We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
The present paper focuses on the travel of Eugène Delacroix to Morocco (first six months of 1832) and his accounts given in his travel notes, letters and an unfinished travelogue, “Souvenirs d’un voyage dans le Maroc”. The writings of the famous painter are contrasted with the book by a Moroccan writer, Tahar Ben Jelloun, “Lettre à Delacroix” (2005). The aim of the paper is to define the art of living “à la marocaine” according to the French painter and the Moroccan writer. It is done in three parts. The first one is devoted to the beauty of Moroccan landscapes, horses and architecture. The second focuses on the art of dressing : the beauty of the inhabitants of the country and the elegance of their cloths. The last part discusses Moroccan traditions, based – according to Delacroix – on Antiquity.
More...
Michel Houellebecq in his novels “Platform” (2001), “Map and territory” (2010) and “Submission” (2015) shows the struggles of a man trying to find his place in the modern world. Author’s “alter egos” – writer, painter, clerk of the Ministry of Culture, researcher in literary studies, witness a deep crisis that heralds the end of Europe. Unbridled consumption, clumsy journalists, crisis of democracy and Church’s institution are leading to the collapse of the old world. The prospect of being absorbed by Muslims, led by an extremely skilled politician, confirms Houellebecq’s talent, arousing anxiety and opposition.
More...
On January 7th 2015, Philippe Lançon, a journalist at “Libération” and at “Charlie Hebdo” attends the newspaper’s premises, when the islamist terrorists attack. The killers’bullets tear his jaws off, severely injure his arms, make his existence capsize, but he survives. In his novel “Le Lambeau”, he tells the story of a mental as well as physical reconstruction, sketching the chronology of his days in various hospitals, depicting the visitors who make his days brighter and the varied shades of his consciousness. Is his writing, a mere testimony of a tragical experiment, the chronicles of a journalist who witnesses how one comes back to life? Or is it a “pharmakon”, a poison within a remedy, which puts back to life things past and gone, as a way of healing? Or shall we give a spiritual significance to this writing, so haunted by Proust that it parodies his style and shows literature as a means of salvation?
More...
The aim of this article is to analyse the prefaces to the French Renaissance apocalyptic epics of the years 1576-1606 (works by Jacques de Billy, Guillaume de Chevalier, Michel Quillian and Jude Serclier) in order to understand the literary and extra-literary issues addressed by their authors. This comparison will highlight in particular the ethos of the author, the problem of representation in a biblical poem and its eschatological dimension, the place of pagan fiction and encyclopaedic erudition, and the rhetorical strategies employed.
More...
French writer Albert Robida, renowned for his futuristic works of fiction written in a bitter-sweet tone, somehow broke away from his usual inspiration in “The Clock of the Centuries” (published in 1902), as electric life short-circuited. This atypical novel opens up, in the early stages of the twentieth century Robida now refuses to anticipate and explore, with a cataclysm that all but extinguishes every form of life on earth and gives a symbolic warning that there is something wrong in the civilized world. Survival is organized, but Robida then subverts the “post-apocalyptic” narrative to introduce an unprecedented variation: the survivors realize that, after the catastrophe, an “out-of-joint” universe, in which the hands of time are now ticking in reverse, has now taken over. Comic relief is provided by the heroes getting younger and historical figures being brought back to life, but conceals the violence of the continuity solution staged by Robida in this counter-clockwise anticipation novel, as the restoration of order is achieved under the aegis of a mutilated Janus. This gave the momentum for an anti-progressive eschatology, which turned out to have a great future in literature.
More...
In this paper, the author examines the distortion of the past and the perversion of art in works of speculative dystopian fiction. Without history, there is no longer a past or a future; only the present persists as a perpetual replication of the same structures. In “1984”, everything is constantly rewritten in minute detail. In “Globalia”, the system wages a fierce war against history. Art is either recuperated or condemned to burn at the stake of state power (“Fahrenheit 451”). However, discovering art objects from past times and reading literary works signal a change of course which raises conscience and even leads to acts of resistance. In dystopian speculative literature, resistance acquires a symbolic dimension: Despite reigning darkness, there seems to appear a gleam of hope thanks to art and to literature.
