Abstract Coffee was a foreign product in Britain, only introduced during the Post-Medieval period. The introduction was not smooth as it was viewed as a drink from the Moors or the Turks. Two groups emerged – one favouring coffee and one deriding it – and the conflicts were depicted in books, pamphlets, and leaflets of that era. Coffee faced opposition from other beverage sellers as it became a threat to their existing businesses. During its initial days, there was even a call for a baptism of the drink to wash out its “Satanic influence”. Coffee, seen as a medicine in its earlier days in Britain, became an essential part of everyday life in the late 17 th century. Coffee houses became a place for public gatherings where social, political, and business discussions took place. This paper will explore the discussions and debates revolving around coffee in 17 th -Century English Literature.
{"title":"Arguments and Counterarguments for and against Coffee in 17<sup>th</sup>-Century English Literature","authors":"Ashfaque Ahmad Shovon","doi":"10.2478/pjes-2023-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/pjes-2023-0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Coffee was a foreign product in Britain, only introduced during the Post-Medieval period. The introduction was not smooth as it was viewed as a drink from the Moors or the Turks. Two groups emerged – one favouring coffee and one deriding it – and the conflicts were depicted in books, pamphlets, and leaflets of that era. Coffee faced opposition from other beverage sellers as it became a threat to their existing businesses. During its initial days, there was even a call for a baptism of the drink to wash out its “Satanic influence”. Coffee, seen as a medicine in its earlier days in Britain, became an essential part of everyday life in the late 17 th century. Coffee houses became a place for public gatherings where social, political, and business discussions took place. This paper will explore the discussions and debates revolving around coffee in 17 th -Century English Literature.","PeriodicalId":402791,"journal":{"name":"Prague Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857684","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 Critical engagement with and intersections of Japanese and African literatures are burgeoning. In pre-colonial African society, a lawful action was that action that took into consideration the common good expressed in the spirit of Ubuntu. Interestingly, Japanese literature and African literature share this universal character in common. Ubuntu intersects with the Japanese philosophy of Nagomi which emphasises harmony and balance thereby creating a nexus of transcultural hybridity. This paper examines Ubuntu and Nagomi as transcultural motifs in stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Nagai Kafu, and Uno Koji in Akutagawa and Others: Three Japanese Short Stories to highlight ideological and law-oriented similarities. Carl Jung’s Persona-Archetype is privileged in this study because it accounts for the recurring images of Ubuntu and Nagomi in the public life of the characters. These cultural images help them to mitigate defiant conducts which violate the fundamental human rights and life purpose of other characters. In Nagai Kafu’s “Behind the Prison” , the motif of physical and psychological imprisonment is eye-catching as the narrator writes His Excellency expressing his frustration at the awful state of things in his Japanese society. Uno Koji’s “Closet LLB” interrogates the imperatives of choice and identity while Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s “General Kim” is a story based on the history of Japan and its neighbour, Korea. In the stories, the protagonists and other characters act heroically in ways that evince the tenets of Ubuntu and Nagomi. Their heroic actions allay the fears of their vulnerable compatriots and protect their fundamental human rights.
{"title":"Stimulating the Law through Ubuntu and Nagomi in Three Japanese Short Stories","authors":"Gabriel Kosiso Okonkwo","doi":"10.2478/pjes-2023-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/pjes-2023-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Critical engagement with and intersections of Japanese and African literatures are burgeoning. In pre-colonial African society, a lawful action was that action that took into consideration the common good expressed in the spirit of Ubuntu. Interestingly, Japanese literature and African literature share this universal character in common. Ubuntu intersects with the Japanese philosophy of Nagomi which emphasises harmony and balance thereby creating a nexus of transcultural hybridity. This paper examines Ubuntu and Nagomi as transcultural motifs in stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Nagai Kafu, and Uno Koji in Akutagawa and Others: Three Japanese Short Stories to highlight ideological and law-oriented similarities. Carl Jung’s Persona-Archetype is privileged in this study because it accounts for the recurring images of Ubuntu and Nagomi in the public life of the characters. These cultural images help them to mitigate defiant conducts which violate the fundamental human rights and life purpose of other characters. In Nagai Kafu’s “Behind the Prison” , the motif of physical and psychological imprisonment is eye-catching as the narrator writes His Excellency expressing his frustration at the awful state of things in his Japanese society. Uno Koji’s “Closet LLB” interrogates the imperatives of choice and identity while Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s “General Kim” is a story based on the history of Japan and its neighbour, Korea. In the stories, the protagonists and other characters act heroically in ways that evince the tenets of Ubuntu and Nagomi. Their heroic actions allay the fears of their vulnerable compatriots and protect their fundamental human rights.","PeriodicalId":402791,"journal":{"name":"Prague Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857672","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 This paper addresses the issue of the loss of the real in the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro as a contemporary author whose thought line is still in progress. His approach to this issue is anti-capitalist as he questions the so-called scientific advancement led by cash-oriented capitalists and industrialists. His writing seeks to strip the veil of the murderous nature of this kind of science. He blames it for killing the real and creating a world of simulations. He animadverts upon dystopian spaces where he holds postmodern scientific knowledge responsible for the digression of the natural course of life and lays bare the secrets behind the replacement of the real with the simulated by drawing attention to such debatable topics as human cloning, cosmetic surgeries and artificial intelligence. In terms of methodology of analysis, this paper is primarily based on a close examination of the author’s literary texts: two novels (Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun) and three short stories from Nocturnes (“Malvern Hills”, “Nocturne” and “Crooner”). Postmodernist concepts have been of great relevance to the analysis of these texts, for his fiction could not be approached in isolation from the realities of the postmodern era where it’s produced. Equally, bearing in mind the author’s socio-ethnic and historical background, the society where he lives and the politico-cultural transformations of the world aTher the Second World War plays an important role in the analysis of his texts.
{"title":"The Loss of the Real in Kazuo Ishiguro’s <i>Never Let Me Go</i>, <i>Klara and the Sun</i> and <i>Nocturnes</i>","authors":"El Habib El Hadari","doi":"10.2478/pjes-2023-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/pjes-2023-0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper addresses the issue of the loss of the real in the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro as a contemporary author whose thought line is still in progress. His approach to this issue is anti-capitalist as he questions the so-called scientific advancement led by cash-oriented capitalists and industrialists. His writing seeks to strip the veil of the murderous nature of this kind of science. He blames it for killing the real and creating a world of simulations. He animadverts upon dystopian spaces where he holds postmodern scientific knowledge responsible for the digression of the natural course of life and lays bare the secrets behind the replacement of the real with the simulated by drawing attention to such debatable topics as human cloning, cosmetic surgeries and artificial intelligence. In terms of methodology of analysis, this paper is primarily based on a close examination of the author’s literary texts: two novels (Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun) and three short stories from Nocturnes (“Malvern Hills”, “Nocturne” and “Crooner”). Postmodernist concepts have been of great relevance to the analysis of these texts, for his fiction could not be approached in isolation from the realities of the postmodern era where it’s produced. Equally, bearing in mind the author’s socio-ethnic and historical background, the society where he lives and the politico-cultural transformations of the world aTher the Second World War plays an important role in the analysis of his texts.","PeriodicalId":402791,"journal":{"name":"Prague Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857682","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 This paper aims to explore the migration of narrative elements from four medieval Welsh tales known as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi into four recent Englishlanguage novels which are part of Welsh publisher Seren’s series New Stories from the Mabinogion. Russel Celyn Jones’s The Ninth Wave , Owen Sheers’s White Ravens , Lloyd Jones’s See How They Run , and Gwyneth Lewis’s The Meat Tree bear an explicit textual relationship to the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a textual whole of unknown authorship. This affords an opportunity to examine the workings of what constitutes a textual tradition, both diachronically and synchronically. The article relies on Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal’s structuralist theory of narrative, on Welsh philologist Sioned Davies’s analyses of the medieval tales, and on Slovak literary scholar Anton Popovič’s view of tradition in terms of prototexts and metatexts. The methodology chosen consists of identifying textual variables and invariables in order to capture possible ways of examining relationships between related texts of different periods and languages within a corpus of linguistically encoded messages of a geographically defined community.
