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The research delves into Guy de Maupassant's narrative technique of character portrayal through the lens of Roland Barthes' concept of “indexes”, focusing particularly on the significance of material details, especially clothing, in his novellas. The primary objective is to elucidate how clothing items serve as communicative tools in shaping characters in Maupassant's works, thereby highlighting their cultural-historical, characterological, and symbolic functions. By analyzing the interplay between characters' physical appearances, gestures, and attire, Maupassant effectively conveys their inner emotions and traits to the reader. Barthes' notion of “indexes”, grounded in concrete elements like outward appearance and clothing, provides a theoretical framework for understanding the thematic distribution of these details, which range from physical attributes to sartorial choices, all of which contribute to character development. Ultimately, it is through such meticulous attention to detail that Maupassant's characters become vivid and relatable to readers, enriching the narrative experience.

The research work attempts to study the contemporary African American women’s struggle to discharge their interpersonal conflict with reference to Terry McMillan’s “It’s Not All Downhill From Here”. Conflict is an expression of struggle between two or more interdependent persons who have incompatible goals. Through her works, Terry McMillan voices the life of urban African American middle class women. The Black women of this class are suppressed under various roles and responsibilities especially related to their families that have lots of challenges like addiction, crime, lack of trust and emotional bonding. Lack of any support builds up antagonistic mindsets and develops interpersonal conflicts. They are trying hard to resolve these conflicts and attempting to restart with more focus on exploration of self. The research work analyses the conflict resolution strategies employed by African American women in the novel.

Political journalism, as a practice aimed at covering the political scene for the benefit of citizens, is a major tool in shaping the public's opinion of political issues and actors. Taken on a global scale, this practice becomes more crucial as it positions political journalism at the intersection formed by national (own) and foreign political and ideological spots. The author has chosen one of the most polarizing topics on the international scene for the last two decades: China-Africa. This strong polarization will enable us to highlight the main trends of analysis of media discourse on China and Africa in Canada, France and French-speaking West Africa. The research confirms this trend: political perception and dominant ideology in Canada and France build a common reading lense for describing and interpreting China-Africa relations in the media. The limits of interpreting African dynamics from the “outside” Africa, in the ideological and political meaning of the term, are considered. The major bias in press coverage is to mainly focus on China-Africa, whereas African countries are nurturing and initiating important partnerships with other countries such as Russia, of course, but also India, Japan, Turkey, etc. Europe needs Africa, which it will have to support in its economic transformation, whatever the cost, to build the long-promised New Deal, that was only envisaged in the emergency thanks to the multipolar situation created by the rise of Asia, among others. Reporting on it from both a European-American and an Asian-African perspective remains a major challenge for political journalism on both sides, for a better understanding of Africa’s new dynamic in a new world order.

Such features of M.Yu. Levidov's verbal creativity as versatile productivity and syncretism of writing are considered. These qualities, as a kind of creative constant, were inherent in his printed products throughout his life. To substantiate this thesis, the authors conducted a periodization of the writer's work and identified three periods in it: 1) the pre-October period (1914-1917); 2) the years of greatest activity (1918-1931) and 3) the last decade (1932-1942). Having tested each of the periods for combining such types of M.Yu. Levidov's activities as journalism, literature, criticism, science, pedagogy, the authors came to the conclusion that already at an early stage Levidov showed authorial activity in the field of literature, criticism and newspaper journalism; in maturity, science and pedagogy were added to these areas, and critical activity has reached the level of “blooming complexity”. But in the last decade, due to unfavorable socio-political conditions, the scope of application of Levidov's creative energy was forced to be narrowed: theoretical work was discontinued, and practical activity was focused on literary creativity, with biographical prose becoming the most acceptable format. In this genre the text's syncretism has reached its apogee.

The article analyses publications in leading Russian daily periodicals - the Komsomolskaya Pravda, Izvestia, and Kommersant newspapers - for the year 2023, which cover conflicts and confrontations of various kinds in African states. The analysis revealed that media attention is primarily focused on the political shifts that accompany the establishment of a new multipolar order on the global arena, wherein Africa is seen as a significant actor supporting Russia. Besides, Russian newspapers represent internal regional conflicts in Africa as well, though such topics are covered substantially less intensively and continuously compared to the Russia-related hostilities. This allows to conclude about the formation of positive media representations of Africa even in negative contexts, i.e. against the conflict-prone background. The agenda built around Africa is marked by Russia-centricity, and the issues of African region are viewed through the lens of the Russian context.

Misinformation and disinformation are receiving momentous global attention largely because of the risks they pose to almost every sector. Also, it deepening hate among ethnic groups, particularly, in Ghana and Nigeria. Lately, the most critical is the consistent manufactured lies in the semblance of news which have further threatened the fragile ethno-religious fabric in these two West African nations. In view of this, the study explores the intricate interconnection between misinformation, disinformation, and their impact on intensifying ethno-religious conflicts in Ghana and Nigeria. The propagation of inaccurate or deceptive information across various mediums has been observed to play a substantial role in exacerbating tensions, deepening divisions, and magnifying animosity among diverse ethnic communities. The primary objective of this research is to establish a wide-ranging comprehension of how misinformation and disinformation contribute to the escalation of ethno-religious conflicts, thereby shedding light on potential strategies to mitigate their detrimental consequences. Employing a qualitative approach of in-depth interview, the study uncovered the mechanisms through which misinformation and disinformation disseminate, shape perceptions, and contribute to the fragmentation of communities in Nigeria and Ghana unity. By highlighting these dynamics, the study seeks to offer valuable insights to policymakers, media professionals, and community leaders, enabling them to confront the predicament of misinformation and disinformation, ultimately cultivating a more unified and harmonious Nigerian and Ghanaian societies.

