ISSN 1821-0686

4/2011


,
2011, III, . 4

, , 3, 11070
. : alfareci@gmail.com; . +381 11 26 99 039;
. : natasa-filipovic@live.com

.

.

. , . , .

Persida Lazarevi Di Giacomo, Universit degli Studi G. dAnnunzio, Chieti-Pescara,
Facolt di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Dipartimento di Studi Comparati e Comunicazione
Interculturale; . , , ; . , . , ; prof. dr Francois Xsavier Coquin,
Colledge de France, Paris; Isabelle White, Eastern Kentucky University, USA; .
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ISSN 1821-0686
300 .


. .......................................................................... 5
DEAR READERS ............................................................................................ 6


................................. 8
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20

THE USE OF METONYMIC METAPHORS IN DESCRIBING

FEMALE CHARACTERS IN MRS DALLOWAY AND ATONEMENT . ..... 37
.
. .......................
.

50

DISCURSO METAPOTICO EN LOS CUENTOS DE JULIO

CORTZAR . ...............................................................................................
.

63

:

..........................................
.

79

DOES B. WONGAR WRITE AS A MIGRANT WRITER?.......................... 93

.
THE QUEST FOR TRADITION IN CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN
FICTION ...................................................................................................
.

104

. .........................116
.
STORY-TELLING FROM THE MARGINS : NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES
IN WOMAN HOLLERING CREEK BY SANDRA CISNEROS
. ................................................................................ 128


-
. ................................................................................. 136

.............................................................. 156
.
THE POSITION AND PROGRESS OF WOMEN IN THE 18TH AND
19TH CENTURIES: COMPARATIVE CASE STUDIES OF MOLL
HACKABOUT AND ELIZA DOOLITTLE .............................................. 169
.
.
THE ACQUISITION OF TEACHING TECHNIQUES
. ................................................................................

206

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189

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208
228

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244

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INSTRUCTIONS FOR CONTRIBUTORS...............................................

254

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Dear readers,
Thanks to the policy of the former editorial staff of Rei and
the commitment of the former editor-in-chief, many changes have
been made to improve the quality of the journal. The number of
papers in English has increased. This has placed Rei onto the M53
list of academic journals. We thank all authors for their contribution.
In this issue our aim was to continue providing quality
papers which will represent a significant academic contribution.
We observed the ACADEMIC JOURNAL EDITING ACT
(article 23, paragraph 2 and article 24, paragraph 2), the Law on
State Administration of the Ministry of Science and Technological
Development of the Republic of Serbia (Official Gazette of the
Republic of Serbia, No. 79/05).
Complementing papers written in English and Serbian, a paper
in Spanish is also being published. This denotes the academic and
professional orientation of the Faculty of Foreign Languages. Our
aim was to realise Senecas idea in practice: A gift consists not in
what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer.
Thanks to the comprehensive and in-depth reviews and
the engagement of top reviewers, we believe we have taken an
important step forward. In the forthcoming period, we must strive
to obtain more papers from abroad. These objectives may seem
somewhat unrealistic. However, we must make great efforts to move
forward and exchange ideas globally. The guiding principle of the
editorial staff, the professors and assistants of this Faculty is neatly
summarized by Nikola Tesla: A man is born to work, to suffer and
to fight; he who doesnt must perish.
The new editorial staff does not plan to make sudden changes.
We will consider it a success if, by the end of the editorial staffs
term, Rei remains on the list of social sciences journals (SSCI).
Editor-in-Chief
Ass. Prof. Nataa Filipovi, PhD

1*

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Brzozowski, Piotr. Relacje midzy wartociami w wietle

bada dyferencjaem semantycznym. : Jzyk a kultura, T. 2.
Wrocaw, 1989. 355383.
, . :
. : W zwierciadle jzyka
i kultury. red. Jan Adamowski, Stanisawa Niebrzegowska.
Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 1999. 91101.
Chlebda, Wojciech. W jakim zakresie sownik dwujzyczny
moe by rdem informacji etnolingwistycznej? :
Etnolingwistyka a leksykografia. red. Wojciech Chlebda. Opole:
Uniwersytet opolski, 2010. 201208.
, . . . :
. . . :
, 2000.
, . :
. : , 49,
.1. : , 2004.
225228.
Krzeszowski, Tomasz. Parametr aksjologiczny w przedpojciowych schematach wyobraeniowych. : Etnolingwistyka.
T.6, Lublin, 1994. 2951.
Laskowska, Elbieta. Wartoowanie w jzyku potocznym.
Bydgoszcz: Wydawnictwo czelniane WSP, 1993.
, . . , 1989.
-, .
. :
, 2008.
Pajdziska, Anna. Wartociowanie we frazeologii. : Jzyk a
kultura. T. 3Wrocaw: 1991. 1528.
, . . . -:

18

, 2004.
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1995.

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, 2007.
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Dejan V. Ajdai
NON EQUIVALENCE OF UKRAINIAN AND SERBIAN VALUE
MARKED PHRASEOLOGIES
Summary
The author compares Ukrainian and Serbian phraseologies that
have a value mark and at the same time he analyses examples of their
non-equivalence. Different types of inequality are separated, such as: 1)
Asymmetry of values (phraseology that denotes a position on drunkenness),
2) Code nonequivalence (different treatment of the vertical axis of the body
in somatic code, Serbian cheek), 3) Non-equivalent quantifiers (Serbian:
dead), 4) Nonequivalent realities (Serbian: poppy, Ukrainian: buckwheat).
Key words: comparative phraseology, asymmetry, non-equivalence,
Ukrainian and Serbian phraseology

19

 M.

: 7.046.1:821.163.41.09
.
: 1.11.2011. .
: 12.11. 2011.

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35

Ana M. Markovi
PROCESS OF MYTHOLOGI ZING IN THE WORKS OF RASTKO
PETROVIC IN THE CONTE XT OF MODERN LITERARY
THEORIES
Summary
This work investigates the models and possible ways of research the process
of mythologization of Rastko Petrovic for whom it can be said that through
his narrative procede links modernistic search for recursive archetypes
on the one hand, and ancient, mythical and folklore patterns on the other
hand, and thus achieve mythological poetisation of reality on the semantic,
structural and on the stylistic-linguistic level. Since the Petrovics poetics of
mythinvolves the implementation of the myth in its diachronic perspective,
the interpretation of Petrovis literary text needs to apply those literary
and mythological theories that emphasize the dynamism of form and
meaning, which is actually caused by the dynamic quality of mythological
material and method of its summary processing. Thus, for certain aspects
of Petrovic`s implementation of mythical models and patterns in the
structure of the prose text is necessary to apply various interpretive tools
and conceptual apparatus of some modern literary-theoretical directions
structuralism, poststructuralism, practicesofdeconstructionism, new
historicism, semiotics, the theory of possible worlds.
Key words: myth, mythological structures, process of mythologization,
structuralism, poststructuralism, practicesofdeconstructionism, semiotics,
new historicism

36

: 821.111.09 Woolf V.
821.111.09 McEwan I.
: 1. 11. 2011. .
: 12. 11. 2011. .

THE USE OF METONYM IC METAPHORS IN

DESCRIBING FEMALE CHARACTERS IN MRS
DALLOWAY AND ATONE MENT1
Abstract: The paper discusses the connection between Woolfs Mrs
Dalloway and McEwans Atonement with special regard to the representation
of female characters, primarily Clarissa Dalloway, Cecilia and Briony
Tallis. As Elaine Showalter explains in her introduction to Mrs Dalloway,
one of the novels major motifs is the female life cycle, which is analogous
to the passing hours of the hot summer day of 1923 and presented through
a wide range of women of different age. This paper moves forward to the
hot summer day of 1935 and aims to add the Tallis women to the mentioned
range, primarily on the basis of metonymic metaphors, or symbols, which
are recurrent in both novels. The objects such as doors, dresses, flowers and
fountains play an important role in portraying female characters, and the
exploration of their possible meanings leads us to the discovery of certain
archetypal patterns regarding femininity, female maturation and initiation
into the womanly world of knowledge and experience.
Key words: symbol, metaphor, transition, female principles

Familiar was transformed into a delicious strangeness

[McEwan, 2002: 20].

As a characterizing feature of a certain poetic type the poetry of
association by comparison which joins a plurality of worlds metaphor
transfers the meaning of a name to an object by analogy or substitution
[Lodge, 1977: 73]. It is a figure generated by a process of substitution based
on a kind of similarity between two or more objects pertaining to different
spheres of thought. However, in exchanging one word (or for that matter,
world) for another we cannot simply rely on the similarity of the notions
behind these words, since metaphor necessarily implies a difference,
* a : tijanaparezanovic@gmail.com
1

This paper is a considerably lengthened and altered version of the paper entitled
Metaphorical Significance of Material Objects in Mrs. Dalloway and Atonement
and presented at the Conference on English and American Literature, Language and
Linguistics in Maribor, Slovenia, on September 19, 2009.

37

strangeness, a feeling of disparity and distinction existing between what is

said and what is meant: this distinction is sustained by the idea of plurality.
Since language as any other system of signs operates simultaneously on two
separate levels, those of combination and selection, metaphor is produced
according to the rules of the latter; it involves the selection of one word
among many others that would substitute and mask the real meaning [Ibid.,
74]. When Clarissa Dalloway starts musing melancholically on life and
death after the disappointment she has experienced her thoughts follow
such a direction:
There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room.
Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must
disrobe... Narrower and narrower would her bed be [Woolf,
2003: 23].
She actually pauses in her attic room at midday to consider the
midpoint of her life: as Woolf suggests, an ageing woman such as Clarissa
must divest herself psychologically of her sexuality (rich apparel) in order
to prepare for death. The narrow bed in which she sleeps undisturbed is in
fact a figure for a grave and the repeated comparative form of the adjective
narrow only serves to emphasize the approach of the end of her life. The
metaphorical substitution of the word grave for the word bed is made on
the basis of similarity between the two objects: their rectangular shapes are
very much alike and they share a common purpose rest. However, the
spheres of thought to which these two objects pertain are quite different: it
would be rather difficult to find a natural context in which bed and grave
coexist adjacent or in contiguity. Certainly, as noted by David Lodge, the
climax of Mrs Dalloway, the point of absolute similarity and spiritual
substitution is the death of Septimus Smith [1977: 188]: on hearing that a
young man has died, Clarissa feels that he has in a sense died in her place:
Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an
accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt [Woolf, 2003: 133]. Knowing
that it was Clarissa who was supposed to die in the original design of the
novel, we may understand the character of Septimus Warren Smith as a
major metaphor for Mrs Dalloway.
Reviewing Roman Jakobsons essay Two Aspects of Language
and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances (1956) Lodge notes Jakobsons
classification of various cultural phenomena according to the distinction
between metaphor and metonymy, metaphor being based on the principle
of similarity whereas metonymy functions on the principle of contiguity.
Thus in the Freudian interpretation of dreams,

38

condensation and displacement refer to metonymic aspect

of the dreamwork, while identification and symbolism are
metaphoric [...] Dream symbolism is a familiar process by
which, for instance, long pointed objects represent male
sexuality and hollow round objects female sexuality [Lodge,
1977: 79].
What Clarissa says of Peter Walsh is that it was his sayings one
remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife [Woolf, 2003: 3], the same
pocketknife which upon meeting Clarissa for the first time after thirtyfour years he takes out of his pocket, then holds quite openly, clenches
his fist upon and finally tilts towards her green dress; it is the same knife
Clarissa could swear he had had these thirty years [Ibid., 32]. Although
the substitution of two objects similar but still strangely separate in the
process of generating metaphor can lead to difficulties in understanding
the text, the realistic feature of a piece of writing can be preserved by
constructing a metonymic metaphor, or symbol: this implies the selection
of a single object or characteristic which is further repeated within a field
of contiguities [Lodge, 1977: 107]. Peters pocket-knife symbolizes his
masculinity and throughout the day he constantly fiddles with the knife
while he follows and contemplates women in the street, fantasizing about
sexual adventures which would prove to him that he is still young and
virile.
Symbol is the first signpost on the road towards true meaning.
Jungian analytical psychology equalizes symbol with the archetype: a
primordial and universal image that makes up the contents of the collective
unconscious and whose existence is revealed by the regular patterns of
imagery that reoccur in individual dreams, artistic productions and
primitive religions and mythologies. The theory of archetypes is [...]
applied by Jung to the personal history of the individual who goes through
a series of stages in a life-cycle going from birth to death [Macey, 2001:
211]. In the course of this cycle, the individual goes through a sequence of
archetypal experiences and incorporates them into his or her personal life,
whereby the merging of the archetypal and personal usually begins in the
later stages of ones life, when the person has gained sufficient maturity to
understand and accept his or her life and experiences [Ibid., 212].

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself [Woolf,
2003: 3].
The reader first meets Mrs Dalloway on a June day of 1923 as
a fifty-two-year-old lady who keeps returning in her mind to the times
when she was just Clarissa, a young girl of eighteen, eagerly waiting to

39

take her life into her own hands and make the best out of it. Her only
daughter is now turning eighteen and Clarissa has reached the end of her
childbearing years, which makes her constantly wonder about mortality
and loss. Her awareness of the inexorable passage of time is further raised
by the insistent chiming of clocks which seems to resonate throughout the
novel as a reminder of her upcoming party. As a perfect hostess that she
now appears to be, she has lost much of the free spirit of her youth and
has gained the feeling of responsibility that maturity necessarily brings.
Clarissas decision to buy the flowers herself serves helpfully to make her
believe she is in control of even those minor aspects of her life. Flowers
also associate her present life with the long summer vacations spent in
the familys mansion in the company of Peter and Sally, who had a way
with flowers. With the two of them [] she shared her past; the garden;
the trees [Ibid., 132]. These moments belong to the realm of times past,
and so does Lucrezias childhood in Milan and its beautiful gardens which
now stand in stark contrast with the ugliness of London streets and the
unhappy life she leads in England. When we first encounter McEwans
Cecilia Tallis, a promising girl in her early twenties, we notice that [she]
half ran with her flowers along the path that went by the river [McEwan,
2002: 18].
The beauty that flowers are inextricably linked with pertains to
femininity: one of the things that remain embedded in Robbies memory
of his encounter with Cecilia is an embroidered flower on her bra, a simple
daisy. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the name of Peters young wifetobe is Daisy: in order to relive his youth, he tries falling in love with
women in full blossom.
Flowers, first of all, are girls. Their beauty, their beautys
brevity, their vulnerability to males who wish to pluck them
these features and others have made flowers, in many cultures,
symbolic of maidens, at least to the males who have set those
cultures terms. The most obvious evidence is girls names
[Ferber, 1999: 74].
Flowers also represent mortality and the short duration of human
lives. It is therefore no wonder that Clarissa is occupied with purchasing
flowers, being obsessed with and frightened of the approaching old age
announced by menopause. The fact that all the three aforementioned women
are connected with flowers and, more precisely, the lack or unfitness of
flowers, is suggestive of certain defects in their femininity. For Clarissa,
there used to be a thing she left at Bourton: the beauty, love and absolute
freedom of her youth which she is no longer able to retrieve. In addition,

40

she feels her motherhood has not been a successful one, as her daughter
appears to be rather detached from her. Lucrezia feels similarly hindered
by the unhappy marriage in a foreign country, deprived of offspring, due
to which her femininity suffers to such an extent that even Septimus sees
her like a lily, drowned, under water [Woolf, 2003: 66]. Cecilia spends
her summer day trying desperately to arrange wild flowers that would
endow her home with the naturally beautiful look. She has not yet been
initiated into the womanly world and therefore cannot be acquainted
with the secrets femininity has to offer. However, the vase containing the
wild flowers gets broken, foreshadowing the violent break of Cecilia and
Robbies relationship2.
If the principles of femininity hide behind the flower imagery,
symbolism of masculine power and strength is revealed by the motive
of running water, the garden being the place where flowers and greenery,
fountains and springs all intertwine. Following the imagery of the Garden
of Eden, the garden continued its literary life as both setting for and
symbol of love encounters [Ferber, 1999: 83]. According to Chevalier and
Gheerbrants dictionary, garden is a representation of the life-giving uterus
and the symbol of mothers3, whereas water is heavenly semen: a universal
fertilizer representing the idea of a divine father [Biderman, 2004: 156].
Robbie explains his early ambitions to become a landscape gardener using
Freudian interpretation of his subconscious desire to become what his
missing father used to be. By doing so, he would fill the void that the lack
of father has made in his life and become himself capable of creating new
life. Hes got a first-rate mind, so I dont know what the hell hes doing,
messing about in the flower beds, says Leon describing Robbie [McEwan,
2002: 52]. The metaphor in this statement is perhaps worth noticing, as we
may wonder what brings flowers and beds together: is it the eternal rest
the beauty of life inevitably finds in death, or the wondrous combining of
youthful beauty with the act of sexual intercourse which will indeed take
place after some more pages of Atonement?

The importance of this scene only gains symbolic meaning and significance in

retrospect, as noted in Wells 2010: 100-101. Considering the novels major issues
(those of story-telling and narrative power), it might be argued that the fountain scene
bears relevance only insomuch as it is serves Brionys art. Although the very reality of
this and many other scenes from the first two parts of the novel is brought into question,
for the purposes of this paper they are interpreted on the symbolical level, regardless of
their role in the novels narrative layers.
See the entry vrt (garden).

41

She refreshed the flowers by plunging them into the fountains

basin [Ibid., 19].
Like every other symbol, water could be observed from two opposite
viewpoints: it is the source of life as well as the source of death. Diving into
waters only to surface later on represents symbolical death: as a frail white
nymph, Cecilia considers what a punishment drowning herself would be to
Robbie, though it would also signify a return to the original source of life
and resurrection. Thus Cecilias sudden plunge into the fountain could be
seen as the death of one stage of her life and the birth of another; it is a sort
of baptism and the first step into the world of maturity: she emerges as a
newborn and more self-aware woman. Two crucial scenes that contribute
to a great extent to both novels plots occur by a fountain: Cecilia and
Robbie keep feeling awkward in each others presence though they cannot
explain the reason. As Briony observes from the vantage point of the attic
room window:
There was only Robbie, and the clothes on the gravel, and
beyond, the silent park and the distant, blue hills. Unseen,
from two storeys up, with the benefit of unambiguous
sunlight, she had privileged access across the years to adult
behaviour, to rites and conventions she knew nothing about,
as yet [Ibid., 39].
After the plunge, they gain knowledge and realize that awkwardness
is a result of their mutual love. This knowledge eventually leads to the loss
of innocence and inexperience still preserved by them both in the fountain
scene. It anticipates the loss of virginity they will experience later on, as
well as Robbies imprisonment and inability to prove his innocence in the
events that will ensue.
Burdened with the thoughts of death, Clarissa remembers having
thrown a shilling into lake Serpentine, an offering she made in order to
preserve her life and soul. Even at the beginning of her day, when she
goes out to buy the flowers, the heroine is overwhelmed by the sensations
that have always haunted her, that something horrible is about to happen,
that living even one day is very dangerous. Clarissa is anxious about life
as well as death; she cannot therefore accept any kind of death, not even
the symbolical one that leads to rebirth into another stage of the cycle of
life: in the Bourton fountain scene, Clarissa does not take the plunge. The
final scene, the terrible scene which he believed had mattered more than
anything in the whole of his life [] happened at three oclock in the

42

afternoon of a very hot day [Woolf, 2003: 47]4. That day, committing her
soul to intensely passionate love seemed to Clarissa like denial of her self.
The moment of knowledge in her life occurs only years later when through
the character of Septimus Smith who, as she observes, plunged, she accepts
old age, transformation and mortality as constituent elements of life5.
Similarly to Clarissas fountain vividly covered with green moss, the
one in the Tallises garden with its muscular figure of the Greek god, the
messenger of the deep, stands as a fine representative of manliness, strength
and virility. Even the hills seen in the distance bear the recognizable phallic
shape which is, like Peters knife, indicative of the masculine instincts,
desires and potency. On the other hand, round and hollow shapes such as
that of a vase denote typically feminine features, whose power relies largely
on the secret of metamorphosis and alchemy: the vase, a flower-holder,
gains by means of similarity of shape the significance of the uterus. Ill fill
it for you, and you take the flowers [...] This was a command on which he
tried to confer urgent masculine authority [McEwan, 2002: 29]. Robbies
urgent masculine authority is directed towards Cecilia with the vase in
her arms that is about to be broken. Apart from the already mentioned
symbolism, the broken vase might further indicate Cecilias ensuing loss of
virginity. Later on, Robbie observes a little dent at the top of her shoulder
and starts pondering on how his tongue will soon trace the oval of this
rim and push into the hollow [Ibid., 130]. The most famous example of
the hollow forms as symbols of femininity is probably the four-letter word
which evokes Brionys thoughts on how the curved and hollow shape of its
first three letters (c, u and n) almost paints the very object the word refers to.
Furthermore, the shape of the letters is equivalent to that of a vase.

Now we will cross, she said [Woolf, 2003: 12].

Doors are often seen as places of transition between two states, two
worlds, between the known and the unknown, innocence and experience,
light and darkness. They are a feminine symbol which contains all the
implications of the symbolic hole, since it is the door which gives access
4

It should perhaps be emphasized that the first part of Atonement takes place on the

hottest day of the summer. Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith keep repeating verses
from Shakespeares Cymbeline: Fear no more the heat of the sun. Enduring heat, as
Clarissa perhaps discovers at the end of Mrs Dalloway, symbolically stands for the
endurance of everything that life brings, be it good or bad. Similarly, the hottest day of
the summer will be Cecilias initiation into the life fraught with love and pain she needs
to endure.
The English idiomatic expression inevitably comes to mind take the plunge. It builds
metaphorically on the similarity between jumping or throwing something and getting
married. Both actions signify transitions to a different state.

