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In society and in literature, age is often associated with positive (wisdom, life experience) or negative aspects (stubbornness, impatience). The article examines the extent to which the biological age influences social relationships, experiences and/or behavior, and the reactions of the archetypal German prankster and his interaction partners.
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The article starts by drawing attention to the historical, western discourse of the eighteenth century, addresses the topic of a newly founded reflection on age groups, provides information on genetic aspects, on new evaluations of Goethe’s early, aesthetic, reflection on age-groups, focuses on his two historical dramas ''Götz von Berlichingen'' and ''Egmont'', shows how the reflection on age groups is launched and is primarily generated by the interaction of literary figures that belong to different age groups: Götz – Georg, Götz – Karl, Egmont – Richard, Clara – Clara’s mother, Ferdinand – Ferdinand’s father, Ferdinand – Egmont. This interaction produces self-representations and interpretations of the counterpart that emerge in dependence on or in difference from certain age-group characteristics.
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The present article looks at how the contemporary discourses concerning cultural and natural heritage are literarily reworked in Judith Schalansky’s book ''An Inventory of Losses'' (Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, 2018). Schalansky’s hybrid book which consists of twelve micronarratives around natural and art objects that have been destroyed or lost over the course of time partakes in the cultural discourse on preservation, memory and intergenerational dialogue, contributing its own views on the practices of valuation of old artefacts and knowledge. The present paper focuses on the common aspects – first of all the intertwining of nature and culture – and the key differences – such as the critique on the essentialist concept of sustainability – between Schalansky’s book and the preservation discourse as it is articulated in collective texts such as the World Heritage Convention.
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Depending on the cultural context, age characteristics or specific portrayals of age are presented differently in television advertisements. Advertising agencies often attempt to convey certain cultural images, family values and principles or even illustrate humorous age stereotypes, which can be identified for example in the two analyzed commercials from Bluna and Teekanne, in order to attract the interest and attention of the audience. Since childhood, each person has certain image ideas that have a great influence on them from literature, society, the media, but especially from television. These influence our perception of the natural process of aging, either positively or negatively. However, such age stereotypes are also culture-dependent, because in Asian cultures the portrayal of old age is perceived differently, in the sense of wisdom, spiritual experience, long longevity, and from a state of healthy well-being. In contrast, in European cultures, perceptions of old age differ significantly, with a greater association with severe physical conditions or mental illnesses.
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Understanding social reality as well as political developments and contexts is not only an important part of our participatory life, but also one of the main tasks of teachers in language integration work. This fundamentally involves juxtaposing the familiar and the target culture, which often becomes a topic in the classroom. These confrontations are closely accompanied by ideas and feelings of belonging and attachment as well as perceived foreignness and otherness. The relationships between the generations and the connections to one’s own family play an important role here, especially as they are characterized by emotionality. The article will therefore analyze how the position of older members of the family and society is presented in the textbooks for integration courses, with respect to both the linguistic and intercultural embedding. Based on the existing offer, ideas for supplementary materials will be developed and presented as examples. Particular attention is paid here to a constructive approach, which primarily looks for connecting. The emphasis is deliberately not placed on the differences, as is the case with the prevailing conception, but a narration of the points of contact is sought.
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''Warten bis der Frieden kommt'' is the second part of an autobiographical trilogy in which the author Judith Kerr presents both her own experiences and the historical context of the 1930s and 1940s of the past century in a literary manner. The main character Anna has to flee from Germany together with her family in the year 1933. They first arrive in Switzerland, then in France and finally in England. While in the first book we encounter a very young and partly naive nine-year-old protagonist who tries to understand and interpret the world surrounding her, in the second part we are being presented with Anna as a teenager who spent the last seven years of her life as a refugee in foreign countries. As a consequence we can observe a change of perspective from the point of view of individual and collective memory. In the following article aims to analyze to what extent the age of the main character influences the literary discourse in regard of the historical narrative.
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This article focuses on the question of “who is speaking?” in Elfriede Jelinek’s texts regarding the level of the narrator, the we-form and the “Sprachflächen”-figures. The so-called characters in her novels and plays are difficult to catch, they are less psychological figures than mere declarations of speakers. One central reference in this context is the chorus’ speech in Greek tragedy which is often an important source for her writing. In Greek tragedy the chorus had both a spatial and a metaphorical function, mediating between the protagonist and the audience. It symbolized the constant conflict between individual and community. Taking the example of Jelinek’s play ''SCHNEE WEISS'' (2018) with reference to Euripides ''The Bacchae'' this article seeks to show how Jelinek’s use of the chorus and the we pronoun deny the speaker’s location and demonstrate the non-originality of speech.
