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This article is a reading focused on several aspects of the Baroque mosaic of "artistic, historical and critical memoirs" of Nicolae Filimon, reflected in Excursions to Meridional Germany. Started on the road with the intention of a precise cultural practice, the writer experienced, like his predecessors, the clash between civilizations. The author records aspects of the way of life (traditions, morals), sketches portraits, informs about places, except that his writing does not lack comments, including comparative ones, that critically highlight the differences between civilizations, morals and mentalities between the Western world and the world left at the gates of the East. There is highlighted what the traveler-writer believes to be the specific way of foreigners to manifest as a compact, unitary category through behaviors that fall within the sphere of stereotypes. During the process of approaching Western Europe, in parallel with the discovery of national identity, the months spent in the West gave him, in political, social, economic, moral and cultural terms, completely instructive confrontations with what the Other represents.
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The present article is a synthesis of a national literary project "A.N.P.C.P. "S.L.B." "(1997-2019) held in 23 editions in collaboration with the Writers Union of Romania and the Gorj County Centre of Creation. The study as such outlines the theoretical and doctrinal basis of the new aesthetic-artistic paradigm of Romanian trans-modernism, a new literary, poetic and critical current that has already acquired a stand-alone status, a distinct profile and a validated axiological and ontological existence. More specifically, through the annual meetings and manifestations of the National Poetry Workshop and Critique "Evenings in Brădiceni", the Trans-modernist Way, the Principles and Laws of Trans-modernism were promoted.
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In the present paper I will focus on the configuration of the contemporary urban space in P. Ackroyd’s non-fiction, with focus on the city of London as a site of memory. In his fiction as well as in his non-fiction writing, Ackroyd anticipates modern quantic physics concepts of reality while playing with the space-time continuum by permanently shifting London’s boundaries and thus turning it into a morphogenetic space. In his London. The Biography, Albion. The Origins of the English Imagination or Thames. The Biography, literature, approaching history, geography and cultural studies are interwoven in his description of the urban space and it is this interdisciplinarity that casts light on its polymorphism.
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If we add thought and language to Snow’s knowledge and experience, we get the full range of the significant dimensions of human existence. For a variety of reasons, language is a good starting point, and in this case a fruitful one, too. Whorf (after Sapir and Dewey) proposes the theory that language shapes or determines thought, and thought is best expressed in “literature”(everything that gets written down). For C. P. Snow, a decade after his “Two Cultures” famous lecture, the knowledge offered by science (Newton) is limited, temporary, partial, replaceable, while experience (Shakespeare) results in general, universally human knowledge. One century before, De Quincey wrote about “the literature of knowledge and the literature of power.” So: how important is literature (art) for STEM-s—a question that is answered by invoking and quoting various authors from the non-humanities; and—if language is so important in shaping thought, where does language come from? From cognitivists (Turner first of all) and others, the answer is “story” (i.e. literature); and the conclusion appears as surprisingly obvious: literature is fundamental for thought and language, for knowledge and experience, for all intellectual pursuits.
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Spanish literary critics consider that readers can acquire historical knowledge about the 19th century in Spain much easier from Galdós’s novels than from history books. Galdós’s literary works encompass considerable historical, anthropological and sociological information, and the novelist faithfully depicts the technological and scientific advancements, as well as the development of the society and what his contemporaries had been dreaming to achieve.Since the novelist eagerly desired to describe very faithfully his society for the posterity, he could not ignore the role of marriage during the 19th century in Spain. The wedded pair was not looking for love, but for an alliance of convenience, mostly due to economic purposes. In this article we intend to unravel when and why Galdós’s characters decided to get married.
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Although sometimes seen as a regional writer, because of his seedtime spent in the South, Truman Capote, among the writers having emerged in the middle of the 20th century, shows amazing versatility and willingness to adapt to a life “on the road,” traveling between and among places and spaces on the American literary map. He will be a writer experimenting with other voices, other rooms, as the name of his first novel suggests, while living on the edge. And then, how can one ignore the exercise in diversity of perspective that Truman will engage in, in his shift from the exploration of the special femininity of a Manhattan geisha in Breakfast at Tiffany’s to the incursion into the troubled consciousness of the killers in In Cold Blood?
