Comparatisms Compared: Stirring the Appetite
The review of: Comparative Literature in Europe: Challenges and Perspectives. Edited by Nikol Dziub and Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019.
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The review of: Comparative Literature in Europe: Challenges and Perspectives. Edited by Nikol Dziub and Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019.
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The purpose of this article is to show the evolution of the historical novel that began in the era of independence, to highlight the peculiarities of male and female historical narratives, and to capture critical reactions and tendencies of assessment of that kind of novel. At the beginning of independence, the poetic prose of a minimal story was established in Lithuanian literature, which was created by the most prominent Lithuanian prose writers, and the historical novel made its debut as a complex experience of poetic narration. Poetry and prose focused on archetypal narratives, national consciousness and ethnic semantics and were characterized by an abundance of associations, but not by a clear storyline. Among common variations of the male historical novel, we can observe historical novels written by women, which have won both literary awards and readers’ approval.
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In La République Mondiale des Lettres published in 1999 and 2008, Ms. Casanova wrote: “Paris is the Greenwich meridian for literature” for the 19th and 20th centuries. Writers and artists have come to the city in the past because it was extremely attractive for creative and economic reasons. But at the beginning of the 21st century, with the rise of the New Media for writing, publishing and diffusing, is it correct to say that Paris is still supreme? Is location more important than the time devoted to writing and reading? The claims on which Ms. Casanova builds her assertions are not supported by the facts of recent history and geography. She refers to “La belle santé économique et la liberté” in Paris but she forgot to mention why artists came from central Europe. It was just because the life was cheaper in Paris than in Berlin, as Walter Benjamin observed in 1926. She notes that Paris was the world centre for high fashion and that writers came together there to be inspired by the place and each other. But these things are no longer true: Paris is one of the most unaffordable cities in the world. Fashion in clothes is determined in many centres, with fashion weeks held in New York, Milan and China; aesthetics no longer depend on a single country. Literary creativity has spread across many continents and the internet and social media provide access to millions of people around the globe. Globalisation has unified the world, note Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Sylvain Tesson, and brought the standardization of cultures. There is also the matter of the dominant language today. The French language has not changed since Ms. Casanova was doing her research, but French writers now dream of being translated into English to reach the largest audience around the world. Publishers also favour English to make the most profit because literature and art are now worldwide commodities. Writers and researchers use the Internet, which connects them with documents, libraries and people all over the world. Newspapers such as Le Monde and Le Figaro in France provide literary reviews from around the world; for example, Histoire de la Traduction Littéraire en Europe Médiane, compiled by Antoine Chalvin, Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, Jean-Léon Muller and Katre Talviste, was written up in Cahiers Littéraires du Monde. What about the readership? If publishing and merchandizing are accelerating and globalizing because of how the Internet changes time and distance, the writer still has to follow the rhythm of the subject.
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Compared to other informal social network mechanisms, guanxi is more common in China and is the most typical. Even in daily life, it is indispensable. Hence, in Chinese fiction, the guanxi motif is prevalent and important. Interestingly, before the Ming dynasty, guanxi was not a literary motif in fiction. This article suggests that three factors contributed to the rise of the guanxi motif in fiction in the Ming dynasty. The first was the boom in fiction writing, especially in the genre of realism, that occurred in this era, which expanded the scope of literary representation. The second was the degradation of public morals in the Ming dynasty, a momentous social transition that Ming fiction writers noted and portrayed. Guanxi, as a disruptive social mechanism that dismantled previous models of human connection, became a focus in their works. The third was the fact that the atmosphere of money worship promoted by guanxi, together with official corruption, facilitated widespread social inequality. Guanxi, as the crux of inequity, inspired writers to expose social turpitude. More importantly, the guanxi motif satisfied the need for plot conflict in literary works. Thus, it became a necessary motif in Ming fiction.
