Laudatio Mircea Dumitru
Speech by Dan Eugen Rațiu on the occasion of awarding the title of Doctor Honoris Causa of "Babeş-Bolyai" University to Mr. Academician and Professor Mircea Dumitru.
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Speech by Dan Eugen Rațiu on the occasion of awarding the title of Doctor Honoris Causa of "Babeş-Bolyai" University to Mr. Academician and Professor Mircea Dumitru.
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A vast majority of Latin texts available to us have been written after the Middle Ages. These writings are very diverse, culturally relevant, and interesting for linguistic research. Yet, this is not reflected in the scholarly attention given to post–medieval Latin. The research dealing with it is neither systematic nor up to date with the modern theoretical and methodological advances in linguistics. As nearly all linguists interested in Latin limit their investigations to the classical and medieval periods, the vast bulk of the texts written in Latin is severely under–researched. In this paper it is argued that the marginal position of post–medieval Latin in the research is caused by the preservation of traditional paths of work and that it is not tenable on the grounds of valid scientifi c reasoning. First, a definition of Neo–Latin is presented and the quantity of its texts is compared to the size of the ancient Latin literature. Then, a quantitative meta–analysis of several major publications in the fields of Latin linguistics and Neo–Latin studies is performed in order to determine the presence of linguistic research of Neo–Latin in them. In the following section, some important reasons why it is under–represented are singled out and contextualised within linguistic methodology and the history of the classical studies. By questioning their validity, a case is made for a full and consistent integration of the linguistic research of Neo–Latin into Latin linguistics.
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According to the author´s knowledge, Ľudovít Štúr had been preparing for his codification step comprehensively and for a long time. Štúr had explained his reasons for establishing the standard Slovak language on the basis of the dialect spoken in central Slovakia in his work Nárečja slovenskuo alebo potreba písaňja v tomto nárečí (1846). By the establisment of the nationwide standard language he had pursued also a significant social goal – to overcome the then linguistic division of the Slovak nation conditioned by the different religious affiliation of the adherents of then used literary languages; achieving this goal had been considered by him in the above mentioned work necessary. In Štúr´s codification also his deep humanistic conviction has been manifested in which he had surpassed his political competitors as well as foreign political and spiritual leaders. With his efforts Ľudovít Štúr had stood not only at the beginning of ecumenical cooperation of the Slovaks but he had significantly shaped it as well and so he had clearly influenced the activities of the Slovak nation-wide cultural association Tatrín and also Matica slovenská as its immediate successor.
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This article develops the notion of plant writing or phytographia, the roots of which go back to the early modern concept of signatura rerum, as well as, more recently, to Walter Benjamin’s idea of a “language of things”and to Jacques Derrida’s arche-writing. Phytographia designates the encounter between the plants’inscription in the world and the traces of that imprint left in literary works, mediated by the artistic perspective of the author. The final section of the essay turns to the so-called “jungle novel,”set in the Amazonian rainforest, as an instantiation of phytographia.
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The aim of this article is to provide a synthesizing overview of religious references appearing in contemporary nature writing and in discourses dealing with the issue of the climate change. The author emphasizes the importance and scale of those references, pointing to the lack of theoretical tools – not developed by “divergent”ecocritical and post-secular theories – that could be used to characterize this phenomenon. Focusing on the descriptions of mystical experiences represented in contemporary nature writing, the author refers to the psychology of religion and neurotheology to show the actual potential of religious paradigm of spiritual and mental transformation (metanoia) in the context of climate change.
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Teofil Ziemba (1847–1900) was a middle school teacher and a university lecturer. He taught Polish language and literature in middle school; at the university he lectured in philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology. Thanks to these university courses, he developed a research method: psychological biographical studies. Its goal was to examine life experiences and their depictions in literary works. Ziemba discovered some of the hitherto unknown documents related to the life of Adam Mickiewicz and published many articles on Mickiewicz’s life and works. His research was hardly professional – Ziemba was an amateur in literary studies. He never published innovative interpretations of Mickiewicz’s works, but he contributed to the publication of a critical biography of the poet.
