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Communal Pleasure in Jean Rhys’s Fiction Neohelicon Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Qiping Yin
Laura Frost’s The problem with pleasure: Modernism and its discontents has blazed a new trail and annexed the concept of pleasure to the notion of modernism in her reading of Jean Rhys’s fiction. For all her meticulously traced genealogy of pleasure, however, communal pleasure is conspicuously absent. This paper argues against a simplistic generalization of Rhys’s treatment of various kinds of pleasure
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Remembering and forgetting in Sara Collins’ The confessions of Frannie Langton Neohelicon Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Yomna Saber
Set in Jamaica and London in the 1820s, Sara Collins’ debut novel The confessions of Frannie Langton (2019) is a neo-slave historical novel par excellence. In it, Collins shapes and reshapes several subgenres of historical fiction, such as gothic fiction, historical romance, and historical mystery. Facing a trial based on the accusation of killing her master and mistress, Frannie Langton narrates her
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Post-Trump masculinity in popular romance novels Neohelicon Pub Date : 2024-03-11
Abstract As an almost exclusively female-dominated medium, the popular romance novel has, throughout its history, allowed women writers to “amplify their political voice” (Teo, 2016, p. 102), especially when they could not actively participate in politics. Commonly, writers fashion storylines that reflect and process concerns from the real world in a fictional context. Using the Regency Romance as
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Adventure and contingency in literary theory Neohelicon Pub Date : 2024-03-06
Abstract The relation between adventure and contingency is an ambivalent one. This ambivalence can be described by using a distinction of two aspects already tied together in âventiure (as a French foreign word in German), distinguished by Jacob Grimm as “begebenheit” versus “erzählte geschichte selbst,” rendered as ‘type of event’ versus ‘narrative pattern’ in the terminology of the Munich research
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The pause button on ecophobia: reflections on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, fifty years in Neohelicon Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Simon C. Estok
One of the reasons that Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek remains very important to the environmental issues we face, even fifty years after its publication, is that it actively rejects the demonizing, anthropomorphizing, gendering, and ecophobic gestures that pervade so much of our understandings and representations of the natural environment. Dillard stresses the importance of seeing, and while
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Evolutionary emotion of AI and subjectivity construction in The Windup Girl Neohelicon Pub Date : 2024-01-12
Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) is man-made with the purpose of serving humans. An emotional machine is designed to meet the demands of human emotion. Science fiction and films provide many stories about the emotional development of AI/robots/androids/clones. This paper argues that there is an evolutionary emotional process for AI and that humans should finally accept the coexistence of humans
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Masochism, literature, and aesthetic form Neohelicon Pub Date : 2024-01-03
Abstract Drawing inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of masochism as an obsession with a perfect form, this essay argues that masochism offers literary critics opportunities to reconsider questions of beauty and form in literature. I use John Keats’s “Lamia,” Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and James Joyce’s “The Dead” as case studies to examine how literary works incorporate
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Introduction: The fifty-year history of Neohelicon, Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, and beyond Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-12-04 Péter Hajdu, József Pál
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L’Europe des Lumières et les colloques de Mátrafüred Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-11-22 Daniel-Henri Pageaux
From 1970 to 1988 the small spa town of Mátrafüred and the holiday home of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences were the setting for six meetings devoted to “Enlightenment in Hungary, Central and Eastern Europe.” It is to Béla Köpeczi, member of the Academy of Sciences, that this great initiative belongs. The article reports on the major orientations of these meetings organized in a comparative, interdisciplinary
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Epic traditions in Balkan world literature Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-11-16 David Damrosch
Long focused primarily on the literature of a few major European powers, comparative studies have increasingly been giving substantial attention to writers in smaller countries and using less widely diffused languages. The rich and varied literatures of the Balkans are ideal candidates for renewed attention, but perhaps because of the number and variety of languages involved, there has been little
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“Monasteri neri”: letteratura ungherese e italiana e scrittura popolare nella Prima Guerra Mondiale Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Cinzia Franchi
