„Denn mein Unglück ist ein schwankendes Unglück“. Das unmöglich gewordene Leben und das Thema der Anfängerschaft in Kafkas Beschreibung eines Kampfes und Rilkes Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge

Author(s): Barbara Di Noi / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2015

Both R􀶂􀶅􀶄􀵾’s novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge and K􀵺􀵿􀶄􀵺’s fi rst narrative Beschreibung eines Kampfes were written between 1904 and 1910. They mark the point of a new beginning – which by R􀶂􀶅􀶄􀵾 represents the search of the „sachliches Sagen“ – and for K􀵺􀵿􀶄􀵺 the fi rst literary work; although it was not published as a whole by his author, Beschreibung eines Kampfes still already contains in nuce all themes and paradoxes of his future work. Both are written in the fi rst person narrative, which should make the identifi cation of the main character with the author easier. Actually they put in scene a motion or, for K􀵺􀵿􀶄􀵺, „ein stehendes Marschieren“ which goes through the temporal space of the reading and whose aim should be the place, where both the author and the fi ctional I are to be found since the very beginning, the „Ort“ of the writing. Both works bear strong selfrefl ecting features, as concerned with a writing on the edge, in which the borders of the text are also the borders of the “I”. This aim of the writing cannot be reached by a linear movement, as it is placed at the turning point of the inversion („Umkehrung“). This underlines the character of selfrefl ection and explains the impossibility of true accomplishment. R􀶂􀶅􀶄􀵾’s and K􀵺􀵿􀶄􀵺’s Anfängerschaft is also the starting point of a new beginning, which must be achieved again and again.

Spuren der Venusberg-Sage im Roman Hora Venušina von František Zavřel. Eine Analyse

Author(s): Marija Javor Briški / Language(s): German Issue: 2/2015

František Z􀵺􀶏􀷞􀵾􀶅’s novel Hora Venušina is almost forgotten today. When it was fi rst published in 1928, it was mainly perceived as an autobiographic novel in which the author settled his account with his many opponents in Prague’s cultural and artistic scene of the time. However, Hora Venušina is far more than this. The title which can be translated as “Venus‘s hill” is not misleading. Being a very unique case in Czech literature, this novel is an adaptation of the Venusberg myth like many other texts that have existed in German literature since the late middle ages. The aim of this analysis is to discover traces of the Venusberg myth in Z􀵺􀶏􀷞􀵾􀶅’s novel and to compare it with German adaptations of the legend, especially with the respective works of Heinrich H􀵾􀶂􀶇􀵾 and Richard W􀵺􀶀􀶇􀵾􀶋.

Bojan Penev a jeho kontakty s Čechami a českou kulturou

Author(s): Marcel Černý,Dana Hronková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2016

The article concerns the interests of Bulgarian literary scholar Bojan Nikolov Penev (1882–1927) in Czech literature and culture. On the one hand it deals with the Czech studies subjects in the researcher’s works on the other hand it exemplifies Penev’s personal relations with representatives of Czech science (A. Novák, J. Páta, F. R. Tichý, F. Wollman) and the response to his personality and work in Bohemia; Penev’s article Dnešní literatura bulharská [Today’s Bulgarian Literature], published in Czech in the book Slovanský přehled 1914–1924. Sborník statí, dopisů a zpráv ze života slovanského. K šedesátým narozeninám Adolfa Černého [The Slavonic Review 1914–1924. The Collection of Papers, Letters and News on Slavonic Life; For the Sixtieth of Adolf Černý; Prague 1925], was particularly of a fundamental importance for the then Czech reception of Bulgarian literature. The article is supplemented with the edition of selected Penev’s correspondence with representatives of Czech scientific and cultural life (A. Novák, F. R. Tichý, M. Murko a A. Černý).

Cortázar et Saramago : la représentation de la dictature et l’affirmation de l’engagement

Author(s): Celina Martins / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2017

Julio Cortázar and José Saramago create the poetics of compromise focused on a critique of the Argentinian and Portuguese dictatorships as paradigms of oppression and censorship. With this study, based on a comparatist analysis approach, we intend to show how the short stories “The Second Time Around” and “The Chair” denounce the evils of dictatorship, shaping fictions that explore the experience of impoverishment of the self. Cortázar’s text explores the practice of disappearance during Videla’s dictatorship from a absurd Kafkaesque perspective whereas Saramago’s writing focuses on the decline of Salazar’s dictatorship as a carnival game. Cortázar and Saramago assume the relevance of compromise, the aim of which is political disalienation in order to shape consciences enabling reassessing the evil effects of disalienating dictatorial regimes.

