scholarly journals Don Juan in Search of Identity in the Play "La Nuit de Valognes" by Éric-Emanuel Schmitt

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikola Bjelić

The first play by the contemporary French writer Éric-Emanuel Schmitt, The Night in Valognes (La Nuit de Valognes, 1989), represents a completely new interpretation of the myth originating from the 17th century, and celebrated in the writings of many subsequent authors, from Tirso de Molina, over Molière and Mozart, to Ballester and Handke. The play is situated in a castle in northern France, taking place some thirty years after the well-known adventures of Don Juan, and represents a trial organized by five women, his former lovers. However, the penalty – to marry his last victim, is not executed. The aim of the paper is to argue that in this humorous philosophical play, written by the end of the 20th century, Schmitt is not interested in the problem of seduction, represented in the classical myth, but in the quest of the main character for his identity. His hero does not give the answer to the key question: “Who am I?”, but instead poses the question if our sexual identities are solid and unchangeable. The hero’s search for identity is presented as the quality of contemporary man, re-examining his sexuality through search for love, as well as homosexuality, hinted at in the play as one possible modern identity of Don Juan.

2019 ◽  
pp. 462-471
Author(s):  
Lyudmila Shirokova

The historical polyethnicity of the Slovak society and the connected problems of the interrelations of cultures, ethics, interpersonal relations, are reflected in the works of modern Slovak prose. They are represented most clearly in the novels of middle generation writers P. Rankov, S. Lavrík, P. Krištúfek. They dwell upon the dramatical events of the 20 th century. They cover wide range problems, from the fruitful coexistence of various ethnic groups and their representatives to national contradictions and racial repressions. The artistic quality of the mentioned works, their composition, the way of narrating, the type of the main character, can be highly evaluated. For example, in a novel by P. Rankov the plot, in spite of its linearity, is a chain of episodes in the span of 30 years from the life of the main characters. It reflects not only their fates, but also the historical and political changes of the world they live in. The main female character of a S. Lavrík ’s novel narrates about everyday life and tragedies in the lives of the dwellers of a Slovak town in the Slovak Republic during the war. P. Krištúfek in his novel focuses on several decades from the life of a Slovak-Jewish family and dwellers of a Slovak provincial society with types and relations specific for this milieu.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 216
Author(s):  
Gitana Vanagaitė

Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) was an Italian modernist writer and playwright who enriched literature with questions of modern identity as it relates to the contradiction between human consciousness and reality. Pirandello pondered questions of art and reality, mask and essence, life and form, and the fragmentation of a personality. In his works, he also foresaw what would later constitute the base of existential philosophy.The reception of Pirandello’s works in Lithuania has been limited, in part because of the small number of his works translated into Lithuanian – only a dozen short stories, two plays, and a novel.The first more or less systematic and thorough introduction to the play wright and his works took place in 1934, when the Italian writer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage.” A few articles on Pirandello’s creative principles appeared in the Lithuanian press. A Lithuanian poet, Kazys Binkis, translated the beginning of Pirandello’s play, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921), and a writer, Kostas Korsakas, edited a book consisting of five novels, Pirmoji naktis (‘First Night’). A Lithuanian translation of his novel, Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal, 1904), and two plays, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore and Enrico IV (Henry IV, 1922), came out during the Soviet period.All translations were accompanied by a foreword containing basic biographical details about and introducing Pirandello’s cultural, literary and creative life. Although Pirandello gets attention in Lithuanian university textbooks, no academic paper about him or his works has been published yet. There have been no translations of Pirandello’s theoretical texts, his thoughts on the cultural situation, literature, and man at the beginning of the 20th century, i.e., a volume of essays Arte e Scienza (Art and Science) written in 1908 or an important long essay, L’umorismo (On Humor), in which author also examines the principles of his own art. On the other hand, the literary reception of Pirandello’s works has been supplemented by theater performances. Five plays of his were mounted and the play, Henry IV, was twice produced on Lithuanian theater stage.The article examines why Pirandello’s artistic ideas, which reached Lithuania during the second decade of the 20th century, remained on the periphery and failed to influence the literary canon. Keywords: Luigi


