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The Masurians as an ethno-regional group have almost disappeared from the ethnic map of the world: their descendents now live in Germany in great numbers, while there are just a few thousand in their native Masuria. At the same time, the Masurians’ original culture spanning between Evangelism, the Polish dialect and culture, and German identity, is vanishing. Probably the last formally organized group of representatives of the local native population is the one active in the Masuria Evangelical Association (MEA). Its members’ main aim is to preserve and maintain their native culture, and thus saving it from complete eradication. The article presents some of the unique measures taken by the activists of MEA in a concrete response to the marginalization of the Masurians and their vanishing in the region due to Germanisation policies and, later Polonisation policies in Masuria which were introduced by force when necessary. Many attempts at establishing the institutional means to rescue the native Masuria identity, which to a large extent proved unsuccessful, are briefly described in the text. The activities of MEA, as an institution of a regionalist character, are shown both in the historical and contemporary contexts. The author also presents the tasks, forms and contents of the Association’s work, taking into account the ideological and practical perspectives of its efforts to support the Masurian population.
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The article attempts to be a closer look into the otaku subculture, its growing Japanese fan groups and (obsessive) collectors of manga, anima and their accesory products, who address each other as “otaku”. The central question to be answered here is what otaku subculture is, what is its place in the contemporary Japanese society, or more precisely is the otaku culture a result of the general transformation of the Japanese society, and how otaku transforms it, but also how otaku subculture reflects the changes in human behaviour, and communication in the postmodern era in general. The first part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the term itself, origins and emergence of the otaku movement, its status and the way it is perceived in the contemporary Japanese society, but also to its growing popularity and spreading in the USA and Europe. The second part depicts etnographic characterization of this subcultural group and grounds of its cultural mythology.
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Razmatrajući književno stvaralaštvo određenog autora, Vladan Desnica prvenstveno traga za onim što je suštinsko i lično za datog autora. Proučavajući književni opus Dositeja Obradovića, u prvi plan izdvaja ono „što stoji nezavisno od racionalističke epohe i njenih težnji prema praktičnom duhu.” U „Razgovoru na književnom petku” Desnica ističe da naša kritika previše pažnje posve}uje pitanju škole, pravca, manira, programskog opredjeljenja, a manje samoj ličnosti pisca. „Najglavnije i najbitnije u umjetničkom djelu je baš ta ’personalnost’, i njen domašaj, potencijal, format...
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In the summer of 2003 Artur Żmijewski was visiting the mother of his friend in a hospital in Tel Aviv. He was surprised by the fact that four out of six patients sharing the room were emigrants from Poland. This particular coincidence was responsible for the making of the video film Our Songbook which presents elderly Jewish women who were forced to leave Poland women singing Polish songs. The film is very simple and full of specific charm. In the context of Polish anti-Semitism and the Jedwabne case, it is significant that three of them (one of who refuses to speak Polish) wanted to appear in this documentary. By singing the songs of their youth the women recalled various images from their past which they shared with Żmijewski. The intention of the film, however, was not to talk about issues related to the Holocaust and the expulsion of Jews from Poland, but to touch a fragment of the present, a living piece of Polish history in Israel, which will soon die out.
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This paper explores the phenomenon of computer games, deemed a crucial issue both in the theory of literature and in the theory of teaching. The question is whether training reading awareness at school can keep pace with PC games, or whether it is more commendable for the future to include the cultivation of "multimedia (post)narrative communication" in literary education. PC games are perfectly fitted for displaying fictional worlds through interactive virtual reality, and it is this aspect, rigidly adhered to in fostering literature and readership, that gives them an important advantage. PC games can accommodate any wide concept of narrativeness, "narratibility " and intuitive "narrative competence". PC games' superiority over books in producing the flow effect is unquestionable. One's ability "to identify themselves with the hero" does not bear comparison with radical interactivity and (co)creating (one's own) character. The act of setting a high standard of a book is not comparable to the assignability of PC games, with several competence levels and other variables, variant "scenarios" and "campaigns". Time is coming which will bring "post-novel" or "post-narrative" or "post-literary" communication, radicalised interactivity, a high number of generatable text variants and stronger flow effects.
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The article discusses a project called "Presentation 20/20", which was launched in early 2011 at the Institute of Information Science and Book Studies at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun. The aim of workshops was to acquaint students with bibliographical preparations for the matriculation exam, including the principles of drafting an outline, bibliography, footnotes and proper preparation of the text in MS Word and Open Office.