El silencio de los oprimidos: la narración de la sumisión y represión en Levantado del suelo de Saramago y Los santos inocentes de Delibes

Author(s): Guadalupe Nieto Caballero / Language(s): Spanish Issue: 1/2017

This article analyses and compares the narration of subjugation, repression and physical abuse in José Saramago’s Levantado del suelo (1980) and Miguel Delibes’s Los santos inocentes (1981). The purpose of the study is to analyse the similarities between two fables dealing with the same problem: the hard-working conditions in latifundiums in the Portuguese region of Alentejo and the Spanish Extremadura, the workers’ impossibility of changing their lives and the subjugation and repression they would face in terms of political, military and ecclesiastical power. Specifically, the study focuses on the relations between privileged people and farmers and how the former deprive the latter of their rights in order to maintain their status through the narration. The article begins with an overview of both the content and the characters of the two novels. Then, we select and analyse some climactic episodes in which the abuses against farmers take place, paying special attention to how the two narrators define their positions on the workers’ side. Finally, we examine how the accumulation of the power suppresses the eruption of any riot in both novels.

Distorsions de l’unité

Author(s): Carmen Dărăbuş / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2018

Fecund in European myth and beyond, the androgynous (gr. andros – “man” + gyne – “women”) constitues, maybe the best, the desire for perfection, aspiration of all ancient civilizations. The synthesis of the male and female it is a mythic, philosophic or artistic fiction, part of archetypal nostalgia, spiritual ideal, but also erotic plethora. From Plato to Gnostics and to the Mystics of the Middle Ages, then to the European romanticists, aspire to this type of perfection, more rudimentary or more sophisticated, initiating rituals allowing the access to the primordial unity. A form of distortion of the androgynous myth can be the myth of Narcissus, where searching half is suspended, because the human being as she is, halved in the platonic myth, divided as female from the Adamic unique body – or androgenic -, it is itself sufficient. Another hybrid form it is the Hermaphroditic. In the mundane plan, this is considered as a kind of profane, a deformation, and a travesty. The world literature – in this case Plato, Ovid, Mary Shelley, Honoré de Balzac, Italo Calvino, Liviu Rebreanu, Scott Fitzgerald - retraces, in artistic way, the contents.

Narațiunile identității

Author(s): Marcela-Cristina Oţoiu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2018

The present paper discusses the relationship connecting memory, narrative and identity, and identifies the ways these are articulated.Far from being static, personal identity appears as an ongoing process of construction and reconstruction. As a crucial concept in narrative psychology, personal identity rests on the premise that self narration operates as an alternative means of one’s self-knowledge. Self awareness is often shaped as a story, a narrative; it is such stories that give us our bearings and distinguish us from others. Life stories lie at the foundation of human identity and define the self, while always occurring within a given social and cultural context.In narrative psychology, memory, personal history and narrative are intimately related, and generate the “homo narrativus,” an individual that builds their identity through narratives. Such assumptions fall within the spheres of psychology, philosophy, sociology and narratology.

The Concept of Home and Family in the Novels of Ken Kesey “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” And “Sometimes a Great Notion”

Author(s): Mykhailo Roshko / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2018

In Mihailo Roşko's article "The theme of family and house in the postmodernist American writer Ken Kesey's novels," One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest "and" Sometimes a Great Notion "are analyzed from the point of view of the independence of two epic traditions: those events which take place outside the threshold of the house, that is, in the great world and those in which attention is focused on life, especially at home. The novel "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" therefore belongs to the first tradition, and the novel "Sometimes a Great Notion" belongs to two family traditions. At the same time, the main heroes of the novels are very similar: strong, unruly personalities, who defend their dependence and freedom from the pressure of the system, and tend to withstand the blows of fate and to cope with life’s trials.

