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In the literature for children and young adults, the motif of death is not uncommon, but it is usually not accepted as a final and permanent solution. This paper examines the narrative representation of death in chosen texts that deal with the Holocaust and include children and young people as narrators or characters. Taking these two principles into account – the narrative of death in the context of the real historical background of genocide, and emphasising children as narrators or characters – we presuppose a different indication of death, as well as narration about it. Here we also debate the power of language in dealing with this subject matter.
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Cultural studies frequently rely on the arts to reveal traditions, history, ideologies, and other aspects of a particular group. However, at what point and how are child readers asked to consider the significance of the arts to individuals’ cultural lives? This paper shares an inquiry that addresses how children’s literature, outside being a distinctive art form in itself, can offer stories that place the arts inseparably at the heart of one’s life experiences – defining culture, traditions, family history, and personal identity. The inquiry shared here focuses on a text set of 12 children’s picturebooks in which characters connect to some form of the arts in very specific and purposeful ways – facing a life challenge as a result of his or her passion for the arts or a challenge for which the arts hold resolution. Through the lens of New Historicism supported by social semiotics, a critical content analysis of these books reveals their potential for powerful, authentic insights into the role of the arts in one’s personal culture.
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Some of Mauri Kunnas’s picturebooks are examined as bearers of Finnish cultural heritage. His Doghill series conveys heritage by describing country life in 19th-century western Finland. Kunnas’s The Canine Kalevala is an adaptation of the Finnish epic The Kalevala and also includes several adaptations of Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Kalevala paintings. Both The Kalevala and the paintings of Gallen-Kallela, held in high esteem in Finland, are adapted for child readers by Kunnas, who retells the story by using animal characters, omits problematic issues and adds humour to make it more appropriate for children. An informed adult reader reads The Canine Kalevala as an adaptation of The Kalevala, with an understanding of complex cultural and literary references, while a child reader sees the book as a new, exciting story.
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This paper highlights the key points of the introduction to the master’s thesis “Morality as Rebellion in the Post-Hollywood Plays of Steve Tesich.” The title of the thesis was taken from the one of the last interviews Steve Tesich gave before his sudden death. The paper emphasizes similarities that exist between the preoccupation with the moral state of America in the speeches given by Martin Luther King and Harold Pinter Nobel Prize Lecture, and the significance that Tesich ascribes to morality in his plays. There is, moreover, a notable similarity betweenTesich’s analysis of the so-called American Dream and the analyses of America reported byWimWenders in The American Dream, Jean Baudrillard in Amerique, and Umberto Eco in Travels in Hyperreality, or Faith in Fakes. Preoccupation with the moral principles on which Western civilization is founded is also the central concern of plays written by South African writer Athol Fugard and Australian playwright Stephen Sewell. All these comparisons are seen as context for the better understanding of Tesich’s contribution to American 20th century art, and background against which specific features of his talent and creativity can be studied.
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At the beginning of the twentieth century, American cities functioned as urban spaces of promise for the masses of ―new‖ immigrants (from Eastern-Europe and Russia) seeking economic and social opportunities for upward mobility in the United States. In their autobiographies, immigrant women writers in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Elizabeth Stern (My Mother and I) and Rose Cohen (Out of the Shadow) described the struggles and challenges they encountered - as women and as immigrants - in different American urban spaces, fraught with complex social, economic, and cultural issues at that time. This article looks at the ways in which the urban spaces navigated by Rose Cohen and Elizabeth Stern, such as the neighborhoods where they lived, the schools and/or settlement houses they attended, have shaped the narrators‘ gendered choices and impacted their processes of acculturation and/or assimilation into the American mainstream society.
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As compared to their Romantic counterparts, Victorian poets refused to make emotion and reverie the milestones of their poetic outlook. Instead, building on what the age’s great novelists had already achieved, they turned to reality and pragmatism in search of a new and distinct poetic voice. The popular Victorian bards, Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, dwelled on the key issues of their time and wrote for a society increasingly vulgarized by industrialization and materialism, while at the same time attempting to preserve their artistic integrity.
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Kate Chopin (1850-1904) was a significant American writer at the end of the 19th century, best known for her controversial novel The Awakening, although she also wrote over 100 short stories that captured the life and the people of Natchitoches Parish in Louisiana. Chopin was mainly known as a regional writer or local colorist, but in her stories she was mostly interested in the condition and needs of women, discussing such avant-garde subjects as the constraints of marriage, divorce, adultery, and suicide. By looking at several Kate Chopin short stories, this essay proposes various strategies and activities for teaching her short fiction to undergraduate students, as part of a course on American women’s writing, entitled “Women in Literature (1870-1930).”
