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This paper discusses the rethinking of the American West in Francisco Cantú’s recently published memoir, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (2018). Written by a former U.S. Border Patrol agent, Cantú’s text chronicles the protagonist’s journey along the U.S.–Mexico continental border, from Arizona to Texas, during and after his 2008–2012 Border Patrol service. Like most memoirs, it straddles the private and the public and produces diverse and multiple subject positions. As he articulates his experience both from the perspective of a law enforcer and as an emotionally involved immediate observer of hazards and horrors of undocumented immigration and the bordering practices that “resignify human body with indifference, ” Cantú inevitably brings into conversation the legal and the spatial, juxtaposing the border, a geopolitical, historically constructed project crisscrossed by economic (both legal and illegal) investments in the land, to the human reality of the borderlands, an ambiguous contact zone shaped by multicultural and multigenerational memory, oral tradition, and a spiritual correlation between people and place. Drawing upon Jane Danielewicz’s view of the memoir as a genre whose function is not only personal or expressive but also public, with a potential to challenge cultural master narratives, create opportunities for political or social action, and provoke change, the paper argues that Cantú’s text itself functions as a contact zone as it negotiates subjectivity primarily in relational terms. Turning private lives of immigrants from abstractions into subjects of public discourse by adding a personal face to the human tragedy produced by the global “economic apartheid, ” it exposes contested cultural narratives and provides new perspectives to both the ongoing border fencing and immigration debate and the human reality of the contemporary West.

Publikacija sadrži uvod, sedam glavnih poglavlja, zaključak, popis citirane literature, kazalo imena i pojmova i bilješku o autorici. Osnovni je cilj studije ukazati na modalitete književne (de)konstrukcije ženskog subjektiviteta i nove mogućnosti čitanja američke fikcionalne proze s prijelaza iz 19. u 20. stoljeće. Metodološki ona se zasniva na povijesno-feminističkom i kulturološkom pristupu, pri čemu u prvom redu slijedi neke od postavki suvremene angloameričke feminističke kritike, od društveno-ideoloških do dekonstrukcijskih. U prvom poglavlju autorica izlaže svoja teorijska, književno-povijesna i žanrovska polazišta te ukazuje na potrebu revizionističkog čitanja američke fikcionalne proze s kraja 19. stoljeća u skladu s osnovnim postavkama povijesno-feminističkog pravca, prema kojemu je u navedenom razdoblju upravo proza, kao diskurzivna praksa koja odražava dominantne društvene tokove, kulturu i politička pitanja, bila važno sredstvo kojim je dominantni ideološki aparat stvarao i umnažao mitove, definirajući ženin subjektivitet i njezin marginalizirani položaj. Drugo poglavlje analizira dva ideološka diskursa prisutna u američkom društvu s kraja 19. st., ideologiju Drugog i ideologiju odvojenih sfera, te povijesni i društveni (politički i kulturni) američki kontekst razdoblja na prijelazu iz 19. u 20. st. U trećem se poglavlju razmatraju prikazivačke konvencije realizma i naturalizma, onodobna obilna američka produkcija sentimentalnih ženskih romana te isprepletenost popularnih (niskih) i elitnih (visokih) oblika romana potrage i njegove feminizirane varijante. Poglavlja IV–VII donose detaljnu analizu romana Buđenje (The Awakening, 1899.) Kate Chopin, Sestra Carrie (Sister Carrie, 1900.) Theodorea Dreisera, Kuća veselja, (The House of Mirth, 1905.) Edith Wharton i Moja Ántonia (My Ántonia, 1918.) Wille Cather.

The paper draws upon the controversy over the use of indigenousrelated sports emblems that has recently sparked a series of protests across the United States against the "Washington Redsk*ns" name and imagery. It focuses on the visual aspect of the debate, tracing the whitesupremacist foundations of the Washington team's insignia to the institutional construction of Native identity through popular Indian Head Pennies and Buffalo Nickels in the period between 1859 and 1938. Pointing at the seemingly paradoxical discrepancy between the minted messages and the systematic political, legal, and military invasion on American Indian sovereignty in that period, it proceeds to deconstruct the paradox by exposing the numismatic pictorial language as a manifestation of the same ideological project and the configurations of power that have remained unchanged to this day. The continued circulation of indigenous-based iconography in the contemporary American context shows that the same cultural imagination continues to serve not only as a powerful rationale for European America's historical, national, and political narrative but also as a form of "anticonquest" that both obscures and enacts the established formulas of colonial domination and control. Observing the alterations of the "Washington Redsk*ns" logo design across some of the key moments of the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century – the McCarthy era, the Civil Rights Movement, post 9/11 sentiment, the global financial crisis, the campaign against ethnic studies, and the illegal immigration debate – the analysis explores how various forms of national anxiety transcend into identity through the politics of representation. In that light, it regards recent activism against mass- mediated symbolization of indigenous identity as an important 17 arena in which centuries-long hegemonic discourses are contested against new venues of self-determination and internal decolonization.

The article discusses contemporary indigenous poetry, focusing on Wabigoon River Poems (2015) collection by Canadian aboriginal writer David Groulx.

This paper examines the interaction between the physical and the historical in Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979). It focuses on Butler's envisioning of the heroine's body as a site of repressed traumatic memory and its potential to reconstruct the dominant national narrative in both historical and contemporary terms. Acknowledging the universal experience of trauma and its emotional scars, Butler's novel retrieves and rewrites the history of slavery from within the body of the oppressed. Analyzing the slave mentality concomitant to bodily dispossession through inflicted torture and sexual abuse, the paper shows that history is inevitably written in the body itself, emphasizing the fact that bodies interacting with history can never be removed from it. It also explores the de/reconstructive scope of the fantastic genre in conveying the historical immediacy and uncovering the resistance consciousness and its adept subversion of the power structures. Finally, it highlights the significance of the novel's time frame, characters' names, and geographic sites as the nexus between the individual and national history.

This paper examines the correspondence between travel and disease in Native American novels Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko and Tracks (1988) by Louise Erdrich. Juxtaposing the novels' protagonists, Tayo and Pauline, it focuses on the detrimental effects of their dislocation from the tribal matrix and their contact with the dominant world. Whereas Tayo's identity quest is centripetal and in itself represents a "homing--‐in" journey, a ceremony of convalescence from the painful emotional ramifications of World War II trauma and his alienation from the Pueblo tradition, Pauline's voyage to the all-white community of Argus leads to a complete mental imbalance and disintegration. In her attempt to assimilate, Pauline becomes obsessed with racial purity and Christianity, and engages in malicious and dysfunctional behavior. Struggling to deny her Anishinaabe background and purge herself from "its evils, " she harms and kills other people, starts practicing bizarre rituals of asceticism and bodily mortification, and ultimately descends into madness. Observing the two characters' different understanding of indigenous epistemologies, and interpreting their bodies as constructs "imprinted by history" and "disciplinary discursive practices, " the paper attempts to expose the correlation between disease and colonization, i.e. healing and decolonization.

The texts before you were, in their shorter version, originally presented at the inaugural symposium of the Croatian Association for American Studies (Hrvatsko udruženje za američke studije), established in 2010 with the aim of bringing together researchers and academics in Croatian institutions of higher education that teach, research and are working towards their degrees in different fields comprising American Studies.

U radu se istražuje hibridna i višeglasna struktura romana "Cogewea the Half Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range" (1927) Mourning Dove primjenom Bahtinove kulturalne semiotike te naratološke, postkolonijalne, feminističke metodologije i metodologije indijanskih studija. Tekst ove starosjedilačke autorice odaje strategije mimikrije i anti-imperijalnog prijenosa uočljive kroz minimalne pomake karakterizacijsko-sadržajne matrice popularnih zapadnih žanrova kojima se autoričin starosjedilački glas emancipira kako od doiminantnog diskursa indijanstva tako i od autoriteta urednika Lucullusa McWhortera.

