University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series
University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series este o revistă cu structură tematică şi apare sub egida Departamentului de engleză, Universitatea din Bucureşti, avînd o apariţie anuală regulată, începând din anul 1999. Printre autorii publicaţi s-au numărat, în afară de membri ai Departamentului de Engleză, nume prestigioase din anglistica şi americanistica internaţională (universitari americani, britanici şi din alte ţări europene, asiatici, australieni, africani sau canadieni), iar calitatea articolelor redactate exclusiv în limba engleză a fost asigurată de sistemul de double blind peer-reviewing pe care îl practică editorii revistei. Cu o abordare interdisciplinară şi tratând problematici importante pentru dialogul cultural de astăzi, University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series (UBR) reprezintă o contribuţie semnificativă în spaţiul academic naţional şi internaţional.
Editura Universității din București - Bucharest University Press
The Ethics and Aesthetics of Humour in Contemporary Transcultural Migration Narratives: Melatu Uche Okorie’s “This Hostel Life”, and Fadia Faqir’s “Under the Cypress Tree”
The voice of the immigrant in Western societies is being heard in the first person in contemporary literature. Therefore, the experience of emigration is no longer or, at least, not necessarily told from the privileged perspective of the white man or woman. And the short story is being a recurrent favourite genre for sharing with readers the diverse causes that force a man or a woman to abandon his/her native land, as well as the conflicts that emerge in the countries of reception. Collections such as The Things I Would Tell You (2017) by Sabrina Mahfouz, or This Hostel Life (2018) by Melatu Uche Okorie, among many others, are offering interesting examples of transcultural renderings of the experience of migration. The purpose of the present contribution is to focus on the use of irony and humour as ethically committed strategies for deploying the possibilities as well as the limits of conviviality in contemporary societies. I study the representative examples of two stories, Melatu Uche Okorie’s “This Hostel Life” (included in the homonymous collection by the author), and Fadia Faqir’s “Under the Cypress Tree”, published in Mahfouz’s collective volume. These two stories are aesthetically brilliant instances of the ethical potential of humour when offering a transcultural view of contemporary migrations that overcomes the limitations of traditional multicultural and intercultural treatments of the topic.
Copyright (c) 2025 University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series
Pathos as Narrative Glue: Marnie the Novel, Film, and Opera
This article looks at several ways in which personal trauma is the source of pathos in the etymological sense of suffering and affliction, engendering social failure in Winston Graham’s novel Marnie. Likewise, the study strives to demonstrate that both the literary original and its cinematic and operatic remediations are sparked into emotional cohesion by the narrative glue of pathos. From the perspective of both psychoanalysis and adaptation studies, this article reaches the conclusion that the open ending of the three versions also involves the reader/spectator in the process of narration – as Aristotle discovered in anticipation of Jauss’s reception theory – and thus leaves it to them to decide whether healing from pathos can ever be reached by the protagonist
“Laughing in the Face of Patriarchy”: The Role of Gendered Humor in Mafalda by Quino
Comics for children have a unique ability to entertain and educate young readers. Often dismissed as comical or unserious, comics are actually an important form of literature that can have a profound impact on children’s beliefs and values. This article will examine various approaches to feminist humor in the context of cultural studies in Mafalda, a popular Argentine comic strip that ran from 1964 to 1973, created by cartoonist Quino. The comic features a precocious and socially aware six-year-old girl named Mafalda, who frequently comments on politics, philosophy, and social issues, criticizing societal norms and structures. She constantly grapples with and questions the societal, political, and moral landscapes of her time, making astute observations that prompt readers to reflect on the complex world she is navigating. Beyond the humor and light-hearted exchanges, Mafalda emerges as a significant cultural text. It seamlessly intertwines entertainment with critical reflection, offering its audience not just a moment of leisurely reading but also compelling them to reckon with the profound questions and critiques articulated by its young protagonist. The use of humor in Mafalda not only serves as a form of critique but also empowers young girls and challenges the dominant gender narratives, because the comic employs gendered humor as a means of challenging traditional gender roles and stereotypes. This article explores the role of humor in Mafalda, specifically in relation to gender and how it challenges gender norms and expectations, ultimately offering a new perspective on gender and power dynamics in comics and beyond.
