GENRE SPECIFICS AND MOTIVES OF THE NOVEL „BIEGUNI” („FLIGHTS”) BY OLGA TOKARCZUK

2019 ◽  
pp. 466-474
Author(s):  
Olha Kovalenko

In this article was considered genre specifics and motives of the novel “Bieguni” (“Flights”) by polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. On the example of the novel was determined the main genre specifics of postmodern novel-travelogue, where was raised the main issues of present days – life and death, physical and spiritual, workaday and philosophical. “Bieguni” is the novel about modern people, which looking for their goal, situated in a constantly movement just not to come to the Antichrist`s hands. The airports and hotels aren`t only a shelter, it`s a real home, what underline motive of travel in the novel. Representing home in a different ways, the writer consider the human body as a shelter for two components – spiritual and material. The body that was created by God is physical “home” for self-awareness. Herewith the writer doesn`t reject physiological theory of body beginning and consider it as a product of completing, finishing and the signification of human`s death. Address to Biblical, religious, mythological, bibliographic and oniric motives again and again underline anti-utopy world with his own canons and decrees, what doesn`t submit to logical, grounded explanation, but have philosophical elucidation. “Bieguni” it`s a binding of stories, feelings and laws. The main characters of the composition are different aged, nationality and different time period people, but united by just one important thing – searching of sense of life, that is different for everyone of them. Variety of characters, story of everyone`s life, text`s fragmentation give to the reader experience of personal meeting with every literature character. The hidden drama, that attendanted in everyone of them create the aureole of mystique, mysteriousness and feeling of temporarily proximity, that`s the main feeling of traveler. The leitmotif of the novel unite fragments into the one full picture, where we can see the main thesis of the novel: “Movement is a life, life is a travel”, because at the travel we can see a human`s wish to find the salvation out of routine problems, social duties and conditionalities. Characteristic for the novel using of philosophical and Biblical motives and also application to the history and author`s experience are non-textual survey of art of Olga Tokarczuk and her own morally-pscychological skills.

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 502-529
Author(s):  
Thomas Irvine

Early in Wilhelm Heinse’s eccentric novel Hildegard von Hohenthal (1796) his characters confront the problem of how music works on the senses. The novel’s hero, Kapellmeister Lockmann, tunes a piano—to an idiosyncratic temperament of his own invention—as he proposes an intensely physical model for musical listening. He uses this demonstration, while simultaneously trying to start a love affair with the novel’s heroine, Hildegard von Hohenthal, to reclaim older ideas about natural temperaments and key characteristics in an era of heightened interest in the anatomy of cognition. But Heinse’s own opinions are not always the same as those of his characters. Drawing on his notebooks, I trace how Heinse struggled to come to terms with opposing views of his friend and colleague, the anatomist Samuel Thomas Soemmering, and of the philosopher Immanuel Kant of how sound affects the body. Soemmering’s Über das Organ der Seele (1796) and Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790) both act as intertexts and paratexts to the novel, and Heinse more than once splits his own opinions about both books between his characters. The tuning scene addresses important questions about the hierarchy of the senses, the creation of musical meaning, and the freedom of performers and listeners to form their own interpretations of music. Heinse’s naturalist ideas about musical agency rub against the grain of a narrative—still current today—dominated by a transaction between heroic composers on the one side and awe-struck listeners on the other. To re-assess these ideas is to re-imagine a crucial hinge in music history.


2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-345
Author(s):  
Sophie Wennerscheid

AbstractDrawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of the ‘body not at home’ on the one hand and on the concept of the disturbing ‘foreign body’ (Fremdkörper) as deployed in various trauma studies on the other, this article explores how the traumatized body is to be understood as a disoriented and unstable body. Trauma, however, is not only something that leaves one restless. It also connects one with the trauma of another and leads to mutual understanding. Having been affected by the wound of another, a certain kind of communication among the wounded emerges, which makes traumatic memory accessible. How such an affective impact may look can be shown by examining Lutz Seiler’s award-winning novel Kruso (2014). Set on the isle of Hiddensee shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Seiler tells the story of two men, Kruso and Ed, both traumatized by the loss of a loved one. As both are East German castaways and equally affected by their loss, they develop an intimate relationship, one not void of suppressed desire, mistrust, and aggression. Only years after Kruso’s death is Ed able to come to terms with the past and find a place for burying the vanished dead.