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The paper presents a detailed analysis of one of the most important program texts, written by Dimitrije Mitrinović, specifically, about futuristic manifesto - “Aesthetic contemplations (About criticism which does’t exist or Defense Rebuilding)”. The style is analyzed, also, basic ideas and principles, which the author proclaimed in his program, and some theses were compared with other important papers, by this avant-garde writer, critic, philosopher, essayist and translator. These are, in fact, papers, named “The problems of aesthetics”, “The national land and Modernity”, and “The democratization of science and philosophy”. Also, it is pointed to the importance of ancient traditions for poetics and rhetoric in this program, and the importance of the “pletenije sloves” as an example for the style of “old practices”, that “the new practices” should take as the value for the future. This program, therefore, actually is a manifesto of “theory of value”, written by Dimitrije Mitrinović, which is reflected in the equating terms - ethics and aesthetics, therefore, they can be written in the following way – Aestet(h)ics. This “philosophy of values” would be a futuristic “wisdom of creation”, or, in other words, “great work”, in the point of view by this, for Serbian culture - important thinker.
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In this paper we are dealing with the narratological approach to the novel The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. We do not do narratological analysis of the entire novel, but by analyzing the narrative instance and focalization. Each story reveals through certain narrative instance, the narrator, who talks with a certain knowledge and events from their point of view, or from the perspective of someone else. The narrator or narrative instance is the one who tells a story, and his first feature is a narrative function. In this paper, we point to the division of the narrator in relation to the very narrative text and in relation to participation in the story. Focalization is the viewing angle, one prism through which the story is presented. The novel The Sound and the Fury is the story of the gradual destuction of the family Kompson, on the material and moral level. We are determine why storytelling entrusted three sons of the Kompsons, and why, as a narrator, does not appear, Kedi, sister of which narrate all the brothers? The narrator and focalization study relying on theoretical assumptions Gerard Genette, Mike Ball, Rimmon-Kenan, Gerald Prince. Different typologies narrator and focalization raised by these authors, we apply on the novel The Sound and the Fury. Our goal is not only to recognize the characteristic of the narrator and focalization, and determine their typology, but also, to determinate the function that storytelling has.
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In a series of publications the author presents and discusses the views of writers on language expressed in their works. This article focusses on Bulgarian writer Iliya Volen (1905–1982).
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Naslov ovog rada “obećava" (u smislu Austinova performativa, sa njegovim uspjesima i promašajima) jednu vrstu analitičke inscenacije identiteta, shvaćene kao dio socijalnih, političkih i kulturno-tekstualnih praksi. Posljednjih desetak godina u humanističkim znanostima pojam id entiteta ima visoku konjukturu. Riječ je o transdisciplinarnom pojmu, koji otvara široko polje kritičke refleksije, ne samo o biografskom personalnom identitetu, već i o procesima diferencijacije i formama kolektivnog identiteta, povezanim sa kulturološkim, socijalnim, psihološkim i povijesnim konstrukcijama spolne, etničke, nacionalne ili klasne samosvijesti i autorefleksije.
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The author of the paper presents a short history of the idea of plagiarism and concludesthat today it should be interpreted as a unique, alternative, but still legitimate mannerof writing, in which what matters most is memory – that of the author and that of thereader. Such an approach was proposed by members of the OuLiPo group (François LeLionnais, Marcel Bénabou, and Pierre Bayard) as plagiarism by anticipation. Its features,such as obvious similarity of texts, discord between the plagiarized fragment and therest of the work and other works from the same period, secrecy, and temporal inversion,in the era of widespread reproduction provoke to think about copies in terms of anticipationor falsification of the missing works. Will the Messiah come from thatdirection?
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In this article, Hâle Seval’s storybook, Kırılgan Kuleler, published in 2003, is analyzed from the point of sociology of literature. Being among female writers making a great effort in different narrative types such discussion, review and short story, Hâle Seval is one of major contemporary representatives of the modernist-storytelling tradition. The empathy method is used in present study conducting a thematic analysis. In literary texts enriched in mesh with fiction, aesthetic and real elements, presence of an understanding of storytelling based on human and natural philosophy comes to forefront. Considering Seval’s stories written in the style of modern short stories, society as a phenomenon in her understanding is not a field of collective representations and symbols developed or produced by the intellectual mind. Like the individual, society also takes on meaning within the natural environment. In author’s sense of reality, natural environment-social environmental/social structure exhibit a nested organic correlation. Evaluating heroes/people with their psycho-social and cultural elements, the author calls attention to the impact of social factors on the individual. We may remark that the author often uses ethnographic, historical, cultural and geographical elements in her stories. In this context, analyzing both the sense of authorship identity and thematic content of stories, we can highlight that Hâle Seval’s stories have pioneered in becoming significant examples of the literary type, also called “documentary story” from the point of the history of story in Turkey. Analyzing in terms of sociology, it is possible to remark that the author discusses various themes along with rich content in her stories. These themes in general can be listed as follows: the relationship between individual’s lifestyle with the city phenomenon; gender-based differentiation, discrimination-exclusion formats from the point of women’s class positions; fragmentations and contradictions in individual’s subjective world created by distinct characteristics and experiences peculiar to urban and rural structure; different types of children created by layers of poverty; reflection and experience types of love and sexuality understanding in subjective world and outer-social world; effects of psycho-social and cultural aspects of the migration phenomenon on individual’s life, alienation; philosophical-sociological breaks created in individual’s lifestyle by the ethnicity-induced migration. Sequence of stories and their section titles symbolize a journey from outer reality towards subjective reality, in which reality is gradually exceeded, and a journey towards the author’s world view and artistic information layers relating to the existence.
