Résultats de recherche

Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Transgressive Shame / Transgressing Shame Reflections on Lorna Crozier’s Poetic Revision of the Christian Myth of the Fall

Zuzanna Szatanik

Langue: EN | Date de publication: | Résumé

The general aim of this paper is to analyse the ways in which the concept of “transgression” loses its negative connotations in queer and feminist interpretations of the Biblical narrative of the Original Sin. In the course of this analysis, “transgression” ceases to be the indication of evil and sin, and starts to represent the possibility of transformation, redefinition, and rebellion. The theoretical part of the article focuses on the feminist reading of the Biblical Creation Myth and ponders the meaning of shame experienced by Adam and Eve in the aftermath of their sin. It also indicates the parallels between the concepts of “shame” and “queerness,” which comparison, in turn, allows for a redefinition of the notion of “transgression.” The subsequent part of the text constitutes an interpretation of Lorna Crozier’s poem titled “Original Sin.” In her revision Crozier subverts the binary logic of the Garden by means of evoking the character of Lilith as well as Aristophanes’ myth of the origins of human kind. The purpose of the proposed reading is to show that through queering the Biblical story, Crozier de-shames the Biblical Eve, and undermines the Biblical depiction of her sin. The last part of the paper focuses on an analysis of Crozier’s poem “What I Gave You Truly” in which Eve’s confession becomes the narrative of transgression.


Key words: Transgression, shame, feminist theory, queer theory, Lorna Crozier.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Woman as a Subaltern in Canadian Literature

Ewa Bodal

Langue: EN | Date de publication: | Résumé

The article takes as its subject the possibility of perceiving women as constituting a distinct subgroup of the subaltern. Following a theoretical introduction to this concept, the article focuses on the practical application of the notion in Canadian literature, discussing the two major female-authored Canadian novels published in the 1970s, that is Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners. Although Atwood’s and Laurence’s novels highlight the influences of the opposite colonial centres, the postcolonial situations and reflections of the main female characters appear quite similar. Indeed, both Atwood’s narrator and Laurence’s Morag Gunn seem to be depicted as doubly colonised: as women, and as Canadians. However, there exists a possibility of reading the protagonists as occasionally acting from a position of superiority towards those subaltern to them, namely the Native population.


Key words: Canadian literature, feminism, postcolonialism, subalternity.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Marque Levy et marque Musso ou la sortie ritualisée de romans français contemporains

Adam Knapik

Langue: FR | Date de publication: | Résumé

Marc Levy and Guillaume Musso are two contemporary French representatives of popular literature, who distinguish themselves among other authors by their significant presence in the media, for example social networks such as Facebook. Their fan pages allow them to conduct a promotional campaign of the novels coming out every year. Many elements of the Facebook promotional activity are repeated with every new novel release. In this text, we are analysing the content of these two writers’ fan pages from the period 2011—2013, including the book covers from these years, in order to answer how and why Levy and Musso resort to the method of ritualization based on the same behaviours, information or communication duplicated every year at the same time. References to the term “branding”, to the sociology of literature and also to contemporary studies about writers’ network presence help us in developing significantly this interdisciplinary analysis.

Key words: Marc Levy, Guillaume Musso, ritualization, popular literature, French popular contemporary novels, Facebook, branding, mark



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Espressivismo linguistico e culturale in Oltre Babilonia di Igiaba Scego

Joanna Janusz

Langue: IT | Date de publication: | Résumé

Postcolonial literature, which did not appear in Italy until the 1980s, started to flourish in that country in the early 1990s. Although it originated there and draws on Italian historic colonial experiences, it can be understood as a way of emphasising the linguistic and cultural separateness of Italian-speaking authors originating from former Italian colonies in Africa (i.e. Libya, Somalia and Ethiopia). It appears that a country like Italy, which has been deprived of its homogeneity and linguistic and cultural cohesion, is particularly susceptible to the absorption of traditions and languages from outside. Postcolonial literature, which at its very basic level is a hybrid, cannot be pushed into the framework of one convention or tradition. On the contrary, it fits well into the mainstream of non-canonical, avant-garde and expressionistic literature that has been present since Dante. Igiaba Scego, the author of Oltre Babilonia, published in 2008, belongs to the generation of young Italian writers of African origin. The article aims to analyse the novel in terms of writing techniques defined as expressionistic at the level of surface, typology of characters and linguistic and stylistic features.


