Communication entanglements in small propaganda texts: The case of the children’s letter to Płomyk

The wide-ranging systemic activities of political propaganda can also be observed and studied in the context of individual products, almost on a microscale. This paper makes an attempt at such an analysis, whose subject is a handwritten letter from the mid-1960s school chronicle, written by primary school students and addressed to the editorial office of the youth magazine Płomyk. In the content of the message, apart from regular communication behaviors, we find references to the context of reality, life and the experiences gained in the immediate circle of the local community. The epistolary narrative, when confronted with facts, leaves no doubt that the letter, while being a tool for didactics of forms and genres of expression, and at the same time an educational tool, also becomes a space in which a consistent utterance with manipulative features is formed. Looking at a single manifestation of a propaganda utterance enables us to ask questions about the level of trust in the text, the assimilation of the style of expression, and the internalization of the rituals of propaganda statements.

Beyond epistemological confinement: The sentimental ethos of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters

In the eighteenth century sentimentalism emerged as an ideological and artistic movement highlighting the value of an alternative episteme that posed a challenge to the cult of reason. The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, are permeated by a sentimental rhetoric aimed at materialising an ethos based on openness, cultural symbiosis and epistemological expansion that contributed to destabilising patriarchal Anglocentric narratives. Following Yuri M. Lotman, in her fruitful mediating position between two different cultural «semiospheres» (Eastern and Western), Montagu could be described as a frontier writer who used her physical journey as a vehicle for literaturising a vitalist cosmovision enabling her to transcend epistemological and emotional constraints. The ideology of her epistolary narrative was effectively encoded by using sentimental motifs, tropes and ideas that generated a unique textuality, the anatomy of which is analysed in this article.

Campania

Pliny’s narrative of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E. underpins almost all modern accounts. The story is rarely told from his point of view. Scrutiny of the meaning or reliability of Pliny’s details is likewise rarely undertaken. The August date of the eruption is also now contested. There is, in addition, a tension between the apparent trustworthiness of the ‘scientific’ details, and Pliny’s desire to present the Elder Pliny’s rescue mission as heroic rather than misguided. The addressing of Pliny’s epistolary narrative to Tacitus may account for the focus on the Elder Pliny rather than on the masses of other victims in the eruption. The youthful constantia of Pliny, the pyroclastic flows and surges, and the death of the Elder are also treated in the course of the chapter, as are the significant Flavian connections of the Elder, and his continuing role in Pliny’s life as a model to accept or reject, and the role of Pliny’s mother during the eruption.

(DE)CONSTRUCTING LETTERS TO LEADERS: ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ APPEALS TO THE AUTHORITIES IN THE 1920s

The article examines students’ appeals to the authorities as a specific type of epistolary narrative discourse. The author focuses on the creation of an epistolary text as a part of socio-discursive communication practice. The aim of the research is to identify the narrative structure of student letters and the ways of their argumentation. The study is (Де)конструируя письма … 173 complicated by the fact that it presents a complex of small disparate narratives that are not related to each other. A structural approach is used for the narrative analysis of student letter texts. The letters of students to the authorities are compositionally divided into two groups – simple, consisting of one or two semantic parts, and complex, consisting of three, four or more semantic parts. The studied letters help identify both general patterns of the narrative structure of appeals to the authorities and particular cases of plotting. The compositional structure of the students’ narrative was determined by the problem of treatment, the genre of writing, social origin, gender, and level of "language personality" of the authors. The texts of selected letters are analyzed separately according to the structural parts of the composition: the initial part, the main part, and the final part. The applicants’ arguments were both rational and emotional, including threats to commit suicide in case of default request. The narratives are presented as “small” stories of “small” people who constructed their stories in accordance with the social norms of the period. The story of each author of the letter was individual, but the experiences of difficulties were collective. Students could not share their stories with each other, which, along with generational habitus, probably determined semantic similarities in the epistolary narrative.

Les récits de voyage épistolaires en Arabie au XVIIIe siècle

Narratives of travel to Arabia in the eighteenth century are often stories written during the journey. These letters form after the return of the traveler the matter of a story published by the traveler himself or by a publisher. The letter that constitutes the travel narrative is usually of particular value: it gives the story a more real character. Based on an analysis of four epistolary travel relationships, this article's main objectives are to prove the presence of letters in travelogues in Arabia, to demonstrate the functions and characteristics of these letters, the originality and specificity of each epistolary narrative. Our study focuses on the letter as a narrative, and not as a mere ornament or circumstantial element related to the course of the action. Les récits de voyage en Arabie au XVIIIesiècle sont souvent des récits par lettres écrites pendant le voyage. Ces lettres forment après le retour du voyageur la matière d’un récit publié par le voyageur lui-même ou par un éditeur. La lettre qui constitue le récit de voyage possède en général une valeur particulière : elle donne au récit un caractère plus réel. Basé sur une analyse de quatre relations de voyage épistolaires, cet article a pour principaux objectifs de prouver la présence des lettres dans les récits de voyage en Arabie, de démontrer les fonctions et les caractéristiques de ces lettres, l’originalité et la spécificité de chaque récit épistolaire. Notre étude se focalise sur la lettre en tant que récit, et non comme simple ornement ou élément circonstanciel lié au déroulement de l’action.

Unimaginable Dreams

Written and directed by Marzia Jamili, a Hazara refugee now living in Sweden, Unimaginable Dreams is an auto-ethnographic essay film that traces Marzia’s last days in Athens, Greece. Blending documentary and fiction, Marzia casts her best friends to recreate magically real versions of her dearest memories of Athens as she delivers a cutting address to Afghanistan, in which she tells the sea about her broken homeland. This film project seeks to demonstrate the possibilities of collaborative filmmaking as a methodology, particularly in response to the limitations of etic observational approaches in migration research and the lack of refugee voices in public discourse. Through reenactment and Marzia’s epistolary narrative, Unimaginable Dreams resurfaces notions of belonging and citizenship within the imagination, weaving together oneiric and real geographies situated in the past and future. Facing perpetual displacement and public erasure, the film medium offers a declarative space of visibility in Athens, where its maker articulates rights and desires denied by the state. Unimaginable Dreams is the first production by the Melissa Network's Film Club, a collaborative program cofounded by Brittany Nugent and Dove Barbanel that challenges hegemonic representations of migrant women by empowering members to reclaim the gaze and create narratives of their own. A creative group of women from Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria and Ethiopia share diverse perspectives to analyze their favorite movies, learn filmmaking skills and collaborate on original productions that add urgent personal nuance and depth to migration storytelling.

RE-ENVISIONING THE RISORGIMENTO: ISABELLA BOSSI FEDRIGOTTI'S AMORE MIO UCCIDI GARIBALDI

Isabella Bossi Fedrigotti's 1980 novel Amore mio uccidi Garibaldi destabilizes historical narration by re-imagining the accepted masculinist chronicles of Italian unification and by making central the female figure within that history. By framing this revision within the structure of an epistolary narrative, the author brings to the public stage the private lives that were once excluded from it. Bossi Fedrigotti's novel exemplifies a larger project of rewriting both the Risorgimento and the gender roles and experiences of this particular historical period. But perhaps its more significant innovation is to evoke the legacy of the unification in the tumultuous events of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy. The text acts as a mirror of Bossi Fedrigotti's own era, which like the Risorgimento, saw critical transformations in Italian culture and society.