The character of Mehmed-paša Sokolović in Ivo Andrić’s works

2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-51
Author(s):  
Kim Sang Hun
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Nobel Committee ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Literary Output

SummaryIvo Andrić was searching and finding material for his stories and novels in the past, especially in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which represents the central topos in his literary output. As noted in the explanation of the Nobel Committee, Andrić received in 1961 the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country”. The protagonists of Andrić’s stories and novels rarely include important historical personalities, and the most significant among them as a literary subject was Mehmed-paša Sokolović, the 16th century Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. The way in which Andrić portrayed the character of Mehmed-paša Sokolović in the novel ‘The Bridge on the Drina’ (Na Drini ćuprija) reflects some of the fundamental premises of his approach to narration, including his profoundly humanist intentions. Andrić held that oral (and written) stories and legends contained the true history of the humanity, and that one could grasp from them the real meaning of that history. Accordingly, in portraying Sokolović’s character, being confronted with historical documents on the one hand, and folkloric material on the other, Andrić gave primacy to the latter, even at the cost of disagreement between historical fact and oral tradition. Moreover, Andrić did not seek “the meaning of history” of Mehmed-paša Sokolović and his bridge in the historical data from Sokolović’s impressive political career accomplished in the Ottoman Empire, but in the bridge which outlived him and started the legend about him. With the novel ‘The Bridge on the Drina’ he created a “literary history” about the creation and meaning of the Višegrad bridge on these grounds – a unique literary “legacy for Mehmed-paša’s legacy”, widening and deepening the legend of Mehmed-paša Sokolović.

Camus's Absurd and the World of Melville's Confidence-Man

PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer
Keyword(s):  
Careful Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Ugly Duckling ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”

The Form of Man

Human Forms ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 31-54
Author(s):  
Ian Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Analogical Reasoning ◽  
Probabilistic Reasoning ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Project ◽  
The One

This chapter examines how the science of man became the natural history of man, a history not of individuals or nations but of the human species. A new biological conception of species “as an entity distributed in time and space,” released from the synchronic grid of Linnaean taxonomy as well as from a providential cosmology, comprised what Philip Sloan has called the “Buffonian revolution.” That revolution would be as consequential for literary genres, especially the novel, as it was for the natural and human sciences, in part due to Buffon's recourse to a literary style and techniques of “speculative thought experiment,” probabilistic reasoning, “analogical reasoning, and divination” in his scientific method. The chapter then looks at the debate over the history of man that broke out in the mid-1780s between Immanuel Kant and Gottfried Herder. One of the great intellectual quarrels of the late Enlightenment, it signposted the forking paths of Kant's critical philosophy, on the one hand, and the scientific project of natural history on the other.

For an Eco-Archive

2019 ◽  
pp. 29-68
Author(s):  
John Patrick Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Haitian Literature ◽  
Boat People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter continues to build the conceptual and historical frame of the eco-archive. It argues that contemporary Haitian literature records the transformation of the environment and accumulates and inscribes overlapping temporalities of past and present, like an archive. The first part reviews a range of Caribbean and Haitian thought on the environment, broadly understood, and considers key moments of Haitian literary history of the twentieth century. Earlier forms and paths of migration and refuge, from the sugar migration up to the journeys of “boat people,” inform and historicize literary representations of the earthquake and its aftermath. The chapter then carries out close readings of a selection of René Philoctète’s poetry and his novel, Le peuple des terres mêlées, a text that depicts the “Parsley Massacre” of 1937. It draws out Philoctète’s eco-archival writing and contends that the novel foregrounds the environmental ethos of the border in opposition to Trujillo’s genocidal nationalism.

Literary History of Bengal, 8th-19th century AD

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thibaut d'Hubert
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Transitions ◽  
Literary Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Narrative Forms ◽  
Literary Practices ◽  
The 19Th Century

