scholarly journals The Importance of Visual Reading for the Interpretation of a Literary Text

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 31-49
Author(s):  
Janja Batič ◽  
Dragica Haramija

In this paper, the two authors showcase the results of a research survey on the role of illustrations in the interpretation of literary texts. The survey sample included students of primary education and preschool education, who were given the poem Učenjak (Scholar) by Niko Grafenauer and asked to answer questions regarding the character’s personality and appearance, the literary space, and other factors. The first group of interviewees was given the poem illustrated by Lidija Osterc and the other the same poem illustrated by Marjan Manček. The results showed that the illustration had a significant impact on the message conveyed by the poem, particularly when the illustrator added the context by representing the character’s environment (which was not explicitly given in the text). Furthermore, the results showed the need for the comprehensive reading of an illustrated text, given that it is the interaction between the verbal and the visual that provides vital information necessary for the reader to understand the message of the dedicated literary work. 

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adia Mendelson-Maoz

This article discusses the role of analogy within the ethics of reading. It examines how Israeli literature uses analogies when reflecting on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Many literary texts that depict the Israeli–Palestinian conflict draw analogies between the Israeli Jewish people and the Palestinians, between specific individuals on both sides, or between historical traumas. These analogies are designed to bridge gaps and encourage empathetic reading. This article challenges this role of analogy by arguing that analogies may in fact paint an erroneous picture of symmetrical relations, strengthen victimhood that denies responsibility, and can often lead to “empty empathy.” Analogies may also create a willfully deceptive understanding of the other, while actually maintaining a narcissistic superior stance. Based on philosophical notions put forward by Emmanuel Levinas, this article suggests a different path to ethical understanding in which the literary text, while still enabling analogy, uses other rhetorical devices to create relationships that suspend it and reveal its imposture.


Author(s):  
Adham Mousa Obeidat ◽  
Tengku Sepora Tengku Mahadi

Since the goal of translation is to bridge the gap between two cultures, translators need to pay attention to literary works. Here lies the importance of good translation to convey cultural messages. The mistranslation of cultural concepts in a literary text may cause misunderstanding of this culture by the TL readers. Therefore, to produce a well-translated literary work, translators need to investigate the expressions that relate to culture such as religious beliefs. The vital role of cultural collocations in a language requires translators to apply effective translation strategies. Domestication and foreignization are two important strategies in translating cultural collocations in a literary text. The authors of this study have applied these strategies to investigate whether religious-cultural collocations in a literary text are domesticated or foreignized. The sentences that have religious-cultural collocations are chosen from an Arabic novel. The collocations are analyzed along with two versions of translation, then the English translations are compared. As a result of the discussion, the two translators tend to apply the domestication strategy more frequently. It is found that since religious-cultural collocations are difficult to be understood by the target language readers, the translators tend to reduce their strangeness and domesticate them.


2003 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boldizsár Fejérvári

It is a common fashion in literary criticism, or 'Lit Crit,' to treat reality, human behaviour, communication, and everything else as though they were 'texts to be read.' This paper proposes to go the other way: it interprets literature (or, more precisely, one literary text, Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) as a part of reality in which several other layers of the real combine, such as linguistics, science, or other literary texts, most notably Hamlet. While Edward II is not generally considered a direct source for Stoppard's play, this paper shows how, in the wider perspective of 'interreality,' Marlowe's tragedy might interact with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. At the same time it is proved that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, contrary to the critical conception of many, is not a parasitic work 'feeding off' Elizabethan playwrights, but a play that enters a symbiotic relationship with its host (as defined by Hillis Miller).


2018 ◽  
Vol 167 ◽  
pp. 375-383
Author(s):  
Valentyna Gerasymchuk

Existence and nonexistence of death in the semantic picture of reality and artistic text on the material of romans Leonid Leonov Road to the Ocean and Maxim Gorkogo The Life of Klim SamginIn this article the problem of death is unfolding in the semantic space of its ontological and existential conception in reality and a literary text. On the one hand, death as the concept of being is presented as its continuation, spiritual content, confirmation. On the other hand, death as a concept of non-being is considered as nothingness, rejection of being and its spiritual content.In reality the concept of death becomes an issue of the questionary and transcendental philosophy, that takes place in the physical time and metaphysical space of thought and expression. When the matter concerns the death of human being, his death acquires an ontological status of being, a status of spiritual significance. In the contrary case, it is possible to consider death and even life in terms of the concepts of being and nothingness. In literary texts the concept of death is also considered to be being or non-being, but taking into account constitutive characteristics of the text, its figurative and notional polysemant, the concept of death acquires not only aesthetic but also conceptual focus. In the article the main points of the topic of death, its being and non-being, are illustrated on the examples of specific literary texts. Буття і небуття смерті в смисловій картині реальності і художньому текстіПроблема смерті у статті розгортається в смисловому просторі онтологічного і екзистенціалістського її розуміння в реальності і в художньому тексті. З одного боку, смерть — поняття буття — постає як його продовження, його духовна наповненість, його стверждення. З другого — смерть — поняття небуття — розглядається як ніщо, як заперечення буття і його духовної наповненості.У реальності поняття смерті стає проблемою запитальної, трансцендентальної філософії, що розгортається у фізичному часі і метафізичному просторі думки і слова. І якщо йдеться про смерть буттюючої особистості, то і її смерть набуває онтологічного статусу, статусу духовної значущості, інакше можна говорити про смерть і навіть життя у поняттях небуття і ніщо. У художніх текстах поняття смерті також розглядається як буття і небуття, проте з урахуванням конститутивних особливостей тексту, його образної і смислової багатозначності, образ смерті набуває, крім онтологічної, ще й естетичну спрямованість.


