Signs in Disguise

The essay discusses Miriam Toews’s novel Women Talking by focusing on the trauma of rape. Based on a true event that happened between 2005 and 2009 in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia, the novel follows the story of women and girls in the colony who were raped and now suffer from memory loss, traumatic memories, and the return of the repressed. By talking to each other and planning their escape, the women gain insight into the injustice of patriarchy within such a small religious community. The narrative moves from the idea of memory being synonymous with imagination, through the idea of traumatic memory as a trap, to the final idea of regained memory that, in the case of the raped women, serves as an epiphany. This essay will explore the ways in which memory functions in the novel to unravel the patriarchal discourse that keeps the women submissive and guilty of their own victimization. Traumatic memory will be examined through the lens of trauma theory (Caruth, Herman, Stampf, Pe...

This paper explores the philosophical elements present in Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried (1990), with particular emphasis on the concepts of authenticity, alienation, and truth, which assume a distinctly existential dimension throughout the text. Although O’Brien’s work has frequently been examined through the lenses of ethics, war poetics, and the problem of truthfulness, the philosophical dimension of his writing has received comparatively less attention. Through a comparative reading of the novel alongside selected philosophical insights, primarily those derived from Nietzsche’s philosophy, this paper demonstrates how O’Brien portrays the experience of everyday wartime life as a space of tension between individual authenticity and enforced dehumanization. The analysis shows that motifs of alienation, fragmented subjectivity, and the search for meaning emerge as fundamental elements of the narrative, while the concept of truth is revealed as fluid and closely connected t...

Knjiga Dramaturški eseji: iz Splita na scenu gledat može se razumjeti kao slojevita intelektualna mapa kazališnog prostora, ali i kao sustavno oblikovan teorijsko-analitički pothvat koji nadilazi okvir prigodnih kazališnih osvrta. Već na razini koncepta djelo uspostavlja ambiciozan cilj, sagledati kazalište istodobno kao umjetnički fenomen, kao društvenu instituciju i kao simbolički sustav u kojem se oblikuju i preispituju kolektivni identiteti. Naslov knjige iznimno je znakovit i nosi metodološku težinu. „Iz Splita” nije tek geografska oznaka, nego polazišna točka interpretacije. Split je kulturni kontekst, mediteranski imaginarij, povijesni sediment i urbani mentalitet. To je grad snažne književne i kazališne tradicije, ali i prostor u kojem se susreću različite estetske i ideološke struje. Autorica time jasno pozicionira svoju perspektivu, ona ne pretendira na apstraktnu neutralnost, nego otvoreno priznaje vlastitu kulturnu upisanost. S druge strane, „na scenu gledat” označava aktiv...

A work of popular culture celebrating its own genre, the romantic comedy Book of Love (2022) can be used to explore the relationship between literary and popular fiction, as defined by Ken Gelder (2004). The film focuses on Henry Copper, a lackluster British debut author, and María Rodríguez, his Mexican ‘traduttore, traditore’ who rewrites Henry’s novel into a steamy romance bestseller. As such, the film juxtaposes literary and popular fiction authors and celebrates the skills and practices behind popular fiction, especially romance and its portrayal of desire. Adopting Janice A. Radway’s view that reading romance is a feminist act, the film’s heroine not only reads but also writes romance to assert her identity and reclaim her power from her patriarchal surroundings. Finally, Book of Love explores the contested issue of literary translators’ authorship by following María from an unrecognized contributor to Henry’s book’s success to an independent author. In discussing these three top...

The socio-political landscape in Serbia has been marked by a series of crises, protests, and turbulent events in recent years. In such an environment, video games have increasingly emerged as a form of response to current developments, creating digital spaces for the expression of social critique, irony, resistance, and civic participation. The paper analyzes video games developed in Serbia between 2022 and 2025 that engage with socio-political events and processes, addressing issues such as corruption, protests, elections, clientelism, and other aspects of political and social life, as well as game jams as specific environments in which many of these games were produced. The research examines how these games represent and comment on current socio-political realities, how their creators employ procedural rhetoric, satire, irony, and humor to articulate social critique or political positions, and to what extent such games can contribute to political activism, civic participation, or edu...

Recent years have seen a rise of academic interest in Gibraltarian cultural studies. The annual Gibraltar International Conference, initiated in 2023, and the Gibraltar Digital Project cultural platform, launched in 2025, focus strongly on language and literature, particularly the specific nature of Llanito and distinctive features of Gibraltarian literature, which seems to have gone unnoticed—for decades, if not centuries—either as part of the Commonwealth or postcolonial literature or as a separate production in its own right.Some of the characteristics of Gibraltarian literature, frequently stressed by scholars, include its preoccupation with the past, the question of identity, balancing between the British and Spanish Other, the similarly balancing language, and various aspects of border imagery. All of these feature prominently in the seven novels and three short story collections authored by M. G. Sanchez, probably Gibraltar’s most prolific author and certainly one deeply dedicat...