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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Jane Austen is one of the most famous women writers of the nineteenth century. Her novels Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1815), and Persuasion (1818) deal with the position of women and their social expectations, most of which are related to marriage. The protagonists of these novels represent a unique response to those expectations, which is a product of their way of thinking. Women in the nineteenth century did not have much choice when it came to their future. They could either get married or become governesses if they were educated enough. Their life was shaped mostly by their families which tried to find them a husband who would support them. Austen’s heroines Elizabeth, Emma, and Anne are self-reliant and uncenventional women who marry the men they love. The other characters, such as Lydia and Mrs. Bennet represent women whose ultimate goal in life is connected to marriage. Charlotte Lucas represents women who marry out of necessity and Jane Fairfax embodies the women who are strong and ready to do anything in the name of love. Accordingly, all those women represent different female responses to social norms and to their own position in the society.

This paper critically discusses the film industry as well as pop culture that have shaped the way how Native Americans are viewed today. Twentieth- century film and popular culture have created countless stereotypes and misconceptions about Native Americans, portraying them through negative and disturbing images - as wild savages, bloodthirsty killers, thieves, rapists, kidnappers, beggars, less intelligent beings, scalp collectors, relentless trackers and as inferior human beings in every possible way. Furthermore, the images that the film industry established have been used by other popular media and the entertainment industry, including team sports mascots, history books, comic books, video games and commercials. They have all continued Hollywood’s legacy of stereotypes only to make profit, entertain the masses, and finally, to mentally destroy real Native Americans. In the past Native Americans were ruthlessly hunted down and killed, deceived into selling their land, deprived of their traditional lifestyle and confined to reservations. Nowadays, Native Americans have to fight against the mainstream media that are robbing them off their own identity. However, some films such as Dances with Wolves (1990) and Powwow Highway (1989) marked the beginning of a break with traditional stereotypes by portraying Native Americans as real, living human beings. Consequently, in the second half of the twentieth century a mental and spiritual war path of Native Americans for their cultural and religious legacy began.

The House of Mirth (1905) by Edith Wharton is a portrayal of the nineteenth-century New York upper class. This paper looks at the realization of Thorstein Veblen’s principle of “conspicuous consumption of time and substance” or “conspicuous waste” (Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899) in The House of Mirth. It describes the differences between the “old” and “new" rich and their respective customs and manners. The position of late nineteenth-century women is examined with respect to the domineering male establishment and the institution of marriage. The marital status of women in The House of Mirth also serves as a background for exploring gender issues and homosocial relations. The division between the leisure class and the working class is presented by contrasting the main character, Lily Bart, with Nettie Struther, a working girl. Whereas the characterization of Nettie Struther embodies Wharton’s concept of naturalism and the Darwinist theory of determinism, the figure of Simon Rosedale, a businessman of Jewish origin, brings up the issue of race and racial discrimination in aristocratic circles of late nineteenth-century New York.

In his novel The Great Gatsby (1925) F. Scott Fitzgerald places a great emphasis on the characters’ social status, and the corresponding level of power or weakness it denotes in society. Moreover, the author highlights the issue of the characters’ never-ending quest for wealth, which is seen as the only basis of their lives. At the beginning of the novel, we are introduced to the character of Nick Carraway, the narrator, who comes to East Egg in search for a better job. Nick represents a member of the working class, a common man who has to earn for his living. Thus, the idea of the quest for financial security is stated at the very beginning of the novel. The first chapter also introduces Jay Gatsby, who is described as a well-off, successful man. The character of Jay Gatsby encompasses all types of pursuits; he struggles to obtain a status of a well-to-do person, while at the same time he unsuccessfully searches for joy and his long-lost love. He, as well as Tom and Daisy Buchanan, blindly believe that one’s position in society depends on a person’s wealth. Tom and Daisy Buchanan stand for clear examples of opulent members of higher class, who never seem to have enough money to buy what they truly lack. All in all, the novel deals with money and the consequences it has on people. These are seen through greedy and corrupted people, who always want more. The novel also challenges the question of social class and the distinctions felt between people of different status. The Great Gatsby is all about money, the pursuit of wealth and possessions.

Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) is a story of a climbing femme fatale. It is a depiction of how the main character struggles to finally gain something. While she finds a way of doing it, the question that arises is the morality of her choice. The novel was written in the nineteenth century when women started demanding the change and pursuing their own dreams rather than just being at home raising children. Sister Carrie is a perfect example of a young woman starting her life and actually taking control over her own life as a femme fatale. Femme fatale is a woman who uses her charms and looks to get what she wants. She is fatal in a way that she uses her men for her own goals until something better comes along. In an era of harsh consumerism, Carrie decides that her only choice is to use her own image to sell herself in order to become part of the elite because poverty is something she is trying to avoid at any cost. Aware that in life not everything is fair, she hurts people, mostly her men, along her way to success as a real femme fatale. She abandons them while she goes further on her way to the top. In light of naturalist theory, the novel does not hide the true nature of human beings. On the contrary, it shows, and flaunts it. All of the main characters are shown with compassion. The author does not judge any of the characters because he realizes that all human beings make mistakes.

Although the dystopian idea has been present in literature for over two thousand years, not until the second half of the nineteenth century did the dystopian literature become appreciated as an important cultural force. Dystopia found its roots in science fiction, but it has also blossomed in political fiction, and became a separate literary genre, following the developments of the first half of the twentieth century. The dystopian authors became social critics who examine the political practice of the world society. Two of the most important representatives of twentieth-century dystopian fiction -- George Orwell and Aldous Huxley -- both explored future states of their societies. In Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) George Orwell wanted to inform English society about the emerging political systems such as Bolsheviks or the Nazis. Orwell´s aim was to satirize the emerging vanity and popularity of governments. Huxley´s Brave New World (1931) portrayed a world where human beings were produced like clones and conditioned with artificial happiness through a never-ending variety of pleasures and seductions. These two visions may differ drastically because Brave New World is often perceived as a positive vision and Orwell´s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a nightmare vision of the future world. Yet, both Orwell and Huxley turned out to be prophets, and their dystopian novels became instruction manuals for many of today’s politicians, corporations and governments.

One of the important and characteristic elements in contemporary American ethnic novels is the style of magical realism. For each ethnic group, be it the Native Americans, African Americans or Asian Americans, oral tradition is very important. Storytelling, as one of the most important magical realist elements in these texts, is used as a way to preserve the tradition and rituals of one’s predecessors. In such stories one does not see any boundaries between the real and the magical. The novels’ aim is to convey a certain message, to teach the individuals how to behave and act in the present world, and still keep their ethnic identity alive. Native American authors Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko, as well as the Chinese American author Amy Tan and the African American author Toni Morrison, use magical realism in their novels to depict and emphasize the values of the community, preserving the oral stories and, therefore, tradition for the future.

This paper describes one of the shortest, but very prolific movements in the history of American literature – Transcedentalism. Transcendentalism came into existence in the first half of the nineteenth century as an endeavour to create, and develop a real American literature. However, transcendentalism has lived to see changes in society as well as in the course of philosophical, and religious thought of the time in which it occurred. In order to really understand the main tenets of the movement, it is important to get to know better the changes which influenced transcendentalism itself. Another essential element of this research is to explain how the whole literary movement influenced not only the American society, but also the overall history of the human knowledge. Finally, it represents in more detail two great authors, and thinkers of transcendentalism – Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Their immense contribution to the understanding of the spiritual concept hidden behind this movement is worth of every respect, and admiration.

This paper discusses the development of female psyche in nineteenth century American literature. Three literary texts by prominent female authors were taken into consideration as a model for this research – the novel The Awakening (1899) written by Kate Chopin, Trifles (1916), a play in one act by Susan Glaspell, and A Room of One’s Own (1929), an essay on feminist criticism by Virginia Woolf. This paper is divided into three chapters, each discussing one particular author. Chapters start with a short information on the author and the literary text, and are followed by the critical analysis of the text. Furthermore, these texts were used to help describe the development of major female characters under the influence of social circumstances of nineteenth century society. The society of that time was immensely patriarchal and distanced from new changes. Yet, that was also the time of the emergence of feminist ideology, whose sole aim is to establish equal political and economic rights for women. Throughout history, even more so in the twentieth century, the feminist ideology has left a huge impact on women’s society. The effect of feminism is strong and a lot can be said about the difficulties women encounter. The afore mentioned female authors are fine examples of female writing at a time when the society was very conservative so that female authors wrote little, if anything. They created characters that prove that women will fight the constrictions of society. Kate Chopin, Susan Glaspell and Virginia Woolf gave evidence of women who gradually discover their own power and identity.