2019 ◽  
pp. 28-30
Author(s):  
Galina Aleksandrovna Sokolova

The article deals with the connection of time and space in literary text. It gives some definitions of the time-space concept, the chronotope; it presents different points of view of Russian linguists about the leading role of the chronotope components; it also lists the main ways of detecting the chronotope in literary work; it defines some features and characteristics of time and space in the chronotope.


Author(s):  
Ilit Ferber

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Anastasiia O. Drozdova

The highlighting of Nabokov’s interpretational strategies in other literary texts is a relevant problem for Russian and European Nabokov studies. The goal of the article is to scrutinize the methods of reduction of a poetic text used by Nabokov in his early essay Vladislav Khodasevich. Collected Verse. The approach developed by receptive poetics allows author to describe Nabokov’s practices of reading and writing as an experience of creative game with literature of his contemporaries and predecessors. The narrative analysis is productive to characterize the point of view, to highlight the role of narrator in the structure of Nabokov's essay and his own literary work and the techniques for the transformation of Khodasevich’s poems into the prose. There are different methods of literary text reduction in Nabokov’s essay: creation of meta-plot not immanent in the original poems; selective sampling of literary contexts common for both authors; ignoring of artistic issue of ethics of beauty important for V. Khodasevich. For Nabokov, the reduction and transfer of his own techniques into the space of Khodasevich’s text is a way of approbation of patterns of artistic reality in texts of the poet, which conceptualizes the problem of boundaries of artistic talent, important for Nabokov himself.


2020 ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Maria A. Elizarieva ◽  
Marina A. Chigasheva ◽  
Boris Blahak ◽  
Maria Yu. Mikhina

The article is devoted to the role of intertext in public speeches of politicians of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria within the framework of the “political ash Wednesday”. On the example of the speeches of M. Söder, A. Scheuer and M. Blume in 2018, the relationship between the type of intertext and its pretext, on the one hand, and the speaker’s intention, on the other, was analyzed. As a result of the analysis of 23 intertextual inclusions, four intentions were revealed, among which (48 %) criticism of political opponents (SDPG, “The Greens”, AfD, “Free Voters”) prevails. Quotes from representatives of these parties, political slogans, a paraphrase of the name of the eco-movement and a quote from an artist are used to express it. As the intertextual analysis showed, to verbalize the second intention (appeal to authoritative opinion and emphasize the continuity of the party course), the former chairman of the CSU F. J. Strauss is cited, while the third intention (opposing Bavaria to the rest of Germany) is implemented using a quote from the Bavarian anthem, a paraphrase of a television commercial and quotations from a literary work. In addition, the authors found that the fourth intention (emphasizing the dialogic nature of communication with ordinary people) is found only in M. Söder’s speech in the form of a retelling of his dialogues with ordinary citizens.


2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 1259-1273
Author(s):  
Fedja Borčak

In this article I put forward the concept of subversive infantilisation to designate a phenomenon in contemporary Bosnian literature, which by using a certain kind of childish outlook on the world undermines paternalistic and balkanist Western discourse on Bosnia and Herzegovina. By analysing primarily the portrayal of the role of mass media in a few literary texts, principally books by Nenad Veličkovié and Miljenko Jergovié, I highlight the way in which these texts “re-rig” and by means of irony and exaggeration illuminate the problematic logic inherent in the subject position from which one represents the other. Textual characteristics of subversive infantilisation are contextualised further and seen as a discursive continuation of experiences of the 1990s war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.


Neophilology ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 385-392
Author(s):  
Yuee Guan

We consider the problems of composing a literary text based on the material of texts by B.A. Uspenskiy. It is proved that as a compositional possibility in the formation of a work can be elicit one or many points of view from which the narration in the literary work is conducted on the concept of “polyphonic collegiality”, in the other words, it finds expression both “internal” (with respect to the work) and “external” points of view on how the point of view of collegiality in the text is understood and determined. Collegiality is one of the main characteristics of the Russian national spirit, which has a telling Impact not only on the creative thoughts of Russian writers, but also on the thinking of Russian theorists in the construction of literary theories. It is justified that the poetics of B.A. Uspenskiy's composition is a continuation and development of M.M. Bakhtin's theory, that M.M. Bakhtin's polyphony is only one of the components in the relation of various points of view in ideological terms. According to B.A. Uspenskiy, the composition of literary text is a multidimensional spatial “free and organic unity”, consisting of multifaceted points of view, possessing both their relative independence and interconnected among themselves.


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