Changing Pieces

NOTE: Due to a possible editorial conflict of interest author Tijana Parezanović did not participate in the editing/publishing process of this issue of the journal.This article deals with the spatial aspect of texts about World War II and the post-war period, analyzing Muriel Spark’s 1963 novella The Girls of Slender Means as an example. It observes the novella as a realistic work narrated in the fantastic mode, and the analysis is primarily informed by Patricia García’s concepts of the fantastic of space and the fantastic hole. The article argues that the temporal disruption made by World War II is reflected in texts about the war as spatial perforation. As The Girls of Slender Means is carefully structured around the firmly ordered and intact space of the May of Teck Club, the one location that triggers the major event of the novella is a hole in the building’s structure, the heterotopic perforation conceived as fantastic because it is hidden from sight in the otherwise shattered lan...

Characters: Over the chimneys, streaks of clouds and smoke across the sky. It is a wet and dismal night. A Saint-Petersburg mansion. In the lordly entrance, stands ARLEKIN in his tights and bells, and he follows the walkers with his eyes.TEACHER (enters, music is heard in the distance) ARLEKIN: Let me guide you. TEACHER: Impudent! ARLEKIN: Ah, no. Have pity! Please, let me guide you… Just from afar. TEACHER: Where are the police when you need them? ARLEKIN (somewhat breaking): My autumn looooove…TEACHER: Leave me!ARLEKIN (earnestly, and with misunderstood power): My queen…TEACHER (is silent) ARLEKIN: I love… you are so beautiful! Are you always so beautiful on autumn nights? TEACHER (as if in a frenzy): Scoff and scoff again! I am a single, thin woman. They pay me twenty rubles… like I’m a cook! I am tired! My voice is hoarse! You listen to me, my voice is hoarse, on my eternally hoarse lips, and I cannot dream of fantasies! ARLEKIN: Ah, no! It’s just, it seems, I’ve only had one dream...

“More liquor,” said the dark-skinned man holding out his glass.“No more liquor,” said the fat man grabbing the bottle from the counter. “Indian dance now; liquor later.”“Liquor,” said the dark-skinned man stretching for the bottle.“Afterwards,” said the fat man, shielding the bottle behind his vast bulk. “Now Indian dance.” He waggled his hips and his flabby belly shook. “Now Indian dance out front. Everyone watch Indian dancing.”The dark-skinned man stopped and stared at his fat counterpart, stared at him as a famished, skittish dog might at a person chewing a sandwich in a roadside bar. The fat man waggled his hips once more, his arms upraised, the bottle in one hand and a shot glass he was drinking from in the other. The dark-skinned man chuckled.“You like that, eh?” said the fat man. His flabby jowls wobbled with laughter, his eyes vanishing between puffy little lids. “Off you go, Indian. Bwana want to see Indian dance. Me bwana, you Indian, monkey.”“Not monkey.” The Indian shook h...

Three decades after American author Edgar Allan Poe laid down the foundations for the detective genre in the 1840s with his “tales of ratiocination,” native detective stories began to appear on Russian literary scene. Among them were those written by Aleksandr Andreevich Shkljarevskij today known as “the father of Russian detective fiction.” This article provides a short overview of Poe’s literary influence as well as of the conditions that brought about the onset of Russian detective fiction. It offers an extensive comparative analysis of short stories by the mentioned “fathers” and identifies many similarities in their poetics. Finally, by looking into the characteristics of American Romanticism and Russian Realism that constitute the sociocultural backgrounds of the authors, it proposes answers to questions stemming from the difference in the aspect of analysis they emphasize. Keywords: 19th century Russian detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, Aleksandr Andreevich Shkljarevskij, soci...

This paper analyzes the covers of the weekly newspaper Novosti, on which the current refugee and migrant crisis is depicted with illustrations where various verbal and visual signs recontextualize the motif of barbed and razor wire. The symbolic, satiric, and metaphoric potential of barbed wire is discussed, and its functions in the narrative on migrants are defined. The examples are categorized according to the distinct semantic characteristics of acting on the body and enclosing space, and the presented research model confirms that the pronounced artistic and critical functionality of the motif of barbed wire lies precisely in the potential of establishing an antithesis that is simultaneously also an element of the satirical dialectic and the source of metaphoric interpretations. Keywords: barbed wire, satire, symbol, conceptual metaphor, semanticsWriting a summary for the history of barbed wire, from the prairies and war trenches to concentration camps, Razac (2009) stops at the con...

The aim of the article is to analyze the connection between non-places (as defined by Marc Augé) and unhomeliness (as understood by Homi Bhabha) in Cacophonie by Ken Bugul. The Senegalese writer has been best-known for her depiction of a postcolonial subject, torn between the Western and the African world. However, her last novel thus far, which concentrates on the trajectory of a Senegalese protagonist living in Benin, sheds new light on the notion of migrant identity. The heroine, Sali, does not belong anywhere. Just like most previous Bugulian protagonists, she is always in transit: her identity is one of an uprooted, fragmented subject. By examining the protagonist’s behavior in a public, archetypal non-place (an airport, a plane), as well in a private place (her house), the study strives to show Sali’s perpetual state of unhomeliness.Keywords: unhomeliness, non-place, postcolonial subject, Ken BugulThe postcolonial subject’s experience of migration and homecoming constitutes one o...