Keywords: Czechoslovakia; Allen Ginsberg; US; Cuba; Prague; 1965; state security; socialism; King of May; communist party;
The U.S. poet Allen Ginsberg flew to Prague for the first time on 18 February 1965, from Cuba. Despite turning up in Czechoslovakia completely unplanned, he made a very deep impression.
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Keywords: Slovakia; magazine; "Kocúr"; Jews; Roma; paintings;
Obrazu Róma a Žida vo folklórnom materiáli sa slovenská folkloristika venuje už niekoľko rokov predovšetkým prostredníctvom prác Evy Krekovičovej (1998a, 2006 a i.). Zaujímavým historickým i žánrovým premostením a doplnením je ďalší typ prameňa – humoristické časopisy objavujúce sa v slovenskom jazykovom prostredí od 2. polovice 19. storočia. Tento materiál predstavuje rôzne typy textov, tlač totiž reprodukovala nielen verejnosťou spontánne šírené látky, ale prinášala i aktuálne komentovanie spoločenských udalostí prostredníctvom textových i obrazových prostriedkov rodiacej sa profesionálnej či poloprofesionálnej žurnalistiky. Spolu s E. Krekovičovou sme pripravili štúdiu, ktorá mapovala obraz „zradcu“ a „nepriateľa“ v prvom humoristickom časopise Černokňažník, kde v kontexte spoločenských a politických pomerov rakúsko-uhorskej monarchie dominovali najmä postavy „maďaróna“, Maďara a Žida (Krekovičová, Panczová, 2013a).
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Keywords: Miroslav Krleža; the novel Zastave; Croatian national identity; Croatianhood; Yugoslavism
The paper analyzes the problems of the Croatian national identity in Krleža’s novel Flags/ Zastave (1976), the “dramatic history” of the agony and the final collapse of Austria-Hungary, the Balkan Wars, Wold War I and the newly formed South Slavic state community.Through the political genesis of the basic actant of the novel and his relation to other characters of the novel the national identity genesis will be monitored as well: from romantic Croatianhood, that strongest (non-state) foothold in the Arcadian experience of “our lovely homeland”, then the ecstatic Yugonationalism as a way out of the “large prison of nations” to the “bloody caricature” of the hero’s youthful political dreams in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In the novel, by analogy, mirror images of unresolved national issues in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia are noticeable.
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Keywords: Baudelaire axiology; ethics; moral responsibility; the Norwidian perspective
The article confronts Baudelaire’s work with the perspective of Norwid’s writings through the issue of moral responsibility. The intermediary in this approach is Stanisław Brzozowski. The discussion over the (im)morality of „Les Fleurs du mal” and Norwid’s contemporary reception of Baudelaire’s writings leads to questions about the understanding of Catholicism in the era of secularization in both writers’ works, the place of evil in the world, loneliness, and the attitude to the source of transcendence. The author of the article argues that the axiological horizon disappears neither from Norwid’s works nor, in spite of appearances, from Baudelaire’s.
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Keywords: disgust; ickiness; taboo; consumption; everydayness; Poland
“Produkt Polski” (The Polish Product) is an example of the book that breaks the taboo of taste. Shuty’s work joins contrary contents (religious, eroticism, dignity, frivolity, the sacrum and the profane), in a caricature way. Therefore „Produkt Polski” may be perceived as distasteful. The purpose of this paper is to explain the reader’s feelings in confrontation with Shuty’s book. The paper also focuses on a discussing the motif of ickiness in „Produkt Polski”. In conclusion, the author proves that disgust and ickiness are used by artist to contest consumerism and the weaknesses of polish culture. Although the text is an example of a case study, it also contains the conclusions that comment contemporary polish culture.
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Keywords: somatic diagnosis; intimacy; authenticity; character decentralisation; holistic medicine;
Intimacy in fiction is an aesthetical, symbolical and emotional choice. Medicine and novel writing seem to prolong the disease nature has given to mankind. Some writers’ propensity for structural themes and motifs from pathology can be considered both a professional and a somatic diagnosis predisposition. Life as a fate leading to death was a general idea at the end of the 19th century. To suddenly utter, that the soul is the body could have destabilised humanistic sciences, and it meant the decentralisation of literary character, the shift of narrative techniques, the conversion of psychology to physiological analysis emphasising the authenticity of sensation. Hortensia Papadat Bengescu’s characters are so fleshless, that it’s easy to see their soul. Illness is their only connection to the world. Each character tragically aspires to a common life, refused to all of them by their psychological or physiological condition.
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Keywords: conscious pain;disease;death;Jacek Kaczmarski
In this article, on the background of “the discourse of disease”, the authoress analyses some of the works placed in that book to see how the illness and the end of life are conceptualized in them as well as considers the functions of definite poetical measures exposing experience of the disease
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Keywords: ocialist television studies; Romania; national tv
During recent years, the study of European televisions has rediscovered "socialist television", and we have witnessed a rapid rise in scholarly interest in a new field of research: socialist television studies. On the whole, this recent body of literature presents two main new insights as compared to previous studies in the field of the history of Western television: on the one hand, it shows that European television during the Cold War was less heterogeneous than one may imagine when considering the political, economic and ideological split created by the Iron Curtain; on the other hand, it turns to and capitalizes on archives, mostly video, which have been inaccessible to the public. The interactions between Western and socialist mass culture are highlighted mainly with respect to the most popular TV programs: fiction and entertainment.The authors give us an extraordinary landscape of the Romanian socialist television. Unique in the Eastern part of Europe is the period of the early 1990s. Upon the fall of the communist regime, after almost 15 years of freezing, TVR found itself unable to move forward.
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Keywords: Bosnia as failed state; Bosnian stagnation; Paddy Ashdown; High Representative; Republika Srpska;
Six years after the end of the fighting in BiH, and despite possibly the largest amount of democratization assistance per capita ever spent in one country, the international mission to BiH has arrived at this paradoxical conclusion: What Bosnia and Herzegovina needs is not democratic domestic politics, but government by international experts.
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Keywords: Urszula Augustyniak; early modern history; early modern culture; history of religion; nobility; Radziwiłł family; reformation
Anniversary publication for Professor Urszula Augustyniak, affiliated with the Institute of History of the University of Warsaw, a renowned cultural historian specialized in the early modern period. Articles collected in the book are concerned with the broadly understood early modern history of culture, politics, and religion.
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Keywords: classroom; humou; teacher; student; laughter;
This study attempts to explore the ways in which humour is used in the classroom. The underlying assumption is that humour relies on ambiguity, representing an intermediate space between different meanings. The paper starts with a theoretical presentation of several theories of humour, such as the incongruity theory, the hostility theory, and the release theory, and includes a review of different types of humour – irony, satire, or sarcasm. The practical part consists of data recorded in the classroom, which are identified as humorous. This part aims to classify the humorous instances. The conclusions are that humour occurring in the classroom is mostly innocent and inclusive; however, teachers may use humour in order to indirectly criticize students, and students may resort to humour as an attempt to challenge teachers’ authority.
More...![Woman as Text: Genre and Narrative Modelling in the Magazine Zhenata Dnes [Women Today] (1960-1970)](/api/image/getbookcoverimage?id=document_cover-page-image_910649.jpg)
Keywords: genre; narrative model; reading and ideological models; women’s magazines; women in totalitarian socialism
The essay traces the changes that have occurred in the communicative attitudes of the magazine in the course of a decade. The reorientation of reading from the dominant genre of documentary reportage to the dominant expression entailed in the essay, as a form, is deeply connected with the transformation of the envisaged modelling of the exemplary “socialist woman“. The text outlines the symbolic potential with which the narrative models of the reportage woman and the essay woman are vested and seeks to elucidate the grounds for their delineation and difference. At the beginning of the period the reportage woman is the pre-announced, fully-realized (but future-oriented) presence, which recruits “facticity“ and “reality“ (the genre characteristics of the documentary reportage) from the database of the repertoire of ideological references. At the end of the period, the essay woman can rely solely on the genre fields of morality fable and caricature and even heroic chronicles prefer to recognize the “facts“ of the past and convey them to the readers through the figure of the essay woman.
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Keywords: voice;text;music;intersemioticity;intermediality;James Chapman;Bernd Alois Zimmermann
The chapter employs Roman Jakobson’s understanding of intersemiotic translation as transmutation from one sign system to another, analysing two works belonging to different modalities, namely Alois Zimmermann’s composition Requiem füreinenjungenDichter (1969) and James Chapman’s novel How Is This Going to Continue? (2007).
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Keywords: Reinhard Goering; Fernando Arrabal; agony; apocalypse; war; destruction
In this article, the author studies the dramas which, while exposing the absurdity of war, express an apocalyptic vision of humanity doomed to its destruction. Whether it is Reinhard Goering’s “Sea battle” or Arrabal’s dramas (“Picnic on the Battlefield” and “Guernica”) we are witnessing an obvious renewal of the tragedy. However, the authors do not apply the rules specific to the canonical genre, but by shining a light on the precarious condition of modern man, they paint a world in its self-destruction where there is no place for catharsis. Tragic in its modernized version inevitably provokes the shaking of the dramatic form which testifies not only to human agony but also to that of dramatic art. In fact, the two playwrights undermine the main foundations of “absolute drama”, deconstructing the action in the classic sense of the word and depriving their characters of their active attributes of a hero of traditional theater.
