In his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 1755) Jean‑Jacques Rousseau argued that man, in a state of nature, was inherently good, but became depraved the moment he decided to live in societies. In 18th century European literature, Rousseau’s idea assumed shape in the description of the original inhabitants of Tahiti. For the first time, Louis Antoine de Bougainville described them as the embodiment of Rousseau’s natural man. At this very moment, Tahiti became, in the European imagination, the epitome of paradise on earth. Beside the account of Bougainville’s journey, the following paper is focussed on literary texts of James Cook, Georg Forster and Denis Diderot.
Key words: Tahiti, the Enlightenment, bon sauvage, utopian thought
The article describes the vision of Corsica emerging from the works of Prosper Mérimée. Known for its picturesque landscapes and the vendetta practiced by its inhabitants, the island became a popular literary motif already in the second half of 18th century. However, Mérimée copes with this “Corsican myth” in a very original way. By deriding the boredom of many young Europeans of his times, he makes them fascinated with the savage island, to really terrify them, afterwards, with its terrible cruelty. Moreover, those who want to forget this traumatic Corsican experience do not manage to do it as the perverse dream has made them addicted to its cursed beauty.
Spanish journalist, politician and writer, Francisco Cañamaque, worked for nine months in 1873 in the Spanish Philippines as a member of the Spanish government. During this period, he wrote down his impressions about the islands and their society, and then published Recuerdos de Filipinas (1877). His book is divided into two different parts: in the first one, he describes satirically the society of the islands, and in the second one, he proposes some reforms to improve the social situation in the colony and to make the metropolis obtain more benefit from it. Although some writers heavily criticized the satire, the cruel, exaggerated, description of the islands might be an important part of the strategy used by Cañamaque to make the government take a more active role in the administration of the islands.
Key words: Spanish Philippines, Francisco Cañamaque, Francisco Entrala, Patricio de la Escosura, Spanish colonies, Recuerdos de Filipinas.
This article means to demonstrate that the complexity of Mysterious Island, stemming from the description of the place, this silent but omnipresent character, prevent it from being limited to the young readership intended by Hetzel, Verne’s editor. The anticolonial and antislavery discourse established as the ideological principle early on, is debunked by a counter‑discourse based on new knowledge of anthropology. Conclusions about Verne’s response to Defoe are also addressed.
This article uses Mauritian fiction in French language to analyse the relationship between the slave descendants, the Creoles, and those of the Indian community. Slaves were brought in Mauritius by the French between 1715 and 1810 and the Indians by the British between 1810 and 1925. The interaction (or the absence of interaction) between these two ethnic groups provides fresh insight into the social history of Mauritius and how these two groups (Creoles and Indians) did not mingle with each other. In fact, such interaction could bring a change in the mindset of the people and chaos in society. Colonial novelists’ display of both the Creoles and the Indo‑Mauritians justifies the colonial ideology, whereas that of the postcolonial writers questions this ideology in their writings.
Key words: Mauritius, colonial literature, postcolonial literature, Creoles, Indian immigrants
The goal of this paper is to show how Édouard Glissant’s understanding of Antillean culture and literature evolve from the project of antillanité to the idea of creolization. The former (put forward in Le discours antillais published in 1981), bears the mark of an “insular” perception of the West Indies, but it simultaneously gives birth to some concepts stressing a relational character of the Antillean social and cultural reality. In a more detailed and elaborated form, this “archipelagic” perspective will be in the very center of Glissant’s aesthetic program presented in Poétique de la relation (1990) and Traité du Tout‑monde (1997), which extend the range of analyzed issues in order to encompass the globalization phenomenon.
Key words: creolization, postcolonial literature, Caribbean literature, Édouard Glissant, antillanité, cultural transfers, literature and globalization
Focused on the broad topic of national identity, the main purpose of this article is to expose the significant change suffered by that concept in the modern Antillean‑Caribbean essay‑writing. Departing from a stark pessimistic viewpoint represented in influential works by the Puerto Rican writers and intellectuals Antonio S. Pedreira, René Márquez and José. L. González, a more moderate, cautiously optimistic perspective has been put forward more recently by Antonio Benítez Rojo and Édouard Glissant. The main difference between the two positions is the replacement, in the second one, of a concern with essentialism by a more open and cosmopolitan instance centered on a pan‑Caribbean multicultural experience.
