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This article concerns the concept of play as it is argued in The Sense of Beauty, by the American critical realist philosopher George Santayana. His argumentation represents a tacit polemic with the understanding of play in the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Thus, the key issue of the article is the opposition between transcendentally reasoned argumentation and a psycho-social understanding of the essence and meaning of play. Keywords: play; work; value; perception; beauty; judgment of taste.
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In the language of theory and drama, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) continues the normative discourse of Boccaccio’s novels and at the same time marks the differentiation between the political and the private spheres, which began in the 14th century. In his treatise "The Prince" (written around 1513), Machiavelli outlines the foundations of a modern political ethics, and in the comedy "The Mandrake" (written around 1518) he shows how the Medieval normative system has turned into an ideology. He also delineates a modern private ethics that goes far into the future; in the course of modernity, this ethics remains dialectically related to the ethics of the political. The message of "The Prince" is frequently reduced to a purely “Machiavellian” theory of power and success, and "The Mandrakе" is interpreted as an illustration of "The Prince". However, Machiavelli is not a “Machiavellian”, and "The Mandrake" is not just a political allegory.
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The influence of the Victorian on postcolonial Indian narratives in English dates to the 1930s with the Founding Fathers: Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan. There is a clear development of the Indian social novel that emerges in the Gandhian era to the connexions with the Victorian, underlying the relationship between neo-Victorianism and globalization. It is the aim of this article to highlight a Dickensian pervasive presence in the first stages of Indian narratives in English, specifically the Indian social novel. I will establish a comparative approach between Dickens’ celebrated novel Great Expectations (1860-61) and Coolie (1936) by Mulk Raj Anand, the social Indian writer par excellence. I suggest a neo-Victorian encounter framed within a colonial/postcolonial encounter, making explicit how different historical processes – late eighteenth-century England and the Gandhian era in India – cause a similar social impact on so different contexts. Mulk Raj Anand adapts and appropriates the Victorian in Coolie, showing deep social concern and claiming against social evils, injustice and hypocrisy in India. This analysis stands as a transcultural exercise that shows Dickens’ universal scope regardless of time and space.
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John Dos Passos conveyed multiple intersections of art and culture and the spirit of the 1920s in his prose. His novel Manhattan Transfer is characterized by intermediality: a combination of theatre, film, and visual art. With this novel, Dos Passos became a chronicler of American life. A passionate critique of modern society runs through Manhattan Transfer. The city is presented in this novel as a site of cultural intersections and transition and this focus is matched by the fragmentary qualities of the text. From his war novel Three Soldiers through his city novel Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos places his readers in the swirl of the human currents of his time and argues for the human spirit against the forces of a mechanistic world that would crush them. The harshness of the vibrant city is illustrated through the strivings and affairs of these immigrants, Broadway stage performers, journalists, and business aspirants. The relationships between Dos Passos’ experimental fiction and modern art and film are explored, along with the cultural transition of the American 1920s.
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Was the chief literary critic of the 1930’s, Antreas Karantonis (1910-1982), spiteful and unfair in his critical texts about the poetry of G.T. Vafopoulos (1903-1996) and was Karantonis a critic who adapted to the poetic evolution? The prominent poet of the 1930’s generation has expressed the opinion that Karantonis has been unfair to his poetry but research on the critical texts shows that, besides the negative views, Karantonis also expressed some positive ones regarding Vafopoulos’ poetry. In addition, the constant critical adaptability that comes as a result of the critic's communication with the shifting poetic codes, and for which Karantonis’ work is reproached by Vafopoulos, could be considered as an essential — perhaps even the most essential — virtue of the dynamic function of critical discourse.
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The paper explores the representation of diasporic Muslim identities in a coming-of-age narrative: Arab American female novelist Mojha Kahf’s bestseller The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf published in 2006. It examines how the religious diasporic hybrid identity is mobilized within the female protagonist Khadra Shamy, including the ways she struggles to negotiate her identity across different cultural terrains and gendered, racialised, intergenerational configurations. It attempts to show how these literary representations construct --and help conceptualize—the ways we understand diasporic Muslims in the U.S. The individual experiences as narrated in the novel illuminate a series of essential socio-political questions facing the community as a religious minority in a secular context. This study will address these questions through the representation of cultural hybridity in the literary narrative within the framework of postcolonial theory. It focuses on three constructs of the novel central to the conceptualizing of a hybrid identity of the female protagonist: firstly, the mirror images and moral panics that generate cultural clashes in the East-West encounter, which foreground, secondly, the predicament of an ambivalent existence of the protagonist as a diasporic individual, and thirdly, the ways she forges her hybrid identity as a New Woman within the diasporic context.
