The paper discusses narrative aspects of the hypertext, with special emphasis on achrony and focalisation. It also questions the thesis that the database offers resistance to narrative. On the contrary, a database as a symbolically unorganised system is arranged into an encoded order of the storyline owing to narratological strategies. The narrative lines can only be limited by the focaliser (author/reader).
This paper analyzes a specific relationship between ideology as an anti-historical category and the narratives underlying the novel The Time of Miracles by Borislav Pekić. It highlights the key features of immutable and always the same ideological mechanisms, regardless of the contents of ideas in whose name they act. Among many ideological tools, there is narration as a primary means to produce an ideological system as an instrument of action based on the perception of community. However, narrative techniques also represent the only means that enables freedom. By forgetting about the symbiosis of ideology and narrative, the Serbian literary scene is at a narrative crisis due to its sterile wandering through the text. The solution out of the crisis is not in ignoring the ideological nature of storytelling, but in finding the right distance between the complex reality that surrounds us and the ideas that guide us.
This paper considers different narrative strategies and manners of modelling characters with various disorders as the “other” in the Serbian novel at the beginning of 21st century, in the context of the post-postmodernist poetics and the post-structural (Foucauldian-deconstructionist) interpretative paradigm. Even though at first glance it seems that such interest of novelists provides proof for a crisis of narration exhausted in an interest in the bizarre, the case is quite the opposite. The results show that the differences of this kind in the novels in question are depicted not as stigmatization, but as a struggle for the right of having one’s own identity, regardless of the fact it does not meet the normative identity standards.
Elif Shafak, one of the distinguished representatives of Turkish Postmodernism, uses different narrative techniques to critically provoke traditional forms and values still present in Turkish literature. The paper deals with the narrative techniques used by Elif Shafak in her novels Flea Palace and Forty Rules of Love. By developing a unique narrative method based on the concept of circle, and also based on experimenting with different narrators and multiple points of view, Elif Shafak creates novels which have distinctive place in Turkish literature, as could be noticed from the fact that she is a very popular writer in Turkey as well as abroad.
Even though earlier works such as John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman or Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea foreshadow current interest in the Victorian period, neo-Victorian fiction has been defined as an independent genre since the 1990s. More than just examples of historical fiction, neo-Victorian novels engage with and (re)interpret the Victorians with a marked self-consciousness. Thus, they perform a double task: in masquerading as Victorian novels, they raise questions about identity and difference between the Victorian period and the present day, shedding light on contemporary issues as well as providing a vehicle for expressing Victorian taboos, or questioning their (our?) values. The recurrent trope of cross-dressing and masquerade can be understood as a reflection of this duality. The aim of this paper, then, is to explore the use of this trope in the novels of Sarah Waters as a metaphor for the status of neo-Victorian fiction in general.
The ever-increasing body of contemporary cosmopolitan theory, partly inspired by globalisation and globalisation theory, focuses on various aspects of literary and artistic cosmopolitanism since antiquity. It concerns itself especially with the so-called new cosmopolitanism whose development was primarily marked by two events: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. Among the key foci of interest in cosmopolitan theory is the cosmopolitan novel, characterised by urban and virtual spaces as sites of global circulations, the overcoming of traditional ideas of community and fragmented, yet cohesive kaleidoscopic narration. This article aims at analysing the dispersed narration and narrative structure of the cosmopolitan novel by and narrative structure by discussing Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, a pioneer of the new cosmopolitan fiction in the 21st century. The idea is to explore the nature of narration in the novel, its meaning and effects, all of which point to a pressing need to reconsider our perception of a host of subversive and transgressive narrative techniques and strategies used in the novel today.
The Hispanic American world and its 20th century fertile literary scene brought to the world of literature a powerful voice of a new generation of writers at the beginning of the sixties who created true masterpieces of lasting value and left a unique literary trail. Occurrence of the crisis of the so-called “boom”, whose protagonists were Mario Vargas Lola, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez, created the “postboom” in the mid 70s. It offered a criticism of previous flows and brought significant changes in the direction of compromised reality, aware of the complex life circumstances of Latin America. In the nineties, this movement was transformed into the “postmodern” and became interested in the experiment, political violence as an immediate reality, Post-vanguard group experience, globalization, mass media and new technologies, which also brought a new approach to the literature. By researching the crisis of literary creativity in the Latin America of the twenty-first century and through exploring a new poetics of Hispanic American writers, this paper will try to point to its ramifications and highlight the new trends, themes and characteristics which formed their own authors, literary critics, scholars and our direct interlocutors.
The paper deals with narrative techniques and methods in the novels by Orhan Pamuk that show a fascinating variety. It has been observed that the opus of this celebrated Turkish author consists mainly of novels different in themes, languages and styles. His prose is marked by a constant experimenting with the form finding some new and unused solutions that bring innovations from the narrative aspect not only to the contemporary Turkish literature, but to the global literature too. From his first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982), until the latest, A Strangeness in My Mind (2014), Pamuk has been constantly occupied by narrative games, succeeding to surprise his readers with new narrative techniques and styles.
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