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This article analyses the reflection of everyday multilingualism in Edzard Schaper’s novel Der Henker (The Executioner, 1940) and its translation into Estonian by Katrin Kaugver (Timukas, 2002). The novel deals with the 1905 revolution in the current Estonian territory, which was at that time a province of the Russian Empire. The novel was written shortly before the outbreak of World War II and translated into Estonian 60 years later after the end of the Soviet era. The complexity and the fluctuation of the contextual elements between the storyline of the novel, the time of its writing and the time of the translation make the novel a rewarding object of research into settings of multilingualism in everyday life. The article focuses on the manifest and latent forms of multilingualism, on the functions of the local languages, as well as on the question whether it helps to analyse language use in real life situations. It also looks at how local multilingualism, dominated by three local languages – German, Russian and Estonian – has been translated from one local language (German) into another local language (Estonian). The examples chosen in the article highlight some regularities in the use of the local and other languages, and offer a cultural-historical and socio-political interpretation of the use of multilingualism.
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The present article analyses the phenomenon of multilingualism in the novels of Gohar Markosjan-Käsper (1949–2015) and discusses her life and work in the socio-political context of the former Soviet Union (in relation to language and cultural politics). Markosjan-Käsper was an Armenian-born writer who spent most of her life in Estonia and wrote her books in Russian. Accordingly, her works originated in a contact zone of different languages and cultures. This article highlights her novels Helena and Penelopa as examples of transcultural writing and analyses the manifestations and functions of multilingualism in these works. The study shows that a number of topics and motifs that are present in German-language transcultural literature also appear in Markosjan-Käsper’s novels (for example cultural comparison, self-discovery in a foreign culture). The multilingualism can be seen in these novels both explicitly and implicitly: in addition to Russian, other languages such as Armenian, Estonian, English, and Latin are used, with numerous indirect references to these languages. Furthermore, various references to world-famous novels such as Ulysses by James Joyce and Master and Margarita by Michail Bulgakov are analysed.
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Based on philological research on multilingualism and with regard to Maja Haderlap’s literary work in general this article deals with the specific form of multilingualism that can be observed in her novel Engel des Vergessens (2011). Maja Haderlap, born 1961 in Bad Eisenkappel/Železna Kapla, Carinthia (region in southern Austria), grew up with two languages, Slovenian and German. The authors of the article pursue the question to what degree her literary work and especially her novel can be characterised as multilingual and what kind of poetic multilingualism can be found there. They focus on the novel’s narrative and on the use of language(s), with a short historical excursus on the Slovenian minority in Carinthia as well as the difficult memory politics in Austria. Maja Haderlap not only writes about the territorial and historical preconditions of multilingualism in Carinthia but also inscribes these conditions in the text itself, characterising both the narrative and the language. Although the novel is the result of a shift from Slovenian to German, its multilingualism can be analysed on different levels: on the level of the relationship between discours and histoire – to refer to Genette’s narratological terms –, on the level of cultural codes of the Slovenian language within the novel’s German text, and in general with regard to the fact, that the text is written with the modes of expression of Slovenian and German or with the help of the ‘no man’s land’ between the languages. One can therefore – with respect to the terms of philological research – find both obvious and latent multilingualism and, thirdly, one can observe Mehr-Sprachlichkeit, a term that has been defined by Silke Pasewalck in previous articles.
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Yoko Tawada (1960) is for good reason one of the prime examples for contemporary German exophonic literature. She is a very successful writer in Japanese and in German and provides in her Germanophone writings an ethnography of the German worldview, as Wilhelm von Humboldt famously called languages, or of the German language-mindset. This article focuses on her 2010 poetry volume Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik (‘Adventures of German Grammar’) to demonstrate how exophonia can allow us to develop an acute awareness of the ways in which language structures shape our patterns of thinking. Coming from a very differently organised language, Japanese, Tawada comments in playful ways on the implications of German, and compares it translinguistically with Japanese. Looking at German from an outside position enables her to be very creative and to make Germans discover their language with new eyes. Translingual writing, even though also present in a real mixing of languages in Tawada, appears here as a way to understand how much our ideas are shaped by our linguistic structures, and that there are alternative worldviews. It thus contributes greatly to a relativisation of one’s own perspective and helps to open up to difference and creativity.
