Brutal Highlanders and Crooked Coastals

This paper presents a philological and imagological analysis of the mutual contradictions of two types of characters in the corpus of Mediterranean literature. The highlander and the seasider, one brutal and the other imbedded in the hetero-conception of the other, belong to standard Mediterranean literary types, namely archetypes, from myths to the present. Literature on the Mediterranean and about the Mediterranean is abundant with typified descriptions of the highlander being a tough guy, violent, and the seasider as cunning, envious or a serial seducer. The imagology of these types and their mutual opposition is the topic of this philological analysis. The paper focuses on a comparative analysis of this imagotype/stereotype existing throughout the Mediterranean and transmitted from one literature to another throughout the centuries. The aim of the work is to review and summarize the literature concerning the archetypes of the highlander and the seasider in order to have a better understanding of the patterns of imagotypes and archetypes in the collective imaginary represented by Mediterranean literature.

Against the Idea of Africa as “Absolute Dystopia”

This paper examines two works that anticipate Africa-centred futures as positive and possible, without promising utopia. Americanah and After the Flare both embrace contradiction and complexity. Furthermore, their treatment of societies (mis)shaped by historical violence includes acknowledgement of their own imbrication in global structures of capitalist modernity. Against the grim backdrop of rising inequality, resurgent racism and the effects of climate change – a moment in which dystopic visions tend to predominate – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Deji Bryce Olukotun’s novels embody a kind of hope. Nonetheless, these alternatives to dystopia do not imagine that the problems and abuses of the present might easily be overcome. Thus, despite their employment of popular genres that invite rather than disavow pleasure, these fictions do not simply offer a form of escapism to distract us as the world burns. Rather, I would argue, they provide useful perspectives on Africa, on race and on humanity, that also have relevance in terms of current discourses of the Anthropocene. Before elaborating my argument in relation to Adichie and Olukotun’s works, I will examine some aspects of the contexts within and against which they operate – in terms of history, geography and representation concerning race, blackness, humanity, and Africa.

Weddings in Korea and Ukraine

Koreans and Ukrainians are two different nations in many aspects, such as geography, language, ethnicity, culture, and so on. It may seem difficult to find something in common between them. However, in terms of folk culture, especially wedding rituals, I would say that the two nations have many things in common. This study attempts to compare the traditional wedding rituals of the two nations which were performed among commoners between the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Through this study, we can understand that the basic structure of the wedding rituals of both cultures have much in common. Even though the ritual forms and contents are different from each other, both cultures use many similar objects and symbolic expressions for the wedding ceremony. This study also deals with how women’s work, romance and new aspirations of social class transformed the marriage tradition, and how rituals were influenced by the intervention of the governments’ authority in personal life.

Readability Thresholds

The unreadable and the illegible tend to be treated as the “other” of writing. Playing on one of the meanings of xenography – writing in a language unknown to the writer – this paper explores the possibility that the metaphorical “gravity assist” of literature, rather than engaging the resources of content and imagination, actually resides in the cognitively inaccessible layers of writing as a material phenomenon. If we accept Harman’s definition of realism as something that can’t be translated into human knowledge without energy loss, regions of unintelligibility in literary writing take on a completely different meaning, and appear as zones coinciding with the asemic material exteriority, equally unavailable to thought and mimesis. Writings of Thomas Ligotti (The Red Tower), Reza Negarestani (Cyclonopedia) and Mark Z. Danielewski (The Familiar) are examined in the light of various atypical formal devices they use to convey a certain “otherness,” introducing varying degrees of unreadability as a response to the “inscrutability of the Real itself” (Fisher) and enforcing new types of non-hierarchical distribution of agency between writer, reader and text.

Structure and Resistance in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge

From his first to his last novel, Pynchon has addressed the “constraints” hemming in human existence and gestured to different ways of transcending these. After summarizing the way his novels exemplify this twofold movement I will offer a reading of his last novel Bleeding Edge and show how the dialectic between structures of power and human resistance continue to order the narrative. My reading of the novel will argue that, like in his previous work, the cooption of utopian potential resurfaces in this work and offers a vivid way of analyzing “speculative change” in literature.

