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The activities of Bosnian Church members are important for the understanding of their place and role in Bosnian society as well as their position in the eyes of Ragusan cotemporaries. The character of Ragusan reports is specific and offers only certain types of information that refer to the secular activities of Bosnian Christians (krstjani). It is always emphasized in the documents that it is about Patarenes or Bosnian Christians. There is no difference between these two terms, at least regarding Ragusan documents which refer to the territory of medieval Bosnia. The term heretics should not be considered, since this expression appears only in times of conflict and it refers more to certain Bosnian magnates than to the members of the Bosnian Church. Ragusans were well informed about the Bosnian Church, they were familiar with its structure and in certain cases individuals were always mentioned with their clerical title. Whether it was the title djed (grandfather), gost (guest) or starac (elder), it was always clearly emphasized in the documents. The activities of Christians in the service of Bosnian nobility were well known for the individuals who were mentioned as diplomats and mediators in certain businesses. Vlatko Tumurlić, Dmitar the Christian and guest Radin Butković stand out as the ones who had a significant career in the secular service for some magnates. The Christians acted in times of particularly tense relations, and were often the power that managed to mediate and reconcile the two battling parties. Their services were also required by Ragusans and several instances were noted when they asked for help and advice of the members of the Bosnian Church. They especially respected Radin Butković and we are best informed about his relations with Ragusa. Upon the trips to Ragusa, the members of the Bosnian Church sometimes used their affection and were often permitted to export certain kinds of goods with significant custom exception or were on different occasions rewarded, especially if the business was finished in favour of Ragusa. In exceptional circumstances Christians were portrayed negatively, but only in the cases when they performed tasks in the service of feudal lords which had nothing to do with their religious beliefs. This article is about the events from the beginning of the 1440-ies when servants of Duke Stjepan, including certain Bosnian Christians took away goods from Ragusan merchants in the region of Goražde.
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Despite the fact that study of toponomastic material on the territory covered by the medieval Bosnian state has continually been carried out for longer than a century, the research has not yet offered a detailed and serious description in the form of a special monograph. The conducted research whose results are presented on preceding pages indicates a complexity of this thematic frame. Medieval toponyms represent an important source for the research of past, however they do not represent a conserved type of information that has maintained its primary form until modern times. With the use of toponomastic material it is possible to view the various segments of medieval Bosnian history. The transformation of medieval settlement has left its traces on toponomastics, and therefore the village as the most frequent and basic form of settlement, with a completely agrarian character was marked with the toponym “vas”. The need for storage of goods was the reason why merchants spent more time on the places where a bazaar day was held once a week thus creating market places which were named after the days of the week when the sales were made. In the next phase, the need to preserve the goods and more frequent trading caused the stay of greater number of people on the squares which resulted with the development of the settlement of a higher level. The part of the settlement where permanent trading and crafting was performed was called varoš (town), a term which would later on be applied to the whole settlement and which has become a toponym. The long connection of one kindred to a certain geographic region inevitably brought to the instituting of personal or family names and rarely nicknames as toponym tags for a narrow or wide land area i.e. for the name of the whole settled place. The names of medieval settlements in many cases derived from vocations or activities which the population of the area performed. In toponomastic material the elements of all three churches the Bosnian, Catholic and Orthodox are present, but also the elements which with certain modifications represent pre-Christian Slav heritage. The folk tales often attempt to construct an image about the name of the settlement as the name given by a famous person in fatal times and put the name of the settlement in the same plain with some supernatural phenomena.
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In this commentary the author brings a few notes about the atmosphere that existed in Tuzla, on the eve of and during the aggression on Bosnia and Herzegovina, and provides some explanation that could serve the better understanding of the context and background of certain events, opinions and statements which marked the social and political life of Tuzla in the first half of the nineties. After the first multiparty elections in Yugoslavia in 1990 one could witness the commotion and turmoil of old and new, the clashing of ideas and projects, identities and differences, skills and ambitions, without the possibility of consideration of the final outcome and consequences of these movements for the lives of the people in this region. The author also expresses his personal reflections on some aspects of historical heritage and the realities of social life in Tuzla, as well as notes on political and intellectual developments in the city in which he himself participated.
