E-book details

Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 11 (2021)

Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 11 (2021)

Liam Gearon

Ebook

The main section of issue 11 (2021), edited by Liam Gearon, deals with the entangled relationship between literature, security, and intelligence. Like other forms of media, books have been used as part of the ideological and intelligence apparatus; authors have been perceived as a physical or ideological threat by dictatorial regimes and targeted alongside intellectuals, to be undermined or even eliminated. While propaganda itself can be considered a weapon of war, books and bombshells often share the same ideological trajectory, particularly during times of war: the cultural always forms a backdrop to conflict. This volume of Text Matters offers a broad treatment of various alignments between the notions of security and cultural production. The subjects addressed include the figure of the spy and themes related to espionage, e.g. in the works of Ciaran Carson; political, cultural and religious destabilizations in (post)Troubles-era Northern Ireland in the poetry of Paul Muldoon and the fiction of Anna Burns; populist and fictional notions of the migrant as "terrorist" in contemporary film and literature; shifting ideas of security in dystopian, post-apocalyptic narratives with a feminist twist (Mad Max: Fury Road); a psychology of security in a reinterpretation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels. The remaining three sections, titled "Bodies, Traumas, Transgressions," "Pop Cultural Encounters," and "Literary Continuities" offer a broad array of subjects, ranging from the fictions of Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut to the sculptures of Kiki Smith and Shakesperean plays. The concluding part consists of four reviews (of Agnieszka Łowczanin's A Dark Transfusion: The Polish Literary Response to Early English Gothic: Anna Mostowska Reads Ann Radcliffe, Nolen Gertz's Nihilism, Don DeLillo's The Silence, and Natalie Crohn Schmitt's Performing Commedia dell'Arte, 1570-1630). The issue is dedicated to the memory of the journal's Founder, Dorota Filipczak (1963-2021).

Alison Jasper (University of Stirling)

Professor Dorota Filipczak In Memoriam

 

LITERATURE AND SECURITY

Liam Francis Gearon (University of Oxford)

Editorial: Literature and Security

 

Grzegorz Czemiel (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin)

“Brought up to Live Double Lives”: Intelligence and Espionage as Literary and Philosophical Figures in Ciaran Carson’s Exchange Place and For All We Know

 

Wit Pietrzak (University of Lodz)

Shibboleths of Grief: Paul Muldoon’s “The Triumph”

 

Ryszard Bartnik (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)

Northern Ireland’s Interregnum. Anna Burns’s Depiction of a (Post)-Troubles State of (In)security

 

Vincent Pacheco (De La Salle University, Manila) and Jeremy De Chavez (University of Macau)

“. . .delivered from the lie of being truth”: The Affective Force of Disinformation, Stickiness and Dissensus in Randy Ribay’s Patron Saints of Nothing

 

Minu Susan Koshy (Mar Thoma College for Women, Kerala)

Transforming the Ich-Du to the Ich-Es: The Migrant as “Terrorist” in Kabir Khan’s New York and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

 

Anna Reglińska-Jemioł (University of Gdańsk)

Victim-Warriors and Restorers—Heroines in the Post-Apocalyptic World of Mad Max: Fury Road

Lech Zdunkiewicz (University of Wrocław)

Aligning with Sociopaths: Character Engagement Strategies in Highsmith’s and Minghella’s Talented Mr. Ripleys

 

POP CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS

Philip Hayward (University of Technology Sydney)

Mer-Hagography: The Erasure, Return and Resonance of Splash’s Older Mermaid

 

Magdalena Cieślak (University of Lodz)

From Romero to Romeo—Shakespeare’s Star-Crossed Lovers Meeting Zombedy in Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies

 

Nurten Birlik (Middle East Technical University, Ankara)

Lacanian Implications of Departures in Zemeckis’s Beowulf from Beowulf, the Old English Epic

 

Kenneth Eckert (Hanyang University ERICA, Korea)

Hercule Poirot and the Tricky Performers of Stereotypes in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express

 

Katarzyna Ostalska (University of Lodz)

Dystopias in the Realm of Popular Culture: Introducing Elements of Posthuman and Postfeminist Discourse to the Mass Audience Female Readership in Cecelia Ahern’s Roar (2018)

 

BODIES, TRAUMAS, TRANSGRESSIONS

Justyna Stępień (University of Lodz)

Performing More-Than-Human Corporeal Connections in Kiki Smith’s Sculpture

 

Alicja Piechucka (University of Lodz)

“Never Trust a Survivor”: Historical Trauma, Postmemory and the Armenian Genocide in Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard

 

Nahid Fakhrshafaie (Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman) and Alireza Bahremand (Velayat University)

“My Monster Self”: Violence and Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder

 

Małgorzata Hołda (University of Lodz)

Narrative, Insecure Equilibrium and the Imperative to Understand: A Hermeneutics of Woundedness

 

Irina Rabinovich (Holon Institute of Technology)

Tragic Victims of Mania a Potu (“Madness from Drink”): A Study of Literary Nineteenth-Century Female Drunkards

 

LITERARY CONTINUITIES

Małgorzata Grzegorzewska (University of Warsaw)

The Gospel of Divine Mercy in King Lear

 

Andrzej Wicher (University of Lodz)

Griselda’s Afterlife, or the Relationship between Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale and the Tale of Magic

 

Robert Tindol (Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in Guangzhou)

Mesmerization with the Lights On: Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”

 

Monika Kocot (University of Lodz)

One Hundred Frogs in Steve McCaffery’s The Basho Variations

 

Chhandita Das (Indian Institute of Technology Patna) and Priyanka Tripathi (Indian Institute of Technology Patna)

Conceptualizing In-Text “Kshetra”: Postcolonial Allahabad’s Cultural Geography in Neelum Saran Gour’s Allahabad Aria and Invisible Ink

 

Mir Mohammad Khademnabi (University of Maragheh)

Episodic Literary Movement and Translation: Ideology Embodied in Prefaces

 

REVIEWS

David Punter (University of Bristol)

A Review of Agnieszka Łowczanin, A Dark Transfusion: The Polish Literary Response to Early English Gothic: Anna Mostowska Reads Ann Radcliffe (Peter Lang, 2018)

 

Pedro Querido (University of Lisbon)

Thinking about Thinking Nothing: A Review of Nolen Gertz’s Nihilism (MIT P, 2019)

 

Mark Tardi (University of Lodz)

“Whenever there’s too much technology”: A Review of Don DeLillo’s The Silence (Scribner, 2020)

 

Piotr Morawski (University of Warsaw)

A Review of Natalie Crohn Schmitt, Performing Commedia dell’Arte, 1570–1630 (Routledge, 2019)

  • Title: Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 11 (2021)
  • Author: Liam Gearon
  • ISBN: 2084-574X, 2084574X
  • Date of issue: 2021-11-22
  • Format: Ebook
  • Item ID: e_4gm2
  • Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego