Future Insights

The idea of the landlord's estate as “paradise on land,” traditional in the Russian culture of the late 19th and early 20th century, evolved in the literature of the 1910s and 1920s into the idea of the city-garden, which united the “beginning” and “ends” of the image of Biblical paradise – the Old Testament Eden and the Apocalyptic New Jerusalem. The substrate of the city-garden mythologem became the "estate topos," which indicates its plasticity and significant heuristic potential, i.e. not only its belonging to the former landowner estate of the 19th century, but also its ability to create new cultural modifications, such as the “city of the future” by V. V. Khlebnikov or the “city garden” in the prose of A. N. Tolstoy and in the Soviet poetry of the 1920s.Keywords: paradise, topics, landowner estate, estate topos, “city of the future,” “city-garden,” the first third of the 20th century, A. N. Tolstoy, V. V. Khlebnikov, V. V. Mayakovsky

The latest tendencies in the modernization of teaching literature stress the development of students’ critical thinking as one of the main learning outcomes of the educational process. Based on this premise, the article demonstrates the applicability of the imagological approach which can, through guided critical reading of the canonical text, reveal another layer of the so-called non-canonical interpretation and point towards the deconstruction of cultural stereotypes embedded in the literary text. The teaching method will be demonstrated via close reading of the image of Roma people in the novella Tena by Josip Kozarac, where minority stereotyping takes on the form of discriminatory discourse in narration. Apart from developing critical thinking skills, a similar approach to a literary text in class offers the possibility of a comparative method, supported by the fact that the same mirage of Roma community drawn from a canonical work of Croatian Realism can be compared to the images ...

One might perhaps feel that the question of the other has been extensively theorized, especially (though far from exclusively) within postcolonial and gender studies, and the processes of othering already illuminated from different perspectives. On the other hand, there are probably those who think that the question deserves constant attention and careful (re)considerations, and Igor Grbić’s book The Occidentocentric Fallacy: Turning Literature into a Province poses a provocative challenge to both stances. What if – the book’s underlying hypothesis seems to suggest – the entire notion of the other is nothing but, as the title states, a misconception narcissistically promulgated by what we commonly refer to as the West although it in effect counts not more than a couple of states, a mere province in any map of the world? What if, namely, numerous scholars and researchers who are concerned with the question of the other in the field of literary studies, criticism and theory only perpetua...

In an age when social media dominate everyday lives of many people across the globe and with the rise of VR games, Netflix, fake news, and 3D printers, it is evident that (digital) technology has become an integral part of everyday life. Online games make new spaces of communication and cooperation that cross the seemingly established borders of nation-states, discussions about online and offline communities gain more prominence each year, and social networks have brought to the fore many scholarly works dealing with various questions about identity, culture, and identification. In this context, a comprehensive guide on or overview of how we could approach these issues in the academic context was scarce. Grant Bollmer’s book titled Theorizing Digital Cultures provides a way of approaching these, somewhat new issues, providing specific tools, i.e. terms and concepts that could help many future researchers of digital culture. What makes this work even more important is the fact that it i...

Proučavajući pojam neomita, kao suvremene inačice mitoloških koncepata u književnosti i kulturi, nametnula su se brojna pitanja. Zara Minc u svom je tekstu iz 1979. godine upozoravala na neomitološke romane ruskih simbolista, kada svijet umjetničkog teksta počinje sličiti mitu (Minc), a istaknuti proučavatelj mita Eleazar Meletinskij ukazao je na važnost novog mita u europskoj književnosti, misleći pritom na romane F. Kafke, J. Joycea, T. Manna i dr., jer proces mitologizacije nastaje kao posljedica razočaranja u ranije umjetničke, znanstvene i druge koncepte, ponajviše pozitivističke (Meletinskij). Vadim Rudnev u Rječniku kulture 20. stoljeća uvodi termin „neomitološke svijesti” kao glavne okosnice kulturnog mentaliteta novijeg doba. Neomitologizam je nastao kao reakcija na pozitivističku svijest 19. stoljeća, pa je gotovo sva književnost 20. stoljeća povezana s mitom, jer bježeći od racionalnog i znanstvenog (logos), stremi iracionalnom (mitos). Suvremena se književnost s jedne stran...

From Homer’s Odyssey and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the sea has always featured prominently in Western literature. Stories of voyages over (or under) boundless oceans, tales of mutiny and piracy, of treasure and adventure, have all become an integral part of our literary tradition. And while it was frequently admired, the sea’s capricious nature and fathomless depths have often led to it being feared in equal measure. Compiled and edited by Mike Ashley, From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea is an anthology comprising fifteen lesser known stories taken from other collections and pulp magazines dating back to the early 20th century, which ably illustrates that period’s fascination with the sea, especially with its more fantastical and uncanny aspects.The collection opens strongly with an invitingly horrific, if somewhat traditional ghost ship story. Albert A. Wetjen’s “The Ship of Sil...