1950 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-56
Author(s):  
C. I. Scharling

The Second Coming of Christ and the Resurrection of the Body. Grundtvigs Eschatology. By C. I. Scharling. This essay shows how Grundtvig, in contrast to his contemporaries in the Church, laid great stress upon the eschatological hope of the future. He may have been partly inspired by Scandinavian mythology (the myth of Ragnarok) and partly by Schellings theories about the great drama of existence (the coming forth of ideas from the Absolute and their returning thither). But the essential point is that the eschatological hope grew forth naturally from his personal understanding of life and death, of the meaning and object of human life, and from his faith in the living, risen Christ as Lord and victor over the powers of darkness and death. It is remarkable that while after 1825 Grundtvig lived with such intensity in the experience of the realisation of the Kingdom of God here and now in the Church’s fellowship with the risen, present Saviour, at the same time, both in his hymns and in his preaching, he gives such powerful expression to the eschatological hope of the future. The author finds the explanation of this in the fact that for Grundtvig (unlike many others) it was not the need and distress of the time that gave life to the Biblical promises of the Second Coming of Christ and the setting*up of the Kingdom of Glory at the Last Day, but his very joy in God’s great Salvation, experienced in the Church. Thus the peculiar thing about Grundtvig’s eschatological expectation is that the tidings of the Second Coming of the Lord are for him an evangel in the full sense of the word; his feelings about the Last Day are far removed from the feeling of fear and horror which meets us in many of the mediaeval frescoes of the Lord’s Return to Judgment or in the old hymn, “Dies irae, dies ilia”. Characteristic of him, too, is his stress on the contin uity between the present world, which came into being at the Creation, and the world to come; the old world shall not be destroyed, but reborn and transfigured; its for this reason that he lays so much stress on faith in the resurrection of the body. On the other hand the author rejects the theory put forward by the Norwegian writer, Paulus Svendsen, that Grundtvig was a Chiliast and “believed in an external, perfect Kingdom of God on earth” ; he refutes it by reference to the fact that Grundtvig explicitly rejected Edward Irving’s conception of the millennium.


Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė

This paper considers how Frances Itani’s Deafening imaginatively rethinks our understanding of the Great War in the age of postmemory. Seeing as the novel is set in Canada and Europe during the First World War and takes as its protagonist a deaf woman, the poetic attention given to the senses as a horizon of phenomenological experience magnifies the moral bonds that the characters establish in defi ance of both deafness and death. Guided by the theoretical reasoning of Marianne Hirsch, Elaine Scarry, and Alison Landsberg as well as contemporary phenomenological thinking, most significantly that of Edward S. Casey, Steven Connor, Michel Serres, and Jean-Luc Nancy, this paper examines how the novel’s attentiveness to the materiality of the body in regard to the ethical collisions of sound and silence as well as life and death contributes to a poetics of resonance that generates prosthetic memories, turning the anonymous record of war into a private experience of moral endurance inscribed on the ear of historical legacy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-6
Author(s):  
Muhammad Irfan ◽  
Muhammad Ali ◽  
Tina Christina Lumban Tobing ◽  
Wisman Dalimunthe ◽  
Rizky Adriansyah

Background Few studies perform follow ups on patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) patients who undergo transcatheter closure. In addition to side effects from the procedure, it is important to evaluate changes in left ventricular function (LVF) parameters and nutritional status. Objective To compare LVF and nutritional status before and during the one-year period post-transcatheter PDA closure, and evaluate potential associated factors in post-closure PDA transcatheter patients. Methods This retrospective cohort study was done in a single center in patients diagnosed with PDA who had undergone transcatheter closure. Data were obtained from subjects’ medical records. The relationship between the post-closure PDA time span and LVF parameters [ejection fraction (EF) and fractional shortening (FS)] was analyzed by Friedman and repeated ANOVA tests; the post-closure PDA time period and nutritional status was analyzed by Friedman test. The time periods analyzed were 1, 3, 6, and 12 months post-closure. Factors potentially associated with LVF 12 months post-closure were analyzed by linear regression. Results A total of 30 patients who had undergone transcatheter PDA closure were included. The body weight mean of at the time of transcatheter PDA closure was 13.1 kg. We found a significant relationship between time period after PDA closure and nutritional status, before and 1, 3, 6, and at 12 months post-closure. In a comparison of pre-closure to 12 months post-closure, subjects’ mean EF (66.6 vs. 70.9%, respectively; P<0.001) and FS (34.4 vs. 37.8%, respectively; P<0.001) were significantly higher. In addition, significantly more patients had normal nutritional status 12 months post-closure than before closure. Age was not related to LVF parameters (EF: r=0.212; P=0.260; FS: r=0.137; P=0.471). Conclusion Both LVF and nutritional status significantly improve gradually over the 12 months post-closure compared to pre-closure. PDA size is not significantly associated with improved LVF parameters and nutritional status.


