Małgorzata Cierpisz
Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland
INTRODUCTION:
THE PAST INFORMS THE PRESENT, THE PRESENT INFORMS THE PAST
This volume includes a selection of articles based on papers deliv- ered at the 14th April Conference, held in 2017 in the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University. The April Conference is a triennial international conference which has been organized in Kraków since 1978. For four decades, the April Conference has provided an opportunity to bring together scholars working in var- ious fields of English and American Studies, and to create a much needed space for the exchange of ideas, scholarly dialogue and net- working. Since the first edition of the event, the open formula of the Conference has been one of its distinguishing features, encouraging an interdisciplinary approach to linguistics, literature, culture, and translation studies.
The word “new” in the title of the 14th April Conference: “New Perspectives in English and American Studies” is by no means intended to be viewed as antithetical to the word “old.” On the contrary, the underlying idea behind the Conference was to view the “new” and the
“old” not as a dichotomous binary pair, but a merger, and to postulate the need for an interchange between them. Thus, the 2017 edition of the event aimed at the construction of an academic framework that would encourage a diachronic uptake on diverse phenomena of literature, language and culture – with a great deal of jouissance,
delightful enjoyment of cross-investigation. The selection of articles in this volume seeks to reflect this idea. They testify to the extent to which the study of the past remains a creative act, an inalienable ele- ment of which involves the construction of a proper meta-language.
The 14th edition of the April Conference was one of the largest in the history of the conference. It featured a selection of thematic sessions with 160 participants from nine countries, including Poland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Denmark, Ukraine, France, Romania and the Czech Republic. The Conference also featured a numerous group of speakers from the US, who participated in the
“New Perspectives on the American South” panel, the largest thematic session in the history of April Conference, which spanned the entire three days. In recognition of that fact, the event was awarded with the patronage of the US Consulate in Poland. Six plenary lectures by liter- ary historians and linguists: Carolyne Larrington (Oxford University), Hartmut Haberland (Roskilde University), Anne Fogarty (University College Dublin), Robert Brinkmeyer (University of South Carolina), Hugh Craig (University of Newcastle, Australia) and Jonathan Hope (University of Strathclyde) allowed to contextualize the thematic panels, and to see the myriad of issues discussed in the individual papers against the background of the latest methodological trends in humanities. Also, the Digital Humanities roundtable, which was or- ganized in cooperation with Maciej Eder, head of the Polish Language Institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences, made it possible to build a bridge between panel discussions and the most current trends in the humanities, in particular, the extent to which the use of the stylo- metric software can provide a novel perspective on the discussion of such perennial literary concepts as authorship, intertextuality or style.
The venue where the April Conference traditionally takes place is in itself symbolic of the interlocking of the past and the present.
The opening ceremony conducted by Zygmunt Mazur, head of the organizing committee, attended by Walter Braunohler, the US Consul General in Kraków, and Elżbieta Górska, the Dean of the Philologi- cal Faculty, was held in Collegium Novum, the main building of the university, whose 19th-century, Neo-Gothic assembly hall is home to
a famous painting of Nicolas Copernicus, a graduate of the universi- ty. The thematic panels and roundtables were held in the historical conference rooms of Jagiellonian University Collegium Medicum, the top medical university college of Poland, as well as in the lecture halls of the Jagiellonian University Collegium Maius, the oldest building of the university, dating back to the 14th century. The organizing com- mittee hoped that the selection of those venues would facilitate the contemplation of how the new perspectives in English and American studies grow out of former methodological paradigms, through the inevitable sequences of Bachelard’s breaks. In other words, how the present organically grows out of the past.
The articles in the volume revolve around the topics of literary and cultural studies and their diversity mirrors the broad spectrum of the thematic panels of the Conference. These included, among others, “Medievalism in Literature” (chaired by Władysław Witalisz and Christoph Houswitschka), “James Joyce Studies” (chaired by Dirk Vanderbeke, Katarzyna Bazarnik and Izabela Curyłło-Klag), “The Contemporary Historical Novel” (chaired by Beata Piątek and Bożena Kucała) and “Multimodality” (chaired by Elżbieta Chrzanowska- -Kluczewska). Aside from these thematic sessions, a number of general sessions dedicated to a wide spectrum of topics pertinent to English and American studies was held – in particular, the issues of the indi- vidual’s perspective upon collective history, regional myths as well as the pivotal new historical awareness. All contributions in this volume have been selected for publication after a double blind peer review. We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to all the authors for sub- mitting their work and all the reviewers for their insightful comments.