The author examines the principle of constructing the hero's path in an early novel by the contemporary writer Paul Auster. In “City of Glass” Auster has already undertaken the problematization of a more traditional narrative form: he pays increasing attention not so much to constructing events that actually happen to the hero, as to pointing out events that could have happened, but did not happen within the narrative world. Such work with the event fits Auster's narrative search into an extensive tradition that problematizes possible worlds in the narrative in its own way. One of the techniques for creating such possible worlds is disnarration, which allows - due to indications of a possible alternative development of events - to create possible worlds within the narrative and even turn them into counterfactual ones. Feeling an interest in this problematic, Auster in his early novel also creates the path of his hero on the principle of variations - consistently presenting to the reader those paths that the hero could have followed, but which nevertheless remained unrealized in his life. This is how Auster in the narrative comprehends the idea of Borges' “forking paths”, simultaneously responding to the cinematic narrative experiments that were undertaken by directors in the second half of the 20thcentury. In this way he consistently develops his own narrative experiment, because several decades after the “City of Glass”, the principle of “forking paths” will be fully embodied in his novel in “4321” not only at the level of character construction, but at the level of the entire narrative structure, which therefore can be defined as forking-path narrative.

The study is devoted to the analysis of the controversy between Zinaida Gippius and Mark Slonim that arose in the mid-1920s on the pages of periodicals of the Russian diaspora. Russian emigration was interested in the dispute over the two branches of literature development, as it concerned the issues of the state of literature of the Russian diaspora and literature of Soviet Russia, as well as the future of these literatures. Gippius argued that literature in Russia is in decline, because it is “torn from the roots”, and Russian literature is preserved only in emigration. Slonim insisted that the literature of emigration was stagnating, and the literature of Soviet Russia was giving new names, new literary groups. The field of criticism of literature of the Russian diaspora in the 1920s and 1930s is poorly studied at the present stage of literary criticism. The controversy between Slonim and Gippius has not been considered by researchers before, this is the novelty of the work. Russian literature the examination of different points of view on the state and future of the two branches of Russian literature in the mid-1920s makes it possible to understand the public mood among the Russian emigration and their view of contemporary literature. The paper traces the dispute between Slonim and Gippius, which influenced the literary life of emigration in the 1920s, identifies issues in which both critics agreed, as well as theses that the authors continued to prove. Russian literature historians emphasize that Slonim put forward a thesis, which will be developed in the future by historians of literature of the Russian diaspora, that the literature of the Russian diaspora is not an independent literature, but only one of the branches of Russian literature.

A few images on journalism and its actors in the Sahel, and specifically Mali, that are shaped by the media itself, are presented. These images, identified in articles that capitalize on the challenges of political, social, and cultural crisis, as well as the risks that a journalist takes when reporting and writing on the realities and events he observes in Sahel, are supposed to shape the power of the media to bring change at an epistemological level in the society it unpacks and depicts. This epistemological metamorphosis is seen as a turning of a page in the history of crises and the proposal herein is to see what type of change this turning refers to, re-launching critical perspectives on the new powers or non-powers of journalists and journalism to inform, create and maintain a critical resistance meant to leave a relevant sign in the history, through deconstruction and management of crises communication, that would finally assure the durable control of crises, exercised by an informed and empowered society with the scope to overcome crises at a pragmatic and epistemic level. The analysis is qualitative and intends to invite the reader to more reflection on the interdependencies between the reality, the journalistic reality, and the journalist’s power or non-power to coin the two. Crises whose management from the point of view of public awareness and truth knowledge is compromised by a second-level crisis affecting the journalists, the leaders of the civil society, and broadly the media, who have concomitant powers and non-powers to change the perception of the public on the first level crises to such a point that, in the holistic interpretation of the term, this management of crisis through deflection should be considered a new page turned in the history of crises.

As part of comparative studies of the works of F.M. Dostoevsky and W. Faulkner, the implementation of the archetypal pattern of “underground” thinking and behaving (most completely embodied in the narrator of Dostoevsky’s novella “Notes from Underground”) in the character of Thomas Sutpen, the main character of Faulkner’s novel “Absalom, Absalom!”, is considered. The mere appearance of a stable association of Faulkner’s works with Dostoevsky’s novels by the early 1940s which subsequently gave impetus to a number of comparative studies not only in Western literary criticism but also (later on) in national literary studies is noted. The traits of the Underground Man (non-acceptance of God-created world, Man-god consciousness, awareness of inconsistency with Man-god ideal, cruel self-punishment and aesthetization of it, moral alienation, and spiritual decay) are realized in many characters of Dostoevsky and Faulkner (Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov, Ippolit Terentyev, Stavrogin, Arkady Dolgoruky, Ivan Karamazov; young Bayard Sartoris, Quentin Compson, Joe Christmas). As for Thomas Sutpen, the opinion has long been established in criticism that considering such characters of Dostoevsky as Raskolnikov and Arkady Dolgoruky, one can discover a portrait, which prefigures his character in almost every detail. In this study, given that Thomas Sutpen is the bearer of the “underground” of the “Stavrogin” type (without self-punishment for inconsistency with the ideal), a comparison between Stavrogin and Sutpen is made. Nikolai Stavrogin committed monstrous crimes for the sake of anesthetization of his immoral existence. Thomas Sutpen who sought to establish his dynasty at any cost went to any crime to achieve his goal. But both of them, trampling on the feelings of people, fell out of the human race and suffered a crushing defeat.

International organizations and numerous countries worldwide have implemented punitive measures, often in the form of sanctions, to express disapproval of certain events within a country or to compel change. A significant body of scholarly work has focused on these sanctions, particularly when imposed on countries outside of Africa, and how the media frames these actions. In various crisis situations, news framing and agenda-setting by the media have shown enormous effect on consumers’ view of the crisis. This study investigates how media in Africa frames sanctions imposed on African countries, specifically examining printed media in Zimbabwe, Mali, and Niger Republic regarding political and economic sanctions imposed on these countries. Employing the framing and agenda setting theories, the study analysed 204 sanction-related headlines (Zimbabwe - 104, Mali - 70 and Niger - 30) from five media outlets with online presence in each country. A multi-stage sampling technique was employed. In the initial stage, purposive sampling technique was utilized to choose print newspapers with online presence. In the second stage, the researcher utilized the search functionality on the newspapers' websites to identify headlines using the keywords “sanction” and “sanctions”. Quantitative content analysis was employed to analyse the data. Findings showed that a generic framing approach is widely used in the three countries. Further analysis reveals that the responsibility and conflict frames consistently dominate in all three countries. The study also finds a positive agenda-setting tone to be dominant in Zimbabwe. Conversely, both Mali and Niger Republic exhibit a dominant negative agenda-setting tone.

