Abstract Book of the XXIII Congress of the ICLA

Criticizing by creating: Friedrich Schlegel's early romantic idea of „Criticism“

2022-11-14T16:45:09+04:00

Friedrich Schlegel is the main representative of early German Romanticism. His romantic poetics are not only important for the development of German poetry, but also for the change from Classic to Modern in European intellectual life. And at the center of his theory is the term “criticism” (Kritik).

There is already a lot of research on this term, including Benjamin Walter's doctoral thesis The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism. Most of them put this term in the Cartesian and Kantian tradition and see it as an artistic expression of philosophical “reflection”. This is indeed one of the most important perspectives to view this term, but in Schlegel's case this is only the first step. In addition, most of these studies are limited to works from his romantic period only, and his earlier works on classical studies are usually not included, which makes the analysis of this term incomplete.

Accordingly, this essay attempts to advance the discussion of Schlegel's romantic “Criticism” in two directions. First, apart from the traditional reflective dimension, this term will further be explored in a skeptical, phenomenological and existentialist dimension respectively. Second, his classical studies, especially the studies of Greek poetry, will also be included in the discussion because they have also played an important role in the shaping of this term.

Through these efforts, this essay intends to prove that literary criticism is actually another name for poetic creation in Schlegel’s romantic poetics, and more importantly, it also reflects the transformation from Classic to Modern in European intellectual life.

Analysis of the concept of reliability in The Origin of Works of Art

2022-11-14T16:50:04+04:00

In Heidegger's article The Origin of Works of Art, "reliability" is an obscure but not easy to understand concept.By contrast with "usefulness", we can find that "reliability" is revealed because of the self – manifestation of the existence of the appliance. In this manifestation, the existence of the farmer woman is also revealed, so that the farmer woman has a grasp of her own world and hears the silent call of the earth.Heidegger chose works of art to reveal the existence of utensils because: First of all, although utensils can show their existence by themselves, such manifestation can only be realized at a specific moment;Secondly, the disclosure of the existence of the appliance itself depends on abnormal behaviors or phenomena, and it is no longer the appliance itself that is playing a role.At the same time, the artistic work reveals the existence of the appliance depends on the image reproduction of the appliance.In addition, although Heidegger's division of the boundary between instruments and works of art appeals to the mystery of art, it does not lead to the elitism of art, because Heidegger's division is not at the level of existence.

Shakespeare’s Paintings of the Prodigal Son – But There are no Paintings…

2022-11-14T16:51:14+04:00

In this paper, I will focus on the paintings of the prodigal son in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor. In 2 Henry IV Falstaff refers to a prodigal son’s painting as a possible decoration for the walls of the Hostess’ tavern and in The Merry Wives of Windsor the Host refers to Falstaff’s chamber as being all decorated with the same story from Luke’s Gospel. However, paintings are not described.

The parable of the prodigal son has enjoyed an unprecedented iconographic afterlife ever since the Middle Ages: over the years the story of the prodigal’s adventures and homecoming has become one of the most privileged visual narratives all over the Western World.

Ever since 1935 the parable of the prodigal son has been acknowledged as “the most frequently mentioned parable of the Gospels in the plays” (Noble, 1935) of Shakespeare. While research has focused on the paradigm of the prodigal son and its use for the description of characters and their behaviour, very little has been said on the prodigal’s “absent pictures” in Shakespearian plots. We know that the prodigal son is the subject of the paintings, yet we don’t exactly know what these paintings depict, nor what scenes are figured in them. To some degree they are “blank”/unekphrastic paintings that require the audience to project onto them what they think ought to be there, they demand the reader’s meditation in order for the plays – namely Falstaff – to be understood. Because we don’t know exactly what’s in them, they offer an opportunity for a dynamic audience engagement in that they are free to “visualize” his/her own narrative of the prodigal son, the only influence upon them being the link between the picture and the play as well as its source in the Gospels. Thus, members of the audience are invited to project something highly idiosyncratic onto the text, they can weave their own experience of the “subject” (a picture they’ve seen in life or a sermon they might have heard in church) into the fiction. In short, they are encouraged to choose their own adventure.

The use to which Shakespeare puts visual objects such as the reference to prodigal son’s paintings shows how visual art can contribute to a better understanding of the plays point to problematic aspects of Falstaff. In this way, visual criticism becomes part of literary criticism and art can be considered a form of literary commentary.

L’art et la vie

2022-11-14T16:53:31+04:00

Si les critiques du roman de l’artiste font remonter l’apparition de ce genre à la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, c’est le premier romantisme allemand (Novalis et Tieck), repris par Balzac, puis par Poe, qui lui a pleinement donné sa signification: dans un souci d’effacer les cloisonnements entre critique et création, mais aussi entre imagination et raison, il affirmait, par le roman de l’artiste, et contre le Bildungsroman, le lien indissoluble entre l’art et la vie. Le mythe de Pygmalion, dans lequel la création artistique consiste à donner vie, celui du vampire, dans lequel l’art se nourrit de la vie, trouvent ainsi des interprétations inédites.

C’est contre une telle pensée de l’art que le naturalisme a construit sa propre interprétation du roman de l’artiste : chez les Goncourt, comme chez Zola ou chez Maupassant, pour en rester seulement au domaine français, l’art semble s’opposer à la vie sous différentes formes: la vie est tout d’abord une destruction de l’art; celui-ci par ailleurs se nourrit de la mort plus que de la vie ; enfin l’art entre en concurrence avec la vie et semble l’écarter.

Derrière ces divergences avec le romantisme, le naturalisme développe une pensée de l’art fondée sur une même remise en question de la mimèsis que la conception romantique. Mais à la réflexion sur l’art et la mimèsis, le naturalisme ajoute une autre fonction prêtée au roman de l’artiste: celle d’art, en ce qu’il discute la position des mouvements picturaux de son temps à l’égard de cette pensée sur l’art.

La communication, prévue pour l’atelier ouvert «Art criticism and creation in European literatures» («Critique d’art et création dans les littératures européennes», sous-thème: «Mots et images traversant les frontières littéraires et critiques»), pourra être proposée en français.

Through Word or Image: How Figural Iconic Solidarity Builds Characters and Drives Narrativity in Comics

2022-11-17T12:06:12+04:00

All but the briefest or most experimental of narratives present at least one character whose activities and experiences are followed over time. Such an individual will thus be brought to the audience’s attention repeatedly. In fiction, for instance, multiple sentences will contain noun phrases – typically a combination of proper nouns (e.g. “Lisbeth”), pronouns (“she”), and descriptive phrases (“the girl with the dragon tattoo”) all of which are understood to refer to the same entity as they move through the storyworld, acting and being acted upon. By comparison, in many comics narratives, the work of establishing a character’s ongoing presence is instead accomplished by means of images. Of course, most comics also provide text elements such as speech balloons and captions, but embodied (drawn) characters within the panels are central focus points for the comics reader and typically bear much of the narrative load.

In this paper we compare the affordances of word and image, introducing the concept of Figural Iconic Solidarity (FIS). By means of FIS, the comics reader identifies narratively salient visual elements that enable narrative continuity and cohesion, just as repeated linguistic references do in prose literature. By “figure” we mean any continuing visual element, or a recurring iconic motif, which usually involves a character (but sometimes a thing, place, or setting). We argue that FIS fills a gap in comics theory: much attention has indeed been given to the composition and structure of visual content, but relatively little has been focused directly on the core visual mechanisms for establishing narrative continuity. The concepts of (co–) reference and semantic compositionality have been central to linguistic theory for decades and more, but, alas, though the interpretation of comics images requires the very same concepts, the linguistic solutions cannot be imported directly: images are not words; panels are not phrases. This problem has scarcely been touched although it has been recognized by some (Groensteen sidesteps the issue; Cohn resolves it ingeniously but, we believe, inaccurately).