Author(s):  
Halyna Bokshan

The study examines the features of the strategies of mythologization and mystification used by Yurii Vynnychuk in creating his literary version of Ivan Vahylevych’s biography in the novel “Liutetsiia”. First of all the paper emphasizes the writer’s inclination to play with historic material characteristic of postmodernism, manifesting itself in most of his works and in the novel under study, in particular. The research pays special attention to the original interaction of mythological and cultural-historical aspects in the fictionalized biography of the renowned public figure of the 19th century, famous for his activity in Ruska Triitsia. It considers the specific features of the literary visualization of Ivan Vahylevych character in the relation to Ivan Franko’s essay representing the epistolary of the figures of the historical epoch depicted in the novel. The study determines the correlation between the personages in “Liutetsiia” and the characters and motives of the Celtic mythology. It identifies the specificity of the reminiscent relations of the main character with the archetypal figure of Don Juan. The conclusions highlight the use of irony, grotesque and comic modus by Yurii Vynnychuk as the manifestation of the neo-mythological device of deheroization. It also accentuates that the strategies of mythologization and mystification in “Liutetsiia” reflect the manner of interpreting cultural-historical material characteristic of the author.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Pakhomova

The article analyzes War Stories (Voennye rasskazy, 1915) by Mikhail Kuzmin and offers a new interpretation of the book’s pragmatics. Most students of War Stories have not treated this collection in much detail, mainly seeing it as Kuzmin’s unsuccessful attempt to become a part of the mainstream patriotic movement during WWI. Contrary to her predecessors, Alexandra Pakhomova argues this particular book has a definite and consciously motivated authorial strategy. What Kuzmin did in War Stories was an attempt to establish his new literary reputation, and also to create an entirely new genre of short fiction in Russian literature. KEYWORDS: 20th-Century Russian Literature, Mikhail Kuzmin (1972—1936), Voennye rasskazy (1915), Literary Reputation, History of Literature.


ICONI ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 148-159
Author(s):  
Alexander I. Demchenko ◽  

The previous issues of the journal featured publications of lectures about such outstanding 20th century Russian composers as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofi ev, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian and Georgy Sviridov. This series is continued with a lecture about the music of Rodion Shchedrin. Following the portions of the lecture which deal with the early and middle periods of the composer’s music, the drama and even the tragic quality of his world perception and their overcoming. the present situation acquired maximal tension upon Shchedrin’s turning to the most acute problem for the romantic consciousness — the problem of interactions of personality and its surroundings, especially in the event of their confrontation. During the lecture’s exposition fragments of musical compositions are offered with their recommended performances, in their sum providing a perception of the most substantial sides of Shchedrin’s musical legacy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 168 ◽  
pp. 327-335
Author(s):  
Agata Firlej

The stolen death: About the play Hledáme strašidlo by Hanuš Hachenburg from 1943The puppet theatre play Hledame strašidlo by Hanuš Hachenburg was written in the Terezín/Theresienstadt ghetto in 1943 and over 50 years was hidden in the archive until it was presented to readers and viewers in the 1990s — but it turned out to be still surprisingly valid and cogent. The author, a 14-year-old prisoner of the ghetto, used the conventions of the puppet theatre, the carnival and the fairy tales. The mythical or fairy-tale-like “timelessness” allowed him to show the absurdity of Nazism and — yet unnamed — the Holocaust. The main character of the play, the King, captures Death itself, which soon becomes so ordinary and kitschy that no one is afraid of her. The confinement of Death — a motif known, among others, from the myth of Sisyphus — is an important theme of the theatre in Terezín; it appears also in the German-speaking opera by Peter Kien and Viktor Ullmann, Der Keiser von Atlantis Emperor of Atlantis. In this article, I show how the old themes of enslaved Death and the dance macabre between extasy and destruction become the symbols of the war, and indeed of the 20th century, which culminates in the devastating forces of the great ideologies and in which there can be found the origins of retrotopia, which is now, according to Zygmunt Bauman, the dominating point of view in East- and West-European and in American discourse.  Únos smrti. O terezίnske divadelnί hře Hledáme strašidlo Hanuše Hachenburga z roku 1943Divadelní hra Hledáme strašidlo od Hanuše Hachenburga byla napsána v ghettu Terezín / Theresienstadt v roce 1943 a více než padesát let byla ukryta v archivu, aby v 90. letech si našla cestu pro své čtenáře a diváky — a ukázalo se, že je překvapivě platná a přitažlivá. Autor, čtrnáctiletý vězeň ghetta, využil konvencí loutkového divadla, karnevalu a pohádek. Mýtická nebo pohádková „nadčasovost“ mu umožnila ukázat absurditu nacismu a — tehdy ještĕ nemenovaného — holocaustu. Hlavní postava hry, Král, zachytí samotnou Smrt, která se brzy stane tak obyčejnou a kyčovitou, že se ji nikdo nebude bát. Únos smrti — motiv známý mimo jiné i z mýtu Sisyfa — je důležitým tématem divadla v Terezíně; objevuje se také v německojazyčné operě Petera Kiena a Viktora Ullmanna Der Keizer von Atlantis Císař Atlantidy. V tomto textu ukazuji, jak se staré motivy zotročené Smrti a danse macabre mezi extázi a zničení stávají symbolem války a celého dvacátého století, v který vyvrcholily ničivými sily velké ideologie a kde lze nalézt počátky retrotopie, která je podle Zygmunta Baumana dominantním hlediskem ve východním, západoevropským a americkým diskurzu.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
Ewa Baszak