Překladatelé a překladatelky v dějinách literatury: aktuální akcenty

Author(s): Lucie Merhautová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 33/2020

The Other as Host. Deconstructing the Stranger in Italo Calvino’s Invisible cities and Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence

Author(s): Oana Fotache Dubălaru / Language(s): English Issue: 65/2016

This paper attempts a comparative analysis of two postmodern novels that might be read as instances of highly sophisticated, meta-literary writing, were they not also very significant and relevant for a contemporary problematics of encountering the Other. Both Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) and Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence (2008) rework the literary myth of Marco Polo’s travels (Il Milione, probably 1299); Calvino’s novel is also alluded to by Rushdie. Besides the exotic setting and the Oriental storytelling frame, the figures of the Stranger and his ‘Other’ are constructed in a modern (and ambiguous) manner in both novels. Although, at a certain level, these narratives belong to the genre of historical novels, their close reading of the past involves an even closer look at the present. The issues of intercultural exchange, of tolerance, of moral responsibility, become central to the two novels that develop a challenging representation of identity. The intertextual relationships between Polo’s travelogue and the later novels also thematize the motifs of stranger and host in a complex and fascinating structure. The analytical methodology employs both theoretical studies on identity in the context of travel, and critical essays on the respective novels.

Rêveries Minerali in George Sand e Ioan Petru Culianu

Author(s): Valentina Sirangelo / Language(s): Italian Issue: 65/2016

The aim of the present comparative study is to focus on the parallelisms between George Sand’s novel Laura, Voyage dans le cristal (1864) and Ioan Petru Culianu’s short story Jocul de smarald (1989) through a hermeneutical mythocritical approach. Both works are modelled upon a type of rêverie that Gaston Bachelard specifically defines an «amplifying play of minerals». Initially the article will investigate the geode and the emerald, lithic containers which emerge as two explorable and marvellous microcosms. Like the Earth which generates them, the two lithic-mineral examples participate in the Central Symbolism of the Feminine: for this reason, both Laura and the Emerald Goddess, impetuses and supreme goals of the initiatory journeys the two main characters undertake, dwell at their centre. Furthermore, the geodic stone and the green stone lead back to the participation mystique with the Feminine. The second part of this study will identify in both works the anima-image, as guide and mediator of the initiation to the Feminine mysterium, and the sparagmos, i.e. the gory dismemberment informing the perilous aspect of the Mother Archetype. As a result, the suave Laura and the omnipotent Emerald Goddess can be read as two reformulations – the former romantic, the latter mythopoeic– of the Great Mother of Initiation.

Alexandra Vrânceanu, Angelo Pagliardini (a cura di), Rifondare la letteratura nazionale per un publico europeo. Da un'idea di Giuseppe Mazzini, Frankfurt am Main, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warzsawa, Wien, Peter Lang, 2015

Author(s): Laura Dumitrescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 64/2015

Constructing the natural. A few remarks on the flower list as a descriptive device in modern literature

Author(s): Oana Fotache Dubălaru / Language(s): English Issue: 63/2014

This paper investigates comparatively the ways in which the flower list functions as a descriptive device in several modern literary works across different cultures, genres, and styles. These include Stéphane Mallarmé’s Les fleurs (The Flowers), Henry Van Dyke’s poem Flood-Tide of Flowers, the novel La Faute de L'Abbé Mouret (Abbé Mouret’s Transgression) by Emile Zola, and Mircea Cărtărescu’s novella REM. Each of these literary works creates a remarkably unitary topos, that of a locus amoenus evoking a long and prestigious tradition of representation in myth, literature, and painting

(De)scrivere Roma nell’Ottocento: alla ricerca delle radici culturali europee, a cura di Angelo Pagliardini e Alexandra Vrânceanu, Berlin, Peter Lang, 2020, 207 p.

Author(s): Pierre Musitelli / Language(s): Italian Issue: 70/2021

ÉRIC PALAZZO, Le souffle de Dieu. Lʼénergie de la liturgie et lʼart au Moyen Âge, Paris, Les Éditions du Cerf, 2020, 355 p.