In particular, we would like to thank Katarzyna Bazarnik, Bożena Kucała, Robert Kusek, Zygmunt Mazur, Beata Piątek and Agnieszka Romanowska for their help in the process.
The division of the volume into five parts does not directly reflect the diversity of the Conference presentations, because most of the articles touch upon a plethora of various issues, and, thus, they escape easy classification as pertaining to English or American literature.
The volume opens with the section dedicated to historical novel and the metalanguage needed for “speaking about speaking” (to use Frank Ankersmit’s famous phrase, 2001: 30) of historical representation. In a fascinating analysis, Carolyne Larrington sets the stage for many of the discussions and considerations that follow. One of her main points, recurring in various historical and literary contexts investigated by other authors here, is that the modern understanding of the past, in her case the medieval past, necessarily derives from our re-representa- tions based in part, but not wholly, on material artefacts. Larrington looks at George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and HBO’s Game of Thrones, interested in the way they depict the relationship between the medieval fantasy and the modern world – two realities blended to form a universe which we find familiar, both because the medieval or pseudo-medieval has become the conventional setting for fantasy, and because historical fantasies always contain analogies with the contemporary. The approach to the medieval past in this particular universe seems to be critical rather than idealistic, with a solid anchor in historic social realities. Larrington sees value in academic pursuits into popular cultural phenomena like Game of Thrones, a show, which, on the one hand lends itself to traditional literary analysis, and on the other helps decode relevant political and social issues.
Ib Johansen investigates intertextual and multicultural (dis)har- monies in three contemporary historical novels, Ishmael Reed’s parody of western Yellow Black Radio Broke-Down, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes – a Victorian pastoral seen through Native American eyes – and Per Højholt’s grotesque Auricula. Johansen is the second one to open, with characteristic flair, many paths for exploration, writing: “[i]n intertextual space(s) a plurality of textual voices are by definition interwoven, and multiculturalism likewise foregrounds a wide-spread solidarity – but also colliding ideological viewpoints – between different cultures, all of them constituting, in their very diversity and on a grand scale, the bedrock of Western civ- ilization” (Johansen: 48 in this volume). All these themes run through most studies published in this volume: history as mass experience, the solidarity and collision of various perspectives, history and fiction as
human constructs, and jouissance – the feeling of bliss that a single subject may experience when dissolving into “ingenious playfulness”
of literary cross-investigations.
In one such study, Petr Chalupský analyses Graeme Macrae Burnet’s method of constructing fictitious historical reality through a polyphony of voices in His Bloody Project, a crime novel structured as a dossier of allegedly authentic documents related to a case of a triple murder committed by Roderick Macrae, a 17-year-old High- land crofter. Inasmuch as it portrays daily life and customs of a remote crofting community from the Scottish Highlands of the second half of the 19th century, provides insight into early methods used in crim- inology, and reiterates anthropological and psychological thought of the time, His Bloody Project can be considered a historical narrative.
But it also actively explodes literary codes, incorporating elements of various genres (crime fiction, psychological thriller). By employing various elements, both real and fabricated, Burnet accentuates the constructedness of history in which a truthful record is impossible due to inevitable subjectivity, interpretation and speculation.
Analysing the relationship between modern imaginings of World War I and its nature as an actual historical event, Kinga Latała fo- cuses her attention on two contemporary historical novels, William Brodrick’s A Whispered Name and John Boyne’s The Absolutionist.
Latała convincingly argues that these authors portray wartime execu- tions from today’s perspective influenced by the dominating critical view of WWI, strong interest in re-evaluating history and a recent campaign to pardon British and Commonwealth soldiers executed during WWI for acts of cowardice, mutiny and desertion. Brodrick and Boyne both explore the conflict between personal beliefs of their protagonists set against the general moral stance of the era, placing their struggles within a broader political context. Fiction is seen here as a response to controversial events, echoing long-term conse- quences, re-interpreting their significance, and exploring the relative nature of morality. Latała’s analysis is yet another study showing the persistence of history, its myth-creating potential and impact on collective imagination.