Rad razmatra društveno-politički kontekst nastanka suvremene starosjedilačke književnosti i discipline indijanskih studija, pri čemu su u žarištu analize djela začetnika indijanskog intelektualnog aktivizma Vinea Delorie Jr.-a Custer je umro za tvoje grijehe: indijanski manifest (Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, 1969.) i Iza puta prekršenih sporazuma: indijanska deklaracija nezavisnosti (Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence, 1974.) te odnos i temeljne razlike između starosjedilačkog pokreta stvorenog koncem šezdesetih i Pokreta za građanska prava. Uz povijesni pregled starosjedilačkog aktivističkog pokreta, autorice ukazuju na kronologiju pravno- političkih odnosa indijanskih plemena i američke Vlade te pružaju prikaz položaja starosjedilačkih zajednica u drugoj polovici 20. st.

This paper interprets Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks in light of Louis Owens’ frontier theory. According to Owens, the concept of the frontier encompasses not just the physical terrain but also the psychological and cognitive aspects of the colonial encounter. It is a dangerously unstable, indeterminate and hybridized space that refuses to be confined through boundaries and serves as a dynamic zone of resistance. Utilizing the conventions of magical realism and the grotesque, Louise Erdrich's novel Tracks (1988) creates such a frontier zone in which the discourse of hegemony is estranged, and power relations reworked and reversed.

The rapid digital revolution and the corresponding paradigm shift towards the hypermedia that we have been witnessing over the last few years have had a substantial impact on traditional monolythic media platforms such as literature. The universal literary merits -- the promise of entertainment and intellectual and emotional stimulation -- are being increasingly challenged by the much more dynamic and appealing multimedia versions of the same. The continuing growth of computer- mediated forms of communication has permeated almost every aspect of our lives, including our professional work. My presentation will examine the positive effects of that process, focusing on the methodological potential and benefits of utilizing the video sharing tool YouTube in American Literary Studies. I will present some audio-visual materials that can effectively be incorporated into the classroom at both undergraduate and graduate levels to stimulate discussion and the students' response to texts from various literary periods. Spanning a diversity of topics and contemporary issues -- from history, identity, multiculturalism, consumerism to human trafficking, globalization, and ecology -- these materials prove that the emerging digital technologies do not necessarily render the literary medium less viable, but, on the contrary, can serve as a valuable educational supplement that points to its charm and lasting relevance.

This paper interprets Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks in light of Louis Owens’ frontier theory. According to Owens, the concept of the frontier encompasses not just the physical terrain but also the psychological and cognitive aspects of the colonial encounter. It is a dangerously unstable, indeterminate and hybridized space that refuses to be confined through boundaries and serves as a dynamic zone of resistance. Utilizing the conventions of magical realism and the grotesque, Louise Erdrich's novel Tracks (1988) creates such a frontier zone in which the discourse of hegemony is estranged, and power relations reworked and reversed

This paper discusses the somewhat oxymoronic tie between Ulysses' poststructuralist effect and its structural design. Observing the changes in the linguistic register and the corresponding syntactical modes in various episodes of the novel, it points at a gradual reduction of the authorial voice and its ultimate displacement by the text itself. Whereas the first episodes of the novel are controlled by a public narrative voice, an obvious narrative switch occurs in the episode “Lestrygonians”, in which the narrative persona turns from heterogdiegetic to homodiegetic, almost blending with the protagonist Leopold Bloom. That becomes even more obvious in the chapter “Scylla and Charybdis”, marked by a complete substitution of the public narrator with an internal focalizer. As the role of the narrative agent shifts from the diegetic to the mimetic pole, its authority gets restricted and subjected to the textual voice. The process of reading Ulysses thus necessarily comprises both the hermeneutic and the formal plane as the text develops its technical codes and conventions, forcing its own structure upon itself. Our interdisciplinary approach to Joyce’s text employs various methods for quantitative assessment, including syntax analysis, tokenization, part-of-speech tagging and corpus text analysis. The analysis utilizes two computer tools for analyzing corpora – Treetagger and Ngram Statistics Package (NSP) – to emphasize the structural discrepancies, differences in lexical units and lemma usage between various sections of the novel.

