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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Copyright (c) 2026 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
CHRONOTOPES OF TRAUMA: RECONFIGURING THE GOTHIC IN SHARP OBJECTS
This paper examines Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, showing how Gothic conventions are reimagined for the twenty-first century. The fusion of time and space emerges through oppressive weather, stagnant temporality, uncanny domestic interiors, and the dynamics of a decaying Southern and Rural Gothic community. These settings externalize Camille Preaker’s psychological trauma and expose Wind Gap’s culture of repression, secrecy, and denial. By analyzing generational haunting, bodily imagery, temporal stasis, spatial doubling, the uncanny, and the dangerous outsider trope the paper argues that Flynn transforms Gothic horror into a study of inherited pain and moral decay. Ultimately, Sharp Objects locates horror not in the supernatural but in the ordinary spaces and relationships that shape everyday life.
DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL THINKING IN LITERATURE CLASSES
This paper presents a survey conducted with university students about critical thinking, and then proposes several techniques for developing critical-thinking skills and dispositions in a literature classroom. It recommends the best approach and the concrete steps the instructor should implement in order to enhance students’ critical thinking through discussing literary works. It also describes the Dialogue Teaching Model, explains its procedure, and analyses the reason for its effectiveness. Based partly on the answers to the questionnaire, the paper advises what kind of practices should be given the most attention, and how to promote students’ confidence to express their opinions, their ability to correct their point of view after considering others’ judgment, and enthusiasm for learning and understanding their own thinking processes.
‘WONDER WORDS’: LEVERAGING ADVANCED LEARNERS’ EXTRAMURAL ENGLISH ENGAGEMENT FOR VOCABULARY LEARNING
The role of English has changed dramatically over the last few decades. It is now the most common global lingua franca, and alternative approaches may therefore be needed in English language teaching which take this new status into consideration. This paper reports on the integration of an element of ‘wonder pedagogy’ into an L2 English language class for advanced learners by means of a specially designed task sequence. A small-scale mixed-methods study was carried out to determine the effectiveness of this innovation. The results indicate that while the wonder pedagogy tasks had a positive impact on learners’ engagement with English outside the classroom, learners will need more support and opportunities to practice in order to achieve sustainable learning gains.
PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS IN SERBIAN AND ENGLISH: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PRESCHOOL AND FIRST GRADE EFL LEARNERS
The present study represents preliminary research into the development of phonological awareness in L1 Serbian and L2 English. By investigating early sensitivity to sounds at two different developmental stages, the study aimed at comparing the level of phonological awareness in a mother tongue and in a foreign language at the beginning of formal education. Bearing the aforementioned in mind, the sample included 20 children, divided into a group of preschoolers and first graders. The results showed that first graders consistently outperformed preschoolers in Serbian, yet this consistency was not entirely reflected in English. This may point to the conclusion that other factors are involved in the development of phonological awareness in a foreign language, indicating important pedagogical implications.
Aestheticism in Zadie Smith's On Beauty and Donna Tartt's The Secret History
As a movement that values form over function/purpose, Aestheticism remains relevant to discussions about the role of beauty. Writing somewhat in the tradition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Zadie Smith and Donna Tartt explore the function of beauty in literature, as well as in academic circles. The stance that academia takes regarding beauty has frequently suffered from excessive theorizing. Smith’s approach seems to satirize aesthetic discussions about art, which occur mostly within university lectures. Meanwhile, Tartt’s ideas of l’art-pour-l’art-ism are exaggerated and grow so stripped of context that they result in tragedy. In both novels, Aestheticism is criticized for its tendency to be hermetic, and academia’s ruminations on beauty further deconstruct the movement’s core ideas and credos.
Copyright (c) 2026 Slađana Stamenković https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
I’M NOT ANGRY…: PERCEPTIONS OF PUNCTUATION MARKS IN ONLINE TEXT MESSAGE BY SERBIAN STUDENTS OF ENGLISH
The aim of this study was to examine the differences in confidence or interest of an online interlocutor perceived by Serbian students of English based on the punctuation mark used in online text messages. A survey with different sets of exchanges in which the exclamation mark, the period, the ellipsis, and no punctuation mark were used was conducted. The task of the participants was to rate the confidence or satisfaction of the interlocutors on a 7-point Likert scale. The average values for each punctuation mark were measured and the statistical significance of the results was determined using a one-way ANOVA test. The results of the study revealed significant differences between the scores for each individual mark and stood closer to native speaker average scores than to L2 speaker scores.
