scholarly journals Artistic Modelling of History in the Literature and Non-Fiction of a Post-Totalitarian Society

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1Sup1) ◽  
pp. 228-237
Author(s):  
Yuliia Laskava ◽  
Volodymyr Bondarenko ◽  
Olena Shulga ◽  
Mykola Stasyk ◽  
Olga Stadnichenko

An artistic interpretation of historical facts is quite relevant in the literature and non-fiction of a post-totalitarian society. Prose works on historical themes are valuable and interesting in that they create an illusion for readers to be present in a certain period of historical time, and it is the artistic modeling of events that makes priceless facts of history completely disappear. The historical past is an inexhaustible material that word artists have been referring to for centuries, creating the best examples of fiction. Prose texts of historical subjects are perceived by each next generation in a new way, historical events and phenomena are interpreted from different angles, the activities of famous figures of the past are widely covered. Non-fiction literature is a kind of literature that is on the verge of artistry and documentary. The main non-fiction genres are a diary, autobiography, biography, memoirs, confession, letters, etc. On the one hand, non-fiction literature claims to recognize the author’s subjective truth about him in her texts; on the other hand, only the reader can either, demonstrating full confidence in the author, call this text documentary, or admit the presence of poetry and aesthetics in the work and tilt the scales in the direction of artistry. The material for observation and research of the phenomenon of artistic modeling are works that allow us to trace the most common, in our opinion, models of correlation of historical and artistic consciousness in postmodern literature and non-fiction of a post-totalitarian society.

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4(17)) ◽  
pp. 57-72
Author(s):  
Melida Travančić

This paperwork presents the literary constructions of Kulin Ban's personality in contemporary Bosnian literature on the example of three novels: Zlatko Topčić Kulin (1994), Mirsad Sinanović Kulin (2007), and Irfan Hrozović Sokolarov sonnet (2016). The themes of these novels are real historical events and historical figures, and we try to present the way(s) of narration and shape the image of the past and the way the past-history-literature triangle works. Documentary discourse is often involved in the relationship between faction and fiction in the novel. Yet, as can be seen from all three novels, it is a subjective discourse on the perception of Kulin Ban today and the period of his reign, a period that could be characterized as a mimetic time in which great, sudden, and radical changes take place. If the poetic extremes of postmodernist prose are on the one hand flirting with trivia, and on the other sophisticated meta- and intertextual prose, then the Bosnian-Herzegovinian romance of the personality of Kulina Ban fully confirms just such a range of stylistic-narrative tendencies of narrative texts of today's era.


Ramus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-74
Author(s):  
Lauren Donovan Ginsberg

Over the past two decades, scholars have devoted increasing attention to Roman civil war literature and its poetics, from the vocabulary of nefas, paradox, and hyperbole to the pervasive imagery of the state as a body violated by its citizens. Thebes and especially the civil war between Oedipus’ sons became prominent lenses through which Romans explored their country's strife-ridden past. Seneca's Phoenissae, however, has received comparatively little attention in this regard, often overshadowed by Statius’ epic Thebaid of the next generation. This paper investigates Seneca's contribution to the wider poetics of civil war through his expansion of the theme of incest, which Seneca uses to articulate civil war's most invasive, penetrative, and disintegrative effects. In particular, Seneca capitalizes on both the metaphorical potential of maternal violation and the eroticized imagery of Roman conquest to create disturbing points of contact between two generations of Jocasta's sons: the one who invaded her bed in the past, and the other who will soon invade his mother city. Seneca writes his Phoenissae to be an escalated return to the original sins of Oedipus’ incesta domus as another of Thebes’ native sons prepares to conquer his motherland.


1914 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-230
Author(s):  
Ephraim Emerton

The decade just passed has witnessed an unusual activity in the production of books about Martin Luther. This activity has been greatly stimulated by the re-introduction of a method of controversy which reasonable men had been hoping was forever silenced. Until about a generation ago there had been two obvious and hopelessly opposed ways of approach to the subject of Luther's character and work. From the one side he was presented as an angel of light; from the other as the type of a depraved and malicious spirit, moved to activity not through any desire to improve the condition of his people but because, being the malignant thing he was, he could not act otherwise. It need hardly be said to the readers of this Review that both of these views of Luther are essentially false. They are perfectly intelligible, one equally with the other. They are the natural precipitation of the bitter controversies that gathered about him in his life, and continued long after his death to complicate the political and economic struggles out of which the new Europe of our day was born. In the light of our modern historical method, both views appear crude and unscientific. They represent a way of looking at historical characters and historical events to which we are apt to apply the crushing word “old-fashioned.” And in fact it did seem, up to a very few years ago, that these primitive judgments, which classified men into good and bad, angels and fiends, had become a thing of the past.


