Thematology

Up until now, ‘migration literature’ has primarily been defined as ‘texts written by migrant authors’, a definition that has been discussed, criticised, and even rejected by critics and authors alike. Very rarely has ‘migration literature’ been understood as ‘literature on the topic of migration’, which is an approach this book adopts by presenting a comparative analysis of contemporary texts on experiences of migration. By focusing on specific themes and motifs in selected texts, this study suggests that migration literature is a sub-genre that exists in both various bodies of literature as well as various languages. This book analyses English and German texts by authors such as Monica Ali, Dimitré Dinev, Anna Kim, Timothy Mo, Preethi Nair, Caryl Phillips, Hamid Sadr, and Vladimir Vertlib, among others.

In this paper I analyse and compare the motif of the rocking chair in some of Samuel Beckett's and Franz Kline's works. Rocking chairs appear in three of Beckett's main works: the novel Murphy, Film, and the short play Rockaby. Kline, in turn, painted a series of portraits of his wife sitting on a rocking chair in a pivotal moment in his life and career – as well as in the history of modern painting –, namely, in the years immediately preceding his turn to abstract painting. By comparing the uses of this apparently marginal motif I intend to show how they can mutually shed light onto each other and help address some of the major aspects of both bodies of work. In particular, I claim that the rocking chair served both authors as a sort of fetish object through which to address their views on the relation between the subject and the outer world, a major theme both in their works and lives which played a relevant role in the development of their creative process and the definition of their poetics.

This essay explores the theme of the home in the poetical work of Eugenio De Signoribus, considering it both in its structural dimension and in its diachronic development, and comparing it with other important themes regarding the representation of the domestic space (threshold, border, alienation, the host and the stranger, fraternity and utopia). A first part lingers over the thematization of the home in 20th-century philosophy, from Heidegger’s conception of enracinement to Adorno’s claim about the impossibility of dwelling. Then, the main theme is investigated through the poetical writings of De Signoribus book after book, with a particular focus on the dialectical tension between openness and closure of the subject, that is partly autobiographical and partly allegorical. The condition of the subject himself is interpreted from a psychic (the boundaries of a house as a second skin), existential and socio-historical point of view. The fundamental question can be posed in this way: in order to reach an absolute hospitality (as Derrida put it), is it possible to start from the recognition of an identity or is it necessary to renounce to any mastery and to the ontologically founded property of an identity?

To what extent can a femme fatale in the shape of a salamander be regarded as the incarnation of poetic seduction? How to frame a literary analysis of two works from such apparently dissimilar contexts? From a thematological perspective, this article examines how Hoffmann and Rebolledo take up the femme fatale tradition in order to narrate a deeply modern variation of seduction. The fatal fascination of poetry itself is presented in these novellas as a charming salamander, who, moreover, through her dual nature, posits the inner conflict of the poet in the Modern Age. At the same time, I intend to explore a comparatist approach that focuses on a concrete literary phenomenon without tracing influences and without, thereby, establishing hierarchies between works of different times and places.

Inwiefern kann eine femme fatale in Salamandergestalt als Verkörperung dichterischer Verführung gelten? Wie gestaltet sich eine literaturwissenschaftliche Betrachtung zweier Werke aus derart verschiedenen Kontexten? Aus einer thematologischen Perspektive heraus beleuchtet der vorliegende Beitrag, wie Hoffmann und Rebolledo die femme fatale-Tradition aufgreifen, um eine zutiefst moderne Variante der Verführung zu erzählen, nämlich die verhängnisvolle Faszination der Poesie selbst, hier imaginiert als eine bestrickende Salamanderin, die durch ihren dualen Charakter zudem die Zerrissenheit des Künstlers in der Moderne zum Ausdruck bringt. Gleichzeitig soll aufgezeigt werden, wie komparatistisches Arbeiten konkrete literarische Phänomene in den Blick nehmen kann, ohne deshalb hierarchisierende Einflussforschung zu betreiben.