Features of the Ironic Detective in Daniel Pennac’s novel The Scapegoat
Ironic detective is a relatively new genre in literature. Its development dates back to the middle of the twentieth century and continues up to the present days. The final crystallization of the genre is taking place in our time. The works of Polish author Joanna Chmielewska became one of the first examples of ironic detective stories. However, the French literature of the twentieth century also has notable representatives of the genre. The present article examines the peculiarities of the irony functioning in the detective genre, in the context of the work of the popular modern French writer Daniel Pennac. We distinguish irony as a means of comic and as a principle of work organization, which is inherent in the genre of ironic detective. Consideration of the ironic detective is impossible without a brief analysis of the detective development stages as a whole, therefore, the article also deals with the genesis of the detective genre from the classic to the French novel-noir. The emphasis will rest on the peculiarities of the ironic detective’s development. Using D. Pennac’s novel The Scapegoat as an example (the French edition is called Au bonheur des ogres, originally published in 1985), the features of the genre, alongside their manifestations at the content and formal level are illustrated. The article focuses on the fact that naturalistic details, scenes of cruelty, evil and chaos, caused by the consequences of the Second World War, are weakened due to ironic characteristics, stereotypes, as well as the very attitudes of the author and the narrator towards the surrounding world. The research proves that the analysed genre is an artistic form of a panoramic view of the society of the 80s with its false ideals and its consumerism.
Humour and Knowledge in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”
In recent times, Bollywood comedies have evidenced a shift in their attitude and perspective towards body image. In earlier comedies, people of different physical appearances were stigmatized. That approach has changed of late and as a result, these movies now serve as powerful catalysts for positive change in society. This article offers an overview of the transformative role played by Bollywood comedy films in contributing to body positivity and promoting self-acceptance. Through an analysis of a selection of films such as Bala (2019), Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015), and Gippi (2013), this study explores how these movies influence individuals’ perceptions, destigmatize identity, challenge stereotypes, and advocate for self-acceptance. This study also emphasizes the role of humour as a central element to engage audiences in sensitive discussions surrounding body image. In a nutshell, this research highlights the profound impact of comedy films on individuals and how these films reshape societal perceptions from body shaming to body acceptance.
Humour as Survival Strategy in Walter Scott’s Waverley, Rob Roy and Redgauntlet
Humour will be shown to be present in a selection of novels by Walter Scott, as a strategy to temper hot spirits on the brink of violence and pre-empt conflict in the fictional societies. Despite the contagious effect spreading to the reader himself, this type of humour relies on paralogical hints, language inadequacy or language gaps, which the fictional audience as well as the reader has to fill in. In the process of solving the linguistic inaccuracies, the audience (both fictional and the reader) is forced to notice the deliberate violation of communication and look for meaning elsewhere. The distance between expected and discovered meaning is so great that a bout of laughter is the result, and fictional tensions are depleted of power. It is my claim that the humorous effect constantly brings the intuitive paralogic collapse of a logic which previously fostered conflict by coagulating opposing factions around powerful feelings and pathos.
Who has the Last Word? The Dead and their Lively Humour in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille
All the characters in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s novel are dead people, but they continue to speak as if they were still alive, and have not realized they are actually dead. Another paradox may be that although all of them are dead, none is really interested in death or its metaphysics. They go on with their earthly interests and spites, abusing and offending one another, spilling out secrets and shouting out loud. Speaking is the only thing they can still do while dead, and they take advantage of it: it is often quite difficult for the reader to understand whose voice it is in the general uproar. Gradually, voices become identifiable and attributable to characters: the reader learns to recognize them by the bad language they use, by certain quirks or by the expression of individual snobbery, pretence and hatred. By taking dead people as his characters, and faithfully recording their imagined speeches, Ó Cadhain re-imagines and refashions satire as a specific Irish genre. The speaking dead stand for the Gaelic rural communities whose language the political activist Ó Cadhain’s taught and promoted as the real repository of the idea of an Irish independent nation. The particular dialogic form of the novel, though seemingly experimental and difficult to comprehend, represents Ó Cadhain’s effort to establish democracy (lacking in the real post-independence Irish state), through the multiplicity of voice polyphony implies, at least at literary level.