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The aim of the article is to present the research achievements of Tadeusz Czapczyński. His literary studies centred on many famous writers, including: Hugo Kołłątaj, Aleksander Fredro, Józef Weyssenhoff, Marian Piechal, and Maria Dąbrowska. He went down in the history of literature primarily as a monographer of Maria Konopnicka’s life and artistic oeuvre.What remained central to Czapczyński’s research were his hermeneutic practices. He considered life, with its dynamics, vigour, and spontaneity, the most important research category, as it was the basis of all human activity, including intellectual one. Czapczyński’s observations were scientifically accurate, and the rich bibliography testifies to a thorough examination of the research area. He encrusted his works with numerous quotations, which made it easier for the reader, who did not have access to the sources, to interact directly with the text.
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The article examines the achievement of Władysław Tarnawski (1885–1951), a Polish translator and scholar who specialized in English literature. It discusses Tarnawski’s biography, his political and aesthetic views, as well as contribution to English studies in Poland and the Polish reception of British literature and its translations. The author also analyses the criteria which Tarnawski adopted in order to evaluate the works of British writers and the way he expressed his opinions thereof. Tarnawski’s views and assessment criteria were deeply rooted in Polish politics and history of the first half of the twentieth century.
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The article presents the multifaceted academic and research activity of Hryhoriy Werwes, an outstanding Slavist and Polish philologist of the latter half of the twentieth century, a promoter of science, a member of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, the long-term head of the Slavic and Balkan Studies Department at the Taras Shevchenko Literature Institute of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences and a member of the International Association for the Research and Popularization of Slavic Cultures at the UNESCO. It offers a review of his most important works and monographs. Special attention is paid to Werwes’s contribution to Polish studies, including his works on such Polish authors as: Adam Mickiewicz, Julisz Słowacki, Władysław Orkan, and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. Additionally, the article examines Werwes’s comparative studies and his work towards fostering Polish-Ukrainian relations.
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The article examines the relationship between Tadeusz Różewicz and Ryszard Przybylski, a friend of the poet and an accomplished critic of his works. It analyzes descriptions of their conversations and feasts, as depicted in Tadeusz Różewicz’s poem tempus fugit as well as in the correspondence that was exchanged over the years by these two masters – masters who saw each other as symposiasts as well as old sage hermits who can save the spiritual and cultural heritage of our civilization.
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Having briefly outlined a vast panorama of Jerzy Starnawski’s research interests, the article describes his academic achievements in the area of the study of Old Polish literature. As will be shown, Starnawski published a wide variety of texts, such as: synthetic epoch analyses, monographs, extensive problem studies, and short articles. He also worked on critical editions. In his study of Polish and Latin literatures, Starnawski used several research methods: the philological, comparative, and biographical methods. His scholarly achievements cover medieval literature (especially hagiography), the Renaissance and Baroque, neo-Latin studies, and the European ties of Old Polish literature, the history of literature, as well as editorial achievements. The relationship between antiquity and the Old Polish literature is a recurrent issue addressed in all of his texts. Starnawski’s research focuses on the works of: Mikołaj Rej, Marcin Bielski, Stanisław Orzechowski, Szymon Starowolski, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, and, to a lesser extent, Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, Jan Kochanowski, Piotr Skarga, Jakub Wujek, Konstancja Benisławska, and Elżbieta Drużbacka, and, in the last years of his life, Knobelsdorf and Marcin Kromer. In the final part of the article, the author discusses the academic reception of his scholarly output, based on the data from the Google Scholar citation counter.
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The aim of the article is to reflect on the works of the historian of antiquity Aleksander Krawczuk. In particular, it focuses on the relationships among historiography, literature, the history of literature, and literary criticism in the works of the author of Poczet cesarzy rzymskich. In her analyses, the author refers to the way in which the category of truth operates in contemporary historical discourse and to the role of the narrative in historiography. For this purpose, in the first part of her article, she lists different scholarly approaches to this matter. In the second part, Szargot examines Krawczuk’s perspectives on the past, as presented in two of his works: Spotkania z Petroniuszem and Polska za Nerona.
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Barbara Kocówna’s contribution to the study of the life and works of W.S. Reymont is rather remarkable. She wrote an important monograph about the author of The Peasants and published: large and small editions of his correspondence which she read from the manuscripts, an anthology of texts about Reymont, a chronological record of Reymont’s life, and interpretations of his works (especially of The Promised Land). Kocówna used verified sources to challenge myths about the writer and expressed her opinions and judgments in a very cautious way. Her aim was to gather and systematize reliable information and offer fair judgement. Over time, her research, free from ideological entanglements, did not lose its relevance. In fact, when studying Reymont, it is hard not to refer to Kocówna’s works. They have served as the foundation for the studies of Reymont’s biographical research and writing, although it should be noted that many of her post-1990 findings after come from the unpublished texts written by Witold Kotowski, which Kocówna used in her works.