ENG SUMMARY (text práce v slovenčine)

The substantial/transcendent transformation, the main focus of our research, represents a universal anthropologically and narratively fixed phenomenon, emerging from the oldest times of human development and culture. It is primarily connected with the magical-mythological thinking of man: it takes place in supernatural (sacred, magical) circumstances both in the current world and in the fictional world of arch-narratives. It follows the ontogenetic/phylogenetic transformations of human body reciprocally conditioned by the so-called needs (Maslow).
In the contemporary world, the biological-physical and psychological-cognitive development of man has long been marked by the rituals of transition, especially the ritual of initiation (Gennep, Turner, Eliade, Campbell, Propp), or the process of individualization (Jung). The thematic algorithm of substantial/transcendent transformation depicted in arch-narratives (original state → act of transformation → new state) strikingly copies the scheme of the socially and individually significant initiation ceremony (separation from the old way of existence → the phase of liminarity → acceptance/entry into a new way of existence). In the religious-magical and mythological-folktale contexts, the rituals of initiation overlap significantly with the notions of death and afterlife. The phase of liminarity (of the boundary), which represents an essential and irreplaceable part of the initiation ceremony, is likened to the state of death, the stay in the underworld or the mother’s womb (metaphorically, the mother’s womb as the “grave of mother earth”). The initiate’s undergoing of painful, often life-threatening trials in the liminary phase of the ceremony is closely connected with the symbolic killing of his previous existence and identity and the subsequent transition to a new state of being, i.e. the re-birth. The very act of transformation, iconized in arch-narratives as a mystery, can be similarly grasped in the semiotic manner: the magical transformation of the protagonist’s physical or spiritual identity is a symbolic, but often literal depiction of the act of protagonist’s death and the subsequent rebirth, i.e. the revival which is often marked by the final wedding of the hero. The ideologeme of death and rebirth thus represents the thematic core, establishing the motif of the arch-narrative thematizing the substantial/transcendent transformation.
In the presented monograph, we have focused specifically on two models of protagonist transformation, which can be part or the result of the protagonist’s reward or a deserved and undeserved punishment. Based on selected models of transformations, the opposition good vs. evil is strongly present, conditioned by the (religious) tradition, and represents the constitutive antithesis of the intra-textual and extra-textual construction of the fictional worlds of the arch-narratives. The function of transformation, and the closely related newly acquired form (identity) of the character, derives from its previous action in the relevant story of the selected narrative. The protagonists’ progress and regression, i.e. the transition (transformation) from one state of existence to another, is a form of explicit or implicit expression (in the metaphorical code of the arch-narratives) of the natural need of man to satisfactorily fulfil his/her needs. It also iconizes the feelings of stress, fear and anxiety from their non-fulfilment or threat - these are most clearly manifested in the theme of an undeserved/unjust transformation.
The motif of the rewarding transformation can be described as a motivic complex tightly bound by intra-textual and extra-textual relations. From the point of view of the logical-causal sequence of narration, the motif of the protagonist’s rewarding transformation consists of the following plot, which presupposes the existence of schematically recurring functions of acting characters - the antagonist, the hero and the executor. In the exposition, the narrator introduces the recipient to the story and clearly defines good characters (the hero) and bad characters (the antagonist). There is a collision - the antagonist, through his actions, causes harm to the hero, or creates a deficiency that afflicts the hero. Imbalance occurs in the narrative world. The hero undergoes life-threatening trials, suffers the adversity of fate, etc., until he finally defeats the antagonist and eliminates the initial shortcoming. At the end of the story, an executor enters the story and rewards the hero and punishes the malicious action of the antagonist. The essence of the rewarding transformation always resides in a certain form of existential physical or spiritual progress (e.g. deification of a human being, lifting of the curse, gaining respect of the community). On the contrary, the essence of punishing transformation is always a form of existential regression. The punishing transformation iconizes the decline of a man into an ontologically worse or a lower level of being (a person changes into an animal, loses his life in prosperity and falls into poverty, fall into the disfavour of the community, etc.).
In arch-narratives, just punishment reflects the religious, moral, and judicial system of the society. It is a motivic complex in which the characters schematically hold four functions: the legislator, the culprit, the harmed character, the executor. The motive of the deserved punishment/transformation has the following invariant storyline in terms of its content and logic: in the introduction, the legislator frames the relevant narrative universe with ethical and religious prohibitions/orders (i.e. sets the standard for what we can consider “good” and “bad”), the culprit violates the set premises and thus harms one of the acting characters (the harmed character). In order to restore the validity of the established laws/orders, the executor enters the action in the end, and justly punishes the culprit by taking away his human form and transforming him into the deserved form of an animal, plant, mineral, etc.
The motive of undeserved punishment/transformation is not interconnected by such strong intra-textual links at the structural level as the motive of just punishment/transformation. The basic intra-textual logical laws often do not apply in it (for example, the recipient does not know why the hero was undeservedly transformed into an inhuman, usually animal form). Despite the weakened intra-textual structure, we noted a schematic relational interaction between the functions of the aggressor, victim and the rescuer in the motive of undeserved punishment/transformation. The motive of unjust punishment develops the following invariant storyline: the aggressor undeservedly punishes his victim by transforming him into an inhuman (most often animal) form. The rescuer frees the victim from the curse and gives him back the human appearance. The motive of unjust punishment/transformation is closely connected with the invariant plotlines of individual stories indexed in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Index of folktale types. In the presented monograph, we chose two motifs for an interpretative analysis: ATU 403 The White Bride and the Black One and ATU 425B The Disenchanted Husband: the Witchʼs Tasks, which iconizes the motive of undeserved punishment in a different way.