Marek Pawlicki investigates William Golding’s fascination with ancient Egypt and its history – a fascination driven less by academic interest and more by its creative potential. In his article, Golding’s The Scorpion God is explored both for its historical and mythological references, and vivid imagination; Pawlicki’s is one of many studies in this volume in which one of the central points of interest lies in the blurring of boundaries between the imagined or preconceived world (here, the world of fable) and the reality which it aims to represent.
Pawlicki makes a convincing case for myth being history rewritten by imagination and imagination being the great driving force of myth.
The relatively recent revival of interest in historical fiction and literary romance, as Barbara Klonowska notes, might be a return to a very old tradition. Going back to ancient Greek classic romances, in which contrived plots and amorous adventures were set against an elaborate (though subservient) background of comprehensive, ency- clopaedic portrayals of cultures and their pasts, Klonowska argues that the contemporary British historical romance has its roots in the very beginnings of European prose. She investigates historical romances published over the last 30 years, reviewing various conceptualiza- tions of history and inspecting artistic techniques employed in their construction. She points out ways in which the changing theories in historiography shape fictional portrayals of the past; from the subver- sive, experimental, fragmented, a-chronological, multi-perspective narrations that question whether a text can reliably represent the past (history as a construct), through “history from below” with stories hitherto marginalised including the post-humanist perspective of animals, plants and geological formations), to romances set during traumatic events in the past and exploring the redeeming quality of love. Klonowska sees historical romance evolving towards restored belief in the more traditional conceptualizations of history steering away from radical experimentation.
Rachael Sumner carries out an intriguing investigation into Hilary Mantel’s two novels, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, in which Mantel shows an uncanny ability to transform larger history into a personal narrative – a perspective uniquely suited for looking at established
interpretations from a new point of view, holding a dialogue with the past, seeing the illusion of our interpretations. Sumner is particularly interested in textual terrain in which time may be collapsed, distorted or extended (Dalley 2013: 34), and the reader suspends historical perspec- tive to sink into the scene. Mantel chooses Thomas Cromwell, an ambig- uous figure, living in her novels half in his past and half in our present, to portray history as “contingent future . . . re-imagined as an entangled web of mishap and motivation” (Sumner: 137 in this volume). Sumner offers a very interesting discussion of the responsibility historians might have toward the subject of their study, of the distinction and similar- ity between an academic representation of a historical fact and the fiction of a literary narrative, of memory as an imaginative force.
In her paper, Beata Kiersnowska offers a close look at social atti- tudes towards women’s participation in sport in Victorian and Edward- ian England as reflected in the press of the period. She describes strug- gles that the new generation of women from the last quarter of the 19th century faced against the well-established Victorian ideal of femininity – that of gentleness and purity, physical and psychological inferiority to men, domesticity and seeing to husband’s needs. In the second half of the 19th century women began to campaign for their rights, with sport as an important domain of female emancipation. Kiersnowska talks about the emergence of schools and colleges for girls where the idea of female athleticism – still controversial at the time – was en- couraged in the face of strong opposition, mainly from the proponents of the limited energy theory, which has somewhat unexpectedly, as the authors of this Introduction understand, gained new life as the philosophy of human health favoured by the current POTUS. Looking at articles and opinions published in magazines and newspapers of that time, Kiersnowska demonstrates tensions between the traditional image of the docile “true” woman, and its newly emerging antithesis.
From there, the focus of the articles shifts to the literature of the American South. Two decades ago, in his Inventing Southern Literature (1998), Michael Kreyling stipulated that “it is not so much southern literature that changes in collision with history but history that is subtly
changed in collision with southern literature” (1998: ix). This antago- nism between the urge for historical myth-making and the recognition of the past trauma remains a pivotal element of Southern Studies – as discussed by Tara McPerson, who in Reconstructing Dixie (2003), juxtaposes the institutionalized nostalgia after the mythical space with the regional ideal of the past that was never there. Such tensions remain the focus of the articles in the second section of the volume.