The study presents an analysis of the specifics of the edits of I.A. Bunin's work “New Year” (1901) based on a comparison of eight versions of this story. The author provides information about the first publication of the story, emphasizing the role of abbreviations of individual fragments of the text in the preparation of later versions, as well as the connection of these abbreviations with the chronology of the writer's life. The emphasis is placed on specific changes in the Bunin text - from the first publication in “Russkaya Mysl” (1902) to the last lifetime publication in the Complete Works (Izd. T-va A.F. Marks Publ., 1915). Edits in various publications concerned both stylistics and content elements. The researcher focuses on the change in the relationship between the characters of the “New Year” Kostya and Olya, in the later versions the characters are clearly at odds, show less empathy, openness and trust. This separation of the spouses is connected with the final breakup of Bunin with his first wife A.N. Tsakni (similar in character to the heroine of the story) and the beginning of his relationship with V.N. Muromtseva in 1906. The very consideration of the story from such positions seems relevant, given the important role autobiographies played in Bunin's writings.

Violent conflicts precipitated by allegations of blasphemy have resulted in loss of many lives and property in Nigeria. Worse still is the effects on peaceful coexistence among the different ethno-religious groups in the country. In all this, the media is a stakeholder, whether as a promoter of peace or exacerbater of tension and division. 306 editions of Daily Trust and The Punch newspapers were explored to ascertain how these national dailies are responding to the tenets of peace journalism enunciated by Johan Galtung, especially in their choice of words, to what extent do they specifically avoid war language in the coverage of sensitive incidents as blasphemy. Using quantitative content-analysis and framing as methodological and theoretical frameworks respectively, this study found that 71 of such (war) lexical indicators were used in covering the incidents of blasphemy investigated, with The Punch having the highest frequency (63). Out of the three war language categories coded (demonizing, victimizing, and emotive), first one is the most prevalent (90%) with individual words like ‘barbaric’ (25.3%), ‘fanatic’ (23.9%) and ‘extremist’ (18.3%) preponderating. All these are arguably a corollary of political, professional and economic factors. The research finally recommends that for blasphemy conflict with its attendant violence to be pre-empted, Nigerian journalists covering ethno-religious crises need to be conscientized on the tenets of peace journalism, whilst national cohesion and peaceful coexistence need to be prioritized by media industry over and above profiteering.

The question of the essence of national consciousness, of the methods of communication between an intellectual city dweller and a villager does not lose its relevance today. The purpose of the research is to consider the writing attitudes of L.N. Tolstoy, A.P. Chekhov, P.S. Romanov, V.M. Shukshin on the possibility/impossibility of mutual understanding between representatives of urban and rural cultures. The author analyzes the lifetime criticism of Chekhov’s story “Peasants”, which invariably referred to the comparison of writers’ approaches to the problem of the village and the techniques of Tolstoy and Chekhov’s poetics. The distinctiveness of the conflict in Chekhov’s short story “New Dacha”, as well as in “Peasants” and “In the Ravine”, is highlighted, emphasizing the breakdown of communication. This disconnection is not primarily characterized by social differences between different classes or even between urban and rural dwellers. Instead, it is portrayed as interpersonal disconnect, a kind of “arithmetic,” as coined by P.B. Struve. In addition, a search is being carried out for elements of Chekhov’s approach to the problem in Russian literature of the 20th century. The observation is made that the drama of mutual misunderstanding artistically reproduced by Chekhov occurred in Tolstoy’s life, that Tolstoy, a philosopher, ideologist and thinker, ends up losing the battle to himself, the artist. The continuation of the Chekhovian tradition is observed in the works of Panteleimon Romanov, a writer of the 20s and 30s in the 20th century. In the latter half of the century Vasily Shukshin, a writer, screenwriter, and a film director, also addressed the issue of the breakdown in communication between the intelligentsia and the common people. However, Shukshin approached the eternal problem from a different angle, looking at it through the “looking glass” - the reverse side - from the perspective of a peasant.

Opinion polls play an important and often controversial role in electoral contests. It is one of the main tools of political communication in democratic societies, where citizens receive much of their information during election campaigns. In Francophone Africa, pre-election polls are increasingly visible in the public arena. However, the release of their results during the election period has been the subject of criticism and controversy questioning their credibility: opinion polls published in the media can influence voters. The polls conducted by the Apidon Research and Survey Institute commissioned by the newspaper “Bendre” ahead of the November 2015 presidential and legislative elections in Burkina Faso drew sharp criticism from the public. Many citizens denounced them for being unreliable. Given the interest shown in this political communication tool in Burkina Faso, the authors sought to investigate the extent to which the publication of the polls influenced voting behavior. By interviewing respondents in the capital Ouagadougou and the rural province of Loumbila, the authors were able to study the reactions of different social categories of the electorate. Analysis of the results showed that the impact of published pre-election polling data on voters was insignificant. At the same time, voters had a deliberately negative perception of the role in political life of the publication of pre-election public opinion monitoring figures. The results of the research revealed the problem and showed the necessity of its further study. On the one hand, future research could focus on the impact of opinion poll results on political actors to determine how they are used. On the other hand, it is useful to see whether journalists follow professional rules when dealing with such information.