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The article deals with the history of Bessarabia split in time from the mother country by the river Prut. Ever since the 16th (the 28th) of May 1812, Prut becomes a border to separate people of a kind. Bessarabia, thus “separated” by this border, expressed its misfortune in folk songs. The author brings as examples a few poetic creations inspired by this reality.
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Even if Ion Marin Sadoveanu is not included among the great poets, his poetry has several features that particularly attract our attention. Reading his death cycle consisting of the poems: Death and the monk, Death and the clown, Death and the sailor, Death and the sick man, we are amazed by some exquisite images, unique in our religious poetry by construction and by theme.
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This article includes a letter written by an older history teacher at a high school in Szawli (nowadays Siauliai in Lithuania). It is a document written in 1865, kept in archives of the Vilnius library. The author of the letter – a Russian by birth, educated in an Orthodox seminary and a graduate from The Pedagogical Institute of Petersburg – was delegated to work in so called West Districts of the Russian Empire, inhabited by citizens who spoke no Russian and were mostly Roman Catholics. Teachers of Russian origin, like the author of the quoted letter, considered themselves missionaries, “sheperds and harvesters”, the “harvest” being russification of the Polish and Lithuanian nation, eradication of Polish and Lithuanian languages, formal complaints and reports about people circulating books in these languages, and providing Russian publications. Such work in the time free from lessons at school was mentioned in the letter from an average teacher to his councellor – curator in Vilnius District. So this is not a letter as such, but e report.
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”Student’s network initiative” was the first discussion panel organized by two student scientific associations of the Institute of Information Science and Book Studies at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun. The article highlights main issues raised during the meeting.
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Eugen Istodor takes an interview with Şerban Huidu and Mihai Găinuşă, two very famous radio and TV journalists in Romania. Their shows are ironical and critical with politicians, with other journalists or artists. This is why they have many friends, but enemies too.
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kalba; kategorizavimas (etikečių klijavimas); socialinė politika; socialinės rizikos asmenys; globotiniai; socialiai remtini asmenys language; labeling; social policy; persons at risk of social exclusion; socially supported persons Laimutė Žalimienė Vilniaus universitetas Vilnius University Straipsnio tikslas – pateikti kalbos, kuri vartojama Lietuvos socialinės paramos politikos įstatymų bazėje, pasekmių paslaugų organizavimui bei konkretiems šios politikos subjektams įžvalgas. Straipsnyje analizuojama kalbos svarba socialinėje politikoje, gilinantis į vieną iš šios politikos sričių – socialinės paramos politiką Lietuvoje. Teigiama, kad Lietuvos socialinėje politikoje bei ją įgyvendinant vartojama kalba (kategorizavimas) sukuria diskriminacinę aplinką asmenims, gaunantiems socialinę paramą, įtvirtina hierarchinius galios santykius tarp šios paramos organizatorių, teikėjų bei ją gaunančių asmenų. Galima net kelti prielaidą, jog tai yra viena iš aplinkybių, kodėl ši politika ir teikiamos paslaugos Lietuvoje nėra ganėtinai efektyvios. The article analyzes the importance of language in social assistance policy in Lithuania. It focuses on the process of categorization that has recently emerged in the Lithuanian social policy rhetoric. Categorization is regarded as a generalized identification of a subject, bearing in mind that attribution of individuals to some category means their generality according to some fundamental features represented by that category. The following terms “socially supported,” “families at risk of social exclusion,” “long-term unemployed,” etc. that have a negative connotation are used in social support policy legislation. This process of categorization covers a very large part of the Lithuanian society since, first, many social groups and individuals use services and benefits of the social assistance system and, second, during the economic crisis the demand and extent of social assistance have increased in Lithuania. Thus, it is important to analyze the language that social policy employs in describing its recipients. Language used in social policy documents and social service organizations can be analyzed as a tool of power by which more powerful actors (policy-makers, service organizers and providers) impose their views and values on less powerful individuals (disabled, children in foster care, long-term unemployed, drug addicts, etc.). It can be argued that the process of categorization in social policy legislation in Lithuania creates a discriminatory environment for social assistance recipients and it establishes hierarchical power relations between social assistance organizers, providers and individuals and families that receive this assistance. It is also possible to assume that the negative labelling of individuals in need is one of the factors making this policy and provided services inefficient in Lithuania.