More...
In “L’Apocalypse de 2030”, “Chroniques de la fin du monde” and “La fin des temps”, three novels by French, American and Japanese authors respectively, the novelists try to hold up a mirror to readers of our world that has become a field of ruin, but they do not fail to warn that the crisis of the present is nothing compared to what awaits us in the decade of 2030. In this gruesome setting, the question of survival remains the major leitmotif of this apocalyptic corpus. By analysing these works under the scalpel of psychocriticism, the critic comes to the conclusion that the authors are taking a critical look at the catastrophic situation of the world, with both compassion and indignation. But beyond their essentially anxiety-provoking and presentist vein, apocalyptic fictions propose a rather anxiolytic framework, oriented towards the future and the conduct to be maintained in this ‘crisis of time’. The authors of apocalyptic literature, far from being “the horsemen of the apocalypse”, set themselves up as prophets of the days of doubt.
More...
The paper aims to describe and analyze the specific loneliness of Walter Ferranini, the protagonist of “Il comunista”, by Guido Morselli (1976). Even though constantly searching for success and praise – as probably it was for Guido Morselli, too – Ferranini lives his grey, unsuccessful, unhappy life in a particular way, which makes him a silent, unrecognized hero, and which gives a special “light” to the full novel.
More...
The analysis presented in this article concerns one of the newest philosophical novels of Aldo Nove, entitled “Il professore di Viggiù” (2018). In the book the author presents an invented interview with mysterious person, by which he transmits reflections on human life in the modern world. The text evokes the existential issues concerning the increasingly precarious conditions in which people live torn between doubts about the reality of their own being. The aim of the research is to emphasize the motifs which can be seen in the work of the Italian writer and to answer the questions related to his way of showing the consumer society.
More...
In the last decades, many studies have proliferated on the different ways in which a specific modality of consumer society, characterized by an unbridled acceleration of the rhythms of production and work, affects the lives of millions of people, especially in highly industrialized nations. These studies suggest that the individuals, under the pressure of an increasingly accelerated and frenetic pace of life, are compelled to perform certain roles and achieve certain goals that, if satisfactorily fulfilled, could guarantee success, or, at least, social acceptance. But what happens when the individual cannot or do not want to perform and fulfil such roles and expectations fast enough, when the individual prolongs or just abandons the entrusted task? In the richly diverse world of Latin American fiction, many writers have tackled this question. In base of three novels of different years: “El libro vacío” (1958), by the Mexican Josefina Vicens, “Wasabi” (1994), by the Argentine Alan Pauls, and “La novela luminosa” (2005), by the Uruguayan Mario Levrero, this paper comments the role played in contemporary fiction by the figure of the apathic, indolent or just slow-moving writer. The main characters of those novels seem to live in a slow-time dimension opposed to the fast one dominant in late modernity.
More...
Ana Blandiana, an internationally recognized writer, has been an opponent of the dictatorial regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu. She is a censored poet, she has had to fight to find a way of conveying her words. She has become a symbol of the Resistance, and despite the prohibition she has continued to write; several of her stories and poems are both a reflection and a critique of how she lived under communist totalitarianism. Blandiana finds in writing a way of living. She ties her works to the fantastic genre, which are divided between a dream world and a historical reality. The dream is the place chosen by the writer to be able to express herself freely through the voice of her characters. In addition to the spatial duality, Blandiana chooses to situate her narrations in a temporal duality. The protagonists find themselves immersed in the writer’s own past, and in an eternal present through which she projects her hopes for a better future.
More...
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the novel "Vispera del odio" (1958), by Concha Castroviejo, with special focus on its impact as a literary testimony of the female condition during the Francoist years. The central plot in the novel revolves around an unhappy marriage, with the wife experiencing violence from her husband. The dramatic situation became a common element in many novels written by women of that time, hence the paradigmatic value of a general condition of feminine struggle that defines a consequent attitude and ability of surviving to adverse historical and social circumstances.
More...