Key words: national identity, essentialism, creolization, Antillean essay, Caribbean essay
The article aims to analyze the literary work of the Cuban‑American novelist Cristina García from the viewpoint of the theory of insularity, proposed by her countrymate J. Lezama Lima («Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez», 1938), paying attention to the references to the enchanted / sacred space evoked in the esseistic work of María Zambrano (“La Cuba secreta”, 1948). Starting with these two fundamental notions, it aims to deal with the very idea of cubanity in the writings of the so‑called Generation 1’5, to whom Zambrano belongs. As the author was born in Cuba, but raised in the United States, her perception of the island is necessarily ambiguous, typical for the sensibility of Cuban exiles, of those people who find themselves in a land between, living between two cultures.
This article proposes to explore the nature of multiple imaginative belongings as this is inscribed within various Mauritian literary texts, written in three different languages. The tyranny of the desire for national belonging has known varied fortunes over the last 200 years as nationalism has been simultaneously praised and derided in the construction of the national imaginary. In the context of multicultural Mauritius, the complexity of the nationalist paradigm exists in parallel with numerous transnational narratives of diasporic belonging. Nowhere is this more visible than in the literary output, where writers play with the often overlapping realities of multiple belongings.
On the basis of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, the main objective of this paper is to take under the scrutinizing eye how the central protagonist retrieves a selective portion of her childhood memories during the Second World War in an effort to reshape her fragmented identity as a Japanese‑Canadian and to deal with the feeling of displacement. Analyzing essential memories, conversations, and stories within the plotline, the aim is to demonstrate that Naomi, in order to fight her identity crisis and feeling of displacement — due to the Japanese community’s sense of belonging in Canada being shuttered by the Canadian government — recasts her personal experiences to her own needs for the identity refashioning in‑between cultures, therefore, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, giving life to a sort of “Third Space.” This paper will therefore demonstrate numerous ways in terms of which the protagonist intrudes upon iconic wilderness and rural landscapes in Canada — hitherto emptied of the indigenous and minorities and thus functioning as a sort of privileged sites of national identity — so as to transform them into heterogeneous and more inclusive spaces, breaking the binary opposition between away and home, a newcomer and native. Significantly, the protagonist’s storytelling may be distinguished by great attention to nature, botanical imagery, and landscapes shaped by experiences of displacement, and it may be argued that the novel is targeted at re‑visiting traditional sites of identity construction as well as bringing into tensions historicizing and idealizing visions of the natural environment to challenge the myths of Japanese‑Canadians’ identity that these sites were hitherto created to support. It brings into life a “Third Space” in the form of a personal island which will neither float to the Japanese Archipelago nor towards Canada, but it will be a separate entity including both. Hence, the dialogic relation between identity and rural and wilderness landscapes provides alternative forms of meaningful emplacement for the self — a personal “floating homeland” anchored in‑between the two cultures.
Key words: Japanese‑Canadian, diasporic self, feeling of displacement, sense of belonging, Third Space, nature, landscape
The present work is devoted to the problem of reception of the Sicilian literature in the Gustaw Herling‑Grudziński’s œuvre. The article is an analysis of the Herling‑Grudziński’s essay on The Leopard published in 1959 in “Kultura”. Herling in his work analyzes the crucial problem of the sicilianity (sicilianità) and the obsession with death. In the Journal Written at Night and in the essay about Lampedusa Grudziński “rewrites” the vision of Sicily and diagnoses the problem of insularity (insularità).
Key words: Gustaw Herling‑Grudziński, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Sicily, The Leopard, insularity
Isolitudine is a neologism coined from isola (an Island) and solitudine (solitude) that was created by Gesualdo Bufalino in order to mark a specific attitude to life which characterizes the mental and emotional ambivalence of Sicily’s inhabitants. On the one hand, they are proud of their difference, but on the other, they feel isolated and disconnected from life on the continent and doomed to cultural and emotional solitude. In the novel Diceria dell’untore the topic of acceptance and rejection of the condition ofisolitudine dominates. The main character is excluded from ‘real’ life in a two‑fold way: he is the inhabitant of an Island and the patient of a tuberculosis sanatorium; futhermore, he has been bruised by his wartime experience. The condition of isolitudine is inscribed not only in characterization but also in the chronotope. The places of the novel are the sanatorium and the island itself. Both of them have the qualities of a pleasant place (locus amoenus) and a horrible one (locus horridus), and their characterization results from a combination of those qualities.
