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Dans ce travail nous offrons les résultats de l’analyse des concepts dramatiques contemporains par rapport au théâtre dit traditionnel, et nous prêtons attention surtout au statut du personnage dramatique, vu que celui-ci est l’un des éléments inévitables dans la structure dramatique. Notre but est de présenter des tendences singulières du théâtre de l’absurde (le degré zéro du théâtre), et plus particulièrement la création des personnages dramatiques en tant que des figures disséminatives, mais aussi d’indiquer leur rôle dans le théâtre contemporain et leur rapport avec les contraintes structurales de celui-ci.
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Comparing the poem Wasteland by Thomas Eliot to the Irish Nobel-prize winner Saemus Heaney’s collection of poetry Bogland, the paper underscores the similarities and differences aiming to prove that almost identical “sense of history’ is present in the poetry of both poets. Eliot views the “sense of history’ as the ability to recognize the same situations and patterns not only in the past, but in the present and future, bringing time into a whole, not chronological, but cyclic. “Living tradition’ is the tradition of stopping and continuing, basing the existence in the past and surviving in the present. The research includes the incongruities of Eliot’s theoretical considerations about tradition and practical realizations of those ideas in poetry, and we conclude that, according to the poet, tradition is not everything written since Homer until today, but only those works that possess the “sense of history’. The important myths (mermaid myth, Holy Grail myth, Narcissus myth) remind us that the 20th century man is not free from the primeval striving towards the spiritual and physical healing, as well as the eternal craving to divulge one’s own being completely. Civilization and capitalist tradition have distanced contemporary man from nature and sexual emotion, and directed him towards profit and material production. Despite Eliot’s declaring as a royalist and follower of catholic tradition, his poetry as well as Heaney’s is predominated by the influence of humanistic tradition based on the conflict of different cultural concepts, on the archetypes of light and darkness, heavens and the underworld.
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Gerhard Richter's books Text – a collection of painter's verbal statements about his artistic method – and Atlas – 783 sheets with images, mainly photographs and visual notations – are two archives that complement the understanding of his diverse artistic practice. The paper presents a textual model that experimentally simulates a possible ordering principle for archives. Richter's statements in the book Text are cut up and used as short quotations. Those that relate to multiple aspects of the painter's oeuvre are identified as hubs in the semantic network. The hubs are organized paratactically, as an array of different themes. The paper presents a methodological hypothesis and an experimental model that aim to connect the research of real networks with the paradigms of humanistic interpretation. We have to bear in mind that the network is a result of the researcher's interpretative approach, which is added to the initial archive included in the book Text. The breaking up of Richter's poetics into atoms of quotations is an experimental proposal of a new textuality in art history and humanities, which has its own history. In comparison to digital archives with complex interfaces that often tend to obscure the content, the elements in our experiment appear as specific configurations of the semantic network and are presented in a limited number of linear texts. The method of listing of quotations gathers the fragments into a potential “whole”, i.e. a narrativized gateway to an archive according to the researcher's interpretation.
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This article deals with the widespread assumption that a significant collection of texts known as the Bible is inherently ‘deceptive’. That is, the Bible does not – it is assumed – say what was ‘really’ going on in the ancient world. The truth, therefore, must be found by going behind or beneath the text (the spatial metaphors should be noted). Here the real story may found, through archaeology or reading the text against itself. This approach may be described as a modernist ‘depth model’, in which the surface attempts to conceal the truth, while the truth itself must be found by going around the surface text. This remains a dominant approach in biblical criticism. However, it cannot be understood without earlier and indeed, in some quarters, current assumptions concerning the realist nature of the text. In this case, the text reflects in a reasonably trustworthy fashion the context of the text, if not the ideological assumptions and positions of the putative authors. Modernist ‘depth models’ may then be seen as attempts to respond to realist assumptions. A third moment is what could be called postmodern: in this case, the distance between surface and depth is challenged, so that the various possibilities become equal contestants for the dominant position. This entails a shift away from the assumption of a singular truth of the text, characteristic of both realist and modernist assumptions, to the understanding of multiple truth claims – not as relative but as absolutes that permit other absolutes. The argument emphasises that these approaches should be seen as dialectically related to one another, rather that mutually exclusive approaches.