The paper main theme is Esther in Purim parodies. As a study case, the Jewish community in Rome is taken into consideration. In spite of the relatively small numbers of Holocaust victims among the Italian Jews, the traumatic memories of persecution were well present in the survivors’ awareness. In the early post-war years, they felt a pressing need to pass on their knowledge of the Holocaust to the younger. Apart from academic papers and literary works of import, a number of popular texts appeared. One example is a version of the Tale of Purim written around 1950. The narration carries on the Italian tradition of Aggadah-style literature, and its language makes it one of the latest documents featuring idioms of the now forgotten Jewish-Roman dialect. In the tale, the Holocaust is referred to by equalling Hitler to the persecutor of the Jews as of Megillath Esther. In that fashion, Esther as a literary character wanders from the ancient religious discourse to the extra-literary actuality.
More...
Our paper aims at analysing the notion of the “city” as a track in Abdelwahab Meddeb’s work, starting from Aya dans les villes (Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1999), seeing the trace as a mnemonic indicator leading, in Meddeb’s case, to the abolishing of One origin and, de facto, to the revelation of the origin disseminated here and there. Our reflection proceeds, mathematically, to smoothing, and therefore, philosophically, to deconstructing the traces included/folded in the corners and recesses of the cities visited and revisited by the narrating-character. The city, as we consider it here, functions as a metaphor of the trace of belonging to the universally human and to the humanly composite. This is what we aim drifting into: dealing with the poetics of the spatial hybrid (the city) evoked and stipulated by the temporal hybrid (the memory), containing traces as folds.
More...
What does the hairy ball theorem have in common with one of the most famous French poets of all time? Going around Charles Baudelaire’s words, can one come across topology? And working around the idea of infinity, can one come across the transdisciplinary embrace of both metaphors and functions? From literary tropes to fixed points, from Baudelaire to Brouwer, and from the concrete to the abstract, this paper sets out to playfully explore the invisible lines uniting together, around and across, the power of poetics and the beauty of mathematics.
More...
Located either in the centre or on the periphery of the vital circle of the men who cross her existence (Charles, Leon, Rodolphe), Emma Bovary often remains without direction and all that she knows in her short life is made of vicious circles. And yet, nothing announced it. Emma is a young girl, beautiful, fed with romantic dreams and hopeless hopes. Anything that could have saved her destroys her. In Madame Bovary, this emblem full of significant resources will be broken, destroyed, annihilated, hoped for, dreamed of and redone with an art that only Gustave Flaubert could be capable of. It is true that this dance of feelings, sensations, desires and falls brought him a trial, but also an irrefragable posterity.
More...
J-M. G. Le Clézio’s literary work is built around several recurrent elements that have us think of the author’s biography and how he perceives and uses, in his texts, various places from all over the world. However, as we are following his characters, we notice that they share a path with their creator. In this study we attempt to retrace their steps in order to identify the type of movement that governs them, and see if the characters leave without returning or if, on the contrary, they feel the need to return to the same place.
More...
Response of the Polish positivist and modernist writers to the biblical triad: faith, hope, and love has been the focal point of my research project. My aim was to trace a representative variety of references to these three motifs, both in their historical and timeless dimension. I was particularly concerned with outstanding, but all too often forgotten literary texts. A combination of traditional and contemporary research methods and critical approaches were used, such as hermeneutic fusion of cognitive horizons, intertextuality, and comparative cultural studies. My research brought to light numerous literary responses to faith, hope and love, of various artistic value, dealing mostly with basic human affairs but also with reactions reaching deeply into transcendence.
More...
The article discusses how nonverbal communication in Dostoyevsky’s “The Double” is presented. It is a story about an official who fell into madness as a result of dehumanized interpersonal relations. Both, controlled and uncontrolled behaviours, are manifested by the body language. These reactions alternate, and they are a consequence of the protagonist’s emotional state made up of: his physical appearance, face expressions, visual imaging and vocal reactions, gestures, and forms of communicating with the outside world, paralleled or unparalleled by dialogues or monologues. The analysis of selected fragments of the work, which covers, above all, the non-verbal messages sent by Goladkin, and how they correlate with what he actually says, shows that the writer succeeded in creating an astonishingly accurate, even clinical, description of schizophrenia.
More...