George Orwell †
Die Pilgerfahrt eines Rebellen
several writers have contributed to this obituary article, among them Arthur Koestler, François Bondy, Julian Symons, V. S. Pritchett
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Die Pilgerfahrt eines Rebellen
several writers have contributed to this obituary article, among them Arthur Koestler, François Bondy, Julian Symons, V. S. Pritchett
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The Muslim of Bosnia and Herzegovina are well acquainted with the colossal value of the work of Ebu Hamjd Muhammad el-Ghazali. Many of his works and epistles have been translated into our language. Several arlicles, thematic of the life of this "outstanding personality of Islam" and his immeasurable contribution to the umma. It seems that not a single work ors tudy, dealing with the approach to the works of imam Ghazali -in the sense o[ noting down and evaluating the translations of Ghazali's works and epistles, has been written in our language.
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Saul Bellow, as a cerebral, analytical, and philosophical writer, unflinchingly describes the world and gives the readers tremendous thoughts about life and society. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 for his human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture. In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow shows the readers a death-burdened, rotting, spoiled, sullied, exasperating, sinful earth. This insane world is full of droll mortality and morbid entertainments. The coexistence of rationality and bestiality in man is vividly displayed in this novel. In his Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism, Professor Nie Zhenzhao formulated the theory of the Sphinx factor as composed of the human factor and the animal factor, and the combination of the two makes an integrated man. The animal factor in the novel is fully demonstrated in the black pickpocket’s bestiality, Mr. Sammler’s voyeurism, the Holocaust, killings and thefts. However, the human factor is not so salient as the animal factor in this novel. I argue that the tension between the two factors not only intensifies the conflicts but shows how the author perceives the world. Bellow shows a strong contempt for the world.
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On the 31st of July 2016, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play written by Jack Thorne in collaboration with J. K. Rowling and John Tiffany, was performed for the first time at the Palace Theatre in London. On the same day, the bookshops of Great Britain were literally invaded by the young wizard’s fans, whom were curious to know what happens next to their favorite heroes. Thereby, The Cursed Child is a play, not only to be performed, but also – and mostly – to be read. Whereas the Theater Studies, at least in France, consider the drama text mainly as a scenic performance element and thus, limits the drama text reading to text analysis, the reception of Thorne’s play allows to ask about the possibility of reading the drama text as a self-sufficient fictional text and invites us to investigate the specificities of this kind of reading. In order to do this, I have analyzed three hundred Cursed Child readers’ reviews, which are located on the babelio.com website, one of the biggest French social networks for book readers.
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The article examines the second novel of Eimear McBride (2016) The Lesser Bohemians from a viewpoint of New Materialisms, with a special emphasis on Karen Barad’s concept of “mattering” and the notion of performative matter. Apart from Barad, the article draws upon the works of N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, to suggest a posthumanist reading of McBride’s novel. The article examines embodiment in The Lesser Bohemians as both material and performative, arguing that its matter “authors” the text and the female body. The idiom of The Lesser Bohemians goes under scrutiny to trace analogies with modern science, especially quantum physics, which links McBride’s novel (2016) with Barad’s research.
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The article focuses on the posthuman authorship in the late short stories of Samuel Beckett in relation to the recent developments in new materialism and material ecology. Beckett’s works insist on the distinctive signature of their author, joining together his trademark minimalist style with his persistence in retelling the same narrative situations over and over again. At the same time, hardly ever does Beckett cease to deprive his narrators of their voices, forcing them to stammer, to struggle with their speech, to be betrayed by it, or to remain completely mute. His hardly readable later short stories seem to abandon any form of the sentient narrator in favour of treating language as self-sufficient matter his abstract spaces consist of, albeit in a manner different from that adopted by the concrete literature. These circumstances interestingly correspond to Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s notion of storied matter which emphasises the textual capacities of non-human actors, blurs human and non-human readerships/ authorships, and affirms the narratives embedded in the material, understood – after Jane Bennett – as the realm of vibrant entities. In my reading, I analyse how these concepts might allow us to rethink those “materialist works” of Beckett and the possible non-human agencies they are entangled in.