R. K. Narayan’s (Post-)Colonial Perspective: Malgudi in Its Humour
R. K. Narayan (1906-2001) is considered one of the founding fathers of Indian writing in English, along with Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and G.V. Desani, and is best known for creating the imaginary town of Malgudi. Another important feature of his fiction is what both critics and readers call a gentle or light-hearted humour. Humour has often been used to both subvert and survive various forms of political oppression (see Ştefănescu, Tripathi and Chettri). In Narayan, Malgudi, the centre of the action, is both a colonial and a post-colonial town, created and recreated over years and even decades. Since Malgudi can be considered a metonymy of India (see Mukherjee), Narayan’s use of humour as a subversive device, together with his skilful examination of the cultural and colonial context, can be perceived as a poignant criticism of the British colonial system and what it entailed, specifically the suppression of what constitutes ‘Indianness’, the Indian way of life and cultural values. On the other hand, the light-hearted and subversive irony allows Narayan to offer a more profound insight into the human nature as such, while juxtaposing a colonial and post-colonial context.
Humour, Wit, and Society in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (“The Author’s Preface”)
The present essay provides an analysis of humour in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, exploring its various forms, functions, and meanings. After introducing the idea of the lex inversa of humour, which can be observed in Sterne’s unconventional storytelling style, it analyses the “Author’s Preface” that appears at the end of the third volume of the book rather than at its beginning. The essay compares the satirical criticism of modern introductions found in Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub and the humorous but balanced mixture of wit and judgment in Tristram Shandy’s Preface. It examines the evolution of the concept of humour in the eighteenth century and traces its various meanings in Sterne’s book, from ancient bodily theories to psychological character construction. It argues that Sterne’s portrayal of odd humours aligns him with those who depicted England as a land of freedom, where humour played a crucial role in challenging wrong societal norms and liberating humanity from hypocrisy. This sympathetic form of comedy portrays human flaws for communal laughter, promoting harmony and balance. After addressing the ambiguity surrounding the actual subject of Sterne’s “learned” satire, the essay concludes by emphasising Sterne’s wit as a form of his humour, especially in the paradoxical defence of wit in the “Author’s Preface”, which he contrasts with the false severity of the “grave folks”. The essay argues that Sterne’s humorous strategy provides society with a moral foundation of humanity, sociability, and freedom.
Online Satirical News as Instances of Liquid Racism: Evidence from Greek
When discussing the relationship between humour and racism, research usually concentrates on ethnic or racist jokes or on other humorous texts which expressly target migrants or other minorities. Relevant studies more or less explicitly ascribe to critical humour studies investigating topics such as how and why humour targeting the linguistic, cultural, or religious Other reproduces and maintains social discrimination and inequality, as well as how and why the generic conventions of humorous genres do not incite the audience to think critically of their content but instead enhance their tolerance for discriminatory and racist standpoints. In this context, the present study explores humorous texts that at first sight appear to have antiracist intentions. More specifically, I analyse a corpus of satirical news coming from popular Greek websites and targeting majority people for their racist views and practices towards migrants. The analysis is based on the concepts of script opposition and target as defined in the framework of the General Theory of Verbal Humour. The findings suggest that distinguishing between antiracist and racist interpretations is not an easy or straightforward matter: humour seems to blur the boundary between racism and antiracism. In order to account for this dimension of humour, I exploit the concept of liquid racism put forward by Weaver (The Rhetoric of Racist Humour) to account for the ambiguities of humorous discourse when it involves racist and antiracist meanings and interpretations.
Lugubrious Victorians, Ludicrous Narratives: The Function of the Comic in Jane Harris’ The Observations
Given the socio-economic circumstances of the Victorian Era, one of its unassailable facts was that the conservative and solemn spirit of the time created a claustrophobic social atmosphere for some of its occupiers. Victorian, as well as Neo-Victorian novels register an exigency for laughter partly as a response to this solemnity. As a successful representative of the latter, Jane Harris’ debut novel, The Observations (2006) narrates the dolorous life of an Irish girl, Bessy Buckley who is taken on as a maid in a Scottish manor and is asked to perform strange duties assigned to her by the mistress of the house. This study attempts to unearth The Observations’ versatile approach to the notion of comic on three functional levels by resting on Alexander Bain’s notion of ‘ludicrous degradation.’ Firstly, the study scrutinizes comicality arising out of situations in which clashes of value and meaning occur. Secondly, it explains how ludicrous degradation turned into humour allows for psychological release. Thirdly, it looks at how Bessy’s sense of humour works as a coping mechanism and an antidote for Victorian pathos apart from being a literary source of amusement.