Author(s):  
Kenneth McNeil

The last chapter is devoted to the transatlantic Scottish writer John Galt. An important contributor to Blackwood’s and a key figure in the early settlement of what is now Ontario, Galt’s writing underscores the complex and often conflicted elements of Scottish post-Enlightenment thinking on the relation between the past and present – and the future – in the modern world. On the one hand, much of Galt’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, partakes of an empirically based ‘statistical account’ mode of regional and national enquiry, adopting the assumptions and speculative stance of a Scottish political economy. On the other hand, Annals of the Parish and his Canadian emigrant novels Lawrie Todd and Bogle Corbet inscribe a complex, and ultimately profoundly unsettling, cultural memory of the circum-Atlantic world. In the ‘annalist’ fiction that recounts the proximate past of the parish of Dalmailing, the ‘theoretical biographies’ of Todd and Corbet, and in other writing, Galt charts the development of a melancholy world-view inspired by a circum-Atlantic memory of constant upheaval and psychic trauma.


Author(s):  
Daiva Milinkevičiūtė

The Age of Enlightenment is defined as the period when the universal ideas of progress, deism, humanism, naturalism and others were materialized and became a golden age for freemasons. It is wrong to assume that old and conservative Christian ideas were rejected. Conversely, freemasons put them into new general shapes and expressed them with the help of symbols in their daily routine. Symbols of freemasons had close ties with the past and gave them, on the one hand, a visible instrument, such as rituals and ideas to sense the transcendental, and on the other, intense gnostic aspirations. Freemasons put in a great amount of effort to improve themselves and to create their identity with the help of myths and symbols. It traces its origins to the biblical builders of King Solomon’s Temple, the posterity of the Templar Knights, and associations of the medieval craft guilds, which were also symbolical and became their link not only to each other but also to the secular world. In this work we analysed codified masonic symbols used in their rituals. The subject of our research is the universal Masonic idea and its aspects through the symbols in the daily life of the freemasons in Vilnius. Thanks to freemasons’ signets, we could find continuity, reception, and transformation of universal masonic ideas in the Lithuanian freemasonry and national characteristics of lodges. Taking everything into account, our article shows how the universal idea of freemasonry spread among Lithuanian freemasonry, and which forms and meanings it incorporated in its symbols. The objective of this research is to find a universal Masonic idea throughout their visual and oral symbols and see its impact on the daily life of the masons in Vilnius. Keywords: Freemasonry, Bible, lodge, symbols, rituals, freemasons’ signets.


Worldview ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
pp. 7-8
Author(s):  
Will Herberg

John Courtney Murray's writing cannot fail to be profound and instructive, and I have profited greatly from it in the course of the past decade. But I must confess that his article, "Morality and Foreign Policy" (Worldview, May), leaves me in a strange confusion of mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can sympathize with what I might call the historical intention of the natural law philosophy he espouses, which I take to be the effort to establish enduring structures of meaning and value to serve as fixed points of moral decision in the complexities of the actual situation. On the other hand, I am rather put off by the calm assurance he exhibits when he deals with these matters, as though everything were at bottom unequivocally rational and unequivocally accessible to the rational mind. And I am really distressed at what seems to 3ie to be his woefully inadequate appreciation of the position of the "ambiguists," among whom I cannot deny I count myself.


1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 242-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.


1969 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 368-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Payne

In recent discussions of the origins and process of animal domestication (Reed, 1961, Zeuner, 1963), both authors rely on two kinds of evidence: on the one hand, the present distributions and characteristics of the different breeds of whatever animal is being discussed, together with its feral and wild relatives, and, on the other hand, the past record, given by literary and pictorial sources and the bones from archaeological and geological sites. Increased recognition of the limitations of the past record, whether in the accuracy of the information it appears to give (as in the case of pictorial sources), or in the certainty of the deductions we are at present capable of drawing from it (this applies especially to the osteological record), has led these authors to argue mainly from the present situation, using the past record to confirm or amplify the existing picture.Arguing from the present, many hypotheses about the origins and process of domestication are available. The only test we have, when attempting to choose between these, lies in the direct evidence of the past record. The past record, it is freely admitted, is very fragmentary: the information provided by the present situation is more exact, ranges over a much wider field, and is more open to test and control. Nevertheless, the past record, however imperfect it is, is the only direct evidence we have about the process of domestication.


PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer

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.”


1943 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-34
Author(s):  
Kenneth Scott Latourette

A strange contrast exists in the status of the Christian Church in the past seventy years. On the one hand the Church has clearly lost some of the ground which once appeared to be safely within its possession. On the other hand it has become more widely spread geographically and, when all mankind is taken into consideration, more influential in shaping human affairs than ever before in its history. In a paper as brief as this must of necessity be, space can be had only for the sketching of the broad outlines of this paradox and for suggesting a reason for it. If details were to be given, a large volume would be required. Perhaps, however, we can hope to do enough to point out one of the most provocative and important set of movements in recent history.


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