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‘Blackness’, Modernity, and the Ideology of Visibility in the Harlem Renaissance

Author(s): Cyraina Johnson-Roullier / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2010

This essay examines the relationship between race and modernity through a critique of interracialism in the Harlem Renaissance. The essay argues that the exploration of interracialism put forward by George Hutchinson in his groundbreaking study The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Harvard, 1995) cannot adequately interrogate the modern significance of white and black participation in the Harlem Renaissance, because the notion of interracialism on which it is grounded holds at its core an uncritiqued and uncontested understanding of ‘race’ that subtly and simultaneously reinforces a binary logic existing between conventional notions of ‘white’ and ‘black’. The new vision of the Harlem Renaissance suggested by analysis of its underlying interracialism can only become fully possible in modern terms to the extent that this conventional binary, white/black, is also pulled apart to expose the cultural significance of the opposition between the two terms, through which the hidden nexus by which they are joined comes violently to the fore. Thus, in order to construct new (racial) boundaries between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, the examination of interracialism in the Harlem Renaissance is not enough to effect a radical and transformative change in the way in which either movement is perceived. This is because it leaves the essential dichotomy between ‘white’ and ‘black’ - by which the two movements are covertly described - in place, rather than seeking to understand what may lie beneath this received discursive, often material and visual reality. Leaving this hidden dichotomy unexplored and uncritiqued will necessarily obscure the compelling new insights that the examination of these unexplored depths may bring to an understanding of one or the other of modernism or the Harlem Renaissance, or both. This study is derived from a larger project that investigates the role of gender in unraveling the complicated relation between race and modernity in the Harlem Renaissance.

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‘I wind my veil about this ancient stone’: Yeats’s Cuchulain and Modernity

Author(s): Margaret Mills Harper / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2010

Analyses of Irish modernity require attention to diaspora, and global emigration from Ireland, totaling some seventy million people, is often figured in hemispheric terms. In particular, a transatlantic paradigm is relevant: there are many more Irish Americans, including Irish Canadians and emigrant communities in Latin America, than there are people living in Ireland. America was a fabled land of opportunity but also a Solomonic choice. Daughters and sons who emigrated were both lost, in that they did not return, and saved, from inhospitable conditions ranging from penury to famine. The imagined relation between Ireland and America expresses this profound relation. America appears in direct and indirect form in a number of cultural productions that speak of the instabilities and attractions of this hemispheric relation. The figure of Cuchulain, a character in medieval sagas that was recycled in 19th century popular culture and reinterpreted by the poet and dramatist W. B. Yeats, interestingly demonstrates the ambivalencies of a gaze across the Atlantic. Yeats used Cuchulain as part of a project to create a usable past for Ireland, turning figures such as the sacrificial soldier and the lone adventurer from imperial discourse against the very empire that birthed them. At the same time, Cuchulain, who appears in a sequence of Yeats’s plays and several poems, is British modernist in style, appearing by means of costumes, set design, and dance that are shot through with British and European modernist modes. But Cuchulain is a multiply overdetermined sign, deeply gendered and racialized, an embodiment of anxious masculinity undone in the face of feminized otherness and a subject that is, we might say, islanded, indefinite, with the promise of completion just over the water. This hero must fight the waves in one play and die in another at the hands of the weakest of male foes, tied by an old lover’s veils to an ‘ancient stone.’ Finally, Cuchulain disappears into what Yeats would call a phantasmagoria, a revery, that relocates him in a space of water and the vaguely articulated lands beyond it and a no-time that is that of change itself. Cuchulain signifies the need to invent Irishness, of the complex crossings that this project entails, of its inevitable failures in a post-independence Ireland and a transatlantic-focused Europe, and of its end in the relentless economies of diaspora, as the hero dies at the hands of a blind beggar.

