Love Motifs in Prudentius

By analysing three paradigmatic passages, this paper explores how Prudentius uses classical love motifs and imagery not only to lambast paganism, but also as a powerful rhetorical tool to convey his Christian message. The ‘fire of love’ imagery is conspicuous in Psychomachia 53–57, which wittily blends Christian and erotic language. In an entirely different context (C. Symm. 2.1071–1085), the flamma amoris is also fully exploited to depict lustful young Vestal Virgins, in combination with other classical metaphors of passion, such as the ‘wound of love’ and the signa amoris. Additionally, the contrast between heat and cold is a central element in the description of the Vestals’ tardy nuptials, redolent of classical satirical portraits of vetulae libidinosae. Finally, in Hamartigenia 628–636 the relationship between the soul and God draws from a Christian tradition of bridal (and coital) representation, but the lapse into sin is portrayed as the love triangle, typical of the Latin love elegy. These examples illustrate how Prudentius creatively and consciously frames love and sex imagery in new contexts, exploring their potential and infusing clichés with new meanings and forms.

Gender Trouble / Genre Trouble – Cecilie Løveids Østerrike

Although Cecilie Løveid is one of Norway’s most important contemporary dramatists, she is not generally considered part of mainstream theater. In fact, she has positioned herself against it by her writing of feminist and performative theater texts since her debut in the 1980s. In her play Østerrike, which is inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s Brand and by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s diary of his stay in Norway, the audience is introduced to a love triangle. Ludwig, his fiancée Agnes and his former boyfriend David are entangeled in a queer love drama causing constant gender trouble. In this article, I will analyze how Løveid combines this gender discourse with a metatextual genre discourse. The play ends with a “beautiful scene”, which disrupts all existing categories of gender and genre. This scene in particular illustrates that Østerrike can be interpreted as a critical commentary on the Ibsen-tradition that determines Løveid’s outsider position.

«Вечный муж» и традиция мениппеи

The article examines the motif structure of the main characters in Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband against the background of menippea and its various genres. The parodic transformations of the images and motifs of Dostoevsky's previous texts, especially the novel The Idiot, modify the traditional love triangle of the short story. The relationship between the protagonist and the antagonist reflects the ambivalence of the archetypal scheme “king vs jester” and the way it appears in Hugo’s romantic drama Le Roi s’amuse and Verdi’s opera Rigoletto. The plot of revenge and vindication of trampled dignity dates back to the genre of medieval mock mystery (R. Jakobson) and its narrative of the Easter resurrection, posing the problem of Christianity and its values in the Russian society of the time.

An Analysis of Edgar Linton’s Psyche Based on Archetypes Theory

Wuthering Heights is one of the most significant realistic novels in British literature, primarily depicting the tragic love story of Catherine and Heathcliff. Nevertheless, involved in the love triangle, Edgar Linton receives much less attention from the researchers. In an attempt to further unravel the characteristics of Edgar Linton, this paper, in conjunction with Carl Jung’s archetypes theory, interprets Edgar’s psyche by analyzing his persona, anima, and shadow through qualitative analysis. The result shows a strong relevance of these three archetypes that are closely related to his childhood experiences. The joint influence of the archetypes forms typical features of his psyche that affects not only him but also his social networks and his soft personality is a good approach to alleviating the heaviness of this work and forming a sharp contrast with Catherine and Heathcliff.

Contemplating Law, Film and Mennonites

In this article, I put Carlos Reygadas’ prize-winning art film, Stellet Licht, to use for Law and Film purposes. Stellet Licht (or Silent Light) is the first film made in the medieval German/Prussian dialect, Plautdietsch (or Low German), and filmed in an Old Order (very conservative) Mennonite colony in Mexico. Viewers of Stellet Licht must be prepared to be contemplative because the film often eschews dialogue or action in favour of contemplation. This fictitious film invites us to contemplate a heterosexual love triangle and provides a novel site for thinking about how law and patriarchy can unconsciously work in our lives. When we do the contemplative work invited by the film, we not only see law differently, but we can also imagine miraculous reconciliation between people.

German Packaging for Russian Novel: on the Problem of the Genre of the “Fiery Angel” by V. Bryusov

The article is devoted to the problem of the genre of V. Bryusov’s novel “The Fiery Angel”. The purpose of the article is to assert that the author uses the tradition of the medieval German novel in a stylized capacity. Bryusov needs the method of literary mystification not so much to hide relationships of real people who served as prototypes for the heroes of the novel, but to establish an allusive cultural connection between Germany in the era of M. Luther and the “Silver Age” of Russian literature, with its interest in issues of religion and gender. The relevance of the study dictated by the attention of the modern reader to the literature of the “Silver Age”, as well as a special interest in metamorphoses that the novel genre undergoes in the era of modernism and postmodernism. The research materials are the text of the novel, biographical information related to the personalities of prototypes, reviews of literary criticism, as well as literary studies. We use descriptive, hermeneutic, synchronic, diachronic, historical-genetic, comparative, analytical and biographical methods in this work. The results of the study and their discussion consist in reflection on the paradigm in defining the genre of the novel, in pointing out the tradition of literary mystification, which rises to the “Belkin’s Tales” by A. Pushkin. Also important is the circumstances that the religious searches inherent in the prototypes of the heroes of the novel are akin to Protestant moods of the Reformation. As a result, we conclude that the author, because of the anthropological unity of the archetypal situation, continued the literary tradition of the German Middle Ages. It is laid down in the basis of the plots of both V. Bryusov’s novel and the first part of “Faust” by I.W. Goethe, as well as A. Belyi’s novel “Petersburg”, in which the love triangle invariant and its transformation from prototypes to characters is represented by the same mechanism as is characteristic of the “Fiery Angel”. The assertion of this way of implementing a behavioral scheme (anthropological invariant) in the process of transforming prototypes into characters is the innovation of our work.

