<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Aphra Behn, a Restoration playwright of unprecedented success, lived by her pen and therefore was obliged to conform to the other literary production of that time (written mostly by men): comedies featuring libertines, coarse morals, debauchery and fortune-hunting protagonists. Behn wrote in this manner, yet adding a satirical spin to her work, by presenting the character of Angellica Bianca, a prostitute (actually a very ladylike companion to older wealthy men). Paradoxically, Angellica is presented as the most upright and generous person among the cast; lamentably, she believes in oaths, of which Wilmore, the double-dealing eponymous rover of the play, cures her mercilessly and swiftly, as soon as he meets a virgin, who comes with a large fortune attached. By this, Behn introduces a dark undercurrent to an ostensibly comic play. This paper pays homage to the elaborate ways Aphra Behn employed to present a prostitute as the most intriguing character of the play.
</abstract>

A prostitute as the unsung heroine in Aphra Behn’s <italic>The Rover</italic>

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> The paper explores the eternal theme of morality and its effects on human thoughts and actions as depicted in M. L. Stedman’s debut novel The Light between Oceans (2012). The aim is to study how her characters, facing a demanding post-war environment, deal with morally challenging events in their lives and how they are able to fight the socially accepted concepts of what is right and what is wrong as well as the consequences of the serious decisions they make. Tom Sherbourne, a WWI veteran, settles down to his new job as lighthouse keeper and marriage with Isabel, but instead of finding peace, he faces several moral dilemmas which create a cold distance between him and his wife, as well as between his pre-war and actual self. In this sense, the paper tries to describe what Stedman has to say - through Tom’s character - about the nature of human morality and decision-making and how tragic their consequences might be.</abstract>

The fight between right and wrong: Exploring morality in M. L. Stedman’s novel The Light between Oceans

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>J. R. R. Tolkien, as somebody who experienced a difficult early life as an orphan and then as a World War I soldier, endured enough trauma and suffering in his life for it to become a significant element in almost all of his fictional works. This paper explores Tolkien’s understanding of the effects of suffering in human life, which was shaped by his religious belief. He presents pain as an inevitable and essential part of the nature of the Fallen World; yet while it may seem at first as a form of punishment, if treated appropriately, it turns into a powerful means of achieving personal or societal salvation.</abstract>

”<italic>What punishments of God are not gifts?</italic>” The meaning of suffering in Tolkien’s life and work

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> In the postcolonial context, language represents one of the crucial tools of cultural communication and is therefore often a subject of heated discussion. Since language constitutes the framework of cultural interaction, postcolonial authors often challenge the privileged position of Standard English within their writing by modifying and substituting it with new forms and varieties. The Trinidad-born writer Sam Selvon belongs to a handful of Caribbean authors who initiated linguistic experiments in the context of Caribbean literature and is considered one of the first Caribbean writers to employ dialect in a novel. His 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners reflects the possibilities of vernacular experimentation and thus communicates the specific experience of a particular cultural group in an authentic way.</abstract>

Communication across cultures: ideological implications of Sam Selvon’s linguistic inventiveness

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Postcolonial criticism offers a radically new platform for the interpretation of science fiction texts. Mostly preoccupied with the themes of alien other and interstellar colonization, the genre of sci-fi breaths with colonial discourse and postcolonial tropes and imagery. Although Margaret Atwood rejects the label of science fiction writer, her dystopian novel <italic>The Handmaid’s Tale</italic> (1985) explores similar ethical concerns to the anti-conquest narratives of postcolonial authors. Atwood’s identification of Canadian identity as a victim of the former British Empire is challenged by her introduction of a female character rejecting their postcolonial subjugated identity in a patriarchal society. Her variation on dystopian concerns is motivated by sexuality, and her characters are reduced to objects of colonial desire with no agency. The protagonist, Offred, endures double colonization from the feminist perspective; yet, in terms of postcolonial criticism, Attwood’s character of Offred is allowed to reconstruct her subaltern identity through her fragmented narration of the past and speak in an authoritative voice. The orality of her narration only confirms the predisposition of the text to interpretation in the same terms as postcolonial fiction.
</abstract>

A postcolonial feminist dystopia: Margaret Atwood’s <italic>The Handmaid’s Tale</italic>

