scholarly journals Appeal to the Witness. The Role of Romanian Post-Communist Witness Literature in Outlining National (Self-)Images

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-78
Author(s):  
Laura Sasu
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Social Self ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Witness Literature ◽  
The One ◽  
Similarity And Difference ◽  
National Images

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to identify and investigate the role of Romanian post-communist witness literature for contemporary historiography in outlining national and social (self-)images. This type of literature, written mostly by former political detainees, is perceived by literary criticism as a specific borderline segment partly relevant as historical documents and partly as literary texts. Applying the conceptual pattern coined by Giorgio Agamben. in his analysis based upon the national socialist concentration camp, to post-communist depositional literature reveals two focal directions of imagological relevance: on the one hand, the points of similarity and difference of totalitarian practices in creating stereotypes, cultivating the sense of absolute antagonist otherness and promoting distorted ethnic, social and national images and. on the other hand, the particular contributions and limitations posed by the post-totalitarian depositional discourse in (re)-creating national and social (self-)images.

Athena’s Way: The Jurisprudence of the Oresteia

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 253-276
Author(s):  
Desmond Manderson
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Legal Reason ◽  
Legal Decisions ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Legal Legitimacy ◽  
Transformative Process ◽  
New Interpretation

This article offers a substantial new interpretation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, one of the most important literary texts to deal with the question of the rule of law, and one of Western jurisprudence’s founding documents. Perhaps in part because of it has fallen under the shadow of Antigone, the play has tended to suffer from a reductionist reading in which legal reason triumphs over the passions. The present article rereads the text drawing on recent scholarship on Aeschylus’ work. It argues that the central figure of the Furies has been misunderstood: they are not simply expressions of violence and passion; on the contrary, they are the most legalistic of all the figures in the play. The model of judgment introduced by Athena in the resolution of Oresteia does not pit law against emotion, or feud against process, but judgment against law. The trilogy begins by presenting the uncertainty of language as law’s curse, and the certain application of the law its cure; it concludes by radically reframing the question. Now the illusory certainty of law is the curse – and the uncertainty of language its cure. Athena’s way positions legal judgment as something more than the mere following of rules. The article then goes on to show that this approach not only casts a new light on orthodox jurisprudence. It is of profound relevance to the work of Giorgio Agamben and the theory of sovereignty he has famously expounded in Homo Sacer. What ultimately separates Athena’s rule of law from mere decisionism or Agamben’s executive and unlimited sovereignty are the external constraints to which she purposely submits herself. Athena demonstrates a vision of judgment as a participatory and transformative process. Above all, she insists on the essential role of public legal argument and public accountability in a discourse of legal legitimacy, which is not simply limited to judges or particular legal decisions. On the contrary, Athena connects the rule of law to a continuing discussion of legal values and judgments which is never finally settled, and in which all of us, as citizens of Athens, are participants.

The role of stylistics in Japan: A pedagogical perspective

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masayuki Teranishi ◽  
Aiko Saito ◽  
Kiyo Sakamoto ◽  
Masako Nasu
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Teaching Method ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
English Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Efl Students

This article surveys the history of English studies and education in Japan, paying special attention to the role of literary texts and stylistics. Firstly, the role of literature and stylistics in Japan is discussed from a pedagogical point of view, including both English as a foreign language and Japanese as a native language. Secondly, the way in which stylistics has contributed to literary criticism in the country is examined, with reference to the history of literary stylistics since 1980. Finally, this article considers further applications of stylistics to language study in Japan, offering two examples: analysis of thought presentation in Yukio Mishima’s Megami (2006[1955]), and the teaching of an English poem and a Japanese haiku to Japanese EFL students. The overall aim of this article is to demonstrate that literature as language teaching material and stylistics as a critical and teaching method are significant not only in understanding English, but also in appreciating our own native language if it is not English.

