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Špirit, Michael. Textologie dnes: (příručka pro začínající editory). Vydání první. Praha: Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, v.v.i., 2019. 267 stran. Varianty; sv. 12. ISBN 978-80-88069-90-4.
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Špirit, Michael. Textologie dnes: (příručka pro začínající editory). Vydání první. Praha: Ústav pro českou literaturu AV ČR, v.v.i., 2019. 267 stran. Varianty; sv. 12. ISBN 978-80-88069-90-4.
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Smyčka, Václav. Das Gedächtnis der Vertreibung: interkulturelle Perspektiven auf deutsche und tschechische Gegenwartsliteratur und Erinnerungskulturen. Bielefeld: Transcript, [2019], ©2019. 256 stran. Interkulturalität: Studien zu Sprache, Literatur und Gesellschaft; Band 15. ISBN 978-3-8376-4386-2.
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This paper contains following book review: Hradilová, Marta, ed., Jelínková, Andrea, ed. a Veselá, Lenka, ed. Paralelní existence: rukopisy a tisky v českých zemích raného novověku. Vydání první. Praha: Academia, 2020. 357 stran. Knižní kultura; svazek 2. ISBN 978-80-200-3128-0.
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During the 1930s, when Olbracht wrote all his Subcarpathian novels, he started to become involved in literary translation (basically to earn a living in all probability), translating exclusively from German and mostly from the work of Thomas Mann. This study carries on from the work of Jiří Opelík from 1967, which for the first time put forward the proposition that Olbracht’s approach to translation work was very active, so these translations acted as catalysts to hasten the qualitative transformation in Olbracht’s work. The study compares the collection of prose works Golet v údolí (1937) with Thomas Mann’s tetralogy of novels Joseph and his brothers (1926‒1942), from which Olbracht translated a total of three works during the 1930s (the first two in collaboration with Helena Malířová). A comparison of both authors’ poetics (the nature of the fictional world, their specific conceptions of myth, the narrator and the characters) indicates that between the two works there are several analogies supporting and in many respects complementing Opelík’s theory. A look at Golet v údolí in the light of Mann’s tetralogy opens up new ways of interpreting this crowning achievement by Olbracht.
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This article aims to systemize the trends in world literature research, highlighting the differences between the concepts of this phenomenon as embraced by “small” and “large” literatures. It also takes account of the Czech and Slovak line of thinking which questions the concept of world literature as normative poetics or the standardized canon of masterpieces and their various discourses. The historical experience of Czech and Slovak comparative literary studies defending the independent values of Slavic literatures suggests that there cannot be any arbitrary research on world literature. With some exceptions and regardless of their terminologically and semantically different interpretations of this specialism, contemporary theoretical concepts (as embraced by Emily Apter, Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Marko Juvan, Franco Moretti, etc.) re-establish recognizing world literature as an international research issue or a subject employing English as a universal means of communication. Imposing such a notion would allegedly condone inequality as a kind of epistemological framework to codify the binary opposition of “developed” and “underdeveloped” or “the center” and “periphery”. It was mainly the Czecho-Slovak structuralist tradition (represented by Frank Wollman, René Wellek, Dionýz Ďurišin, etc.) that rejected national literature as a natural starting point of world literature. Anchored in the Central European intellectual milieu at the crossing of various aesthetic movements, these “defensive” theories were linked with the structural concept of the Prague Linguistic Circle, letting alone the multilingual tradition of the former Habsburg Empire and the phenomenon of migration which implied the aspect of polyglossia and heterotopia as a breeding ground for comparative scholars.
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Much discussion of world literature, as seen in the theories of Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, is still not entirely able to rid itself of Eurocentric and Western-centric biases. More recently, Zhang Longxi, a leading Chinese cross-cultural scholar, despite his good intentions, displays Sinocentric limitations by claiming that imperial China “functioned as a center in the East Asian region”. Based on the assumption that Zhang’s argument is emblematic of a larger current of Sinocentrism in China, this article argues that East Asian countries, most notably Korea and Japan, developed their own literatures and cultures, although they have been influenced by Chinese culture. This article calls for a more globally-oriented paradigm and asserts that any form of ethnocentrism, Eurocentric or Sinocentric, is injurious, or even fatal, to the salutary development of world literature.
