Literary Myths in Mixed Reality

It is well-known that the Decadent movement in European literature (fin de siècle) depends on the narrative of the antiquity, as it is revealed from the discoveries of archeology in the second half of the nineteenth century. Amid the ruins of the past authors, painters and poets re-conceptualize time and history through a modernist vision based on an imaginary reconfiguration of the antiquity. In this context, the myth of a city (Pompeii) or of a woman (Salomé) offer examples that would illustrate in a great variety the synergy of a multi-temporal and multi-cultural memory of the myth. In this paper we identify a “content-based” shortcoming of modern Mixed Reality (MR) intangible and tangible digital heritage storytelling applications for digital humanities. It is an important problem as the very nature of these applications has often been identified with either misguided storytelling, or non-compelling, non-engaging narratives, except the initial captivating moments due to the immersive 3D visual simulation. We propose a new concept that forthcoming MR applications can draw from: “Literature-based MR Presence.” Based on modern literature excerpts associated with the real heritage sites, digital narratives can achieve new depths of Presence (phenomenon of behaving and feeling, as if we are in the virtual/augmented world created by computerized displays). They would evoke deeper sensations if their dramaturgical plots were based on literary texts associated with the heritage sites, from users, as similar to those often associated with cognitive presence, e.g., when someone is feeling of being transported in an alternate reality when simply reading a compelling novel or poem. We examine modern MR simulations and serious games for digital heritage and propose this conceptual framework to study them under this new concept, in order to achieve heightened feeling of Presence in the virtual heritage simulations, based on recent novel h/w advances. Two cases of a tangible historical place (Pompeii) and an intangible character (Salome) are identified as cultural heritage items, with associated reconstruction examples via Mixed Reality simulations and corresponding early modern literary works

Women and Intertextuality: On the Example of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

The aim of the study is to consider feminist retellings of myths and legends. As an example, Margaret Atwood’s book The Penelopiad is analyzed. The interpretation is situated in a broader context of intertextual practices characteristic of the feminist vision of literature. I present the ideas which Atwood shares with authors engaged in women’s movement. Among these there is Atwood’s understanding of intertextuality (noticeable especially in The Penelopiad). Bibliographical basis of the study comprises books which are fundamental to feminist and gender criticism (e.g. Poetics of Gender, ed. by N. Miller, New York 1986; S. M. Gilbert, S. Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth- Century Literary Imagination, New Haven and London 1984). What is more, the study refers to the books which allow considering the notion of intertextuality (G. Allen, Intertextuality, London and New York 2010, J. Clayton. E. Rothstein (eds.), Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, Wisconsin 1991) and connecting the interpretation with the problems crucial to contemporary literary studies (L. Hutcheon L. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction, New York and London 1988, B. Johnson, A World of Difference, Baltimore and London 1989)

Betwixt and Between Past and Present: Cultural and Generic Hybridity in the Fiction of Mary Yukari Waters

The cosmopolitan make-up of the American society has yielded cultural hybrid offspring and this cultural hybridity features strongly in contemporary American fiction. Amy Tan and Mary Yukari Waters are both Asian-Americans who portray such hybridity in their short stories which depict the shifting identities of the self. But do the internal categories of gender, race and ethnicity help in the coherence or do they add to the fragmentation of diverse identities? It is the dynamics of this critique of multiple identification and hybrid cultures that is being traced here in this study and how all this is reflected in narrative responses to such conditions of the examination of the self and, on a broader scale, community. The fiction of both writers usually ends up with a metaphysical human aspiration that retains the past, holds on to the present and looks forward to the hidden joys of the future. Betwixt and between was a term coined by Victor Turner to describe those who are culturally both and neither, that is, they stand at a liminal (border) stage that should be a temporary state, but, in certain cases has become a permanent one. Waters and Tan fulfill Will Kymlicka\u27s exemplary mode of multiculturalism. Kymlicka does not want ethnic/Americans to separate their conflicting identities in order to fit in. They should not bring their lifestyles to conform to various codes; instead, they should have the freedom of multiple identification in whichever place and with whichever group, be it a minority or mainstream. Multiple identification has been a blessing for both writers as both consider it like two alternate worlds that they can resort to the one when they are fed-up with the other. Two short stories were chosen for each writer: Rationing and Aftermath for Mary Yukari Waters; The Moon Lady and A Pair of Tickets for Amy Tan. Cultural hybridity is clear in their appreciation of their ancestors\u27 stoicism, wisdom and guidance on the one hand, and in their willingness to take in American cultural traits on the other. Generic hybridity is exemplified in the interpenetration of the historic, the mythic and the symbolic. The history of China and Japan during World War II is constantly conjured up and the present and the past are intermingled through the workings of memory. The mythic has a powerful presence in the texts of both writers given the influence of the myth in their Eastern spiritual cultures. Names and actions acquire a symbolic significance which adds richness in meaning to the texts. The two writers, moreover, add a touch of folklore to stress their Asian origin and to prove the fact that (multicultural) society and (hybrid) culture must have their influence apparent in all literary texts