Robert H. Brinkmeyer delivers a fascinating analysis of W.J. Cash’s philosophical path and interpretation of Southern culture in The Mind of the South, a book that remains pivotal for the understanding of the region’s history. Interested in international affairs and keenly aware of the rise of fascism in Europe, Cash saw deep-running parallels between Nazi Germany and the American South with its focus on conservative culture and segregation. As the European conflict escalated, Cash’s view of the South became increasingly dour. Thus, as argued by Brinkmeyer, one of the central issues in The Mind of the South is the collision between democracy and totalitarianism.
Expanding on the theme of systemic segregation and oppression, Anna Łozińska explores the portrayal of Native Americans in William Faulkner’s short stories. Faulkner valued the pioneer image of masculine self-reliance; he saw the comforts of civilisation as a threat to both true American values and the sublime ideal of the wilderness as sanctuary – a privilege, as Łozińska notes, reserved for cultural elites detached from the reality of land use. In his stories, idealised Native American characters, when subjected to white people’s influence, transform into displaced degenerates with no place in the culture. Having lost their pu- rity, they lose their right to be protected, or respected. Selective in his- torical and anthropological research, Faulkner created characters which served his ideological choices and the perpetrated myth of corruption consistently thwarted Native American efforts for cultural preservation.
Analysing another aspect of the traditional social order of the South, Todd Hagstette takes a look at Augusta Jane Evans’s St Elmo and the way in which she reimagines the old conflict between the violent honour culture (here metaphorically expressed through the practise of duelling) and the domestic tranquillity epitomized
by the pious woman – the protector of home and family. Her protag- onist, an aspiring writer Edna Earl, hopes to publish a didactic novel of the evils of duelling. She herself witnessed two duels and the expe- rience changed her profoundly, making her recognize the damage that the more violent aspects of the patriarchal order inflict on domestic bliss. Evans, interested in the financial success that the popularity of her book brought, but also clearly focused on the didactic value of her writing, sees redemption in taming the honour culture, rejecting it for the sake of religious morality and Christian home.
Katarzyna Jasiewicz also turns her attention to female voices in Southern literature, but they differ from that of Augusta Jane Evans’s in that Evans sought escape from aggressive patriarchy in promoting the traditional values of Christian domesticity, while Kate Chopin in- vestigated by Jasiewicz seemed more interested in the remodelling of the old order, lending an ear to voices that had previously been silenced.
Jasiewicz takes up Patricia Yaeger’s (2000) plea to re-examine two broad themes recurring in the writings of Southern female writers: the
“disposable bodies” of the people of colour and the trivialising image of the female body, traditionally depicted as diminutive, fragile and pure.
Jasiewicz applies this lens to Chopin’s short stories set in New Orleans and rural Louisiana. Close reading renders a complex picture of race relations; people of colour are – untypically for a white Southern female author of the 19th century – placed at the centre of many stories, but still portrayed essentially as “disposable bodies” born out of the culture of neglect, humiliated or invisible. Chopin’s female protagonists often fit the stereotype of the delicate Southern belle, but many of them refuse to be happy with the existing social order. Also the portrayal of black women, traditionally depicted as strong and large, valuable workers and protectors of their fragile ladies, in Chopin’s writing gets subvert- ed to symbolically emphasise their enslavement or associate physical strength with empowerment. Chopin’s is a multi-faceted portrait of the patriarchal South with strong undercurrent of female self-assertion.
Szymon Wnuk, the author of the final paper in this section, leaps forward to the most contemporary prose, analysing Cormack McCar- thy’s take on fertility myth in The Road, read by critics as a mythical or
biblical allegory of a father and a son trying to survive in a post-apoca- lyptic world. Before the story began, the man’s pregnant wife, refusing to fight for uncertain survival and risk torture at the hands of cannibalistic groups of other survivors, committed suicide with a piece of obsidian symbolically linked to an Aztec mother goddess. With that act she surrendered to the deeply nihilistic, forlorn vision of no future in the barren land; the two men, however, continue to struggle and hope for physical, moral and spiritual survival. Wnuk bases his analysis on The Golden Bough, James George Frazer’s (1996) examination of fertility nar- ratives, which, as he admits, has been criticised for inconsistencies, but has nevertheless inspired a considerable number of works. Wnuk traces allusions to popular motifs of regeneration through guardianship of the divine soul within wasteland and legends of the Grail where a divine object serves as an antidote to the depraved world. As the father dies, the boy continues on without him, joining another family of survivors.