Copyright (c) 2026 Miloš Milisavljević https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
“I MEAN, WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? YOU HAVE THE MORALS OF AN ALLEY CAT” – THE NEGATIVE EVALUATIONS OF THE POLITICAL OPPONENT IN THE 2024 US PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES
The paper focuses on the rhetoric of the two US presidential debates held in 2024 between the Republican and Democrat presidential nominees, the first between Joseph Biden and Donald Trump, and the second one between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. We investigate the strategies of discrediting the political opponent, such as insults, pronoun-based oppositions, repetitions and three-part lists, and metaphors. It is shown that both the Republican and Democrat nominees abundantly used these devices and relied on similar argumentative strategies in the debates, which may have had an evaluative and persuasive function and deepened the political polarization. This has contributed to the impression of predominantly hostile and polarizing rhetoric employed in the 2024 debates.
Copyright (c) 2026 Maja Stevanović, Tijana Vesić Pavlović https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Information does not need to be false to pose a risk to social norms and the dominant culture. An uneven power dynamic can be disrupted by revealing (in)appropriate true information. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club presents a rebellion against a postmodern world born through the unveiling of the late-capitalist system in underground boxing clubs. With dangerous knowledge and a legion of loyalists, the nameless narrator’s split personality, Tyler Durden, plans to reset society. The present paper aims to investigate the impact of the methodical dissemination of dangerous knowledge in Fight Club through the framework of information hazards. The results reveal that information hazards are crucial to both Durden’s operation and the retention of the novel’s subversive essence despite its mainstream appeal.
Copyright (c) 2026 Aleksandar Radović https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
HYBRID FAMILIES IN POSTCOLONIAL NARRATIVES: SMALL ISLAND BY ANDREA LEVY AND LARA BY BERNARDINE EVARISTO
Postcolonial urban narratives offer rereading of a metropolis from migrants’ perspectives through the description of their experience of arriving and settling in a city along with questioning the monolithic British national identity. This paper draws on postcolonial theory to examine the complex constructions of family and identity in Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island (2004) and Bernardine Evaristo’s novel-in-verse Lara (2009), focusing on the diasporic experiences of migrant families in postcolonial London. This paper will also put a particular emphasis on the children born to white British mothers and Black fathers whose hybrid identities disrupt conventional notions of nationality and belonging.
Copyright (c) 2026 Emilija Lipovsek https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
HETEROGLOSSIA IN ELT AND ESP RESEARCH ARTICLE ABSTRACTS: INSTANTIATION AND REALIZATION ACROSS RHETORICAL STRUCTURE
This study investigates how authors construct evaluative stance and engage readers in research article abstracts, drawing on the Engagement subsystem of Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005). Focusing on heteroglossic expressions, it examines how writers manage dialogic space through strategies of contraction and expansion across rhetorical moves. The sample includes 50 abstracts—25 from English Language Teaching (ELT) and 25 from English for Specific Purposes (ESP). A mixed-method approach combines quantitative corpus analysis using UAM CorpusTool with qualitative interpretation. Results indicate that dialogic expansion predominates in introduction, purpose, method, and conclusion sections, while contraction is more frequent in product sections. Findings clarify how Engagement choices shape disciplinary identity, guide readers, and support knowledge-building in academic writing.
Copyright (c) 2026 Katarina Ilic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Aspects of Literariness in New Media Writing
Electronic literature has been established as a new, technologically enabled way of writing, through anthologies and awards such as the New Media Writing Prize. This paper analyses the four latest NMWP winners – Florence Walker’s I Dreamt of Something Lost, Everest Pipkin’s Anonymous Animal, Joannes Truyens’s Neurocracy, and Dan Hett’s c ya laterrrr – focusing on their literary qualities. Defamiliarization, self-referentiality, and dialogism are taken as the most prominent aspects of literariness, and the analysis aims to describe whether they are mediated electronically (through digital technologies) or literarily (through imagery and language). As the analysis shows, literariness persists as a defining feature of electronically produced works and can be used as a criterion for estimating their value and establishing linearity in electronic literary production.
