CINEMA, GOTHIC, CANON

През 2021 г. доц. д-р Огнян Ковачев чества своя шестдесети рожден ден. Във връзка с това Катедрата по теория на литературата към СУ

„Св. Климент Охридски“ организира двудневен форум на 26–27 ноември 2021 г. в негова чест под наслов „Кино, канон, готика“ с фокус върху теоретичните и литературноисторическите му интереси през годините.

Кино, готика, канон не са само три събирателни точки. Те са цели изследователки траектории, около които Огнян Ковачев не просто фокусира научните си интереси, а прокарва като нови пътища в българското литературознание. Отделните тематични ядра на настоящия брой бележат ярките акценти от работата на О. Ковачев, които продължават да бъдат разработвани от самия него и от редица други изследователи. Такива са научните проблеми на адаптацията и репрезентацията, каноничното и извънканоничното в литературата и киното, готическото и възвишеното, алтернативни канони и алтерации на канона, световната литература.

Тези търсения са включени в настоящия брой на „Studia Litteraria Serdicensia“. Редакторите му изразяват сърдечна признателност към Института за литература при БАН и най-вече към проф. Пламен Антов, главен редактор на изданието, за поканата това начинание да се разгърне на страниците на изданието, както и за търпението, грижата към детайла и професионалната работа по целия път – от идеята до реализацията. Тези съвместни усилия Ви дават възможност като читатели да се срещнете с литературоведския свят на О. Ковачев, видян през погледа на авторите от следващите страници.

CONTENTS

The paper examines the transformation of narrative elements in the film adaptation of the collections “Roots” and “Eternal Times”, as realized in Assen Shopov’s 1974 film “Eternal Times”. Attention is focused on the differences in the construction of the image of Baba Nedelya in the literary text and in the film. The death of grandmother Nedelya, presented in the film, is seen as part of the overall strategy of cinema of this period, which dissolves the cyclical ‘eternity’ constructed by the literary text, locating it along the axis of socio-historical time.

This research elaborates on the recognition that Woody Allen’s films and short stories are markedly linked to the literary canon. It features the reiterated indebtedness of his scripts to the classical Russian novel and the ancient Greek tragedy. The paper makes observations on the specificity of Allen’s interpretation of exemplary literary texts, and proposes a hypothesis about the mechanism behind the transmedia references analysed here.

Starting from several Eisensteinian publications from the late 1920s, this article discusses the problem of a deep, essential closeness between the language of cinema as the perfect symbiosis of language and technology (and the film camera as the perfect machine) and different modes of Eastern/Japanese traditional culture: haiku poetry, kabuki theater, traditional ukiyo-e painting, and the nature of pictographic writing itself. This “language” plot is considered as part of the large-scale turn in Western culture/ art in the early twentieth century as a radical crisis-renewal act of overcoming one’s own “classical” tradition of relation to reality. The “second” Heidegger and particularly “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer”(1953/54) was used as a philosophical paradigm of the plot.

This paper is part of a larger study on the essay film. It aims to explore more exactly the “essayistic” in and through film, where the essayistic indicates a kind of encounter between the self and the public domain, an encounter that measures the limits and possibilities of each as a conceptual activity. Appearing within many different artistic and material forms besides the essay film, the essayistic acts out a performative presentation of self as a kind of self-negation in which narrative or experimental structures are subsumed within the process of thinking through a public experience

This essay examines the varieties of intimacy depicted in the novel and the film “I Served the King of England” and shows how totalitarianism prioritized love to the Party and the Party Leader over the intimate love between men and women and how the Nazi idea of the pure race transformed human sexuality into animalistic copulation.