The literary history of Bengal is characterized by a multilingual ecology that nurtured the development of Middle Bengali literature. It is around the turn of the second millennium, during the Pāla period (c. 8th–12th century), that eastern South Asia became a major region for the production of literary texts in Sanskrit and Apabhramsha. Early on, Bengal developed a distinct literary identity within the Sanskrit tradition and, despite abrupt political transitions and the fragmentation of the landscape of literary patronage, fundamental aspects of the literary culture of Pāla Bengal were transmitted during later periods. It was during the Sultanate period, from the 14th century onward that courtly milieus began to cultivate Middle Bengali. This patronage was mostly provided by upper-caste Hindu dignitaries and (in the case of lyric poetry at least) by the Sultans themselves. During the period ranging from the 15th to the early 19th centuries, vernacular literature can be divided into two broad categories: short narrative forms called padas or gītas (songs), which were often composed in an idiom derived from songs by the Old Maithili poet Vidyāpati (c. 1370–1460); and long narrative forms in Middle Bengali called pā̃cālīs, which are characterized by the alternation of the prosodic forms called paẏār and tripadī and the occasional insertion of songs. These poetic forms are the principal markers of the literary identity of Bengal and eastern South Asia (including Assam, Orissa, and Arakan). The Ḥusayn Shāhī period (1433–1486) contributed to the consolidation and expansion eastward of vernacular literary practices. Then, the political landscape became fragmented, and the multiplication of centers of literary production occurred. This fragmentation fostered the formation of new, locally grounded literary trends. These could involve the cultivation of specific genres, the propounding of various religious doctrines and ritual practices, the fashioning of new idioms fostered by either dialectal resources, classical idioms such as Sanskrit or Persian, and other vernacular poetic traditions (Maithili, Avadhi, Hindustani). The late Mughal and early colonial periods witnessed the making of new trends, characterized by a radical modification of the lexical component of the Middle Bengali idiom (i.e., Dobhāṣī), or the recourse to scripts other than Bengali (e.g., Sylhet Nagari/Kaithi, Arabic). The making of such new trends often implied changes in the way that authors interacted with Sanskrit, Persian, and other vernacular traditions. For instance, Persian played as crucial a role as Sanskrit in the various trajectories that Middle Bengali poetry took. On the one hand, Persian in Bengal had a history distinct from that of Bengali; on the other hand, it constituted a major traditional model for Bengali authors and, at times, Persianate education replaced the one based on Sanskrit as the default way to access literacy. Even if Middle Bengali poetic forms continued to be used in the context of various traditional performances, the making of a new literary language in the 19th century, the adoption of Western genres, and the development of prose and Western prosodic forms occasioned a radical break with premodern literary practices. From the second half of the 19th century, with the notable exception of some ritual and sectarian texts, access to the ancient literature of Bengal began to be mediated by philological analysis and textual criticism.

Iuwers zornes unmâze / missevellet uns sêre – Legitimität von Maßlosigkeit im mittelalterlichen Erzählkosmos

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-28
Author(s):  
Amelie Bendheim
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Epic Hero ◽  
Heroic Epic ◽  
History Of ◽  
Flore Und Blanscheflur ◽  
The One ◽  
History Of Literature ◽  
Historical Epoch ◽  
Flexible Model

AbstractStarting from the deficiencies of current approaches regarding the description of the hero in medieval narratives, this article aims to functionalise exorbitance (unmâze) as a new category of literary history. Unlike the conceptual and binary typing of the protagonist as ‘hero’ resp. ‘knight’, this category promotes a flexible model that operates relationally and hence enables gradual differentiations between the texts.Examples of medieval (heroic) epic (‘Nibelungenlied’) and (chivalric) romance (‘Flore und Blanscheflur’, ‘Wigalois’) will show the narrative treatment and stylisation of the exorbitant hero. The focus will be on the varying assessments of his acts: If the epic hero is able to defy social norms and current laws (cf. Siegfried’s courtship, Hagen’s murdering of Siegfried) without being penalised, the exorbitance in the romance falls within the scope of ‘ratio’. Thus, exorbitance is on the one hand confined and ‘assessed’, on the other hand excessive acts are rigorously sanctioned and inhibited. Referring to the current manifestations of exorbitance in the socio-political context, the concept of exorbitance emerges as an unchanged productive pattern. Its socio-political relevance encourages a literary-historical, epoch-spanning use of this concept, whose scope is a re-assessment of the history of literature as the history of exorbitance.

The Jurisprudence of Humanism

Traditio ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 493-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myron P. Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Major Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Legal Concepts ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship

During the last decade the works of Professor Guido Kisch have made an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the legal thought of the sixteenth century, particularly to the school represented by the University of Basel. His articles and monographs have dealt with the biographical and literary history of significant scholars as well as with the rival schools of interpretation represented by ‘mos italicus' and ‘mos gallicus.' Building on these earlier studies, Professor Kisch has now produced a major work of more comprehensive scope, which goes beyond biographical and methodological questions to the analysis of significant change in substantive legal doctrines. Convinced that the age of humanism and the reception of Roman law saw the formation of some of the most important modern legal concepts, he centers his research on the evolution of the theory of equity with due attention, on the one hand, to the relationship between sixteenth-century innovation and the historic western tradition and, on the other, to the interaction between the academic profession and the practicing lawyers.

scholarly journals The Ottoman origins of capitalism: uneven and combined development and Eurocentrism

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
KEREM NISANCIOGLU
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
Uneven And Combined Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
Transition To Capitalism ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So