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>This paper deals with the British dystopian novel <italic>Never Let Me Go</italic> by Kazuo Ishiguro, in which human clones are forced to donate their organs in an alternate reality set in 1990s England. Through the characters of the novel, various manifestations of suffering are examined from the viewpoint of existentialism. The whole concept of donation might be understood as a metaphorical expression for human life, as well as the omnipresent consciousness of its finitude. Ishiguro has prepared the ground for disturbing discussion where two ostensibly different groups of people – clones, whose only purpose is to donate their vital organs, and “normal people” as the recipients – suddenly appear to be indistinguishable in terms of mortality and the general experience of human existence. This paper focuses on the concept of existential anguish in the context of the novel’s story. Using an unobtrusive science fiction narrative, <italic>Never Let Me Go</italic> encourages readers to contemplate the essence, meaning and purpose of human life, and it quietly points to topics that are usually treated as highly sensitive: the inevitability of death and apparent absurdity of human existence.</abstract>

The suffering of existence in Kazuo Ishiguro’s <italic>Never Let Me Go</italic>

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The study represents a partial output of research on the culture of artificial neural networks, as the authors call the cultural complex, in which a number of different actants participate (technologies, their users, results of the generation process, their recipients, media, etc.) and which is constituted by language games that have a performative function. The aim of this study is to conduct a media-archaeological insight into the imaginative layer of these language games and to point out that one of the sources of neural network culture is precisely the deeply historically anchored technological imagination. The genealogy of this imagination is traced in the study from its ancient origins to the 1950s, when the idea of the artificial mind was transformed into a scientific theorem and founded the research field of artificial intelligence. In this way, the paper draws attention to the fact that when we think and talk about artificial intelligence, we are talking about a set of imaginations that should not be confused with reality, but rather treated as technological fictions.
</abstract>

Technological imagination as a source of the culture of neural networks

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
<italic>From William Byrd’s 18th-century “lubbers” of the North Carolina backcountry through the deviant gun-toting hicks with missing teeth from John Boorman’s survival thriller</italic> Deliverance <italic>(1972) to Darlene Snell from Netflix’s recent crime drama series</italic> Ozark <italic>(2016), the stereotype of the “hillbilly” has been one of the most pervasive images in American popular culture. This image has been usually associated with mountaineers inhabiting either the Appalachians or the Ozarks, and it has portrayed them as dirty, lazy, ignorant, often mean, violent and dangerous. Since the beginning of the 20th century, it has been popularized by film, music, and, starting with the Depression Era, also by comic strips such as Al Capp’s</italic> Li’l Abner, <italic>which shaped all subsequent depictions of these mountain folk. This article considers the depiction of hillbillies in comics with a focus on horror comics published by EC in the early 1950s.</italic>
</abstract>

The Hillbilly Stereotype in Horror Comics

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
<italic>The prosaist Marek Vadas is a contemporary Slovak writer who has won several literary prizes. A unique part of his bibliography is represented by short stories inspired by African culture and environment. The main objective of this paper is to analyse via interpretation these stories and to prove the role of the African environment in the process of creating the magical as a quality of expression. Stories from the following collections are looked at:</italic> Liečitef’, Čierne na čiernom, <italic>and</italic> Zlá štvrt’. <italic>The methodological approach of the interpretation is based on the theory of František Miko and his system of expression categories. The portrayed image of Africa interpreted in this contribution proceeds from Vadas’s personal experience. We conclude that the unique African element in his work adds to the magical quality of expression, which is based on the coaction of several elements: different cultural experience, thematic scheme, blend of multiple qualities of expression and of compositional techniques. The final magical quality of expression represents the specificity of Vadas’s writing style</italic>.
</abstract>

The foreign atmosphere of Africa as part of magical expression in the fiction of Marek Vadas

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
<italic>Samuel Beckett’s Come and Go (1965) is about three women whose conversations are both audible and inaudible due to each one’s whispering whenever two of them are alone and the other is out of sight. This paper focuses on the film version of</italic> Come and Go – <italic>directed by John Crowley in 2000</italic> – <italic>as part of the Beckett on</italic> Film <italic>project, which transferred Beckett’s 19 stage-plays to the screen. Drawing upon Mladen Dolar’s theorization of the object voice, this paper aims to analyse how Crowley renders Beckett accessible for contemporary audiences in cinematic terms, with a specific focus on the whisper scenes</italic>.
</abstract>

Shhh!: Whisper cycle in John Crowley’s rendition of Samuel Beckett’s <italic>Come and</italic> Go

