Reading, Writing, Being: Persians, Parisians, and the Scandal of Identity

Moraru discusses the impact of Matei Calinescu's writings to all his readers. Calinescu's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps have never perceived himself. Calinescu suggests that meaning-making in the margins of an other's work is self-making, a self-centering identity protocol complete with its rewards and illusions--with identitarian illusion itself as the ultimate and vital reward. In Calinescu's view, identity is conquest, asserts itself with the virility of a conqueror via an historical rhetoric of competition, confrontation, and contradictions

Zombie Pedagogy: Rigor Mortis and the U. S. Body Politic

This article explores the popularity of Zombies in recent American popular culture and media

“To Eat Is a Compromise”: Theory, Identity, and Dietary Politics after Kafka

"La faim, c'est moi"- hunger is me- confesses Amélie Nothomb's heroine in Biographie de la faim (The Biography of Hunger) (22). A strange statement, of course, but no stranger than the Flaubertian dictum it evokes. So what exactly does Nothomb acknowledge here? More to the point: what does it mean to suspect that one's identity gels around hunger (20), that, more generally, being is insatiable, grounded by a fundamental and ever-replenished "insufficiency" (satus is Latin for "enough," as the reader will recall)

The Forster Connection or, Cosmopolitanism Redux: Zadie Smith's On Beauty, Howards End, and the Schlegels

To be sure, On Beauty can be read as a tribute to Forster, on several levels. An exquisite response to Howards End, the novel repays Smith's debt with cultural interest, so to speak, by retelling Forster's story for the new millennium's globalizing world, with the politically conservative, religious-minded Caribbean-British Kippses and the racially mixed, more liberal American Belseys playing in today's Boston the parts the British writer assigns the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels, respectively, in Howards End's early twentieth-century London. What is more, Smith's intertextual tour-de-force has a precise focus. As I argue, her novel's "Forster connection" sets out to foreground connectedness itself; it is this concept and the whole array of cosmopolitan cultural-emotional experiences associated with it that, through Foster, On Beauty "drags" into our time (Caldwell)

Film remakes, the black sheep of translation

Film remakes have often been neglected by translation studies in favour of other forms of audiovisual translation such as subtitling and dubbing. Yet, as this article will argue, remakes are also a form of cinematic translation. Beginning with a survey of previous, ambivalent approaches to the status of remakes, it proposes that remakes are multimodal, adaptive translations: they translate the many modes of the film being remade and offer a reworking of that source text. The multimodal nature of remakes is explored through a reading of Breathless, Jim McBride's 1983 remake of Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (1959), which shows how remade films may repeat the narrative of, but differ on multiple levels from, their source films. Due to the collaborative nature of film production, remakes involve multiple agents of translation. As such, remakes offer an expanded understanding of audiovisual translation

Téa Obreht’s Transnational Disremembering within the Mythical Realism of The Tiger’s Wife

This paper discusses Téa Obreht's 2010 novel The Tiger's Wife within the context of transmigrations and post-national conceptions of both the real and mythical translocality. Through analysis of Obreht’s discourse of disremembering, which is in Aleksandar Hemon’s definition a recognition of one’s own experience under the new narrative, the paper will explore the transnational dimensions of the Slavic-American identity of The Tiger’s Wife. The aim of this paper is to focus on the new understanding of transnational relationality as well as on a reconception of reality that disremembers Obreht’s or, on a larger scale, human experience within the mythical realism of The Tiger’s Wife.Keywords: transnationalism, the Slavic-American identity, disremembering, Aleksandar Hemon, Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife, mythical realismTo disremember, according to Aleksandar Hemon, a celebrated Bosnian-American writer with an immigrant experience, is to recognize one’s own experience under the new narrative. He points out that it especially refers to the “people who have come through a form of actual, physical slaughter, and to the extent the construction of narrative is memory, then the narrative, for them, has to involve a quantity of amnesia. More amnesia that is involved in most narrative” (Interview by Richard Wirick). Disremembering blends non-fiction and fiction, genocide documentation and utopian imagery, and implies an alternative interpretation of reality. Hemon’s 2008 novel The Lazarus Project is a transnational project of disremembering. In The Lazarus Project, Hemon intertwines a double narrative of the multilayered parallel universes of the past and the present by following the narrator Vladimir Brik, a post-war Bosnian who lives in the United States, as he questions his life. Brik traces the story of Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish immigrant who is a survivor of the Kishinev pogrom in what is now Moldova, and an alleged anarchist. At the same time, Brik questions both the inner and outer aspects of his reality. In the first-person narrative, he explains that he needs to re-imagine what he could not retrieve, and to see what he could not imagine. For this reason, he disremembers his own experience within the story of Lazarus that also implies resurrection and a new birth story. This paper will analyze Téa Obreht’s evocative 2010 novel The Tiger's Wife from the point of view of a Hemonesque narrative concept of disremembering and, within the discourse, an Obrehtesque interaction of myth and truth

Reality beckons: metamodernist depthiness beyond panfictionality

It is often argued that postmodernism has been succeeded by a new dominant cultural logic. We conceive of this new logic as metamodernism. Whilst some twenty-first century texts still engage with and utilise postmodernist practices, they put these practices to new use. In this article, we investigate the metamodern usage of the typically postmodernist devices of metatextuality and ontological slippage in two genres: autofiction and true crime documentary. Specifically, we analyse Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and the Netflix mini-series The Keepers, demonstrating that forms of fictionalisation, metafictionality and ontological blurring between fiction and reality have been repurposed. We argue that, rather than expand the scope of fiction, overriding reality, the metamodernist repurposing of postmodernist textual strategies generates a kind of ‘reality-effect’