Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies

“The City that Truly Counts” – the Meaningful Cityscape of Jim Crace’s Six

Petr Chalupský — 2024-06-06

Jim Crace’s ability to create both authentic and poetic geographic and topographic renderings has led critics to coin the term “Craceland” to denote these idiosyncratic settings that appear other and relatable at the same time. His narrative power lies in his ability to render places and spaces which, in spite of their wholly fictitious character, evoke a strong feeling of plausibility and familiarity. His milieux are never abstracted from the human element, and his stories examine the close link between his protagonists and the places they occupy or move through, thus emphasising the experiential and emotional dimension of space and place. Six (2003), his seventh novel, set in an unnamed imaginary present-day city, follows the fate of Lix Dern, a celebrated actor and a father of six children, in his life and career. Along with Arcadia (1992) and The Melody (2018), Six ranks among its author’s urban novels which explore the diverse aspects of the interrelatedness between modern cityscape and its inhabitants’ mental and physical existence. By using humanistic geography and phenomenological geocriticism as its theoretical points of departure, this paper attempts to analyse the roles the city assumes in conveying the novel’s principal thematic concerns, as well as to demonstrate how Six differs from Crace’s other two urban novels.

Reimagining Nature in Selected Hawaiian Literature: An Indigenous Ecological Perspective

Kristiawan Indriyanto — 2024-06-06

This study analyzes four selected works of Hawaiian literature, focusing on the refiguration of nature, presenting it as an active and conscious subject. Contrary to Western anthropocentrism, which instrumentalized nature, Hawaiian literature underscores the profound interconnectedness shared between humanity and the more-than-human world. This distinctive environmental imagination permeates the narratives and rejects Western distinctions between the human and non-human realms by intertwining the supernatural and human agency. The reading of selected Hawaiian literature analyzes how nature is positioned as an active subject with its agency, not merely a passive, static setting. Personification in Hawaiian literature primarily focuses on female figures, Pele as the volcano goddess and various ancestral spirits known as ‘aumakua. This critique of anthropocentrism is deeply entrenched in Hawaiian cultural and spiritual traditions, where gods, goddesses, and 'aumakua personify various elements and forces within the environment. This reimagining invites us to consider a different environmental imagination, recognizing the active agency of the non-human world. In conclusion, this study highlights how the Native Hawaiians ecological discourse seeks to reorient humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

Reconnecting with the Non-human World: Loss and Uncertainty in Esther Woolfson’s Field Notes from a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary

Laura Suchostawska — 2024-06-06

The article focuses on the issue of reconnecting with the non-human world of animals and plants that can be encountered in the city, as presented in Esther Woolfson’s book Field Notes from a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary. Even though it deals with an urban environment, the book can be treated as an instance of nature writing, more specifically British new nature writing. By focusing on non-human beings living in the city, Woolfson makes them more salient in the readers’ minds, demonstrating that direct contact with nature is not limited to the wilderness or the countryside and is accessible to anyone, regardless of where they live. At the same time, her diary reveals underlying sorrow connected with the gradual loss of species, populations, habitats, and familiar weather patterns, as well as uncertainty as to what can and should be done to protect the environment and the living beings that inhabit it.

American Southern Great Chain of Being in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Magic City

Grzegorz Kość — 2024-06-06

This paper reviews the various modes of racist, sexist, classist, ageist, and interspecific oppression as well as occasional transgressions in the city of Bogalusa, Louisiana, as they are dramatized in the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, particularly in his 1992 memoirist volume Magic City. More than anything else, Komunyakaa remembers from his childhood days the discourses and practices of violence and control aimed at maintaining a rigid hierarchical structure regulating order between all forms of life and preserving the sense of identity of many. It is a realm of unrelenting terror in which all creatures must succumb to a regime bringing to mind the medieval great chain of being. Komunyakaa investigates thoroughly Southern morals to determine the extent of psychological and epistemic damage they cause.

