Hamlet – A Never-Ending Story

This article fuses a survey of the play’s most important standard interpretations with those aspects which may be considered particularly fascinating about this text: the conflict of England’s catholic past with the rise of protestant culture in the early modern period; the meta-dramatic dimension of the play; the theatricality of Renaissance court life; the play’s reflection of the emerging modern subject triggered off by the rise of reformation discourse. To elucidate some aspects which tend to be overlooked in the scholarly discussion of Hamlet, the article will bring two important topics into focus: the courtly discovery of perspective and the dying Hamlet’s request to tell his story to the afterworld at the end of the play.

Introduction

This chapter situates the book within the development of an increasingly ‘global’ conceptualization of the Middle Ages, and links this conceptualization to a rising desire to reckon with the discipline’s colonialist, nationalist, and racist legacies. Tracing this development’s main stages and debates, the chapter explores the centrality of interconnectedness and cultural exchange as motifs in the study of the global Middle Age. Through negotiating debates in the field of world literature, the chapter argues for the efficacy of the term ‘world medievalism’ rather than ‘global medievalism’, not just because world medievalism shares the inclusive ethical project of world literature, but also because it enables us to formulate medievalism itself as ‘world-disclosing’—a transhistorical encounter that enables the modern subject to apprehend the past ‘world’ opened up in medieval and medievalist texts and objects. This chapter addresses the strengths and drawbacks of viewing non-European spaces through the lens of medievalism.

Bigger Than Life

In Bigger Than Life Mary Ann Doane examines how the scalar operations of cinema, especially those of the close-up, disturb and reconfigure the spectator's sense of place, space, and orientation. Doane traces the history of scalar transformations from early cinema to the contemporary use of digital technology. In the early years of cinema, audiences regarded the monumental close-up, particularly of the face, as grotesque and often horrifying, even as it sought to expose a character's interiority through its magnification of detail and expression. Today, large-scale technologies such as IMAX and surround sound strive to dissolve the cinematic frame and invade the spectator's space, “immersing” them in image and sound. The notion of immersion, Doane contends, is symptomatic of a crisis of location in technologically mediated space and a reconceptualization of position, scale, and distance. In this way, cinematic scale and its modes of spatialization and despatialization have shaped the modern subject, interpolating them into the incessant expansion of commodification.

The role of world literature in the formation of students' planetary thinking

The article is devoted to the issues of teaching world literature in secondary schools in the context of modern challenges in the world and the main aspects of education brought by these challenges. Here, the importance of world literature in the formation of students' planetary thinking in the teaching process is analyzed. The progressive role of these examples in the formation of students' logical, critical and creative thinking, teaching selected examples from world literature, the formation of cognitive and communication skills is emphasized. The study notes that the formation of national and human ideas, the development of personality in students is one of the main requirements of modern subject programs. The establishment of parallels between national and world literature is of great scientific and methodological importance in order to achieve such goals as the formation of a planetary image of the growing generation, the inculcation of ideas and ideas about the unity of the world.

Przymus przemiany. Serial „Hannibal” jako krytyka kultury terapeutycznej

The article is an analysis of the Hannibal series (2013–2015) made by Bryan Fuller with reference to therapeutic culture. Hannibal is presented as a manifestation of the critique of contemporary culture, which focuses on the relationship of subject and power in therapeutic culture in Western liberal societies. The main thread that has been analysed is the relationship between the main characters: Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter. The article presents the origin of therapeutic culture and the category of “psychological man” (P. Rieff). The relationship between Will and Hannibal is not a meta-image of contemporary therapeutic culture in general, but its dark face. The series shows the culture of therapy brought to its limits, where norms are not so much exceeded, but subverting. Hannibal Lecter is presented as the “ideal self” of liberal societies, an entity free from cultural norms in an absolute way. Will is opposed to him. His personality does not allow classification, just as a modern subject does not want to be classified, because it would mean pinning him to one place and making it impossible for him to develop. An important problem in the article is “coercion of change”. The “right to change” legitimised by the liberal system changes into “coercion of change” in the series. The requirement of “full life” means that standing in a place is something undesirable, live in a real way is to experience of something new, to change — even if it means a transformation into a murderer. In the end it is argued that “being yourself” is an effect of power in therapeutic culture.

