A HISTORICAL VIEW ON THE EXPORT OF AMERICAN LAWS

Author(s): Yuan Renhui / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2013

In addition to its political clout, economic strength, military reach, cultural pervasiveness, and scientific and technological advancement, American Law Export is also an important component of what constitutes America as a superpower.American Law Export (ALE) can be defined as all the systematic and/or non-systematic arrangements made and actions conducted by governmental and non-governmental American legal bodies to protect or to maximize US legal subjects’ benefits abroad in a predictable way by consciously helping or forcing the target subjects to know, to learn, to accept, to transplant, and to import from the US ideas, systems, practices, education, research, and culture in the field of law. In summary, ALE is the expansion or globalization of American law.

A középige jelentőségéről Platón Euthüphrón című dialógusában

Author(s): Miklós Nyírő / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2021

In the Euthyphro, which is a dialogue about the ’holy’, the middle voice (mesotes) plays an exceptionally emphatic role in Plato’s language usage, although this voice has been identifi ed by the Greek grammarians only in the 2nd century BC. This fact is explained in the study by pointing to the thematic relevance of the meaning conveyed by the middle voice, arguing that this diathesis expresses the original disposition of the psyche, which is prior to any activity and passivity.

A LATE VICTORIAN INTERFERENCE OF GENRES: AESTHETICISM RESHAPING THE FAUST MYTH IN THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

Author(s): Patricia Denisa Dita / Language(s): English Issue: 14/2019

The theoretician of Aestheticism in English literature, Walter Pater, materializes the principles and concepts of Aestheticism in his novel Marius the Epicurean. His student and follower Oscar Wilde expresses the ideas of Aestheticism in his own novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which also revives and rewrites the myth of Faust with regard to the character representation strategies in the work. The present study, on comparative grounds of analysis, attempts to reveal the ways in which Wilde’s novel unites in one fictional discourse the principles of an artistic theory with those of a literary myth in order to build a distinct world vision and provide a point of view reified by both an aesthetic and a mythic context.

A Lifetime Memory Quest: Identity, Places and Characters in John McGahern's Memoir

Author(s): Dana Radler / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

Childhood and youth emerge and re-emerge, time and again, as durable concerns and difficult intervals to reach adulthood, as John McGahern describes his experience in novels and short stories. In Memoir (2005), the writer adopts a more detached vision than in his earlier writings, yet he does not admit it to be a typical autobiography. How are conflicts shaped and reconverted by the passage of time? Where does imagination start and where do facts determine the narrative? Is Memoir a piece of fiction, a well-documented and rather neutrally-written volume, or something in between? This article aims at exploring the way in which the narrator’s identity is infused with difficult, tormenting memories of a distant past, while the writer undergoes a difficult process. To understand the process, the analysis relies on major cultural concepts: collective memory (Halbwachs), communicative memory (Assmann), remembering as remediation (Erll) and memory seen as migration (Glynn and Kleist).

A minor apocalypse? The apocalyptic in Charles Williams’s Shadows of Ecstasy

Author(s): Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk / Language(s): English Issue: 11/2015

The study examines Shadows of Ecstasy (1933), the earliest novel of Charles Williams (1886-1945)—British poet, playwright, theological writer, literary critic, bibliographer, and author of seven works of fiction—in the context of the apocalyptic as discussed by Barry Brummett (1991), Douglas Robinson (1998), and other scholars. Based on the characteristics presented by Brummet, Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk traces apocalyptic motifs in the novel, drawing attention to both its socio-political and religious/spiritual aspects. Kowalczyk comes to the conclusion that despite some evident allusions to the biblical apocalyptic, Williams’s text is more ambiguous than its biblical hypotext in terms of its ideological/moral significance, raising a number of open-ended questions. This, in turn, extends its apocalyptic “revelation” onto the reader, who is invited to rethink her/his perception of Western culture/civilization, making room for some spiritual/metaphysical elements in the materialistic outlook predominant in the 20th century.

A Mogul India költészetéből: Bihárí párversei

Author(s): Imre Bangha / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 2/2018

A NIKKEI TRANSLATION OF TANIZAKI’S MAKIOKA SISTERS

Author(s): Philippe Humblé / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 11/2015

This article focuses on five different translations of Junichiro Tanizaki’s classic The Makioka Sisters (Sasame Yuki): in English, Dutch, French, German and Brazilian Portuguese. These five translations were done by highly skilled and experienced translators, yet are all very different. I am particularly interested in the Brazilian translation, because it has peculiarities which indicate that specific characteristics of the translator shape the features of a translation. Indeed, in the Brazilian translation language is rather more formal than in the other translations researched. Also there are many more footnotes and some of the passages were maintained in Japanese. All these features make this translation seem very different from the others under scrutiny. Since one of the characteristics of the Brazilian translation is that it was made solely by Japanese descendants, one wonders if there is a causal relationship between the two. The main difference between the different translators is that all of the four Brazilian translators, being of Japanese descent, live in a country where there is a numerous Japanese community with still strong ties to the ‘motherland’ and its culture.