The analyzed text puts a great emphasis on the concept of an island perceived not only as a geographical autonomic zone, but also as a cultural and personal continuum. Culicchia’s novel focuses on the emotional and generational voyage preceded by the images that are alive in the mind of a child who now becomes an adult. Sicily is an example of the concept of mente locale which defines the relationship between space and human being for whom it is essential and primordial.
Key words: Giuseppe Culicchia, island, voyage, identity, mente locale
The woman is an island, uninhabited (soulless), inaccessible, or a predictable and well‑known. A woman who lives on the island, can perfectly reflect the entire insular nature of being. In my article I will present the form of women living in this closed environment and prove how strong stigma the island can leave in human life. Heroines all of the novel created in the twentieth century and written by writers associated with Sicily, were selected on the basis of contrast: the mother of “Sicilian conversation” by Elio Vittorini, prostitutes from the “Pension Eva” by Andrea Camilleri. The thing which determines their lives, which affects their choices and relationships to others, is an island, its history and severity, which in this article I will try to present and proove. Reflections and interpretations of texts will be preceded by presentation of interesting philosophical and sociological aspects of a woman and her social functions.
Key words: islander, island, Sicily in literature, Andrea Camilleri, Elio Vittorini
On her journey through various countries of Asia and the Pacific (e.g. the island of Hong Kong, Japan, the Hawaiian Islands), Fallaci was able to discover that the feminine insularity was dictated not only by the geographical reality. The periphericity of the condition of the “useless sex” seemed to her almost a sine qua non of femininity itself. The colonial center / periphery dichotomy strengthened on a special role of the Asian woman, who only with globalization of the twentieth century found herself forced to a painful confrontation with tradition on the one hand and with modernity on the other. Therefore, it seems interesting to analyze the results generated by the sociocultural tension observed by Fallaci and the changes onto‑epistemological caused by the revolution of costumes.
Key words: woman, island, insularity, Oriana Fallaci, Asia
This article examines three novels by Ananda Devi, a well‑known francophone novelist from Mauritius, the author of many novels, short stories and poetry books. In her novels, theauthor portrays the lives of women, the roles and norms that have been imposed on them, as well as their place in the conservative and patriarchal society in Mauritius and in India.
The protagonists of Pagli, Le Voile de Draupadi and Indian tango, whilst searching for their identity, rebel against the society, their families and religion which marginalise them and deny their right to make decisions about their own lives. The protagonists of Devi’s novels by objecting to such a lifestyle, by violating the social norms and breaching bans, discover their identity. Pagli symbolically rediscovers her true name, Anjali freedom and Subhadra her body/sexuality.
Key words: Ananda Devi, francophone novel, woman, identity, freedom, violation of social, religious and moral norms
Nomadism and hybridity (métissage) are two keys words when it comes to Creole island societies. J.M.G. Le Clézio, Édouard Maunick and Ananda Devi of Mauritius all explore memory and language to erase (often constructed) boundaries between past and present, reality and the imaginary, land and sea, French and Creole. It is a way to transgress literary canons. Their poetics favour liminal spaces, a plurality of voices and meanings and an openness to the Other that may offer a new way of reading works written in the in‑between space of exile — a condition becoming more and more common in today’s globalised world.
Key words: Mauritian Francophone Literature; nomadism; hybridity; poetics of liminality
A cabin boy arrives with his crew to the territory of the Rio de la Plata. Saer was inspired by the story of Francisco del Puerto, a ship’s boy who travelled with the expedition of Juan Diaz de Solís that allegedly ended up eaten by a cannibalistic tribe of one of the islands of Parana’s delta. The hero is bound to learn from the new territory two times; but it is the search for identity, the narration to preserve memory, the construction of the general history, and the limits of one’s self that this article deals with.
Key words: Island, tribe, language, identity, memory, otherness
Pitcairn is inhabited by 56 people, largely the descendants of the mutineers aboard HMS Bounty. Despite being a British territory, the island never had a tight relationship with the Crown until 2004, when the British Empire had to settle a child molestation case that shook the whole island. In that case, 7 out of 14 men were accused of having sexual relations with minors during a timespan of almost 40 years. After the trial the island became divided into three camps — the Islanders, the Others, and the Enemies. Maciej Wasilewski’s book is a (literary) reportage of the author’s visit on Pitcairn after the trials of 2004. This article aims at analysing the three groups of islanders. By studying Wasilewski’s interviews with them, we try to examine the dynamics of this small and remote island and elaborate on the problematic division into “us” and “them” (the Islanders vs. Strangers and Others) that emerged in times of conflict and remains to this day.