The concept of FIS is, in part, a critical modification of Thierry Groensteen’s notions of iconic solidarity and redundancy, while it also draws from other approaches in Comics and Film Studies and linguistics, including in particular the characters’ connectivity – function in Kai Mikkonen’s Narratology of Comic Art, Ulrich Krafft’s setting function of signs (Setzung), and Murray Smith’s notion of recognition in his model of how spectators construct fictional characters in films. Related notions include Neil Cohn’s “continuity constraint” and Chiao – I Tseng’s “cohesive chain”. In our talk we will draw examples from David Prudhomme and Pascal Rabaté’s Vive la marée !, also Chris Ware, Robert Crumb (“A Short History of America”), and certain well – known optical illusions.

Exploring Canadian and Indigenous relations with/in Graphic (Hi)stories

2022-11-17T12:11:41+04:00

By connecting comics to the broader social contexts in which they originate, circulate, and are consumed, scholars have shown how this hybrid medium can effectively comment on contemporary issues and historical events, challenging, contesting and subverting conventional narratives. Indeed, as Nick Sousanis (2015) discussed, comics function as “a push against considering things from a single perspective and instead draw on multiple ways of seeing to expand our understanding.” Hence, this medium can be used to meta – narratively ask the reader to question historical sources and generally held assumptions to adopt a collaborative/active role in the historical reconstruction/investigation.

Being a “cool medium” (McLuhan, 1964) comics provide less sensory information and therefore demand more involvement and/or ‘completion’ by the reader/viewer. They ask for slowness, as the viewer has to recompose, understand, and question the existing relation between words and pictures. This mode of fruition contrasts with the rapid way we generally consume news (even though they might use a similar visual – verbal syntax). Their slowness help comics visualize the stories of those who have been ignored/neglected by the international arena and make the reader witness human rights violation and abuses.

Given the above, this presentation aims to discuss how contemporary comics (re)narrate the past and present
relationship between Aboriginal people and (all) Canadians. These graphic narratives aim to acknowledge and
resist the (not so) past histories of expropriation, oppression, exploitation, and genocide; and they also seek to
present the present – day impact of this past. Interestingly, this work of historical revision sees the participation
of both white and Indigenous comic artists alike. For example, This Place. 150 Years Retold (Akiwenzie – Damm
et al., 2019) and A Girl Called Echo (Vermette et al., 2017) are clear example of the First Nations’ willingness to
reclaim their right to self – representation and teach the public about their history. At the same time, Chester
Brown’s Louis Riel (1999) and Joe Sacco’s (2020) Paying the Land testify the existence of allied depictions that
aim to break (even controversially) the silence about past and present sufferings of Indigenous peoples in Canada.

Female Bodies in Graphic Narratives: on Sexuality and Pregnancy

2022-11-17T12:13:33+04:00

This paper examines depictions of the female body in graphic narratives and explores recent changes in the comics landscape, focusing on Japanese manga where female creators work towards breaking taboos surrounding such representations.

Throughout the history of visual art, the human body has often been reimagined in idealized forms. In Greek sculpture, renditions of ideal bodies were considered the norm for representing beauty; this pursuit of ideals was reiterated by Renaissance art, the artistic principles of which were carried over from ancient Greek and Roman culture. This fascination with the "ideal body" has been inherited by succeeding generations, where the pursuit of perfect proportions and the emphasis on masculinity and femininity continue. In comics, a dominantly pictorial narrative medium, characters' bodies are often depicted with these gendered features sometimes exaggerated. In the depiction of women, femininity is often reinforced as positive representation, while the lack of femininity is condemned or ridiculed. So too, in Japanese manga, women with normative "feminine" bodies tend to take the lead, while the realities of female bodies are often overlooked, sometimes through over – sexualization and at other times through the concealment of sexuality. Depictions of women’s bodies in narratives about sexuality and pregnancy by female artists such as Moto Hagio, Moyoko Anno, and Yumiko Shirai opened up the discussion of this problem. It is worth noting that Japanese female – authored manga have established a history of denouncing male – oriented status quo as well as the sanctions such a society levels against those who question gender roles: by analyzing their stories about sex and pregnancy, as well as essay comics that have flourished in recent years, this paper examines the continuing pursuit against idealization and taboo.

The ‘Gentleman Traveller’ as ‘Comic Travellographer’ in Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang and Jerusalem

2022-11-17T12:15:39+04:00

The genre of travel writing – so protean that American critic Paul Fussell lamented the death of travel in the 20th century, even while attempting to define the genre for the first time in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980) –becomes even more nebulous in the graphic narrative form in the 21st century. My paper seeks to extend Paul Fussell’s prototype of the ‘Gentleman Traveller’, originally in the British context of the inter – war years, in graphic travel narratives of the 21st century through the work of Canadian graphic novelist and animator Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (2003) and Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (2015). Although the subgenre of international graphic literature includes classics like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2000) and Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980), graphic travelogues in the tradition of Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937) that merges political commentary with observations on quotidian life – narratives which are also documents of liminal spaces, many of which becoming increasingly inaccessible due to conflict and pandemic travel restrictions – have received scant critical attention.

My study is on the intersections of the discourses of memory, history, and the craft of ‘literariness’ in these graphic travelogues. Through this lens, I seek to examine mutations of a form that resists classification, and its generic delineation poses a formidable challenge to literary criticism since it is a form that glides in and out of diverse generic boundaries. Paul Fussell, while attempting to define the genre for the first time, remarked, “criticism has never quite known what to call books like these” (202). My work seeks to investigate the graphic travelogue from this position of uncertainty. Additionally, the paper also examines the politics of memory and nostalgia in the trope of the erudite ‘gentleman traveller’ that defines the author – persona of ‘conventional’ travelogues in the context of the ‘comic travellographer’ and its subject position in relation to home, fellow travellers, readers, and the text.

Terrorists, Historical or Fictional: Different Perspectives on the Politics of Fear

2022-11-17T12:21:20+04:00

Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta is arguably the most famous graphic narrative dealing with the deeds or misdeeds of a fictional terrorist; published in short episodes on Warrior magazine from 1982 to 1985, the series was left unfinished for three years after the magazine closed; it was subsequently republished as a 10 issue series by DC Comics from 1988 to 1989. A remarkable detail is V's use of gelignite for his bombings, a high explosive used by irregular or paramilitary groups such as the Irish Republican Army and, less frequently, by British loyalists – this an other tell – tale particulars reveal how much this dystopian and to a certain extent science – fictional comic was rooted in its historical time and space.

In a time in which terrorism is usually presented by the media as one of the greatest threats to the safety of western societies (and a devastating presence in the rest of the world), when Al – Qaeda and then Daesh have spread fear on the western world, one cannot help thinking that comics have often dealt with the politics of terror, but with very different approaches and from very different political or moral stances. This essay aims at analyzing these approaches and stances by focusing on a trio of European comics depicting acts of terrorism, regardless of their being historical or fictional.

The discussion will start with a reading of V for Vendetta with will highlight its anachronistic aspects (positing V as the reincarnation of the late – 19th – Century anarchists and focusing on the symbolic subtext which propels the narrative by opposing the terrorist and the authoritarian Norsefire regime as the embodiments of two abstract principles, disorder and order respectively), but will also point out some episodes that foreshadow 21st Century Islamist terrorism –which is not fictional at all.

