Critical Survey

In this article, I propose a theorisation of what I term ‘the writer's block subgenre’, a literary category comprising creative works shaped by and engaging with the condition of writer's block. Drawing primarily on the theoretical framework of Edmund Bergler, credited with first coining the term ‘writer's block’, I argue that in certain cases, this condition proves so enduring and traumatic for the artist that it can become, paradoxically, the idea or plot they previously struggled to find. Through close readings of Samuel Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’, Keith Douglas's ‘The “bête noire” fragments’ and Ted Hughes's ‘The thought fox’, I examine how these poems engage with creative inhibition and why they qualify as quintessential examples of the writer's block subgenre.

This article argues that writer's block in Mahmoud Darwish's works is a reflection of the poet's experience of a creative block, a clinical condition that emerged after his surgery in 1998, and is also a metaphor for the ongoing block or impasse in the Palestinian political situation. The central thesis of this article is that writer's block in Darwish is akin to experiences like Heideggerian anxiety, the Sartrean attraction of the abyss, the Lacanian eruption of the Real, and Freud's neuroticism. In all these cases, the poet, through a momentary awareness of his impending death, experiences an ecstatic intensification of Being and an expansion of life possibilities, in the Nietzschean sense. This article further demonstrates that Darwish turns into a successful neurotic writer who utilises stuttering and his potential mental illness as a creative means to overcome the abject reality and invent a new reality, wherein unsatisfied wishes could be fulfilled.

This article examines the complex relationship between crime, capitalism and drug-trafficking in Dope (1922) by Sax Rohmer, suggesting that the novel reveals how criminal empires are connected to global capitalism, private enterprise and imperial trade. Drawing upon a wide range of theoretical discourses, the article explores how while disciplinary regimes of surveillance, detection and policing attempt to reinstate the boundary between the legal and illegal, it becomes increasingly difficult in a highly globalised economy, where drug cartels operate like multinational corporations, intelligence agencies and intergovernmental organisations. In this sense, the novel demonstrates how the international drugs trade will continue to exist until the capitalist economy gazes at itself in the mirror and accepts the social and economic consequences of its ruthless exploitation, aggressive monopolisation and ever-encroaching corporate control.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the specifics of the world views of the characters in Anton Chekhov's novella Ward No. 6, revealed through existential issues. The following methods were used to achieve the research objectives: abstraction, generalisation, content analysis, comparative analysis and the method of artistic hermeneutics. Every character in this literary work by Chekhov follows a path of ideological searching, and the position taken by the author is expressed through the process of clashing two personalities that act as oppositional in their world views. The personification effect acts as the main mechanism for revealing existential conflicts, which in the process of revealing ideological content relies on the search for truth expressed by the work's characters and their unique way of looking at the world.

Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince (1973) is a metafictional novel that has been deemed by many critics a literary expression of Murdoch's moral philosophy. However, by adopting different ethical approaches, one can unravel conflicts at the heart of the text that cannot be explained with conventional readings. The present article aims at studying the concepts of love and ethics in this novel based on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's poststructuralist thought. Contrary to previous readings, this article argues that, rather than being a purely Platonic love or a destructive experience, the protagonist's love is schizophrenising and in line with his immanent becoming. Accordingly, when he is finally sentenced to life imprisonment, instead of grappling with ressentiment, he actively and joyfully embraces his fate and becomes a Body without Organs via creating a minoritarian work of fiction.

This article analyses the aesthetic evolution of the work 酒国 Jiuguo by Chinese author Mo Yang in the process of translating the work into English. The article employs Mo Yan's 酒国 Jiuguo and its English translation by Howard Goldblatt to analyse aesthetic transformation in literary translation. A comparative analysis identifies disparities in aesthetic elements and linguistic strategies, emphasising the translator's role in preserving or modifying the original aesthetics. The translator effectively conveys metaphors and symbols, such as ‘tea’ or the ‘wedding scene’, enabling English-speaking readers to maintain associations with Chinese culture. Preserving the depth of the original's cultural context may be less effective when translating colour and emotional nuances. This study may be useful for researchers in the field of linguistics, in particular for further research in the field of literary translation.

This article analyses neologisms reflecting the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic in the English and Russian media discourse. Media discourse is currently the main platform for the emergence, testing and entry of new lexical units into the active vocabulary of languages. The research methodology includes content analysis and a continuous sampling method for selecting linguistic material, methods of structural and word formation analysis, comparative analysis, and semantic component analysis. The material for the study was English- and Russian-language web content from Great Britain, Germany, India, China, Russia, the USA and Estonia. The analysis of the neologisms that arose under the influence of the pandemic in terms of word formation demonstrated that in English and Russian the most productive models are addition and blending. Suffixation and clipping are models specific to the Russian language.

In an attempt to make sense of post-Brexit Britain, Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet (2016–2020) refashions Shakespeare as a source that speaks to contemporary sociopolitical concerns by openly alluding to and pervasively engaging with his romances. Smith reworks the specifics of Shakespeare's plays in terms of their staging of the workings of time; the fallout from death, guilt and violence; the intersection of the supernatural and the oneiric; and the catastrophic drifts of forms of government manipulating factual truth. In this article, I suggest that the Quartet's multilayered Shakespearean subtext works as a paradigmatic tool to reflect on the social, political and cultural trials confronting post-2016 UK. Also due to the very nature of tragicomedy, Shakespeare's romances invite us to recognise and play experimentally with imaginable alternatives, thus strengthening our conviction that a different kind of world could actually be envisaged.

Grandchildren by Nellie Strowbridge

A Cramp In My Style by Nellie Strowbridge

I Can Do It By Jacob Rose