scholarly journals Book Review: Celebrating Life Customs around the World: From Baby Showers to Funerals

2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Chloe E. Bragg

Victoria Williams is a freelance writer and editor with a PhD focused on European fairy tales and folklore. She has edited a variety of ABC-CLIO reference works on folklore-related topics, ranging from sports and games to human sacrifice. Celebrating Life Customs around the World: From Baby Showers to Funerals is the most recent of Williams’ works. The three-volume set consists of more than three hundred entries on rituals and customs related to specific life stages. The entries in this set are organized first by life stage, then alphabetically. The first volume focuses on birth and childhood, the second on adolescence and early adulthood, and the third on aging and death. Each entry ends with internal cross-references and further reading and includes inset color photographs, selected bibliography, and comprehensive index.

Author(s):  
O.V. Kozhevnikova

The article sets out a problem aimed at determining the structure of personal maturity in the period of early adulthood. The theoretical study revealed a lack of unanimity in terms of interpreting and conceptualizing the concept of personal maturity and defining its structural and content elements. The empirical study involved humanitarian students from the first to the third courses (females (103) and males (22) aged 17-20 years). As a result of the exploratory factor analysis procedures, an integrative variable of personal maturity has been calculated which is considered as a set of cognitive (self-understanding, positive thinking), emotional (self-sympathy) and behavioral characteristics (autonomy, sociability). The personality of a mature subject in the period of early adulthood can be described as distinguished by an optimistic view of the world and a deep understanding of his or her identity combined with positive emotions and self-attitude and the ability to maintain personal boundaries even creating close relationships with others. The considered algorithm for calculating the integral variable can be applied in studies aimed at studying latent psychological phenomena.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (6) ◽  
pp. 1895-1898
Author(s):  
Ana Stišović Milovanović

Literature and literary theory at the end of the Second and the beginning of the Third millennium were challenging many issues. The dichotomy of modern and postmodern poetics has led to certain wanderings. Postmodern literature dealt with the question of the relation between the author and the text, but on the logic of inner opposites. The relationship of reality and text has been transformed into the construction of the world, and the text is often only a modified architect. The construction of a story becomes more important than the story itself. The author's intentions lead to radical discontinuity with earlier known ways and narrative models. The postmodern code minimizes the possibility of the distinction between structural elements of the work. Wittgenstein therefore spoke about the impossibility of improving theoretical thoughts on literature. It is interesting that Umberto Eco was trying to reintegrate the characteristics that determined value systems in the entire literary history and gave safe grounds for theoretical considerations of the literary text. Eco starts from the idea that the code is the basic unit of meaning, which carries the system of rules, "whether it is essential, generally valid, conclusive or historical, transient or superficial." Calvino also thinks in this discourse. Italo Calvino is a postmodern writer, but in his work there is a peculiarity, which makes it a true code keeper. This is first seen in the construction of a work as a system, which can be independent of reality, but does not deviate from solid, almost geometric forms, symmetry, combinatorics, proportions. In the essays of Italo Calvino, the author of "innovative imagination", there is a corpus of texts about authors who are interested in the problem of language, themes and forms in literature. Calvino writes about Gustave Flaubert, Raymond Queneau, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges. This selection of writers is paradigmatic, since Calvino recognizes them as the authors of the encyclopedic type. The encyclopaedic openness of the work is, for Calvino, in fact a multitude of codes and levels, which are translated from one time to another, from one poetics to the next. Selected authors are the guards of the heritage of literary history and the entire discourse of written words, but are also the foothold for all future authors. Calvino believes that these writers are the foundation of the "library of the third millenium" because they combine imaginatively and intellectually. For Italo Calvino, "in the infinite universe of literature, the paths of research are always open, whether old or new," because literature is a "search for self-consciousness". In this search, the most important issues of language, theme and form. In the language code, Calvino returns simplicity to myths and fairy tales, in order to avoid linguistic arbitrariness and loss of language expressiveness. Borges also insisting on the importance of language and myth as the fundamental phenomenon of total literary creation. In preserving the code, Calvino believes that literature must fight the authenticity, the recognition of individual and collective heritage, by multiplying internal consent. These are the ways in which anonymous and abstract pictures of the world can be overcome, offered by literature from the postmodern wanderings. Calvino says it is necessary to preserve, in the "library of the third millennium", a rich legacy of imaginative knowledge, in which literature will be the activity of an intellectual order. This library is proof of the necessity of continuity in literature, which ensures the quality of literary work, but also theoretical thoughts about it.


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