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‘Living in Translated Worlds—A Pragmatist Approach to Transnationalism

Author(s): Laura Bieger / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2007

‘The history of all cultures is a history of cultural borrowing’, Edward Said once said—a thought that could be rephrased as: the history of all cultures is a history of translation. This paper is about translation and its methodological and critical potential for theorizing transnationalism. To unfold this potential we need to understand this term in the broadest possible sense: as a principle and agent of transformation; a principle we find at work on the production as well as on the reception side of any instance of signification; and which operates through any kind of medium and in any semiotic register. Such an understanding goes well beyond the general use of the term which ties it to processes of linguistic transfer in a much stricter and more limited sense. In the following pages I will make some rather speculative remarks and far-reaching suggestions about the methodological potential slumbering in the concept of translation, and in this sense I would like the following thoughts to be understood as an open invitation for further speculation and discussion. And yet I don’t want to expose them to debate without mentioning that they are grounded in a long and intense period of research which I did around the concept of translation and which, for the sake of brevity, I will scarcely be referencing here.To study cultural formations in a transnational perspective is to encounter various and complex dynamics of exchange and transformation; dynamics which breach across a wide array of borders between as well as within cultural formations formerly perceived in a national paradigm; which materialize through all different media as attempted acts of communication; which might be written, painted, photographed, filmed, sculptured, built, tailored, spoken, sung, danced, gestured, etc.; and whose trajectory might very well be ruptured, contain gaps, take detours, lead elsewhere. One thing can be safely assumed without further specifying the spectrum of exchange dynamics at stake here: to become operational as a comprehensive methodological tool apt to deal with this range of different processes, the broadening of our understanding of translation beyond its traditional linguistic borders mentioned in the beginning needs to go hand in hand with developing a new systematization of the concept itself—a task which I suggest to meet by dealing with it on the formal and operational level addressed above.

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‘Safety is in our speed’: Reading Bauman Reading Emerson

Author(s): Giorgio Mariani / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2010

Taking the lead from John Tomlinson’s call to think of modernization and globalization not only in terms of ‘metaphors of territory and borders, of flows and the regulation of flows’, but also as ‘shifts in the texture of the modernity’, the essay offers a tentative exploration of how mechanical velocity and acceleration have contributed to the reshaping of the American cultural imagination. The essay focuses in particular on a few passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson, read through the lenses of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity, and argues that the former’s response to speed is not only ambivalent, but for the most part paradoxical. Speed is certainly a feature ‘of a generalized global modernity’ and therefore, as Tomlinson argues, it makes little sense to think of it ‘as the original property of any one national culture’. On the other hand, the essay insists that global traits of modernity may be differently perceived and culturally constructed within specific geo-cultural spaces. Emerson, for example, tried to come to terms with mechanical velocity by imagining that abundance of ‘free’ spaces could attenuate the more disruptive consequences of velocity, a notion inherited by some of the more visionary US counter-culture of the Sixties and Seventies.

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‘The Days After’ and ‘the Ordinary Run of Hours’: Counternarratives and Double Vision in Don DeLillo’s "Falling Man"

