Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) is a prime specimen of post-Joycean heteroglossia in Irish fi ction. The novel exhibits a programmatic dialogical/intertextual orientation orchestrated with its own parodic and ironic modes, which makes McBride’s work uniquely capable of re-energizing Irish cultural tradition. Simultaneously, her novel contributes its own distinct voice to the impressive amplitude of artistic expressions which have emerged from Irish culture in the wake of Joyce’s writings. Mikhail Bahtin’s approach to the novel (as discussed in The Dialogic Imagination), in turn, is particularly relevant to McBride’s fiction because of her incorporation (as well as adaptation) of a variety of voices and perspectives. As a consequence, in A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, the categories of heteroglossia and dialogism appear to be responsible for creating and sustaining a vital cultural dimension, a dimension which is subject to being perpetually rewritten in the present, even though it crucially depends upon ur-texts from the past.  

The article describes some of the experiences of Ukrainian futurist Mykhail Semenko and Russian ego-futurist Basilisk Gnedov in the fi eld of visual poetry and their connection with folklore motifs. For a more holistic image of this problem, the text briefl y outlines Semenkov’s concept of “poesomalarstvo”, connected with the plastic appearance of the poetic text, as well as the general nature of linguistic and visual poetry experiments in Gnedov’s early works. There are also related aspects of the artistic practice of both poets, whose work to a certain extent had common origins. Folk roots in the poetry of both futurists are represented on the material of analysis of two early poems, which are an example of visual poetry.

In Poland quite obscure, Marlen Haushofer (1920–1970) was an Austrian writer whose artistic work fell on the 1950s and 1960s. In her lifetime neither the novels nor the shorter prose works she was an author of won much recognition. Only the 1980s and the intense feminist actions made literary critics have a new look at Haushofer’s works. Since that time she has been regarded as a representative of women’s writing. Her main characters are women going through their everyday problems, living in solitude, having their anxious moments, suff ering the consequences of wrong life choices and the eff ects of traditional and rigorous upbringing. What is not to be blotted out of their memories is wartime experiences. Even though they do not talk about it, those memories come flooding back as isolated pictures. There are more such pictures, as these are not only situations “experienced” from the family  life but also situations likely to happen, expressing thoughts that were concealed for many  years. In the novel The Wall (1963), the heroine, finding herself by sheer coincidence in a forest retreat, writes a report on a couple of months spent in extreme conditions. Writing is for her, on the one hand, a way of surviving and, on the other hand, it gives her the possibility of reflecting upon her whole life. The heroine of The Loft (1969) finds a place for herself in a house which shelters her from the seemingly well-ordered family life and in which she can devote herself to drawing without being controlled by anyone. She tries to find her true self, which is almost entirely alien to her. In her whole life she had a hard time that she withstood by keeping a diary. Haushofer narrates in a highly disciplined manner. She uses a limited number of stylistic devices but they are selected very carefully. In the end, we deal with extremely subjective and interesting prose writing.  

The article explores the problem of migration prose in Slovak literature and focuses on some aspects of Zuska Kepplová’s books: Buchty švabachom (Buns in the Schwabacher) and 57 km od Taškentu (57 km from Tashkent). Some characters of Kepplová’s debut prose, young immigrants from Central Europe living in their new countries, although realising their inferior status of “the Other”, attempt to take adaptive actions and get closer to local culture, while others, on the contrary, close up in the enclave of migrants, refusing to confront the new situation. The majority of the protagonists live in a state of limbo and indeterminacy, and their identity can be described as a hybrid identity. The problem of cultural, social and mental boundaries is also present in Kepplová’s prose, exemplifi ed by the characters of expats from the West migrating to the post-comunist countries. The concept of hybridity is also refl ected in the fragmentary and mosaic composition of the texts, the variety of literary forms and conventions applied. 

The following paper presents a postcolonial reading (combined with the ideology-critical approach) of the little-known story about Darwin by the East German writer Eberhard Hilscher. The analysis focuses on the perception of the foreign and the own by the fi gures of the story and it also refers to the overlapping of the terms race and class. The considerations lead to the conclusion that in the story the foreign is constructed preferably with the help of the opposition culture (the own) and nature (the foreign), and that hierarchical and dichotomous thinking characterizes also Darwin, even if in his case one can see certain ambivalences. 

The following article aims to present a study on twitterature – an intersection of literature and Twitter and a variant of twitter fi ction. The latter has become increasingly popular since the advent of Twitter at the end of the fi rst decade of this century and has dwarfed longer and traditional narratives. The subject of analysis will be Twitterature. The World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less (2009) by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin. The author of this article argues that parodic reworkings of 76 literary classics for the 21st century readers should be analysed as a variant or subgenre rather than a fully developed literary genre. Therefore the analytical tools have been appropriated from literary realm rather than new media studies. The author’s aim is not to present an outline of electronic literature or its typology, since that has been exhausted by other researchers. The main objective is rather to comment on one of the variants of electronic literature, which undertook a postmodernist dialogue with classic hypertexts (hypertexts in the Genettian sense of the word). Thus the most relevant aspects investigated here include generic boundaries, the role of the reader, inherent features as well as (Twitter) format and style respectively.