Mireille Calle-Gruber is not only a university professor and a writer, but also a leading scholar and critic of French literature and contemporary Francophone literature. Her works on Michel Butor, Claude Simon, Assia Djebar, Derrida and other contemporary writers (as well as those dealing with the history of the twentieth century literature) fill gaps in the contemporary literary history of the twentieth century. Her books not only scrutinize and analyze the writing of Claude Simon; they also shed new light on the analysis of the novel and autobiography in contemporary literature, through the memory of experience and perception
A character and the problems associated therewith are one of fundamental issues of the literary work interpretation. Most works devoted to characters in literary works take a rather more specific view of this concept (i.e. particular character(s) of a specific novel is/are analyzed). Both in the Czech and Russian literary theory, there is a vast variety of works associated with analyses of individual characters or their groups, but the studies analysing a character as a theoretical concept have emerged rarely. What is more, there is not any single study to cover the characters of works that belong to one literary school. This contribution especially addresses the issue of a narrative function and its relation to a character. Based on the demonstrative materials, we can claim that the Czech and Russian postmodernist novels are characterized by a mixed method of separation of a narrative function and characters. These categories partly blend together and partly go through each other. We also want to highlight, among others, a wider grasp of a narrative function than ever before, where the influence of a narrative role is limited not only by living human beings. The postmodernist novel sees a deliberate gradual transfer from the world of characters to the world of an implicit author and other metamorphoses, which can also be explained by the impact of communication theories (to that effect that an implicit author or a character with a narrative function communicates in any way (often indirectly) with the characters of the story they talk about). The lines among the participants in the communication chain in the latest novels are “transparent”, as manifested by a certain effort to get rid of certain rules and concepts that is apparent in the postmodernist texts. The author considers the deconstruction effect one of the reasons for this approach but he also believes that it is one of the methods the authors use to demonstrate freedom of aesthetical methods, to experiment and to attempt to put “something incompatible” together. The postmodernist novels show the general “art for art’s sake” principle that was already present at the romanticists in the 19th century. Aesthetics of the postmodernist Russian and Czech novels manifests itself in a complexity of various text layers. One of the essential marks of postmodernist aesthetics in the concept of a character with a narrative function is that the “statements” are frequently made by someone (a drunk, a lunatic, a child, a ghost) whose words may be easily denied, disproved or modified. Using those characters, the authors seem to leave room for inserting other layers (illusive, apparent, “true” against the previous ones). The postmodernist novels include a special use of focalization where the characters look at themselves, describing themselves. This is enabled by the transfer from one condition to another, ability of some characters to reincarnate as well as by multilayered structure of the story.
From the Romance to the Novel and Back Again by Ladislav Nagy is dedicated to the topic of historical prose. The author analyses the theoretical debate about the relationship between fictional and historical writing, and he also examines the generic development of English historical fiction. In the passages dedicated to the narrative aspects of history, Nagy offers a persuasive criticism of Hayden White’s distinction between fictional and historical writing, and sees an alternative to it in Paul Ricœur’s theory of narrative. In the second line of argumentation Nagy presents a thesis that historical prose has developed from the romance genre, and through a short diversion to novel it returns to romance again. He analyses Scott’s novel Waverley, which famously defines itself against romance, as a romance, and he uses the same term for postmodern historical fiction. This thesis seems less plausible to me as Nagy’s definition of both novel and romance genres is problematic.
У овом чланку предмет анализе је поређење пољске и српске верзије романа Гордане Куић Мирис кише на Балкану, као и покушај одговора на питање о сличностима и разликама у перцепцији овог дела код српских и пољских прималаца литературе.
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The article concerns the comparison of Polish and Serbian versions of the novel The Scent of Rain in the Balcans and attempt to answer the question about the similarities and differences in the perception of the novel in Serbia and Poland.
Between phantasy and reality. Some comments to Dichterleben written by Heinz Piontek The novel by Heinz Piontek Dichterleben is not an autobiographical novel. Nonetheless the article tries to find correlations between statements stated by the novels character Reichsfelder and the opinions of Piontek, written by himself in his essays and interviews. The article also highlights the tendency Pioteks to “reproduce” the belonging to literary prose or lyric texts, motives and “linguistic pictures” in Dichterleben and to process them. Above that the article shows how close the phantasy and reality are connected together. It is also an attempt to show which component of the novel is most important.
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