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
<italic>This article revisits two well-known novels in Indian diasporic writing</italic>, Anita and Me <italic>(1996) by Meera Syal and</italic> The Namesake <italic>(2003) by Jhumpa Lahiri, to examine the cultural agents behind the formation and sustenance of the Indian diaspora. The article first establishes the multivalence of food to understand Indian literature and culture and then contextualizes the novel into the tradition of Indian diasporic food writing. By focusing on the culinary discourses in the novel, the article argues that Indian women employ their culinary strategies and ingenuities to produce a cultural version of Indianness, central to the construction of the Indian diaspora. The article draws the theoretical framework from Anita Mannur’s postcolonial concept of “kitchen Indians” to unravel the structural working of gender roles that operate at the foundation of the Indian diaspora</italic>.
</abstract>

(En)gendering diaspora: Negotiating food, culture and women in select Indian diasporic novels

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
<italic>The paper deals with cultural phenomena</italic> – <italic>realia and precedent phenomena</italic> – <italic>in the novel by contemporary Slovak author Pavol Rankov:</italic> Svätý mäsiar zo Šamorína a iné príbehy z čias Malej dunajskej vojny <italic>[The Holy Butcher of Šamorín and Other Stories from the Time of the Lesser Danube War, 2016] and in its German translation</italic> Der Kleine Donaukrieg <italic>(2022). The novel depicts a fictional war between Slovakia and Hungary, with its specific feature being the clash of several cultures and linguo-cultural spaces (Slovak, Hungarian, Roma, Czech) on the linguistic and extra-linguistic levels. The paper presents an interpretative probe into the analysed novel as well as a theoretical definition of the types of cultural phenomena in translation communication, focusing on the ambiguity of the rendering and definition of the “own” and “foreign” in a literary text. In the comparative analysis of the original work and its German translation, we focus on the interpretative, receptive and translational specificities of realia and precedent phenomena reflecting the Roma and Slovak linguo-cultural space</italic>.
</abstract>

The “own” vs the “foreign” in the German translation of Pavol Rankov’s novel <italic>Svätý mäsiar zo Šamorína a iné príbehy z čias Malej dunajskej vojny</italic>1

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> Hard-nosed female investigators Sara Lund and Saga Norén from the extraordinarily successful Scandinavian TV crime series The Killing and The Bridge are the latest examples of female hard-boiled detectives - dysfunctional loners who solve crimes where no one else succeeds. This article looks at the character construct of the hard-boiled male detective, maps these tropes against social expectations of gender norms and then considers how Sara Paretsky constructs an explicitly feminist “tough guy” private eye in V.I. Warshawski. It then analyses how Paretsky’s negotiation and partial subversion of the tropes of the hard-boiled genre are handled in translation, drawing on the German translation of Indemnity Only.</abstract>

“Philip Marlowe in drag?” – The construct of the hard-boiled detective in feminist appropriation and translation

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> The coexistence of different cultures in specific pluralistic settings not only has positive but also negative impacts. Besides exchanging cultural contents within a multicultural environment, societies use humour as a form of social interaction, which reinforces cultural interrelationships as well as ethnical differences. However, humour differs from culture to culture and from individual to individual. On the one hand, it develops social cohesion, fosters positive relations and increases the self-identification of the individual in relation to other ethnic groups, but on the other hand, it functions as an acceptable and tolerated form of aggression in a particular society. The bipolar character of humour stems from its status and functions. It serves both as a social unifier and a social separator. The most common paradigms of humour in social discourse are ethnic jokes or cartoons that are often built on fixed ethnic/racial stereotypes leading to social categorization but also to fast and correct decoding of semantic information by an audience. Ethnic jokes are social thermometers, recording and measuring the level of sensitivity towards specific cultural groups. The main aim of this paper is to introduce ethnic humour and its key functions in the context of ongoing cultural interactions and changes.</abstract>

Ethnic humour in a multicultural society

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> In an increasingly globalized and digitalized world, where the advancement of technologies and media constructions oversimplify and manipulate public beliefs and shared knowledge, the artistic sector seems to provide new networks of solidarity, collaboration and interaction that challenge a world dominated by conflicts and cultural shocks. Against this backdrop, acts of translation within the arts bear witness to humanity and become the ultimate ground for subjective expression and fundamental reflections upon individualist attitudes against migration issues. By putting emphasis on the role of translation in its political transfer of migration into the arts, this investigation draws attention to a recent corpus of works of art that testifies to the modalities by means of which the creative cultural industries are contributing to giving voice to migration not just as transruption and memory, but as an inclusive form of movement and communication. In Notes on the Exodus by Richard Flanagan, with illustrations by Ben Quilty (2016), and in the arts installations Call Me By My Name and All I Left Behind. All I Will Discover (London, 2017), translation intervenes as an instrument of cross-cultural collaboration and solidarity, resistance and dissent, and also demonstrates to what extent stories of migration can interact within art forms and be performed as acts of translation involving processes of (re)narration and (re)framing of identities.</abstract>