Key words: Postcolonial literature, expressionism, episodic structure, neologism, language hybridism.




Revue: Romanica Silesiana

“Impossible to break into nice free stroll” Canadian Re-citations of Paris in Gail Scott’s My Paris

Agnieszka Rzepa

Langue: EN | Date de publication: | Résumé

The narrator/writer of Gail Scott’s novel My Paris (1999) finds herself in an overdetermined urban space of contemporary Paris. The space, already multiply written and rich in cultural associations, is re-worked again in the fragmented “diary,” in which the narrator both echoes and contests her literary guides, primarily Gertrude Stein’s work and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Her Paris emerges as a re-citation of the Paris inscribed in those and other texts, reconfigured from a perspective marked by temporal remove, which is stressed in the novel. Scott explores multiple, criss-crossing spaces of the city: those of architecture, culture, race, gender, nationality. While the text’s concern is to move to and fro “across comma of difference,” and to avoid binary oppositions without obliterating the all-important comma, it politicises its postmodern concerns. The article explores the postcolonial dimension of Scott’s novel, which, though not necessarily foregrounded, provides an important conceptual thread of the text. The narrator, a bilingual Québécoise, considers spaces of alterity and otherness of Paris, explicitly relating them to Canadian national experience. From this perspective the enticement and impossibility of the unitary construct of a nation symbolised by the republics of France and the United States are explored. The postcolonial reflection is closely related to the notion of a non-unitary, nomad subject that emerges from the novel.


Key words: Quebec novel in English, Gail Scott, postcolonial urban space, Paris in literature, postcolonial Canadian literature, experimental writing in Quebec.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Girlhood, Disability, and Liminality in Barbara Gowdy’s Mister Sandman

Anna Czarnowus

Langue: EN | Date de publication: | Résumé

Barbara Gowdy’s 1996 novel Mister Sandman centers on the mysteriously silent figure of Joan Cannary, a mentally disabled child who yet does not become a spectacle of the grotesque in the mode quite standard for representations of the disabled female figures, as Rosemarie Garland Thomson noticed in her magisterial study Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. In her disability Gowdy’s Joan does not constitute a metaphor of the condition of her family, either, despite the transgressions they are prone to devote themselves to. The novel offers an open-minded outlook on transgression as a means of liberating oneself from the social constraints and from the self-imposed limitations. Joan’s eternal girlhood makes her a lens for the family members’ tendency to transgress against the norms, which is ultimately received with affirmation. Her figure offers a valuable commentary on other texts by Gowdy, which present a discourse on the liminality of human body and on the boundaries of identity.


Key words: Barbara Gowdy, Canadian novel in English, disability, body, gender.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Rituals of Hunger. Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls

Zuzanna Szatanik

Langue: EN | Date de publication: | Résumé

The following article discusses rituals of control and purification characteristic of anorexia and bulimia nervosa, as shown in Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Wintergirls. One of the main assumptions of the paper is that eating disorders should be analyzed in the context of contemporary Western culture and the conventional models of femininity. As the Beauty Myth becomes the modern religion, rituals of hunger are interpreted as a present‑day version of religious rites.

Key words: anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, the Beauty Myth, rituals of control and purification



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

El bienestar de la cultura

Félix J. Ríos

Langue: ES | Date de publication: | Résumé

This paper deals with the cultural conflict in Western societies throughout the past few decades. As Vargas Llosa says, present-day culture is reduced to a practice that tends to get rid of our concerns, and that makes us live a kind of fiction or game. We must denounce the complicity of the big names that represent the culture in the postmodern world. Many intellectuals refuse to discuss it, and prefer to live on the revenues generated by the industry. The market has become a cultural expression. The responsibility lies in senders and receivers. Consumption of these pseudo-cultural products no longer causes shame. This conflict is evident in the so-called digital literature (not to be confused with digitized literature) which creates a hybrid product that is based on superficiality, simulation and spectacular sign. Present-day literature responds to the force of the image with the misappropriation of the movie phenomenon. In the same way that the neo-classicists denounced the Baroque excess, today we can, with absolute legitimacy, express our astonishment at the abandonment of literary essence, which is the act of reading, and the empowerment of other elements (visual and auditory) in products which we continue to call “literary”. We must find a way out of the dilemma that occurs and answer the question of whether culture is an idea, a feeling, a brain mechanism for progress, or a new consumer item that serves to hide our grief, our doubts and our questions.