{"title":"New stories from the Mabinogion and Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi: Texts, Narratives and Tradition<sup>1</sup>","authors":"Hynek Daniel Janoušek","doi":"10.2478/pjes-2023-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/pjes-2023-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper aims to explore the migration of narrative elements from four medieval Welsh tales known as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi into four recent Englishlanguage novels which are part of Welsh publisher Seren’s series New Stories from the Mabinogion. Russel Celyn Jones’s The Ninth Wave , Owen Sheers’s White Ravens , Lloyd Jones’s See How They Run , and Gwyneth Lewis’s The Meat Tree bear an explicit textual relationship to the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a textual whole of unknown authorship. This affords an opportunity to examine the workings of what constitutes a textual tradition, both diachronically and synchronically. The article relies on Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal’s structuralist theory of narrative, on Welsh philologist Sioned Davies’s analyses of the medieval tales, and on Slovak literary scholar Anton Popovič’s view of tradition in terms of prototexts and metatexts. The methodology chosen consists of identifying textual variables and invariables in order to capture possible ways of examining relationships between related texts of different periods and languages within a corpus of linguistically encoded messages of a geographically defined community.","PeriodicalId":402791,"journal":{"name":"Prague Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857683","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 This paper explores the use of the passive in present-day British English, focusing on its register-specific lexico-grammatical patterns. The interaction of the grammatical structure, lexis, phraseology and register is examined on the basis of two sub-corpora of the British National Corpus 2014 – academic prose and informal conversation. The results have corroborated the findings of previous studies in that the pattern ‘BE / GET V-ed’ is populated by verbal participial forms which create a cline with departicipial adjectives. The communicative needs of registers have been shown to have a decisive impact on the frequency of passive patterns and the specific lexical choices associated with the patterns. In both registers, the ‘BE / GET V-ed’ patterns appear to constitute the core of larger fixed phraseological units, e.g., can’t be bothered to/with, or it should be noted that .
摘要本文探讨了现代英国英语中被动语态的使用，重点研究了其特定语域的词汇语法模式。本文以2014年英国国家语料库学术性散文和非正式会话两个子语料库为基础，考察了语法结构、词汇、短语和语域之间的相互作用。结果证实了之前的研究结果，即“BE / GET V-ed”模式由动词分词形式填充，这些分词形式与去分词形容词形成了一个渐变。语域的交际需要对被动模式的频率和与之相关的特定词汇选择有决定性的影响。在这两个语域中，“BE / GET V-ed”模式似乎构成了更大的固定短语单位的核心，例如，can ' t BE bother to/with，或者应该注意到。
{"title":"The Passive across Two Registers of Present-Day British English: A Corpus-Based Lexico-Grammatical Perspective","authors":"Markéta Malá, Zuzana Ježková","doi":"10.2478/pjes-2023-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/pjes-2023-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper explores the use of the passive in present-day British English, focusing on its register-specific lexico-grammatical patterns. The interaction of the grammatical structure, lexis, phraseology and register is examined on the basis of two sub-corpora of the British National Corpus 2014 – academic prose and informal conversation. The results have corroborated the findings of previous studies in that the pattern ‘BE / GET V-ed’ is populated by verbal participial forms which create a cline with departicipial adjectives. The communicative needs of registers have been shown to have a decisive impact on the frequency of passive patterns and the specific lexical choices associated with the patterns. In both registers, the ‘BE / GET V-ed’ patterns appear to constitute the core of larger fixed phraseological units, e.g., can’t be bothered to/with, or it should be noted that .","PeriodicalId":402791,"journal":{"name":"Prague Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857671","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 This paper examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ecophilosophy in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by focusing on his various representations of the natural environment and the human relationship to it. It suggests that the story reflects his belief that nature is divinely arranged and that humanity should protect rather than manipulate its systems. From his perspective, the disruption of natural systems would not only cause the extinction of many animal species but also endanger human life and existence on earth. The paper further suggests that Hawthorne promotes a view of nature as a living organism whose entities possess souls and spirits. Their capacity to have feelings and emotions makes them entitled to moral respect and consideration. In its study of the author’s environmental values and ethics, the essay claims that Hawthorne advocates the idea that human beings do not occupy a privileged position in the universe and that they are not superior or more important than nonhumans. In contrast to the Biblical vision of humankind, he portrays humans as weak and flawed creatures that cannot attain divine perfection. For these reasons, the paper asserts that “Rappaccini’s Daughter” exhibits Hawthorne’s deep ecological awareness and underlines his stature as a pioneer of American literary environmentalism.