Translation as artistic communication in the aesthetics of migration: From nonfiction to the visual arts

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This study explores the self-nature relationship through tracing the key role that the weather conditions in Arab American Laila Lalami’s novel <italic>The Other Americans</italic> (2019) play in narrating the protagonist’s story. It highlights how the weather conditions echo Nora’s deep emotions and reflect her inner thoughts and feelings in the light of her relationships with other characters. The study focuses on Nora’s journey of becomingness and reveals that through depicting the changes in the weather, the story of Nora’s self-actualization and settlement can be narrated. It considers presenting how reading the weather conditions informs the reader about Nora’s self-perception, love affairs, career development and aspirations. It also explores how Lalami employs weather description to show the ways in which Nora ends up achieving self-reconciliation. As the events unfold, Nora is transformed from a person who comments on the clouds and winds and describes the fogs and rains to a fully-fledged character who, figuratively, is able to conjure up thunderstorms and hurricanes. Hence, by paying closer attention to the weather conditions, one can arguably witness Nora’s metamorphosis. In other words, Lalami’s novel is a site in which discourses on identity, ethnicity, multiculturalism and environment converge.
</abstract>

The weather as a storyteller in Lalami’s <italic>The Other Americans</italic>

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> The authors of the paper focus on the intercultural dimension in the translation of advertising texts, attempting to compare and illustrate the influence of cultural elements upon advertising text-creation in American, German and Slovak cultural spaces. Reflecting the social, psychological and cultural aspects of translation transfer, they survey the tension between the domestic and the foreign and consequent choices in translation strategy. They present tendencies observed across a span of almost two decades in the translation of advertising texts into Slovak and provide possible explanations for their development.</abstract>

Culture in advertising and advertising in culture: Communication, translation, representation

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> In recent years, the artistic representation of communities (e.g. in community-based theatres) has found its source in the realm of the imagination (documentary drama, verbatim theatre, post-dramatic performance, etc.), addressing issues that are important and relevant not only for the communities themselves but also for the wider society. In this presentation I will use Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of the “seductive lightness of being” - or the transitory nature of our virtual experience - to talk about the role of selected community-based theatres in the United States and about their imaginative depiction and discussion of issues which are of vital importance for any community: identity, the personal vs. the political, a sense of belonging, progressiveness, social awareness and the capability of coexistence.</abstract>

Imaginative Communities: The Role, Practice and Outreach of Community–Based Theatre

Open Access License

Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement

Style Sheet

Ars Aeterna

Literary Studies and Humanity

 Ars Aeterna is a literary peer-reviewed academic journal focused on the questions of literature and art and their importance in the contemporary world for the development of...

SNIP

MNiSW

 Ars Aeterna is a literary peer-reviewed academic journal focused on the questions of literature and art and their importance in the...

Ars Aeterna

Literary Studies and Humanity

Technological imagination as a source of the culture of neural networks

The Hillbilly Stereotype in Horror Comics

The foreign atmosphere of Africa as part of magical expression in the fiction of Marek Vadas

Shhh!: Whisper cycle in John Crowley’s rendition of Samuel Beckett’s Come and Go

(En)gendering diaspora: Negotiating food, culture and women in select Indian diasporic novels

The “own” vs the “foreign” in the German translation of Pavol Rankov’s novel Svätý mäsiar zo Šamorína a iné príbehy z čias Malej dunajskej vojny¹

Ars Aeterna

Literary Studies and Humanity

Technological imagination as a source of the culture of neural networks

The Hillbilly Stereotype in Horror Comics

The foreign atmosphere of Africa as part of magical expression in the fiction of Marek Vadas

Shhh!: Whisper cycle in John Crowley’s rendition of Samuel Beckett’s Come and Go

(En)gendering diaspora: Negotiating food, culture and women in select Indian diasporic novels

The “own” vs the “foreign” in the German translation of Pavol Rankov’s novel Svätý mäsiar zo Šamorína a iné príbehy z čias Malej dunajskej vojny1

The “own” vs the “foreign” in the German translation of Pavol Rankov’s novel Svätý mäsiar zo Šamorína a iné príbehy z čias Malej dunajskej vojny¹