ENG SUMMARY (text práce slovenčina):

In the present monograph Notes on the Trickster as a Literary Character in the Archnarratives (Thematic and Cultural Contexts), we used a transcultural and heterogeneous genre sample of archnarratives, and through intertextual and intercultural confrontation tried to describe the constitutive principles of depicting a mischievous figure of a trickster, which appears in the religious-mythological notions of each civilization and cultural circle in a wide range of possible representations and renditions. As mentioned in the introduction to the present work, the trickster is a distinctive and unmistakable figure, which is difficult to grasp due to his ambiguous and variable character. Based on the initial analysis, we believe that this archetypal figure is defined by the following universal properties:
- absence of internal development as a literary character,
- ambivalence,
- cunning,
- liminality,
- power of transformation,
- comic-grotesque poetics.

The above properties also condition the structure of the underlying trickster narrative/thematic algorithm: the way literary characters appear on the scene and the definition of their character (exposition) → the trickster causes a conflict by his jokingly fraudulent actions → the trickster escapes from the "crime scene" (exodus). Based on the research of our textual material, we found that the sujet formula in a trickster narrative branches into four variants, i.e. separate modes with their own logical-content sujet scheme: civilizer (cosmology), user (body and corporeality), fool (sacred category), scamp (satirical-eschatological principle). From a purely linguistic point of view, we can view the listed functions as information-saturated sememes with a distinctive and complex structure of rendering, and the archfigure of a trickster as an abstract archetypal semantic theme. In brief, let us summarize the basic profiles/definitions of individual functions. The trickster – civilizer is a functional type appearing mainly in etiological, anthropogonic and cosmological myths. Through his deceptive and unpredictable actions, he brings culture and civilizational achievements to the people. Especially in the natural archaic communities, he semantically intersects with other ancient figures – the ancestor and the demiurge – and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish whether he is a human or an animal. Conversely, in cultures with a more developed constitutional state-building institution, where the totemic hypostasis is not so strong, he is usually a (semi)god with a body, or imago homo, who usually only has the function of a cultural hero. The trickster – civilizer function differs most distinctively from other functions and it is easy to identify. In order to label the trickster in a story as a civilizer, the story must take place in the so-called mythical age of the birth of the world and, and a certain progressive or regressive cosmological/civilizational change must be evident at the end of the sujet, which the trickster causes (often accidentally). In the trickster – user typological-character function, the trickster appears as physically lustful and dissatisfied, which results in the strictly libido-driven to instinctively animalistic motivation for his actions. It is most evident on the motivic plane of sexuality and hunger/digestion. For the trickster to satisfy his desires for food and sexual intercourse, he uses various tricks, illusions and lies. The poetics of the stories about the trickster – user is thus conveyed on the level of grotesque obscenity, the Dionysian principle of physical and spiritual boundlessness, chaoticism and (excessive) abundance. His crazy and instinctive actions, metamorphic hyperbolic play with the body and travestion of bodily manifestations in the sense of Bakhtin's natural physiologism come to the fore, and the line between the (potent) body and the world, life and death, vitality and old age is completely blurred. This also relates to the fact that the trickster – user maintains a residual connection with the ancient cults of the phallus and fertility, i.e. the mysteries of death and rebirth. The user function is often present as an ancillary function alongside a (dark) civilizer, because he often causes fundamental changes in the universe through his libido behavior. The trickster – fool function