Creating spaces... Inclusive communities and individual (in)visibility

On May 17-21, 2021 at the Christian boarding school in Darmstadt (the Federal Republic of Germany), the International Week “Creating Spaces... Inclusive Societies and Individual (In)Visibility” was held, which is described in this article. The focus of the international week included the trajectories of the life of a modern subject in the face of the challenges of our time.

COVID-19 as archetype rather than event: Thinking COVID-19 in the light of Eliade’s ‘terror of history’

For Eliade, linear time constitutes the metaphysical substrate of modernity. Consequently, the modern subject experiences time as an irreversible series of events occurring within an absolutised history. It is this subject that ‘makes’ that history. By extension, this time, and the history it valorises, cannot be transcended. This sets up the modern view against a premodern one where temporality is seen in multiple ways, allowing history to be transcended by archetypes. Eliade mourns the alternative ways of being and meaning cultivated by the premodern self that have been lost to hegemonic modernity and its associated, often precarious, subjectivity. He believes that these archetypal modes need to be recovered to counter the damage caused by modernity’s desire to ‘make history’. I reflect on this Eliadean thesis in the light of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis, drawing on an example from the Islamic tradition to show what an archetypal, rather than event-centred, approach to the crisis might look like. Specifically, I examine the thoughts of British Muslim theologian, Abdal Hakim Murad, on COVID-19, who reflects on the phenomenon both in the light of the archetypal Islamic concept of the divine names and the event-centred capitalism of late modernity.Contribution: Through an examination of Eliade’s important text, the article continues the decolonial interrogation of modernity’s foundations and its implications for being and acting in the world as distinct from premodern approaches. By highlighting time in both approaches, Eliade shows modernity’s foundations to be just as ‘theological’ as those of religion.

Telluric Recollection: On the Disappearance of History in Deep Time

Since the turn of the millennium, the humanities have been progressively forced to come to terms with the materiality of a warming world, in particular the entanglement of natural environments with technical infrastructures that lies at the heart of anthropgenic environmental change, and its implications for the hithertofore seemingly impentetrable ontological wall of separation between natural and human history. In an effort to address the concomitant insufficiency of remaning solely at the discursive level, one such attempt has been to reorient the interpretative concerns of the humanities by submerging the modern subject into geological registers of deep time. This paper cautions that along with such a reorientation, however, any sense of a limit – such as a hermeneutical horizon belonging to human history – thereby disappears into the fundamental depthlessness of deep time, and the subject suddenly vanishes from the center of the global environmental drama. Ironically so, since the purported novelty of the globalization of technology is precisely the manner in which it highlights the anthropogenic dimension of global environmental change, and thus the deep time consequences of human action.

DUGME: POETIKA SIMBOLIČKE MINIJATURE U DNEVNIKU O ČARNOJEVIĆU MILOŠA CRNjANSKOG I HAMLETU VILIJAMA ŠEKSPIRA

The paper analyzes the narrative and symbolic values of the button in Miloš Crnjanski’s novel The Journal of Čarnojević. In the perturbation that occurs when the hero, during the meeting with his beloved, angrily but inadvertently tears the buttons off her dress, traces of the gap that will determine their marital relationship can be recognized. The button that falls and exposes the girl is a sign of overstepping and destabilization of the ontological union of two beings. This destabilization – the rudeness of the hero, the agitation, the withdrawal and fall of the woman – is determined by the self-challenging forces of the subject itself. The crisis as a state of the modern subject in Crnjanski’s novel is viewed against the relationship between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ophelia. The button in Shakespeare’s dramatic literature, a sign of disruption of order and of the negation of action, is a sign of theatricality and dissembling; the unbuttoned Hamlet seduces Ophelia, and others through her, painting a coldness falling quite short of the lyricism of Crnjanski. In fact, it seems that only against this tense lyricism can Hamlet be made ready to be read as a lyrical misinterpretation of arid theatrical coldness. The lyrical force of modernity in Crnjanski’s novel transforms the torn off buttons into marks of nightmarish existences, upheavals of old ideas and concepts, the dismantling of the categories of subject, identity, history, metaphysics, language. A symbolic miniature, a button is a scene on which an entire poetics presents itself.