Dear John

Are 'Dear John' letters lethal weapons in the hands of men at war? Many US officers, servicemen, veterans, and civilians would say yes. Drawing on personal letters, oral histories, and psychiatric reports, as well as popular music and movies, Susan L. Carruthers shows how the armed forces and civilian society have attempted to weaponize romantic love in pursuit of martial ends, from World War II to today. Yet efforts to discipline feeling have frequently failed. And women have often borne the blame. This sweeping history of emotional life in wartime explores the interplay between letter-writing and storytelling, breakups and breakdowns, and between imploded intimacy and boosted camaraderie. Incorporating vivid personal experiences in lively and engaging prose – variously tragic, comic, and everything in between – this compelling study will change the way we think about wartime relationships.

Quality of Elementary School Trial Tests on Indonesia Language Subjects in Term of Material, Contruction, and Language Aspects

The achievement of the learning process results can be measured by the teacher by using the test as one of the benchmarks. The test is given by the teacher to students as one of the evaluation tools, in accordance with basic competencies and also indicators of achievement of learning outcomes. Thus, the teacher must really ensure that the questions or tests being tested are of high quality and can map the actual abilities of students. The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the quality of school exam questions in Indonesian subjects in terms of material, construction, and language aspects. The data used is in the form of a package of test questions (try out) for the elementary school level exams in 2020. The research method used in this research is descriptive qualitative with content analysis techniques. Based on the results of the analysis, it can be concluded that the quality of the 2019/2020 elementary school test test questions in Indonesian subjects in terms of material, construction, and language aspects still needs to be improved, especially in the language and material aspects. The language aspect in question includes spelling, punctuation, and letter writing. The language aspect in question includes spelling, punctuation, and letter writing. Then on the material aspect in terms of the suitability of each item with the indicator.Keywords: Kualitas Soal, Bahasa Indonesia.

Ironia jako dekonstrukcja umierania w Listach Witolda Wirpszy

This paper focuses on Witold Wirpsza’s Letters from the volume Second Resistance. Poems 1960–1964 (1965) and shows how irony becomes a deconstruction of dying, and at the same time of itself and of literary communication in general. The persiflage-oriented ars moriendi turns out to be a diagnosis directed against the discourses of thanatology, operating in institutions of power, medicine or religion (public letters) and family (private letters). Wirpsza designed it as a play of signs and communication noise in which meanings embedded in surface and deeper semantic levels intersect and contradict each other. This is accomplished by writing about death through epistolary, postal, philatelic tropes, concerning message, mediation and transmission. What are particularly important are the metaliterary parts, parabases intensifying the irony, which contain the vision of a postage stamp robbery as reality transformed into signs. The interpretation of the Letters reveals that the deconstructive irony makes epistolary poetry a literary event – the letter, writing that is to be stolen, killed, read by the reader in her or his own way.

Quintilian in Northern Europe during the Renaissance, 1479–1620

This chapter discusses the impact of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria in northern Europe between 1479 and 1620. It discusses the printing history of the text, which began in Italy but was largely northern European after 1520 and which peaked in the years 1520–1550, and the commentaries which were published alongside the text. It analyses the use made of Quintilian by prominent northern humanist writers of textbooks on rhetoric and letter-writing, such as Rudolph Agricola, Erasmus, Philipp Melanchthon, Juan Luis Vives, Peter Ramus, Cyprien Soarez, Gerardus Vossius, and Nicolas Caussin. It considers the use made of Quintilian’s ideas in theories of education by Sir Thomas Elyot and Erasmus and in Montaigne’s Essais.

Emotion in the Rhetorical Arts and Literary Culture c.1070–c.1400

Chapter 3 explores how style itself became an explosive field in the professional rhetorics of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, the ars dictaminis and the ars poetriae. These new pragmatics of rhetorical theory trace their roots back to the epideictic teaching of late antiquity, where the whole range of emotions is a property of style. The arts of poetry and of letter-writing have proved extremely resistant to modern theoretical probing of their affective and aesthetic principles, because they stress the technical dimension of composition. But they also see rhetoric as a performance-oriented enterprise, and for them the obvious resource for generating strong emotion lies in style. This apotheosis of style is the most durable medieval tradition of teaching how to respond affectively to texts and to write affectively oneself. It manifests itself with joyful zeal in all quarters, from lowly classroom poetry and exemplary anthologies to Petrarch’s commanding high style and Chaucer’s parodies of emotive style.