Hybride Temporalitäten

When the astronomical clock of the Strasbourg Cathedral was inaugurated in 1574, Nicodemus Frischlin, humanist and professor of poetics in Tübingen, responded to this monumental, ‘time-defining event’ with a didactic poem – in Latin, and profoundly informed by the great models of Classical Antiquity – in which he embedded the stages of human life in an encompassing horizon of both secular and religious temporality. With his ‘carmen’, Frischlin aimed to complement the ambitious technological construction with an equally ambitious literary account, gradually tracing the building’s multiple and hybrid conceptions and semantics of ‘time’ in versified description. This article examines how Frischlin’s didactic poetry organizes knowledge of anthropological, historical, and eschatological times; moreover, illuminating the motifs of the moon disc, the ‘Lebensalterautomat’, and the mechanical figure of Death, it sheds light on the emulating adaptation of Classical tradition (Lucretius; Ovid). Frischlin portrays the Strasbourg clock as a technological masterpiece without equal in Classical Antiquity.

FORMATION OF GRAMMATICAL COMPETENCE OF FUTURE PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHERS BY MEANS OF INTERESTING LINGUISTICS

The questions of formation of grammatical competence as a component of an individual’s linguistic competence have been considered, the essence of the definition of “grammatical competence” has been analyzed and author’s comprehension of this notion has been suggested. The structural components of grammatical competence (grammatical knowledge, grammatical skills and abilities and grammatical awareness) have been singled out. It has been emphasized that the study of grammatical system of a language requires logical operations, such as scientific information analysis, ability to compare, relate and summarize the linguistic facts and deduce certain regularities. The possibilities of the subject “Formation of primary school students’ language personality by means of interesting Linguistics” in the process of formation of students’ grammatical competence in the context of linguistic subjects cycle have been outlined. Special attention has been paid to the application of interesting Linguistics elements while teaching students notional and categorical apparatus. It has been suggested to take into account the interpretation of linguistic terms by linguists, consider and correspond the modern ones with their equivalents in the old Grammar books. It has been proved that the definition of the term “Grammar” has been narrowed down diachronically. There have been outlined the other methods and techniques applied to form student’s grammatical competence (revealing linguistic notions etymology, using linguistic aphorisms, Comparative Historical Linguistics elements, didactic poetry, linguistic fairytales, entertaining tasks, exercises, jokes, learning projects) that contribute to enlargement of future teachers’ scientific perspective and their professional level growth.

2. Love poetry

'Love poetry' examines Ovid’s ventures into the sub-genre of love-elegy and describes the development of this exclusively Roman literary form over the previous two generations, and the conventions that Ovid had inherited. Ovid wrote three books on the subject of love, these are Amores (Loves), Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) and Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love), a meeting of love-elegy and the popular ancient tradition of didactic poetry. The Amores was the collection that launched Ovid’s poetic career, and it set the terms for the rest of it, marking him out as the leading proponent of elegiac verse in Rome. In his approach to love-elegy we also see a style that will characterize much of his later work, playful and intensely self-aware. The Amores is less poetry about love than poetry about love poetry, its primary appeal lying in witty manipulation of poetic convention. Meanwhile, the Ars Amatoria teaches men and women how to find and keep a lover, and then the Remedia Amoris explains how to ‘unlearn’ the lessons of the Ars.

Description

Description is generally associated with the novel in its modern form, a perception captured in one of the dictums from Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas: “Descriptions: There are always too many of them in novels.” But description has a much longer history and abounds in other genres, from the epic to lyric and didactic poetry to tragedy and beyond. In the 18th century, it was even considered a genre unto itself, in the newly conceived genre of descriptive poetry popularized by the Scottish poet James Thomson. Description also features prominently in genres of writing often considered nonliterary, such as encyclopedias, scientific writing, how-to manuals, and travel guides. Indeed, critical suspicion surrounding description in Western rhetorical and poetic tradition stems in part from the perception that it can too easily become a site for the incursion of the nonliterary (i.e., things rather than people, scientific or technical knowledge, abstruse vocabulary) into the literary domain. Description resists easy definition and has been characterized as one of the blind spots of Western literary discourse. In antiquity, rhetorical and poetic treatises gave scant attention to description, and neoclassical poetic doctrine was more concerned with policing description’s boundaries than defining it. It was not until the 18th century that description emerged as a theoretical problem worthy of debate and as a prominent literary practice. Since antiquity, description has been associated with visualization and the visual arts, through the rhetorical figures of enargeia and ekphrasis and the Renaissance doctrine of ut pictura poesis. Through this association, description has close ties to mimesis and has proved especially vulnerable to Platonic attacks on poetry, and on literature more broadly, as a mere copy of reality. In the 19th century, description featured prominently in the realist novel, but in the mid-20th century it was used, notably by the French New Novelists, as a means of contesting realism. Formalist and structuralist criticism sparked renewed interest in theorizing description in the 1970s and 1980s. At the beginning of the 21st century, in an age of interdisciplinarity when the boundaries between the literary and the nonliterary have become increasingly porous, description has once again emerged as a key theoretical problem for thinking across disciplines and has even been proposed as a new mode of reading that avoids the pitfalls of humanist hermeneutics.

Some notes on the literature on ancient didactic poetry

The student of ancient didactic poetry has to face a complex web of modern findings and opinions about the genre. This paper attempts to present a few prominent studies from some specific points of view, such as the ways in which they describe the genre (with categorizations and sets of criteria) and in which they delineate ancient views on the genre. The levels of a historical approach and self-awareness in these studies are also examined.