I am a Comedian, That’s My Job: The Stand-up Activism of Vir Das
In an epoch characterized by rapid digitalization, the proliferation of disinformation, and the deepening schisms within society, the significance of stand-up comedy has assumed unprecedented prominence. Its popularity is burgeoning on a global scale, and concurrently, the Indian comedy landscape has witnessed a remarkable influx of talent over recent decades. Among this exceptional cohort of comedic voices, Vir Das emerges as a prominent figure. Known for his incisive humour, he ventures far beyond light-hearted humour, delving into the heart of pivotal societal issues. This article discusses the profound impact of comedy and satire in catalysing socio-critical transformations through a discerning analysis of select jokes from Vir Das’s repertoire. As such, it is organized into three distinct sections, each contributing to the overarching objective. The initial section offers a concise exploration of the historical evolution of comedy, with a particular focus on its development within the Indian context. Subsequently, the second section delves into the core concept of stand-up comedy as a potent medium for activism, grappling with fundamental questions regarding the gravity and consequential influence of comedic discourse. Lastly, the concluding section meticulously conducts a comprehensive thematic analysis of Vir Das’s body of work, accentuating his pivotal role as a stand-up activist.
The Humour-Pathos Link from Late-Victorian Aestheticism to Modernism and After in British Literature
By using Freud’s theory of humour (1927) and his Jokes in their relation to the unconscious (1905), we follow the dominant features of the humour-pathos nexus from the late Victorian to the postmodernist literary decadence, taking in our stride the two peaking twentieth century modernist texts published by T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in 1922 Britain. We begin with Oscar Wilde’s popular The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) in relation to Walter Pater’s less well-known autobiographical novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), showing what relation the latter has with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses. The modernist genial humour of Eliot’s 1939 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is contrasted with Tom Stoppard’s in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and with the dark humour closer to pathos in The Life and Songs of the Crow (1970) by Ted Hughes.
The present study intends to look at the ways in which humour enacts modes of knowledge and self-expression in Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” (1921). The story revolves around two spinsterly sisters who have spent most of their lives tending to their tyrannical father and now find themselves at a loss when they are finally free of him. The narrative is both sympathetic and merciless towards the sisters’ fumbling attempts at independence, but the women are often in on the joke; humour is both a “black dressing-gown” which envelops the sisters and renders them objects of ridicule, but it is also a way out, offering a subversive counterpoint to the voice of the Father, as the sisters imagine the patriarch in very comical and undignified positions, while perceiving themselves as outsiders, “creeping off…like black cats”. Though the short story has often been read in terms of hopelessness and despair by Rhoda B. Nathan and Gerri Kimber, this paper wishes to show how humour modulates and moderates this hopelessness, allowing for the two single women to assert their personality within the stifling society of their time. The ridiculous, in this case, does not need to be a death sentence, but rather a form of knowledge and resistance: the spinsters are aware of the absurdity of their condition and the futility of their place in the modern world and choose comedy over tragedy.
Motifs of Disguise/ Imitation in European Literary Tradition (From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century): Comic Effect vs. Tragic Pathos
The article defines and examines the connection between the disguise/imitation motifs and the categories of comic and tragic within European literary tradition (from Antiquity to the Eighteenth century). The authors of this research explain the factors that make these motifs popular means of creating comic effect or tragic pathos and highlight the trends in their functioning. Disguise/imitation motifs are shown to be mostly related to situations that violate the usual norms of conformity, hierarchical relations, behavioural canons, and for this precise reason, they have a powerful affective potential, i.e. become capable of evoking strong emotions. The disguise/imitation motifs are appropriate for comic effect due to their archaic genetic links with ritual-laughter culture and their conformity to the very nature of the comic, which is based on contradictions. Tragic pathos arises as a result of tragic consequences of one’s identity loss within disguise/imitation situations, it prompts awareness of the injustice of society and the “cruelty” of fate, which are the cause of the forced rejection of one’s self. The article indicates the prospects of researching disguise/imitation motifs in modern art, where they are often employed in adventurous narratives to increase the plot’s dynamism, heighten dramatic tension, and intensify intrigue.