{"title":"Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Ecophilosophy in “Rappaccini’s Daughter”","authors":"Sabri Mnassar","doi":"10.2478/pjes-2022-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/pjes-2022-0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ecophilosophy in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by focusing on his various representations of the natural environment and the human relationship to it. It suggests that the story reflects his belief that nature is divinely arranged and that humanity should protect rather than manipulate its systems. From his perspective, the disruption of natural systems would not only cause the extinction of many animal species but also endanger human life and existence on earth. The paper further suggests that Hawthorne promotes a view of nature as a living organism whose entities possess souls and spirits. Their capacity to have feelings and emotions makes them entitled to moral respect and consideration. In its study of the author’s environmental values and ethics, the essay claims that Hawthorne advocates the idea that human beings do not occupy a privileged position in the universe and that they are not superior or more important than nonhumans. In contrast to the Biblical vision of humankind, he portrays humans as weak and flawed creatures that cannot attain divine perfection. For these reasons, the paper asserts that “Rappaccini’s Daughter” exhibits Hawthorne’s deep ecological awareness and underlines his stature as a pioneer of American literary environmentalism.","PeriodicalId":402791,"journal":{"name":"Prague Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123935666","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 Speculative fiction, containing speculative elements based on supposition and imagination, changes the dynamics of what is real or possible as we perceive them in our current world and then surmises the likely consequences. Litterateurs have employed speculative fiction as a means of suggesting the latent possibilities and promises for our immediate reality which are not yet enacted or materialised. Accordingly, female writers of feminist speculative fiction, particularly from the 1970s onwards, have used this genre as an effective tool both to expose and to interrogate the oppressive status quo and the normative ethos of the conventional power relation between the sexes prevailing at present. In keeping with this, Naomi Alderman, in her Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017 winning novel The Power, strategically flips the current power structure between the sexes on its head by investing the women, primarily adolescent girls, with the unforeseen yet inherent power of electrocuting men which ultimately results in a Cataclysm initiating a new world order ruled and dominated by empowered women some time in the future. This paper aims at exploring how Alderman, a staunch feminist, purposefully demonstrates in The Power that her novel’s fictional dystopia, though macabre and gruesome, is, in essence, a fairly accurate representation as well as a critique of the hierarchical gender relationship as it is prevalent in our present reality.
