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The digital environment in which the humanities are now firmly immersed has opened the door to innovative ways for students to interact with traditional formats such as archival and print material, and to develop a deep and personal understanding of topics and issues. Libraries, museums and archives are in the unique position of facilitating the creation of digital initiatives in the classroom by offering up their collections as “learning laboratories,” and by sharing their expertise in technology, information, and digital literacy as well as data management. Through active collaboration with course instructors, they can build bridges between their collections and the digital skills students need in order to embrace the new learning paradigm and to help lead them into the future. This paper outlines an archival-digital pilot launched in 2015 at the University of Ottawa, Canada. It situates the project in its historical context; details its early and subsequent iterations; and surveys the assumptions, challenges, surprises, and pleasures of introducing students to archival sources and to acquiring digital skills.
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In this edited interview, Stephan Wolfert, American actor and playwright, talks about his pluri-awarded play, Cry Havoc, a one-man show he has been performing since 2012 with several variations through the years; the play is autobiographical but it is also the exemplary story of many US veterans who cannot find a way to readjust to civilian rules once they come back home. The play tells of Wolfert’s struggle with Shakespeare’s words in order to find his own voice to speak what could not be said differently: his own trauma. By bringing to the fore a number of veterans in Shakespeare’s plays, starting from Richard III to Hotspur, Henry V, Coriolanus and many others, Wolfert fascinatingly lights up corners of the Shakespearean macro-text which we knew were there without really seeing them. Wolfert’s approach, in his show as well as in the use of Shakespeare within the DE-CRUIT Veterans Programme he founded, highlights the importance of human interaction through the mediation of the most ancient among media: theatre. Shakespeare’s writing for the theatre, with its characteristic intermedial quality (as it is suspended between page and stage) and cross-cultural inclination (as it has travelled the world), reactivates a holistic sense of the body and, in so doing, it channels powerful and deep physical emotions that can be expressed and shared with mutual benefit by actors and audience alike within the safe communication environment of theatre. Wolfert’s work makes the most of all this and even puts Shakespeare’s language to a therapeutic use for US veterans.
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This essay looks at the 2001 Romanian production of Hamlet directed by Vlad Mugur at the Cluj National Theatre (Romania) from the perspective of geocriticism and spatial literary studies, analysing the stage space opened in front of the audiences. While the bare stage suggests asceticism and alienation, the production distances the twenty-first century audiences from what might have seemed difficult to understand from their postmodern perspectives. The production abbreviates the topic to its bare essence, just as a map condenses space, in the form of “literary cartography” (Tally 20). There is no room in this production for baroque ornaments and theatrical flourishing; instead, the production explores the exposed depth of human existence. The production is an exploration of theatre and art, of what dramatists and directors can do with artful language, of the theatre as an exploration of human experience and potential. It is about the human condition and the artist’s place in the world, about old and new, about life and death, while everything happens on the edge of nothingness. The director’s own death before the opening night of the production ties Shakespeare’s Hamlet with existential issues in an even deeper way than the play itself allows us to expose.
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This article examines two huaju performances of Shakespeare—The Tragedy of Coriolanus (2007) and King Lear (2006), which are good examples of cultural exchanges between East and West, integrating Shakespeare into contemporary Chinese culture and politics. The two works provide distinctive approaches to the issues of identity in intercultural discourse. At the core of both productions lies the fundamental question: “Who am I?” At stake are the artists’ personal and cultural identities as processes of globalisation intensify. These performances not only exemplify the intercultural productivity of Shakespearean texts, but more critically, illustrate how Shakespeare and intercultural discourses are internalized and reconfigured by the nation and culture that consume and re-produce them. Chinese adaptations of Coriolanus and King Lear demonstrate how (intercultural) identity is constructed through the subjectivity and iconicity of Shakespeare’s characters and the performativity of Shakespeare’s texts.
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Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare played an essential role in Chinese reception history of Shakespeare. The first two adaptations in China,Xiewai qitan 澥外奇譚and Yinbian yanyu 吟邊燕語, chose Tales as the source text. To figure out why the Lambs’ Tales was received in China even earlier than Shakespeare’s original texts, this paper first focuses on Lamb’s relationship with China. Based on archival materials, it then assumes that the Lambs’ Tales might have had a chance to reach China at the beginning of the nineteenth century through Thomas Manning. Finally, it argues that the decision to first bring Shakespeare to China by Tales was made under the consideration of the Lambs’ writing style, the genre choice, the similarity of the Lambs’ and Chinese audiences, and the marketability of Tales. Tracing back to the first encounter between Tales and China throws considerable light on the reception history of Shakespeare in China. It makes sense that nothing is coincidental in the history of cultural reception and the encounters have always been fundamentally influenced by efforts from both the addresser and the receptor.