In the focus of the current analysis is Maupassant novel “Fort comme la mort” (“Strong as Death”), which treats the topic of the painter and particularly the image. We propose that its content to be reviewed through the prism of reflection multiplication (counterparts, repetitions, similarities) as an attempt to bring mimesis in question. According to our opinion the French author presents copies of characters and objects with different degree of deviation from the original, following the reflection principle, with the aim to blur the basic image and to bring gradual loss of its referentiality. Maupassant recreates a situation in which the mimesis is somehow empty of any meaning because of the so many reproduced reflections of the reflections which start replacing each other till they create hallucination picture of a world without possible stable representation. Such picture is too subjective and undermines the prerequisite itself of image objectivity connected to the principles of realism and naturalism. This is the reason why we suppose, that Maupassant is one of those premodern creators who seek new forms and techniques without cardinal detachment from the classical ones, although he realizes they are worn out, and he is trying exactly through numerous repetitions to involve them in the expression of their own denial.

In 2020, Julia Ducournau received the prestigious Golden Palm Film Award for her latest film “Titan”. It provoked a number of ambiguous reactions, some of them in Bulgaria. Although her latest work repeatedly focuses on the woman and her experiences, Ducournau’s brave solutions and feminist themes are visible in the 2016 production entitled “Raw”. This debut film plays with roles and concepts, long established in cinema, of the passive position of women. Ducournau’s heroine literally and metaphorically “tastes” the blood of life. Justin’s story and the course of her ritual transformation allude to the Gothic tradition of representing the vampire. But while the classical gothic vampire feeds on his immortality (and sexuality) by feeding on the blood of his victims, Ducournau’s bloodthirsty heroine “drinks” her way to realization of one’s own pleasure and emotional maturity. The origin of Justin’s thirst is not insignificant – she inherits it from her mother. This article analyses the film “Raw” as a female reading of classical gothic imagery and the typification of the female character.

The article explores the myth of the double and its manifestations in literature. The focus is on the novella “Adventure on New Year’s Eve” by E. T. A. Hoffman. The figures of doppelgängers in the novel and the wavering ego identities of the characters are consistently traced. The multiplicity of the self and its vacillation are examined through Carl Gustav Jung’s concept of total personality.

This paper looks at a series of “fearful” translated fictional texts around the short story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1856) by Edgar Allan Poe that appeared in the periodicals after the end of the Crimean war (1853–1856), offered by authors such as Todor Shishkov, St. S. Bobchev, Konstantin Fotinov, Hristo Vaklidov, Nikola Mihaylovski, Dimitar Blaskov, Pandeli Kisimov, et al. These texts corresponded to the old human interest in horrors and the supernatural that gain new force in the mid-19th century in Bulgarian literature. In this context, their similarities with the Gothic novel are traced. Some transformations of the originals in the process of translation are marked, such as the shift from anti-Catholic line to anti-Greek, and also their influence on the original Bulgarian fiction from that time.

The article outlines the parameters of the horrific in the Slavic mediaeval literature of Byzantine type. The aim of the research is to compare the mediaeval Slavic horrific with the Gothic version of the same category through a prospective approach. Translated and original Slavic-language works (different in origin, genre and style) from the IX to the XVII century have been analyzed, but later texts have also been used for comparison. Among the main contextual meanings of the Slavic mediaeval words for horror are: 1. ‘fear’, 2. ‘compassion’, 3. ‘fear combined with astonishment’, 4. ‘combination of wonder and delight’. Attention is paid to the significantly reduced presence of verbal signals of experience of horror-compassion in the Byzantine martyrs’ lives and, conversely, to the escalation of the feeling of horror in the Slavic versions of the vitas (in the works of St. Dimitry of Rostov). The common features which unite the mediaeval horrific and the Gothic one are above all the supernatural as a source of horror and the connection between the horror and the sublime. Revelation (to the mind) of the Divine plan for the salvation of people, which is the most sublime phenomenon in the history of the world, stimulates the theological activity of mind and arouses delight. In mediaeval Slavic texts, however, this delight is often referred to by the lexeme оужасъ and its derivatives. The reason for this is sought primarily in the Greek equivalent ἔκστασις, which tends to be used as a generic term for going beyond the usual emotional states, for any kind of extreme experience – positive or negative.

The text presents a genealogy of terror and terrorism by interpreting the political rhetoric of the French Revolution and the political theory of the Enlightenment in relation to the reception of Gothic fiction in late 18th century England. By doing that, the article tries to establish connections in the use of terror in literature and politics in order to present the links between fiction and power in relation to the problems of terror and terrorism in the particular time frame.

