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Cine l-a auzit pe Cornel Ungureanu povestind despre Banat rămâne fermecat nu doar de patosul naraţiunii, ci şi de ineditul spectacolului retoric.
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The article studies the artistic representations of death in several poetic texts signed by Emilian Galaicu-Păun, Nicolae Popa, Dumitru Crudu, Leo Bordeianu, Irina Nechit, Marcela Benea, Alexandru Vakulovski. The tanatic imaginary is produced in a multitude of projections depending on the position of man towards the religious vision, through the prism of which death is only a release of the (immortal) soul from the body, from the matter that degrades and transforms into other vital structures, and with the profane perception, which defines the phenomenon as a complete end of the organism’s life cycle. The author especially researches the system of tanatic images formed through the artistic reconceptualization of the ideational relationship death-creation, intensively explored in contemporary Bessarabian poetry.
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Ever since it was published, Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016) has been scrutinized for its peculiar engagements with the Shakespearean pre-text at the cross-section of various discourses, from literary and media studies, through drama pedagogy, even to prison studies. Drawing on the prison metaphor from the original and recontextualizing it as a contemporary prison performance is just one of the multitudinous forms and ways in which The Tempest is incorporated into Atwood’s novel. Thus, though it is quite difficult to designate a sole term for what she (un)does with the classic, one striking issue anyone may encounter is its intertwining metatextuality which encapsulates many of its core interpretations as a rewriting and/or adaptation. The present paper aims at unravelling the many layers, means and functions of this particular type of metatextuality and/or metatheatricality found in the novel. We look at the polyphonic nexus of texts and contexts that defines Atwood’s novel as an experiment that reconsiders, with a gesture of metatextual homage, the prospects of rewriting – a practice Shakespeare himself was highly familiar with – in the contemporary age. Nested in the Genettean structuralist framework (Genette 1997 [1982]), our approach is meant to expand its applicability taking into consideration Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizome to investigate Atwood’s rewriting as an instance of “rhizomatic metatextuality” as well as the strategies of interpretation, appropriation, and reconstruction in fan fiction rewriting (see Jenkins 1992). Placing metatextuality as the central interpretive key of the novel, we shall discuss the roles of theatre (and art, in general) represented in Hag-Seed as an aesthetic and art history account, as well as the status of the interpreter or the intended audience of both the novel and the play within.
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Review of: Kuzmíková, Jana. Kognitívna literárna veda: teória, experimenty, analýzy. Bratislava: VEDA, vydavateľstvo Slovenskej akadémie vied, 2021. 262 stran. ISBN 978-80-224-1896-6.
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This review examines a multi-authored work that presents edited versions of papers presented at a conference of the same title as the book. The reviewers' comprehensive attention to detail provides a thorough and expert literary analysis of the publication
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Cemil Kavukçu (b. 1951) made his mark in Turkish literature, especially in the 1990s. In the stories that he published in Boş Zamanlar (Spare Times) (2022), he draws attention to dilemmas in the inner worlds of individuals who have experienced both provincial and urban life. Spare Times, including six stories, one of which is three-layered, deals with people who are stuck between bygone days and childhood, provincial life and modernism, boredom and crisis, escape and sanctuary, emptiness and routine. Kavukcu, who had a provincial life in his childhood and first flush of youth, lived in the city during his university years and career, which reflects in his stories as significant autobiographical experiences in terms of conveying both collective subjects bored with ordinary and repeating relationships of provincial sociology, and crises and distress of urbanites to the fiction. While a bourgeois individual tries to push back the clock and write new stories to get rid of boredom, people in the province attempt to get rid of the vicious cycle of life by making up stories and exchanging gossip. The stories in the book have strong autobiographical references through his fictional author figuration, which shows that Kavukcu also does not have any other remedy but to create new stories and write in the same state of boredom. In this article, I tried to bring the author’s reality into a connection with the past, childhood, province, boredom and crisis by examining their impacts on story creation in Cemil Kavukçu’s Spare Times.
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One of the most significant figures of Bosniak cultural and literary revival during the period of Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia was certainly Safvet-beg Bašagić. With an exceptionally wide range of occupations and diverse activities in the field of culture and social and political activity in general, he enormously contributed to the affirmation of the national and cultural identity of Bosniaks and their inclusion in the European socio-historical and cultural context. In the relatively rich literary opus of Safvet-beg Bašagić, one of the most important places certainly belongs to his patriotic lyric poetry. In the current paper, we will point out the sources of his lyric poetry, some of its poetic characteristics, and the most important traits of the two phases that appear in the development of this type of Bašagić's lyric poetry.