In the next three sections of the volume, the focus of the essays moves beyond Dixie, towards diverse issues of American literature, British prose and drama.
Exploring the antagonism between historical myth-making and rec- ognition of past traumas, Grzegorz Kotecki goes beyond literature of the South to dissect Toni Morrison’s Paradise for themes of collective remembering and forgetting. In the story of two conflicted isolated communities – Ruby, an all-black town proud of its homogeneity, old tradition, and conservative values, and Convent (formerly a Catholic mission for Native American girls) housing a group of five emanci- pated women who sought shelter from trauma – Morrison suggests that the excessive commemoration and remembrance of the past may reinforce collective trauma and make it impossible for a community to adjust to inevitable change. Referring to two of Paul Connerton’s (2008) seven types of forgetting: repressive erasure and prescriptive forgetting, Kotecki notes the parallel between Rubians dealing with their own trauma of being rejected by their own race and, in turn, rejecting, killing, and erasing the memory of a group of strangers who threaten their carefully cultivated order.
An effort to re-amplify a silenced voice is Zitkála-Šá’s Old Indian Legends, a collection of traditional Sioux stories analysed by Tadeusz Lewandowski, which, although first classified as literature for chil- dren, unfold deeper levels when put in the broader historical context, asserting Sioux cultural resistance and condemning the policies of white society towards indigenous lands. Zitkála-Šá (Red Bird) grew up as Gertrude Simmons educated as part of a campaign of Indian assimilation; this experience informed her activism as she quickly saw the perversity of erasing indigenous cultures and the resultant loss of identity, exploring both themes in her writing, rejecting Euro-Ameri- can society and re-discovering her birth culture. Old Indian Legends are one of the first translations of the Sioux oral tradition into English text;
Lewandowski argues the case for looking at Legends as a tract which
“declares the supremacy of indigenous values and forecasts an ultimate triumph over white colonization” (Lewandowski: 248 in this volume).
Continuing the theme of silenced voices and dominant narratives, Thomas Savino looks at an instance of manipulating the memory of historical events in Thomas Dooley’s Deliver Us from Evil: The Story of Vietnam’s Fight to Freedom, overtly an account of a medical doctor on a humanitarian mission, which in its essence is an effort to push Ameri- can interpretation of the Vietnamese Civil War and intensify anti-Com- munist fears. Savino re-evaluates historical realities behind Dooley’s fic- tionalised reporting and shows its “white” perspective, which seems to consider the “brown” point of view of the Orient of lesser importance. He points to the process of dehumanising and alienating the Other through presenting them as the bloodthirsty, barbarian enemy intent upon destroying civilization – an ideologically slanted narrative, which has had very practical implications for decades of American foreign policy.
Exploring the myth-building and myth-destroying power of the written word with profound social consequences, Joanna Durczak looks at the evolution of traditional agriculture in North America into modern-day agribusiness and its consequences portrayed, and often diagnosed in American and Canadian literature. Wendell Berry, a writer and Kentucky farmer himself, started his critique of the current philosophy to maximise production and profit over sustainability as
early as 1960s, lamenting the erosion of the traditional farmerly ethos based in responsibility and restraint, and seeing in this process echoes of a larger crisis: that of the traditional American values of integrity and democracy. He created the character of the Mad Farmer, who mutated with time in other writers’ work into the iconic figure of the Lunatic or Renegade Farmer standing in opposition to capitalist or exploitative logic. Durczak focuses the majority of her paper on two non-fictional books, Brian Brett’s Trauma Farm, a poetic meditation on the author’s experience of working on a marginal farm and Kristin Kimball’s The Dirty Life, an autobiographical story of a young female journalist turned organic farmer. Both authors make a compelling case for small-scale sustainable agriculture, questioning the deeply ingrained myth of the human right to subdue and exploit and with it the established model of modernity based in technological progress.
Looking at father figures in Foer’s two novels, Everything is Illumi- nated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Joanna Antoniak investi- gates the literary portrayal of past traumas and their consequences. Starting from a brief outline of psychological theories on the father as a symbolic figure and a social role, Antoniak focuses on the postmodern approach to the notion of fatherhood as an unstable construct resulting from the collapse of the patriarchal authority. She proceeds to discuss four fathers portrayed in Foer’s fiction and sees in them symbols of the postmodern society – the older generations confused and traumatised, and their sons, affected by the trauma of their fathers, feeling abandoned and (in one instance successfully) looking for ways to re-define fatherhood.
