‘When most I wink, then’ – what? Assessing the comprehension of literary texts in university students of English as a second language

This article introduces a test for literary text comprehension in university students of English as a second language. Poetry is especially suited for our purpose since it frequently shows features that offer challenges to comprehension in a limited space. An example is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43, on which our test is based: it is suited for assessing not only if a text has been understood but also the ability of respondents to reflect on their own comprehension skills. We show that the test’s psychometric properties are satisfactory, and we demonstrate its validity by analysing relevant external indicators. Thus, we can show a direct link between general reading experience and text comprehension as tested: the more students read, the better do they perform. The collaboration of literary studies with psychometrics moreover allows for a statistically valid identification of specific challenges to comprehension and thus advance our knowledge of what readers find difficult. This will be of interest not only in a hermeneutic and linguistic perspective but also with a view to addressing those difficulties in an educational context. For example, asking someone whether they have understood an utterance (in this case: a line of poetry) does not elicit reliable answers. Being able to say how one has established the meaning of a line seems to be a more reliable indicator of actually having understood it.

Buryat Crossroads: Poetry and Mythological Thinking

The authors give a literary assessment of the monograph by I.V. Bulgutova Buryat philosophical lyrics: mythopoetic foundations and traditions with the involvement of some of her other works. A set of questions is studied related to the Buryat mythological school, the mythogenicity index of the Buryat professional literature, various types of mythological thinking, zoonymous mythical plots, the shamanistic cycle, the mythologization of history, and ethno-poetic constants. The practical part of the monograph under review is a mytho-ontological analysis of representative philosophical poetic texts by D. Ulzytuev, L. Tapkhaev, B. Syrenov, G. Radnaeva, R. Shoymardanova. Much attention is paid to the features of the Buryat Russian-language poetry, represented by the works of N. Nimbuev and B. Dugarov.

Considerații lingvistice privind fitonimele românești care implică termenul „crăciun”

Our paper aims to reveal an inventory, an interpretation and a statistical analysis of Romanian names of plants which implicates the term Crăciun (Christmas), spread through the botanical terminology, a phenomenon which, as considered by E. Coşeriu is not enough highlighted (given that the individual speaker became creator of language / poetry whenever he named a flower. Botanical popular terminology has primarily a practical value, designating, distinguishing and categorizing elements of the plant kingdom within the given natural reign, but also has a high theoretical significance, especially for linguists, both by the ethimons to which they send back and by the metaphorical meanings the phytonims mostly have.

‘The best English-Irish poetry before Yeats’

‘[T]he best Irish-English poetry before Yeats’: thus, in The Listener in 1970, John Holloway described a genre of exuberantly worded songs that employed complex patterns of rhyme deriving from Irish language poetry, many of which were among the nineteenth-century ballad sheet collections of Sir Frederic Madden, held in Cambridge University library. Items in this form seem to have surfaced in the mid-eighteenth century, soon after the appearance of the earliest eight-page songbook to be printed in Ireland, and probably the first anywhere in the ‘British Isles’. This essay traces the development of this genre towards, perhaps its finest manifestation, the luxuriously florid bawdry of ‘The Cuckoo’s Nest’, probably composed by the northern-born but Drogheda-based weaver poet John Sheil (c.1784–1872). Many commonly known and apparently innocuous traditional songs are found as bawdry in early collections and employ a range of sexual metaphors, well understood at that time among men but not (openly) among women or more recently. The combination of verbal flourish and double entendre together with a consummate control over the complexity of rhyme and rhythm forced John Holloway to recognize vernacular verse as, not a debased version of ‘educated’ poetry, but as a genre with its own standards, a parallel form that bears comparison at a high level.

The Epiphany of Language: The Connotation of Zen-Taoism in Charles Bernstein's Echopoetics

As a prominent representative figure of American Language poetry, Charles Bernstein has incorporated many themes concerning “nothingness” into his poetry. Contrary to the traditional Western philosophy that defines the concept of “nothingness” as meaninglessness and agnosticism, “nothingness” in Bernstein's poetics is endowed with profound poetic and aesthetic implications. Bernstein studied the works of Zen-Taoist philosophy in his early years. Understanding the Zen-Taoist connotations of “nothingness” is an important new dimension in interpreting Bernstein's echopoetics. Bernstein integrates the anti-traditional ideas in Zen-Taoist philosophy and aesthetics with the experiment of American avant-garde poetry. “The transformation between Xu (emptiness) and Shi (Being),” the beauty of “speechlessness,” and the expression of “defamiliarization” show the “epiphany” of language and the “nature” of language. The Chinese traditional Zen-Taoist philosophy is an important part of Bernstein's echopoetics.

In the Un-American Tree: The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetries and Their Aftermath, with a Special Reference to Charles Bernstein, Translated

Leevi Lehto, in a keynote on American poetry presented in China, outlines the challenges and possibilities of Language poetry outside the American context, with specific relation to the meaning of translation.