The paper “Black Monasteries”: Hungarian and Italian Literature and Popular Writing in the First World War analyzes War literature and the directly related literature about internment camps, both relating to the First World War, which had a different development in Hungary and Italy; however, similar features can be found in them. Regarding these aspects, this essay examines some works, starting from
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The post-memory of the Armenian genocide and the myth of origins in Antonia Arslan’s works Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Franca Sinopoli
This contribution aims to analyse the postmemory of the origins through the work of an Italian author of Armenian descent, Antonia Arslan, and stems from an ongoing research project about “Narrating the Trauma in European Literatures and Cultures” based at La Sapienza University of Rome. I will therefore focus on the link between this research project, which serves as a theoretical framework, and the
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The Roman and Viennese indices of prohibited books in Austrian and Bohemian lands under Maria Theresa Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-11-11 Luka Vidmar
Under Maria Theresa (ruled 1740‒1780), handling books in Austrian and Bohemian lands was largely governed by the Index librorum prohibitorum, which the Catholic Church in Rome started publishing in 1559, and the Catalogus librorum a commissione aulica prohibitorum, which the Court Book Censorship Committee in Vienna published from 1754 onward. Through censorship secularization, the Viennese index gradually
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Censor’s scissors in Croatian literature: Shaping a(n) (inter)national community Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Marina Protrka Štimec
Using some of the best-known examples from Croatian literature, this article examines the influence of censors on shaping the literary field in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. It compares the role of educated censors who supported the development of the literary field in the first decades of nineteenth-century Habsburg Croatia with that of censors
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Irony and sentiment in the literary field: Prešeren’s sonnets and the Slovenian alphabet-censorship war Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Marko Juvan
Restoration censorship forced European Romantic literature to retreat from society and politics into subjective intimacy, fantasy, mythology, history, and exotic places. In addition to conforming to restrictions, however, censorship also led writers to evade its control (pseudonyms, publication abroad, allusive style) and, more rarely, to overt or covert rebellion (petitions, satire, etc.). An example
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Between policing and literary criticism: Habsburg censorship of literature in Lombardy-Venetia Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Daniel Syrovy
The article looks at censors’ statements from the Venice State Archive and asks whether the parallels between censors speaking on literary texts and the mode of literary criticism can be productively analyzed with the help of these archival materials. The Venetian censorship bureau, established in 1814/15 in the context of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia and forming part of Habsburg Empire, is a welcome
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Metal cultures, ecocriticism, decolonization, and Tara June Winch’s The Yield Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Iris Ralph
The late arrival of ecocriticism in literary studies in the 1970s attests to what seems to have meant hardly anything at all to literary studies scholars since the birth of literary theory and criticism. What mattered had to be, at the very least, human, or a set of human interests that effectively debased the environment. Ecocriticism, established less than half a century ago, has made inroads on
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Anatomy of the “deathly silence”: Slovenian newspapers in Carniola and the pre-March censorship Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Marijan Dović
The media landscape of the Habsburg Monarchy in the pre-March period was relatively meagre. In Carniola and other Austrian crownlands with a Slovenian population, the opportunities for literary development were limited: this is well evidenced by the ban on the publication of Slavinja in mid-1820 as well as by the many conflicts Krajnska čbelica (‘The Carniolan Bee’) had with censorship in the early
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Who is at the helm? Mary Wollstonecraft’s contribution to the romantic construct of the imagination Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Ágnes Péter
In my essay I pursue the line of inquiry which has recently been proposed by scholars who have reconstructed the historical context of Wollstonecraft’s feminism to bring into sharper focus what can be seen as consistent motives of her thought. Starting out from the thesis of Barbara Taylor that Wollstonecraft’s feminism was deeply rooted in the egalitarian theology of Radical Protestantism (Barbara
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Transcending the national: on worlding the peripheral literatures Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-08-18 Anton Pokrivčák, Miloš Zelenka
The study is concerned with contemporary theoretical concepts of world literature (“literature of the world”, “worldliness of literature”, “world literary system”, “world literary republic”). Considering the results of the XXII International Congress ICLA/AICL in Macau 2019, it discusses how the concepts are reflected in the Slovenian scholar Marko Juvan´s monograph Worlding a Peripheral Literature
