RSS 1.0Text Matters: a journal of literature, theory and culture nr 13/2023
Browse by
Recent Submissions
-
Periodicals and Nation-Building: The Public Sphere, Modernity, and Modernism in Modern Review and Visva Bharati Quarterly
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)The paper analyzes selections from Modern Review and Visva Bharati Quarterly, to study the complex act of nation-building taking place in India during the first half of the twentieth century. Through these periodicals, it ... -
Grande Dame Guignol at 60: A Review of Crazy Old Ladies: The Story of Hag Horror by Caroline Young (BearManor Media, 2022)
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20) -
“All of history a rehearsal for its own extinction”: A Review of Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger (Knopf, 2022)
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20) -
Harry Styles as a Cecaelia: Sexuality, Representation and Media-lore in “Music for a Sushi Restaurant”
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)The music video for Harry Styles’s 2022 track “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” (directed by Aube Perrie) provides a surprising representation of the pop star (arguably at the peak of his career) appearing as a cecaelia (a ... -
Abjection of the Other in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend: The Subject’s Deterrence Strategy for Becoming the Abject
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) is about the volatile relationship between Robert Neville—the sole survivor of the human race—and vampires as the members of a brave new world order. While many critics tend to read ... -
Envisioning the Ecological Future: Three Perspectives off the Beaten Track
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)With few truly hopeful visions currently emerging from mainstream academia or from established science concerning humanity’s collective environmental outlook, it might be necessary to go off the beaten track in order to ... -
Erasing “Knowable Communities”: From Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to Brassed Off
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)The paper discusses cinematic representations of working class communities in British cinema from the pre-war documentary movement to (post-)Thatcher feature films chronicling the decline of traditional industries. A ... -
Dialogic, but Monologic: Toxic Masculinity Meets #MeToo in Teddy Wayne’s Campus Novel Loner
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)Teddy Wayne’s 2016 Loner tells the story of a Harvard freshman’s sexual obsession with a fellow student, leading to stalking and attempted rape. On a deeper level, the campus novel can be interpreted as a critique of wider ... -
“The particulars of loss”: Grief Memoirs and Their Pragmatic Applications
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)Death is commonly pushed to the periphery in contemporary society, leaving the grief-struck to endure the turbulent nature of their loss alone. Unsurprisingly, our mortality-denying times have witnessed the proliferation ... -
Grievable Lives during the COVID-19 Pandemic: US-American Television, Melodrama and the Work of Mourning
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)The present article applies Judith Butler’s notion of “grievable life” to reflect on the manner in which selected US-American television series engaged in the work of mourning and memorializing the loss of life in the first ... -
Artist Collaboration and Unity in Times of Crisis: The Spirals Project
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)The pandemic crisis of COVID-19 that we have recently endured, and that to some extent we are still experiencing, abruptly changed the way in which we conceive of the interaction between inner and outer space. Specifically, ... -
“English with a Polish Accent and a Slight Touch of Irish”: Multilingualism in Polish Migrant Theatre
Prykowska-Michalak, Karolina
; (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)
Issues of migration writing (see Kosmalska) and migrant theatre have recently gained prominence, leading to an increase in research focused on analyzing the theatrical works of artists with a migrant background. This ... -
Waves of Pixels and Wordgenerated Algorithms: Drone Poetry as a Collaborative Practice between Machine and Human in Waveform by Richard A. Carter
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)The following article explores the creative collaborative practices in digital poetry between more-than-human agents. Richard A. Carter’s artistic project Waveform (2017–) makes one reconsider the ways in which multimodal ... -
Cosmic Hunt, Copper Electroplating, Chaosmic Transduction: Chaosmotechnics of Molecular Collaboration in Matthew Barney’s Redoubt Project (2016–21)
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)The article considers Matthew Barney’s artistic project Redoubt (2016–21) from the point of view of Gilbert Simondon’s transductive philosophy of individuation. Informed by Simondon—read here with Félix Guattari, Gilles ... -
“How Do You Know Who You Are?”: Marjorie Prime on Envisioning Humanity Through the Faculty of AI-Powered Memory as Reconstructive Tissue
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)In reference to the theme of the issue devoted to literary extremities, Jordan Harrison’s play Marjorie Prime raises thought-provoking questions about the potential benefits and drawbacks of advanced AI technology by ... -
Practices of Planetary Relationality in Colum McCann’s Apeirogon
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)For a number of critics, what we are witnessing in postmillennial Anglophone fiction is an attempt to do away with postmodern posturings of ironic distance and ethical non-commitment, and a renewed interest in questions ... -
HTML Texts and the Dawn of Asemic Digital Literature: Exploring Dennis Cooper’s Ideas
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)Dennis Cooper’s HTML texts which use Graphic Interchange Format (GIFs) instead of traditional glyph-based text, exhibit the extremities of our times, both thematically and structurally, through the radical temporality of ... -
Plasticity and the Poetics of Inside-Out Inversion in Emmett Williams and Roman Stańczak
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)Informed by the current call for a reassessment of the concepts of radicalism and extremity in the fields of literature and visual arts, my study aims to investigate the radicalities entailed by the tactics of turning ... -
The Extremities of Literature: Traumatic Memory in Two Novels by Kazuo Ishiguro
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)Drawing on Michel Foucault’s description of literature as being from the outside, Catherine Malabou explains that only literature can give us access to the inconceivable space occupied by traumatic experiences. How a ... -
“What I lack is myself”: The Fluid Text and the Dialogic Subjectivity in Susan Howe’s Debths
(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2023-12-20)James Joyce’s neologism “debths” (Finnegans Wake) that Susan Howe elects for the title of her 2017 volume of poetry points to at least three semantic coordinates of “obligation,” “trespass,” and “demise,” never—due to its ...