kula liryzmu

Lillian Smith ’s Killers of the Dream is somewhat of a hybrid – an essayistic autobiography, an introspective social critique of the Jim Crow South. Her urge to reach beyond the micro scale of autobiographic writing manifests itself at the very outset: the first chapter is titled “When I Was a Child” [emphasis added] – a title which suggests some degree of self-centeredness characteristic of a memoir . Yet the opening paragraph is concerned with collective experience, as reported by a third-person, omniscient narrator: “Even its children knew that the South was in trouble” (Smith 25). In the following four paragraphs the distant, off-stage perspective shifts into the perspective of “ we who were born in the South” (Smith 26). Only after such introduction does Smith proceed to actually speak for herself: “In this South I lived as a child and now live” (27). In fact Smith quite often sheds the individual, subjective “I” perspective, as if the first person singular voice was not suf...

Southern Gothic is a violence-ridden genre. Its subject matter, characters, and imagery are often disturbing and transgressive. However, this mode of writing does not necessarily rely on shock value, or our primal attraction to the repulsive. Some of the most successful Southern Gothic works offer multi-layered, contextualised depictions of violent behaviour, which should not be conflated with physical brutality. Southern Gothic authors more or less consciously describe in their works a full range of non-physical aggression which emanates from structural violence. There has been an ongoing semantic shift in the usage of the word “violence” itself. Due to sociocultural forces, its reference has expanded to include acts of aggression that cause harm via other means than physical force used face to face; for instance, World Health Organisation in its classification of violence includes also sexual and psychological attacks, as well as “deprivation or neglect” (Krug et al, 2002, p. 6...

In The Road by Cormac McCarthy endless reports of building campfires, preparing food, ransacking desolate buildings, and fixing various objects set the tempo of the narrative. Yet for all its descriptions revolving around the tedious practicalities of securing subsistence in the post-apocalyptic world, The Road is perceptibly engaged with the symbolic and the mythic. It is quite reasonable since, as David Eder put it, “ mankind has invariably found it helpful to find a refuge in myths to relieve its perplexity and to mitigate its unhappiness ” (81). This paper is concerned with the myths of Prometheus, the frontier, and progress that permeate the tissue of McCarthy’s work. These myths are additionally approached from the ecocritical perspective. Fire occurs continuously in the novel both physically and metaphorically. It is depicted in a conflicting way: there is an ominous fire that has burned down the biosphere and polluted it with smoke and ash; but there is also a fire that brin...

Barney Warf and Santa Arias, scholars who specialise in the spatial turn and human geography, state that “space is a social construction relevant to the understanding of the different histories of human subjects and to the production of cultural phenomena” (1). They explain that “geography matters, not for the simplistic and overly used reason that everything happens in space, but because where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen” (1). Following this line of thought, it is worth considering why Nathaniel Hawthorne , an American writer associated with New England, sets “Wakefield” in London. Similarly, it should be noted that E. L. Doctorow sets his contemporary reinterpretation of Hawthorne’s tale back in the United States, outside the New York City, somewhere in the suburbs. At the time when Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales were published, London was the largest city in the world and the heart of the Industrial Revolution. According to Andrea Chiurato, apar...