Language Pangs

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilit Ferber
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Philosophical Text ◽  
Origin Of Language ◽  
Pain Expression ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

Language and pain are usually thought of as opposites, the one being about expression and communication, the other destructive, “beyond words,” and isolating. Language Pangs challenges these familiar conceptions and offers a reconsideration of the relationship between pain and language in terms of an essential interconnectedness rather than an exclusive opposition. The book’s premise is that the experience of pain cannot be probed without consideration of its inherent relation to language, and vice versa: understanding the nature of language essentially depends on an account of its relationship with pain. Language Pangs brings together discussions of philosophical as well as literary texts, an intersection especially productive in considering the phenomenology of pain and its bearing on language. The book’s first chapter presents a phenomenology of pain and its relation to language. Chapters 2 and 3 provide a close reading of Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772), which was the first modern philosophical text to bring together language and pain, establishing the cry of pain as the origin of language. Herder also raises important claims regarding the relationship between human and animal, sympathy, and the role of hearing in the experience of pain. Chapter 4 is devoted to Heidegger’s seminar (1939) on Herder’s text about language, a relatively unknown seminar that raises important claims regarding pain, expression, and hearing. Chapter 5 focuses on Sophocles’ story of Philoctetes, important to Herder’s treatise, in terms of pain, expression, sympathy, and hearing, also referring to more thinkers such as Cavell and Gide.

scholarly journals The irony as a sense of reality (on the example of the short stories of O. Konyskyi)

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 124-130
Author(s):  
Nadiia Boiko
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Dominant Feature ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
Empirical Research Methods ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual

The article deals with the analysis of the short stories by O. Konyskyi from the point of view of irony functioning in them. S. Kierkegaard compared irony to divine madness, which, like Tamerlane, did not leave a stone unturned, because “in the irony, negativity takes precedence over positivity, freedom over necessity”. In the modern literary criticism, irony is seen, on the one hand, as an aesthetic category, the characteristic feature of which is the lack of care to make the reader laugh; it is primarily a matter of marking of the author’s perception of reality (“Ironic meaning” by S. Pokhodnia). On the other hand — irony is viewed as a stylistic figure, which is based on allegory and which testifies to the potential of the individual authorial style. However, in both cases, to understand the true meaning of an ironic statement, it is necessary to have a context, which is its main semantic background. In a number of works by O. Konyskyi, irony serves as a means to express certain traits of character and behaviour of the character and is exemplified through epithets and comparisons. Less often, it becomes a means to construct the text and a plot-forming factor, as is in the story “And we are people!” The subject of the study is irony as a complex (two-tier) message, the purpose to understand the hidden content of which requires context. The object of the literary analysis is comprised of the short stories by O. Konyskyi, that have not yet been considered from this point of view. The latter fact informs the novelty of the study. The purpose of the article is to clarify the place and the role of irony in the bulk of short stories by this writer. The outlined goal determines reaching the following objectives: to trace the dynamics of the apperiance of different types of irony in the short stories by O. Konyskyi; to identity the dependence of the frequency and the form the ironic expression; to find out the influence of the author’s ironic approach on the form the work. As a result of the analysis by means of the approaches of biographical, historical-literary and empirical research methods, it was possible to find out: despite the fact that irony is not a dominant feature of O. Konyskyi’s worldview, in his short stories works with textual irony stand out.

"You're only as healthy as you fell". Scrittura e interstestualitŕ in Taxi driver di Martin Scorsese

IKON ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 295-321
Author(s):  
Franco Lonati
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Taxi Driver ◽  
Martin Scorsese ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Journal Entries

- The goal of this paper is to analyse the famous Martin Scorsese's film Taxi Driver (1975) with an interdisciplinary approach and from a double perspective: on the one hand, it examines the narrator's forms of expression chiefly focusing on the written documents, the journal entries and the autobiographical references in the movie. I also consider the way the director uses these documents in order to trace the twisted psychology of the antihero Travis Bickle, the main character in the movie, played by Robert De Niro; on the other hand, this study investigates the film from an intertextual perspective, centering on how the filmic ‘text' uses the many other ‘texts' to which it constantly alludes: literary texts (among the others, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Thomas Wolfe's God's Lonely Man), cinematic texts (for instance, Orson Welles's Citizen Kane and John Ford's The Searchers), musical texts (songs by Kris Kristofferson and Jackson Browne), or, in some cases, even facts from real life (for example, the attempted assassinations of prominent politicians), not to mention the many autobiographical clues disseminated in the film by screenwriter Paul Schrader, director Martin Scorsese and even by Robert De Niro himself, through his peculiar performance. The result is a compound structured film which makes use of sophisticated narrative and expressive modes. A film not only inspired by its sources but also able, in its turn, to influence the work of other filmmakers and, paradoxically enough, even to affect real life: it's the case of John Hinckley jr who, obsessioned by Taxi Driver, attempted to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan in an effort to impress actress Jodie Foster, who had played the role of an underage prostitute in the film. All these aspects, together with its unquestionable technical qualities, make Taxi Driver one of the most significant films of a golden age for American filmmaking.

