations of agony and despair as it documents Zauner’s cancer-stricken mother’s last days. However, I will focus on how Zauner devotedly undertakes learning to cook and consume her mother’s dishes following her mother’s demise. As the gustatory sensation is induced in its entirety, she not only starts memorializing her mother but also starts learning how to embrace her biracial identity, which has often been a bone of contention between her and her mother. Therefore, evoking David Sutton’s concept of gustemology, which identifies food as a cultural site capable of reimagining the worlds displaced in space and time, I will examine how synesthesia, radiating through the process of creation and recreation of food and memory, could suggestively resuscitate the irrevocable loss, often suffered by migration and displacement, death, and bereavement.

my Mother’s Mother always told her the world was a dangerous place

it began in the sea between their Island and the shore where swimmers were processed when the monsters that were there when that world had begun pulled them by the fin processed from the missing Father who also thought he could swim

my Mother answered her Mother that she wasn’t afraid of the sea monsters or the factories with tall chimneys

but only of what would happen to the moles when neither the Island nor the shore had a single tree left

the world is a dangerous place as it takes a twenty-year-old tree...

Kad su dva mladunca lava i tri čegrtuše proglašene nestalima, istražitelji su otkrili da je ravnatelj zoološkog vrta Charles Hunt (58) ujedno trgovao kožama divljih životinja.

Nesiguran kojom ulicom krenuti, György Szerb, ugledni mađarski kartograf koji je u grad došao na svadbu, zakoračio je na cestu i istoga ga je trena udario auto.

Nakon što je desetljećima slušao vlastiti glas snimljen 1977. u studiju u Hammersmithu, kako najavljuje postaje, Herbert Stift (48) bacio se pod nadolazeći vlak.

Kližući po dvorcu Hampton Court u pustenim papučama, da ne ošteti podove...

Peter Ackroyd’s novels explore encounters with the past in the present of literary creation. Through the figure of the ghost, the usual borders between past and present are crossed as elements or characters from the past resurface in the present. This analysis explores the ways in which Ackroyd’s works engage with the past in three singular life narratives. It hovers around two main steps that highlight conversations with the past: the first one considers the textual instances of communication, while the second addresses diegetic components. Through ‘transtextuality,’ past words and texts are used again in the novels, emphasizing how the ghost of the English canon pervades and invades Ackroyd’s works. Through the apparitions of spirits, along with the introduction of all-absorbing places, objects, or bodies of communication, spectral manifestations keep resurfacing in the novels. The ghost of the English literary tradition combined with specters and spirits embody how Ackroyd’s life na...