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The narrative voice operates in Maurice Blanchot’s récits by means of the narrative distance which is a fine mechanism of discourse mobilisation. The quasi spatial nature of distance contaminates also Blanchot’s reflexion about literature; come through the narrative, perceptional or logical trials, the distance turns out to be ethical. The article is aimed at taking Blanchot’s spaces according to the mobile distance of the narrative voice; discursive, syntaxical and visual displacements of the narrative voice are particulary analysed in Blanchot’s récit Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas.
More...Stratégies de construction et de déconstruction spatiales dans Thomas l’Obscur
Maurice Blanchot completely reshaped the very concept of literature. By connecting literary space to philosophical thinking, his works have contributed in refashioning the understanding of literature as a double act of creation and reading. This article aims to question the contribution of the second version of his first novel, Thomas l’Obscur, to a remodelling of space within writing. Looking at geographical representations as well as fictional, narrative and textual models, the aim of this article is to identify the various strategies created and implemented by Blanchot as part of the process of constructing and deconstructing the space. Blanchot’s novel is considered as the embodiment of a “spatial concern” through which literary creation emerges as an innovative means of refiguring space. The novel is read and studied from a “spatial” perspective which puts forward space as a key element in the text.
More...(with a Little Help from Maurice Blanchot)
My argument takes as its premise the idea that western theatre, what we might call, in shorthand, Aristotelian theatre, invests in a theological notion of time, which I associate, on the one hand, with a causal, linear narrative (beginning, middle, end), and, on the other, with a viewing experience which produces an absorptive temporality, rooted in a kind of weightlessness, a mode of temporal transcendence, an exiting from the earth. By taking us out of time, by abstracting us from our bodies, the dramatic logic of western theatre, invests in a time of redemption, in which the temporality of artificial/staged events is perceived as being somehow more real than time itself. Against synchronous identification and the time of drama, the article argues that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, purposively produces an experience of ‘presentness’, in which the subject – the spectator – is compelled to undergo an alternative temporality – the time of waiting. This is immanent time, the time of a different theatrical event, the time in which, to cite Beckett’s Endgame, ‘something takes its course’. ‘Presentness,’ as I define it here, has nothing in common with what the art critic Michael Fried sees as a moment of grace, and neither does it refer to an act of metaphysical self-coincidence. Rather, it is best seen as an ambivalent, impossible mode of temporality which I term ‘sacred time’. Crucially, this is not the time of cycles and myths; more disconcertingly, as in the sense of the English adverb presently, this is a time that is never quite here, a time of deferral, suspension and dis-appointment. The time, then, that I am interested in designating as sacred or as presentness has much in common with Maurice Blanchot’s notion of time as disaster or catastrophe; it is time that never arrives primarily, and scandalously, because it is always already here, weighing on us, insisting on its absent but irreducible gravity. It is a time that roots us to the earth.
More...Mario Aquilina, The Event of Style in Literature, Basingstoke
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This article argues that the notion of ‘space’ in Maurice Blanchot’s writings is best understood in conjunction with Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. In light of recent trends, I begin by assessing the relevance of geocriticism before dismissing it in favour of a less positivistic critical approach that takes its cues from Blanchot’s very own The Space of Literature as well as from his late works, where the ‘neuter’ occupies an increasingly pivotal position. More specifically, I bridge the gap between these two seemingly distinct concerns by drawing on a) Derrida’s analysis of the crypt, a quintessentially Blanchot-esque type of architecture, and b) his deconstructionist take on the Platonic chora, which emphasizes the neutrality of space. In closing, I briefly probe the connection between Blanchot’s ‘dis/aster,’ writing, and outer-space.
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From narratives to their contemporary critical essays, the Blanchotian experience of space appears at first as that of an unlocalizable outside, where any subject capable of experiencing it gets lost. Nevertheless, such an impossibility is spatially endured and thematized through writing, according to a meaning of spatiality that has to be apprehended, no longer as an extent, but as that nocturnal depth which would be the intensive origin of it, far below the a priori scope of possible experience. Therefore we can account for an experience of space as pure intensity, before any subjective appropriation of places and, all the more, any territorial rationalization. Thus, the wandering one finds oneself destined to by such a « space of literature » – an essentially disoriented and literally crazed space – depends on a double movement: on the one hand, the collapse, in a pure outside, of the subject of possible experience, on the other hand, because of that dis-subjectivation itself, the access, out of oneself, to a real experience of space as an intensive power – no longer lived but living, relating life itself to the forces which transform it incessantly and open it to the impossible.
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