Konferenzbericht
Report on the conference: »Between Territories, Eras and Languages – on transitory Elements in Literature« September 16-17, 2014; organized by the Institute for German Literature at Marie-Curie-Skłodowska-University
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Report on the conference: »Between Territories, Eras and Languages – on transitory Elements in Literature« September 16-17, 2014; organized by the Institute for German Literature at Marie-Curie-Skłodowska-University
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Umro je Ante Stamać (1939–2016). Prvo što mi pada na pamet pri spomenu njegova imena jest nevjerojatna energija spojena s isto takvom erudicijom i osjećajem za vrijednosti. Ovo potonje iskazivao je u široko rasprostranjenim interesima, u potrebi za perfekcionizmom, ali isto tako u svakodnevnim prilikama. U vrijeme naših čestih kontakata, između 1975. i 1990. godine, nalazili smo se u različitim situacijama i svim mogućim društvima, književničkim, studentskim i kavanskim. Kad bi se među nama zatekao netko nepoznat, a pogotovo ako je bio pisac, Stamać ga je predstavljao s vrstom obzirnosti i građanskog takta koji je o tom osjećaju za vrijednosti svjedočio jednako uvjerljivo kao njegovi eseji, prijevodi i specijalističke knjige.
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Zadaća je i smisao ove studije opisati i u izdvojenim primjerima pripovjedačkoga teksta dokazati estetske i stilske osobenosti sandžačkomuslimanske u kontekstu crnogorske i južnoslavenskih književnosti XX stoljeća. Izabrani karakteristični pripovjedački tekstovi Sijarića, Bašića i Baltića su u ovom referatu estetski model za poetološku sintezu opisivanja stilske i jezičke autohtonosti sandžačko muslimanske u južnoslavenskim književnostima.
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Vizionarski doživljaji i snoviđenja oduvek su ulazili u književnost, usmenu i pisanu. U literaturi lako su postajali tehnički elemenat kazivanja, kao motiv, tema ili okvir pripovedanja. Tako je u srednjovefeovnoj književnosti Evrope alegorijski san prosto konvencionalni pesnički soblik sa stalnim obeležjima. U gotovo svakom delu ove vrste nalazimo pesnika koji se, mućen nesanicom, laća knjige, pa potom nad njom zaspi. Usni da se našao u nekom lepom vrtu, u proleće. U vrt, ili u neki njegov zakutak, mahom ga dovlodi kakva životanja. U isamom vrtu, ili pri odlasku iz ovoga, pesnik doživljava niz zgoda u kojima se javljaju libovi alegoiičnog značeaija, najčešće i obeleženi alegoričnim imetaima. San čini veći deo pesme, a ova se završava naglo, buđenjem pesnika. Na kraju je, ponekaid, i poziv upućen čitaocu da san protumači.
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Gerhard Richter's books Text – a collection of painter's verbal statements about his artistic method – and Atlas – 783 sheets with images, mainly photographs and visual notations – are two archives that complement the understanding of his diverse artistic practice. The paper presents a textual model that experimentally simulates a possible ordering principle for archives. Richter's statements in the book Text are cut up and used as short quotations. Those that relate to multiple aspects of the painter's oeuvre are identified as hubs in the semantic network. The hubs are organized paratactically, as an array of different themes. The paper presents a methodological hypothesis and an experimental model that aim to connect the research of real networks with the paradigms of humanistic interpretation. We have to bear in mind that the network is a result of the researcher's interpretative approach, which is added to the initial archive included in the book Text. The breaking up of Richter's poetics into atoms of quotations is an experimental proposal of a new textuality in art history and humanities, which has its own history. In comparison to digital archives with complex interfaces that often tend to obscure the content, the elements in our experiment appear as specific configurations of the semantic network and are presented in a limited number of linear texts. The method of listing of quotations gathers the fragments into a potential “whole”, i.e. a narrativized gateway to an archive according to the researcher's interpretation.
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This paper inquires whether video games, as cultural artifacts stemming from the digital environment, can be interpreted from the angle of transnational literature. As such, two main hypotheses are reviewed: first, that video games are transnational in content, recycling in a syncretic manner the themes and archetypes that were once rooted in local, nationalized mythologies, but that are now decontextualized and reevaluated in a transnational narrative space; and secondly, that video games create transnational communities with specific social morphologies, where both authors and readers can each become the immigrant who plays without (outside of) national borders. The conclusions that we may draw hereof do not concern game studies alone. Indeed, they may very well lead us to believe that in video games, transnational literature can and does find its most accomplished expression – a literature that not only places itself between national borders, but that also transcends these borders altogether.
