Harmony and Disharmony: Acoustic Opposition in the Early Lyrics of Alexander Blok

The article studies the role of the observer - the subject of acoustic perception of poetic narrative, in particular, in the construction of a dual reality in the early work by Alexander Blok Poems about the Beautiful Lady. Acoustic perceptual data is the basis for the creation of complex mystical and philosophical symbols and poetic images. The divine, ideal world of the Beautiful Lady and the real world of the lyric hero are in opposition to each other in acoustic terms, which give rise to the opposition HARMONY - DISHARMONY. The opposition is realized in musical sounds, songs, and bell ringing typical of the upper world. The real world is characterized by other sounds, non-musical: groans, creaks, complaints, and crying. Accordingly, emotions also differ in value depending on belonging to one or another world: in the world of the Beautiful Lady they quietly laugh, rejoice; in the world of the lyrical hero they cry, moan, complain. SILENCE is a significant symbol of the divine world. The world of the Beautiful Lady is thus harmonious, musical and quiet. Its important element is the voices of birds: swans, cranes, eagles. Smell, touch and taste play a minor role in the creation of the Bloks dual reality. Temperature sensations participate in the formation of the COLD symbol as a phenomenon hostile to the divine world. Thus, the concept of dual reality in Bloks early lyrics is embodied in a number of acoustic oppositions and acoustic symbols of silence, song, and bell ringing.

Made to Measure: Revealing and Measuring a Dynamic Coastal Environment

<p>MacLean Park located on the Kapiti Coast has one of the most dynamic natural environments in the country. As tides rise, dunes shrink and grow and rivermouths shift over time, it can be difficult to perceive these environmental changes due to promptly forgotten benchmarks. Within this thesis, I argue that architecture could provide both a benchmark and datum by which we can begin to understand and register these environmental changes, highlighting a need for architecture’s role to act as a mediator between our natural and urban environment. The project explores a series of methods and strategies to make this dynamic and shifting environmental condition visible. A rigid and reductive geometry forms a potential answer. This informs a series of experiments which look to uncover how we can visually measure and observe our built and natural environment. A design-led research methodology leads to initial investigations on form and reduction within a chaotic landscape, followed by approaches to register site specific data and historic landmarks. The final design investigations centre on a holistic coexistence of built form amongst the dunescape, lifting the modular structure on piloti above the delicate ecosystem below to allow the landscape, dunes and flora to flow freely in a temporal manner and interact with the building. The resulting design method shifts from a reductive approach to taking measure through ordering systems and composition to a more integrated approach between landscape and architecture. Here, measurement and observation become both an instrumental and poetic narrative as the building becomes a reflection of its surrounds. The resulting tension between a rational and poetic approach to designing sees the Kapiti Island Biosecurity Visitor’s Centre become a measurement device on a coastal threshold. Through this architectural response, we can begin to observe, measure, read and understand the ecological qualities of the immediate site and its association with the township beyond.</p>

Made to Measure: Revealing and Measuring a Dynamic Coastal Environment

<p>MacLean Park located on the Kapiti Coast has one of the most dynamic natural environments in the country. As tides rise, dunes shrink and grow and rivermouths shift over time, it can be difficult to perceive these environmental changes due to promptly forgotten benchmarks. Within this thesis, I argue that architecture could provide both a benchmark and datum by which we can begin to understand and register these environmental changes, highlighting a need for architecture’s role to act as a mediator between our natural and urban environment. The project explores a series of methods and strategies to make this dynamic and shifting environmental condition visible. A rigid and reductive geometry forms a potential answer. This informs a series of experiments which look to uncover how we can visually measure and observe our built and natural environment. A design-led research methodology leads to initial investigations on form and reduction within a chaotic landscape, followed by approaches to register site specific data and historic landmarks. The final design investigations centre on a holistic coexistence of built form amongst the dunescape, lifting the modular structure on piloti above the delicate ecosystem below to allow the landscape, dunes and flora to flow freely in a temporal manner and interact with the building. The resulting design method shifts from a reductive approach to taking measure through ordering systems and composition to a more integrated approach between landscape and architecture. Here, measurement and observation become both an instrumental and poetic narrative as the building becomes a reflection of its surrounds. The resulting tension between a rational and poetic approach to designing sees the Kapiti Island Biosecurity Visitor’s Centre become a measurement device on a coastal threshold. Through this architectural response, we can begin to observe, measure, read and understand the ecological qualities of the immediate site and its association with the township beyond.</p>

Writing From Diasporic Space: A Poetic Narrative of a Refugee Daughter

The poetic narrative recounts a story of a Vietnamese refugee daughter I met in New Zealand. Her experience of family separation and dispersion when her parents decided to flee the country after the Vietnam war ended in 1975 evoked a sense of trauma, a collective trauma of thousands of Vietnamese who suffered from losses: “their country,” their home, their families, and their place, to the oceans they crossed. Many of them never had the future they thought they would when they stepped on the overcrowded, half-sunk boat into the dark and could not manage to see the light.

Venise des deux côtés du miroir : Imaginaire et identité entre l’amour et la mort

"Venice, deeply imaginary and symbolic, is in various cultural documents, like books, paintings, cinema, music, photography and other arts. In this research, we use the literary and the poetic narrative as privileged sources for understanding the imaginary and the identity of this city, closely connected with love and with death too. This investigation uses as a method Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology defined in The Poetics of Space and the symbolical imaginary described in relation to the material imagination in Water and Dreams. Venice is a city on water and its identity is closely associated with love, as one mirror side, and with death or even hell, as the other mirror side."

