<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> Translation has been essential to the development of languages and cultures throughout the centuries, particularly in the early modern period when it became a cornerstone of the process of transition from Latin to vernacular productions, in such countries as France, Italy, England and Spain. This process was accompanied by a growing interest in defining the rules and features of the practice of translation. The present article aims to examine the principles that underlay the highly intertextual early modern translation theory by considering its classical sources and development. It focuses on subjects that were constantly reiterated in any discussion about translation: the debate concerning the best methods of translation, the sense-for-sense/ word-for-word dichotomy - a topos that can be traced to the discourse on translation initiated by Cicero and Horace and was further developed by the Church fathers, notably St. Jerome, and eventually inherited by both medieval and Renaissance translators. Furthermore, it looks at the differences and continuities that characterise the medieval and Renaissance discourses on translation with a focus on the transition from the medieval, free manner of translation to the humanist, philological one.</abstract>

“De interpretatione recta...”: Early Modern Theories of Translation

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article proposes to examine the interplay between rewriting and the text/ile metaphor in Margaret Atwood’s <italic>The Testaments</italic>. The author’s predilection for intertextuality is inextricably linked to her conception of the text as a fabric and the writer as an embroiderer. Weaving, interweaving and reweaving are seamlessly tied to her acts of (re)writing. Drawing on André Lefevere’s theorization of rewriting and Gérard Genette’s conceptualization of metatextuality, the article examines the aesthetic and thematic relationship between rewriting and sartorial poetics. The novel is a textual patchwork of interlaced references gleaned from a large array of generic materials. The essay, which is divided into two parts, mainly argues that Atwood’s (re)writing strategies, or what Adrienne Rich calls “re-vision,” based on decoupage, collage, stitching, and sewing, are tools of resistance. The first section provides a theoretical framework for understanding the act of rewriting and the different ways in which it can be conceptualized. The second part applies this theoretical framework to Atwood’s novel, examining how she uses the text/textile metaphor to explore the power of storytelling and the importance of resistance. Creating a tapestry-like novel with interwoven textual strands not only resists aesthetic and cultural closure, but also mobilizes attention against all forms of oppression.
</abstract>

The Art of Retelling: Text/ile in Margaret Atwood’s <italic>The Testaments</italic>

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> Starting from the presupposition that art and art criticism in the United States of America are closely linked and that the very meanings and receptions of art works have been reflected by various writings in the field of art criticism, this first part of a comprehensive study on the topic attempts, on the one hand, to divide the historical evolution of American fine arts and art criticism into several distinct periods, and on the other, to evaluate the major directions of art criticism by considering its historical periods as being markedly ideological or cultural, as the case may be. Thus, considering the approximately 150 years of historical accomplishments of art criticism in the United States, I will argue that the starting point of American art criticism is visibly cultural, while the next two periods are characterised by ideological art criticism, noting that the ideological orientation differs in the two time frames. The fourth moment in the evolution of art criticism marks the revival of the cultural, so that, within the fifth, the postmodern art criticism could no longer grasp a clear distinction between the cultural and the ideological. The present article will focus on the first two important orientations in art criticism in the United States, 1865-1900 and 1908-1940, respectively; a future study will consider the remaining three periods, following this historicist approach of art criticism in the United States.</abstract>

American Art Criticism between the Cultural and the Ideological (I)

What Is World Literature?

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This essay demonstrates how Richard Wagamese employs oral storytelling techniques to make the complex idea of Indigenous dispossession sensually and intellectually accessible to readers of his novel, <italic>Indian Horse</italic>. The Wabseemoong First Nation writer depicts the devastating effects of white entitlement when rendering character Saul Indian Horse’s experiences in Canada’s residential schools and the effect those schools had on his subsequent life. Using narrative analysis, it will be shown how Saul loses his ability to perceive places as being alive and resonant, and is thereby dispossessed on an individual, social, and spiritual level. Furthermore, Wagamese’s descriptions of the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of Indigenous children draw attention to the harrowing histories of Canada’s residential schools, thus laying bare the necropolitical potential of settler-colonial dispossession. This essay links Wagamese’s narrative to recent arguments brought forward in Indigenous studies. It aims to demonstrate that Indigenous dispossession in settler colonial states is part of modernity, and its overarching political economy, that is capitalism.i
</abstract>

