Historical Literacy and Alternating Questions in the Novel (The Blood of Al-Hussein)

Ibrahim Issa's novel (The Blood of Hussein) employs the historical incident in the service of the narrative theme of the narrative text itself, and despite the dominance of the historical text on most of the pages of the novel, it remains within the narrative rather than the historical framework. For the clarity of the creator's goal of evoking this historical incident without others. This study, marked by (historical education and different questions in the novel (The Blood of Hussein)) aims to explain the interpretive reading and the questions that are silent in the places of historical narration and how to use them in building the plot of the novel, so the research was carried out on several axes that dealt with the history of the novel, and the mechanisms of producing the narrative meaning from the historical document As well as the psychological-ideological conflicts and the imagined pattern in which the main theme of the novel was manifested in spite of its small written space. The study found results, the most important of which are: the prevalence of psychological and ideological conflict over the main characters of the novel, the determination of the narrative type to naturalize this novel, as well as the narrator’s attempt not to surrender to the historical incident as it is, but on the contrary, he proceeds to discuss and refute it at many times.

Places of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in Vidzeme and Their Symbolic Language

In analysing the symbolic language of Holocaust memorials, the author uses the concept of lieux de mémoire, elaborated by the French historian Pierre Nora. Nora highlights the essential differences, even rupture, between history and memory and the growing importance of lieux de mémoire, places of memory that lie between memory and history. The task of these places is to return the event to the present, reviving it in both the individual memory and the memory of society. Therefore, a memorial can also be considered a lieu de memoire. Moreover, the memorial is a more complicated case with material, symbolic and functional significance, a lieu de mémoire and a historical text with changing relations between them. The paper will briefly describe the basic principles of Holocaust iconography and the history of the development of Holocaust memorials as a new genre of commemorative art. The author will look at the development of this genre in Latvia using the example of memorials dedicated to victims of Nazism in Vidzeme. The monument’s symbolic language and whether it has been influenced by the specific place and events or whether artists have followed a specific iconographic canon will be explained. The examples will also be considered from the point of view of the dialectics between a place of memory and a historical text, mentioned above.

Alejo Carpentier, The Harp and the Shadow: Literature, History and Fiction

Not entirely a historical text, The Harp and the Shadow, the last novel published by Alejo Carpentier, takes as its pretext certain historical data in order to offer the readers a specific view of the protagonist, Christopher Columbus. Considered by some the great discoverer of the New World or highly regarded as “The Admiral of the Seas” and despised by many others as an adventurer and a liar, Columbus is also the author of some disturbing writings that still put critics and literary historians in discomfort. This is the novel’s point of departure, together with the intent of Pope Pius IX to initiate the canonization of Columbus, an idea regarded by the great majority of his contemporaries as a complete blasphemy. At the aesthetic level, comparable up to a certain point to the conception of Jorge Luis Borges, Carpentier’s form of understanding and practicing literature is always, in a more or less obvious way, reliant on Cervantes himself. But it is not limited to Don Quixote: in The Harp and the Shadow, the Cuban author builds an endless network of intertextual associations connecting his own creation to The Works of Persiles and Segismunda, the last work by Cervantes.

Evolution of emotion semantics

Humans possess the unique ability to communicate emotions through language. Although concepts like anger or awe are abstract, there is a shared consensus about what these English emotion words mean. This consensus may give the impression that their meaning is static, but we propose this is not the case. We cannot travel back to earlier periods to study emotion concepts directly, but we can examine text corpora, which have partially preserved the meaning of emotion words. Using natural language processing of historical text, we found evidence for semantic change in emotion words over the past century and that varying rates of change were predicted in part by an emotion concept's prototypicality - how representative it is of the broader category of "emotion". Prototypicality negatively correlated with historical rates of emotion semantic change obtained from text-based word embeddings, beyond more established variables including usage frequency in English and a second comparison language, French. This effect for prototypicality did not consistently extend to the semantic category of birds, suggesting its relevance for predicting semantic change may be category-dependent. Our results suggest emotion semantics are evolving over time, with prototypical emotion words remaining semantically stable, while other emotion words evolve more freely.

Buddhists Herminutics: An Analysis of Dhammapada in Sustainable Development

Gautama Buddha, the emblem of peace and love, pioneer of Buddhism, was born in Kapilabastu, Lumbini, Nepal. The peace and love. Compassion in Buddhism is the basic element of Sustainable development. Thus Buddha is the pioneer of sustainable development. Buddha’s text Dhammapada in the present sustainable era is more relevant than past. The paper deals with the hermeneutic analysis of Buddhist’s text Dhammapada in sustainable development. Hermeneutics generally starts from the context of the historical text and ends with the contemporary general understanding. Hermeneutics is concerned with the construction of meaning within the relationship between author/text/reader, and the overarching paradigm. It is the relationship between Buddha, Dhammapada, and sustainable development. It follows six steps as below: 1. Observation and Contextualization; 2. Structural Analysis; 3. Correlation and Interpretation; 4. Fusion of Horizons in Application; 5. Reconstruction, and 6. Generalization of Understanding of the text. The main objective of the study is to find out the contemporary contextual general understanding of Dhammapada in the sustainable development era. The final standpoint of the hermeneutic analysis of Dhammapada on sustainable development is that the peace and prosperity of the people on the planet are only possible through the meaningful partnership in environment protection and right livelihood.

Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the structure of a historical text

The subject of this research is the historical writing technique, which allows creating convincing images of the past. The goal of this article is ti analyze the structure of texts written by the historians and covering the period from antiquity to the XXI century. The theoretical framework consists of the idealistic approach towards history developed by the author. This article is first to examine the structure of texts written by the prominent historians of the past, such as Herodotus, Nestor, Karamzin, Klyuchevsky, and some historians of the XX – XX centuries from the perspective of idealistic approach and the use of quantitative methods. For comparison, analysis is conducted on the literary texts of A. S. Pushkin and V. S. Pikul dedicated to historical themes. The article employs content analysis, structural analysis, and terarchical cluster analysis of the texts on the basis of their structure. This revealed that the structure of these texts consists of the factual and theoretical statements, where the firs prevailed until the mid XX century. The use of cluster analysis allowed building a matrix of similarity of the works. The main method of creating convincing historical text lies in selection and interpretation of the the facts in accordance with the dominant worldview or a widespread historical concept. Facts are subordinated to the theory and confirm the fundamental ideas and historical concepts, as well as depict a convincing image of the past. The conducted analysis indicates that theory plays the key role in creating a convincing historical text, while facts are secondary; no significant impact of historical methods is revealed. The major difference between the analyzed historical and literary texts consists in the fact that there is no theory in the literary works.

Chaining algorithms and historical adjective extension

Natural language relies on a finite lexicon to express a potentially infinite set of ideas. This tension often results in the innovative reuse of existing words to describe emerging ideas. In this chapter, we take a computational perspective to examine how English adjectives extend their range over time to modify nouns and form previously unattested adjective-noun pairs. We hypothesize that how novel adjective-noun pairings emerge is non-arbitrary and follows a process of chaining, whereby novel noun referents for an adjective link to existing nouns modified by the same adjective that are close in semantic space. We test this proposal by exploring a set of probabilistic models that predict adjective-noun pairs from a historical text corpus (Google Books) that spans the past 150 years. Our findings across three diverse sets of adjectives support a chaining mechanism sensitive to local semantic neighbourhood -- formulated as an exemplar model of categorization similar to the Generalized Context Model. These findings mirror existing work on chaining in the historical growth of grammatical categories. We discuss the limitations and implications of our approach toward a general theory of word meaning extension in natural language.

Reading Þórðar saga kakala as literature

Þórðar saga kakala is a thirteenth-century contemporary saga, extant today in the surviving manuscripts of the fourteenth-century compilation Sturlunga saga. The original version of the saga – *Þórðar saga kakala hin mikla – was written during in Western Iceland during the 1270s, most probably by someone close to Hrafn Oddsson who had been present at the saga’s events (notably proposed to be Svarthöfði Dufgusson) (White 2020a). In extant form, Þórðar saga kakala contains 50 chapters covering the years 1242-9/50 and 1254-6; however, *Þórðar saga kakala hin mikla was longer and, whilst also ending in 1256, likely began in c.1233 (or even earlier in c.1210) (White 2020a). Historically, contemporary sagas – such as the component texts of Sturlunga saga – have been treated uncritically by scholars seeking to cite them as primary sources of Icelandic history. Despite this, in recent years attitudes have begun to change (cf. Jón Viðar Sigurðsson et al. 2017). The transformation in approaches to the contemporary sagas has been spearheaded by the great scholar of Sturlunga saga, Úlfar Bragason, who has sought throughout his career to evaluate the literary qualities of the compilation, especially from a narratological standpoint (e.g. Úlfar Bragason 2010). This article carries out a literary analysis of Þórðar saga kakala, specifically in relation to how its structure and intertextual connections serve as meaning-making devices. Two arguments are presented across this article. The first is that Þórðar saga kakala’s interlaced structure encourages the reader to focus in on Þórður’s personal qualities. The second is that Þórðar saga kakala’s implicit references to other texts serves to induce the reader to attribute Þórður’s successes to his possession of exceptional characteristics. The article closes by emphasising the literary nature of this apparently historical text, and echoes Úlfar’s call for historians to use subject the text to thoroughgoing analysis when using it as a primary source.

East African Literature and the Gandasation of Metropolitan Language – Reading from Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is, without doubt, one of the finest literary writers to have come out of East Africa. The Ugandan has succeeded in writing herself into global reckoning by telling a completely absorbing and canon-worthy epic. Her creative impulse is compelling, considering her narration of a riveting multi-layered historiography of (B)-Uganda nation in her debut novel, Kintu. With her unique style of story-telling and intelligent use of analepsis and prolepsis to (re)construct spatial and temporal settings of a people’s history, Makumbi succeeds in giving readers an evocative historical text. In narrating the aetiological myth of her people, Makumbi bridges metonymic gaps between two languages – core and marginal. She deliberately attenuates the expressive strength of the English language in Kintu by deploying her traditional Luganda language in the text so as to achieve certain primal goals. The present study seeks to disinter these goals by examining the use of Metonymic Gaps as a postcolonial model to construct indigenous knowledges within a Europhone East African text. The study also mines overall implications of this practice for East African Literature. I argue that, just like her contemporaries from other parts of Africa, Makumbi projects Luganda epistemology to checkmate European linguistic heteronomy on East African literary expression. Her intentionality also revolves around the need to bend the English language and force it to carry the weight of Luganda socio-cultural peculiarities. Consequently, her text becomes a locus of postcolonial disputations where the marginal jostles for supremacy with the core in East African literary landscape.

Memories of the 1947 Bengal Partition and Its Aftermath: Tanvir Mokammel’s Seemantorekha

This article examines Tanvir Mokammel’s documentary Seemantorekha as a historical text that opens a representational space to engage with the memories of the 1947 Bengal Partition. Seemantorekha documents the journey of four individuals to their erstwhile homes in Bangladesh and West Bengal. In the moment of seeing their ancestral homes, they share the ‘Third Space’ of being, the premise of which transcends the ideological normative of nations and borders.