Interfaces

The fiction of J. G. Ballard closely examines contemporary environmental and climate change issues through the author’s consistent juxtaposition of natural and urban settings, which are often associated with individuals on both a personal and global level. While his early works – cli-fi novels – primarily focus on global-scale physical catastrophes caused by human activities, his later works – urban disaster and urban violence novels – portray the urban catastrophe that threatens to invade man’s personal sphere. This inquiry attempts to demonstrate that the inhabitants of the enclosed societies portrayed in Ballard’s urban violence novels, namely Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000), are inexorably drifting toward a state of social and psychological entropy. These communities strive to condition their cognitive framework to align with the sterile and impersonal urban environment, thereby eliciting us to envisage incessant reciprocity with the milieu. By introducing the concept...

This paper describes Croatian translations of Beatrix Potter’s works based on bibliographic and peritextual data and provides a comparative analysis of characters’ names and two segments of the source text and its translations focusing on the selected tale. Seven different Potter’s books including 27 different stories among themselves have been published in Croatian. There are multiple translations of six stories, four of which have two, and two have three translations. The comparative textual analysis focuses on Croatian translations of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which is not only the most popular Potter’s tale, but also the most frequently published in Croatian, translated three times. The analysis shows that the translations of characters’ names are mostly domesticated and traceable in retranslations and that there are narrative-semantic shifts in the target texts in comparison with the source text.Keywords: Beatrix Potter, children’s literature, Croatian translations, character name...

The paper deals with the computer-aided analysis of characters in the following texts of Croatian literature: Šuma Striborova (Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić), Oprava (Josip Kozarac), Krvavi most u Zagrebu (Mirko Bogović), Oko Lobora (Antun Gustav Matoš), Posljednji Stipančići (Vjenceslav Novak). In the theoretical part, digital humanities and its subfield digital philology are defined. Basic terms from the fields of natural language processing and narratology are explained, since they are the theoretical and practical basis of the research. The rest of the paper is research conducted on the texts above in the internet program called Sketch Engine. The research question is stated as follows: whether it is possible to obtain data that is useful for the interpretation of literary characters through computer-assisted analysis, based on narratology and the existing literary-theoretical elements of characterization. Based on the results, the affirmative answer is given to the formulated research que...

The paper explores the relationship between Heather Widdows's theoretical proposition of beauty as an ethical ideal, or of beauty as a "moral matter" (Widdows 2) and the particular manifestation of doing beauty through the example of the video make-up tutorial named "Foundation Routine For Acne/How To Cover Pimples, Scars, Cystic Acne, Blackheads & Oil" by Cassandra Bankson. The analytical focus of this paper is on the "before-after" phenomenon, which is a condensed narrative formula of the change of the initial state in some unit of time into another, new and altered state; the change functioning similarly to magical fairy tales "transformations, like the one in Cinderella" (Levy and Rook 381). Besides, the makeover process must be revealed to the interested public because the process of becoming bears higher relevance than the goal or the achievement itself (Jones 15-16). However, the selected video material with its structural features deviates from, for this video genre, the typica...

This article gives insight into the ways in which enforcement and institutional vigilante activities portrayed in Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games foreshadow the urban thicket of garbage dump yards and slum dwellings. The text will be analyzed from an ecocritical perspective to establish aspects of slow violence and its explicit and implicit results. Chandra’s plotline, regarding several entangled human tragedies against the background of refuse, urges a study of the novel through the lens of waste studies. However, he fails to address the reasons for the characters’ opinion of Mumbai being uninhabitable and infamous for treating human life as expendable. The novelist also seems to normalize the issues of inequalities in waste management and justifies the anthropocentric utilitarian perception of resources. The depictions of Mumbai gang wars against a disturbingly overlooked state of dilapidated lives and misplaced ideologies mention waste as being both created and ignored. Such represent...

The paper is concerned with Paul Auster’s novel Oracle Night (2003) from the point of view of the importance of the city and its analogy to human thoughts, feelings, and life itself. Acknowledging the relevant theoretical framework, such as Elizabeth Grosz’s concept of ‘interface,’ Yi-Fu Tuan’s notions of space and place, as well as various critical views on Auster’s works, the paper aims to contrast “closed spaces” with “open-air city scenes,” in order to emphasize that closed spaces mirror the main character’s confusion, whereas open-air urban scenes reflect his increased clarity of vision. The paper concludes that the feelings of being alive and happy seem possible, certain, and hopefully permanent only in contact with the streets, outside all rooms, and free from locks. In addition, by analyzing the nature of writing, the paper finds that the main character is the embodiment of the interface (Grosz 248) between the private/body and the shared/city.Keywords: Paul Auster, Oracle Nigh...