Writing war, writing memory: the representation of the recent past and the construction of cultural memory in contemporary Bosnian prose

Focusing on the work of Miljenko Jergović, Nenad Veličković, Alma Lazarevska, and Saša Stanišić, this paper examines how the representation of the recent past intertwines with the construction of collective memory in contemporary Bosnian prose. The author argues that a first, significant function of recent Bosnian literature consisted of not only witnessing the horror of the Bosnian war but also turning historical events into sites of memory. This is especially true for the literature about the wars of the nineties – the siege of Sarajevo, Srebrenica, etc. However, the involvement of Bosnian authors with the recent past – in prose written during the war as well as in more recent works – proves to be more complex and seems to be indicative of a growing interest in and reflexivity upon the ways in which collective and individual memory are constructed. This paper suggests that the interest in memory/remembering the recent past has been accelerated by the war and the social and political turmoil of the nineties. This liminal situation urged writers firstly to represent the horrors of the recent past in order to prevent them from falling into oblivion. Secondly, because war emerged as a kind of turning point, a radical break between past and present, writers were compelled to reflect on the processes of remembering and oblivion and on the ways identity is constituted by a strange and often unpredictable interplay of both

Anthologizing Sir Samuel Ferguson: Literature, History, Politics

Published Online: 2013-10-25; This content is open access.Although Sir Samuel Ferguson is generally recognized as one of the key figures of mid-nineteenth-century Irish literature, there has been no major edition of his poems since 1916, as a result of which his work tends to be known to the general reader through selections published in anthologies. The essay analyzes the selections of Ferguson’s work in anthologies of Irish literature published between 1895 and 2010 in an attempt to assess the impact of the cultural dynamics of twentieth-century Ireland on the interpretation of Ferguson’s achievement as a poet. The evidence collected demonstrates that the image of Ferguson perpetuated by most twentiethcentury anthologists, most of them Hibernocentric in approach, was that of a respectable if rather old-fashioned Romantic nationalist antiquarian, whose work focused primarily on familiarizing the Victorian reader with the ancient myths and traditions of Ireland. This interpretation of Ferguson’s achievement, motivated, it is argued, by the predominantly nationalist agenda of modern Ireland’s cultural establishment, has largely marginalized the other side of Ferguson—a political thinker committed to the unionist cause and vehemently opposed to the violence perpetrated by the emergent Irish republican movement and culminating in the Phoenix Park murders of 1882, which formed the subject of two of Ferguson’s most powerful late poems, “At the Polo-Ground” and “In Carey’s Footsteps.

A new “Romen” Empire : Toni Morrison's love and the classics

An important but little-studied feature of Toni Morrison's novels is their ambivalent relationship with classical tradition. Morrison was a classics minor while at Howard University, and her deployment of the cultural practices of ancient Greece and Rome is fundamental to her radical project. Indeed, the works' revisionary classicism extends far beyond the scope of established criticism, which has largely confined itself to the engagement with Greek tragedy in Beloved, with the Demeter/Kore myth in The Bluest Eye and with allusions to Oedipus and Odysseus in Song of Solomon.1 Morrison repeatedly subverts the central role that Greece and Rome have played in American self-definition and historiography. In Paradise, for example, the affinity between the Oven in Ruby and the Greek koine hestia or communal hearth critiques the historical Founding Fathers' insistence on their new nation's analogical relationship with the ancient republics. And in their densely allusive rewritings of slavery, the Civil War and its aftermath, Beloved and Jazz expose the dependence of the “Old South” on classical pastoral tradition. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in her most recent novel – Love (2003) – Morrison further develops the transformative engagement with America's Graeco-Roman inheritance that characterizes all of her previous fiction

The 'memoir problem', revisited.

The ‘memoir problem’ revisited “That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir”. Neil Gunzlinger, book reviewer for the New York Times, griped in a review of yet another confessional memoir. It’s true; suddenly everyone is writing memoir, even people who only ever wrote fiction, rock music or poetry, or never wrote before. I even find myself writing memoir, but mining some of my own fictional writing for triggers and nudges, delving into old poems for clues and lines of inquiry. After all, the memory does not always linger on. Now, since revisiting this autobiographical writing as a resource for chapters of my Creative Nonfiction PhD thesis, a food memoir, in this paper I’ll discuss attempts made to fictionalise the ‘true’ events of the stories, and the uses made of them, to revitalise memoir. I also reflect on the work of controversial memoirist Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose six-volume work, ‘My struggle’, has offended members of his extended family, critics and purists, or simply bored many readers with the impossibly detailed accounts of his life, to ask again of memoir, “Should it be artful or truthful?