scholarly journals Telling the difference: linguistic differentiation and identity in Guillem de Berguedà, Giacomo da Lentini and Bonifacio Calvo

2018 ◽  
Vol 134 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-403
Author(s):  
David Murray

AbstractEditorial practice in literary traditions still dominated by neo-Lachmannian philology remains focussed on the establishment of the text as the medieval author knew it himself. For adherents of this method, the influence of “foreign” languages is labelled as a contamination that should, if possible, be removed as unauthentic. This article proposes a less doctrinaire practice and demonstrates its fruits when brought to bear at the interstices of literary history and Romance philology, as represented by poems by Guillem de Berguedà, Giacomo da Lentini, and Bonifacio Calvo. Approaching both medieval poets and their modern editors in the light of Derrida’s Le monolinguisme de l’autre, the present contribution counters the tendency to impose linguistic and cultural identities on medieval authors, instead allowing their manuscripts to speak for themselves. It further considers the thinking of medieval poets and their transmitters on the nature of language and lyric poetry, and how these systems could and should be used and developed.

2020 ◽  
pp. 44-69
Author(s):  
E. E. Dmitrieva

The article is concerned with the difference in understanding of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ inRussiaandFrance. Often considered a predominantly negative phenomenon inRussia, cosmopolitanism fi st provoked a discussion at the time when the emphasis shifted from ideology to understanding of the historical-literary process. Since the late 18th c., the idea of the possible existence of a literary work within the global literary environment (the concept of world literature)   was adjusted by the ‘golden chain’ metaphor, which enabled implementation of the ‘universality’ concept as a unity principally separate from the French idée universelle. During this evolutionary period emerged a distinctive subject of literary history: fi st, ‘humanity’ as a general term (initially identifi    with universalism or cosmopolitanism), and then ‘a nation’. But it is the discovery of the national that the author believes is connected with particularism and provincialism,   the latter summoning the memory of the noble intention of universalism and cosmopolitanism. An interim summary of the process was produced by Joseph Texte, a professor of comparative literature inLyon, at the end of the 19th c.


Author(s):  
Henry Spelman

This introduction announces the theme of the next three chapters: Pindar’s sense of literary history and specifically his use of other lyric poetry. Pindar capitalizes on his audiences’ familiarity with other lyric to an extent that has perhaps not yet been adequately recognized. His poems use related poetry to tell stories about themselves and their place in life. By examining different sorts of references and allusions across the corpus, one can discern a coherent view of the poetic world, both past and present. Understanding Pindar entails understanding an immanent literary history that reaches into and shapes his present. Methodological and historical questions of early Greek intertextuality are addressed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Vandana

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. The basic questions that I have tried to look into through this study include: Why is it problematic to retrieve literary history in India? Why is it essential to have an alternative literary historiography of Dalit literature? How does Dalit subalternity differ from colonial subalternity? How the Dalit voice is disintegrated from within because of the prevalence of graded inequality? What constitutes the politics of history writing and canon formation in the third world countries like India where retrieving subaltern literary trends remain a problematic discourse?


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dieter Issler

<p>On physical grounds, the rate of bed entrainment in gravity mass flows should be determined by the properties of the bed material and the dynamical variables of the flow. Due to the complexity of the process, most entrainment formulas proposed in the literature contain some ad-hoc parameter not tied to measurable snow properties. Among the very few models without free parameters are the Eglit–Grigorian–Yakimov (EGY) model of frontal entrainment from the 1960s and two formulas for basal entrainment, one from the 1970s due to Grigorian and Ostroumov (GO) and one (IJ) implemented in NGI’s flow code MoT-Voellmy. A common feature of these three approaches is their treating erosion as a shock and exploiting jump conditions for mass and momentum across the erosion front. The erosion or entrainment rate is determined by the difference between the avalanche-generated stress at the erosion front and the strength of the snow cover. The models differ with regard to how the shock is oriented and which momentum components are considered. The present contribution shows that each of the three models has some shortcomings: The EGY model is ambiguous if the avalanche pressure is too small to entrain the entire snow layer, the IJ model neglects normal stresses, and the GO model disregards shear stresses and acceleration of the eroded mass. As they stand, neither the GO nor the IJ model capture situations―observed experimentally by means of profiling radar―in which the snow cover is not eroded progressively but suddenly fails on a buried weak layer as the avalanche flows over it. We suggest a way to resolve the ambiguity in the EGY model and sketch a more comprehensive model combining all three approaches to capture gradual entrainment from the snow-cover surface together with erosion along a buried weak layer.</p>


