scholarly journals Literary Geography and Cultural Translation

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 256-261
Author(s):  
Eva-Nicoleta Burduşel
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Translation ◽  
Literary Geography

Josephus

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. D. Elledge
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Translation ◽  
Hellenistic Philosophy

The only early Jewish author to have written a surviving description of what his contemporaries believed about the afterlife was Josephus, yet his testimonies about the afterlife are complex historical, literary, and apologetic descriptions. They cannot be immediately corroborated by contemporary writings; nor should they be exclusively categorized as a purely Hellenizing literary construction that had no relationship to actual Jewish eschatological beliefs. To understand his testimonies to the afterlife, it is ultimately necessary to address how Josephus wrote about the afterlife. This chapter argues that his treatment of the afterlife can be reasonably explained as an apologetic cultural translation that made use of established doxographic and ethnographic techniques. His descriptions of the afterlife are, thus, an important window into his own compositional methods. In translating Jewish eschatological hopes into the categories of Hellenistic philosophy, Josephus also anticipates the strategies of later Christian apologists.

scholarly journals Levantinizing the Balkans: Outlines for a Literary Geography of Encounters

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-82
Author(s):  
Guido Snel
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Spatial Mapping ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Literary Geography ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Etel Adnan

AbstractThe debate on the ‘where’ of the Balkans seem to be stuck between national paradigms and a nostalgia for cosmopolitanism. This essay explores an alternative spatial mapping of the region, opening it up to the wider Eastern-Mediterranean, in particular the fuzzy and contested notion of the Levant. First, it looks into various instances of ‘the Levant’ and ‘the Levantine,’ ranging from Turkish and Greek to Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian examples – with a particular focus on the latter. Secondly, by then ‘levantinizing’ the Balkans, in an explicit analogy to Édouard Glissant’s understanding of ‘creolization’ in the Caribbean, it attempts to draw the outlines of a geography of encounters. Finally, it offers a sample of what such a geography might look like and what its literary-historical repercussions might be, bringing together the work of Semezdin Mehmedinović and Etel Adnan.

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