Henry Miller is a modern American novelist who was famous for his autobiographical expression of sexuality in his novels on the background of metropolis like New York and Paris. His novel “Black Spring” which was written in 1932-1933 and first published in 1936 presents his childhood memories in Brooklyn and New York. The novel focuses on the development of sexuality of the novelist and his journey from childhood to adulthood, focusing on his sexuality. The novel presents his childhood sexuality, fantasies and his approach to sexuality changing with time. Miller challenges the taboos, canons and moral orders taking sexuality as a weapon against a person. He modifies all the rules of self-expression and perhaps he is the first novelist who presents himself as sexual hero. The research focuses on Miller’s view on sexuality and morality and his journey from childhood to youth and his development of personality along with the role of sexuality in the development of his personality. The paper is also an endeavour to study the concepts of contemporary moral order and social ethics presented by Henry Miller.

The article examines the features of literary translations of A.S. Pushkin's poems into the Kyrgyz language, authored by the People's Poet of the Kyrgyz Republic Omor Sultanov. The problem of the research lies in the lack of knowledge of the originality and stages of development of literary translations into the Kyrgyz language of the works of even the most famous Russian poets. The object of the study is literary translations of Pushkin’s poems into the Kyrgyz language, carried out by O. Sultanov. The subject of the research is the characteristics of equivalence, freedom and adequacy of the literary translations being studied. The novelty and scientific value of this study lies in the fact that it is based on a theoretical and practical approach. In the work, by line-by-line comparison of the originals and Kyrgyz translations of specific poems, the main nuances, criteria and artistic circumstances of their similarities or differences are determined. The interaction of unrelated languages, Russian and Kyrgyz, within the framework of literary translation is studied. It seems very relevant to trace their mutual influence in the context of the ongoing integration processes between Russia and Kyrgyzstan, including in the sphere of culture. In this case, the study of literary translations of poetry by Pushkin as the most popular Russian-language poet is quite understandable. Literary translations of his poems into the Kyrgyz language in O. Sultanov’s version have elements of the necessary equivalence, freedom and adequacy.

The article examines the issue of the status and content of the term mythopoetics, which, despite its prevalence, requires greater clarity and clarity in understanding. A review of articles by Russian and Azerbaijani literary scholars is provided, in which this category is conceptualized as a tool for philological analysis of text at the intersection of mythology, folklore and fiction.

The author examines the peculiarities of understanding Christian traditional experience in Zakhar Prilepin’s novel “The Abode”. The historical novel of a modern writer, dedicated to the tragic theme of Solovki, in its own way speaks of Christian sacrifice and repentance. Martyrdom, suffering and compassion, which are natural to Christianity, become important spiritual foundations in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky and the figures of the Russian religious Renaissance with his ideas about “Godmanhood”, which is reflected in the novel “The Abode”: the struggle between the “Godmanhood” and the “Mangodhood” can be traced everywhere in the text. The novel interweaves both classical works of Russian literature and philosophical ideas about the “overman”, enhancing the intertextuality of the “The Abode”: to become a “man-beast” or to clarify the face of God in oneself - this is the spiritual and moral choice that the heroes of the novel face. However, the writer’s task is not to show the complete transformation of the characters: their actions balance between bestiality and the possibility of sacrifice and repentance, and very often this possibility is not realized. This is especially clearly visible closer to the end of the novel: all the desires of the heroes are laid bare, only the human inside remains, thirsting for earthly, bodily things, and for this it is often necessary to “come down from the Cross”.

The author attempts to systematize and summarize the review works of Chinese philologists devoted to Pushkin’s fairy tales. The history of the translation of Pushkin's fairy tales into Chinese is considered. The works of studying Pushkin's fairy tales, which regard Pushkin's fairy tales as entirety, are presented. The studies of Chinese philologists on a separate Pushkin's fairy tale are shown, especially on “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish”. It is concluded that the study of Pushkin's fairy tales in China is huge, and it has its own character. Nowadays, the study of Pushkin's fairy tales is experiencing a new upsurge. Because of the generational change in literary theory, philologists in China have expanded the fields of research and created new interpretations of Pushkin's fairy tales and are following wider and more research on Pushkin's fairy tales.

The familiar format of the pop-up book provides a dynamic artistic springboard for creatives working with digital media in the twenty-first century. This article explores how and why the format of the pop-up book, and other historic paper-engineered artefacts, have been utilised to re-imagine British children’s literature “classics” in contemporary transmedia adaptations. To demonstrate this phenomenon, I compare the formal aesthetics and experiential potential of two recent works. In Mary Poppins Returns (2018), a cinematic Disney adaptation of P. L. Travers’s early-twentieth-century Mary Poppins book series, a CGI-animated pop-up book serves as a theatrical stage for a bawdy music-hall performance. In Curious Alice (2021), a psychedelic virtual reality (VR) rendering of Lewis Carroll’s nineteenth-century Alice books at the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser, players were whisked into a peepshow Wonderland crafted from pixelated paper. Both texts remediate paper-engineered devices to literally re-animate key chapters of these classics, but also to metaphorically re-animate, and continue, the legacies of celebrated authors from past centuries for the next generation of young readers. In this way, remediated movable books can reinstate the seemingly immovable status of classics such as Alice and Mary Poppins, elevating their “timeless” appeal to the “universal” desires of children to become immersed in fantastical storyworlds. This renewal is partly achieved by the amplification of the movable book’s “temporal paradox”, as an artefact that is both perpetually novel and forward-looking, yet rooted in analogue nostalgia for the past. The icon of the pop-up book, in particular, creates a conceptual bridge between the figure of the imaginative, intuitive, Romantic, nineteenth- and twentieth-century child, and the media-saturated, transliterate young consumer of today, recalibrating classics for modern tastes and challenging current understandings of the child.

