Papers by Vesselin M. Budakov
Cross-Disciplinary and Cross-Cultural Awareness: Essays in Honor of Madeleine Danova. Edited by Vesselin Budakov, Galina Avramova, Gueorgui Jetchev, and Traci Speed. Sofia: St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, 2023, pp. 217–238. ISBN: 978-954-07-5861-9 (Print)., 2023
Abstract:
In discussing three South African Bildungsromane published within two decades after ... more Abstract:
In discussing three South African Bildungsromane published within two decades after the end of apartheid, the paper analyzes an analogy between the portrayal of the growth and social integration of young South Africans and the development of a new South Africa. Based on the discussion of these novels, I point out the dissemblance between the contemporary South African Bildungsroman and the earlier European counterparts and argue that post-apartheid formative fiction enunciates consequences of precarity. Post-apartheid formative fiction presents an unidealistic portrayal of vulnerable youths and their conflict with society’s transition to democracy. Within the framework of the postcolonial visions of individual and national autonomy, it depicts the confrontation of protagonists with a social mindset that only gradually seems to be changing, revealed in a genre of fiction that transformed from a linear development of a character to a compressed focus on being in the context of South Africa’s sociopolitical changes after the apartheid period. The protagonists in such novels are pictured as vulnerable in the face of social and political precarity, straining to find individual ways to claim their own place in a society inattentive to their precarious condition of living. The post-2000 coming-of-age fiction in South Africa describes subjectivities which reveal contemporary anxieties in individuals’ aspirations, valorized by pessimism, tempered aspirations, and restrained optimism.
Keywords: Post-apartheid, South Africa, Bildungsroman, coming of age, youth, precarity, vulnerability, K. Sello Duiker, Niq Mhlongo, Masande Ntshanga
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“Introduction: Cross-Disciplinary and Cross-Cultural Horizons.” Cross-Disciplinary and Cross-Cultural Awareness: Essays in Honor of Madeleine Danova. Edited by Vesselin Budakov, Galina Avramova, Gueorgui Jetchev, Traci Speed. Sofia: St. Kliment Ohridski UP, 2023. ISBN: 978-954-07-5861-9 (Print), 2023
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Tradition and Innovation. Edited by Svetlana D. Gyuzeleva & Veneta Sirakova // Традиция и новаторство. Димитрова-Гюзелева, Светлана и Сиракова, Венета (Съст.). Sofia: NBU Publishing House, 2023. // София: Издателство на НБУ, 2023. pp. 273–285. ISBN 978-619-233-255-6 (Print), 2023
Alexander Craig's Ionia: Land of Wise Men and Fair Women (1898), which may be defined as a lost-r... more Alexander Craig's Ionia: Land of Wise Men and Fair Women (1898), which may be defined as a lost-race novel, describes an imaginary utopian society, hidden in unexplored regions in the Himalayas, and aims to encourage speculations about social reform in the Western world. The paper first discusses the lost-race genre and its relatedness to utopian thinking. Then it analyzes the first part of the novel, which draws a contrast between metropolitan privations and the idealized English countryside, portraying a narrator who seeks to fulfill his philanthropic ideals but deduces that all his public-spirited endeavors seem to be small in scale. It next discusses the novel's second part, which deals with the narrator's visit to Ionia where the protagonist is introduced to a methodology of social reform. Ionia is a model modern state whose social structure, politics, and ideology are validated by the precepts of late nineteenth-century social Darwinism. The article argues that in designing a feasible eutopia, Alexander Craig intended to suggest that social reform in contemporary Western societies was contingent upon the implementation of the principles of social Darwinism and eugenics. However, such a philosophical conviction contradicts the ethics of utopianism. Thus, instead of a eutopia, the novel reads as a nightmarish realization of a utopian dream.
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Swiftian Inspirations: The Legacy of Jonathan Swift from the Enlightenment to the Age of Post-Truth. Edited by Jonathan McCreedy, Vesselin M. Budakov, and Alexandra K. Glavanakova. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020. pp. 57-82. ISBN-13: 978-1527541764, ISBN-10: 1527541762.
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In Google Books: https://books.google.bg/books?id=AGDNDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
This book addresses key problems regarding Swiftian thought and satire, analyzing the inspiration... more This book addresses key problems regarding Swiftian thought and satire, analyzing the inspirational cultural legacy which generations of writers, thinkers, and satirists have recurrently relied upon since the Enlightenment. Section One deals with the eighteenth century and the topics of truth, falsehood and madness. Section Two focuses on two film adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels as well as on allusions to Swiftian satire during the US Enlightenment and in post-racial America. Section Three looks at the politics of language, politeness, and satire within translation, and Section Four dwells upon the process of reading Swift in the age of post-truth and Brexit. It will be of interest to students and scholars of eighteenth-century literature and culture, modern-day politics as well as to those interested in satire, science fiction, and film adaptations of literary works.
