The first part of this article examines the distinctive temporal condition generated by postmemory—the mediated, inherited memory of collective trauma theorised by Marianne Hirsch—and argues that it cannot be adequately described by any of the categories through which Western philosophical thought has sought to capture the experience of time. Drawing on a trajectory from ancient Greek thought to postmodernity, the article proposes that postmemory generates a temporal condition organised around two cardinal principles—instantaneousness and simultaneity—and a single temporal conception: an absolute, eternal present onto which unresolved historical trauma is continuously projected. This theoretical framework is then applied to a concrete literary case study in the second part of this article: a comparison of two Hungarian novels—Péter Esterházy’s Harmonia cælestis [Celestial Harmonies] (2000) and Dénes Krusovszky’s Akik már nem leszünk sosem [The Ones We Will Never Be Again] (2018)—in terms of temporal narrative structure and remembrance of a tragic historical event, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Belonging respectively to generation 1.5 and generation 2.0 of postmemory, the two authors employ non-linear temporal structures that reflect fundamentally different relationships to inherited trauma: ontological fragmentation in Esterházy, where narrative discontinuity mirrors lived traumatic experience; and structural fragmentation in Krusovszky, where non-linearity operates as a conscious strategy for reconstructing an unreachable past. Contextually, in Esterházy the remembrance of the 1956 Hungarian revolution is painful but not without hope, in Krusovszky it is not a remembering but a reconstruction of buried collective memory.
Long after the end of the terrible conflicts in the 90s, the memoryscapes are still deeply divided inside the former territory of the country that no longer exists, not only at the level of official mnemonic regimes of the successor states, which indicate the persistence of ethno-nationalist competitive memories, but also at that of social remembering, polarized between the painful memories of the wars and Yugonostalgia. This is particularly the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, once perceived as a Yugoslavia “en miniature,” which was the epicenter of conflicts, and where both the memory wars and Yugonostalgia are manifesting in a more intense degree than in the other post-Yugoslav societies. Thematized within a rich corpus of literary texts, both mnemonic poles—the traumatic one and the nostalgic one—are incorporated in the two memory novels of the German author with Serb-Bosniak origins Saša Stanišić in agonistic configurations that reveal, by means of both multiperspectivism, and historical, social and political contextualization, the nuanced faces of an apparently ever-present past.
This article investigates the historical development and conceptual instability of the fantastic in literary studies, particularly within Anglophone tradition. Circumventing the definitional disputes that have long polarized criticism, the essay foregrounds a historical approach. It shows that a distinct, self-aware literary genre known as the fantastic, or rather le fantastique, did in fact emerge in France in the 1830s, catalyzed by the reception of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s works. Through historiographic reconstruction, the article reveals how the fantastic was shaped by a coherent oversimplification of Hoffmann’s poetics, as well as by market forces, and national intellectual traditions. French critics and writers such as J.-J. Ampère, P. Duvergier de Hauranne, T. Gautier, and Ch.-Au. de Sainte-Beuve codified this genre around a distinctive tension between the real and the extraordinary—following a binary structure that would later inform many twentieth-century academic theories. While acknowledging later transformations and hybridizations, the essay asserts that understanding the historical specificity of the fantastic is vital for clarifying its place within non-realistic literature, and for resisting the conceptual flattening of its identity in critical discourse. In particular, the article critiques the problematic absence—or superficial treatment—of the fantastic in contemporary scholarship on the gothic and the weird, arguing that a transgeneric approach would prove more fruitful when investigating nineteenth-century non-realistic and/or supernatural literature. This article investigates the historical development and conceptual instability of the fantastic in literary studies, particularly within Anglophone tradition. Circumventing the definitional disputes that have long polarized criticism, the essay foregrounds a historical approach. It shows that a distinct, self-aware literary genre known as the fantastic, or rather le fantastique, did in fact emerge in France in the 1830s, catalyzed by the reception of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s works. Through historiographic reconstruction, the article reveals how the fantastic was shaped by a coherent oversimplification of Hoffmann’s poetics, as well as by market forces, and national intellectual traditions. French critics and writers such as J.-J. Ampère, P. Duvergier de Hauranne, T. Gautier, and Ch.-Au. de Sainte-Beuve codified this genre around a distinctive tension between the real and the extraordinary—following a binary structure that would later inform many twentieth-century academic theories. While acknowledging later transformations and hybridizations, the essay asserts that understanding the historical specificity of the fantastic is vital for clarifying its place within non-realistic literature, and for resisting the conceptual flattening of its identity in critical discourse. In particular, the article critiques the problematic absence—or superficial treatment—of the fantastic in contemporary scholarship on the gothic and the weird, arguing that a transgeneric approach would prove more fruitful when investigating nineteenth-century non-realistic and/or supernatural literature.
In this study, I investigate the literary variation of Mulan’s tale within digital fandom, focusing on queer fanarts of Disney’s Mulan (1998) collected from American social media platform Pinterest. Drawing on a hybrid framework of fandom and queer theories, I argue that these fan generated works constitute a legitimate and transformative layer of the story’s literary variation. Specifically, lesbian, transgender, and gay rewritings introduce queer heterogeneity that challenges heteronormativity by offering positive representations of gender minorities. Yet these subversive rewritings also reproduce racialized stereotypes of Asian masculinity, revealing the limitations of grassroots political imagination in digital art. Extending beyond this single case, I conclude this essay by reevaluating digital fandom’s position within Pierre Bourdieu’s literary field. I contend that radical media change has inverted its traditional hierarchy: commercial media adapters and fans now challenge the positional authority once held by elites, making grassroots digital creation a vital yet contested force in contemporary literary production.
Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) opens with a single imperative: “Listen.” Criticism of the novel has reached for sonic metaphors—polyphony, cacophony, voice—without treating sound as an analytical category. Drawing on Schafer’s soundscape theory, Attali’s political economy of noise, and Brathwaite’s concept of “nation language,” while flagging the Eurocentric assumptions in Schafer and Attali, I propose the term “heterophonic narrative” to describe James’s acoustic organization: more than seventy-five characters repeatedly vary a shared traumatic ground, a sonic relation that, Bakhtinian polyphony does not by itself fuly specify. The concept derives from Caribbean musical practice—kumina drumming, reggae riddim, call-and-response traditions—where the refusal to merge voices into harmonic unison carries political as well as formal force. The analysis proceeds through four stages: a ghost narrator’s establishment of the novel’s acoustic field; the Singer’s (Bob Marley’s) structurally designed silence as an absent keynote; the relation between heterophonic organization and Bakhtinian polyphony; and a three-level demonstration that heterophony functions as resistance—through tactical illegibility in code-switching at the micro level, through the refusal to domesticate violence into consumable narrative at the aesthetic-ethical limit, and through portable vocal retuning across what Stoever (2016) calls the “sonic color line” at the transnational macro level. Heterophony in this novel, I argue, does not merely describe a formal relationship among voices—it is itself a mode of resistance, operating through the acoustic properties of prose.
