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The essay analyzes the introductions to the Moldavian historical works of the XVI-XVIII centuries. The anonymous Slavonic-language chroniclers of the earlier period say nothing about themselves and the purposes of their creation but enter directly into the heart of the narrative. Instead, Macarie, the first author who signs his work, finds it appropriate to open it with an embryonic preface, in which he talks about himself and the patron, discusses the Moldavian annalistic tradition, clarifies his personal writing experiences and stylistic criteria. Along his lines, the disciples Eftimie and Azarie specify the chronological framework of their exhibitions, glorify the commissioning voivodes and recall the activity of their venerable master. Grigore Ureche, the first historian to use his mother tongue, prefaces his work with brief remarks in which he discusses a theme congenial to him, the educational value of history. In the introduction to De neamul moldovenilor, Miron Costin argues for the need to pierce the darkness around the origins of the Romanian people and expresses himself not only on the uplifting value of literary writing, but also on the aesthetic one. In the joint introduction to his chronicle and collection of legends O samă de cuvinte, Ion Neculce dwells on the late development of the Moldavian historiographical tradition and underlines the edifying value of his commitment. The introductions of the Moldavian historiographers are distinguished by a common trait, a style that is simple and close to the mindset of readers, devoid of the large historical, mythological and literary references that swarm in the writings of fellow Wallachians of those centuries.
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The gynocritical study of Anna Terék’s latest book of poems, Dead Women (2017) is an analysis based on the outline of a subcultural framework of feminine experience. The string of poems is narrated by women in times of war, sickness, adultery, cruelty and aggression. The poems are told by women from an unconventional perspective. The traumas of the characters are persistent and cannot be overcome in a lifetime, thus they are “dealt with” after their death. This way Terék touches upon a key element of feminist criticism, “the art of dying”. Suicide appears as a solution, as well as something natural and an act of free choice. Another topics that emerge in the poems are matrophobia, adultery, identity, patriarchal relations. Along with the intrinsic analysis of Terék’s poetry, the paper also touches upon the ideology and history of development of the female literary tradition, biological determinism and limitations of gynocriticism.
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Named by its authors “schizoanalysis”, the critique of interpretation developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) – the two volumes of their work Capitalism and Schizophrenia – is a radical one. Exposed as a dead-end street, that only keeps thought trapped in the tyrannical circle of the “Signifier”, the interpretation, as the privileged expression of semiology – point out Deleuze and Guattari – corresponds to the “overcoding” made by the despotic political assemblage, which consists in the abolition of the old clanic-territorial relationships and the centralization of all social codes, followed by their subordination to a unique code, mirrored by the solar symbolism of the sovereign's power. In the same way as the imperial-despotic "social machine", which proclaims a transcendent unity as the absolute center of existence, the signifying semiotics – explain Deleuze and Guattari – is structured by removing out of the chain of signs a privileged object (“the despotic signifier”), which, in creating the illusion of a transcendence to which all the signs converge and from which all the signs seem to come, destroys the pre-signifying territorial semiotics through linearization and homogenization. Consequently, the interpretation is inevitably encumbered by all the shortcomings of the significant regime of signs: that is, above all, the rigid linearity of the system, in the perspective of which any deviation, as well as any tendency of detachment, diffusion or dispersion, appear, apriorically, as unjustified divisiveness, unnecessary detours and fateful dead ends. The “superliniarity” of semiology causes the interpretation to eliminate any autonomous “growth”, to devalue any heterogeneity, and to consider any attempt to exit the system as counterproductive and “meaningless”. At the same time, the process and the guiding vectors of interpretation are always aimed at a synthetic, hierarchical and systematizing approach, thus responding to the imperative of the despotic “machine” to appropriate all resources and to subordinate all the codes. The interpretative act is one of “overcoding”, whose semiotic-discursive function is to (re)order all signs, as well as all the judgments and arguments, according to a “central idea”, which is nothing but a representation, a projection of the “despotic signifier”. The argumentation of Deleuze and Guattari denounces interpretative thinking, be it traditional or modern, as being not only an instrument of the imperial-despotic “social machine”, but, moreover, as a faithful mirror of the state apparatus. The osmosis between thought and the state – evidenced and stimulated by the act of interpretation – is the very basis on which the symbolic power is built.