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Théories littéraires et indéfinition de la littérature : pour une ontologie moindre de la littérature Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Jean Bessière
Literary theories do not offer a unitary definition of literature. This led to the conclusion that such a definition is unnecessary. This lack of a unitary definition is here reconsidered according to the basis of these theories: the ontologies of literature they develop, which they imply and which constitute as many unitary definitions of literature. Three strong ontologies are identified: literature
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Two perceptions of childhood: Alexander Baron (1917-1999) and Howard Jacobson (1942-) Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-08-08 William Baker
Alexander Baron’s From the City from the Plough (1948) received high praise as the best fictional record of ordinary British soldiers’ experiences during the Second World War. Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question (2010) won the prestigious Booker Prize for the best novel of the year. In 2022, each author's memoirs were published: Baron’s Chapters of Accidents: A Writer's Memoir and Jacobson's Mother’s
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The horror of censorship in fin-de-siècle Hungarian journalism Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-07-24 Péter Hajdu
The freedom of the press was regarded as an important achievement and valuable heritage of the 1848 revolution in nineteenth-century Hungary. The liberal government after 1867 seldom dreamed of installing censorship; they rather developed more sophisticated, indirect methods to influence the press. However, the government tried to suppress the agrarian movements in early 1898, among other measures
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Metaphors of violence and survival: Primo Levi’s philosophy of chemistry Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Peter Arnds
One of the principal dilemmas Holocaust survivors have faced is how to voice the traumatic memories that haunt them. Although in his seminal Language and Silence George Steiner once claimed that “the world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason”, the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi was an obvious exception in having been able to voice his trauma throughout his life by writing
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Metaphorical conceptualization of beauty in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History: translation perspectives Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Yakiv Bystrov, Uliana Tatsakovych
In the article, the principles of the conceptual metaphor theory are applied to translation studies. It provides an overview of Lakoff’s classification of conceptual (orientational, ontological, structural) metaphors and Kövecses’s procedures for image metaphor creation (extension, elaboration, questioning, combining) and discusses their application to analyzing the translation of conceptual metaphors
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Défis et Enjeux d’une historiographie littéraire comparatiste: « Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes » et Neohelicon Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Yves Chevrel
The year 1973 was marked by two important events concerning comparative studies in Europe: the publication of the first volume of a project initiated by the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), a « Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages » (John Benjamins); and the launch of a new journal, the aim of which was the « presentation of epochs, periods, trends and currents
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Strategies for transnational projection through international book fairs Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-06-15 M. Carmen Villarino Pardo
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Introduction to the special issue World literature and the strategies of nation-building Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-06-15 Sándor Hites
The introduction gives a survey of recent developments in cultural nationalism and world literature studies. I argue that these trends have come to tackle the issues of cross-cultural transfers in antithetical directions: While the former highlighted the transnational patterns of national self-fashioning, the latter wanted to reclaim the individual and the particular from all-absorbing globalist commodification
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Art, politics and identity in de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-05-25 Valentina Monateri
The aim of this paper is to analyze Anne Louise Germaine de Staël’s novel Corinne ou l’Italie (1807) from the point of view of the cultural studies and the visual studies, to shed a light on de Staël’s attempt at promoting the construction of a modern Italian national identity, founded on the arts. The article examines how de Staël’s participation in the Italian nation-building was half linked to her
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Hungarian writers in the interwar USA: the fiction of József Reményi and Áron Tamási Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Péter Hajdu
In the Interwar period, József Reményi (1891–1956) and Áron Tamási (1897–1966) wrote fiction about the experience of Hungarian immigrants in the USA. Reményi immigrated before WWI and made his residence permanent after his naturalization, whereas Tamási moved to the USA in 1923 but returned to his homeland in 1926. The paper contrasts their personal experiences as immigrants in America, discusses their