The article focuses on the dialogue “Lugubrious Nights” by José Cadalso and analyses it from the point of view of its Gothic and Enlightenment traits. While Tediato, the protagonist, embodies the ideas of the Enlightenment, the Gothic is associated with the atmosphere of horror and the constant presence of the supernatural. The dichotomies, constituent of the poetics of the Gothic, between the supernatural past and the devoid of supernatural present are transformed in the dialogue into oppositions between the rational Tediato and the superstitious Lorenzo. Thanks to the genre of the dialogue the tension between the two poles remains constant which on its turn enhances the impact of “Lugubrious Nights”.

The present text focuses on the idea of the self-reflexive nature of the Gothic. It is argued that one of the signs of such “Gothic” self-reflexivity can be linked to the notion of Gothic laughter, developed by Ognyan Kovachev in his work on Gothic literature. The central research question regards how the idea of gothic self-reflexivity can be found in contemporary literature through the analysis of the novel “Prince” by Argentinian writer César Aira.

The current paper aims to point out three points of intersection between the gothic tradition and surrealist art by drawing comparisons between some of the works of Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo and some key gothic fiction traits. The work of Max Ernst is represented by his three collage novels, while the text also focuses on Leonora Carrington’s fiction and some of Remedios Varo’s paintings. The paper examines the ways in which the three artists’ works relate to reality and dream and how the convergence of the two states forms surreality. The relationship between reality and surreality is examined through the lens of alchemy, madness and mystification, which are inseparable parts of the work of Ernst, Carrington and Varo, as well as key elements of the gothic cannon. Additional examples are drawn from the works of Vítězslav Nezval and China Miéville.

Matilda is the key character in Matthew Gregory Lewis’ novel “The Monk”: she is the seductress, the femme fatale, who sets in motion the series of sins committed by the monk Ambrosio. The text examines Matilda as a figure of seduction in Lewis’s novel, defining the heroine’s fatality through questions of the instrumentalization of gender, the exposure of the body, the dynamics between disguise and revelation. By outlining several techniques of seduction that the heroine employs in the realization of her goal (disguise of self, gender, virtues, face) it will appear that the use of disguise and the play of concealment and revelation are the temptress’s primary tools.

The current text is dedicated to the interpretation of Ognyan Kovachev on Edmund Burke’s treatise “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”. This interpretation is to be found in Kovachev’s preface to the first Bulgarian edition of the treatise of 2001, as well as parts of the monograph “The Gothic Novel” (2004). We interpret Kovachev’s introduction to Burke not only in its didactic and propaedeutic dimensions – as a text that introduces the Bulgarian public to the problems of a hitherto unknown author within the framework of its broad cultural, historical and philosophical context (the 18th century), but in view of the specific interpretation of Burke’s aesthetics, offered by Kovachev. The study claims that Kovachev reads Burke through the problem of doubling and duality. At the same time, for Kovachev, Burke’s doubling functions not as a subversive element in the logic of the philosophical exposition, but rather as a constitutive moment of the aesthetic subject of Modern age. The latter is related to the genre of the gothic novel and its interpretation in Kovachev’s monograph on this type of novel.

The article develops Ognyan Kovachev’s observation that in Edmund Burke’s influential Philosophical Inquiry of the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, “[t]he characteristic for modernity device of estrangement turns out to be an active principle.” Although Burke rejects at the outset novelty as an effective resource for aesthetic effects because of the destructive impact of the force of habit on novelty, he distributes its effects over various aspects of the beautiful and the sublime, and thus renders it ubiquitous.

This   article   examines   the   structural   relationship   between Kant’s philosophy and the genre of Gothic literature, in view of the formation of the modern idea of the subject. The paradox of Kant’s idea of the sublime reveals the blind spot of the Subject: Reason does not (can not?) know itself. The phenomenon is noumenal at its very core insofar as the existential condition is not susceptible to objectification because the existential idea presupposes the inseparability of the subject from the object. From this point of view, the appearance of the figure of the gothic Double is inseparable from the emergence of the category of subject itself. Ultimately, the Subject is the Double. Duality is an ontological structure determining for Modernity – the Double is the matrix of reflexivity, and therefore of Reason and the Subject. This experimental hypothesis was developed by juxtaposing Immanuel Kant and Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s ideas of the determinism of nature and supernatural necessity.

