Review Umberto Rossi
Brumal : Revista de Investigación sobre lo Fantástico = research journal on the fantastic,
06/2023, Letnik:
11, Številka:
1
Journal Article
The traditional folkloric substratum of different cultures and the mythological one are still very noticeable nowadays, and the modern person cannot disregard them, as they are intensely ...reinterpreted, reimagined, and promoted in a vast array of fantasy books, fantasy films, etc. The protagonists of fantasy culture are the imaginary, supernatural, magical, demonic beings, the totemic animals, the fantastic objects, etc. In relevant literature they are defined as mythemes. Moreover, another present-day function was assigned to folkloric, mythological elements (the mythemes) through their animated metamorphosis into the realm of video games, already being annotated, listed online. The present paper aims to emphasise the role of realia-mythemes in traditional and current culture on one hand, and on the other hand to present a series of means of conveying, mainly in Romanian, the fantasy (i.e., folkloric, mythological) realia-words with Russian cultural characteristics (cf. Ба́ба-Яга́ Ro Baba-Iaga, En BabaYaga/Jaga; Богаты́рь Ro bogatîri, En bogatyr; Васили́са Премудрая Ro Vasilisa Premudraia, En Vasilisa Premudraya; Жар-пти́цa Ro jar-ptița, En zhar-ptitsa; Русáлка Ro rusalca, En rusalka, etc.). The transfer of realia elements constitutes a complex process that has been drawing the attention of researchers for a long time, especially since there is no “sole” translation solution, and the “ideal” rendering of these units is performed by considering certain intra- and extralinguistic, intra- and extratranslational aspects.
The skin, the marvelous and highly complex covering of our organism, is omnipresent in the work of Laura Pugno. In this essay, treasuring above all the hypotheses formulated in one classic of ...psychoanalysis such as The Skin-Ego by Didier Anzieu and a volume by the anthropologist David Le Breton, we follow the minimal, humble deeds of the very young protagonist of When you will come, the second novel by the Roman writer, as well as a splendid allegorical-fantastic representation of the urgent need to mark defined limits in our liquid time (the adjective belongs, as is more than known, to Zygmunt Bauman). In an era of collapse of the symbolic, the epidermis – the organ that precisely draws the outline of our bodies – would seem to be the last limit left to us, the one from which to start again.
This article deals with the spatial aspect of texts about World War II and the post-war period, analyzing Muriel Spark’s 1963 novella The Girls of Slender Means as an example. It observes the novella ...as a realistic work narrated in the fantastic mode, and the analysis is primarily informed by Patricia García’s concepts of the fantastic of space and the fantastic hole. The article argues that the temporal disruption made by World War II is reflected in texts about the war as spatial perforation. As The Girls of Slender Means is carefully structured around the firmly ordered and intact space of the May of Teck Club, the one location that triggers the major event of the novella is a hole in the building’s structure, the heterotopic perforation conceived as fantastic because it is hidden from sight in the otherwise shattered landscape of post-war London. This location is simultaneously a spatial emblem of the cultural and social circumstances of the era since it creates a temporal loop which bring the present, past, and future together into a comprehensible whole, which can be seen in the parallelism of the novella’s two timelines (1945 and 1960s). Additionally, the analysis results in the implications of the given concepts of spatiality to the narrative method, showing that spatial perforations also cause a perforated story and narrative gaps, thus leaving for the reader to infer the meaning of the unnarrated.
This paper analyses Giuliano Scabia's Fantastica visione, a drama written in 1973. The text will be studied in two directions. Initially, elements will be identified that allow it to be defined as a ...rewriting of the myth of Faust, according to the criteria of Brunel’s Mitocritica. Two aspects of the myth will be highlighted: its being potentially a text of the fantastic genre (as in other rewritings of the same years by Buzzati, Landolfi and Calvino) and a critique of capitalism (as in Marxist readings by Lukács and Cases). After that, the hypothesis that drama is an antecedent of the contemporary New Weird, characterised precisely by the fantastic and the critique of reality, will be supported. To conclude, these two readings will be placed in dialogue.
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