The article offers a methodological reflection on the trends that have shaped literary historical research from the postmodern cultural turn in the late 20th century to the present. It maps and analyses postmodern tendencies that have challenged the model of literatures based on the principle of homogeneous and unified identity, emphasised hybridity and syncretism, and shifted attention from the centre of cultures to their peripheries. However, it becomes evident that similar strategies inherent in the previously rejected cultural models – such as the construction of a unified identity and the projection of a teleological, emancipatory trajectory – are also present here. The paper highlights contemporary initiatives that correct these approaches and conceptualise new relations between diversity and homogeneity and centre – periphery dichotomy. The article also applies these processes to the study of Slovak literature conceptualised as a “small” literature – an approach rooted in principles that the current cultural paradigm views with scepticism. Drawing on the methodological impulses of Yuri M. Lotman’s theory of culture, the paper points to the potential of a methodological starting point that accepts the processual nature of identity, as well as the dynamic character of the centre and periphery of cultures. Thus, the processes shaping both culture and the history of literature as its “institutionalized discourse” (Galin Tihanov) aim for a unified identity as an ideal, yet are fundamentally rooted in diversity and pluralistic movements.

The study examines literary depictions of the Slovak National Uprising (1944) in the post-war period and in the years of stabilisation of the emerging communist regime. Special attention is paid to works intended for children and youth that used the adventurous themes of the Uprising to convey current interpretations of recent events, role models, ideals, and norms. It illustrates how individual heroic cults evolved and transformed against the backdrop of the central narrative leading to victory. In this context, it also highlights the emergence of texts written while the war was still ongoing. Through a comparative study of textual modifications in reissued literary works, it documents the gradual shaping of the official narrative of public memory regarding the Uprising, including elements that were subject to censorship. It also highlights how authors employed uprising themes to actively demonstrate their conformity and loyalty to the new political regime. Despite its apparent outward rigidity, the theme of the Uprising provided many authors with a relatively wide field for influencing public discourse and also for advancing their individual or group interests.

In the context of Slovak cultural history, the 1990s marked a transitional period characterized by radical transformations in values – also concerning the role of writers and the evolving social functions of literature. The cultural situation of the era can also be illustrated on the “Kasarda case” of 1991, which followed the magazine publication of the short story “(perhaps) Last supper” by Martin Kasarda (b. 1968). The publication of the text provoked a wave of resentment related to the blasphemous nature of the author’s paraphrase of the canonical biblical story. The article attempts a poetological and literary-historical contextualization of M. Kasarda’s first book, The history of inferiority (1994), where the author elaborated on the aesthetic foundations of the short story that sparked considerable controversy. My interpretation is grounded in the concept of transgression – the moment when a text is shaped by crossing boundaries set by canonized models and codes. The contradictory aesthetic principles employed by the author, reflective of the period, led to the debut’s cautious critical reception.

The aim of the article is to analyse the elements of literary agrarianism in the novel Mists at dawn (1930) by Milo Urban (1904 – 1982). Typical elements of literary agrarianism include the idealisation of the peasant life, the mythologising of the land and agricultural work, nationalism, the relationship between humanity and nature, the contrast between town and village, and the individualism of the peasant. An analysis of these elements reveals the broader socio-political and cultural context of Urban’s novel, highlighting its ties to literary ruralism, the Heimatroman genre familiar in German-language literature, and both communist and radical nationalist visions of the “new world” and the “new man.” The article places special emphasis on the novel’s utopian elements, particularly in the depiction of Adam Hlavaj’s home environment. Utopianism is represented through such typical attributes as liminality, exclusivity, otherness, and creativity. In addition to its literary aspects, the work is also interpreted as a source reflecting a certain stage in the development of Milo Urban’s worldview. The footnotes to the article enrich the interpretation with annotated excerpts from Urban’s journalism, which explore the same themes and ideas found in the novel.

Erika Lalíková: Reflection of Naturalism as a philosophical-literary problem in the Czech-Slovak environment of the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century

As distinct from a ‘close reading’ that has long become a core value in literary studies, ‘distant reading’ has been proposed by Franco Moretti (2000) to overcome the obstacles faced by comparative literature, and to counterweigh the disadvantages of distant reading. Relying on my past work in Mediterranean and Black Sea Studies, I attempt an interpretive ‘distant reading’ of the two fiction works that were written from a meaningful distance, that is, approaching the Mediterranean and/or the Levant from the Black Sea point of view. In keeping with his literary style, Cartarescu himself referred to Istrati in his fiction. (The Levant 102, 136) This intertextuality invites a reconsideration of how he echoed his predecessor, just as the Levant in the title did the Mediterranean. I argue that the representation of the pre-World War I Mediterranean in Istrati’s Mediterranean (Sunrise) (1934) and (Sunset) (1935), posthumously available in a single volume (2018) is ‘impression-istic’ and informed by modern social and poetic realism. It differs from Cartarescu’s postmodern reworking of this geography as a film-set with a distinct background, by recourse to the repertoire of conventions and clichés constitutive of the Levant literature. I relate this basic difference to the writers’ space/time specifications, as well as the literary space, or alternatively literary geography, within which they positioned themselves. The present study is devoted to the evaluation of the intertextual connection between the two books and its overall representational consequences.

This article explores how Frances Lamont and Elizabeth Morison’s An Adventure (1913) disrupts temporal and spatial dichotomies through its supposed representations of time travel. An Adventure presents time as a shifting force that aligns with Bergsonian notions of temporality – specifically the concepts of objective and subjective time as defined in Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1911) and “Time and Free Will” (1913). This article also considers how Freudian notions of “condensation” further outline the subjective rendering of time in An Adventure’s surreal journeys back in time to the French Revolution and how the narrative’s subjective presentation of time aligns with Ford Madox Ford’s later theories of literary impressionism, particularly his idea that modernist narratives are composed of “various unordered pictures”. This article ultimately argues that Lamont and Morison’s book benefited from the temporally minded scientific and social climate of the time and used the theoretical groundwork of thinkers like Henri Bergson, Ford Madox Ford and Sigmund Freud as starting points from which they could tell their tale as truth. Specifically, their formal construction of the text as scientific research seeks to consciously obscure the differentiation between fact and fable, effectively positing their nonlinear time slip as truth. If that truth is humored, Lamont and Morison are proposing a more radical conception of time than Bergson – a nonlinear conception of time – a proposition that sits in tension with their use of scientific diction and discourse.