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The present paper participates in the discussion about the differences between masculine and feminine modes of travel in terms of interests, perception, and representation, by exploring the Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W--y M--e Written during Her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. As a traveller, Lady Mary engaged in the contemplation of cultural landscapes: she attempted to understand the social logic of the communities she met and to assess the cultural distance between the English society and the local customs of the countries she visited. Within this large social and cultural framework, the focus of her keen spirit of observation is represented, in many of her letters, by gender dynamics and the status of women, thus allowing a feminine configuration of the map of continental Europe and the Ottoman Empire and a comparative understanding of femininity and expected feminine behaviour. Therefore, the contention of this paper is that, in Lady Mary’s letters, the female-traveller’s gaze ends in meditation and self-contemplation, and functions as a means of comparing and reassessing female identity.
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Beginning with the discussion of the terms narration and narrative, the paper asserts the difference between point of view, which is defined as “who” tells a story, and perspective, which shows “how” a narrator / a character perceives the events making up the story. To show the power of perspective in a literary work, the paper focuses on the young adult novel series The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater. The five main characters – Blue Sargent, Richard Gansey III, Adam Parrish, Ronan Lynch, and Noah Czerny – have been given unique perspectives that are unveiled through their separate character arcs. Blue’s perspective is clad with assumptions; Gansey’s is a clash between the perceived and the perceiving; Adam’s comes to light only when compared to other characters’ perspectives; Ronan’s is postponed and contrary to expectations; Noah’s is absent until the very end of the series.
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This paper is an attempt to compare Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, published in 1983, and its cinematic adaptation directed by Robert Altman, released in 1985, in terms of the notion of possible worlds (in the philosophically-oriented branch of cognitive poetics). In her discussion of possible worlds, Marie-Laure Ryan proposes a typology of accessibility relations (identity of properties, identity of inventory, compatibility of inventory, chronological, physical, taxonomic, logical, analytical, and linguistic compatibility) in order to account for how the sense of the reality of our actual world reverberates in fictional worlds. Ryan also offers another typology, that is, the internal structure of the fictional world (knowledge worlds, intention worlds, wish worlds, obligation worlds, and fantasy worlds) to show how the characters’ different conceptions of the world define and build up the narrative structure of fiction. It is argued that the change of medium – drama into film in this case – results in some changes in the possible worlds projected, since verbality and visuality give rise to some differences in terms of modes of perception. Also discussed is the significance in this regard of the spatio-temporal scope, which is confined in the case of drama, a genre often conceived to be performed, whereas in a movie the director is able to expand this scope as the occasion demands.
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U periodu od 1969. do 1979, Edvard Said je redefinisao američku komparativnu kniževnost, stvarajući fraze, dopunjujući novi kritički panteon (Viko, Švab) i povrh svega, smišljajući metod. Iako je bio između generacija i suočio se sa dva različita tipa kontinentalnog emigranta – jednog filološkog, drugog tekstualnog – Said je vešto savladao drugog tako što je reinterpretirao prvog. U dvokrakom potezu, upotrebio je čitav arsenal argumenata protiv novog kritičkog formalizma i njegovih najnovijih avatara u „teoriji”. Sa ovim argumentima, njegov autoritet je bio tako prodoran i osetio se do te mere da je podrio zdanje tradicionalne komparativne književnosti time što je naglasio pozicioniranost forme i tranzitivnu inteligenciju humanističkih intelektualaca.
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Amid the complexity of concern of the modernist literary discourse in Britain, the thematic nucleus of James Joyce’s writings is formed by certain basic aspects of life, such as individuality, art, religion, nation, language, and his work shows the two hypostases of the author himself as accomplished artist and Irish citizen. In a troubled period in the history of Europe and of his own country, Joyce grasped the sense and the atmosphere of frustration, alienation, futility, chaos, and confusion. The concerns of Dubliners, his first important book, published in 1914, consist in rendering the political and social life of Dublin, the misery of human condition, the theme of exile, the problems of the individual’s existence in an urban background which Joyce saw as paralyzed and, like Eliot, as an expression of a period of crisis in the history of humanity. Joyce intended “to write a chapter of the moral history” of his country, and he chose Dublin as it seemed to him “the centre of paralysis” on different levels which he presented under four aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. All the fifteen stories of the book express life experiences of the characters that are of unpretentious standing, incapable to fulfil inner potentialities and to establish communication with others. At moments they experience relevant epiphanic realisations, seemingly due to some trivial incidents – by which they receive an apparent perspective of accomplishment – and though they attempt to escape the bonds of everyday life and of their trapping circle of existence, all they get is an acute sense of frustration, alienation, and entrapment. To reveal and compare the thematic status of the epiphany in the short stories with regard to various issues of individual existence and to the use of motifs and symbols that create an increasing complexity of ideas and subjective human reactions represents the main purpose and the essence of the content of the present study.