V for Vendetta will be read against Frank Miller's controversial Holy Terror (2011), a graphic novel where a costumed vigilante named The Fixer battles an Islamist terrorist organization, a work Miller conceived after 9-11 and subsequently distanced himself from. While V for Vendetta has been hailed as one of Moore's masterpieces and became immensely popular also thanks to the homonymous movie, Holy Terror is currently out of print and has been somewhat disowned by his author. And yet by superimposing these two comics we may better understand what happens when the issue of terrorism is tackled in the context of superhero fictions. Then there will be an analysis of Davodeau and Collombat's Cher pays de notre enfance (2015), a French graphic reportage dealing with the terrorist action of the SAC, or Service d'Action Civile, the armed branch of the Gaullist party, to show how comics may deal with the historical deeds of a terrorist organization which did not aim at overthrowing a government, but at strengthening its control of the country, and keeping it in power – one remarkable difference being that while Moore and Lloyd's series has a single terrorist fighting against the powers that be, here we have a collective entity struggling to fight those who are not in power. The essay will eventually deal with Francesco Barilli and Matteo Fenoglio's Piazza della Loggia (2018), an ambitious and large – sized mix of graphic reportage and graphic historiography, dealing with the 1974 Fascist bombing in Brescia, and painstaking reconstructing its historical background and the investigation that slowly led to the identification of the terrorists and their arrest (investigations which were repeatedly sabotaged by the Italian secret services and police forces). Italian Fascist terrorist organizations played a role much similar to that of SAC in France, and the reconstruction of the Brescia bombing has striking similarities with Davodeau and Collombat's reportage. The two graphic essays will provide a radically different approach to terrorism from that offered by the superhero comics, and yet both approaches may yield interesting insights about the representation of terrorism in mass culture.

„A Ghastly and Inappropriate Splendour“: The Fantastic in Dino Battaglia’s Comic Adaptations

2022-11-18T15:19:33+04:00

In the Italian and European scene Dino Battaglia is considered one of the authors who most knew how to focus his artistic research and intellectual reflection on the absolute linguistic value of comics as well as on its otherness compared to the purely verbal language, reflection constantly addressed in his outstanding work. This is even more evident in the many adaptations of great literary texts which make up the bulk of his production, real rewriting which meant for Battaglia the ideal testing ground in which to focus on that stylistic tension, from the unusual design techniques used to a new concept of “architecture” of the page, which supports the transposition from one to another code.

The choice to “rewrite” a lot of the masterpieces of the fantastic genre may thus not be ascribed only to a mere personal preference: if by fantastic we mean a literary genre that makes hesitation and ambiguity its constituent elements, always poised between the adjacent categories of étrange and merveilleux, it’s clear that the translation into another language, precisely into that of comics, of the fantastic quid, will require different strategies to revive that vagueness that is essential to the representation both verbal and figurative of the uncanny, sooner than the presence of specific issues and distinctive semantics. The work of transposition that the Venetian artist performs in the last period of his career on several stories by Edgar
Allan Poe, one of the most representative author of the nineteenth – century tradition of the genre, therefore proves paradigmatic of this stubborn linguistic research. Therefore, through a detailed comparison with the original texts of Poe, this paper will detect the formal and representative technical strategies used by Battaglia to recreate in the language of comics the disquieting inexplicability that makes his «drawn stories» authentic fantastic works.

TRESE Enters the Media Mix: From Komiks to Netflix Anime

2022-11-18T15:51:32+04:00

In 2005, Budjette Tan and KaJO Baldisimo created Trese as an independent series of 20-page komiks, to be reproduced via photocopy and sold at local pop-culture conventions in Manila, as well as posted online. In 2008, the first collected volume, Trese: Murder on Balete Drive, was published by Visprint, Inc. The series has since had many volumes and variants, also receiving multiple awards, including the Philippine National Book Award for Best Graphic Literature in 2010. In June of 2021, the six-episode animated series began airing on Netflix.

This paper is part of a larger study on the entry of Philippine pop-text and mythological “database” into the transcultural media mix. It sets out preliminary comparisons of the komiks and the animated adaptation through close reading, identifying narratological strategies involved in the transmedia shift from a highly episodic comic book series to a relatively condensed animated TV series. By focusing on narrative compression in plot & pace, it explores how adaptational choices impact the representation not only of themes and specific characterizations foregrounded by the original stories, but of Philippine cultural knowledge in general. This includes the narrative representation of mundane and mythological spaces, folkloric and contemporary popular figures, and contextual references to Filipino “communal” experience and beliefs.

This textual approach also serves as groundwork for the larger analysis of transnational practices that transform the series. Thus, in lieu of conclusions, it relates the surveyed transformations to observations about the series’ history of international
publicity, as well as marketing strategies such as Netflix’ simultaneous cross-language dubbing into English, Filipino, and Japanese. Finally, it touches on aspects of audience and reception, surveying early reactions from Philippine media and discourses arising from the participation of a global Philippine diaspora online.

Teaching From the Unknown: Students' Reinvention of Hildegard of Bingen's Lingua Ignota

2022-11-18T16:00:55+04:00

Hildegard of Bingen’s Lingua ignota (12th century) is the earliest rational languageinvention we know of in the European Middle Ages, consisting of 1012 “unknown” nouns, translated into Latin and Old High German. She includes five unknown words in a macaronic antiphon she composed: “O orzchis ecclesia,” a kind of code – switching in the strictest sense. This paper describes a pedagogical approach for a class I teach called "Magic Language in the Middle Ages” where, among other things, I encouraged students to explore the unknown (ignota) by way of their own imitation of it. I gave them a creative assignment that taught them phonology, phonosemantics and lexical structure, as well as some understanding of the desire on the part of so many imaginative people to reinvent words. The Lingua is hardly “magic”; it was intended as a deific substitute for and an imitation of the summaria in her day (lists of Latin words and their vernacular translations used by ecclesiasts). But Hildegard’s words have a distinct and consistent sound to them that imitates her native German, and in many cases matches the initial syllables of the words for which she’s finding her divine substitutions. By abandoning the impulse to invent English – sounding words, my students’ invented Hildegardian words for categories she missed: large animals (she has an oxherd and a shepherd but no ox or sheep for instance, or any other beast besides birds), celestial bodies (no planets, no sun or moon), and so forth. It’s important that students and other interested readers reject popular claims that her Lingua was a) an entire language, b) entirely arbitrary, c) a secret code, or d) glossolalic, but includes many compounds and evidence of gender. The Lingua ignota and her accompanying litterae ignotae resemble in design and layout noteworthy language inventions today – far more so than other early and late medieval languages of “angels” (such as that found in the Tenga Bithnua or the Pistis Sophia, which are largely nonsensical). In a book I interviewed by Carl Phelpstead called Tolkien and Wales, Tolkien wrote to a friend that he had learned Greek by making up a similar language that was "Greekier than Greek." Education by imitation. No one but an enthusiast would turn the Lingua Ignota (all substantives, verbs, adjectives – which we surmised would have Latin cases and conjugations) into an expanded, usable language, but there is the dream of doing it, the joy of examining Hildegard’s modus operandi, and the satisfaction of seeing in her something familiar to many.

Waking unknown languages? James Joyce’s Wakese challenge

2022-11-18T16:15:51+04:00

James Joyce claimed to be fluent in roughly five or six languages. These were Latin, German, French, Norwegian, Greek and Italian (but also Triestino, the dialect of Trieste, a city in which he spent 16 years). However, in his last work, Finnegans Wake (1939), scholars identified up to seventy languages arranged in multiple different ways in the text. By taking advantage of wordplays, puns, which combined double or multiple meanings of words, neologisms, portmanteaux, ambiguities, alliterations, experimentations with sounds and spellings, unhyphenated compounds etc., Joyce managed to exploit his linguistic repertoire to its full extent. This happened thanks to the languages he mastered but also to the ones he only partially or limitedly knew and did not know, such as Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese etc. All these languages contributed to create the so – called ‘Wakese’, Finnegans Wake’s ‘language’, or a variable idiolect which defamiliarized both known and unknown tongues.

In my presentation, I will explore Joyce’s quest for unknown languages from which his work was generated. In more detail, I will investigate Joyce’s linguistic sources – how he practically tapped into unknown languages; whether, for instance, these languages are more frequently combined with other known or unknown languages and how they are accommodated in Finnegans Wake’s narrative; what functions they play in the text etc. By doing that, my aim is to understand the linguistic unknown from the writer’s rather than from the reader’s perspective – a highly understudied topic which deserves further developments and attention.