Key words: Pitcairn, Other/Otherness, Maciej Wasilewski, trichotomy, social division
When the French novelist Bernardin de Saint‑Pierre wrote Paul and Virginia, in 1787, little did he know the international impact the book would have. Indeed, this novel emblematises the whole of the Mauritian francophone literature. This is because the vast majority of authors, from the colonial period to date, have internalised some form of mimicry of the book. The legacy it supports ranges from the representation of the utopian island to the ideological and aesthetics values of The Enlightenment, all of which pass through culture, History, the marks of anti‑slavery movement, or the works of Nature.
Key words: The Enlightenment, Mauritius, nature, realism, literature
Our purpose is to study how the island is manifested in the relationship between the movement in space and identity in the Caribbean literary discourse. We took Chamoiseau for paradigmatic case of contemporary writer. Our idea is this: the question of the subject is a way to make a double social and literary attack in the intellectual universe. And subjectivity is only possible by a self‑inner journey to another. This approach remains partial in Elbadawi which itself is limited to the exploration of an ego that suffers. And the conditions of possibility of this approach are threefold and is measured in space possible.
Key words: Chamoiseau, Elbadawi, comparative literature, Island, francophone literature
In this article I delve into a recently published novel, El dios de Darwin (2014), written by Sabina Berman. Its purpose revolves around the utopic implications of the author´s esthetic project. First, I examine the relationship between the two plots which are intertwined in the novel. One of them takes place nowadays, around 2012; the other happens in 1876, in the decline of Darwin’s life, since he is the main character. El dios de Darwin is the story of a secret document found in Westminster Abbey by Antonio Márquez, a zoologist. A moment before his murder by a fundamentalist cell in Dubai, he attains to send by email fragments of the secret document to three other pro‑evolutionist friends. One of them is Karen Nieto, the main character of the contemporary plot. Struggling against Franco, Márquez’s former lover, who was a spy of a fundamentalist organization, Nieto at the end manages to rescue the secret document, he attempted to destroy. Within the second plot, the secret document (Theological Autobiography) and the circumstances of it being written by Darwin are interspersed until the end. The Autobiography was verily brought to light from censorship by Nora Barlow (1995), Darwin’s great‑granddaughter. The story unravels the unknown conversion to agnosticism experienced by the British naturalist. Since the novel is rich enough in scientific data and demonstrations extracted from The Origins of Species, The Descend of Man and the authentic Autobiography, I establish a parallelism between Darwin’s revolutionary contribution and the set of ideas about planetary ethics posed by the Brazilian theologian, Leonardo Boff.
In this article I delve into a recently published novel, El dios de Darwin (2014), written by Sabina Berman. Its purpose revolves around the utopic implications of the author´s esthetic project. First, I examine the relationship between the two plots which are intertwined in the novel. One of them takes place nowadays, around 2012; the other happens in 1876, in the decline of Darwin’s life, since he is the main character. El dios de Darwin is the story of a secret document found in Westminster Abbey by Antonio Márquez, a zoologist. A moment before his murder by a fundamentalist cell in Dubai, he attains to send by email fragments of the secret document to three other pro‑evolutionist friends. One of them is Karen Nieto, the main character of the contemporary plot. Struggling against Franco, Márquez’s former lover, who was a spy of a fundamentalist organization, Nieto at the end manages to rescue the secret document, he attempted to destroy. Within the second plot, the secret document (Theological Autobiography) and the circumstances of it being written by Darwin are interspersed until the end. The Autobiography was verily brought to light from censorship by Nora Barlow (1995), Darwin’s great‑granddaughter. The story unravels the unknown conversion to agnosticism experienced by the British naturalist. Since the novel is rich enough in scientific data and demonstrations extracted from The Origins of Species, The Descend of Man and the authentic Autobiography, I establish a parallelism between Darwin’s revolutionary contribution and the set of ideas about planetary ethics posed by the Brazilian theologian, Leonardo Boff.
The aim of my article is to explore the representation of the islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues in The Prospector (1985) by French writer Jean‑Marie Gustave Le Clézio and of the Solomon Islands in the Regeneration trilogy (1991—1995) by a British writer Pat Barker. Both Le Clézio and Barker use and challenge the pastoral recourses belonging to the tradition of Great War writing and the convention of idealising remote Arcadian lands. Several insular myths are thus undermined by the two writers, who thus resituate remote islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as integral parts of European modernity.