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Introduction. The paper concerns the problem of supervising integrated bachelor theses, based on literary texts as materials for teaching a foreign language. The aim of the paper is to frame the principles of conducting integrated graduate research work which is to display professional and subject-specific competencies, acquired by graduate students during the course of study. Materials and Methods. The research is based on the following methods: observation; analysis and synthesis, employed to correlate literary, linguistic and teaching approaches to works of fiction and to systematize personal professional experience of teaching English and lit-erature and supervising graduation theses on these topics; and modeling, aimed at building the algorithm of integrated graduate research work. Results. The paper describes the algorithm of testing an authentic fictional text in order to determine its educational potential in teaching a foreign language. The educational potential of a text is revealed by means of analyzing specific text features on extralinguistic, content, structural and language levels and matching these features with reading exercises, activities and tasks they predetermine. Conclusions. The proposed research work algorithm, based on a complex approach to a fictional text as a source of linguistic, literary, socio-cultural, and historical information, can be effectively used to design teaching materials and to enhance the competencies acquired by bachelor students, majoring in teaching a foreign language.
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The essay suggests that Don DeLillo is one of the U. S. authors who have reflected most responsibly on the crisis of modernity’s fundamental institutions and community structures. Compared to the relatively stabilizing deep freeze of the Cold War, the late 1980s and the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall are, as DeLillo shows especially in his post-White Noise works, more interconnected, more “systematic,” and overall more “present.” Focusing primarily on DeLillo’s 1982 novel The Names and its “world presence” theme, the essay addresses the writer’s fascination with the systems that define the contemporary and its “aesthetic” and shows how some individuals set out to resist being defined and confined by our world’s networks of “madness.”
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Both in Speak, Memory and in Strong Opinions, Nabokov insists on his early proficiency in English, French. This authorial stance makes it easy to believe that the writer’s transition to English was easy. And yet, Nabokov’s correspondence with publishers and his literary agent, Altagracia de Jannelli, reveals that this conversion was torturous and required extensive support from native speaker editors and translators. The essay documents Nabokov’s inner turmoil at the time when he began to explore the British and American markets. In spite of the publication of Camera Obscura in England (1936) and, as Laughter in the Dark, in the US (1938), his other works’ journeys to the Anglophone reader required time and effort. A close reading of the famous afterword to Lolita, a comparative analysis of Winifred Roy’s translation of Camera Obscura and Nabokov’s self-translation of Laughter in the Dark, and the perusal of the author’s correspondence illustrate the difficulties he had to overcome in order to convey stylistic intricacy of his fiction to this new audience.
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The article is devoted to the study of grotesque forms in Jonathan Swift's novel "Gulliver’s Travels" based on the text of part II of the novel "A Voyage to Brobdingnag". On the basis of the selected actual material, displays of the grotesque elements in the semantic field of the work’s text are traced. The grotesque world of the novel is the author's model of mankind, in which J. Swift presents his view not only on the state of the modern system of England, but also on the nature of man in general, reveals the peculiarities of the psychology of human nature, especially human socialization. In part II, the author continues to develop a complex and contradictory picture of human existence in front of the reader, the world of giants appears as an ambivalent system in which the features of an ideal society and ideal ruler, in author’s opinion, with the ugly face of man and society, are marvelously combined.
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The article is devoted to the study of genre transformation and the specifics of the stories by Eleanor Hodgman Porter. The signs and problems of new genre formations are considered, the range of scientific researches of the mentioned theme is outlined. The emphasis is placed on the genre specificity of the cycle of stories by E. Porter called “Short stories”. The development and the main tendencies of the genre transformation of the writer's stories in the historical-literary and ideological-aesthetic context are extracted.
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A very significant poetic determinant of resistance poetry is reflected in the contrapuntal understanding of the Other. According to this view, the position of the Other is assigned to the colonial subject by inverting the matrix of symbolic simulacra and by rearranging the predetermined positions of Centre and periphery. Although Darwish clearly highlights rival alter ego as an ethical and epistemic difference, he does not perceive the otherness as static phenomenon, which is the nature of Orientalist canon. On the contrary, in the Palestinian poetry of resistance the Other develops from the position of enemy to that of Wittgenstein’s fugitive part of personal spirituality. In this way, resistance poetry opposes the concept of alterity defined by the canon, since the Other represents a complex and polyvalent entity, rather than a stereotyped one. Consequently, such verse represents an opportunity to rediscover the man in his totality which indicates the intensity of universal humanism in Palestinian poetry.
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The paper discusses the peculiarities of functioning of hikaya as an art form in A. Eniki’s prose during the 1940s–1960s. The relevance of the research is determined by the uncertainty of the concepts used for designation of works of average and small forms of epics in the Tatar literature of the 20th century. The analysis has been performed in order to identify the genre characteristics of hikaya as the non-canonical genre of Tatar Literature, which is not identical to the non-canonical small epic genres (e.g., stories) in Russian and European literature. Furthermore, it has been established that hikaya is not identical to novella on the one hand and narrative on the other hand. Systemic structural analysis, syn-chronic and diachronic approaches to investigation of the material have been used to achieve the above-stated goal.
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