(Dis)placements

“My darling sister, you have a hole in your butt,” Ivka says in all seriousness, as if relating a particularly important discovery. Children giggle and point fingers at the torn up stitching right in the middle of Tona’s round butt. Tona has just bent over while dragging the wooden stool from the kitchen, and now, broad and strong, she stands up next to the stone table. Villagers let go of their chatting and prick their ears up. There is a smile lurking at the corner of their lips – they know what their Tona is all about. Even now, when you can clearly make out her white panties under the wide, colourful skirt, it doesn’t cross her mind to cover the hole with her hand, let alone feel embarrassed. On the contrary, it’s as if she has been waiting for fancy Miss Ivka to slap that remark in the middle of a hot summer afternoon. Her tiny eyes pop with delight and people know her tongue, so sharp and witty, is half way out to snap back at Ivka.“First, it’s not a hole, it’s a cranny,” she fir...

Disability studies has a history of distinguishing the “dichotomy” between the biological and the cultural identity of the body and the attempts to deal with this conflict. Identity is divided into two registers of knowledge: the corporeality of the body and cultural ideas about the normal body. In his former two books, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (1995) and Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism & Other Difficult Positions (1995), Lenard Davis tries to locate these focal points of entanglement between the biological and cultural. In Enforcing Normalcy, Davis attempts to analyze the historical origin and instrumentalization of the concept of the normal body (2), whilst in Bending over Backwards, he introduces the critical concept of dismodernism – a way of rethinking postmodern concerns with identity and how these relate to disability studies (27-31). In his third book, The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era, Davis explores a wholly new av...

Transgressivity, in a broad sense, denotes a state of movement from one distinct position, mode, or territory to another, be it spatial, geographical, mental, spiritual, or even narrative. Transgression occurs when one crosses boundaries, in other words, limes of different entities. Geocritical transgressivity, which is a multifaceted concept, may lead to a variety of interpretations at many different strata. Transgressivity finds echoes in Caryl Phillips’s narratives, at times in geographical forms, where a deterritorialized character crosses borders without ever gaining reterritorialization, at other times, in his fragmented narration where the reader stands at a threshold. Our paper uses Phillips’s A New World Order (2001) in particular as a key text through this geocritical lens of transgressivity to see to what extent it functions as the author’s map legend that presents a cartographic pattern of his writing in general. Our discussion also focuses on Phillips’s distinct analyses i...

This paper examines David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), with a particular focus on history and narrative time. It seeks to offer an alternative perspective on the multiple and intertwined fictional narratives of Mitchell’s oeuvre as these evidence a move past the "post-" of postmodernism. Keywords: David Mitchell, time, narrative, historiography, experimental fiction, post-postmodernismPostmodernism has cast an extended influence over much literary criticism in the last fifty years. However, with the end of the noughties now in reach of critical hindsight, and with the shock of September 11, 2001 beginning to subside, significant attention is turning once again toward the new literary vanguard. Efforts to discuss post-postmodernism, critical realism, new materialism, and new-millennial writing are certainly on a par with artistic and literary efforts to move beyond postmodernist playfulness and relativism. Within this broader framework,...

Gwen Pharis Ringwood (1910–1984) is one of the most eminent Canadian playwrights of the 20th century. In her drama Drum Song: An Indian Trilogy which consists of three parts: Maya (Lament for Harmonica, 1959), The Stranger (1971) and The Furies (1981) the author implements her knowledge of First Nations’ traditions and customs. Moreover, it is “in the lives of the Indian tribes [that] Gwen Ringwood had found an elemental struggle for survival that has produced conflicts comparable with those of Greek tragedy” (Perkyns 330). Such conflicts and elements characteristic of Greek tragedy find their place in this trilogy as well. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to analyse those elements, examine their function, the way and form in which they are presented in the trilogy. Keywords: Canada, drama, First Nations, Gwen Ringwood, tradition, tragedy, trilogy

This paper offers an analysis of two characters, Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden, in William Faulkner’s Light in August. The characters are analyzed through R.D. Laing’s concept of ontological insecurity. In the search for the roots of ontological insecurity, special attention is given to the childhood years of these characters, and to the race-related trauma originating in that period. The aim is to show that both these characters exhibit schizoid personality traits as a consequence of that trauma, and also as a result of the society they live in. Namely, Joe and Joanna never work through their initial trauma because it is actually reinforced by their society.Key words: William Faulkner, Light in August, R. D. Laing, ontological insecurityAn articulate critic of the South, Lillian Smith in her Killers of the Dream presents southern culture as a rigid society that controls its citizens through ruthless socialization. Drawing primarily from her own experience, she describes southern cul...