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Reconfiguring the West in Neil Jordan's short story "Love"
No full textIn introducing his article, the author draws attention to the enormous importance space, especially the west of Ireland, has in the Irish culture and in the legitimization of Irish identity. The central part of the article is devoted to an analysis of Neil Jordan's "A Love" in which the author describes the way Jordan uses the West as the privileged place of Irish self-representation. A close reading of the text shows the writer's strategies which subvert the conventional image of the West of Ireland and the author voices the opinion that Jordan's text refers to the end of one conceptualization of Irish identity. Offering the concept of heterotopia (Foucault) in his conclusion the author opens up the possibility of reading the representation of space in Jordan's story as his inscription of those places which were elided from the utopian Irish national saga
What Has Changed in Nature and in the Economy?
No full textThe author begins this article by describing the changed priorities of the present: whereas previously attention was focused on social issues, today it is the environment that has become the focus of human concerns. Although the impact of human actions on nature has been noted in the past, the author argues that today this impact is unprecedented. This can be seen, for example, in the way that contemporary engagements with the archive foreground the ecological issue. The author illustrates his disagreement with this practice by glancing at ecologically-minded re-readings of Karl Marx. Turning to American Studies as the disciplinary background of his argument, the author explains the reasons for this focus on Marx. The next step of the paper explores the ecological presence in American Studies before the conclusion, in which the author engages certain works of fiction and shows how he had previously not given sufficient weight to the ecological problematic
What Does Melville See on the Ocean?
Get PDFThe article begins with a brief discussion of what the author judges to be an overproduction of publications in literary studies. He offers an explanation of this development and contends that the causes are endemic to the humanities. Two causes of this overproduction are particularly pertinent for his reading of Melville: firstly, the constant change of interpretative paradigms and, secondly, the striving of the humanities to reflect upon the contemporary moment. The departure point of the reading is the spatial turn and the author's contention that this geographical knowledge has failed to address the sea. Elaborating on this contention, the author foregrounds the need for a maritime criticism and proceeds to read Moby Dick by excavating the manner in which Melville represents and thinks of the sea. On the basis of this evidence, the author argues that in Moby Dick, Melville offers a meontological thinking of the sea. Consequentially, the author argues that this meontology has a bearing on the present economic crisis and that it can be used in understanding the latest mutation of money. In the conclusion, the author claims that literary studies can make an important contribution to efforts to cope with the challenges of the present moment
American Studies as a Contemporary Disciplinary Practice
Get PDFThe departure point of this article is that however one conceives the practice of American Studies one has to recognize that it is a disciplinary practice. In accordance with this contention the author proceeds to discuss the notion of the discipline as such before he goes on to ask and answer the question: “How do American Studies constitute themselves?” The author argues that American Studies, like other disciplines, constituted itself by objectifying an exceptional polity. The crux of his argument is that this self-constitution was founded on an act of erasure, whereby the evidence of capitalism was elided from the research agenda of the discipline. Contending that this erasure is paradoxical considering that American Studies has as its object the exemplary capitalist nation, the author proceeds to delineate the reasons for this erasure. He goes on to contend that American Studies was complicit with the capitalist system of production and that one can speak of it as being a part of an ideological apparatus. However, he proceeds by showing that the discipline of American Studies has always had to address the evidence of its object, namely the historical transformations in the United States, which have forced the discipline, at different points of the historical continuum, to revise its protocols and research agenda. In the last part of the article the author maintains that the unfolding economic crisis sets the ground for one such transformation and that the “command of money,” which has been revealed by the crisis, beckons us to undertake a new interdisciplinary networking, this time with economics. In the conclusion of the paper the author argues that the challenges of the present moment force the discipline to attend to postdisciplinary developments which have been proposed as ways with which to address the intractability of the present mutation of capitalism. At the very end of the article the author articulates and identifies the political position which is implied in his reading of American Studies as a disciplinary practice
Yeats's Marching Songs
Get PDFThe immediate occasion for the present article is Richard Finneran`s exclusion of "Three Songs to the Same Tune" from Yeats's 1935 collection A Full Moon in March in his edition of The Poems of W.B. Yeats (1983). Assuming that this decision was not dictated only by
aesthetic considerations but by a certain political bias, the author briefly delineates Yeats's authoritarian political stance culminating in his short-lived association with the Fascist-inspired Irish Blueshirt party. His reading of the two versions of the "matching songs" pur-
ports to show that the poet's revision of the earlier song does not amount to a disclaimer of an authoritarian vision of man and society but registers the Yeats's disappointment with political activism as such. In conclusion the author voices his disagreement with Finneran's elimination of the earlier, more politically-charged text and warns that totalitarian practice may lurk in unexpected quarters
Što nam je promaklo u čitanju Dražbe predmeta 49 Thomasa Pynchona?
Get PDFAcknowledging the anniversary edition of the literary journal Književna smotra as the context of his paper, the author specifies that his article was conceived as a reengagement with an earlier published analysis of Pynchon's novel in which he had deployed poststructuralist ideas and procedures in his interpretation. Looking back on his earlier readings of Pynchon's work, the author asks why he and the vast majority of analysts of Pynchon did not see or why they simply ignored the economic thematic which is so evident and conspicuous in The Crying of Lot 49. After amassing evidence which clearly has to do with economic matters, the author proposes that this thematic passed under the screen of their attention because poststructuralist approaches to Pynchon had other priorities. In the second part of the article, the author engages poststructuralist theory and shows that, contrary to the privileging of textualist readings, that theory was always already marked by economic concerns. In the concluding part of the article, the author introduces interdisciplinarity and asks how the rapprochement of literature and economics can function in this new development and what questions need to be asked if such networking of the disciplines is to establish a critically thought-out foundation
Concerning the Spatial Turn
Get PDFU radu autor prikazuje dva nedavno objavljena zbornika posvećena onome što se danas imenuje kao »zaokret ka prostoru«. Nakon što je opisao ključna pitanja koja zaokupljuju priloge sakupljene u zbornicima, autor koristi prigodu ukazati na problematično izostavljanje njemačke tradicije promišljanja prostora iz dominantnih teorijskih paradigmi koje izrastaju iz rečenog spacijalnog zaokreta. Na kraju prikaza autor nudi nekoliko zapažanja o razlozima elidiranja problematike prostornosti u domaćoj teorijskoj produkciji.In the article the author discusses two recently published collections of essays devoted to what is today designated as the “spatial turn”. After addressing the key questions that preoccupy the contributions collected in these publications, the author uses the occasion to point to the problematic omission of the German tradition of thinking space from the dominant theoretical paradigms which have emerged from the above mentioned spatial turn. At the end of the article the author offers a number of observations relating to the reasons for the elision of the spatial problematic in Croatian theoretical production
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