Zbog rastućeg opsega i heterogenosti suvremenog starosjedilačkog književnog korpusa, ova knjiga ne pretendira biti njegov sveobuhvatan pregled, nego u razmatranje uzima nekoliko ključnih i reprezentativnih djela—romane Ceremonija (Ceremony, 1977.) i Pripovjedač (Storyteller, 1981.) Leslie Marmon Silko, Ljubavna magija (Love Medicine, 1984.) i Tragovi (Tracks, 1988.) Louise Erdrich te Medicine River (1989.) i Zelena trava, voda koja teče (Green Grass, Running Water, 1993.) Thomasa Kinga. U žarištu su čitanja koncepti pripovijedanja, narodnosti i hibridnosti kojima želimo ukazati na poetološku i epistemološku posebitost suvremenog starosjedilačkog pisma. U prvom poglavlju razmatramo distinktivna poetološka obilježja starosjedilačke književnosti te problematiku njezine klasifikacije i njezina određenja prema dominantnom književno-kritičkom kanonu. Prikazom teorijskih pristupa Arnolda Krupata, Jamesa Rupperta i Andrewa Wigeta te predstavnika starosjedilačke književne kritike Louisa Owensa, Grega Sarrisa i Geralda Vizenora ukazujemo na aplikabilnost postkolonijalnog koncepta hibridnosti i Bahtinova dijalogizma pri interpretaciji suvremenog starosjedilačkog pisma. Kroz komponente jezika, srodstva, pripovijedanja, kolektivnog pamćenja, mjesta i ceremonija razmatramo recentne teorijsko-metodološke priloge disciplini indijanskih studija—model etičke kritike autora antologije Reasoning Together (2008.) Craiga Womacka, Roberta Warriora, Jacea Weavera, Daniela Heatha Justicea i Christophera Teutona te matricu narodnosti Toma Holma, Diane Pearson i Bena Chavisa. U drugom poglavlju analiziramo tehnike konceptualnog posredovanja u romanima Ceremonija i Pripovjedač Leslie Marmon Silko. Pritom u središte interesa stavljamo strategije hibridnosti i subverzije dominantnog žanra elementima narodnosti utkanim u kompoziciju i kronotoptih djela. Dok roman Ceremonija promatramo s obzirom na efekt recepcijske reorijentacije stvoren razgradnjom konvencija romana potrage i alijenacije, dijalog s dominantnom tradicijom u romanu Pripovjedač iščitavamo kroz otklon tog djela od zapadnog koncepta autorstva i autobiografije te njegove formalno-stilske preinake narativne teksture. U trećem poglavlju u razmatranje uzimamo "protupripovijesti" Louise Erdrich i Thomasa Kinga. Odnos prema povijesti osnovno je polazište čitanja Erdrichina romana Tragovi. U žarištu je pritom ponešto sporan odnos postmodernog pisma prema povijesti, ali i prema postkolonijalnoj književnosti i teoriji. Motrenjem signala magijskog i grotesknog realizma te diskursa ludila ukazujemo na Erdrichine postmoderne strategije povijesnog i epistemološkog prijenosa. Uz postmoderne metodološke protokole Jean-Françoisa Lyotarda, Linde Hutcheon, Ihaba Hassana, Andreasa Huyssena i Davida Lodgea, tumačenja magijskog realizma Lois Parkinson Zamore, Wendy B. Faris, Thea D'Haena i Stephena Slemona te teorija mimikrije i trećeg prostora Homia Bhabhe, antikolonijalni karakter Erdrichinih tekstova otkrivamo i pomoću koncepta varalice. Dok u romanu Tragovi tipologiju varalice sagledavamo kroz karakterizaciju pojedinih likova pomoću Bahtinova tumačenja karnevala i menipejske satire te diskursa varalice Geralda Vizenora, pri čitanju romana Ljubavna magija polazimo od postmodernih strategija fabularne atomizacije, jezične igre i recepcijskog dijaloga. Odnos starosjedilačkog pisma i povijesti dalje razmatramo kroz polemičke tekstove Thomasa Kinga: Izmišljanje Indijanca: bjelački likovi, starosjedilačka usmena književnost i suvremeni starosjedilački pisci (Inventing the Indian: White Images, Native Oral Literature, and Contemporary Native Writers, 1986.), Sva moja rodbina (All My Relations, 1990.), Istina o pričama: starosjedilački narativ (The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative, 2003.), "Godzilla vs. Postcolonial" (2004.), Nezgodan Indijanac: čudan izvještaj o starosjedilačkom narodu iz Sjeverne Amerike (The Inconventient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, 2012.) te njegove romane Medicine River i Zelena trava, voda koja teče, ističući pritom značaj retoričkog suvereniteta indijanskog pisma. Naglašavanjem empirijske, formativne i prokreativne funkcije pripovijedanja u indijanskim kulturama analiziramo Kingove tehnike rekonceptualizacije zapadne monološke linearne povijesti uvođenjem narativnog višeglasja i starosjedilačke hermeneutike zajednice. Promatrajući elemente fantastičnog i nadrealističnog te trop varalice, kojim Kingovi romani u humoristično-parodičnom tonu "komadaju" veliku priču osvajanja i njezine formativne mitove, ukazujemo na vitalnu ulogu pripovijesti kao nositelja kulturnog ozdravljenja i univerzalne povijesne istine. U četvrtom poglavlju prikazujemo društveno-politički kontekst nastanka suvremene starosjedilačke književnosti i discipline indijanskih studija. Razmatramo djela začetnika indijanskog intelektualnog aktivizma Vinea Delorie Jr.-a Custer je umro za tvoje grijehe: indijanski manifest (Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, 1969.) i Iza puta prekršenih sporazuma: indijanska deklaracija nezavisnosti (Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence, 1974.) te odnos i temeljne razlike između starosjedilačkog pokreta stvorenog koncem šezdesetih i Pokreta za građanska prava. Uz povijesni pregled starosjedilačkog aktivističkog pokreta, prvi dio ovog poglavlja uključuje i kronologiju pravno-političkih odnosa indijanskih plemena i američke Vlade te prikaz položaja starosjedilačkih zajednica u drugoj polovici 20. st. Potom analiziramo književni izričaj Johna Trudella—njegovu hibridnu, eksperimentalnu i nadasve angažiranu poeziju te specifičnu "holističnu" filozofiju koju određujemo kao "spoj starosjedilačke duhovnosti i suvremene ekonomsko-političke analize". U trećem dijelu poglavlja izdvajamo djela Mir, snaga, pravičnost: starosjedilački manifest (Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto, 1999.) i Wasáse: starosjedilački putovi djelovanja i slobode (Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom, 2005.) Taiaiake Alfreda, istaknutog suvremenog aktivista iz akademskih redova. Važnost mentalne i psihološke dekolonizacije te regeneracije starosjedilačkih kultura povratkom tradicionalnim duhovnim vrijednostima, ali i mogućnosti iznalaženja zajedničke filozofije opstanka indijanskih i neindijanskih kultura neke su od tema koje zahvaćamo analizom tekstova tog, kako ga mnogi nazivaju, Deloriina nasljednika. Naposljetku, usporedbom teorijskih postavki Craiga Womacka, Roberta Warriora, Deaniela Heatha Justicea, Jacea Weavera i Elizabeth Cook-Lynn suvremenu starosjedilačku književnost i teoriju određujemo kao neizostavan aspekt aktivizma kojim starosjedilački narodi ispisuju svoj glas i opstanak u kulturno-povijesnom prostoru Amerike i aktivno mijenjaju svijet.

The paper examines the relation between the fantastic and the (post)colonial character of Louise Erdrich's novel Tracks. Employing the fantastic through magical realism, the discourse of madness and the grotesque, Erdrich devised a polyphonic text that effectively questions and destabilizes the consistency of colonial symbols and identity constructs. This narrative technique is observable in the characterization of Pauline Puyat, one of the main protagonists and narrators in the novel, whose assimilation in the Western culture results in her complete renouncement and hatred of her indigenous heritage and identity. Yet, Pauline's identification with the dominant worldview, her obsession with Christianity and racial purity, manifests itself as mental illness and (self)destructive behavior that includes bizarre acts of penance, neglect of hygiene and a morbid wish to kill her unborn baby to save it from sin. Ironically, through her attempt to cleanse herself of her paganism, Pauline becomes spiritually, physically and morally the most unclean character in the novel. Mortifying and terrorizing her body to protect herself from the evils of nature and the temptations of instincts – sources of shame, corruption and barbarity, Pauline attests to the fact that the body is a construct "imprinted by history" and "disciplinary discursive practices" , the "‘text’ on which colonisation has written some of its most graphic and scrutable messages" . Yet, Pauline's rigid understanding of faith leads her not only to insanity but also to sin. In spite of her Christian creed and her sharp detachment from her heathen roots, she manifests occult tendencies and supernatural abilities that she regularly uses for evil purposes - to commit murder, adultery, deception, and various malicious acts. Possessed by magic and visions, she uses satanic methods to serve Christ's purpose, thus exhibiting the very traits that she claims to defy. Conflating Ojibwa and Judeo-Christian cosmologies by blurring the boundaries between the real, mythic, magical and supernatural, Erdrich exposes the inconsistency of Pauline's missionary pursuit, and highlights wickedness, selfishness, and immorality as its main features. Thereupon, using magical elements, she disturbs the coherence of the imperial dogma and its evangelical tools. This narrative effect concurs with Homi Bhabha's definition of hybridity – the reversal of "the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other 'denied' knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority - its rules of recognition" . Drawing upon Bhabha's hybridity theory and Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptualization of the grotesque, the analysis additionally juxtaposes the use of the fantastic in Erdrich's text to its commitment to epistemological translation, historical revisionism, cultural memory and emancipation.

This reading of Louise Erdrich's novel Tracks (1988) focuses on the debated relationship between postmodern literature and history, as well as postcolonial theory. Observing the signals of magical realism, Rabelaisian grotesque and the discourse of madness, as evinced through the characterization of Pauline Puyat, the analysis attempts to demonstrate Erdrich's postmodern strategies of historical revisionism and anti- imperial translation, and the concomitant synthesis of the postmodern and postcolonial perspectives. The discourse of madness identifies the wickedness, selfishness and corruption as the main features of Pauline's missionary pursuit, exposes the imperialist construct of indigenous identity, as well as the psycho-physical perils of its internalization. By problematizing and pluralizing the real in a typically postmodern way, drawing upon the techniques of magical and grotesque realism, the novel offers an ironical transcription of the binary dogma on racial purity and superiority. Attributing Pauline with the very traits that she claims to defy, Erdrich juxtaposes this dogma with the rhetoric of conversion, challenging the dominant epistemology, its colonial historiography, symbols and strategies.

