scholarly journals Discursive Aesthetic Impact Strategies in Medieval Literary Texts

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-184
Author(s):  
Yuliya P. Vyshenskaya
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Emotional State ◽  
Research Output ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Special Character ◽  
Cognitive Power ◽  
Belles Lettres ◽  
The Aesthetic

The paper deals with the matter investigating the nature of the aesthetic impact of the belles-lettres style being generated within the scope of great transfer from high Middle Ages to the start of Renaissance. In course of the analysis, some traditional ideas and terms adopted in the historical stylistics are used. The mentioned ideas turned up into being during the period of its discrimination from other disciplines of linguistic historical cycle. Acquired linguistic independence charged the ideas with the function of marking the borders between the historical stylistics and other disciplines mentioned. One of the markers of the type is the voluminous historism, i.e., co-relationship between stylistic phenomena and the context of their existing. Flexible borders of the latter regulated by targets and tasks of the proper research can be extended up to the certain type of culture. Importance of a special character gained by the medieval culture during the period of the international Gothic dominating when considered as a type of a context necessary for analysing the belles-lettres style generating corresponds to the importance of combining philological and non-philological kinds of practice and induced by the purpose to enrich the analysis as well as to increase the research output verification. It is suggested that the analysis of the elements of another semiotic nature presented by types and illustrations highly important for discursive strategies to influence the recipient should be thought of as an instance of a combination of the kind. One of the mighty instruments of the mentioned sort of the esthetic impact is the medieval illuminated book of the epoch of the international Gothic (XIV - XV centuries) dominating within the borders of European cultural space. Soft power, immanent to it, id est, some ability to modify emotional state of consciousness and behaviour of a recipient is characterised by semiotic attractionness and cognitive power, and embodies one of the type of strategies of the kind.

Allegra Iafrate, The Long Life of Magical Objects: A Study in the Solomonic Tradition. The Magic in History Series. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019, xi, 235 pp., 19 b/w images, 2 tables.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 252-254
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Modern World ◽  
State University ◽  
Eastern Culture ◽  
Historical Objects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Objects ◽  
The Middle Ages

Throughout times, magic and magicians have exerted a tremendous influence, and this even in our (post)modern world (see now the contributions to Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2017; here not mentioned). Allegra Iafrate here presents a fourth monograph dedicated to magical objects, primarily those associated with the biblical King Solomon, especially the ring, the bottle which holds a demon, knots, and the flying carpet. She is especially interested in the reception history of those symbolic objects, both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, both in western and in eastern culture, that is, above all, in the Arabic world, and also pursues the afterlife of those objects in the early modern age. Iafrate pursues not only the actual history of King Solomon and those religious objects associated with him, but the metaphorical objects as they made their presence felt throughout time, and this especially in literary texts and in art-historical objects.

Working-Class Writing and the Use Value of the Literary

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 932-938 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonali Perera
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Use Value ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Greenwich Meridian ◽  
Country Culture ◽  
The Aesthetic

Formal preoccupations, which is to say specifically literary concerns, appear in small literatures only in a second phase, when an initial stock of literary resources has been accumulated and the first international artists find themselves in a position to challenge the aesthetic assumptions associated with realism and to exploit the revolutionary advances achieved at the Greenwich meridian.—Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters“In our country culture has become so complex, this complexity is reflected in our literature. It takes a certain level of education to understand our novelists. The ordinary man cannot understand them …” … And she reeled off a list of authors, smiling smugly. It never occurred to her that these authors had ceased to be of any value whatsoever to their society—or was it really true that an extreme height of culture and the incomprehensible went hand in hand?—Bessie Head, A Question of Power (first ellipsis in orig.)ON WHAT BASIS ARE SELECT TRADITIONS OF LITERARY INTERNATIONALISM RECOGNIZED AS WORLD LITERATURE AND OTHERS DEEMED MERELY historical, relics of nostalgic Marxism or of resolved debates on aesthetics and politics? According to recent influential formulations, world literature is writing that in original or translated form circulates outside the author's country of origin. But what of traditions of literary internationalism, like those of working-class writing, that reverse and displace practical, utilitarian propositions to ask, instead, in more abstract terms, what is the use value of the literary? Bessie Head's A Question of Power poses a challenge to practical definitions. What of literary texts that have global currency but aren't of “any value whatsoever to their society”?

scholarly journals Existential Sentences as a Characteristic Syntactic Feature of I. A. Bunin’s Poetic Texts

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4 (202)) ◽  
pp. 256-272
Author(s):  
Olga A. Selemeneva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Surrounding World ◽  
Traditional Structure ◽  
Lyrical Poetry ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
Existential Sentences ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Poetic Texts ◽  
Main Components

In this article, existential sentences are examined as a syntactic dominant of I. A. Bunin’s lyrical poetry. The interest in the originality of the syntax of Nobel laureate’s literary texts is due to the lack of research on this issue, linguists’ focus on the aesthetic salience of the vocabulary, its expressive properties and combination potential, as well as stylistic figures and tropes. Meanwhile, it is the writer’s selection of specific syntactic structures for the implementation of the idea, the representation of key ideas and concepts that reflect his personality and the peculiarities of his perception of the surrounding world. The author refers to Bunin’s poems from 1886–1917 and 1918–1953 published in Bunin’s collected works in 9 volumes. In the writer’s poetic oeuvre, existential sentences are regularly used. Despite the traditional structure that underlies them and is represented by three meanings (‘the object of being’, ‘being’, and ‘area of being’), the richness of the lexical content of each of the main components stands out. As a result, existential sentences become a universal form used to represent completely different situations in the author’s individual worldview: the existence of natural objects in space, meteorological phenomena, events, time periods, artifacts, etc.; physical states of the surrounding world; psychological states of the subject. Acting as a semantic core of a poetic text, existential sentences do not have a fixed place in it, and are used as a lyrical beginning, an interposed element, or an ending in its structure. In each position, their use is conceptually significant. It is established that the peculiarity of existential sentences in Bunin’s lyrical poetry is their syntactic unconditionality (attachment to three registers of speech, i.e. reproductive, informative, and generative) and polyfunctionality (performing the pictorial, characterising and concluding, and generalising functions).