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The paper addresses a peculiar transition in the history of music aesthetics at the turn of the 19th century. While the first Enlightenment aesthetic theories relegated music to the lower echelons of art for a lack of conceptual tools to address it, by the beginning of the 19th century music was elevated above all the other art forms, a process culminating in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and Wagner’s ouvre. Using Thomas Kuhn’s analyses on the dynamics of science, Morrow explains this sudden and perplexing change by uncovering a forgotten strand of contemporary German musical discourse which quietly worked out the conceptual foundations for the would-be revolutionaries. The paper is the first chapter of Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
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The present paper aims at analysing the ways in which the ancestral xenophobia exceeds modern scents. As investigated, from a connotative point of view, the foreigner’s portrayal can induce a state of detachment and even threat. The vocabulary of some indo-european languages, together with the idioms of the negative alterity and the foreigner’s literature come to prove this. Still, in the fictitious collective, the foreigner is much more than a sum of ethnic features, it is exactly what draws our attention and even more, the recurrence of a gnostic scenario in the Romanian presentation of the history and of the exile as seen by authors such as: Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Vintilă Horia, Ioan Petru Culianu. The corpus chosen is not exhaustive but illustrative and intended to catch the other’s figure (Euripide, Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Vintilă Horia, Michael Cunningham) from different perspectives.
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A discussion held at the Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw on 9 December 2004 as part of Festiwal czasopism kulturalnych [Cultural Magazines Festival], chaired by Sebastian Cichocki. Participants: Marcel Andino Velez, Przekrój; Piotr Bernatowicz, Arteon; Grzegorz Borkowski, Obieg; Dorota Jarecka, Gazeta Wyborcza; Iza Kowalczyk, artmix;, Joanna Mytkowska, the Foksal Gallery Foundation; Violetta Sajkiewicz, artPAPIER and Michał Woliński, Fluid. Would it be possible for art in Poland to live its own life without the existence of critics? Would artists work more freely without being concerned with critical analyses? It is obvious that art critique is extremely important in relation to many phenomena taking place in the world of art since it “provides a framework for contemporary art”, greatly helping the viewer in the interpretation of the particular works. “Art without a commentary remains in a void, often being illegible and defenceless against the various attacks that it has to deal with.” The problem, however, is the fact that we still lack involved critique, with ‘involved’ meaning critique that expresses individuality as well as one’s own opinions and values concerning art. A critic’s ‘bold pen’ is still a rarity. There are still not enough articles like Ewa Toniak’s confident critique of the works of Artur Żmijewski (published in Format). What is more, we still suffer from a shortage of negative critique based on well-founded arguments, as opposed to the heavy criticism offered by right-wing publications, for example Nasz Dziennik. What is more, contrary to the severe criticisms from right-wing publications such as Nasz Dziennik, we still suffer from a shortage of negative critique based on well-founded arguments. Professional magazines including Magazyn Sztuki, Arteon and Obieg, have not yet engaged in dialogue. Each seems to be following with their own trend, like, for example, Raster, which is addressed to its own specific readers, communicating with them with ‘its tongue in its cheek’. Additionally, the fact that most critics are also gallery owners does not improve the situation. In Western Europe this condition is often compared to “the work of psychoanalysts who sleep with their patients.” In this case a negative and harsh assessment becomes a complex challenge. Fortunately, the former manner of writing displaying the critic’s extensive vocabulary and knowledge has been replaced by a style that focuses on the contents and the message. And despite the fact that professional publications still use terminology that is difficult to understand for ordinary readers, and despite the demand for challenging critical and theoretical texts by the critics themselves, the goal of expanding the circles of contemporary art perception is becoming increasingly apparent.
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Text is an analysis of symbolic strategies, serving creation of Josip Broz Tito’s authority as the leader of the socialist Yugoslavia; it also reveals their cultural and political motivations. Author indicates three dominant factors in the process of cult creation, which are characteristic for the cult of personality in totalitarian systems; as such they also remain a specific continuation of traditions as a base of the local p ower culture. In this perspective, the Tito’s cult and political mythology as its frame is an end emic embodiment of mythological provincionalism with universal aspirations – typical for communism. The function of this cult is a consolidation of multi-nation community and legitimization of federal state formula in the conditions of immaturity of the local political culture.
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