Nighttime Invasions, Colonial Dispossession, and Indigenous Resilience in Richard Wagamese’s <italic>Indian Horse</italic>

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>In the context of twenty-first century global conservatism, where anti-immigrant sentiment is everywhere apparent, the importance of Ishiguro’s writing arguably lies in its on-going challenge to this perspective’s faulty logic and its capacity to reveal the radical violence behind nationalist political attacks on minority and immigrant populations. In this article I explore this challenge explicitly through a politically-oriented reading of <italic>The Remains of the Day</italic> (1989), highlighting this novel’s joint critique of Thatcherite nationalism and late twentieth century global entrepreneurialism. While this focus obviously represents a response to an earlier socio-political moment, defined by its own unique amalgam of ideological anxieties, nevertheless what emerges most prominently through this reading is the novel’s topical condemnation of cultural essentialism and its attendant hierarchies, concerns which remain of utmost critical significance within the twenty-first century. Thus, by making this assessment explicit, highlighting British conservatism’s devastating psychological and material implications for affected individuals, ranging from repressed and traumatised psychologies to radical economic precarity, this novel can be seen to register Thatcherite prejudice in a poignantly relevant manner. Indeed, the pseudo-respect granted to the ‘genuine old-fashioned English butler’ in this novel might also be seen as comparable to Trump’s pseudo-populism or Brexit nostalgia, both of which likewise ignore the pressing reality of imperialism’s historical violence.</abstract>

“A Genuine Old-Fashioned English Butler”: Nationalism and Conservative Politics in <italic>The Remains of the Day</italic>

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title><bold/> This paper provides a close reading of Paul Farley’s 160-line poem, “Thorns.” The poem is read in dialogue with William Wordsworth’s celebrated Romantic ballad “The Thorn.” Special attention is given to Farley’s treatment of memory and metaphor: It is shown how the first, exploratory part of the poem elaborates upon the interdependent nature of memory and metaphor, while the second part uses a more regulated form of imagery in its evocation of a generational memory linked to a particular place and time (the working-class Liverpool of the 1960s and 1970s). The tension between the two parts of the poem is reflected in the taut relationship between the poet and a confrontational alter ego. Wordsworth’s importance for Farley is shown to inhere not only in the Lake Poet’s use of personal memory, but also the close connection between his poetry and place, as well as a strongly self-reflective strain that results in an interminable process of self-determination. Farley’s independence as a poet also comes across, though, and is for instance in evidence in his desire to avoid the “booby trap” of too simple appropriation of the methods and motifs of his Romantic predecessor.</abstract>

“Never Some Easy Flashback”

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>This article shows that the Booker Prize for fiction, which is neither the oldest nor the richest award given for novels in English, is nevertheless widely conceded to be the pre-eminent recognition. Sometimes it is called the “most significant”; sometimes the “most famous”; ultimately these two qualities are inseparable. I canvass some of the explanations for the Booker’s position as top prize and argue that the most important reasons are Publicity, Flexibility, and Product Placement. The Booker has managed its public image skillfully; among the devices that assure its continued celebrity is the acceptance, almost the courting, of scandal. Flexibility is partly a function of the practice of naming five new judges each year, but the Booker has also been responsive to challenges, including the recognition that it paid too little attention to female authors. The decision to admit American books into the competition was a sign of flexibility, as it was a guarantee of scandal. And the Booker has followed a path of “product placement” that positions it accurately between demands for high art and for “readability,” as examination of several periods in its history demonstrate.</abstract>

How the Booker Prize Won the Prize

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The article introduces and discusses a corpus-assisted study that sets out to identify and analyse how self-mention is employed in science communication associated with COVID-19 research disseminated to the general public by leading universities in the United Kingdom (the UK) and the United States of America (the USA). The corpus of the study is comprised of computer-mediated communication related to the COVID-19 pandemic on the official websites of Johns Hopkins University (the USA) and University College London (the UK). The corpus was examined quantitatively for the presence of self-mentions, such as <italic>I</italic>, <italic>my</italic>, <italic>me</italic>, <italic>mine</italic>, <italic>myself</italic>, and <italic>we</italic>, <italic>our</italic>, <italic>ours</italic>, <italic>ourselves</italic>, and <italic>us</italic>. The results of the quantitative analysis indicated that computer-mediated communicative practices associated with COVID-19 discourse and communication by these scientific institutions exhibit similarities in terms of the use of self-mentions. However, in contrast to COVID-19-related discourse communicated by Johns Hopkins University, the self-mention <italic>I</italic> and its forms were used more liberally in COVID-19-related discourse and communication disseminated by University College London. These findings are further discussed in the article from the vantage point of the current Anglo-Saxon tradition of academic writing in English.
</abstract>

