(Post)modernism and the Other

No. 2 - Year 1 - 06/2011

University of Zadar | eISSN 1847-7755 | SIC.JOURNAL.CONTACT@GMAIL.COM

Editorial

There is always a good reason to cherish and celebrate a second issue of a journal. In our case it would probably be the fact that in spite of the severe world financial crisis and its repercussions on the academic world we found a way to beat the odds and publish what is hopefully a progressive, intellectually competitive and, at the end of the day, an interesting collection of academic papers. As opposed to the first issue, dedicated to the theme of the endangered "body", the second one functions as a form of proceedings from the conference that was held at the University of Zadar in September 2010. The conference entitled Re-Thinking Humanities and Social Sciences questioned the issue of (Post)modernism and the Other through an extremely wide variety of scientific approaches, creating an atmosphere of highly academic competitiveness surrounded by a distinct Mediterranean ambiance. The second issue of our journal is an intellectual and textual extension of that unique experience. Obviously the papers presented here are merely a fragment of that experience but nevertheless we believe that they will provide the reader with an interesting and challenging insight into the issue of (Post)modernism and the Other. ...

Literature and Culture
Marinko Koščec, University of Zagreb, Croatia:

Although the novels of the French writer Lydie Salvayre tend to be soliloquic, they are far from being mono-logical: founded on the clashes of different logics and systems of value, discourses and desires, they embody the protagonists' inherent antagonism and rage, reflecting the violence of the outside world. This study analyses some common matrixes underlying Salvayre’s prose. It focuses on the manifestations of resistance to either external or self-imposed oppressions, restrictions and mystifications. It aims to demonstrate that Salvayre’s novels not only represent subjects in permanent and incurable crises, but also challenge the very imperative of the subject's constitution through the foreclosure of the other, of what is outside the self.Salvayre’s texts are typically monologues in which an individual strives to affirm his or her distinct unicity and separation from the rest of the universe. These discourses are defensive, since the protagonists present themselves as endangered b...

DOI: 10.15291/sic/2.1.lc.9
Literature and Culture
Mario Vrbančić and Senka Božić- Vrbančić:

Since film first established itself as pre-eminently a narrative medium there has been a long-running questioning on the nature of the connections between film and literature. Conrand’s known statement about his novelistic intention - “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the powers of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see” (McFarlane 3) - has often been quoted by the first filmmakers who were striving to make an adaptation and explore the vast territory of the cinematic world. Some novels have been constantly adapted, and, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (written in 1897), have created a whole genre. In this essay we will try to analyse some aspects of the adaptation of Stoker’s novel Dracula in the first preserved film version of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnaus’ Nosferatu (1922), and, one of the latest adaptations, Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola (1992). Some differences are noticeable between the ‘original’ narrative and ...

DOI: 10.15291/sic/2.1.lc.4
Literature and Culture
Ljubica Matek, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Croatia:

Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road did not receive much academic attention despite the fact that it is an exceptionally refined and capturing piece of fiction. It was critically acclaimed following its publication in 1961, nominated for the National Book Award in 1962 and then forgotten. Not surprisingly, the novel was “rediscovered” once a movie adaptation was made in 2008. Revolutionary Road is typically read – quite expectedly – as a story of suburban malaise and a critique of the American (suburban) life in the 1950s. However, in an interview, published in Ploughshares in 1972, Yates stated that although he intended the novel to be an indictment of American life in the 1950s because of a general lust for conformity (DeWitt and Clark 66), he never planned the novel to be anti-suburban in any way. On the contrary, he hoped to make it implicit in the text that he is writing about a particular couple, the Wheelers, and what turns out to be specifically “their delusion, their prob...

DOI: 10.15291/sic/2.1.lc.11
Literature and Culture
Sandra Antulov and Mislava Bertoša:

This paper aims to analyse and compare two newspaper articles dealing with issues of gay people in Croatia that were published in two different periods. The first article dates from the early 1990s, which was the starting point of contemporary Croatian gay activism. The second was published 16 years later, in 2008, within a different social and political context. It was the period when gay activism in Croatia had already reached some of its aims, and when the discourse on homosexuality had become more visible and acceptable in the media. In comparing these two periods, we focus on surface differences between two newspaper articles, while at the deep level we look for similarities and unchanged features. Our perspective is sociosemiotic – it will be explained in more detail in the next section. For now, it needs to be stressed that we integrate both verbal and visual elements of the two articles, explore differences and similarities in the discursive strategies of constructing and repre...

DOI: 10.15291/sic/2.1.lc.2
Literature and Culture
Gordan Maslov and Atila Lukić:

The dissolution of Yugoslavia was an immensely complex, difficult and violent turmoil, whose full implications, even after a decade and a half, are relatively well known and, at the same time, still in need of further explanation. Thus, when speaking of the collapse of communism, Alain Badiou's term „obscure disaster“ is pertinent as a designating term, a metaphor for the lack of meaning itself, for an absence further exacerbated by specific conditions in which socialism crumbled in former Yugoslavia. This obscurity is only reinvigorated by the latest set of problems with which the South-East European states are faced after the late-2000s global financial crisis. For our present needs it will be enough to state that Yugoslavia’s dissolution affected every aspect of social life; the unprecedented scope of this transformation, as well as its current inscription in ongoing „suspended“ histories of newly founded nation-states certainly adds something to this „obscurity“. Our aim in this pa...

DOI: 10.15291/sic/2.1.lc.13
Literature and Culture
Slavica Troskot, University of Zadar, Croatia:

Generally speaking, in the postcolonial literary theory the other is represented as the object of colonization. The O/other is inevitable, essential and important to the defining of the subject identity in both cases – if we deal with the subordinate, marginalized and exploited other, or on the other hand with the Other who is itself the representation of the imperial discourse of power and in whose gaze the subordinate identity is being constructed and exists: In both cases the opposition simply must exist, it is usually the result of a basic distinction between the dominant and subordinate class and it is not rare that in post-colonial texts the process of othering may also become extremely violent. Simply speaking, the Empire by definition colonizes and subjugates the objects of colonization. Political independence of the former colonies did not bring equality to all social groups in the new countries, and the process of subordination continued in some other aspects and distinctions...

DOI: 10.15291/sic/2.1.lc.14