Ian McEwan Celebrates Shakespeare

The aim of this article is to analyse Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, published in September 2016, as a modern rewriting of Hamlet in relation to the usual issues and themes previously tackled by the author throughout his narrative. The novel focuses on the love triangle involving Claude [Claudius], Trudy [Gertrude] and John Cairncross [King Hamlet] and narrates how the lovers plot the murder of the husband from the unusual perspective of a proto-Hamlet in the womb. Despite the fact that he is rewriting a Shakespearean work, the author remains faithful to his style and favourite topics, displaying the function of the family as destructive rather than constructive, conditioning the later development of the children and rendering them devoid of the affection needed. Similarly, Nutshell also depicts his recurrent configuration of mothers as authoritative and destructive, especially for the natural growth of their offspring.

Semantic of color in the poetics of Vladimir Mayakovsky

This article analyzes the use of color in the poetic works of Vladimir Mayakovsky as a symbolic actualization of the most important aspects of both the reality surrounding the poet and the world of his inner experienceshe authors note that the poet's choice of a particular color palette in his literary works is often determined by a number of objective and subjective factors: personal sensual love experiences, including complicated and fairly long relationships within the love triangle "Lilya Brik - Osip Brik - Vladimir Mayakovsky"; events of the early twentieth century, rapidly replacing each other, in which not only Russia, but the whole world were immersed (World War I, revolution, civil war in Russia, new economic policy, etc.). And, although the poet constantly mentions in his works about the rich color palette of the surrounding world, including thousands of colors, the authors of the article substantiate the position that in reality Vladimir Mayakovsky uses a rather limited number of colors and shades (the most popular with him are gold, red, black and white).

Interpretation and Characterization in Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot

This chapter looks at how Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe adapt T. H. White’s The Once and Future King in both original 1960 Broadway stage production and the 1967 Hollywood film adaptation. Specifically, this chapter looks at how the musical Camelot interprets White’s version of Arthurian legend, tracking the changes Lerner and Loewe made and especially how song affects characterization. Drawing on archival research completed at the Library of Congress, this chapter examines the process of adapting this long unwieldy myth into a musical. Although Loewe did not work on the 1967 film, Lerner wrote the screenplay. Since the film version remains fixed and widely available, it is worth investigating how the changes made to it further adapt the tale. Since Lerner and Loewe chose to focus on the love triangle between Arthur, Guenevere, and Lancelot, this chapter pays particular attention to how Lerner and Loewe alter their characters.

Love Triangle in August Strindberg’s ‘The Stronger’ and G.B. Shaw’s Candida

Love triangle, or eternal triangle, has been the focus of many plays where the plot revolves around a three-sided affair in which the woman becomes a site of love competition between two males, the husband and the lover. The majority of those plays present the woman as the erring wife who chooses either to be with the lover or remorsefully remain with the husband. In this paper, we deal with another portrayal of love triangle in which the wife either defends her marriage or stands against the intruder. Such a portrayal is identified in August Strindberg’s ‘The Stronger’ and G.B. Shaw’s Candida. Yet, this does not suggest that the plot in both plays is identical. While the intruder in Strindberg’s play is a woman, it is a young poet in Shaw’s play. Moreover, whereas Shaw’s play ends with the intruder’s departure opening the space for the husband and wife to continue their marriage on a new basis of understanding, the conflict remains unresolved in Strindberg’s play. This paper argues that this contrastive portrayal of love triangle in both plays relies, to a great extent, on the playwright’s personal experience and also his notion of the woman and her role in the domestic and public spheres. Key words: love triangle, Strindberg, Shaw, ‘The Stronger’, Candida. الملخص لقد كان موضوع مثلث الحب أو المثلث الأبدي مركزيا في الكثير من المسرحيات التي تناولت الحبكة فيها علاقة ثلاثية تصبح المرأة فيها مسرحا لصراع الحب بين رجلين هما الزوج و العاشق. و في الأعم الأغلب من هذه المسرحيات أنها قد قدمت المرأة رمزا للزوجة الخطاءة التي تختار أما الرحيل مع العاشق أو البقاء نادمة مع زوجها. في هذا البحث نتعامل مع عرض جديد لموضوع مثلث الحب والذي تقوم الزوجة فيه أما بالدفاع عن زواجها أو الوقوف بوجه الشخص الدخيل. وهكذا نوع من العروض يمكن تشخيصها في مسرحيتي "الأقوى" لأوغست سترندبيرغ و كانديدا لبرناردشو. ان هذا التقارب في موضوع المسرحيتين لايعني بأن الحبكة فيهما متطابقة. فبينما يكون الشخص الدخيل امرأة في مسرحية سترندبيرغ، فأنه يصبح شاعرا يافعا في مسرحية برناردشو. بالاضافة لذلك، بينما تنتهي مسرحية برنادشو برحيل الدخيل فاسحا المجال للزوجين بأكمال زواجهم بفهم جديد للعلاقة بينهما، يبقى الصراع قائما في مسرحية سترندبيرغ. و تبين الورقة البحثية أن هذا التقديم المتناقض لموضوع مثلث الحب في كلا المسرحيتين يعتمد بدرجة كبيرة على تجربة الكاتب المسرحي نفسه و كذلك رأيه بالمرأة و دورها على المستويين المنزلي و العام.