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Grace Tiffany’s debut novel, My Father Had a Daughter, is a vibrant tale of uninhibited desire, revenge and loss in the shape of a fictionalized ‘memoir’ of Judith, Shakespeare’s youngest daughter. The present paper will focus on the diegetic narrator’s trajectory of becoming; the theoretical framework will be informed by some of Deleuze and Guattari’s most important concepts, such as lines of flight, desiring machine, nomad and body without organs.
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The current paper explores the physicality in Jane Austen’s novels, their film adaptations, and her personal letters. The nouns referring to human body are examined in terms of frequency and context. Corpus linguistics is used as a method, involving the use of in-built online corpora, offline microcorpus creation, and the use of part-of-speech tagger and a concordancer. The results allow to conclude that, firstly, to Austen, referring to the human body was less appropriate in private written communication than in fiction; secondly, the film adaptations use some words in a literal sense, while the novels – in a figurative sense.
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The present paper concerns Edith Wharton’s strategic formation of triangular relationships in her real life. As the reticent wife of an upper-class renowned family, Wharton used all she had to make male acquaintances that would enhance her intellectual stimulation and deepen her insight as a writer. Including her husband Teddy in her social circle, she skillfully entertained guests by creating a private space in her automobile and her mansion in Lenox. In this paper, her rather “strategic” methods to establish these relationships will be examined in detail.
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From the semiotic perspective, one can tentatively distinguish between two kinds of art – the first is semantically oriented and is involved in creating meaningful messages within the given art form, using ready-made means, while the second, syntactically oriented, aims at generating new possibilities within literary arts. Artur Alliksaar (1923–1966) represents both tendencies: he has created outstanding syllabic accentual poems and prescribed poetic forms, especially sonnets, but in addition, he has enriched the Estonian poetic language with entirely new possibilities of sound instrumentation, which is particularly evident in his free-verse works. The article has two objectives. Firstly, it presents one possible classification of Estonian sound instrumentation, considering both the structure and placement of relevant techniques within the text. This model is illustrated with examples from Artur Alliksaar’s poems, in which sound plays a structurally significant role. The paper examines the techniques used by Alliksaar, as well as their function. Secondly, case studies are conducted on the basis of archival materials, analyzing the draft versions of the poems to see how the author worked on and shaped the sound structure. The article looks into the corrections made by the author in the manuscripts and the possible motivation behind these changes. The analysis reveals a clear regularity. Although his heavily sound-instrumented free-verse and accentual-syllabic poetry has often been regarded primarily as a play based on free associations within the language, lacking semantic structure and coherence, the study of drafts shows that Artur Alliksaar has consistently worked on multiple levels of the poem, taking into consideration not only the sound but also the semantic and rhythmic aspects. In addition to numerous repetitions at different levels, he regularly developed contrasts in both meaning and sound, creating a multi-layered play between sameness and difference.
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The search for connections between history and literature has been going on continuously since antiquity. Interference between disciplines is obvious today, due to the narrative form of application, bringing the stories told closer to the novel. The search for non-narrative connections continues to this day. The main task of this article is to conduct a brief analysis of the basic interpretations of both disciplines and to indicate their role in building alternative literary stories. It also serves to show that categories such as narrative, imagery, truth and fiction play a pivotal role in the historiographic teaching process through alternative literary histories.
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The paper attempts to introduce Polish readers to a theory presented by the American literary scholar Margaret Freeman in her recent book, The Poem as Icon (2020). In the monograph, Freeman analyzes ways in which the reader experiences reality – both visible and invisible – through poetry. Her fundamental assumption is that the relevant research question is not what literary art is, but how it comes to be what it is. The purpose of the present paper is to show that, although written by a literary scholar, the monograph corresponds to general tendencies that can be seen in contemporary humanities: in cognitive linguistics (in particular, Leonard Talmy’s theory of -ception and George Lakoff’s cognitive theory of metaphor), in the theory of linguistic picture of the world, or in discourse analysis. All these disciplines are based upon the assumption that the essence of the world is continuous change, and they investigate linguistic expressions in the process of becoming, which is relative to factors traditionally considered as non-linguistic. Freeman’s poetic cognition has a wide scope: it embraces cognitive processes of human mind, but also bodily and emotive cognition. Thus poetic cognition is embodied, and in Freemen’s theory a “poem-as-icon” ultimately becomes an illusion of the “here-and-now” direst experience.