PARADIGMI ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 85-99
Author(s):  
Calame Claude

- Poetic images and Pragmatics Starting from Benveniste's analyses of historical enunciation, the nature of pronouns and the subjectivity of language, this essay focuses on that the kind of subjectivity implied in much Greek lyric poetry, especially in Pindar. By means of discursive tools, the narration builds an exclusively verbal image of the "I", which comes before any reference to elements external to the text. In this way, the "I" stands for an enunciative, pragmatic and polyphonic subject: it is, indeed, the actor (singer, tragic actor, choral group) of a ritualized situation. This performative identity is different from the author of the written text. In Greek poetry, the written text is above all a speech-act, mostly a song-act. This raises the problem of the difference - and of the relation - between the author's biographic subjectivity and the identity created by the linguistic devices in the text. Using different images: chariots, ceremonial processions, Calame's analysis focuses on the metaphorical identification between poetic song and journey.Key words: Enunciation, Image, Metaphor, Poetry, Pragmatics, Subjectivity.Parole chiave: Enunciazione, Immagine, Metafora, Poesia, Pragmatica, Soggettivitŕ. Vedere come.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Sarha

Lord Byron’s Don Juan is a poem which depends on gendered literary traditions for both its originality and its intelligibility. In the harem episode of cantos V and VI, we can recognise a libertine fantasy, an Orientalist premise, and a picaresque adventure, but also some traces of epic, the gothic and literature of sensibility. Yet, these tropes are consistently complicated in the poem and used to undermine the gendered foundations of their traditions. This essay considers the formulation of such subversions through explicitly literary paradigms: what signs of gender are referred to, and how are they made intelligible as fictional constructs? By interrogating the use of gendered tropes, their formation as intelligible concepts within literary history, and their negotiations with sexualised conventions of narrative, I intend to highlight the discrepancies in the heteronormative construction of these literary paradigms and Byron’s use of them to suggest sexual fluidity.


1991 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 57-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
L.J.A. Nienhuis

This article describes two small scale studies aimed at defining the number of words necessary for comprehension.of written texts in the native language (Dutch) and in two foreign languages (English and French) In the literature one finds coverage percentages varying from 75% for global comprehension to 98% for almost complete comprehension. The subjects in these studies were students from different age groups and different learning backgrounds (HAVO-4, VWO-5 and university). It is concluded that it is not so much the knowledge of the language as the age and the greater knowledge of the world that account for the difference in scores.


2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Blackburn

This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so repugnant to inveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction, and are probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).If we now recognize that literary history is more than a history of literature, it is perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of literary history is an important subject for literary historiography. Yet literary histories are a rich source for understanding local conceptions of both history and literature. More accessible than archaeology, more tangible than ethnology, literary histories are culturally constructed narratives in which the past is reimagined in the light of contemporary concerns. Certainly in nineteenth-century India, the focus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as evidence to be advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities, language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were all asserted and challenged through literary histories in colonial India. Asserted and challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.


2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika S. Schmid ◽  
Teodora Mehotcheva

The present contribution discusses recent developments and future directions in the attrition of instructed foreign languages, arguing for a distinction between this type of attrition and attrition involving second languages acquired implicitly in an immersion setting. An overview of the history of research in the field and the most prominent findings is provided, followed by a discussion of theoretical models and methodologically problematic issues. We conclude by outlining some future directions for the field.


2020 ◽  
pp. 7-54
Author(s):  
Angel Angelov

The purpose of the author is to find the main motive why Auerbach chose to use the non-disciplinary term “European philologists” and what he meant by that. I argue that Auerbach’s consciousness of Europe as a historical entity was formed in the 1920s, but his exile turned this consciousness into a position. A basic question is about the symbolic geography of European culture in the works of Auerbach. The synonymous use of Europe and Abendland distinctly reveals Auerbach’s dual, unifying/divisive understanding of the identity and symbolic geography of European culture. If we accept the opinion that the European has been represented for centuries by the Romance, then the tasks of Romance philology as European philology will become clearer and the cultural geography of Europe narrower. The cultural-historical identification of Europe and Abendland after the Second World War solidified the anyway existing division of Europe in to two blocs. Literary history and philology divided Europe in the way this was done by the relevant political doctrines too. The human sciences also contributed significantly to the creation of value-attitudes, and an investigation of the former from this perspective gives us additional reason to assume that the agreement on the division of Europe after the Allied victory was not based solely on strategic interests.


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