‘Á Kálfskinni’: Sagas and the Space of Literature

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Torfi H. Tulinius
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
The Self ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
French Writer ◽  
Saga Literature

AbstractThe “space of literature” is a metaphor for literature introduced by the French writer and critic Maurice Blanchot to express the specificity of literary discourse, which says what otherwise cannot be said. In this it produces a community around the unsayable. This ability to say something previously unsaid makes literature to some extent akin to scientific inquiry. In the last decades, research in Old Norse-Icelandic studies has not focussed on this aspect of the saga literature. The study of the sociological conditions for literary production in medieval Iceland can explain why the self-conscious pursuit of literary expression resulted in the emergence of a unique literary genre, the Saga about early Icelanders (

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Evans
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
The Many

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis shows how translation, rewriting and intertextuality are central to the work of Lydia Davis, a major American writer, translator and essayist. Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013, Davis writes innovative short stories that question the boundaries of the genre. She is also an important translator of French writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert. Translation and writing go hand-in-hand in Davis’s work. Through a series of readings of Davis’s major translations and her own writing, this book investigates how Davis’s translations and stories relate to each other, finding that they are inextricably interlinked. It explores how Davis uses translation - either as a compositional tool or a plot device - and other instances of rewriting in her stories, demonstrating that translation is central for understanding her prose. Understanding how Davis’s work complicates divisions between translating and other forms of writing highlights the role of translation in literary production, questioning the received perception that translation is less creative than other forms of writing.

Temps du deuil, temps du récit. Le renversement du temps dans La première année de Jean-Michel Espitallier

2020 ◽  
pp. 71-82
Author(s):  
Despina Jderu
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
Prominent Feature ◽  
Literary Space ◽  
French Writer ◽  
Recent Activity ◽  
Nature Of Time ◽  
Denial Of Death ◽  
The Relationship

This paper aims to analyze the nature of time as identified in the narrative structure built by the French writer, Jean-Michel Espitallier, in his novel, La première année. We are considering how the author perceives the relationship between time and mourning through the ability of literary space to provide a compensatory universe. We are looking to observe recent activity in French mourning literature through the lens of this particularly novel, namely its perspective on processing mourning and trauma. This paper also highlights a prominent feature of French mourning literature: how the narrator’s literary discourse is used to fight against the passing of time. The fight against time is an implicit denial of death and mourning.

The Art itself is Nature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Morton
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Broad Category

The chapter outlines different models of nature in medieval Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy in order to show how the Rose plays them against each other to articulate its own model of the complex relationship between art and nature. For the Rose there is no getting at nature except by means of art, as suggested by the self-conscious artificiality of the figure of Nature, taken from the allegories of twelfth-century Neoplatonism. Art, a broad category that encompasses all human activity, is insufficient in describing nature’s truths and is potentially sophistic in its lies. However, questions of nature are always questions of art on whose help humans depend to understand and to represent to themselves a nature that can never be fully known. Finally, the model of reproductive nature is used to legitimate the reproduction of texts and the continuation of arts that is literary production.

scholarly journals Writing letters and chronography in parallel: the case of Michael Glykas’ letter collection and Biblos Chronike in the 12th century

2020 ◽  
Vol 113 (3) ◽  
pp. 837-852
Author(s):  
Eirini-Sophia Kiapidou
Keyword(s):  
Literary Genre ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
Letter Collection

AbstractThis paper focuses on the 12th-century Byzantine scholar Michael Glykas and the two main pillars of his multifarious literary production, Biblos Chronike and Letters, thoroughly exploring for the first time the nature of their interconnection. In addition to the primary goal, i. e. clarifying as far as possible the conditions in which these two works were written, taking into account their intertextuality, it extends the discussion to the mixture of features in texts of different literary genre, written in parallel, by the same author, based on the same material. By presenting the evidence drawn from the case of Michael Glykas, the paper attempts to stress the need to abandon the strictly applied taxonomical logic in approaching Byzantine Literature, as it ultimately prevents us from constitute the full mark of each author in the history of Byzantine culture.

NIETSCHE'S CONTRIBUTION TO A PHENOMENOLOGY OF INTOXICATION

2000 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-43
Author(s):  
Sonia Sikka
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenological Description ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Authorial Voice

AbstractThrough a reading of Nietzsche's texts, primarily of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, this article develops a phenomenological description of the variety of intoxication exemplified in conditions of drunkenness, or in states of emotional excess. It treats Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a literary expression of such intoxication, arguing against attempts to find a coherent narrative structure and clear authorial voice behind this text's apparent disorder. Having isolated the intoxicated characteristics of Thus Spoke Zarathustra - its hyperbolic rhetoric and emotions, its lack of balance, its injustice, its shifting and conflicting moods, and its self-contradictions - I then offer an interpretation of the work, and by extension of intoxication itself, in terms of Nietzsche's model of the self as a dynamic multiplicity of forces. At the same time, I argue for a multiple and dynamic conception of personality in general.

scholarly journals A Revival of Life Writing Genres in Language Pedagogy Settings: The Case of Diary Writing

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (2 (4)) ◽  
pp. 78-92
Author(s):  
Elena Xeni
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Written Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Language Pedagogy ◽  
Diary Writing ◽  
Writing Genres

The article discusses a number of issues contributing to the efficient teaching of a foreign language. Studying Diary Writing as a unique literary genre (a text disclosing the self of the author) the author of the article believes it is very important that students should have diaries since such an assignment highly contributes to the improvement of a written language.

Uncommon Measure

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoon Sook Cha
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Relative Power ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
Special Character ◽  
The One

This chapter, a reading of “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force,” considers Weil’s claim about the special character of force, that in being assumed and redeployed by those whom it subjects, flattens the relative power of humans. The chapter argues that the claim directs us to the possibility of a new relationality that forfeits sovereign modes of power without that forfeiture thereby signifying an equitable power between the self and the other, such as it is in supplication. Referencing Maurice Blanchot, it is argued that supplication establishes an “uncommon measure” between the suppliant and the one supplicated, not by virtue of any power the suppliant has, but by laying bare his human presence. In this context, one’s subjection to force offers a certain opening to the other even as it marks the precariousness of one’s own human being.

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