Humour without Pathos of Internet Memes in the Context of Online Visual Communication
In this article we focus on internet memes that have become an important genre of online communication, as internet users have created a new visual language: not only in form, but also in meaning (often very satiric). Internet memes relate to the Web 2.0 phenomenon, where users can access hundreds of meme templates, images, or short videos, and can assign them a specific meaning. The aim of this article is to theoretically define the “memetic visual language” with specific background, forms, and rules for creating and decoding it. In the empirical part of paper, we present a selection of examples put forward by the Slovak project ZOMRI, meant to demonstrate without pathos, but with humour, the power of internet memes to depict the personality of Slovak president Zuzana Caputova.
“A jest with a sad brow”: Shakespeare’s ambivalent insults
Shakespeare’s insults are ambivalent creatures that oscillate between humour and pathos. That is what this article aims to show. It focuses on the part insults play in the articulation of humour and pathos in Shakespeare’s plays, Falstaff and his reference to “a jest with a sad brow” appearing as a case in point. Through examples taken from Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, King Henry IV, Hamlet, Othello, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the article explores how insults and moments of insult convey the complex and fragile balance between humour and pathos. It shows that Shakespeare’s theatre of insult is based on the tension between laughter and tears, between the ludic and the serious modes or humours of insult, at a time when the word ‘humour’ was mainly conceived in the plural and still referred to fluid(s) rather than wit. This article first analyses how Shakespeare’s plays reveal a breach between humour and pathos by dramatizing, on the one hand, what is called “skirmish[es] of wit” in Much Ado About Nothing, and, on the other hand, what is called “heart-struck injuries” in King Lear. After dissociating comic and tragic insults, the article then shows how Shakespeare cultivates moments of insult when the spectators do not know whether they should laugh or cry, moments when insults waver between humour and pathos, between mirth-making and grief-making, moments in which insults hurt even when they are supposed to be humorous. This ambivalence is related to the ambivalence that is at the heart of the way the tongue is represented in Shakespeare’s world which points to its essential volatility, unpredictability and instability.
THE DISCOURSE OF COUNTER-MODERNIZATION. CONSTANTIN NOICA’S REACTIVE NATIONAL IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION
Nationalist philosopher Constantin Noica (1909-1987), like many other public intellectuals in Romania, felt that modernization and modern civilization were traumatic to his culture. In this article, I mean to address the discursive templates he used to formulate his version of a traumatized Romanian identity. These templates are structured by master tropes (cf. Kenneth Burke’s “Appendix” to A Grammar of Motives and Hayden White’s “Introduction” to Metahistory) and are ideologically charged. Relying on suggestions from François Hartog (The Mirror of Herodotus) and from Ruth Wodak et al. (The Discursive Construction of National Identity), I propose alternative master tropes which are generally used in shaping national identities, as well as in dealing with the particular situation of cultures that feel threatened and traumatized by modernization.
Copyright (c) 2024 University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series
“THE DREAMS OF MEN, THE SEED OF COMMONWEALTHS, THE GERMS OF EMPIRES”. THE IMPACT OF COLONIALISM IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS
Despite accusations of racism and of upholding colonialism, Heart of Darkness reveals the problematic nature of the imperial enterprise. The dichotomy between superior versus inferior, us versus them, self versus other, embedded in colonial discourse, becomes challenging when considering that the foray into the Dark Continent reveals more about the character of Europeans. The outward journey of exploration of the still partially unknown Africa is mirrored by an inward journey that reveals the degenerate nature of the European identity. The geographical journey is doubled by an anthropological one, towards our earliest origins, as well as a psychological one, towards the primitive self.
CALLING OUT TO THE HEAVENS FOR AID: DISASTER SONGS IN AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC
This article will explore American folk songs dealing with disasters, mostly from the first half of the twentieth century. These songs dealt with shipwrecks, train-wrecks, fires, tornadoes and drought and even the so-called Dust Bowl. Along with murder ballads, these songs functioned as a kind of oral newspaper providing information to even illiterate people in rural America. The songs also served as a stimulus to imagination, opening up exotic worlds to people often isolated and sedentary. The songs provided an opportunity for the listener/singer/musician to experience vicarious pain and catharsis in relation to the particular disaster. Finally, there was often a religious dimension to the songs and disasters which were being memorialised in song. The paper will conclude with a demonstration of how the disaster song finally became politicized with the example of Woody Guthrie. The primary source for the songs was the anthology of disaster songs entitled People Take Warning released in 2007. The artists included in the collection and discussed in this paper range from well-known figures such as the Carter Family and Charlie Poole to lesser known musicians who are practically forgotten. There will also be a discussion of the predecessors to these songs as well as the successors.