Author(s):  
A.A. Long

No Greek philosopher born before Socrates was more creative and influential than Heraclitus of Ephesus. Around the beginning of the fifth century bc, in a prose that made him proverbial for obscurity, he criticized conventional opinions about the way things are and attacked the authority of poets and others reputed to be wise. His surviving work consists of more than 100 epigrammatic sentences, complete in themselves and often comparable to the proverbs characteristic of ‘wisdom’ literature. Notwithstanding their sporadic presentation and transmission, Heraclitus’ sentences comprise a philosophy that is clearly focused upon a determinate set of interlocking ideas. As interpreted by the later Greek philosophical tradition, Heraclitus stands primarily for the radical thesis that ‘Everything is in flux’, like the constant flow of a river. Although it is likely that he took this thesis to be true, universal flux is too simple a phrase to identify his philosophy. His focus shifts continually between two perspectives – the objective and everlasting processes of nature on the one hand and ordinary human beliefs and values on the other. He challenges people to come to terms, theoretically and practically, with the fact that they are living in a world ‘that no god or human has made’, a world he describes as ‘an ever-living fire kindling in measures and going out in measures’ (fr. 30). His great truth is that ‘All things are one’, but this unity, far from excluding difference, opposition and change, actually depends on them, since the universe is in a continuous state of dynamic equilibrium. Day and night, up and down, living and dying, heating and cooling – such pairings of apparent opposites all conform to the everlastingly rational formula (logos) that unity consists of opposites; remove day, and night goes too, just as a river will lose its identity if it ceases to flow. Heraclitus requires his audience to try to think away their purely personal concerns and view the world from this more detached perspective. By the use of telling examples he highlights the relativity of value judgments. The implication is that unless people reflect on their experience and examine themselves, they are condemned to live a dream-like existence and to remain out of touch with the formula that governs and explains the nature of things. This formula is connected (symbolically and literally) with ‘ever-living fire’, whose incessant ‘transformations’ are not only the basic operation of the universe but also essential to the cycle of life and death. Fire constitutes and symbolizes both the processes of nature in general and also the light of intelligence. As the source of life and thought, a ‘fiery’ soul equips people to look into themselves, to discover the formula of nature and to live accordingly. The influence of Heraclitus’ ideas on other philosophers was extensive. His reputed ‘flux’ doctrine, as disseminated by his follower Cratylus, helped to shape Plato’s cosmology and its changeless metaphysical foundations. The Stoics looked back to Heraclitus as the inspiration for their own conception of divine fire, identifying this with the logos that he specifies as the world’s explanatory principle. Later still, the neo-Pyhrronist Aenesidemus invoked Heraclitus as a partial precursor of scepticism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bojan Žikić ◽  
Danijel Sinani ◽  
Miloš Milenković