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Italo Calvino’s Invisible cities as a postmodern parody of The travels of Marco Polo Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Sayyed Rahim Moosavinia, Bibi Marzieh Ahmadzadeh
The postmodern idea of “return to the origin” of a literary text characterizes almost all literature. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a reconstruction of The Travels of Marco Polo, but despite the strong connections between the two texts, little attempts have been made to apply this intertextual relationship in a reading of Invisible Cities. Identifying such connections could lead to insightful
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La traduction pour la recherche en sinologie : le cas des titres traduits dans Le Siècle des Youên Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-04-12 Qiang Zhang, Yuqi Ding
Le titre traduit, malgré sa longueur modeste, s’avère comme un lieu de confrontation de différentes stratégies traductives et un révélateur des considérations académiques du traducteur. Dans le présent article, à la lumière de la théorie du skopos, nous avons pour objet d’étude les titres traduits des 100 pièces de théâtre incluses dans la célèbre anthologie littéraire Le Siècle des Youên compilée
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Towards a hermeneutics of the postmodern transnational space: the case of contemporary Australian literature Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-03-23 José-Carlos Redondo-Olmedilla
The work analyses the “spatial turn” in recent Australian literature, which has led to a new transnational orientation in many contemporary Australian narratives. To do so, it frames literary production in terms of spatial cognition and analyses spatiality and cognition as presented by several scholars in several realms. This theoretical introduction is followed by a more practical examination of recent
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Sounds national: mediating the ballad in nineteenth-century Scotland and Transylvania Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-03-03 Veronika Ruttkay
When Transylvanian bishop János Kriza published Vadrózsák [Wild roses], his collection of Székely folklore in 1863, he was soon to be hailed as “the Hungarian Percy.” The ballads seemed to provide a solid foundation for literary nation-building and their significance was confirmed by rival claims of Romanian cultural nationalism, leading to the so-called “Wild rose controversy” or Heidenrösleinkrawall
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Venezia, i fratelli Zrínyi e la causa magiara: uno sguardo alla politica e alla letteratura ungherese della metà del XVII secolo Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Simona Nicolosi
Alla metà del XVII secolo Venezia, già crocevia di scambi commerciali e rosa dei venti della diplomazia internazionale, divenne il centro degli intrighi politici filofrancesi e antiasburgici dell’Ungheria reale in lotta contro il Turco. A Venezia giunsero più volte i fratelli Zrínyi, uomini d’arme e di cultura, non solo per tutelare i propri interessi commerciali e per stabilire contatti con le accademie
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Cosmopolitanism and cosmo-poethics: the cultural migrations of a ‘concept’ Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Silvana Carotenuto
The paper deals with the interest nowadays played by the concept of cosmopolitanism in contemporary schools of critical thought through different and interconnected perspectives. The article reads some deconstructive, culturalist and postcolonial rewritings of the Kantian notion of cosmopolitanism, with a focus on the network of ‘refuge-cities’ functioning on global cooperation, as offered by Jacques
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Framing, rewriting, and reception in world literature: the case of Wolf Totem Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-01-30 Yanqiu Cui, Yang Bai
When world literature is seen as a product of translation and circulation and as a mode of reading, new world literature attributes, other than literariness, can be inferred, such as relevance to readers, a combination of cultural peculiarity and universality, and accessibility. A case study of Wolf Totem reveals that these attributes can explain how commercial publishers frame, translators rewrite
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Between nation, post-empire, and world-literature Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-01-11 Marco Bucaioni
African Lusophone literatures are largely a Portuguese product: the very construction of literary corpora though book editing and printing was mainly led by Portuguese publishers before and after independence. Other non-African institutions (universities, literary agents, critics) were largely responsible for that process of canonization in the Portuguese-speaking world, with repercussions in Africa
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Representations of Istanbul at the intersection of modern Turkish literature and world literature Neohelicon Pub Date : 2023-01-09 Ayşegül Turan
As the cultural capital of both the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey, Istanbul has assumed a central role in the literary imagination of the cultural legacy of the imperial past and the modern nation-state. When we consider Turkish literary history, construction of a national literary tradition reveals a close engagement with the West and Western modernity, often resulting in epistemological and
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Worlding in Georgi Gospodinov’s There, where we are not Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-12-27 Mihaela P. Harper
