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When speaking of Zeno's famous paradox (Achilles and the tortoise), Lacan remarks: A number has a limit and it is to that extent that it is infinite. It is quite clear that Achilles can only pass the tortoise - he cannot catch up with it. He only catches up with it at infinity (infinitude).
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Incognito de P. Dumitriu et Le Docteur Jivago de Pasternak sont deux romans publiés en 1962. Ils s’appuient tous deux, selon des modalités et avec des spécificités analysées dans l’article, non seulement sur le modèle du roman bourgeois qui s’appuie sur une trajectoire individuelle, sur un substrat chrétien et, en particulier, recours au mythe christique, qu’il convient néanmoins de dépasser, afin de régénérer ou de mettre à bas un communisme qui a perdu de vue la personne humaine.
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Review of: Migiena Nikolchina, Sense and Matricide, Skopje: Sigmapres, 2000.
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Arab Bedouin communities have long been a subject of analysis by Oriental scholars. There has been a great tendency to exoticize the Bedouin man, and particularly the Bedouin woman. A custom often overlooked and misunderstood is the significance of the ideology of asil‖ or pure blood.‖ It was as important to keep the family‘s blood line ―pure as it was to maintain the horse‘s, or mare‘s, breeding. When Bedouin women occupy the same space as the mare, is this utter objectification of their bodies, or perhaps, is there a huge value placed on the woman? The mare‘s significance has also been present in some works of literature. The Tent, by Miral al-Tahawy, presents us with a protagonist, Fatima, who loses her mare to a foreign Orientalist in exchange for her education. With the mare‘s loss comes Fatima‘s loss of self, identity, and eventual descent into madness. The mare is significant to Bedouin culture, and it is this contact with the colonizer that threatens the culture and the psyche. This paper will combine both cultural ideologies, as well as attempt a literary examination of the above mentioned work. It aims to present a new approach at looking at the significance of the mare in Bedouin culture and literature, as well as the invasion of colonialism, which does not save Bedouin women, but rather steals the culture.
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The study examines the influence of the Mbari club and early Nigerian prose writers on theworks of the Nigerian literary dramatists. In addition, the study analyses and documentsthe impact which this influence has on the works of selected Nigerian literary dramatistsover decades.
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All along the New York Trilogy, Auster‘s detectives bear unspoken wounds of their past. Their epistemological quest for the truth is further hampered by their uncertainty to find answers about who they truly are. Chasing a perpetrator turns into chasing a shadow, aninner self, and a sense of belonging. Drawing on Trauma theory, this essay attempts toexamine how The New York Trilogy is an artistic materialization of an underlying traumaleading to a confused definition of identity. This article shall primarily focus on the readingof the novel as a traumatic event. It will examine how textual indeterminacies are implemented to convey a problematized self-definition. Ultimately, it shall study how the detectives‘ quest for the truth is a query for personal, social and artistic belonging. This belonging is lost in the tides of a traumatic past that impedes the articulation of a clear subjectivity.
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The major purpose of this study is to analyse the aspects and the role of the Material Self present in the novel The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. The Material Self is a constituent of the Empirical Self which William James (Henry James‘s brother) defines in his theoretical work The Principles of Psychology. Therefore, the representation of the Material Self in Henry James‘s works is much more interesting when compared with the representation of the Self in William James‘s theory. According to William James, one of the core elements of the Material Self is the ‗house‘. The house is carefully selected by Henry James as a tool for creating the images of his characters from The Portrait of a Lady; the analogical relation between setting and character helps Henry James build indirect characterisation. The houses he drafts represent in detail the appearance and character of their masters. Moreover, the hierarchy of the constituent parts of the Material Self suggested by William James in his theory is somehow reshaped by the major character in The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James.
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The aim of the article is to examine the conditions of educational processes which need to be opened for external integration which greatly modifies the sense of community identity. These processes concern the social behaviour in certain symbolic spaces of multicultural world, and they include one’s respect towards social and political values, acceptance of laws and duties of single people towards a nation and international organisations, as well as the rules of responsible social coexistence. The need to learn how to live in the world of diversity causes that intercultural education needs to be seen as an important educational aim of any type of school. The author’s arguments include the discourse on the essence of inclusive identity, the current research on regionalism; the arguments highlight the notion of tolerance, the acceptance of the Other, and the intercultural dialogue. The author establishes the conditions of introducing cultural difference into “one’s own thinking”. She also demonstrates practical opportunities of making use of literature of cultural encounters in primary and high schools. Comparative approach – comparing literary texts and phenomena taken from various cultural spheres – includes examples from painting, sculpture, architecture and music. Such method guides the students and takes them through various areas or spheres “in between”; as a result, the method may facilitate creative thinking about one’s culture and that of the others. Intercultural ideas are an integral element of cultural education of contemporary students of all levels of education; so far there has been no alternative to them.
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The aim of the article Different faces of old age as perceived by the students of Polish studies is to present how old teachers perceive old age. The exemplification material consists of three texts: Winter tale. An essay on the old age of Ryszard Przybylski, “The Old Man’s Route”. An attempt at old age politics by Tadeusz Sławek and Lala Jacek Dehnel. Hermeneutical reading allowed for the creation of several images of autumn of life: a painful, marked by suffering attempts to overcome and suffering in a creative act; old age as a possibility of a deeper look at the spiritual dimension of human existence and old age reconciled with the laws of transiting the events immersed in the act of memorization.
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The following text emerges from the need to research student’s current world of values and the image of such world should be treated as the foundation for educational reflection and the organization of teaching process. The first point of reference for the issue mentioned above was referring to research on the axiological image of young generation, which was conducted within the last thirty years. The second point of reference are the experiences regarding the reception of classic literature at modern school. The issue mentioned in the topic has been discussed in reference to the exemplifying material, which constituted the record of student’s opinions gathered during Polish language classes regarding the very first reception of a literary text chosen for discussion. The analysis of those opinions revealed a significant shift in the area of students’ values, i.e. a clearer devaluation of moral values, relativization of ethical principles, as well as stronger domination of pragmatic values connected with material and tangible interest of an individual. This text also shows a clear withdrawal of young generation from the objective consideration of values. At the end, the author emphasizes that the awareness of such state of things could be of utmost importance to a proper organization of educational processes, as it allows to prevent naïve and inefficient activities and makes it possible to take adequate actions in order to diagnose the state of things and implement appropriate didactic strategies.
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The purpose of this article is an attempt to show what role required reading can play as a carrier of values in the literacy and cultural education of teenagers. This problem will be discussed on the example of fantasy novel The Hobbit or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien. Research on the reception of this book in Poland by contemporary teenagers and my experience with the discussed issues have motivated me to describe a few – interesting in my opinion – strategies for dealing with this novel in Polish language education in axiological terms.
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Review of: Jüdische Räume und Topographien in Ost(mittel)europa. Konstruktionen in Literatur und Kultur. Hrsg. von Klavdia S m o l a und Olaf T e r p i t z . (Opera Slavica. Neue Folge, Bd. 61.) Harrassowitz. Wiesbaden 2014. XI, 274 S., 21 Ill., 6 graph. Darst. ISBN 978-3- 447-10281-0. (€ 58,–.). Reviewed by Elisa-Maria Hiemer.
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An infectuous and fatal virus, known as Covid 19, broke out at the beginning of 2020 and turned into pandemic, affecting the whole world. It is known that it emerged in the People’s Republic of China. The health system in some developed countries either collapsed or came to the point of collapse due to the pandemic. Many people have lost their lives with the contamination of the virus. People have come to the point of quitting their rights. People have been warned to stay away from their social environments, places frequently visited, public transportation and worshipping places. Even curfew restrictions have been imposed. Education in schools were postponed. Many governments faced harsh times politically. Many countries had to take strict economic measures in order to help people who cannot go work, closing their worklaces or unable to ern money. Scientific health councils were established. The first or breaking news of TV bulletins were about the virus pandemic. Innumerable sessions, panels, discussions, reports wereheld on TVs every day on the rules to be obeyed, the measures taken, finding vaccine, and solution suggestions. In addition, social messages were sent to people almost incessantly. What did folk poets think about the pandemic, having influenced the whole world? What did they express about it? How were they influenced? The aim of this study is to determine and exhibit the points of view, ideas and emotions put forward by the folk poets in the East and North East Anatolia region. Although there are many poets, jokes and caricatures about the virus pandemic, we will focus on 11 poems produced by 11 various poets, we have compiled by our own means. We will present the poems in order of compilation.