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The ‘Canada in the English Classroom’ joint research team of the University of Colongne and Károli Gáspár University of the Hungarian Reformed Church has been producing a cultural reader series to enhance the dissemination of up-to-date and engaging cultural information on Canada through general English language classes for the secondary school age group in Central Europe. The cultural reader series is seen as a means of facilitating cultural discourse and cross-cultural learning, also advocated in Canadian contexts by Berrell and Gloet (1999). Using Kramsch’s (1991) and Damen’s (2003) theories, the readers have been devised so that more abstract and/or lesser-known Canadian cultural aspects can be brought closer to the target group through English as a foreign language. To realize this objective in an effective way in the English classroom, Gochenour and Janeway’s (1993) model of culture learning has been observed, which advocates the gradual involvement of students in culture-related issues: starting from observation of culture moving towards genuine communication about culture. After introducing the cultural reader series project briefly, the paper will discuss the theoretical background behind the series and the project activities leading up to the preparation and compilation of its completed volumes. As a next step, an overview of the content of these volumes and the accompanying teacher’s notes will be presented. This will be followed by a sample unit demonstration of how the series achieves the goals that research has targeted.
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Before the advent of deconstructive schools of thought in the second half of the twentieth century, anthropology and ethnography were hailed as scientific disciplines whose major consideration was to provide an objective analysis of other cultures. However, the launch of such critical approaches as postcolonialism, feminism, and postmodernism has nullified the two disciplines’ claim to scientificity and objectivity by laying bare their sexist, racist backdrop. In the postist zeitgeist, new ethnographies have been promoted in an attempt to disrupt the hierarchical relationship between the researcher and the studied subject of classic ethnography through including first-hand marginalized voices. Moreover, they blur the long-held generic boundaries between science and fiction via establishing the “ethnographic novel” as a medium that committedly voices the subalterns. Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) is one of these new ethnographic novels which has as its protagonist an oppressed African woman. What makes Walker’s work distinct and notable is that the feminist writer subversively employs the conventional mode of ethnographic writing to stand up to African patriarchy and its horrific ritual of female circumcision.
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Literature from the past up to the present day from the value judgments of the society, the perception of life and their beliefs in their world hosts the content. In this regard, literature is a tool that enables the transfer of Culture. That belong to the past period, a belief, a way of life, sometimes when it is transferred to the current social environment is repeated. In this case, literary narratives, as a literary production have been associated with the old content, and carry traces of them. These texts provides the transition between the collective consciousness of a nation that is under the transfer of intellectual values caused by an organic bond. This bond that exists in modern culture as renewed in the past through a narrative similar occurs again. In addition, has a common background and the same culture at different times in different regions from each other, brothers who are members of communities of faith bearing the same motifs and similar elements of narratives can reveal. In this study, a common history and culture, Turkish culture, with the two brothers belonging to the community two of the common motif of narrative texts. will be evaluated in terms of. One dimension of this narrative that carries the legend of a folk literary narrative of Yaşar Kemal entitled The fallow deer, and the other that belongs to the Kyrgyz Turks and Kococas that are present in the oral environment is epic. Beliefs that the Turks belong to the period of hunting and gathering, which is located in the center of this narrative, this period featured in the deer/is centered around the cult of the loser. In this context, narratives and motifs that are common to both episodes have been identified. This partnership in which both of Turkish tribes in the cultural sense, born from the same source, the same culture in different geographies of the phenomena that they are.
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Antonioni’s “Blow-Up”, released in late 1966, is usually taken, on the one hand, to represent (celebratingly and scandalously) the youth culture of Swinging London and, on the other, the problems of (tenuous) relation between reality and its representation (the main protagonist thinks he discovers a murder by analysing photographs he has taken). Although most critics have attempted to link these two levels by means of some existential metaphor (most often: the main protagonist who represents the image-crazed youth of Swinging London encounters its biggest taboo, death, which is unrepresentable to boot), the paper proposes a more literal and political interpretation arguing that the abstraction of blurry grain of silver halide into which the image of the corpse finally dissolves in a series of photographic blow-ups is a way of representing something which also cannot have a proper image: the all-pervasive but no longer perceptible lowkey everyday violence which constitutes the propelling force of the supposedly emancipated “swinging” lifestyle.
