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English | |
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Literature, Film |
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1803-7720 | |
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Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Editorial Board |
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The Moravian Journal of Literature and Film welcomes contributions in literary, film, and cultural studies exploring all aspects of the disciplines. All submissions will be peer-reviewed. Send essays electronically to moravianjournal@upol.cz, or, mail printed essays accompanied by a compact disc with the electronic version to Moravian Journal of Literature and Film, Department of English and American Studies, Philosophical Faculty, Palacký University, Olomouc, Křížkovského 10, 771 47 Olomouc, Czech Republic. Essays should conform to the humanities style (notes and bibliography), as defined in the current edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. A stylesheet is available on the journal’s website. The editors can assume no responsibility for loss of manuscripts. Manuscripts shall not be submitted simultaneously elsewhere. |
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Moravian Journal of Literature and Film moravianjournal@upol.cz |
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Moravian Journal of Literature and Film
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The Moravian Journal of Literature and Film, founded in 2009, is a Czech scholarly journal whose objective is to be a platform for an intersection of literary and film history, criticism, and theory. The journal examines literatures and films in any language, thus merging both regional and universal themes. The journal is published in English, has been peer-reviewed since its foundation, and has two issues a year. |
Spring 2011, Volume 2, Number 2
Reconfiguring Gender Roles in Russian-German Imaginary Families
This article deals with the representation of the transnational family in two films (Andreas Dresen's Die Polizistin and Bernd Böhlich's Du bist nicht allein) and one novel (Alina Bronsky's Scherbenpark [Broken Glass Park]) that focus on the relationship between portrayals of German and Russian family structures. Each text reflects the reconfiguration of "family" as its components respond to shifting gender roles, ethnic difference, and the effects of migration and immigration on the perception of the family as constituting a basic social unit. The intersection of literature and film around the issue of the changing family reflects contemporary demographic trends as well as anxiety about intimacy, citizenship, and linguistic identity. In these representations, the family assumes attributes of an "imagined community" (Anderson) inhabiting "imaginative geographies" (Said).
Bonding and Moving On: Southern Female Companions in Motion (Pictures)
The early 1990s witnessed an outpouring of movies that follow southern heroines through various stages of development as they search for new "selves." The intersections of gender, race, and class seem to define the selfhood of southern women, which more often than not comes into being through the agency of female bonding. Through "mothering the mind," lesbianism, laughter, and getting outside, female bonding precipitates women's growth, it sets them in mental motion that leads them to self-discovery, and in so doing it allows women to challenge the practices of the hegemony of white (heterosexist) patriarchy trying to define female existence. The films chosen for the analysis -- Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985), Jon Avnet's Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Richard Pearce's The Long Walk Home (1991), John Sayles' Passion Fish (1992), Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise (1991) -- illustrate these essential functions of female bonding, which provide oppressed women with an avenue for self-expression, self-determination and self-discovery.
From Heteroglossia to Worldmaking: Fictions of Robert Burns and Iain (M.) Banks
The essay compares the fictions of individual and collective identity in the major works by Robert Burns, the tale Tam O'Shanter (1791) and the "cantata" Love and Liberty (1799, better known as The Jolly Beggars), with the representations of identity in the fictive worlds of sci-fi and non-sci-fi novels of Iain (M.) Banks. It discusses the importance of Bakhtin's paradigms of dynamic, heterogeneous structure ("heteroglossia" or "grotesque body") for the interpretation of Burns's poetry and the transformations of these paradigms in Banks's fictional "worldmaking" (Nelson Goodman). While Burns's poetry achieves a balance between dynamic representations of individual and collective identities (including Scottishness, Britishness and humanity), Banks's fictions problematize them. This especially influences Banks's "versions" of collective identities but also has a significant bearing on the individual identities of the protagonists.
Žižek's Act and the Literary Example
This essay focuses on the role of literary characters in Slavoj Žižek's political theory. Žižek, when theorizing political agency, likes to turn to literary texts such as Sophocles's Antigone or Herman Melville's Bartleby, The Scrivener, which exemplify his concepts. In his thinking, the truth of theory lies in its exemplification, in its practical demonstration. Thus the literary characters (Bartleby, Antigone) who provide examples register the fatal limits of his theory insofar as they prove to be models of authentic political agency, which one cannot actually follow. At the same time, however, they prove to be decisive in allowing Žižek to manipulate his readers in a more indirect and yet crucial manner.
Compliance Versus Defiance: The Characters' Response to Social Structures in Alasdair Gray's Lanark and 1982 Janine
The article focuses on two novels by Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) and 1982 Janine (1984), in particular on the ways in which the characters are influenced by externally imposed social structures and the attitudes they assume in dealing with them. The adverse workings of official institutions, such as education and employment facilities, are received with compliance on the part of the protagonist in 1982 Janine but meet with resistance from both of the two mirror protagonists in Lanark. In the context of the standing of Scotland within the United Kingdom, institutions represent the interests of the powerful English majority rather than the dependent Scottish minority, and therefore any act of rebellion against them is charged with a subversive potential. Besides the political implications, the article explores the social dimensions of the novels and illustrates by means of individual examples the means used by the powerful to exploit the powerless, as well as the strategies the latter employ to defend themselves.
Review of Still in Print: The Southern Novel Today, edited by Jan Nordby Gretlund. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. 285 p. ISBN 978-1-57003-944-7.
Review of Kolář, Stanislav, Zuzana Buráková, and Katarína Šandorová. Reflections of Trauma in Selected Works of Postwar American and British Literature. Košice: Pavol Josef Šafárik University, Faculty of Arts, 2010. 129 p. ISBN 978-80-7097-849-8.
Other Issues
Fall 2010, Volume 2, Number 1Spring 2010, Volume 1, Number 2
Fall 2009, Volume 1, Number 1