The paper examines the generic hybridity in Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller (1981) as a tool for synchronizing the private and the public history, emphasizing a synecdochic relationship between the individual and the communal, as well as the necessity of the Western readers' conceptual reorientation for appreciating that relationship. Through its shift towards oral discourse, Silko?s novel stretches the horizon of the Western genre, challenging its narrative, authorial and receptional conventions, as well as its epistemology of space and time. Infusing a sense of collectivity into the traditional Western concept of personal narrative, Silko draws upon Laguna sacred history, delineating the importance of storytelling in shaping and preserving the communal identity. Transgressing the border between the fictional and the real, the secular and the mythic, Storyteller also conveys the power of storytelling to transcend material boundaries of the real and shape them at the same time. The analysis pays special attention to permutations, as a stylistic device that converges postmodern techniques with oral storytelling in order to exhibit the variability of the oral discourse and translate it into written form.

Premda je posljednjih desetljeća doživjela iznimnu popularnost, književnost američkih Indijanaca još uvijek je relativno nepoznata i neistražena u hrvatskim razmjerima. Kroz romane Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range (1927.) Mourning Dove, Ceremony (1977.) i Storyteller (1981.) Leslie Marmon Silko te Love Medicine (1984.) i Tracks (1988.) Louise Erdrich, ova disertacija želi osvijetliti distinktivna poetološka i epistemološka obilježja te književnosti, uključujući i neke novije teorijske dvojbe vezane uz njezinu klasifikaciju i interpretaciju. Osnovno je uporište studije diskurs hibridnosti kao najistaknutija strategija subverzije i anti-imperijalnog prijenosa u navedenim tekstovima. Analiza također prati evoluciju ženske indijanske književne tradicije kroz njezina tri ključna stadija -- narjanije razdoblje, tzv. "indijansku renesansu" i suvremeni postmoderni trend. Dok ranija djela osporavaju Zapadne sustave prikazivanja kroz mimikriju sentimentalnog i western žanra (Cogewea), romana potrage (Ceremony) i tradicije autobiografije (Storyteller), romani Louise Erdrich ne razgrađuju dominantnu konvenciju, već stvaraju dijalog između Zapadne i indijanske ontologije. Uprkos tomu, takva prilagodba hibridnosti u Erdrichinim tekstovima ne priječi njihov politički potencijal. Rabeći heteroglosiju, grotesku, magijski realizam, diskurs ludila i signaturu varalice na tipično postmoderan način, Tracks i Love Medicine otvoreno oživljuju povijesne rane, prkose autoritetu kolonijalne metapripovijesti, razvrgavajući njezina značenja, slike i konstrukte identiteta, te vezu između imperijalizma, kapitalističke etike i povijesne amnezije. Ubrizgavajući usmenu tradiciju i oćut kolektivnosti u Zapadni oblik, Mourning Dove, Silko i Erdrich propituju granice dominantnog diskursa iznutra. Na taj način, asimilacijom u dominantne književne paradigme, one pružaju otpor kulturnoj asimilaciji i nestanku svojih naroda u anglo-američkom svijetu.

Polifono ustrojstvo romana Theodorea Dreisera Sister Carrie (1900.) otvara ovo djelo suvremenim postmodernim, kulturalnim i feminističkim čitanjima. Heteroglosija je u ovom romanu postignuta prožimanjem i međusobnim osporavanjem žanrovskih matrica naturalizma i sentimentalnosti i diskursa potrošačke kulture. Dokumentirajući začetke procesa komodifikacije koji je zahvatio Ameriku krajem 19. stoljeća, Dreiser je uočio "iščeznuće zbiljskoga" i anticipirao potrošački apetit kao novu društvenu determinantu. Ukazavši na kontradikciju između tradicionalnog poimanja subjekta i nadolazećih kulturalnih glasova, on je istodobno naznačio preobrazbu ženina položaja i dao definiciju moderne svijesti. Premda je sam ostao vjeran brojnim elementima tradicionalne poetike, upravo takva hijerarhija jezika roman Sister Carrie odvaja od obzora očekivanja njegova vremena i približuje ga suvremenoj recepciji.

Rad analizira lik 'nove žene' u američkom romanu s prijelaza 19. na 20. stoljeće kroz djela: 'The Awakening'(1898.) Kate Chopin, Sister Carrie' (1900.) Theodorea Dreisera, 'The House of Mirth' (1905.) Edith Wharton i 'My Antonia' (1918.) Wille Cather

This master’s thesis analyzes the fight for environmental justice in three works of Linda Hogan – the novels Mean Spirit (1990) and Solar Storms (1995) and the collection of essays Dwellings (1995). It discusses the ways in which the analyzed texts incorporate ecofeminist notions in the Indigenous fight for environmental justice. All three texts depict the everlasting negative impacts of the colonization on the environment, culture, and lifestyle of Native Americans – its damaging physical, mental, and spiritual consequences including the Indigenous peoples’ generational trauma and the alienation from their tradition and their land. The paper argues that Hogan represents the fight for environmental justice as a predominantly female issue informed by Indigenous gynocratic and matrilineal tradition and draws attention to the connection between the oppression of nature and the oppression of women through both linguistic practices and various forms commodification. It also explores the roles of men in the (ecofeminist) fight for environmental justice. Drawing upon ecofeminist principles set by Greta Gaard and Karen J. Warren and the work of the late American Indian studies scholar and author Paula Gunn Allen, this paper argues that Hogan’s texts intertwine the environmental and ecofeminist notions in order to pave the way towards healing from the environmental trauma and restoring and protecting the Indigenous peoples’ bond with their ancestral tradition and their land.

This paper analyzes the animal motif in Edgar Allan Poe’s selected works. It focuses on three animal motifs in four of Poe’s works – the short stories “The Black Cat,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “Hop-Frog,” and the poem “The Raven.” The paper argues that the three animal motifs, the black cat, the raven, and the orangutan, personify certain elements of the human nature – feelings, emotions, human constructs, phenomena of the human society, and the stages of development of human consciousness – and that some of them can also be analyzed through the socio-historical lens as motifs associated with the oppression of African Americans and the history of slavery.

This paper explores the importance of the narrative perspective in Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories – the horror story “The Tell­Tale Heart,” the adventure story “MS. Found in a Bottle,” and the detective story “The Purloined Letter.” Drawing upon narrative theory, it argues that the narrative perspective is an important aspect of Poe’s literary technique and one of the key instruments in producing the ultimate narrative effect. Even though all three stories employ first­person narration and reflect the conventions of their respective genres – “The Tell­Tale Heart” relies on mystery, murder, and gore, “MS. Found in a Bottle” contains life­or­death situations and the propensity for the unknown, and “The Purloined Letter” describes an unsolvable case ready to be cracked – there are significant differences in the way their narrative voice is constructed and perceived. Unlike “The Tell­Tale Heart,” which is told by an unreliable narrator whose delusion and irrational actions undermine his claim to reliability, the focalization in “MS. Found in a Bottle” presents an unbelievable story through an autodiegetic narrator whose rationality shapes the story’s final effect. Likewise, the homodiegetic narrator in “The Purloined Letter” significantly contributes to the story’s innovative narrative effect. The paper maintains that their narrative perspectives make Poe’s stories worth analyzing as they raise the (still very relevant) questions of credibility and reliability not just in literature but also in every single medium.

This paper analyzes the Gothic elements in Toni Morrison’s neo-slave narrative Beloved (1987). It argues that the main character, Beloved, is the embodiment of the Gothic elements in the novel. In order to justify this claim, the paper first provides an explanation of the Goth-ic genre and its main features along with a definition of the term neo-slave narrative and its connection to the Gothic. The analysis of the novel consists of three parts, each dedicated to Beloved’s different levels of power. Her first and lowest level is her ghost form, when she is only haunting house 124 and causing commotion to her mother, Sethe, and sister, Denver, who live there. The second level is her transformation to human form, which is triggered by her mother’s attempt at finding happiness and moving on from Beloved’s death. At this stage Beloved is adjusting to the life on Earth and testing the abilities of her powers. The last level analyzed in the paper concerns the height of Beloved’s power, but also her demise. Beloved starts to feed off her mother’s life force, which makes her an incredibly powerful being, until she is stopped by Denver and a group of local women from the community, who perform an exorcism that banishes her forever from Cincinnati.