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Tibetan author Alai’s Chinese essay, Yi di shui jingguo Lijiang (一滴水经过丽江 [A drop of water passes through Lijiang]) is a piece of travel writing that describes the city of Lijiang (home to the Naxi minority of Yunnan province) and its environs from the perspective of an anthropomorphic drop of water. The essay has been subsequently translated back into the minority Naxi language of Lijiang by Naxi scholar Mu Chen, and both versions are presented as a lapidary inscription in a tourist square. Writing travel from the reverse perspective, i.e. translating the writing from the minority perspective of the place being travelled, is perhaps a way of counteracting the genre’s inherently epistemic appropriation of the ‘other’. I believe that a comparative approach can act as an antidote against the monolingual, ethnocentric tropes of travel writing. In this essay it will be observed that through back-translation of the travel writing into the Naxi culture being observed, cultural specifics can be reintroduced into a text, and a minority culture can reclaim the power to speak for itself.
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The intersection of the study of travel writing and the study of translation produces two major perspectives: travel writing in translation and translation in travel writing. The first one looks into how the travel narrative is reshaped in a different linguistic and cultural context; the other looks into the translational character of the travel narrative, as the traveller is constantly moving between languages and cultures. Though the conceptual analogy between traveller and translator has been long noted, the linguistic dimension that marks the language difference in travel narrative is rarely underlined. In this essay, in order to explore the possibility of foregrounding both the conceptual link between travel and translation and the linguistic dimension of travel narrative, I propose to integrate an attention to language difference into a reinvention of the contested yet promising term ‘cultural translation’. The American writer Peter Hessler’s travel account Country Driving is cited as a case study.
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This article studies how the profound changes in theorizing human sexualities in the fin-de-siècle and early 20th century were used and re-used in the oeuvre of Estonian cultural moderniser Johannes Semper (18 92–1970). In his texts, two modern discourses of sexuality appear in highly telling ways: sexology and psychoanalysis, with which Semper mainly familiarises himself respectively through the works of Otto Weininger and Sigmund Freud. Taking a feminist standpoint to analyse the thoroughly male-centred sexuality discourses of the abovementioned thinkers, this article sets out to study how sexuality and gender are articulated in Semper’s oeuvre, both within a heteronormative and queer framework. Two literary texts are closely examined. The first, the short story collection Ellinor (1927), depicts the world entirely through the eyes of an emancipated woman who encounters a lesbian character – the first in Estonian literature. This encounter begins the discussion of various desires as the protagonist tries to explain her ‘femininity’ in contrast to the queer character Madame Liibeon’s ‘inversion’. The second, Semper’s novel Jealousy (1934), is used for comparison, as sexual Bildung and desires are mediated through the eyes of a male heterosexual protagonist.
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Textological problems of oral poetic works are in the center of attention of Russian folklore studies. Atpresent, the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences is drafting a commentary on the volumes of the “Byliny” series of the Code of Russian Folklore, where the textological aspect occupies an important place. The article considers one of the textologcial problems of folklore studies: the right to the conjecture of a recorded (published) text. It is proposed to the scholarly community to agree on the rules of the conjecture. A number of examples are used to point out the mishearings that may happen when folklore collectors record (transcribe) oral poetic works, and errors that occur when reading archival materials. Examples are given from by liny and historical, wedding, and lyrical songs. Conjectures are offered for some byliny from the classic collections by P. N. Rybnikov and A. F. Hilferding. The research material also includes records of a famous Soviet writer Fyodor Abramov published by E. I. Yakubovskaya. The examples given in the article demonstrate once again that working with archival manuscriptsor republishing classic folklore collections must be analytical.