A norvég nemzeti karakterológia Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson és Henrik Ibsen magyar befogadástörténetében

Author(s): Veronka Örsike Asztalos / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 04/2021

Today, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s name does not seem as familiar to Hungarian readers as Henrik Ibsen’s, although Bjørnson was the first of them to be known in Hungary and his wide popularity can be traced in the Hungarian press from the second half of the 19th century. Mainly due to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s prosecutions in the international press against Hungary’s minority policy in 1907 (known as the “Björnson-affair”), he unexpectedly falls out from the Hungarian canon. However, Henrik Ibsen’s plays are essential pieces, his fame is uninterrupted to this day. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the contextual factors and limitations which determine the Hungarian reception of these Norwegian authors, and also to interpret what kind of stereotypes related to national characterology organize the Hungarian reception of Bjørnson and Ibsen.

A Pharsalia Trója-jelenetének forrásairól és értelmezéséről

Author(s): Gergő Gellérfi / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2013

A Photomontage of Memory: The Role of the Visual in Angharad Price’s “The Life of Rebecca Jones”

Author(s): Aleksander Bednarski / Language(s): English Issue: 11/2018

The article examines the visual aspect of the novel The Life of Rebecca Jones by the contemporary Welsh writer Angharad Price. The book is an imaginary autobiography of the eponymous Rebecca Jones, Price’s distant relative, who died of diphtheria in 1916, aged 11. Apart from Rebecca’s family photographs reproduced in the text, ekphrastic descriptions of a photograph, a painting (by a blind artist) and the video recording of a television programme, the novel problematizes the dichotomy between seeing and blindness. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how these elements in Price’s novel contribute to the production of meaning by generating tension between two different modes of discourse: verbal and visual. Price’s novel is read as an ‘imagetext’ which, by adopting photographic/visual features, creates an illusion of ‘photographic’ verisimilitude (described as a trompe-l’œil effect). This mechanism is interpreted as the manifestation of the narrator’s struggle to assert her authority as a perceiving subject and the text itself as a site where the memory of place and family history can be preserved.

A POETIC MIRROR REFLECTING 20th CENTURY MULTI-CULTURAL SALONIKA

Author(s): Renée Levine Melammed / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2018

Bouena Sarfatty was born in Salonika in 1916 to a Sephardi family. After World War II, she memorialized her birthplace by composing hundreds of Ladino verses (coplas) about Jewish life in the twentieth century. Her phenomenal memory and personal insights provide a poetic mirror that reflects the multi-cultural environment which she experienced personally. The poems appearing below reflect her thoughts about the process of modernization, whether of language, education, dress or mentalité. European influences created a cosmopolitan city that clearly affected Jewish life. The changes that transpired following the devastating fire of 1917 often harmed the development of this community that had been so vibrant and essential for centuries. Be that as it may, the poems written by this native Salonikan present a unique glimpse into the mindset and experiences of multilingual Jews attempting to adapt to the twentieth century and life in a multi-cultural city.

A Poetics of the Holocaust? Three Exemplary Poets

Author(s): Efraim Sicher / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2020

Whether or not we understand the Holocaust to be unique or following a series of catastrophes in Jewish history, there is no doubt that the writing that came out of those traumatic events is worth examining both as testimony and as literature. This article looks again at Holocaust poetry, this time circumventing Adorno’s much-cited and often misquoted dictum on poetry after Auschwitz. The essay challenges the binary of either “Holocaust poetry is barbaric and impossible” or “art is uplifting and unaffected by the Holocaust.” I analyse three individual cases of Holocaust poetry as a means of both survival and testimony during the Holocaust – not retrospectively or seen by poets who were not there. Aesthetic and ethical issues are very much part of a writing in extremis which is conscious of the challenge well before Adorno and critical theory. In a comparison of Celan, Sutzkever, and Miłosz we can see their desperate attempt to write a poetry that meets the challenge of the historical moment, for all the differences between them in their cultural backgrounds, language traditions, and literary influences. As I argue, although scholars and critics have read these poets separately, they should be studied as part of the phenomenon of grappling with an unprecedented horror which they could not possibly at the time understand in all its historical dimension and outcome. We should no longer ignore their sources and antecedents in trying to gauge what they did with them in forging a “Holocaust poetics” that would convey something of the inadequacy of language and the failure of the imagination in representing the unspeakable, which they personally experienced on a day to day basis. By not reading “after Adorno” we can arrive at a more nuanced discussion of whether there is a Holocaust poetics.