The history of American Indian boarding schools had been mostly unknown until a few decades ago. A recent upsurge of writings on this topic across the United States of America and Canada has brought to light the inside perspective, making the damaging effects of the cultural reprogramming through education that affected thousands of Indigenous children for over a century visible and clear. This thesis explores the issues of alienation, trauma, memory, and identity crisis resulting from the forced removal of Indigenous children and their exposure to mainstream education in off-reservation boarding schools during their formative years. It analyses Debby Dahl Edwardson’s novel My Name is Not Easy (2011) and three nonfictional texts – K. Tsianina Lomawaima’s They Called It Prairie Light (1994), Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton’s memoir Fatty Legs (2010), and Laura Tohe’s No Parole Today (1999). All of these texts re-write/right the history of the boarding-school era by emphasizing the assimilation policy as the central component of Indian residential schools’ programme. They reveal not only the negative but also the positive side of the students’ experience as well as the fact that these schools frequently became sites of resistance and resilience in which the disciplinarians’ rules were subverted and Native identity maintained through students’ mutual support, friendship, and solidarity. Although the students sometimes managed to claim the power of the boarding schools for themselves and even though, despite the government’s efforts to destroy their connections to the tribal communities, many of them returned from school even stronger and with the knowledge of many new skills, effects of the boardingschool trauma and discrimination are felt even today as the lingering issues of depression, suicide, and substance abuse continue to plague Native communities. The final part of this paper looks into those issues and explores the possibility to alleviate them by incorporating cross-cultural knowledge and Indigenous teaching methods in contemporary mainstream school curricula.

This paper analyses central female characters in Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900) and Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). It argues that both Dreiser’s Carrie and Williams’ Blanche are “fallen women” who act and present themselves as someone they are not. It also contends that in their attempt to escape poverty and the miseries of life, bothcharacters are led by strong desires, but that eventually, they attain the opposite from what they hoped for. Even though, unlike Blanche, whose madness and trajectory of decline reveal that she obviously gets punished for her transgressive behaviour, Carrie gets “rewarded” through her social ascent, Dreiser’s heroine is also indirectly punished as she eventually fails to find happiness and her desires remain unfulfilled. Apart from exploring the relation of these texts to their respective socio-historical backgrounds, the analysis also focuses on elements of naturalism – determinism in particular – that shape their heroines as fragile females in a brutal world ruled by men and define them as victims of circumstances beyond their control.

This master’s thesis provides an analysis of Alice Walker’s novels The Color Purple (1982) and Meridian (1976) in relation to the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy. It discusses the theme of African American female experience of inequality and discrimination in terms of both gender and race. The paper argues that even though their time frames differ, as The Color Purple is set at the beginning of the twentieth century and Meridian reflects the years during and following the Civil Rights Movement, the novels’ main characters share the experience of double oppression by both White supremacist and patriarchal social structures. The Color Purple depicts the trials and tribulations in the life of its protagonist, Celie, who endures mistreatment perpetuated by Black men on a daily basis. Likewise, Meridian depicts racial and gender discrimination in the rural South, exposing Black women’s confinement by the dominant standards of femininity. The analysis of Meridian focuses on three motifs – the story of Marilene O’Shay, the Wild Child, and the Sojourner Tree – through which it exposes the suppression of Black women’s voice and their social marginalization. The paper also examines the ways in which this novel addresses the rift within the Civil Rights Movement, caused by the shift from nonviolent to radical activism, and argues that both novels advance Walker’s concept of “womanism” by celebrating female solidarity, which helps their heroines resolve their marginalized position and overcome racial oppression and patriarchal constraints imposed on Black femininity.

Written as a Festschrift honouring a beloved professor, colleague, and friend, this volume comprises a collection of essays offering a wide array of contemporary approaches to literature, linguistics, and applied linguistics. It covers a variety of topics, ranging from medieval to contemporary literature and language, and explores genres as diverse as fantasy, dystopia, drama, poetry, and film, addressing issues such as post- and transhumanism, age, gender, identity, family, metonymy, and narrative discourse. The diversity of themes and methodologies makes the collection a widely applicable resource in the academic discussion of literature, language, and culture, both as a significant contribution to different philological fields and a useful educational tool for anyone teaching or studying English, Anglophone literature, British, American, and German studies, English as a Second Language, linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and applied linguistics, or conducting research in these fields.

This paper discusses the notion of Otherness in contemporary American immigrant fiction by addressing issues such as ethnic diversity, transnational identities, identity quest, alienation, intergenerational relations within immigrant families, the linguistic, cultural, and social obstacles to assimilation, and the psychological and spiritual impact of dislocation. Employing William Boelhower’s model for interpreting American immigrant literature, developed in his study “The Immigrant Novel as Genre,” and Josip Novakovich and Robert Shapard’s concepts of the “stepmother tongue” and “stepmother-tongue stories,” the paper provides an introduction to American immigrant genre and one of its main concerns – the dynamics of identity and Otherness. The analysis focuses on three American immigrant texts – Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club (1989) and two short stories from the collection Stories in the Stepmother Tongue (2000), “The Winter Hibiscus” by Minfong Ho and “Happiness” by Bharati Mukherjee. It attempts to show that in all three texts, storytelling functions as a powerful narrative strategy that both reveals and resolves the characters’ state of in-betweenness and issues such as identity struggle, cultural and generational gap, (mis)communication, and cultural translation. Whereas The Joy Luck Club introduces the culturally specific narrative technique of the “talk story,” Ho and Mukherjee employ traditional third-person and first-person narrative style, respectively. Nevertheless, in all three texts, storytelling has a crucial role that enables the characters to discover, reclaim, and redefine their identities by voicing their hidden secrets and fears, bridging language barriers, reconstructing their histories and personal life stories, passing on their cultural heritage, and ultimately, celebrating their multiculturalism. By emphasizing the importance of the authors’ personal experiences and life stories in interpreting these texts, the paper also argues that American immigrant fiction is strongly related to the genre of autobiography.

American literature is rich in stories of individualists who succeeded only by their own merits and faced the unknown, unexplored territory also called the frontier. This idea defines the identity of the nation to the point that even long after the literal frontier has been conquered and explored, the American spirit is to find new frontiers. This paper provides a brief sociohistoric overview in order to explain why individualism and self-reliance marked the American identity and what conditions those created in America. It also discusses the problems of society which clashed with those ideals, and thereby created the new moral frontier. The analysis focuses on three works: Walden or, Life in The Woods (1854) and Civil Disobedience (1849) by Henry David Thoreau and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) by Frederick Douglass, all of which uphold the unadulterated idea of individualism and self-reliance. Whereas Thoreau intended to overcome the materialistic, superficial way of modern life and live only on the factual necessities in order to seek out what makes a happy and fulfilled life, Douglass wanted to overcome the hurdles of his life and the life of all other slaves, which he managed to do through his own hard work and expediency. The paper also provides a comparative analysis and synthesis of Thoreau’s and Douglass’s works and their philosophies and differentiates between two kinds of frontier – the internal, or personal, and the external, or the socio-political one – by analysing how those frontiers are overcome by perseverance.

Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (1982) and Rupi Kaur’s collection of poetry the sun and her flowers (2017) seem to be two completely different literary works. Although the former is a novel written in the twentieth century and the latter is a poetry volume written in the twenty-first century, both works represent a woman’s personal growth from subordination to emancipation. This thesis explores the similarities between Walker’s novel and Kaur’s poetry volume in order to show that the emotional responses they convey are representative of female experience in general, regardless of the time and place where one lives. In order to prove that, the two works are analyzed according to five life stages proposed by Kaur in her poetry volume – wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. In each of the five stages of life, the main character of The Color Purple and the speaker from the sun and her flowers experience various struggles, but the emotions that occur out of those experiences are the same. Their initial scare, confusion, and subordination eventually turn into strength, fearlessness, and quest towards independence. Examining their common themes and motifs, such as heartbreak, racism, violence, abuse, and community, the paper argues that despite the time period, the place, or the cause of the trauma, both texts maintain that hardships can be made bearable and meaningful if one finds support in one’s community or resilience within oneself.

Peti po redu tematski zbornik Size Zero / Mala mjera sadrži jedanaest radova autora iz Bosne i Hercegovine, Crne Gore, Hrvatske i Srbije koji analizom suvremenog ženskog pisma nastalog unutar različitih nacionalnih književnosti – crnogorske, hrvatske, srpske, američke, britanske i irske – propituju odnos ženske poetike i suvremene stvarnosti te upućuju na nove komparativne mogućnosti pristupa ženskoj estetici iz transhistorijske i transnacionalne perspektive. Glavni je cilj studije ukazati na potencijal ženskog pisma da potakne kulturno-kritički dijalog i dekonstrukciju diskurzivnih praksi koje generiraju nejednakosti i ugnjetavanja te da novi ženski glas pridruži ne samo politici roda nego i drugim oblicima društveno-političke borbe za ravnopravnost kako na lokalnoj tako i na globalnoj razini. Konstrukcija ženskog subjektiviteta u prozi i poeziji te feministička poetika tijela dominantne su teme prvog dijela zbornika. Razmatranjem djela anglofonih autorica drugi dio studije propituje odnos identiteta i diskurzivne prakse, ukazujući na nužnost povijesnog i žanrovskog revizionizma iz ženske, odnosno etničke ženske perspektive. Treći dio zbornika, naslovljen „Kulturno mapiranje ženskog pisma“, razmatra problematiku književnog kanona, intertekstualnosti te osobne i društvene ideologije u ženskom književnom tekstu.

American literature of the nineteenth century provided an abundance of literary icons. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leader of the Transcendentalist movement, and novelist and satirist Mark Twain are undoubtedly among the most prominent representatives of the period. Both Emerson and Twain tried to portray what it really meant to be an American, and the unique identity they shaped in their texts has remained in American national consciousness to this day. Seemingly different –Emerson being a transcendentalist and Twain being a realist –the two authors shared similar principles regarding the position of an individual in society. The Transcendentalists put focus on non-conformity and self-reliance, i.e. they emphasized the primacy of the individual over the collective and the national.Mark Twain’s texts delivered the same message, though with a pinch of irony. In his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)Twain used Emerson’s transcendentalist concepts as a framework in shaping the micro universe of the main character, a thirteen-year-old orphan, Huckleberry Finn. Even though his protagonist in many ways demonstrates Emerson’s concept of self-reliance, which is one the foundations of the American Dream, Twain also challenged this concept by showing its shortcomings. He introduced the character of a runaway slave to demonstrate that self-reliance can be achieved only in ideal conditions and that not everyone has the same rights when it comes to fulfilling the American Dream. This paper attempts to reveal both the merits and the downsides of the concept of self-reliance through a comparative reading of Emerson and Twain, as well as through an analysis of different types of characters from Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Its main aim is to juxtapose the two authors’ view on the question: Can a man be both self-reliant and a part of society, or is social isolation a prerequisite for self-reliance?

The novel Sister Carrie (1900) reflects the period in which it was written, the era of emerging capitalism and consumerism. This era corresponded perfectly with American literary naturalism, which spanned the last ten years of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century. Naturalism essentially contains a philosophical thesis that includes notions of determinism and causality, which results in portraying human beings as animals whose life is ruled by external forces. The author of the novel, Theodore Dreiser, is also noted for being a social historian who documented important changes and developments of the latenineteenth-century American society. Sister Carrie is a naturalist novel, portraying the life of a young woman who arrives in the industrially booming Chicago in search of a better future, and ultimately becomes a famous actress. Carrie achieves wealth and fame in the American society by adapting to its norms and conventions as she does everything that is required of her to succeed. Thus, Carrie’s character is a true epitome of the naturalist philosophy since she thoroughly embodies the phrase “survival of the fittest.” This paper discusses the influence of the naturalist philosophy on Dreiser’s novel as well as Dreiser’s critique of the American society and its artificialness. It also demonstrates how a society dominated by greed for wealth, which became its main value, lacks true emotion and rather resembles a theatrical performance.

This paper analyzes and presents a survey of American mainstream culture of the 1950s, the Beat Generation, and the counterculture of the 1960s. Both the 1950s Beat movement and the hippie movement of the 1960s were a reaction to the affluent and materialistic capitalist society of the 1950s and 1960s. They emphasized uniqueness and beauty of the individual, and attacked the dehumanizing effects of materialism and industrialism. These movements were critical of the mainstream culture and its ideology, and attempted to overthrow mainstream society by promoting the values of love, peace, humanity, and respect for the individual and society. The main ideas of the Beat movement and the 1960s counterculture, whose influence is discernible even today, will be discussed from a socio-historical perspective and through an in-depth analysis of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” (1956).

Book of Abstracts from the international conference Adaptation: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy, held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek from Feb. 23-25, 2017. It examines the theory, criticism, and pedagogy of adaptation, theories and methodologies for studying adaptation studies today, specific adaptations, and the pedagogy of adaptation in a cross-cultural and intercultural context.

Over the decades, Walt Disney Animation Studio has become well-known for adapting various types of texts for the big screen, particularly (children’s) novels and fairy tales. However, regardless of the nature of the source materials and the cultural, historical, social, etc. context in which they originated, their animated adaptations tend to follow the same basic pattern, largely predicated on fairy tales. The films created through this specific process of adaptation – often referred to as Disneyfication – may be described as a mixture of fairy tales and Hollywood musicals, complete with romantic plots, anthropomorphised animals and other marvellous creatures, lavish song- and-dance numbers, and happy endings. In this presentation, I propose to examine the process of Disneyfication by means of a close and comparative reading of Disney’s animated feature film The Princess and the Frog (2009) and its source material, the fairy tale “Der Froschkönig” (“The Frog King”) published in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales, 1812/15–1857). While acknowledging that the process of adaptation can never be a straightforward reproduction of a given story in a different medium, the presentation will focus on concrete strategies employed to modify the Grimms’ fairy tale in accordance with the recognizable Disney mold. Special emphasis will be placed on the treatment of the fairy tale’s (superimposed) didactic features as well as the character traits ascribed to the male and female protagonist in both the fairy tale and the film.

This paper discusses the mythological foundations of popular comic books Detective Comics (DC) and Action Comics – the Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman series, Marvel Comics, Dragon Ball Manga, and Shonen Manga. It pays special attention to the heroes' characterization and the similarities, as well as the discrepancies between mythological tropes and their comic book adaptations. The main thesis of this paper is that comic books are the mythology of our era. They are an integral part of our time and culture and serve to entertain, educate, and inspire the readers throughout times of either prosperity or poverty and hardship. What Heracles was for the ancient Greeks, Superman is today for us – an inspiration of a perfect warrior and what a human being should want to become. Batman is a modernized version of Odysseus, relying on his skill and intelligence, not just his brute force. Additionally, comic book characters and their stories reflect social and cultural phenomena of our time just as different mythologies depicted their culture and civilizations. The main conclusion of this paper is that comic books are a crucial part of contemporary culture and as important to our civilization as myths were to ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Norse cultures. These stories reveal how the culture worked in the time they were told. Their heroes depict the ideal, perfect human being, while the villains show us what is perceived as bad and evil. Sorcery and gods are today replaced mostly with science and alien beings that are way more advanced than humanity, but their job is the same: to act as a catalyst to the heroes' abilities and to act as a higher power compared to the heroes.