DIPLOMATIC GIFTS AS EXPRESSION OF THE COLONIAL TRAUMA. STORIES OF AFRICAN WOODEN AND IVORY SCULPTURES
This article offers an analysis of a series of diplomatic gifts of African origin, part of the “Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu Collection” of the ASTRA National Museum Complex in Sibiu, Romania, from the perspective of their capacity of evoking the trauma of the colonial oppression, in an international context. While the collection includes a high variety of objects, of different types and origins, this study will focus on a selection of black wood and ivory sculptures which explicitly refer to catastrophic aspects of the colonialist encounter, such as war and slavery, and belong to a particular kind of political objects offered by African leaders to their counterparts throughout the second half of the 20th century. Although the objects derive from the colonial interaction and may seem, at first sight, an alienation of local artistic traditions, made for an external audience, so as to satisfy foreign tastes and expectations, I argue for understanding them as expressions of the catastrophic realities of the colonial oppression, which belong to the local culture and serve two main purposes. Firstly, they act as parts of a form of cultural resistance, as commentaries upon the endured violence and humiliation. Secondly, they serve as political messages for an external audience, meant to raise sympathy and support for the cause of the people’s liberation. The conceptual framework of performativity and cultural performance, as explained by anthropologist Victor Turner provides an understanding of the way in which social conflicts are memorized and communicated in artistic forms, while the works of Africanists such as Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Harry G. West and Nichole Bridges offer an overview of the aesthetics and functions of African sculpture as objects of communication, throughout the colonial and post-colonial eras. Comparative studies, referring to the contributions of Alexandre Girrard-Muscagorry and Alexander Bortolot, provide concrete example of African sculptures being offered to several state leaders in diplomatic context, hereby offering valuable insights for the interpretation of similar objects in the “Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu” collection.
“WHAT IS THE COST OF LIES?” HISTORIOGRAPHY OF A DISASTER AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET METANARRATIVE IN CRAIG MAZIN AND JOHAN RENCK'S HBO MINISERIES "CHERNOBYL"
HBO's five-episode docudrama Chernobyl (2019) is an attempt to re-imagine the horrific nuclear explosion of 1986 in Pripyat, and what it was like to live through the catastrophic tragedy. Throughout the extent of the show, the creators are seen attempting to strike a balance between the dramatization required for televisual representation and the effort to maintain historical accuracy. Subsequently, Chernobyl successfully portrays (and juxtaposes) two conflicting responses to the disaster of 1986 — the state-sanctioned denial and distortion of the real events incorporated by a series of self-serving officials, and the “personal evaluation” of first-hand witnesses — such as Valery Legasov, Boris Scherbina, and Ulana Khomyuk — configured to establish a counter-narrative to a state-monopolized history. Hence, Chernobyl becomes what Agnes Heller calls an ‘evaluative reconstruction’ of the 1986 disaster, making way for a historiographical study. This article will also attempt to illustrate how Craig Mazin and Johan Renck's portrayal of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster opens up the possibility of critiquing the pre-existing unquestionability, and the imagined notions of power and perfection of the Soviet hierarchy, as is represented in the show by a set of corrupt government agents and servicemen working for the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
DISASTER AND EMOTION IN RICHARD MATHESON’S NOVEL "I AM LEGEND"
This article seeks to examine the emotional impact of disaster in the novel I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson, one of the most celebrated writers of science fiction and horror genre in the 20th century. A global pandemic appears to have transformed all people into vampires, except for Robert Neville, the hero, who is immune to the virus. The only human survivor now, he is nightly faced with the massive threat of these infected living and undead vampires, whom the hero kills without mercy day by day, drastically reducing their numbers. While striving to survive at all costs, he tries hard to find a cure for the disease but is finally caught by the living vampires and condemned to death due to his unrestrained violence against them. As the last representative of the ‘old society’, he must relinquish the Earth to the ‘new society’, which is now able to keep the disease in check with a pill. Based on a qualitative research, the analysis begins with an introduction into the concepts of disaster and emotion. It subsequently elaborates on a range of emotions and feelings resulting from the catastrophe in the novel: fear and anxiety; sadness and grief; interest and anticipation, with a view to analyzing the hero’s capability of managing and regulating his emotions and the others’ emotions under psychologically and emotionally distressing circumstances. It is concluded that Neville is not particularly able to effectively manage his emotions, which translates into excessive violence against others. Becoming aware of the consequences of his destructive acts, he accepts his tragic end with courage.