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The paper analyzes the expressionist portrait of Peter II Petrović Njegoš, which Stanislav Vinaver presented in the essay “Njegoš and the Evil Wizards” (Gromobran svemira, 1921). In order to understand this particular vision of the romantic poet, the immediate historical proximity of Crnjanski's Njegoš from 1919 (the poem “Njegoš”, Lyrics of Ithaka), then his Njegoš from 1925 (the essay “Reflections on Njegoš”), and finally Andrić's Njegoš in the essay “Njegoš as a tragic hero of Kosovo thought” (1935). As the neglected texts of previous Njegosology, today, at a time when Njegoš's character and work have become a singular Balkan apple of discord, they show another way of understanding, and that is the way of utopian thinking.
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In the theoretical conceptions of the historical novel, elaborated by Elizabeth Wesseling, Brian McHale, Viktor Zmegach, three stages are ascertained through which this genre passes (traditional or realistic, modernist and postmodernist historical novel), identified through the prism of its relationship to history/historiography and through the narrative and structural manifestations of that relationship in the novel. Starting from these theoretical premises, the aim of the paper is to interpret three Macedonian novels, seen as paradigmatic for the phase of the realist historical novel: Tole Pasha and Shakjir Vojvoda by Stale Popov and The Salonica Assassins by Jovan Boshkovski. The main focus of interpretation is placed on two levels: on the novelistic relationship to history/historiography and on the structural manifestations of the relationship between literature and history.
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Many years of research and literary scholars have come to the conclusion that his autobiographical works are of great importance and play an important role in the study of the life and work of any creative person, master of words, who has weight in the world art of words. The role of the poet's autobiographical works is invaluable in the study of the life and creativity of Seyid Muhammadhuseyn Shahriyar (1906-1988), a well-known poet of Azerbaijan and world literature of the 20-th century. When we consider the works written by the immortal master of words, both in Persian and in his native language, we see that the main moments of M. Shahriyar's life and activities of social importance have masterfully found their artistic reflection in the poet's work. Since our research object is the work of Muhammadhuseyn Shahriyar in his native language, we have devoted more space to the poet's works written in his native language. However, depending on the direction of the theme we are investigating, we will also consider the autobiographical poems written by the master artist in Persian, and we will try to analyze them from this context. It is no coincidence that we chose the poet's autobiographical works as a research topic. Our goal is to highlight the role of the artist's autobiographical works in the study of the artist's literary activity, artistic biography and idea-artistic features of his works. Analyzing M. Shahriyar's creativity in this direction, conveying to the modern reader that his autobiographical works have not lost their artistic value even today, from the perspective of the present time, is one of the aims and objectives of our research. The autobiographical works of Seyid Muhammedhuseyn Shahriyar are of no small importance in terms of getting acquainted with the era, the environment, the surrounding world, and the social atmosphere of the time in which the poet lived. Well-known poet scholars are also of the opinion that referring to the author's own writings is a more effective research method to reveal the truth.
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The article examines the manifestations of popular literature in Bulgaria from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It offers a commentary on the plots of those writings and some strategies to hold the reader’s attention. The primary focus is on three forms of popular culture: scary stories, fantastic stories, spiritualism, and somnambulism. The opinions of some elite Bulgarian intellectuals about popular literature, expressed in the periodical press, are discussed. The study analyzes the socio-cultural contexts in which popular literature existed in Bulgaria: a constant growth of the literacy level, formation of the elite-mass opposition, the industrialization of culture and literature in particular, and the appearance of popular literature on the pages of major newspapers and magazines. The thesis that is defended is that the popular literature of the period was based on the familiar and formulaic, rather than on creative experiment and innovation and its strategies to attracts its readers were descriptions of the exotic, the mysterious, and the construction of sentimental and melodramatic plots. The elite-mass boundary is problematized, and based on some memoirs, it is concluded that even elite intellectuals such as Simeon Radev and Alexander Balabanov or classics of Bulgarian literature like Ivan Vazov visited the theatrical-carnival manifestations of Bulgarian popular culture. Thus it seems justifiable to claim that the history of any national literature, including the Bulgarian one, would be incomplete if the forms and manifestations of popular literature were ignored.