A representação trágica da luta armada em Palavras cruzadas de Guiomar de Grammont

Author(s): Zuzana Burianová / Language(s): Portuguese Issue: 2/2020

This paper deals with the role of the tragic in the novel Palavras cruzadas (2015) by the Brazilian writer and historian Guiomar de Grammont. The goal is to analyse how Grammont’s novel portrays the Araguaia Guerrilla War, as well as the whole armed struggle against the military dictatorship in Brazil. Starting from the argument that the tragic, though no longer associated only with dramatic representation, remains present in modern literature, the paper first analyses the inspiration Grammont’s novel draws from ancient tragedy. The tragic dimension of the narrative is then discussed in relation to the debate over the significance of the armed resistance and to the issue of forced disappearances during the Brazilian dictatorship. Though criticized for presenting a conciliatory view of the dictatorial past, the novel expresses a clear denunciation of the military regime. However, at the same time it points to the contradictions of the armed struggle, as it unveils the tragic trajectory of a couple of young militants who participated in the Araguaia Guerrilla War. Grammont‘s representation of the armed struggle is based mainly on the experiences of the families of the victims of political repression. It demonstrates that they must deal not only with a traumatic loss, but also with a prolonged silence about the past on the part of the Brazilian authorities. The novel seeks, through its protagonist who tries to resist this silence, a way to overcome the trauma, if only on a personal level.

A RESCRIE FOLCLORUL. BASMELE ROMÂNE LUI LAZĂR ȘĂINEANU CA PRIMA SINTEZĂ A REPERTORIULUI INTERNAȚIONAL DE BASME POPULARE

Author(s): Nicola Perencin / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1 (15)/2022

Published in 1895, Lazăr Șăineanu’s Romanian Fairy Tales: A Comparative Study made a significant number of European folk tales available in a single volume for the first time. Some 500 Romanian fairy tales and their international variants are presented in condensed form, classified after Hahn’s typology. This encyclopaedic synthesis is also made searchable by keywords, thanks to an innovative “folkloric index”, which anticipates Thompson’s more extensive and advanced Motif-Index. Focusing on unique aspects of Șăineanu’s work, which include a wide use of summaries as a form of rewriting, the article reassesses the author’s significance to international folklore studies.

A RHETORICAL APPROACH TO NARRATIVE UNRELIABILITY IN NEVER LET ME GO

Author(s): Corina Alexandrina Lirca / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issue of unreliability in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro deploying the rhetorical approach to narratives - which conceives of narratives as a purposive communicative act - and a range of signifiers and signifieds as defined by Wayne C. Booth, James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. By contrasting two possible readings of this book, i.e. its common reading as a dystopian novel vs the author’s recommendation of reading it as an allegorical novel, one has the possibility to nuance the issue of reliability.

A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma: Deception, Truth and Modernism

Author(s): Roland Boer / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

This article deals with the widespread assumption that a significant collection of texts known as the Bible is inherently ‘deceptive’. That is, the Bible does not – it is assumed – say what was ‘really’ going on in the ancient world. The truth, therefore, must be found by going behind or beneath the text (the spatial metaphors should be noted). Here the real story may found, through archaeology or reading the text against itself. This approach may be described as a modernist ‘depth model’, in which the surface attempts to conceal the truth, while the truth itself must be found by going around the surface text. This remains a dominant approach in biblical criticism. However, it cannot be understood without earlier and indeed, in some quarters, current assumptions concerning the realist nature of the text. In this case, the text reflects in a reasonably trustworthy fashion the context of the text, if not the ideological assumptions and positions of the putative authors. Modernist ‘depth models’ may then be seen as attempts to respond to realist assumptions. A third moment is what could be called postmodern: in this case, the distance between surface and depth is challenged, so that the various possibilities become equal contestants for the dominant position. This entails a shift away from the assumption of a singular truth of the text, characteristic of both realist and modernist assumptions, to the understanding of multiple truth claims – not as relative but as absolutes that permit other absolutes. The argument emphasises that these approaches should be seen as dialectically related to one another, rather that mutually exclusive approaches.

