Tom 14 (2022): Zeszyt 1 (June 2022)

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter can be read within the framework of postcolonial theory, with colonialism equating patriarchy. The anti-colonial reading of the novel is permitted through Hester’s struggle with what seem to be prevalent regulations regarding gender, culture and religion. The only way for females to be liberated from this patriarchy is by rejecting it. Hawthorne, in this novel, suggests that being a woman is in itself fighting back. Thus, it is only through womanhood that the female character is able to arrive at a reconciliation with themselves and with their consciences.

The prominent place that Eavan Boland occupies in the essentially male-defined and male-dominated canon of contemporary Irish literature is the result of the poet’s pioneering act of entering into a reconstructive and resituating dialogue with that tradition and which in turn has paved the way for numerous younger women poets to claim a place for their voices and redefine that tradition itself. The paper seeks to examine and explore a number of topoi with and through which Eavan Boland would negotiate her position in relation to the Irish literary tradition, from broad general motifs to ones peculiar to the Irish context.

The so-called “trickster” is a special and important archfigure in the mythological and fairy-tale images of each civilization and cultural circle. The trickster is a controversial and often (seemingly) contradictory character that belongs to the “culture of popular laughter” (Bakhtin) or picaresque mythology (Kerényi). The aim of this paper is to present a brief initial analysis of the selected characters on a trans-genre and trans-cultural sample of ancient texts.

The article discusses humour as a form of communication and social interaction, which is not only based on sociocultural similarities, tolerance and solidarity among in-group members but also hostility or aggression towards out-group members. As humour is formed on binary oppositions, the female gender is often used as a popular “target” in humour discourse. It also represents “otherness” regarding the opposite gender and communicates social codes based on physical appearance, behaviour, or specific roles in society. Gender-stereotyping, which is used to categorize and understand the “outside” world better, is one of the most common and simplest approaches in humour discourse. The main aim of our research is to discuss the role of women and the way female identity, as a social construct, is defined and presented in humour discourse through stereotypes. More precisely, this article examines the evolution of women’s representation in the situation comedies with regards to their stereotypical portrayals and traditional social roles.

The paper contends that space envisioned in literature – which is always inextricably intertwined with time – has never been real. From the bucolic settings in Theocritus’s idylls (which have a pronounced mythical component) to the town in the heart of America in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which is narrated in the past tense to be as “once a town”; from the Ptolemaic concept of heaven and hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy to the “unreal cities” in Eliot’s The Waste Land; from the thatched cottages and country churches besides the vanishing village greens in Chaucer, Blake and Austen to the goings-on in the imagined county of Wessex in Hardy’s novels or the invented islands by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels to the retreat to the Walden Pond, to, the fading away of institutional space – whether in the phenomenal world or the space within the human heart – as in Larkin’s “Church Going”, literature worth reading has always been a complex record of what we were (the vanished time-space) to what might become of us in the dystopic time-space narrated with all the horror on the screen that collapses the boundaries between the actual and the virtual. The paper attempts to contemplate on some of these points.

This article seeks to explore the parallels between the spatial turn embraced by contemporary literary theory and the so-called textual turn in architecture. More specifically, links between the contemporary developments of architectural theory and practice and literary criticism are established. In order to highlight the nature and origin of the connection between these two contemporary tendencies, this paper draws on a number of authoritative texts of both literary criticism as well as architectural theory, predominantly within the Anglo-American context. Architecture is presented from the viewpoint of the 20th and 21st centuries, which accentuates its liberation from a purely formal understanding by emphasizing the human involvement in its interpretation. The conception and structuring of physical spaces are therefore regarded as conditioned by processes similar to those involved in the construction of meaning in language and literature. Thus, while literary studies benefits from the extension of its field of study through the inclusion (and contemporary primacy) of the spatial point of view, architectural criticism invites active participation in the construction of its meaning, in other words, its reading. The processes of the mutual influencing and enrichment of both the textual turn in architecture and the spatial turn in literary studies is exemplified by means of contemporary architectural works that embody the synergic relationship of the two traditionally separate fields – (literary) text and architecture.