This paper traces the evolution of the postmodern slave narrative. It pays special attention to the emergence of this genre as a continuation of nineteenth-century slave narratives and a response to pro-slavery writing, which appropriated African American history to encourage prejudice, stereotyping, and cultural misrepresentation. Using William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) as the paradigmatic text, which initiated a critical debate over its authenticity, as well as subsequent intertextual deconstructions of its historical bigotry, the paper juxtaposes Styron's text to two postmodern neo-slave narratives – Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose (1986) and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979). Highlighting the correlation between the novels' postmodern narrative strategies and their attempt to engage in historical revisionism and convey the authentic reality of the slave experience, it argues that both Williams and Butler successfully de/re-construct and re-write/right the dominant narrative of African American history by depicting a black woman's first-hand experience of the past and inscribing the physical wounds of slavery into the present. Finally, it reviews the cinematic representation of slavery and racial stereotypes through several representative slavery films – D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), Victor Fleming's Gone with the Wind (1939), Haile Gerima's Sankofa (1993), Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), and Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013) – and classifies Gerima's and McQueen's films as representatives of a new trend of transferring slave narratives to the big screen.

This paper analyses and provides a historical overview of gender relations in American society from the creation of the United States to the present. Gender relations were economically and socially conditioned and influenced by major events, such as the Industrial Revolution, World War II, and major women’s movements – the Women’s Suffrage and Women’s Liberation Movement. During and after the Industrial Revolution, for many men the work place moved from home to the urban centres, thus separating the public from the private sphere. Subsequently, the roles of husbands and wives, who in Pre-Industrial society worked together and had equal roles in their household, became more separate and unequal than ever; men became the sole breadwinners, and women were bound to the house, fulfilling the role of mother and housewife. Furthermore, the American society made an immense step towards gender equality under the influence of the Women’s Suffrage movement. However, changes achieved through women’s suffrage only concerned women’s political rights and had a limited impact on gender relations at home and work. It was World War II and the 1960s Women’s Liberation Movement that brought about a profound shift in gender relations and became major catalysts for women’s acceptance into labour force. Nevertheless, gender inequality and the division of labour into separate spheres, that furthers the male role of the breadwinner and the female role of mother and housewife, still exists in present-day American society, as is confirmed by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay “We Should All Be Feminist” (2014) and John Cheever’s postmodern short stories “The Fourth Alarm” (1978) and “The Enormous Radio” (1978).

Receiving accurate information is very important, especially when dealing with topics such as war. The 2003 Iraq War is a relatively recent conflict between The United States of America and other Coalition forces against Iraqi Army led by Saddam Hussein. The literature about this particular conflict is still in the making, so it is important to know how to disambiguate between accurate information and sensationalism. This paper tackles the problem of accurately conveying facts about the Iraq War by analyzing three battles through three different perspectives, namely those of journalists, officers, and enlisted personnel. Each of them perceive the war through the prism of their own beliefs and prior experiences, and due to that, it is necessary to filter their own subjective perceptions from the objective truth. That is done by looking into one event from various points of view. By comparing how the three battles were narrated from each of the perspectives, this paper aims to extract the information that overlaps in all of the perspectives. Those pieces of information can be regarded as objective, whilst the rest of the individual narratives are personally influenced and vary slightly, depending on the narrator. Sources from which these three perspectives will be drawn are Evan Wright’s war reports compiled into a book titled Generation Kill, which was later turned into a TV miniseries, and Nathaniel Fick’s war memoir One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer.

Motivation is an important part of everyone’s life, but it might be even more important in drawing people into the military and, almost certainly, the war. This paper analyzes characters from five Gulf War memoirs in order to find the motivational aspects which influenced their decision to enlist. The surveyed memoirs are Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (2005), Nathaniel Fick’s One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer (2005), Chris Kyle’s American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (2011), Kayla Williams’ Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army (2005) and Matt Gallagher’s Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War (2010). The specific motivational aspects of each of the soldiers have been derived from their memoirs by analyzing their writing. Those have then been sorted into categories which were used in the empirical studies from the field of psychology. Studies surveyed for the purposes of this paper are: "Towards an Understanding of Army Enlistment Motivation Patterns” by Pliske et al. and "Enlistment Motivations of Army Reservists: Money, Self-Improvement, Or Patriotism?" by Gorman and Thomas. The categories of “self-improvement”, “money” and “serve” have been derived from the Gorman and Thomas’s study. It has been found that the motivational aspects of soldiers derived from the memoirs and those derived from the empirical studies match to a great degree; hence, a conclusion is drawn that people drawn to the military calling have similar motivation for enlisting.

Being a worldwide cultural phenomenon, the Harry Potter novels have been analyzed through various critical perspectives. As the main setting, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry offers a gateway to an analysis of the educational context represented in the novels. Considering education as being one of the important underlying themes, this paper focuses primarily on the depictions of learning and teaching since the Harry Potter series contains various pedagogical examples of both good and bad teaching, approaches, and learning methods and theories. After a brief insight into Hogwarts’ structure and curriculum, the most prominent teachers and pedagogical examples of the novels are described and further analyzed through principles of Bloom’s taxonomy, Fink’s taxonomy, and Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. After analyzing the novels from a pedagogical stance, it can be concluded that the educational process portrayed in the Harry Potter series indeed contains numerous pedagogical examples that can denote attitudes towards nowadays education and its principles. The analysis of the examples on theoretical foundations can provide better understanding and more legitimate explanations as to why some approaches and methods are more eligible than others.

The American Dream was created by the first settlers who came to America. For them the Dream was connected to God and religion, and they believed that if they worked hard enough, God would elect them when the apocalypse came. Yet, when they began connecting the Dream with the ability to succeed and accumulate material wealth, the Dream started to be corrupted. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1940) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) both deal with this topic. Fitzgerald connects Gatsby's Dream not to material wealth, but to the love of his life, Daisy. Just like the Dream, Daisy is desirable, materialistic, selfish, careless, beguiling, and haunting. Fitzgerald also places emphasis on social status and implies that the Dream stopped being achievable for an individual when it became corrupted. Therefore, poor people never get their chance to achieve the Dream. Like Fitzgerald, who emphasizes the detrimental effect of materialism, Miller also points at the corruption of the Dream and its values. Through his main character, Willy Loman, he shows a man who believes in all the wrong values of the Dream, which leads to an unsatisfactory and dysfunctional life of both himself and his family. On the other hand, through the character of Charley, Miller depicts a man who understands the system and therefore succeeds. Miller implies that some parts of the Dream that were later created, such as individualism or competition, have caused the downfall and the disintegration of society. He also implies that people need to start working together towards greater good to be able to restore the true values of the American Dream.

The paper discusses the elements of the quest romance in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Jerome David Salinger's The Catcher in The Rye (1951). It focuses on the novels' male protagonists who embark on an identity quest by distancing themselves from their family and friends and experiencing numerous adventures. The more adventures the protagonist undertakes, the more he learns about himself and the world around him. Yet, towards the end of his journey, he realizes that he does not fit into society and that he must continue with his quest. Accordingly, neither of these characters' quests leads to a closure. The analysis pays attention to both the hero's psychological development and his changed relation to society upon his return. It also interprets Defoe's, Swift's, Twain's, and Salinger's works in terms of social critique as all of them draw attention to important political and social issues of their time. Whereas Defoe and Swift expose the psychology of colonialism, corruption, and dishonesty, Twain and Salinger address racial issues, hypocrisy, and materialism of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American society, respectively. Additionally, the paper discusses the role of gender in shaping the narrative formulas and social implications of the quest genre.