This article proposes that rather than a concern with safeguarding a national identity, Georgi Gospodinov’s poetry collection There, where we are not (2016) exposes the relationship of self and world as coextensive and mutually constitutive. His poems undertake the remaking of the world as they reconfigure the self with language at the heart of this undertaking—words and meanings in flux, at play in
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Rendering the unsayable: unnatural acts of narration in koan literature Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-12-16 Amiao Wu
A narrative approach to Zen texts remains largely under-researched due to the fact that Zen enlightenment is claimed to be a direct, unmediated experience beyond words. This article attempts to explore how literary Zen renders the unsayable by drawing on unnatural narrative theory. Because the unnatural proliferates in koan texts, an exploration of their narrative mode may expect to do justice to their
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The Gothic aesthetic in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-12-12 Junjie Qi
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Interfaith marriage goes wrong: Belle Kendrick Abbott’s Leah Mordecai Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Irina Rabinovich
The literary preoccupation with interfaith marriages between Christians and Jews in nineteenth-century American literature reflects the social and cultural concerns that were at stake with regards to America’s place as a ‘Melting pot’, and the sensitive rapports between the dominant (Christian) culture and the Jewish minority. Most nineteenth-century novels dealing with intermarriage were written by
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Essential (mostly neglected) questions and answers about artificial intelligence Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-12-06 David Brin
Worries about Artificial Intelligence are no longer just the province or science fiction (SF) or speculative futurism. Sober appraisals list potential dangers arising from predatory resource consumption to AI harnessed into destructive competition between human nations and institutions. Many SF tales and films about AI dangers distill down to one fear, that new, powerful beings will recreate the oppression
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La lettura schellinghiana della Divina Commedia Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-28 János Kelemen
I filosofi dell’idealismo tedesco, fra cui in primo piano Schelling, hanno scoperto il significato universale di Dante per la civiltà europea. L’autore nel saggio esamina questo ruolo di Schelling. Le questioni principali che egli mette a fuoco sono le seguenti: la singolarità del genere della Comedia, il problema del rapporto della poeticità e del carattere concettuale nell’opera e il problema dell’allegorismo
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Pushkin’s Tatiana, read through Shakespeare and Lotman Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Lyudmil Dimitrov
The text explains how the narrative matrix of Eugene Onegin integrates the plot of Taming of the Shrew. In the autumn of 1830, in Boldino, Pushkin finished the last canonical chapter of the novel in verse—the eighth. The period is characterized by Pushkinʼs active absorption of Shakespeare’s drama poetry. But the important question is—what justifies the complete metamorphosis of Tatiana, who has transformed
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Human emotions projected onto androids: a manifestation of internal crisis—human–android interactions in “The Sand-Man” by E.T.A. Hoffmann as example Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-23 Lin Cheng
Machines, robots or androids are often associated with a lack of emotions. But in the literary imagination at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was already a mechanical android which has been endowed with projected emotions. In “The Sand-Man” (1816), E.T.A. Hoffmann introduced an android to represent the modern individual crisis. In the human-android emotional interactions in this novella
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On human expendability: AI takeover in Clarke’s Odyssey and Stross’s Accelerando Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Johannes D. Kaminski
This paper discusses how Arthur C. Clarke’s four-volume Odyssey series (1968–1997) and Charles Stross’s Accelerando (2005) relate to humanity’s narcissistic injuries. Here, powerful AIs threaten the self-perception of humanity, which intuitively assumes that it holds a central position in the universe. Clarke’s and Stross’s texts are representative of changing AI visions between the optimistic can-do
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‘By creating plot texts, man learnt to distinguish plots in life and thus to make sense of life’: a discussion of narratology in the work of Juri Lotman Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Joe Andrew
The overall aims of this article are to revisit one of the key contributions to narratology of the late twentieth century, Juri Lotman’s The origin of plot in the light of typology of 1973, to attempt to determine its place in Lotman’s work as a whole, its relationship with the work of other theorists, as well as to suggest its value, and its applicability to literature and other manifestations of
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On some aspects of the binary in the context of the ternary and the plural in Juri Lotman’s semiotics of literature Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-16 Katalin Kroó
