Етиките на Макиавели: "Владетелят" и „Мандрагора“

Author(s): Paul Guyer / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2-3/2017

In the language of theory and drama, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) continues the normative discourse of Boccaccio’s novels and at the same time marks the differentiation between the political and the private spheres, which began in the 14th century. In his treatise "The Prince" (written around 1513), Machiavelli outlines the foundations of a modern political ethics, and in the comedy "The Mandrake" (written around 1518) he shows how the Medieval normative system has turned into an ideology. He also delineates a modern private ethics that goes far into the future; in the course of modernity, this ethics remains dialectically related to the ethics of the political. The message of "The Prince" is frequently reduced to a purely “Machiavellian” theory of power and success, and "The Mandrakе" is interpreted as an illustration of "The Prince". However, Machiavelli is not a “Machiavellian”, and "The Mandrake" is not just a political allegory.

Prendre la grippe comme on prend les eaux : variations caricaturales sur un mal à la mode entre 1830 et 1848

Author(s): Marie-France De Palacio / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

Under the reign of King Louis-Philippe, 1830-1848, France was severely visited by a number of epidemics, namely, influenza, which were regularly reported in the press. Although the effects of such epidemics were methodically undervalued, the flu was frequently caricatured as offering analogies with the political, social and cultural life of the time. It was often endowed with the characteristics of a rational being, she-devil, woman of distinction or termagant of a wife! In 1858, Cham will even call it “the lioness of the day”. The flu will be found congenial with such social assemblies as carnivals or balls, which it either disrupted or embellished. The present paper deals with the satirical purport of the flu, whether underrated or exaggerated, showing at the same time how it became typified as a “mal à la mode” akin to Physiologies, a widely-discussed topic at that time.

Les puschts, les bardaches, les « almées… mâles » : une caricature de la femme orientale ou un autre rêve d’Orient ?

Author(s): Małgorzata Sokołowicz / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

The present paper focuses on some representations of male Oriental dancers who dance dressed as women. It tries to answer the question whether those representations form a caricature of the Oriental woman or if it is another, perverse, Oriental dream. The first part of the paper presents the Oriental male dancer and shows how he was perceived in the Middle East and in Europe. The second part discusses the critics of male dancers’ behaviour in the travelogues by Jean Potocki and Vivant Denon. The three following sections analyse three examples of descriptions dating from the 1840-1850 by Gérard de Nerval, Gustave Flaubert and Théophile Gautier. It turns out that, with time, the caricature becomes less obvious and the descriptions are more and more aesthetic. One can no longer only mock and condemn the male dancers, a new perverse dream seems to be born.

De Cloporte en Janus : sur quelques représentations du portier dans la caricature française du XIXe siècle

Author(s): Caroline Strobbe / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

There are numerous caricatures of male concierges or doormen in the nineteenth-century texts and drawings. They constitute a very modern phenomenon, as new building layouts of the time, or new buildings in general, almost always included a lodge. Their role of controlling the whereabouts of people getting in and out of the building was subject to the contradictory pressures from landlords and tenants alike. We will try to demonstrate how the doormen and concierges belonged to the in-between places in the nineteenth-century French caricature, with their social position stretched between their landlords and tenants, a function that allowed them to combine servility and an excessive show of strength, and resulted in their depictions ranging from animals to gods.

La Mythologie politique de Paul Hadol : des figures du pouvoir à l’épreuve des mythes grecs dans la caricature au début de la Troisième République (1871-1872)

Author(s): Sylvain Nicolle / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

Between 1871 and 1872, the cartoonist Paul Hadol published in the satirical weekly Le Charivari, eleven loaded portraits forming a series entitled La Mythologie politique. This article first places the series against the backdrop of the pre-existing tradition of iconographic parody of antiquity that began in England at the end of the 18th century, before being adopted in France during the July Monarchy. We then question the biographical criteria for the selection of the caricatured celebrities, and the potential thematic coherence of the series based on the typology of mythological filters – the cycle of Troy, the Olympian deities, heroes, monsters. Finally, the more specifically semiotic analysis of the caricatures highlights the resumption of the process associating big-head and versified legend with the two series of the Charivaric Pantheon (1838-1841 and 1866-1867), the dimension of political rebus, and the game of artistic, literary and even musical quotes. The conclusion shows that the scope of the series can be considered from a political and artistic point of view, but also intellectually in relation to the time which it concerns.