Sample Chapter:
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/65852
In Google Books:
https://books.google.bg/books?id=AGDNDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Publication Details:
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/swiftian-inspirations
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VTU Review: Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2018
The Grand Tour, defined by a number of scholars as the early phase of modern tourism, was the sub... more The Grand Tour, defined by a number of scholars as the early phase of modern tourism, was the subject of a debate which focused on its utility and benefits but also touched upon issues such as the significance of travel and the role of educational tours in the shaping of knowledge about native and foreign cultures. The article considers this initial stage of tourism and argues that in addition to the courtly paradigm, which stressed the importance of foreign travel, the education of the English gentleman included patriotic allegiance to the home country. It examines the role of the paradigm of gentility in the making of the virtuous gentleman abroad in Richard Lassels’s The Voyage of Italy (1670) and Jean (John) Gailhard’s The Compleat Gentleman (1678). The article also discusses Richard Hurd’s Dialogues on the Uses of Foreign Travel (1764), which marked a critical return to the debate about the role of educational tours. It is argued that Hurd undermined the former courtly paradigm and challenged the benefits of foreign travel by proclaiming British national values and advocating home education as a more valuable platform for the making of English gentlemen.
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Academia Editorial del Hispanismo
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Notes and Queries, 2011
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Notes and Queries, 2010
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Notes and Queries, 2010
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Introduction In his reading of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere, Jürgen Habermas main... more Introduction In his reading of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere, Jürgen Habermas maintains that " it is no accident that the eighteenth century became the century of the letter. " 1 Even though this position has been generally acknowledged by many scholars of epistolary literature, the goal of this paper is to look into the causes that may have triggered the letter-writing boom in the eighteenth century. Literary, historical, and sociological approaches to epistolarity seem to resemble on two points: the letter both as an artifact and as a literary norm came to existence with the social transformations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the letter for fictional purposes appeared with the rise of the middle class whose lifestyle it also aimed to discuss. 2 Thus the letter as a prevalent form of expression certainly made no sudden appearance in the eighteenth century. It may be argued that a number of sociopolitical and cultural imperatives in the preceding century had prepared for the Enlightenment to become " the century of the letter. " Therefore, in what follows, my aim is to examine the social prerequisites that enabled the development of an epistolary culture in the seventeenth century, first as artifact and then as a fashionable mode of literary and non-literary expression. I suggest that the rise of seventeenth-century epistolary culture and its supremacy in the eighteenth century had its origins in the regulations for establishing faster and safer postal service that meant to enable and secure early modern commercial capitalism.
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The agreement between letter writers to stay in touch, irrespective of the time and space that wi... more The agreement between letter writers to stay in touch, irrespective of the time and space that will keep them apart, presumably calls for an interpersonal contract that has both a ritual and symbolic meaning. The epistolary agreement is an interpersonal contract between potential correspondents who have consented to continue their contact in an indirect manner, through letter writing. The paper argues that the promise to correspond was, and still is, a kind of epistolary, social contract that substantiates the imaginary dialogue over distance. The eighteenth-century epistolary narratives under discussion show that, with their letters, epistolers kept a promise not only to write back but also to gratify recipients' curiosity of the world at large. As it was considered rhetorically closer to the art and practice of oral conversation, letter writing was also viewed as proof of friendship.
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The article in Google Books:
https://www.google.bg/books/edition/Globalization_in_English_Studie... more The article in Google Books:
https://www.google.bg/books/edition/Globalization_in_English_Studies/aEoaBwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Budakov+Emails+and+Fiction&pg=PA48&printsec=frontcover
Abstract:
In discussing Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs (1995), S. Paige Baty’s e-mail trouble (1999), and Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook (2000), I argue that the neoteric mode of communication has retained the features of conventional epistolary fiction, charging the epistolary form with taking over other genres. Thus, the three postmodern e-mail works are exactly such a kind of generic medley of diary, autobiography, and letter writing that many eighteenth-century novels similarly mingled in one narrative, as the letter was considered to comprise all genres. The almost automatic, daily use of computers and the Internet has turned into an inspiring starting point for the three authors to discuss and problematize existential, postmodern ideals in the digital age. Douglas Coupland is optimistic about computer-mediated epistolarity. S. Paige Baty argues that technology makes society less human and more isolated. Winterson takes another route. As e-mailing is one more way of communication, she depicts the past as ongoing and dehistoricized in an electronic correspondence, in the timeless present of a timeless and borderless cyberspace.