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The article discusses the phenomenon of multiple reading of literary hypertexts. The construction of electronic hypertext is conducive to creating uncertainty and generates both: story and structural puzzles. The author on the example of the afternoon. a story by Michael Joyce discusses the characteristics of this type of literary works, which by involving the reader in the process of creating the course of the plot, put him before new challenges. Hypertext multiplies questions and riddles, plays with suspense as a ploy that promises a solution, and delays the fulfillment of the promise indefinitely. At the same time, it refers to solutions known from twentieth-century experimental novels.
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Daniel Isaacson, the narrator in E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971), recounts the story of the life and execution of his parents, in the form of a doctoral dissertation. As a vehicle of textual politics, Daniel’s narration, however, transcends a mere historical retelling of the past and fashions a personal synthesis of the ideological conflicts that have irreversibly damaged him and his family. The present article proposes to argue that Daniel’s refashioning of the lives of the Isaacsons is an instance of Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of “improvisation”. Daniel manipulates familiar history and improvises the past into his own version of fiction, while maintaining sufficient distance. By exposing the conflicting positions in the narrative as deeply flawed ideological constructs, Daniel’s appropriative improvisation gestures toward an ultimate synthesis, which, far from endorsing the Old or New Left, de-glorifies radical subversion and limns it as inefficacious.
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A kaleidoscopic narrative encompassing all of Don DeLillo’s recurrent motifs – sport games and war games, paranoia and secret codes, obsessed collectors of secular relics, religious rituals superseded by consumerism, dysfunctional relationships –, Underworld (1997) is at least as relevant today as it was in the late ’90s. My paper centers upon land art and desert lore as tropes meant to convey loneliness and the feeling that we have become a mere abstract audience in the political theatre, but it also takes into consideration the main protagonist’s Jesuit education.
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The essay outlines critical thinking of the Argentinian philosopher Walter Mignolo, known for his critique of the relationship between modernity and coloniality, and introduction of the decolonial option. The decolonial option propagates decoupling and decentering from the European epistemic hegemony and turning to colonial epistemologies rejected by the West as valid knowledge (or knowledge in general). The main point of Mignolo’s critique is that colonialism is constitutive of modernity, and not its historical product. Therefore, Mignolo develops a number of concepts for resisting the imposed necessity of modernity (such as the concept of “transmodernity”), as well as the general epistemic hegemony of the West (such as the concepts of “border thinking”, “border epistemologies” and “pluritopic hermeneutics”). Since what is said is less important than who is saying it, as well as where from and for whom, Europe needs to be criticized from the outside (from its borders) rather than from the vantage point of its own intellectual tradition. The European auto-critique is necessary, but it is not sufficient.
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In this discussion of the concept of transculture, which originated with the Russian-American critic Mikhail Epstein in conjunction with the Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili (who unofficially introduced post-structuralism into Soviet thought in the 1980s), the present author places the concept into a wider context of European thought on the production of meaning in culture. The concept of transculture is defined by difference which is privileged as the arche of meaning and self-reflexive thought in poststructuralism (Derrida), and which resonates with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “outside” (vne-nahodimost’). This leads to the deduction that the the position of the “outsider” is the ideal transcultural position of meaning. For Epstein, transculture is “a mode of being” at the “cross-roads of cultures”. The effect of this is that transculture frees humanity from culture itself. It is, according to the present author, from such a position of freedom that the transculturalist resembles Hegel’s phenomenologist, whose starting position in Bildung (education) is a double negativity. For, according to Epstein and Mamardashvili, the “centre” of transculture is the notion of “non-belonging”. Thus, all forms of identity (identity politics, nationalism, racisms, ethnicities, etc.) are alien to the mode of being of transculture. Ultimately, it is concluded, transculture is a transcendental concept irreducible to an empirical dimension such as a methodology or a discipline (for example, World Literature or Cultural Studies).
