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Editorial
It is likely that anyone who encounters the term otherness for the first time would think it describes something different from us and yet akin to us. And they would be right, just as they would simultaneously be wrong. Otherness is an exceptionally complex term, which cannot be understood separately from the idea of the self. When we want to articulate who is, to us, the other, we also have to articulate who is their opposite – the latter being us. Therefore, when speaking of the other, we inevitably speak of ourselves. The coupling of terms myself/other was mentioned already by Hegel, who emphasized that the identification of the Other enabled the synthetization of one’s own identity (112). The Other (who is often identified within ethnic, racial, religious, geographical, and many other cultural and social categories) functions as a mirror. For Georg Simmel, for example, the Other is more than a stranger who is either close to or distant from us. The Other is an element that can simultaneously be a member of the group, outside of it, and in a confrontation with it (144). For Emanuel Levinas, the Other is what I am not. It is identified as one similar to us, but also different and extraneous. Precisely this extraneousness, which Levinas also refers to as alterity, illuminates a subject’s path toward himself by demonstrating that which is intrinsic – where he belongs (43, 48). By identifying the Other, a person or a group is labeled in a process in which we construct our own roles, our position within the society, and the meaning of ourselves. To have an Other is essential to creating an identity, for by identifying the Other, we facilitate the understanding of that which is “here” and that which is “there” because, as Antony Smith emphasized, identity is not created merely from one’s own experiences, memories, and myths, but through positioning oneself in relation to the collective identities of Others (11-36, 43). This process of synthetization of one’s own identity consists of forming an awareness of an in-group, which is based on a necessary delimitation toward an out-group. ...
The article presents an overview and analysis of the five existing Croatian translations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, including two integral translations (Ivan Krizmanić, 1827; Mate Maras, 2013) and three partial ones (Pasko Antun Kazali, mid-19th century; Hugo Badalić, 1896-97; Antun Šoljan 1962, 1980). In addition to providing five diverse Croatian interpretations of Paradise Lost, an English and international classic, these five renderings reflect various tendencies and developments within Croatian literary culture and particularly those that affected its translation practices in different periods.Keywords: John Milton, Paradise Lost, Croatian translations, Hugo Badalić, Pasko Antun Kazali, Ivan Krizmanić, Mate Maras, Antun ŠoljanIn Croatian culture, John Milton is esteemed as an undisputed English, European, and world literary classic, even though he is not counted among the most popular and influential anglophone (canonical) authors, which include – first and foremost – William...
All narratives of Caryl Phillips present prolific ground for research in spatial literary studies. Phillips’s “Heartland,” the focus of this paper, deals with the mechanics of Britain’s enslaving past. The narrator is an anomalous character who stands at the borderline between two multiplicities and takes part in the social deterritorialization process of the absolute anomalous or, to say, a perpetual outsider, the slave, who loiters without a safe anchorage. The process of social deterritorialization necessitates the eradication of all beacons of geographical, familial, tribal, linguistic, and cultural belonging. The process of social deterritorialization necessitates the eradication of all beacons of geographical, familial, tribal, linguistic, and cultural belonging. This then requires a more stratified understanding and evaluation of the slave-making process as well as a critical reading of narratives of slavery such as “Heartland.” This paper, therefore, aims to construct a multifo...
This text discusses the discursive construction of the body of a woman/witch as a threatening Other under Article 60 of the Criminal Practice, which served both as a criminal law and as a criminal procedure law in Hungary, and thus Croatia and Slavonia, during the period of mass witchcraft trials from 1699 to the mid-18th century. Otherness is approached from a psychoanalytic, Lacanian point of view because it opens up the possibility of understanding the collective affective politics of fear as a reflection of the unconscious in the language that created the witch imaginary, which takes its origin from the register of the imaginary and the mirror stage, i.e., in the psychological economy of structuring of the self/ego. The legal procedures that are analyzed in the text as part of the symbolic register seek to socially channel and discipline fear first by inscribing on and into women’s bodies various deviations and transgressions of the human, which are then entirely annulled through d...
I have never yet written
I’ve only scribbled this or that nor was it ever true
I now can write and can see, what it is.
True.
Such truth as is reality itself, like that which is not like itself
A mathematical dream:
An absolute good. On the cube.
Now I will write no more, I’ll merely jeer.
Jeer even Anatole France himself and I surely can write yet surely more can cry and even more can endure... if someone requires it of me.
It bothers me greatly that there is no reasoner... measurer.
...
Breath
1
misty tulips
a mist of tulips
of tulips
of tulips
a morning spread like a dream
over rivers...
don’t you wake up Atlas’s son
don’t
don’t
let him sleep
with his head resting
on a pillow of tulips
2
white tulips
son’s light
light
yellow tulips
son’s sun
sun
red tulips
red
red
father’s sunset
like fire through backbone
...
This paper is a critical examination of discursive strategies of othering in three refugee-focused books in Turkish children’s literature written after the onset of Syrian civil war. Drawing upon Van Dijk’s ideological analysis, eliciting the representation of “us vs. them” in a network of semantic and formal structures, the study has two closely related main aims. The first is to show how children’s literature, as a significant conveyor of norms, values, and ideology, provides fertile ground to examine power relations. The second is to identify discursive strategies of othering, which categorize and underscore group-based differences by attributing negative characteristics, in three Turkish children’s books about the Syrian war. Findings demonstrate that negative representation of the Other is foregrounded by actor description, lexicalization, and implicitness within the framework of semantic structures. Formal structures resonate with topoi under the umbrella of argumentation and rhe...