Self-Mention in Science Communication Associated with COVID-19 Research: A Comparison of Computer-Mediated Communicative Practices in the United Kingdom and the United States of America

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The interview offers a comprehensive, paradigmatic overview of the experience of literary modes within the broad frameworks of modernity and postmodernity. It invites reflection and rethinking of epistemic change from a major literary historian and theorist whose work in the Anglo-American context has become synonymous with the examination of temporality, historicity, and poeticality in twentieth century experimentation with form. Revisiting central concepts and aesthetic categories in literary criticism and theory, Randall Stevenson contributes a highly contemporary, ground-breaking vision of the literary act against the backdrop of the new structures of knowledge pertaining to the digital age and the post-humanist crisis.
</abstract>

Modernism, Postmodernism and the Nature of the Times: A Conversation with Randall Stevenson

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Postcolonial criticism appears today as the sole champion of the study of colonialism and its aftermath. However, viewed from post-Soviet Europe, it displays a number of flaws and lacunae: an amputated atlas of modern colonialism which ignores the experience of Eastern Europe under Soviet colonial occupation, a binarism that fails to explain the more complicated mechanisms of cultural colonization, and an in-built ideological bent that blinds it to the trans-ideological nature of colonialism whereby mutually incompatible ideologies have functioned as both the hegemonic and the counter-discourses of colonialism. While it has found the general framework of postcolonialism useful, postcommunist cultural studies has worked inside these theoretical interstices to supplement the orthodoxy of postcolonialism with equally sophisticated analytical tools that seem more adapted to deal with trans-colonialism in the global age. This article explains the added value of the cultural critique of (post)communist coloniality: how it has complemented the routine charts of colonialism during and after the Cold War by more accurately mapping the complex colonial relationships between all “Three Worlds”; how it by-passed the simple binary imagination of radical postcolonialism in order to address the political ambivalence and the ethical dilemmas of global (post)coloniality where there are no fixed hero/villain positions; and how it replaced Manichean anti-capitalist discourses with a more flexible and open perspective on the convoluted ideological rapports during the Cold-War and after the collapse of the Soviet empire.
</abstract>

The Postcommunist Supplement: The Revision of Postcolonial Theory from the East European Quarter

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Throughout the history of the United States, there have been many critical times associated with racism. When other forms of crisis overlap the existing ones – as the Covid-19 pandemic – even more challenges appear, calling for a more complex artistic response. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is well known across the United States and the world not only through their innovative ballet style (which builds on classical choreography and enriches it with creatively processed blues, jazz, and Afro-Caribbean tones), but also through what Thomas F. DeFrantz calls Alvin Ailey’s “embodiment of African American culture” in the subtitle of his book (<italic>Dancing Revelations</italic>, 2004). This essay looks at Ailey Theater’s politics of the dancing body, with a focus on recent productions included in the Ailey All Access online project, meant to replace a Fall 2021 United States tour that could not take place because of the pandemic. I will argue that the company’s choreographic overcoming and even beautifying sorrow through dance expands Ailey’s healing narrative about African American history to the Covid-19 pandemic. Their recent projects propose a desirable post-racist world, in which those who have been through much sorrow can support those who have been through less, and thus promote a politics of human togetherness, hope, and reconstruction.
</abstract>

From Race Crisis to Race Celebration: Online Body Politics and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theateri

