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Between the mid-1940s and the late 1950s the centralization and ideologization of culture marginalized the schlager-song practice from pre-socialist times. Performing and listening to this musical genre was recognized by the authorities as a relic of the bourgeois past and was at the same time regarded as non-aesthetic by the professional composers. In the 1960s the generational change and the penetration of the new modern Western popular culture in Bulgaria altered the focus of the institutions of the regime. The old-fashioned pre-war schlager lost its political incorrectness to a significant extent and gradually became a convenient instrument in the hands of the institutions thus allowing to cover the attention of the elderly generations.
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The aim of the article is to analyse Tim Burton’s film Alice in Wonderland (2010) as exploiting Joseph Campbell’s model of the hero’s journey. Burton, as well as the screenwriter, Linda Wolvertoon, treated the original works by Lewis Carroll (1865, 1871) only as a starting point to present their own vision. In the presented considerations, the authors propose the interpretation of the film incarnation of Alice as a mythical heroine who must gain self-awareness and undergo an internal metamorphosis – a transgression from a lost girl into a brave warrior for her own autonomy.
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The main goal of the article is to describe and analyse the artistic practice of the American artist Sharon Lockhart as well as her works created with the participation of children and young adults. The materials studied herein are the documentation of her activities, interviews, and texts accompanying exhibitions. A particular attention is paid to the projects made in Poland, especially those created with Milena, a teenage girl from a poor area of Łódź, and her friends from the Youth Sociotherapy Centre in Rudzienko. In the article, the artist’s statements are confronted with a formal analysis of her projects. With the use of such secondary sources as cultural, anthropological, art, and childhood studies literature, Lockhart’s artworks are described and interpreted in the context of creating the child’s image, of the young girls’ participation in art projects, and of the author’s method of work itself, which she calls ‘etnographic.’ The precise and interdisciplinary research shows superficiality of this pedagogical and emancipatory method, including using the girls to evoke a specific mood in the audience. From the perspective of art studies, Lockhart’s works, however, may be interpreted as an aesthetic story about a meeting with and an attempt to get to know the Other.
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This paper deals with the process in which a collection of oral legends found on the terrain of the Belica locality was created. Its objective is to get an insight into the terrain which would include a geographical and cultural aspect as well as up-to-date records of the transmissions. This position creates an explanatory start- ing point for the need to repeat and expand the research in a way in which different theoretical and methodological assumptions can be appreciated. The presentation of the collection relates to the pre-terrain, terrain and post-terrain stages, and it focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of the research procedures that have been ap- plied so far. The material collected will be classified and described in line with the classifications adopted in folkloristics. Moreover, an attempt will be made to point out the possibilities for some future research, not only of this terrain, but also of legends in general. The fluidity of the borders of genres and the difficulties arising from the attempts at definition and classification are the issues that even impose a need for a contemporary researcher to look for different new approaches. This paper indicates the selected aspects of study that open up in a dialogue with the existing paradigms in contemporary humanistic sciences. Accordingly, the research tends to observe the oral legends originating in the Belica terrain through the lens of the theories of nar- ratology and imagology with the aim to reveal the material in a different spectrum of concepts that could affirm the existing scientific assumptions or possibly point to the new approaches in understanding this folklore genre.
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В этой работе мы представим терминологическое дистинктивное значение понятия „мифологика”, учрежденного французским антропологом Клодом Леви-Строссом. Понятие „мифологика” будет интерпретироваться в контексте странствующих мифологических мотивов, присутствующих в коллективном бессознательном (брошенный ребенок, герой-подкидыш, герой совершающий инцест, миф о рождении героя, культурный герой). Надстройка „героика” относится к героям сербской героической народной поэзии и мифологическим моделям, с которыми они были объединены. Следовательно, методом работы является сравнительный мифоанализ древной поэзии. Предметом будут модели и вариации, общие для античной, средневековой и сербской народной поэзии. Цель работы – показать, как эти мотивы развиваются с точки зрения сербского устного творчества. Тема относится к мотиву „брошенного ребенка”, а в связи с двумя песнями о Находе Симеуне, которые были собраны Вуком Стефановичем Караджичем.
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Nel presente saggio osserviamo Italia come brand. Uno dei primi con- cetti che viene in mente quando si tratta dell’Italia è dolce vita caratterizzato dalla leggerezza della vita, dalla spensieratezza e dal godersi il momento. Abbiamo deciso di analizzare in quale modo l’Italia venga rappresentata nel manuale Nuovo Magari perché esso si distingue dalla maggioranza dei manuali di lingua italiana soprat- tutto per un approccio critico. Nuovo magari, per i livelli C1 e C2, tende a offrire un’immagine imparziale dell’Italia, la quale, come tutti i paesi, attraversa periodi di problemi relativi alla società, e fa scoprire anche aspetti non così positivi o famosi del bel paese, volgendo l’attenzione a diversi realistici e davvero interessanti fenomeni culturali, storici, sociali e linguistici.