Ovid on Reading: Reading Ovid. Reception in OvidTristiaII

1999 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 19-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The One ◽  
Ars Amatoria ◽  
As If

In this paper I propose to consider Ovid's poem as a document of literary criticism, which offers us a striking treatment of the role of the audience in reception. Ovid's concerns are twofold: on the one hand he is concerned with the ostensible manner in which his own works have been read, but he also discusses a wide range of other texts, and in doing so, offers readings of them, which, I will argue, illustrate the open-ended nature of reception and meaning.Now, undoubtedly we are sometimes too willing to label works as ‘anti-Augustan’ or ‘Augustan’, as if that was all that could be said about them; the glib use of such terms often seems to obscure more complex and more interesting questions (theAeneidand theGeorgicsare familiar examples). But with Ovid, however, such issues are at least raised by the poet himself, since the exile poems do deal with Ovid's attitude to Augustus, and the twin possibilities of writing poetry which can offend the emperor, or which can please him. Now while Ovid's famous explanation of the causes of his exile as ‘carmen et error’ (Trist.2.207) may perhaps be a smokescreen — Ovid adducing theArs Amatoriaas his fault in order not to have to go into the details of what theerrorwas that had offended Augustus —Tristia2 must still be considered on its own terms; Ovid writes as if it is possible for Augustus to be offended by his poetry, and therefore the issue is an important one.

scholarly journals METAMOTIVES OF POWERFUL DEATH IN PROSE OF GAYTO GAZDANOV

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-319
Author(s):  
E.E. Ivanov
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Violent Death ◽  
Altered State ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Continuous Sampling ◽  
Moral Transformation ◽  
Altered State Of Consciousness ◽  
The One ◽  
The Buddha

The article analyzes the role of the metamotive of violent death in the poetry poetry of Gazdanov (The Return of the Buddha, The Phantom of Alexander Wolf, The Prisoner). In this case, the motive for the murder is considered in connection with the motive of sleep as a single semantic complex, reflecting the transgression of going beyond the limits of present reality. The Oneirotop in these works not only defines the modes of the impossible (such as the elimination of reality through the narration of the ghost in “Return of the Buddha” or irrealism in “The Ghost of Alexander Wolf”), but also conveys the immanent author’s strategy of “rebirth”. In this article, the gazdanov hero’s intention to gain selfhood is first described in terms of Gurdjieff’s ideas (“man-sleeping machine”, “pluralism of consciousness”, etc.). Gazdanov's literary texts correlate with the provisions of his teaching on the moral transformation of personality. Using traditional methods of continuous sampling, motivational and typological analysis, specific features of the metamotive of violent death were revealed by G. Gazdanov in intertextual coverage. The Gazdanov hero is represented in the anthropological paradigm of F. Schiller-A. Pushkin-F. Dostoevsky, on the one hand, on the other hand, defines his place in the romantic series of “extra people” coming from Adolf Constant. The altered state of consciousness in the form of a fight against sleep, which is observed in all texts and allows us to talk about the metatextuality of the topic of murder in the writer's work, is separately noted. Through the prism of the meta-motive of violent death, a new approach is proposed to understanding G. Gazdanov’s dominant discourse of mortality, which is presented as an intention to “awakening”. The experience of transition in the context of the phantom and likeness of war and emigration totally eliminates historical reality and is assessed as anti-stabilization. At the same time, the unshakable faith of the lyrical hero in “rebirth” manifests vitalism, which turns out to be the paradoxical underside of mortality

scholarly journals SYNTAX AS AN OBJECT OF PARODY

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-51
Author(s):  
Boris Ju. Norman ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Speech Styles ◽  
Text Collections ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Communicative Effect ◽  
Linguistic Units