43

to the hole [Circlot, 1971: 85]. Clarissa is disturbed by someone slipping

the brass knob on her door, and on entering Cecilias house, Robbie makes
note of the brass lions-head handle. According to certain traditional tales,
the lion is seen as the keeper of a mysterious castle or a temple6. Robbie
indeed supports this idea by taking off his boots first, and then his socks
as well once he is inside the house of his beloved, and after he has been
accused of the horrible crime, Mrs Tallis does not want his polluting
presence in the house. Clarissa finds it outrageous that anyone should dare
to interrupt her in the privacy of her room on the day of the eagerly awaited
party. Clarissa keeps trying to balance the privacy and loneliness she needs
with the necessity to communicate with other people. One of her attempts
at communication is throwing parties: on these occasions, people gather
and reunite and her house suffers some changes as all the doors are taken
off their hinges. This is done in order to facilitate communication and force
people to come out of their rooms/selves and share common space with
others: every person who enters a room fills it with his or her presence,
thoughts and feelings. It thus becomes easier to understand other peoples
personalities. Going through doors and peering out of windows is the same
as crossing boundaries: intruding upon other peoples minds and trying
to communicate with them. Septimus is haunted by the idea that he must
tell everybody what he has discovered: that there is no death, and this he
confirms by jumping out of a window. Window is the line that separates
one being from another: upon retreating to her room to muse on the death
of a young man, Clarissa sees an old lady in a room of the house opposite
her own: Clarissa and the lady exist at the same time within their separate
rooms, within their individual selves. Seeing the old lady is for Clarissa
like looking in the mirror into which she can finally plunge and find herself
on the other side, at another stage of life: in her old age. In a similar way,
all Cecilia needs to do in order to enter the garden with the fountain is go
through the French windows of the living room; she thus penetrates into
the area of maturity and gains access to the world of women in their prime.
That very evening, in the library with Robbie, Cecilia will make a sighing
sound which marks a transformation. On the other hand her younger sister
has not yet gone from her mother she is gradually experiencing various
elements of adulthood through a series of events that initiate her into
the world of mature people. Briony is at the stage of her life where she
inhabits an ill-defined transitional space between the nursery and adult
worlds which she crosse[s] and recrosse[s] unpredictably [McEwan,
2002: 141]. Looking out of the window at the fountain, she is situated
in between these two worlds: the world of her own mock adulthood and
6

44

Examples include Chinese, Cambodian, Indonesian and Thai cultures.

childish seriousness with which she strives to put on the play showing the
toil and hardship of adult life, and the world in which a real moment of
transition into adulthood is about to take place. However, being separated
from reality in an enclosed room of her own, Briony is in a sense still in
her ivory tower, still awaiting the moment of being when she will at last
become recognisably herself [McEwan, 2002:41], just like Clarissa who,
when she feels most deserted and excluded, goes to her attic room and likes
to think of herself as a child exploring a tower [Woolf, 2003: 23]. Both
Briony and Clarissa (and Cecilia, for that matter) are attempting to enter
the following stage of their lives, and both are required to question their
expectations and beliefs in the process.
Virginia Woolf invites her readers to imagine a room, like many
thousands, with a window looking across peoples hats and vans and
motorcars to other windows [Woolf, 2004: 29]. It is also through a
window that Briony bids her farewell to Robbie, whereas Cecilia crosses
the threshold to reach out to him. Robbies arrest and departure take place
precisely at dawn, which is by definition a period of transition between
two states.

[She] gently detached the green dress and carried it to the

window [Woolf, 2003: 28].
As Cecilia tries to find an adequate gown for the dinner party, she
first discards the black dress which makes her look too serious and is
inappropriate for her age; then she rejects the pink dress that makes her
too childish. She owned only one outfit that she genuinely liked, and that
was the one she should wear [McEwan, 2002: 97] a dark green dress
bought to celebrate the end of finals as another crucial point in her path
towards maturity. Briony, on the other hand, is dressed in a girlish white
frock though she is well aware that it is childish not to take care of her
appearance; she is looking forward to playing Arabellas role and wearing
peach and cream satin dress her mother found for Arabellas wedding. White
is considered to be the colour of the first stage in the rituals of initiation;
it is therefore also the first step in the progress towards the inevitable
death. White is the traditional colour of virginity and purity, usually worn
by brides to symbolically denote their farewell to girlhood. According
to Chevalier and Gheerbrants dictionary, as a lunar colour, white is
associated with a full moon whose round shape is the archetype of a fertile
woman7. The moon symbolizes the biological rhythm and female principle
reflected in the constant transformations from one phase to another. The
7

See the entries bijelo (white) and mjesec (moon).

45

moons continually changing phases led to its association with mutability,

metamorphosis, inconstancy, or fickleness [Ferber, 1999: 128]. The way
Peter Walsh sees Clarissa, she still had the power as she came across the
room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace
in the summer sky [Woolf, 2003: 35].
Upon coming to the Tallises household, Lola changed into a green
gingham frock to offset her colouring, from which Briony immediately
draws the conclusion that she could not ask Lola to play the prince
[McEwan, 2002: 11]. Due to her outfit, Lola appears as a true woman, not
a child; her dress stands in contrast to Brionys and indicates that Lola has
already crossed Brionys transitional space. It is therefore not possible for
her to play the role of a man, as it would be were she still a child. In Mrs
Dalloway, womens attire is almost exclusively green, as if it were a kind of
natural exfoliation8. Elizabeth is like a hyacinth sheathed in glossy green
[Woolf, 2003: 90]. Septimus is entranced by the memory of Miss Isabel
Pole in a green dress walking in a square. Even Miss Kilman wears a green
macintosh coat and though Clarissa at the age of eighteen used to wear a
white dress, she now admires sea-green brooches at the jewellers, while
her favourite dress is a silver-green mermaids dress. Just like Cecilias
vase, Clarissas dress needs mending; so Clarissa arms herself with a
needle and scissors. Scissors are her means of protection against intruders
upon her privacy; scissors were also a tool of Athrope, one of the Parcae,
who used them to cut the thread of life. They are therefore reminiscent of
the possibility of sudden death, of which Clarissa is terrified. It is her fear
of death that she tries to overcome by mending her green dress and thus
attaining an illusion that she can perhaps control her ageing; it is also her
diminishing femininity that she strives to recover.
Green is a human colour; the colour of the incessant regeneration
and resurrection of the mother earth, the colour of vegetation which
puts on its green apparel every spring. Every new yearly cycle restores
fertility to the soil; therefore, green is another female colour: like nature,
women are capable of giving life and feeding their offspring. The parallels
between the sexual and the natural cycles are in both novels reinforced
by the green colour of womens attire. Apart from the leaden circles of
Big Ben as a warning against the inexorable flow of historical time and
Clarissas subjective time span of thirty years, there is a third time zone
in Mrs Dalloway, marked by the ticking of the biological clock. Choosing
a green frock for both Clarissa and Cecilia signifies acceptance of their
femininity and the process of its constant change: while Cecilia needs
8

46

See Introduction to Mrs Dalloway (1992) by Elaine Showalter, p. XXXI.

to grasp the notion of her newly gained sexuality, Clarissa is bound to

face the stage in which her sexuality dwindles and gives way to a new
generation of womanhood. As Elaine Showalter notes in her Introduction,
Mrs Dalloway deals on several levels with peoples ability to cope
with change [1992: xv]. Clarissas feelings could well be expressed by
the thoughts of Emily Tallis: And here was the ghost of her childhood,
diffused throughout the room, to remind her of the limited arc of existence.
How quickly the story was over [McEwan, 2002: 151]. What neither of
them openly acknowledges is that the story is everlasting and reaching
further beyond what most of us can fathom: all the way to the very core
of humankind and the essence of femininity. Women represented in these
two novels Clarissa, Cecilia, Lucrezia, Briony, Lola and Emily all to a
certain extent embody those genuine and ancient female principles, which
are largely emphasized by the use of recurring symbols, the significance of
which extends further beyond the scope of Atonement and Mrs Dalloway.

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: 159.946.3: 32
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7.11.2011.

:
.
1 . , . . .
,
.
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1. J , ,
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, - , , ,
* : elentsche@yahoo.com
1

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.

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,
, a .

2.
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. 1 ,
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.
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,
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[, 2004:
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, .
, , , ,
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struktura/predsednik.39.html

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 [, 2000: 291].
,
, .
,

[, 2000: 302-303]. 1. ( .): , , , , ,
, , ; 2. (, ); 3.
. [ 1969: ].
, a .
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[, 2000:
208]. ,
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 , . ,
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[, 1997: 304]. ,
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54

3.1.3.
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,
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 , ,

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 , , .
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, , a (, 2000: paronomasia).
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 ,
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61


. http://www.kragujevac.rs/Predsednik_skupstine-107-1, 27. 10.
2011. .
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.
Jelena Lj. Spasi
FIGURES OF REPETITION IN POLITICAL SPEECH
Summary
In this paper an attempt has been made to establish the most
frequently used schemes in Serban political speech. The analysis has
been conducted on data collected from two political speeches held at The
National Assembly of Serbia in March 2009. The use of the anaphora,
epiphora, epanaphora, mezophora, polyptoton, paronomasia, cumulation
and polysyndeton has a very important role in the cohesion and coherence
of the political speech. Various schemes may serve for giving structure to an
argument and underlining the repeated elements. The most frequent scheme
in political speech is anaphora and it is also combined with other figures of
repetition. There are repetitions of a word or phrase at the beginning of a
sentence or section of speech, but also repetitions of the lexemes that make
the theme of the speech or repetitions of the homofunctional elements of a
clause. Each repetition in political speech includes a variation of meaning.
Key words: stylistics, linguostylistics, political speech, figures of
speech, repetition

62

821.134 (7/8).09. Cortzar J.

: 1. 10. 2011. .
: 12. 10. 2011. .

DISCURSO METAPO TICO EN LOS

CUENTOS DE JULIO CORTZAR
Resumen: La narrativa cuentstica de Julio Cortzar se caracteriza por la
presencia de un discurso metapotico. La problematizacin textual de las
cuestiones relativas a su propia potica. El presente trabajo se preocupa
del anlisis de este discurso en los cuentos seleccionados, escritos por
Cortzar, por medio de la consideracin de diversos aspectos de la relacin
autorlector, as como la metfora de la continuidad de la literatura.
Basada en este impulso metanarrativo, la narracin de Cortzar en estos
cuentos llega al punto de intercambio de los papeles de autor/lector, lo que
resulta en la llamada apertura del texto. De tal modo, la metarefleccin
se convierte en un medio de fusin de las dos agencias, el acto que lleva
al lector ms plenamente en el proceso creativo. Se trata de un acto de
juego libre o creativo entre el autor, la agencia que ofrece a los lectores la
oportunidad de generar el significado (y textos), y el lector, quien llene los
vacos interpretativos generados por el texto.
Palabras clave: metapotica, autor, lector, discurso, narracin, teora de la
recepcin, espacios vacos del texto
No puede ser que seamos dos, no puede ser
que seamos dos.
(Del Poema sin nombre en ltimo round)
El escritor frente al objeto esttico es el motivo presente, en
diferentes maneras, en casi toda la obra de Julio Cortzar. Las reflexiones
acerca de creacin y recepcin del texto literario marcan su escritura desde
Bestiario (1951) hasta Deshoras (1983), desde los Premios (1960) hasta
Libro de Manuel (1973). En este trabajo quiero discutir este motivo dentro
de la cuentstica del autor. Sin embargo es necesario notar una tendencia de
Cortzar de relacionar todas sus novelas, cuentos y ensayos unos con otros
en cuanto a la cuestin. Cada nueva obra resulta el dilogo con la potica
de la obra anterior, de manera de que se afirma en realidad la metfora
de continuidad de literatura. Los fundamentos de su potica encontramos
* : natasa-filipovic@live.com

63

expuestos en modo explcito en su ensaystica (Para una potica, Del

cuento breve y sus alrededores, Notas sobre la novela contempornea,
Algunos aspectos del cuento). Sobre todo, en estos ensayos parece obvio el
concepto de literatura como bsqueda: La verdad es que la literatura con
mayscula me importa un bledo; lo nico interesante es buscarse y a veces
encontrarse en este combate con las palabras que despus dar el objeto
llamado libro.1 Con Rayuela empieza la reflexin metapotica. Por medio
de Morelli Cortzar habla de desescribir la literatura, de lector como
el creador del texto, del significado del texto literario como situado en la
relacin entre el texto y el lector. Opta por la esttica de la recepcin activa
y dice en el captulo 97 de Rayuela: El verdadero y nico personaje que
me interesa es el lector, en la medida en que algo de lo que escribo debera
contribuir a mutarlo, a desplazarlo, a extraarlo a enajenarlo.
El inters de Cortzar por el lector coincide con la interrogacin
despierta de la crtica frente el acto de lectura y frente la relacin autortexto. Ocurre un cambio de perspectivas literarias en el sentido de
actualizacin de las cuestiones de las relaciones realidad-ficcin y narradordiscurso. Sobre todo interesa notar el movimiento hacia autoreflexividad,
donde, explcita o implcitamente, el autor cuestiona su propio papel y
actitud en la constitucin del objeto esttico. En este sentido, la potica
de Julio Cortzar manifiesta unas caractersticas de lo que se denomina
como el postmodernismo. El asunto de metaficcin y dentro de este la
problematizacin de la relacin autor-texto-lector aparece en muchos
relatos del escritor. Lo que domina en estos relatos es el propsito de
cambiar la manera de ser lector y autor, de minimizar la distancia entre
ellos. El lector en un perodo anterior no es la instancia problemtica; no
tiene acceso en un mundo en que existen slo autor y el texto. Se ignora
el hecho que el texto est dirigido al lector. Para sostener este punto de
vista, se sirve de estrategias narrativas como el uso de la primera persona,
autoreflexividad, manipulacin de la voz narrativa o claves intertextuales.
Este ensayo est basado en la seleccin de cinco textos de Cortzar
como ejemplos del uso por el autor de la metfora de continuidad de
literatura. Para responder a la pregunta qu es literatura? para Cortzar,
me sirvo de una divisin provisional a los dos grupos de relatos. El primer
grupo ofrece la respuesta medio de la discusin sobre la posibilidad de
fusin de autor y lector, y el segundo trata la consecuencia de esta fusin,
encarnada en el entendimiento del texto como apertura y posibilidad.
1

Julio Cortzar, Saludos de Julio Cortzar, Life en espaol. vol.33, nm. 7 (Nueva
York, 1969).

64

Fusin de autor y lector en Axolotl y Continuidad de los

parques
La inversin de la nocin tradicional de las funciones de autor, lector
y personaje y su instalacin dentro de un marco de metaficcin produce el
cambio no slo en el entendimiento de gnesis de la obra literaria sino en
la posicin ontolgica. Vice versa, parece que la insistencia en la falsedad
de la divisin entre sujeto y objeto, entre lo racional y lo irracional, antes
y despus, produce en la reflexin poetolgica de Cortzar la conclusin
sobre la posibilidad de fusin de las instancias narrativas en el proceso de
creacin. Todo en escritura de Cortzar refleja este deseo de fusionarse con
otredad, llegar al cielo de la rayuela. Su programa insiste en el pasaje
al otro lado de lgica, en compenetracin de lo racional e imaginario,
emotivo y lgico, sujeto y objeto.
La relacin obvia en Axolotl del yo-otro es anloga a la de autorlector.
La transformacin del sujeto en el objeto se produce por el uso de los
pronombres yo (el narrador en primera persona), l (el axolotl), nosotros
(la fusin: escribir sobre nosotros). La confusin de perspectivas, genera
la imposibilidad de responder a la cuestin sobre la autenticidad del sujeto
de enunciacin (yo, l o nosotros?). Como sujeto y objeto terminan en
una especie de simbiosis ontolgico (nuestro cuerpo), es evidente que se
trata de una potica que insiste en la unicidad de las instancias narrativas.
El asunto es sostenido por el uso de metfora de espejo: el autor y lector
se miran uno a otro y esta mirada recproca parece que constituye el
significado del texto: la imposibilidad de separar dos manos unidas en
oracin.
La idea similar encontramos en Continuidad de los parques. Aqu,
diferente que en Axolotl, donde sujeto y objeto enfrentan uno a otro antes
de asimilarse, las instancias funcionan en una eje vertical: un relato sirve
como el marco para el otro, y consecuentemente, la fusin ocurre con la
irrupcin de un nivel narrativo en el otro. La fusin ocurre entre los niveles
de escritura y realidad, cuando la primera irrumpe en la segunda, mientras
por medio de metfora de lector entrampado y asesinado se insina la
imposibilidad de la lectura pasiva. El lector sentado cmodamente en el
silln no se da cuenta de la posibilidad de la confusin de dos planos y de
que est perseguido desde lo interno del texto. Como receptor pasivo del
mensaje cae vctima fcil de la propia pasividad. En trminos de potica
cortazariana se insina por una parte, la muerte de lector conquistado por
la ilusin novelesca, y por otra la idea de la continuidad de literatura
y de su ilimitacin. En trminos negativos se hace afirmacin de una
posicin esttica que invita al lector que comparte en el acto de creacin.

65

Se insina un lector entremetido en el proceso de creacin, que se somete

conscientemente a la manipulacin y participa en ella. De tal manera la
lectura y la escritura, slo como partes complementarias pueden generar
el significado. Las instancias narrativas invierten sus lugares, donde el
lector crea el texto ajeno y el autor lee su propio texto. Este asunto sigue
siendo en los relatos cortos de Cortzar en el sentido de que la relacin
lector-autor-texto le sirve como punto de partida para generar los temas y
que cada uno de ellos requiere un lector cmplice, capaz de compartir en
el acto de creacin. Es el mismo lector a que Julio Ortega califica como
lector modificado2.

Consecuencias de la fusin: el texto como apertura

Ya dijimos que Cortzar escribe en el momento en que el criticismo
comienza a destronar a autor en favor a lector. Su intencin es la
reconciliacin de una falacia intencional con la falacia afectiva. Llega a
la conclusin de importancia de una teora receptiva en lugar de aceptar
la nocin de que el autor genera el significado del texto. La constitucin
del significado del texto en el contexto de la intenciones del autor resulta
insuficiente. La bsqueda filosfica de un mundo invisible se convierte
en su potica en la exploracin y bsqueda de los huecos que producen
el significado de un texto. La bsqueda inicia con Rayuela que ms que
nada postula un nuevo papel para el lector. Aparece la idea de la necesidad
de la colaboracin del lector en la creacin de la novela. Como la lectura
tradicional, pasiva, no logra a constituir el significado, se proclama una nueva
potica que exige un nuevo lector capaz de transformarse en el creador del
texto, de llenar los huecos dejados por el texto. Para Cortzar el inters del
lector por las intenciones del autor es slo un caso especial de la afirmacin
que el lector constituye el significado del texto. De otras palabras, el texto
provee las palabras e ideas, pero el lector constituye el significado por
medio del proceso del traduccin. En este punto llegamos a la coincidencia
entre la potica de Cortzar y teora de recepcin de Wolfgang Iser. En The
Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation3 Iser afirma la
importancia de la interaccin entre la estructura de la obra y su receptor
para la creacin del significado de texto. De tal manera el estudio de la obra
se preocupa, no slo en el texto, sino en la respuesta al texto tambin:
From this we may conclude that the literary work has two
poles, which we might call the artistic and aesthetic: the artistic
2
3

66

J ulio Cortzar, La casilla de los Morelli. Prlogo por Julio Ortega (Barcelona: Ortega), 8.
Wolfgang Iser. Interaction between Text and Reader, in The Reader in the Text: Essays
on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton
University Press, 1980), 106-119.

pole is the authors text, and the aesthetic is the realization

acomplished by reader. In view of this polarity, it is clear that
the work itself cannot be identical with the text or with its
actualization but must be situated somewhere between the
two. It must inevitably be virtual in character, as it cannot
be reduced to the reality of the text or the subjectivity of the
reader, and it is from this virtuality that it derives its dynamism
[Interaction between Text and Reader, 106].
La parte de la discusin de Iser que nos interesa aqu empieza
con su cita de Laing (Politics of Experience): your experience of me is
invisible to me and my experience of you is invisible to you. Segn Iser
esta invisibilidad presenta el fundamento de las relaciones personales.
Sobre este espacio entre dos personas que Laing denomina como nothing and Iser gap, se construye el significado. Lo mismo se refiere a
la relacin lector-texto, con la diferencia de que aqu no existe el marco
referencial ni claves que regulan esta interaccin, todo lo que representa el
punto central de la teora de huecos de Iser. Segn esta teora, los huecos
en la estructura del texto estimulan el proceso de ideacin en el lector
segn un marco que propone el texto. Los huecos del texto de tal manera
inducen la construccin del significado, lo que en ltima instancia provoca
la apariencia del objeto esttico. La participacin del lector en el texto no
se reduce slo a la interiorizacin de lo dado en el texto, sino significa su
transformacin:
What is missing from the apparently trivial scenes, the gaps
arising out of the dialogue-this is what stimulates the reader
into filling the blanks with projections. He is drawn into the
events and made to supply what is meant from what is not
said Whenever the reader bridges the gaps, communication
begins [Interaction between Text and Reader, 110].
Cortzar, del modo similar a Iser, ve el significado del texto literario
situado en la relacin lector-texto. En Ultimo round expone su potica y
habla de la teora que encuentra el significado del texto en la articulacin
de los huecos entre los signos. Se deduce que Cortzar ve en los huecos de
Iser una posibilidad fuerte de escribir de lo desconocido, de hacer apertura
de literatura, de comunicar todos sus textos, construyendo de tal modo una
literatura ilimitada y continua.
El acto de creacin de texto para Cortzar no pertenece a un
enunciado fijo y a un proceso unidireccional. Con la aceptacin de la
teora de huecos, la constitucin del significado se convierte en un proceso
dinmico, lo que es evidente en los textos que nos interesan. Se trata de

