Patchwork Student Journal

We are pleased to announce the publication of the eleventh issue of Patchwork Student Journal. Although the texts in this edition may seem disparate, there seems to be a throughline connecting them – the line between the cultural and the natural. Where is this boundary, where does the human fall and are there other oppositions to be delineated?

The natural and the cultural within the human: First, David Brajković analyzes the use of music in Burgess’ and Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange as an exploration of the duality of humanity as both cultural and bestial. He argues that the juxtaposition of classical music with scenes of extreme violence challenges the audience’s preconceived notions about high culture, while also critiquing various societal structures which accentuate one aspect of human nature and violently suppress the other.

The human and the cultural within the natural: This is followed by Petar Sakač’s sonnet The Tears of Eagles (and a bit of Tempest), an interlude which decenters the human in its own dealing with the relationship between the “cultural” and the “natural”, alluding to Shakespeare’s (certainly high culture) take on that dichotomy in The Tempest.

Beyond the human, the cultural, and the natural: Taha Al-Sarhan similarly departs from anthropocentric perspectives in describing Lovecraft’s inversion of traditional humanistic (Burkean) conceptions of the sublime – rather than revealing the vastness of experience as an opportunity for transcendence, Lovecraft’s encounters with the sublime only indicate the insignificance of human agency within those vast expanses.

Who gets to be human? Finally, Lara Braun’s paper narrows the scope, focusing in on the question of agency, specifically in Women in Prison media – who is granted humanity and subjectivity and who is simply captured by the subject’s gaze?

We hope that you will enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed creating it.

The Editors

We are pleased to announce the publication of the ninth issue of Patchwork Student Journal. It is the second of two issues titled Spaces in Between, both of which focus on interdisciplinary works, as well as works on intertextuality, transtextuality and intermediality. As explorations of the junctures of various arts and disciplines, these issues are especially interested in concepts such as “borders”, “liminality”, and “ambiguity”: in identifying and analyzing references to Lolita in the post #MeToo novel My Dark Vanessa, Bikić uses an intertextual approach to illustrate shifting cultural boundaries and power dynamics, as well as the obscure yet unrelenting effects of trauma; Surjan’s reading of Light in August highlights the semipermeable and contingent nature of purportedly absolute and biological categories such as race; Keserović’s interpretation of the supernatural elements in Coleridge’s demonic poems explores the poet’s idea of imagination as the subject’s attitude to reality, both natural and supernatural; finally, Francišković offers an overview of the many ways social boundaries, such as exclusion based on racial prejudices, are unconsciously and arbitrarily constructed, as seen in The Lonely Londoners.

We hope that you will enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed creating it.

The Editors

We are pleased to announce the publication of the eighth issue of Patchwork Student Journal. It is the first of two issues titled Spaces in Between, both of which focus on interdisciplinary works, as well as works on intertextuality, transtextuality and intermediality. As explorations of the junctures of various arts and disciplines, these issues are especially interested in concepts such as “borders”, “liminality”, and “ambiguity”: Stanko’s paper describes both the literal pushing of borders in 19th century North America and the permeable borders between the empirical world, the discursive worlds of literature and academia, and the virtual one of Red Dead Redemption 2; Krčan’s reading of Winterson’s work offers an optimistic approach to the increasingly hazy distinction between human and artificial intelligence through the inherently ambiguous, simultaneously human and superhuman nature of narratives; analyzing Hogg’s novel, Čatlaić identifies its many liminal and uncanny aspects which were to become so characteristic of later Gothic fiction, pointing to the text’s own intermediate, transitional status; finally, Finocchiaro’s reinterpretation of Zone One through the lens of Derridean deconstruction introduces a productive ambiguity into a seemingly overdetermined world of capitalist realism.

We hope that you will enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed creating it.

The Editors