AbstractThe history of capitalism's origins is unmistakably Eurocentric, placing sixteenth-century developments in politics, economy, culture, and ideology squarely within the unique context of Europe. And while the disciplinary remit of International Relations (IR) should offer a way out of such European provincialism, it too has been built on largely Eurocentric assumptions. In Eurocentric approaches, the Ottoman Empire has been absent, passive, or merely a comparative foil against which the specificity and superiority of Europe has been defined. And yet, the Ottoman Empire was arguably the most powerful actor in the Early Modern period. In this article, I argue that any history of capitalism's origins must therefore account for the historical importance of the Ottomans. In doing so, this article seeks to address the non-European blind-spot, both in theorisations of capitalism's origins and in IR theory, by reincorporating the material significance of the Ottoman Empire in historical processes, which led to the transition to capitalism. I do so by utilising the theory of Uneven and Combined Development, and in the process seek to defend its credentials as a non-Eurocentric social theory on the one hand and as a sociologically and historically sensitive theory of international relations on the other.

scholarly journals Samuel Richardsons brevromaner

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 174-187
Author(s):  
Martin Hultén
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
History Of ◽  
Epistolary Novels ◽  
The Many ◽  
Professional Critics

En litteraturhistorisk placering The Epistolary Novels of Samuel Richardson: Reconsidering the Historical PerspectiveThe epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson were received with enthusiasm throughout Britain and Europe upon their publication in the 1740s and 50s, and they have had their unquestioned place in the literary canon and the literary history of the 18th century, as well as in the many rivalling Rise of the Novel narratives, ever since. The qualities of Richardson’s novels praised by contemporary reading audiences and professional critics were to some extent the qualities we still acknowledge in the the works. And yet I propose to reconsider and modify our ‘historical’ understanding of Richardson’s novels. Richardson scholars from the 1970s onward have deepened our understanding of the contexts of Richardson’s life and writing, and they have shown to what extent both the style, the form, the motifs, and the themes of his novels must be placed alongside the works of rival authors, today much less known, and the comedies and tragedies of the restoration period, just to mention two important fields of inspiration for Richardson. On the basis of their findings we must conclude that the novels we read today when considering Richardson’s works as part of a formal literary history are not quite the same as the novels contemporary readers cherished. There are important differences as well as correspondences between the contemporary reception of Richardson’s works and the reception of professional scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

scholarly journals Fine workmanship when Al- Bukhari Imam in the multiple hadiths in the one chapter Through (Book of Knowledge) from (Sahih Al- Bukhari): الصَّنْعَةُ المَتْنِيّةُ عِنْدَ الإِمَامِ البُخَارِيّ فِي الأَحَادِيثِ المتَعَدِّدِةِ في البَابِ الوَاحِدِ  من خلال (كتاب العلم) من (صحيح البخاري)

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed Khaled Kullab, Mohamed Ahmed Abdulghafour
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

The research dealt with a brief translation of Imam Muhammad bin Ismail Al- Bukhari, and revealed his method of referring multiple hadiths in the one section in his Sahih, where Imam Bukhari was distinguished by the mention of hadiths with one subject; Putting a title for it, given under each title a sentence of hadiths, and taking into account in its arrangement a specific purpose for which those hadiths are spoken. The hadith may include the name of the narrator, or an indication of an increase in the narration, or an expression of a statement to hear a narrator from another, a copy of a sentence, an absolute restriction, or an overall detail, Absolute, or detail in detail, or taking into account a chronological history of the novel, to other benefits that we reached in this research, and in which we used the method of deduction and analysis through contemplation of the hadiths he mentioned in the (book of knowledge) from (his Sahih), which was included under fifty- three sections.

scholarly journals “The literary debuts of the Romanian 80’s generation”

Sæculum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-112
Author(s):  
Vlad Alui Gheorghe
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Allen Ginsberg ◽  
Central European ◽  
The North ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Nicolae Ceausescu

AbstractIndividual identity crisis became an obsessive theme of the Central-European literature, lived intensively in this space. From this point of view, the generations and literary promotions of the 1960 and 1970’s Romania benefited from a specific openness due to a complex of social, political and historical factors. The 80s generation appeared in a full process of strengthening the ideological vigilance after the famous July Theses introduced by Nicolae Ceausescu following the North Korean model. Although there were the same rules and the same barriers for beginners of the era, the issue was treated and felt differently. While some suffer from the delay of the debut, others are patient because they trust their chance, others give up. Even if the overall context was an oppressive one and the institution of censorship was the one that controlled the literature during the communist period, authors managed to adapt and write no matter what, they found accepted ways that did not alter their message and they published under conditions that today we can hardly call without doubt honourable. The published authors had visibility and were united around some literary circles, forming what Allen Ginsberg called in The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, «circles of liberation.»

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