Author(s): Laura Dumitrescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 70/2021

Hope and Hopelessness through the Lens of Myths. A Comparison Based on Short Texts by Kafka and Camus

Author(s): Vilma-Irén Mihály / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Not only do myths stand at the beginning or represent the birth of literature, but they have been present all along ever since. In times of havoc caused by natural catastrophes, wars or pandemics, people look for answers to the uncertainties that surround them. While often presenting such chaotic states themselves, myths can give an answer or offer a solution to these problems. The aim of the present paper is to compare and analyse short texts mainly by Kafka and Camus that deal with ancient myths (e.g. that of Prometheus, Odysseus, or Sisyphus) focusing on the type of answer they bring to the questions raised amidst and after the two world wars. The paper mainly focuses on the connection between hope and hopelessness.

For Everyone His Own Verhaeren: Czech Reception of Belgian Modernist Literature as an Example of Cultural Transfer and a Path to the Czech Avant‑Garde (1880s–1920s)

Author(s): Petra James / Language(s): German Issue: 2/2022

Translating and interpreting the work of the Belgian francophone poet Émile Verhaerenin Bohemia between 1880s–1920s was a way of being Czech, Francophile, modern, andcertainly not German – not always in the same order or with the same understanding ofwhat ‘modern’ means. The study analyzes Czech reception of Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916),in critical discussion with the German (Austrian) appropriation and in the context ofdebates on modern art. Jaroslav Vrchlický needs to be given credit for introducing to hisCzech aesthetic adversaries of the 1890s their Belgian symbolist models. The trajectorythat leads Verhaeren, a “Rubens in words” of Vrchlický’s 1888 interpretation, to Šalda’s recognised representative of Belgian symbolism of the 1910s and the proto -communistcollective author of Neumann’s and Hilar’s appropriation of 1920s guides us through thecomplex development of Czech modernist art from early modernism of the 1880s to itsavant -garde peak in the 1920s. Verhaeren served as a catalyzer and a guiding figure forthe Czech artists, who helped to steer them, through complex meanders, towards themodernity of the 20th century

Rehabilitation of Baricco’s and Japrisot’s Heroes in the Light of Modern Criticism

Author(s): Ljiljana Z. Petrović / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2023

The paper observes the attempt to morally rehabilitate the soldiers executed in the First World War, which takes place on a literary level in the novels Questa storia (This Story) by Alessandro Baricco and Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement) by Sébastien Japrisot. The soldiers were punished twice: by taking their lives and by being stigmatized in the memory. A detailed analysis, relying on the theoretical propositions of Michel Foucault and René Girard, leads to the conclusion that the truth is exactly the opposite of what seems evident from the legal side. Through the prism of such a new and different view, the culprit and the victim change places; it is the state that represents the violent/punitive apparatus whose main motive of action is to acquire or maintain control and power, while the executed individuals are only its victims.

The Representation of Love in Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost

Author(s): Andreea Petre / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

This work analyses the way in which the representation of love in the novel Manon Lescaut by Prévost highlights some important aspects that mark the perception of love in the eighteenth century. Following the literary tradition of Classicism, according to which passionate love is a source of evil and even of the protagonists’ death, in Prévost’s novel, the Chevalier Des Grieux’s passionate love arises from the concern of the Age of Enlightenment to emphasize the importance of individual identity, which implies the freedom and courage to decide on one’s own life, the refusal of one’s positioning in an inherited hierarchy, at the top of which there lies the paternal or divine authority. To illustrate this conviction, Prévost builds a love story in which the male character occupies the privileged place, and femininity does not represent strangeness or otherness but an artificial entity, one created from within the male figure to capture his departure from the original, paradisiacal state of moral perfection. Under these circumstances, the construction of the female character becomes a tribute to the literary tradition of the representation of charm and beauty as sources of the extreme degradation of the male character.

Myths, Science, and Literature – Different Fields, the Same Essence

Author(s): Vilma-Irén Mihály / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

The present study aims at analysing the relationship and establishing the similarities between ancient Eastern myths, literature, and today’s leading scientific views such as quantum physics. In ancient times, the mythic worldview was the only one being widely accepted, a dominancy that lasted up into, roughly put, the mid-nineteenth century, when most sciences as known today started to flourish and overtook the place of mythology, invalidating it. Nowadays, however, ancient myths and modern sciences have begun getting closer to each other and, at a deep insight, one may discover that they reveal the same truth. Thus, the paper shall discuss and compare ancient Buddhist texts with leading quantum theories and literary works by Béla Hamvas and Sándor Weöres that facilitate the comprehension of the essence.