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For about twenty years Herta Müller has established a procedure in her work that is predominantly visually organized. However, she herself describes this process, which is preceded by the cutting of countless words and sentences from print media, as writing. Müller later combines these fragments in various fonts, sizes and colours, initially gathered together randomly, into new texts, guided by intuitive and visual impulses. She supplements each of these texts with a pictorial element, likewise cut out with scissors or arranged from various elements. In Müllers recently published volume ''Im Heimweh ist ein blauer Saal'' (2019), visuality acquires a new quality even for Müller’s collages: It transcends the composition and the external appearance of the collages and involves the speaking instance of numerous collages in reflections on image and idea, on sense and intellect. The relevance of the visual for the narrative is based on the idea of linking not only two media, but also two modes of cognition: that of the senses and that of the intellect. In recourse to Baumgarten’s reflections on a sensual wholeness of aesthetic experience (1750), this contribution is devoted to the aesthetic linking of narrative visualization strategies in the collages.
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Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s was controlled by the Communist Party, which strictly determined cultural policy. The book market was centrally planned and based on the reduction or negation of market mechanisms. In this study, I show the ways in which the Party in power tried to determine the optimal way of calculating authors’ royalties in order to achieve a “fair” payment system and to limit “unearned” profit. Similarly, I examine what factors were taken into account in setting a uniform selling price for the book, which was not to be based on actual financial costs or the level of reader demand, but was to take into account the social value of the book and represent a “fair price for readers”. Although the governing bodies of the Ministry of Culture tried to find a very precise and transparent way of calculating royalties and the selling price of a book, they had to gradually take into account more and more exceptions and specific circumstances relating to particular types of books or book genres. This demolished their ideas of a possible “ideal calculation” of a “fair price”. The result was a system that had to be revised many times and was nearly never respected because of the number of exceptions. The study is based on research into archival material from the Ministry of Culture and demonstrates well the way in which literature and other book production was considered in the 1950s and 1960s. It shows how great discrepancy was generated between the utopian idea and its actual implementation in practice.
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This study provides the reader with the correspondence of Jan Čep to Josef Tichý, the editor of the Olomouc publishing house Velehrad and Čep’s friend. The correspondence contains thirty-one letters and eight postcards sent by Jan Čep to Josef Tichý from 1939 to the end of 1947. The letters (together with Josef Tichý’s memoirs of one of his visits to Myslechovice) are kept in the Memorial of Literature in Moravia in Rajhrad.
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A growing number of social initiatives is feeding off the ideas of emancipatory and critical pedagogies and is looking for tools to obtain and include the sometimes essentialized voice of the child. But the still dominant definitions of autobiography, referring to the concepts of non-fiction literature and personal documentary literature, place great emphasis on forms that, due to the necessity of using more or less advanced literacy, exclude children or make their autobiographical attempts doomed to the charge of infantilism. Autobiography understood as a technique of the self, according to the dominant narratives, requires genre and narrative, writing proficiency and the ability to rationalize one’s memories. And as such, it is one of the many politics of writing, sanctioned through specific genres and power relations. In the introductory article to the issue, we draw on the framing of critical childhood studies formulated by Spyros Spyrou. We reflect on the various politics of presenting the autobiographical voice of the child and ask and conditions for reaching the child’s experience. We also outline the basic methodological assumptions for interpreting children’s autobiographies and show their social, political and historical conditions.
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Janusz Korczak appreciated children’s biographies and published them in the magazine he edited, “Mały Przegląd”. From today’s point of view, some of these diaries/memoirs absolutely should not have been published. They violated the privacy of children, both the authors of the diaries and the friends they described. In the context of the publication in “Mały Przegląd”, it is worth considering to what extent Korczak’s words about the “right to silence” and “respect for children’s secrets” were respected by him. Korczak required his correspondents to write the absolute truth, also in the case of diaries, and sometimes their truthfulness was verified. The firm order to write the absolute truth, the shortcuts made by the editors that change the essence of the statement, make us wonder who the autobiographical texts were intended to serve. Some autobiographies indicate that they were selected to serve Korczak’s educational ideas or to fit into the Zionist model of forming a “new man”. In autobiographies and memoirs, the educational line of “Mały Przegląd” is visible to a greater extent than in letters. Therefore, I would like to put forward the thesis that some of them were, to some extent, used instrumentally, despite Korczak’s noble statements.
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In this article, I present the correspondence Emil Zegadłowicz (1888–1941) carried out between 1937 and 1939 with the so-called “Trzydziestka” [Thirty], i.e. a group of Jewish female students of Zofia Rozenfeld’s gymnasium in Warsaw who collaborated with the “Small Review”. In order to reconstruct the history of this contact, I use letters found in the archives, previously unpublished, of both the writer’s teenage correspondents and their tutor Felicja Wermusówna. The surviving letters of “Trzydziestka” are dominated by environmental motifs, but there is also no lack of reflections of a general human nature, often encountered motifs are a longing for the order of biology, nature contrasted with urbanism, pessimism flowing from observation of the immediate environment of the inhabitants of the Jewish neighborhoods of Warsaw, and a feeling of horror, generated by growing fascism and increasingly common manifestations of anti-Semitism, concern for the fate of the Jewish people, a protest against people’s indifference, the loss of the ideals of brotherhood and the glorification of Truth and Friendship.