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The possibility of glossing specific aspects of the history of Don Quixote from the source from which Cervantes’s inspiration could spring, opens new boundaries in the enjoyment and use of the masterpiece of Spanish Literature. It’s not just only an alternative way of discovering and endorsing deep nuances of the author that critics have intuited or discovered in other ways, and that with this supplementary aid gain greater strength; it also implies a better understanding of the difficulty that Cervantes himself revealed in the prologue of his second installment with the tales of madmen and a technical explanation of how he managed to reach the height of a masterpiece, so rich and full of universal ideas, reasons and contents.
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In this article - based on the analysis of José María Merino’s micro stories included in Palabras en la Nieve. Un filandón (2007) - we will propose an analysis of the confidence that readers must give to the contents of the prologue to the volume, written by an apocryphal author who exalts the experience of long and traditional evenings of stories around the fireplace, typical of the rural tradition. Can the inheritance of the filandón, a ritual of stories narrated over many sessions, be compatible with the features of the mini-fiction? Is there a link between certain foundational elements of ultra-brief fiction - polysemy, conciseness, language compression, ellipsis and concentration - and the prolonged experiences of narration and listening to which the apocryphal creature refers in his prologue? A study of Merino’s texts is proposed here, to analyze if the translation to the micro-story’s concise writing of those experiences of the “narrative word” based on prolonged narrativity is feasible.
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The Emperor's New Clothes (1837) by Hans Christian Andersen is a classic of children's literature, but also holds an emblematic position in the sphere of world literature and culture in general – it is one of the most translated stories/fairy tales, published in numerous languages all around the world and transposed into various media, but it is also a story with a rich semantic potential which allows for diverse and stratified interpretations. The focus of this paper is the comparative analysis of the famous Andersen story, and the eponymous feature film by the Croatian and Yugoslav director Ante Babaja, filmed in 1961. The screenplay was written by Božidar Violić, who adapted Andersen's story for film. The Emperor's New Clothes is the first feature film by this renowned director, and also the first Croatian feature film in colour. The unusual adaptation by Babaja is interesting on several levels and for several reasons – both strictly poetic reasons (the approach is atypical, where the standard scenography is absent, and white surfaces take its place along with the so-called high-key film photography, done by Oktavijan Miletić), and reasons of a wider scope, related to reception. Babaja's film enables different readings than the ones based on Andersen's template by intervening into the motif and narrative dimensions of the original story, but also through transgressions at the stylistic level (intermedial contact with stage acting), and, especially, the socio-political context in which the film originated (socialist Yugoslavia). More precisely, Babaja's The Emperor's New Clothes reinterprets Andersen's story by adding to it a concrete socio-political allegory of (not only) former Yugoslavia, while at the same time not discarding the central space of Andersen's story – the relation between collective conventions and individual consciousness, cowardice and courage, submission and freedom, as the archetypical spaces of human communities.
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This article takes a look at the available teaching resources of Neo-Latin culture and literature. The main focus is the Neo-Latin literature, i.e., the textbooks in circulation that are used in classrooms. Other resources for the teaching of Neo-Latin literature have likewise been taken into consideration. The most essential and the most recent ones of these resources has been described and compared in the article. As Neo-Latinity was a phenomenon that at least linguistically united Europe from the 14th century to the beginning of the 19th century, texts were composed and published in Latin also in the former capital of Livonia – Riga. The poet and physician Basilius Plinius, which can be regarded as one of the Riga humanists, produced several works of panegyric and didactic poetry. The most well-known of these works – “Encomium Rigae” (1595) – has been used as a source in the creation of a teaching material of Neo-Latin literature. Due to the virtual obscurity, inaccessibility and lack of research dedicated to the texts by Riga humanists, this particular case can be deemed an extravagant exception. Thus, the article considers this case – the teaching material produced by the German teacher Michael Feller – and seeks to analyse how the text by Plinius has been employed as a means for teaching Neo-Latin culture and literature.
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The present study aims to highlight some themes, directions and ethical aspects revealed by Andersen’s fairy tales, the conception of the world, our existence and its meaning. Andersen is a romantic who sees childhood as a pure, but fleeting and sometimes tragic age. Some critics spoke of metaphysical themes and his desire to draw the ideal of humanity but they also offer us a pretext for analysis and meditation.
