The Zone and Zones - Radical Spatiality in our Times

No. 2 - Year 2 - 06/2012

University of Zadar | eISSN 1847-7755 | SIC.JOURNAL.CONTACT@GMAIL.COM

Editorial

The long-expected fourth issue of [sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation offers a selection of papers presented at the second international conference entitled Re-Thinking Humanities and Social Sciences and held at the University of Zadar in September 2011. The conference topic, The Zone and Zones - Radical Spatiality in our Times, proved to have been intellectually enticing to almost one hundred scholars who managed to create a radical space of their own. Immersed into the zone of Croatian seaside filled with the aroma of pine trees and the Adriatic Sea, the zone of leisure rather than work, they managed to create an intellectual heterotopia by discussing the multilayered meanings of space. ...

Literary Translation
Leila Sebbar and Mirna Sindičić Sabljo:

Jedan je čovjek rekao: „Najljepše godine moga života su ondje, u prašini eksplozije.“Zaspali su u kukuruzu. Ništa ne čuju, ništa ne vide. Mladi su. Kukuruz ih štiti.Operaciju su najavili u tisku. Televizija, radio ponavljaju informaciju, riječi naviru, uporne, i ako se rečenica izgubi od jedne do druge sobe, rekonstituirat će se između kuhinje i balkona. Čuje se: „rušenje… problemi… zone… stambeni park… prenaseljenost… predgrađe… dotrajalost… rušenje… eksploziv… stambena četvrt… deset nebodera…“ Shvaćamo da će već mjesecima zazidani neboderi biti srušeni. Barem je to jednostavno. Iz jednog se nebodera preselila u drugi. Kad je suprug došao po nju u selo, odmah je pristala. Sve te godine u kući koja nikad neće biti njezina. Od prvog je dana znala da je majka njenog supruga neće voljeti. Nije ju zlostavljala, ignorirala ju je, kao da ona nije bila majka djece njenog najstarijeg sina. Svekrva ju je intrigama pokušala odvojiti od dječaka kako bi ih poslala da žive s ocem jer ona nije bila ...

DOI: 10.15291/sic/2.2.lt.2
Literary Translation
Jane Bowles and Vivijana Radman:

Na periferiji glavnog grada stajala je niska bijela kuća, veoma nalik kućama koje su je okruživale. Ulica u kojoj se nalazila nije bila popločana zato što je to bila siromašna četvrt. Vrata te kuće, posve nova i ukrašena čavlima, bila su zakračunata i s unutarnje i s vanjske strane. Velika soba, opremljena s nekoliko modernih kromiranih stolica, barom i džuboksom otvarala se na prazno unutarnje dvorište. Na jednoj od tih stolica sjedio je debeo dječačić Indijanac i slušao Good Night, Sweetheart, pjesmu koju je netom odabrao. Svirala je vrlo glasno, a dječačić je ozbiljno zurio u stroj pred sobom. Bila je to jedna od kuća kojima je upravljao njihov vlasnik, senor Kurten, napola Španjolac, napola Nijemac. Poslijepodne je bilo tmurno. U jednoj od soba upravo su se probudile Julia i Inez. Julia je bila sitna i nalik majmunčiću. Bila je privlačna samo zbog svojih neobično velikih i sjajnih očiju. Inez je bila visoka, čvrstih grudiju. Glava joj je bila premalena za tijelo, a oči suviše blizu...

DOI: 10.15291/sic/2.2.lt.7
Literature and Culture
Brandon LaBelle, Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway:

Experiences of listening can be appreciated as intensely relational, bringing us into contact with surrounding events, bodies and things. Given that sound propagates and expands outwardly, as a set of oscillations from a particular source, listening carries with it a sensual intensity, whereby auditory phenomena deliver intrusive and disruptive as well as soothing and assuring experiences. The physicality characteristic of sound suggests a deeply impressionistic, locational "knowledge structure" – that is, the ways in which listening affords processes of exchange, of being in the world, and from which we extend ourselves. Sound, as physical energy reflecting and absorbing into the materiality around us, and even one's self, provides a rich platform for understanding place and emplacement. Sound is always already a trace of location.Such features of auditory experience give suggestion for what I may call an acoustical paradigm – how sound sets in motion not only the material world but a...

DOI: 10.15291/sic/2.2.lc.1
Literature and Culture
Stipe Grgas, University of Zagreb, Croatia:

On the basis of ever-mounting evidence, amongst which is the “zone” problematic of the Zadar conference that occassioned these notes, it can be concluded that the spatial turn has insinuated itself as an all-pervading heuristic tool throughout the humanities and the social sciences. The extent to which space and spatiality have usurped the central stage in the various branches of reasearch can be gauged by admonishments that what we are witnessing is a new fundamentalism that has simply inverted the terms of the dualism of time and space (May and Thrift 2001: “Introduction”). According to Michael Dear the sway of space is manifested in multifold ways: in the ubiquity of spatial analysis in social theories and practices; in the explosion of publications devoted to the exploration of the interface of the social and the spatial; in the reintegration of human geography into various domains of knowledge; in the focus given to difference and the consequent diversification of theoretical and ...

DOI: 10.15291/sic/2.2.lc.5
Literature and Culture
Biljana Kašić, University of Zadar, Croatia:

It is time to radically rethink the question of the political – is how contemporary theorist Enrique Dussel explained the motive to write his Twenty (20) Theses on Politics [20 Tesis de política], almost six years ago. In one of his theses he stated that the radical transmutation of the political system is actually a “response to new interventions by the oppressed and excluded” (Dussel 112), or in other words, that it relies on other spaces and impulses of the political, namely on those which are dedicated to engaging in critical, that is, liberating actions. A year ago, in a joint public conversation between two leading feminist theorists – Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – organized by the Centre for Postcolonial Theory in Frankfurt in May 2011 and devoted to critique today, the main meaning of critique was expressed neither as a method nor as a theoretical position, rather as its potency to explore “how it may be possible to think”; namely, the way “in which we pose the...

DOI: 10.15291/sic/2.2.lc.3
Literary Translation
Susanne Jorn and Dora Maček:

Pjesništvo Susanne Jorn intimno je s mnogo kratkih pjesama koje često izražavaju osjećaje, atmosferu i dojmove. Tu su osobna viđenja prirode i ljudi, doživljena, mogli bismo reći, na slikarski način. Boje su gotovo redoviti sastavni dio tih doživljaja i kao na slikama, stvaraju dramatičnu ili smirenu atmosferu. One su izraz prirode koja okružuje pjesnikinju, ali su i izraz osjećaja i duševnih stanja. To se jasno pokazuje u zbirci Ne sada već sad, čiji je okvir paleta plavih boja. Druga scena njezine poezije sličice su iz japanskog života i japanske umjetnosti i pjesništva, koje mnogo puta prenosi u svoju dansku okolinu. U zbirci Ne sada već sad mnoge su pjesme prizori iz Danske ili Tokija, ali i drugih krajeva svijeta gdje je boravila. Ipak, njezino je pjesništvo prije svega vezano uz nordijsko nebo, zemlju i kulturu te sjećanja na oca (poznatog danskog likovnog umjetnika Asgera Jorna, koji je u svojim djelima spajao različite vrste umjetnosti. Asger Jorn bio je član poznate transnacio...

DOI: 10.15291/sic/2.2.lt.6