L’excès de réel – caricature et réalisme dans quelques nouvelles de Maupassant

Author(s): Hans Färnlöf / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

By its mimetic exaggeration, the caricature could seem incompatible with the aesthetics of realism, which seeks to give an image faithful to reality. Yet the ironist Maupassant often applies caricature in his portrayals in order to highlight the exaggerated features of the character. By establishing firm links between the portrait of the character and the unfolding of the story, which illustrates the negative consequences of this extravagance, Maupassant reveals the danger of deviating from a moderate behaviour. The realism resides in the coherence between the caricatural portrayal of a character and their acts. It also derives from the application of a rational scheme to depreciate the caricatured character, whose extravagance, often in the form of a passion, provoke a misunderstanding of the objective reality. The impossibility of applying such a normative framework, as in the fantastic genre, could indicate the need to abandon partially the realist aesthetics and embrace other forms of writing.

La caricature entre image et parole : Villiers de l’Isle-Adam rival d’Honoré Daumier

Author(s): Anna Opiela-Mrozik / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

This article analyzes, from a comparative perspective, the aims and the characteristics of two types of caricature: Honoré Daumier’s graphic caricature and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s literary one. For the purposes of his satiric revenge on bourgeoisie, Villiers resorted, by means of irony, to Daumier’s method, even trying to overshadow him. In their way of presenting the world of bourgeoisie and selected social groups (journalist and artistic ones), this draughtsman and this writer worked out their own means of the use of caricature. Without stopping stigmatising the vices of society, Daumier proposed a peculiar kind of caricature (in which an explanation played a secondary role) and developed the ludic aspect of his art, whereas Villiers was focused on mockery, even though his caricatures were often ambiguous. Villiers’ caricature, which even became a literary genre, connects a distorted portrait with a linguistic and situational caricature, by which means it makes the sense, formed by Daumier’s image, broader.

Au pays des supplices : caricature et paroxysme dans la Chine fantasmée d’Octave Mirbeau

Author(s): Gaultier Roux / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

This article studies the tools and strategies employed in the creation of caricature in one of the prototypical works of the European exotic discourse. Le Jardin des Supplices is indeed an important milestone in the formation of stereotypes about China; however, this representation, far from seeking to develop a realistic depiction of China, or even to point out its supposed barbarity, aims, on the contrary, at producing a caricature of its counterpart, Europe, while using verbal and figurative exacerbation as main devices. Le Jardin des Supplices acts as a mirror in which the West recognizes itself in the described phantasmagorical utopia; in this sadistic farce, we will therefore identify both a parody of European institutional structures and a pastiche of the characteristic features of literary decadence. Notwithstanding, Le Jardin des Supplices provides a lasting and ironical view of the representation of China and the Chinese in the collective unconscious.

La mode féminine de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle dans la caricature iconographique et littéraire

Author(s): Zofia Stępińska-Kucza / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

The present paper analyzes the relationship between the caricature and the women’s fashion of the second half of the 19th century. The period was favorable for fashion caricature, because, while reflecting the political, economic and social transformations of the time, the clothing trends endorsed at the time by fashion magazines were based on the exaggeration and distortion that we identify among the weapons of humorists. The first part of the paper focuses on the graphical representation of fashion, in particular of the crinoline, and aims to discover the messages hidden in those illustrations. The second part analyzes the motif of the fashion and the clothing in the Bertall’s satirical text, Comédie de notre temps, and tries to define the image of the woman at that time and her role in the French bourgeois society.