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In recent years, comparative literature has affected a lively response to the dynamic transformations of its socio-cultural environment: it has declared the death of the old discipline and the beginning of a new one, and has increasingly set foot into the realm of the modern digital laboratory. It has, however, too seldom made use of a historical analysis of its own origins, which could have an impact on how future tasks and opportunities in comparative studies are perceived. This paper looks back to the rhetorical legacy of the category of comparison — one of the traditions that led to the institutionalization of comparative studies in the nineteenth century, and which could be useful in an attempt to rewrite the discipline’s history, particularly if grounded in translation studies.
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Conceptions of the devil in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Serbian literatures were taken from the polytheistic religion, Christianity and their mutual intertwining in folk Christianity, and from transformed motifs and various types of mythic, magical and rational thinking found in the 19th century literary movements. The devil is found under various names in the oral and written culture, and in the texts analysed here we find (1) names such as Satan, Lucifer, Asmodeus, Astaroth, Beelzebub, Antichrist, Mephisto, Pan Kopitinski etc.; (2) the fight between the Devil and God, the deal with the devil, exorcism, the devil as the tempter, the devil in hell, the devil at the sabbath, the devil in a dream, the devil’s servant/child/disciple, the devil in love, and the powerless devil. The section dealing with the themes that involve the devil touches upon the features of chronotopes, characters, ideas and intertextual connections. We also refer to works which mention demons in 19th century Slavic literatures by literary historians such as Renate Lachmann, Yuri Lotman, Yuri Mann, Jan Tomkowski, Alois Schmaus, Dejan Ajdačić etc.
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This article examines the blurred boundaries between different oral and literary poetics in early modern Finland. Both the first written examples of traditional Finnic oral poetry (in so-called Kalevala-metre with no rhymes or stanza structures) and the first rhymed and stanzaic poems originate from this very same period, often in various hybrid forms. Ambiguity and the hybrid character of poems means the contemporary audiences may have interpreted individual poems as relating to several poetic traditions. The material demonstrates that the elites had knowledge of oral poetics that they both avoided and applied in various ways. In Lutheran hymns, the features of traditional oral poetry were first avoided, but, from the 1580s onwards, alliteration and some other features were incorporated into rhymed, iambic stanzas. At the same time, the clergymen and scholars also created a rhymed, heavily alliterated and trochaic genre of literary poems, which was apparently conceived as a version of the oral Finnish poetic form. Later scholars have often interpreted this learned, literary form as a misunderstanding of traditional oral poetics. In this article, it is understood as an intentional, hybrid form of rhymed couplets and Kalevala-metre. The various hybrid uses indicate that – contrary to the later scholarly views – the early modern writers did not conceive the old oral form as a conclusively pagan metre that should be strictly avoided.
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Literary criticism has always been based on the literary realm as well as the political realm since the Tanzimat period. The first feature of the literary criticism in the Ottoman-Turkish literature is the transformation of itself into a symbol of modernization. Still another feature is that “formal/objective criticism” has not been well established as a critical approach for a long time. Literary texts, therefore, have been usually evaluated on the basis of personal judgements rather than objective theoretical criteria. The critics on Divan poetry seem to be an area where boundaries between the literary and political realms are the most blurred. The source of devaluing judgements, which have been repeated since the Tanzimat period and turned into stereotypical expressions, on Divan poetry are mostly shaped by these two features of literary criticism. To define, however, the position of Divan poetry not only in the Ottoman-Turkish but also in the world literature in a rightful way, it is necessary to foster “formal/objective criticism” in the field of literary criticism.
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The paper is concerned with the topic of connection between the theory of paradigm as a primary notion of cognition, as defined by Giorgio Agamben, and its historical contextualization in the British literary movements which were flourishing during the decay of the Empire, ending in the turmoil of two World Wars. The diminishing notion of self-sufficient political and cultural ideology gave rise to various daring attempts to demystify the false solemnity of British middle-class society by the usage of scandalous literary ideas at the beginning of the XX century (as in Imagism and Modernism), which would only after World War II start to turn more subtle and discrete (as in Postmodernism). Whatever their discourses, these movements all held a common theory that a momentum of revolutionary cynicism is a necessary standpoint for the salvation of epistemology, culture, and arts from the clutches of ideological introversy.
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