This article explores Ivana Mladenovic’s 2019 film Ivana the Terrible, focusing on its engagement with historical and personal trauma along the banks of the Danube on the Romanian-Serbian border. The film weaves together Mladenovic’s personal experience with broader socio-political dynamics, examining the collapse of Yugoslavia, the impact of shifting borders, and the psychological residue of these transformations. Central to the film is Ivana’s personal crisis, intertwined with the unresolved communist past of the region. A remnant of this past, the Kladovo Festival is a symbol of past cross-border camaraderie and contemporary economic desperation on the Serbian side, and for Ivana it becomes the point in which timeframes converge to create a background for her personal crisis that is complicated by historical trauma. The article analyzes how the film blurs the lines between fiction and reality, past and present, highlighting the protagonist’s internal struggle as a metaphor for intergenerational trauma. Mladenovic’s non-linear narrative and fragmented storytelling mirror the effects of trauma, presenting Ivana’s personal breakdown as symptomatic of larger historical forces. By examining the relationship between personal and collective histories, the study underscores how unresolved traumas can perpetuate a sense of dislocation and identity crisis, destabilizing one’s ability to navigate the present.

Fantasy fiction is renowned for its fantastic worlds and intricate multiverses. The Ocean at the End of the Lane exhibits probably one of the most complex such structures identifiable in Gaiman’s works. Set as a memorate, with a frame and an inset, it has an intricate temporal and spatial scaffolding; the passage between the two being triggered by distinct recall cues and bringing forth past traumatic events. The hesitation between reality, memory, trauma and fantasy makes the reader wonder whether the events described are truly memories, if they are the main character’s way of coping with trauma or if they belong to an alternate timeline. The complexity of the novel’s chronotopic structure is mirrored by the multiple layers of the main character’s memories; their instability corresponds to the intricacy of the human psyche. This study aims to analyse and lay out the multilayered structure of the novel’s multiverse, to catalogue the alternate timelines, as well as the temporal and spatial constructs brought forth by trauma.

The present study focuses on Ana Blandiana’s diary Mai-mult ca-Trecutul / More-than-the Simple Past: 31 August 1988-12 December 1989 published in 2023, which chronicles the last year and a half of communist regime in Romania during which the author was banned from publishing. For its contemporary readers, the text raises a lot of questions as it provides invaluable context for mapping the dynamic and still controversial geography and temporality of an era that is neither far enough to be considered “the Past,”/settled history, nor close enough to be referred to as “recent past” by younger generations. As my essay demonstrates, this still contentious past defined by a collective trauma will probably continue to remain suspended in the insoluble ambiguity of a neither-there nor here, and a never-entirely-then nor now for those who lived it. Blandiana’s title preserves the sense of this past’s inherent undecidability, which evokes Derrida’s différance, a trope which haunts not only historical interpretations, but discourse itself, whose most persuasive accounts hide a fundamental absence: a black hole at its very center.

Denne artikkelen presenterer en intermedial lesning av Marianne Gretteberg Engedals Pølsetjuven (2019) og viser at det å lese denne bildeboka i et intermedialt perspektiv kan være avgjørende for tekstforståelsen vår på to korresponderende plan: På den ene siden er undersøkelsen av samspillet mellom medialiteter en fruktbar inngang til å forstå hovedpersonen Kjells identitetsutvikling. På den andre siden finner vi, i dette samspillet, spor av metarefleksjoner omkring bildebokmediet. Den intermediale analysen setter disse planene av mening i sammenheng med hverandre. Slik muliggjør den mediebevisste tilnærmingen en helhetlig tolkning av bildeboka, der både formelementer og et av de mest sentrale motivene på innholdsplanet (kunsttjuveri) sammen bidrar til å kaste lys over, men også utvide forståelsen for den identitetsproblematikken som en samlet resepsjon har løftet fram som bokas hovedtematikk. Med andre ord illustrerer analysen at det å studere bildebøker med vekt på samspillet mellom ulike medialiteter muliggjør en fortolkningsmessig forskyving av fokus fra hva bildeboka betyr til hvordan den betyr.

This article explores how contemporary climate theatre navigates the distorted scales of the Anthropocene and the climate crisis through its unique aesthetics – embodiment, spatiality, temporality, and reciprocity. Previous literature on climate theatre has largely discussed its anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism in relation to global warming. Building on ecodramaturgical frameworks, this article draws on ecocritical appropriations of Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope to investigate how theatrical time and space make the abstract nature of climate change tangible. The argument posits that chronotopes of climate theatre are crucial for understanding how contemporary theatre and performance tackle scalar derangement. By drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from environmental humanities, performance and theatre studies, and posthumanism, the study situates itself at the intersections of performance art, political theatre, aesthetic theatre, drama, and environmentalism, examining how different theatrical formats use theatrical ‘timespaces’ to address the spatio-temporal complexities of the Anthropocene. It discusses Ella Hickson’s Oil (2016); April De Angelis’s Extinct (2021); Extinction Rebellion’s “The Sea Is Rising and so Are We” (2019); and Chris Rapley and Duncan Macmillan’s 2071 (2014), showing how each uses theatrical chronotopes to transform deep time, slow violence, and the dispersed nature of climate change into the ‘hyper-present’ of the stage.