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Defining what is special about John P. Quinn in a day and age having left behind, while also dealing with, long traditions and bewildering varieties of authors of all orientations is obviously difficult. Such an endeavor depends on expressions of sameness and difference of the grounds and realms shared with others, as well as in terms of oppositions to what others are or do. The current text examines Quinn’s work in relation to poetic coordinates to be found in Ted Hughes’s poetry of fascination with the mythic perspective on the fierce animal world, as well as with features to be observed in such American poets as Robert Frost. However, Quinn’s work asserts its artistic autonomy, expressing a remarkable sense of the here and now, while also evincing a fascination with the nostalgically remote. It displays memorable flashes and glimpses of personal experience, with occasional touches of humor. The current essay explores Quinn’s artistic realm, which reveals a legitimate drive toward dealing with new ground, both formally and thematically, to challenge formerly set fences and boundaries, while at the same time playing with them, in fashions reminiscent of the poetry of Robert Frost.
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The present paper will focus on two literary creations which have the fabulous city of New Orleans as their setting and which reveal the many-sidedness of the city. A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams’ play, which made the New Orleans streetcar so famous, focuses on the tropical atmosphere which makes people desire, while John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is the perfect example of why New Orleans is known as “The Big Easy”. Focusing on different aspects of the city, both literary pieces reveal new facets of New Orleans, either by relying on the characters’ background or by playing with history for the delight of the reader.
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Postmodernism offers a new perspective on Romanian literature in the western context, anticipating the principles of philosophy to be pluralistic, that is, of the communist regime and the transition to current and literary democracy and cultural pursuit remains identified in the programmatic and postmodern diversity. Postmodernism has experienced the most intense proclamations of its end and several critical perspectives after 1990. It is important to note that the first debate on this topic in the Romanian cultural space took place four years earlier from that moment, on the occasion of the emergence of a special number of "Critical Books" dedicated to the literary current mentioned above. The aim was also to trace directions that would outline an evolution of the word postmodernism and its derivatives, which began circulating in our national culture even before 1986.
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The communication makes an incursion into the history of literature and literary theory from the last century and tries to establish the tangentiality between the new literary forms of the modern novel and the most important directions of theoretical interpretation: on the one hand, the theories of reading and the theories of reception, on the other, the dialogism of Mihail Bahtin. Mihail Bahtin's dialogism appears as a reaction to the rigidity of the formalists’ interpretations, independent of this movement from Soviet Russia, a few decades later, in Western Europe, as a reaction to structuralism, appears theories of reading and reception. Both dialogism and reader-oriented theories were conditioned first by the specificity of the new literary discourse, which, from the desire to escape the author's biography or the rigidity of strictly linguistic interpretations of the structuralists and formalists, broke away from the traditional form. Unlike the theories of reading and reception, which have divided the process of literary communication, the dialogical perspective intersperses the intratextual dimension (implied reader, implied author, narrator, characters) with the extra-textual one (the concrete reader and author with all the determinations and influences related to their specific socio-cultural contexts). For the Russian scholar, all these intrinsic and extrinsic courts become "voices", framed in a continuous dialogue from which the text's meaning is subsequently crystallized. The study of literature from the perspective of dialogue can solve many dilemmas of reading and interpretation process.
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Inspired by the remarkable personage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his transition from comedian and actor to an inspirational leader admired around the world, this paper will examine the similar fate of Hal/Henry V in Shakespeare’s second Henriad. The focus will be on Henry’s comic “career”, prior to ascending the throne, “slumming” with Falstaff and his followers, in particular in Henry IV Part One. There will be an attempt to demonstrate how Henry, contrary to expectations, makes profitable use of his time to “learn the ropes”. Henry in his interactions with Falstaff and others employs a wide range of comic techniques: jokes, insult comedy, imitations, political satire, etc. In contrast, however, with Zelensky who has bravely rallied his country and inspired the world with resistance to a larger aggressor in a defensive war, Henry V does the exact opposite invading neighbouring France on the most flimsy of pretexts. Although lionized in many productions as a great military leader, icon of Englishness and man of the people, this paper will argue for his ultimate failure as a leader, failing to heed the lessons of his comic “apprenticeship”, in stark contrast to Zelensky.
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This article looks at two turn-of-the-century neo-Victorian works – Tipping the Velvet (1998) by Sarah Waters and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) by Peter Ackroyd. Both novels offer a detailed depiction of cross-dressing and theatre in the latter part of the nineteenth century and its effects on the main characters. The article analyses each work individually to sufficiently examine significant relationships and their impact on the main heroines’ character formation. Furthermore, it looks at gender performativity in the Victorian setting and the unique environment of the music halls. As demonstrated, the examined characters achieve liberation by occupying both male and female spheres and by refusing to propagate the strict rules encompassing gender binaries. As a result, both characters are able to freely explore their possibilities while wearing male clothes and arrive at a more authentic and well-rounded image of who they are.