Author(s): David Brauner / Language(s): English Issue: 3-4/2009

The publication in 2007 of Don DeLillo’s fourteenth novel, "Falling Man", was keenly anticipated and then indifferently received. As many reviewers observed, DeLillo had already dealt in previous novels with the issues that 9/11 seemed to crystallize: international terrorism, the global impact of American politics and culture, the relationship between the media television—in particular—and the events on which it reports. Citing a number of examples (the Happy Valley Farm Commune in "Great Jones Street" (1973), the Radical Matrix in "Running Dog" (1978), Ta Onómata in "The Names" (1982)), John Leonard points out that terrorist groups are ubiquitous in DeLillo and argues that ‘some kind of 9/11 was always implicit’ in his work (Leonard, 2007: 1). Similarly, Andrew O’Hagan suggests that DeLillo’s ‘interest in the conjunction of visual technology and terrorism … put him on the road to having September 11 as his subject long before the events of that day happened’ (O’Hagan, 2007: 1). However, for O’Hagan the arrival of the event itself, rather than giving DeLillo the material he had been waiting for, has rendered him redundant. O’Hagan sees DeLillo as the victim of his own prescience, asking rhetorically: ‘ “What is a prophet once his fiery word becomes deed?” What does he have to say? What is left of the paranoid style when all its suspicions come true?’ (O’Hagan, 2007: 5, 6). This notion that DeLillo had somehow scooped himself is also implicit in the comments of Toby Litt, who announces that ‘[i]n "Mao II", DeLillo had already written his great 9/11 novel, long before the specific date and the event happened to come around’ (Litt, 2007: 1) and of David Cowart, who writes that ‘DeLillo has already produced, in "Mao II", the definitive novelistic treatment of terrorism centered in and emanating from the Near or Middle East’ (Cowart, 2003: 217).Unlike the others, Cowart’s remarks—in the concluding chapter of his book "Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language" (2003)—were made before the appearance of "Falling Man". So convinced is Cowart that anything DeLillo publishes after September 11th, 2001, must be a response to the events of that day, that he presses "Cosmopolis" (2003), the predecessor in DeLillo’s oeuvre to "Falling Man" and his first book to be published after the attacks on the towers, into service as an oblique 9/11 novel. He refers in his discussion of the novel to its ‘ 9/11-tinged atmospherics’ (211), claiming that ‘[a]lthough the action of "Cosmopolis" takes place in Manhattan a year and a half before the 9/11 terrorist attack, DeLillo depicts a city over which, as he and the reader know, a terrible event looms’ (210). Undaunted by the absence of any concrete allusions to 9/11, Cowart discovers in the narrative trajectory of "Cosmopolis" an implicit precognition of 9/11, so that the novel becomes a ‘brilliant … explor[ation]’ of ‘a proximate past from the never explicitly stated vantage point of post-9/11’, an ‘engagement’...

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‘The Long War’: Who is Winning the Battle for Ideas?

Author(s): Frank Furedi / Language(s): English Issue: 3-4/2009

From the outset this has been a very confusing conflict. For over seven years western leaders have never tired of telling the world that the War against Terrorism is principally an ‘ideological struggle’ or a ‘battle of ideas’. But the concept of a ‘battle of idea’ is rarely elaborated. In official proceedings the term has a uniquely shallow and rhetorical character. Official statements self-consciously avoid spelling out the ideology that they are tackling. Recycled historical allusions to Nazism, totalitarianism and Stalinist Russia serve as a substitute for clarity about the ideological character of the contemporary threat. Other than denouncing it as ‘extremist’, ‘totalitarian’ or ‘fanatical’ there is a studied silence about the content of the ideological threat facing Western democratic societies. This remarkable reluctance to spell out the issues at stake betrays a sense of defensiveness and hesitancy toward the conduct of the battle of ideas.The most striking symptom of this defensiveness is the linguistic confusion shown in official communications. Policy makers appear to lack a language through which they can give meaning to contemporary realities. Indeed they appear to devote more energy toward lecturing people what words not to use than to offer a clear explanation of their objectives. Jonathan Evans in his first public speech in November 2007 as head of MI5 pleaded with newspaper editors to avoid words that help the enemy. He insisted that we must ‘pay close attention to our use of language’ and avoid words that encourages the association of terrorism with Islam since that would undermine the Government’s ability to win the hearts and minds of Britain’s Muslim communities (Evans, 2007). Soon after this statement reports were circulated indicating that officials were ‘rethinking’ their approach and ‘abandoning what they admit has been offensive and inappropriate language’. The acknowledgement that UK officials expressed themselves in a language that was offensive and inappropriate betrays a palpable sense of disorientation in Whitehall. According to reports the term ‘war on terror’ will no longer be heard from ministers and the threat will not be described as a ‘Muslim Problem’ (Norton-Taylor, 2007). It is as if the ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives´ campaign of 2nd World War has been rehabilitated –only this time there is confusion about who the enemy is and what to call it.