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article envisages a possible tripartite division of (types of) being, in correspondence, one the one hand, to Eugenio Coseriu’s linguistic contents (<italic>significatum</italic>, <italic>designatum</italic>, sense) and on the other hand to Charles Sanders Peirce’s ‘participants’ in the process of <italic>semiosis</italic> (sign, object and interpretant). Being as <italic>eidos/ essence,</italic> corresponding to idiomatic <italic>significata</italic>, is responsible for the constitution of stabilities and/ or iterations within the otherwise perpetual flux of <italic>cogitata</italic>/ phenomena. Being as <italic>actual existence or particular, intentional object</italic> corresponds to the linguistic <italic>designata</italic> as they are produced through and by speech in the very linguistic act(s). Finally, being as <italic>ecstasis</italic> (in the Heideggerian sense of this term) or as <italic>sense</italic> represents the individual speaker’s ‘stance’ in the world, at the same time ‘opening’ it to interpretation by the others. Also, if on the levels of <italic>significata</italic> and <italic>designata</italic> language is simply/ purely <italic>logos semantikos</italic>, on the level of sense the three possible intents of the speaker (<italic>apophantikos, poetikos, pragmatikos</italic>) can be put into correspondence to the old/ traditional naming and understanding of temporal ec-stases as past, present and future respectively.
</abstract>

Triangle(s) of Being: Linguistic (Coserian) and Semiotic (Peircean) Perspectives

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical novel <italic>To the Lighthouse</italic> explicitly connects itself with Bloomsbury formalist aesthetics, with a special acknowledgement of Roger Fry’s formalist influence. This essay focuses on the influence of Fry’s formalist principles on <italic>To the Lighthouse</italic>, but additionally proposes a reorientation of reading that argues for Woolf’s modifications of formalism, which is concretized as the reconciliation of formalism and everyday life, where everyday life is specified as Woolf’s notion of “moments of being.” The essay contends that such a reconciliation is facilitated by representation and thus adopts James Heffernan’s theory of ekphrasis to analyse Lily Briscoe’s painting. Drawing on Heffernan’s definitions of ekphrasis, this essay regards the formalist elements in Lily’s picture as representational but not pictorial, whereas the object represented in Lily’s picture – in the text, Mrs. Ramsay – is of second-degree representationality, which spells out as intimacy and unity in terms of human relations. With intimacy and unity as core values in her mind, Lily eventually manages to represent Mrs. Ramsay’s being until “there she sat.”
</abstract>

“In the Midst of Chaos There Was Shape”: Formalist Aesthetics and Ekphrasis in <italic>To the Lighthouse</italic>

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The English on display in the picturebook <italic>Cicada</italic> by Shaun Tan includes various breaks with grammatical convention, such as a lack of tense morphemes, subject omission, and non-use of the first-person pronoun. However, not only are these deviations acceptable to native speakers, but the anomalous English plays a crucial role in showcasing the protagonist as a communicatively undeveloped outsider (Ikarashi and Maher). Building off Eugenio Coseriu’s integral linguistic ideas, this article investigates how what may seem grammatically insufficient language can in fact function quite naturally given appropriateness at the textual level. In exploring the motivations for a writer to opt for such non-standard expressions, this study proposes that the protagonist’s characterization demands a strange, nuanced manner of speaking, though such deviation is not without its own peculiar conventions. Furthermore, comparison with the Japanese translation of <italic>Cicada</italic> will allow for a better understanding of just what kind of unique leeway exists at the textual level for defying linguistic standards in English as opposed to Japanese.i
</abstract>

When Anomalous Language Is Acceptable: Suspension and the Motivations Behind Breaking Convention in Shaun Tan’s <italic>Cicada</italic>

Sten Pultz Moslund, Marlene Karlsson Marcussen and Martin Karlsson Pedersen, editors. <italic>How Literature Comes to Matter: Post-Anthropocentric Approaches to Fiction.</italic> Edinburgh UP, 2021. Pp. 276. ISBN 978 1 4744 6131 3 (hardback); ISBN 978 1 4744 6133 7 (electronic).