67

los tres cuentos de dos diferentes libros de cuentos, que elegimos como
ejemplos del proyecto cortazariano de la literatura no acabada. Queremos
tanto a Glenda es el cuento del libro que lleva el mismo ttulo4; Botella
al mar y Diario para un cuento, los textos inaugural y clausural del libro
Deshoras [Cortzar, 1982]. En este punto nos interesa la relacin entre los
tres cuentos en la luz de la idea de la continuidad de la literatura. De otras
palabras, parece que los huecos en Cortzar no existen solamente dentro
del texto, sino entre los diferentes textos, a travs de la de inversin del
ordenamiento de los cuentos en Deshoras. Botella al mar, el texto que abre
el libro, subtitulado Eplogo a un cuento presenta el dilogo con el cuento
escrito antes (Queremos tanto a Glenda), mientras el texto final, Diario
para un cuento expone el proyecto de preparacin para la escritura de un
nuevo cuento. Los tres cuentos giran sobre la cuestin de la obra artstica.
Queremos tanto a Glenda sirve como como punto de partida: el
cuento narra la historia de un grupo de admiradores de Glenda Garson que
apropian las copias de sus pelculas para modificarlas segn lo que ellos
consideran es la perfeccin. Cuando la actriz se retorna al cine despus
del temporario retiro, los miembros eliminan a Glenda para mantener la
perfeccin lograda.
Botella al mar y Diario para un cuento estn escritos en forma de
metatexto. El primer relato, escrito como, contiene la trama del cuento
anterior Queremos tanto a Glenda y de la pelcula Hopscotch, mientras
el segundo, escrito en forma de diario, cuenta la historia de una ancdota.
Los dos estn escritos en primera persona, con los abundantes referencias
a la vida del autor y los dos contienen las reflexiones sobre las cuestiones
poetolgicas. El uso de las formas de diario y cuento apunta hacia el efecto
de autenticidad, mientras en realidad existen dos tipos del discurso (carta
y cuento en Botella al mar , diario y cuento en Diario para un cuento), el
hecho que genera, entre el texto y lector, un espacio blanco. Este hueco,
creado por la confusin de dos diferentes discursos es en efecto el espacio
de problematizacin del texto de la manera de que pone nfasis en la
imposibilidad para el autor, de excluirse del objeto del discurso, y para el
lector, de aislarse de su papel de sujeto en la creacin del texto.
El texto consiste de una carta dirigida a la actriz Glenda Jackson.
El narrador-autor descubre la coincidencia entre su relato Queremos tanto
a Glenda y la pelcula Hopscotsh, protagonizada por Glenda Jackson. Le
parece al escritor que la pelcula represente la respuesta (o la venganza) de
actriz a ese cuento, todo lo que da el tema a la carta. La voz narrativa trata
de descifrar (interpretar) la dicha respuesta. (No es una venganza sino un
4

68

Julio Cortzar, Queremos tanto a Glenda (Mxico; D. F. Editorial, 1981)

llamado al margen de todo lo admisible, una invitacin a un viaje que slo

puede cumplirse en territorios fuera de todo territorio.)
El texto de Botella al mar est operando con dos discursos: el cuento
Queremos tanto a Glenda y la pelcula Hopscotch. Los dos representan
el objeto de interpretacin para el autor-narrador de la carta que los
contiene. La estrategia del narrador consiste en poner los dos discursos
en una relacin de reciprocidad. La analoga entre ellos se establece con
el motivo comn de la eliminacin de los caracteres principales. Las
claves para el significado de cada uno estn situadas en el otro, en la
interpretacin de cada uno de los discursos. El narrador juega con el uso
de los pronombres para confundir las instancias narrativas: En el cuento
que acaba de salir en Mxico yo la mat simblicamente, Glenda Jackson,
y en esta pelcula usted colabora en la eliminacin igualmente simblica
del autor de Hopscotch. El punto que nos interesa aqu es el uso de autor
de Hopscotch para identificar el personaje con el autor Julio Cortzar.
De modo similar se borra la diferencia entre Glenda Garson (personaje)
y Glenda Jackson (actriz). El procedimiento permite la posibilidad para
el autor que mate al personaje (Julio Cortzar mata a Glenda Garson en
Queremos tanto a Glenda. Tambin, resulta posible lo contrario: Glenda
Jackson, personaje en la pelcula Hopscotch, mata al autor de Hopscotch.
Lo que la voz narrativa llama hermosa simetra est representado por el
hecho de que cada uno de ellos est creado en el texto de otro.
En Botella al mar el narrador y el autor son la misma persona, lo
que nos lleva al problema de la relacin entre el narrador y su texto y de la
creacin del objeto esttico. En su base, el texto se crea por el juego de dos
recursos: la presencia del metadiscurso y el nivel intertextual.
La configuracin del metatexto como el propio texto es estrategia
presente en muchos de los relatos cortos del escritor (Carta a una seorita
a Pars, Lejana, etc.) Botella al mar rompe con el cierre del cuento
Queremos tanto a Glenda para formar un nuevo cierre (nuevo significado),
lo que produce por consecuencia la apertura. La indeterminacin producida
tiene por efecto el deseo de lector que llene los huecos, tratando de resolver
el conflicto entre la apertura y la ambigedad del texto.
La nocin de metalenguaje sirve para designar a un lenguaje
que habla sobre otro, de manera de que existen un lenguaje enunciador
(metadiscurso) y un lenguaje enunciado (discurso). Los trminos
relacionados: metaliteratura, autorepresentacin, metaficcin tienen por
nfasis el proceso de creacin de literatura en vez de creacin como
producto. (Linda Hutcheon define metaficcin como fiction about
ficcin- that is, fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own

69

narrative and/or linguistic identity.5) El texto de Botella se desdobla en

metadiscurso/discurso de carta y discurso del cuento que consiste de dos
tramas: la pelcula Hopscotch y el cuento Queremos tanto a Glenda. El
problema con la escritura de cartas consiste en la simulada ausencia de
las pretensiones literarias de su escritor; es un narrador que no quiere
narrar sino escribir cartas. Esta estrategia produce una estructura doble que
tiene por resultado el dicho hueco en la lectura. Cortzar insiste en esta
dualidad en la organizacin del texto: por una parte, tiene que seguir las
normas del narrar, y por otra parte, las normas de la escritura de carta. El
lector, por consecuencia, cambia el enfoque de lectura desde el discurso de
narrador hacia discurso de autor. Lo que propone Cortzar de tal manera es
la interrogacin sobre las formas literarias superadas y la renovacin de la
nocin del papel del lector: se invita al lector que llene el hueco producido
como artificio de la ficcin.De este hecho parece evidente la investigacin
por parte del escritor de la relacin autor-lector-personaje dentro del proceso
de escritura. El cuento mismo est dedicado a los problemas poetolgicos.
Carcter epistolar del texto se elige para aprobar la participacin de
todos los interlocutores como productores de los mensajes. (Estamos
escribiendo o actuando para terceros, no para nosotros.) La relacin entre
estas instancias se ve bien reflejada en la estructura del relato.
El texto es el dilogo de la voz narrativa con Glenda ausente. La carta
a Glenda se presenta al mismo tiempo el relato destinado a los lectores. La
carta en su primera parte sintetiza el propio relato de Cortzar Queremos
tanto a Glenda, mientras en su segundo segmento da un sumario de la
pelcula Hopscotcsh. Por medio de la interpretacin de la coincidencia
misteriosa entre ellos, se produce el nuevo texto que debera dar un
cierre. La relacin autor-personaje se presenta en la primera parte como
conflictiva, para que se resuelva en la hermosa simetra de la conclusin.
De otras palabras, el narrador del relato opta por el entendimiento mutuo
de las instancias comunicativas como condicin del discurso literario. Se
indica, en trminos positivos, una confusin entre la voz y el personaje,
entre el sujeto y objeto.
La misma relacin es evidente en cuanto al nivel ontolgico. En este
sentido, el relato se presenta como interdependencia del sujeto y objeto
en el proceso de escritura. En el principio el sujeto es incapaz de explicar
las coincidencias entre el cuento y la pelcula (ni usted ni yo podemos
saber lo que es.). Sin embargo, a travs de la escritura de la carta (el
acto de interpretacin), ste llega a la posicin de ahora s de sobra - el
estado de hermosa simetra entre el cuento y la pelcula, entre realidad
5

70

L
 inda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (Waterloo: Wilfrid
Laurier University Press, 1980), 1.

y ficcin. Por medio del dilogo con Glenda, la voz narrativa parte de una
situacin de la primera parte, definida como no podemos saber lo que
es, para llegar al territorio fuera de toda la brjula, lo que insina un
aspecto de apertura del texto. La perspectiva del yo est completada por
la funcin del otro. Optando por el compromiso, el escritor se niega a s
mismo como el dominador del lenguaje. En el nivel ontolgico, se insiste
en la unicidad de las instancias del sujeto y el objeto a la manera de que
el contraste yo-otro se convierte en simetra de dos sujetos igualitarios.
Las figuras ficticias (Glenda Garson) se ponen en el mismo plano con las
personas reales (Glenda Jackson). Este desdoblamiento ocurre tambin en
el nivel de la relacin yo-t, de tal modo que el autor real de Rayuela y
Glenda Garson llegan a pertenecer a la misma categora (el territorio fuera
de toda la brjula).
El nivel intertextual del cuento est abarcado en un modo que:
One particularly productive way of defining the
intertextual relationship is to think of it metaphorically
as a form of citation in which the fragment of discourse is
accomodated or assimilated by the focused text. Discribing
it in this way allows us to view the intertext as having two
separate identities: (a) as an independent text functioning in
its own right, which may be unknown, forgoten, or even lost;
(b) as an assimilated or accommodate version embedded in
some way in the focused text.6
En el comentario de esta estrategia me limito en una frase del relato:
como muchas cartas, como muchos relatos,
tambin hay mensajes que son botellas al mar y entran en esos
lentos, prodigiosos sea-changes que Shakespeare cincel en
La tempestad y que amigos inconsolables inscribiran tanto
tiempo despus en la lpida bajo la cual duerme el corazn
de Percy Bysshe Shelley en el cementerio de Cayo Sextio, en
Roma.
Se trata de una alusin a los versos de Tempestad en la tumba de
Shelley: Nothing of him that doth fade,/But doth suffer a sea change/Into
something rich and strange. Los efectos que produce este en el discurso
del cuento-carta es posible ver en relacin con la estrategia narrativa del
texto de Cortzar. Los versos de Shakespeare pasan de un contexto a otro
(Shelley muri en una tempestad). En Botella al mar la metfora de sea
changes se refiere al cambio del contexto que ocurre con cada nueva
6

O wen Miller, Intertextual Identity, in: Identity of the Literary Text, ed. Mario J.
Valds y Owen Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 21.

71

lectura. La carta est en la botella y expuesta al proceso del cambio. Todo

esto es la parte del concepto de la apertura del texto literario que niega
la posibilidad de fijar el significado del texto. En este sentido, el texto en
botella est transformando su propio discurso hacia un nuevo significado.
Diario para un cuento
Diario para un cuento es el dilogo del narrador consigo mismo
que quiere escribir un cuento. El cuento sera en su base la historia de un
acontecimiento del pasado del narrador, que coincide con el autor-Julio
Cortzar. La historia se revive a travs del recuerdo, de manera de que el
diario resulta el marco para la trama del cuento, y el autor resulta su lector.
La narracin se abre con la absurda preocupacin del narrador de no estar
capaz de escribir el cuento. Lo que ocurre en efecto es el miedo del narrador
de quebrar la narratividad del lenguaje del cuento y consecuentemente,
su permanencia en los lmites del metalenguaje del diario. Dentro de la
narracin se instala un espacio para examinar la situacin narrativa, desde
el cual el lector se da cuenta de la potica del autor.
Siguiendo la estructura del relato, el lector de Diario para un cuento
tiene que notar, en primer lugar, la oscilacin que existe en el discurso
entre diario y cuento. Por un lado el texto en su dimensin de diario
pretende interferir con lo real (siendo la experiencia autntica), mientras
el cuento, que constituye el objetivo del diario, presenta el artefacto
literario, la ficcin. De tal manera se establece la paradoja inicial sobre la
relacin de un diario como escritura que pretende ser objetiva y real
pero no lo logra, y un cuento, considerado escritura de ficcin, que remite
una situacin real y verosmil. Esta tensin en el relato parece servir para
centrar la reflexin del narrador en la relacin del autor y su discurso. De
la manera similar a Botella al mar, Diario para un cuento se constituye a
partir de una red de relaciones intertextuales. Se introducen las referencias
a Poe y los citas de Derrida con el objetivo de examinar la relacin autortexto. Nos encontramos ante el texto que llega a la conclusin de la
imposibilidad de su propia produccin. El motivo no s cmo decirlo
encontramos en otros cuentos de Cortzar: Ah pero dnde, como y Las
babas del diablo como metfora de no poder captar la realidad con las
palabras. Se trata de un procedimiento en que el narrador escribiendo trata
de definir su posicin dentro del mismo texto. El narrador no puede escribir
el cuento por la imposibilidad de superar la distancia que existe entre la
historia narrada (el cuento) y el proceso de escritura (el diario). l crea su
narrativa sobre el hecho de la imposibilidad de narrar. La imposibilidad de
la actualizacin de la escritura (Para qu un cuento, al fin y al cabo, por
qu no abrir un libro de otro cuentista, o escuchar uno de mis discos?)

72

sirve como introduccin a la discusin de otros problemas poticos y como

posibilidad de definir la literatura como una continua bsqueda.
La narracin de Anabel sigue un orden lineal interrumpido por
las digresiones tericos. Una de las digresiones introduce el nombre de
Bioy Casares. El narrador quiere identificarse con su modo de manejar
la narracin, quiere crear el cuento que unira en una cita literaria las
referencias de tiempo, lugar y nombre, que segn l la justificaran. Por lo
tanto introduce su cuento con la cita de Annabel Lee de Poe. Sin embargo,
tiene que interrumpir su historia al instante, preguntndose del propsito
de la misma historia (Cmo hablar de Anabel sin imitarla, es decir sin
falsearla?). El admirado Bioy Casares lo lograra desde cerca y hondo y
a la vez guardando esta distancia, ese desasimiento que decide poner (no
puedo pensar que no sea una decisin) entre algunos de sus personajes y el
narrador. La tcnica de Bioy Casares se compara con el boxeo, donde la
escritura se presenta como una lucha entre el autor y el personaje y donde
el autor no se expone explcitamente (me falta el juego de piernas y la
nocin de distancia de Bioy para mantenerme lejos y marcar puntos sin
dar demasiado la cara.). El narrador de Bioy parece controlar el proceso,
mientras el narrador en el Diario se asla en el apartamento de su amiga
Susana, distancindose as del material real de su futura narracin. Para
acercarse otra vez a Anabel, se sirve de escritura para recuperar la ancdota
de milonga convertindola en otro tipo de discurso (cuento). De otras
palabras, al narrador no le resulta posible establecer la distancia entre la
escritura y del objeto de la escritura y por lo tanto opta por presentar la
inmediatez del acontecimiento tal como ocurri, uniendo la narracin y
accin.
El pasaje de Derrida, repetido tres veces a lo largo del diario, se
pone en una relacin anloga con la cuestin del narrador que quiere poner
en prctica la tcnica de Bioy y la imposibilidad de lograrlo. A lo que se
refiere el narrador en el fragmento de Derrida es la falta de inters del
sujeto de Derrida por s mismo y por el objeto. De tal manera se plantea
el problema de la relacin entre el autor y el objeto esttico que l quiere
crear. El narrador no puede escribir el cuento porque no puede evitar la
presencia de s mismo en ello, y por lo tanto escribe el diario, en el cual no
debe esconder su identidad. Domina el deseo del narrador de renunciar a
la escritura mientras la escribe, para lo que le sirve la cita de Derrida y el
comentario que sigue:
Derrida est hablando de alguien que enfrenta algo
que le parece bello, y de ah sale todo eso; yo enfrento una
nada, que es este cuento no escrito, un hueco de cuento, un

73

embudo de cuento, y de una manera que me sera imposible

comprender siento que eso es Anabel, quiero decir que hay
Anabel aunque no haya cuento. Y el placer reside en eso,
aunque no sea un placer y se parezca a algo como una sed
de sal, como un deseo de renunciar a toda escritura mientras
escribo (entre tantas otras cosas porque no soy Bioy y no
conseguir nunca hablar de Anabel como creo que debera
hacerlo.
El relato est cerrado entre dos momentos: el reconocimiento inicial
del narrador de su incapacidad de escribir el cuento y la comprobacin
final de su fracaso. Entre ellos, paradjicamente sigue en un modo lineal la
historia de los acontecimientos de milonga. El narrador continua su diario
dndose cuenta de la imposibilidad de escribir de Anabel. La historia est
interrumpida por las tres interpretaciones del fragmento de Derrida. Los
anlisis del texto y de su objeto llevan a la renuncia definitiva a escribir
sobre Anabel: Ningn inters, de vers, porque buscar a Anabel en el
fondo del tiempo es siempre caerme de nuevo en m mismo, y es tan triste
escribir sobre m mismo aunque quiera seguir imaginndome que escribo
sobre Anabel.
Toda la narrativa de Julio Cortzar se caracteriza por la presencia de
la reflexin de la propia ficcin y de la problematizacin de las cuestiones
poetolgicas. No es posible discutir en un espacio limitado todas las
consecuencias de esta presencia y por eso me limito en el comentario de los
aspectos de la relacin entre autor y lector y la metfora de la continuidad
de la literatura. Resulta que los dos aspectos estn en una relacin de
interdependencia y que la nocin de una literatura continua deriva de una
relacin invertida entre autor y lector: el sentido del texto se crea como
resultado de una oscilacin entre los dos. Por lo tanto tomamos como punto
de partida dos cuentos (Axolotl, Continuidad de los parques) que insisten
en el mismo acto de fusin, insinuando en un modo muy implcito las
consecuencias en el campo de narrativa. La necesidad que siente Cortzar
de afirmar estas consecuencias toma forma de una literatura de metaficcin
cuyos ejemplos son los relatos inaugural y clausural del libro Deshoras. La
lectura de un texto de Cortzar se identifica con su creacin y viene como
resultado de una configuracin de otros textos y por lo tanto pusimos en
relacin estos dos relatos con el relato anterior titulado Queremos tanto a
Glenda.
Cortzar trata de escapar de los cnones por medio de la subversin
del propio texto. Ataca a todas las convenciones borrando las lneas
divisorias entre sujeto y objeto, y consecuentemente entre autor, lector y

74

personaje. Mucho est escrito de la continua presencia de dos planos en la

estructura de sus relatos, de la fusin de los dos mundos, uno racional y
otro onrico, por medio de las galeras, puentes. Dentro de este contexto,
parece que la reflexin poetolgica le sirve al escritor como puente para
unir autor y lector, donde el lector llega al punto de convertirse en el
creador del texto. Frente a los huecos del texto el lector se desdobla en un
lector interpretador del hueco y otro que continua la lectura como sucesin.
Con su interpretacin del espacio blanco creado por autor, lector no slo
descifra las claves del texto, sino crea el nuevo texto. Sin embargo, el
significado no est contenido en ningn polo de la relacin sino en este
hueco de la posibilidad de la literatura sin lmites. En concordancia con su
programa que insiste en estar fuera de lo ordinario, en la compenetracin
de la emocin y lgica, sujeto y objeto, las instancias de autor y lector
deben acercarse uno hacia el otro. Son un lector y un autor cuyo ltimo
objetivo consiste en fusin uno con otro.

Literatura
Canclini, Nestor Garca. Desescribir la literatura. In: Cortzar: una
antropologa potica. Buenos Aires: Editorial Nova, 1968. 80-95.
Chanady Amaryll. Julio Cortzar: una respuesta latinoamericana a
la literatura de agotamiento. En: Los ochenta mundos de Cortzar:
ensayos. Ed. Fernando Burgos. Madrid: Edi 6, 1987. 67-73.
Cols, Santiago. Postmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine
Paradigm. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994.
Cortzar, Julio. Deshoras. Madrid: Ediciones Alfaguara, 1982.
Cortzar, Julio. Ceremonias. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1983.
Cortzar, Julio. Rayuela. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980.
D
 Haen, Theo. Text to Reader: A Communicative Approach to
Fowles, Barth, Cortzar and Boon.Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1985.
L
 agmanovich, David. Contigidad de los parques, continuidad de
la escritura. En: Codigos y rupturas: textos hispanoamericanos.
Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1988. 117-132.
M
 ac Adam, Alfred. El individuo y el otro: crtica a los cuentos de
Julio Cortzar. Buenos Aires: Ediciones La Librera, 1971.
R
 ios Pinheiro Passos, Cleusa. O outro modo de mirar: uma leitura
dos contos de Julio Cortzar. Sao Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1986.

75

Nataa B. Filipovi
METAPOETIC DISCURSE IN JULIO CORTZAR S SHORT
STORIES
Summary
Storytelling of Julio Cortzar is largely characterized by the presence
of a metapoetic discourse, the textual problematization of questions of his
own poetics. The present paper is dealing with the analysis of this discourse
through the consideration of various aspects of author-reader relationship,
as well as the metaphor of continuidad de la literatura in selected stories
written by Cortzar. The outcome of the analysis is that the author and the
reader, based on this metanarrative impulse, change roles, which results in
so-called opening of the text. The metareflection thus becomes a means
of a fusion of the two agencies, the act that brings the reader more fully into
the creative process: there is a free-play or creative act between the author
that gives to the readers the opportunity to make meanings (and texts), and
the reader supplying the gaps in understanding generated by the text.
Keywords: metapoetics, author, reader, discourse, narration,
reception theory, textual gaps
.

,
,
. Bestiario (1951) Deshoras
(1983), Premios (1960) Libro de Manuel (1973).
,
,
continuidad de la
literatura.
(Para una poetica, Del cuento breve y sus alrededores, Notas sobre
la novela contempornea),
, .

76

 . ,
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,
, ,
.
,
.
: ,
, , .
,
,
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(Axolotl, Continuidad de los parques)
,
(Queremos tanto a Glenda, Botella al mar, Diario para un cuento)
,
(apertura).
, ,
, , ,
/,
/ , /,
.
Axolotl / ( , /) (yo,
l, nosotros), , ., .
Continuidad de los parques
, ,
, , .

77

 (Queremos tanto a Glenda, Botella al mar,

Diario para un cuento) ,
continuidad de la literatura. ,
,
, .
Botella al mar Queremos
tanto a Glenda, Diario para un cuento .
, ,
, ,
,
()
.
,
. ,
,
: , ( ) ,

, (continuidad) .
: , , , , ,
,

78

: 39 (497.11)
: 1. 10. 2011. .
: 12. 10. 2011. .

