Abstract Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, first appearing as the opening poem to Lyrical Ballads, has proved to be highly enigmatic since its publication. The blending of supernatural and reality along with the intricacy of the underlying structure seem to have added to the complication. The present article is an attempt to read the poem through the lens of Algirdas Julien Greimas’s actantial model and semiotic square to shed some light on the semantic richness of the poem. The results seem in line with Coleridge’s idea of imagination as the Mariner’s imagination in co-presence with his will, along with the Moon as the source of Nature’s benignity and his muse, assist him with his object-value: the unity between man, Nature, and the Creator. Moreover, the Mariner’s suffering and atonement could be attributed to his moments of reasoning and free-will, devoid of imagination or spirituality and associated with the presence of the sun or diurnal elements. Greimas’s model offers the possibility to elucidate the moments of confusion as ‘void’ or ‘all’ phoric states of passion in which the absence of diurnal and nocturnal elements or their co-presence could justify the Mariner’s wanton murder of the Albatross or his survival.
{"title":"A Greimassian Reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner","authors":"F. Rahmani, Hossein Pirnajmuddin","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, first appearing as the opening poem to Lyrical Ballads, has proved to be highly enigmatic since its publication. The blending of supernatural and reality along with the intricacy of the underlying structure seem to have added to the complication. The present article is an attempt to read the poem through the lens of Algirdas Julien Greimas’s actantial model and semiotic square to shed some light on the semantic richness of the poem. The results seem in line with Coleridge’s idea of imagination as the Mariner’s imagination in co-presence with his will, along with the Moon as the source of Nature’s benignity and his muse, assist him with his object-value: the unity between man, Nature, and the Creator. Moreover, the Mariner’s suffering and atonement could be attributed to his moments of reasoning and free-will, devoid of imagination or spirituality and associated with the presence of the sun or diurnal elements. Greimas’s model offers the possibility to elucidate the moments of confusion as ‘void’ or ‘all’ phoric states of passion in which the absence of diurnal and nocturnal elements or their co-presence could justify the Mariner’s wanton murder of the Albatross or his survival.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":"66 1","pages":"201 - 223"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75294317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract 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.
{"title":"The Postcommunist Supplement: The Revision of Postcolonial Theory from the East European Quarter","authors":"B. Ștefănescu","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract 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.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":"3 9 1","pages":"139 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83096266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Although abortion was legalized in 1973 through the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, it is state legislatures that have ultimately acted as the final arbiters on the matter ever since. As a result, only over the course of the last decade, more than two hundred abortion restrictions have been enacted nationwide in the United States. As more and more restrictions are put in place in an attempt at policing women’s bodies, the practice that came to be known somewhat inappropriately as ‘abortion tourism’ is becoming increasingly common. More and more women travel across state lines in order to benefit from a safe procedure while evading the legal limits imposed upon them in their home states. This is even more acutely so in the case of young, under-age women, as only a few states do not have parental consent statutes covering abortion provisions. It is against this background that my article discusses two recent movies which tackle the issue of teen pregnancy and ‘abortion mobility,’ Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) and Unpregnant (2020). I look at how both travel narratives illustrate, in different genres and manners, the hurdles (young) women have to navigate to gain access to necessary medical care and expose the state-sanctioned obstacles to abortion in two stories about female friendship and empathy above all.
