scholarly journals Hidden Ekphrasis in the Works of Miroslav Krleža

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-133
Author(s):  
Nataša Lah

Throughout the entire literary oeuvre of Miroslav Krleža we are faced with a great number of credible descriptions, describing real historic events, or real artists and artworks belonging to the rich resources of European art history. By applying a cryptographic method of incorporating descriptions into his texts, Krleža on the one hand hid his sources, while on the other also revealed them. He hid them in the tissue of fictional texts, and unmasked them using a key work only those familiar with the source could identify. We term this method the use of “belletristic cryptograms”, and can further categorise it into thematic subgroups of concealed artwork descriptions, naming this whole method the use of hidden ekphrasis. The choice of artworks Krleža describes in his work is comprehensive, diverse and each described differently. Since we are dealing with literary texts, descriptions are often used in the function of a wide array of interpretative strategies of depiction; in some aspects, they are used as a mere glimpse into a piece of art with the goal of visually associating, evoking or minutely symbolizing the incorporeal frame of an artist’s mind or of the wider social context. In other aspects, the artworks are richly and meticulously presented with regard to their importance and credibility as they, according to Krleža, possess an “ethical intelligence” and “ethical conscience”. Only Krleža’s prose is researched here, and this is done on two levels. We take a look at examples where real art is incorporated into fictional texts in order to determine the significance and meaning of a certain dialogue, mise-en-scène or situation. This is most commonly found in the author’s plays, novels and novellas. On the other hand, we can trace a completely opposite method by which artworks enter these texts, where, due to their historic determination and already established worth/status, they thus re-enter reality, as seen from the perspective of Krleža’s life and work, so as to yet again test art history’s credibility through the matrix of contemporaneity. This approach is most often found in Krleža’s essays, critiques and diary entries.

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-133
Author(s):  
Nataša Lah

Throughout the entire literary oeuvre of Miroslav Krleža we are faced with a great number of credible descriptions, describing real historic events, or real artists and artworks belonging to the rich resources of European art history. By applying a cryptographic method of incorporating descriptions into his texts, Krleža on the one hand hid his sources, while on the other also revealed them. He hid them in the tissue of fictional texts, and unmasked them using a key work only those familiar with the source could identify. We term this method the use of “belletristic cryptograms”, and can further categorise it into thematic subgroups of concealed artwork descriptions, naming this whole method the use of hidden ekphrasis. The choice of artworks Krleža describes in his work is comprehensive, diverse and each described differently. Since we are dealing with literary texts, descriptions are often used in the function of a wide array of interpretative strategies of depiction; in some aspects, they are used as a mere glimpse into a piece of art with the goal of visually associating, evoking or minutely symbolizing the incorporeal frame of an artist’s mind or of the wider social context. In other aspects, the artworks are richly and meticulously presented with regard to their importance and credibility as they, according to Krleža, possess an “ethical intelligence” and “ethical conscience”. Only Krleža’s prose is researched here, and this is done on two levels. We take a look at examples where real art is incorporated into fictional texts in order to determine the significance and meaning of a certain dialogue, mise-en-scène or situation. This is most commonly found in the author’s plays, novels and novellas. On the other hand, we can trace a completely opposite method by which artworks enter these texts, where, due to their historic determination and already established worth/status, they thus re-enter reality, as seen from the perspective of Krleža’s life and work, so as to yet again test art history’s credibility through the matrix of contemporaneity. This approach is most often found in Krleža’s essays, critiques and diary entries.


Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Epongse Nkealah ◽  
Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji

Ideas of nationalisms as masculine projects dominate literary texts by African male writers. The texts mirror the ways in which gender differentiation sanctions nationalist discourses and in turn how nationalist discourses reinforce gender hierarchies. This article draws on theoretical insights from the work of Anne McClintock and Elleke Boehmer to analyse two plays: Zintgraff and the Battle of Mankon by Bole Butake and Gilbert Doho and Hard Choice by Sunnie Ododo. The article argues that women are represented in these two plays as having an ambiguous relationship to nationalism. On the one hand, women are seen actively changing the face of politics in their societies, but on the other hand, the means by which they do so reduces them to stereotypes of their gender.


Author(s):  
Touré Bassamanan

This paper highlights the different layers of meaning that characterize the notion of manhood in Gaines’ fiction. The quest for manhood represents an imperative for the frustrated men in the framework of the social context wherein they are emasculated. Here, manhood should be grasped through a binary paradigm. On the one hand, the expression of manhood equates with male domination and violence. On the other hand, due to social expectations, manhood refers to the struggle for freedom. It undermines the white racial superiority and it claims blacks’ humanity. Manhood fosters humanistic principles. Thus, it takes on a universal dimension.


KronoScope ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-167 ◽  
Author(s):  

AbstractThe structure of mathematics, as revealed by the exploration of axiomatic systems, bears striking similarities to the structure of nature, as revealed by the hierarchical theory of time. It is assumed that this isomorphism is not accidental but reflects the evolutionary development of the human capacity of handling numbers. This assumption permits a conjecture. Namely, if mathematics is found to possess certain systematic uncertainties, than nature must also possess corresponding qualities which may be identified. The paper proposes that the theme of the conference, "time and uncertainty," be understood in this broad context. I would like to demonstrate the existence of certain striking similarities between the structure and properties of mathematics on the one hand and, on the other hand, the structures and processes of nature at large, as revealed by the hierarchical theory of time. Then, using these correspondences, I propose a framework that promises to provide a unified perspective for the rich program we have ahead.


