We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
This paper analyses the ways in which Romanian culture struggles to forge, at the level of historical and cultural discourse, an identity, a “personality”, and a specificity. It observes, within the process of forging its identity through a series of avatars, the discursive strategies through which specificity is revealed as an essential form of national uniqueness as well as the compensatory trends of identity fabrication. The paper also attempts to highlight the forms of historical and literary mystification through which, over time, Romanian culture responded to complexes related to its age, identity, belatedness, heredity, legitimacy, etc. Thus, the analysis reveals that, in essence, all the efforts, complexes and myths through which an identity was negotiated at the level of the histories of literature and Romanian historiographical texts betray, in fact, the same spectrum of the Identity-Otherness dialectic. Romanian culture, like other emerging cultures, was forced, first to survive and, later, in order to have a potential for prosperity, to define itself as a distinct entity by relating to the surrounding cultural reality, its growth and evolution taking place either under the sign of antagonism (i.e. a refusal of allogeneic import), or under that of synchronism (as permeabilization with regard to foreign influence), but, necessarily, as a reference to the Other. Moreover, the paper highlights, at the discursive level, the two main poles that have obsessively polarized the questions of descent and heredity within Romanian culture: its Roman and Dacian ancestries. The nuanced intentions underpinning the cultural need for international recognition by means of belonging as well as differentiation are discussed in the process.
More...
Images of Italy – a book by the Russian historian of art Pavel Muratov, published over a hundred years ago, is a legen dary work both known and unknown. Regarded from the very onset as a masterpiece mainly among the Russian-speaking public, Muratov’s book remained unfamiliar to the European reader for 60 years. Not much was altered by translations into the Polish and the most recent translation into Italian. Despite relatively slight popularity Images of Italy enjoys a high rank amongst humanist readers. The author follows the sources of admiration and the perennial cognitive and literary merit of this enthralling publication.
More...
The author of this wartime essay ponders on select aspects of complex relations between the categories of Imagination and Horror in modernistic Western culture. Upon the basis of Bruno Schulz’s visions of an encroaching annihilation of the entire pre-war European world and his wish to preserve this doomed world within artistic creativity, the essay – via images of the Angel of History (Walter Benjamin) and the Angel in Rilke’s Duino Elegies – thematizes the dialectic of the visible/invisible, Beauty and Horror, considers the essence of anchoring Horror in Imagination: annihilation, disintegration, suffering caused by loss, as well as posing a question about the possibility of imagining horror via vision (pro-vision), knowledge based on experience (pro-knowledge), and opportunities revealed via the immanent structure of language (pro-prognosis). At the same time the essay delves into the very nature of imagination conceived as one of the most powerful sources of the possibility of Evil in its relationship with Horror, i.a. via the register of the Imaginary (Jacques Lacan). The text ends with an attempt at defining certain essential personal dimensions of phenomenological relations between Beauty and Horror in wartime.
More...
J esienią wyruszam na Mani. Jadę gonić lato, ogrzać ciało, zanurzyć się w morzu i przede wszystkim zostawić za sobą kłopoty. Już pierwszego dnia, tuż przed zmierzchem, wchodzę do chłodnej i nieco wzburzonej wody, a potem jem kolację pod wysokimi sosnami blisko pensjonatu, gdzie mieszkam. Całe dnie spędzam w zatoce pod domem Fermora. Towarzyszy mi niewiele osób. Morze nadal jest błękitne jak latem, czyli takie, o jakim marzy, do którego wzdycha, niemal każdy przybysz z Północy. W taki czas trudno uwierzyć, że u Homera, w jego poematach, morze jest na ogół ciemne jak wino, groźne i zwodnicze. I wszystkie nieszczęścia spadają na Greków ze strony domeny Posejdona.
More...