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‘THE WORLD OF MADE IS NOT THE WORLD OF BORN’: America and the Edge of the Continent

Author(s): Tadeusz Sławek / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2015

At the beginning of his great 1927 poem "Women at Point Sur", Robinson Jeffers offers a harsh judgment of the American mind as a producer of a culture of avoidance or evasion. In Jeffers’ words, ‘You chose to ignore consciousness, incredible how quickly / The American mind short-circuits by ignoring its object. / Something in the gelded air of the country’ (Jeffers, 1927: 26). It is a commentary on the conversation that Reverend Barclay has just had with a boy working at a hotel, and whose opinion as to a possible existence of God he is asking. Since there comes no answer to the interrogation, ‘Do you think there’s a God?’, and the young man does not seem to have an opinion at all, these circumstances occasion Reverend Barclay’s angry dismissal of America not as incidentally empty of interest in the transcendental but as purposefully choosing such ignorance. America bespeaks double ignorance: 1) it ignores consciousness (which, for Jeffers, stands for the ability to live and investigate life in a most serious manner), and 2) this ignorance leads to the second type of evasion—America, in avoiding all the seriousness of life and developing new strategies of disarming life’s seriousness, avoids itself, voids itself, ignores its own object. What is seriousin life, what makes life serious, why life IS serious, has been eliminated from the American life, which therefore presents itself as ‘gelded’, i.e., deprived of what is essential for life to happen.Life in what Jeffers refers to as ‘America’ develops in the aura of a certain vital lack that makes this life almost a parody of existence. Life conceived under the auspices of ‘something gelded’ is monstrous or phantasmatic, and this spectrality can be documented upon the level of the self (‘consciousness’), the state (‘America’), and God. Each of these phantasms turns its own existence into a peculiar kind of imprisonment in which what Jeffers repeatedly names ‘inexhaustible life, incomparable power, inhuman knowledge’ changes into no more than a ‘blind adventure’ (Jeffers, 1927: 90, 21). In consequence, the solidity of the structure called ‘America’, its ‘wall-ed’ streets, and mansions that advertise the present and future prosperity are now revealed to be constructions of spectral urbanity and phantomatic architecture. As Reverend Barclay contends, ‘Sticks plastered, cloth, books, what they call a home; / Framed to wall out the wild face of eternity’ (Jeffers, 1927: 23). Jeffers avows then that ‘America’ is a project, the heart of which was the ambition to conquer wilderness (hence the mythology of the frontier and pioneer). The project backfired, or short-circuited, because, while successfully eliminating the natural wild, it has forsaken the existential wild, which must always be kept and preserved as a condition of existence. ‘America’ grows as the Enlightenment project of the civilizing illumination which compromises itself by ‘enlightening’ the world to such a degree that it has neglected...

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‘Zones of Discomfort’ in US Latino Politics: When Sharing a Sea Does Not Suffice

Author(s): Virginia R. Dominguez / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2014

What is a U.S. Latino and what does US Latino politics look like? Moreover, what does space, location, and travel over sea, land, and air have to do with U.S. Latino life and politics? Over the years many people have come to anticipate certain things as characteristic of the Latino presence in the US (either from media coverage or political analysis). Many concentrate on the large population of at least partial Mexican family origin. But what happens when different questions are asked and different locations are privileged? In this paper, I look at the southeast coast of the U.S. and not the central, western, or southwestern parts of the country, and I examine expectations of who lives in Florida, what their relation to ‘the US’. is, and what their sense of diaspora and nationness are. Typical and long-standing associations placing Cubans in southern Florida and Puerto Ricans in the New York metropolitan area are shown here to be more problematic than expected. This paper will show (a) that a noteworthy difference still exists between Puerto Rican and Cuban-American engagement with the US but that it is full of paradoxes, (b) that much of the difference concerns racialization, and (c) that it may be most productive now and in the future to concentrate on the surprises, what I have elsewhere (Dominguez, American Anthropologist, September 2012) recently called the ‘zones of discomfort’, rather than our ‘comfort zones’ as students, scholars, and academics. Among the most provocative points made reframing the issue will be the idea that the Cuban diaspora has made more Cubans into Americans than the 1917 Act made Puerto Ricans Americans.

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’Twas Brillig: Two Children and Alice

Author(s): Virginia Lowe / Language(s): English Issue: 02/2015

This paper is a case study of two children’s responses to Lewis Carroll’s and John Tenniel’s Alice books. Their encounters with the stories were recorded for a period of eleven years. The thoughts and concerns inspired by the books demonstrate the children’s interpretive abilities as they sometimes raise serious philosophical issues. Based on the collected data it is argued that the children’s understanding and philosophical ability can be revealed in their response to literature. The findings support the notion that children’s capacity for abstract thinking should not be underestimated.

