2009 | ||
semiannually | ||
English | ||
Literature, Film |
||
1803-7720 | ||
Moravian Journal of Literature and Film
The Moravian Journal of Literature and Film, founded in 2009, is a Czech scholarly journal whose objective is to be a platform for an intersection of literary and film history, criticism, and theory. The journal examines literatures and films in any language, thus merging both regional and universal themes. The journal is published in English, has been peer-reviewed since its foundation, and has two issues a year. |
Fall 2009, Volume 1, Number 1
Living Cultural Plurality: A Tribute to Josef Jařab
Josef Jařab
Josef Jařab: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1966–2009
This bibliography of Josef Jařab, a leading Czech American literature and American studies scholar, the former Rector of Palacký University in Olomouc and the Central European University in Budapest, and the former member of the Senate of the Czech Republic, lists all his publications in languages other than Czech as well as most of his Czech works. Besides monographs, anthologies, and studies in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, it also lists his reviews, prefaces, commentaries, writers' profiles, and translations from English.
Not On Native Grounds
The paper discusses the significance of foreign experience for American writers. Differentiating several types of this experience, diplomatic service, expatriate experience, war service, and academic lecture tours, the paper analyzes the specific effects of foreign experience on three American writers, William Demby, Allen Ginsberg and Yusef Komunyakaa.
Multicultural Optimism or the Potential Joys of Otherness
The essay focuses on the literary reflection of the changing discourse on ethnicity and race in the second half of the twentieth century. It analyzes two novels of the 1990s that address the issue of ethnic identity from a humorous point of view. In both Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land (1996) and Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich's co-authored novel The Crown of Columbus (1991) ethnic identity is no longer a tragic burden but a mask to be used or discarded, explored, embraced, or modified. Both novels are delightful and hilarious ways of addressing and challenging serious personal, ethnic, cultural and historical issues and thus they well document the paradigmatic shift in the acceptance of ethnicity and the re-interpretations of centrality and marginality in American culture.
Ethnicity and Some Other Aspects of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep
The essay on Henry Roth's novel Call It Sleep views ethnicity and cultural diversity as very significant sources of the novel's dynamism. It focuses on Roth's depiction of ethnic diversity in an American urban ghetto, represented particularly by New York's Lower East Side. A detailed analysis of the novel's Prologue draws on the fact that it predetermines the nature of the author's novel, which is seen especially as a story of redemption. Special attention is paid to language as an important agent of expression of cultural plurality and to the confrontation of different religions. The essay also attempts to interpret several central symbols that relate to the protagonist's life and to the past of his family.
Jazz, Poetry, Ethnicity, and Democracy in the Work of Gary Snyder
The essay examines one of the key figures of the San Francisco Renaissance, Gary Snyder. It discusses those aspects of his life and work that have played a crucial role in the life and work of that pre-eminent personage in American studies scholarship, Josef Jařab. Jařab can be credited with introducing Snyder's writings, as well as the author himself, to Czech (and Czechoslovak) readers. It is not surprising that there are numerous points of contact between the careers of the two men. As the title suggests, the essay explores four selected issues. It probes into Snyder's experiments in combining verse with jazz forms, some of which took place while the poet was performing in Prague. It also deals with Snyder's unique vision of a multi-ethnic America and his all-embracing view of democracy, which goes beyond the boundaries of the human realm.
Breathing Out the Words of a Different World: American Indian Authors Writing in English
The essay discusses the connection between language and culture in American Indian literatures. Having found affinities between the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about language as a tool that shapes reality and the Indian belief in the magic of words, the author argues in favor of protecting the national (tribal) language and American cultural diversity because, with the loss of its language, a minority ethnic culture loses its grounding.
Frictions in the City: Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing vs. Paul Haggis’s Crash
The essay offers a comparative look at two cinematic responses to the question of multicultural coexistence in the American urban context, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) and Paul Haggis's Crash (2004). Both films received a variety of prizes and represented what were, in their day, ambitious efforts to address racial problems in the USA. The purpose of this comparative analysis is to consider to what extent the films succeeded in describing the phenomenon of US race relations in their multifaceted complexity.
Review of Time Refigured: Myths, Foundation Texts & Imagined Communities, edited by Martin Procházka and Ondřej Pilný. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2005. 382 p. ISBN 80-7308-102-4.
Review of Conformism, Non-Conformism and Anti-Conformism in the Culture of the United States, edited by Antonis Balasopoulos, Gesa Mackenthun, and Theodora Tsimpouki. European Views of the United States 1. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag WINTER, 2008. 330 p. ISBN 978-3-8253-5479-4.
Other Issues
Fall 2014, Volume 5, Number 2
Spring 2012, Volume 3, Number 2
Fall 2011, Volume 3,, Number 1
Spring 2011, Volume 2, Number 2
Fall 2010, Volume 2, Number 1
Spring 2010, Volume 1, Number 2