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Art movements show their effects in different ways according to the political and social conditions of societies, the time they are in, and the change processes that art undergoes with its own dynamics. One of these movements is Dadaism, in which artists reacted to phenomena and practices such as the destruction caused by the First World War, intensifying industrialization, the clarification of class distinctions, and urbanization between 1916 and 1920, and obscured the relationship between life, art and meaning. Dadaism, which is based on the rejection of all kinds of rules and understanding, is seen as a destructive movement because it has such a marginal attitude to deny art as well. Dadaism has shown its effect in Turkish literature within the framework of individual orientations, in the context of influences rather than total adoption, and has not become a settled and adopted trend. Mümtaz Zeki Taşkın (1915-2001) is one of the poets who was influenced by Dadaism in the context of individual orientations and showed this effect clearly in his poems collected in his book Alo Alo 1934 (1934). Taşkın's poems, which contain innovations in terms of form and substance and can be considered as avant-garde, are far from Western examples in terms of destructiveness and denial, although they have influences from Dadaism. One of the reasons for this is that Dadaism could not be institutionalized as a trend adopted in Turkish literature. In this article, first of all, the emergence and characteristics of Dadaism will be emphasized. After following the traces of this movement in Turkish literature, the poems written by Mümtaz Zeki Taşkın in the context of this effect will be evaluated.
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In this literary critical approach we deal with Viktor Pelevin’s first novel Omon Ra from a postmodern view, considering the fact that here the author is deconstructing both the myth of the Soviet space programme and the heroism of the Soviet people. In the same time, we underlined the fact that the novel represents a satire of the Soviet utopia, being a grotesque postmodern version of роман воспитания, well known in the Soviet literature, as characters and subjects – typical for the mentioned period – are used as simulacra. Ironizing the past and the present of his country, Pelevin succeeded in “deconstructing the communist metanarratives”. Parodying the icons, symbols and discourses of the Soviet culture, the novel can be classified as belonging to the sots-art movement, as well as to the conceptualism, but foremost it represents a sample of postmodern writing – as we saw that through fiction, through metaphor the illusion created by the communist propaganda can be demolished.
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The author presents concrete examples of poetic images, motives, ideas of the two Slovak writers: Paľo Bohuš (1921-1997), a Slovak writer who belongs to the Slovak minority living in Voyvodina-Serbia and Ján Smrek (1920-1982), a Slovac poet living in Slovakia. There are some persuasive elements in their imagery of life and literary works (poetry), the most interesting values of the Slovak spirituality, literature and poetic sensitiveness.
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А.С. Грибоедов открывает одну из самобытных страниц русской литературы. Он по праву считается родоначальником русской драматургии. Славу драматургу принесла комедия Горе от ума, написанная сразу после войны 1812 года, когда особое внимание стало уделяться духовной стороне развития личности. На первый план в комедии выдвигаются острые социальные проблемы того времени, основной из которых была отмена крепостного права. Сюжет комедии составляет конфликт между Чацким, молодым дворянином, вернувшимся в Москву неизвестно откуда, и обшеством, которое упирается в некую закоренелость и духа и действия и вовсе не готовo принять новое. Чацкий – главный герой комедии. Именно он должен быть указать выход из социального застоя. Но указал ли он его, и если нет, то почему? Чацкий в своих пылких монологах клеймит «век минувший» и его представителей. Свои обличительные речи он произносит грозно, воодушевленно. Он прекрасный оратор. Но он «спотыкается» на деле. Он сам ещё находится на полпути к воплощению своих идеалов. Чацкий умный человек, понимающий смысл жизни и имегощий цель, но он ещё не знает, как этой цели добиться. В Чацком собраны черты, которые были характерны для всей передовой интеллигенции того времени. Образ Чацкого – первый в русской литературе образ дворянского интеллигента, бросившего вызов своей среде, осознавшего своё гражданское достоинство. Но несмотря на свой ум, честность, смелость, герой Грибоедова остается непонятным не только обшеством, и любимой, но самим читателем. Он ещё «не возмужал» окончательно, но уже томится в кругу отечественников. В своём «противостоянии» Чацкий пока одинок, а в одиночку «устоять» довольно не просто. Но ведь всегда остается надежда? Вот надеждой пока и выживаем.