Key words: e-mail, fiction, epistolarity, postmodernism, cyberspace, on-line relationships
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Edited Books by Vesselin M. Budakov
Cross-Disciplinary and Cross-Cultural Awareness: Essays in Honor of Madeleine Danova. Edited by Vesselin Budakov, Galina Avramova, Gueorgui Jetchev, Traci Speed. General Editor, Professor Valeri Stefanov. Sofia: St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, 2023. Pp. 1–720. ISBN: 978-954-07-5861-9 (Print), 2023
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Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020. pp. i-xxii,1-250. ISBN-13:978-1527541764, ISBN-10:1527541762., 2020
This book addresses key problems regarding Swiftian thought and satire, analyzing the inspiration... more This book addresses key problems regarding Swiftian thought and satire, analyzing the inspirational cultural legacy which generations of writers, thinkers, and satirists have recurrently relied upon since the Enlightenment. Section One deals with the eighteenth century and the topics of truth, falsehood and madness. Section Two focuses on two film adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels as well as on allusions to Swiftian satire during the US Enlightenment and in post-racial America. Section Three looks at the politics of language, politeness, and satire within translation, and Section Four dwells upon the process of reading Swift in the age of post-truth and Brexit. It will be of interest to students and scholars of eighteenth-century literature and culture, modern-day politics as well as to those interested in satire, science fiction, and film adaptations of literary works.
Sample Chapter:
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/65852
In Google Books:
https://books.google.bg/books?id=AGDNDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Publication Details:
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/swiftian-inspirations
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Papers by Vesselin M. Budakov
In discussing three South African Bildungsromane published within two decades after the end of apartheid, the paper analyzes an analogy between the portrayal of the growth and social integration of young South Africans and the development of a new South Africa. Based on the discussion of these novels, I point out the dissemblance between the contemporary South African Bildungsroman and the earlier European counterparts and argue that post-apartheid formative fiction enunciates consequences of precarity. Post-apartheid formative fiction presents an unidealistic portrayal of vulnerable youths and their conflict with society’s transition to democracy. Within the framework of the postcolonial visions of individual and national autonomy, it depicts the confrontation of protagonists with a social mindset that only gradually seems to be changing, revealed in a genre of fiction that transformed from a linear development of a character to a compressed focus on being in the context of South Africa’s sociopolitical changes after the apartheid period. The protagonists in such novels are pictured as vulnerable in the face of social and political precarity, straining to find individual ways to claim their own place in a society inattentive to their precarious condition of living. The post-2000 coming-of-age fiction in South Africa describes subjectivities which reveal contemporary anxieties in individuals’ aspirations, valorized by pessimism, tempered aspirations, and restrained optimism.
Keywords: Post-apartheid, South Africa, Bildungsroman, coming of age, youth, precarity, vulnerability, K. Sello Duiker, Niq Mhlongo, Masande Ntshanga
https://books.google.bg/books?hl=en&lr=&id=AGDNDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA57&dq=budakov,+dystopia&ots=v1zw2SRccW&sig=PsWj6iN4eW0HGj9raEMgud6i0cY&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Sample Chapter:
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/65852
In Google Books:
https://books.google.bg/books?id=AGDNDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Publication Details:
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/swiftian-inspirations
Abstract from EBSCOhost Connection: http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/65232557/cacotopia-eighteenth-century-appearance-news-from-dead-1715
ACCESSION # 65232557
https://academic.oup.com/nq/article-abstract/58/3/391/1410757?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjr103
Abstract from EBSCOhost Connection:
http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/48752721/dystopia-earlier-eighteenth-century-use
ACCESSION # 48752721
https://academic.oup.com/nq/article-abstract/57/1/86/1182435/Dystopia-An-Earlier-Eighteenth-Century-Use?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjp235
https://www.scribd.com/document/75299474/Dystopia-Usage
https://www.google.bg/books/edition/Globalization_in_English_Studies/aEoaBwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Budakov+Emails+and+Fiction&pg=PA48&printsec=frontcover
Abstract:
In discussing Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs (1995), S. Paige Baty’s e-mail trouble (1999), and Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook (2000), I argue that the neoteric mode of communication has retained the features of conventional epistolary fiction, charging the epistolary form with taking over other genres. Thus, the three postmodern e-mail works are exactly such a kind of generic medley of diary, autobiography, and letter writing that many eighteenth-century novels similarly mingled in one narrative, as the letter was considered to comprise all genres. The almost automatic, daily use of computers and the Internet has turned into an inspiring starting point for the three authors to discuss and problematize existential, postmodern ideals in the digital age. Douglas Coupland is optimistic about computer-mediated epistolarity. S. Paige Baty argues that technology makes society less human and more isolated. Winterson takes another route. As e-mailing is one more way of communication, she depicts the past as ongoing and dehistoricized in an electronic correspondence, in the timeless present of a timeless and borderless cyberspace.
