Volume 6 (2014): Issue 1 (June 2014)

The article outlines the beginnings of ethnic literature research in the United States of America with regards to its reception from the 1960s to the 1980s. Aesthetic merit as a leading consideration in the evaluation of literary works, in view of the opinions of numerous critics, is quite problematic to apply in the case of Czech and Polish literature. Considering the output of Slovak-American research in the field of literary criticism and literary history, the results are not satisfactory either. There are a few works that provide valuable insight into the literature of the Slovak diaspora.

Although the foundations of the Soviet concentration camp system date back to the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War, the amplitude of human suffering in the Gulag would not be known in detail until after 1962, i.e. the year when A. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published. But even before the start of World War II, the totalitarian Soviet universe spoke the language of oppression that public opinion in the West constantly refused to acknowledge. This paper tries to recover a neglected corpus of early autobiographical narratives depicting the absurd Soviet concentration system, in the authentic voice of a number of Gulag survivors (G. Kitchin, Tatiana Tchernavin, Vladimir Tchernavin, S. A. Malsagoff, etc.).

In Mantissa, Miles Green is deprived of his identity, and his Muse(s) attempt to help him reforget it through different (sub)cultural impersonations. This privately coded novel presents the process, which results in what could be termed a culturally determined variant of the postmodern human condition. My paper discusses some aspects of the way in which John Fowles reformulates his interpretations of the postmodern human condition, while demonstrating the capacity of art in general and of the novel in particular to adjust its rhetoric, narrative and technical solutions to the expectations generated by this extremely complex and difficult task.

Ciaran Carson’s poetry is deeply concerned with the city of Belfast, as many of the poems unfold their twisting itinerary against the active background of this northern urban location. In addition to the poems Carson has published a fair number of prose pieces and a tentative autobiography, which also resurrects the city in its dynamism, though on a different timescale. The poems and the prose pieces together constitute a narrative of the changing city with the conclusion that the most apparent element of permanence in the context of the city is change itself, which leads to a strained relationship between the city and the map representing it.

David Foster Wallace’s fiction is often considered to be an expression of the new American fiction emerging in the late 1980s, the authors of which expressed a certain distance from the dehumanised and linguistically constructed subject of postmodern fiction, and which depicted individuals influenced by mass media, pop culture and technology in technologically advanced American society. David Foster Wallace’s short story Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko (1999), however, was also included in the Avant-Pop Anthology (Larry McCaffery, L., eds. After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology. London, New York: Penguin, 1995). Some other critics (Adam Kelly, for example) consider him to be an author who expresses New Sincerity in his depiction of reality, which is a tendency in fiction trying to depict human experience and emotions through the use of language and which does not emphasise the human subject and experience to be a product of the interplay of signifiers as understood by Deconstruction criticism and many postmodern authors. This paper will analyse David Foster Wallace’s use of narrative strategies that are connected with postmodern narrative techniques and, at the same time, the way they express a distance from them through a depiction of human experience as interactive communication between human subjects. In addition, the paper will analyse the poetics of the new sincerity as part of contemporary postpostmodern sensibility. That is why I use the term sensicerity to express a combination of the new sensibility and sincerity.

The article deals with the ideas of humanity and morality as reflected in the works of R. W. Emerson, the main representative of an intellectual movement called American transcendentalism. It conveys basic facts about the movement and focuses on the key aspects of Emerson’s transcendental philosophy, particularly his concept of the Over-soul and his concept of Nature, which gave his humanistic philosophy a religious and moral accent. Due to it, Emerson’s religious humanism also became the basis of American democratic individualism. The article offers insight into Emerson’s ideas on morality and ethical behaviour, which challenge us to live in harmony with God and nature.