{"title":"Abortion Travels in Contemporary American Cinema: Parental Consent and the Bumpy Ride to Termination in Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s Unpregnant","authors":"Raluca Andreescu","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Although abortion was legalized in 1973 through the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, it is state legislatures that have ultimately acted as the final arbiters on the matter ever since. As a result, only over the course of the last decade, more than two hundred abortion restrictions have been enacted nationwide in the United States. As more and more restrictions are put in place in an attempt at policing women’s bodies, the practice that came to be known somewhat inappropriately as ‘abortion tourism’ is becoming increasingly common. More and more women travel across state lines in order to benefit from a safe procedure while evading the legal limits imposed upon them in their home states. This is even more acutely so in the case of young, under-age women, as only a few states do not have parental consent statutes covering abortion provisions. It is against this background that my article discusses two recent movies which tackle the issue of teen pregnancy and ‘abortion mobility,’ Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) and Unpregnant (2020). I look at how both travel narratives illustrate, in different genres and manners, the hurdles (young) women have to navigate to gain access to necessary medical care and expose the state-sanctioned obstacles to abortion in two stories about female friendship and empathy above all.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"117 - 138"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88874014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract When asked whether all texts are translatable, Roman Jakobson answered: “yes, to a certain extent” (qtd. in Hatim and Munday 16). Poetry in particular is notoriously difficult to translate due to its complexity and intricacies of form and meaning, on the one hand, and its cultural features, on the other. Over the years, poetry translation has been the key topic in many studies and articles that pinpoint concrete issues that may assist the translator during the three main stages of the translation process: source text analysis, linguistic transfer, and target text assessment. The present article tackles the issue of the translatability of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven into Romanian in terms of sound symbolism and orchestration with reference to Emil Gulian’s and Dan Botta’s translations. It also investigates the extent to which a particular case of sound symbolism known in the literature as phonaesthesia is a cross linguistic phenomenon and the ways in which it may become a tool in the translation process, given the complexity of the phonological structure of the poem.
{"title":"The Translatability of Poetry: Phonaesthesia, Sound Iconicity, Orchestration, and Aesthetic Function. A Case Study of Poe’s The Raven","authors":"Maria-Teodora Creangă","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2022-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2022-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract When asked whether all texts are translatable, Roman Jakobson answered: “yes, to a certain extent” (qtd. in Hatim and Munday 16). Poetry in particular is notoriously difficult to translate due to its complexity and intricacies of form and meaning, on the one hand, and its cultural features, on the other. Over the years, poetry translation has been the key topic in many studies and articles that pinpoint concrete issues that may assist the translator during the three main stages of the translation process: source text analysis, linguistic transfer, and target text assessment. The present article tackles the issue of the translatability of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven into Romanian in terms of sound symbolism and orchestration with reference to Emil Gulian’s and Dan Botta’s translations. It also investigates the extent to which a particular case of sound symbolism known in the literature as phonaesthesia is a cross linguistic phenomenon and the ways in which it may become a tool in the translation process, given the complexity of the phonological structure of the poem.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":"163 - 178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87030318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, Nation","authors":"Raluca-Georgiana Deaconeasa","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2021-0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2021-0023","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"162 - 165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85110326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight over the English Language","authors":"Adriana Neagu","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2021-0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2021-0026","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":"78 1","pages":"178 - 180"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80260110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract According to Giorgio Agamben, the Greek term for ‘habitual dwelling place,’ or ‘habit,’ is ethos. The rise to prominence in the twentieth century of the modern idea of the suburb, or ‘suburbia,’ held open the door to the potential realization of the American (and Canadian) dream ethos of universal home ownership. The tantalizing appeal of a the ideal of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ have become key terms in the Post World War Two pursuit of a mode of ‘dwelling’ linked to consumer capitalism. Yet for Frankfurt School critics such as Theodor W. Adorno, the pursuit of this suburban ideal induced a deep sense of ennui such that to feel ‘at home’ in such a suburban environment challenged the very foundations of the dwelling place of Western civilization. “It is part of morality,” Adorno concluded in his book, Minima Moralia, “not to be at home in one’s home.” This text is an exercise in examining this question of ‘dwelling’ and ‘home’ through an allegorical poetical focus (drawn from Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire) focusing on a newly completed suburb in the Canadian city of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
