Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies
Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies (Belgrade BELLS) is an academic journal that publishes original research articles that address matters pertaining to the English language, anglophone literature, teaching, translation and cultural studies.
English Department, Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade
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ABOUT THE POSSIBILITIES OF FUTURE REPRESENTATION OF CHARLES SIMIC AS A POET, ESSAYIST AND TRANSLATOR IN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE CURRICULA
The paper explores the main motifs, symbols and layers of ideas in Charles Simic’s literary work. Simic’s poetry, essays and translation work are analyzed in the first part of this paper. In essayistic and poeticized prose, special attention is paid to this author’s ideas about language, literary translation, metaphor, philosophy, poetry, truth, the relationship between the world and language, language and truth, truth and imagination. The second part of the paper explores the possibilities of representing his work in languages and literature curricula, both through regular and additional classes and extracurricular activities. Charles Simic’s work is an excellent starting point for various forms of project-based learning, which includes intradisciplinary (literature – language) and interdisciplinary correlation (English and Serbian language, literature and philosophy, literature and sociology, etc.) Rich intertextuality, reflected in Simic’s literature (to mention only some of the influential names the author references, including Descartes, Wittgenstein, Jasper Johns and Kant among others), opens up possibilities for connection with many subject areas. Charles Simic, as an author who for many years “thought and wrote in a language spoken with an accent” (as he himself described his own language situation), is an interesting example of the challenges and creative possibilities provided by bilingualism as a phenomenon in the modern world.
THE MEMORY OF A LITERARY TEXT – INTERTEXTUAL ELEMENTS IN THE NOVEL MEMORY OF WATER BY EMMI ITÄRANTA
The history of literature has already recorded cases of authors who did not write in their native language. Nowadays, when English is the main lingua franca of our globe, we can expect an increasing number of authors from other linguistic circles, writing in the language. An interesting case is Emmi Itäranta and her Memory of Water. The author created her novel simultaneously in both Finnish and English. What impact does such mixing of corpora of literature – in reference to Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality – have on the shape of a literary work? In my paper, I decided to examine what intertextual elements, typical of Finnish literature, literary history and cultural nuances are contained in the English version of the novel.
THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE – FANTASY THEATRE IN TRANSMEDIA DIALOGUE(S)
This article explores the theatrical actualisation of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, i.e., the creation and convincing realisation of its storyworld on stage within the emerging matrix of exchange between fantasy theatre and global popular culture. The paper focuses on the creation and recreation of multiple fantasy, fairy-tale, and mythological intertexts employed to bring Gaiman’s ‘fairy tale for adults’ to life on stage. Emphasising the transformation from traditional to modern forms based on contemporary theatre narratology, the paper explores both the active dialogue with the tradition through the play’s complex web of intertextuality and the establishment of this particular iteration of Ocean as the version of the storyworld, whose actualisation enters a transmedia landscape, conversing both with fantasy theatre productions and other media iterations of the narrative.
SPIRES AND SHADOWS: DEPICTIONS OF OXFORD IN LUCY ATKINS’S MAGPIE LANE
Oxford is one of the world’s most iconic cities, and over the centuries it has been a source of inspiration for many authors. A recent addition to this body of literature is Lucy Atkins’s 2020 psychological novel Magpie Lane. Set in a fictional Oxford college, the narrator, Dee, has been engaged as a nanny for the unwanted child of the college’s newly-appointed Master who has just arrived with his new wife. Amid a turbulent background of family trauma, mysterious personages, and seemingly supernatural occurrences, this contribution illustrates how the book’s Oxonian location, characteristics, and traditions enrich the complexities of this gripping work, exploring how these features and the unique atmosphere of its setting are crucial to the events and development of the novel.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OR FICTION? – RAYMOND FEDERMAN’S SHHH: THE STORY OF A CHILDHOOD
Raymond Federman, a French – American postmodern writer, created his own literary manifesto in which he announced a movement he called “surfiction”. According to Federman, surfiction does not differentiate between reality and fiction since they are interchangeable. Federman followed this closely in his works, to the point where it is impossible to state that anything he had ever written, even about his own life and childhood, is based on reality or is entirely fictitious. His novel Shhh: The Story of a Childhood is truly representative of Federman’s surfiction, since it does offer an account of his early childhood, something he refused to write about for a very long time, yet it is written in such a way that the reader is left constantly questioning the veracity of the text in front of them. This novel is Federman’s last, which is important to note because of his reluctance to address that part of his life until much later in his career. Shhh: The story of a Childhood was intended to be written as an autobiographical piece, covering a part of Federman’s life preceding one pivotal moment of his early years. The aim of this paper is to present the ways in which Federman succeeded in writing this autobiographical piece, yet still leaving room to doubt its authenticity, which is in line with his theory of surfiction. Juxtaposing different theories on autobiographical writing with Federman’s literary theory, the author of the paper aims to present the novel Shhh: The Story of a Childhood through a multi-layered lens in order to determine its classification in terms of literary genres.