Przez wiele lat w redagowanym przez Julitę Karkowską „Przeglądzie Polskim”, tygodniowym dodatku do nowojorskiego „Nowego Dziennika”, ukazywały się różne moje teksty, opatrzone nagłówkiem Pod innym kątem. Równolegle, w redagowanym przez Elżbietę Sawicką „Plusie-Minusie”, a także w „Rzeczy o Książkach”, dodatkach do „Rzeczpospolitej”, ukazywały się teksty z cyklu Szeroki margines. Jedne i drugie dotyczyły na ogół konkretnej książki lub wystawy, ale czasem były też relacjami z krótkich podróży albo z wędrówek „drogami jakubowymi” bądź wspomnieniami pośmiertnymi, miały zatem charakter bardziej autobiograficzny. W roku 2001, kiedy redaktorem naczelnym „Magazynu Literackiego” został Piotr Dobrołęcki, publikowałem tam regularnie dziennik, zatytułowany Muszla i kij, który miał podobną formułę, jak teraz Spod powieki: bieżące spostrzeżenia, przeplecione wrażeniami z lektur, wystaw i podróży, czasem wspomnieniami, niekiedy wyznaniami. Obecną próbę od poprzednich różni intensywna obecność ilustracji. Zbigniewowi Benedyktowiczowi i Redakcji „Kontekstów” serdecznie dziękuję za gościnę.
More...
Interview with Szpilka Kuba, by Próchniak Paweł and Monika Sznajderman.
More...
The topic of this article is Florence as seen by Giorgio Manganelli, one of the most interesting 20th century Italian men of letters, who devoted a large part of his works to subjective accounts of numerous journeys. Florence viewed by Manganelli – particularly described in sketches from the collection: La favola pitagorica. Luoghi italiani (2005; texts about Florence come from 1982–1988), but also in other works, i.a. those in Emigrazioni oniriche (2023), the most recent collection of Manganelli’s writings dedicated to art – appears to be subjected to the precise and flexible rules of fairy-tale geometry dictated by the evil ruler of the Baptistery. Fairy-tale quality and oneiric geometrical disputes seem to organise the space of a spectral and unobvious Florence as seen by Manganelli. The author explores the most prominent Florentine churches: Santa Maria Novella, Santa Maria del Fiore, San Lorenzo, Santa Croce, and Santo Spirito in Oltrarno, but also tours galleries and exhibitions, being particularly interested in Galleria degli Uffizi. Owing to the disclosure of a network of conflicts within its architectural-fairy tale layout Florence manages to get rid of the false labels of a “beautiful city”, a “masterpiece”, which the author found so discouraging. The text also takes into consideration the recently published collection of reminiscences by Manganiello’s daughter, Lietta (Giorgio Manganelli. Aspettando che l’Inferno cominci a funzionare, 2022).
More...
An introduction by the translator of Napoli, a book by Raffaele La Caprio, a Neapolitan by birth and one of the greatest experts on the history of the titular town. Joanna Ugniewska draws attention to the intriguing and multistrata image of Naples, extremely distant from standard narratives. In doing so, she demonstrates successful attempts at breaking with the dominating paradigm of perceiving Naples in descriptions and stories by foreigners.
More...
The presented text is composed of several essays from Napoli, a volume by Raffaele La Capria. The book in question – actually: a collection of sketches from 1986–1998 – is an extraordinary testimony of the accuracy of memory, and a brilliant presentation of the abundance of images of the phenomenon of the titular town from the viewpoint of anthropology, history, literature, and personal experience. The discussed collection is a veritable key to the author’s oeuvre, an image of a “beautiful day“, that “un peu de temps à l’état pur” (Proust) perpetuating the author’s mythical childhood and youth by the Bay of Naples.
More...
La Capria, novelist of the sea. Not the violent ocean, as in the case of Melville, Hemingway or Conrad, but the joyful sea of summer holidays, with its enchanting texture of waves and hues of the depths, joyful and carefree. The novel by La Capria is a song of praise, a tribute to Mediterranean radiance, liberty, and infatuation. But it is also a sad story about the vanishing old world, the change that must come in the manner of a thundercloud after a hot summer day. It is impossible to replay the moment of happiness or to recover old love, but on the majority of La Capria’s pages the sea simply sparkles with fish, and people laugh, swim, dive, and live in spite of everything. They remain attached to water, which comforts them.
More...
The beginning coincides with the end, life – with death, and the moment of creation collides with the apocalypse; all those phenomena blur their boundaries and cease to exist as distant poles. The presented text focuses on the role and contexts of wine – in particular the Italian Lacryma Christi (“Tears of Christ”) and Sangue Di Giuda (“Blood of Judas”) – that constitute the unobvious element of this process. By balancing between Old Testament and New Testament traditions as well as oscillating between Jewish and Christian heritage the author casts light on the consequences of intoxication, light-headedness, and indistinguishability.
More...