The Consequences of Crossing the Color Line: Identity and Racial Passing in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half

Magdalena Łapińska — 2024-06-06

The article explores the concept of identity and the notion of transgressing the color line in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. Racial passing, in which light-skinned African Americans lived their lives as white people, is a trope present in numerous African American novels, notably Nella Larsen’s Passing. Brit Bennett’s novel returns to the once-popular trope of transgressing the color line in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States. Although Bennett subverts the trope as no tragedy befalls those who cross the line of the racial divide, the novel presents how one’s race, circumstance, and choices shape not only one’s own identity but also how they impact the next generation. Through the return to the past, Bennett’s novel emphasizes the continued divide within American society. Based on the historical and cultural backdrop of the United States, as well as through the application of affect theory, the article explores to what degree one’s race, choices, experienced violence, and society’s stereotypes and prejudice impact how characters feel, behave, and define themselves. The focal point of the analysis is the exploration of two generations of women from one family and the examination of how differently their racial identities have been shaped.

Self-sculpting in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden

Justyna Fruzińska — 2024-06-06

Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden features arguably the strongest and most transgressive heroine in the writer’s work. Catherine Bourne replays a fear present in other novels by Hemingway and in his view of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage: she is the rich and controlling wife of a writer, whose masculinity is threatened by her financial position. Additionally, Catherine starts a series of experiments connected to gender and sexuality, testing her and her husband’s limits, and ultimately putting at risk their relationship. The paper discusses Catherine’s gender-bending practices as a form of self-expression and self-sculpting, looking for an identity beyond the limitations imposed on her by society. Her transgression is analyzed both as an aim in itself and as a means in the process of self-fashioning, in which Catherine is more determined not only than Hemingway’s other female protagonists but also than her husband David.

Experiments in Narrative: Katherine Mansfield and the Close-up

Anna Kwiatkowska — 2024-06-06

In the publications dedicated to Katherine Mansfield’s oeuvre, the traces of the cinematic in her narratives and, in particular, the importance of close-up are duly noted. However, despite the fact that the writer’s interest in close-up is earlier than her mature interest in cinema, the discussions do not devote much consideration to the beginnings of the technique visible in Mansfield’s early works. The comparative analysis of two stories, i.e., “At ‘Lehmann’s’” and “The Little Governess,” exemplifies, therefore, the development of Mansfield’s close-up technique and, most importantly, describes how exactly the writer develops it. The essay points to the traces of this particular cinematic tool in the writer’s pre-cinematic period and considers Mansfield’s verbal close-ups with a close reading method. The analysis adds to the critical conversations over Mansfield’s cinematic interests and their influence on her narrative technique. It demonstrates how the development of close-up enhances what is to become Mansfield’s central point, i.e., the subject-object relationship, and how it influences the emotional reception of the character.

Miłosz as a Translator of Literary Roughness in Herbert’s Poetry

Julia Maryniak — 2024-06-06

The aim of the work is the analysis of translations of Herbert’s poems into English by Miłosz with a focus on preserving the so-called roughness of his style. This term encompasses non-obvious and awkward structures, which, according to Miłosz, were one of the most important elements of Herbert’s style and, therefore, needed to be present in the English versions. The text contains a comparative analysis of two poems by Herbert: “Elegy of Fortinbras” and “Apollo and Marsyas,” with their translations into English. The translations were compared with the originals, taking into account their general form, the vocabulary, and the syntax. The analysis of vocabulary and syntax showed that to maintain the style of the original, the translator changed places where literary roughness was present. The translations into English were also more conventional and rooted more in European culture (while Polish contexts were moved to the background). One can thus conclude that the idea of spreading Polish literature across other cultures was more important for Miłosz than the translation of literary roughness.

Review of East Central Europe Between the Colonial and the Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Dorota Kołodziejczyk and Siegfried Huigen, Palgrave/Macmillan, 2023, 265 pp. ISBN: 978-3-031-17486-5

Grzegorz Moroz — 2024-06-06

Review of Japanese-American Literature through the Prism of Acculturation by Małgorzata Jarmołowicz-Dziekońska, Routledge, 2023, 294 pp. ISBN: 9781032379203

Klara Szmańko — 2024-06-06