Key words: Culture, digital world, globalization, literature.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Le néofantastique : entre la transgression et l’esprit conservateur

Katarzyna Gadomska

Langue: FR | Date de publication: | Résumé

The néofantastique (neo-fantasy) literature abounds in representations of transgressions, be it moral, religious, and social. This literary genre often deals with crimes, pornography, cannibalism, necrophilia, etc. Because the new fantasy literature breaks various cultural taboos, many critics perceive it as a genre liberal par excellence. However, there are also conservative, or didactic, works inscribed in the genre in which all transgressions are punished by the death of the transgressor. This study analyzes this ambiguity of the néofantastique on the basis of a number of short stories in the French language by various Belgian and French authors.

Key words: Fantasy literature, new fantasy, (néo)fantastique, transgression, taboo, fear, ambiguity, short fiction, the uncanny.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Controverses autour de la question identitaire des lettres belges (1881—1980)

Aleksandra Komandera

Langue: FR | Date de publication: | Résumé

The aim of this paper is to discuss some questions concerning French-Belgian literature between 1881 and 1980. Since 1830, when Belgium became an independent country, controversies about autonomy and dependence of its national writing have involved many authors or theorists, and divided its literary scene. The magazine La Jeune Belgique argued with the old generation of writers and fought against the idea of social art and symbolists’ innovations and exaggerations in literature. Then, some regionalist authors rejected French domination by focusing on local scenery and characters. They were criticized soon by writers forming a group called groupe du Lundi, who claimed the affiliation to French literature. This view was challenged in the 70s and 80s, first, by the notion of belgitude, then, in La Belgique malgré tout.


Key words: Controversy, Belgian literature in French, identity, autonomy, dependence.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Un modernismo del desasosiego. En torno a cuatro novelas breves de Amado Nervo

Amán Rosales Rodríguez

Langue: ES | Date de publication: | Résumé

Concentrated on four short novels by the prominent Mexican modernist writer Amado Nervo (1870–1919), namely, El donador de almas (1899), Mencía (1907), El sexto sentido (1913) and Amnesia (1918), this article argues that Nervo uses the fear sentiment in a subtle and quiet way, but nonetheless effective in its purpose of generating an atmosphere of unrest and mystery. Although Nervo’s stories show similitude with those of, for instance, R. Darío and L. Lugones, through a skilful use of dark humor, ironic distance and moderate skepticism, the author creates a disturbing and mysterious world very much of his own. In this article, Nervo’s fantastic texts are also viewed in the context of the rich Spanish American Modernist movement.


Key words: Mexican Literature, Fantastic Literature, Spanish-American Short Novel, Spanish-American Modernism.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Pour une théorie littéraire illustrée

Magdalena Wandzioch

Langue: PL | Date de publication: | Résumé

The artists and the theorists have always been fascinated by and driven to discover the relationship between arts, like painting and literature. What may come out as a surpise for those who love books, as for those who admire painting, is the illustrated theory of literature by Roger Caillois, whose background is not in literature or in painting, but in sociology. His work entitled Au coeur du fantastique published by Gallimard in 1965 and illustrated with famous paintings as well as less known ones has brought together literary criticism and painting by focusing on the theory of the genre of fantastique in literature and in painting, pointing at the similarities rather than differences.
However from the 18th century, literature has beeen considered to have straight connection with time, what means being subject to chronosyntaxe (time syntax) while painting has been linked to space what signifies being subject to toposyntaxe (space syntax). The Caillois’s theory allows the public to guess what lies in the profoundity of fantastique, intangible but identified in art.


