Lilijana Burcar

University of Ljubljana · Department of English and American Studies

In his dramatic sketch The New World Order Pinter exposes practices of psychological and physical abuse targeted at local people who resist neo-colonial advancements in territories directly occupied or indirectly controlled by Western hegemonic powers. Through the deployment of Pinteresque double-layered meanings conveyed through seemingly ordinary...

The latest capitalist restructuring has resulted in new conditions of employment, seriously affecting possibilities for people’s self-realization. Women have been hurt the most and face an increasing feminisation of poverty. This paper foregrounds the importance of literary socialisation in preparing young people to accept or reject neoliberal gend...

Under the current conditions of global capitalism, with the ongoing systemic exploitation and racially motivated persecution of immigrant workers that characterizes this system, it is important to investigate the kind of work literature performs as a social imaginary and, by extension, a tool of acculturation in Western societies. Because works of...

The year 2023 marks Michael Ondaatje’s 80th birthday, a landmark in the author’s life and an occasion for literary critics to look back and revisit what are perhaps some of the more troubling aspects of his literary production. Ondaatje’s poetry and fiction have received little attention from feminist literary critics, which is due to the author’s...

The article offers a systematic critique of identity politics and intersectionality that today dominate Western mainstream literary theory and Anglo-Saxon literary production by bringing to the fore a much overlooked critical intervention on the part of materialist (literary) system theorists and Western Marxist feminists. It then dissects the ways...

In the wake of the so-called postmodernist turn in literary studies and criticism, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath has been subjected to a major interpretative revision that has reoriented the focus solely on the chapters dealing with the Joads while leaving out those that provide a detailed analysis of larger socioeconomic forces at work. The latt...

With high heels brought back into fashion in the 2000s by the beauty-industrial complex, health organizations have since reported an ‘epidemiology of high-heeled shoe injuries’, especially among young women. Feminist theory in general, and literary criticism on gender, have not yet systematically addressed the role high heels play in upholding and...

ETHNICIZING WOMEN'S DOMESTIC ENTRAPMENT IN SANDRA CISNEROS'S ANTIBILDUNGSROMAN THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET The House on Mango Street has been translated into more than 20 languages worldwide, including Croatian in 2005. The novel has secured a firm foothold in many a literature and cultural studies syllabus outside the USA and has served as one of...

This contribution investigates and lays bare the ideological workings of racialized beauty myth as presented in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye by bringing together feminist theory and postcolonial theory of race. It demonstrates that racialized beauty norms are informed by both the constructs of gender and race, and that they serve as a tool of soc...

The article foregrounds the importance of honing critical literacy through socially engaged literature. Dealing with literature in an engaged and critical way can help students to develop critical thinking skills and a systemic understanding of burning social issues that inform their own living realities. Critical literary pedagogy and socially eng...

Ideologija starostizma je bila na Zahodu institucionalno zakoreninjena v osemdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja kot sestavni del neoliberalnega napada na kapitalistični tip socialne države, ki je v svojem izhodišču že tako minimalna ali pa delna. Pojav in vzpon ideologije starostizma v našem prostoru je sovpaden s ponovno nastavitvijo kapitalistične...

Ob spremembi družbenoekonomskega sistema in razgradnji socialistične države blaginje izginjata tudi sistemska skrb za starejše in pozitiven odnos do njih. Namesto tega so na delu družbenoekonomske silnice, ki si prizadevajo za institucionalno porajanje odklonilnega odnosa do starejših, njihovo degradacijo in prekategorizacijo v posebno skupino homo...

Roman Kuća u Ulici Mango preveden je na više od dvadeset svjetskih jezika, uključujući i hrvatski (2005.). Ovaj je roman našao svoje mjesto u brojnim programima studija književnosti i kulturalnih studija izvan Sjedinjenih Američkih Država te je jedna od temeljnih početnih točaka za rasprave i razumijevanje položaja žena u američkim etničkim zajedni...

Pinter’s short dramatic piece questions the women’s rights discourse that USA-led Western hegemonic powers rely heavily upon when justifying their incursions into the territories of the Global South. The play blasts this posture apart by pointing to the patriarchal paradigm and gendered hierarchies that inform the structuration of Western capitalis...

BETWEEN ACTIVISM AND ACADEMIA INTRODUCTION ‘Democracy in Crisis: The Dynamics of Civic Protest and Civic Resistance’ was the title of the twenty-sixth State of Peace Conference held in September 2012 at the Austrian Study Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution (ASPR).1 Located in the medieval castle of Stadtschlaining, the ASPR lies near the form...

Kot dokazuje zgodovina, so možnosti samouresničitve in načini delovanja posameznice odvisni od strukturnih dejavnikov, kot jih krojijo političnoekonomski sistemi, ki so vedno že družbeni. Socialističnega sistema in ureditve ni mogoče misliti kot zgolj vrsto mimobežnega eksperimenta, kot nam dopovedujejo propagandna občila tako imenovanih kapitalist...

The article deals with the discursive analysis of Disney's Little Mermaid, Pocahontas and Aladdin, which it discusses through the combined lens of feminist literary theory and postcolonial studies. It argues that Disney's adaptations of canonized literary fairy tales do not rest only on the perpetuation and further exacerbation of hierarchically st...

The article takes as its point of analysis the new draft of the HE education reform bill, which aims to throw the doors of public universities wide open to corporate agendas. One of many such corporate moves the new proposal supports and legitimizes includes making private schools equal in status with public ones in order to ensure their state fund...

ZVis IN NAdALJNJI ELEMENTI UTRJEVANJA LOgIKE KAPITALA Odcepljena podjetja in vseživljenjsko učenje POVZETEK V prispevku analiziramo uvajanje odcepljenih podjetij in vseživljenjskega učenja na univerze, kar pred-pisuje novi osnutek ZViS, in pokažemo, da gre za dva povezana podsistema. Njun skupni imenovalec je legalizacija komercialnih in eksploatac...

Feminist as well as gendered narratology, which benefited in many aspects from the former, have since the late 1990s transcended the binarism of gender differences and adopted the concepts of sex, gender and sexuality for the description of formal and structural aspects of narrative. Several narratologists have started to develop gender oriented an...

The article first outlines the way in which mainstream children's fiction has traditionally sought to address and underrnine the artificiality of oppositional and hierarchical gender paradigms. Pro-ferninist texts that abound in mainstream children's literature have never really extricated themselves from the bonds of gender-related binarisations a...