We invite scholars to join us at the international conference Contemporary Indigenous Realities to be held at the Faculty of Philosophy, Nikšić, University of Montenegro, on June 25-27, 2015. “Realities, ” being “attributes and circumstances that shape one’s perspective, ” invite contributions from a variety of disciplines including cultural and ethnic studies, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, arts, literature, linguistics, and education. By “contemporary” we mean exclusively turn of the twenty-first century phenomena related to indigenous peoples. We hope that scholars working within this broad range of fields should be able to easily tailor their current research around this topic. We are interested in creating a vivid mosaic of contributions that would also involve performances, story-telling events, screenings, exhibitions, and poster sessions. We anticipate participation of several renowned scholars and filmmakers from Canada and the USA and are working towards an event at which scholars and artists would meet and temporarily work together towards new ideas.

Louise Erdrich is an important contemporary Native American writer of mixed heritage, known for her peculiar narrative style that employs intratextuality and the use of multiple narrators, presenting the readers with narrative crossovers and the possibility to perceive her fictional world from a variety of perspectives. One of the prominent themes that Erdrich explores in her novels is the perception of femininity and fluid gender identity. Her novels Love Medicine (1984) and Tracks (1988) introduce certain female characters whose looks and personalities can be compared to those of traditional Native American archetypes the berdache and the trickster the figures with no fixed identity that combine elements of various cultures, worlds, and even genders, and live in marginal and liminal spaces. This paper discusses the concept of the trickster in Love Medicine and Tracks as a tool for deconstructing the stereotypes about Native American women and the Western concept of gender roles and gender identity, observable both as an element of characterization and as a narrative strategy. It focuses on the characters of Fleur Pillager, June Morrissey, Lulu Nanapush, and Marie Kashpaw, whose identity is liminal and fluid as they incorporate both the feminine and the masculine traits. In other to uncover these characters' berdache/trickster nature, the analysis pays special attention to their physical appearance, personality, character, social status, relationship with other characters, as well as their ability to transcend both the physical and the narrative boundaries. Finally, it defines Louise Erdrich's unique technique of narrative fragmentation and playfulness as an important indicator of the trickster discourse.

The paper analyzes the novels Four Souls (2004) and The Antelope Wife (1998) by contemporary Native American author Louise Erdrich. Describing unusual love relations, complex family ties, and women who, with their almost magical powers, fight against the white influence and their own people's prejudices, Erdrich provides insight into contemporary Native American identity and contributes to its revitalization. The paper consists of two major parts. The first one analyzes a variety of love relations described in the novel Four Souls. It focuses on Fleur's relationship with her children, Lulu and John James Mauser II, and her husband John James Mauser. It also analyzes Fleur Pillager's identity quest and her recovery from its failure and pays attention to the blurring of the boundary between the mythical and the real, and between the human the animal, visible in Fleur's characterization. The second part explores the concepts of love, family, and women's social roles in The Antelope Wife. It analyzes Rozin's marriage to Richard, Klaus's obsessive love for Sweetheart Calico, and briefly sums up the consequences of a love triangle between Augustus Roy, Mary, and Zosie Shawano, emphasizing the diversity of these love relations and their magical elements. The Antelope Wife introduces many concepts of family and shows that, in situations when an individual needs help, the whole community takes up the family's role. It also depicts cultural intermixture as a positive concept and teaches us that forceful and selfish acts only cause imbalance in the community. This section also discusses strong women characters, who fight for their goals and freedom, that abound in this novel. It analyzes Rozin's decision to get rid of Richard's obsessive love and Cally's connection to her ancestors, especially to Sweetheart Calico, as well as her courage to be a mediator between the past and present. This paper supports the thesis that love relationships in both of the novels are not strictly reserved for a man and a woman, but go beyond this basic concept. It is possible to love a place where one resides, or even have feelings for the non-human beings, too. It argues that in Erdrich's fiction family and community are interchangeable concepts since one can get help not only from the closest family members but also from one's relatives. Thus, the cultural mixture within a family is described as a positive concept in the novel. Lastly, the paper emphasizes the role of Erdrich's women characters – their relevance in the community, their strength in defying authority, as well as their power and responsibility to change the world.

This paper explores the political, religious, and feminist aspects of contemporary witchcraft novels. It discusses the novels: A Discovery of Witches (2011) by Deborah Harkness, The Witching Hour: Lives of the Mayfair Witches (1991) by Anne Rice, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009) by Katherine Howe, Voodoo Dreams: A Story of Marie Leveau (1995) by Jewell Parker Rhodes, and Beautiful Creatures (2009) by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. The analysis pays special attention to these novels' references to social issues such as racism, intolerance, social status of women, and the social function of religion that are achieved not only through fictional depiction of social issues but also by referring to actual historical occurrences. The chapter on political aspects of witchcraft discusses in depth the policies and social interactions between witches and elaborates on the moral issues of using magic for personal gain. The analysis of the religious aspect of contemporary fiction about witchcraft, conducted in the following chapter, points at the role of the Catholic Church in the persecutions of witches during the Middle Ages. This Chapter also analyzes the religious elements in witchcraft itself by comparing fictional rituals to practices of pre-Christian religions. The last chapter, dedicated to feminist aspects of these novels, provides evidence of fictional witches being strong, educated, and independent women. In addition to social issues, the analysis of political, religious, and feminist aspects provides an insight into the complex character of a fictional witch. The novels included in this scrutiny show that contemporary authors turn away from the traditional way of depicting witches as villains by revolving the plot around their lives and experiences. They demonstrate that a witch need not always be a negative character but can also be good and kind. As these authors include important social issues into their writing, reference historical occurrences, and create multifaceted characters, it can be said that fiction about witchcraft must not necessarily be trivial.

The system of slavery had been present in the New World for many years and it left horrible consequences on people who managed to survive it. People needed to be extremely strong both physically and psychically to endure all the pain and pressure that white people put them through. White people could not accept that there existed people who were different from them and, because they were in majority, they gave themselves the right to abuse their power and to decide the fate and life of other people. Many great literary works have explored the issue of slavery, and every one of them is very realistic and disturbing. In his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) Frederick Douglass presents us with a brutal and remorseless picture of the life of African American slaves. He gives us a realistic picture which can shock or upset even the most insensitive of us. We can see how hard it was for the slaves to live the kind of life where you are not completely sure what you can or cannot do, and where you cannot know whether you are going to be sold or even survive to see the next day. In her novel Beloved (1987) Toni Morrison introduces a family consisting of a mother and a child who escaped slavery. We can see the life they live as free people, but it is not the one filled with happiness of their escape. We see that they are wrecked by the slavery and its aftermath and how they are divided between two identities, especially the mother who survived being a slave. She tries to leave painful memories behind her, thus depriving herself of a normal life in the present because she is unable to deal with her past life and actions. This paper attempts to demonstrate that people who survived slavery have endured an enormous amount of physical and psychic pain. They endured working as animals, whipping and even watching their friends or family being killed. All of that left a deep impact on them so that even when they became free, they could not live as normal people. They were constantly afraid, which sometimes made them do horrible acts that left them unable to live a normal and happy life. There were different types of people. Some, like Frederick Douglass, were decisive and knew what they really wanted and went for their goal. Although he had and a very difficult life, he did not give up and eventually he managed to escape and build a real and stable life. On the other side are people like Sethe, the protagonist of Morrison's novel, who were not strong enough to deal with their problems so that they allowed their problems to overpower them. For Sethe it was so hard to deal with the killing of her baby that she pushed the people who loved her away and allowed her guilt to take over. Luckily, she realized that with the help of the right people, people with similar experience, she could deal with her pain and her problems.