is related to the spiritual, supernatural and/or mystical world. He is personified by divine entities as the bearers/legislators of the ideal concept of "higher theological-social truth", which evoke a feeling of unattainability, anxiety and fear. The fool is able to maintain a sacred fragile contact with the sacred sphere, and it is this subtle communication that causes his different and strange behavior, which the uninitiated (ignorant, unconscious) usually explain as foolishness. In this context, folly is perceived as a stigmatized result of understanding of a kind of higher mystery (initiation mystery), which is sent by the supernatural beings and is otherwise inaccessible to the common man. Under the influence of divine inspiration, the fool controversially criticizes the sinfulness of man and the bodily and material aspects of the world, which is always semantized as something imperfect, impure and inferior in various religious currents and mythological ideas. However, the fool's criticism has a deeper spiritual message – his intention is to correct man and society in an effort to return to the original religious ideals and authentic renewal of the concept of the sacred in the profane world. The trickster – scamp typological-character function is an instrument of folk (collective) criticism directed against the system sanctified by tradition, i.e. the structure of the universe. As the name itself suggests, the trickster plays with other literary characters, makes mischievous jokes about them, makes fun of their shortcomings, and decoronizes and travests the secular and religious authorities. His critique, however, has no deeper (spiritual, mystical) meaning. The aim of the trickster as a satirical mocker is to humiliate the object of his ridicule as much as possible. This fact is to some extent also reflected in the genological line: the fool mostly appears in magical fairy tales and hagiographic legends, while the trickster – scamp is found mainly in the fairy-tale subgenres with realistic and humorous themes, satirical tales or allegorical short stories. Since the scamp often denounces gluttony and promiscuity as socially undesirable human qualities, the boundary between the trickster – scamp and trickster – user can often be blurred, especially if the trickster appears as an animal. However, if a particular story thematizes gluttony and sexual intercourse in didactic and moralizing ways, we are certainly dealing with the mischievous function of a scamp. The typological-character functions (modes) are not isolated; on the contrary, they are organic components of the complex archetype of a trickster, which represents one of the basic existential semantic themes of human survival. Through the various forms of expression and universal narrative images typical for the respective typological-character functions, it communicates with the recipient at the level of laughter folk culture and/or picaresque mythology. Finally, we can add that the individual functions of the trickster archetype are an important instrument in the effort to classify an otherwise difficult-to-grasp and ambiguous literary character of a trickster in a particular story.

La materia del presente trabajo se divide en tres bloques. En el primero se abordan, de modo muy somero, la conflictiva historia de la temática y la tematología en el contexto de los estudios literarios en general y comparatistas en particular, así como algunas propuestas concretas relativas a los objetivos y al campo de actuación de la disciplina. El segundo bloque se dedica a la definición de algunos de los conceptos fundamentales (tema, motivo, tópico, mito, etc.) y a la aclaración de la confusa terminología. El tercero se centra en determinadas propuestas de clasificación general de los temas literarios. Finalmente, se ofrece una bibliografía sucinta sobre la materia.

“How One Becomes a Perfect Zaddik?  A Typology of the Changes that Occurred in the Transition of Themes from the East to the West:  A Comparative Study of Nathan of the Radiance and Joseph the Gardener of Ashkelon”, Fabula, Journal of Folklore Studies, vol. 42, 3\4, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York (2001 (  Extended version [English]

Morphology of the Motif of Figural Transformation
in the Subject of Stories about a Sister Seeking Her Brothers
Turned into Animals

(Text príspevku v slovenčine)