GEORGIAN PERCEPTIONS OF MARGARET ATWOOD’S THE HANDMAID’S TALE: CHALLENGES OF THE LITERARY TRANSLATION
The paper deals with Ani Kopaliani’s Georgian translation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Dystopia as a genre has its strict conventions and complexity in context, requiring great cultural knowledge from the translator. Moreover, Atwood’s dystopia, which presents a woman’s view of the theocratic regime, contains numerous allusions and metaphors from the Bible, as well as ironic implications and puns. The translator largely succeeds in overcoming various translation challenges such as maintaining contextual accuracy and proposing original alternatives for the title, as well as for the unusual names of the female characters. On the other hand, due to the specific objective of the paper, the focus is placed on several specific semantic translation errors that may leave the reader unaware of some contexts of Atwood’s dystopia or potentially lead to misunderstanding some of its nuances.
There are many ways of mapping spaces. Mapmaking can be informed by various realms of knowledge – from history and culture to the sciences. Taking geography as a starting point, maps unite physical and fictional spaces as they focus on the interaction between geography and society, that is, location and culture. Disciplines like cultural geography and geocriticism explore how narratives relate to landscapes. Viewing writers as cartographers, the American writer and scholar Peter Turchi describes how stories about places map those places according to their authors’ visions. The stories about spaces provide the indispensable link between mind and space, making navigation possible. On the other hand, spatial stories make the imagined spaces “real” to readers bringing them close to their own worlds. In his fictional world, the British writer Peter Ackroyd imagines London by building an intricate network of relationships between the location and the stories that were lived and told by the people who populated it over time. In Ackroyd’s imagination, the portrait of London is produced by the histories, memories, experiences, and daily routines of its real and fictional dwellers. In this paper, I propose to analyze how London is fantasized and mapped in Ackroyd’s fiction. Drawing on Robert Tally’s studies in literary cartography and Bertrand Westphal’s book on real and fictional spaces, this paper aims to show how fiction contributes to mapping spaces and creating portraits of places.
LIMINALLY ANGLOPHONE WOR(L)DS: M.G. SANCHEZ’S GIBRALTARIAN STORIES
This paper deals with the 2006 collection of stories by acclaimed Gibraltarian author M.G. Sanchez, titled Rock Black: Ten Gibraltarian Stories. These stories focus on the lives of young Gibraltarians in the 1980s and 1990s, which are largely determined by the place they inhabit. The paper approaches the stories as an example of Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature, with the premise that the imagery and style which make these stories a minor literature are rooted in the anthropological concept of liminality. As the analysis reveals, characters who occupy Sanchez’s Gibraltarian world live in a state of permanent liminality, which contributes to the elusiveness of their identity and makes it unalignable with any fixed category in the Anglophone literary sphere.
POSTMODERN REIMAGINING OF THE OEDIPUS MYTH IN SAM SHEPARD’S BURIED CHILD AND A PARTICLE OF DREAD
In his dramaturgical work, Sam Shepard often explores the tragedy of a family life fraught with ineffectual patriarchy, dysfunctional familial relations, and cursed genealogy. Family discourse as the focal point of a tragedy is reminiscent of the Greek tragic canon, most notably the myth of Oedipus. Oedipal themes are present in Shepard’s Buried Child and A Particle of Dread, which is a direct adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. This paper will address the postmodern reinterpretation of myths from the standpoint of theorists such as Linda Hutcheon and Roland Barthes, and the two plays will be compared to the Sophoclean precursor regarding the inexorability of fate, the “curse on the house” motif, rituals of pollution and purification, and cultural and familial collapse.
BEYOND THE WALL OF AN AMBIGUOUS UTOPIA – THE LANGUAGE OF URSULA LE GUIN’S THE DISPOSSESSED
The Dispossessed is one of the most popular works of Ursula Le Guin. Published in 1974, it is believed to have been inspired by the cold war between the Soviet Union and the USA. The story is set in Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Universe, and deals with the differences between an anarchistic-socialist society and a capitalist society on two sister planets, Anarres and Urras. Once a mining colony of Urras, Anarres is the home of revolutionaries who settled on it almost two centuries before the novel begins. They have lived in isolation ever since, and during that period they developed an artificial language, Pravic, which was created in accordance with the highest values of their very strict society. In this paper I will try to explain some words, constructions and anarchistic concepts of this artificial language, while trying to see how this invented language forms the characters and the way they perceive the world around them. Since Ursula Le Guin’s work is mainly about unbuilding the walls which exist between species, races, sexes, or, in this case, societies, we will try to find out what happens when one of the walls is one’s language.