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George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) had Shakespeare on the brain. He returned to his literary predecessor again and again throughout his lifetime, whether in theatre reviews, his own plays or in Shakespearian-themed works which will be the focus here. Shaw coined, of course, the term ‘Bardolatry’ in order to ridicule the blind worship of everything Shakespearian, feeling it impeded the evolution of a new kind of theatre of ideas embodied by the works of Henrik Ibsen and first and foremost, Shaw himself. Shaw had a kind of love-hate relationship with his predecessor, but also an obvious chip-on-his-shoulder, which he kept returning to repeatedly. Arthur Ganz (1983, 58) in his work George Bernard Shaw hits the nail on the head: “Lacking a kind of ‘negative capability’, Shaw could not forgive Shakespeare for failing to offer a systematic, optimistic vision of human life and history, what Shaw called a religion.” Shakespeare, in other words, lacked a moral purpose and message. Having said that, Shaw was instrumental in reversing the established trend of cutting Shakespeare’s plays in performance, something which we should all be most grateful for. At times, his dismissal of Shakespeare comes across as willful if not absurd, like a boxing challenger calling out the champion in order to increase the hype; this being incidentally precisely the theme of Shaw’s final work Shakes vs. Shav. Michael Holroyd (1988, 360) quotes the subject of his three volume biography on the issue as follows: “With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.” His bark is worse than his bite, thankfully, and the works examined herein all display an obvious pleasure in both the topic, the language and the imagined man. Charles A. Berst (1998, 64) sums up Shaw’s mixed feelings about his illustrious predecessor: Thus Shaw’s ambivalence about Shakespeare: on the one hand, keen disappointment and frustration with his mediocrity as an original or deep thinker; on the other hand, enticement by the vividness of his characters and scenes, admiration for his immense power over language, and enchantment with his musical expression. Shaw’s obvious enthusiasm about Shakespeare’s language, and the process in which he came up with his verse, is the primary focus of the following three Shakespearian themed works: The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, “A Dressing Room Secret” and Shakes vs. Shav.
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This article focuses on England, England (1998), a late twentieth-century novel about memory and nostalgia. Centering on Englishness, the novel plays with traditional ideas of national identity and stereotypes that construct collective memory. Moreover, Barnes’s novel addresses the circulation of these stereotypes, the commodification of the nation and the relationship between personal and national identities. The novel provides an example analysis of the construction of national identity and a satirical portrayal of the artificial invention of nationhood; yet, it gives the idea that despite its inauthenticity, there is a human need to construct a collective memory whose stability is held by history. The theme park in the novel, as a nostalgic project, is an assembly of working cultural motifs. There, the nation is commodified and represented as a marketable, reified object and thereby converted into a series of saleable symbols. Svetlana Boym (2001) defines two kinds of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective. Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos (“to return home”) and “attempts a trans-historical reconstruction of the lost home.” As she defines (Boym 2001, 41) it, “restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstruction of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and time.” Though nostalgia has many different explanations for different disciplines, the shared feeling is defined as a yearning for the past. With modernity, the pathological paradigm of nostalgia faded away and became connected to the sentimentalization of the past, to feelings of loss and attachment. Modernity accused nostalgia of being repressing and resisting critique and change. In postmodern world and literature, nostalgia appeared as a defence to discuss and critisize the rapid pace of modern life. This article proposes that, similarly, Barnes’s novel, England, England, laments the fact that it is not possible to identify an authentic place of origin for the nation or for personal memory. In this nostalgic version of England, the traces of the past are curiously hollow. Ironically, in the attempt to invent a national identity, elusive memories and distorted views of history come together to trace Englishness.
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Review of Susanne Klingenstein: Mendele der Buchhändler. Leben und Werk des Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh. Eine Geschichte der jiddischen Literatur zwischen Berdichev und Odessa, 1835-1917. (Jüdische Kultur, Bd. 27.) Harrassowitz. Wiesbaden 2014. XIV, 494 S., Ill. ISBN 978-3-447-10145-5. (€ 29,80.). Reviewed by Heidi Hein-Kircher.
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The article examines a mother-daughter relationship in Ewa Kuryluk’s autobiographical novel Frascati using the term “strangeness” as a methodological tool. Maria Kuryluk (Miriam Kohany), a Holocoaust survivor, who keeps her real Jewish identity as well as her pre-war life secret from her progeny, is partly a “stranger” – using Julia Kristeva’s term – in biography of her daughter. As a Jewish woman, a wife of the high-ranking socialist in the communist Poland, but also an unfulfilled artist who suffers from mental illness, Maria experiences many types of exclusion on both the social and the private field. The unspoken trauma and the hidden identity strongly influence the bond with her daughter, Ewa, burdening her with a painful past and a traumatic memory (postmemory). Kuryluk as a writer has to face the ambiguous status of this mother-daughter relationship – strange, yet still intimate – to create a feminine, transgenerational story, both for her mother and herself.
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A.A. Milne is known primarily as an author of four books for children – two volumes of poetry, When We Were Very Young (1924) and Now We Are Six (1927), and also two collections of stories, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928). These books have been extremely successful all over the world, but in Poland the most popular have been the collections of stories about the adventures of the teddy bear and his friends. The translations by Irena Tuwim – Kubuś Puchatek and Chatka Puchatka (both 1938) – have become beloved books for many readers. Shortly after the Second World War and in the next decades the words spoken by Miś o Małym Rozumku [the Bear of a Very Little Brain] and by other animals from the Forest came into use in Polish. Irena Tuwim’s transalation very fast became canonical, but at the same time Winnie-the-Pooh became unknown. This article is devoted to the Polish reception of A.A. Milne’s work for children. It examines why Kubuś Puchatek became so popular in the post-war years, but also how this success have influenced the reception of subsequent translations.
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