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In his seminal essay theorizing the concept of heterotopia, “Of Other Spaces”, Michel Foucault insists that his focus is on external spaces. However, given the ability of certain spaces, especially those associated with trauma and torment, to simultaneously be inhabited and inhabit the psyches of their denizens, it stands to reason that some heterotopic spaces are internal as well. One such example is Ursula K. Le Guin’s Dry Land, an inner hellscape which appears throughout her Earthsea series. The Dry Land serves to mirror, invert, and contest not only the world of Earthsea, but also the pervasiveness of Western literary and cultural influences on the genre of fantasy itself. Inspired by classical and Renaissance sources (Homer and Dante) and modernist ones (Rainer Maria Rilke and T. S. Eliot), the Dry Land, a jarring spatial and literary aberration in the context of Earthsea’s Taoist framework, serves to confront both the resistance to the finality of death and the supremacy of the Western literary canon. In doing so, it demonstrates Le Guin’s desire to distance herself from Western canonical influences, while nevertheless highlighting the fact that, given the cyclicity of literary rebellion, she is, in fact, walking in Dante’s and T. S. Eliot’s shoes.
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The paper analyses a contemporary Georgian novel – Zura Jishkariani’s Chewing Dawns: Sugar-free. The novel belongs to the sub-genre of bio-punk. The aim of the paper was to identify the defamiliarized and ironized socio-cultural processes taking place in the contemporary Georgian society, considering the narratological concept of alternative worlds and the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor. The outcomes of the research would draw the cultural-intellectual orientations of contemporary Georgian society. Based on these two conclusions, the paper aimed to find an age-long similarity between the social-political challenges of the 1920s and the contemporary problems of the Georgian society. Research has proved that numerous systems of values have been deconstructed and carnivalized by means of a play with alternative worlds. The development of the world depends on the activation of the human brain capacity, which ensures the cognition of the “higher reality“. The literary text under analysis reflects current achievements in cognitive sciences. The mental trips reflect the capacity of the human brain. The text describes the protagonist’s aspiration towards manipulating and stimulating of the human brain. This is the only way to overcome the banality of life. The manner of narration and the idealization of the aim serve the purpose of description of the revolutionary spirit.
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The second issue of volume 12 of The Romanian Journal for Baltic and Nordic Studies continues to reflect the academic discussions occasioned by the Eleventh Conference on Baltic and Nordic Studies of May 2020. Prof. Radu Carp was one of the keynote speakers of the conference and his address on Combining soft power with the geopolitical approach - how difficult is it for the EU to change its attitude? elicited a great interest among the presenters and attenders of the scientific event. As in any such scholarly event, especially an international gathering with a critical focus on the construction/reconstruction of Europe in vital moments of its past and recent past aspirations, the viewpoints of the participants, including the analysis of Prof. Carp on the current challenges of the EU are passed on to the wider community of fellow researchers, the public and decision-makers. The call for stepping up to a new level of integration and geopolitical power projection is dissected both in its soft and hard power dimension without eschewing the focus on democracy, climate change mitigation measures or cybersecurity.
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Under the reign of King Louis-Philippe, 1830-1848, France was severely visited by a number of epidemics, namely, influenza, which were regularly reported in the press. Although the effects of such epidemics were methodically undervalued, the flu was frequently caricatured as offering analogies with the political, social and cultural life of the time. It was often endowed with the characteristics of a rational being, she-devil, woman of distinction or termagant of a wife! In 1858, Cham will even call it “the lioness of the day”. The flu will be found congenial with such social assemblies as carnivals or balls, which it either disrupted or embellished. The present paper deals with the satirical purport of the flu, whether underrated or exaggerated, showing at the same time how it became typified as a “mal à la mode” akin to Physiologies, a widely-discussed topic at that time.
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The present paper focuses on some representations of male Oriental dancers who dance dressed as women. It tries to answer the question whether those representations form a caricature of the Oriental woman or if it is another, perverse, Oriental dream. The first part of the paper presents the Oriental male dancer and shows how he was perceived in the Middle East and in Europe. The second part discusses the critics of male dancers’ behaviour in the travelogues by Jean Potocki and Vivant Denon. The three following sections analyse three examples of descriptions dating from the 1840-1850 by Gérard de Nerval, Gustave Flaubert and Théophile Gautier. It turns out that, with time, the caricature becomes less obvious and the descriptions are more and more aesthetic. One can no longer only mock and condemn the male dancers, a new perverse dream seems to be born.
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There are numerous caricatures of male concierges or doormen in the nineteenth-century texts and drawings. They constitute a very modern phenomenon, as new building layouts of the time, or new buildings in general, almost always included a lodge. Their role of controlling the whereabouts of people getting in and out of the building was subject to the contradictory pressures from landlords and tenants alike. We will try to demonstrate how the doormen and concierges belonged to the in-between places in the nineteenth-century French caricature, with their social position stretched between their landlords and tenants, a function that allowed them to combine servility and an excessive show of strength, and resulted in their depictions ranging from animals to gods.