In the following text I advocate the opinion that the concept of “genius” is unconditionally necessary today, in our contemporary times, among the proliferating critical languages, institutions, strategies for recognition and affirmation in art, philosophy and the sciences. The Kantian concept of genius is given here the central stage and is partially implemented, where necessary, by the interpretations that follow. The aim is to outline the possibility for relativity between the activity and affectivity of the sublime and the activity of the genius. These approximations allow us to explore the possible relation within 1) the logic of analogy, doubling, as an apposition between two immense powers, 2) as a confrontation of two infinities; 3) through the concepts of “heterosimultaneity”, “counterfinality”, “freedom”. An additional hypothesis here – that the material forces of life are the forces of philosophy (namely, in Boyan Manchev’s philosophical fantastic they are Fire / Eros, Apeiron, Chaos, Chaos Unbound), which had fascinated Kant as well, are transitive within the modal foundations of existence – follows from the free play between the monstrous force of nature and the magic power of the conceptual language of the genius, from the necessity of thought as an active force of the transformation of the world. In the perspective of Boyan Manchev’s surcritique and modal ontology, I will attempt to extend the definition of genius. If the given law of nature must be overturned, this is only possible if the secret of nature lays open, the secret of creativity, of the genesis beyond the gene, of the necessary freedom. Тhe genius weaves the secret of free world-creation. The sublime is a representation of his technique. It is a measure of desire of thought; a front and a companion on the front of his unknown; a projective transfiguration of the internal eternal fire of thought.

The article examines the problem of the sublime in Pushkin’s ‘little tragedy’ “The Stone Guest”. The late Pushkin associates art not with beauty and contemplation, but with the sublime – with fear, power and justice. He imagines it as more powerful than life, able to abandon its separateness from life, and directly intervene in its course.

The paper examines several testimonies from Plato (from the dialogues “Laws”, “Protagoras” and “Phaedrus”), as well as several key verses from Theognis, which contribute to delineating certain characteristics of early canonizing thought in the field of the literature. There is a prioritization of poetry over prose and works that are examples of transmitting a model of virtue are more highly valued, whether from the position of the philosopher taking on the role of a literary critic, or of the author himself. More often, these works are ancient, but it is not impossible for a similar status to be attributed to contemporary works of the commenter, including own works. Until Aristotle, there is still a lack of real reflection on the artistic characteristics of highly valued literary genres/individual poets, insofar as emphasis is put both on the educational role (towards achieving general virtue) of the commented poetic examples and on the variability of receptive situations and the individual preferences and abilities of the recipients. However, a certain openness and liberality of the discourse on literary production and reception is also found, allowing the aesthetic and ethical benefit of the perception of works from different genres. This legitimizes Ancient Greek literature, along with similar theoretical reflections within its framework, as rightly recognized as canonical in its entirety.

The article insists that “the canon does not tolerate avant-gardes”. With examples from Bulgarian, Polish, Ukrainian, Austrian and Serbian poetry, the position is defended that even in the most representative “classical” anthologies of the respective literatures, avant-garde texts are usually “thrown out”, considered to be some “deviations” from the norm. Examples of such significant neglected avant-garde works are also given. The literary-historical situation is almost the same, whichever literature is concerned.

The article offers a reconstruction of the main moments of the relationship between Th. W. Adorno and G. Lukacs in the period after the Second World War. The first part focuses on the challenge provoked by Lukacs’s book “The Young Hegel” and on the interpretation of it by Adorno in the spirit of idealism and as a project comparable to Heidegger’s. For Adorno, these are forms of totalizing thinking through which the subject suppresses and muffles the originality of objects. The second part focuses on the effect of Lukacs’s book “The Destruction of Reason” and the accusation of German Classical Philosophy in irrationalism. For Adorno, there is room for irrationalism in true dialectics. But far more frightening to him are the variants of one-sided rationality, as well as its incarnations in the power structures that crush all dissent. This is where the specific problem that led to the enmity between Adorno and Lukacs comes to light – the so-called “partisanship” of art or the ideology – art relationship. The third and fourth parts deal with the relationship between avant-garde art and realism, in which Lukacs sees a subjective-antisocial escape from reality, and Adorno – an expression of heterogeneity of the socially-objective world itself.

