http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21531 Sat, 04 Apr 2026 20:14:33 GMT 2026-04-04T20:14:33Z https://dspace.uni.lodz.pl:443/bitstream/id/11067816-9526-47c9-98bc-05ff21844f05/ http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21531 http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21774 A Sociosemiotic Analysis of Fugard’s My Children! My Africa! Viator, Timothy J. This essay presents a sociosemiotic analysis of My Children! My Africa! (1989) by Athol Fugard. By considering the characters’ views about self, community, education, and time, it points to the Fugard’s anxious attempt to offer liberalism as the solution to apartheid in South Africa instead of oppositional politics, especially blacks’ calls for activism and communalism. Sociosemiotics is suitable to plays overtly political; it holds that political writers are troubled by political changes that do not correspond to a firmly held ideology—a tension between what a playwright believes is absolute and what s/he senses and perhaps fears is happening. Keys to the analysis are contemporary texts, including essays from leading Black writers and journalists and from studies and essays from attendees of a 1986 conference on liberal solutions to the unrest in South Africa. Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21774 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21773 Communality and the Individual in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road Tazbir, Jędrzej The subject of the article is the analysis of the notion of communality in the relation between the two protagonists of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Traversing the post-apocalyptic landscape populated mostly by wretched savages harbouring ill intent towards other human beings, the heroes ostensibly seek a place where establishing a sustainable society composed of the “good guys” can still be possible. However, while for the young son this goal implies the necessity of maintaining a sense of openness and hospitality towards the other, for the father it is the matter of day-to-day survival that takes precedence, which leads to repeated instances of withdrawing help from destitute survivors and avoiding human contact. The boy objects to this behavior, despite being wholly dependent on his father, as his sense of responsibility seems innate and unconditional. The man, on the other hand, gradually recognizes that he was so profoundly afflicted by the experience of losing his world that he cannot overcome his radical pessimism and distrust of the other. Therefore, when the man arrives at the end of his life, he comes to understand that it is only without him at his side that the son can enter a larger community. Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21773 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21772 Shakespeare’s Exceptional Violence: Reading Titus Andronicus with Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben Porcelli, Stefania In this paper I explore the multifaceted relationship between violence, speech and power in the most graphic of Shakespeare’s plays, Titus Andronicus. I take my cue from Hannah Arendt’s reflections on violence as opposed to power, and as something “incapable of speech,” but I read the play through the lens of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of sovereignty as the suspension of the law. I consider the dichotomy speech/muteness as an example not only of the dichotomy power/violence (Arendt) but also of the opposition between bios and zoe, that is the difference between a life worth to be included in the political realm and a life understood as the mere condition of being alive, a condition common to human beings and beasts (according to classical philosophy). In Titus Andronicus, these distinctions are blurred, and zoe becomes fully exposed to the sovereign decision. While the image of a mutilated and mute body cannot match Arendt’s idea of politics as the combination of speech and action bereft of violence, Agamben has developed the notion of a politics that renders life disposable, mute, bare, and can still be called politics or power, and precisely biopower. From this perspective, I argue, Lavinia and the other characters of Titus Andronicus are the embodiment of the concept of “bare life” as developed by Agamben, and Shakespeare’s Rome is a State of exception and of exceptional violence. Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21772 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21631 “Reread me backwards”: Deciphering the Past in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day Johnson, Stephanie Set during the midst of the London Blitz, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day revolves around a narrative of espionage, but unlike many novels from the spy genre, it refuses to disclose all of its secrets. Instead, the novel’s dense and complex language, which so effectively expresses the dislocating effects of a city under attack, resists an easy or uncomplicated reading. This article examines the motif of reading within the novel, which manifests when its protagonist, Stella Rodney, learns her lover Robert is a Nazi spy. In her efforts to locate proof of his defection, Stella becomes caught in a recurrent but indeterminable task of rereading past events, a movement which attempts to remember the past but also foregrounds a fundamental inability to ever wholly resolve its enigmas. When Stella fails to read her past for lost clues, she is prevented from viewing the events of her life as a coherent and meaningful narrative. The novel’s difficult language reflects this lack of resolution, refusing to assimilate the events it depicts into a straightforward account. With its wartime setting as a disorienting backdrop, The Heat of the Day undermines the purpose of reading as the discovery of sense and meaning, producing instead only more questions and mysteries. Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/21631 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z