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This article explores female alterity in the Iliad and the Odyssey in an attempt to show how women’s marginalization is already present in these early works, which have had such a lasting influence on Western literature and thought. First, I analyze how men treat aristocratic women, who are systematically excluded from war and speech despite their idealization as heroines. Then, I focus on women who fall into the category of slaves or concubines to illustrate women’s absolute objectification and to demonstrate how the violence of this exclusion structures women’s experiences. Through an interdisciplinary framework, I study Greek antiquity through combining contemporary alterity studies with literary analysis. I argue that Western society has been structured in a patriarchal and androcentric way since its beginning. Thus, my objective is to suggest, through the lens of the philosophy of alterity, how we might reach a more ethical consideration of the Other in the study of classic literature.
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The article analyses the various countenances of Moscow which have been presented by Barbara Włodarczyk in the cycle of television reportages “Wide Tracks”. The text focuses on illustrating the specific features of a film report that allow its author to present the wondrous picture of the Russian capital emerging from the particular fragments of the discussed reportages. Moreover, as a result of juxtaposition of the reports from that part of the city, which overwhelms one with its richness and splendour, with the accounts from these corners of Moscow in which the continuous struggle for survival takes place, the article examines the internal contradictions which may be observed within the depicted urban space. The analysed cycle also exposes the series of political conflicts which undermine the immaculate image of Moscow as a wondrous city, presented by some of the characters of the discussed film pictures, and simultaneously, it allows one to discover some new, less known countenances of the metropolis.
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Cepraga`s book on the experiments of Italianism within the Romanian literature of the 19th century is a thorough and useful study on a niche research, with a subtle alternation of perspectives and a consistent documentation. Written in Italian, Cepraga`s study also picks up the forgotten gems of the 19th century Romanian language. The creation of the Romantic poetical language is retrieved through a complex fusion of methods imported from stylistics, music, history of language, poetics and linguistics, combined with cultural studies
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The paper aims at discussing translation as a political and ethical paradigm, as proposed by Bogdan Ghiu and Lawrence Venuti, in the broader context of comparative literature’s contrarian turn with the Bernheimer and the Saussy reports, as well as in conjunction with anarchism’s minor literary tradition (in the deleuzian sense). I argue that the translation paradigm and the non-vanguardist anarchist aesthetic are stemming from the same legacy of freedom, both formulating their basic ethical, political and aesthetical assumptions in the context of the crisis of representation, and both encountering the same practical and theoretical difficulties.The analysis will have two main focuses: one will examine the link between translation and the contrarian turn of comparative literature; and the second one will read the minoritizing model of translation through the anarchist antirepresentationalist ethic and aesthetic, in order to illustrate their convergence as alternative, radical lines of thought.
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Animist realism, introduced by Harry Garuba in his article Ben Okri: Animist Realism and the Famished Genre is a relatively new term. Garuba links it to African literature, while others (Ato Quayson, Graham Harvey) use it in association with a broader spectrum of fiction. The main objective of this article is to redefine the category of animist realism as a subgenre of magical realism with its own connecting characteristics and its formal difference. Author of the article argues that animist realism is applicable especially to postcolonial and indigenous literature permeated with myths and other elements derived from traditional belief systems.