2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (47) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stiegler Bernard

Stiegler argued in Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (the third volume of Technics and Time) that we must refer to archi-cinema just as Derrida spoke of archi-writing. In this article he proposes that in principle the dream is the primordial form of this archi-cinema. The archi-cinema of consciousness, of which dreams would be the matrix as archi-cinema of the unconscious, is the projection resulting from the play between what Husserl called, on the one hand, primary and secondary retentions, and what Stiegler, on the other hand, calls tertiary retentions, which are the hypomnesic traces (that is, the mnemo-technical traces) of conscious and unconscious life. There is archi-cinema to the extent that for any noetic act – for example, in an act of perception – consciousness projects its object. This projection is a montage, of which tertiary (hypomnesic) retentions form the fabric, as well as constituting both the supports and the cutting room. This indicates that archi-cinema has a history, a history conditioned by the history of tertiary retentions. It also means that there is an organology of dreams.


2016 ◽  
Vol 110 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
DENNIS C. RASMUSSEN

This article explores Adam Smith's attitude toward economic inequality, as distinct from the problem of poverty, and argues that he regarded it as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, as has often been recognized, Smith saw a high degree of economic inequality as an inevitable result of a flourishing commercial society, and he considered a certain amount of such inequality to be positively useful as a means of encouraging productivity and bolstering political stability. On the other hand, it has seldom been noticed that Smith also expressed deep worries about some of the other effects of extreme economic inequality—worries that are, moreover, interestingly different from those that dominate contemporary discourse. In Smith's view, extreme economic inequality leads people to sympathize more fully and readily with the rich than the poor, and this distortion in our sympathies in turn undermines both morality and happiness.


2004 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 87-113
Author(s):  
Marta Ungermanová

This paper describes the syntactic properties of three types of locative complements in Czech that are compatible with verbs of movement. The distinction between these complements (each with its own interpretation) is made in the first place on the basis of several formal criteria (in particular, involving the rich Czech morphology), and, in addition, on semantic criteria. It is examined whether there exists sufficient correspondence between these criteria, and in particular, to what extent they can satisfactorily classify locative complements into essential and circumstantial ones. It is shown that there is no clear-cut distinction between these two categories of locative complements with Czech movement verbs. Furthermore, the syntactic role of the locative complements is shown to depend mainly on the verb, but also on other elements of the sentence. Finally, on the basis of several examples, it is argued that, on the one hand, the form of the complement does not predict its syntactic role and interpretation and, on the other hand, that two different forms can share the same syntactic role and interpretation.


Literator ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hendrik Van Coller

It had already been stated that Siegfried Schmidt (in Hjort 1992) discerned four ‘roles’ within the Literary System, that of literary production, dissemination, reception and literary processing. According to this definition, T.T. Cloete, the well-known author and critic, had played all of these roles. In this second part of a two-part article the focus is on Cloete as a literary historian and in particular on his theoretical (methodological) perceptions pertaining to literary history. It is abundantly clear that in all of his different roles a historical awareness was always present. For Cloete the literary work of art was inbedded in a historical timeframe which imposed hermeneutical imperatives on the critic; on the other hand the literary work of art is present in the here and now and accessible to any skilled reader. One of the objectives of this study is to argue that there was thus an implied dichotomy in Cloete’s thinking on literary history. On the one hand there had been a relativistic view that positioned literary texts in the past, and on the other hand a normative view that implied that certain texts (due to inherent qualities like integration and complexity) could gain a certain permanence. In the last part of this article-true to the narrative approach, an implied confrontation with Cloete’s (methodological) views of literary history lead to a personal standpoint as a confrontation with the self (cf. Sools 2009:27). This explication of a personal view on the writing of a literary history (as an implied homage to Cloete) concluded the article.


2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Tapati Guha–Thakurta

The essay narrates the biography of a single art object—acclaimed in recent history as a “masterpiece” of ancient Indian sculpture—to invoke the larger spectrum of practices and discourses that came to constitute the field of art history in modern India. It explores the shifting locations and aesthetic trajectories that marked the transformation of this artifact from a curious archaeological “antiquity” into a national “art-treasure” and icon of Indian femininity, and later even into “a travelling emissary of ancient Indian art and culture.” On the one hand, the spectrum of travels of this object provides an ideal instance for mapping over the twentieth century the changing colonial, national and international stature of Indian art. On the other hand, its career also pointedly reveals the clash of contending claims and the politics of “return” and “restitution” that have attended the nationalization and artistic consecration of many such objects.


Author(s):  
Johnny Kondrup

AbstractThe paper investigates Gérard Genette’s concept ‘peritext’ in relation to the concepts ‘text’ and ‘work’. It is obvious that Genette regards both text and work (which he tends to mix up) as immaterial entities and conceives the peritext as their way into the material world. The peritext forms a path between the text, considered as a series of linguistic signs, and the physical document, which is the book.Certain peritexts are indeed material (such as the format of the book and its typography). But other peritexts are linguistic, i. e. texts, and as such immaterial (e. g. the preface and the colophon). This ambiguity might be avoided if the term ‘peritext’ was confined to the linguistic ones and the material peritexts were labeled ‘materiality’.Also, Genette’s notion of ‘work’ is ambiguous. On the one hand, he describes a work as synonymous with a text, and on the other hand, he confines the term to a certain class of (literary) texts. None of the notions is in accordance with his argumentation, underneath which lies implicitly the idea of the work as a ‘polytext’.Finally, the paper discusses which peritexts can be regarded as belonging to the whole work, and which belong only to a certain version of the work or to a specific copy (document).


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