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Chinese Shakespearean criticism from Marxist perspectives is highly original in Chinese Shakespeare studies. Scholars such as Mao Dun, Yang Hui, Zhao Li, Fang Ping, Yang Zhouhan, Bian Zhilin, Meng Xianqiang, Sun Jiaxiu, Zhang Siyang and Wang Yuanhua adopt the basic principles and methods of Marxism to elaborate on Shakespeare’s works and have made great achievements. With ideas changed in different political climates, they have engaged in Shakespeare studies for over eight decades since the 1930s. At the beginning of the revolutionary age, they advocated revolutionary literature, followed Russian Shakespearean criticism from the Marxist perspective, and established the mode of class analysis and highlighted realism. Before and after the Cultural Revolution, they were concerned about class, reality and people. They also showed the “left-wing” inclination, taking literature as a tool to serve politics. Since the 1980s, they have been free from politics and entered the pure academic realm, analysing Shakespearean dramas with Marxist aesthetic theories and transforming from sociological criticism to literary criticism.
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Shakespeare studies in Mainland China and Taiwan evolved from the same origin during the two centuries after Shakespeare being introduced into China in the early nineteenth century. Although Shakespeare was first seen on the Taiwan stage in the Japanese language during the colonial period, it was after Kuomintang moved to Taiwan in 1949 that Shakespeare studies began to flourish when scholars and theatrical experts from mainland China, such as Liang Shih-Chiu, Yu Er-Chang, Wang Sheng-shan and others brought Chinese Shakespeare to Taiwan. Since the 1980s, mainland Shakespeareans began to communicate actively with their colleagues in Taiwan. With the continuous efforts of Cao Yu, Fang Ping, Meng Xianqiang, Gu Zhengkun, Yang Lingui and many other scholars in mainland China and Chu Li-Min, Yen Yuan-shu, Perng Ching-Hsi and other scholars in Taiwan, communications and conversations on Shakespeare studies across the Taiwan Strait were gradually enhanced in recent years. Meanwhile, innovations in Chinese adaptations of Shakespeare have resulted in a new performing medium, Shake-xiqu, through which theatrical practitioners on both sides explore possibilities of a union of Shakespeare and traditional Chinese theatre. This paper studies some intricate relationship in the history of Shakespeare studies in mainland China and Taiwan from a developmental perspective and suggests opportunities for positive and effective co-operations and interactions in the future.
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The versatility of the appropriation of Shakespeare in recent years has been witnessed in a variety of registers and media, which range from special effects on the stage, music, cartoons, comics, advertisements, all the way to video games. This contribution looks at some of the novels in the Shakespeare Re-told Hogarth series as effigies of the contemporary process of adapting the Elizabethan plays to the environments in which the potential readers/viewers work, become informed, seek entertainment and adjust themselves culturally, being, ultimately, cognitive schemes which are validated by today’s reception processes. The first novel in the series was Jeanette Winterson’s Gap of Time (2016), in which the Shakespearean reference to the years that separate the two moments of The Winter’s Tale’s plot becomes the title of a video game relying mainly on fantasy. Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016) rewrites The Tempest as a parable of the theatrical performance and its avatars, as undisputable authority, on the one hand, and source of subversiveness, on the other. Dunbar (2018) is Edward St. Aubyn’s response to the family saga of King Lear, where kingship, territorial division and military conflict are replaced by modern media wars, and the issues of public exposure in the original text are reinterpreted interpreted by resorting to the impact of the audio-visual on every-day life.
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The paper concerns the blockbuster musical film Mamma mia, loosely using some of Shakespearean patterns, topoi and plots. Set on a small Greek island, idylic and exotic, the film offers a contemporary romantic story with new/reversed roles in terms of gender, parenthood, sexuality, marriage and age, pointing to a different cultural paradigm. While the Shakespearean level is recast, remixed and probably less visible, the priority is given to the utopia of the 1970s and to the question of its outcome and transformation.
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Among the works of Aristotle there are also dialogues, a literary genre, represented in ancient Greek literature above all by Plato. Although Aristotelian dialogues were not preserved to our times, on the basis of mentions found in the works of other ancient authors, an image of form and content of Aristotle’s dialogues may be drawn. The article aims to analyze selected testimonies and fragments concerning Aristotle’s Symposium, and to discuss motives and topics which appear in the dialogue of Plato’s pupil.
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The brief, but interesting, work by Apuleius constitutes a fixed point both to delineate the biography of the famous African rhetorician, a native of Madaura, and to trace a picture with quite defined outlines on the social and cultural, economic and political aspect, in which he was paying the Roman Empire in the second century aD, especially in that rich southern Mediterranean area. In this short essay the close relationship between culture and magic is highlighted. In culturally backward populations, the educated person is often referred to as a magician, a name which, with its semantic nuances, continues today, especially in some villages of southern Italy. So magician, both in the singular and in the plural, means both the educated person and those who are able to spell or predict the future.
