Learning without Teachers (?): a study of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha

The title character in Herman Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha, tried to revolt against teacher-centered teaching and started his own journey to get enlightenment through self-quest or self-investigation. However, this research paper studies Siddhartha declaration acquiring enlightenment through his self- education with contradictory ideas and marks a direct or indirect involvement of teachers in his education. The essay supports its line of departure giving the background of Siddhartha’s journey of enlightenment, studying his self- education as a part of teacher-based education by answering the question in two different topics (why did he leave teachers? / Can education be possible without teachers?) and finally draw its conclusion. Though Siddhartha is an artistic work and the ideas of this paper may not be applicable in the real classroom scenario, the reliability of the analysis of the book would become fruitful since it gives some perspectives to understand our practices philosophically- if not practically.

Plautus’s Curculio

Plautus’s shortest play Curculio has not drawn the same attention from scholars, authors, and performers over the centuries as his Menaechmi, Amphitruo, Pseudolus, and Miles Gloriosus, yet the play offers a set of dramatis personae that encompasses all the main stock characters of Roman comedy (with the exception of mother and father figures), a plot that ties together three common Plautine storylines (erotic, deception, and recognition), and an unparalleled metatheatrical monologue from a truly unique character, the Choragus. The young citizen man Phaedromus desires Planesium, enslaved to the sex-trafficker Cappadox, who is asking for more money than Phaedromus has. Phaedromus’s parasite Curculio, sent on a journey to Caria in search of a loan, comes back instead with a ring stolen from the soldier Therapontigonus, who has contracted with Cappadox to purchase Planesium. Using the ring to forge documents and an eyepatch disguise, Curculio (under the pseudonym Summanus) tricks both Cappadox and Lyco the banker into handing Planesium over. Therapontigonus arrives, enraged at being tricked, but soon learns that Planesium, who has recognized Therapontigonus’s stolen ring on Curculio’s finger, is his long-lost sister. They are reunited, Planesium is acknowledged as a citizen, the two of them agree to a marriage between Planesium and Phaedromus, and Cappadox is physically abused and forced to repay Therapontigonus. The title character influences Terence’s Phormio and Catullus’s erotic persona, as well as the stock character Ligurio in Italian commedia dell’arte; meanwhile, the recognition and reunion of the soldier Therapontigonus with Planesium, his sister and erstwhile object of erotic desire, inspires similar plot twists in Molière, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and more. The play’s concision and nonstop action have made it a popular choice for student productions, particularly at North American colleges and universities. This article comprehensively catalogues scholarship on Curculio, beginning with overarching works (general studies, editions, the manuscript tradition, commentaries, translations) and then moving into the major topics of scholarly interest in the play: Greek original and Plautine adaptation; plot, staging, and music; themes and characters; social and historical contexts; humor and language; and reception and performance history. For other surveys of Plautine scholarship, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles Plautus, Plautus’s Amphitruo, and Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus. See also the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles on the main surviving playwright of Greek New Comedy, Menander of Athens, and Plautus’s Roman comedic contemporaries Terence and Caecilius Statius.

Orlando’s Celebration of “prose not verse”

In Woolf’s literary history, the eighteenth century saw the male writer and poetry begin to cede power and popularity to the female writer and the novel. Orlando (1928) personifies this literary history with the title character, a nobleman-poet who turns from man to woman in the eighteenth century, while his/her poetry turns from tolerable to bathetic. Some of the adventures of the newly female Orlando take their inspiration from the novels of Daniel Defoe and the life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Woolf draws on Defoe and Lady Montagu to underscore the mutual ascent of women and prose. Orlando is based primarily, of course, on Vita Sackville-West. Allusions in the novel to Sackville-West’s long poem The Land (1926) betray Woolf’s dim view of her lover’s poetry and the conventional, sentimental poet figure more generally, and argue that a woman poet after the eighteenth century writes in a form poorly suited to her era and her sex.

Velázquez, Wagner and the Red Skull. Intermediality and the Genesis of Meaning in a Particular Scene of Captain America: The First Avenger

In the 2011 superhero movie, Captain America: The First Avenger (produced by Marvel Studios, directed by Joe Johnston) the main opponent of the title character is a Nazi officer, Johann Schmidt, who turns out to be a kind of superhuman entity, the Red Skull. Throughout the movie, viewers can follow the process of him gradually leaving behind his identity as a Nazi officer, and presenting himself as the leader of the occult-high-tech terrorist organization, the Hydra. At a certain point we can see him visited by one of the scientists working for him, Doctor Zola, whom he puts wise to his plans. During the conversation a portrait is being painted of the Red Skull, but we cannot see his face, only that the artist uses a huge amount of red paint. In the background, excerpts of Wagner’s operas are being played, which is very unusual in a Marvel movie. The question is, should the viewer recognize the diegetic music and notice the possible reference to the painting Las Meninas by Velázquez? How the detection of these intermedial references and the awareness of the act of trespassing media borders would affect the semiotic processes of interpretation? And also, how would the more precise identification of the cited materials change the semiotic modality of intermediality here? The article tries to answer these questions by interpreting the scene and the role of the references in question within the entire film through the prism of intermedial semiotics.

