scholarly journals The Uncanny and the Unspoken Element of Speech in Kazantzakis and Terzakis

Author(s):  
A. Alexopoulou

This study investigates the theme of Uncanny in the Modern Greek roman of the 20th century and in particular in Terzakis’ Secret life and Kazantzakis’ Christ Recrucifi ed. The unspoken element of speech is a common component of the romans and a structural element of their poetics to the extent that it refl ects the divided consciousness of the characters. The encounter with the erotic Other becomes the occasion for the subjective division to emerge, to the point where the only escape is death drive. The cancellation of the love aff air brings the characters in confrontation with the diametrically opposed poles of their own subjectivity, the impulse of death on the one hand and life on the other. The depersonalisation of speech and the phenomena of xenopathy appear as a consequence of the extinction of the subject. Their doppelgängers emerge as a response to their desperate desire, up to the point where they eventually crush their living existence.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Gekle

The history of mental development on the one and the history of his writings on the other hand form the two separate but essentially intertwined strands of an archeology of Ernst Bloch´s thought undertaken in this book. Bloch as a philosopher is peculiar in that his initial access to thought rose from the depths of early, painful experience. To give expression to this experience, he not only needed to develop new categories, but first and foremost had to find words for it: the experience of the uncanny and the abysmal, of which he tells in Spuren, is on the level of philosophical theory juxtaposed by the “Dunkel des gerade gelebten Augenblicks” (darkness of the moment just lived) and his discovery of a “Noch-nicht-Bewusstes” (not-yet-conscious), thus metaphysically undermining the classical Oedipus complex in the succession of Freud. In this book, psyche, work and the history of the 20th century appear concentrated in Ernst Bloch the philosopher and contemporary witness, who paid tribute to these supra-individual powers in his work as much as he hoped to transgress them.


2020 ◽  
pp. 89-112
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Kabacińska-Łuczak ◽  
Monika Nawrot-Borowska

The aim of this study is the reconstruction of children’s toys received by them during the Christmas period in the second half of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century. In its subject matter, the article refers, on the one hand, to the deliberations about Christmas toys and, on the other hand, it is part of the ever-growing trend of research on children’s toys from the historical and pedagogical perspective. The text is part of the triptych prepared by the authors on the subject of children’s Christmas toys during the period of Partitions of Poland. Selected iconographic sources – press graphics, Christmas postcards and photographs on which children’s toys can be found, comprise the source basis of this part. They are sources important for cognitive reasons, because they show the image of toys of the time, their appearance, shape, size, the way they were made, decorated, etc. They also indicate which toys were particularly popular (fashionable) and liked by children in the analysed period, and show the ways they were used.


KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tibor Földes

The semantic structure of demonstrative and indexical linguistic signs encodes the subject’s ties to reality. These are statements that one can understand without knowing the spatial and temporal coordinates of the subject or the object, or any of their descriptive content. These challenging semantic features make them the target of 20th century language philosophy. On the one hand, the classical notion of meaning becomes untenable because it packs into one single entity the concepts of cognitive value, proposition, and propositional attitude. On the other hand, indexes play a part in the Kripke-Putnam turn that disrupts the unity of imaginability, modality and meaning.


2020 ◽  

Is technological control taking the place of what appeared uncannily uncontrollable? Or is it itself becoming uncanny? Two seemingly contradictory narratives have shaped the history and theory of technology. The narrative of disenchantment describes how nature, experienced as something foreign and dangerous, was tamed by becoming scientific and mechanised. Secondly, the narrative of (re-)enchantment recounts how artefacts and technological possibilities become uncanny, especially by way of their seeming independence and by confronting us with an ‘autonomous’ logic of their own. In today's debates about self-learning, ubiquitous, invisible and opaque technologies, the uncanny moment resonates of a technology with ‘a life of its own’. Following up on the mechanisation and automation discourses of the 20th century, this contributes to the ‘demonisation’ of technology. On the one hand, technology makes the world familiar and comprehensible, e.g. by equating understanding with technical reconstruction. On the other hand, the technical reproduction of the world – or its radical transformation into an alienated one – is experienced as something disturbing. When artefacts appear to do ‘what they want’ or when large technical systems shape the world according to their ‘own logic’, a limit is reached that was already mentioned by Freud – we become uncertain whether we are still living in the modern world at all.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothea E. Schulz

Starting with the controversial esoteric employment of audio recordings by followers of the charismatic Muslim preacher Sharif Haidara in Mali, the article explores the dynamics emerging at the interface of different technologies and techniques employed by those engaging the realm of the Divine. I focus attention on the “border zone” between, on the one hand, techniques for appropriating scriptures based on long-standing religious conventions, and, on the other, audio recording technologies, whose adoption not yet established authoritative and standardized forms of practice, thereby generating insecurities and becoming the subject of heated debate. I argue that “recyclage” aptly describes the dynamics of this “border zone” because it captures the ways conventional techniques of accessing the Divine are reassessed and reemployed, by integrating new materials and rituals. Historically, appropriations of the Qur’an for esoteric purposes have been widespread in Muslim West Africa. These esoteric appropriations are at the basis of the considerable continuities, overlaps and crossovers, between scripture-related esoteric practices on one side, and the treatment by Sharif Haidara’s followers of audio taped sermons as vessels of his spiritual power, on the other.


