Елена Борисова

The text traces the process of transferring the human brain into an artificial mechanical body in Lyuben Dilov’s novel “To choose yourself." My task is to bring forth the contingent wandering of the awareness of the character Daniel Dimi between spatiality of the already lost body and the new, another body, whose different sensuousness and shape the character has to cope with. The problematic identities of Dimi are presented by means of confrontation, a clash between own and foreign, between human reason (the peculiarities of knowledge which he owns) and opportunities provided by his the new mechanical body (this body presents him unlimited possibilities, but it itself is limited by the human who controls it). The emphasis of the narrative, on the one hand, is laid upon the ways in which human identity is rationalized as unsteady in the confrontation with beyond human, with the Other; and on the other hand - reveals the peculiarity of cognition bound by certain conditions.

In 2025, the journal Literaturna missal (Literary thought) is going to publish an issue dedicated to the interdisciplinary topic "Sound and Text". The issue will include articles in English and Bulgarian. The complex interrelations between sound and text have a history as long as literature itself, dating back from the primary unstable form of oral poetry, through the secondary writing forms of oral poetry, up till today’s digital audio-visual forms (Paul Zumthor. Oral Poetry: An Introduction). Sound should be considered in the broadest possible sense, and in many literary and cultural forms it is practically inseparable from the text. The interconnected forms of sound and text are positioned in a broad intercultural context, as these forms develop from the verse of Antiquity to the present day. The research could focus on acoustic and textological issues of the Medieval Corpus and Early Modernity to the 20th century. It can adopt historical or theoretical approach. From the perspective of intermediality, the research could analyze the sound-text interaction in the historical avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes. The complex relations between the two are crucial also for many other realms of contemporary cultural studies (electronic audio literature, film, theatre, performance, popular music, video games, digital media, etc.). Their theoretical and historical configurations call for examination from various perspectives.

If we view literature and law as different spheres of language usage or classify them as different “language games” (Ludwig Wittgenstein), we would probably jump to the conclusion that they cannot explain each other. Despite the different conventions of law and literature, however, the two have been inextricably linked since ancient times and sometimes in complex and mediated ways. Poetry and legal proceedings have common rhetorical roots from a time when both were public attractions. Law and literature have been opposed in social and historical aspect multiple times. A number of lawsuits have been organized against certain literary works; lists of “banned books“ were prepared. There are also literary representations of fictional trials and laws, of fictional states with sinister or absurd legislation. The field of critical theory also contains both oppositions and examples of agreement between the two fields. The issue of the journal is being prepared in partnership with the seminar "Literature and Law" of the "Ethical Studies Section", Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at BAS and the "Faculty of Slavic Studies", Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski".