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Rene Sentre: ŽIVOTINJE KAO „IZOBRAŽENJE PRIMERA“ Frederika Oduen Ruzo: ŽIVOTINJA Mišel Pasturo: KO JE KRALЈ ŽIVOTINJA? Mišel Pasturo: SIMBOL
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When I first read the proposed theme for this issue and thought about Schwab's realizations about reading, and my own recent, driven rereading of Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos science fiction/fantasy series, set in the semi-fictional world of Dragaera. The questions that Schwab poses, and Schwab's experiences reading Buck's Peony, had me focused more than I normally would on why Brust's series is such a touchstone for me as a reader. Then, looking back outward to other readers, I wondered, how does reading, as a kind of dreaming, potentially change our views of self, and perhaps change how we interact with our "reality", our lived world, and what that could be? I have chosen to discuss the works of Steven Brust, who has not yet been a part of academic conversation, in the hopes of opening up those existing conversations to the many other creative works of speculative fiction.
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Under a title unerringly reminiscent of Marianne Moore’s modernist manifesto in “Poetry” (1921) ‒ good, real modern poets should give us “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”‒, this paper follows the journey or quest of the fox (particularly Vulpes vulpes) from Aesop (tentatively) to the “fox poems” of Mark Jarman, Lucille Clifton, Philip Levine, John Clare, Kenneth Patchen, W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, Rita Dove, Adrienne Rich, Ted Hughes (whose “Thought-Fox” may have been the starting point ‒ “I imagine this… forest…” ‒ of our own quest) and Brendan Kennelly; a journey that takes us from the image of the real animal, its many lives and deaths (metempsychosis is evoked), to that of dreams, thoughts, and poems embodying it (or simply mentioning it). The succession of authors and poems is not chronological, but rather as required by the various stages of this fictional journey.
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In this article we intend to set out on an itinerary which will take us from the Malay space in Lord Jim (1900) to the Latin American one in Nostromo. A Tale of the Seaboard (1904). We posit that these spaces composed by the creative fabulation of the English-Polish writer Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) go beyond, respectively, the so called “salvage ethnography” in Lord Jim and the images coined by English travellers in Nostromo. Furthermore, as products of artistic creation, these spaces postulate worlds, that is, temporal-spatial wholes which surpass referentiality and mimesis.
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The condition of the family towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century is subjected to a series of socially related changes, which were the direct consequences of the First Wold War and the Bolshevik Revolution. Love, the key element of human nature, was meant to flourish within the boundaries of a family; otherwise it was considered adulterous and libertine. John Galsworthy’s novels, the Forsyte Saga series, and Mihail Sholokhov’s vast novel On the Quiet Don take into discussion different social and cultural milieu, the urban so- ciety of the high English bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and the rural community of the Cossacks on the Don, on the other. In both cases, marriages are carried out on the initiative of the family; the girls learn how to take care of home while men occupy the central position in society, assuming freedoms totally banned to women. Inevitably, the personal, individual plan intersects the historical one, and, consequently, family relations are under constant change.
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This article focuses on the relationship between real life, Pirandello’s art and his audience, past and present, who endeavours to grasp the messages encrypted in his dramatic art. We are here attempting to reconcile the playwright’s main ideas with the spectators’ existential reality. We shall also consider the critical approaches to Pirandello’s work, many of which are heavily influenced by the psychoanalytic perspective. Pirandello does not seek perfection and he does not know other ways of making art except those where real life asserts itself and blends with creative genius. The mystery of life pervades Pirandello’s art; his work is populated with shadows that haunt the spectator and invade his/her reality, forcing their dominion over the normal, ordinary existence. Hence a feeling of fragility and loss entailed by the irretrievable passage of time.
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The two words in the title refer to purity, innocence, Dickinson’s “white election”,anything painterly in that color and, most importantly, snow. It is in fact “pastoral”snow poems that the paper follows, beginning with Dickinson’s “It siftsfrom Leaden Sieves”, back to Emerson’s “The Snow-Storm”, and back to Coleridge’s“Frost at Midnight” and Cowper’s The Task, and forward to Whittier(“Snow-Bound”), Lowell (“The First Snowfall”), and Longfellow (“Snowflakes”and “The Cross of Snow”). The white enclosure, enveloping or folding of thesnow provides the context and backdrop for a series of “narratives” (not all ofthe poems are of this type) focusing on silence, isolation, loneliness, memories,… and death. The themes are often similar, and so are the motifs and images ofthese 19th-century traditionally organized and structured poems. Though RobertFrost himself wrote a couple of pastoral “snow poems” in the twentieth century,“In White” has nothing to do with his poem / variant of the same title.
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Through the analysis of the daily life of the protagonists, the ordinary people and events, this essay examines the socio-political, economic and moral decay/degeneration of post-independence Ghanaian and Kenyan society as portrayed in both novels . The postcolonial disenchantment and bitterness which are pervasive in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Kill Me Quick are due to the gnawing corruption, embezzlement and nepotism that grip the whole society. To denounce these permeating evils, both authors turn to scatology, decay, putrefaction, filth and everything connected with human waste from the body such as odour, vomit, piss, blood, phlegm and spittle as literary devices.
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Drawing upon critics such as Walter H. Sokel and Mark M. Andreson, I intend to explore the direct and implicit meanings of one of Franz Kafka’s most intriguing polysemic terms – Verkehr. The ending of Kafka’s 1912 short story The Verdict (Das Urteil), a piece of writing he considered emblematic and fundamental to his poetics, directly involves the representation of traffic, Verkehr in its most usual sense, a flux of life that continues after the protagonist’s suggested violent suicide. But Verkehr also means sexual intercourse, and Kafka explored this unusual semantic territory by using several sexual connotations in his writing and in his private observations concerning the act of writing. As he wrote The Metamorphosis shortly after, Kafka indirectly employed the same type of suggestiveness in order to reveal Gregor Samsa’s estrangement from the “traffic” of social and familial life.
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In 1938, Eugène Ionesco left for Paris in order to be able to work on his doctoral thesis entitled The Theme of Death and Sin in French Poetry, but which he never finished. After a short stay in Romania, just at the onset of World War II (1940), the aspiring playwright returned to France at the beginning of 1942 and never came back to his native country afterwards. Between 1938 and 1946, he sent a number of letters to the journal “Viața Românească” that were dominated by a utopic vision of the French cultural model, regarded by Ionesco as representative for the entire Europe and considered to be still alive, a redeeming hope for a Europe that was experiencing a tormenting moment in its history. His utopic vision came as a natural follow-up to his inclination to ‘mythicize’, which can be also noticed in his early publications, where the cultural references made in his commentaries on the Romanian literature always idealized the French model. However, the war that followed and its aftermath undermined Ionesco’s vision. Starting from this underlying historical context, this study aims at presenting a detailed description of Ionesco’s utopic vision of the French cultural model so as to identify the landmarks of his ‘cultural radicalization’, which further generated a lot of skepticism both in his attitude and action during his so-called French period.
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This research proposes that augmented reality technologies have the capabilities of intertwining natural spaces, material spaces, and networked (or immaterial) spaces together through the author's original idea of the between, which can in turn be used to further explore rhetorical discourse and im/materiality and bolster emerging discourse within the digital humanities. By using a variety of contemporary research on diverse topics within augmented reality and the humanities, such as the inside/outside model and the regenerative/transformative concept (each proposed by Victoria Gallagher in her works on visual rhetoric), as well as an examination of current augmented reality applications (Wikitude and Pokémon Go), the author argues that emerging applications in AR can offer scholars a variety of possibilities to explore new media and the humanities, as well as more interdisciplinary fields such as public spaces, natural spaces, digital spaces, rhetoric, science, technology, and critical cultural theory.
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This paper consists of a theoretical and empirical part. The theoretical part primarily focuses its attention on the purpose of reading, then discusses the results that the youth from Croatia achieve in international literacy studies and the possible causes of the lack of reading for pleasure among youth. Furthermore, the motives, interests and habits of young people are discussed based on the results of previous research. The authors take the view that the subject of the book is one of the factors that can stimulate and motivate young people to read. The paper further provides an overview of the topics that appear in books intended for young people published from the 60s of the 20th century onwards. The empirical part of the paper presents the results of the research conducted by a combination of different methodological procedures; creating a book list and analyzing the content, with the aim of determining the topics that appear in the books for young people published in Croatia from 2016 to April 2019. The conclusion of the research part of the paper is primarily focused on the topics that are present in the books for youth. The conclusion at the end of the paper brings together insight on the topics of the books for young people and knowledge gained from previous research and theoretical knowledge on reading topics, as well as the tastes, habits and interests of young people to read for pleasure and the role of topics of books in motivating young people for this type of reading.
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The interest of the Romanian writer of German expression Oscar Walter Cisek for the multiethnic Dobruja manifests both in the short story Die Tatarin (1928) and in the novel Der Strom ohne Ende (1937). It is motivated by the literary friendships kept by Cisek, but also by his interest in the Oriental world, doubled by the interest of the German publishing house of the Enoch brothers for the ethnographic picturesque and vital, original prototypes, this interest also being visible in the publishing program of the German translations of the works of Panait Istrati. This study also focusses on the admiration expressed by Cisek for the expressionist poet and novelist Wilhelm Lehmann, in his early days. It documents the relations of Oscar Walter Cisek to the Romanian and German language artists in Balchik, as well as to those discovering Vâlcov, a small settlement where the Chilia branch of the Danube meets the sea, as source of inspiration. Yet, as opposed to the Dobruja in Adolf Meschendörfer’s novel Der Büffelbrunnen (1935), Cisek’s short story Die Tatarin is not written from a colonial perspective but exposes and dismantles the stereotypes applied to the Tatar women in Dobruja. At the same time, Cisek’s short story depicts the abandonment of the traditional roles and occupations by the Tatars, as well as the resulting problems brought upon by the social renegotiations among the ethnicities of the province. The issues of the cohabitation of the Lipovans, Romanians, but also of the Tatars or the Jews are the backdrop of the novel Der Strom ohne Ende. The study places this work in its historical context – the Tatarbunary uprising of 1924, led by Osip Poliakov, a fisherman from Vâlcov, followed by the trial of the insurgents that gained international attention, as well as the proclamation of the so called Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic by those who had fled across the Dniester river – and discusses Cisek’s choice not to use this information about the south-eastern part of Romania, which was very current at that time, in his novel dedicated to the Danube Delta and its people.
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In the letter through which Dungal demonstrates to Charlemagne the mathematical rationality of the two eclipses of sun of 810 there is no reference to the allegorical model of the universe promoted in patristics from Clement of Alexandria to Cosmas Indicopleustes. Inspired by In Somnium Scipionis, where Macrobius synthesises the astronomic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world, it shows that during the Carolingian period the pre-Christian cosmological model, which proves that we are in mid first European Renaissance. The originality of the letter consists in the simple answer of actuality that Dungal suggests to the emperor: the predictable periodicity of the astronomic events proves that their association with tragic moments of the personal life is related to superstition, namely to pseudo-science. In the following lines, I propose an analysis of the text of this letter from the perspective of the sources, of structure and of pre-Christian cosmology elements.
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This work presents an overview of the style and technique which William Shakespeare used in order to create his own form of sonnet sequence. In other words, this article presents a detailed analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66 through the lens of the American New Critical approach. It means that the precise fourteen-line structure of the sonnet is examined, and such a structure reflects the Bard’s themes and ideas inside of the sonnet. The article gives an analysis of particular features of the American New Criticism and the people who contributed to the creation of such a literary criticism. Furthermore, the article explains the notion of how the language used reflects the meaning behind Sonnet 66. Also, the article explains the ways in which the Bard influenced other poetry writers, such as Laza Kostić, as well as the manner through which he was able to insert elements of his poetic craft into the famous Shakespearean dramas.
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Relying on a cultural studies approach to literary texts, this paper analyzes Jhumpa Lahiri’s recent embrace of the autobiographical form as a radical change, associated with a modernist strategy of innovation. The central theme of the author’s fictional work is the process of self-understanding experienced mainly by second-generation members of the Bengali community in New England. This paper starts from the premise that, as well as her characters, the author follows a transcultural path to redefinition via her relocation to a different space (Italy). This argument investigates the significance of Henri Matisse’s visual universe in relation to Lahiri’s transcultural metamorphosis.
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This article, based on selected text extracts from JOSEPH ROTH and MILOŠ CRNJANSKI, demonstrates that the (post)imperial spaces depicted in both ROTH’S reports about the western Balkans, and CRNJANSKI’S lyrical novel Tagebuch über Čarnojević, can be read as neither Völkerkerker (“prisons of nations”), nor as supranational spaces beyond the national, as is frequently the case in imperial studies within Cultural Studies. Through the lens of Koselleck’s model of sediments of time, and the Cultural Studies concept of the palimpsest, the intricate relationships between the national and the imperial are illustrated. This overlap of the national and the imperial and their simultaneous clash constitute the characteristics of a palimpsest of southeastern and eastern Europe in the discussed texts.
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This article analyzes the principles of creating a multiverse in the works of various authors of the second half of the XX century in the context of cultural and scientific prerequisites. It uses comparative historical and descriptive methods.These methods allow us to generalize scientific theories from antiquity to the XX century and to determine how ideas about the existence of many worlds influenced the fantasy literature in the XX century. It is concluded that the concept of the multiverse was highly demanded by the genre of fantasy, as it allowed to expand the boundaries of the world and complicate the structure of the narrative. It is important to emphasize that these ideas developed in parallel with the emergence of the esthetics of postmodernism, which denies the only truth and, therefore, the existence of one single world. The authors whose works were analyzed represent the multiworld differently. In the works of Clive Staples Lewis, Michael Moorcock and Roger Zelazny, we see a tendency toward a cosmological center, but it is presented in different ways. In the works of Martin D. W. Jones, the system of parallel worlds is structured and their appearance is explained most logically; at the same time, Jones and Zelazny establish and conceptualize the system of twins living in different worlds. Philip Pullman does not seek to create a thoughtful structure of the multiverse, since he emphasizes ethical and humanistic problems. But in his books, the image of an object that allows creating portals between dimensions is important. In the works of Andrzej Sapkowski, the structure of the multiverse is also not fully revealed, but this concept performs a world-forming function.
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Il presente contributo analizza le modalità della ricezione ermeneutica di Jorge da Burgos, uno dei personaggi principali del romanzo Il nome della rosa, e i legami intertestuali che si stabiliscono tra il romanzo di Eco e i due racconti di J. L. Borges incentrati su personaggi eretici. Nel racconto Tre versioni di Giuda Borges riflette sulle interpretazioni metafisiche di Giuda ad opera di Nils Runeberg, teologo svedese, l quale, in netto contrasto con l’intera tradizione teologica, elabora tre rivisitazioni del tradimento di Giuda. Nella prima, Dio si umiliò a tal punto da diventare uomo, ma non un uomo impeccabile e perfetto, Egli si identificò anche con il suo peccato scegliendo il destino peggiore di tutti, quello di Giuda. L’ambigua interpretazione borgesiana del tradimento di Giuda acquista un ruolo importante nel contesto della ricezione ermeneutica della figura di Jorge perché permette la coesistenza di due sistemi assiologici contrapposti, entro i quali gli atti di Jorge possono essere interpretati sia come delitti sia come espressioni della volontà di Dio.
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