The paper raises the problem of binarisms in Juri Lotman’s conceptual and text analytical system from a new perspective. The approach combines several focal aspects of examination. It consist of the parallel study of the application of the notion of binarism in cultural semiotic theory and its active role as a crucial methodological tool for literary text interpretation (the question is: how binary
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Dialecticizing realism: aesthetics, forms, and the European bildungsroman Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-18 Stefano Ercolino
The scholarly literature on realism has largely discussed the factors that have led to realism’s development and, concurrently, have played a role in the rise of the novel. Yet one of them has received little theoretical and historical framing: namely, the dialectical relationship that realism, especially late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century realism, established with the novelistic genres
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Negotiation between social structure and personal feelings—An inquiry into the covert progressions in Ian McEwan’s Machines like me Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-15 Mingying ZHOU, Wangjiao WU
This article is an attempt at breaking through the existing pattern of criticism and diverting our attention to the covert narrative dynamic behind the plot development of Ian McEwan’s recent fiction, Machines Like Me, so as to reveal the ironies and paradoxes underlying the text. Firstly, the love feelings of Charlie and the humanoid Adam towards the same woman, named Miranda, are brought into a comparative
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A study of desires and emotions in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-10 Yuying Wang, Tianhu Hao
The dream in the title of Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? refers to the ability to have “desires” and “emotions.” The text focuses closely on “desires” and “emotions”—a theme that can be divided into the humans’ lack of emotion, the evolution of the androids’ desire and its effect on human emotion. Most of the existing studies center on the humans’ lack of emotion
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Love and hope: affective labor and posthuman relations in Klara and The Sun Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-11 Lanlan Du
If super AI becomes possible, what could be the relationship between humans and non-humans? Does love play an important role in it? What is the meaning of true love? Noted for writing “novels of great emotional force”, Kazuo Ishiguro in his most recent speculative fiction Klara and the Sun imagines a posthuman world in which enhanced transhumans, super AIs and ordinary human beings coexist and interact
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Confessional text in the light of Yuri Lotman’s semiotic research Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-10 Péter Hajdu, Lyudmila Lutsewich
Yuri Lotman developed and during his career frequently revisited the concept of “culture as text,” which he demonstrated to be universal. Within the framework of the semiotic approach, culture, perceived as a text, is, according to Lotman, a complexly encoded structure. This article attempts to consider confessional texts in the light of Lotman’s semiotic model of culture. Following his methodology
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Dreary useless centuries of happiness: Cordwainer Smith’s “Under Old Earth” as an ethical critique of our current Emotion AI goals Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-10 Alba Curry
This paper explores the ways in which Cordwainer Smith’s short story “Under Old Earth” problematizes emotions, who/what has them, and who/what is granted moral status. Most importantly, however, “Under Old Earth” questions the primacy of happiness in human society, especially where happiness is understood as the absence of other (negative) emotions. As such, “Under Old Earth” challenges the notion
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Lotman’s semiotics of literature in terms of “space as language” Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-07 Peeter Torop
The present paper is dedicated to the analysis and interpretation of languages of space within the context of the artistic world, conceptualised by Lotman in his early works, especially in his examination and characterisation of N. Gogol’s spatial universe (1968). The central problem is the transformation of the languages of space into space as language. Space is the complex notion for Lotman and consists
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Affective cyborgs and other artificial constructs in feminist science fiction: Sideshow and Six Moon Dance by Sheri Tepper Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Anikó Sohár
This essay examines the emotions of diverse artificial intelligences envisioned by an incongruous feminist science fiction author, Sheri S. Tepper. The focus of the comparison will be on a complex cyborg, the Questioner in Six Moon Dance and the relevant sentient creatures in Sideshow so as to contrast the representation of emotions felt/expressed by constructs, and try to establish the connection
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Postmodern philosophy of history and reading its traces in postcolonial (re)writing Neohelicon Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Mustafa Kirca
Presenting the outlines of the postmodern philosophy of historiography as it shapes the theoretical background for the analysis of the historical novel, this study aims to render that the recent understanding of history and its reconceptualization in decolonizing fictional (re)writings still provides the “re-visionary” stance seen in contemporary postcolonial narratives. After the introduction of postmodern