Jewish Writers Between Arabic and Hebrew: In search of Arab – Jewish modern literary form

2022-11-18T16:25:41+04:00

The intertwined connections between Hebrew and Arabic stood for many generations at the center of Jewish literature, and shaped literary tendencies, perceptions of identity, and sometimes also theological influences. This bidirectional movement underwent great changes over the centuries, yet continuously remained central to all Jewish communities in the Arab world, through secular and religious works in Judeo – Arabic, in Hebrew as well as in translations between languages.

In this paper I wish to explore several formative moments of Jewish writing between Hebrew and Arabic, be it Bi – lingual writing or translation, literary Arabic or Judeo – Arabic, Rabbinic Hebrew or Israeli Hebrew, Middle ages or Modern, pre – 1948 or post – 1948, and I will ask how these writing stands in connection with questions of Literary traditions, and what these writing suggest poetically, linguistically and in terms of identity. I will further explore how transitions and translation between languages are connected to questions of religiosity, secularization and Orientalism, migration, exile and nationalism, as well as formulations of national, ethnic, class and gender identities.

The orientalist Csoma and the minimalist Szemző, creating along the linguistic unknown

2022-11-18T16:32:14+04:00

Sándor Kőrösi Csoma/ Alexander Csoma de Körös, a 19th – century Orientalist, set out on an Asian expedition in search of the Unknown with thirteen living and dead languages. He believed that the ancestors of the Hungarians had once lived in the area of Uighuria, but there were no further finds or linguistic evidence to prove it. Thousands of kilometres divided him from his home and the destination he dreamed about, but he braved the many dangers and discovered other languages, ancient texts, and legendary and historical facts along the way.

When the contemporary minimalist artist Tibor Szemző started to compile the images, music and texts for his film about Csoma, he decided to include Csoma's languages in the film, even though Szemző was not familiar with most of them. The resulting films from 2006 use Csoma's languages through the voice of background narrators, while the main narrator in the Hungarian film version is Mari Töröcsik and in the English version Susanna York (Az élet vendége – Csoma – legendárium, A Guest of Life – Alexander Csoma De Körös). A decade later, Tibor Szemző took up the subject again, this time not with the main narrators of László Sárdi's script, but with a narration created by himself. With his team he created the cinema concert Ezüstmadár és a biciklis / Silverbird and the Cyclist, which is still on the programme.

The presentation shows how the languages of these two parallel productions, known and unknown to a wider audience, relate to each other, and how the linguistic unknown is bridged for the viewer. These code – switchings are not stumbling blocks, but a flow within one type of verbal musicality to another. While the background languages enunciate and verbally enrich what is seen visually, there is the narrative voice, telling a beautiful, exciting, and quite different story.

Desert/ed Trail. A journey into unknown, forgotten and lost languages in Eurasia with the polyglot author Sabira Stahlberg

2022-11-18T16:38:44+04:00

Sabira Stahlberg, PhD, is probably the most polyglot writer of our time. Her poetic works contain dozens of both modern and ancient languages, and she mixes and experiments, combines and disassembles codes, scripts and languages on all levels of language, from the phonetic to the semantic. In her academic work, Sabira has written extensively on historical, cultural and linguistic encounters in Central Asia, Siberia, the Volga region and the Balkans, and as a poet she uses her knowledge of both living and extinct languages to create unique poems with messages, references, inferences and understanding that go far beyond the aesthetic or linguistic levels discernible through any ordinary Western scientific or literary analysis. In the Desert/ed Trail reading, Sabira embarks on a journey through Eurasia, discovering trails and traces of unknown, forgotten and lost languages, scripts and codes. She explores the existing knowledge and understanding of their background and present roles, connections and heritage, the processes of fanning out, thriving and finally fading into the shadows, and being lost in the desert sands of history. Following deserted trails back into the near and distant past, and the future of endangered languages, the journey is characterised by scientific and poetic methods, extensive code – switching on all levels, and graphic and audio expressions. The Desert/ed Trail awakens memories of lost or forgotten languages also in the personal history of the poet, and challenges the listeners to look for their own language trails, their use of codes and their multiple switches both in the past and the present.

Synthesis or Absence: The Cultural Code in Alexander Chantsev’s Yellow Angus

2022-11-18T16:46:23+04:00

Yellow Angus [orig. Жёлтый Ангус] (2018) is a collection of short stories by Russian japanologists, writer, essayist, and literary critic Alexander Chantsev. This book consists of two seemingly culturally defined parts: Time of the Cicadas [orig. Времяцикад] – “the hard – hitting stories about Japan,” and Humus Horizons [orig. Гуму-совый горизонт] – “the reflective adventures in the Moscow dacha.” However, the division of the book into the Japanese part and the Russian part is conditional, since the cultural coordinates in them are intentionally shifted and ambiguous. It can be seen in the plots, intertextual allusions, on the character and metaphorical levels, and indeed in language. Thus, for instance, Yellow Angus is formally a multilingual work, but because of the inserts in English, not Japanese, as one would assume. Japanese in the book is invisible and appears implicitly through the interlingual homonymy. At the same time, it is in the second – supposedly Russian – part that the Russian language is used from such a distance that it seems foreign. These and some other significant peculiarities of Alexander Chantsev’s translingual poetics can be seen as forms of cultural codification, potentially aimed either at recreating an unknown cultural code, irreducible to the sum of its components or at the verbal representation of the absence of any cultural certainties. The study aims to explore this moving and elusive сultural code in Yellow Angus in its architectonic function.

Reading with Accents – Literature as Sounding Archive of the Multilingual Cultural Memories

2022-11-21T10:33:39+04:00

Because of cultural interferences and historical juxtapositions, the inner heterogeneity and hybridity of East–Central Europe as a shared territory between different national and ethnic groups and as a “multilingual selfawareness” (Thomka 2018) could be seen and enforced as a common non – nationalistic local background. The multilingual poetics created by “commuting grammars” (Thomka 2018) of bi – or trilingual authors whose poetic languages create between different languages, transferring, juxtaposing, layering cultural worlds and social experiences.

Focusing on the accents, which always preserve the sounding memory of another language, the audible interaction of languages could transform the multi – ethnic memory of a multilingual region into a contemporary audible experience. Accents enable to turn the written and latent multilingualism into an oral manifest reading experience.

Reading with accents stages this literature as an oscillating – sounding archive with layered local multilingual memories and, at the same time, as a contemporary oral transnational medium. My corpus of the analysis will be the novels of Ádám Bodor, which transform the Hungarian language into an audible archival medium of multilingual cultural spaces, creating local perspectives by juxtaposing (conflicting) historical mnemonic legacies and divergences.

Performative German in Sándor Vály's Die Toteninsel

2022-11-21T10:41:52+04:00

This presentation analyzes the improvised lyrical opera Die Toteninsel by the multimedia artist Sándor Vály. The project was deemed by the artist as a reconstruction of a lost work, specifically the musical aspect of an original German language libretto written by Karl Georg Zwerenz in 1919, telling the story of Arnold Böcklin's painting of the same name Die Toteninsel. The multilingual examination of the piece lies in the opera's performative dimension. Since Vály specifically casts himself and his actors without having any German language knowledge whatsoever, the actual singing and interpretation of the original text ends up being largely improvised. Thus, the performed German transforms into an entirely different language, becoming a performative tool, cutting ties with the rigorously written native German. Metaphorically, Vály's initially planned reconstructive work turns out to be more of a deconstruction of language, form, and genre.

Contemporary healing spaces in European narratives of illness: dialogues between urban centres and peripheries

2022-11-22T12:39:59+04:00

This work analyzes the fabric of literary representations of tuberculosis, conceived in the first half of the 20th century, which are contextualized in the microcosm of the sanatorium. Specifically, I will study how these narratives (Der Zauberberg, 1924; Choucas, 1927; Genesung in Graubünden, 1938; Sette piani, 1937; Pabellón de reposo, 1943; El mar, 1958; Diceria dell'untore, 1989) articulate the division between core / periphery that these spaces of confinement and exclusion produce.