In this text Venice has two faces. The process of deconstructing (epistemological) metaphors of that which is visible and that which is concealed and comprises a foundation serves a self-reflective connotation of the town’s irreducible ambivalence. Characteristic features of Venetian texts include a syntagmatic arrangement of metonymic descriptions constantly confirming this duality. If fictions are means for expressing imagination with the aid of signs “usually” used to depict reality then Venice presents itself as extremely similar to fiction. This homology causes it to be an ideal place for deconstructing oppositions, norms, and hierarchies. Consequently, for the traveller, man of letters, and author of novels Venice turns out to be a place for pursuing not so much the ethnography of the Other, but rather the anthropology of the ego. Venice is the site of fiction.
More...
An anthropological attempt at deciphering a fragment of a Sicilian text. The author considers motifs of the labyrinth, frenzy, and the triskelion as those organising a discourse on Sicily
More...
An introduction to Sabbioneta, Cryptic City. The author - architect and academic teacher - wishes to disclose the unique character of the titular town by comparing it with the personality of Vespasiano Gonzaga, its designer and author. True, the image of Sabbioneta is complex and contradictory, unpredictable and elusive. At the same time, however, it is also palpably intertwined with the personality of Vespasiano Gonzaga so that while speaking about one we, in a certain sense, also speak about the other. After all, neither Sabbioneta nor its author can be mutually reduced. The architecture of Sabbioneta cannot be comprehended solely via its local, architectonic references. Its place is among the most important narratives of the time: texts by Machiavelli, Montaigne or Shakespeare.
More...
The invasion of Russian troops into Ukraine brought the country into the spotlight of both public opinion and academic circles. The fact that it did not fall within a few days of the massive Russian attack surprised the international community and forced it to ask a fundamental question: what is Ukraine? Of course, both the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity attracted worldwide attention. For the “West”, however, Ukraine was still an “unexpected nation” that seemed to exist only for those brief moments of presence in the global media. In fact, the entire region between Western Europe and Russia remains understudied by Western scholars and objectified in the media covering international affairs. However, the Russian attack in February 2022, which received wide political and media coverage, means that the importance of this region can no longer be ignored. The Kremlin's attempt to take over Ukraine has raised a broader and perhaps even more fundamental question, namely how to conceptualize issues related to the area in question.
More...
Postcoloniality should be regarded as a human condition, an existential situation, whereas decoloniality is an option, consciously chosen as a political, ethical, and epistemic positionality. Such an unconventional understanding of the terms “postcolonial” and “decolonial” allows to transcend the long-going rivalry and geopolitical divisions between the postcolonial studies and the decolonial option through the medium of the post-socialist and post-dependence optics and discourses. The post-socialist intervention launches a number of concepts necessary for the analysis of the post-socialist / postcolonial intersections. Among them, the imperial difference; the geopolitics and corpopolitics of knowledge, being, gender, and sensing; decolonial aesthesis; and the reversal of temporal directions in the post-Soviet context. Postcolonial discourse needs to be contextualized and eventually radicalized. It means a shift from the explanation of the other in the language understandable by the same to delinking from the rhetoric of modernity with its hidden colonial logic and tracing other genealogies of knowledge and activism and other ways of interpreting modernity / coloniality
More...
Sarajevo is the capital and largest city of Bosnia and Herzegovina (and of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina entity). As such, Sarajevo is the leading political, social and cultural centre, as well as historically famous for its religious diversity (Islam, Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Judaism) and therefore called “Jerusalem of the Europe”. The city has developed under the Ottoman Empire (in 15th century). Sarajevo is well known all over the world as the place of the assassination of the Archduke of Austria Franz Ferdinand that caused World War I. In 1984 it hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics.
More...
Albania is a country of rich cultural-historic heritage, home to many archaeological sites from various periods – Greek, Roman, Venetian, Albanian, etc. Apollonia Archaeological Park is one of Albania’s sites with a significant value; the ancient Illyrian city was the biggest and most important one amongst 30 cities in the whole ancient world, which were named in honor of the God Apollo, originally founded in the territories of Illyrians Taulantis about 620 BC. The monuments of this city have 1000 years of history. These monuments are scattered around the park, making Apollonia the largest archaeological park in Albania.
More...
Cappadochia is a historical region in Central Anatolia, between the Black Sea, the Upper Euphrates, the Taurus Mountains and the river Halys. It is one of the world’s top ten tourist destinations. This would have for sure not been the case hadn’t it also been for its cultural, anthropological and core human messaging. Nature and humanity do go hand in hand.
More...