Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2007 vol. 43
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- ItemThe dis-closure of "Huckleberry Finn:. Natura naturata vs. lumen naturale, lighting out vs. Lichtung(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2007) Semrau, JanuszAgainst the popular frontier-wilderness discourse, the paper offers to discuss one of the most celebrated lines in all American literature, Huck Finn’s closing resolution to light out ahead of the rest, as an adverbial-existential rather than as a categorical-territorial affair. Drawing on Heidegger’s notion of “resoluteness”, it is argued that the novel discloses at the very end – ‘lights out’ – a mode of presencing rather than of disappearing. More broadly, this is to show that the received image of Huck as a maverick dodger, incorrigible vagabond and, most emphatically of all, as a celebrant of Nature is not borne out by the reality of the text and is informed instead by the dynamics of cultural (auto-)stereotyping.
- ItemHistory or journalism: Two narrative paradigms in "Bloody Sunday. Scenes from the Saville Inquiry" by Richard Norton-Taylor(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2007) Lachman, MichałThe article focuses on one of the most controversial plays in contemporary Irish theatre, Richard Norton-Taylor’s Bloody Sunday. Scenes from the Saville Inquiry. The play belongs to the popular form of drama called verbatim or documentary and attempts to render factual material and recorded evidence about the Bloody Sunday tragedy in a possibly most objective and reliable way. The aim of the article is to present Norton-Taylor’s work against the long and interesting tradition of the genre of documentary theatre. What is more, the central subject of the analysis is the complex interconnection between journalistic methods of rendering facts and strictly fictional strategies – such as for instance metaphor, metonymy or synecdoche – which according to Hayden White belong to modern historical discourse. The seamless blurring of journalism and elements of historical writing makes it possible for Norton-Taylor to maintain realistic objectivity of the medium, while still holding the reader’s interpretations and understanding under politicised and ideologically biased control.
- ItemParadise revisited: Images of the first woman in the poetry of Joy Kogawa and the fiction of Thomas King(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2007) Filipczak, DorotaThe article offers a comparative analysis of a poem by Joy Kogawa entitled A song of Lilith, and the chosen texts by Thomas King, namely his short-story “One good story, that one” and his novel Green grass, running water. Despite being rooted in their respective cultures, these two Canadian writers are interested in the Book of Genesis. Kogawa, of Japanese origin, and King, of Cherokee and Greek origin, rewrite the story of the first woman by deconstructing the images of femininity from Old and New Testaments. King’s and Kogawa’s interpretations communicate much about the authors’ status within the Canadian mainstream.
- ItemThe author and the reader – “Us and them” in Maria Edgeworth’s texts for children and young adults(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2007) Mazurek, MonikaThe paper attempts to tackle the hyphenated self of Maria Edgeworth as Anglo-Irish writer in her books for children and young adults, reflected not only in the fact of the occasional introduction of Irish characters or Irish setting but also at the deeper level of the identity of the narrative voice and the implied reader of these texts. It attempts to show that the Anglo/Irish ratio in the narrative voice of Edgeworth’s texts is a fluctuating value, defining itself in the opposition to the implied reader, whose identity is in turn constantly changing sides as well, hovering between the poles of “us” and “them”.
- ItemThe protean nature of Irish tale: The generic analysis of Maria Edgeworth’s "Ennui"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2007) Maciulewicz, JoannaThe aim of the article is to demonstrate the derivative nature of Irish tale, a short-lived genre which thrived in the Romantic period. The analysis is based on Maria Edgeworth Ennui (1809), which skillfully and self-consciously combines various kinds of factual discourse (e.g. memoirs, autobiographies, travelogues) with diverse fictional modes (romance, melodrama) with a view to expose the shallowness of English stereotypes about Ireland as well as to call for the modernization of Ireland through the professionalisation of its gentry.