In this article I focus my attention on the archetype of women in Sardinian cinema. First of all, I explain the definition of the cinematographic movement which dominates Sardinia and I try to find the answer if Sardinian cinema cinema sardo exists. The next part of this paper shows the division of the cinema in Sardinia into two categories: seen from an external perspective by authors originating off the island and its culture, defined as hetero-representation, and seen from an internal point of view, developed by directors born and culturally raised in Sardinia, defined as self-representation.In the second part of the paper, I write about the term il deleddismo, which means the picture of Sardinia seen by the writer Grazia Deledda. Gianni Olla uses this term with reference to the cinema, il deleddismo cinematografico, as a way to enter the Sardinian world from the cinematic point of view. In early Sardinian cinema, stereotypes aimed at educating society and in the case of women by the merits of 20th-century ideology — to show them how they should behave. In recent decades this has not changed completely, but the figure of the modern woman is more often shown as the main character, who possesses far more power than her predecessors.


Author(s):  
Corrie Jonn Block

This chapter presents economic peacemaking in historical business terms through an exploration of the meaning of competition in the 20th century. The 19th century meme, “survival of the fittest,” may be considered a quality of natural law that has been used to defend laissez faire capitalism, which has at times produced economic outcomes that are good for a select few at the expense of humanity at large. The counter-concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which was developed in the mid-20th century, presented an alternative view of the corporation as citizen, and called for the compromise of profits for the sake of the betterment of the community in which the business existed. This chapter explores the historical development of these concepts in the social science context of social Darwinism vs. neo-Darwinism, concluding that economic peacemaking through stakeholder management and CSR implementation is an inherently natural concept and preferable for humanity to unregulated competition.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2.7) ◽  
pp. 436
Author(s):  
Velivela Gopinath ◽  
Arigela Srija ◽  
Dr S Krishna Rao ◽  
Avula Madhuri

Smart Home is a flourishing technology of 20th century. It integrates of many new technologies through home networking for improving quality of human’s life. Intelligent Home trade has drawn goodish attention of researchers for quite a decade. Smart Home technology is a combination of network and services and much more consequently, this paper focuses on various topics in smart home technologies from surveying for smart home research projects and presents a survey of all such systems and covers advantages of smart home systems, smart steps and simple components to install smart homes. So, the presented paper can be cookbook of ideas for who ever want to learn this blossoming technology.  


2020 ◽  
pp. 83-99
Author(s):  
Jelena Gojic

Brecht was one of the most influential theatre practitioners, playwrights, poets and filmmakers of the 20th century. In this paper we deal with one of his dramas, which was one of his early dramatic writings and which transparently portrays Brecht’s social engagement and his affection for the Communist Party. This drama shows the basic postulates of Marxist ideology and it has received little attention in Serbian scientific literature. This paper points to Brecht’s engagement in this didactic piece, with the support of the theoretical postulates of Shaw, Sartre, Foucault and Adrienne Rich. The aim of the paper is to show the development of the main character, Pelagea Wlassowa, who is undergoing such a transformation, which is inevitably accompanied by her activation in current socio-political events


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