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“[A] GLOWING GOLD TINGE ON THE WATERS OF THE PANTAI”: CONRAD’S CHALLENGE TO THE NARRATIVE OF ECONOMIC SUCCESS IN ALMAYER’S FOLLY

Author(s): Agnieszka Setecka / Language(s): English Issue: XII/2017

The exotic setting of Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly suggests the novel’s affinity to the adventure romance, a genre popular in the final decades of the nineteenth century. However, readers expecting a story of dangerous exploits in the remote lands (or seas) must be disappointed. As Andrea White showed in Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition, Conrad challenges the romance convention by contrasting a life full of adventures, which can only be glimpsed from afar, with the protagonist’s mundane existence. The aim of my paper is to take White’s argument further, and to present Conrad’s first novel not only as a challenge to the late-Victorian romance tradition but also to any narrative of (economic) success which accompanied colonial ventures. Conrad exposes both the myth of the adventurer, whose luck coupled with daring enables him to find a treasure, and the myth of a self-made man, whose perseverance and hard work in the colonies ensure his financial success.

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“[A] window into the city’s underlying fabric”: Bouncing at the edge of the global metropolis in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy

Author(s): Julia Nikiel / Language(s): English Issue: 11/2016

In the article, I examine the descriptions of the globalized urban landscape found in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy (Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), Zero History (2010)) and argue that in the socioeconomic reality Gibson projects the global metropolis functions as both a global facilitator and a global bouncer acting on the premise of selective inclusiveness. In the article, I first argue that in the Bigend Trilogy cities act as the enablers (or enforcers) of the global flows, and, what is often overlooked, are thus complicit in all the grounding (and often villainous) processes of globalization. Subsequently, I develop some critics’ ideas about Gibson’s presentation of the urban consequences of global exchange, and conclude that in the trilogy global metropolises are the frontline for the confrontation of globalization and local idiosyncrasies, and portend the advancing global homogenization. Finally, I compare Gibson’s analyses of the post-millennial metropolis and the 20th-century edge city. Just like once edge cities, I propose, the global metropolis prides itself as the new Territory of American civilization; the opportunity it offers, Gibson illustrates, is, however, equally illusory and reserved only for the privileged minority.

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“2 hours priceless talk” – on the Friendship between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

Author(s): Mirosława Kubasiewicz / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2018

In spite of all the differences between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, their biographers and critics underline a strong affinity between the two writers. What brought Mansfield and Woolf together was their passion for writing, their desire to become professional writers and to find a new voice that could genuinely express their female experience. Having a partner to discuss and share ideas on new ways of writing was of immense importance to each of them and had direct creative consequences for their work. In the light of existing evidence it comes as a surprise that opinions of Woolf and Mansfield as bitter rivals, and of Woolf as Mansfield’s enemy, still persist. The aim of this essay, then, is to present their relationship, with all its vicissitudes, as a story of a professional friendship, drawing on the findings of the Woolf and Mansfield criticism and on my own reading of their letters and works.

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“A Bag of Bones is not Justice”: Enforced Disappearance and Witnessing in Michael Ondaatje’s “Anil’s Ghost”

Author(s): Danijela Lj. Petković / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2017

Michael Ondaatje’s fourth novel, Anil’s Ghost, is almost universally deemed his “most politically ambivalent work” (Marinkova 2011:1) – and that’s putting it mildly. Since the publication of the novel in 2000, both Anil’s Ghost and its author have been accused of aestheticising terror, of an apolitical glance, an uneasy human rights discourse, and of evading the discussion of the actual causes of the Sri Lankan civil war, as summarised by Wendy Knepper (in Muhleisen and Matzke eds 2006: 45-6). While the aim of this paper is not necessarily to defend Ondaatje by refuting all of these claims individually, it nonetheless offers an interpretation of the novel, which implicitly problematises at least some of these assertions. The central argument is that the novel, while expressing unambiguous disillusionment with (violent) political struggle, is political in the sense that it unflinchingly explores state terrorism and one of its weapons, the enforced disappearance: even more so in its representation of the terror-defying potential of ethical witnessing (especially when contrasted with testifying). As the novel is explicitly set in real life “political time and historical moment” (Ondaatje 2001:2), these issues are contextualised within the history of state terror and resistance to it, on the one hand, and criticism of ethical witnessing on the other. In Anil’s Ghost, as in real life historical examples, moreover, both state terror and witnessing centre on torture, so the paper relies on insights by Avery Gordon, Elaine Scarry and Jenniffer Ballengee in particular to support the thesis that Ondaatje’s clinical and poetic focus on the bodies exposed to pain and death under conditions of state terror inevitably incites the empathetic and defiant response from the reader/viewer/the witness. It is here that the political potential of witnessing comes to the fore most forcefully.

