PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE FRONT LINE IN LITHUANIAN CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

The image of the front line is deeply rooted in the contemporary Lithuanian discourse about cultureand politics. The strands of its cultural landscape connect art, media, politics and history. The concept of the line here performs like a literary metaphor deeply ingrained in everyday consciousness as a defensive front line due to the painful history of the nation’s experience. The confrontation with the constant threat of the Russian Empire and the catastrophes of occupation, especially in the 20th century, drew the Lithuanian prototype of the nation’s resistance and filled the 21st-century daily discourses with reflections on the emerged meaning of the Mannerheim Line. This actualised vision travelled to the spaces of artistic creation, music, cinematography, literature, creating feelings of infinity, spaces of transcendent landscapes, bridges of time and the dramaturgy of the Baltic archetypes of contiguity. These insights aim to unfold the Lithuanian discourse of contemporary culture with the special mark of the front line.

The Ontological Essence of Transferring the Word Meaning: the Interpretive Resource of a Metaphor

Taking in to account the analytical experience of Metaphorology, the article understudies deals with the ontological essence of a literary metaphor. It mostly occurs as a receptive issue and is regarded on a specific example of poetry by W. Shakespeare’s – the central figure of “the western canon”. Particular emphasis has been laid on Sonnet 64 and its Ukrainian and Russian translations, where the paradigm of time arises as a basic metaphor. According to O. Potebnia’s concept, time, as an image, always preserves its “inner form”: it is anthropomorphic and in all respects corresponds to the archaic mythologeme, which is further on is implemented as a detailed generative metaphor. A multi-componential metaphor of a “deadly thought” (“This thought is as a death”) about the destruction and fatal end of all things, which perfectly corresponds to the overall theme of the sonnet, consistently appears, unfolds and gets materialized in Shakespeare’s text. It transforms the abstraction of thought into a format of metaphorical imagery, the latter being distinctly conveyed in practically all translations. This metaphor is formed along an “ontological spiral” by zeugma (a four-time repetition of ‘when’, eventually attached to the generalization “Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate...”). This classical figure also models a compositional frame of metaphors in the sonnet. Relying on the issue of primacy in the ontological pair “essence” and “substance”, we might conclude that metaphor, being treated as a subjective reality-text, creates simultaneously “non-being” and is considered as a specific, fragmentary copy of the world, its quasi-original. The paradox of the phenomenon lies in the fact that “plunging” into the metaphorical field, we thus deeply penetrate into non-being, however heading to reality.

POETICS OF LIFELOGGING: ON INTERSUBJECT FORMS OF UTTERANCE IN IGOR KHOLIN’S POEMS

The article is addressed to the consideration of the subject organization of lyrics by I. Kholin, a representative of the Lianozovo literary group, who became widely known as the author of the book of poems “Residents of the Barack”. Already in the presented, debut for the poet, composition there were outlined the types of speech widely presented to him, in which the subject is likened to a life-log camera, and the focus of attention is shifted from “Self” to “you”, from internal to external to the speaking world. The term “life-logging”, meaning the automatic fixation of a person's life using a video medium fixed to the body, is used in the article as a literary metaphor, “highlighting” the difficulty of personal speaking and self-expression of the protagonist. However, just as the environment of a life logger who does not fall into his own lens gives him a sufficient (if not exhaustive) idea, the life realities in the subject's field of view can tell about his inner world no less than he by himself. The analysis of a number of poems (the most detailed is considered “Fences. Garbage cans. Posters. Advertising”) allows you to demonstrate the intersubjective nature of life-logic “optics”. The latter is used by Kholin in three different forms: as the “dissolution” of the speaker in the text, as the construction of the statement on behalf of the syncretic subject and as the priority of the “other” over the “self” when creating the verbal “self-portrait” of the hero. The impossibility of distancing from hostile reality, but also the inadequacy of selfdetermination in its conditions, testify to the formation of a kenotic model of the artist's relationship with reality. In Kholin's poetry, the lyrical subject is not only a detached viewer, but also a protagonist who fully shares his sins and suffering with the world.