Working through the lens of queer theory, Anna Białkowska takes a look at William S. Burroughs. Though openly gay, Burroughs, a recognized postmodern literary innovator, is rarely read from that perspective; Białkowska is interested in potential reasons behind this lack of recognition. She points to his novels, in which Burroughs de- fies hetero-normative discourse, creating characters with fluid sexual identity. Interestingly, his literary experiments – Burroughs would cut up pieces of his prose and texts by other authors and paste them back together at random – might be another way to challenge the dominant discourse and shift the balance of power.
Zygmunt Mazur investigates 11 poems from Section II of The Shad- ow of Sirius, a collection by William Stanley Merwin which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In Section II Merwin celebrates the memory of his three dogs, Muku, Makana and Koa, exploring the universal and complex truths of loss and despair, pain, absence and alienation. Com- posed in present tense, the poems focus on specific moments in time to define the poet’s immediate emotional state. They suggest a strong belief in some sort of immortality, where death is not a conclusion.
Invoking the philosophical and aesthetic category of the sublime, Anna Světlíková examines Jonathan Edwards’s conversion and religious expe- rience. Edwards, a pastor and theologian involved in Christian revivals in the New England of the mid-18th century, described the mixture of terror and delight he felt when witnessing thunder and lightning. Světlíková de- lineates the definition of the sublime, an exhilarating, elevating experience of something transcending one’s limits, referencing the works of John Dennis, an 18th-century literary critic, who noted the proximity of the sub- lime and religious experience. In his theory of poetry, Dennis wrote exten- sively about passion and claimed that the strongest passions are provoked by religious ideas; he was the one to introduce terror to the contemporary discussions of the sublime. Edwards saw terror as one of the key elements in his view of divinity and human depravity, where the self “embrac[es]
the terror and becom[es] lost in God” (Světlíková: 335 in this volume).
From across the pond, Anna Bugajska also goes back in time to tell an intriguing story of C.S. Lewis’s possible reluctance to acknowledge influence behind his Narnian Lion. She traces its echoes back to a series of troubled dreams that Lewis reportedly had after the death of his charismatic colleague, Charles Williams. In her historical investigation, Bugajska invokes Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence and shows Lewis’s battle for mastery over his creative process, in which he eventually learns to use Williams’s ideas to complete his own vision like Bloom’s strong poet would do. The Chronicles of Narnia thus become the ground where the conscious and unconscious references clash in an act which is both a tribute and rebellion against a powerful, inspiring presence.
Sabina Sosin investigates aesthetic strategies employed by B.S. Johnson in his experimentation with the constraints of literary
canons as a way to establish an interactive relationship between the text and the reader. Johnson published The Unfortunates in a box with 27 unbound sections designed (apart from the first and last chapter) to be read in any order. This was to reflect the workings of his cre- ative mind, “the random interplay of memories and impressions in the human mind” (Coe 2005: 22). The Unfortunates epitomize what Barthes would call a “writerly” text providing bliss or jouissance felt in exploding literary codes and breaking with the traditional role of the reader. Referring to Fajfer’s concept of liberature, Sosin discusses the act of unboxing the novel as a way to highlight its material aspect and establish the immediate connection, requiring “performative reading” (Bazarnik 2016: 86) and constant shifts in attention.
Olga Glebova takes a close look at two Nobel laureate writers, Doris Lessing and J.M. Coetzee, their respective positions within celeb- rity culture and their attitudes towards literary celebrity. For Glebova, literary celebrity culture is a complex structure and process of creating value through various agents, including critics, sponsors, booksellers, readers and event organizers. Lessing keenly felt and expressed ideo- logical and economic pressures put on prominent writers; she argued against propagandist agendas, advocating openness and commitment to ethics. She openly criticised celebrities who use political actions to self-promote. Coetzee, aware of partaking in a celebrity culture he feels ambivalent about, often resorts to self-parody. He explores the theme through the character of Elizabeth Costello, a revered writer expected to provide popular entertainment. Costello becomes a brand defined by her most popular creation; she lives in part as a constructed public persona, which brings her financial benefit but also becomes a burden.
