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24.08.2014

M. Finke. Repetition and Pil’niak’s Poetics of Trauma: “Moist Mother Earth”

This article analyzes the Boris Pil'niak’s story, Moist Mother Earth. It offers an interpretive framework for a new understanding and reevaluation of certain features of Pil'niak’s prose that have long attracted notice, but been adduced as weaknesses: the prominent role of repetition and self-citation in his work; the chaotic chronological organization of his narratives; their shocking thematics, and so on. A psychoanalytic approach helps make sense of these features as related to an underlying notion of trauma; and trauma theory proves useful not only in application to horrifyingly violent events connected with peasant revolt and the Civil War that are depicted in the story, but also in rethinking the structural principles organizing the narrative.

Keywords: Pil'niak, Moist Mother Earth, Trauma theory, Psychoanalytic approach, intelligentsia and folk, Dostoevskii, The Peasant Marei.

Philological sciences #3, May, 2014, pp. 89-101

16.11.2013

J. Kuortti. India in translation: tendencies of representation in translating Indian fiction

The article analyses certain cultural elements of Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A (2005) in the English original and its Finnish translation, Tyhjentävä vastaus, eli kuka voittaa miljardin. It discusses comparatively the strategies of intercultural dialogue adopted in the original (ST) and the translated (TT) versions. Swarup’s novel textually explicitly represents India for the reader in a transcultural context. While it is written by an Indian about India, it is published for the international English-speaking audience. As a diplomat, Swarup can be defined as a diasporic writer. Yet the themes and issues of the novel are current socio-political matters in India ― from communalism to corruption and the Indian cinema to poverty ― but the context is transcultural global media setting. Furthermore, the identificational context and underlying conflict is intra-cultural, not cross-cultural ― especially between the poor and the rich. The article looks at how the representation of India is further handled and transmitted in translation. The aim is to consider the translation strategies in translating transcultural texts, the prerequisites for transcultural readership, and the challenges these pose for analysis.

Keywords: translation strategies, transculturation, representation, Indian English literature, Vikas Swarup.

Philological sciences #3, November, 2013, pp. 73-79

22.10.2013

Richard Tempest. “War is Existence Itself”: Representations of the Authorial Self in Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s Story “Zhelyabuga Village”

An analysis of the authorial, autobiographical and diegetic layers of meaning in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s two-part tale “Zhelyabuga Village,” with reference to the text’s structural binarism and its historical and polemical content.

Keywords: Solzhenitsyn, “Zhelyabuga Village,” explication de texte, World War II, masculinity, military prose, village prose.

Philological sciences #2, July, 2013. pp. 88-93

22.10.2013

Sabine Broeck. One More Trip To the Quarters: Uncle Tom‘s Cabin Revisited With Toni Morrison

The article looks at Harriett Beecher Stowe's famous anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Published first in serial installments in an anti-slavery paper in 1851, one year after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, the novel not only joined in the heated political controversy the abolitionist movement had instigated in the pre-Civil War United States, it defined its terms to no small extent. After decades of feminist instruction about the “cultural work” of fiction it has become possible again to appreciate the novel‘s articulateness, its genre-rich versatility, and its overwhelming sentimentality in terms other than trivia. The article focuses on the tension between, on the one hand, Beecher Stowe's early feminist and abolitionist sincerity in her propagandistic fight against slavery, and on the other hand, her white racism in her refusal to grant her black characters an agency of their own.

Keywords: Harriett Beecher Stowe, slavery, Tomi Morrison, African-American fiction, abolitionism, textual cultural work, feminism.

Philological sciences #2, July, 2013, pp.94-103

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M. Finke. Repetition and Pil’niak’s Poetics of Trauma: “Moist Mother Earth”

J. Kuortti. India in translation: tendencies of representation in translating Indian fiction

Richard Tempest. “War is Existence Itself”: Representations of the Authorial Self in Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s Story “Zhelyabuga Village”

Sabine Broeck. One More Trip To the Quarters: Uncle Tom‘s Cabin Revisited With Toni Morrison