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN JOYCE’S ULYSSES: LITERARY AND NON-LITERARY INFLUENCES
This paper aims to examine both literary and non-literary influences on James Joyce’s innovative use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, focusing in particular on two sections of his novel Ulysses (1922): the thirteenth episode, “Nausicaa”, and the final episode, “Penelope”. Since Dorothy Richardson’s novel Pilgrimage (1915) represents the earliest example of the stream-of-consciousness style in the English language, her influence on Joyce will be explored in detail. On the other hand, the non-literary influence of Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle, who wrote unpunctuated letters to her husband, will be considered as a possible source of inspiration for the punctuation-free monologue of Joyce’s character Molly Bloom in the final episode. In analyzing these influences, the paper relies on Randall Stevenson’s study Modernist Fiction (1992) and Brenda Maddox’s biographical work Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom (2000).
STATUES SPEAK – POLITICS AND SPIRITUALITY IN SHELLEY AND TOLKIEN
When Frodo and Sam encounter a desecrated statue of a king while journeying to Mordor, the prose clearly recalls Shelley’s “Ozymandias”. The similar imagery of power found in Shelley’s famous sonnet and Tolkien’s equally famous work of fantasy invites discussion on their differing political views. Shelley was a revolutionary thinker, a Republican, whereas Tolkien was a conservative monarchist. The roots for their political attitudes are then sought in their distinct spiritualities. Whereas Shelley found the ultimate reality in the dialectical Spirit of Nature, Tolkien held fast to the personalistic Christian God. These beliefs persistently influence their opinions and works.
LITTLE WOMEN AND FEMINISM: BOOK AND MOVIE NARRATIVE
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott portrays the lives of four March sisters in 19th-century America, grappling with societal expectations. It delves into gender roles, domesticity, marriage, and feminism. This analysis examines each sister’s conformity to societal norms and Alcott’s depiction of femininity, notably through protagonist Jo March. Additionally, it explores Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation, emphasizing narrative theory and contemporary relevance. Gerwig’s adaptation highlights the timeless themes of the original work while offering a fresh perspective for modern audiences. Through both the novel and its adaptation, Alcott’s exploration of women’s struggles and societal constraints continues to resonate, sparking conversations about gender and identity.
THE TREATMENT OF SOCIAL SATIRE – A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF RADOJE DOMANOVIĆ’S LAND OF TRIBULATION AND JONATHAN SWIFT’S GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
The paper will deal with the comparative analysis of societies and their flaws in Radoje Domanović’s Land of Tribulation and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Since both of these authors explored the satirical side of their nations and the deficiencies of Serbian and British people, through their comparative analysis the paper will aim to conclude that these flaws are an intrinsic part of every society, regardless of a nation or geographical area, and that satire has always been a whip employed as a remedy against them.
A STUDY OF PASKVALIĆ’S POETRY AND ITS INFLUENCE ON LODGE AND SHAKESPEARE
This paper comprehensively considers and presents the influence that Ludovik Paskvalić had on the literary legacy of two prominent English poets. Previous scholars of his work have recognized the direct influence of his poetic lyre on the Elizabethan poet Thomas Lodge. Additionally, for years there has been persistent speculation in academia that Paskvalić may have had an indirect influence on the works of William Shakespeare. Based on these observations, we determined the direct influence of the poet from the Bay of Kotor on the work of Thomas Lodge using the comparative method. We have succeeded in proving only Shakespeare’s indisputable reliance on a post-Petrarchist manner, devoid of all individuality.
‘ME LYSTE NAT THEREOF MAKE NO MENCION’: MALORY AND THE PLEASURE OF READING
Taking into account Wolfgang Iser’s “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” this paper focuses on the ‘unwritten parts’ of Malory’s Morte Darthur, parts which generate the frustration of the reader’s expectations and make him/her “fill in the gaps left by the text itself.” As Malory’s principal interest lies in knighthood and kingship rather than in love, his ‘unwritten parts’ have to do with the private matters and spaces of his protagonists. The particular points at which Malory’s text produces frustration for the reader are those when longlasting and intricate quests come to an end and the Round Table fellowship returns to Camelot. As a rule, such occasions are marked by lavish feasts, which Malory always describes in a similar way, as plenteous and joyful, full of cheerful voices and resounding laughter. His sentences run smoothly reinforcing the reader’s thoughts of a ‘continuation’ because, after weeks and months of perilous adventures, the reader expects to spend some time in Camelot and learn about its inhabitants’ ways, mutual relations and everyday activities. Malory, however, refuses to be more specific on that and constantly thwarts such expectations by introducing sudden twists and turns which bring his narration back to the familiar ground of knightly quests. As “no author worth his salt will ever attempt to set the whole picture before his reader’s eyes,” it will be argued that by refraining from giving ‘the whole picture’ Malory shows as the author particularly careful about activating his readers’ imagination because “literary texts transform reading into a creative process that is far above mere perception of what is written”.
