Autofiction, Post-conflict Narratives, and New Memory Cultures

A reaction against the death of the author provided one context in which autofiction started to develop in the 1970s. The rebuttal of the death of the author has been prominent among postcolonial writers, who, because their voices were historically marginalized until the recent past, are unlikely to accept the tacit silencing that theories of the death of the author might imply. Through a discussion of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s depiction of Nigeria’s Biafran War of 1967–1970 in Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Justin Cartwright’s reflection on the massacre of Zulus by Boers in 1838 in Up Against the Night (2015), this chapter shows how they use techniques associated with autofiction to contribute to new forms of memory culture in post-conflict societies.

Antoni Słonimski w aktach cenzury PRL. Wybór dokumentów Głównego Urzędu Kontroli Prasy, Publikacji i Widowisk z lat 1961–1980

The examples of documents of the Main Office for the Control of Presentations and Public Performances (GUKPIW) quoted in the article show the censorship strategies towards Słonimski. Interestingly, in this case the most controversial – from the point of view of GUKPPiW – were not the works of this writer, but his figure. This is particularly evident in the materials from 1976, after the death of the author of Alarm. As a result of the previously binding “entry” on the poet, only reprinting of the Polish Press Agency (PAP) communiqué was allowed. The censorship’s attitude to Słonimski is undeniably illustrated by the types of interference – the author was perceived as an undesirable, controversial figure, whose courageous actions – not least in the fight for freedom of speech in Poland – should not be reminisced. Mentions in the texts – potentially referring to the political context – were removed. Censorship was very meticulous: single words or whole sentences were cut out, and when it was not possible to “neutralise” the meaning of the text in this way – the whole thing was not allowed to be printed. Unfortunately, this way considerably impaired the reception of Słonimski.

Hero vis-à-vis Author

This article examines the complex relationship between the hero and the author. Through a reflexive phenomenological tone, it is argued that the hero depicts the emotional seed of the subject itself while the author is the beautiful mind that projects events and worlds by cultivating the intellectual seed. The call of adventure as a ringing bell for the hero and the author, the proclaimed Death of the Author, the almost confirmed Death of the Hero, and the horizon of the Teacher’s Death are discussed. In this setting, the fear from the authority of the hero and the author remains imminent. This article attempts to move beyond the horizon of death certificates in order to reach primary frequencies at the nexus between author and hero, derived from the very inner tones of the human psyche that come as a call to take us away to the beautiful world of Aha Erlebnis. The author and the hero – they do matter.

The (un)death of the author: Authorship as horror trope in Stephen King’s fiction

Both in his fiction and in his non-fiction, Stephen King has reflected in more depth on authorship than most of his peers. Critically negotiating Roland Barthes’s declaration of the death of the Author (1967), King ‘resurrects’ the author persona in his fiction and turns it into an ‘undead’ horror trope. This article explores how this narrative mechanism operates in four King novels: Misery, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones and Lisey’s Story. King’s development of authorship into a fictional horror trope, the analysis demonstrates, metaphorically negotiates King’s anxiety regarding his own authorship and its literary status.

―SHADOW AND BONE‖: NEGATIVE SPACES OF MEAN-ING

The debut novel Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo promises the magical journey through the world of fictional country Ravka, which was inspired by the Russian Empire of the 1800s. In this article, I discuss three negative spaces outlined by Bardugo‟s text. These are negative spaces of Russian culture, politics and dynamics revealed by the long absence of Russian translation of the novel. Having this possible interpretation in mind, I cannot speculate that Bardugo deliberately chose to let the body of her work outline and shape the negative spaces discussed in this article. The reception potential of her work is wider and more diverse than the author intended. She tries to prune it back to the shape of her original intentions, interfering with the process of the reader‟s meaning-making. Thus, in a certain way, she pushes back against the concept of the “death of the author”. With this dichotomic process, I suggest stepping away from the author‟s intentions and tracing the subtle trends of the market, that contributed to Bardugo‟s popularity. The discussion I want to open is not whether Bardugo intended to create a book that exploits Russian culture without doing justice to it, hinting towards a New Cold War, and separating the world to the familiar poles of the West and East.

Barthes’ Semiotic Theory and Interpretation of Signs

The current survey paper aimed to shed light on the science of signs in general, and Barthes’ semiotic theory to interpret signs in particular. In order to achieve this objective, the researchers reviewed the prominent works of Barthes on this respect to develop an understanding of his semiotic theory. They also displayed some conducted research applying Barthes’ semiotic theory. The researchers also intended to answer the question: How can researchers interpret signs using Barthes’ semiotic theory? Barthes’ major studies reviewed were Mythologies, Elements of semiology, The five codes, The rhetoric of the image, The death of the author, and From work to text. The conclusion answered the question in that the focus of the theory is on three levels: denotative which describes the literal meaning, connotative which is related to the mental concepts, and mythology which is related to the history, and culture of viewers.

On the centennials of the discoveries of the hydrogen bond and the structure of the water molecule: the short life and work of Eustace Jean Cuy (1897–1925)

The bent structure of the water molecule, and its hydrogen-bonding properties, arguably rank among the most impactful discoveries in the history of chemistry. Although the fact that the H—O—H angle must deviate from linearity was inferred early in the 20th century, notably from the existence of the electric dipole moment, it was not clear what that angle should be and why. One hundred years ago, a young PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, Eustace J. Cuy, rationalized the V-shape structure of a water molecule using the Lewis theory of a chemical bond, i.e. a shared electron pair, and its tetrahedral stereochemistry. He was inspired, in part, by the proposal of a weak (hydrogen) bond in water by two colleagues at Berkeley, Wendell Latimer and Worth Rodebush, who published their classic paper a year earlier. Cuy went on to suggest that other molecules, notably H2S and NH3, have similar structures, and presciently predicted that this architecture has broader consequences for the structure of water as a liquid. This short, but brilliant paper has been completely forgotten, perhaps due to the tragic death of the author at the age of 28; the hydrogen-bond study is also rarely recognized. One of the most impactful publications on the structure of liquid water, a classic treatise published in 1933 by John Bernal and Ralph Fowler, does not mention either of the two pioneering papers. In this essay, the background for the two discoveries is described, including the brief history of Lewis's research on the nature of the chemical bond, and the history of the discovery of the hydrogen bond, which inspired Cuy to look at the structure of the water molecule. This is – to the best of the author's knowledge – the first biographical sketch of Eustace J. Cuy.

Communicative Model – Author, Hero, Text, Recipient in a Postmodern Novel

The study deals with the communicative interaction between the author, the hero, the text, the reader in a postmodern novel. A similar and ambiguous reality, on the one hand, sometimes led to the subjectivist hypertrophy, absolutizing the author’s world view, and at times minimized and devaluated the author’s identity, on the other. Therefore, from the end of the 1990s the ways of expressing author’s “Self” changed dramatically, which directly affected the means of creating a hero in the contemporary Ukrainian literature. An important place in the communicative literary model was occupied by the text as an independent semantic unit and the reader as an interpreter of the text. The specifics of deploying the dialog between the author and the hero point to the transformation of their functions in the Ukrainian postmodern novel. Considering the statement of the death of the author proclaimed by R. Barthes, the former stops being the main holistic text creator, thus rather becoming its product and the way of expression. The author, the hero and the text have a certain integrity aimed at the interpretative game with the recipient, who diffuses the newly created semantic integrity into a diversity of meanings.