Caricature textuelle et visuelle française du XIXe siècle. Enjeux sémiologiques d’une analyse icono-textuelle

Author(s): Cécile Guinand / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

This article considers caricature as an icono-verbal tool that mobilizes shared cultural codes. It shows that in the 19th century, both visual (in this case, Daumier and Gavarni) and textual caricature (in this case, Balzac, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Musset, Flaubert, Huysmans) were designed based on the model of a theatrical scene which plays on the rich possibilities offered by the combination of text and image at the heart of comical mechanisms.Indeed, invalidating the observation of the primacy of image over text (Charles Baudelaire's stance) or vice versa: of text over image (represented by Roland Barthes), this article posits that the visual and the textual take on fluid roles and complement each other. As such, the consonance or dissonance between the image and its title/legend are two types of relationships that contribute to the birth of laughter as well as to the semantic richness of a caricature.This vision of laughter proceeding above all from formal mechanisms could lead one to believe that the evaluation of the adopted value systems is superfluous. The important thing would be to understand and analyze, not to judge. Against such a claim, this article supports the need to add to the formal analysis of a work in its historical context, its ethical positioning in the face of its explicit and implicit ideological implications.

L’écrivain fictif entre caricature et modélisation au tournant du XIXe siècle

Author(s): Federica D'Ascenzo / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

During the Belle Époque, the writer’s novel gradually replaces the painter’s novel and forms a platform for asking questions about the role of the author in bourgeois society and the causes of their distress. Through this work, the author thus conveys an axiological portrait of himself which, implicitly referring to the difficulty of creation, gives an account of the values shaping the end of the century. The resulting modelling incorporates caricature, which becomes omnipresent in the 19th century, not only for the parodical load that characterises it, but for the accepted power that exaggeration, distortion and joke hold in the interpretation of reality. From Huysmans to Gide, from Lorrain to Gourmont, from Dumur to Mauclair, Mirbeau or Céard, the writer’s novel makes caricature and the devaluation a guarantee of the authenticity of the fictional self-projection.

La caricature sociale dans les albums de Jean Bruller : une Comédie humaine de l’entre-deux-guerres

Author(s): María de los Ángeles Hernández Gómez / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

The first albums of the cartoonist Jean Bruller propose an original social caricature by combining text and image. La danse des vivants (1932-1938) aspires to illustrate the human comedy of the 20th century with a caricature of customs and a universalist tone; Visions intimes et rassurantes de la guerre (1936) is anchored in the interwar years to develop a social criticism strongly influenced by the threats of war. This article offers an in-depth analysis of the aesthetics of Jean Bruller’s two works, marked by a particularly wry and ironic humour and some pessimism. This analytical approach will also be complemented by an account of the dialogue between the work and the artist’s thinking, as well as of the dialogue between his production and the historical-social context.

Entre l’art de l’invisibilité et l’art de la démesure : Marcel Proust caricaturé par Jean Cocteau

Author(s): Katarzyna Thiel-Jańczuk / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

The paper discusses the relationship between Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau in connection with the problem of their “visibility” (Nathalie Heinich) based on Jean Cocteau ’s portrait (1922) of Marcel Proust and Claude Arnaud’s biographical essay (2013). In this context, Cocteau’s drawing, which conveys Marcel Proust’s extravagant character, could nowadays be considered not only a caricatural representation of the author of In Search of Lost Time, but also a demythologizing one, especially in contrast to the image of invisible Proust created by structuralist interpretations. Also, in the mediatic and theoretical contemporary context, Cocteau’s visual representation of Proust could be used to reflect on Proust ’s action (conduite) which, combined with his narrative discourse, defines the “posture” (Jérôme Meizoz) of the author of In Search… within the literary field.