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The proposed article aims to analyze the genesis and functions of the image of the sea in the emerging film language of early Greek cinema in the context of building the modern Greek national identity and reproducing national memory. The focus is on the first period from the birth of film art in Greece from the early 20th century to the mid-1930s, when many Greek filmmakers left the country due to the imposition of the Metaxas regime with a coup in 1936. The outbreak of the Second World War and the German occupation (1941–1944) stifled the successful aspirations of early Greek cinema, and turbulent political events would not allow it to enter its mature period until the 1950s.
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In 2020, Bulgarian mountaineering celebrates 125 years since its inception. It began on August 27, 1895 with the first mass ascent of Cherni Vrah (2290 m), the peak of Vitosha Mountain, located near the capital of Bulgaria – Sofia. This was initiated by two of the most popular Bulgarian writers and public figures in that era – Aleko Konstantinov and Ivan Vazov. Thus, only three decades after the establishment of the Alpine Club in London (1865), which marked the beginning of modern mountaineering, and only 17 years after the liberation of Bulgaria from Ottoman rule (1878), Bulgarians adopted a modern European idea, which at that time still inspired the continent. For various reasons, the mountaineering association, established in 1895 ceased to exist, but mountain tourism continued to develop as a free initiative. In 1899 the First Bulgarian Tourist Association „Aleko Konstantinov“ was founded in Sofia, similar companies appeared in other cities of the country and thus a permanent organization was created under the name Bulgarian Tourist Association (BTA). Although the first companies were called „tourist“, the main place in their activities was occupied by classical mountaineering.Apart from organized excursions in the mountains, BTA developed active cultural and educational activities for the promotion of mountaineering and tourism, for a healthy lifestyle and for the protection of Bulgarian nature. To this end, in 1902 the monthly magazine „Bulgarian Tourist“ started to be published, as an official body publication of the BTA. An important place in the ideology of Bulgarian mountaineering then occupied the neo-Slavic movement and therefore consequently at the Slavic Congress in Sofia in 1910 the issues of „Slavic tourism“ became part of the agenda. In 1912, on the eve of the Balkan War, BTA united 12 companies (branches) with 650 regular members. The majority of them were people of culture, science and art, teachers and civil servants, representatives of the middle class. Military officers on active duty, and from the reserve of the Bulgarian army, also took an active part. Although relatively smaller in number, from the very beginning women have also participated in the Bulgarian mountaineering and tourist movement. The tradition established in 1895–1912 became widespread and developed rapidly after the First World War.
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The article examines the “spiritual landscape” of modern Sofia and particularly – the place of the “sacred mountain” in the ideas and ritual practices of various occult communities that existed in the city from the late 19th to mid-20th century. Based on various sources the social construction of the sacred space (its borders, functioning and use) is studied. The main research question, explored by methods of history and cultural studies, is the importance of these formations, considered marginal subcultures, products of foreign cultural influences or followers of inherited spiritual tradition, in the Bulgarian “spiritual landscape”.
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Purpose. Explore the sociocultural reasons for the transformation of discourses of religion and gender in modern political systems. Theoretical basis. In philosophy, as in other sciences, the feminist direction emerged and took shape within the framework of liberalism as an emancipation project with the main goal of political equality. Although this path - unlike the radically separatist - is modernist, it, like a thousand years ago, forms a stable opposition with the essentialist attitudes of world religions. Within the framework of the social constructivist methodology, gender is defined as the cause and result of the interactions of power and inequality of women. As gender discourses change, systems change, but world religions today reproduce inequality, supporting traditional gender systems. Scientific novelty. At the beginning of the XXI century. Gender is less and less a component of unchanging identity and more and more a product of interactions with other people, social institutions and social structures. Thus, gender is a constantly created property of situational interaction, and not a role or a sign. The concept of gender in theology opens up a huge field for interpretation, showing a slight tendency to change, and is still identified with the transcendental and supernatural as masculine and natural and physical as feminine. Findings. The causes of gender inequality are difficult to comprehend for a strictly rational reflection environment. Women's inequality cannot be fully reduced to a system of norms and laws. Theology associated with early Christian teachings shows particular stability in the interpretation of women as “invisible” and apolitical, taking advantage of the Old Testament ideas about the nature of women, while also offering no explanation for the “invisibility” of women in their purely private sphere.
More...Nilsen, Alleen Pace & Nilsen, Don L.F. (2019) The Language of Humour: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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The number of books, papers, articles, reports on Yugoslavia, former Yugoslavia, ex-Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro, Serbia, Montenegro, Serbian republics in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, not to mention Slovenia and Croatia, grows and grows. I too have added to that growing field. Still, understanding seems to be diminishing rather than growing. Why? There are, I think, three reasons. I shall discuss them in a somewhat balkanized way because that approach may further comprehension. [...]
