From „neither this nor that” to „a stereoscopic and stereophonic attitude to the world”: writers’ attitude to bilingualism

Tekstualia ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (46) ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
Olga Kubińska
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Eva Hoffman ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
Sociology Of Translation ◽  
Intellectual Capacity ◽  
Popular Language ◽  
Adequate Evidence

The article examines the problem of bilingualism from a diachronic perspective in the context of the contribution of current cultural theories (gender, postcolonial) to the perception of multilingualism in contemporary culture. A distinct issue in this research is compulsory bilingualism caused by the Holocaust and involuntary resettlement processes resulting from political harassment. The article also emphasizes the import of cultural anthropology, cognitive sciences and the sociology of translation into the redefi nition of the very notion of bilingualism and the infl uence of this phenomenon on such remote from literature spheres as therapy. Refl ection on bilingualism is largely dependent on the intellectual capacity of the bilingual authors conducting self-analysis. The cases of Eva Hoffman and Anna Wierzbicka provide more than adequate evidence which signifi cantly complements the testimony of philosophers, such as trilingual George Steiner, and bilingual writers, such as Conrad, Nabokov or Brodsky. Finally, it should be added that globalization favors bilingualism among authors but often also provides the rationale for choosing a less popular language as a means of expression.

scholarly journals Urban Gothic and the Sphinx Factor: Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-135
Author(s):  
Zhang Tian
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Human Factor ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
City Culture

Saul Bellow, as a cerebral, analytical, and philosophical writer, unflinchingly describes the world and gives the readers tremendous thoughts about life and society. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 for his human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture. In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow shows the readers a death-burdened, rotting, spoiled, sullied, exasperating, sinful earth. This insane world is full of droll mortality and morbid entertainments. The coexistence of rationality and bestiality in man is vividly displayed in this novel. In his Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism, Professor Nie Zhenzhao formulated the theory of the Sphinx factor as composed of the human factor and the animal factor, and the combination of the two makes an integrated man. The animal factor in the novel is fully demonstrated in the black pickpocket’s bestiality, Mr. Sammler’s voyeurism, the Holocaust, killings and thefts. However, the human factor is not so salient as the animal factor in this novel. I argue that the tension between the two factors not only intensifies the conflicts but shows how the author perceives the world. Bellow shows a strong contempt for the world. A pessimistic and critical outlook is conveyed in Bellow’s understanding of cities, represented by Chicago and New York. Robbery, cheating, speculation, beauty, money and lust construct a corrupted panorama of industrial cities. This is one of the reasons why Bellow highlights the animal factor more than the human factor. He seeks to criticize the American city from different perspectives of city culture, including the corruption of the bureaucracy, vices in public transport, changes in the urban landscape, competition between the pursuit of art and the pursuit of money.

scholarly journals „An der schönen blauen Donau…” Obraz rzezi nowosadzkiej we współczesnej literaturze serbskiej

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miłosz Bukwalt
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Individual Psychology ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
Danilo Kis ◽  
Novi Sad ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Direct Threat ◽  
Research Tools

An der schönen blauen Donau… Depictions of the Novi Sad massacre in contemporary Serbian literatureThe tragic events in Novi Sad in January 1942 constitute an important subject in the prose of Aleksandar Tišma (Knjiga o Blamu [The Book of Blam]), Erih Koš (Novosadski pokolj [Novi Sad Massacre]), and Danilo Kiš (Psalm 44 and Peščanik [Hourglass]). Jewish-Serbian writers were not left disinterested by the fact of the Shoah of fellow Jews or by the violent deaths of their Slavic neighbours. The above-mentioned, formally very diverse works belong to the corpus of Serbian novels about the Holocaust, which are a testament to the crime and which render individual deaths meaningful. Novels about the Novi Sad massacre reveal the psychological motivation of the instigators and direct perpetrators of the crime, shed light upon the logistics and the mechanics of death, and constitute a record of the victims’ reactions in the situation of a direct threat to their lives, and also the world of mental nightmares tormenting the survivors. Finally, and most importantly, they are an artistic tribute to all the identified and anonymous victims of the Hungarian repressive and exterminatory operation.The above-outlined issues were examined using the notions and research tools of psychopathology, individual psychology, humanistic psychiatry, thanatology, suicidology, victimology, and cultural anthropology. An der schönen blauen Donau… Obraz rzezi nowosadzkiej we współczesnej literaturze serbskiejTragiczne wydarzenia nowosadzkie ze stycznia 1942 roku stanowią ważny temat utworów prozatorskich Aleksandra Tišmy (Księga Blama), Ericha Koša (Rzeź nowosadzka) oraz Danila Kiša (Psalm 44, Klepsydra). Pisarze serbscy narodowości żydowskiej nie pozostali obojętni wobec faktu zagłady swych współplemieńców oraz śmierci ich słowiańskich sąsiadów. Wspomniane utwory współtworzą korpus serbskich powieści o tematyce holocaustowej, które zaświadczają o zbrodni i nadają sens jednostkowej śmierci. Powieści o masakrze nowosadzkiej ujawniają motywację psychologiczną zleceniodawców i bezpośrednich wykonawców zbrodni, ukazują logistykę oraz sposoby zadawania śmierci, stanowią zapis reakcji skazańców w sytuacji bezpośredniego zagrożenia życia oraz świat koszmarów psychicznych osób ocalałych. Ponadto, co niezwykle istotne, są artystycznym hołdem złożonym zidentyfikowanym oraz anonimowym ofiarom węgierskiej akcji represyjno-likwidacyjnej.Do zbadania zasygnalizowanych powyżej zagadnień wykorzystano w niniejszym artykule pojęcia i narzędzia badawcze z zakresu psychopatologii, psychologii indywidualnej, psychiatrii humanistycznej, tanatologii, suicydologii, wiktymologii oraz antropologii kulturowej.