Key words: e-mail, fiction, epistolarity, postmodernism, cyberspace, on-line relationships
Edited Books by Vesselin M. Budakov
Sample Chapter:
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/65852
In Google Books:
https://books.google.bg/books?id=AGDNDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Publication Details:
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/swiftian-inspirations
In discussing three South African Bildungsromane published within two decades after the end of apartheid, the paper analyzes an analogy between the portrayal of the growth and social integration of young South Africans and the development of a new South Africa. Based on the discussion of these novels, I point out the dissemblance between the contemporary South African Bildungsroman and the earlier European counterparts and argue that post-apartheid formative fiction enunciates consequences of precarity. Post-apartheid formative fiction presents an unidealistic portrayal of vulnerable youths and their conflict with society’s transition to democracy. Within the framework of the postcolonial visions of individual and national autonomy, it depicts the confrontation of protagonists with a social mindset that only gradually seems to be changing, revealed in a genre of fiction that transformed from a linear development of a character to a compressed focus on being in the context of South Africa’s sociopolitical changes after the apartheid period. The protagonists in such novels are pictured as vulnerable in the face of social and political precarity, straining to find individual ways to claim their own place in a society inattentive to their precarious condition of living. The post-2000 coming-of-age fiction in South Africa describes subjectivities which reveal contemporary anxieties in individuals’ aspirations, valorized by pessimism, tempered aspirations, and restrained optimism.
Keywords: Post-apartheid, South Africa, Bildungsroman, coming of age, youth, precarity, vulnerability, K. Sello Duiker, Niq Mhlongo, Masande Ntshanga
https://books.google.bg/books?hl=en&lr=&id=AGDNDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA57&dq=budakov,+dystopia&ots=v1zw2SRccW&sig=PsWj6iN4eW0HGj9raEMgud6i0cY&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Sample Chapter:
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/65852
In Google Books:
https://books.google.bg/books?id=AGDNDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Publication Details:
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/swiftian-inspirations
Abstract from EBSCOhost Connection: http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/65232557/cacotopia-eighteenth-century-appearance-news-from-dead-1715
ACCESSION # 65232557
https://academic.oup.com/nq/article-abstract/58/3/391/1410757?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjr103
Abstract from EBSCOhost Connection:
http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/48752721/dystopia-earlier-eighteenth-century-use
ACCESSION # 48752721
https://academic.oup.com/nq/article-abstract/57/1/86/1182435/Dystopia-An-Earlier-Eighteenth-Century-Use?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjp235
https://www.scribd.com/document/75299474/Dystopia-Usage
https://www.google.bg/books/edition/Globalization_in_English_Studies/aEoaBwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Budakov+Emails+and+Fiction&pg=PA48&printsec=frontcover
Abstract:
In discussing Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs (1995), S. Paige Baty’s e-mail trouble (1999), and Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook (2000), I argue that the neoteric mode of communication has retained the features of conventional epistolary fiction, charging the epistolary form with taking over other genres. Thus, the three postmodern e-mail works are exactly such a kind of generic medley of diary, autobiography, and letter writing that many eighteenth-century novels similarly mingled in one narrative, as the letter was considered to comprise all genres. The almost automatic, daily use of computers and the Internet has turned into an inspiring starting point for the three authors to discuss and problematize existential, postmodern ideals in the digital age. Douglas Coupland is optimistic about computer-mediated epistolarity. S. Paige Baty argues that technology makes society less human and more isolated. Winterson takes another route. As e-mailing is one more way of communication, she depicts the past as ongoing and dehistoricized in an electronic correspondence, in the timeless present of a timeless and borderless cyberspace.
Key words: e-mail, fiction, epistolarity, postmodernism, cyberspace, on-line relationships
Sample Chapter:
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/65852
In Google Books:
https://books.google.bg/books?id=AGDNDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Publication Details:
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/swiftian-inspirations