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This article studies the tools and strategies employed in the creation of caricature in one of the prototypical works of the European exotic discourse. Le Jardin des Supplices is indeed an important milestone in the formation of stereotypes about China; however, this representation, far from seeking to develop a realistic depiction of China, or even to point out its supposed barbarity, aims, on the contrary, at producing a caricature of its counterpart, Europe, while using verbal and figurative exacerbation as main devices. Le Jardin des Supplices acts as a mirror in which the West recognizes itself in the described phantasmagorical utopia; in this sadistic farce, we will therefore identify both a parody of European institutional structures and a pastiche of the characteristic features of literary decadence. Notwithstanding, Le Jardin des Supplices provides a lasting and ironical view of the representation of China and the Chinese in the collective unconscious.
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The present paper analyzes the relationship between the caricature and the women’s fashion of the second half of the 19th century. The period was favorable for fashion caricature, because, while reflecting the political, economic and social transformations of the time, the clothing trends endorsed at the time by fashion magazines were based on the exaggeration and distortion that we identify among the weapons of humorists. The first part of the paper focuses on the graphical representation of fashion, in particular of the crinoline, and aims to discover the messages hidden in those illustrations. The second part analyzes the motif of the fashion and the clothing in the Bertall’s satirical text, Comédie de notre temps, and tries to define the image of the woman at that time and her role in the French bourgeois society.
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This article considers caricature as an icono-verbal tool that mobilizes shared cultural codes. It shows that in the 19th century, both visual (in this case, Daumier and Gavarni) and textual caricature (in this case, Balzac, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Musset, Flaubert, Huysmans) were designed based on the model of a theatrical scene which plays on the rich possibilities offered by the combination of text and image at the heart of comical mechanisms.Indeed, invalidating the observation of the primacy of image over text (Charles Baudelaire's stance) or vice versa: of text over image (represented by Roland Barthes), this article posits that the visual and the textual take on fluid roles and complement each other. As such, the consonance or dissonance between the image and its title/legend are two types of relationships that contribute to the birth of laughter as well as to the semantic richness of a caricature.This vision of laughter proceeding above all from formal mechanisms could lead one to believe that the evaluation of the adopted value systems is superfluous. The important thing would be to understand and analyze, not to judge. Against such a claim, this article supports the need to add to the formal analysis of a work in its historical context, its ethical positioning in the face of its explicit and implicit ideological implications.
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During the Belle Époque, the writer’s novel gradually replaces the painter’s novel and forms a platform for asking questions about the role of the author in bourgeois society and the causes of their distress. Through this work, the author thus conveys an axiological portrait of himself which, implicitly referring to the difficulty of creation, gives an account of the values shaping the end of the century. The resulting modelling incorporates caricature, which becomes omnipresent in the 19th century, not only for the parodical load that characterises it, but for the accepted power that exaggeration, distortion and joke hold in the interpretation of reality. From Huysmans to Gide, from Lorrain to Gourmont, from Dumur to Mauclair, Mirbeau or Céard, the writer’s novel makes caricature and the devaluation a guarantee of the authenticity of the fictional self-projection.
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The first albums of the cartoonist Jean Bruller propose an original social caricature by combining text and image. La danse des vivants (1932-1938) aspires to illustrate the human comedy of the 20th century with a caricature of customs and a universalist tone; Visions intimes et rassurantes de la guerre (1936) is anchored in the interwar years to develop a social criticism strongly influenced by the threats of war. This article offers an in-depth analysis of the aesthetics of Jean Bruller’s two works, marked by a particularly wry and ironic humour and some pessimism. This analytical approach will also be complemented by an account of the dialogue between the work and the artist’s thinking, as well as of the dialogue between his production and the historical-social context.
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The paper discusses the relationship between Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau in connection with the problem of their “visibility” (Nathalie Heinich) based on Jean Cocteau ’s portrait (1922) of Marcel Proust and Claude Arnaud’s biographical essay (2013). In this context, Cocteau’s drawing, which conveys Marcel Proust’s extravagant character, could nowadays be considered not only a caricatural representation of the author of In Search of Lost Time, but also a demythologizing one, especially in contrast to the image of invisible Proust created by structuralist interpretations. Also, in the mediatic and theoretical contemporary context, Cocteau’s visual representation of Proust could be used to reflect on Proust ’s action (conduite) which, combined with his narrative discourse, defines the “posture” (Jérôme Meizoz) of the author of In Search… within the literary field.
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