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Many scholars think nowadays that the mission of the university should still be, in Mark Taylor’s words, ‘a responsibility to serve the greater social good’: to cultivate ‘informed citizens who are aware of and open to different cultural perspectives and are willing to engage in reasonable debate about critical issues. The present article is an introduction to the main problems the study of Humanities faces nowadays in Universities.
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‘Humanity does not exist at all yet or it barely exists.’ French historical figure Jean Jaurès’s statement, famously echoed by Jacques Derrida, then by Bernard Stiegler, provides a fittingly provocative starting point for my reflections on the present condition and future of the ‘humanities’, envisaged both as the pluralization of what differentiates ‘us’ from other species and as the academic implementation of programmes (as well as the philosophical questioning) in the name of humanism.This article investigates the condition of the humanities in the digital age as always already that of the ‘posthumanities’. The impact of the Derridean deconstruction of the sign as technological ‘trace’ is recalled as an antecedent to Stiegler’s conception, from his first volume of Technics and Time onwards, of humanity as indissociable from an exteriorizing technicity which gave rise to a third kind of, or ‘epiphylogenetic’, memory. The second part looks at Stiegler’s notion of ‘pharmacology’, his diagnostic of the enslavement of contemporary homo technicus through tele-technologies and his pragmatic search for socio-political, cultural and educational remedies. Taking my cue from his approach as well as inflecting Bolter and Grusin’s notion of ‘remediation’, I conclude with a final section envisaging tomorrow’s ‘remedial’ (post)-humanities, adducing as precursor examples a couple of creative practitioners (Mark Taylor and Gregory Ulmer) and emphasizing the rich potential of videogames in such a ‘re(-)creative’ process.
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This article starts from general remarks on education which is regarded as largely a physical, interpersonal process for extending one’s knowledge of our collective human repertoire and shows how that changed, temporarily, with the postmodern combination of information technology, social complexity, and cheap energy. But the first requires the other two, and as they fade, premodern forms of pedagogy and scholarship may return – unmoored (but for the Humanities) from the deep past and from professionalization’s Byzantine administrative labyrinth. The next part of the essay investigates today’s hegemonic neoliberal arrangements that must vanish with the market they developed to exploit; in this case, ‘nostalgia’ will lament the lost energy-abundance and social complexity that virtual education required. Instead, loose coalitions of teachers may form subscription-based universities where learning – not credentialling, nor capital accumulation – is central. The article finally sketches these trends and offers a general plan for a resilient, low-tech, low-energy Humanities university, as complex societies like the United States continue to reckon with the abrupt forms of decline that we call ‘collapse’.
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Safeguarding cultural-historical heritage is of key importance for the preservation of national identity. The Bulgarian school has always been one of the main pillars in this process. The dynamics of changes in the resent years has led to alterations in school curricula, to shift of priorities, and construction of new school disciplines and educational profiles. This article observes the introduction of specialized classes of students of Bulgarian musical folklore at the Dobri Chintulov Secondary School in the city of Burgas, and delineates their development over the years.
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The article offers a study of horror stories in urban legends from Bulgaria and the Czech Republic in comparative aspect. It proposes a specific classification, which groups horror stories as follows: 1) mysterious events and encounters with supernatural beings, which neither harm, nor help the participants; 2) omens or encounters with supernatural beings, which cause death or other harm to the participants; 3) mysterious signs or encounters with supernatural beings, which help people; 4) evocation of spirits; 5) crime stories: murders or harm – with or without deliberate intention; 6) rumours; 7) parodic horror stories. Parallels drawn between particular stories from the two countries point to the existence of a common folkloric substratum that manifests their universal character and international distribution. Largely, the motifs in those stories result from social life and specific social practices of modern times, but some also have deeply archaic origins.
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Im Schulsystem sollte die Literatur nicht nur durch traditionelle Verfahren–Frontalunterricht und analytische Verfahren, die durch Frage (der/die Lehrende) und Antwort (der/die Lernende) vermittelt werden. Vielmehr musste das in unserer multimedialer Zeit auch auf andere Weise geschehen, die handlungs- und produktion- sorientiert sind und andere Medien nicht ausser Acht lassen (Film, Musik, Hörspiel, Computer). Um den Ist-Zustand im intitutionellem Literaturunterricht zu beleuchten, wurden unter einer Gruppe von 10 Germanistikstudierenden qualitative Untersu- chungen durchgeführt und die durch Interwievs gewonnenen Daten analysiert. Das Ziel der Untersuchung war es, nicht nur den Ist-Zustand zu untersuchen, sondern auch Vorschläge für die Änderung der Unterrichtspraxis zu geben.
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