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The paper aims at exploring Margaret Atwood’s vision in her books emphasized in an interview written by Bland Jared, “It's 'scary' watching aspects of her fiction come to life, Margaret Atwood says”, August 24, 2013. We have chosen this interview because Margaret Atwood presents in detail her intentions with some of her books. The author has been drawn into the feminist camp, and she has been famously denying such involvement. In the interview she explains how aspects of her fiction came to life as a consequence of our past actions. The purpose of this article is to highlight the arguments that build up her belief and the roots of inspiration for some of her novels. The article can be useful to students focusing on the Canadian fictional novels with a particular interest in feminism.
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In his recent book, Conceptual Conflicts in Metaphors and Figurative Language, Michele Prandi describes synaesthesia and metonymy as competing options for the interpretation of a literary image. This article illustrates a kind of configuration in which the two rhetoric processes participate as complementary options – not as competing ones – in the construction of an image. In the first part metonymy is described in relation to metaphor and synecdoche, then to synaesthesia. In the second part, we give examples from Romanian literature, analyzing a binary structure noun-adjective where synaesthesia is realized in absentia, through the intervention of a virtual subject that is the product of a metonymic operation.
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My essay intends to outline the linguistic and rhetorical foundations of simile and metaphor in order to distinguish these two figures. They are indeed too often assimilated to each other because of the kind of relation on which they are grounded, i. e. the analogy between elements that belong to different semantico-referential fields. From classical theories to the investigations of Nouvelle Rhétorique, scholars do not show a clear distinction between simile and metaphor but tend to consider metaphor as an elliptical comparison. Nevertheless, from Interaction Theories onwards (Richards, Black), the new conception of metaphor as «conceptual conflict» (Prandi) – no longer intended as an exception to the rule but as interaction – brings about a sharp separation between the two figures. In particular, studies by Henry, Le Guern, and Prandi clearly distinguish the fields of investigation on simile and metaphor and begin to notice the creative potentialities of simile. The latter can create, to my mind, projective analogies just as metaphor does, although through quite different mechanisms.
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U našem dobu, kada smo sve više zasuti tekstovima kratkoga daha i niske umjetničke moći, postavlja se pitanje kako odvojiti žito od kukolja, kako prepoznati prave književne vrijednosti o kojima vrijedi govoriti. Književni znalci, naravno, znaju kako. Stoga oni, pišući književne kritike, nastoje ukazati na to što je danas dobro i što ne valja u suvremenoj književnosti, ali i u društvu općenito jer što je i književnost drugo nego opisivanje svega postojećega, pa i devijacija društva.
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In this essay I argue that while utopias can be dangerous when distorted by ideology and religion, captured to serve the economic and political ends of the rich and powerful, or warped so that the better life is only available to a select few, they are essential because the desire/hope for a better life for everyone is the only way to overcome such distortion/capture/warping. In conclusion, I opt for the “relative utopia” of Albert Camus, the “realistic utopia” of John Rawls, or what, more recently Erik Olin Wright called “Real Utopias” and Rutger Bregman has called “Utopias for Realists.”
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Utopia seems to be one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation. Does this peculiar entity still have a social function? How should we formulate the position of utopia with respect to the political? I would like to suggest that utopia emerges at the moment of the suspension of the political. Utopianism involves a certain distance from the political institutions which encourages an endless play of fantasy around their possible reconstructions and restructurations.
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Following Hesiod’s proceeding of splitting the good and bad Eris, in the three parts of these Theses, Communism, Science Fiction, and Utopia/nism are split between the two poles and examined. In SF the role of Estrangement and the Novum is revisited; both are now seen as subject to encroaching fakery. Most articulated is Part 3 on good and bad utopianism, with a discussion of anti-utopia, defined as a targeted and openly political use of a closed horizon to refute, ridicule, andrender unthinkable both the utopia of a better possible world and the dystopia.Entropic closure and the early Disneyland and disneyfication are explored to understand the anti-utopia that lives us. As different from all earlier variants of utopia/nism, people are now wholly and permanently inside this fake utopia. The theory of utopia/nism, axiomatically postulating utopias are not realizable, can be salvaged by assuming eutopia is in anti-utopia latently present as a constituted absence.
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Ulrich Beck, in his article, “Climate for Change” of 2010, suggested that in the face of “climate breakdown” (George Monbiot), “something historically new can emerge, namely a cosmopolitan vision in which people see themselves … as part of an endangered world …”. This paper will reflect on the possibility and impossibility of utopianism in the Anthropocene and ask the question if utopia is possible in the Anthropocene? It will take into consideration recent debates around utopia and the Anthropocene and lookat four literary examples from Germany, Norway, England and the US.
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In the proposed research there is a comparative analysis of two conceptions – of the English thinker Karl R. Popper (1902- 1994) and of the Romanian thinker Lucian Blaga (1895 – 1961), thinkers who launched the idea of a new model of knowledge and that would ultimately help to establish, to outline a possible model of the efficiency of the process of scientific creation, of advancement in knowledge, of the discovery of the new, of progress in the cognitive aspect in the last instance.
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My two intellectual passions are interdisciplinarity and methodological rigour. The former is motivated by my interest in social-cultural reality, where disciplinary boundaries seem irrelevant. The latter comes from my desire, as a teacher, to empower students to do their own analytical work. Hence, the interest in ‘travelling’ concepts as tools for interdisciplinary analysis. Below, I give a few arguments in favour of concepts over (disciplinary) methods, and then I sum up a few examples of useful concepts in the Humanities.
