Wojciech H. Kalaga – författare

The contributions in this volume examine literary and other texts as well as cultural and political discourses in relation to issues of identity formation and dis-formation, of self and society and of the socially local within the global. All these issues come into play through the exploration of the fantasmatic space of mutual mis-recognition and mythmaking between coloniser and colonised, between 'Africa' and 'Europe'.

This book analyzes Mo Yan’s writings as well as other scholarly interpretations of his writings. When Mo Yan from China was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the term «hallucinatory realism» was invented to describe his storytelling as a «merging» of folk tales, history, and the contemporary. The author stakes out a Marxist approach to theorizing the class ideology that underwrites what Mo Yan says he «knows» of the «nebulous terrain» where one supposedly experiences moments of «transcending» or going «beyond» class and politics in literary sensibility.

This fifth volume in the Litanic Verse series is centered upon the poetics of European litanic verse (genre structure, rhythm, rhetorical figures), as well as its philosophy and cosmology, with a particular focus on the space-time matrix within which the litanic world is depicted. The content of the book moves beyond an analysis of enumerations and parallelisms as it provides an insight into relevant cultural processes, including the history of religion and literary conventions from Antiquity to Early Modernity. This allows seemingly distant topics, such as comparative versification and European identity, to be related. Theoretical considerations are accompanied by examples mostly taken from Latin, English, French, German, Iberian, Italian, Scandinavian and Slavic poetry.

This book interrogates the concept of the subject in the poem, against the broader background of literary-theoretical issues related to the lyric subject. Specifically, what kind of subject is the subject in the poem? What relation does it have to other forms of subjectivation that human beings experience in their life practices? What is its singularity?“The Lyric Subject is a most impressive achievement: a shrewd evaluation of a wide range of writings (philosophical, linguistic, literary) bearing on the question of the lyric subject. With myriad poetic examples, Varja Balzˇalorsky Antic´ develops a rich, multileveled mapping of the various forms of subjectivity and agency in the lyric.”Jonathan Culler, Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Breathing Earth: The Polyphonic Lyric of Robert Bringhurst examines the innovative poems for multiple voices composed by the Canadian poet by drawing on the main insights of biosemiotics, ecophilosophy and material ecocriticism. In seeking to emulate the polyphonic texture of reality, Bringhurst’s ecopoetry directs readers’ attention to vibrant matter and to the entanglements of (non)human and (in)animate actants in a world that is a semiotic-material unity. In light of the current climate crisis, his polyphonic poems are a timely, wise reminder of the need to rethink the way humanity relates to the more-than-human world and to restore a deep ecological bond with breathing earth.