Changing Pieces

Yasmina Saleh – Algeria At least five or six of them, maybe even more, had overrun his house and family. He was not a politician, an inciter of dissent, nor a troublesome writer; he was a decent citizen. Yet they permeated his little dreams and reluctant joys. The darkness and gloominess of the Algerian night increased after the first shot was fired; the family was overcome with unspeakable dread. Another scene of horrible confusion, terror, and carnage ensued.Mahmoud Kandeel – Egypt Despite the tombstones surrounding her, the place felt empty. The cemetery stood still but for her nervous figure, sitting and fidgeting beside a green, rusted dumpster. Agitated, the woman stuck her right hand inside her blouse and fiddled with something unseen, as though desperately searching for something lost.“Look, she’s caressing her breasts,” my companion whispered with a snicker.

Australian literature, as one of the vital constituents of English-speaking literature, boasts a rich diversity of themes and style, as does the society and continent on which it is located. It is rooted in an ancient landscape, which carries some of the oldest cultural traditions, as well as a mixture of numerous cultural immigrants. Ever since Patrick White received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, the literary critical public has turned its attention to the South, toward a distant and mystical land where contemporary writers who play with the aesthetic principles of the Western Circle have begun to emerge and remain loyal to Australia, attempting to understand and, at the same time, defining Australian culture – or a variety of its cultures. Until recently, a small number of scholars from Serbia and the neighboring countries approached the study of Australian literature. Theoretical concern for the Australian literature never substantially advanced our understanding of this r...

The paper investigates the extent and peculiarities of censorship in two Croatian editions of Pippi Longstocking, a classic of Swedish and world children's literature. Comparing the original Swedish text, contained in three books: Pippi Langstrump (1945/1948), Pippi Langstrump gar ombord (1946/1969) and Pippi Langstrump and Söderhavet (1948/1969), with the first edition of the Croatian translation published in 1973 and its revised 1996 edition shows significant differences in the number, layout, and title of chapters, and establishes the diversity of taboo topics present in both omitted and retained chapters. The retained chapters, after joining the micro-strategies previously adapted to the collected data (according to Desmet, Davoodi), also reveal clear variability in the way of translating taboo topics, such as inappropriate behavior, life (mis)fortunes, violence, racial intolerance, and religion.Keywords: Swedish children’s literature, censorship, taboo topics, translation micro-st...

The article deals with the Japanese poetic and conceptual terms kire and kireji, situating them within Croatian literary theory and practice. It consists of three parts: the first is titled “Signifier” and it focuses on the delimitation of both key terms and their reception in Croatia. Based on the analysis of the current situation, a suggestion to use „usjek” and „usječnica” as translations is made, while elaborating on the link of both terms with caesura as a close literary phenomenon. The second part (“Signified”) discusses the specifics of the kire with examples selected from Japanese literature. Special attention is paid to contemporary cognitive-literary theories and the characteristics which kire shares with metaphor and blending. The final part (“Corpus Analysis”) uses examples selected from three anthologies of Croatian haiku poetry to demonstrate some possibilities of distant reading (searching for kire, vector word models) in order to completely define and rehearse kire with...

In recent years, popular culture has witnessed the proliferation of violent female characters, while female criminality has also received increasing attention from many critics and academics. These women remain a fascination for both mainstream culture and researchers as their acts go against cultural conceptions and are even viewed as antithetical to femininity. And while the increasing presence of female violence in media and popular culture may be symptomatic of present-day society’s concerns about gender behavior, the portrayal of violent women still seems to be following genre conventions and familiar stereotypes that inevitably frame, and thus normalize, their acts within boundaries of traditional discourses on femininity. In that regard, Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Film and Series of the Post-Feminist Era presents itself as a particularly timely book that investigates the representation of women who kill in a so-called postfeminist context recognized principally by a...