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The following article contains an overview of memoirs written by two sisters – Alina and Henryka from the village of Urle during the World War II and after. We present the content of the memoirs in a wider social and cultural context. We examine the relationship between personal experiences of two young girls, aged 11 and 12 – their self-acceptance, arguments, love of animals and the tragic events of war: the liquidation of the ghetto in Jadów, escaping a rape attempt and the fear of loosing their loved ones. We also examine the local politics of memory in Jadów which marginalises the history of local Jewry.
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Szczepan Twardoch was inspired by the term “limit situations” created by Karl Jaspers to develop a method of turning elements of his own biography into literary material. The article presents evidence that the writer uses it consciously. Then, the works in which it was used are listed and what events in the writer’s life were reflected in his novels and short stories are discussed.
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The topic of the article is Krzysztof P. Czyżewski’s book – Izabela. Świat w płomieniach [Izabela. The World in Flames]. The author tries to show how the writer used the figures of memory (protagonist’s name and fictional breastpin) to create a historical novel with literary regionalism themes. The object of reflection is the main character’s creation and its influence on the perception of an Enlightenment Era and regionalist motives. Considerations are summed up by referring to cultural memory theory.
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“Spaţiul mioritic” is one of the most popular works written by Lucian Blaga. It describes the stylistic connection between soul and spatiality in Romanian culture. Due to Blaga’s philosophy this connection is unconscious and forms the basis of every cultural creation. Concerning Romania, the cultural style is formed spatially, like waves. This aspect is based on the characteristic archetype of Romanian folk culture. One has to imagine the typical Romanian shepherd who is wandering over mountains and valleys with his sheep. This imagination deeply influences Romanian poetry, music as well as cultural products of everyday life, like the design of clothes or the rural architecture of farm houses. It should also be noted that Blaga’s popular work was translated into German by Rainer Schubert, the former Austrian cultural attaché in Bucharest. The translation was published by LIT Verlag, Vienna, in the year 2022. The book has already been translated into German by Julius Draser and has been published in the year 1982 by the publishing house Minerva in Bucharest.
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Heroism as an unremitting subject conquers and even haunts literature as well as history. Historical and fictitious heroes are guiding spirits of human beings regardless of time and geography. Historians and writers have so sternly adhered to the ideals of heroism that this fascination has been transformed into hero worship dating back to antiquity, bringing heroism to the forefront as a metanarrative in history and literature. Particularly contributing to the undying predicament of literature caught between the ideal and the real, causes of heroism have been largely left unquestioned putting heroes in the shoes of a messiah. Peter Ackroyd (1949-), renowned for his historiographic metafictions fashioned within postmodernism, dares to challenge this unimpeached -ism in The Fall of Troy (2006). In the novel, Ackroyd rewrites the history of Troy and introduces an eccentric half-real hero, Heinrich Obermann, against celebrated heroes of history and literature. Accordingly, this paper reads heroism as a metanarrative and delineates how Ackroyd sketches an atypical hero by acting contrary to traditional heroism and heroic literary tradition in his vibrant postmodern parody, The Fall of Troy.
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The English for Aviation Language Testing System (EALTS) is one of the international tests for pilots wishing to operate in international airspace. This test presents a wide range of difficulties for Algerian pilots, but little research has been conducted to estimate its validity. This paper seeks to answer two questions: (1) What are test-takers perspectives on the EALTS test construct? and (2) What is the assessors' perception of the testing procedure and test validity? A descriptive study was conducted using qualitative data from a semi-structured questionnaire for ten pilots and a semi-structured interview for three certified assessors and four university researchers. The authors used 'first-hand' data from the targeted sample to cross-check results' validity through triangulation. The results show specific difficulties from an affective dimension, such as stress and anxiety caused by inefficient preparation and unfamiliarity with test tasks. A different interpretation of ICAO descriptions using the rating scale is another issue noted by assessors. Additionally, technical issues with the computer-based listening test and non-compliant features of the test contents with features of the target situation language use are among the main issues noted by both test-takers and assessors.
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A peculiar dimension in the Native American writing is the documentation of the history of the Native Americans’ traditional lives before, during and after their encounter with the white settlers. It is a development that is essentially explicable within the purview of postcolonial discourse, given that, in some contexts, historical distortions from the perspective of the ‘other’ have been asserted as the rationale for such creative explorations on the part of the Native writers. In the context of this study, such a dimension, with particular reference to James Welch’s novels, is considered as, indeed, counter-discursive. Two of his novels, Fools Crow and Killing Custer, are selected with a view to assessing how the historical documentations in the texts translate to counter-discourses in the context of the Native Americans’ historical evolution. The study reveals that, while the Native American histories in the texts dovetail into each other, they are largely inspired by the Native Americans’ colonial experience vis-à-vis the need to represent their history from the perspective of ‘us’ as opposed to ‘other’. It concludes that the narratives have, in a significant way, performed the allegorical configuration function, as a counter-discourse strategy described by Slemon (1987). This holds in that they have conceivably assumed ‘readings’ and ‘contestations’ of the previously textualised colonial experience of the Native Americans from the perspective of the ‘other’.
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