Lively Histories

Contemporary Austrian novels with a family theme go beyond the problematization of two-generational conflicts and tell the story of at least three generations of the family. These are generational novels that often deal with the phenomenon of crisis and the collapse of the family as a result of the crisis. The paper shows that historical caesuras run through the generational novel, showing the causes and consequences of major socio-political changes on the family, which is the basis for all family conflicts in the novel Es geht uns gut (We’re Doing Fine) by Austrian writer Arno Geiger. The approach to the topic begins with a conceptual definition of the crisis and the family, and a reflection on their interconnectedness. When it comes to crisis, the starting point is that it requires a reaction within the community, and that the lack of an appropriate response leads to disintegration; in this particular case it concerns the family but can be reflected in the wider society. The aim of t...

The characters of Živojin Pavlović’s seminal film The Rats Woke Up (Buđenje Pacova, 1967), regularly discussed in the context of the Yugoslav Black Wave cinema, offer significant and very intriguing figures of dissent. The film depicts misfits, bottom-dwellers, and dissidents living on the margins of society in the largest and capital city of Belgrade at a time when Black Wave authors have been breaking some new grounds for Yugoslav cinema and influencing artists well after the movement became a part of history. This essay concentrates on the characters and their interaction, the complexity of which suggests the complexity of Pavlović’s criticism of everyday life and institutions in the 1960s Yugoslavia.Keywords: Živojin Pavlović, The Rats Woke Up, Black Wave, Belgrade, figures of dissent, film criticism, Yugoslav cinemaHistorical studies of socialist Yugoslav cinema often place special emphasis on the Black Wave tendency of the 1960s and early 1970s (Goulding), sometimes even consider...

Recent years have witnessed the trend that comedy studies combine with what were once considered separate disciplines, such as translation studies. Nevertheless, few studies have been conducted to investigate the linkages in the areas of comics studies and comedy studies. Rewriting Humour in Comic Books: Cultural Transfer and Translation of Aristophanic Adaptations, which is part of the series of Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting, timely fills the gap by excavating humor in comic book adaptations of Aristophanes’s comedies.The book is composed of six chapters, including an introduction (chapter 1), a main body of 4 chapters, and a conclusion (chapter 6), together constituting a theoretically rich and empirically rigorous study. The first chapter starts by stressing that Marvel Comics may use humor for branding purpose, considering that humor is something memorable that readers are instinctively willing to appreciate and share. The author then explains why he chooses the ...

The aim of this paper is to research the translation procedures of metaphors for LOVE in the novel Chevengur by Andrei Platonov by using a corpus linguistics search tool to explore the potential of corpus analysis in literary translation. The research shows that the analyzed translation is dominated by the M M procedure, that is, translation with the same conceptual metaphor and, more precisely, with the same linguistic expression. A few exceptions can be explained by different conventions of the Croatian language and the Russian, while, certainly, particular translator’s motivations remain beyond the scope of the research. The observed dominance of the said procedure does not surprise if one takes into account the possibilities of the source and target languages – the Slavic cultural and linguistic heritage which, at least to some extent, enables the understanding of shared concepts and the usage of the same linguistic expressions. The research also proves the potential of corpus anal...

In recent decades, the concept of “complexity” has been one of the leitmotifs of social science used to open the conceptual baggage needed to understand the dynamics of “post-modernity,” primarily the composition and structure of society, and the mutations of the technologies of government. Alex Williams, a British political scientist, is best known for the important work Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, co-written with Nick Srnicek, which posed the politically dense and central problem of the collective use of technologies to “accelerate” the overcoming of capitalism. His latest book, Political Hegemony and Social Complexity: Mechanism of Power After Gramsci, elaborates on some of the diagnoses set out in the previous one, especially those concerning neoliberalism as not merely an economic but a total social phenomenon, and those on the ambivalent, porous, and productive intertwining of politics and technology. The focus on hegemony allows Williams to con...

This paper explores the politics of Holocaust representations without dealing with the problem of the ethics of the representation itself, but rather indirectly: by asking what the strengths and limitations of film media representation are, it deals with the problem of the politic/politics of the Holocaust cinema. Furthermore, it looks at the heteronomies of a certain number of movies in relation to the autonomous field of art which also sets limitations of the media, especially by taking into account the dominant social contexts, politics, and the approved representational ethics. By applying the case study method to three documentary films – Night and Fog (1995) by Alain Resnais, Shoah (1985) by Claude Lanzmann, and Respite (2007) by Harun Farocki, what is being presented is the discrepancy between the concepts of politics and ethics of Holocaust representation. The chosen films represent three different points in time and three different dominant and avant-garde discourses of Holoca...