The construction of sanatoria arises throughout Europe as a means of removing disease from the city itself, of making the infectious body (the threat) disappear from urban centers (the world of the healthy). As a heterotopic (and heterochronic) space, the microcosm of the sanatorium maintains specular relationships with the place from which it seeks to distance itself (the city). In the sanatorium, the dichotomy of belonging / not belonging is established, both to the place of arrival and to the place of departure, which implies the difference between belonging to the category of the almost – dead, or of the living.

The remoteness of sanatoria from urban centers does not make the duality of center / periphery disappear; instead, it becomes mental and discursive in these narratives. This dialogue between center and periphery is dramatically present for the patient, although the referents of these concepts alternate. What is center and periphery when the focus of these narratives is the exiled patient themselves? What is center and periphery within the autonomous space that is the sanatorium, where the medical and service personnel function as correlates of the urban space (life)? What is center and periphery when the tuberculosis patient must face not only the captivity that the limited space of the sanatorium involves (and even the more restricted space of their room), but also that other space that they must challenge, which is their sick body?

From Street – life to Cruising in The Park: Queers and the dancefloor (1978-1988)

2022-11-22T12:41:32+04:00

It is only in recent decades that appraisal of pop music has gained footing in academic musicology studies. Intersections of pop and queer sexualities have since been well documented. However, this paper argues that comprehensive analysis of the role and impact on queer audiences, of the dance floor, and its musical soundtrack, has remained relatively uncharted.

The paper commences in 1978, a point by which disco had saturated the lexicon of mainstream North American and European pop cultures (Echols, 2010). Outlining its trajectory, and the subsequent backlash provoked by its perceived challenges to heteronormativity, the paper questions the notion of the reputed ‘death of disco’. Here, the genre of Hi – Nrg is introduced and explored, as proof of disco’s musical evolution, and for its pioneering embodiment, of “[…] gay life on the dancefloor” (Jones & Kantonen, 1999, p.145). The significant role pop music can play in relation to individual identity formation LGBTI/queer constructions (Dhoest, Herreman & Wasserbauer, 2015) is then considered. Its proven dexterity, as a fostering agent with the capacity to imbue a sense of mutual connectivity among audiences (Gill, 1995; Siegel, 2001), is also explored. Leading to further analysis, of the importance and role of ‘safe spaces’ to queer audiences, and in offering examples of lyrical, pop artefacts from the period, the paper builds a picture of the dance floor’s transnational function, as vital space for queer audiences.

Triana – Tres Mil: Emancipation Through Nostalgia?

2022-11-22T12:43:01+04:00

The Roma – majority community living in the quarter of Triana (Seville) was expelled from their houses between 1957 and 1961, due to property speculation and xenophobia. While a few of these inhabitants were offered housing in different newly built apartment buildings in the outskirts of the city, many of the inhabitants of Triana remained in temporary housing and shacks.

Between the years 1968 and 1977, they were finally offered housing in building blocks in an area called Poligono Sur. The lack of sufficient attention from the municipality, added to the low living standards and the impoverished situation of this community led to a rise in criminality, abandonment, and marginalization, especially in a sub – zone generally known as “Tres Mil Viviendas”. However, since the beginning of the 21^st century, many initiatives from governmental institutions and NGOs have been working in the area to improve their material and educational conditions. Some of these initiatives have focused on the flamenco tradition from Triana, aiming at focusing on pre – existing identity aspects from before the forced migration. These projects aim to foster education and occupational training, as well as artistic and collaborative skills. Furthermore, documentaries and artistic works have been produced showing the revival of flamenco culture in the Tres Mil quarter. While this approach could be seen as problematic for several reasons and the cultural works produced tend to idealise the role of flamenco in impoverished communities, it is also an opportunity to rethink nostalgia in a different light.

This paper will develop a notion of nostalgia which can overcome the reactionism that is usually linked to. This new conceptualisation aims at evaluating the ways in which political problems can be assessed, and the role of artistic creation in dealing with nostalgic feelings through responsibility, accountability, and historical liability.

The topic of this paper is linked to the writing process of a poetry collection about Seville, urbanism, and xenophobia. This project has been awarded a Grant from the Ministry of Culture in Spain for Literary Creation (Grant code 2102234).

A ‘Substantial’ Diversity. Approaches to the Concept of Suburbia in the Global North

2022-11-22T12:44:45+04:00

Suburbia is considered the globally ubiquitous borderland of every major urban settlement. While the debate about specific suburban characteristics has been extensive, it is primarily held under North American assumptions: (slowly diversifying) white middle – class settlements with low – density detached housing.

Harris criticized this Anglo – American – centric approach to the concept of suburbia as mostly self – referential, instead advocating for “a typology to organize […] the diversity of suburban meanings, worldwide” (2010: 16). Developing a general framework he illustrated differences and commonalities between the Global North and the Global South but forwent a deeper differentiation.

For the case of suburban Germany Burdack and Hesse emphasized its highly discrete characteristics (2006); the suburban France is often described as periurban instead; and the suburban Asia (i.e. Japan and South Korea) seems altogether neglected in international academia. In other words: There is a spectrum of concepts of suburbia in the Global North that is uncharted.

With urbanization as a global phenomenon also came globally understandable aspects of what is considered urban. In a reaction to the debate about ‘planetary urbanization’ as an overly generalizing concept Brenner proposed an engaged pluralism (2018): Incorporating local specifics into a nevertheless ubiquitous phenomenon.

Following Brenner under a dedicated intercultural hermeneutically perspective I will in my contribution use the term suburbia as a basic container. In a comparative meta – analysis of academic literature I will explore how this container is filled with a ‘substantial’ diversity of concept of suburbia in the Global North.

Mapping the Borderland: South African Identity, Memory, and Space Making in P. Mpe’s “Welcome to Our Hillbrow” and P. Abraham’s “Mineboy”

2022-11-22T12:46:16+04:00

The proposed contribution will compare the novels Mine Boy (Abrahams 1946) and Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Mpe 2001) regarding their use of urban mobility as a form of recurring spatializing practise and its role for (national) identity construction and memory production. Both novels narrate the story of a rural black man that comes to Johannesburg in order to become a part of the city. The metropolis of Johannesburg is a place of significance in the national imagination. It is where the nation’s future is renegotiated especially at the beginning and end of apartheid (1948-1994).

Both characters exhibit similar spatialising practices in order to claim their place within the city and nation. Their movements map the urban environment and fuse it with the characters’ rural place of origin. This act creates spaces for liminal identities that merge the peripheral and core of the nation. Johannesburg becomes thus a borderland bridging racial segregation as well as the nation’s past and future.

However, the novels differ in their way of mapping. In Welcome to Our Hillbrow, the process of orientation is informed by the racist past of the nation hence mapping becomes simultaneously an act of memory production reaching into the nation’s past and future. Mine Boy, written at the onset of apartheid, points forward into the nation’s future by incorporating Marxist ideology into the mapping process. In both cases, the city becomes a border space that questions imperial discourses of power (Anzaldúa 1987, Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006) while negotiating national identity.

The analysis combines a literary and cultural studies approach arguing for the relational and discursive character of identity forming categories of space and mobility. It is informed by Massey’s (2005) definition of space as a process of materially embedded practises, which puts mobility at the centre of spatializing practices. Mobility and space are both objects of knowledge in the Foucauldian sense (Frello 2008) and as such give insight into the naturalization and subversion of discourses of belonging in a postcolonial context.

Creating the urban transit: railway building, railways and the construction of the urban periphery in end – 19th century Hungarian fiction

2022-11-22T12:47:33+04:00

The construction of the Hungarian nation’s railway network was seen as an index of national and social modernity by Hungarian intellectuals at the end of the 19^th century Hungary, but writers of fiction reflected with more sensitivity for the implication of social change and the ephemeral nature of the urban experience. My proposal focuses on the vastly diverse implications and literary meanings of the main railway stations of Budapest in the work of Mór Jókai (1825=1905) whose late fiction associated railway journeys with a loss of class and social status for his aristocratic characters (Gazdag szegények/ The rich poor, 1890) while for the fiction of Ernő Szép ( Lila ákác /Purple lilacs, 1919) reflected on the coming of the railway as a disruption of lower middle class metropolitan idyll. My commentary of the railway’s representation in fin – de – siecle fiction attempts to interrogate the tensions between individual authorial identities embracing technological progress and prising these complex notions apart in fiction.