Annalee Newitz’s The Terraformers (2023) explores the endeavors of the Environmental Rescue Team (ERT), which consists of diverse humans, uplifted animals, engineered organisms, bots, drones, and AI, and how they strive to construct a sustainable planet, Sask-E, and cities amid Verdance – a Capitalocenic corporate power that shapes the dynamics between humans, nature, and life. Drawing on the concept of the Capitalocene and Donna Haraway’s theories of the Chthulucene, sympoiesis, making kin, and staying with the trouble, this article discusses the significance of multispecies actors and intelligences in urban-making, while also emphasizing the necessity of acknowledging the complexities and uncertainties of this process. Further inspired by the insights of recent urban scholarship, such as smart and AI urbanisms, the article discusses the essential role of technology, engineering, AI, and machine in building democratic cities. By examining the efforts and collaborations between these multifaceted characters, the novel challenges market-driven anthropocentric notions of urbanism and envisions a future where multispecies communities use technology and great care to build equitable and viable posturban landscapes.

Situated at the intersection of literary studies and cultural studies, the present article looks at how fictional representations of Africa have evolved over the past century, from Conrad’s canonical Heart of Darkness, which has unjustly become the landmark of colonial biased narratives of Africa despite the author’s declared disengagement with his protagonists’ perspectives, to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s recent reverse rewriting of Marlow’s journey, this time from the heart of darkness outward. Dwelling on the spatial metaphors of Heaven and Hell, this study argues that the two works under scrutiny put forward two essentially dichotomic representations of the same place, the African continent, which are largely dependent on the cultural environment and on cultural constraints. Whereas Conrad’s infernal depiction of Africa relies mostly on Eurocentric stereotypes and on a personal experience whose horror mostly stemmed from a cultural shock produced by experiencing difference as evil, Gurnah’s more complex and authentic depiction is a result of telling the story from within, as an insider, and reflecting on difference as productive diversity. In this respect, this study brings into discussion Ranjan Ghosh’s recent dialogue with J. Hillis Miller on Literature and Globalization (2016) to argue that a transnational, transcultural and transdisciplinary approach to the narrative text would actually result in bridging the gap of classical binary difference and would emphasize the immanence of the literary text. Thus, Gurnah’s Paradise reconstructs pre-WWI Africa from within, as a sum of lost Paradises which are by no means of Western extraction, while Conrad’s canonical Inferno echoes the fears of an empire.

Tayari Jones, one of the more memorable contemporary African American voices, debuted at the beginning of the 20th century with her novel Leaving Atlanta (2002). She did not gain notable recognition until the publication of An American Marriage (2018) a decade later. Nevertheless, a number of scholars praised her first effort and included it in famous African American critical anthologies as an example of the voice of a new generation. In her debut while she tackles a painful episode in American history, the Atlanta Child Murders, Jones achieves a multivocal child-led narrative that supplies a new perspective on the events, which does not take as a starting point statistics and easy solutions. Tasha, Rodney, and Octavia are left to navigate their oft dangerous and difficult social and private environment as the threat looms over their lives as an ‘unspeakable’ and invisible presence. Each of them becomes a victim to the spaces that predetermine their existence. The present article evaluates the characters’ ability to find a space that they would consider a home in order to reach conclusions about general belonging patterns, coping mechanisms, and available alleys for escape.

This article demonstrates how narrative sensemaking involves mapping social spaces onto physical structures with which they correspond image-schematically, focusing on the spatiotemporal coordinates of lines and circles as organizing principles of the storyworld in Rose Macaulay’s 1923 novel Told by an Idiot. This essayistic novel follows the Garden family from the late Victorian through the Georgian periods, reflecting on the interrelated patterns of circular stasis and linear progress that govern both generational dynamics within the family and their political, social and cultural backdrop. A key scene takes place on the “Inner Circle,” later the Circle Line, where two teenaged Gardens, Imogen and Tony, aimlessly ride the trains all day as they go round and round the looped track. The novel sets this pattern of circularity, repetition and stasis against that of the linear “Twopenny Tube,” now the modern Central Line, a route mainly used by commuters travelling to the city centre from outlying districts. I argue that Macaulay’s storyworld unites these two image-schematic structures of urban movement just as the model of history adumbrated in the text likewise involves a tentative union of stasis and progress. Macaulay thus establishes an isomorphic relationship between the spatiotemporal structure of Underground image schemas and the settings through which the novel’s characters move physically, socially, and historically. Reading fiction in this way, I propose, helps to uncover the role that spatiotemporality and isomorphic relationships play in patterning storyworlds, as the structures of the environments through which characters travel and within which events unfold are revealed as “significant forms” that figure in the encoding and decoding of narrative.

Wai Chee Dimock’s literary-theoretical paradigm of ‘planetary time’ neatly fits the epithet ‘post-historicist/post-territorialist’ for its simultaneous repudiation of historicist and nationalist approaches to literary critical practice. Opposed to the absolute jurisdiction of temporal periods and spatial territories as literary analytic units, the ‘post-historicist/post-territorialist’ paradigm seeks to tap into the spatiotemporal entanglements of literary criticism to produce analyses of literature that trace the transtemporal and extraterritorial linkages forged by literary processes and their attendant actors. The article primarily focuses on Wai Chee Dimock’s literary analytic scale of ‘planetary time’, an extended temporal scale that, according to Dimock, is intrinsically coupled to a spatial scale of planetary dimensions. While subjecting Dimock’s literary-theoretical approach to a sustained metacritique, the article also intermittently engages with closely related paradigms that could shed more light on the nuances of literary analytic scales. Two analytic scales appropriated from the field of historiography – Fernand Braudel’s extended longue durée and Carlo Ginzburg’s episodic (micro)history – will not only lend an interdisciplinary perspective to this metacritical study, but also underscore the spatiotemporal implications of scale in literary criticism. These insights could help recalibrate literary critical practice by introducing greater self-reflexivity in its deployment of scale.