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This article seeks to examine the remarkable literary venture of Odia culture that took a crucial step in creating space for world literature. Amid the plurality of conceptualizations of world literature as a commercial entity, a mode of circulation, an intellectual problem, a medium of international literary exchange, a dynamic system, and an emerging discipline, it sees world literature as a tool for liberating the Indian region of Odisha from linguistic and cultural domination. The colonial controversy over the language policy and the constant struggle of the Odia-speaking territories prepared the grounds for the language movement which resulted in the formation of a language-based British province in 1936. The article explores the question whether the establishment of Odisha led to linguistic liberation or a paradigm shift from cultural dominance of Bengali and Hindi during the colonial era to the hegemony of English in the post-independence period. We argue that after India’s independence the Odia language and literature fell victim to neo-colonialism as a result of the adoption of the English language as the medium of internationalization. Additionally, we examine how world literature supported the liberation of the regional language and its literature from neo-colonialism by evaluating the contribution of the world literature book series titled Biswa Sahitya Granthamala, which was released in Odia by the publishing house Granthamandir in 1969–1970.
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Silence is a concept both praised and criticised when put to practice. The latest trends in society encourage individuals to be their true selves; simultaneously, some are reproached for presenting too much of themselves to the world. In this sense, discretion is arguably closely linked to a performative silence used as a rhetorical tool for self-protection. The question is whether silence and performativity are opposite or complementary terms. The main purpose of this article is to analyse this binary logic from an intersectional perspective. More specifically, to ascertain whether resistance to society’s limitations can be performed through silence or necessarily through performative actions. The case study is Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (1996) set in mid-nineteenth century, puritan Canada. Atwood’s postmodern fictionalization of Grace Marks makes her a conflicted character with a duality that terrorises society. She is, in Hegelian terms, both the Master and the Slave. Grace’s discretion later becomes performative, in the sense that it alters reality and brings something new into existence: her social resistance. This article has led to the conclusion that Grace makes a calculated use of her silence in an attempt to balance the lack of control that she seems to have over the press’s representation of her identity.
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The present paper focuses on the theoretical approaches to the notion of “myth” as presented by European, American, and Iranian scientists. It discusses characteristics of myth such as its narrative, characters, and ancient beliefs, which it reflects. Aim of the paper is to note common comprehensions of “myth” of scientists like Eliade, Bascom, Miletinski and notable Iranian linguists and culturologists such as Amouzegar, Bahar, Esmailpour. In order to define the term, they also concentrate on drawing a line between its distinctive features and that of epos.
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The present paper puts into discussion the aspect of stage aurality from multiple perspectives. In this regard, stage aurality is treated in conjunction with the visual aspect of the performance. At the same time, the study focuses on the aural and semiological analysis of the dimension of stage speech. Considering the role of the director in creating the aural architecture of the performance, the study investigates also the narrative aspects of stage aurality. In conclusion, the analysis undertaken notices the way in which the aurality contributes to the unfolding of the scenic actions from the perspective of the spectator considered witness to the scenic events.
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The essay aims at interpreting the behaviour of Miss Julie – August Strindberg’s character from the well-known homonymous play – from the point of view of her educational background.
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This article discusses the fictional transpositions of a traumatic event in recent Romanian history in some contemporary novels by women writers. Decree 770/1966 meant the brutal intervention of the paternalistic state in the private lives of its citizens and the redefinition of gender roles to the effect of translating reproductive roles into productive ones. The theme of abortion is analysed from the theoretical perspective of new historicism and cultural materialism and through a feminine and feminist lens in a number of works published by Romanian contemporary women authors in the past few years.