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The paper deals with literary critic Lionel Trilling and his theory of the novel. After indicating a systematic character of Trilling’s opinions in the concerned area, two continuous features in the reception of his essayist opus are critically examined: insistance on its non-theoretical nature, and accommodation of its interpretative vision to the American context. The concluding part of the paper brings a survey of the reception of Trilling’s texts in Yugoslavia, as well as of its continuous neglect by the journal Umjetnost riječi.
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A writer can only be a man who feels a sense of responsibility, although it so happens that in his particular actions he may show this no more than others. This is a responsibility for the life that is deteriorating and man should not feel shame in saying that this responsibility is inspired by pity, which is of no value if it is declared to be a general and undefined feeling. Pity requires a concrete metamorphosis of every creature that lives and exists. Through myth and traditional literatures, the writer learns and practices metamorphosis. He is summed up to nothing if he does not apply metamorphosis in his environment. The diverse life which pierces the author and of which he perceives separately every aspect of its appearance is not reduced, within the writer, in one simple concept, but instead it gives him strength to reject death and thus it transforms into something universal. It cannot be that the writer leaves mankind in the pity of death. The writer, who refuses to be imposed upon, learns on his own that death exerts a great power over many people. Even if many will find this to be a pointless endeavor, he will rise against such a thing and will refuse to give in. It will be a pleasure for the writer to oppose the heralds of nothingness, who are increasing their numbers in literature, and the writer will give a finer battle using other tools rather than their own.
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A collection of essays about the remarkable personality of Romanian literary criticism, Mircea Martin.
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This essay starts from the proviso that the best writers are also the most passionate readers, thus engaging their readers’ minds, souls and bodies in the most complex and compelling ways. In many cases, they do so through their characters, which become the embodiments and prototypes of our own reading selves. In The Vegetal Memory, Umberto Eco argued that ’the rhythm of reading follows that of the body, the rhythm of the body follows that of reading. We read not only with the brain, we read with our whole body and that is why, when we read a book, we cry or we laugh or, when we read thrillers, they make our hair stand on end’ (Eco 2008: 26). Emily Dickinson’s unsettling account that ’If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry’ (The Norton Anthology of American Literature 1985: 2482) may serve as a reinforcement of the essentially somatic nature of our engagement in reading. We will speak about the experiences of reading codex as narrated or described by writers and common readers, be those our own or described by others, and we will argue that those are ultimately physical.
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This essay purports to bring to focus a series of collective valorizations of books in the Romanian context. Ethnographic data and quantitative research concerning the book consumption in various ages lie at the basis of cataloguing several representations of books. Of these we mention: the book as gift, the book as tool, the book as object, the book as a repository of knowledge, the book as salvation, the book as concentrated time, etc. Each of these hypostases of books applies both to those who use books in print and those who use e-books. This demonstrates that, irrespective of the technology put into publishing and print, social representations of books which offer them a special ontological status persist in the collective mindset. All this has consequences both in the social sphere and at the level of human attitude. The book represents access to knowledge and it implicitly confers formulae of social achievement or it institutes hierarchies and stirs respect, admiration and curiosity
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Recent works on spatiality have proven that space is not a fixed and unchangeable but rather a fluid and mobile reality. This relativity of space has taken out space from the auspices of Kantian apriorism and the philosophy of positivism and signalled that it is a controversial juxtaposition of the real and the fictional, of perception and representation, of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Michel de Certeau assertes that space has to be understood as a “spatial practice”, meaning that it is modulated by the spatial representations of the dweller. That points to the utility and practicability of space as opposed to a dominant supersaturated space that speaks in local laws. The “spatial practice” dilutes the frontiers and communicates to other spaces, from which results the transgressive quality of space. Having this spatial theory as a starter point, this paper points out the significance of storytelling as a marker for space. As de Certeau states out, storytelling invents space, because it has no hermeneutical encoding and only may be understood as a “making-do” process which says what it says without additional meaning. The focus of this paper is to analyze the stories of two Moldavian authors, Mihail Sadoveanu and Al. O. Teodoreanu. Storytelling becomes for the two writers a way to relocate the periphery into the center as Moldova has lost its political and cultural importance towards the capital Bucharest. Storytelling becomes marginality, a genius loci that carves a local specificity. The territory is mapped in fictional stories in which memory works as a catalyzer. De Certeau thinks that memory is the connection between storytelling and space because it modifies and constructs space according to the laws of the narrative. Memory is indeed an important issue in the stories picked up for analysis: Moldova becomes a fictional space for Sadoveanu and Al. O. Teodoreanu, the territory of passed glorious rulers, decadent boyars and archaic myths.
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This essay is an examination of the figurative language of nature that informs bridal laments and wedding songs in Romanian and Slavic ritual poetry. Most wedding rituals and songs in these largely patrilocal societies center on the bride. I discuss oral traditional verse that articulates her separation from her past as both personal expression representing her “vertical” growth as well as a “horizontal” journey to a new life in her in-laws’ home with implications for the community. Nature imagery depicts the bride through metaphorical language that invokes plants and birds. These tropes portray the bride, as well as her fear and anguish, in the symbolic “death” that traditional weddings signified for her. I also consider how, later in the wedding, the bride and groom figure together in the poetry as a couple. At this time, the tone shifts as images of death are left behind and the bride’s imminent “rebirth” and incorporation into her new family and home are celebrated. I demonstrate how motifs of plants and birds in Romanian and Slavic ritual wedding poetry voice through an economy of words yet depth of meaning the profound concerns of the bride in the most significant rite of passage in the traditional world, marriage.
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