Key words: Fantastique, literature, painting, Roger Caillois.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

D’une querelle l’autre : l’autonomisation de la littérature acadienne

Benoit Doyon-Gosselin , David Bélanger

Langue: FR | Date de publication: | Résumé

This article will look at the history of Acadian literature through different disputes within this cultural community. Acadian literature was developed in a homogenous community with a relatively small population, and seems to have grown because of all the disputes. In Acadie, the debate was conducted in newspapers. The article analyses three disputes: 1) the Old against the modern (1963); 2) the chiac dispute (1974—1975) and 3) the France-Acadie price controversy (1995).


Key words: Acadian Literature, Empowerment, Dispute, Sociology.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Le rôle de l’espace dans la littérature acadienne contemporaine Chacal, mon frère (2010) et L’Ombre de Chacal (2016) de Gracia Couturier

Anna Żurawska

Langue: FR | Date de publication: 28-12-2020 | Résumé | p. 98-107

The aim of deportation and expulsion of the Acadians during the so-called Grand Dérangement, also known as the Great Upheaval, was to deprive them of their land, which is presented in their history and literature. The idea of space is in this case closely connected with the question of identity in Acadian literature. Not referring directly to the above-mentioned historical events, Garcia Couturier explores in her novelistic diptych the relation between identity and space. Although Couturier’s writing is largely based on categories which characterise Acadian literature, she is able to go beyond them in order to concentrate on individual identity and liberty. She also investigates metaphorical expulsion, which shows her desire for autonomy from tradition and underlines modern aspects of the two novels.
The aim of the article is therefore to examine the narrative representation of the space, its symbolic function and its role in shaping both individual and collective identity in Couturier’s novels.

2020-12-28



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Decostruzione delle figure maschili nella narrativa dei “giovani narratori” della fine del Novecento

Barbara Kornacka

Langue: IT | Date de publication: | Résumé

The Deconstruction of Male Figures in the “Young Writers”’ Fiction of the End of Twentieth Century

The aim of the article is to present the image of male protagonists in the literature written by some of so-called “young writers” of the 80s and 90s in Italy. These authors deprive the male figure of his traditional attributes of authority and power. They achieve this aim by realizing textual strategies such as a metaphorical attempt on the patriarch or an attack on other’s male authority, by a visualization of the masculinity as uncompleted or prosthetic, and by a victimization of the male protagonist.


Key words: Italian literature of the 80s and 90s, male protagonist, crisis.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

La nouvelle fantastique au XXe siècle: le charme trouble du mystère et du non-dit

Katarzyna Gadomska

Langue: PL | Date de publication: | Résumé

Katarzyna Gadomska devotes her text to the science-fiction literature, predestined to create the aura of understatement by nature. The author focuses on the short stories by Bours and Andrevon.

Keywords: Bours; Andrevon; mystery tale; the unsaid; secrets



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Crossing the Virtual Partition: Changing Jewish Rituals in Women’s Narratives

Brygida Gasztold

Langue: EN | Date de publication: | Résumé

For many years excluded and marginalized, Jewish women have managed to alter the definitions of Jewish ritual in an attempt to find more self‑conscious ways of religious expression. My paper examines how literature reflects this process by demonstrating different strategies employed by women writers to bridge the gap created by androcentric narratives. Given the example of two novels: E.M. Broner’s A Weave of Women (1978) and Allegra Goodman’s Paradise Park (2001), I discuss the changing role of Jewish women in Judaism. Whether by mirroring the male rituals, or reshaping the existing foundations of Jewish practice and thought, they have managed to change the performance and conceptualization of modern Judaism; the process, which is by no means completed.


Key words: Judaism, ritual, Jewish women, American‑Jewish literature



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Traduction est un jeu d’oulipien ou sur le caractère ludique et oulipique de la traduction

Anna Paliczka

Langue: FR | Date de publication: | Résumé

The article is a theoretical consideration on translation perceived as a game. The aforementioned game, whose constituents were brought up at the beginning of the article, bears features typical of the practice of writing texts during the Thursday meetings of the OuLiPo members.

