Volume 13, Issue 2

2018

Data publikacji: 19.07.2018

Licencja: CC BY-NC-ND

Redakcja

Redaktor naczelny Celina Juda

Sekretarz redakcji Dominika Kaniecka

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A Half-Formed Thing, a Fully Formed Style. Repetition in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

Katarzyna Bazarnik

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, Volume 13, Issue 2, 2018, s. 77 - 88

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.18.007.8629

The article begins with addressing alleged similarities between Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and James Joyce’s works to suggest that they cannot be systematically sustained. Her much praised, experimental style relies on the opposite of Joycean richness. Limited vocabulary, jumbled word order, and lexical and phrasal repetitions are one of the most salient features of her style. McBride applies rhetorical variants of conduplicatio to create an emotionally powerful idiom to narrate an anti-Bildungsroman about a loving sister and her dying brother, her sexual abuse by an uncle and final suicide. So despite some thematic parallels, and linguistic experimentation, A Girl bears only superficial resemblance to the modernist master, which is additionally evidenced by stylometric findings.

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Michèle Roberts’s Mud and the Practice of Feminist “Re-Vision”

Marta Goszczyńska

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, Volume 13, Issue 2, 2018, s. 89 - 96

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.18.008.8630

In Michèle Roberts’s Mud (2010), writing emerges as an act of creative recycling, allowing pre-existing texts to be moulded into new forms and infused with new meanings. In the opening, title story, the idea is expressed through the image of mud, whose curly brown flakes falling off shoe-soles are seen as “bits of writing” − fragments of letters, commas and full stops − to be pieced together into “something new”. This process of literary replenishment is repeatedly witnessed by the readers of Mud as they come across characters, scenes and motifs borrowed from such well-known literary texts as Beowulf, Tristan and Isolde, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary and Nana or encounter a host of actual historical figures, including George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Claude Monet, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and Colette, in stories that set out to retell incidents from their biographies. Offering new versions of these literary and historical texts, Roberts engages in an act of feminist revision as outlined in Adrienne Rich’s seminal 1979 essay, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision. Rich describes the practice of feminist rewriting as “an act of survival”, whose essence is “not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us”. Indeed, in story after story in the collection, this is precisely what Roberts seems determined to do.

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The Past as a Partitura: Peter Carey’s Historical Novels

Barbara Klonowska

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, Volume 13, Issue 2, 2018, s. 97 - 106

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.18.009.8631

In a literary text, repetition of previous motifs may constitute the poetics of a text, shape its themes and contribute to its interpretation. The following article will try to trace these aspects of repetition in four historical novels by Peter Carey which use it to both structure their texts and convey their specific political ideas. Referring to Oscar and Lucinda, Jack Maggs, True History of the Kelly Gang and Parrot and Olivier in America, it argues that Carey’s fiction uses repetition as a strategy to both inscribe his works in literary and cultural traditions and to revisit and revise them in order to make room for other readings and interpretations.

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The Eternal Recurrence of (Hi)Story: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

Bożena Kucała

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, Volume 13, Issue 2, 2018, s. 107 - 115

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.18.010.8632

This article analyses the structural and thematic repetitions in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Similar motifs and character types are re-used in the novel’s circular rather than linear structure. It is argued that, while staging a dialectic of sameness and difference, Cloud Atlas eschews the Platonic hierarchy of a model and its copy and blurs the distinction between the real and the fictional. All the six interlocked narratives that build the novel may be regarded as artefacts, remediated and encased in other artefacts. The same material is reconfigured in an endless cycle, which, as the article argues, harks back to the second, Nietzschean model of repetition distinguished by J. Hillis Miller in Fiction and Repetition.

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Two Layers of Repetition in Kate Morton’s The House at Riverton

Kinga Latała

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, Volume 13, Issue 2, 2018, s. 117 - 124

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.18.011.8633

The article discusses the two layers of repetition in Kate Morton’s The House at Riverton (2006) and their mutual correlations. The first layer concerns the setting of some parts of the novel, namely the 1910s and 1920s. The past is relived in fiction, fuelled by the nostalgia for the pre-World War II days and the enduring interest in early 20th-century aristocrats, socialites, and war poets. The second layer involves the reconstruction of the past by means of a historical film and the reminiscences of Grace, the protagonist, who at the dusk of her life attempts to revive the tumultuous events she witnessed in her youth.

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Formal Repetition as a Device Reinforcing the Theme of Powerlessness

Sabina Sosin

Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, Volume 13, Issue 2, 2018, s. 125 - 132

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843933ST.18.012.8634

Innovative authors who explore various narrative techniques have often been inclined to tell one story from several different perspectives. The aim of this paper is to analyze formal repetition employed in three contemporary narratives: J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007), Dariusz Orszulewski’s Jezus nigdy nie był aż taki blady (2013), as well as House Mother Normal (1971) by these authors’ avant-garde predecessor, B.S Johnson. Johnson was an author ahead of his time, better fitted in the literary discourse of the 21st century, which is proven by his presently republished oeuvre having gained fresh literary significance among both scholars and readers. Each of the novels subject to analysis in this study is compiled from thoughts and observations of the same events but originating from different characters. Their individual accounts, typographically separated from each other, create a multitude of perspectives on the mental and physical inadequacy felt by the characters.

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Słowa kluczowe: Irish novel, Eimear McBride, James Joyce, repetition, style., rewriting, retelling, feminist rewriting, Michèle Roberts, Mud: Stories of Sex and Love., repetition, music, the past, post-colonialism, Peter Carey, historical novel., David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, repetition, historical cycle, eternal recurrence., repetition, nostalgia, biopic, reminiscences, reconstruction, Kate Morton., multiple perspectives, formal repetition, B.S. Johnson, J.M. Coetzee, Dariusz Orszulewski.

Volume 13, Issue 2

2018 Następne

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2018