‘Elusive Bodies’: Liminal Urban Spaces in Works of Haruki Murakami and Irina Denezhkina

2022-11-22T12:50:38+04:00

This paper will take the characters’ movements through the urban spaces of Tokyo respectively Petersburg as starting points of an analysis focused on narrative technique in portraying the borderlands and characters’ movements between them, with a particular view to the interconnectedness of mobility and identity.

The very first lines of After Dark imagine the city as a living organism, seen from a bird’s – eye view: “Eyes mark the shape of the city. Through the eyes of a high – flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature – or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms” (3). The image of the city as a living organism, made up of different parts that are together yet distinct from each other, making up its “elusive body” (3), encapsulates the complexity and contradictions that characterise the urban space and the borders intrinsic to it. In a narrative style imitating the filmic technique of the zoom, the text then focuses on the “‘amusement district’” (3f.) to reach a Denny’s, where two of the principal characters first meet in the middle of the night. Encompassing a single night from midnight until 7 am, the time turns even seemingly central places into quasi – liminal spaces that are different to their daytime existence, emphasising the focus of the novel on the interrelatedness of space and time. The importance of time is emphasised by each chapter bearing the time as a quasi – title.

The liminal spaces present in this text include a “love ho” by the name of ‘Alphaville’, in which an IT executive violently beats up a Chinese prostitute, as well as a public park and, finally, the suburb. My paper will investigate how the narrative portrayal and function of the urban liminal spaces in Murakami’s earlier work Dance, Dance, Dance, which also prominently features a hotel as a classic urban liminal space in old and modern incarnations, differ from those in After Dark, and moreover draw on the liminal spaces in Irina Denezhkina’s Give Me (Songs for Lovers) (2002), which describes the erotic and other pursuits of a group of teenagers in Petersburg.

Place – making strategies in the contemporary peripheral novel

2022-11-22T12:52:14+04:00

Satellite neighborhoods and towns have long been considered residual non – places in literary urban studies. Over the past number of decades, however, these homogeneous and densely – built peripheral areas, home to social housing and to large migrant working – class communities, have emerged as literary features in a phenomenon that spans across national traditions. Drawing on the recent scholarly appraisal of these marginal spaces (Ameel, Finch and Salmela, 2015), this paper argues that it is precisely the peripheral and borderland position of satellite urban spaces that renders them important sites in the imagining of complex urban spatialities beyond the traditional hierarchy of dominating core versus marginalized fringes. Through a comparative analysis of Irish, English, Catalan and Spanish novels by Roddy Doyle, Dermot Bolger, Zadie Smith, Javier Pérez Andújar, Albert Lladó and Najat El Hachm set in the peripheries of Dublin, London and Barcelona this study will identify common patterns in this contemporary corpus by focusing on the following: the dynamics of material borders and contact zones in the generation of a sense of belonging, the tension between geographical center and periphery, place – making strategies that restore dignity to these seemingly desolate, run – down areas and the maze of intersections (particularly gender, class and ethnicity) that problematize space – bound identities across generations.

The Story of a Cowherd at Ranch of Hope: From Student Activism to the Anti–Nuclear Protest in Fukushima

2022-11-22T12:54:25+04:00

This presentation analyzes the story of a cowherd in Fukushima from an ecocritical perspective and examines the social and economic relationship between student activism and anti–nuclear protest.

The earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster of 2011 damaged a wide area of eastern Japan, and many humans and non – human animals became victims of the catastrophe. Many farm animals near the nuclear power plant either starved or were killed due to high radiation levels. However, Masami Yoshizawa, the owner of Ranch of Hope, decided to continue to keep his beef cattle until they died. As of 2021, more than 200 cattle are still alive there.

The story of this ranch and its cattle are frequently depicted in literary works, films, and media reports of the incident. For example, the fictional works In the Zone (2013) by Randy Taguchi and Sacred Cesium Ground (2014) by Yusuke Kimura were both based on the authors’ own experiences at the ranch. A documentary film Disaster of the Animals (2013) shows volunteers from animal conservation groups taking care of the cattle. These works show powerful images of dying cattle and the farmer’s moral struggle to keep them alive as farm animals.

Ranch of Hope functions as a place for the anti–nuclear movement in Fukushima. At the entrance of the ranch, tractors and trucks can be found with handmade placards opposing nuclear power and the killing of animals. Yoshizawa was the first townsperson to protest at the headquarters of Tokyo Electric Power Company in Tokyo. In the 1970s, he led student demonstrations at the Tokyo University of Agriculture. The literary works I discuss reveal that his student activism and the anti–nuclear movement are organically connected in protecting the lives of living beings.

Capital of Culture: Milo Rau’s The New Gospel (2020)

2022-11-22T12:55:49+04:00

The paper discusses the political aesthetics of Milo Rau’s 2020 film The New Gospel [Das Neue Evangelium]. The film was realized in the Southern Italian city of Matera as part of the city’s designation as European Capital of Culture in 2019 and displays the city both as a capital of film history and as a capital of agricultural exploitation. Matera’s archaic cityscape, a UNESCO world heritage site, which shows topographic similarities with Jerusalem, served as a film set for two of the most famous Jesus films: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004). In the present, the outskirts of the city have become a poor refuge for thousands of migrants who crossed the Mediterranean sea. Many of them end up working on large tomato or orange plantations under exploitative conditions held up by mafia structures. Rau’s film portrays the migrants’ fight for dignity through the Christian Passion narrative and its local film history. My paper shows how the film uses aesthetic strategies of contradiction and layering to create a complex political Passion play for the present and to emphasize the role of agriculture for fundamental cultural and political questions in the 21^st century.

The Role of the revolutionary women in agrarian revolts: From 1940s to recent days

2022-11-22T12:58:40+04:00

This paper seeks to address the role of women in the agrarian movements in India and their literary representation through decades. Indian farmers have a rich history of rebellion against the state during both the colonial and the post – colonial rule. In late 1940s and late 1960s Indian farmers stood up with arms against the state. In the recent movement of the farmers to resist the farmers’ bill, women farmers fought at the forefront. Working – class women performed great roles in the Telengana – Tebhaga movement, in the Naxalbari movement and in the Delhi movement. The Adivasi women are challenging the ruling class through their continuous struggle to protect their rights of the ‘Jal – jamin – Jangal (Water – Land – Forest)’. They redefined the aesthetics of politics by adding their views and demands in those movements. The state questioned women’s role and asked them to go back home or sometimes they brutally tried to suppress women rebels’ voice. This was not for the first time. The state or even the authors hesitated to recognize women revolutionaries’ active role. Sometimes the leftist authors too highlighted their ‘passive’ roles. How did the authors represent revolutionary women in the fictions written on the agrarian revolts? How do the revolutionary women challenge the patriarchal society and resist the state’s anti – people activity? I’ll try to address these questions in my paper.

La politique esthétique militante de Michel Houellebecq à partir de Sérotonine

2022-11-22T12:59:59+04:00

L’esthétique de Houellebecq en général lui permet d’exprimer ses points de vue sur différents sujets de société. Il qualifie même ses romans « d’art d’intervention » (cf. aussi les tomes d’Interventions) dans La possibilité d’une île. J’argumenterai dans cet article à partir de l’exemple dans Sérotonine où il défend avec véhémence la cause des agriculteurs, que Houellebecq vise à l’activisme à travers ses romans, ce qui rejoint les exigences du réalisme socialiste en général (Houellebecq 2010) et de la théorie marxiste de la littérature en particulier (Lukács, Adorno). Dans Sérotonine, l’aristocrate Aymeric d’Harcourt – Olonde est décrit comme un héros courageux aux racines et aux idéaux bien ancrées. Il s’engage dans la production laitière de qualité sur son domaine avec château hérité de sa famille aristocratique. Non seulement il menace les CRS lors de la manifestation des agriculteurs mais il finit par se suicider. Cette manifestation dont l’ampleur et la violence ainsi que ses retombées médiatiques sont décrites de manière détaillée est la sonnette d’alarme pour Houellebecq, qui y voit un fait de société européen, notamment en raison de la suppression des quotas laitiers de l’UE. Toute la mise en scène des événements occupe une grande partie du roman, mais au – delà et comme toujours chez Houellebecq, relève d’une fin morale.