Author(s):  
Iryna Rusnak

The author of the article analyses the problem of the female emancipation in the little-known feuilleton “Amazonia: A Very Inept Story” (1924) by Mykola Chirsky. The author determines the genre affiliation of the work and examines its compositional structure. Three parts are distinguished in the architectonics of associative feuilleton: associative conception; deployment of a “small” topic; conclusion. The author of the article clarifies the role of intertextual elements and the method of constantly switching the tone from serious to comic to reveal the thematic direction of the work. Mykola Chirsky’s interest in the problem of female emancipation is corresponded to the general mood of the era. The subject of ridicule in provocative feuilleton is the woman’s radical metamorphoses, since repulsive manifestations of emancipation becomes commonplace. At the same time, the writer shows respect for the woman, appreciates her femininity, internal and external beauty, personality. He associates the positive in women with the functions of a faithful wife, a caring mother, and a skilled housewife. In feuilleton, the writer does not bypass the problem of the modern man role in a family, but analyses the value and moral and ethical guidelines of his character. The husband’s bad habits receive a caricatured interpretation in the strange behaviour of relatives. On the one hand, the writer does not perceive the extremes brought by female emancipation, and on the other, he mercilessly criticises the male “virtues” of contemporaries far from the standard. The artistic heritage of Mykola Chirsky remains little studied. The urgent task of modern literary studies is the introduction of Mykola Chirsky’s unknown works into the scientific circulation and their thorough scientific understanding.


Author(s):  
Daiva Milinkevičiūtė

The Age of Enlightenment is defined as the period when the universal ideas of progress, deism, humanism, naturalism and others were materialized and became a golden age for freemasons. It is wrong to assume that old and conservative Christian ideas were rejected. Conversely, freemasons put them into new general shapes and expressed them with the help of symbols in their daily routine. Symbols of freemasons had close ties with the past and gave them, on the one hand, a visible instrument, such as rituals and ideas to sense the transcendental, and on the other, intense gnostic aspirations. Freemasons put in a great amount of effort to improve themselves and to create their identity with the help of myths and symbols. It traces its origins to the biblical builders of King Solomon’s Temple, the posterity of the Templar Knights, and associations of the medieval craft guilds, which were also symbolical and became their link not only to each other but also to the secular world. In this work we analysed codified masonic symbols used in their rituals. The subject of our research is the universal Masonic idea and its aspects through the symbols in the daily life of the freemasons in Vilnius. Thanks to freemasons’ signets, we could find continuity, reception, and transformation of universal masonic ideas in the Lithuanian freemasonry and national characteristics of lodges. Taking everything into account, our article shows how the universal idea of freemasonry spread among Lithuanian freemasonry, and which forms and meanings it incorporated in its symbols. The objective of this research is to find a universal Masonic idea throughout their visual and oral symbols and see its impact on the daily life of the masons in Vilnius. Keywords: Freemasonry, Bible, lodge, symbols, rituals, freemasons’ signets.


Proceedings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Shan Zhang

By applying the concept of natural science to the study of music, on the one hand, we can understand the structure of music macroscopically, on the other, we can reflect on the history of music to a certain extent. Throughout the history of western music, from the classical period to the 20th century, music seems to have gone from order to disorder, but it is still orderly if analyzed carefully. Using the concept of complex information systems can give a good answer in the essence.


2018 ◽  
Vol 134 (4) ◽  
pp. 1154-1176
Author(s):  
Alice Bodoc ◽  
Mihaela Gheorghe

Abstract The present paper aims to present an inventory of Romanian middle contructions (se‑verbal constructions), and to extend the analysis to other structures (with or without se) that were not previously investigated, but exhibit the same characteristics, and seem to allow middle reading (adjunct middles). Since Jespersen (1927), middles were attested cross-linguistically, and the focus on middles is justified if we consider the fact that this is an interesting testing ground for theories of syntax, semantics and their interaction (Fagan 1992). Starting from Grahek’s definition (2008, 44), in this paper, middles are a heterogeneous class of constructions that share formal properties of both active and passive structures: on the one hand, they have active verb forms, but, on the other hand, like passives, they have understood subjects and normally display promoted objects. The corpus analysis will focus on the particular contexts in which the middle reading is triggered: i) the adverbial modification; ii) the modal/procedural interpretation of the event; iii) the responsibility of the subject; iv) the arbitrary interpretation of the implicit argument which follows from the generic interpretation (Steinbach 2002).


1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. J. McNair

Between the execution of Gerolamo Savonarola at Florence in May 1498 and the execution of Giordano Bruno at Rome in February 1600, western Christendom was convulsed by the protestant reformation, and the subject of this paper is the effect that that revolution had on the Italy that nourished and martyred those two unique yet representative men: unique in the power and complexity of their personalities, representative because the one sums up the medieval world with all its strengths and weaknesses while the other heralds the questing and questioning modern world in which we live.


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