{"title":"Naomi Alderman’s The Power: A Speculative Feminist Dystopian Fiction Mirroring the Here and Now","authors":"T. Sen","doi":"10.2478/pjes-2022-0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/pjes-2022-0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Speculative fiction, containing speculative elements based on supposition and imagination, changes the dynamics of what is real or possible as we perceive them in our current world and then surmises the likely consequences. Litterateurs have employed speculative fiction as a means of suggesting the latent possibilities and promises for our immediate reality which are not yet enacted or materialised. Accordingly, female writers of feminist speculative fiction, particularly from the 1970s onwards, have used this genre as an effective tool both to expose and to interrogate the oppressive status quo and the normative ethos of the conventional power relation between the sexes prevailing at present. In keeping with this, Naomi Alderman, in her Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017 winning novel The Power, strategically flips the current power structure between the sexes on its head by investing the women, primarily adolescent girls, with the unforeseen yet inherent power of electrocuting men which ultimately results in a Cataclysm initiating a new world order ruled and dominated by empowered women some time in the future. This paper aims at exploring how Alderman, a staunch feminist, purposefully demonstrates in The Power that her novel’s fictional dystopia, though macabre and gruesome, is, in essence, a fairly accurate representation as well as a critique of the hierarchical gender relationship as it is prevalent in our present reality.","PeriodicalId":402791,"journal":{"name":"Prague Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127818119","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 This paper seeks to carry out an analysis of the ekphrastic and intertextual dialogue in the character of Mariana in both Alfred Lord Tennyson’s homonymous poem and its subsequent pictorial representation in a painting by John Everett Millais. The character of Mariana is taken from Shakespeare’s comedy, Measure for Measure, which was published in the First Folio in 1623. By contrast, in 1832, Lord Tennyson introduces the character in his homonymous poem, “Mariana”, as a woman who continuously laments her lack of connection to society. Through interfigurality, Tennyson opts to present her as a “tragic” heroine and she is depicted from a pessimistic perspective. The process of interfigurality entails a conversion stage of reverse ekphrasis through which Shakespeare’s source text is turned into another text, Tennyson’s poem. This interaction between both texts is later turned into two visual expressions. In doing so, both texts are later transferred into John Everett Millais’s painting. Millais’s intertextual dialogue with Tennyson’s poem and Shakespeare’s play involves a process of reverse ekphrasis. Taking this approach, this paper will analyse the ekphrastic and intertextual dialogue between the poem “Mariana” and its visual representation in Millais’s artistic manifestations.
{"title":"“Her tears fell with the dews at even”: The Ekphrastic and Intertextual Dialogue between Victorian Poetry and Pre-Raphaelite Painting","authors":"Rocío Moyano Rejano","doi":"10.2478/pjes-2022-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/pjes-2022-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper seeks to carry out an analysis of the ekphrastic and intertextual dialogue in the character of Mariana in both Alfred Lord Tennyson’s homonymous poem and its subsequent pictorial representation in a painting by John Everett Millais. The character of Mariana is taken from Shakespeare’s comedy, Measure for Measure, which was published in the First Folio in 1623. By contrast, in 1832, Lord Tennyson introduces the character in his homonymous poem, “Mariana”, as a woman who continuously laments her lack of connection to society. Through interfigurality, Tennyson opts to present her as a “tragic” heroine and she is depicted from a pessimistic perspective. The process of interfigurality entails a conversion stage of reverse ekphrasis through which Shakespeare’s source text is turned into another text, Tennyson’s poem. This interaction between both texts is later turned into two visual expressions. In doing so, both texts are later transferred into John Everett Millais’s painting. Millais’s intertextual dialogue with Tennyson’s poem and Shakespeare’s play involves a process of reverse ekphrasis. Taking this approach, this paper will analyse the ekphrastic and intertextual dialogue between the poem “Mariana” and its visual representation in Millais’s artistic manifestations.","PeriodicalId":402791,"journal":{"name":"Prague Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114768019","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 Modernist literature was obsessed with a metaphysical problem regarding the word. A series of formal and material experiments started to address the word’s self-referentiality and aesthetic autonomy, against the backdrop of a new sociocultural milieu in the early twentieth century. To discover how this materialisation of language explored the interplay of literary and artistic modernisms, this paper will critically scrutinise Mina Loy’s and James Joyce’s radical reforms of writing and try to answer the following questions: how did Loy’s multifarious artisthood and poem-writing exchange, interact with, and reinforce each other? As both were closely associated with avant-garde art movements between Europe and America, how did Joyce influence Loy’s refashioning of “torrential languages” (LoLB 88) as a creative model of linguistic experimentation? How did their visual aesthetics and experimental poetics help to declare the independence of language and the shape of aesthetic modernism in a new historical epoch?
