Thèmes et variations Réflexions stylistiques sur l’itinéraire d’Égérie

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 611-621
Author(s):  
Sára Horváthy

SummaryEgeria, a 4th century pious woman from the south of present-day Spain, retold, after visiting Palestine with the Bible in hand, her observations to her sisters. If the linguistic aspects of her letters are quite well-known, much less is known about its stylistic value, inappropriately called “simple”.What seems to be boringly the same again and again, is in fact a constantly renewed and perfectly mastered “variation on a theme”, just as in a well-composed piece of music. Her apparent objectivity is indeed a wish to focus on what she considers the most important, namely to tell her community, as closely to reality as possible, what she observed during her pilgrimage. However, Egeria’s latin is also a testimony of the christian lexicon in construction and of the social changes that were in progress by that time.Linguistics and stylistics work together here, the choice of a word or a grammatical formula reveals hidden information about the proper style of an author who, despite her supposed objectivity, had real personal purposes.

Imbizo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-42
Author(s):  
Niyi Akingbe

Every literary work emerges from the particular alternatives of its time. This is ostensibly reflected in the attempted innovative renderings of these alternatives in the poetry of contemporary Nigerian poets of Yoruba extraction. Discernible in the poetry of Niyi Osundare and Remi Raji is the shaping and ordering of the linguistic appurtenances of the Yoruba orature, which themselves are sublimely rooted in the proverbial, chants, anecdotes, songs and praises derived from the Yoruba oral poetry of Ijala, Orin Agbe, Ese Ifa, Rara, folklore as well as from other elements of oral performance. This engagement with the Yoruba oral tradition significantly permeates the poetics of Niyi Osundare’s Waiting laughters and Remi Raji’s A Harvest of Laughters. In these anthologies, both Osundare and Raji traverse the cliffs and valleys of the contemporary Nigerian milieu to distil the social changes rendered in the Yoruba proverbial, as well as its chants and verbal formulae, all of which mutate from momentary happiness into an enduring anomie grounded in seasonal variations in agricultural production, ruinous political turmoil, suspense and a harvest of unresolved, mysterious deaths. The article is primarily concerned with how the African oral tradition has been harnessed by Osundare and Raji to construct an avalanche of damning, peculiarly Nigerian, socio-political upheavals (which are essentially delineated by the signification of laughter/s) and display these in relation to the country’s variegated ecology.


Author(s):  
Brian R. Doak

The purpose of this book is to tell the story of Israel’s nearest neighbors—not only discovering what the Bible has to say about them but also what we can know from archaeology, ancient inscriptions, and other sources. The Bible itself presents these neighbors in nuanced and conflicting ways; sometimes they are friends or even related to Israel at a family level, and sometimes they are enemies, spoken of as though they must die in order for Israel to live. We are left wondering how the biblical portrayal might have affected our thinking about these people as historical groups, on their own terms. How would an Aramaean have described her own religion? How would an Edomite have described conflict with Israel? This book explores both the biblical portrayal of the smaller groups surrounding Israel and what people can know about these groups through their own literature, archaeology, and other sources. By uncovering the identity of the Philistines as settlers along the coast at the same time that early Israel carved out their place in the land, for example, one can better understand the social turmoil and political maneuvering that lies just beneath the surface of the biblical narrative, and can see more clearly just how the authors of the Bible saw themselves in the face of others.


Author(s):  
Gerald O. West

Liberation biblical interpretation and postcolonial biblical interpretation have a long history of mutual constitution. This essay analyzes a particular context in which these discourses and their praxis have forged a third conversation partner: decolonial biblical interpretation. African and specifically South African biblical hermeneutics are the focus of reflections in this essay. The South African postcolony is a “special type” of postcolony, as the South African Communist Party argued in the 1960s. The essay charts the characteristics of the South African postcolony and locates decolonial biblical interpretation within the intersections of these features. Race, culture, land, economics, and the Bible are forged in new ways by contemporary social movements, such as #FeesMustFall. South African biblical studies continues to draw deeply on the legacy of South African black theology, thus reimagining African biblical studies as decolonial African biblical studies—a hybrid of African liberation and African postcolonial biblical interpretation.


Author(s):  
Torun Reite ◽  
Francis Badiang Oloko ◽  
Manuel Armando Guissemo

Inspired by recent epistemological and ontological debates aimed at unsettling and reshaping conceptions of language, this essay discusses how mainstream sociolinguistics offers notions meaningful for studying contexts of the South. Based on empirical studies of youth in two African cities, Yaoundé in Cameroon and Maputo in Mozambique, the essay engages with “fluid modernity” and “enregisterment” to unravel the role that fluid multilingual practices play in the social lives of urban youth. The empirically grounded theoretical discussion shows how recent epistemologies and ontologies offer inroads to more pluriversal knowledge production. The essay foregrounds: i) the role of language in the sociopolitical battles of control over resources, and ii) speakers’ reflexivity and metapragmatic awareness of register formations of fluid multilingual practices. Moreover, it shows how bundles of localized meanings construct belongings and counterhegemonic discourses, as well as demonstrating speakers’ differential valuations and perceptions of boundaries and transgressions across social space.


Südosteuropa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 408-431
Author(s):  
Irena Petrović ◽  
Marija Radoman

AbstractThe authors analyze the changes in value patterns—patriarchy, authoritarianism and nationalism—in Serbia in the context of the social changes that have marked the postsocialist transformation period. They focus on the extent and intensity of two sub-patterns within each of these three basic value patterns: private and public patriarchy, general and specific authoritarianism, organic (natural) and ethnic nationalism. The conclusions about changes in these value patterns are drawn on the basis of three empirical studies conducted in 2003, 2012, and 2018. They show the prevalence of private patriarchy, general authoritarianism, and organic (natural) nationalism over their counterparts. Private patriarchy has weakened, which is largely to be explained by the significant structural changes in Serbia. On the other hand, support of general authoritarianism and organic (natural) nationalism has been on the rise, which clearly mirrors the unfavorable economic and political situation in the country.


2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Michael Werz

Recent debates about the future of the European Union have focusedin large part on institutional reforms, the deficit of democratic legitimacy,and the problem of economic and agrarian policies. As importantas these issues may be, the most crucial question at the momentis not whether Europe will prevail as a union of nations or as a thoroughlyintegrated federal structure. What is of much greater concernis the fact that political structures and their corresponding politicaldiscourses have lagged far behind the social changes occurring inEuropean societies. The pivotal transformation of 1989 has not beengrasped intellectually or politically, even though its results areincreasingly visible in both the east and west.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-307
Author(s):  
Fransjohan Pretorius

In investigating the reading practices of Boer combatants during the South African War, diaries, letters, and reminiscences were consulted. The state of literacy reveals a picture of a small number of highly literate men, a larger group of adequately literate men, a still larger group of semi-literates, and the illiterate. Reading matter included the Bible, newspapers, and books. Issues raised are: Did literacy (or illiteracy) influence military decision-making or troop morale? Were certain works making some impact on the battlefield? Was the practical experience the Boers had gained before the war more successful in planning strategy and tactics than literacy?


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