The author assumes that every literary text is a result of the game proposed by the writer. The translator faces the challenge posed by the original text, and by translating it into a different cultural and linguistic reality, he makes his next move in the game. During the analysis of his actions, it occurs that translation resembles writing texts under strict rules.

The ludic character of translation is also confirmed in the article by selected translators, who share their experiences related to the art of translation. The translator, just like an Oulipian, draws from the richness of language and literature, creating new texts based on those which have already been created. A translation’s level of difficulty depends on the source text’s type and characteristic, its cultural origin, as well as the culture of the target text. These elements constitute a sort of constraints, determining the choices made by the translator, nonetheless giving him some freedom as well. Translations are similar to OuLiPo practices, relying on intellectual exercise and the joy of creation, the purpose of which is to ensure that there is a continuity and freshness in literature and to provide it with new tools and structures.


Key words: Game, translation, Oulipian works.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Dire la crise environnementale. Véronique Bergen, Antoine Wauters et Hélène Laurain face à un monde ravagé

Judyta Zbierska-Mościcka

Langue: FR | Date de publication: 29-06-2024 | Résumé | p. 1-11

The power of literature has been severely tested in recent decades. During the turn of the 1980s the return of the concrete, in its various forms, was already seen in literature. The ecological crisis is a part of this concreteness, and has a direct impact on the literature, which is forced to rethink its forms of expression to regain the real effectiveness in its quest for a lost link with the living, and to face up the  climate crisis. The literature is an important part of the large field of environmental humanities and as such, it helps to enhance the environmental knowledge. In this paper three contemporary fictions are examined —Tous doivent être sauvés ou aucun by V. Bergen, Mahmoud ou la montée des eaux by A. Wauters and Partout le feu by H. Laurain. All those texts tackle environmental themes and try to find the necessary force to modify our thinking about today’s world.

2024-06-29



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Esempi di rappresentazione degli omosessuali nella Commedia di Dante

Davide Artico

Langue: IT | Date de publication: | Résumé

Selected Representations of Homosexuality in Dante’s Commedia

Since its very beginning, ‘the Queer’ as a cognitive construction in academic studies has been characterised by a certain degree of resistance to definition. The reluctance to have its traits encompassed by precise borders mirrors the very theoretical perspective ‘the Queer’ moves from, that is, one from which every strict classification appears to be hermeneutically reductive. Nonetheless, literature as a means of expression undoubtedly presents identification benchmarks for ‘the Queer.’ That is true for Italian literature as well, in which homosexuality, for instance, has been (re)presented since Dante Alighieri’s Commedia. The analysis of three Cantos performed here is aimed at providing a starting point for future diachronical studies whose purpose is to compare the approach to the theme in the Italian literature of the Middle Ages to the benchmarks emerging from the 20th century’s production, in whose mainframe an evolution in representation of ‘the Queer’ is made patent in the passage from Pasolini’s prose of the Sixties to the works by later authors such as Franco Buffoni and Pier Vittorio Tondelli.

Key words: homosexuality in Dante’s Commedia.

Selected Representations of Homosexuality in Dante’s Commedia

Since its very beginning, ‘the Queer’ as a cognitive construction in academic studies has been characterised by a certain degree of resistance to definition. The reluctance to have its traits encompassed by precise borders mirrors the very theoretical perspective ‘the Queer’ moves from, that is, one from which every strict classification appears to be hermeneutically reductive. Nonetheless, literature as a means of expression undoubtedly presents identification benchmarks for ‘the Queer.’ That is true for Italian literature as well, in which homosexuality, for instance, has been (re)presented since Dante Alighieri’s Commedia. The analysis of three Cantos performed here is aimed at providing a starting point for future diachronical studies whose purpose is to compare the approach to the theme in the Italian literature of the Middle Ages to the benchmarks emerging from the 20th century’s production, in whose mainframe an evolution in representation of ‘the Queer’ is made patent in the passage from Pasolini’s prose of the Sixties to the works by later authors such as Franco Buffoni and Pier Vittorio Tondelli.

Key words: homosexuality in Dante’s Commedia.

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