Orpheus in Berlin: A Reappraisal of Johann Georg Sulzer's Theory of the Polite Arts

1995 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan van der Zande
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Modern State ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Prussian Academy ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Belles Lettres ◽  
Civic Awareness ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

In 1771 Johann Georg Sulzer, a well-established member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres, published the first volume of his long awaited lexicon A General Theory of the Polite Arts (Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste). Although the work sold well, not many critics were convinced of its major tenet that the production and enjoyment of works of art should serve to promote the civic awareness of the citizenry of the modern state. And while Sulzer's influence on the aesthetic theories of Kant and Schiller is generally recognized and he consequently has kept a relatively high profile in histories of aesthetics, his lexicon did not survive the century in which it was written.

Eastward Ho! Aspects of Eastern European Writing Translated into Irish

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Titley ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Central European ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Reading Material ◽  
Eastern European Countries

The article focuses on translations into Irish of literary texts by writers from several central and eastern European countries. The author adopts a historical approach by first drawing attention to the Irish language as a means of literary expression and a vehicle for the translation of classical texts in the Middle Ages. Irish came under sustained attack because of English rule from the seventeenth century onwards and was only spoken by the poor and the marginalized in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century the language experienced a revival. The latter process was intensified following the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. In 1926, a project for literacy and provision of reading material in the Irish language was implemented, and a government publishing company known as An Gúm started producing books for the new Irish-reading public. Since the start of the project, the general tendency has been for books by western European writers to be translated into Irish. However, a significant number of texts by eastern and central European authors, ranging from classics by Tolstoy and Chekhov to novels and short stories by contemporary Russian and Slovenian authors, have also been published over the years.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 191-200
Author(s):  
Jacqueline de Romilly
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Greek Culture ◽  
The Middle Ages

This concluding chapter discusses how the story of Alcibiades' life requires consulting both historical and literary texts. The honors bestowed on his tomb by the emperor Hadrian have served as the epilogue of Alcibiades' death. This is not surprising since Hadrian was known to be an admirer of Greek culture. Nor is it surprising that cultivated Romans knew about Alcibiades. They read Plato, the Greek historians, and later Plutarch. And in addition to the biography written by Cornelius Nepos, one encounters Alcibiades in all the scholars of the imperial age. After that, a heavy veil of silence fell. There is no mention of Alcibiades through the Middle Ages until the reappearance of Greek texts. The chapter then offers an analogy between Alcibiades' life and the unification of Europe. When one looks back at his life, the crisis in democracy is what is most striking and moving today.

Egyptian Life, by and with Literary Texts

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludwig D. Morenz
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Potential Significance ◽  
Form And Function ◽  
Belles Lettres ◽  
Egyptian Literature ◽  
And Function ◽  
Writing Errors ◽  
Theoretical Considerations ◽  
Middle Egyptian

This chapter discusses aspects of Egyptian ‘fine literature’ (belles-lettres), and combines general literary and cultural-scientific theoretical considerations with specific case studies from both Middle Egyptian and Late Egyptian literature. It addresses questions of form and function, producers and recipients, as well as discussing the search for empirical readers. Also discussed are the question of original manuscripts and the potential significance of writing errors.

The Medieval Image, I

2019 ◽  
pp. 196-223
Author(s):  
Thomas Nail
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Aesthetic Field ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

Chapter 10 presents a realist aesthetics (versus constructivist) and a kinetic materialism (versus formal idealism) that focuses on the material kinetic structure of the work of art itself, inclusive of milieu and viewer. What the author calls “kinesthetics” is a return to the works of art themselves as fields of images, affects, and sensations. The chapter more specifically offers a focused study of the material kinetic conditions of the dominant aesthetic field of relation during the Middle Ages. The argument here and in the next chapter is that during the Middle Ages, the aesthetic field is defined by a tensional and relational regime of motion. This idea is supported by looking closely at three major arts of the Middle Ages: glassworks, the church, and distillation. The next chapter likewise considers perspective, the keyboard, and epistolography.

Proletarian Modernism: Film, Literature, Theory

PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (5) ◽  
pp. 1056-1075
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kohlmann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Alternative Route ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Literature Theory ◽  
Opening Up

This article identifies a body of work—films, literary texts, and theories of the aesthetic—that can help us reopen the question of what it means for an artwork to project a vision of classlessness. The article begins by focusing on early-twentieth-century proletarian modernism, in particular in the cinematic work of Sergey Eisenstein and in British literary works that repurposed Woolfian and Joycean styles during the later interwar years. Proletarian modernism, I argue, highlights an alternative route taken by modernist literature and art: unlike the late modernists feted in much recent scholarship, proletarian modernists aimed to retool modernism, opening up new and global political futures for it rather than anticipating its end. The article concludes by showing that the cultural genealogy of proletarian modernism mapped out here doubles as a prehistory of contemporary aesthetic theory: it enables us to recognize the significant political and theoretical erasures that structure recent accounts of art's democratic potential.

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