Key words: island, Mauritius, Rodrigues, Solomon Islands, Eddystone Island, Great War, pastoral, modernity
Mauritius is a small island in the Indian Ocean, whose population approximates to that of Warsaw. Since its discovery, the island was ruled by several governments: Dutch, French, and English, before it finally became independent in 1968. On this piece of land of about 2,000 m2 live direct descendants of the inhabitants of three continents: Europe, Africa and Asia. The history of the island and the Mauritian people create its specificity.
Undoubtedly, the fact that Mauritius is an island largely influences the Mauritian society. In my article, I will study how this impacts on the society, including its writers. I will seek to define the nature of their relationships. I will try to describe the various representations of the island in Franco‑Mauritian literary fiction at the turn of the twentieth and twenty‑first centuries. Since this topos is in dichotomy of good and evil, I will consider the island as a synonym of a half‑paradise and a half‑prison. Subsequently, I will analyse it as a character of its own. Finally, I will argue that Mauritius can be seen as a reflection of the world, a miniature model. In summary, after examining the various images of Mauritius, I will try to demonstrate its special status in the Mauritian society, especially in literature.
The article interprets the novel There is a Tide by Lindsey Collen against the background of her article “Another Side of Paradise” and in the perspective of the political history of Mauritius. Both in the article and in the novel the central image is that of Mauritius as a paradise island, There is a Tide evoking the edenic imagery of Bernardin de Saint‑Pierres’s novel Paul and Virginia. In Saint‑Pierre’s utopian society there are neither ethnic nor class antagonisms. The idea of Mauritius as a Paradise island, where neither class nor ethnic struggles disrupt the ideal harmony, is questioned by Lindsey Collen. Mauritius, as it is presented to the reader of There is a Tide, turns out to be a place where people are divided along ethnic lines and along class lines, both divisions making the image of the island state in Collen’s novel contradict the view of Mauritius presented in de Saint‑Pierre’s Paul and Virginia.
Key words: Mauritius, paradise island, ethnicity, class, antagonisms
The novel D’un pays sans amour (2011) by Gilles Rozier features two narrators who try to recapture the past and to reconstruct with letters the Yiddishland annihilated after World War II. This vanished state, with its cultural capital situated in Warsaw, is called Atlantis in the novel and presented as a paradise in the yiddish literature and language. The choice of this metaphor encourages the reflection on the ambivalence between reality and fiction, as well as on the oppositions between presence and absence or memory and oblivion. What is more, this metaphor refers to the categories of time and space.
The aim of this article is to examine the function of the Atlantis metaphor on which the novel is based and to analyze the mechanisms of narrative as memorial (on the basis of Paul Ricœur’s concept) which allow the narrator to rebuild the annihilated world of the mythical island and to bring the non‑existent back into existence.
Key words: Atlantis, mythical island, the yiddish literature and language, presence / absence, memory / oblivion, time and space
This article tackles the issue of alienation in the Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, by Alfred Jarry. To do so, it analyzes a few of the metaphorical islands found in Book III, “De Paris à Paris par mer”. The analysis also posits a link with a lacanian concept: lalangue.
Key words: Alfred Jarry, Jacques Lacan, alienation, Island
This paper aims to study ideological configurations that arise from the effect of insularity in La barraca (belonging to the regionalist novel cycle) by Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. One of the main assumptions of this article is that the island effect is a narrative device which suggests regionalism as a class contradiction but also as a form of resistance against urban culture. The author of this article recognizes three rhetorical strategies employed by Ibáñez: mythemes dislocation, analysis of the effect of the Hegelian master / slave relationship, and the dialectic established between totem and taboo. In conclusion, the author focuses on the concept of politically peripheral nationalism.
Key words: regionalism, the bunkhouse, valencian huerta, peripheral nationalism
The aim of the article is to present some of the translation difficulties that may arise while recreating the poetic idealization of nostalgia in the poem Matka by Julian Tuwim considered one of the most talented and renowned poets and translators of the period between the wars in Poland. The article focuses on the expressions that show profound links between the historical circumstances and personal experiences that are supposed to be an inspiration source for the author, and those that, in some cases, might be difficult to translate into Spanish, as well as may result from cultural and structural differences between the two languages. This comparative analysis is based on examples extracted from the Spanish translations of Julian Tuwim’s poem made by Maria Dembowska, Samuel Feijóo, Luis Melgarejo, and Joanna Studzińska.
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