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“A City of Resurrections” and “a City of Nightmares”: London, Female Monstrosity, and the Weird Sublime in Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan”

Author(s): Jacek Mydla / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

As a point of departure I present the psychoanalytic interpretive strategies used to address late-Victorian, or fin-de-siecle, Gothic fictions. These strategies see in the fictions expression of the numerous anxieties that troubled Victorian at the turn of the nineteenth century. Also, one of the second-wave Gothic’s representatives, Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” can be read as a fictional expression of those anxieties. The approach I propose in the main body of the article consists in seeing in Machen’s story a realisation of a new type of the sublime, called here the weird sublime. I show how Machen engages the ideas of the modern metropolis (London), the femme fatale, and of the occult to construct this type of sublimity. In particular, attention is drawn to the way in which the female element becomes fused, via the intercession of the pagan deity, with the city.

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“A STINKE IN THE CHAPELL”:READING SACRED SPACES IN THE MIDDLE ENGLISH SIR AMADACE AND THE ERLE OF TOLOUS

Author(s): Hülya Tafli Düzgün / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2017

Though medieval romances are often adversly criticized for their depiction of sacred spaces, nevertheless, these spaces may be viewed as going beyond merely places for prayer and meditation. The Middle English Sir Amadace and Erle of Tolous seem to carry their audience through such sacred spaces. These romances seem to enter into a dialogue with the complex dynamics of desire and devotion which are mapped onto the space of the church. In this context, this paper will focus on the renewal of understanding the sacred space in medieval narratives. The literary landscape (i.e. monasteries, convents, shrines and chapels) may not utterly constitute a secular equivalent to the canonically inspired order. Hence, the major concern of this paper is to explore how some medieval romances seem to be a product of the complex process of inhabiting and representing a space which is itself far from simple.

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“AZƏRBAYCAN YURD BİLGİSİ” DƏRGİSİNDƏ AZƏRBAYCANAVROPA ƏDƏBİ ƏLAQƏLƏRİ MƏSƏLƏSİ

Author(s): Altuntac Məmmədova / Language(s): Azerbaijani Issue: 1/2009

Bu çalışmada, Ahmet Caferoğlu’nun müdürlüğünü yaptığı “Azerbaycan Yurt Bilgisi” dergisindeki Azerbaycan-Avrupa edebi ilişkilerinden bahsedilmektedir. Araştırmada “Azerbaycan Yurt Bilgisi” dergisi bu bağlamda çeşitli yönleriyle incelenmiştir. Mesela, dergide Avrupa basınında yayınlanmış Azerbaycan Türkçesi, edebiyatı ve kültürü hakkında bilimsel çalışmalar ve Avrupalı bilim adamlarının bu konudaki makaleleri mercek altına alınmıştır. Ayrıca derginin “Tahlil ve Tenkitler” köşesindeki belirli çalışmalara dair görüşler ve eleştiri yazıları da incelenmeye çalışılmıştır.

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“El entenado” de Juan José Saer, mito, islas y límites

Author(s): María Elena Blay Chávez / Language(s): Spanish Issue: 10/2015

A cabin boy arrives with his crew to the territory of the Rio de la Plata. Saer was inspired by the story of Francisco del Puerto, a ship’s boy who travelled with the expedition of Juan Diaz de Solís that allegedly ended up eaten by a cannibalistic tribe of one of the islands of Parana’s delta. The hero is bound to learn from the new territory two times; but it is the search for identity, the narration to preserve memory, the construction of the general history, and the limits of one’s self that this article deals with.