  The subject of the paper is transcultural comparison of Slovak and foreign-language stories based on the fairy-tale subject about a sister who seeks her brothers turned into animals. According to Aarne-Thompson-Uther´s international catalogue of folktale
types, the fairy tales dealing with the subject in question fall into the central motif type 451 The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers. The paper places weight on morphology and iconization of the metamorphosis motif, which is an irreplaceable part of the invariant plot diagram of the fairy-tale subject in question with the aim of finding
out what syuzhet and motif constellations include transformations of the characters involved and what (if anything at all) makes depiction of the metamorphosis motif in the Slovak variants of the fairy-tale subject being researched specific in comparison
with the foreign equivalents. The sources are constituted by ten fairy tales from all over Slovakia – one authorized record by Pavel Dobšinský and regional versions from Nitra,
Trnava, Považská Bystrica, Žilina, Žiar nad Hronom, Trebišov and Humenné, which are mostly compared with the sources from Slavic linguistic and cultural territories (Czech, Bulgarian and Ukrainian fairy tales). The research materials also include a fairy
tale The Seven Ravens by the Brothers Grimm, which is in terms of reception one of the best-known European versions of the tale type in question. The variants from the non-Slavic cultural area include a Norwegian fairy tale The Twelve Wild Ducks and a Danish fairy tale The Twelve Ravens, which feature motif elements untypical of the
Slavic linguistic and cultural territory in terms of the plot structure.

(ENGThe present paper focuses on the material identification and basic typological classification of the “castle” as a sememe in the Slavic fairy tales. Through intertextual and intercultural confrontation, we will try to reveal the constitutive principles of depicting the castle, i.e. to find out what narrative situations and subject-motivic constellations this sememe is iconized in, and clarify its function and archetypal meaning in the metaphoric code of the Slavic fairy tales. We assume that the „castle“ in the world of fairy tales and magic stories represents a distinctive and distinguished topos, which is an integral part of the „hero´s journey“ (Campbell), and/or his initiation (Propp, Hodrová) or the process of individualization (Jung, Bettelheim, Hollis). The present paper is the primary probe into chosen topic.

V predloženom príspevku sa zacielime na materiálovú identifikáciu a základnú typologickú klasifikáciu semémy zámku v slovanských čarovných rozprávkach. Prostredníctvom intertextuálnej a medzikultúrnej konfrontácie sa pokúsime odhaliť konštitutívne princípy zobrazovania zámku, t. j. zistiť, v akých naračných situáciách a sujetovo-motivických konšteláciách dochádza  k ikonizácii zvolenej semémy a cez to objasniť jej funkciu a archetypálny význam v metaforickom kóde slovanských čarovných rozprávok.  Domnievame sa, že seméma „zámku“ vo svete čarovných rozprávok a magických príbehov reprezentuje osobitý a význačný topos, ktorý je neodmysliteľnou súčasťou hrdinovej cesty (Campbell), resp. jeho iniciácie (Propp, Hodrová) či individualizácie (Jung, Hollis, Bettelheim). Proponovaná štúdia je prvotnou sondou do výskumu zvolenej témy.

This PhD thesis analyses a selection of texts that are part of the Italian literature of the Axis War, written between 1945 and 1975, examining the relationship between literary representations and the Italian collective memory discourse of World War Two. This study builds on a number of theoretical frameworks, combining memory studies, historiography, thematic criticism, and narratology, which are used to explore the relations between literature and memory narratives about the past.
The analysis of the primary literature centres on those figures of repetition (topoi, themes, masterplots) that characterise the texts of the corpus and that have been taken as points of connection between literary representations and collective memory narratives. Through the study of the most recurrent tropes across the corpus, this thesis pinpoints the existence of dominant structures that affected the literary representation of the Axis War, which have strong links to the ways in which the Second World War and the Fascist past have been narrativised in postwar Italy.
The literature of the Axis War represents the Italians as innocent victims, it abstains from portraying them as perpetrators of violence, and develops textual strategies that avoid conveying to their readers any sense of guilt, with only a minority of texts resisting this overbearing representation. These aspects are analysed through a series of close readings, which, whilst forming the backbone of the thesis, intersect with the examination of several theoretical issues, such as collective memory, the literary concepts of themes, motifs, and masterplots, the idea of silence in war writings, and questions of individual and collective guilt.