scholarly journals ‘In the manner of Cavafy’: The example of the poet from Alexandria

Literator ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Phil Van Schalkwyk

The Greek poet C.P. Cavafy (1863–1933) is held in high esteem around the world by readers and authors alike. He had influenced not only some of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, but due to the fact that his work lends itself particularly well to translation, he is also a relatively strong presence in literatures other than Greek and English. For many – most notably gay readers, authors and artists – Cavafy holds an exemplary status both in terms of literature and life. W.H. Auden has argued that, what ultimately distinguishes Cavafy, is his tone of voice which reveals a person with a unique perspective on the world. Within the context of a research project on idiolectic author identity, this contribution attempts to review the distinguishing features of Cavafy’s work in terms of both form and content. This is done within the framework of the broad critical discourse on Cavafy, and with reference to some manifestations or examples of a Dutch and Afrikaans critical and creative perspective on his poetry, with the aim to shed specific light on the special kind of wisdom communicated in Cavafy’s work.

2001 ◽  
pp. 85-90
Author(s):  
O. V. Kozerod

The development of the Jewish religious movement "Khabad" and its organizations in the first quarter of the twentieth century - one of the important research problems, which is still practically not considered in the domestic Judaica. At the same time, this problem is relevant in connection with the fact that the religious movement "Khabad" during the twentieth century became the most widespread and influential area of Judaism in Ukraine and throughout the world.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Squires

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.


Author(s):  
O. O. Gubka

The features of unmanned rocket and space engineering´s development in the USSR and in the world in the first half of the XX century were considered in the article. They defined subsequent formation of scientific and technical schools in the rocket and space industry.


Author(s):  
Seva Gunitsky

Over the past century, democracy spread around the world in turbulent bursts of change, sweeping across national borders in dramatic cascades of revolution and reform. This book offers a new global-oriented explanation for this wavelike spread and retreat—not only of democracy but also of its twentieth-century rivals, fascism, and communism. The book argues that waves of regime change are driven by the aftermath of cataclysmic disruptions to the international system. These hegemonic shocks, marked by the sudden rise and fall of great powers, have been essential and often-neglected drivers of domestic transformations. Though rare and fleeting, they not only repeatedly alter the global hierarchy of powerful states but also create unique and powerful opportunities for sweeping national reforms—by triggering military impositions, swiftly changing the incentives of domestic actors, or transforming the basis of political legitimacy itself. As a result, the evolution of modern regimes cannot be fully understood without examining the consequences of clashes between great powers, which repeatedly—and often unsuccessfully—sought to cajole, inspire, and intimidate other states into joining their camps.


Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-45
Author(s):  
Mariya Sedunova ◽  
Liliya Konovalova

International potential and consequent greater competition in belt wrestling increase the significance of assessing quantitative and qualitative indicators of competitive activity of the strongest wrestlers in the world. It is important to identify the sport development trends and to search for effective ways and tools for achievement of the sport excellence. Purpose: to reveal the features of efficient competitive activities of the world leading wrestlers on the basis of analysis of group differences in technical and tactical excellence indicators. Materials and methods of research. We analyzed videos of 285 events with participation of 197 wrestlers competing at the Belt Wrestling World Championship 2019 in Kazan. We registered the following indicators of competitive activity: the total and average number of fighting techniques, including techniques executed to the right and to the left side within 4 minutes of combat; number and types of technical actions of competition winners among men and women. Research results and discussion. The paper focuses on the comparative analysis of technical and tactical skills of men and women, the winners of the Belt Wrestling World Championship. The research revealed distinguishing features of the winner’s technical toolkit including the diversity of technical and tactical actions, a balance in the knowledge of the right and left-handed techniques. At the same time, the analysis of technical and tactical actions in women wrestling shows the backlog of female athletes in these components of technical fitness.


Author(s):  
John Carman ◽  
Patricia Carman

What is—or makes a place—a ‘historic battlefield’? From one perspective the answer is a simple one—it is a place where large numbers of people came together in an organized manner to fight one another at some point in the past. But from another perspective it is far more difficult to identify. Quite why any such location is a place of battle—rather than any other kind of event—and why it is especially historic is more difficult to identify. This book sets out an answer to the question of what a historic battlefield is in the modern imagination, drawing upon examples from prehistory to the twentieth century. Considering battlefields through a series of different lenses, treating battles as events in the past and battlefields as places in the present, the book exposes the complexity of the concept of historic battlefield and how it forms part of a Western understanding of the world. Taking its lead from new developments in battlefield study—especially archaeological approaches—the book establishes a link to and a means by which these new approaches can contribute to more radical thinking about war and conflict, especially to Critical Military and Critical Security Studies. The book goes beyond the study of battles as separate and unique events to consider what they mean to us and why we need them to have particular characteristics. It will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, and students of modern war in all its forms.


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