{"title":"The Materialisation of “torrential languages” within the Avant-Garde: Mina Loy, James Joyce, and Aesthetic Modernism","authors":"Bowen Wang","doi":"10.2478/pjes-2022-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/pjes-2022-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Modernist literature was obsessed with a metaphysical problem regarding the word. A series of formal and material experiments started to address the word’s self-referentiality and aesthetic autonomy, against the backdrop of a new sociocultural milieu in the early twentieth century. To discover how this materialisation of language explored the interplay of literary and artistic modernisms, this paper will critically scrutinise Mina Loy’s and James Joyce’s radical reforms of writing and try to answer the following questions: how did Loy’s multifarious artisthood and poem-writing exchange, interact with, and reinforce each other? As both were closely associated with avant-garde art movements between Europe and America, how did Joyce influence Loy’s refashioning of “torrential languages” (LoLB 88) as a creative model of linguistic experimentation? How did their visual aesthetics and experimental poetics help to declare the independence of language and the shape of aesthetic modernism in a new historical epoch?","PeriodicalId":402791,"journal":{"name":"Prague Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126380264","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 Wole Soyinka and Samuel Beckett apparently occupy distinct places in the literary space, in all ramifications. Specifically, while the former’s dramaturgy is definable within the context of the traditional convention of playwriting, otherwise known as well-made plays, the latter is inherently non-conformist in this regard. Hence, the effort in this paper was to locate a nexus in their writings, using two of their plays, Death and the King’s Horseman and Endgame, respectively. Theatre of the Absurd, as an offshoot of existentialism, provided the ground for the critical intersection of philosophical and ideological geometry of the two plays. The critical paradigm essentially relied on the interconnectivity of absurdist writings and existentialist thoughts, as the holistic context which fundamentally defines modernism, to assess what is conceived as modernist theatricality in the two plays. Building on the modernists’ interrogation of man’s existence and essence in the world in which existential meaning is presumably lost, the paper concluded that the two texts are largely intoned with modernist thoughts, regardless of their formal or structural distinction. It arrived at this by placing particular emphasis on the playwrights’ attempts, in these works, at demanding a more spontaneous response to the question of the essence of the individual and his/her place in the universe in which meaning in existence, in the modernist sense, is believed to have been lost.
{"title":"Existential Dualism and Absurdity: Modernist Theatricality in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame","authors":"Issa Omotosho Garuba","doi":"10.2478/pjes-2022-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2478/pjes-2022-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Wole Soyinka and Samuel Beckett apparently occupy distinct places in the literary space, in all ramifications. Specifically, while the former’s dramaturgy is definable within the context of the traditional convention of playwriting, otherwise known as well-made plays, the latter is inherently non-conformist in this regard. Hence, the effort in this paper was to locate a nexus in their writings, using two of their plays, Death and the King’s Horseman and Endgame, respectively. Theatre of the Absurd, as an offshoot of existentialism, provided the ground for the critical intersection of philosophical and ideological geometry of the two plays. The critical paradigm essentially relied on the interconnectivity of absurdist writings and existentialist thoughts, as the holistic context which fundamentally defines modernism, to assess what is conceived as modernist theatricality in the two plays. Building on the modernists’ interrogation of man’s existence and essence in the world in which existential meaning is presumably lost, the paper concluded that the two texts are largely intoned with modernist thoughts, regardless of their formal or structural distinction. It arrived at this by placing particular emphasis on the playwrights’ attempts, in these works, at demanding a more spontaneous response to the question of the essence of the individual and his/her place in the universe in which meaning in existence, in the modernist sense, is believed to have been lost.","PeriodicalId":402791,"journal":{"name":"Prague Journal of English Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122821027","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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