One of the most famous enterprises within the British search for the so-called Northwest Passage in the nineteenth century, the Franklin expedition, was described in the novel "Terror" (2007) by American writer Dan Simmons, as well as in the TV series based on the book (2018) of the same name. What the expedition became known for was its disappearance in the Arctic wastelands despite – for its time – the most modern technological equipment, as well as the fact that its command staff consisted of experienced researchers. Simmons' presentation of the circumstances that led to the collapse of the expedition was based, to a certain extent, on the scientific knowledge about it, collected from the first searches for the expedition to this day, but also on the cultural idea that was formed first in Great Britain, and then in Canada and the United States, during that time period. As the essence of cultural communication produced by the novel and the series, we see the inability of civilization as a source of fear – or horror – before the socially ontologically uncertain position that people are brought into, when they are displaced outside their original sociocultural context and find themselves in conditions in which norms of that context can be contrary to the measures that are taken for the sake of physical survival. This given fear is of cultural origin: its root is in a situationally generated idea that it is possible that the reality is different from the one which is being defined by the social order and cultural norms, namely the rules, that make our world known and subject to human control, are not fully applicable. The boundaries of this fear are permeable for those things which a person is not able to face successfully on the basis of his/her innate abilities and cultural development.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 73-84
Author(s):  
Asunción Rangel

The topic of the illness reveals at various points in Peruvian-Japanese poetry José Watanabe. Born in 1945 in Laredo, Peru, he died at the age of 62, suffering from throat cancer. It is not strange to find allusions to the degenerative process of the body – derived from the disease – and to the cure in, for example, “Krankenhaus” (hospital, in German), a section of the book El huso de la palabra (1989). In his poetry about disease, Watanabe involves, on the one hand, knowledge derived from medicine and, in addition, knowledge that is outside the frame of writing: advice, family or community stories, what lives and arises –to put it with one of his verses– “en la honda boca de los mayors”. The notion of disease that is poetically devised, links medical knowledge and those that come from the family. The idea of the disease must be incorporated into the way of living it. The sick body to which Watanabe refers is one who feels, perceives and experiences the ailment as a way of living, but also as a way of dying: the agony. His poetry is a way of living dying and dying in living, within the framework of disease that is nothing other than agony. This comparison is significant if we take into account that the process of writing and reading are seen as the life of poetry (in its writing, in its reading) that goes, as it progresses verse by verse, irremediably to death. At the end of reading the poem, it dies; while reading, agonizes. This allows you to venture a path of reading that splices writing, body, disease, life and death.


2019 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-466
Author(s):  
Marek Więckowski

Political boundaries represent a universal phenomenon and key element by which social and economic phenomena existing across space are structured. But both the presence and the nature (role, function, etc.) of borders are seen to vary temporally and spatially, with differentiated attendant consequences for socio-economic development. The present article relates to state borders, which separate certain areas off from others, while at the same time constituting meeting points and points of contact between them. While this would hold true whether we perceive the said borders as lines, areas or zones, the modern-day approach to borders is a multi-dimensional one that treats them as socio-spatial constructs revealing and articulating differentiation that truly exists. It is possible to note two opposing cause-and-effect processes here. On the one hand, there are different divisions and boundaries between many socio-economic and even natural phenomena that sanction the existence and locations of borders; while on the other the very existence of state borders establishes or reinforces the existence of other, new divisions that can be regarded as boundaries (even as they are not now necessarily state borders as such). I trust that this argumentation helps capture the essence of the geography present in considerations of boundaries and borders; as well as its changing but ever-important role, while at the same time generating opportunities for further research, and for the ongoing observation of the diverse processes linking up with the existence of borders. Variability and change of function would seem to offer a key to the understanding of the significances of borders and the influences they exert, as regards the border landscape, neighbourly (international) relations and phenomena of a socio-economic nature. In that light, four functions for borders are in fact proposed here – as barriers, peripheries, lines of differentiation and axes of integration. Each change has knock-on implications for transformations of function in regard to both borders as such and the areas adjacent to them. Thus, by making assumptions as to the fundamental aspects characterising variations in the nature of borders, it has been possible here to come up with proposals regarding the consequences these will bring with them. And even as a process whereby a border opens up is underway and integration is ensuing, it is still possible that change as a whole will falter or even stall, should issues arise locally (e.g. through conflict or other negative events), nationally (e.g. through unilateral or bilateral severing of agreements), or globally (e.g. thanks to external threat, a desire to protect domestic markets or a migration crisis). For these reasons, geopolitical considerations will always reign supreme over other borderland phenomena, determining directions of development and possibilities for borders (and adjacent areas) to function. In that light, this article stresses the still-relevant need for borders, borderlands and relevant ongoing processes to be made subject to theoretical conceptualisation and processing. And this would be true as regards, not only the spatial extent or scope of borderland areas, but also the changing conditioning, consequences and actions. In this, a challenge that continues to be present entails the founding of theoretical concepts for the borderland that draw on selected paradigms and stress the role and importance of border and borderland geography, along with its key subjects of interest. And, where the study of borders being pursued in Poland is concerned, it needs to be hoped that a new trajectory may be found and followed, with each conceptualisation exerting a summarising or theorising impact proving of value as form is given to a full new theory for the development of borders and borderlands in Poland and its neighbouring countries, with account taken, not merely of recent decades, but of a much longer time period.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-150
Author(s):  
Matthias Aumüller