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The aim of the article is to present the method of sharing and promoting the manuscript collections on the example of the 18th-century manuscript of Christian Gabriel Fischer available in the Pomeranian Digital Library (PDL). This manuscript inspired the Library of the Gdańsk University of Technology and the Institute of City Culture in Gdańsk to cooperate on a project promoting. Thanks to the joint initiative, work on the transcription of the German text written in „Kurrent” script was started and a number of events were organized to popularize both the manuscript’s content and the 18th-century calligraphy among contemporary audience. The authors used statistical information on the number of pageviews of the manuscript and the number of visits in the period from the launch of the PDL platform until May 31, 2021. In order to illustrate how popular and useful the organized events were, the authors presented the data collected by the Institute of City Culture monitoring the number of the participants of the events. The statistical data was supplemented with an analysis of the literature on the promotion of cultural heritage collections.
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In 1862, Dostoevsky traveled for the first time through the Western Europe, which enabled him to have direct contact with the real life of the Western world, whose literature, art and culture he already knew well. In the fall of the same year, he writes Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, where the writer’s clearly negative attitude towards the West emerges for the first time, primarily because of the materialism and alienation he attributes to Western society. Two years later, in the Notes from the Underground, where the critique of the rationalism and positivism (which both caused Enlightenment) of the European world appears as the goal of Dostoevsky’s worries. The Demons, written almost two decades later, offers a deep analysis of a division of the Russian society of that period: Slavophiles, Westerners, liberals, nihilists, populists, anarchists. Finally, the The Brothers Karamazov raises deep ethical, philosophical, and existential questions faced by Russia and the West, according to Fyodor Mikhailovich. The three generations of the Karamazovs can be interpreted as three different moments of Russian history: its present, past and future.
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Adam Zieliński (1929–2010) grew up before World War II in Stryj, a town in southern Poland. A happy childhood in a Jewish intellectual family turned into a traumatic experience related to German terror. After the war, he left for Cracow, finished his studies, got married and started working in the radio. The change in the political situation influenced the decision to emigrate to Vienna, where he achieved economic and literary success. In his literary work, he presents Galician Jews, who were a parallel and at the same time close community to Poles and Ukrainians. In Vienna, Jews and Poles struggle with the reluctance of the Austrians. Zieliński experiences this in two ways – as a Jew and a Pole in one person. He presents the related problems in an interesting way in his novels and short stories. In articles on social subjects, he sets himself another task – to work for reconciliation between Poles and Jews, and thus between Christianity (Catholicism) and Judaism. As an author of literary works, Zieliński fulfils his task well. Writing on social topics, marked by oversensitivity, leads him to express unfair opinions that do not serve the Polish-Jewish rapprochement.
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This article presents autopathography as a genre in which patients can reclaim their voices to articulate their experiences of the medical system, drawing on Arthur Frank’s theory in The Wounded Storyteller. Illness narratives can be understood not only as means of expressing a largely negative experience by way of monologue, but also as platforms for dialogue between patients and their caregivers. Such encounters, albeit seemingly impossible under the conditions of contemporary medical system, have been postulated, among others, by Rita Charon, the founder of narrative medicine. In the text, autobiographical works of Anatole Broyard and Aneta Żukowska are given as examples of patients expressing the need for a sustained, mutual relationship between doctors and their patients. As such, autopathographies can play their part in bringing to life the ideals of narrative medicine, as well as of what S. L. Jain called “elegiaic politics”.
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The article is dedicated to vernacular writings as a form of traditional culture. Its source of inspiration is the research of the writings of ordinary people in Europe, carried out by the cultural historian Martyn Lyons. The aim of the article is to suggest vernacular writings as the valuable source for the studies of the 20th century culture in Latvia. Attention has been drawn to the concept and genres of vernacular writings, their borders with the handwritten literature and oral folklore, as well as the future perspectives of their research. Vernacular writings (tautas rokraksti) is a new term in the Latvian culture research. It is based on the concepts used in European cultural studies (besides vernacular writings also écritures ordinaires and ego-documents) to refer to individual writings popular in the lower and middle classes of European society. From a folklorist perspective vernacular writings is a handy umbrella term that covers all popular manuscripts of traditional form, which so far have been analysed both as folklore and handwritten literature, or have not been noticed at all due to the assumption that it is a too recent phenomenon related to mass culture. In Latvia, similarly to elsewhere in Europe, writing culture became a part of every day life in the second half of the 19th century along with the modernisation of society and general access to education and continued up to the beginning of the digital era in the 1990’s. Vernacular writings not only took over several functions from the oral culture implemented in the previous centuries, but also offered new opportunities for social communication and individual creativity. It particularly refers to the so-called artistic genres – autograph albums, song books, diaries, etc. The diversity and eclectics of genres in vernacular writings encourage to focus attention to the personality of the author rather than to the specifics of separate genres. The analysis of manuscripts created by one person not only provides an opportunity to approach the personality of the author, but also helps to understand the role of these manuscripts in the creation of his personal social networks. Thus, with the help of individual case studies of vernacular writings, it is possible to examine the social and cultural history of Latvia – the family structure and hierarchies, the school culture, the everyday life and festive traditions in rural and urban environments, the professional networks and models of private relationship, the personal experiences of historical and political events, the cultural expressions of personal and gender identities, the habits of culture consumption, the manifestations of individual and collective creativity etc., opening up new channels of information for research in humanities and social sciences.