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„Stockholm noir“: odvrátená tvár švédčiny. Jazyk ako teritoriálny a sociálny ukazovateľ v románe Jensa Lapidusa „Snabba cash“

Author(s): Katarína Motyková / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2020

The study deals with one of the most renowned works of contemporary Swedish crime fiction, the 2006 thriller Snabba cash (Easy Money) by Jens Lapidus, a part of the so-called Stockholm noir trilogy. By means of linguistic analysis of the novel, the article presents the work’s linguistic inventiveness, in which the language of the Stockholm suburbs is confronted with foreign expressions, the slang used by criminals and gangsters, as well as the language of higher social classes, i.e. the sociolect of the better-off neighborhoods of Stockholm. The characters’ discourse is a significant indicator of their belonging to a certain social stratum and manifests not only the social status but also the social exclusion.

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„К чонгури“ Николоза Бараташвили: ритм подлинника и трех переводов

Author(s): Yordan Lyutskanov / Language(s): Russian Issue: 20/2/2019

In this article I analyse semantic, syntactic, strophic and verse rhythm of a poem by Nikoloz Baratashvili (1817–1845), “To chonguri” (1837), and of three of its translations (to Russian – by Boris Pasternak and by Boris Brik, – and to Bulgarian – by Stoian Bakŭrdzhiev). As tool for the analysis of the original text, two literal translations are used (by Irine Modebadze, 2012, and mine, 2017). Analysis of the semantic and syntactic rhythm of the original leads to the following conclusion: while the text switches its focus from past to present to future, on the hind a coming-to-being and then an interiorisation of dialogue as an experience of the lyrical ‘I’ happens. Proceeding towards analysis of the strophic and verse rhythm, I put forth the question of Baratashvili’s poem’s hypothetic precedents: thematic (a poet addressing his musical instrument) as well as strophic (three tri-verse stanzas). I discuss commonalities and differences between “To chonguri” and the following forms: terzina (minding both hypothetic paths of its Georgian reception – via Russian and via Polish mediation), Spenserian stanza, some specimens of Mikhail Lermontov’s lyric and of Anacreontic lyric, Sapphic stanza, psalms, and of particular works in Georgian language from the 18th and early 19th c. displaying close similarity to “To chonguri” at least in their strophic structure. Considering both thematic and strophic levels allows indicating two works of poetry – hopefully known to me and to Baratashvili at the same time – as closest to Baratashvili’s: Horatius’ ode I, 32 and Psalm 136 (137 acc. to the Masoretic numbering). Considering the level of poetic line, “To chonguri” can be viewed as an exact structural equivalent of the form called, with regard to syllabotonic systems of versification, “logaeds” (heterometric ‘prose-poetic’ lines). Considering all three levels – thematic, strophic, and of poetic line (lines are structured as symmetric – 5/5 – decasyllables, combined on strophic level with pentadecasyllables, all shaped as dactyl-trochaic logaeds), – another piece of poetry appears closest to “To chonguri”: “Mastam [Intoxication] about [gown’s] rustle, to be pronounced for [during] the dance mukhaliph” by Giorgi Tumanishvili (1774–1837).

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حكاياتُ شوقي الشِّعريَّة في ضوء نظريَّة التَّلقِّي الأستاذ المشارك الدكتور: أسامة اختيار

Author(s): Ousama Ekhtiar / Language(s): Arabic Issue: 11/2016

This research tackles the poetic tales in Ahmed Shawki’s poetry in terms of reception theory. This theory comprises readers’ perception of literary texts. One of the objectives of this theoretical approach is to examine the horizon of expectation of the reader, either explicit or implied. We have studied the horizon of expectation of the explicit reader in the following points: Rhythmic expectation, Linguistic expectation, and Dramatic expectation. We have also got to know the aesthetic distance between the literary text in anecdotes and explicit reader. We have examined the hidden references to the implied reader in terms of the social and political reality in poetic tales. Then we have got to know the anecdotes in deep linguistic structure of the signs of the implicit reader capable of signing the literary text. We hope this study accomplish important results including the relationship between the reader and the text.

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