根据Giorgio Agamben的说法，希腊语中“习惯性居所”或“习惯”的意思是“ethos”。20世纪，现代郊区概念(suburbia)的兴起为实现美国(和加拿大)普遍拥有住房的梦想打开了大门。“家”和“家园”的理想诱人的吸引力已经成为二战后追求一种与消费资本主义相关的“居住”模式的关键术语。然而，对于法兰克福学派的批评家，如西奥多·阿多诺(Theodor W. Adorno)来说，对这种郊区理想的追求引发了一种深深的无聊感，以至于在这样一个郊区环境中感到“宾至如归”，挑战了西方文明居住地的基础。“这是道德的一部分，”阿多诺在他的书《最低道德》(Minima Moralia)中总结道，“不待在自己的家里。”这篇文章是通过讽喻的诗意焦点(取自沃尔特·本雅明和查尔斯·波德莱尔)来研究“居住”和“家”这个问题的练习，重点是加拿大新斯科舍省哈利法克斯市一个新建成的郊区。
{"title":"Homes for Canadians (II)","authors":"David Brian Howard","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2021-0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2021-0021","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract According to Giorgio Agamben, the Greek term for ‘habitual dwelling place,’ or ‘habit,’ is ethos. The rise to prominence in the twentieth century of the modern idea of the suburb, or ‘suburbia,’ held open the door to the potential realization of the American (and Canadian) dream ethos of universal home ownership. The tantalizing appeal of a the ideal of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ have become key terms in the Post World War Two pursuit of a mode of ‘dwelling’ linked to consumer capitalism. Yet for Frankfurt School critics such as Theodor W. Adorno, the pursuit of this suburban ideal induced a deep sense of ennui such that to feel ‘at home’ in such a suburban environment challenged the very foundations of the dwelling place of Western civilization. “It is part of morality,” Adorno concluded in his book, Minima Moralia, “not to be at home in one’s home.” This text is an exercise in examining this question of ‘dwelling’ and ‘home’ through an allegorical poetical focus (drawn from Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire) focusing on a newly completed suburb in the Canadian city of Halifax, Nova Scotia.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":"11 1","pages":"123 - 156"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87424457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Scottish Literature: Representing the Nation in the Age of the Post-National","authors":"Petronia Popa-Petrar","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2021-0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2021-0014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"1 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75827830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Guided by new materialist approaches to the memory of loss, this reading of Jackie Kay’s 1998 novel Trumpet surveys the affective permutations registered by different objects of remembrance in the Scottish-Nigerian writer’s fictional account of mourning. Exploring several material figurations of Black Scottishness in Kay’s writings, the essay derives its main theoretical framework from studies on blended subject-object ontologies, including Bill Brown’s critique of thingness, Maurizia Boscagli’s notion of the disruptive agency of stuff, and Mel Y Chen’s view of matter’s animacy, and discusses how the novel latches onto the role of things in anchoring memory and in helping humans work through bereavement.
{"title":"“Daft naff Scottish things”: Stuff, Waste and Memory Objects in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet","authors":"C. Borbély","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2021-0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2021-0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Guided by new materialist approaches to the memory of loss, this reading of Jackie Kay’s 1998 novel Trumpet surveys the affective permutations registered by different objects of remembrance in the Scottish-Nigerian writer’s fictional account of mourning. Exploring several material figurations of Black Scottishness in Kay’s writings, the essay derives its main theoretical framework from studies on blended subject-object ontologies, including Bill Brown’s critique of thingness, Maurizia Boscagli’s notion of the disruptive agency of stuff, and Mel Y Chen’s view of matter’s animacy, and discusses how the novel latches onto the role of things in anchoring memory and in helping humans work through bereavement.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"7 - 28"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73676578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract 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.
{"title":"Modernism, Postmodernism and the Nature of the Times: A Conversation with Randall Stevenson","authors":"Adriana Neagu","doi":"10.2478/abcsj-2021-0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2021-0020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract 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.","PeriodicalId":37404,"journal":{"name":"American, British and Canadian Studies","volume":"184 1","pages":"105 - 122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80522204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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