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Dating back to ancient Greece the classic dichotomy of “barbaric vs. civilized” has become a multifunctional topos in European languages and cultures. Constructing a binary between the “self ” and the “other”, the term denotes differences between individuals, nations, races, religions, and even aesthetics. As such this topical binary may be conceived as a rhetorical device, and, depending on the given perspective of a person, group or culture, it can always be reactivated, reconstructed, and accommodated to shifting conditions. The paper describes two mutually interacting fields in which the topos “barbaric vs. civilized” is constructed and functionalized: in the political, where the lines are drawn between nations and civilizations, and in the aesthetic, where the lines are drawn between groups or literary periods in a single culture. The political and aesthetic functions of the binary topos are not mutually exclusive in the works of any author or group, but they may co-exist synchronically or intermittently. The paper outlines this process by analyzing a few examples from the poetry of Russian symbolism (Brjusov, Blok) and Polish modernism (Morstin, Iwaszkiewicz).
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The article examines a book of memoirs belonging to a larger group of textual representations of individual struggle with anorexia in order to shed light on the city as a crucial character in the account of the disease. “Kid Rex: The Inspiring True Account of a Life Salvaged from Anorexia, Despair and Dark Days in New York City” (2008) by Laura Moisin is one of many recent publications touching upon the subject of eating disorders penned by and depicting the life of young upper middle class big city women. First notable books of this kind appeared around 1980, while since the beginning of this century we have been observing a steady increase in this respect, resulting in the proliferation of these personal narratives in popular culture. In accordance with the research suggesting that the incidence of eating disorders is higher in urban areas, publications of this kind all seem to refer to such environments; however, the aforementioned book could be considered special here as it portrays the deep-reaching relations between witnessing the events of September 11 attacks and the development of the disease. Even though it remains unclear which elements of cityscapes are responsible for the higher incidence of the anorexia, the acute experiences offered by NYC around the time of the attack highlight the probable causes. Employing the interdisciplinary perspectives offered by psychogeography, food studies and sociology of medicine, the article analyses how the influence of the city on female victims of anorexia is presented in the memoir to show that urban spaces may function both as a symptom of and as a factor contributing to the disease.
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The theoretical thinking of Anton Popovič on translation and conception of the discipline of translation studies was formed between two boundary positions: comparative literature and semiotics. Popovič’s early scholarly works published in the late 1950s focused on Russian-Slovak literary relations and, at the same time, on the more broadly understood Slovak-Slavonic literary relationship in the 19th century. He completed this linguistic and literary scope with the study of translations from English and the analysis of Slovak translations of Shakespeare.In the 1960s, he already formulated the conceptions of literary translation in the period of Slovak romanticism and in post-romantic poetry. In the work of Anton Popovič, comparative literature and history were increasingly moving towards literary theory (Slovak structuralism,formal method, theory of the verse), history of translation, but first of all theoretical questions of translation. This research finally ended in the book Poetika umeleckého prekladu. Procesa text (Poetics of Artistic Translation. Proces and Text) in 1971. The paper concentrates on the first decades in the scholarly work of Anton Popovič and sums up the starting points leading to Popovič’ s understanding of translation as a semiotic category.
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The Odyssey, the Iliad and the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes are among the possible sources of motifs present in the Hobbit.
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In today’s world numerous dangers seem to threaten human lives. Modern society is claimed to be fearful and anxious, hence it is exposed to perils that are neither comprehensive nor controllable. Both global and local threats, such as economic crises, unprecedented technological advancement, terrorism or climate change and the increasing instability in the job market, crime or otherness influence everyday existence of modern man, who becomes increasingly apprehensive. The persistent atmosphere of fear is additionally nourished and sustained by the ubiquitous message presented by the media, which selectively focus on the negative broadcast. Modern cities, which are now perceived as a location where otherness is to be rather feared than praised and cultivated, are believed to be places which encapsulate almost all contemporary fears. First and foremost, they are scenes where the fear of crime takes its toll. Not only does it shape the structure of the city, as it leads to the establishment of the so-called gated communities, occupying closed and guarded estates, but primarily the relationships among different formal and informal social groups existing within the city. Feared are those of different race, religion, nationality, social status, gender, and even age. Being other, feared are also those coming to cities as tourists. In the face of the fact that city tourism is on the increase one could suspect that this is entirely safe and entertaining pastime; however, the analysis of urban tourism leaves no doubt that it also brings certain dose of fear and anxiety. The article aims at presenting various fears and anxieties experienced within urban area by both tourists and citizens.
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