Volume 60, Issue 2

The study highlights the conjunction of Friedrich Nietzsche and the theory of literary history in Slavonic literatures which both in the early twentieth century and in the inter-war period stood neglected within the Central European context. Through German humanities, many literary historians (M. M. Bachtin, W. Dilthey, J. Kleiner, Z. Łempicki, V. M. Zhirmunsky, etc.) whose works philosophically drew on the stream of differentiated Neo-Idealistic aesthetics were affected by a radically scathing critical approach to historicism and naturalistic scientism. A secure rank among these was occupied by the American structuralist of Czech origin René Wellek (1903–1995) as a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle and the founding father of New Criticism. This was apparent, for example, in accentuating the meaningful ‘energy’ of literary texts and in appreciating literary originality so as to manifest an intuitive intellect. Further, it is reflected in using ‘regulative’ concepts which (regardless of their fictional character) constitute our ‘rational’ knowledge while bringing forth Nietzsche’s notion of ‘perspectivism’ as an evaluative approach to the surveyed object that can be interpreted from various perspectives without failing to remain an objectively existing phenomenological ‘entity’. Wellek was right to regard Nietzsche’s postulate of the integrality of a literary work, along with Dilthey’s structurally ‘sympathetic’ psychology and Husserl’s phenomenological antipsychologism, as the main impetus for the application of philosophical structuralism to the area of poetics. Such a transformation was facilitated by a specific concept of structure understood as a holistic complex of ‘meanings’ determined by mutual relations of its individual parts. We presume that the analysis of the philosophical roots of Wellek’s literary research, later aspiring to the study of systems and supranational literary wholes, repels the traditionally accepted idea of a forced caesura between psychological and structural-technological approaches as they were canonised in the 1930s’ structural aesthetics.

Described as a modern and grotesque Iliad, with overtones of South American guerrilla warfare, Le Rêve d’Alvaro by Eudes Labrusse is a hypertextual variation of Homer’s famous poem, blending genres and tones to illustrate the rules governing the world and social relations today. The play skillfully wields the comic, the tragic, and the epic to serve politics, understood in its broadest sense of civility or Politikos : the exercise of power in a society and a state. The article first examines the fusion of categories and their contribution to the construction of the play, then the role of ideological structures, and finally, it aims to draw out a reflection on the place of Le Rêve d’Alvaro in contemporary political theatre.

This paper examines how the perception of plants as ornaments or passive resources – central to the logic of the Anthropocene – has shaped interpretations of Ophelia’s use of flowers in Hamlet as meaningless or mad. Focusing on Act 4, Scene 5, it explores how both criticism and film adaptations have erased the presence and agency of real plants on stage, thus reducing Ophelia to a powerless, incoherent figure. In contrast, this article proposes a phytocritical reading that takes seriously the material and symbolic presence of flowers in her hands. Drawing on early modern herbals and new materialist ecocriticism, it argues that Ophelia acts with deliberate botanical knowledge, offering plants as both remedy and accusation. Her gestures, often misread as nonsense, are reframed as a radical form of ecological and political agency. In doing so, this reading reimagines Ophelia not as a victim but as a prophetic figure – one who speaks from the margins of court and text, and who challenges the intertwined forces of patriarchal control and environmental neglect.

Lorraine Hansberry, African American playwright, is hailed as a pioneer of Black theater with her seminal work A Raisin in the Sun . She artfully weaves elements of African-American popular arts such as spirituals, gospel, blues, and folk dance into the fabric of the play. Focusing on the play’s rich musical landscape, this article argues that music in the play functions as both a cultural bond that sustains collective memory and pursues harmony, and an aesthetic space that exposes individual differences and accommodates conflicts. The aim is to elucidate how these artistic elements awaken African American’s consciousness of cultural subjectivity and confront the problem of racial discrimination, thereby promoting, to a certain extent, the construction and development of ethnic community.

This article analyzes the prolific African American writer Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Red at the Bone (2019) from a position informed by transgenerational trauma and postmemory. While the novel outlines the story of two Black families united by a teenage pregnancy, it harbors a legacy of loss metastasized and transmuted among the protagonists. Employing the theoretical framework of Michael G. Levine’s belated witnessing, the paper explicates childhood as a probable site of belated witnessing. He argues that belated witnessing occurs in the liminal space where stories are transmitted to the witness. Building on Levine’s theory, the article further problematizes young adulthood as a liminal space negotiating the complex process of witnessing. By analyzing the protagonists’ reluctance to witness and their belated acceptance of the traumatic past, the paper concludes by commenting on resilience and reconciliation as a positive outcome of adversity.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s exploration of memory in A Pale View of Hills opens a window for us to understand his literary creation. Although the academic community fully acknowledges Ishiguro’s reliance on memory and recognizes the connection between the writer’s own memories of his native Japan and this work, it has not yet analyzed the mechanism of memory’s occurrence and development as a central topic. As a result, the role of memory elements in the theme of this novel remains obscure. Utilizing the philosophical theory of memory, this article conducts an in-depth examination of the writer’s memory and the characters’ memories and finds that the protagonist’s memory of the atomic bombing is constructed through Ishiguro’s transferential framing of his own memories of his native Japan. Ishiguro uses the mutual referencing of Etsuko’s narration – Etsuko’s narration to Sachiko, and Sachiko’s narration to the unnamed woman – to allude to the widespread sense of collective loss among people in post-war Japan. He deliberately designs a spiral literary rhetorical structure of overlapping references to war memories, ultimately achieving a transformation of the re-encoding of war trauma.