Portraits caricaturaux du gouvernement de Vichy sous la verve démesurée de Céline

Author(s): Ana Maria Alves / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

In his three novels, commonly referred to as the German trilogy, Céline evokes the story of his dangerous exodus to Germany, from 1944 to 1945, then to Denmark from 1945 to 1951. Our purpose is not to take the whole journey back, but to dwell on his stay in Sigmaringen where almost all the outstanding figures of the Collaboration are depicted and caricatured by Céline in a tone of contempt particular of him and of his exceptional singularity. We will use a few examples to show how the writer amplifies his characters’ features, to strengthen his descriptions. Céline paints their portraits, exaggerating their characteristics or, sometimes, endowing them with ridiculous attitudes. By hilarious, burlesque, comical details, Céline manages to caricature certain figures of the Vichy government in an atmosphere where absurdity, chaos and decadence mingle.

La caricature ou le mystère des mots bourdonnant aux oreilles dans Le Nègre du Gouverneur de Serge Patient

Author(s): Mylène Danglades / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

The caricature, in its most elementary representation, in its polysemy, its multiple extensions, refers to the burden, to the “fagot load” causing man to moan, to bend and to walk bent “with heavy steps”. Writers, such as comedians or painters of modern life, strive to combine the norms of representation and to distort words to emphasize the animality of man. Serge Patient, in his column entitled The Governor’s Negro published in 1978, propels us back in time, into the collective Guyanese imagination and invites us to focus on a black slave, D’Chimbo. It is then up to the reader to decipher the data, correct them or blame them by laughing brutally or domesticating the laughter. With soothed or revived laughter and words buzzing weaker in the ears, what language and clichés could still emerge?

La lodyans caricaturale dans la comédie humaine haïtienne de Gary Victor

Author(s): Sara Del Rossi / Language(s): French Issue: 10/2020

Popular oral literature has always been the most effective means of criticizing authority. In Haiti, there is a special genre to castigate and mock the administrative elite: the lodyans. This short satirical tale of popular origin, with its carnivalesque grip on socio-political reality, is used to inform the population about current events through parody and derision. This essay aims to analyze the use of the accumulative caricature in the social portraits in Gary Victor’s lodyans. The two main characters, Albert Buron and Sonson Pipirit, can be considered emblematic social types, who embody the main traits of their social categories. The narration of their (mis)adventures and the portraits of the characters met through their stories allow to draw up a sort of Haitian Human Comedy, so nigh to reality. This type of interpretation confirms Victor’s engagement, whose aim is to provoke a forced laughter, aware of Haitian sociopolitical issues.

Парменид – За природата

Author(s): / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 02/2020

Средновековният скален манастир „Алботин“

Author(s): Vanya Pekova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 02/2020

The Mind Is the World: Virginia Woolf on the Embodied Self

Author(s): Leonor Serrano / Language(s): English Issue: 9/2020

Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s insights into bodies as the place of existence, David Abram’s thinking on the more-than-human world, Jane Bennett’s conceptualisation of vibrant matter and Stacy Alaimo’s notion of “transcorporeality,” this article explores how Virginia Woolf transforms ction into a powerful epistemological tool in her examination of the self amidst a vibrant world. In novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), Woolf found not only that human beings are nite, singular and exposed, but also porous, embodied selves that are sensuously immersed in the vitality intrinsic to matter. Fasci- nated by the ow of consciousness and the workings of the human mind when confronted with reality, the novelist seeks to capture the evanescent moment in time as refracted through the consciousness of her own characters. Her compulsion to write down impressions, thoughts, and half-ideas is expressive of her concern with imposing order upon the phenomena of a world populated by agentive entities through the medium of language. If the ux of life was simply unstoppable, language gave her at least the opportunity to freeze moments of being and look at them as if from simultaneous perspectives, as well as to shed light on how humans are in and of the earth – i.e., part of, not apart from, a more-than-human world.

Recenzja książki Anny Józefowicz Obrazy dzieciństwa w polskiej prozie dzie- cięcej XXI wieku. W poszukiwaniu kontekstów edukacyjnych, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku, Białystok 2020, ss. 518

Author(s): Urszula Chęcińska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 9/2020