BURSTING THE TRINITY BUBBLE: DOUGLAS HYDE’S IRISH AVANT-GARDE FARCE
This article examines a neglected bilingual farce by Douglas Hyde, one of the founders of the Irish language revival movement in the late nineteenth century and the author of a number of Irish-language and bilingual plays in the early twentieth. This play is Pleusgadh na Bulgóide/The Bursting of the Bubble from 1903, set in Bubble College, reference to Trinity College Dublin, where Hyde had been a student. I examine the dispute over the Irish language that forms the background for this play, while also turning to Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of bubbles as a means of understanding the linguistic and cultural issues that the play involves. Sloterdijk presents bubbles as spaces of intimate relationship to which any notion of egoautonomy is subsidiary. He also sees bubbles as predisposed to their eventual bursting. Sloterdijk further regards bubbles as microscopic instances of much larger spaces or spheres. Pleusgadh na Bulgóide exemplifies these various aspects of bubbles. The linguistic anarchy of mis-communication that it unleashes arises from the bursting of Bubble College, an explosion that lends the play a radical avant-garde character. Pleusgadh na Bulgóide extends beyond the specific question of the Irish language to engage the modernist crisis of language in literature and drama at the start of the twentieth century. On this basis, I contend that the neglect of Hyde’s play in Irish modernist studies is a significant oversight.
WILLIAM FAULKNER’S “MAKING IT NEW” AND BEYOND
The paper will try to explore the contribution of William Faulkner to Modernism: his response to Ezra Pound’s imperative “Make it New”. It will summarize some of Faulkner’s most distinguished “modern innovations” in his mythological kingdom Yoknapatawpha – a cosmos of his own, which goes beyond the time he lived in and created them in. They will be illuminated from different critical perspectives with the idea to open a critical conversation on Steven Connor’s “Modernism after Postmodernism”, and to be closed with Stephen Ross’s “Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading.” A look backward at some English Department contributions to understanding the complex poetics of William Faulkner and Modernism will also be presented.
CAREER PATHS OF ENGLISH GRADUATES IN SERBIA: THE CURIOUS CASE OF EFL TEACHING
Amidst widespread concerns about the declining status and profitability of humanities degrees, this paper investigates the employment potential of English graduates in Serbia. Based on a survey of 207 alumni from the English Department at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade who graduated within the past decade, we examine their career trajectories, the challenges they encountered when entering the job market and the relevance of their academic skills and knowledge to their current roles. Additionally, we analyse the proportion of graduates who pursue English language teaching, the modes of language instruction they engage in, their motivations for entering the profession, job satisfaction and suggestions for enhancing the professional standing of English language teachers.
PATIENT-CENTREDNESS IN DENTAL STUDENTS’ EXPLANATIONS: AN ANALYSIS OF MODAL HEDGES IN ELAN-ANNOTATED ROLE PLAYS
The present study examines a corpus composed of 10 role plays by analysing the instances of modal hedges in line with the taxonomy provided in Trbojević-Milošević’s (2004) study of epistemic modality. The audio recordings of dentist-patient role plays were first annotated using the ELAN annotation software developed by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Afterwards, the usage of epistemic modal verbs, non-factual verbs, modal adverbs, modal expressions containing epistemic nouns and adjectives, and semi-modals was analysed. The findings of this research are expected to indicate whether ESP students tend to adhere to the patient-centred approach and hedge their statements properly, as well as to serve as guidance in terms of nurturing hedges in the ESP curriculum, as Hyland (1996) put it.
EFL TEXTBOOKS AND GENDER REPRESENTATION: A MIXED-METHOD CASE STUDY
The aim of this paper is to examine the way women and men are represented in two EFL textbooks used in Serbian high schools – Focus 2 and Solutions Pre-Intermediate. In order to thoroughly investigate the topic in question, the study employs both quantitative (frequency counts and collocation analysis) and qualitative (visual aid analysis) research methods. The quantitative data alone shows that women are underrepresented in the corpus. When combined with the qualitative analysis, the data reveals, on the one hand, stereotypical portrayals of both women and men and, on the other, efforts to challenge those stereotypes. The pedagogical implication derived from this small-scale case study is that gender bias should be discussed and problematized by teachers and their students.