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The relationships between comparative research and traductology are interconnected, because comparative studies use translations as a method of obtaining knowledge about other systems, and the results of comparative research are a source of knowledge for translation. These connections occur both in translating and comparing the law between different legal systems and languages, and in comparing multilingual literature. Similarly, translation work and comparative work, although starting at the linguistic level, go beyond it, in order to establish the cultural context of the text. The critical moment of this thought process is a specific linguistic “profit and loss account”, forced by the transfer of meanings from one language to another. This transfer can be compared to crossing borders: in relation to the law they are the borders of the empire, and in relation to literature – the borders of the world. In these empires and worlds, translators and comparativists play special cultural roles, mediating the transfer of meanings and symbols between the authors of texts and their recipients. Each of these roles, if played well, requires effort, courage, and understanding between different empires and worlds. The metaphor of the crew of the ship, on which the Argonauts set off on a “linguistic expedition”, believing that they will bring “the golden fleece”, that is, the same meanings in different worlds, defines the framework of the presented sketch.
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Some of the most eminent Polish writers such as Bolesław Leśmian, Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert or Witold Gombrowicz studied law for some time or even graduated from it. The article aims to present their attitude to studying law. In particular, the paper shall present the reasons for choosing law studies, memories of student times, flashbacks of lecturers, and their attitude to legal practice (B. Leśmian and W. Gombrowicz). The history of their legal experience is mostly a story of disappointments. Adam Zagajewski wrote that law is “inaccessible to the poet’s melting mood”. The second part of the article tries to look for other than personal predilections explanations of this feature of law. In the conclusion, it is claimed that although poetry and perhaps also literary prose are interested in the field of general cognition in which they resemble the law however the extent of this field lies in the sphere of legal irrelevance.
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On February 24, 1920, Adolf Hitler announced the 25-point program of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP). Article 19 of the program proclaimed: “We demand that Roman Law, which serves a materialistic world order, be replaced by a German common law” (German: Wir fordern Ersatz für das der materialistischen Weltordnung dienende römische Recht durch ein deutsches Gemeinrecht). The presence of Roman law on the Nazi agenda aroused surprise from the beginning. The more time passed, the more sophisticated attempts were made to find its cultural-ideological basis. As a result, a complicated ideology was added to it post factum. Meanwhile, it cannot be ruled out that the inspiration for Hitler and his aides was not some great political tracts, but a primitive anti-Semitic lampoon – Judas Schuldbuch: Eine Deutsche Abrechnung. The book, under the pseudonym Wilhelm Meister, was published by a minor financial official named Wilhelm Meister in 1919.
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Imagination can be associated with the innocent capacity to contemplate on either non-existent or absent objects, which for some reason or another seem to be nonexistent in our immediate or actual surroundings. It enables us to escape the confines of instantaneous reality, thereby liberating us from the subjection to our immediate surroundings and transferring us to transient worlds in our minds, which are somewhat cut off from actuality. With respect to this suggested nature of the imagination, some may argue that the ultimate power of imagination lies in its ability to empower the subject with a profound sense of freedom, that is innately strong enough to break the limits of what is actual and what is real. While on a personal level, imagination gives one the ability to traverse bounds of immediate reality; on a macro/community level, imagination can be very toxic for some. This paper will look at different real and fictional literary examples, while journeying through Sartre, Husserl, Castoriadis and Ricouer’s ideas and theories of imagination, and, trying to map out the essential aspects of the needs and formations of identities of different marginal individuals/communities. Along side that, it will also try and connect the different ways of survival and perseverance that people find via imagination.
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This paper explores the connections between Iain Sinclair’s 2015 travelogue Black Apples of Gower and the Merlin legend. Despite the fact that, on the surface, Sinclair does not refer to the early Welsh merlinistic tradition, on closer inspection both share what M. Wynn Thomas has described as “hidden attachments” – cross cultural connections and experiences between the two literatures of modern Wales. The archaic bedrock of the Merlin legend and the alchemical imagery in Sinclair’s book are both rooted in the mythico-ritualistic complex of symbolic regeneration based on the repetition of the act of original creation. Both Merlin and the alchemical process involve an ontological transformation which is mirrored in Black Apples of Gower by the transcendence of textual and medial boundaries: a complex network of intertextual allusions and word-image relationships (ekphrases, reproductions and illustrations). By exploring these relationships, along with the merlinistic and alchemical imagery present in the text, I argue that the work employs the strategy of what I call textual nigredo – a process of intertextual and intermedial transformation. The affinities identified between the Merlin legend and Sinclair’s travelogue provide an argument for seeing Iain Sinclair as a Welsh writer and shed new light on the links between the Welsh-language literary tradition and English-language Welsh writing which may be pursued further in the future.
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