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This paper analyses the role of the motifs associated with the development of science and new technologies in Svetoslav Minkov’s short stories. The author developed a rather unusual hybrid genre which consists of fantastical, science-fictional, satirical and absurdist elements. In the first phase all the elements (even those typical of science fiction) are merely in the function of representing an estranged, mystical, diabolical world; whereas in the second one, evil is no longer mystified in the form of a strange diabolical presence – now it becomes clear that the main source of the absurd is a form of capital production as well as the new model of modern pseudo-rationality that reduces the human life to a role in profit making and consumer spending, resulting in its total subservience to the market. After the loss of religious faith, or metaphysical ground, i. e. the ultimate loss of the Father, symbolical and social order have become circumferential systems of production and consumption, so the new man is no longer a child of God, but rather a strange being whose lack of being is represented by metaphors of either an animal or a robot.
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Zero type code-switching (ZCS) arises when the narration of the multilingual fictional world happens in one language only. ZCS is not only an enigmatic aesthetic tool the narrators often use, but it is a source of multiplying the interpretation possibilities of the text. The present study exemplifies how a simple poem built on ZCS can be differently interpreted depending on the reader’s way of decoding the hidden cultural references. After theoretically introducing the narrative framework of a literary work along the cultural identifiers of the actants, the poem of Inger-Mari Aikio will practically exemplify how important is the reader’s understanding of ZCS. Depending on the way the reader ZCS understands, the poem can be interpreted either as a poetic process reflecting intercultural, transcultural, multicultural or pluricultural interaction. Beside these prototypical interpretations, there are – naturally – many other variants, but for the theoretical concern of this study, this is the most relevant way to evaluate the process.
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Taking into account the different goals of the AH and Fantasy novel plus AH subgenre writing, we can try and develop one definition of both. AH writing reconstructs the national or world history and the changed facts, conclusions draw our attention to specific facts, key moments of well-known stories that are invisible for us, since of everyday life’s obvious reality prevents us from analyzing processes, we turn on the automatic mode instead. While Fantasy novel plus AH subgenre writing is rather monumental work, because it turns to the world history or historiography model making. Fantasy novel plus AH subgenre works use the historyographical method, but they exist in unreal time dealing with well-known constructions of the action world history of civilization. For example, one of the first uchronic stories by George Richard Raymond Martin “The Hedge Knight” (Martin) uses the space of Middle Ages in Europe for fiction story modeling. Also, it is an abstract of the world of the latest “Game of Thrones” – the greatest fiction saga of the new age literature in the 2000s. There is no doubt that “A Song of Ice and Fire” is constructed based on the matrix of such myth as “The Elder Edda” and “The Lord of the Rings” by John R. R. Tolkien. Legendary fantasy writer J. R. R. Tolkien spent much of his life studying, translating, and teaching ancient tales of northern Europe at Oxford and drew on them for his own writing. These epic stories, with their wizards and knights, dragons and trolls, cursed rings and magic swords, are as fascinating today as they were thousands of years ago. Reading them brings us as close as we will ever get to the magical worlds of the Vikings and the origins of their twentieth-century counterpart: Tolkien’s Middle Earth gave G. R. R. Martin, according to his own confession, the idea of the fantasy world of Westeros. The article deals with the specifics of the Fantasy novel plus AH subgenre in comparison to the Alternate history itself. The aim of the study is to emphasize the main features of the Fantasy novel plus AH subgenre and its common and different characteristics. The study uses such a method as comparative, descriptive, analysis and statistics counting. The novelty of the current research is realized by the essence of the first-time study of the AH subgenres on the world literature sources. The sources of the study are novels written by G. R. R. Martin “A Song of Ice and Flame”, “Kaiser and the War” by Simon J. Ortiz and V. Neff “Queens Don’t Have Legs”. Conclusions. As well as “A Song of Ice and Flame” by G. R. R. Martin, V. Neff’s trilogy exhibits a gallery of kings, queens, dukes, wizards, captains, people. Some of them are real, some are prototypes of actual statesmen; some characters come from Greek myths, while some – from the author’s fantasy. Although the objective of the alternative history method in the both works is quite different, it plays a similar role in the plot construction. Alternative history builds the walls of fantasy world from the bricks of actual historical elements, making the novel interesting for readers and involving them as betrayers.