In the mind of the native speaker, there is an idea of the syntactic “optimum”, which allows them to use linguistic units most effectively to achieve a desired communicative effect. It contains a set of pieces of intuitive (“naïve”) knowledge about the parameters of the sentence, the organization of its structure, the rules of correspondence of lexical and grammatical meanings, etc. Deviations from this optimum can become independent objects of not only scholarly research, but also parody in a literary text. The article analyzes the problem lying on the borderline between linguistics, literary criticism and psychology: What syntactic features of the original text are enhanced or hyperbolized in parody? Analysis of numerous examples from Russian fiction allows the author to make a conclusion about the metalinguistic significance of certain features of the structure of the text. Collections of literary parodies (by A. Arkhangelsky, A. Ivanov, etc.) were subject to a special (continuous) analysis. The following syntactic phenomena were identified as the object and reason for their reflection in the parodies: a) excessive length of the sentence; b) artificial complication of its structure, specifically by means of chains of consecutive subordination, homogeneous members, abundance of epithets, etc.; c) absolutization of elements of oral, official and other speech styles, including the “telegraph style”; d) violation of the isosemy rule; e) non-realization of obligatory syntactic valency (unmotivated ellipsis); f) separation from the sentence of its part (parcellation), etc. These phenomena, used systematically, obtain a linguo-psychological characterization of salience (identifiability against the general background). As a result of the study, the author made up a list of syntactic facts that acquire the role of secondary signs in a work of fiction, along with other stylistic categories. Such a list, on the one hand, is intended to serve the convergence of scholarly (“academic”) and mass (“secondary school”) grammar, and, on the other hand, is of interest to experimental psychology, which studies the problems of perception and comprehension of the text.

Ancient Egyptian Literature

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
Ancient Egyptian ◽  
The Social ◽  
Egyptian Literature

This book reviews the numerous developments in the theoretical framework of interpretation that have taken place over recent years. The application of more theoretically informed approaches to the ancient literary corpus, and a more detailed analysis of context, form, and reception, have fundamentally challenged the interpretative paradigms that formerly held sway. No consensus on interpretative stance has yet emerged, and in this volume many of the foremost researchers in the field examine the overall state of work on the subject. The chapters in the present volume are intended to contribute to this development of different approaches in their application to real Egyptian texts. No single overarching theoretical framework underlies these contributions; instead they represent a multiplicity of perspectives. The range of chapters includes textual criticism; literary criticism; the social role of literature; reception theory; and the treatment of newly discovered literary texts. All contributions centre on the problems and potentials of studying Egyptian literature in a theoretically informed manner. Although major difficulties remain in interpreting a literature preserved only fragmentarily, this volume demonstrates the ongoing vitality of current Egyptological approaches to this problem. This volume also incorporates a broader cross-cultural and comparative element, providing overviews of connections and discontinuities with biblical, Classical, and Mesopotamian literatures, in order to address the comparative contexts of Ancient Egyptian literature.

scholarly journals "Practical Dialectics", or the Laws of History and the Sovereign Power of the Paradox

2021 ◽  
pp. 395-401
Author(s):  
И.И. Кобылин
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Soviet Power ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Dialectical Structure ◽  
Decisive Importance ◽  
The One

Статья посвящена анализу предложенного А.Л. Юргановым генезиса сталинской «практической диалектики». Отталкиваясь от полемики «механистов» и «диалектиков», Юрганов прослеживает становление такой диалектической структуры, где решающее значение имеет суверенная воля модератора. «Борьба на два фронта» – это логическая машина, которая всегда обеспечивает выигрыш тому, кто ее запускает. В статье эта «машина модерации» сопоставляется, с одной стороны, с размышлениями Карла Шмитта и Джорджо Агамбена о суверенитете и чрезвычайном положении, а с другой – с идеей Бориса Гройса о советской власти как о торжестве «медиума языка» над «медиумом денег». В финале намечается дальнейшая перспектива исследования роли этой машины в позднесоветских условиях. The article is devoted to the analysis of the conception of the genesis of Stalin's "practical dialectics" proposed by A.L. Yurganov. Starting from the polemics of "mechanists" and "dialecticians", Yurganov traces the formation of such a dialectical structure, where the sovereign will of the moderator is of decisive importance. A “fight on two fronts” is a logical machine that always wins for the one who launches it. The article compares this "moderation machine", on the one hand, with the thoughts of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben about sovereignty and a state of emergency, and on the other, with Boris Groys's idea of Soviet power as the triumph of the "medium of language" over the "medium of money." In the finale, a further perspective is outlined for researching the role of this machine in late Soviet conditions.

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