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article presents my interpretation of Shakespeare’s monologue “To be or not to be” in the framework of my book <italic>Los poemas del ser y el no ser y sus lenguajes en la historia</italic> (2017). It develops my thesis that “to be or not to be” proves not to be the real question for Hamlet, since he immediately abandons this metaphysical contraposition and proceeds to formulate in moving verses his real problem: the tragic misery of human life and of his own life, and the anguish and uncertainty of what comes beyond it if one takes one’s own life. The difference between sleep and death is that, after the latter, consciousness will lack a body, and nobody can imagine what dreams could look like without it. But the whole monologue is an argument against trying to solve real life problems through rising to the utmost abstractions.
I have tried to summarize the significance of this monologue as a historical step between several ancient poems about being and non-being, and their relation to the real conflict of understanding life and death, and texts of Goethe, Hegel and Machado, which approach the subject from the new awareness elaborated by Shakespeare in his text.
</abstract>

“To Be or Not to Be”: Was That the Question? On My Book Los poemas del ser y el no ser y sus lenguajes en la historia

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article shows, using the example of number agreement, that an ecological perspective with a focus on the situation of the utterance (i.e. here-now-I-real) is an effective way to understand differences in grammar among individual languages and to identify commonalities above and beyond such differences. On the surface, English and Chinese would appear to be exact opposites in terms of whether or not they conform to the rule of number agreement, while the position of Japanese would appear to be ambivalent on this question. But in fact this is not the case. Numerous languages around the world are consistent in the way number distinction is more likely to arise the higher the subject’s position on the animacy hierarchy. Chinese and Japanese are no exceptions. Leaving aside differences in individual circumstances, languages differ only in the boundary lines on the animacy hierarchy where number distinction becomes obligatory. In order to reach the above understanding, it is essential to see animacy from an ecological perspective. Furthermore, an ecological perspective is essential as a principle for explaining levels of not only animacy but also self-expressiveness, esteem, and transitivity. The prevailing view of language as separate from the situation of the utterance requires considerable revision on the subject of grammar.i
</abstract>

Grammatical Number from an Ecological Perspective, Focused on the “Here-Now-I-Real”

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>This essay is an inquiry into two intermedial installations that address the experiences of people on the run from war or poverty, yet overtly hinder and problematize the viewer’s identification with the depicted refugees. By doing so, <italic>Friday Table</italic> (2013) by art collective Foundland, and Isaac Julien’s video installation <italic>Ten Thousand Waves</italic> (2010) differ from the many contemporary discourses dealing with the so-called refugee crisis that suggest a blind assumption of empathy’s benevolence. Taking theoretical texts concerning the relation between empathy, politics and the (lens-based) representation of refugees by, for instance, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_abcsj-2016-0018_ref_029_w2aab3b7b3b1b6b1ab1ac29Aa">Slavoj Zizek (2016)</xref> and <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_abcsj-2016-0018_ref_005_w2aab3b7b3b1b6b1ab1ab5Aa">Jill Bennett (2005)</xref> as a starting point, I read <italic>Friday Table</italic> and <italic>Ten Thousand Waves</italic> as reflections on the pitfalls as well as the critical political possibilities of empathy in contemporary debates on refugees. Moreover, I argue that the two lens-based installations in question are able to examine the limits of empathy and identification with refugees through their common denominator: intermediality. Both <italic>Friday Table</italic> and <italic>Ten Thousand Waves</italic> combine lens-based media (photography, video and film) with non-lens-based medial forms such as drawings, graphs and calligraphy. As I will demonstrate, the interplay between different media is decisive when it comes to the way in which the three works of art produce, manage and reflect on the relation between spectators and depicted refugees.</abstract>

An Empty Table and an Empty Boat: Empathic Encounters with Refugee Experiences in Intermedial Installation Art

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>Twenty first century film evokes a new topology of the body. Science and technology are the new century’s ‘sovereign power’ which enforces biopolitics through bodies which, by virtue of being seen at their most fundamental level, have become docile surfaces. The film body is at once manipulated and coerced into an ethos of optimization; a thoroughly scientific and ‘molecular’ optimization which proffers ‘normalization’ and intimately regulated bodies. In the film bodies of this millennium, bodily intervention results in surveillance becoming internalized. Now the body is both a means and an end of social control. This essay applies the philosophies Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose to twenty first century Hollywood film, elucidating a new tropos, a new film body/body of film.</abstract>

New Poetics of the Film Body: Docility, Molecular Fundamentalism and Twenty First Century Destiny