There was a fierce controversy in Russian literary studies as to whether it is justified to speak of a romantic discourse in Pushkin’s poetry in the early 1920s (1819–1824) and what caused it, provided that there was no major social cataclysm to unleash the relevant conceptual  direction  in  literature.  It  missed  something  particularly  important: the Greek uprising of 1821, echoed among all Balkan nations, and the increased  fascination  with  Byron’s  rebellious  poems  (a  kind  of  “import” of Byronism) demonstrated by the first poet of Russia. How the ideas of “Megali Idea” and “Eteria” reflect on the strengthening of the Greek (rebellious) theme and the appearance of the Bulgarian hero in Pushkin’s work, and in a sense provoke the Decembrist revolt in late 1825, will be discussed with examples from his lyric poetry and prose, outlining an overall paradigm in the poet’s existential turn and his attitude to freedom.

This paper compares the short essays of two of the most prominent Bulgarian political exiles in the United Kingdom in the second part of the 20th century – Petar Uvaliev (1915–1998) and Georgi Markov (1929–1978).  Both  authors  wrote  their  essays  to  be  aired  on  the  radio – Markov wrote them for the Radio Free Europe, Deutsche Welle and BBC, whereas Uvaliev’s texts appeared in the weekly BBC radio program Five minutes with Petar Uvaliev. Even though the life and writing trajectories of these authors differ significantly, as well as their perspectives on the totalitarian regime in People’s Republic of Bulgaria, their writings find common ground in the exploration of religious ideas and stylistic devices. This article seeks to identify the similarities and the differences in the ways Markov and Uvaliev treat religious themes and motifs in their essays. The paper also highlights the great art of essay writing and their intimate and strong connection to the Bulgarian cultural tradition.

The paper compares the debut novel of author Ernest Cline and its film adaptation by director Steven Spielberg in terms of the way they construct and utilize an alternative canon, closely related to the video game culture. Of main interest to this study is the critical reception of both works and its possible implications.

In the following text, I want to look at the nexus of word and visuality that is so central to Ognyan Kovachev’s work (and to how important themes and stock images of world literature travel in time), and to do so with our recent pandemic crisis in mind. I take my cue from the importance, until recently also ubiquity, of the mask in order to examine the co-existence of word and image from a different perspective, moving also in a different geographical direction, from Europe to the Caucasus, where the consolidation of Armenian literature as a national literature takes place in the first two decades of the last century.

Returning to “The Purloined Letter” introduces the question of interpretation on two intertwined levels – the internal (the fictional characters’ comments) and the external (the critics’ comments). The paper has the task of tracing interpretive strategies through characters’ voices, i.e. through the conflict of internal interpretations. Monsieur G’s method insists on the typical and on hermeneutic depth. The detective Dupin uses the contrasting approach; he conceptualizes the logic of the incommensurable and mimicry. The anonymous narrator's voice is not impartial, he confides in Dupin and so there are blind spots in the narrative itself. The following paper unfolds two detective micro-plots by following the tracks of the epigraphist and the author of the purloined letter. I examine the poetics of narrative as isomorphic to the manners in which we interrogate the interpretations of the characters within it. The conclusion is not surprising – reading is a real detective story.

The paper examines the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar as an example of world literature, going through three steps. The first step is to question why Marguerite Yourcenar is one of the authors included in David Damrosch’s “Around the World in 80 Books”. The second step is looking at the notion of world literature through the concepts of Harold Bloom’s “The West- ern Canon”, Ognyan Kovachev’s “Literature and Identity Transformations of Otherness”, and Galin Tihanov’s “Beyond Circulation”. The third step reads Yourcenar’s method as being in line with the idea of literary zones and zonality.