Opening the four-paper section on drama, Tomasz Wiącek analy- ses late medieval cycle plays, theatrical productions of biblical themes intended to be both didactic and entertaining. Set in the familiar pres- ent of the medieval life with contemporary vocabulary, terminology, props and costumes, they provided additional political commentary for the benefit of the public. Wiącek focuses on Passion Plays depict- ing Jesus’ trials and death. Passion Plays alluded to the long conflict between two legal systems of the lay justice on the one hand and
the ecclesiastical Courts Christian on the other. He offers a detailed discussion of the contemporary medieval context and specific legal matters which found their way to the stage.
In a sweeping analysis, Rowland Cotterill explores Shakespearian plays and three more recent plays by Ibsen, Claudel and Hugo von Hof- mannsthal, for ideas about endings of the old and beginnings of possible new worlds and how these ideas are expressed through emotionally mem- orable means. He goes beyond the plans and endeavours of various char- acters, tracing themes of the great shifts in social or human paradigms.
Jurgita Astrauskienė examines wit as an important sense-building element of the 17th-century drama The Duchess of Malfi. She focuses on two types of wit, repartee (a verbal contest in a dialogue) and quip, a clever one-shot observation. A historical account of how the concept of wit de- veloped in literature is followed by an interesting case study into the way Webster uses repartee and quip in his drama to expose moral corruption and pursuit of power, often employing sexual imagery. Wit in his drama seems to be a double-edged sword, a power-play, where sardonic, degrad- ing comments aimed at another character also corrupt the attacker and expose their proclivity toward violent ridicule. Necessarily context-bound, wit provides insight into tendencies and manners of the period.
Philipp Reisner’s interest lies in David Adjmi’s special kind of sa- tirical tragedy. Reisner analyses the subversive way Adjmi employs the- ological elements in his plays, breaking with cultural norms and moral expectations. Adjmi’s characters constantly question and search for the meaning of the divine. Absurd transgressions help explore existential and ethical questions, reimagining the classical cathartic function of vi- olence in tragedy. Through these and biblical references, Adjmi creates his own version of theology, reflecting on human failures and tragic paradoxes of the contemporary views on faith, marriage, and sexuality.
The final section of the volume is dedicated to matters of style and multimodality. The focus on the interdependence of the language and the visual seems to be an inevitable element of the discussion about the metalanguage of literature and culture. In his essay Rhetoric of the Image, Roland Barthes argues that nowadays
at the level of mass communications, it appears that the linguistic message is indeed present in every image: as title, caption, accompa- nying press article, film dialogue, comic strip balloon. Which shows that it is not very accurate to talk of a civilization of the image – we are still, and more than ever, a civilization of writing, writing and speech continuing to be the full terms of the informational structure (Barthes 1999 [1964]: 37).
The papers included in this section explore the plethora of mean- ings that can be ascribed to representations of various kinds. The dis- cussion of the polysemy of these texts allows to understand the extent to which the very vehicle of representation modifies the signified.
In the first paper of this section, Mariano D’Ambrosio analyses several contemporary multimodal novels for their use of dynamic patterns. Referring to Bazarnik’s discussion of liberature and multi- modal novel (2016), he lists the defining characteristics of the latter genre: the use of multiple semiotic modalities and expanded semantic dimension of the material form, need of or call for active reading and a certain self-consciousness – a multimodal novel is self-reflexive, aware of its own materiality. All elements of paratext are sense-building and require the reader to perform active operations. Book-form, plot and the process of reading become dynamic. D’Ambrosio traces these dynamic patterns and metaphors in four novels: Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, and S., by Dorst and Abrams.
Access to digitalized forms of novels has allowed researchers to trace minute patterns of composition. Looking at James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ioana Zirra tracks all instances in which the word parallax is used in the novel to examine the chain of associations and their meaning in the path of Leopold Bloom’s fictional life. The word seems to point to the wanderings of the undisciplined mind of the modern Ulysses; in a spirited, erudite discussion, Zirra explores the mech- anisms of progression “from word to narrative sequence and, from subliminally invoked notions, to fully grasped ideas – in Mr Bloom’s mind/path” (Zirra: 473 in this volume).
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