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The social, ethical, and political thinking of Goethe that resulted from the shock of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the new shaping of European map, societies, and politics, particularly from the rise of nationalism, can be characterized as a European wisdom in search of a cosmopolitan liberalism, rather unpolitical community grounded in neo-humanism.
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This paper questions Merleau-Ponty’s statement, according to which all literature and phenomenology together should deliver an experience of the world that precedes any thought about the world. It combines phenomenological reading and textual analysis Le Procès-verbal (1963) by J.-M. G. Le Clézio.
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This paper, focused on Seneca’s conception of melancholy, attempts to analyse the link between two important philosophical notions – otium and taedium vitae – constituting the ethics of the sewer of life due to idleness, and its opposite, happiness. After examining the “anatomy” of melancholy, that means the origin and development of this concept in medicine, we try to interpret how otium can lead to taedium and what kind of remedies Seneca offers to his pupil Quintus Serenus to reach the untroubled and tranquil condition of the soul (tranquillitas animi), characteristic of the Stoic sage.
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Through an analysis of Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues’s quotation of the myth of Dibutade’s daughter, this article shows the limits of Jacques Derrida’s reading of it as no more than an expressive gesture : the example is about expressing a sensitivity to signs. It tells us about producing a trace, and a sort of writing, in opposition with Derrida’s idea of Rousseau being a prisoner of the metaphysical illusion of an immediate expression for which language would be nothing but a pale substitute.
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This article contrasts the concept of melancholia and mental depression, through three personal narratives about depression: Route de nuit by Clément Rosset, Darkness Visible by William Styron and The Crack-Up by F.S. Fitzgerald.
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Several images can vividly convey and express black humor causing melancholy. Among those images, water happens to have a strong evocative power; indeed, water can express the feeling of nothingness, the anguish of being trapped in its shadows, but also possible soothing reassurances, even if they eventually mean the choice of one’s voluntary death.
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Arnulf Rainer paints on the photograph of a face with an iconoclastic violence betraying a guilty desire for the Image. In its spiritual connotation, the revamped portrait acts as transfiguration, where the melancholy of the inner experience makes it sensitive to the idea of a gaping loss.
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This paper analyzes the portrait of the poet as an old man, which lies in opposition to the wish of transparency expressed by Jaccottet in The Ignorant and which borrows its elements from the humorism of Greek medicine. So, this paper finds the melancholic ambivalence of his poetry and explains the opacity which persists there.
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This text is an illustration of the ancient medical meaning of melancholy: the black humor of the depressed and the great artists that faced the death which nourished their works. There are five promenades along Parisian cemeteries which mix architectural and historical considerations with personal experiences taking the form of reveries oscillating between life and death, shadow and light.
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This article analyses the meaning of melancholy in Michel Lambert’s, Dieu s’amuse. There is a metaphorical onto-thanatology that builds a character distinguished by a melancholic affectivity. The origin of this trait is to be found not only in an incapacity of living in the present and let go of the past (the latter being a source of sadness, suffering, unhappiness and boredom), but also in a tendency to mourn.
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This paper emphasizes the importance of a detail from La Rochefoucauld’s self-portrait: the « black eyes » symbolize the melancholy of the moralist, and announce the tone of the Maxims and their commentaries. Some critics denounce a bias towards pessimism, but melancholy seems to be a rule for moral analysis.
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This article discusses the melancholy one may find in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and it provides an attempt to reveal the autobiographical of his writings. Derrida’s melancholy, that is also the melancholy of deconstruction, speaks more through his style than through his concepts.
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The translatability of William Shakespeare’s titillating puns has been a topic of recurrent debate in the field of translation studies, with some scholars arguing that they are untranslatable and others maintaining that such an endeavour implies a divorce from formal equivalence. Romanian translators have not troubled themselves with settling this dispute, focusing instead on recreating them as bawdily and punningly as possible in their first language. At least, this is the conclusion to which George Volceanov has come after analysing a sample of Shakespearean ribald puns and their Romanian equivalents. By drawing parallels between such instances of the Bard’s rhetoric and three of their Romanian translations, my article aims to reinforce the view according to which Romanian translators have succeeded, by and large, in translating Shakespeare’s bawdy puns into their mother tongue.
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The article is a review essay of the book Sporne postaci polskiej krytyki feministycznej po 1989 roku edited by Monika Świerkosz and it discusses some crucial issues concerning the feminist literary criticism in Poland after 1989. By focusing on the methodological concept of “disputability,” the question of its both productive and possible reactionary implications is taken into consideration.
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Between the Coordinates of Prose, History and Literary Aesthetics. The object of reasoning about the connection of a story, knowledge of the past and its artistic expression became the text Pentcho and remembering of those who by the cultural history were included under the literature of a major disaster. Last century has registered in its memory two wartime disasters that destroyed a large number of human lives, changed a lot of fates of individuals, families and countries. War theme contents were depicted in different ways, in addition to atrocities and experiences having (again) existential character, after a passage of time since the events, moral and emotional narrations as well as recollections of experienced suffering and close people started to prevail so that the descendants of the generation who escaped war and concentration camps could reasonably and in a sophisticated way comment on what the literary history, history and individual memory has recorded. Literary aesthetics is updated in the artistic method and poetology through the author’s strategy and carried out in genealogy, but always in order to highlight the educational and cultural value of the theme and idea of the artistic text.
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