Copyright (c) 2026 Tijana Parezanović, Milena Stojanović https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Exploring Syntactic Ambiguity Enablers in News Headlines
The language of news headlines incorporates a number of linguistic devices with the aim of effectively getting the message across and attracting the reader’s attention. Together with contracted syntax, which is typical of headline language, some of these devices often lead to more than one interpretation. This research sets out to analyze syntactic ambiguity enablers (Oaks 1994), or, in other words, linguistic phenomena leading to ambiguity in headlines, which is resolved by way of providing tree diagrams for each interpretation. The diagrams follow the rules posited in the X-bar theory of syntax, which introduces the hierarchical phrase structure, allowing for disambiguation in cases where linear structures would fall short of. The dataset analyzed consists of 38 headlines found on various websites. The results suggest that ambiguity in headline language is not incidental but rooted in structural patterns which are classified into five categories. The results also show that 57.9% of the headlines comprising the dataset fall into the category involving the ambiguity which stems from the capacity of some word forms to serve as different word classes.
Copyright (c) 2026 Miloš Mirković https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
OPINION MINING IN ESP CLASSROOMS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF TRADITIONAL VS. AI-ASSISTED INSTRUCTION
This study investigates sentiment analysis, specifically opinion mining, in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classrooms by comparing traditional teaching methods with AI-assisted instruction. A total of 41 students (11 males, 30 females) were exposed to traditional classroom methods during the winter semester (serving as a Control group) and, later, participated in AI-assisted classroom during the summer semester (serving as a Target group). Employing advanced sentiment analysis techniques, we analysed 82 essays written by these students, focusing on their attitudes towards the provided learning materials. Our approach involved using a specialised sentiment lexicon for accurate scoring and classification. The findings reveal a shift towards positive sentiment in the AI-assisted classroom (Target group), underscoring AI's potential in augmenting the emotional aspects of language learning. These insights are critical for understanding student perceptions of different teaching paradigms and highlight the transformative impact of AI in educational settings.
Copyright (c) 2026 Igor Ivanović https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Female Sanguinary Capitalism in Victorian Vampire Fiction
The historical residue of the Victorian-era vampire is yet to release its firm grip on its contemporary revivals, allowing additional spaces for new historical and socio-political insight into the effect of Marxian capitalism as “economic vampirism” (Morrissette 2013: 637) on fin-de-siècle nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. The class-consciousness of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and Sheridan LeFanu’s novella Carmilla is also yet to be comprehensively explored in terms of elucidating the inextricable link between Victorian vampire and industrial capital. Well-established Marxian tropes in Dracula and overlooked in Carmilla, such as capital, class conflict and the bourgeois work ethic, require attention and reinterpretation; while undetected ones in both fictions, estrangement, animalisation, emasculation, factory working conditions, child exploitation, deterritorialization, call for a thorough examination. Furthermore, the neglected potential of female vampires as sanguinary capitalists within the framework of nineteenth-century political economy is also established in this paper. Thus, in applying relevant (post)Marxist ideas of economy and political philosophy to a materialist reading of Stoker’s and LeFanu’s works of Gothic horror, an unprecedented relationship is set up between female Victorian vampire and industrial capitalism. In establishing this relationship, the undeniable intuition of Marxian ideas in Stoker and LeFanu is further broadened. While Marx stops short at only correlating the vampiric sucking of blood with capitalist draining of value and life-force from labour and labourer, these masters of the Victorian Gothic genre construct an unprecedented, comprehensive insight into the machine of industrial capitalism via the literary trope of the female vampire. Thus, the female sanguinary capitalist is, distinctly from her male counterpart, an ambiguously spectral force of estrangement.
capital, Marx, Victorian Gothic, vampire, Dracula, Carmilla
Copyright (c) 2026 Mara Ruža Blažević https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Metaphorical and Ontological Representations of Human Life in a Selection of Poetry by H. W. Longfellow and E. A. Poe
This article focuses on how human life is represented, in ontological (metaphysical) and metaphorical terms, in a selection of poetry by two American 19th-century poets – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe. The analysis includes three poems by Longfellow (“A Psalm of Life”, “The Beleaguered City”, “Victor and Vanquished”) and one poem by Poe (“The Conqueror Worm”). Although both poets include God into their respective ontological systems, those systems, in fact, differ considerably in their very spirit, as well as in their metaphors. The article stresses the value and significance of the juxtaposition of the ontological concepts of these two American Renaissance authors for the world history of ideas and, pointing to their apt indicativeness of the philosophical clashes of the nineteenth century, argues that the American literature of the 1800s, though still in search of its independence from Europe at the time, deserves great appreciation and continued scholarly attention.
Copyright (c) 2026 Goran Petrović https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
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).