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The significance of Parvīn E’tesāmī’s poetic garden as a complex allegory, constructed out of several smaller metaphors, has received little detailed treatment. The present study proposes to explore this garden as an instance of classical Persian allegorical gardens that generally have didactic functions. As this study will argue, Parvīn’s allegorical garden is most often rendered into a number of debates between conflicting characters selected from a vast array of entities and endowed with particular ‘moral’ qualities interacting without being subordinated to the authorial voice of the poet. The metaphorical pair of lovers, ‘the rose and the nightingale,’ with a range of earthly and divine meaning, is at the heart of this ‘garden clash’ motif, confronting other figures of this garden, notably the thorn, water (both as raining cloud and as stream), the ant and the moon. Though the garden represented through these debates can be seen to function within a religious framework, it does not lead to spiritual quietism and suppression of human efforts.
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Postmodernism, as conceived by literary criticism, has a particular taste for revisions, reconfigurations or reconsiderations of works belonging to a past that continues to haunt us, despite the many layers of interpretation that now mystify it. In a 2016 novel adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the much-acclaimed Canadian writer Margaret Atwood reconstructs the original plot of the play, cleverly exploiting its semantic potential for today’s audiences. While preserving some of the elements and patterns in Shakespeare’s text, the novelist introduces a series of displacements and changes at various levels. One of the most intriguing aspects of Atwood’s novel is that it is entitled Hag-Seed (a derogatory term used by Prospero to address Caliban in Shakespeare’s play), while there is no clearly identifiable Caliban in it. The present paper explores this puzzle, by pondering on Atwood’s narrative techniques of emphasizing and developing certain discreet but unsettling meanings whose seeds are to be traced in Shakespeare’s play.
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Precarity and Healing: On the Role of Grief in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998). Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) is a fictional account of the undocumented Parsley massacre of 1937, when black Haitian migrant workers were killed by Rafael Trujillo’s government in the Dominican Republic. The paper places the novel in the African diasporic tradition of writing about the traumatic past, with the Parsley massacre being one such traumatic event of Haitian diasporic writing. The paper highlights the critical problem that unlike most post-colonial fiction, this Haitian diasporic story about gaining voice and agency fails to provide a satisfactory therapeutic valence or an explanation for individual suffering. The paper proposes an application of Judith Butler’s concept of precarity in order to reconsider the problem of healing the wounds of the past in Danticat’s novel. For Butler, social relationality makes subjects vulnerable within the social structure they inhabit, but this vulnerability may also carry a potentiality for the experience of social vulnerability to be shared in makeshift acts of solidarity. The paper claims that precarity does have a limited potential in the novel, which can be detected through the analysis of the water imagery. Amabelle Désir, the protagonist, is already living a precarious life before the Parsley massacre, but the brutality to which she is subjected isolates her socially even more afterwards. She is unable to bear her testimony, living in the past, mourning her lost lover. The representation of precarity in the novel’s water imagery indicates that making contact with her former employer in 1961 brings a momentary sense of connection and community that enables her to commit suicide eventually. This element of truncated healing can be read as the limited potential of precarity available in the Haitian diasporic context.
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The subject of study is the components of the poetics of a literary fairy tale, which is based on the folkloreand mythological tradition transformed through the creative consciousness of a Swedish writer Sven Nordqvist. The objectof the research is the children’s series about an elderly farmer Pettson and his cat Findus. The research novelty andthe relevance of the topic are, on the one hand, in the referral to the works that previously have not received suffi cientattention from researchers, and on the other hand – in the fact that Nurdqvist is a representative of Swedish children’sliterature and thereby continues the tradition laid down by Selma Lagerlöf and Astrid Lindgren. The study was carriedout using the genetic historical, biographical, and intertextual methods. As a result of the study, the author of the articleestablishes that Nurdqvist borrows the image of a magic assistant from fairy tales, endows it with the features of themythological trickster and subjects it to anthropomorphization. Such a transformation pursues not only an entertaining,but also a didactic goal: taking up all the owner’s free time, a magic cat helps him cope with loneliness.
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The Other, whose presence is essential for the construction of the Self, has almost always been depicted peculiarly in the literary texts of the East and the West. The investigation of Jalal al-Din Rumi’s parables and Bernard Pomerance’s play, albeit the genres, time, place, and cultures are totally different—Rumi’s parables are classical Persian poems and Pomerance’s work is a modern American play—well indicates how the Other is mistakenly delineated and how the Colonizer’s attempt at making the Other “almost the same, but not quite”—as Bhabha states—fails and leads to the unsophisticated fabrication of the Other. Self is well understood in relation to the understanding of the Other. In this research, it is shown how both the Other and the Colonizer fail when there is no thorough mutual understanding.
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