To Unsee the Sea

This article provides a glimpse into the echo of the European refugee crisis in contemporary European cinema and the modes of narration deployed in representations of the phenomenon that is rapidly changing the European political and cultural landscape. The representation of the crisis seems to be bringing about a crisis of representation. Mainstream media refugee images are penetrating both the big screens and television production. Drama and victimhood are, consequently, inevitably becoming the dominant modes of narration (See Rosi’s Fuocoammare), but a growing number of filmmakers address the issue in rather creative ways, bravely experimenting with the nature of the cinematic event as a whole.

Consonantal Structures in Phonetics and Phonology

The purpose of this study is to present and compare two different approaches (a phonetic approach and a phonological one) for the speech sound systems of natural languages. To this end, this study investigates natural speech sound systems with the consonantal systems of four Slavic languages, Russian, Polish, Czech and Serbian and Croatian, on the basis of phonetic and phonological approaches. In the phonetic approach, the consonant inventories of the four Slavic languages are analyzed with the theory of maximal and sufficient dispersion and the size principle, together with a frequency-based statistical approach. Segmental universals are discussed regarding sound types such as obstruents and sonorants. From the phonetic approach, it is shown that Slavic consonant systems are very unusual in terms of natural languages. Palatalized sounds in Russian and affricates and fricatives in Russian and Polish support that the Slavic consonantal system is far removed from the general aspect of human languages. On the other hand, with the phonological approach, four of the five feature-based principles proposed by Clements are employed to reveal the universals of the languages. They are Feature Economy, Marked Feature Avoidance, Robustness and Phonological enhancement. What we have seen is that some unsolved problems from the phonetic approach are explained by phonological accounts. The fact that Russian has plenty of segments represented by [+palatal] may not be unusual with respect to a feature-based approach. In addition, while the phonetic approach claims that Slavic languages (in particular, Russian and Polish) have different consonantal systems from the general aspect of natural languages because of the marked segments, the phonological approach accounts for the universals of these languages in the light of Robustness and Feature Economy. In short, what we get from phonetic accounts are language universals, found by frequency-based statistical approach while what we get from phonological accounts, using a feature-based approach, are linguistic universals.

Village Tutelary Deities as a Cultural and Axiological Symbol in Korea and Romania

An artistic creation expressed as a cultural phenomenon symbolizes the characteristics of a nation’s soul and mental life. And the cultural heritage of a nation, which shows us the religious symbols and signs in the great nature to be harmonized with the profane and the sacred, is also easily found in the East and the West. Troytsa, Jangseung, Sotdae: these can be taken as representative. Regarding the Romanian cultural heritage of Troytsa, the village tutelary deity conforms very similarly to Korean Jangseung and Sotdae. Jangseung and Sotdae, representative popular sculptured creations of Korean folk beliefs, and which are related to the totem pole, are close to villagers’ lives, being the divine protection of the village’s peace, as well as functioning as a signpost and a boundary, ensuring a good harvest and preventing misfortune, etc. A Sotdae, which features a bird on top of a pole, is recognized as an object of belief mixed between the “Tree of the World” and the “Bird of the Soul” in northern-cultural Asian shamanism. Unlike them, the Romanian Troytsa, which took root in an ancient faith (the Totem of the Tree), is a divine, sculptured creation mixed with Christianity, generally located at the entrance of a village or at an intersection of roads. These tutelary deities and their variations share functions and characteristics, but their features and patterns are different. Jangseung have angry and fearful countenances in order to turn away diseases and evil spirits, but Sotdae and Troytsa maintain the style of a menhir or a column as one of the folk beliefs related to the totem pole. Even today, Troytsa, Jangseung, Sotdae are being generated and developed as representative cultural prototypes and village tutelary deities.