http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38710 2026-04-03T20:17:04Z 2026-04-03T20:17:04Z Farhadi, Ramin http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38756 2021-08-24T01:41:53Z 2020-11-24T00:00:00Z

Wartime Propaganda and Gender in Ahmad Mahmoud’s The Scorched Earth: A Dissident Reading Farhadi, Ramin The Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) has been the subject of many aesthetic productions in contemporary Persian literature. The Iranian mass media during the war with Iraq described the armed conflict as holy and masculine, and propagated the replacement of the word “war” with “sacred defense” to urge authors to write within this established framework and reflect the ideals of the State. Opposed to such an ideological view of the war, the prominent Iranian novelist Ahmad Mahmoud began to express dissent in his works of fiction such as The Scorched Earth (1982). This study, therefore, analyzes Mahmoud’s scope of dissidence toward wartime propaganda and gender in the above mentioned novel to articulate how Mahmoud raises important questions regarding the State’s view of war and the established gender norms in Iran at war. It uses cultural materialist dissident reading and textual analysis to study Mahmoud’s contempt for wartime propaganda through the text’s portrayal of desperate people in Khorramshahr in the southwest of Iran caught between Iraqi airstrikes and artillery fires, and domestic problems including inflation, looting and mismanagement.

2020-11-24T00:00:00Z Burzyński, Tomasz http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38754 2021-08-24T01:41:56Z 2020-11-24T00:00:00Z

Systemic Intertextuality. A Morphogenetic Perspective Burzyński, Tomasz If late modern literary production is structured by any principles rendering order to the otherwise nebular character of the process, this is the idea of intertextuality that paves the way for the dissolution of well entrenched structures, literary conventions and institutionalized canons. By fostering and facilitating the erosion of boundaries between elite and popular culture, mechanisms of intertextuality show that literature is not only a fixed collection of texts, but also a dynamic social system including structured practices of production and reception together with their institutional, cultural and technological determinants. The paper aims to provide a sociologically-oriented model of intertextual relations taking place within the social system of literature. In this context, circulation, dissemination, and recycling of literary motifs is viewed from a perspective of morphogenetic processes which result in the structural elaboration and systemic change due to the mobilization of social, cultural, and economic capitals in an effort to alter pre-existent practices of signification. Consequently, literature is discussed as an intertextual system in statu nascendi, a sphere of social practices that knows no sense of institutional boundaries or structural constraints.

2020-11-24T00:00:00Z Prośniak, Anna http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38755 2021-08-24T01:41:33Z 2020-11-24T00:00:00Z

“Sardoodledom” on the English Stage: T. W. Robertson and the Assimilation of Well-Made Play into the English Theatre Prośniak, Anna The article discusses a vital figure in the development of modern English theatre, Thomas William Robertson, in the context of his borrowings, inspirations, translations and adaptations of the French dramatic formula pièce bien faite (well-made play). The paper gives the definition and enumerates features of the formula created with great success by the French dramatist Eugène Scribe. Presenting the figure of Thomas William Robertson, the father of theatre management and realism in Victorian theatre, the focus is placed on his adaptations of French plays and his incorporation of the formula of the well-made play and its conventional dramatic devices into his original, and most successful, plays, Society and Caste. The paper also examines the critical response to the well-made play in England and dramatists who use its formula, especially from the point of view of George Bernard Shaw, who famously called the French plays of Scribe and Victorien Sardou—“Sardoodledom.”

2020-11-24T00:00:00Z Holda, Malgorzata http://hdl.handle.net/11089/38753 2021-10-07T06:54:20Z 2020-11-24T00:00:00Z

The Poetic Bliss of the Re-described Reality: Wallace Stevens: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Figurative Language Holda, Malgorzata The article addresses the issue of the intimate but troublesome liaison between philosophy and literature—referred to in scholarship as “the ancient quarrel between poets and philosophers.” Its aim is double-fold. First, it traces the interweaving paths of philosophical and literary discourse on the example of Wallace Stevens’s oeuvre. It demonstrates that this great American modernist advocates a clear distinction between poetry and philosophy on the one hand, but draws on and dramatizes philosophical ideas in his poems on the other. The vexing character of his poetic works exemplifies the convoluted and inescapable connections between philosophy and poetry. Second, it discusses various approaches to metaphor, highlighting Stevens’s inimitable take on it. The diverse ways of tackling metaphorical language cognize metaphor’s re-descriptive and reconfiguring character. They embrace e.g., Stevens’s concept of metaphor as metamorphosis, or as “resemblance rather than imitation.” The to date interpretations of Stevens’s poetry in the light of a whole host of philosophies yield important insights into the meaningful interconnections between poetry and philosophy. However, rather than offering another interpretation of his poems from a given philosophical angle, the versatile voices presented here interrogate what poetry consists in.

2020-11-24T00:00:00Z