A Rim with a View: Modernist Studies and the Pacific Rim

Author(s): Stephen Yao / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2010

This essay outlines an agenda for the study of modernist cultural production that focuses on the dynamics of movement and transformation within the context of a particular geographical formation, namely the ‘Pacific Rim.’ In such an approach, I argue, the rigors and opportunities of an expressly transnational comparative methodology take center stage. The conscientious development of a ‘view from the Rim’ entails more than simply acknowledging the fact of geography. Rather, it involves a dedicated attention to tracing the manifold historical and material relations among groups within the area and beyond along a number of different vectors, as well as attending to how these relations at once occasion and condition cultural production. For literary concerns in particular, such vectors include, but are by no means limited to, the particularities of language and various dimensions of power such as asymmetrical economic arrangements underwritten by military and political domination expressed through a variety of channels. In advancing this set of concerns, I also suggest that Modernist Studies in general can enrich its approach to both the decidedly international cultural scope and subsequent global spread of Modernism by entering into an engagement not only with Area Studies, but also with more recently emergent (as well as non-historically defined) fields such as Ethnic Studies.

A Scholar Poet from the Neighbouring Land: Uddaṇḍa Śāstrin’s Perceptions of Kerala

Author(s): Rajendran Chettiarthodi / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

The present paper proposes to investigate the perceptions of Kerala in the works of Uddaṇḍa Śāstrin, a remarkable scholar, who came in search of patronage to the court of Mānavikrama, the Zamorin of Calicut of the 15th century A.D, from Lāṭapura, a famous Brahmin centre in Toṇḍamaṇḍala, in Chengalpattu, in the present Tamil Nadu. Often stereotyped as a haughty outsider looking down upon his contemporaries with contempt, Uddaṇḍa was actually a sharp-witted scholar, who readily appreciated the scholarship of his adopted land, even while mincing no words when he encountered mediocrity. His message poem Kokilasandeśa and his play Mallikāmāruta, as well as many stray verses still current in Kerala, apart from being a veritable treasure of information as far as medieval Kerala is concerned, are of great cultural significance as they register the perceptions of a gifted scholar poet from the neighbouring land. Unfortunately, in popular imagination, he is projected as a haughty outsider outsmarting indigenous scholarship, but ultimately defeated by a native prodigy in the form of Kākkaśśeri Bhaṭṭatiri. This paper aims at retrieving Uddaṇḍa’s valuable and often unbiased insights of Kerala, which are often overlooked in popular perceptions of him. As a sensitive author who recorded his impressions on crossing the geographical boundaries of his native land to reach Kerala, his firsthand accounts of great cities, centres of learning, famous temples, food habits and festivals, such as Ōṇaṃ of Kerala, that can be found in his works are really worth probing.

A skald in royal service – the case Þórarinn loftunga. Part 2: Poetics and ideology of Tøgdrápa

Author(s): Jakub Morawiec / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

The present study is focused on Tøgdrápa (Journey drápa), a poem Þórarinn devoted to Knútr’s expedition to Norway in 1028. A distinguished feature of Tøgdrápa is its metre – tøglag (journey metre). It differs from dróttkvætt by having four syllables (instead of six) in each line. Presumably, referring to the title of the poem, the metre was to be used in accounts on war expeditions, optionally other travels of the king. Tøglag seems to be especially bound to Knútr’s court. Close metrical analysis of the poem as well as comparison with Sigvatr Þórðarson’s Knútsdrápa suggests that, contrary to previous assumptions, it is very likely that neither of the poets was an inventor of tøglag. Rather both, as talented and already distinguished skalds, did not hesitate to take another artistic challenge, most likely put up by somebody else. It seems reasonable to assume that such a challenge was born at Knútr’s court, probably as a side effect of the king’s success in Norway in 1028.

A Sociosemiotic Analysis of Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!

Author(s): Timothy J. Viator / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

This essay presents a sociosemiotic analysis of My Children! My Africa! (1989) by Athol Fugard. By considering the characters’ views about self, community, education, and time, it points to the Fugard’s anxious attempt to offer liberalism as the solution to apartheid in South Africa instead of oppositional politics, especially blacks’ calls for activism and communalism. Sociosemiotics is suitable to plays overtly political; it holds that political writers are troubled by political changes that do not correspond to a firmly held ideology—a tension between what a playwright believes is absolute and what s/he senses and perhaps fears is happening. Keys to the analysis are contemporary texts, including essays from leading Black writers and journalists and from studies and essays from attendees of a 1986 conference on liberal solutions to the unrest in South Africa.