:


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,
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,


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.
Holland & Quinn : cultural models are widely shared
by the members of the society and they play an enormous role in their
understanding of that world and behaviour in it [Holland&Quinn, 1987:
4]1.
* : natasha.guzina@gmail.com
1


.
[: ]

79

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[, 2009: 115].

[, 2009: 111],
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[Holland&Quinn, 1987: 4].
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: what they must know in order to
act as they do, make things they make, and interpret their experience in
the distinctive way they do2 [Idem, 4].


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2005:14].

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org>].
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84

 2011. <http://www. rsplaneta.com>].

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www.rsplaneta.com>]
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to understand why people do what they do, it is not enough to know the
dominant constructs of the society; it is also neccessary to study how actors
internalize those constructs3 [D Andrade & Strauss, 1992: 4].
, ,
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[, 2001: 185].
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: , a [ : . 27. 2011. <http://
www.tvorac-grada. com>],
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. [, 2006: 29].
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88

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89


, . . : -
, 2006.
 . . :
. . . , : , 2005. . 10.
, . . :
, 1995.
, . . : XX
, 2005.
 . .
: , 2001.
Gmez, Jess. Leyendas tradicionales espaolas. Madrid: Espasa
Calpe, 2002.
D Andrade, Roy & Strauss, Claudia (Eds.). Human motives and
cultural models. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
, . . :
, 2001.
, ; , ; , ;
I . : , 2000.
, . .
et al. : , 1995.
, . . :
/ , 2002.
, ; , ; . .
: , 2003.
 . . .
( ). : , 2005.
, . . . : , 2009.
Holland, Dorothy & Quinn Naomy (Eds.). Cultural models in
language and thought. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1987.

90


 ; <17. 2011>;

<http://www.rsplaneta.com/RegijeRS/Podrinje/13070Grad-proklete-Jerine.html>
 ; <27. 2011>; <
http:// www.tvorac- grada.com/knjige/srpskeepske/zidanjeskadra.
html>.
 ;
<25. >; <http://www.znanje.org/lektire/ i
26/06iv07/06iv0720/Na%20Drini%20cuprija.htm>
, . ; <25. 2011>; <http://www.
razmena. org/sh/33/1/81/?tpl=94>
Nataa N. Guzina
THE DIRECTIVE FORCE OF CULTURAL MODELS: ITS ROLE
AND SIGNIFICANCE BASED ON THE EXAMPLE OF ANALYSIS
OF LEGENDS
Summary
The contemporary sociolinguistic language studies pay no attention
enough to the problem of the interaction between language, culture and
society. The mentioned problem is best understood from the perspective
of folklore because that is the context in which the language infallibly
represents the social and cultural element. By using the method of
the directive force of cultural models and legends as specific forms of
folklore and discourse, this paper calls attention to the language as a way
of propaganda of culturally acceptable behaviours in the specific social
circumstances.
Key words: directive force of cultural models, language, culture and
society, cultural models, legends as specific forms of folklore, discourse

91

Nataa N. Guzina
LA FUERZA DIRECTIVA DE LOS MODELOS
CULTURALES:
PAPEL E IMPORTANCIA EN LOS EJEMPLOS DE ANLISIS DE
LAS LEYENDAS
Resumen
En los estudios sociolingsticos actuales de la lengua se presta
insuficiente atencin al problema de la interaccin lengua-sociedad-cultura.
El dicho problema mejor se entiende desde la perspectiva del folklore
porque en ese contexto la lengua obligatoriamente se manifiesta como un
elemento social y cultural. Partiendo del mtodo de la fuerza directiva de
los modelos culturales, este trabajo tiene como objetivo ilustrar a travs de
las leyendas como formas y discursos folklricos, de qu forma es usada
la lengua como un recurso de propagar los comportamientos culturales
aceptables en las circunstancias sociales especficas.
Palabras clave: la fuerza directiva de los modelos culturales,
idiomasociedad-cultura, los modelos culturales, leyendas como formas
folclricos peculiares, discursos

92

: 821.111 (94).09 Wongar B.

821.111 (84).09
: 1.10.2011. .
: 12.10.2011. .

DOES B. WONGAR WRITE AS A MIGRANT

WRITER?
Abstract: This paper deals with the controversy surrounding, for more than
thirty years, the literary career of Australian writer of Serbian origin Sreten
Boi, alias B. Wongar. Within the literary communities of multicultural
Australia, the debate about the case of B. Wongar has rarely been
revolving around the literary merits of his work. Instead, critics have
focused on the question of his ethnic and authorial identity. The obsession
of postcolonial and multicultural critics with the credentials of B.
Wongar and his right to speak as an Aboriginal instead of write as a
Serbian migrant-writer reveals the genuine nature of postcolonial critical
strategies: they are just new forms of camouflaging vested orthodoxies and
preserving the existing power relations.
Key words: B. Wongar, Aboriginal, migrant, ethnic identity, authorial
identity, postcolonialism
The literary reputation of Serbian migr Sreten Boi who came to
Australia in 1960 and has written since then several collections of stories
and a number of novels and plays as well as a few non-fictional works is
rather strange.1 For almost 40 years, under the pseudonym B. Wongar, he
has concerned himself, both in his life and literary career, with the condition
of Aborigines and their relationship with white Australia. In 1974 Wongar
put together a provocative exhibition of photographs, under the title Totem
and Ore which was banned soon after it was shown in the library of
* a : milica.zivkovic61@yahoo.com
1

As a co-author with Alan Marshall, Sreten Boi published Aboriginal Myths (1972) and
A Stone in My Pocket (1973). All other novels, stories and plays were published under
his Aboriginal name B. Wongar, including his nonfictional autobiography Dingoes Den
(1999). Some of his most famous collections of stories are The Sinners: Stories of
Vietnam (1972), Balang, a Village (1973), The Trackers (1975), The Track to Bralgu
(1978), Babaru (1982) and the novels: Walg (1986), Bilma (1984), Karan (1986), Gabo
Djara (1988), Marngit: A Novel (1992), The Last Pack of Dingoes (1993), Raki: A
Novel (1994).

93

Parliament House in Canberra.2 The incident left with Wongar a life-long

sense that Australian authorities and publishers were not interested in his
work. Unfortunately, it was not just an impression: whilst he has received a
few international rewards and his books have been published overseas and
translated into many languages, the titles of his books are almost unheard of
in Australia. His books remain basically unavailable in public or university
libraries and critical attention to his work has been relatively scarce. Walg,
the first novel from the so called Nuclear Trilogy (Walg, Karan and Gabo
Djara) the three novels that are closely linked in theme and all deal
with the writers quest for the truth about the outback nuclear testing of
the 1950s in Australia which killed and dispossessed so many Aboriginal
people had been published in America and translated in German before
it appeared in Australia. When in 1997 Wongar won an award from the
Literature Fund of the Australian Council for an outstanding contribution
to Australian literature, there were only two other people who attended
the presentation, besides a representative from the Australian Council. His
award and his work have been met with silence.
Yet it is not wholly true: scholarly studies on the authenticity of his
authorial, Aboriginal identity greatly outnumber the critical appreciation
of his artistic achievement and the literary merits and moral significance
of his work. The award that Wongar got in the mid 1980s helped fuel a
debate about the real identity of this author. Though the mystery of who
Wongar really is was solved long ago, critics continued to discuss Wongar
in the context of literary frauds and forgeries which became extraordinarily
prevalent in Australian belles lettres in the late 1990s. Some of them even
condemned him as a fake writing fake literature and accused him of
doing a Helen Demidenko, who was the protagonist of the most famous
literary charade at that time. This paper deals with the debate about who has
the right to represent individuals or topics belonging to a minority culture,
i.e. the debate about the questions of authorial and textual authenticity and
postcolonial representation within the literary and cultural communities of
Australia. It purports to show that this debate is one more instance of the
multicultural/postcolonial strategy of obscuring questions of history and
genuine resistance to oppression. Wongar has been qualified as a fake by
postcolonial/multicultural criticism because he does not write as a proper
Other a Serbian migrant writer who creates his imaginary homeland, to
use Salman Rushdies famous phrase. Instead, he subverts clearly defined
2

94

T
 he subject of the exhibition was the exploitation of uranium resources by mining
companies on Aboriginal land which had long-term consequences for Aboriginal
communities: the contamination of the land on which Aborigines lived, the massive
displacement and destruction of Aboriginal families.

positions on the multicultural terrain by writing as an Aboriginal thus

revealing the true nature of postcolonial/multicultural strategies: they are
only new forms of camouflaging vested orthodoxies and preserving the
existing power relations.3
The controversy surrounding Wongars literary career, as I have
already suggested, has not been revolving so much around the literary
matters and merits as around an old line from Shakespeare what is in
a name? So, what is his name all about? In his autobiography Dingoes
Den Wongar explains that he acquired the name Wongar more or less by
accident: it was given to him by the Aboriginal people. The name is used in
the mythology of East Arnhem Land and it actually means the messenger,
a person who comes from the outside world. In an Aboriginal sense that
outside world was the spirit world or the animal world i.e. where the dead
go and [the Wongar] bring them messages from time to time [173-4].
The initial B. he has explained differently on several occasions thus
contributing to the confusion. But the name stuck: under this pseudonym,
Sreten Boi published almost all his novels and short stories. Wongar
seems to have considerably contributed to the creation of the mystery and
fictionality of his identity. I never thought that the Tanami Desert could be
fatal for a traveller are the opening words of B. Wongars autobiography
Dingoes Den [7], as if the authors life had begun at the age of thirty
in the midst of the Australian dry continent [Risti, 155]. There, in the
Australian desert, Sreten Boi, born in a Serbian village Trenjevica near
Aranelovac, begins his new life, assumes a new identity and sets off on
a fifty year long journey in search of forty thousand year old Aboriginal
culture: the theme of the appropriation, dispossession and discrimination
of the Aborigines has become central in his literary work. Anyone who
turns to Wongars autobiography with an anticipation to penetrate through
to the authentic identity of the author or find the facts that could either
support or deny Wongars claims on the Aboriginal heritage, which he has
written about for so many years, will be disappointed. The author does
not seem to have put more of himself and his own experiences into the
autobiography than into the fictional works such as the Nuclear Trilogy
or Raki. Robert Drewe, a distinguished Australian novelist, who revealed
3

Donald Horne expresses his doubts: I would now say that in the sense that they
should seek Australian, not British, definitions of Australia, all multiculturalists
in Australia should be as it were anti-British. Failing this, there is a danger that
multiculturalism becomes a way of keeping the ethnics quiet while the anglos can
go on running things, as destiny demanded they should. If the aim is to define Australia
as a multicultural society and to set multiculturalism as a national goal, how, at the
same time, can Australia be declaredly monocultural, as, not only symbolically, but
constitutionally, it still is? [Horne, 3]

95

that Wongars real name was Boi in the late eighties of the twentieth
century, tried to resolve the controversy in a tolerant and sympathetic way
by observing that [Wongar] was a sort of living novel [Matthews, 367].
If the mystery of the real author is not easy to unravel, one thing
is quite clear from the beginning of Dingoes Den this is not a typical tale
of migration, exile and displacement, a tale about diaspora as the space in
which hybridity is acted out. Nor does Wongars tale, at least in terms of
the textual practices and formal devices participate in many of the aesthetic
and literary legacies of postmodern culture. In the matter-of-fact style of
a mere recorder, Wongar tells us the story of his life in Australia: how he
nearly died in the Tanami Desert, about Juburu, a Warlpiri man who saved
his life and introduced him to the mythology of the land that later has
infused so much of his writing; about assimilation and aboriginal camps in
the desert, the nuclear testing zone where Aboriginal people lived; about
his Aboriginal wife Djumala and their children who seem to have perished
during the period of the cyclone and whom he never saw again but in visions
and dreams; about political persecution and his eventual moving away to
Melbourne. Many of the people and scenes from his autobiography are
fictionalized in his other books; in other words, the experiences recorded in
his novels were in fact autobiographical. His memoir is at times novelistic
with abrupt shifts from indirect discourse to direct one and the first-person
voice mainly belongs to someone who is an observer, more curious about
what he is seeing around him than about himself. Sreten Bois thoughts,
reflections, ideas are not the focus of Wongars interest or vice versa. Nor
does he elaborate on the theme of the discovery of his Aboriginality.
He seems to suggest that it should come naturally if you believe that
[n]o human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to
understand, to learn, to inhabit another world [Gates, 30].
Between a politics of radical difference and a yearning for sameness,
Wongar opts for a third way difference located in hybridity. Hard-won
hybridity and not some universally celebrated postmodern identity of
an exile. B. Wongar is not a cosmopolitan who is able to transcend his
ethnic culture, who is free of the constraints of any particular culture and
merely enjoys it, elevated above it. Wongar is not a multiculturalist who
freely chooses his culture drawing on the best of a multitude of cultures
and escaping cultural restrictions at the same time. Nor does he advocate
ahistoric concept of hybridity and periphery as the loci of authenticity and
resistance. For Wongar, writing is an attempt to recover, explore and name
both the oppressed and the oppressor. And the lived experience plays the
central part in this difficult and painful process.
The writer who provides the multicultural tourism of the margins
dislocated from the material conditions of oppression is likely to deserve

96

the appreciation of postcolonial/multicultural criticism. The one who

defies the institutionalized regimes of forgetting, as Wongar certainly does,
must be silenced because multiculturalism in the form of commodified
difference involves a forgetting of origins...; [it is] an ideology of denial
(Ryerson).4 Despite its proclaimed anti-imperialist stance, many schools
of thinking within postcolonial/multicultural studies reveal themselves as
dogmatic defenders of status quo who do not allow room for negotiations
of identity in ways which acknowledge history, tradition and concrete
difference. By remaining silent about the issues of class domination,
economic and political neo-colonialism, institutional exploitation, by
evading the criticism of capitalism and class, they introduce more subtle
versions of incorporated disparity instead of challenging an organisation
of discourse that justifies the status quo [Brydon, 1989: 24]. On the
Australian politicized terrain, on which so many quests for named agency
are at present taking place, the problem with Bois pseudonym seems to
lie only in the adoption of an improper name: to assume an Aboriginal
name cannot be regarded as a choice but appropriation:
(adoption of an) Aboriginal name is therefore read
(in relation to one set of intertexts) first as signifying his
Aboriginality, then (in relation to another set of intertexts)
as a claim to Aboriginality, an act of indigenization whose
meaning lies in the appropriation of an authentic belonging to
place [Prentice, 2].
By resorting to a series of illegitimate simplifications or conflation,
not bothering to make any distinctions, postcolonial logic says that it is
much worse to assume an Aboriginal name than to assume the burden
of guilt for the physical and cultural colonization and genocide of the
indigenous population in Australia. The Wongar case reveals the methods
employed by literary institutions to silence the disturbing voices: they must
resort to distortions if the assumed identity threatens to disturb the calm
surface of literary culture. On the one hand, multiculturalism cannot stop
calling the Other into being and demanding its voice, whilst, on the
other hand, it hurries to silence it if the Other speaks as an improper Other.
Like the neurotic, it represses its own terrible secret: beneath the veil of
multicultural equality lie the ever-same systemic forms of racialization.
4

As Colin Mooers writes, [multiculturalism] asks the oppressed to make an affective
investment in the reified ethnicities it establishes and to forget those bodily memories
of racism which rear up from everyday life but which now find no place in the official
transcript of the public sphere. To those oppressed by racism, it says, in effect, your
difference is now acknowledged; you are part of the colourful tapestry of the nation;
and, implicitly, stop whining about racism [Mooers, Multiculturalism].

97

In Dingoes Den Wongar reveals how his interest in Aboriginal

culture began and why it never waned: the meeting place was the common
history of oppression and a possibility of resistance to it. Passing himself
off as an Aboriginal, Wongar has moved deeply into Aboriginal culture:
his identification with Aborigines and sympathy for their plight springs
from the connection he discovered between Serbian and Aboriginal people
and their histories. That simple parallel becomes the site of recognition
which is, perhaps, the most important condition for a genuine cross-cultural
dialogue, as Maria Campbell suggests in The Book of Jessica: While
you were being overwhelmed with my history and my oppression...
she rebukes Scottish-Canadian collaborator Linda Griffiths, I couldnt
understand why you didnt know your own history...the history of your pain
and all the things that happened to your people was exactly the same as our
history...It seemed that that would be a meeting place for us [Campbell and
Griffiths, 35]. For Wongar, the link was found in his native countrys long
tradition of collecting folk poetry and literature, especially during Ottoman
suppression of Serbian culture. Love for the creative word, myth and fable,
was passed on to him by his father; love for the land the family tilled
and admiration for the living world of nature were instilled into him by
his mother. Simply enough, these powerful childhood experiences enabled
him to love and understand Aboriginal Australia. In Raki, perhaps his most
challenging work, he draws on his Serbian childhood memories in order
to underline the link between the Serbian oral stories he grew up with and
Aboriginal myths. The story is narrated by one first-person narrator whose
identity shifts between the naive Serbian child and his wartime memories
and an Aborigine visited by his Serbian mother.
Unlike many western critics who have never bothered to familiarize
themselves with the native cultures from which ethnic writers come,
Wongar learned a lot about the Aboriginal culture before he started to write
on it, first working as a co-author of Aboriginal Myths (with Alan Marshall).
Like Vuk Karadi who preserved Serbian epic tradition, Wongar began to
collect Aboriginal tribal tales in order to save them from oblivion during the
genocidal official policy of assimilation in Australia. Wongars description
of his early writing is expressed in ethnographic terms:
I took notes. I was interested in the oral tradition and
the art because of the oral tradition I came from. . . . I was
interested in collecting myths. I have published a book of
tribal myths. I was also interested in the different languages,
in the different art. I spent ten years looking into that...
[Willbanks, 204].

98

Sreten Boi shares with the Aborigines the experience of being

Other. The cultural baggage he brought with him to Australia made him
sympathetic to Aboriginal plight. Their meeting place was human ability
to survive against physical and cultural genocide. As a man who had little
formal education, who did not know English and who grew up on the
living oral tradition of his native country, it was natural to draw upon the
Aboriginal oral tradition rather than the white written Anglo-Celtic one.
Wongars position as a researcher (observer and recorder) in the Aboriginal
community was also interesting, for he shared no common background
with the Anglo-Saxon colonizers. I believe that for Aboriginal people
Wongar must have been a different type of the Other than most AngloCeltic Australians. As for himself, he was the Other for both Australians and
Aborigines: the negotiation of his own identity must have revolved around
the concept of the double other. Wongar has embraced the racialized
identity and tried to learn what it means to see past, present and future
through the colour of skin. However, he has not accepted the role of the
victim of the past. The idea of victimization fell apart when Aborigines
and the Serbian writer faced each other and discovered that they share the
ability to resist oppression and survive.
Though Wongar has refused to admit his implication in political
questions I am not in the political field; Im not standing for election
[Sharrad, 42-3] his commitment to interpreting historical facts about
the forms of open violence of the Law and the Western theories that it
used to justify the exploitation and dispossession of native Australians is
undeniably clear in his autobiography. In the postmodern/postcolonial
vein par excellence, Wongar creates anxiety which itself generates difficult
questions by bringing previously overlooked historical documents of
political significance into his autobiography which should be read, by
definition, as a personal record of life. As Ljiljana Bogoev-Sedlar has
observed, it is possible to claim that Wongar was driven to become a writer
precisely by the desire to examine, most fully, the appalling differences
between historical facts and fictional texts fabricated to reinterpret,
distort or disguise them [Bogoev-Sedlar, 316]. In chapter four of his
autobiography, Wongar provides a detailed account of a court hearing held
in 1969 in the city of Darwin, involving a case brought up by some tribal
Aborigines against the Australian government:
The native claim is made on the basis that the law
of this land recognizes Aboriginal ownership of the land,
but there is no such recognition under the law... The land of
Gove Peninsula is Crown Land and it was only due to our
generosity that 317 natives used that land until we needed it
for other purposes [65].

99

He does not bother to clear up the mystery why exactly he (at that time
he worked as a construction worker who had little knowledge of English) was
in a Darwin courtroom in 1969 listening to an Aboriginal group challenging
a mining company. We can assume that it may as well be imagined, but
it does not change the subversive effect it produces by being incorporated
in the genre of autobiography. By reading this true or imaginary account
all the same against the historical fact that it was not until 1967 that the
Aboriginal population of Australia had been given the citizenship rights and
included in national statistics the proclaimed purpose of postcolonialism
has been achieved. By historicizing fiction or fictionalizing history, it is all
the same, Wongar clearly shows that the official history is a most powerful
tool of incessant political manipulation, constructed as a rationale for the
system based on the hegemony and domination, or in Wongars words: [t]
he government lawyer behaved like a politician turning history upside
down to suit his oratory [Dingoes Den, 73].
Cultural difference is apparently propped by postmodernist
thought which shares an interest with postcolonialism in giving voice to
those previously marginalised. Postcolonialism is believed to possess a
more explicit political commitment than postmodernism. However, the
case of B. Wongar points to many problems involved in the concept of
hybridity and its postcolonial/multicultural definition: Does confessing
hybridity necessarily challenge hegemony? Is resistance possible if
we overlook material and social conditions? How representative is the
figure of intellectual migrant who lives in a so-called third space in
this postmodern world in which more than 200 million people share the
experience of being exiles in the real countries not imaginary homelands
where exile is as physical a state as psychological? There is a huge
difference between the sense of exile in a refugee or an immigrant, on the
one hand, and a cosmopolitan intellectual, on the other. Hybridity translates
issues of economic exploitation and political inequality into problems of
cultural tolerance. That is why so many narratives of metissage, as some
postcolonial critics have noticed, function as empty signifiers that grant
primacy to what they apparently oppose: colonial fictions about ethnic
identity.
It is an irony that certain qualities of Wongars literary work can
be assessed more deeply only through postcolonial criticism: the irony, of
course, proceeds from recent postcolonial debates which do not revolve
around the ethical significance and aesthetic merits of his work but focus
on the authenticity of his authorial identity. To those who have not become
insensitive to the questions of truth, responsibility and reality, Wongars
work offers enough evidence to believe in the writers commitment to

100

question the facts offered by the master narrative of white Australia.

Wongar does not need the postmodern techniques, such as heteroglossia
or heterotopia, to deconstruct the official history or show his moral
engagement. The story of his life and writing career reminds me of Lionel
Trillings brilliant discussion of the modern self and, more particularly,
of the ideal of authenticity; for Trilling and Romanticism the search for
authenticity is demonstrated at least as much in the recognition of ones
own self his reference is to himself only [Trilling, 1971: 97] as it
is in opposition to the demands of social life his existence is intended
to disturb us and make us dissatisfied with our habitual life in culture
[Trilling, 1955: xiv]. Wongar is one of those last Mohicans who believes
that he has been called upon not only to live his life in his own way but also
to defy any received social and political opinion which breeds oppression
and discrimination.

Bibliography
Bogoev-Sedlar, Ljiljana. Mapping the Other, Mapping the Self: B.
Wongars Novel Raki (1994). In: Facta Univesitatis. Linguistic
and Literature Series, Vol. 2, No. 9 (Ni, 2002)
Brydon, Diana and Helen Tiffin. Decolonising Fictions: Comparative
Studies in Post-Colonial Literatures. Sidney: Dangaroo, 1993.
Campbell, Maria and Linda Griffits. The Book of Jessica: A Theatrical
Transformation. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1997.
Gates, Henry Lois, Jr. Authenticity, or the Lesson of Little Tree.
New York Times, November 24, 1991, sec. 7:1.
Horne, Donald. The perils of multiculturalism as a national
ideal. In: Third Annual Address to the Australian Institute of
Multicultural Affairs. Melbourne: AIMA, 1983.
Matthews David, B. Wongar (Sreten Bozic). University of New
Castle. Accessed 16. 11. 2011. http://www.wongar.com/pdf/DLB. pdf
Mooers, Colin. Multiculturalism and the Fetishism of Difference.
Ryerson University. Accessed 16. 11. 2011. http://journals.sfu.ca/
sss/index.php/sss/article/viewFile/45/42
Prentice, Chris. Grounding Postcolonial Fictions: Cultural
Constituencies, Cultural Credentials and Uncanny Questions of
Authority. In: Span 36 Postcolonial Fictions, 1993. Accessed 16.
11. 2011. http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/litserv/
SPAN/36/Prentice.html

101

 Risti, Ratomir. Mitsko putovanje kroz istoriju i politiku Sretena

Boia Vongara. In: Cvet u pustinji. Ni: Prosveta, 2004.
Sharrad, Paul , Does Wongar Matter?. Kunapipi 4.1, 1982
Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1972.
Trilling, Lionel. The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism.
New York: Viking Press, 1955.
Willbanks, Ray. Speaking Volumes: Australian Writers and Their
Work. Ringwood: Penguin, 1992.
Wongar, B. Dingoes Den. Australia: An Imprint book, ETT
Imprint, 1999.
Wositzky, Jan. Dingoes, Names and B. Wongar. An Interview
with B. Wongar for ABC Radio Nationals Books and Writing
program. Accessed 16. 11. 2011. www.abc.net.au/arts/ books/
stories
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102


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103

 .
: 821.111 (71).09-31

: 1. 11. 2011. .
- : 12. 11. 2011. .

THE QUEST FOR TRADITION IN

CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN FICTION
Abstract: The paper represents one aspect of a wider research on
contemporary Canadian literature, focusing on women writers and their
critique of patriarchy in an effort to promote literature by women as both
part of and in opposition to the dominant male tradition. Major Canadian
women writers, namely Margaret Laurence, Gabrielle Roy, Alice Munro,
Carol Shields, have contributed to a specific form of female bildungsroman.
Their novels highlight the importance of matrilineal heritage in literature,
while not refuting the patrilineal one. They also belong to the postmodern
genre of female autobiography. The article examines four novels within
these theoretical frameworks: Laurences A Jest of God, Roys The Road
Past Altamont, Munros Lives of Girls and Women, and Shields The Stone
Diaries. Parallel with the close readings of the novels, the paper highlights
their authors views on writing and the subject of female autobiography. A
brief account of some recent views on autobiography is given, concluding
with Adreinne Richs idea that for women writing is always a kind of
rerevision and a form of survival, which has been illustrated by the four
novels under scrutiny.
Key words: Canadian fiction, bildungsroman, female autobiography,
identity, authorship.
In a good deal of current Canadian fiction, the search for a tradition
often merges with individual quest for identity. The personal and the
historical become closely related. For several prominent writers of the
time, says W. H. New, author of A History of Canadian Literature,
the historicity of heritage was a motif that shaped still larger canvases,
in which the autonomy of historical events and the subjectivity of the
individual record of history are related but separate measures of the reality
of experience [New, 1989: 242].
* : rnastic@gmail.com

104

Novels frequently have the form of a specific Canadian-style

bildungsroman, a novel of-growing-up. One typical premise, says
New, results in integration and success [New, 1989: 240]. Novels by
women writers, loosely belonging to this category, often invert conventional
prototypes of femininity in the process, or challenge the male codes of
the standard ritual-of-passage story. The quest frequently discovers that
matrilineal heritage is at least as important as the patrilineal one. On the
national and historical level this means the rediscovery of the significance
of the natural background and the native tradition. On the individual level,
the quest turns inward.
Numerous novels by current Canadian women writers follow the
pattern of Erica Jong's concluding passage to Fear of Flying, describing
the process of learning how to mother yourself, or the experience of a
woman who has stopped looking for accomplishments outside herself, and
turned inward in order to be born again as her own mother and her own
child [Jong, 1974: 252]. The article will examine major works of fiction
by several leading Canadian women writers: Carol Shields, Alice Munro,
Margaret Laurence and Gabrielle Roy. After a close reading, they will be
looked at within the theoretical framework of female autobiography as a
wider context of rereading lives of women. In spite of the fact that some
of the novels are written in the third person, they contain autobiographical
elements.
The analysis will start with a negative example of the issue of
quest, with one of the most popular works of contemporary fiction, Carol
Shieldss Pulitzer Prize and Governor Generals Award winning, The Stone
Diaries. The novel follows its heroine, Daisy, from birth to death. Her
mother died at childbirth, she never succeeded in grasping the essence of
life. Ominous atmosphere surrounds the occasion of her birth the people
present look like mourners, a delirium of helplessness binds them together.
She is immediately separated from her stunned father who does not know
what to do with her. A neighbour takes her away to town to look after her,
but not for long. She, too, dies in an accident. Daisy is brought back to her
father and raised in a mans world. She always tried to do things right: she
was a good daughter, a good student, a good girl who marries well to a rich
boy of a respectable family. He, however, also dies prematurely in the first
days of their honeymoon.
The heroine does not give up. She misreads the signs along her
lifepath. When her father marries a young Italian, she decides there is no
place for her in the house, goes back to her former guardians son, twenty
years her senior, and marries him. She tries her best to be a good wife:

105

reads magazines to learn how to please her husband, how to keep her
house, to bring up her children, how to cook. She lives comfortably to see
her three children grow up, marry, have their own children. Her husband
dies, she goes on with conducting her household, even has a part-time job
as a newspaper columnist. Suddenly, she is fifty-nine and in a deep crisis,
crying and depressed. Nobody knows what the matter is. The author uses a
quasi-documentary style to describe Daisys condition. She cannot explain
herself because she is very uncertain of her own identity. The others,
people who are close to her, try to define her. Her present sinking of spirit,
the manic misrule of her heart and head, the foundering of her reason, the
decline of her physical health all these stem from some suffering core
which those around her can only register and weigh and speculate about
[Shields, 1993: 230].
Somewhere along the line she made the decision to live outside of
events; or else that decision was made for her. Now, at fifty-nine sadness
flows through every cell of her body, yet leaves her curiously untouched
[ibid., 252]. Its not so much a question of one big disappointment, though,
says her friend Labina. Its more like a thousand little disappointments
raining down on top of each other. After a while it gets to seem like a flood,
and the first thing you know youre drowning [ibid., 254].
When she recovered, her dreams released a potent sense of absence.
It was the absence of a mother, of a real foundation of her life, of origins.
She becomes aware of it only shortly before death, when in hospital, by
mistake, her maiden name was written on her bracelet: Daisy Goodwill.
She cherishes it. More and more she thinks of it as the outward sign of her
soul As she wastes away, she shrinks immensely. How is it possible, so
much shrinkage? [ibid.], wonders her daughter Alice, who is ultimately
to understand her mother after her death. She has shrunk to a little being
she was when she was born, left alone on the kitchen table, while her
unhappy silent mother was dying. Alice decides to take on her mothers
maiden name under which to continue her writing career. The dead Daisy
is described by her survivors as a woman who went down, went down and
down...who missed the point..., but was, nevertheless, almost unfailingly
courteous to others [ibid., 354]. She was afraid to look inside herself. In
case there was nothing there [ibid., 356].
The author of The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields, was raised in a
relatively happy but very conservative family and later entered into an
even happier marriage and had five children. However, from early youth
she felt that there was something wrong with womens position in
marriage and society. The feeling was confirmed after she had read Betty

106

Friedans The Feminine Mystique which affected her like a thunderbolt.1

I had no idea, wrote Shields, women thought like that or women could
be anything other than what they were. In The Stone Diaries she wrote the
novel about a woman who had not realized the changed position of her sex.
The novel is postmodern in that it is metafictional, a work about itself,
the study which foregrounds the problems of writing autobiography.2
The narrative ambiguity which Winifred M. Melor finds in the novel
refers to the double narrative framework. The protagonist Daisy Goodwill
writes a diary, but her life is narrated by a different voice which appears
to be almost omniscient. As the novel progresses the heroines voice
becomes ever thinner if at all present, and we realize the authors irony
in highlighting the fact that Daisy has been given a story, but she has not
been given a voice [ibid.].
Alice Munros novel or collection of stories (can be read as both)
Lives of Girls and Women, presents a different kind of a heroine. By her
choice to become a writer, the young Del Jordan inherits two traditions, a
male and a female one. Dels family generously bestows on her the heritage
of their most prominent member, the family scholar Uncle Craig, writer
of a political history of Wawanash County, of allegiances of families, (of)
how people were related, what had happened in elections, etc. [Munro,
1971: 33]. He was engaged in two projects, as Del puts it with mild irony:
a history of Wawanash County, and a family tree, going back to 1670 in
Ireland. Uncle Craig was revered most of all by the female side of his
family, his elderly spinster sisters. Del thought of Aunt Elspeth and Auntie
Grace when she read, years afterwards, about Natasha in War and Peace,
who ascribed immense importance, although she had no understanding
of them, to her husbands abstract, intellectual pursuits. It would have
made no difference if Uncle Craig had actually had abstract, intellectual
pursuits or if he spent the day sorting hen feathers; they were prepared to
believe in what he did, because he was the man of the family. While he was
at his old black typewriter, they dropped their voices, and made absurd
scolding faces at each other for the clatter of a pan [ibid.].
But, although they respected mens work beyond anything, they also
laughed at it. This was strange to Del. They could believe absolutely in its
importance and at the same time thought it to be frivolous, nonessential.
But they never meddled with it. Their own work was what actually
1
2

The Carold Shields Literary Trust, http://www.carol-shields.com/biography.

html/8/11/2011.
Mellor, Winifred M. The Simple Container of Our Existence: Narrative Ambiguity.
In: Carold Shields The Stone Diaries. Web page accessed November 18, 2011.http://
journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/viewArticle/8225/9282.

107

mattered, their laps were always full of work cherries to be stoned, peas
to be shelled, apples to be cored. Their hands, their old dark wooden
handled paring knives, moved with marvellous, almost vindictive speed
[ibid.]. The aunts also told stories. They seemed to tell them for their own
pleasure. They were funny, they played jokes.
When Uncle Craig died, the aunts entrusted Del with his manuscript
nearly a thousand pages. He typed the last page the afternoon of the day
he died. They believed that one day she would be able to finish it. They
thought at first about giving it to Owen, her younger brother, because he
was the boy, but she was, actually, the one (who) has the knack for writing
compositions [ibid., 68]. They also hoped she would learn to copy his
way. However, they were talking to somebody who believed that the only
duty of a writer is to produce a masterpiece, thought Del to herself. She
did not want Uncle Craigs manuscript put back with the things she had
written, because it seemed so dead to her, so heavy and dull and useless,
and she thought it might deaden her things too and bring her bad luck. She
took it down to the cellar and left it in a cardboard box. The last spring she
was in her hometown, the cellar was flooded and she found the box with
the manuscript just a big wad of soaking paper. She did not look to see how
damaged it was. It seemed to her a mistake from start to finish. That was
the end of this episode in Dels growing up.
Del also grows up defiant to her mother, a woman of the future,
as she likes to call herself. She constantly feels the burden of her mothers
eccentricities. Her mother sells encyclopaedias to the neighbouring farmers,
and declares: There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and
women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up
till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more
lives of our own, really, than domestic animals [ibid., 193]. Dels initial
resistance is stimulated by a half-conscious thought that she was not so
different from her mother, but had to conceal it, knowing the dangers there
were [ibid., 90]. She has to live through all sorts of experiences first. The
experience Del wanted to go through concerned men, love and passion,
precisely because her mother kept warning her of the dangers there were,
and of her virginal correctness.
Love was something her girlhood could not imagine. It was
connected to the stage of transition, bridge between what was possible,
known and normal behaviour, and the magical, bestial act [ibid., 196].
She expected sexual communication to be a flash of insanity, a dreamlike,
ruthless, contemptuous breakthrough in a world of decent appearances
[ibid., 177].

108

Her mother was always speaking of self-respect. Del was set up to

resist it. She also felt her mothers advice not so different from all the other
advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed being female
made you damageable, whereas men were supposed to be able to go out
and take on all kinds of experiences. She had decided to do the same [ibid.,
193]. There were many things that upset Del because she was not able to
resolve them: the frightening song on the radio the girl that I marry
will have to be, as soft and pink as a nursery [ibid., 196]; an article in a
magazine on the subject of the basic difference between the male and the
female habits of thought. The author was a famous New York psychiatrist,
a disciple of Freud, who illustrated this difference by the thoughts a boy
and a girl had, sitting on a park bench, looking at the full moon. While
the boy thinks of the universe, its immensity and mystery, the girl thinks
I must wash my hair [ibid., 197] because for a woman everything is
personal; no idea is of any interest to her by itself, but must be translated
into her own experience; in works of art she always sees her own life, or
her daydream [ibid.]. This dissociation of sensibility is precisely what Del
wishes to transcend and manages to do so later, with maturity.
The way to passion first led the young girl through religion. God was
a necessary stage, thought she. She was initially attracted by the theatrical
quality of the religion. That was how she joined the Baptists and met her
first boyfriend, Garnet French, to whom she voluptuously surrendered,
but not for long. She was mystified by Baptist church, and consequently, by
Garnet who seemed to be a devout Baptist. Her religious ecstasy is mixed
with sexual ecstasy. In the beginning, she does not want to break the spell,
although she senses all the time that Garnet is a rather simple, stupid boy,
and that he hates people trying to tie things together. Since these had been
great pastimes of mine, why did he not hate me?, thought Del. More
likely, he rearranged me, took just what he needed, to suit himself! [ibid.,
241] That was what she did with him. She loved the dark side, the strange
side, of him, which she did not know, not the Baptist. Young heroine did
not fear anything: neither the discovery, nor the pregnancy. Everything
they did seemed to take place out of range of other people, or ordinary
consequences.
Del does not fail on her final exam, but she does not get the
scholarship, either, and, consequently, cannot study at the university, to her
mothers great disappointment. Neither does her affair with Garnet have
any future. The end comes with the scene of Garnets attempt to virtually
baptize her in the river, which she takes as an attempt to drown her, being
not able to possess her entirely. She is at first amazed, than angry, that

109

anybody could have made such a mistake, to think he had real power over
me. The powers in play, as Del puts it, were only the powers she granted
him [ibid., 261]. Now she realized that the game they played was a game
that required you to be buried alive. While she was fighting under water,
she thought she was fighting for her life. She got away. As she walked back
home, she felt she had repossessed the world.
This is where the heroines real life begins. She has all the freedom
of the world, yet she is scared by the suddenly acquired freedom. Then
she decides to write a novel. The novel draws on her own experience,
but is, nevertheless, different. In the final scene of Munros novel, while
in company with a local boy who serves as a prototype for one of the
characters of Dels novel, wishes her luck in her life. At that stage, peoples
wishes and offerings were what she took naturally, as if they were her due.
Therefore, instead of simply saying thank you, she just says yes. With
this Joycean yes to life, the novel ends with a promise of a fruitful life
for Del Jordan.
Before she had become one of worlds best known story-tellers,
Alice Munro was a housewife who, admittedly, wrote secretly, shut in her
room under pretext of sewing a curtain.3 Lives of Girls and Women has
been recognized by critics as one womans narrative about her childhood
and adolescence, in the form of fictive autobiography as the story is told
by an older Del who reveals that she has become the writer she desired to
be in the Epilogue to this book. Coral Ann Howells, one of the leading
theorists of Canadian literature who wrote these definitions of Munros
book, also wrote that the novel is a story of Del [] in process of forging
her identity as a woman and an artist, and a feminized version of James
Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [Howells, 1998: 32]. She
also underlines Barbara Goddards view that, beside being the heroine of
her own life story, Del is also implicated in the female condition, and
Munro shows how writing about one girls life involves writing about other
womens lives. These other women, although different from Del, are her
mother, her aunts and her girlfriends.4 Besides these considerations, Dels
story, according to Howells, raises a wider issue of how to write about
3

Sheldrick, Catherine, Alice Munro, A Double Life, (ECW Press, 1992), 55.This was

quoted in an earlier article on Alice Munro, Radmila Nasti, Who Do You Are?
More Than a Question of Identity, In: Language and Literature at the End of XX
Century: Collection of Papers, Institute for Foreign Languages, (Podgorica: University
of Montenegro, 1997), 298.
Ibid., quoting Barbara Goddard, Heirs of the Living Body: Alice Munro and the
Question of a Female Aesthetic, in: J. Miller (ed.), The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the
Unsayable, (Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo Press, 1984), 43-72.

110

Canadian pioneer history which Munro continues to explore in her later

collections.., as well as answers to the question put by Goddard about
female authorship: How does one write as a woman? Munros answer
is that as a woman one writes both like the fathers, and like the mothers
in the separate tradition of oral literature, creating with the body on the
margins [Howells, 1998: 41-42].
Variations of a theme similar to Munros appear in a number of other
novels, we will deal with two, one by Gabrielle Roy, the other by Margaret
Laurence. In the French Canadian Gabrielle Roys novel The Road Past
Altamont, the young heroine, still a child, is impressed to tears by her
grandmothers ability to make all sorts of things with her hands, especially
little dolls. Youre like God she wept into her grandmothers ear. Youre
just like God. You can make things out of nothing as he does [Roy, 1976: 14].
In my dream, says she further, God the Father, with his great beard and
stern expression, yielded his place to Grandmother, with her keen, shrewd,
far-seeing eyes. From now on it would be she, seated in the clouds, who
would take care of the world, set up wise and just laws. Now all would be
well for the poor people on earth [Ibid. 16]. Much later, with the beginning
of her maturity, she decides to become something like a god who can create
out of nothing to become a writer, and to undergo every possible ordeal to
that end. To learn to know myself and to write was a far longer task than
I had thought at first, [Ibid. 145] is her conclusion. Very early in her life
the author of this novel, Gabrielle Roy, decided to become a writer but her
career was not simple and easy, as she had to support her much loved mother
and the large family, while at the same time was tempted to travel, learn and
improve. As the title of The Road Past Altamont suggests, it is about journeys
[Darby, 1999], and as the story discloses, it is about a young girls growing
up into an artist. Critics and readers have observed its autobiographical
quality, that it is a barely-fictionalized memoir of Gabrielle Roys childhood
and adolescence.5 The focus is on the dominant and over-protective mother
figure as something at the same time overpowering and reassuring. The
background to the story is recognized as Roys own hometown St. Boniface.
The author is in part endeavouring to understand and perhaps to forgive,6
to come to terms with her early life.
Rachel, the heroine of Margaret Laurences novel A Jest of God
(Rachel, Rachel), is in her thirty-fourth year completely ignorant of the
5
6

Web page accessed November 18, 2011. http://shelflove.wordpress. com/2008/07/21/

the-road-past-altamont/.
Grosskurth, Phyllis, Gabrielle Roy and the Silken Noose. Web page accessed
November 18, 2011. http://cinema2.arts.ubc.ca/units/canlit/pdfs/articles/canlit42Gabrielle(Grosskurth).pdf.

111

world and intimidated by her possessive mother. She is a teacher in a small

place which she dares not leave under the pretext of her mothers weak
heart, always courteous, always controlled. The summer when the novel
takes place, she goes through a hysterical outburst at a religious meeting,
comes across a young man she used to know at school, has a brief love
affair with him, thinks with horror that she is pregnant, but discovers she
has a tumour and undergoes an operation. The young man informs her he
is married, and she realizes that all has been a jest of god, that god is a
jester, and decides to take her own destiny into her hands. She leaves the
small town and starts a new life with her fussy mother who protests she
will not live through the journey. She realizes that her mother, too, was but
a frightened child, and tries to calm her down. Hush, it will be all right
there, there. And then she thinks: I am the mother now, [Laurence,
1966: 170] meaning that she has been born again, mothered herself,
repossessed the world, and has finally come in touch with her true self.
Throughout her career the author of this novel, Margaret Laurence,
presented a female perspective on life, depicting the choices and
consequences of those choices women make to find meaning and purpose
in life.7 The Jest of God is perhaps her most representative novel in this
tradition, and for that reason also might be described as autobiographical.
Laurence had an unorthodox life which took her to three continents and
allowed her to engage in a variety of activities. This novel is, as a critic
observed, about that eternal question which Freud famously foregrounded
What does a woman want?8 Similar to Shields heroine, Laurences
Rachel has for a long time resisted her own voice which Laurence
represents by the initial lack of a real plot. As the heroine regains the voice
which can tell her story, there is a change in the discourse which marks
her psychological progression as she develops a stronger public voice and
comes to accept all her voices.
It seems justified to examine the novels under scrutiny as forms
of their authors autobiography, since the heroines, themselves writers,
teachers or creative women, can be seen as the personas of the respective
authoresses.
Several prominent theorists have dealt with the genre of female
autobiography and its relevance in contemporary literature and culture:
Shai Banstock, Authorizing the Autobiographical, Women, Autobiography,
Theory: A Reader, Shoshanna Felman, What Does a Woman Want? Reading
7
8

h ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Laurence.
 tein, Karen, Speaking Tongues: Margaret Laurences A Jest of God as Gothic
S

Narrative. Web page accessed November 18, 2011. http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/

bin/ get.cgi?directory=vol20_2/&filename=Stein.htm

112

and Sexual Difference, Shirley Neuman, Autobiography and the Question

of Genre, Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Womens Autobiography.
In discussing autobiography, Shirley Neuman distinguishes between
the humanist poetics of autobiography in which the autobiographer is
seen as discovering meaningful pattern in the flux of past experience in
order to arrive at an understanding of himself as unique and unified. In
poststructuralist poetics, however, autobiography becomes re-vision, rememory etc. a new way of looking at the past. Adrienne Rich famously
stated that for women rereading, or re-vision the act of looking back,
of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical
direction is an act of survival, because survival is, profoundly, a form
of autobiography. Shoshana Felman, building on Richs views, further
expands the theory of reading autobiographically, which is an activity
and a performance, and frequently the best way of representing trauma, a
huge wound which is truly central to many female stories, and to the novels
under scrutiny in this paper.

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1945. 1947. . ,
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11
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. . . : , 1939.
13 E
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14
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2.
,
, , (
), .
1996. .
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.

2.1.
1920. , .
.
, , ,
(18761944),
1913. . , Parabeln I,
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 [, 1920: 4]. ,
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1939, 1946. 1965. . , 1947. . .
:
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, [,
1967: 344]. . , .
, .

 (1816-1882),

18 I zbrana dela: v petih zvezkih (Marx, Karl); Ludwig Feuerbach in konec klasine
nemke filozojije (Engels, Friedrich);Osemnajsti brumaire Ludvika Bonaparta, (Marx,
Karl);Mezda, cena in profit, (Marx, Karl)
19 M
 irko Koir. panija na braniku demokracije, svobode in miru: (1936-1939). Ljubljana:
Cankarjeva zaloba, 1946; O. Slakar (pseudonim Mirka Koira). Muenika panija.
Ljubljana, 1937.
20
 :
, ,
: , . . :
16 (30. 1980. .): 3.
17

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, , .
,
, ,
... [, 1947:26]

.
.
?
In kaj je konni namen vsega teavnega dela, ki ga
opravlja vsak zaveden lan loveke drube? Ali naj veno
ostane ideal loveke drube druba Droogstopplov? Ne,
prihodnost bo drugana, prihodnost bo lepa! [,
1947:25]
: , .
, [,
1947:24]. , :
Multatuli je v svoji slubi na raznih krajih nizozemskih
kolonij dodobra spoznal ves sistem kolonialnega izkorianja
[ ... ]. Za vsem tem sijajnim in gladkim sistemom pa se
skriva najhuje izkorianje domaega prebivalstva, ki mora
dati zadnji koek zemlje, zadnjega vola iz hleva, da bi
zadovoljilo nenasitno razsipnost domaih velikaev [, 1947:12-13].

.


.
:
Prava zaveznika Javancev pa sta se pokazala
predstavnika Sovjetske zveze Manuljinski in Viinski - ko
sta letos v februarju branila koristi indonezijskih ljudstev v
Varnostnem svetu Zdruenih narodov. Za njima so stali in
stoje vsi narodi Sovjetske zveze in okrog njih se zbirajo vse

121

napredne sile na svetu od indijskih delavcev, ko noejo

vkrcavati et in oroja na ladje, namenjene v Indonezijo,
do avstralskih, amerikih, nizozemskih delovnih mnoic, ki
protestirajo proti zatiranju narodno-osvobodilnih gibanj v
kolonijah. Ta mednarodna solidarnost pa je porok, da bodo
vsem oviram navkljub vendarle zmagali Saidje in Adinde
[, 1947:5].

2.3.

(1904 1977). 1946.
.
. .

1927. .
. ,
. , , Twentieth Century Fox, . : ,
, , .

( ) .
1956. 21.

, ,
:
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XIX (
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.24 ,
,

, , , [, 1967: 326327].
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.
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. 1957. .
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 oratio Smith, A Dictionary of Modem European Literature. New York 1947. London
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25. .
,
- [, 1967: 326-329].

:
,
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.

. [, 1967: 338]
, [, 1967: 338]. ,

[, 1967: 338].

- [, 1967:
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[, 1967: 341].
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 : , .
[, 2005: 14 15]

124

3.

.

. , ,
. 26
[, 1904] .
(1920. )
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.
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26

 (1871-1928),
().

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 : ,
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Even-Zohar, Itmar. Polysystem Studies.: Poetics Today.
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yXIX. : , 1951.
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. : . : , . 2. (1993)
. . : , 1920.
.
. : , 1993.
. (Eduard Douwes Dekker). . :
, 1993.
. - .
: , 1947.
. : . : , 5. 1955. .
. Max Havelaar ali nizozemska trgovska druba
prodaja kavo na drabi. : , 1965.
. . : LutErazmo & ReVision
Consulting Group, 1996.
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kleine akte van geloof, : , 1994.

126

 , . : .
, . 63. : , 1963.
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1954. .
Sran V. Nikoli
THREE YUGOSLA VIAN TRANSLATORS OF MULTATULI
RECEPTION OF HIS WORK IN YUGOSLA VIA
Summary
Research conducted by the author of this paper whose aim was
to examine reception of the works of the famous Dutch author Eduard
Douwes Dekker in the ex-Yugoslavia showed, among other things, that,
from the beginning of the 20th century until today, there were three
important translators and spokesmen of his works who were also the most
important mediators between this writer and Yugoslavian readers. These
authors were: unknown translator from the year 1920 who translated
Otto Hauser views, Mirko Koir and Ivo Hergei. All three of them had
different approaches to the Multatulis works influenced by social and
political circumstances as well as their personal affinities. Their views and
approaches were analyzed in this paper as well as objective circumstances
that had decisive influence on the position of Multatulis works within the
Yugoslavian cultural polysystem.
Key words: Multatuli, reception, Max Havelaar, Eduard Douwes
Dekker, Mirko Koir, Ivo Hergei

127

: 821.111 (73) Cisneros S.

: 1. 11. 2011. .
: 12. 11. 2011. .

STORY-TELLING FROM THE MARGINS:

NARRATIVE TECHNI QUES IN WOMAN
HOLLERING CREEK BY SANDRA CISNEROS
Abstract: This paper analyses some narrative techniques used by the Chicana
writer Sandra Cisneros in her short-story cycle Woman Hollering Creek.
First, her specific use of language is addressed. By using the techniques
of mixing and switching of codes she subverts the dominant language and
puts the reader in the position of immigrants who do not understand the
English language. The paper further analyses the deployment of religion
as a recurring theme. The older autochtonous Mexican religion and newer
Catholicism create a hybrid which empowers the characters in this book.
Finally, we focus on the authors use of parody and irony to tackle serious
issues such as the status of women, tradition, religion, identity, crime and
responsibility.
Key words: Sandra Cisneros, ethnic women writers, narrative techniques,
language, religion, irony and parody, hybrid, margins.
Introduction
According to Elizabeth Ordez, ethnic women writers hav[e]
produced a coherent and interrelated system of texts [Ordez, 1982: 19]
which share certain common characteristics: 1. the disruption of genre,
of particular relevance to the female text which fuses discourse and body
in a rejection of genre/gender limitations; 2. the power to displace the
central patriarchal text; that is, the Bible and other commonly accepted
mythical constructs exerting power over woman; and, 3. the writing and
rewriting of a heretofore buried or subversively oral matrilineal tradition,
or the invention either through inversion or compensation of alternate
mythical and even historical accounts of women [ibid.].
Sandra Cisneros, as a Chicana writer, belongs to this group. In
this paper, by examining some of the narrative techniques deployed in
her work Woman Hollering Creek, we will see how the aforementioned
characteristics are displayed in it. Particular attention will be paid to the
* : arteapanajotovic@yahoo.com

128

concepts of fusion and hybridity, which Deborah Madsen emphasizes as

key concepts in Cisneross work [Madsen, 2001: 105-134].

Language
O ne of the most powerful tools Cisneros uses to assert her and her
characters identity is language. [Cisneros] revels in her biculturalism,
enjoys her life in two worlds, and as a writer shes grateful to have twice
as many words to pick fromtwo ways of looking at the world [Ganz,
1994: 8].
Verena Andermatt Conley explains that [a]s an institution, literature
reinforces the values of the dominant class, the literary establishment serves
a class interest under the guise of moral and aesthetic values. Literary
discourse must marginalize itself not through socialist-realist techniques
but through the questioning of language. In Sandra Cisneros stories, this
marginalization of language occurs, for instance, through her incorporation
of Chicano Spanish.1 By doing this, she undermines the ruling culture
in a formal, overt way, placing the reader in an unfavourable yet enticing
position of not understanding everything, of having to guess and deduce the
meanings of words and phrases in a foreign language, the so-called cognitive
holes. Multikulturni tekstovi po pravilu sadre prepreke u razumevanju
koje strateki i selektivno postavljaju sami pisci pred itaoce koji ne
poseduju znanje jezika i kultura kojima tekstovi pripadaju, primoravajui
ih tako da aktivno tragaju za smislom i da time postanu deo znaenja teksta.
Oni u isto vreme navode itaoce da uestvuju u procesu interpretacije tako
to e sami iznalaziti znaenje nepoznatih sadraja i elemenata [Izgarjan,
2008: 7]. The reader is thus put in the position of the immigrant minority
and realizes what it is like for the immigrants when they do not understand
English. This technique is known as mixing of codes.
B esides mixing of codes, the technique called switching of codes is
also present. Kada govornici alterniraju izmeu jezika u duim iskazima
na primer kada menjaju jezike pri promeni tema ili sagovornika taj proces
se naziva promenom kodova [Izgarjan, 2008: 19]. At the very beginning
of Woman Hollering Creek, in the dedication, Cisneros addresses her
American mother in English, and her Mexican father in Spanish. In Bien
Pretty, the protagonists normally speak English, but make love in Spanish.
M ixing of codes and cognitive holes are metaphorically represented
in Benjamins letter to Black Christ in Little Miracles, Kept Promises.
As a minority a homosexual, he mixes two different codes (letters and
1

M
 aria-Theresia Holub, De-Colonizing Images: Re-Membrance and Feminist
Subversion in Sandra Cisneros Woman Hollering Creek (paper presented at Crossing
the Boundaries XII: Image Power An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference,
Binghamton, New York, April 23-24, 2004): 1.

129

numbers), which immediately distinguishes him from others. This makes

his text incomprehensible (because of the cognitive holes numbers)
and intriguing for the readers they want to break the code. When we
understand that numbers stand for vowels, we grasp the meaning of his
text just as we manage to realize what perro, charro, arroyo, etc. mean in
the story cycle.
It is interesting to note that in the first part, where children are
narrators, there is the least mixing of languages. Only later do narrators
recognize the power of their position as bilingual speakers and Chicanos/
Chicanas.

Religion
Apart from being one of the main themes in Woman Hollering
Creek, religion plays another important role in this short story cycle. By
persistently appearing in most of the stories, always with a different function
and meaning, it grows into a major narrative strategy which contributes to
the unity of the cycle. In this section, we will explore the many aspects in
which this theme is present in the text and its role in the perception of this
collection of stories as a short story cycle.
The first thing we perceive about religion is that there are (at least)
two religions. There is the older, autochthonous Mexican religion, and
the newer Catholicism, established as a ruling religion which pushed the
older one out. What Karla Sanders points out regarding the Chippewa tribe
holds true for Mexicans as well. There are two traditions: the culture of
their ancestors and the Western traditions brought by Catholic missionaries
who sought to civilize the tribe. These differing mythologies present
contradictory messages of power and place for these men and women
[Sanders, 1998: 1]. The dialectics between the two, their complex interplay
and dynamic tension, becomes, if interpreted correctly, a great source of
power for the characters immersed in them. It is also a challenge and a test
of maturity acceptance and adoption of both religious systems is a sign
of finding ones identity and a specific rite of passage.
In Little Miracles, Kept Promises we witness such maturation
of the narrator, Rosario, who after initial denial of religion turns it into a
source of strength which helps her become proud of belonging to a minority
in the United States. This initial denial was a result of her interpretation of
Catholicism (and particularly the cult of Virgin Mary) as one of the main
mechanisms that the patriarchal society uses to keep women in a subdued
position. Virgencita de Guadalupe. For a long time I wouldnt let you in
my house. I couldnt see you without seeing my ma each time my father
came home drunk and yelling, blaming everything that ever went wrong
in his life on her [Cisneros, 1992: 127]. But later on she experiences an
epiphany: I dont know how it all fell in place. How I finally understood

130

who you are. No longer Mary the mild, but our mother Tonantzn. Rosario
thus redefines her perception of religion. She deconstructs the stereotypical
image of Virgin Mary and redefines it as an all-encompassing global deity:
When I learned your real name is Coatlaxopeux, She Who Has
Dominion over Serpents, when I recognized you as Tonantzn, and learned
your names are Teteoinnan, Toci, Xochiquetzal, Tlazolteotl, Coatlicue,
Chalchiuhtlicue, Coyolxauhqui, when I could see you as Nuestra Seora de
la Soledad, Nuestra Seora de los Remedios, Nuestra Seora del Perpetuo
Soccoro, Nuestra Seora de San Juan de los Lagos, Our Lady of Lourdes,
Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Our Lady of the Rosary, Our Lady of Sorrows,
I wasnt ashamed, then, to be my mothers daughter, my grandmothers
granddaughter, my ancestors child.
When I could see you in all your facets, all at once the Buddha, the
Tao, the true Messiah, Yahweh, Allah, the Heart of the Sky, the Heart of the
Earth, the Lord of the Near and Far, the Spirit, the Light , the Universe, I
could love you, and, finally, learn to love me [ibid., 128].
Interestingly, there is no clash between the two religious systems.
Again, as in so many instances mentioned, a hybrid, a fusion, is seen as
the only response to the complex (here religious) situation on the border.
This ranges from superstitious fear of offending one of the religions and
being on the safe side by pleasing both (I burned copal in a clay bowl.
Inhaled the smoke. Said a prayer in mexicano to the old gods and Ave
Mara in Spanish to La Virgen, and gave thanks [ibid., 99].) to deification
of military and political leaders (Look favorably on this petition and bless
me, that I may continue to glorify your deeds with all my heart santsimo
Nio Fidencio, gran General Pancho Villa, bandito Don Pedrito Jaramillo,
virtuoso John F. Kennedy, and blessed Pope John Paul. Amen [ibid., 119].)
to pleading to yet another religious system (Seven African Powers that
surround our Saviour Obatala, Yemaya, Ochn, Orunla, Ogun, Elegua,
and Shango why dont you behave and be good to me? [ibid., 128]) to
an epiphanic revelation of the common basis of all religions in the world.
In Woman Hollering Creek, the independent feminist Felice
rebels against Catholicism: Did you ever notice, Felice continued, how
nothing around here is named after a woman? Really. Unless shes the
Virgin. I guess youre only famous if youre a virgin [ibid., 55]. Cisneros
herself shares the same opinion: Were raised in a Mexican culture that
has two role models: La Malinche y La Virgen de Guadalupe. And you
know thats a hard route to go, one or the other, theres no in-betweens.
The virgin and the whore these categories of good versus bad women
are complicated by the perception, shared by many Chicana feminists, that
they risk betrayal of the people if they pursue an alternative construction of
femininity that is perceived to be Anglo [Madsen, 2001: 123].

131

Irony and Parody

In Woman Hollering Creek, Sandra Cisneros addresses very serious
issues such as the status of women, tradition, religion, identity, crime and
responsibility. But while tackling them, she constantly uses irony and
parody, thus subverting these ideas and helping liberate the reader to take a
freer and less prejudiced look at them. It is essential to notice that she does
not necessarily use parody and irony to criticize the ideas she disapproves
of, but to add new meanings and shed new light on the most essential
concepts in her writing.
She mocks American hunger for authenticity in Mericans, where
American tourists want to take a photo of indigenous Mexicans, and become
offended when the boy they took a picture of starts speaking English. In this
amusing, light-hearted way, many serious issues are raised: the questions
of identity, genuineness, authenticity, stereotypes and nationality.
In an even more subversive way, religion is questioned in One Holy
Night. The person representing himself as a descendent of Mayan kings,
as a semi-deity, speaking a language nobody understands, calling himself
fancifully Chaq Uxmal Paloqun, around whom an aura of untouchability
exists, losing virginity with whom is described as a religious rite (So I
was initiated beneath an ancient sky by a great and mighty heir Chaq
Uxmal Paloqun. I, Ixchel, his queen [Madsen, 2001: 123].) turns out
to be Chato which means fat-face. [] Born on a street with no name
[ibid., 33]. His father a knife sharpener, his mother a vendor of apricots
at the local market. He a serial killer. Who is the author ironic about?
Nave teenagers? Gullible readers? Tradition? Prophanization of religion?
Are gods of today like this? By adding a tinge of irony, Cisneros adds new
layers of meaning to her stories.
In the next story, My Tocaya, she continues questioning the
adequacy of religion, this time Catholicism, in todays society. Here what
was intended by the holy sisters to be Youth Exchanges turns into Sex
Rap Crap. And how the lectures about The Blessed Virgin: Role Model
for Todays Young Woman, Petting: Too Far, Too Fast, Too Late and
Heavy Metal and the Devil completely miss the point.
The motif Cisneros is constantly ironic about is telenovelas.
Telenovelas are opium for women. Although often taken lightly, they are
one of the pillars of perpetuation of patriarchal society in Latin America.
The society wants women who are passive, obedient, like telenovela
heroines. First they suffer, and then there is a happy ending. Only in
reality women rarely move on to this second stage, remaining in a subdued
position forever, hoping that life will change.

132

Finally, in the last story irony is used to assert womens rights.

The narrator, an artist, after the failure of her last relationship, decides to
invert the myth of Prince Popcatpetl and Princess Ixta in her painting,
symbolically giving the active role to the woman, changing traditional
female passivity into activeness, and making the prince passive. Went
back to the twin volcano painting. Got a good idea and redid the whole
thing. Prince Popo and Princess Ixta trade places. After all, whos to say
the sleeping mountain isnt the prince, and the voyeur the princess, right?
So Ive done it my way. With Prince Popcatpetl lying on his back instead
of the Princess. Of course, I had to make some anatomical adjustments in
order to simulate the geographical silhouettes. I think Im going to call it
El Pipi del Popo. I kind of like it [ibid., 163].

Conclusion
The objective of this paper is to analyze the deployment of some
narrative techniques in Woman Hollering Creek. Sandra Cisneros uses
them very skillfully to assert herself as an ethnic woman writer, a Chicana,
a storyteller from the margins. Through her specific use of language,
recurring theme of religion and irony and parody, she offers a gift to
the uninitiated, the chance to taste deeply of Hispanic culture while
accompanied by a knowing and generous guide [ibid.].

Bibliography
Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.
New York: Random House, 1992.
Ganz, Robin. Sandra Cisneros: Border Crossing and beyond. In:
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Holub, Maria-Theresia. De-Colonizing Images: Re-Membrance
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Izgarjan, Aleksandra. Maksin Hong Kingston i Ejmi Ten: ratnica i
amanka. Novi Sad: Filozofski fakultet, Katerda za engleski jezik
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Ordez, Elizabeth. Narrative Texts by Ethnic Women: Rereading
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133

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rs/code/navigate.php?Id=62, 25. , 2011.
Milan D. Jovanovi
ETHICAL-MORALBASIS OF COMMUNICATION
Summary
The moral and ethical bases of communication are analyzed in
this text. Communication with people of different levels of culture and
knowledge and communication with ourselves are necessary conditions
for action, creativity and innovation in all areas of human activity. At the
beginning of every human communication, the same as at the beginning of
every human activity that is governed by free will as a precondition for ones
own decision, there are three corner stones: personal human ethics (adopted
universal ethical valuating principles for our own actions and the actions
of others, from the perspective of good and bad), morality (the valuing
quality of accepting, upholding and implementing general values based on
the customs and the traditions of some ethnic group) and the professional
ethicalcodes of separate professions in witch a certain individual is involved.
These three fundaments are possible causes and reasons for every human
action and reason for non-activity of humans as cultural beings, so it is the
same for communication as one of the essential characteristics of humans.
Communication is the necessary condition for all of the other individual or
social activities in relation with ourselves, other humans or nature. Human
ethics, morality, and the preservation of traditional values are necessary
to be observed not only as a basis of interrelated communication, but in
correlation with all of the objects, problems and purposes that humans are
forced to continuously deal with. A human is an entity that in the process of
necessary global communication could be understood only from the aspect
of the entirety of universal values of all cultures.
Key words: ethics, morality, communication, tradition, ethical code

155

: 37.026.78
: 1. 10. 2011. .
: 12. 10. 2011. .

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Din in the head ( ). Din in the
* a : biljana.mircic@ftb.rs

156

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163

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Balboni, E. P. La comunicazione interculturale. Venezia: Marsilio

Editori, 2007.
Balboni, E. P. Le sfide di Babele. Torino: UTET Libreria, 2002.
Borneto, S. (a cura di)Cera una volta il metodo. Roma: Carocci,
1998.
 . . . : , 2003.
Costamagna, L.Cantare litaliano. Perugia: Guerra Edizioni,
1990.
De Marco, A. (a cura di)Manuale di Glottodidattica, Insegnare
una lingua straniera. Roma: Carocci, 2000.
Di Francesco, A., e Naddeo, C. M.Bar Italia. Firenze: Alma
Edizioni, 2002.
Naddeo, C. M., e Trama G.Canta che ti passa. Firenze: Alma
Edizioni, 2002.
Serragiotto, G. (a cura di)CEDILS Certificazione in didattica
dellitaliano a stranieri. Roma: Bonacci editore, 2004.

Caon F. Canzone pop e canzone dautore per la didattica della lingua,
della cultura italiana e per lapproccio allo studio della letteratura.
2005; 28. 10. 2011. . http:// venus.unive.it/
filim/materiali/accesso_gratuito/Filim_caon_teoria. pdf
Caon F., Lobasso F. Lutilizzo della canzone per la promozione
e linsegnamento della lingua, della cultura e della letteratura
italiana allestero. 2008; 28. 10. 2011.
. http://www.glottodidattica.net/Articoli/articolo5_04.pdf
Morosin, M.S. Litaliano in gioco: Emozioni e apprendimento: il
cervello che sente impara.U: InIt. Sommario 19. (Perugia: Guerra
Edizioni, 2006): 6-11; 28. 10. 2011. .
http://www.guerraedizioni.com/initonline/pdf/init19.pdf

167

 Murphey T. Song Stuck In My Head Phenomena. In: System. Vol.

18. No 1. (Great Britain: Pergamon Press, 1990): 53-64.
28. 10. 2011. . http://www.kuis.ac.jp/~murphey-t/
Tim_Murphey/Articles_-_Music_and_Song.html .
Pasqui, R. Lutilizzo della canzoni in glottodidattica. In:
Bollettino Itals. (2003). 28. 10. 2011. .
http://venus. unive.it/italslab/modules.php?op=modload&name=e
zcms&file=inde x&menu=100&page_id=116
Pasqui, R. Risorse tecnologiche per linsegnamento/apprendimento
di una L2/LS attraverso le canzoni: suggerimenti per litaliano. In:
Bollettino Itals. (2004). 28. 10. 2011. .
http://venus.unive.it/italslab/modules.php?op=modload&name=ezc
ms&file=index&menu=79&page_id=120
Biljana . Miri
THE USE OF SONGS IN TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES
Summary
This paper aims to show, first of all, the advantages of using songs as a
didactic material in teaching foreign languages, as well as the ways in which
they may be used. It also deals with some of the criteria for the selection of
songs trying to offer an answer to the question of how to use them, that is,
points to the fact that song as a didactic material in the teaching of foreign
languages may be useful in the development of almost all language skills.
Finally, by providing guidelines for the development of teaching units, the
paper also presents one possible way of didactisation of composition.
Key words: song as a didactic material, the advantages of using songs,
ways of using songs , criteria for selection of songs, language skills,
didactisation

168

 M.


.

: 741.5 Hogarth W.
821.111 Shaw G.B.
347.156 055.2
: 1.10.2011. .
: 12.10.2011. .

THE POSITION AND PROGRESS OF WOMEN IN

THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES: COM PARATIVE
CASE STUDIES OF MOLL HACKABOUT AND
ELIZA DOO LITTLE1
Abstract: This paper explores the representations of women and their
life progress in A Harlots Progress, a series of engravings by William
Hogarth (1732) and Pygmalion by the Irish playwright George Bernard
Shaw (1912). After the introduction which gives insight into the position
of English women after the Middle Ages, the paper moves on to explore
two different life paths presented in Hogarths plates and Shaws acts. Moll
Hackabout moves from childlike innocence and purity to a morally corrupt
life, while Eliza Doolittle rises from poverty and coarseness to ladylike
manners and lifestyle. The influence of society is important in both
examples, and is seen through other characters that in most cases appear to
be rude or immoral. After the structural analysis and comparison of the two
works, this paper will aim to show that what matters more than the social
factor are the individual stance, courage, pride and moral correctness. The
conclusion points out the importance of these in choosing ones life path.
Key words: AHarlots progress, Pygmalion, position of women, Moll
Hackabout, Eliza Doolittle

The position of women through history an overview

The Middle Ages, often described as the dark period in the history
of humankind, brought about particularly difficult living conditions for
women. In the 15th century England, women were considered to be their
husbands property, and their only purpose in life was to produce children,
* : atina1301@gmail.com
1

This paper is a slightly altered version of the term paper Milica Vasiljevi wrote as part
of the course on British Cultural Studies in May 2011, under the supervision of Tijana
Parezanovi. Ovaj rad je neznatno izmenjena verzija seminarskog rada koji je Milica
Vasiljevi napisala tokom kursa Studije britanske kulture u maju 2011. godine, a pod
Tijane Parezanovi.

169

preferably sons, which was the cause they committed their lives to from
the age of twenty or less until they were forty [McDowall, 2009: 62].
Most women were peasants and had to master the skills of making cheese,
growing vegetables, raising animals, looking after the children and making
cloth and clothes. These activities took up the greatest part of their day.
However, life was no easier for the minority of noble women, who were
obliged to protect and care for the entire village in case of their husbands
absence. The general attitude towards women was rather ambivalent, as
the Church spread two different ideas about them. They were supposed to
be innocent and pure like the Virgin Mary, and to inspire admiration in men
as such. On the other hand, they were not to be trusted as, like Eve, they
represented a moral danger to men [Ibid., 62]. In Tudor times, however,
this changed to a certain extent, possibly thanks to the great popularity and
significant achievements of Queen Elizabeth I. As it was recorded,
[f]oreign visitors were surprised that women in
England had greater freedom than anywhere else in Europe.
Although they had to obey their husbands, they had selfconfidence and were not kept hidden in their rooms as women
were in Spain and other countries. They were allowed free
and easy ways with strangers [Ibid., 84].
Nevertheless, a womans future still depended entirely on marriage.
So it happened that the unmarried women particularly suffered during
the Tudor period: the Reformation gave way to the dissolution of most
monasteries, so they could not become nuns. Thousands of them became
beggars and could only hope for a servants position in someone elses
home. Life offered few or no alternatives to them.
As the power of monarchs became more absolute during the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, so the power of the husband and
father increased [Ibid., 105]. The wife and children belonged entirely to
the father of the family, and in addition to this, women also lost all legal
rights to any property they had brought into a marriage [Ibid., 105]. In the
eighteenth century, towns became the centre of social life and offered many
opportunities, which is the reason why many people moved from villages.
Although the discrepancy between the rich and poor was enormous, it was
noticed that for the British people it was very easy to move up and down
the social ladder: In London a man who dressed as a gentleman would
be treated as one. It was difficult to see a clear difference between the
aristocracy, the gentry and the middle class of merchants [Ibid., 115]. It
is precisely this tendency towards transformation that presents the major
issue of both AHarlots Progress (1732) and Pygmalion (1912). AHarlots
Progress is a series of six engravings by William Hogarth, first produced
as paintings in 1731. The series shows the story of a young woman, Moll
Hackabout, who arrives in London from the country and becomes a

170

prostitute. The series was developed from the third image: having painted a
prostitute in her boudoir in a garret on Drury Lane, Hogarth struck upon the
idea of creating scenes from her earlier and later life. The series achieved
immediate success, as it represented something completely novel. It was
life itself, but focused and concentrated as we see it on the stage [Dick,
1929:7]. The Victorian Era appeared to be no more benevolent towards
women than the eighteenth century. The ideal for a woman was to be slim,
pale and pretty the idea behind this ideal was that a woman (if she comes
from a rich and noble family) needs to marry into a rich and noble family.
However, even rich women were still their husbands possession and the
husband had the right to beat them or lock them in a room as he wished.
Women from lower classes preserved their unenviable positions as servants
or worse and working women were frequently sexually abused by men of
all classes. It was only in 1918 that some women over the age of thirty
gained the right to vote after a long, hard struggle [McDowell, 2009: 162].
Although essentially about the transformation of a woman, Pygmalion
(1912) still puts the emphasis of a mans role in it. As Henry Higgins, a
Professor of phonetics, makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney
flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassadors garden
party, he assumes the role of her creator and owner. Both Pygmalion and A
Harlots Progress show two poor girls fighting for their survival. However,
unlike Moll, Eliza is going to become a modern self-aware woman. The
fine manners and gentle way of speaking that Higgins teaches her will
prove to be of minor importance in the process. Once Eliza realizes that
Higgins and Colonel Pickering only view her as an experiment and not a
human being, she will rebel, showing that she is not a toy for two men to
play with and has her own free will, her own feelings and brains.

Part One: Eliza sells flowers at Covent Garden and Moll

arrives in London at the Bell Inn
A flower girl sells flowers at Covent Garden. She is perhaps eighteen
or twenty, and not of attractive appearance. Her little hat needs washing
badly, and so does her hair, which has changed its natural colour due to
the constant exposure to dust and soot. Her clothes and boots are shabby
and coarse. Her speech is barely comprehensible as most of the sounds
she utters seem as shrieks and mutters. As she tries to sell a flower or two,
she meets Professor Higgins, who calls her a creature with her kerbstone
English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days
and claims that in three months [he] could pass that girl off as a duchess
at an ambassadors garden party. [He] could even get her a place as ladys
maid or shop assistant, which requires better English [Pygmalion: 18-19].
Moll has arrived at the Bell Inn in Cheapside, fresh from countryside.
She carries scissors and a pincushion, seeking employment as a seamstress

171

or domestic servant. Unlike Eliza, Moll is wearing a long white dress which
is a symbol of her innocence and purity. The figures of bystanders that
appear in Act I of Pygmalion (and are later identified as Professor Higgins
and Colonel Pickering) are also evident in the first plate of A Harlots
Progress, though they are quite different. Hogarth presents Elizabeth
Needham, a notorious brothel-keeper, and Colonel Francis Charteris, a
notorious rake prosecuted for and charged with rape. He is fondling himself
in expectation of the pleasures brought about by the new girl in town. The
power and popularity of both works relies at least partly on their references
to historical facts: both Needham and Charteris are historical figures, while
the character of Professor Higgins, by Shaws admission, has touches
of the English philologist, phonetician and grammarian Henry Sweet
(1845 1912). There is a stark contrast between the two colonels: Pickering
will prove to be the only person who actually treats Eliza Doolittle as
a lady, while Charteris is standing with his pimp in front of a decaying
building, symbolic of his moral bankruptcy and allusive to the destruction
he is going to bring upon Moll. The two girls are also contrasted: Elizas
attire already bears all the dirt of the urban life, while Molls is impeccably
white and clean. Eliza is ready to struggle with all her energy and might to
get a penny or two, and she is all too glad to spend the money she receives
on a cab. She strives to make her life better even by such a trifle act. Moll
is more modest and seems not to wish for a higher position or the benefits
it brings; she is looking for an honest job. The white strangled goose in
the bottom right corner of the plate, which is as white as Molls dress,
symbolically represents her naivety and foreshadows her future.

Part Two: Eliza comes to professors house in order to

learn to speak properly and Moll is now a kept woman, the
mistress of a wealthy merchant
As Eliza arrives at the Professors house, she appears tidier than
before with a nearly clean apron and a hat with three ostrich feathers. She
says that she wants to be a lady in a flower shop instead of selling flowers
in the street. They wont take her unless she can talk in a more ladylike
fashion. She is ready to pay him and does not give more than a shilling.
Higgins shows no interest in her, but she reminds him of his boast the
previous day, so he accepts. Moll is now the mistress of a wealthy Jewish
merchant, and lives in a well-furnished town house. The Old Testament
painting in the background points out to how the merchant will treat Moll
in between this plate and the next one.2 Currently, Moll is richly attired and
keeps a monkey for entertainment, an Indian boy servant and another girl
servant, all of whom have probably been provided by the merchant. She
is deliberately kicking over the tea table with her leg so that she would
2

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Harlots_Progress

172

distract the merchant as her another lover sneaks out of the room. Unlike
Moll, who has everything provided for her by the merchant, Eliza is too
proud even to think of accepting such a thing. She claims that [she] didnt
want no clothes. [She] wouldnt have taken them. [...] [She] can buy [her]
own clothes [Pygmalion: 34]. While Moll is enjoying all the benefits of an
easy and carefree way of living, full of excessive pleasures, Eliza has no
home, no family and no money. However, she is still morally untainted and
despite her looks appears as innocent as a child, which is emphasized by
Higgins suggestion that his housekeeper, Mrs. Pierce, should adopt her as a
daughter. The second plate/act is completely contrasted to the first ones: the
roles are now inverted and it seems that, while both girls are striving hard to
succeed, they are doing it in different manners. Eliza appears more modest
than Moll now, as her only wish is to work in a shop. The money she would
thus earn is honestly made by her own efforts and work. The means by
which Moll receives money are, on the other hand, morally wrong. What is
more, Molls means represent a pure example of agreeing to and supporting
the debasement women frequently had to face at the time.

Part Three: Elizas first public appearance and Molls

departure to a brothel
After days and days of speech exercises, the day of Elizas first trial
comes, when she has to socialize with the Eynsford-Hills, who are visiting
Professor Higgins mother. Eliza is beautifully dressed; she utters perfect
sounds and generally produces an impression of remarkable distinction.
She appears graceful and elegant, while Higgins himself seems rather rude,
sarcastic and spoiled. However, the moment Eliza is presented with the
adequate subject, she retreats to her common vernacular and confides her
suspicions that her aunt was killed by relatives. She also hints that the aunt
in question was an alcoholic, which leaves the company astonished.
Having betrayed her wealthy keeper, Moll has been demoted to
common prostitute. She now lives in a shabby room, with a witch hat hung
on a wall and the first signs of syphilis showing on her face. The bed is
the dominant piece of furniture, and her breasts are half exposed as she
shows off a watch, presumably a gift from one of her lovers. The wig
box of highwayman James Dalton (hanged on 11 May 1730) is stored over
her bed, suggesting a romantic dalliance with the criminal3. The famous
magistrate at the time, Sir John Gonson, is coming through the door with
three armed bailiffs to arrest Moll for her activities.
While Moll has betrayed her wealthy lover, Eliza has betrayed her
true origins. Both girls at this point are judged by society: Eliza has to sit
through her first test in high society and Moll is literally being taken to
3

I bid.

173

court. Both of them fail, though Elizas naivety and simple-mindedness

cause sympathy in her jurors, while Moll causes nothing but terror and
disgust. The witch hat serves to point out how diabolical and impure her
actions have become and the satisfied smile on her face implies that she is
hardly aware of her deeds. On the other hand, it is not easy to forget the
innocence with which she arrived from her village and the cruel deceit
effected upon her; it could therefore be claimed that the very society that
is now condemning her was the main culprit for her demise. This same
society is forcing Eliza to act contrary to her nature and be something that
she is not. The only difference is in the fact that Eliza still cannot hide her
true nature, while Moll has completely adjusted to her new surroundings.

Part Four: Eliza is at the Embassy Ball and Moll is in

Bridewell Prison
Elizas appearance at the ball turns out to be a complete success.
She has learned to behave and speak like a lady in less than six months
and has even managed to fool the famous Nepommuck, a former student
of Higgins who speaks thirty-two languages and is a great connoisseur of
phonetics. Everyone is impressed by her sophistication, and Nepommuck
goes so far as to claim that she is of royal Hungarian origin. This seems
to be the climax of Elizas transformation; however, the true climax takes
place upon the companys return from the ball. Eliza realizes that she has
not actually gained anything by her success: she has only acquired a false
personality which she cannot use in everyday life. Moreover, she realizes
that to Higgins she has represented nothing more than an experiment, a
means to prove his scientific grandeur. The moment she starts believing
she has been treated in an inhumane way is the moment when her truly
human side surfaces and she rejects all the favours Higgins has done to her.
The false attire, makeup and jewellery taken off, she becomes once again
a proud human being.
Moll is in Bridewell Prison, the house of correction for prostitutes,
where she is exposed to hard work. The jailer is pointing to her task
threateningly, while his wife is stealing clothes from Moll. Molls own
servant seems to be wearing Molls shoes as she smiles at the theft furtively.
The entire room is filled with poor, weak or ill people it represents the very
worst of society and as such stands in stark contrast to the Ambassadors
residence and glamorous party. Molls meek acceptance of the hard work,
theft and her servants betrayal suggests at first that she has, unlike Eliza,
conformed to the rules dictated by society. A closer look, though, might
reveal that Molls true nature is also resurfacing: in the fourth plate, her
figure appears rather bright and pale against the gloomy atmosphere of
the prison. This evokes the first plate, where Moll is represented in all
her innocence and purity as a girl in white. A great part of the blame for

174

Molls destiny is put on society, and the prison does not seem to offer
any path towards correction and atonement. On the other hand, Molls
punishment does not appear completely undeserved, as she willingly and
gladly became part of the morally corrupt society. The words spoken by
Eliza: I sold flowers. I didnt sell myself. Now youve made a lady of me
Im not fit to sell anything else. I wish youd left me where you found me
[Pygmalion: 88] do not apply to Moll. Unable to detach herself from the
deceitful and corrupt world, Moll is doomed to suffer.

Part Five: Elizas departure from the Professors house and

Molls death
Eliza has left Professor Higgins who is looking for her while she
is half-hiding at his mothers home. Upon Pickering and Higgins arrival
at Mrs. Higgins, Eliza seems to be more graceful and sophisticated than
ever. In a highly rational manner, she accuses Professor Higgins and praises
Colonel Pickering:
It is not because you paid for my dresses. I know you
are generous to everybody with money. But it was from you
that I learnt really nice manners; and that is what makes one
a lady, isnt it? You see it was so very difficult for me with
the example of Professor Higgins always before me. I was
brought up to be just like him, unable to control myself, and
using bad language on the slightest provocation. And I should
never have known that ladies and gentlemen didnt behave
like that if you hadnt been there [Pygmalion: 105].
Elizas statement is perhaps a direct accusation of society: it is from
people around us that we learn how to behave, and distinguished experts
such as Higgins and Pickering could not have been more representative of
the higher social classes. Eliza reaches the conclusion that proper speech
and clothes are not the things that make a man, and neither are wealth
and eminence. Manners and a kind heart are what matters, and these can
be found among the poor as well as the rich. Molls last hours are tainted
by the presence of morally deviant people from all social layers. She has
returned to the garret, and she is now dying from venereal disease. Two
doctors, both quacks, are arguing over their medical methods while a
woman, possibly her landlady, is rifling Molls possessions and looting
whatever she finds interesting. Almost no one seems to care about the dying
woman, whose clothes seem to reach down for her as if ghosts drawing her
to the afterlife.4 The kind figure of Colonel Pickering is missing in the
representation of Molls life. This might lead us to a possible conclusion
that the position of women has over centuries undergone a change for the
4

Ibid.

175

better and that at the turn of the twentieth century women appear to be more
self-aware and exposed to more opportunities and choices. This change is
partly influenced by shifts in society on the whole, as the twentieth century
brought more open-minded views on various forms of life.

Part Six and the Last: The Denouement

In terms of the medieval representations of women, it could be said
that Eliza preserves the admiration reserved for the Virgin Mary. Her newly
acquired attitude and the decision to marry Freddy and open a modest
flower shop are truly worthy of admiration. Moll, on the other hand, is
more like Eve, as her life indeed used to be the life of a temptress. In the
best Aristotelian tradition, Pygmalion ends with a comic marriage, while
A Harlots Progress ends with a tragic death, despite its title, which proves
to be rather sarcastic. What Moll goes through is more of a regress and,
moreover, the final plate shows neither optimism nor faith in a brighter
future. Molls son, for instance, is sitting right under her coffin, which
overshadows that the boys future will be marked by his mothers misdeeds.
The company gathered around the coffin includes a parson who has got his
hand up the skirt of a girl next to him, a girl who steals the undertakers
handkerchief and another girl who is vainly looking at her reflection in the
mirror, although her face shows a syphilitic sore on its forehead. Elizas
future, on the other hand, brings the opportunity of a decent job and the
possibility of education.
It could be argued that both works represent harsh social satires.
Even though every man or woman is a social being, we all live in the
present moment and have only today to change our ways of life. Life is a
precious gift which we need to cherish and appreciate unless we want to
lose the constant battle between our individual selves and the collective
spirit. This battle for self-esteem and achievement has lasted for centuries
and continues into the future of a modern man. While it is true that social
norms, however rigid, wrong or incomprehensible may largely influence an
individuals progress in life, the comparative analysis of the two examples
presented in this paper teaches us that one should always strive towards
self-fulfilment. Perhaps the battle for establishing the fully developed
individual personality in a world of social restrictions might not always be
successful the point is still in striving and fighting.

Bibliography
McDowall, David. An Illustrated History of Britain. Longman
Group, Harlow 2009.
Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. The Forgotten Books 2008.
Available at: http://books.google.rs [accessed 10/05/2011]

176

 Stewart, Dick. William Hogarth: 1697 1764. In: Bulletin of

the Pennsylvania Museum, Vol. 25, No. 129 (Nov., 1929), 2-11.
Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3794433 [accessed
20/05/2011]

Internet resources
Tate Gallery. A Harlots Progress. Accessed 20/05/2011. http://
www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/hogarth/modernmorals/
harlotsprogress.shtm
Wikipedia. A Harlots Progress. Accessed 20/05/2011. http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Harlots_Progress
Wikipedia. Pygmalion. Acessed 20/05/2011.http://en.wikipedia.
org/ wiki/Pygmalion
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18. 19. :

1732. , ( A Harlots Progress) 1912. .

,
. ,
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, , , .
: , .
;
. , ,
.
,

177

 .
. ,
. , .
,
. : ,
.
.
, . ,
,
, , . ,
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: . , ,
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. , , .
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178

: 371.13
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:12. 11. 2011. .

THE AC QUISITION OF TEACHING TECHNIQUES

Abstract: Observation of the first classes held by trainee teachers shows
that most students on a teacher training course tend to use almost the
same lesson shape and just a few teaching techniques which are usually
based on the model of teaching presented by their former teachers. The
type of teaching they were exposed to seems to have more influence than
the theories presented in relevant literature and instructions and advice
given by the professor who teaches ELT. This kind of modelling is not
just powerful, but often quite limiting in SLT. This is why teacher training
courses should involve much more supervised observation and practice
as well as more peer cooperation that may lead to a better adoption of
contemporary language teaching techniques.
Key words: Model learning, observation, subconscious learning, teaching
techniques, teacher training.
Introduction
This paper deals with the acquisition of teaching techniques, or in
other words with the processes present in learning how to teach. The
well-known distinction Krashen made between learning and acquisition
[Krashen, 1981:10] seems to be relevant not only in language learning,
but in learning how to teach foreign languages as well. According to
him, learning is a conscious process that involves some kind of formal
instruction, while acquisition is an unconscious process and often much
more effective than learning. Surprisingly, in many aspects of human
learning, a similar distinction can be made and similar conclusions drawn.
Owing to great progress made in applied linguistics and the importance
of foreign language learning, modern teacher training is carefully designed
to fit the increasingly demanding standards of the teachers job. Although
good teachers keep learning about teaching constantly throughout their
teaching careers, teacher development can no more be a slow process that
develops through years of experience as it used to be a few decades ago.
On the other hand, experience seems to play an important role not only
* a : vesna_pilipovic@yahoo.com

179

in the form of the professional experience teachers get when they start to
teach, but in the form of observational experience got by watching their
former teachers and incorporated in their idea of what teaching should
be like. Scrivener says [Scrivener, 1994: 15] that much of our view of
what a teacher is and what a teacher should do can often be traced back
to these many years of lesson observation from the pupils seat. Sadly, a lot
of the teaching that has left a deep impression on us was not necessarily
very good teaching. The type of teaching we were exposed to sometimes
seems to be even more powerful than the theories and instructions we get
through teacher training courses. Unfortunately a wrong teaching model is
quite limiting and since unconsciously adopted, not easy to reject. This is
one of the crucial problems ELT trainers have to deal with.

The research
The problem of the powerful unconscious acquisition of teaching
techniques was first observed and then further investigated in groups of
thirdyear students of English at the Faculty of Law and Business Studies
who have a compulsory basic course English Language Teaching
Methodology.
This course consists of a theoretical and a practical part. The former
covers the development of teaching methods, teaching techniques most
commonly used nowadays and other relevant topics, such as: working with
different groups, factors that influence language learning, the choice of
resource materials, etc. The practical part is carried out in the classroom
in state or private schools where trainee teachers get their first real
experience in teaching and try to employ the techniques they learnt about.
The first two years of observation (2009-2010) showed that
most trainee teachers employed the teaching techniques that they had
previously criticized, which was quite surprising. During the first part of
the course, the advantages and disadvantages of certain teaching methods
and techniques were often discussed and most students were genuinely
interested, participated actively in these discussions and showed an
amazingly high level of critical thinking, expressing excellent ideas of
what might be useful, motivating and challenging in the classroom. They
often complained of the ways they had been taught, pointing out that the
basic lesson plan usually consisted of reading, translation and exercises
provided in their coursebooks. Surprisingly, most of these students did
almost the same during their first classes and they could not explain why.
This led the author of this paper to the conclusion that in spite of the
theoretical knowledge and good ideas, the model of teaching they were

180

exposed to may be much stronger and may have influenced the way they
teach significantly. This is why a small-scale qualitative research involving
22 third-year students was carried out in 2011. The data were collected
through a simple questionnaire, interviews and observation and the main
aim was to test whether the teaching styles of their former teachers can be
linked to their own teaching style.
The questionnaire consisted of as few as 3 questions:
What was a typical lesson shape of your English lessons at
school?
Did you like it?
Why?
The students did not know that their answers were later to be
linked to their performance in the classroom. The answers were given
in a written form, but each student was subsequently interviewed.
Twenty two students were involved and their answers showed
the following:
Basic lesson shape
A variety of
activities,
A chance to
participate actively
during the class
Reading, translation,
coursebook exercises

Reading, translation,
coursebook exercises

Number of
students (%)

5 (22.72%)

6 (27.28%)

11 (50%)

Satisfied/
Complaining

Common
comments

Satisfied

enjoyed the
classes,
felt motivated,
the classes were
interesting,

Satisfied

had some
additional
activities
the teacher was
nice/smiling

Complaining

the classes were

boring
always did the
same

Table 1
Table 1 shows that as few as 5 out of 22 students (or 22.72%) had
English classes that consisted of a variety of activities. They often worked
on language skills such as listening and speaking, participated in role-plays
and group discussions and enjoyed their classes a lot.
However, Table 1 also shows that as many as 17 (77.28%) students
had the so-called traditional classes that involved reading, translation

181

and doing the exercises provided in the coursebook. Eleven students

(50%) were quite dissatisfied with the way their teachers taught and
usually described their classes as boring, predictable and consisting
of the same activities all the time. In most cases, grammar was taught
deductively. Two students said that their former teachers even used to
check their knowledge of words by going through the lists of words and
asking them to translate them into Serbian. These are clearly the elements
of the notorious grammar-translation method, but not in its pure form
owing to differently designed coursebooks used nowadays.
A quarter of the students interviewed had the same type of teaching,
but they were satisfied. What made them satisfied was that the teacher
was nice, smiling or telling jokes and, in some cases that they
had some chance to take part in discussions or to listen to interesting
recordings after the inevitable text-translation-exercise segments of the
lesson. These answers show that students generally want to take part in
different communicative activities and that the role and the attitude of the
teacher are very important. Although, these students were satisfied with the
classes they had, the reason for their satisfaction seems to be the teachers
personality or a chance to spend a few minutes of their class in more
challenging activities. The rest was the same: reading aloud, translating
and doing exercises.
The analysis of the teaching styles the students were exposed to
shows that the majority of them had English lessons with some common
features:
a limited number of teaching techniques
a predictable lesson plan, often strictly following the coursebook
content
deductive grammar explanation
little work on skills
little communication in the classroom.
During the second part of the course, the practical one, the 22
students, who had been interviewed, tried to teach for the first time
and their first teaching attempts were observed and analysed. Apart
from minor problems that are inevitable in the beginning stages of
teaching, some crucial common problems were found and they are
summarised in Table 2.

182

Observations

Number of students (%)

Respecting the coursebook lesson shape too

strictly

19 (86%)

No proper warm-up, introduction or link

between the activities, little communication

17 (77%)

Deductive explanation of grammar 1

3 (59%)

Overusing translation, limited number of

teaching techniques employed

12 (54.5%)

General impression: the atmosphere not

really motivating

15 (68%)

Table 2
As many as 19 students (or 86%) respected the lesson shape
suggested in the coursebook too strictly and employed traditional teaching
techniques. In spite of the theoretical knowledge they gained, most
students focused on reading the text (and translating parts of it) and then
proceeded to do the exercises. In their view, this lesson shape may seem to
be the safest, but at the same time, it can be as boring as the employment
of grammar-translation method if the lesson plan is based solely on the
coursebook content.
In most cases (77%), parts of the class were not linked to each other
in any logical way, there was no spontaneous chat or discussion to link
different activities, no proper introduction to a new activity and to most
students (and to the observer) it seemed that the point was to finish the task,
to do all the exercises and not to communicate.
Around half of the students (59%) chose a deductive approach
in explaining grammar although it was constantly pointed out (during
the theoretical part of the course) that deductive grammar teaching is
inappropriate when working with younger students.
The students showed a limited number of teaching techniques in
presentation and practice. Translation was generally over-used (in 54.5%
cases). There were just a few trainee teachers who wanted their students to
translate parts of the text or even whole dialogues, but a surprisingly great
number of students overused translation when explaining new vocabulary
which was by no means necessary in these particular situations. Admittedly,
they insisted on translation less than their former teachers did, but still
employed this technique too often.
Owing to the problems listed above, the overall impression was
not really satisfying. Strong elements of traditional teaching generally

183

demotivate students, make lessons highly predictable and emphasise

the skills like reading aloud and translation, while productive skills and
communication remain neglected.
Curiously, most of the students did well during the theoretical part
of the course, they understood the theory, but failed to put it into practice.
One may think that this is quite natural since successful performance often
takes some time in a number of daily activities, but what is discouraging
is the fact that most trainee teachers showed what they had been observing
for years instead of what they had learnt and understood during the ELT
course. This large gap between the implicit and explicit learning made the
author of this paper look for the explanation and solution to this problem
in the field of social learning.

Implicit vs. observational learning

Subconscious or implicit learning is present in a number of daily
situations. It is defined as learning without conscious awareness of having
learned [French & Cleereman, 2002:XVII] or as the process through
which we become sensitive to certain regularities in the environment (1) in
the absence of intention to learn about these regularities; (2) in the absence
of awareness that one is learning; (3) in such a way that the resulting
knowledge is difficult to express [Cleeremans and Jimenez, 2002: 20].
Skills learned this way are often difficult to express and this explains why
most trainee teachers, when asked to say why they had chosen to employ
certain traditional techniques during the lesson could not give the answer.
Implicit learning usually involves imitation a process of
reduplicating someones behaviour without conscious analysis. Imitation
is often a stronger means of learning in childhood when certain authorities
serve as role models. Since, from the point of view of a student, a teacher is
undoubtedly an authority, it is quite likely that once, in the role of a teacher,
a student will probably subconsciously imitate his former authority without
much analysis. The problem is that the model given by a former teacher is
not always a really good one. Most students who took part in this smallscale research had obviously adopted the traditional approach to teaching
through implicit learning or imitation.
Fortunately, according to psychologists, subconscious or implicit
learning usually precedes conscious learning, which means that a sort of
remodelling is possible.
According to Bandura [Bandura, 1977], a recognised social
psychologist, there is a type of social learning or modelling that involves
conscious analysis and therefore a choice whether to accept or to reject

184

certain behaviour. Observational learning was shown as useful in adopting

new forms of behaviour or changing the old ones, which is exactly what
is needed in this particular situation. Successful observational learning, as
Bandura points out, requires:
conscious attention to the model selected
retention of details
motor reproduction and
motivation and opportunity.
These four criteria show one of the ways trainee teachers can
improve their teaching skills. Since students are capable of reproducing the
model behaviour and since they are highly motivated, the crucial elements
to focus on are: conscious attention and retention of details. These are
exactly the processes that are required in observation, an integral part of an
ELT course that obviously deserves more attention.

Observation, team teaching and peer coaching

During the ELT course, students are asked to observe a few classes
in state or private schools and to focus on particular aspects of a lesson,
usually those that are easy to observe: the presentation, the sequencing of
activities, the error correction etc. This enables them to see how experienced
teachers teach and how they employ certain teaching techniques. However,
there are some aspects that inexperienced trainee teachers rarely see and
they might involve: on-the-spot decision making, strategies to liven
up a speaking activity and many others. This is why a form of guided
observation would help students in conscious analysis of the teaching
model presented and enable them to focus on important details and discuss
them later. The trainer or the teacher who would cooperate with the trainer
may offer valuable help, explaining why certain techniques were employed
and some decisions made. This sort of observation would give much better
effects because it requires real attention and analysis. Moreover, such type
of observation offers a clearer picture of the processes going on in the
classroom.
Guided observation should ideally be followed by peer observation
during the practical part of the course that should involve:
team teaching and
peer coaching.
Team teaching is defined as a kind of teaching in which teachers
share responsibility for planning the class or course, for teaching it, and
for any follow-up work associated with the class such as evaluation and
assessment. [Richards and Farrell, 2005: 159]. Working in pairs or groups,

185

trainee teachers have better chances to analyse the lesson plan, exchange
ideas and discuss different techniques and resource materials that might be
appropriate. This enables better preparation and more successful classes.
When two colleagues share a class, each has an opportunity to move
between teaching and observing, so each of them can get valuable nonjudgemental feedback. In this way, team teaching often grows into peer
coaching.
Peer coaching is defined as a confidential process through which
two or more professional colleagues work together to reflect on current
practices, expand, refine, and build new skills, share ideas; teach one
another; conduct classroom research; or solve problems in the workplace.
[Robbins, 1991: 1] In this particular case, it practically means that trainee
teachers work together and observe each others lessons. As one student is
teaching, the other one or the other ones (depending if they are working in
pairs or in groups) are watching and collecting data to present them later
and give their feedback and suggestions for improvement, if necessary.
The observers adopt the role of a coach and provide constructive
feedback in a positive and supportive manner. Peer observation is often
quite effective because it is absolutely non- threatening if the students are
carefully grouped.
It is only after these stages that trainee teachers should be allowed
to teach the whole class on their own since implementing theoretical
knowledge in practice successfully requires some time, careful preparation,
conscious analysis and relatively undemanding, graded practical tasks.

Conclusion
In spite of the development of applied linguistics that is a valuable
source of ideas in teacher development, the beginning stages of teaching
can sometimes be seriously hindered by the influence of subconsciously
adopted, wrong models presented by former teachers. The problems of
putting theory into practice and overcoming the limitations set by implicit
learning can be successfully solved through a carefully graded ELT course.
A gradual movement from guided observation that requires real attention,
conscious analysis and focus on details to non-threatening form of peer
observation that is simultaneous with the initial practical experience
through team teaching is a good preparation for implementing the
theoretical knowledge practically. Admittedly, such graded teacher training
courses require more time than it is usually planned or, alternatively, more
people involved in certain stages than it is commonly the case, but it would
certainly lead to modern, motivating and successful teaching.

186

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Key Pals:http://www.paly.palo-alto.ca.us/~cmerritt/Keypals.htm
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correspondencia
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www.languagepenpals.com/
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cervantes. es/oteador/
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http://www.fundeu.es/esurgente/ListaApuntes.asp
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infoling/
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info/ecosel.html
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um.es/ lincoing/aelco/
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206

Nevena B. Sekerez
INTERNET AS A COMMUNICATION MEANS IN THE TEACHING
OF SPANISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Summary
Contemporary information-communication era is marked by the emergence
of its probably the most important and nowadays almost completely
affordable products computers and the Internet. The emergence of the
Internet as a global medium has had a profound impact on the education in
the way that foreign language teachers have at their disposal another very
useful means that gives them additional help in foreign language teaching.
Since the Internet combines texts with pictures and sounds and enables its
users to get into conntact with other users without any spatial or time barriers,
it has dual function in the foreign language teaching informative and
communicative. Its role as a didactic aid in teaching logically derives from
these ones. The primary purpose of the paper is to present communicative
functions of the Internet in foreign language teaching, together with the
presentation of the possibilities to use supplementary services, such as the
electronic mail, keypals, forums, chat groups, distribution lists, blogs and
MOO s as the additional didactic help in the process of language teaching.
Key words: Internet, foreign language teaching, Internet communicative
function, additional didactic means in foreign langauge teaching, electronic
mail, forums, chat groups, blogs

207

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Vlasta M. Suevi

GENERAL DETERMINANT SOFPRIMARY EDUCATION

QUALITY
Summary
Education represents one of the pillars of knowledge acquisition. There
is no quality knowledge without quality education, not even the progress
of society generally. Education has the function of the development of an
individual, but also the function of the development of future generations,
which is necessary for the economic development of society that the individual belongs to. In the world quality is considered to be the most significant phenomenon of our time, with the constant trend of its improvement.
The paper explores quality in general, that is, the general determinants of
quality as a new phenomenon of living. Further, this paper focuses on the
quality of general education system.
The paper studies the new orientations of European view on the quality of
education. In terms of education quality there are many theses, more or
less accurate, all developed in different contexts, but there are few systematic studies on this subject. In the context of education the term quality,
joined with its normative meaning, is increasingly important. The paper
theoretically explores the indicators of primary education quality.
Key words:quality, primary education, resources, dimensions of quality,
indicators of quality.

227

: 81272 811.11127
: 1. 11. 2011. .
: 12. 11. 2011. .

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* : jelenafbgd@gmail.com

228

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 (Critical language study) analyses social interactions in a way which focuses upon their
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in the system of social relationships, as well as hidden effects they may have upon the
system. [. . .]

229


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2. lingua franca: ?
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identities, each of which has a particular range or scope and function. [. . .]
4
 Societies do reflect and sustain the sociolinguistic regimes in a country, that is, the
relative hierarchies normatively maintained and the dominant ideas supporting them.
Such ideas would include ownership, membership, and authority: this is our language,
we are Americans and we speak English, this language doesnt belong here, he
doesnt speak the language well. [. . .]
3

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Ethnologue 2000. ,
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 [...] the universality of shared moral values and the diversity of cultural expression;
in particular, linguistic diversity for historical reasons is a major component as well as
being as we will try to illustrate a wonderful tool at the service of integration and
harmonisation. [. . .] focuses upon their linguistic elements, and which setsout
to show up their generally hidden determinants in the system of social relationships, as
well as hidden effects they may have upon the system. [. . .]

234

 [ , 2002: 6]: .
, 1,
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7 [ ,
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 The European Union is developing a society based upon knowledge. Learnign
other languages improves general cognitive and metacognitive skills, reinforces
understanding of ones mother tongue, strenthens reading and writing and develops
general communication skills. The ability to understand and communicate in other
languages is now one of the basic skills that citizens need if they are to participate fully
in European society. [. . .]
8
 But lingua francas have their limitations. If European citizens were only able to speak
their mother tongue plus a lingua franca, companies, individuals and society would lose
out .Business have more opportunities to sell their products if they speak the language
of the customer; a lingua franca will not meet this need. Citizens who move to live
in another Member State finda that a lingua franca alone is insufficient for them to
integrate into the local community. And whilst a lingua franca may help with basic
transactions, real mutual understanding and a rich appreciation of other cultures comes
through direct contact with people in other countries by attempting to speak their own
language. [. . .]
7

235

 2008. , , , A rewarding challenge:

How the multiplicity of languages could strenthen Europe, , , ,
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(Guidelines for the Development
of Language Education Policies in Europe) 2003.
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239


Blommaert, Jon. Language policy and national identity. In:
T. Ricento, ed. An introduction to language policy. Theory and
method. Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell Publishing (2006): 238-254.
, . . : XX , 2005.
Comission of the European Union. Promoting language learning
and linguistic diversity Consultation. Brussels: European Union,
2002. 1. , 2008. http//:ec.europa.
eu/education/policies/ lang/policy/consult/consult_en_pdf,
Crystal, David. Language: medium, barrier, or Trojan horse?Paper
presented on the Conference on Cultural Diplomacy at the
Crossroads: Cultural Relations in Europe and the Wider World,
Wilton House, 26: November 1997. 1. 2008.http://www.crystalreference.com/ 10 [...]
the multiple, often unpredictable and volatile identity work we
effectively perform when we communicate. [. . .] dc/,
Crystal, David. The future of English: where unity and diversity
meet. In: S. Troudi, C. Coombe & S. Riley, eds.Unity through
Diversity. Proceedings of TESOL Arabia 98, 1-11; adapted as
The future of English. In: D. Lynch & A. Pilbeam, eds.Heritage
and Progress. Proceedings of the SIETAR Europa Congress 1998
(Bath: LTS Training and Consulting, 2000): 6-16. 1. 2008.http://www.crystalreference.com/dc/
Crystal, David. English as a global language (2nd edition).
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
, . . : . , .
. : , (2007): 375-385.
, . lingua franca: , . : .
, . . : , (2008).
, . : . : , 2009.
, . : . : 21 (2009): 109-127.

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 , . Language policy and planning in standard

language cultures an alternative approach. : , .
.
. :
, , , (2011): 121-136.
Fishman, Joshua A. Language and ethnicity in minority
sociolinguistic perspective. Clevedon-Philadelphia: Multilingual
matters, 1989.
Fishman, Joshua. Language policy and language shift. In: T.
Ricento, ed. An introduction to language policy. Theory and method.
Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell Publishing (2006): 311-238.
Gnutzmann, C. Lingua franca. In: Byram, M. ed. The Routhledge
encyclopedia of language teaching. London: Routhledge, (2000):
356-359.
Guidelines for the Development of Language Education Policies
in Europe. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2003.
House, J. English as a lingua franca: a threat to multilingualism?In:
Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(2003): 556-578.
Maalouf, Amin et al. A rewarding challenge: How the multiplicity
of languages could strenthen Europ. Proposals from the Group
of Intellectuals for Intercultural Dialogue set up at the initiative
of the European Commission. Brussels, 2008. 8. 2011. http://ec.europa.eu/languages/
documents/report_en.pdf,
Milroy, James.Language ideologies and the consequences of
standardization. In:Journal of Sociolinguistics 5/4(2001): 530-555.
Silverstein, M. Monoglot standard in America: Standardization
and metaphors of linguistic hegemony.In: D. Brenneis & R.
Macaulay, eds. The matrix of language: Contemporary linguistic
anthropology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, (1996): 284-306.

241

Jelena M. Filipovi
EUROPEAN MULTILINGUALISM PROJEKT AND LANGUAGE
(EDUCATUON) POLICIES
Summary
In this paper, the role of English as the language of international
communication, on one hand, and the role and relevance of other languages
in the European context, on the other hand, are investigated through the
lense of national and supranational language (education) policies. Strategic,
epistemological and socio-historical factors which always interact with
language policy decisions are outlined, along with proposals for the
development of authentic European plurilingualism in which English as a
lingua franca coexists with other European national, regional, minority as
well as with non-European languages.
Keywords: langauge (education) policy, linguistic globalization, English as
a lingua franca, L1 - language for identification, language for international
communication, personal adoptive language

242

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247

,
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code-switching), (. code-mixing), - (. matrix language) (. embedded
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248


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249



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, . : . : , 2009.
Maguire, M. Introduction: reflecting on methodology and
methods. In: Sociolinguistics studies, 1 (1) 2007: 5-24.
Andrijana S. ordan
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON SOCIOLINGUISTICS (THE POWER OF
WORDS: ESSAYS ON CRITICA L SOCIOLINGUISTICS BY
JELENA FILIPOVI)
Summary
This paper is a review of the monograph entitled Mo rei: Ogledi iz kritike
sociolingvistike (The Power of Words: Essays on Critical Sociolinguistics)
by Jelena Filipovi, PhD. The author of the book is an active researcher of
sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and Spanish phonetics and phonology.
The aforementioned monograph defines sociolinguistics, analyses the
research methods applied in the field, the relationships between language
and social power, language and context, language policy and planning,
language and ethnicity, language and cultural models, language and gender,
as well as language contact.
Key words: critical sociolinguistics, social power, context, language policy
and planning, language contact, ethnicity, cultural models, gender.

250


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253

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