“A Mirror” of the Alternation of Ethics --- The Ethical Selection of The Maples in Updike’s Separating

Separating, by John Updike, tells a story that happened in a middle-class family, where the protagonists the Maples decide to separate from each other, and they announce their decision to four children, thus resulting in a family conflict. This essay intends to analyze the choice made by the Maples and the reasons behind them, hence revealing the changes in American marriage thoughts and the contradictions that exist in American marriage life in the 1960s.

Strategies of investigating and translating poetical prose of the classical and contemporary English short stories

The article considers the notion of prose poeticalness from linguistic and translation points of view. Prose poeticalness can be defined as the introduction of poetic features into the prose text with the help of such devices as extended metaphors, intertextual allusions, stylistic convergence, syntactical and phonetic repetitions. The investigation involved the analysis of the fairy tales by Oscar Wilde, the short stories by Kate Chopin and Dylan Thomas, which are referred to as classical prose, and the contemporary American flash fiction stories. The strategy of investigating prose poeticalness involved determining the devices of prose poeticalness in each text, defining the linguistic and stylistic components of these devices and their functions. As a result of our research, it is determined that the most foregrounded device of poeticalness is stylistic convergence. In the classical short stories, convergences function in bigger text fragments, they are based on the extended antropomorphic metaphors or similes in the interaction with alliterations. The stylistic convergences are used for poetical description of nature as human beings possessing the ability to speak, to think, to love (Wilde, Thomas), and even as gods (Rob Carney). Biomorphic tropes are used as the core of convergences, as a device of poetical description of people in the stories by Thomas, fairy tales by Wilde, in the flash fiction stories by John Updike, Grace Paley, Leigh Wilson and other writers. In the contemporary flash fiction stories, convergences foreground the ideas of sympathy, tolerance; they help to create a strong emotional effect. The strategy of rendering stylistic convergences in translation of the poetical prose consists in the exact reproduction of images applying literal translation or synonymic substitution and retaining the sound effect in trope components. Mythological and biblical allusions used as a system in the text are a device of poeticalness typical for Thomas's stories. The strategy of translating implicit allusions involves retaining the intertextual comments and giving explication in the text or in the footnotes. It is suggested that the prospects of further research lie in investigating poeticalness in the novels of contemporary writers.

Hand Grenades in the Kitchen: a commentary on The Murenger and Other Stories and Rebel Rebel

The published works being submitted, The Murenger and Other Stories and Rebel Rebel are, respectively, collections of 15 and 21 short stories. They form part of a substantial body of almost ninety short stories, gathered in five collections over three decades by the author. They represent a contribution to the short story in both English and Welsh and offer evidence of experiment with the form. The critical review examines some of the technical aspects of crafting these short stories and considers some of the disparate themes in these volumes, such as Brexit, nature and David Bowie. It also sets the collections within the context of both the writer’s other outputs and the work of other authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, John Updike and Kevin Barry whose influence has made its mark. It also considers issues arising from being a bilingual writer and applies some ideas about literary cartography to the two volumes under consideration.