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Keywords: survival; resilience; “pharmakon”; writing; testimony; trauma
On January 7th 2015, Philippe Lançon, a journalist at “Libération” and at “Charlie Hebdo” attends the newspaper’s premises, when the islamist terrorists attack. The killers’bullets tear his jaws off, severely injure his arms, make his existence capsize, but he survives. In his novel “Le Lambeau”, he tells the story of a mental as well as physical reconstruction, sketching the chronology of his days in various hospitals, depicting the visitors who make his days brighter and the varied shades of his consciousness. Is his writing, a mere testimony of a tragical experiment, the chronicles of a journalist who witnesses how one comes back to life? Or is it a “pharmakon”, a poison within a remedy, which puts back to life things past and gone, as a way of healing? Or shall we give a spiritual significance to this writing, so haunted by Proust that it parodies his style and shows literature as a means of salvation?
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Keywords: art of living; deconstruction; imagination; parody; proverb; rhetorical manipulation; stereotype; surrealism
Proverbs convey an idealized and conventional art of living that is generally referred to as popular wisdom. Made of stereotypes and pretending to shape our behaviour, this popular wisdom has been strongly contested by the surrealist poets Paul Éluard and Benjamin Péret in their 152 proverbes mis au goût du jour. On the one hand, this article analyzes the rhetorical modalities of this contest. These consist in a parody discourse that distorts traditional proverbs, while preserving their phraseology. On the other hand, this study examines how these parodic manipulations deconstruct the stereotypical art of living conveyed by the proverbial genre through different processes (trivialization, pejoration, contradiction, etc.). It also shows that the work of undermining carried out by Éluard and Péret on proverbs leads to the proclamation of a new art of living based on the poetic liberation of language, the refusal of authority and the reign of imagination.
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Keywords: French language; French philology; Polish students; social representations; se¬mantic fields
The main objective of the article is to present the results of some research – carried out with students of French philology in Poland – on their representations regarding to the French language. Some of the aspects will be subjected to a detailed analysis: the feelings that French evokes, its social status, the difficulties identified by the students as the most salient in French learning. All the images, woven by future philologists in their individual productions (and therefore subjective par excellence), allow us to reconstruct the semantic fields specific to the French language.
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We present here a summary of the results, obtained in the field of art history during the last twenty five years, as long as they appear in the publications, published between 1935 and 1959. Naturally, this outline cannot not be complete. It was necessary to confine oneself to a critical choice, and among the articles published in the specialized periodicals, or in the collections written for certain occasions, to mention only those which are of general importance.
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Keywords: Sherlock Holmes; exotic; displacement; vampirism; racism
In the Sherlock Holmes canon of 60 stories, we find various representations of the exotic and the foreign, which, arguably, is a reflection of Britain’s geopolitical position as well as sentiments current in the period in which the stories were written. In view of this, it is intriguing to see how easily Conan Doyle exploited his readers’ prejudices concerning the non-British, from belief in cannibalism among savages, vampirism to racism. Given the genre which the stories represent, worth exploring are the ways in which the exotic and the foreign are used to construct mystery plots. This analysis focuses on the assumptions that Conan Doyle makes concerning his readers’ knowledge of the exotic and the foreign, or, more to the point, their ignorance. These assumptions have allowed him to ascribe a great number of outlandish or sensational features to human characters, animals, artefacts, and substances. The paper examines a selection of the stories which feature culturally displaced characters.
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Keywords: animals; cruelty; anthropomorphization; hyperbolization; autonomy; Octave Mirbeau
Mirbeau’s writings constantly show his deep and surprisingly modern interest in the world of nature, his respect for its often brutal force and his desire to preserve it from dangers of civilization. His pessimistic view of mankind as stupid, cruel and ignorant results in him portraying animals as embodiment of wisdom, tenderness and love. After a brief classification of roles animals play in Mirbeau’s works, the rhetorical figures he uses to influence the reader’s point of view will be succinctly analyzed. However, by using hyperbolization, anthropomorphization, or mystification for his animal portraits, is Mirbeau sacrificing his understanding of nature for the sake of argumentation? The relations between human beings and animals, as it results from his writings, will thus form the final part of the present study.
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