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The article is about Georg Mancelius’s (1593–1654) book Phraseologia Lettica (1638), in particular about its second part called Ten Conversations. Research on the Conversations started late for the first edition of Phraseologia published in 1929 was incomplete. Starting with Arturs Ozols’s 1965 monograph about Old Latvian in which Ozols deals with Mancelius’s role in the genesis of modern standard Latvian, the research report considers contributions upon the Conversations until 2015. For a long period only linguists were interested in Phraseologia Lettica; in 1992, Jānis Krēsliņš was the first who presented Mancelius as both a scholar and a preacher. After remarking on the audience of the Ten Conversations a synopsis of Mancelius’s Phraseologia Lettica is given. Here Mancelius’s dialogues are divided up into three topic areas: (i) a travelling gentleman talks to the host about a pub and a coachman; (ii) the dialogues VI–IX address work in the country where a gentleman talks to farmers to organise their work; at last, (iii) two farmers are the participants in dialogue X – one of them previously lived in Livonia and praises the area so much that the other asks him why he went back to Courland. Mancelius’s uncertain relationship with two great minds in Pedagogics at that time, i.e. with John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) and Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), is discussed by comparing the structures of respective works of Mancelius, Comenius, and Erasmus in the final paragraphs. With regard to the terminus ante quem of 1638, when Mancelius published his Phraseologia Lettica only two of Comenius’ school books had come into the world – these were the more famous Janua linguarum reserata in 1631, and the less known Vestibulum latinae linguae in 1633. However, Mancelius seems to have focused on Erasmus’s work Colloquia familiaria printed in various editions between 1518 and 1533. Many authorities from the 16th and 17th centuries assigned Erasmus’s work to be a set book in the schools ruled by them. Consequently, it could be a question for further research to find out whether Erasmus’s Colloquia familiaria was used in Mitau or Riga, where Mancelius had been a pupil at the local grammar schools in the first decade of the 17th century.
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In the article an understudied field of research in Latvian classical folk song is explored, focusing on a mostly unrecognized large-scale problem: in the editions of folk songs the most extensive category is made of the so-called short songs – mostly quatrains and six line, rarely eight-line stanzas that are self-contained in terms of content and poetic form. It is clear that in practice they did not exist in an isolated way as self-sufficient, independent entities. However, there is very little known about the way the short songs were combined and sequenced to strings. Our knowledge on this subject is inexcusably small: sporadic statements by some collectors and researchers, a couple of short publications, where the strings have been examined next to other questions, and only one large study entirely devoted to that phenomenon (see: Vaira Vīķis-Freibergs Sink or Swim. On Associative Structuring in Longer Latvian Folksongs, 1997). The short songs however (both in customs and beyond them) “lived” in strings – varying and changing each time being performed. The strings were their “way of life” and a factor significantly influencing semantics. Baron’s and other multi-volume editions of Latvian classical folk songs are huge depots of building blocks of strings that have been classified according to their thematic parameters, yet their ability to express anything about their life in practice is very limited. The deplorable condition within the study of the strings is the consequence of the continuous reproduction of the 19th centuries research dispositions. The article provides an insight in the origin and history of the problem. Its aim is to facilitate polemic and encourage research.
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