Abstract The paper surveys two different functions that may be ascribed to unreliable narratives. Derived from the notion of technique (Russian »priëm«, German »Verfahren«), function is a key concept of literary theory, which relates textual properties to effects. One of the functions, in recent time related to unreliable narration, is deception. In order to appreciate the literary effect of deception, the reader must finally understand that s/he has been deceived for a certain time. In other words, in order to recognize that s/he has been deceived, the reader must find out what is the case in the narrated world, i. e. fiction, and distinguish it from what was told without being the case. Another effect will be introduced. It is related to narratives in which it is impossible to find out what is true in the fiction. In those cases, readers will be perplex or helpless. In the next step, these effects – that of deception and that of helplessness – being effects of reception shall be substituted by their hermeneutic counterparts. If one is deceived by an unreliable narration, one finally finds out what is the case in the fiction (with regard to the reason for the deception); if one is left helpless by an unreliable narration, one cannot find out what is the case in the fiction (with regard to the unexplained fact that is the reason for the helplessness). The first one of these hermeneutic counterparts of the reception functions will be called the closed function of unreliability, since a gap of explanation can be closed by an interpretation; the second one will be called the open function of unreliability, since a gap of explanation is left open and cannot be closed. The remaining parts of the paper deal with literary examples which show different cases fulfilling those functions. The first two examples are taken from stories by Stefan Zweig. In »The Fowler Snared« (»Sommernovellette«, 1911), the closed function is fulfilled because the trustworthy extradiegetic narrator finally corrects the unreliable intradiegetic narrator. The next example of Zweig, »The Woman and the Landscape« (»Die Frau und die Landschaft«, 1922), lacks an explicit correction, since the narrator deceives not only the reader but also himself. A thorough interpretation, however, shows that it is more plausible to assume that the narrator’s account referring to certain facts is not true than to assume that it is correct. In this case, the gap can be closed, too, although there are more assumptions required than in the first case as the second text gives no explicit trustworthy evidence. The evidence must be inferred by hermeneutic conclusions. In contrast to the closed function, the open function of unreliability is much more complicated to ascribe. The first case, the (very) short novel The Castle of the Brothers Zanowsky (Das Schloß der Brüder Zanowsky, 1933) by Paul Zech presents several contradicting versions of a fact of the fiction (narrated world). The narrator renders them without preferring one of them. He is even unable to account for, let alone to recognize the fact that these versions are contradicting each other. So, it seems impossible to determine which one of these versions is true in the fiction. The version the narrator believes to be true may be true or not. On the one hand, the narrator can be considered to be plainly unreliable; on the other hand, his unreliability is not the point of the story. It is its point that what the narrator tells us is inevitably vague; it is not its point that he lies or is not able to find out what is true in his world. – The last example stems from the novel The Poor Squanderer (Der arme Verschwender, 1936) by Ernst Weiß. In this case, the narrator’s discourse is full of single contradictions and omissions. Some of the gaps can be closed, some of them not. However, there is no explanation which accounts for the narrator’s misreporting and underreporting tout court. The overall setting of the narrator’s putative unreliability is left open due to the lack of self-awareness the narrator reveals in his discourse. – The paper closes with a short outlook on the literary/poetical difference between the closed and the open function of unreliable narration. Texts that close the gaps caused by the unreliability of their narrators display other literary properties than texts that leave the gaps, caused by the unreliability of their narrators, open. Additionally, the difference between texts whose open gaps are caused by unreliable narration and texts with similar gaps, which are not unreliably narrated, is hard to explain.


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