For a translational sociology: Illuminating translation in society, theory and research

2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102110021
Author(s):  
Esperança Bielsa
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Sociological Perspective ◽  
Cultural Globalization ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
The World ◽  
Sociology Of Translation ◽  
Basic Social Process

This article argues for a non-reductive approach to translation as a basic social process that shapes both the world that sociologists study and the sociological endeavour itself. It starts by referring to accounts from the sociology of translation and translation studies, which have problematized simplistic views of processes of cultural globalization. From this point of view, translation can offer an approach to contemporary interconnectedness that escapes from both methodological nationalism and what can be designated as the monolingual vision, providing substantive perspectives on the proliferation of contact zones or borderlands in a diversity of domains. The article centrally argues for a sociological perspective that examines not just the circulation of meaning but translation as a process of linguistic transformation that is necessarily embodied in words. Only if this more material aspect of translation is attended to can the nature of translation as an ordinary social process be fully grasped and its intervention in meaning-making activities explored. This has far-ranging implications for any reflexive account of the production of sociological works and interpretations.

The Pale Death: Poison Gas and German Racial Exceptionalism, 1915–1945

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-296
Author(s):  
Peter Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Defense ◽  
German Society ◽  
Chemical Weapons ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Fritz Haber

AbstractIn April of 1915, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber supervised the first deployment of industrialized chemical weapons against French colonial troops. The uncertain nature of the attack, both in its execution and outcome, led many German military men to question the controllability of poison gas. Over the next three decades, Germans would continue this line of inquiry, as aero-chemical attacks appeared increasingly imminent. This article narrates the German search for control over chemical weapons between the world wars, revealing the ways in which interwar techno-nationalists tied the mastery of poison gas to ethno-racial definitions of Germanness. Under the Nazis, leaders in civilian aero-chemical defense picked up this interwar thread and promoted a dangerous embrace of gas that would supposedly cull the technically superior Germans from other lesser races. Although this vision of a chemically saturated world did not suffuse German society, such logic did play out in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

scholarly journals On Becoming a Non-Jewish Holocaust Writer: Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Rachel F. Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
Family Level ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Origins

To appraise Martel’s non-Jewish perspective of Holocaust thematic, it is important to assess it in the context of the Jewish relations with the Holocaust. Even though the Jewish claim to the uniqueness of the Holocaust has been disputed since the end of the war especially in Eastern Europe, the Jewish response determined to a large extent the reception of the disaster on the global scene. On a family level, the children of survivors have identified themselves as the legitimate heirs of the unknowable experience of their parents. On a collective level, the decree of Jewish annihilation constructed a Jewish identity that imposed an obligation to keep the Holocaust memory in the consciousness of the world. Martel proposes to supersede the history of the Holocaust with a story which would downplay the Jewish filiation with the Holocaust, elicit an affiliative response to the event of the non-Jewish writer and consequently integrate it into the memory of humanity at large. However, the Holocaust theme of Beatrice and Virgil refuses to assimilate within the general memory of humanity; rather, the consciousness of the event, which pervades the post-Holocaust world, insists on its constant presence. The omnipresence of the Holocaust blurs the distinctions between the filiative (Jewish) and affiliative (non-Jewish) attitudes toward the Jewish tragedy, gripping the writer in its transcendent horror. Disregarding his ethnic or religious origins, the Holocaust takes over the writer’s personal life and determines his story.

Constructive realism: In defense of the objective reality of perspectives

Human Affairs ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roman Madzia
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
William James ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
Constructive Realism ◽  
Neural Processes ◽  
The World ◽  
Epistemological Position ◽  
Epistemological Realism

AbstractThe paper proposes an outline of a reconciliatory approach to the perennial controversy between epistemological realism and anti-realism (constructionism). My main conceptual source in explaining this view is the philosophy of pragmatism, more specifically, the epistemological theories of George H. Mead, John Dewey, and also William James’ radical empiricism. First, the paper analyzes the pragmatic treatment of the goal-directedness of action, especially with regard to Mead’s notion of attitudes, and relates it to certain contemporary epistemological theories provided by the cognitive sciences (Maturana, Rizzolatti, Clark). Against this background, the paper presents a philosophical as well as empirical justification of why we should interpret the environment and its objects in terms of possibilities for action. In Mead’s view, the objects and events of our world emerge within stable patterns of organism-environment interactions, which he called “perspectives”. According to pragmatism as well as the aforementioned cognitive scientists, perception and other cognitive processes include not only neural processes in our heads but also the world itself. Elaborating on Mead’s concept of perspectives, the paper argues in favor of the epistemological position called “constructive realism.”

scholarly journals Evaluation of error correction in writing process

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-51
Author(s):  
Cuong Phu Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Error Correction ◽  
Positive Attitude ◽  
Writing Process ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
English Writing ◽  
The World ◽  
Popular Language ◽  
Giving Feedback

It is obvious that English has become a popular language in many countries in the world. As a means of communication, English guarantees better mutual understanding and has become indispensable for most of people around the world. Thus, it is necessary to find out an appropriate and effective methods of giving feedback to help university students improve their English writing skills. The result of this study indicates that using indirect coded feedback in error correction help students make noticeable progress. The students’ positive attitude towards teacher’s feedback (indirect coded feedback) means that they enjoyed using error codes to find and correct their errors. Moreover, their confidence was boosted because error codes motivated them.

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