Jelena Šesnić (ed). Siting America/Sighting Modernity: Essays in Honor of Sonja Bašić. Zagreb: FF Press, 2010.
The collection of essays by an array of international and Croatian contributors concerns itself with a set of topics such as different theoretical and methodological aspects of American studies, the institutionalization of American studies in Croatia, while, in its last section, it focuses on certain aspects of modernism (mainly in the works of James Joyce) and narratology.
Marta Medved Krajnović. Od jednojezičnosti do višejezičnosti: Uvod u istraživanje procesa ovladavanja inim jezikom. Zagreb: Leykam International d.o.o., 2010.
Jelena Šesnić. Mračne žene. Prikazi ženstva u američkoj književnosti (1820.-1860.) Zagreb: Leykam International, 2010.
Tatjana Jukić. Revolucija i melankolija. Granice pamćenja hrvatske književnosti. Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak, 2011.
Sven Cvek. Towering Figures: Reading the 9/11 Archive. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2011.
The book analyzes US literary representations of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, focusing on the works of Jonathan Safran Foer, Art Spiegelman, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon. The book is an attempt to articulate the fundamental relation of the 9/11 cultural archive: between the historical event, its cultural imprint, and the wider social system.
Mario Brdar, Stefan Gries, Stefan, and Milena Žic Fuchs (eds). Cognitive Linguistics: Convergence and Expansion. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2011.
Cognitive Linguistics is not a unified theory of language but rather a set of flexible and mutually compatible theoretical frameworks. Whether these frameworks can or should stabilize into a unified theory is open to debate. One set of contributions to the volume focuses on evidence that strengthens the basic tenets of CL concerning e.g. non-modularity, meaning, and embodiment. A second set of chapters explores the expansion of the general CL paradigm and the incorporation of theoretical insights from other disciplines and their methodologies – a development that could lead to competing and mutually exclusive theories within the CL paradigm itself. The authors are leading experts in cognitive grammar, cognitive pragmatics, metaphor and metonymy theory, quantitative corpus linguistics, functional linguistics, and cognitive psychology. This volume is therefore of great interest to scholars and students wishing to inform themselves about the current state and possible future developments of Cognitive Linguistics.
Borislav Knežević. Reading Joyce after the Postcolonial Turn. Zagreb: FF-press, 2012.
The book examines the impact of postcolonial theory on interpretations of Joyce’s fiction. It seeks to elucidate critically some of the limitations of historiographic discourse in postcolonial criticism. It also seeks to call attention to some underanalyzed issues in Joyce’s fiction, such as the issue of social class.
Mario Brdar, Ida Raffaelli, and Milena Žic Fuchs (eds). Cognitive Linguistics between Universality and Variation . Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.
The present volume contains a collection of contributions originally presented as keynote talks or as regular papers at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference Cognitive Linguistics between Universality and Variation, held in Dubrovnik (Croatia), 30 September–1 October, 2008. The participants were invited to focus on various points on the continuum in the cognitive linguistic agenda stretching from the study of the universal to the study of variation in space and time, between individual and society. As it transpires from the contributions selected in this volume, it is impossible to disregard the methodological aspects of conceptual unification while tackling the universality vs. variation issue, i.e. while adopting usage-based and constructional approaches to linguistic phenomena, doing cognitive corpus linguistics, cognitive contrastive linguistics, cognitive sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, or diachronic cognitive linguistics. The volume is divided into four parts, roughly mirroring the methodological access points in addressing universality and variation.
The study discusses the corpus of Australian Aboriginal fiction in English and is meant to familiarize the Croatian reader with a series of Aboriginal novels and short stories which have not been discussed in the Croatian context. The discussion opens up with the problem of approaching a culture-specific text by an outsider and the traps of an easy-going application of the Eurocentric theoretical apparatus. Introductory chapters also offer an insight into the socio-historical context in which Aboriginal writing appears as well as an intricate discussion on the ontological concept of The Dreaming, necessary for understanding Aboriginal writing in general. The main part of the book focuses on the appearance and development of the novel and short story. The chapter on Aboriginal short story attempts to locate the “moment” in which traditional oral narrative transforms into a short story, i.e. when the guardian of oral tradition shifts into the author of a literary text. The most extensive chapter of the study, that on the Aboriginal novel, sheds a light on the circumstances and problems of the appearance of Aboriginal novel and discusses its thematic and structural distinctiveness. The author then divides the novelistic corpus into “modern” novel, detective fiction and adventure novel, historical novel (historiographic metafiction), fantastic novel, Stolen Generations novel, urban novel and queer novel, albeit signalling that every taxonomy is limiting to a certain degree. Each genre is exemplified with a series of novels by famous Aboriginal authors in the 1964-2010 period. Some of the authors include Mudrooroo, Sam Watson, Bruce Pascoe, Eric Willmot, Richard Wilkes, Sally Morgan, Doris Pilkington, John Muk Muk Burke, Tara June Winch, Melissa Lucashenko, Vivienne Cleven, Alexis Wright, Larissa Behrendt, etc. The book finishes with a chapter on the literary frauds in Australia caused by conscious appropriation of Aboriginal identity. Labelling this phenomenon “pseudonymic plagiarising” triggered mostly by profit, the author discusses the notion of the allegedly clear demarcation line between different cultural codes, as well as between literary ethics and aesthetics.
Through its explicit ethical approach and scepticism towards a casual application of Eurocentric critical machinery, the author opens up a totally new cultural space to the Croatian readership.