BETWEEN THE HOSTS AND THE GUESTS: REPRESENTATIONS OF CULTURAL TRAUMA IN KEHINDE AKANO'S EMIRATE BLUES AND HOME RESIDENCE

<div>Recent literary theorisation of trauma entails an emphasis on sociological approaches aimed at creating a cultural framework that is devoid of the perceived Eurocentric mode of the 'classical' psychoanalytic trauma theory. This movement away from the mono-cultural, individualistic bias of the Caruthian psychoanalytic trauma theory causes the birth of Alexander's cultural trauma theory with its empirical approach to literary trauma representation. This study primarily aims to investigate the best way to represent trauma in the non-Western literature. To achieve this objective, cultural trauma theory was used to analyse Kehinde Akano's poetry collection, Emirate Blues and Home Resistance. In the end, the findings of the research show that: (a) Moro Concerned Group is identified as a carrier group in Emirate Blues and Home Resistance; (b) the ‘stoical’ fiefdom labourers and citizens, descendants of Laderin and Awongaga form the audience; (c) there are 'claims' that Emirate system is a threat to the soco-cultural make-up of the poet's collectivity; (d) descendants of Awongaga react to the 'claims' by erecting a signpost in their land; and (e) Afonja and the Fulani are the victim and the perpetrator respectively. These results indicate that, by Alexander's set standard in cultural trauma theory, Emirate Blues and Home Resistance can be classified as a trauma (poetic) narrative. </div>

BETWEEN THE HOSTS AND THE GUESTS: REPRESENTATIONS OF CULTURAL TRAUMA IN KEHINDE AKANO'S EMIRATE BLUES AND HOME RESIDENCE

<div>Recent literary theorisation of trauma entails an emphasis on sociological approaches aimed at creating a cultural framework that is devoid of the perceived Eurocentric mode of the 'classical' psychoanalytic trauma theory. This movement away from the mono-cultural, individualistic bias of the Caruthian psychoanalytic trauma theory causes the birth of Alexander's cultural trauma theory with its empirical approach to literary trauma representation. This study primarily aims to investigate the best way to represent trauma in the non-Western literature. To achieve this objective, cultural trauma theory was used to analyse Kehinde Akano's poetry collection, Emirate Blues and Home Resistance. In the end, the findings of the research show that: (a) Moro Concerned Group is identified as a carrier group in Emirate Blues and Home Resistance; (b) the ‘stoical’ fiefdom labourers and citizens, descendants of Laderin and Awongaga form the audience; (c) there are 'claims' that Emirate system is a threat to the soco-cultural make-up of the poet's collectivity; (d) descendants of Awongaga react to the 'claims' by erecting a signpost in their land; and (e) Afonja and the Fulani are the victim and the perpetrator respectively. These results indicate that, by Alexander's set standard in cultural trauma theory, Emirate Blues and Home Resistance can be classified as a trauma (poetic) narrative. </div>

The Manifestations of Fate in Medieval Germanic Poetry and Lithuanian Folk Songs

Reflections of mythical worldview are embedded in traditional oral poetry, viz. Old Icelandic collection of poems Poetic Edda, Old English poem Beowulf, and Lithuanian folk songs. Archaic motifs and archetypal imagery are conveyed by means of poetic grammar (alliteration, kennings, epithets, etc.). Through interpretation, the hidden (symbolic) meaning of the poetic grammar is unveiled, and the connection between the two worlds, the sacred (the divine) and the profane (the human) (Eliade 1959), is exposed. To advance the analysis of poetic narrative, the methodology employed in the paper combines comparative Indo-European poetics (Watkins 1995) and oral-formulaic theory (Kiparsky 1976; Foley 1996). The paper focuses on the poetic narrative’s motifs that encode the archetypal image of the goddess(es) of fate in the Germanic and Baltic traditions. Selected passages from Old Icelandic, Old English, and Lithuanian poetic texts reveal the motif of fate in the following contexts: the establishment of the laws governing human life, the courtship and wedding narrative, the inescapable decrees of misery and death, the warrior’s fame and fate, and the connection between the goddess of fate and the cuckoo bird (in the Lithuanian tradition). The poetic grammar and poetic formulas, in particular, reveal the prototypical characteristics of the supernatural beings who rule fate – Norns, Wyrd, and Laima – and present them as an integral part of the Indo-European mythological system.

Polysyndeton in Ukrainian poetry language of the second half of the 20th — begining of the 21st century: Typological characteristics and functional load

Polysyndeton may be seen as not developed properly in the Ukrainian linguistic style, although it has been vastly applied in the language of poetry of Ukrainian artists in the second half of the 20th — beginning of the 21st century. The aim of this article is to reinterpret polysyndeton as a stylistic figure based on the rhythmic repetition of the same conjunctions, prepositions, and par ticles which help to achieve a harmonious structure of the poetic text. Rich data collected have allowed distinguishing varieties of polysyndeton due to the following criteria: 1) word class membership of a repeated unit, e.g., conjunctive, prepositional, and partial; 2) placement in contact, e.g., contact, distant; 3) the nature of ‘grammatical registration’ (for sentences of different grammatical structure). Moreover, all varieties of expressive means of a language are significant for the formation of the linguistic units of the poem: they perform pictorial and compositional functions and functions of accentuation, metaphorisation, the actualization of the emotional component of the expressed and harmonious organization of poetic text’s space. This indicates the multifunctionality of polysyndeton as a stylistic figure which contributes to the harmonization of a language and poetic narrative. Keywords: stylistic syntax, language and poetic narrative, multifunctionality, polysyndeton.