New Perspectives in the Israel-Palestine Conflict: Righting the Wrong through metaphor in Mornings in Jenin

Majority of world opinion today is critical of Israel’s role in the current standoff with Palestine fueled by the illegitimate occupation of the West Bank, depriving millions of Palestinians of their homeland. Yet, almost all non-Islamic countries maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, recognizing it as a country. The plight of the Palestinians, especially the children uprooted from their homes and forced to lead lives of depravation as refugees as a result of Israeli occupation has become a subject for insightful writings by many writers and critics, including Abulhawa who in Mornings in Jenin, skillfully employs language to showcase not the political tragedy (though it operates as the background) but the personal one. This paper textually analyzes Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin to explore the author’s use of the literary metaphor to expose not only the reality in Palestine, but more importantly, the horror of Israeli violence against Palestinians, trauma both physical and psychological. The study further highlights how the author raises a significant question: Who is the real terrorist in Palestine? The findings show that the novel utilizes several literary techniques to bring forth Israeli terrorism and Palestinian agony under Israeli occupation. Via language use, Abulhawa concludes that it’s the Israeli occupation, brutality and aggression that leads to Palestinian resistance/terrorism. Mornings in Jenin, in other words, is an attempt by Susan Abulhawa to justify the means of resistance concluding that Israel is the actual terrorist and not the Palestinians who have a ‘just cause’ to resist Zionist colonization. What is remarkable is her ingenuous use of literary devices to achieve the desired effect on the readers.

Objects and Ideas

Chapter 5 explores broader political, economic, psychological, literary, and intellectual meanings of the object lesson, presenting it as a key way of reasoning in and about nineteenth-century American culture. It connects object lessons to the rhetoric that surrounded the tariff debates of the 1890s and presents the practice as a way to talk about commodities and capitalism. Teachers often conducted object lessons on easily purchased materials, connecting classroom practices to the choices children would make as consumers. At the same time, psychologist G. Stanley Hall and educator T. G. Rooper tried to understand the ways children’s sense perceptions linked to their understanding of the wider world. Finally, the practice was used as a literary metaphor, to describe the need to pause and to consider something carefully. In these ways, the classroom object lesson became a central way to reason about and through nineteenth-century American cultural and intellectual life.

Literary Metaphor Comprehension and Production

This chapter addresses literary metaphors, which are used in literary works to enrich the meanings and evoke aesthetic effects. The aim of this chapter is to provide a unified view that can explain how literary metaphors are understood and generated. The chapter authors argue that comprehension of various types of literary metaphors involves a process of direct or indirect categorization by integrating and extending existing metaphor theories and empirical findings, in particular the author's metaphor research such as the interpretive diversity theory of nominal metaphors and the indirect categorization theory of predicative metaphors. The chapter authors also apply the unified view of literary metaphor comprehension to metaphor production, and discuss how people generate literary metaphors.

The materiality of the intangible: Literary metaphor in multimodal texts

Based on a larger practice-based research project in digital writing, this article examines how the materiality of digital media contributes to a layered metaphor that delivers meaning, reflects on the cognitive processes (the writer’s and the reader’s) of navigation and generates a dynamic narrative structure through multimodality, unnatural narration and user interaction. Many writers and artists engage with their chosen medium through an instinctive understanding of the materials at hand, gained through experience; the explicit study of a medium’s materiality is not always required for artistic success, however, that may be judged. This article offers insights into the creative process of creating digital, multimodal fiction, based on a practice-based research project designed to explore the effects of digital media on author and text, and argues that digital media have a significant effect on the outcome of the artefact itself. Awareness of these effects, their variations according to hardware and software, and the affordances of these various materials offer the digital writer greater insight and capability to craft his/her texts for the desired metaphorical meaning.