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>One of the more interesting science fiction movies of recent years, at least to Humanities academics, is Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 alien-invasion movie, <italic>Arrival</italic>. It is a film which not only features a Professor of Linguistics as its heroine, but the plot of which is organised around the critical global importance of a multi-million dollar translation project. This essay compares the film with the original novella upon which it was based – Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1998) – to examine the role translation plays in both, with the aim of placing this in the context of the crisis in the Humanities which has marked universities over the last few years, and can be linked to a more general crisis in liberal values. While founded upon a time-honoured science fiction scenario the movie also clearly articulates the sense of global peril which is typical of much of the cultural production of our current times, manifested in fears about ecological catastrophe, terrorist attacks, and the anthropocene, etc. Another of its crisis-points is also ‘very 2016’: its ability to use science fiction tropes to express an anxiety about how liberal values are in danger of being overtaken by a self-interested, forceful, intolerant kind of politics. <italic>Arrival</italic> is as much a work of ‘hu-fi’ as it is ‘sci-fi’, that is, ‘Humanities fiction’, a film which uses Chiang’s original novella to convey a message about the restorative potential of ‘Humanities values’ in the face of a new global threat.</abstract>

Humanities Fiction: Translation and ‘Transplanetarity’ in Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” and Denis Villeneuve’s <italic>Arrival</italic>

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> This article examines art as it is depicted ekphrastically or merely suggested in two scenes from Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, to critique its androcentric assumptions by appeal to art criticism, feminist theories of the gaze, and critique of the en-gendering of discursive practices in the West. The first scene concerns Mrs Ramsay’s artinformed appreciation of her daughter’s dish of fruit for the dinner party. I interpret the fruit composition as akin to Dutch still life paintings; nevertheless, the scene’s aestheticisation of everyday life also betrays visual affinities with the female nude genre. Mrs Ramsay’s critical appraisal of ways of looking at the fruit - her own as an art connoisseur’s, and Augustus Carmichael’s as a voracious plunderer’s - receives a philosophical slant in the other scene I examine, Lily Briscoe’s nonfigurative painting of Mrs Ramsay. The portrait remediates artistically the reductive thrust of traditional philosophy as espoused by Mr Ramsay and, like the nature of reality in philosophical discourse, yields to a “scientific” explication to the uninformed viewer. Notwithstanding its feminist reversal of philosophy’s classic hierarchy (male knower over against female object), coterminous with Lily’s early playful grip on philosophy, the scene ultimately fails to offer a viable non-androcentric outlook on life.</abstract>

Food for Thought: Of Tables, Art and Women in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> This paper participates in the discussion about the configuration of what is commonly being referred to as ‘the posthuman condition’ by addressing the technological transformation of the human body and the cultural and political inflections of this transformation through the exploration of Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box.” The paper interrogates the implication of the fusion of flesh and technology and the re-conceptualization of the body as information, thus enabling insights into how these changes affect subjectivity, individuality, and the stereotyped understanding of gender hierarchies.</abstract>

The Posthuman Body in Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box”

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>This article examines how Palestinian American novelist Hala Alyan employs sea imagery in her debut novel <italic>Salt Houses</italic> (2017) to reflect her characters’ emotions and thoughts. In particular, this article shows that by examining a number of events in which characters are sitting by the sea or wading into the waters of the sea, the reader is given an insight into these characters’ inner feelings and beliefs and the way they perceive their identities and contextualise their experiences as they move from one city to another. As the novel relates the narratives of four generations of a Palestinian family, sometimes using flashbacks, sea imagery increasingly occupies central positions in these narratives which reveal Alia’s and her descendants’ endeavours to express their opinions through memories and experiences of displacement, exile and estrangement. Although the title of the novel rightly heralds the significance of houses, it is the sea that forcefully emerges as a pivotal component in the narratives that these characters relate in their quests for a homeland that lives in the older generation’s memories and the young people’s imaginations. As Alia’s granddaughter, Manar, visits Palestine in the final chapter of the novel and draws the family tree of the Yacoubs on Jaffa’s beach, including her unborn baby, memories and imaginations merge to assert the right of Palestinians to “belong” to their homeland.</abstract>

Sea Imagery in Hala Alyan’s <italic>Salt Houses</italic>

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The Journal of Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu

 Publishing House and Owner: Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania  Founded in 1999 as the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania,...

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