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Proclaiming boldly that “The postmodern years of plenty, pastiche, and parataxis are over” (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010: 1), Vermeulen and van den Akker introduced their theory of metamodernism in 2010. The term metamodernism, inherited from the literary theory, where it was used to signify various transgressions of modern literary postulates (Zavarzadeh 1975: 75), was now meant to spread across art and culture and mark tendencies that surpass the postmodern principles of creative and cultural endeavour. Vermeulen and van den Akker conceived their theory as pertaining to a broad array of “tendencies [that] can no longer be explained in terms of the postmodern” sentiment of hopelessness or aesthetic principles of deconstruction and parataxis, but now give way to the feeling of hope and aesthetic “notions of reconstruction, myth and metaxis“ (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010: 1–2). Several years after the theory of metamodernism was introduced, in their book about metamodernism (edited by Vermeulen, van den Akker and Alison Gibbons, 2017) the authors toned down the denunciation of postmodernism significantly. Rather than its strong opposition, postmodernism is here understood as an integrative element of metamodernism, which is specifically underlined by the explanation of the very term “metamodernism” by the means of the polysemic Greek prefix “meta” (beyond, with, above). The authors, now as editors, reconsider some earlier standpoints and, together with other colleagues, develop, apply and test the concept of metamodernism in different disciplines, predominantly from popular culture (film, sitcoms, contemporary crafts, literature, etc). Therefore, the main aim of this study was to inspect and deepen the meanings and major traits of metamodernism as the dominant cultural paradigm of the 21st century. The study turned to the decisions and inconsistencies in etymology and terminology, then the definition of metamodernism as a structure of feeling within a particular time, and finally, metamodernism as Neo-Romanticism. Metamodernism is, above all, understood as a sentiment and sensibility characteristic of our contemporaneity, rather than a creative/artistic manifesto or programme. The variations in terminology are thoroughly examined and some inconsistencies are carefully clarified. Even though the conceptual elaboration of metamodernism from 2017 was more explicitly shown as reflecting in the artistic and popular media texts, its elusive nature was still referred to consistently and described by Vermeulen and van den Akker as the cultural/historical imagination and general sensibility, the sentiment of the era, or, borrowed from Raymond Williams, a structure of feeling (van den Akker and Vermeulen 2017: Ch.1). The structure of feeling was discussed in relation with some other similar (yet still different) concepts. In particular, the study aimed to underline the metamodernist roots and Neo-Romantic traits in music. In conclusion, the study points to the ambivalent nature of theory of metamodernism, embracing, on the one hand, the principles of historicism and periodisation in art and culture, and, on the other, the meta-historical approach with metamodernism being an integrative, ever-oscillating amalgam of postmodern deconstruction, parataxis and pastiche, as well as modern reconstruction, myth and metaxis. Finally, the analytical writing style, despite all efforts to make the content more linear and even more structured, perfectly and inevitably reflects the nature of the phenomenon analysed. Thus, the subject remains rhizomatic and open for further reflections and implications.
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In this novel, written between 1940 and 1942, Ioana Postelnicu no longer submits to the analysis a single case of female consciousness, but creates a gallery of extravagant characters engaged in contexts hard to overlook. A close look at these beings that populate the fictional universe reveals the author’s attraction to pathological cases. In this novel, beyond the dysfunctionality of an artificially increased family, one observes the gradual disaggregation of the personality of its members.
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This paper analyzes the appli- cation of the preceptive premises of decorum and verisimilitude in Cervantes’ and Avellaneda´s Quixotes, with special attention to the ideological resonances in the last one. The analysis is supported by the Horacian Ars, Pinciano’s preceptive, and the Aristotelian background from which these concepts emerge. Besides, as a preliminary context, we will situate the act of imitation as an inherent practice of the literary world in the 17th century and we will also reflect on the historic evolution of the concepts of influence and originality. Finally, we will refer to laugh as an effect of the pragmatics of decorum.
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