PROMOTING CRITICAL THINKING IN A UNIVERSITY EFL CONTEXT – ENGLISH MAJORS AS CRITICAL THINKERS
This paper focuses on the importance of developing and fostering critical thinking in higher education, and in particular, in university-level EFL classrooms. The paper will present the design of the course taught to English majors at the English Department of the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade. The course is aimed at enhancing the productive language skills of speaking and writing and is part of the core course Contemporary English. In addition to writing and speaking skills, the underlying goal of the tasks and materials in this course is to engage students in critical reflection about the topics covered, their language use, English as a global language, and their subject positions as English majors in the contemporary world. The aim of this paper is to propose a method for developing and encouraging critical thinking in a university-level EFL classroom: critical perspectivization.
critical thinking development in higher education
SPEECH ACT OF CRITICISM IN PEER FEEDBACK ON ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAYS OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS OF ENGLISH IN COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION (CMC)
Using the theoretical concepts of speech act theory and politeness theory, this paper analyses the speech act of criticism, language forms and communication strategies utilised in peer feedback on argumentative essays of first-year university students of English, submitted via the Moodle platform. This was the writing assignment required in Integrated Skills classes as part of the compulsory Contemporary English Language Course (G1), during which students learned the basics of argumentative essay and academic writing. The corpus was collected during two consecutive academic years (2015-6 and 2016-7), with the participation of 122 students in total, where each student had to comment on at least one essay written by a peer, but could choose to comment on more than one. Speech act and communication strategies analysis tools were developed based on works by Nguyen (2005) and House and Kadar (2021), taking into account the fact that all student participants are non-native speakers of English and native speakers of Serbian.
THE OMNIPRESENT AUTHOR: DISTRIBUTION OF MARKERS OF AUTHORIAL PRESENCE IN SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES IN LINGUISTICS, ECONOMICS, AND TECHNOLOGY WRITTEN IN ENGLISH, SERBIAN, AND GERMAN**
Across cultures, authors use a variety of linguistic strategies to implement their voice into their academic texts, sometimes explicitly marking their presence through personal pronouns. Based on a corpus of 124 research articles written by native speakers in English, Serbian, and German, in the fields of linguistics, economics, and technology, this study investigates the quantitative and qualitative uses of authorial presence markers across these communities. The quantitative results show that these markers are most frequently used in the English sub-corpus, followed by the Serbian and German sub-corpora. Moreover, they are used most frequently in linguistics, and least in technology, while the economics sub-corpus in English accounts for almost half of the markers in the entire corpus. These differences are further elaborated in a qualitative analysis discussing their context of use.
DIMENSIONS OF (NON)-ANTONYMY IN ENGLISH PHRASAL VERBS PUT ON AND TAKE OFF THROUGH THE LENS OF COGNITIVE SEMANTICS
This paper is an attempt at decoding the labyrinthine semantic structure of the opposite English phrasal verbs put on and take off examined through the lens of cognitive semantics. Even though this phrasal verb pair is traditionally viewed as antonymic, a closer look at the overall conceptual-semantic structure of these two phrasal verbs casts a different light on their meaning(s), consequently their semantic relation(s) as well. More specifically, it is demonstrated that, despite the obvious antonymy exemplified by numerous meanings, a considerable number of meanings, neverthless, fail to show any signs of mutual oppositeness when the complete radial networks of the phrasal verbs’ meanings are respectively elaborated and then compared. The paper concludes that the actual degree of the put on and take off oppositeness can be determined more precisely in the light of their image-schematic structure (the support schema) and conceptual mappings underlying the constituent particles on and off making up the given phrasal verbs.
STANCES ON THE XYLELLA FASTIDIOSA BACTERIUM AND THE CORONAVIRUS IN THE PUBLIC DISCOURSE
The paper deals with the stances on the Xylella fastidiosa (Xf) bacterium and the coronavirus in the public discourse. Relying on Hyland’s stance model (2005), we seek to identify the linguistic devices (hedges, boosters, attitude markers and selfmentions), used in both contexts, which helped the authors express their opinions. The corpus comprises articles on Xf and the coronavirus collected from the internet sources in English. The findings indicate that the most frequent stance markers in both subcorpora include hedges and boosters. There are slight differences in the marker frequencies, depending on the disease in question. The conclusion discusses the role of stance markers in impacting attitudes while reporting on these two important issues and their use in communicating tentativeness or certainty.
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