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The purpose of the article is to consider the originality and analyze the plays of V. Kozhelyanko in the context of modern dramaturgy and special subgenre, what is called ―plays for reading. The novelty of the study is that the dramaturgical heritage of V. Kozhelyanko (in co-authorship with V. Serdyuk) became the object of a comparative study for the first time and has not yet been systematically introduced into the modern literary process in Ukraine. Research methods used in the article are subject to the comparative principle of presentation of the material, combine descriptive and functional-pragmatic methods of analysis. Conclusions. Architectural and genre-stylistic findings of V. Kozhelyanko in the dramatic genre of writing not only laid the foundation of his creative block, in particular the novel in the genre of alternative history and adventure postmodern and newmodern novels, but also formed a workshop of the latest creative tools used by other modern authors (for example, Neda Neshdana). The plays of V. Kozhelyanko are considered in the key of genre and style analysis. Having analyzed some aspects of dramatic texts (the image of the national hero, historical and political figures in the writer's parodic prose, historical and detective novels and the realization of the chronotope in them as a distinguishing genre marker, emphasis on the mental mistakes of the Ukrainian nation as the leitmotif of the creative intention of V. Kozhelyanko) from the point of view of structural, descriptive, receptive and comparative approaches of literary science, we have good reason to talk about the work of V. Kozhelyanko as an example of high-quality modern neomodernist work of the European level.
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What serves as a starting point for the article are theses regarding the analogy in legal acts and regulations – the rule analogy and the precedent analogy. What in turn serves as its point of reference are theses concerning cultural schematization, which include narrative patterns of myth, general (universal) history, and individual history. The legal rule and precedent analogies may be considered as argumentative and narrative strategies. The precedent analogy plays an important role in contemporary, modernist, individualized biographical and autobiographical micronarratives. In fact, the anecdote and the episode may be examined as examples of the precedent analogy.In the contemporary humanities, as well as in the social sciences, the presence of “travelling concepts” has been observed (Mieke Bal). The “episode” and the “anecdote” can be seen as examples of this inter- and trans-disciplinary concept. With this in mind, the article poses questions regarding the argumentation that refers the anecdotal and the episodic in microhistories, especially in particular, individual histories, and, above all, in subjective (auto)biographies.The terms “episode” and “anecdote” pertain to two different modes of describing that which is instant, short-lived, and seemingly included in the allegedly coherent historical whole. The former refers to an extraordinary event that constitutes a breach and disrupts the much sought-after temporal and semantic coherence which helps give meaning to events. The anecdote, by contrast, confirms this coherence (which includes alleged historical purposefulness and necessity) along with a revealed sense. What serves as a crucial context for the reflections presented in the article is the theory put forward by Max van Manen in Phenomenology of Practice. Meaning-Giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing. In his applied phenomenology, van Manen proposes an argumentative reference to the history of an individual subject – to biography, which he recognizes not only as a documentary testimony to individual existence, but also as an “anecdote” – an example of a general subjective attitude.
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Review of: Somdev Chatterjee. Why Stories Work—The Evolutionary and Cognitive Roots of the Power of Narrative. Chennai: Notion Press, 2023. 112 pp. ISBN 979-8-88935-938-8.
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With poem Judith, the enterprising Marulić calls for a courageous individual act and strengthening of the literature development in the Croatian expression. Referring to an independent renaissance vision, the construction of literature also arises, parallel with the historical reality, i.e. with transferred representation, the creative subject writes and spreads reality. The paper points out the autopoetic vows to biblical and classical, oral and written heritage („bašćina“) and indicates the mediations and vital deviations from the recognized achievements. The abyssal intersections of poetic meanings stand out in particular, as well as external contexts and echoes, which leads to shifted methodological settings and different interpretive forces. Initially, the analysis of the first edition, along with comparisons with selected editions, reveals the verticals of the literary values of the poem, the indelible stock of meanings in which it emanates, and purposefully mirrors the distinct beauty.
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In this paper we tried to illustrate how various literary and philosophical theories can be applied to interpretation of the play “Balkanski špijun” (“Balkan Spy”) by a famous contemporary Serbian playwright, Dušan Kovačević. In the introductory part of the paper, we analyzed the play “Balkanski špijun” according to the basic principle of Manfred Pfister’s drama theory—the overlapping of the internal and external communication system. We used Pfister’s theory to better explain in which ways reality figures in Kovačević’s play and to show that his work relies on comedies written by the great Serbian comedy writer, Kovačević’s predecessor, Jovan Sterija Popović. In the second segment of the paper, we considered the functioning of ideologically determined subjects, Ilija and Danica, and in the third and the central part of the work, we tried to present Ilija’s world as simulacrum induced.In all the segments of this work, we tried to show how modern theories related to different domains of human thinking can be successfully applied in the interpretation of a complex work of art such as “Balkanski špijun” by Dušan Kovačević.
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