The works of Christopher Nolan, besides achieving commercial success and critical acclaim, are often singled out for their remarkable preoccupation with time. His innovative representation of time, its passage and impact, is reflected in his intransigent manipulation of temporality in his narratives. As his structures grew significantly more experimental and challenging over the years, his concern with the questions of memory, identity, conflict and existence at large grew more profound. In Dunkirk (2017), timelines, taking place in distinct spaces, converge forming a singular war-survival experience that pulls the viewer into the individual and communal intricacies of the past. In Tenet (2020), time is inverted to save humanity from a war that is worse than a nuclear holocaust. The future in such a film becomes both the enemy and the ally. The present paper closely examines the two narratives in an attempt to comprehend how the manipulation of time, as a storytelling mechanism, functions to stimulate rich aesthetic experiences. Relying on David Bordwell’s conceptualization of the viewer’s activity, the analyses follow the stories’ unfolding through various cues and constraints that trigger a set of cognitive and affective experiences. Both films are carefully made to ensure that the spectator develops a distinct viewing experience in which different schemata are conjured, modified and redrawn. In addition to their compelling intellectual demands, the works allow for a deep emotional involvement that strikes a balanced rhythm between fulfilment, excitement and a sense of urgency.

Intersecting at the crossroads of explainer comic and petronarrative, Peak Oil (2015) by Stuart McMillen is a graphic adaptation of how geoscientist Marion King Hubbert developed the peak oil theory. Through its 120 pages of black and grey panels, this graphic narrative narrates human history’s transition from coal to oil, oil to peak oil, and the subsequent possible changes the World might face. The present research aims to study how Peak Oil represents a necessity for energy commons through the formal elements employed by McMillen. Energy commons, according to Imre Szeman, is an ideology to regulate energy as a vital resource, a deviation from which may turn hazardous to the living communities. In his graphic narrative, McMillen employs various spatiotemporal techniques by placing the character of Hubbert in almost all the pages of the text. This research attempts to study Hubbert’s spatiotemporal profiling through Bakhtin’s theory of chronotope and Lefèvre’s terms for space construction in comics.

This article offers an analysis of a son’s ‘relational auto/biography’ of his lone mother; Swedish author Peter Handberg’s novel Den vita fläcken (The White Spot 2015). It focuses on how the book builds a sense of the mother Gunhild’s lifetime through the use of three different temporal dimensions: historicization, extension, and relational weaving of life courses. Matrifocal books by sons are interesting in several ways. First, in that they counter the gendered convention of sons’ patrifocal auto/biography, and cross over to the matrifocal auto/biography that has typically been linked to the mother-daughter relationship. Second, in contrast to patrifocal narratives that typically attempt to recover the parent who was absent or lost, they attempt to tell the story of the always-present parent: the mother. In their description of a close, ongoing, and often loving – although seldom unproblematic – relationship between a (now middle-aged) son and his mother, they furthermore counter ingrained cultural myths that envision ‘mother-son separation as the precondition of manhood’ (O’Reilly 2016, 15). Therefore, I argue, while sons’ auto/biographical writing about their lone mothers can be an inroad to investigating how subjective narratives of (lone-parent) family lives are constructed in life writing, they can also be inroads to re-thinking conventional genderings in literary studies.

What happens when we, as researchers, are living through a world crisis such as Covid-19, whilst studying a family epistolary archive produced during World War Two, another world crisis? What epistemological and methodological bridges can be made between the personal experiences of two women (great aunt and great niece) living in two moments of history but who are connected by the process of writing and reading epistolary documents? By conducting a feminist autoethnography of my experience in the Covd-19 pandemic, I reflect upon what it has meant to do feminist historic and archival research of the experience of Trixie Mayer, the first Mexican volunteer to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in Great Britain from 1942 to 1946 and who produced more than 200 personal documents during her war work and afterwards kept them, together with the documents she received form her family in Mexico, for more than 70 years. I analyse how living through a pandemic has helped me understand my great aunt’s crisis experiences from a different perspective, questions, partialities and, at the same time, how these personal and familiar writings have helped me understand and question our current reality and PhD thesis from an alternative perspective.

If images were once conceived either as subordination or oppositions of words, the advent of the Internet has started new relationship dynamics between them. Within this digital scenario, vision and textuality intensely intertwine in the form of captions, posts, hyperlinks or other kind of social media content, daily handled by users. In this context, autobiographical narratives will take on a major role, shaping the way in which the subject conceives, forges and registers his or her identity in relation to the reader/viewer. This article aims to address the question, more present than ever, of how certain autobiographical narratives are disseminated through social networks, and how image and narrative dialogue within this framework. By addressing specific cases found on platforms such as Instagram, we will try to elucidate how these publications point to an ambivalent relationship with visual tropes or narratives associated with certain life experiences, either questioning it or contributing to the creation of a collective narrative. A complex interplay of image and narrative that will affect not only how we share life, but also how we understand it and construct it together with others in a changing world.

Artikkelen presenterer funnet av en lenge tapt populær melodi som ble brukt i to av visene til Petter Dass. Det viktige funnet gjør det nødvendig å spørre om ikke en oppdatert melodikritikk representerer en gjennomgående filologisk utfordring i de eksisterende tekstkritiske utgavene av 1600-tallets musikalske poesi. En gjennomgang av Andreas Emil Erichsens, Kristen Valkners, Didrik Arup Seips og Jon Haarbergs tekstkritiske utgaver av Petter Dass og Dorothe Engelbretsdatter demonstrerer behovet for oppdaterte tekst- og musikkfilologiske utgaver. De uheldige konsekvensene av den tekstkritiske slagsiden i norsk edisjonsfilologi viser seg i Haarbergs melodikommentarer til de ti budene i Dass’ Katekismesanger fra 2013. I kommentaren til «Det siette bud. Du skal ikke bedrive Hoor» fører den eksisterende melodikritiske standarden til at en av de mest populære visene, den såkalte Pickelhærings melodi fra begynnelsen av 1600-tallet, forblir liggende i mørket. Artikkelen avslutter med en bred historisk og musikkfilologisk presentasjon av denne melodiens proveniens, og et oppslag til hvordan funnet av denne melodien kan bidra til studier av Dass’ katekismesanger som en estetisk integrert musikalsk-poetisk helhet.