WHEN MEMORY BECOMES DEBRIS: AESTHETIC MODES OF REPRESENTING DISASTER LOSS
The concept of public forgetting by Bradford Vivian explains how acts of forgetting are utilized to enhance selective and normative public remembrance. One common example is when tons of debris caused by a natural disaster that once functioned as material memory either on a personal or collective levels were taken away. How do people respond to this kind of loss when such memory has to be disposed of as waste? Japanese disaster memory discourse aims to disseminate knowledge of disaster prevention, preparedness, and commemoration of victims, while the ways disaster survivors make sense of their losses individually have yet to be examined. The Kobe City’s monument and the annual commemorative service of the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake bring about chronological post-disaster temporality among the general public. However, three different survivor testimonies this article analyzes show that individual kins of the deceased called izoku continue to nurture their memories of the deceased relevant to their current lives; their memories are related to the past trauma, but they are simultaneously interrelated memories in the present. James E. Young’s concept of texture of memory, Giuliana Bruno’s concept of fabrics of the visual, and Ernst van Alphen’s concept of reintegration of subjectivity and body are examined to consider the way a survivor/izoku connects lost material memory with the present living memory. The series of earthenware works crafted by a survivor/izoku are analyzed to consider how she makes sense of absence and presence of the deceased in her present everyday life. The author proposes decomposed memory as a concept of processing memory as debris, where memory needs to be appropriately decomposed and transformed by individuals into interrelated memory.
LAUGHING AND CRYING AT THE SAME TIME: READING BIYI BANDELE’S BURMA BOY THROUGH A BERGSONIAN THEORY OF THE COMIC
The fabricated disaster caused by war and conflict and its traumatic effect on people and the environment hardly seems an appropriate subject of comic representation. Yet such an unamusing topic has often been represented in literature and visual arts through humour. Joseph Heller’s novel Catch 22 and movies such as Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit or Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful exemplify artistic expression that uses laughter to substantiate the poignant absurdity of war and genocide. Similarly, British-Nigerian writer and film director Biyi Bandele’s WWII novel Burma Boy, the focus of the present article, uses Comedy to portray the futility, irrationality and madness of a war that had mortal consequences and traumatic resonances on the lives of the often-forgotten young Black African soldiers who participated in the Burma Campaign. In this article, I read the novel through a Bergsonian lens of the Comic to suggest that such techniques reveal the absurdity and tragedy of war by dragging the reader onto the stage to perceive themselves as part of the failings of humanity and, above all, of western modernity.
BREAKING THE SILENCE: THE IRISH CIVIL WAR IN THE SHORT STORIES BY DOROTHY MACARDLE
The article focuses on Dorothy Macardle’s collection of short stories Earth-Bound to complicate the traditional understanding of the Civil War (1922–1923) as a catastrophe subject to enforced silence or the aporia of representation. This despite the fact that Macardle’s stories are not event-centric nor realistic accounts of the conflict: they are set before 1922, during difficult periods for the Irish such as in times of famine or the Anglo-Irish War, and, throughout the collection, realism combines with the supernatural, multiple temporalities mingle, and there is a peculiar co-dependency of politics and aesthetics. However, I contend that it is precisely by displacing the Civil War from her stories and by replacing it with narratives of other, ‘minor’ tragedies that Macardle thematically foregrounds the defining characteristics of internecine conflict: the collapse of the bonds of solidarity and the consequences of that for the most vulnerable. Story after story, through narratives of ‘slow violence’ dispersed across time and space, readers get a sense of a slow erosion of the Irish community, predating the war and then exploding in the destruction of the conflict, but also a sense that violence – its continuous perpetration now and in the future – is not inevitable. Some of the tales in Earth-Bound have the potential, through estrangement and shifts in setting, to move their readers to think critically about the status quo and possibly act on and change it. Hence, my article first explores the supposed un representability of the Civil War; second, by comparing the stories in Earth-Bound to the more celebrated ones by Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain, it intends to highlight the peculiarity and originality of Macardle’s writing.