Naukowe i akademickie

Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 8 (2018)

Wit Pietrzak

Issue 8 (2018) of Text Matters is a collection of texts on diverse topics within literary and cultural studies, focusing on Ireland and including the literary explorations of American and Canadian identities. The main section, "Engaging Ireland: History, Politics and Aesthetics," edited by Wit Pietrzak, features essays critically examining Irish history and culture through literary analysis. Among the articles in this section, we can find the analysis of Kevin McCarthy's Peeler as a post revisionist novel, a re-evaluation of George Moore's role in the Gaelic Revival, as well as articles on Colm Tóibin's Brooklyn, Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys, Michael Longley's poetry, the connection between gender issues, Irish poetry, and the Troubles, Frank Ormsby's poems on war and soldiers in A Northern Spring, Samuel Beckett's oeuvre, the Charabanc collective's Somewhere over the Balcony, and the coverage of the Irish Famine in the American press. The "Continuities" section concentrates on the portrayal of Jews in Chester Mystery Cycle plays, Alan Spence's play No Nothing, and the construction of otherness in modern sci-fi cinema. Articles in "Engaging American Identities" concern the artistic connection between Hart Crane and David Siqueiros, the General Council of the Chippewa's governance structure blending traditional and American systems, the representation of oppressive whiteness in Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress, the political potential of parataxis and Ron Silliman's New Sentence in disrupting conventional narratives, the perpetuation of white male supremacy through economic exploitation of black domestics as seen in V. F. Durr's memoirs, Laila Lalami's novel The Moor's Account, the literary experience of childhood and nostalgia, Josefina Niggli's Mexican Village exploring Mexican culture and border narratives through folklore, the concept of simulacrum in American art and photography, and the notion of hyperreality and the antihero in Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Finally, the "Canadiana" part discusses the works of Timothy Findley and Audrey Thomas. The issue concludes with three reviews (of John Berryman's Public Vision by Philip Coleman; Barry Shiels's W. B. Yeats and World Literature: The Subject of Poetry; and Stewart Parker's Hopdance), as well as Jadwiga Uchman's interview with Jan Jędrzejewski.

Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 9 (2019)

Aritha van Herk, Vanja Polić

Issue 9 (2019) of Text Matters, titled Roguery and (Sub)Versions, edited by Aritha van Herk (University of Calgary) and Vanja Polić (University of Zagreb), focuses on the figure of the new rogue as a personification of subversion in literature and film. Roguery is understood here both as a feature of characters who break up societal conformity through their creativity, and of texts which embrace liminality and defy discursive boundaries. These visions of roguery are addressed by the volume's first section, "New Versions of Roguery," which contains papers dealing with Bruce Chatwin's rogue appropriation of the concept of songlines, the representation of women manipulating others through wealth, the rogue protagonist of the film Monster, mobility in the road movies Scorpio Rising and Duel as well as fiction by Guy Vanderhaeghe, the self-fashioning rogue in a short story by Aleksandar Hemon and in Ned Buntline's fiction, rogue textuality in comics, a subversion of roguery in Patrick deWitt's novel, and roguery understood as disappearance. The second section, "(Sub)Versions and (Re)Visions," builds on the rogue's subversive potential, and includes papers on the figure of Mary Magdalene in Michele Roberts's book, the figure of the heretic in the secular age, life writing by Joe Brainard, the Irish noir by Lisa McInerney, and the hardboiled fiction of Ross Macdonald. The following section called "Negotiating Traumas" contains essays that discuss the ability of performance art to heal trauma, the figure of the trickster in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel, as well as trauma in hag horror. Finally, "Liminal Spaces" includes papers focusing on the environmental disaster in the poetry of Robert Minhinnick, spatial representations in J. G. Ballard's novel, a Virilian reading of Don DeLillo, and the development of American improvisational theatre. The volume ends with reviews of works by Sam Solnick and Bret Easton Ellis.