Philologia
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Philologia is a peer-reviewed academic journal established by scholars at Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, in 2003. The journal welcomes articles, critical and theoretical essays, empirically-based analyses, book reviews, conference reports and translations related to the studies of language, linguistics, applied linguistics, literature, culture, translatology, social science. Various subfields of the said sciences may also be analyzed.
All papers are evaluated in a double-blind fashion by two external reviewers who are experts in the relevant field. The contributions are required to be solidly anchored in theory and methodology (qualitative or quantitative). They may be of interdisciplinary nature.
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- Aesthetic Legitimacy for the Dystopian Environment in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
- George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) contributed to the appearance of strong feelings of dislike against the type of oppressive, totalitarian regime, through the impact the novel had upon an enormous number of readers. The interest of the public in the image of the controlled individual by an almighty state remains high, even though Postmodernism, with its permissiveness, has generated the diversification of literary forms, technical inventions and, in the sense of reception, changes in taste and mentality. George Orwell imposed the most revealing description of a dystopian environment, surpassing the phenomenon of definitive human degradation under the assault of irrational cruelty. Orwell’s fictional world has aesthetic legitimacy, even though there were critics that noticed the presence of a single narrative voice. The author created a parable developed with Kafkian means, an irrational fictional world, but, paradoxically, passionately read by the public for its cruel, revealing realism and memorable scenes. The novel fails to reach the aesthetic absolute, it does not illustrate a remarkable constructive performance, but confirms a major human problem and existential tension, creating the impression of thorough analysis of humanity. The difficulty of writing is the metaphor of the irrationality of the world and the book is a transparent product, through which we follow the mechanism of terror in full operation.
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- Aesthetics, Ideology and Postmodern Literature (David Foster Wallace’s Short Story Signifying Nothing, 1999)
- In the last decades many theories such as Marxist, some feminist and post-colonial emphasize the ideological and political function of the literary texts as well as the “politics” of representation. The literary text is understood as a cultural product and as equal to any other, non-literary texts and discourses while the text’s specificity, its artistic, literary and aesthetic quality are often suppressed and marginalized. Such approach to artistic texts as practised by the Marxists, Marxist feminists, and, for example, cultural theorists can be relevant for the study of culture but, in my view, not for the study of arts (literature) since one of the most important aspects of the literary and artistic texts—their aesthetic quality is suppressed and understood as irrelevant. In post and (post)postmodern literary works not only the above mentioned narrative strategies, but especially parody, irony, self-reflexivity and metafiction form the tools that create an aesthetic potential producing not only a relevant aesthetic message, but through which the authors both reflect the contemporary cultural condition and sensibility and re-write traditional myths associated with particular cultural traditions. In my paper I analyze the role of metafiction, parody, and irony in the production of meaning and aesthetic quality in the postmodern literary texts as manifested in David Foster Wallace’s short story Signifying Nothing (1999) as well as the way these means create the message on the current cultural condition in the USA In addition, I analyze the way how these narrative strategies foreground the ontology of a literary text through the treatment of the relationship between language, fiction and reality.