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The article discusses the works of Stanisław Makowski: Świat “Sonetów krymskich” Adama Mickiewicza, W szwajcarskich górach. Krajobrazy alpejskie Słowackiego and Okopy Świętej Trójcy. These monographs are informed by the researcher’s intention to travel in the footsteps of the poets (Mickiewicz, Słowacki, Krasiński), and they juxtapose the topographic realities with their literary mapping. Since the idea of such a trip taken by a literary scholar comes directly from the tradition of genetic research, the author of the article examines Makowski’s attitude to this methodology and to the principle of combining it with ergocentric research. He also investigates Makowski’s way of implementing and combining various goals: editorial goals, goals related to literary studies, and his intention to create a guidebook or a reportage about the places visited by the poets.
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The article presents the famous Ukrainian scholar Luiza Olander, who has for many years been thoroughly researching the phenomena, characters, and processes that can be found in Polish literature. She is the author of many dissertations in which she used various (historical, literary, comparative, biographical, and structural) methods to analyze literary phenomena. In her work, Olander uses and develops the concepts of the European founders of semiotics and structuralism. Because of her long-term biographical connection with Volhynia, she has paid special attention to writers from the cultural borderland and examined their works from a comparative perspective. In Olander’s work, the most outstanding figures of Polish literature are considered in a very broad European cultural context.
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Rostysław Radyszewski is well-known both in Poland and Ukraine. He is a doctor of philology, professor, a correspondent member of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, a member of the Polish Academy of Learning, and the head of the Department of Polish Studies at the Faculty of Philology of the Kiev National University. The article presents his most important works and monographs and mostly focuses Radyszewski’s contribution to Polish studies and his work that aimed to foster Polish-Ukrainian relations.
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Tadeusz Różewicz’s drama The Trap has rarely been examined by scholars of literature. Most texts written about it are reviews of its theatre productions. The Trap can be interesting for the studies of literary intertextuality, as it makes frequent references to Kafka’s oeuvre. Różewicz himself frequently spoke of his obsession with Kafka, whom he called one of the saints of literature and an artist with whose works he had a lasting, dialogic relationship. It seems, however, that the intertextual dialogue with Kafka is not the main theme of The Trap, but rather a pretext to address more universal problems. Centra to the play is its symbolic and mythical dimension which resonates with a wider context of cultural convergence. The article discusses cultural convergence and the symbolic and mythical imagination in connection to Gilbert Durand’s concept of cultural pluralism. Durand perceives a literary text as based on a symbolic plot – diachronically dispersed myths and symbols, which form a suprahistorical and supracultural anthropological path. The article addresses such concepts as: the imaginative deformations of the chronotope, the mythologem of the house, the transposition of the myth of the scapegoat, and the symbolic and mythical aspect of presentation. The eponymous “trap” is often interpreted as a trap of history and memory. Yet, the character created by Różewicz is not trapped solely by the past. The symbolic and mythical dimension of the play conceals another – more fundamental – anthropological traps of existential fear and of being confined by love, by the family, by everyday life, and by daily chores. These traps are represented by Felice, Mother, Father, and the symbolic attributes of marriage: the wardrobe, the bedroom, the bed, and the table, which terrify Franz. In the anthropological sense, the human being presented in The Trap experiences an incessant katabasis (symbolized by the basement and the shoemaker’s workshop, from where the characters fearfully observe the world through the window, but never become its part, or by the slow descent downstairs). He needs to dig underground labyrinths, as he struggles to survive under the surface of everyday life, hiding from the terror of history and the terror of social relations, which violate his freedom.
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The author of this article discusses the circumstances of delivering a speech Sermo de tuenda dignitate sacerdotii by Martinus Cromerus, analyzes its content and style. Proves that iuvenilis sermo is worth attention because of the author’s great rhetorical workshop, excellent biblical and patrological preparation as well as general erudition. The speech was composed according to the priciples of classical rhetoric and it is inspired by the speeches of Cicero.
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The author briefly presents the life and work of André Motte (who died 28 November 2021), who was a professor of ancient philology and philosophy at the University of Liège, and details his longtime cooperation with the ancient philologists and philosophers of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.
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