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В этом тексте речь идёт о том как украинская литература помогала своему народу преодолевать препятствия на пути к национальному освобождению. В этот процесс обновления сознания украинского человека вносила свою долю как литература XIX-го века, так и новейшая украинская литература, постмодернистская. Один из писателей постмодернистов, Юрий Андрухович, представил в своих романах возможный путь к счастью, а именно ориентация украинцев на Европу и европейскую культуру.
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One of the most prominent Postmodernist Russian writers, Viktor Pelevin, makes a significant contribution to Russian contemporary literature through his unique, unusual style and the themes which are discussed in his works. The combination of science-fictional novel and Oriental elements renders a mystical and original fragrance to the writer’s works. The writer observes the social changes in the Russian archetype, being mainly interested in the processes which occur in the collective subconscious mind of the Russian nation. The transition from Soviet to Post-soviet Russia implies tremendous changes in people’s mentality and their social attitude. Not only does Pelevin deconstruct the Communist ideology, but he also points out to the dangers of the implementation of a new totalitarian system, due to consumerism. The article studies the main themes and motifs encountered in Viktor Pelevin’s works, as well as the differences between Russian and Western Postmodernism.
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Autorul analizează prezenţa spaţiului central-european în literature polonă, oprindu-se cu precădere la doi autori: A. Stasiuk şi J. Stempowski, cu raportare nemijlocită la textele lui E. Cioran. Studiul are caracter comparat. În timp ce la Stempowski predomină istoria şi reflecţia istorică, la Stasiuk lipseşte dimensiunea istorică, viziunea sa având mai degrabă un caracter grotesc. Ca şi Cioran, cei doi scriitori polonezi surprind câteva trăsături ale identităţii centraleuropene: efemeritatea şi instablitatea, o anumită atitudine ironică faţă de viaţă şi o distanţă specifică faţă de timp. În cazul României, „imaginaţia înlocuieşte memoria”, formele nu prind contur, rămânând de multe ori în fază de proiect.
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Tatjana Lehenová was one of the first to come up with demythologization of gender traditions in Slovakia. Her lyric subject keeps men in distance, ironically commenting asymmetries in partnership. She captures disintegration of relationships, including her own, and challenges the romantic notion of love. She rarely reveals her emotions. Ambivalent - rational and emotional - attitude creates a significant source of tension in the poems. Although the subject separates from the crowd and brings together with those on the edge and atmosphere of the collection is connected to bohemian, decadent and beat gestures, but even in this case subject keeps the distance. Lehenová undermines traditional gender stereotypes by distancing herself from the naive and reflective form of a relationship. She also breaches the image of working woman of those days: emancipation from above. She reflects hiding women behind „men's backs“. Besides the physical way of writing (écriture du corps), Lehenová creates functional verbal dialogue between substandard and vulgar vocabulary on one hand and deminutivs on the other. It is impressive how she combines charging or detached passages with more abstract and poetic passages. Dialogue and the ambivalent nature of the verses is suited to larger extension of poems. Form of poems is related with trends of postmodern literature of that period: pluralism, parody, ironization, dissolving boundaries between high and low art etc. „Silence“ and „dumbness“ is present in the collection several times: e.g. as the silence between the partners. We can read it also as protest against androcentric language or as "external silence". It is also related to the potency of new language options. The subject is aware of the devastating power of silence in a partnership that leads to revolution and thus improving the partnership status or terminating it. Allegorically, we can apply it on problem of silence as subversion. Lehenová also refers to the forced silence of women. The unmasking of these tactics, however, undermines it. Her poems are expressing new version of "femininity": in its non-stereotypical gender, ambivalent, emotional-rational way. In keeping with the thinking of authors of écriture féminine she is trying to write playful semiotic through the symbolic language. Lehenova´s writing is far away of utopic "feminine" ideal of H. Cixous, because her subject has too strong knowledge of being part of androcentric order. Reflects it, sometimes she oversteps it for a moment, but never completely. She is connected more on ideas of J. Kristeva and L. Irigaray
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