Binary opposition «power/people» in S. Eisenstein's historical and biographical cinematography

This article is devoted to the study of the binary opposition «power/people» in Soviet historical and biographical films. The research material is S. Eisenstein’s iconic films Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944). Having analyzed the development and transformation of the binary opposition «power/people» in Eisenstein's historical and biographical films in terms of plot, character system and composition, the author came to the following conclusions: characters of formal authority are often negatively marked. The image of the people is represented by an indivisible monolith. The binary opposition «power/people» is removed by the introduction of a mediator, the character which becomes a key one in films. In the film Alexander Nevsky, the image of the cultural hero, the title character, removes the conflict between the opposing sides: the image of the prince is opposed to the image of the official power and absorbs the features of the people's ruler. The image of the people, when interacting with the image of a cultural hero, becomes an ambivalent carrier of both power and heroic traits. In the film Ivan the Terrible, the development of the medial image of the tsar leads to the fact that he himself becomes the embodiment of absolute power, occupying the «powerful» side of the opposition. Thus, the binary opposition is replaced by the ambivalence of the ruler. The author concludes that the development of the opposition «power/people» in the historical and biographical cinema of the Stalinist time is representative of its period and demonstrates strengthening of the imperial discourse of Soviet ideology and the role of the ruler's personality.

The Philosophical Lineage of Mr. Cogito (part 2)

The article constitutes the second part of a larger paper concerning the philosophical heritage of Mr. Cogito, the lyrical subject of Zbigniew Herbert’s poems. The self-consciousness of the title character is formed, quite like in P. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of existence, in relation to the sphere of history and culture, as well as to the other. Mr. Cogito, when confronted with the war and annihilation, cannot simply use the Cartesian deductive method of reasoning in order to intelligibly prove the existence of God and an immortal soul. Therefore, he refers in his philosophical thinking not merely to rationalism, but also to symbol, which more profoundly than ratio describes the nature of his existence. When challenged by boundary situations, he unsuccessfully attempts to find consolation in the Upanishads, Stoicism, or the wisdom of Chasidism. His attitude towards the modern philosophy of nature as well as to the relative motion theory is that of a sceptic; he juxtaposes them with Aristotle’s Logic. The propensity of contemporary Western civilization to follow magic or gnosis is perceived by him as a sign of self-delusion, or even self-destruction.

Textológiai megfontolások és poétikai tanulságok

Mihály Fazekas’s epic poem was first published in 1815 without indicating the author; the author then intended to replace this “piratical edition”, published without his knowledge, with an authorised, revised edition, but still anonymously (1817). The article first discusses the philological questions of this publishing history with attention to the importance of textual modifications by the author. The study takes into consideration the questions surrounding the presumed source material’s origins known in international folklore, critically reviewing the standpoint of folkloristics and literary history so far. Then it concludes that it is not the title character of Lúdas Matyi who is the central figure, but the other important character, Döbrögi, because this latter one is capable of demonstrating the state of purity achieved through suffering, and Lúdas Matyi, who takes his revenge on him three times by beating him up, is only depicted as a means to that end. The article identifies the fundamental structural schemes of crime stories (Kriminalgeschichte) in the poetic solutions of the work, which genre became popular at the end of the 18th century-beginning of the 19th century, reaching Hungary via German intermediation in the 1810s.

The Royal Treatment: Temporality and Technology in The King's Speech

This essay examines the intersections of class, technology, and disability manifest within The King's Speech. It argues that the film obfuscates modern scientific and critical understanding of communication disorders by rendering stuttering as a moral failure rather than by attempting to understand it as a socially constructed condition contingent upon established societal and temporal norms. The essay identifies the social codes enforcing correct and eloquent speech that create a political and social climate for "compulsory fluency"—the socially imperative verbal facility promoted as necessary to participate in public life. Crucially and somewhat ironically, with its emphasis on the nobility of the title character, the film sublimates an inherent tension between media technology and the lingering social stigma surrounding disability. The King's Speech thus situates compulsory fluency as an essential component of modern kingship. By reading the film's strategic deployment of radio technology alongside its troubled representation of class and his fraught invocation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the essay reads attitudes towards vocal disability within the context of royalty, patriarchy, and national identity. Ultimately, the essay locates The King's Speech as a film whose image of modern kingship grounds itself upon a notion of imperial authority as technologically constructed but ultimately disabled by a national fantasy of historical wholeness in the fabricated kinship between a monarch and his people.

The Figurative Structure of Ivan Bunin’s Story «The Snow Bull» («Snezhny Byk») (To the 150th Anniversary of the Birth)

The study involves a philological analysis of Ivan Bunin’s story and reveals its multilevel structure. The relevance of the study stems from a growing popularity of Bunin’s works among readers and investigators. Moreover, some of his texts are included in a set of testing and assessment materials for the Unified State Exam in the Russian language as source texts for writing composition. The study is aimed at clarifying and specifying the interpretation of the story based on linguistic analysis in terms of the writer’s biography and legacy. The author identifies the patterns of the lexical structure and composition of Bunin’s story, unfolding the text at the common level as well as at the symbolic one. The author focuses on the title character of the work, which is a counterpoint to psychological and moral-philosophical issues, as well as to other means of revealing subtext semantics. The research methodology involves lexical, intertextual and motif analysis; the research results are presented mainly using the method of linguistic commenting. The research outcomes embrace the philological results (interpretation of the story The Snow Bull, identification of the universal patterns of Bunin’s artistic style and dominants of his vision) and didactic findings (validation of such works as The Snow Bull as the examination material for the USE in the Russian language).

Self-Knowledge

The chapter is a discussion of value of self-knowledge and the role that reflection plays in its acquisition. It employs the title character in Jane Austen’s Emma as an illustration of the importance of reflection in people understanding themselves and developing self-trust. It argues that appropriate self-trust is a virtue in Aristotle’s sense. The person with the virtue of self-trust employs self-doubt effectively, avoiding both insufficient and excessive confidence in her own judgment. The chapter shows how Emma uses reflection as a way of correcting her own tendency toward overconfidence, enabling her to have greater self-knowledge and hence, greater self-trust. The chapter explains how reflection conducive to self-knowledge and self-trust is a skill and argues that it is a skill worth acquiring.