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Lucretius, considered to be the continuator of Epicure, is the author of the poem De rerum natura. Essentially, this title suggests that it is a work that addresses the problems of ancient physics, in this case the materialistic concept of reality. Of course, this is true, but besides the physical doctrine, the poem also contains numerous sections on ethics and morality. Although no part of De rerum natura is a constant ethical argument, the whole text is permeated with information that serves precisely this purpose. The aim of this article is to show how the poet uses in his prologues for subsequent books of the poem the structure, content and various stylistic and rhetorical elements to convince the reader of the rightness and values of the explicitly and implicitly demonstrated ethical views he proclaims.
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The article offers a survey of the reception of Ovid in the Wawrzyniec Korwin’s astronomical dissertation Cosmographia dans manuductionem in tabulas Ptolemaei (ed. 1496) by applying literary perspectives of such Ovid`s poems as Metamorphoses, Fasti, Epistulae ex Ponto, Amores and Heroides. The title Korwin’s take on Ovid hints at the actual and real potential of his heritage that is both a fixed, poetic base shared by Korwin since his study at the Cracow Academy as well as a body of references constantly being reinterpreted in response to astronomical and geographical challenges of the work of the Polish writer. The reader is given an insight into the processes shaping Korwin’s borrowings from Ovid and the importance of Cosmographia to the Polish Renaissance culture.
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The main aim of the article is to present ways of expressing one of the most important means of reasoning – namely, the topos of exaggerated modesty – in selected parliamentary speeches by Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski. The considerations are focused on indicating its sources, definitions, functions and variants. The most important method used to explore the topic will be rhetorical analysis. In addition, the author indicates the relationship between the topos of exaggerated modesty and language etiquette.
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The article deals with the comparison of word-formation models of Old Church Slavonic composites and their Greek correspondences. Despite the typological proximity of the Old Church Slavonic and Greek languages of the Byzantine period, in actual examples, the word-formation models of Old Church Slavonic composites often do not coincide with the models of their Greek counterparts. The author concludes that calque as a component of the procedure of word-formation of the Old Church Slavonic composites was mainly concerned with the autosemantic root morphemes. In addition, for the Slavonic translators, the general semantics (le sens général) of the roots of the model Greek word was important first of all. In each case the choice of the word-formation model could either coincide with the word-formation model of the Greek correspondence or be different, demonstrating an orientation towards the Old Church Slavonic word-formation mechanism.
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The Vienna Cod. Slav. 37, known also as Codex Hankenstein, is a unique manuscript. It consists of two texts: the main text written in the centre of the folia, and the surrounding text written above, below and on the both sides of the main text. The study shows that the surrounding text complements the main one. The contents of the manuscript consist of resurrection services in eight modes, the weekly services from Sunday Vespers to Saturday Orthros in the first six modes, synaxarion, resurrection kontakia in eight modes and the cycle of six common services for Prophets, Apostles, Patters, Reverends, Martyrs, and Women Martyrs. According to an acrostic, the kanon for Patters is a work of St. Clement of Ochrid. There is a kathisma inserted after the sixth ode of the kanons in the first four common services. This is considered as an archaic feature. It is suggested that the composition goes back to the ninth century, the time of the holy brothers Cyril and Methodius and their pupils. It is also connected to the reduction of the kontakion: in all probability this happened very soon after the death of St. Theodore the Studite who was the last writer of large kontakia. After him, the reduced kontakion was inserted after the third ode of the kanon. The Hymn for St. Clement of Rome ascribed to Cyril the Philosopher is evidence for this. The archaic character of the repertory included is also proved by the lack of the anatolika and alphabetika stichera. The latter appeared in manuscripts after the establishment of the Evergetis redaction of the Studite Typikon. The conclusion is that the manuscript was compiled by the middle of the eleventh century. The actualization of the repertory that is revealed in the surrounding text was done at that time as well. This actualization follows a liturgical order unlike the genre order followed in the main text.
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The article describes the initial stages of the diffusion of the new redaction Athonite Bulgarian translation of the Pentecostarion in the Serbian literature. More evidence is added to the suggestion that the known Pentecostarion (Sl.1 of the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem) written by Serbian scribes on Sinai was a direct copy of a new Bulgarian translation made on Athos, which is conserved in the Pentecostarion of St. Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai (Sin. 24). The comparison of the structure, the text and the orthography of the hymnal parts of the two pentecostaria (excluding the synaxaries which have been published and analyzed thoroughly by L. Taseva) reveals that the copying (done by two copyists) was complicated by the change in the orthography: from an orthography with two letters for original nasal vowels (yus) and two for reduced vowels (yers) the text was ‘readjusted’ to an inconsistent Rashka orthography without yus signs and with only one yer sign. As far as the hymnographic text is concerned the variant readings are minimal in relation to the total volume so the two manuscripts reflect one and the same redaction of the translation. In the overall reproduction Yanikie and Yakov have preserved the Middle Bulgarian literary language of their antigraph, which is an important monument of the Athonite Bulgarian translation school of the 14th c.
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