Aymeric est qualifié d’« aristocrate martyr de la cause paysanne » (Houellebecq 2019, 265) et son sacrifice, son suicide, a aussi une portée morale : Son comportement est à l’opposé de celui du narrateur, Florent, qui a trahi ses femmes, ses idéaux et donc soi – même. Florent se caractérise par la lassitude et l’opportunisme, Aymeric au contraire reste fidèle à ses convictions jusqu’au bout et incarne l’engagement politique que Houellebecq aurait attendu de ses lecteurs après avoir pris conscience du nihilisme dépeint dans ses romans (Houellebecq 2005, 147).

How to Make the Farmers Revolt? Georg Büchner’s “Hessian Messenger” (1834) and the Materialistic Aporias of Peasant Agitation in German Vormärz

2022-11-22T13:01:31+04:00

“Fatten the peasants and the revolution gets apoplexy. A chicken in the pot of every farmer and the Gallic rooster dies.” In his letter to Karl Gutzkow from 1835 the German author Georg Büchner marks the political status of the farmer as a notoriously unreliable one – just one year after he has identified and addressed the farmer as crucial revolutionary subject in his leaflet “Hessian Messenger”. The lecture takes Büchner’s pamphlet written in collaboration with the pastor and revolutionist Friedrich Weidig as a starting point to explore the literary formats and forms of peasant agitation and mobilization in the context of the German Vormärz (ca. 1830–1848). The political and aesthetic aporias that accompany the conceptualization of the farmer as both a rebellious and anti – revolutionary actor in theory and literature of this time (e.g. Karl Schloenbach’s “Das deutsche Bauernbuch”,1948) will be analyzed from three perspectives: 1. as a question about the politically precarious status/class of the peasant between proletariat and bourgeoisie that increasingly manifests itself as an internal division in the farmer itself – a division that is still inscribed as moral dilemma in the agricultural protests of the 20th and 21st century (cf. Baier 1985). 2. as crucial stake in the debate about a new egalitarian agrarian law which at this time was not only discussed by (early) communists in France and Germany like François Babeuf, but also in the section of the "Society for Human Rights" founded by Büchner (cf. Mayer 1985), and lastly in Marx’s elaboration of the peasant question 3. as an aspect of a peasant form of existence, which is located by contemporaries on the one hand in a mythical religiosity, on the other hand in a specific understanding of nature and the self. As I will argue, precisely those characteristics that mark the farmer as a model of an unalienated form of being within the cultural – critical and socialist utopias of the 18th and 19th century, at the same time render him an uncertain political ally: the farmers striving for self – sufficiency, his practical materialism, but also his sense of right and justice that arises from an agrarian reference to ground and soil and which – thinking with Marx – also reveals an ecological punchline.

The Mexican Revolution: Literature as a Medium of Protest?!

2022-11-22T13:02:55+04:00

Social tensions as a result of unequal distribution of resources and land, political instability following the Mexican Revolution and agrarian reforms to alleviate the massive impoverishment of the rural population. These aspects are appropriated in El Llano en llamas (Juan Rulfo, 1953). More shocking is that the abuses described in Rulfo’s work continue into the 21st century, as the report Mexico rural en el siglo XXI (2018) clearly shows that the causal link between poverty, inequality of opportunity, structural discrimination, and spatial marginalization in rural Mexico remains virulent.
In my article, I would like to take the example of the 17 short stories in El Llano en llamas (Juan Rulfo, 1953) to examine the literary appropriation of the precarious situation of the Mexican rural population and the forms of protest during the Mexican Revolution (1910 – 1920).
In order to relate El Llano en llamas (1953) to current extra – literary discourses on the situation of the Mexican rural population and a culture of protest, I proceed from an implicit moral function of Rulfo’s short stories. Accusation, criticism and protest are therefore not only to be understood as social phenomena, but also come into play in literary practice. To this end, I place Rulfo’s literary work in a tension between ethics – aesthetics – documentation. In order to make the literary – scientific per¬spective on these protests also relevant for interdisciplinary discourses, I will investigate the following questions:
What is the relationship between the narrative mediation and modelling of a space hostile to man and life and the selection of representative figures (land workers, landowners and revolutionaries) whose existence depends without exception on this country? How does the spatial rooting of the figures affect their possibilities for action and development? What social agenda does Rulfo pursue as an author when he gives a voice to figures who have hardly such an ability to articulate outside the literature? How are power and socio – economic hierarchies appropriated, reshaped and reflected in literary terms?

Babel Radio: Multilingual Art and Writing from Mayakovsky to Meireles

2022-11-22T13:14:45+04:00

Cildo Meireles has described his sculpture Babel (2001) as a "tower of incomprehension." Taking Meireles's work as its starting point, this presentation addresses the pros and cons of multilingual art and writing. My case studies include Vladimir Mayakovsky's forceful Futurist mixing of Russian and English in his 1925 compilation of poems Amerika (America), Joseph Brodsky's less extravagant mélange of Russian and Spanish in his Мексиканский Романсеро (Mexican Romansero) from 1975, and today's flamboyant practice of code – switching as represented in the 2009 publication Фотосинтез (Photosynthesis) by poet Vera Polozkova and photographer Olga Pavolga. In contrast to the earlier tradition, Фотосинтез uses foreign words and phrases without either transcribing them into Cyrillic or providing their translation into Russian. Similarly, Pavolga's photography refrains from providing any direct visual reference to Polozkova's poems. The presentation further considers the intense debates surrounding Google Translate with some commentators seeing as it as travesty, while others hailing it as an antidote to that very incomprehension between nations pointed out by Meireles. Illustrated with analogue and digital photography by the author, the presentation cites, among others, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson, Max Kozloff, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Self-reflexivity in Plurilingual Poems by Alvarez, Chingonyi, and Hashem Beck

2022-11-22T13:16:33+04:00

The publication of Jane Hiddleston and Wen – chin Ouyang's Multilingual Literature as World Literature (2021) is one among many recent testimonies to the fact that the study of creative multilingualism has gained momentum in considerations of language hierarchies and their implications. Hiddleston and Ouyang state in the introduction that their anthology "argues not only, with Spivak and Mufti, against the dominance of English, but also against a dominant concept of monolingualism that has further served to limit and skew the scope of world literature" (3). Likewise, this group session investigates the use of plurilingual creative expression across different genres and media in order to contest the status of a global language and its implications for authors, audiences, publishers, and editors.

Yasmin Yildiz, in Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2013), identifies the simultaneous consideration of language appropriation and depropriation as "steps necessary towards a nonhomologous multilingual practice" (42). This group proposes such considerations in the context of different media, including music, poetry, theater, and photography. The four presentations discuss creative multilingualism diverse in genre, location, and language combination. The first speaker presents David Bowie's attempts at multilinguality as a Benjaminian critique of monolingualism. The second speaker analyses the use of self – reflexive elements by plurilingual poets such as Kayo Chingonyi, Zeina Hashem Beck, and Julia Alvarez. The third speaker examines Yael Ronin's play Winterreise, in which refugees regard Germany and German as a place and language of exile, and the fourth speaker focuses on technological aspects in her study of Russian artists.

At the Crossroads of Languages: A Study of ‘Half – English, Half – Bengali’ Poems from Colonial Bengal

2022-11-22T13:17:46+04:00

Multilingualism is a natural phenomenon in India, where most people are inherently bilingual or trilingual. People who can fluently communicate in three or more languages are not difficult to find across India. This multilingual nature of Indian society and culture gets naturally reflected in Indian languages and literature. This paper will focus on the modern manifestation of this linguistic situation with reference to the oeuvre of multilingual songs and poems that emerged after India’s cultural contact with the English language in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Once a 19^th – century singer in Kolkata, then the centre of British administration, was asked by his patron to perform songs before British guests. This singer who had no formal training in the English language sang a few devotional songs, otherwise attributed to the legend of Radha and Krishna, in a mixed language, which he himself called, ‘Half – English, half – Bengali’. This phenomenon was not a new one, since Bengali songs with Persian phrases and words had already been composed in previous eras when India was under Mughal rule. The shift in the language, that is, from Persian to English, is representative of the administrative change, and how artists responded to this change.

The composition of the so – called, ‘half – English, half – Bengali songs continued and prospered during the British rule, and soon enough became tools of satire, humour, and critique of British administration. Through this paper, the researcher would like to look into various multilingual poems and texts from India, especially from Bengal and would like to analyse them through the lenses of comparative literature, their social relevance keeping in mind the act of reception of a foreign language and artistic responses to that foreign language and foreign administration.

Alternative media Role in Spreading Local Arabic Cultures: Arab creativity in the Global Cultural Dialogue

2022-11-22T13:19:07+04:00

This study aims to shed light on the Arab cultural heritage, by making use of various contemporary technological developments, and harnessing them in electronic advertising campaigns, based on the developments of our current era, in which there are many means of communication that do not believe in borders and geographical barriers.

It is possible for pictures and words to cross maps and media. Consequently, it has become imperative to benefit from the current media and informational propaganda streams. It keeps pace with all serious thinking, especially with regard to the globalization of Arab local cultures and propagating them so as to get involved in the global cultural dialogue.

Therefore, the role of the alternative media appears as one that adopts Adsence technology and promotes it in independent electronic newspapers, popular content sites on Viral search engines, and influencer’s pages on social media.

This study seeks to investigate the following points:

The globalization of local cultures and their inclusion in the global dialogue.
Harnessing the mechanisms of scientific research in modern technology sciences to highlight the bright interface of the local Arab cultures. and creating cultural propaganda directed from the countries of the South to those of the North.
Encouraging Arab researchers to undertake digital research projects and publish them in contemporary media.

The return of the history of Arab culture requires keeping pace with the current situation, marketing, and building bridges, by employing the current forms of communication, as it became possible for this type of locality to move from the original home to any part of the world, which provides a greater margin for freedom of expression and the spread of information in order to strengthen international relations.Hence, the world is not reduced to narrow circles or small villages, which arenot based on domination and Cultural fallacies..

La Floride représentée et réinventée dans Naufragios de Cabeza de Vaca et Cabeza de Vaca le conquistador aux pieds nus d’Abel Posse

2022-11-22T13:21:25+04:00

Le géographie du « Nouveau monde » était une invention de l’Europe et de sa vision impérialiste du monde. L’Amérique avant d’être un espace « pratiqué », réel et exploré, était un espace imaginaire et fantasmé par l’Europe qui, à partir du XVI^esiècle, commença à cartographier l’espace, à l’ordonner, à l’homogénéiser en le soumettant à ses désirs et à la conception qu’elle avait du monde. De ce fait, une géographie imaginaire «cartographie », produit d’un imaginaire géographique et pourtant clairement tracé et établie, antérieure à la géographie réelle, vue et vécue, donna à l’Amérique sa première forme et ses caractéristiques profondes. L’objectif de cette étude consiste à montrer comment Naufragios de Cabeza de Vaca, dans un contexte colonial, s’est écarté de cette représentation canonique et a inspiré dans un contexte postcolonial la fiction littéraire contemporaine. En effet, Naufragios d’Alvar Nunez et Cabeza de Vaca le conquistador aux pieds nus d’Abel Posse sont les lieux de ces représentations qui résistent au canon occidental ainsi qu’à l’imaginaire colonial. De ce fait, l’espace géographique américain subi une reconfiguration qui actualise ses caractéristiques tout en annihilant les formes binaires de représentations qui ont toujours placé l’Amérique dans la marginalité. Le thème de la violence que l’espace génère et subie est au cœur de ces textes et sera le fil conducteur de cette étude.

Malik Khushinud Khan, Habshi Poet in 17TH Century Deccan Difference in a Plural Society

2022-11-22T13:23:26+04:00

Taking the specific case of the Dakhni poet Malik Khushnud Khan, a member of the Habshi community of African origin, perceiving his “own” people from within a Persianate literary tradition, I study the literary representation of the other in the plural society of the late medieval Deccan . Khushnud Khan a Habshi slave, was born in Golconda and became the court poet of Adil Shah of Bijapur . Khushnud can be credited with participating in the formation of the Dakhni literary system in the plural society of the Deccan in the 16^th and 17th centuries : i attempt to unravel the “historical” from the “literary” perception by contextualising an inherited repertoire of signification as a case of literary reception .

The locality of Habshiguda in Hyderabad is testimony to the presence of Ethiopians or Abyssinians, known in Arabic as al – Abash in the Deccan

The medieval Deccan was a milit

Over the course of many centuries Ethiopians would appear repeatedly in the historical record. Some were quite notable: in the seventh century, Bilal ibn Rabah, the son of an enslaved Abyssinian woman and Islam's first muezzin (the person who calls Muslims to prayer); in the 14th century, Bava Gor, a merchant in the agate trade and a highly venerated Sufi pir (Muslim spiritual master); and in the early 17th century, Malik Ambar, a Muslim general in India's Deccan, under whose command were nearly 8,000 soldiers, including several thousand fellow Habshi. In 1530, during the Portuguese occupation, Sayf al – Mulk Miftah, the governor of Daman on the coast of Ahmednagar in western India, was described as an Ethiopian who commanded a force of 4,000 Habshi soldiers.

The Plurality of Subjectivity: Memories Of Displacement in Selected “Postcolonial” Narratives of Africa and South Asia

2022-11-22T13:24:51+04:00

In the period immediately following the colonial era, a massive displacement from the respective “motherland” or the native place is witnessed due to several political and social factors. The dislocation from one’s own land, and the trauma and the pain which follows, results in its reflection in the literary landscape, sometimes in the memory of the protagonist who is unable to return to the native place, or sometimes in the lived experience of the person, who, on return to her erstwhile native place, witnesses a massive change in this postcolonial land, which is so familiar, yet unfamiliar. This paper will try to explore the various nuances of the memories of the displaced people, and the unique narrative format they had chosen to write their memories, with respect to select long narratives from Anglophone Africa and South Asia. Merleau Ponty pointed out that language is the medium for transporting the “I” into the other person’s perspective – in it and through it we participate in the intersubjective world. Hence, the politics of the language chosen, too, will be an area to be explored. This paper will also try to problematize the shared notion of postcoloniality with respect to Africa and South Asia, and how the identity of an African and a South Asian is fractured by the colonial experience.

Reception of Literatures of Africa into Bangla: A Case Study

2022-11-22T13:26:24+04:00

Study of literary relations plays an important role in the domain of Comparative Literature. Tracing the journeys of literary texts, traditions, movements can be one example through which one can substantiate the many aspects of literary relations. In the multilingual context of literary relations or contacts, translation plays a role of mediator where different languages and literatures interact with each other.

During colonial history, literatures from both sides, i.e colonizer and colonized were translated into multiple languages. Interestingly, in the colonial as well as in ‘postcolonial’ periods different colonial geographical spaces interact with each other through translated literatures. There are instances where texts, authors from Africa, Latin America were translated into different Indian Languages. For example – Professor Manabendra Bandyopadhyay translated texts extensively from literatures of Latin America, critically analysed texts from Africa. There were translators like Dhruba Gupta who translated Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard into Bangla. In later point of time several writers like Tayeb Salih, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’O’s writings were translated into Bangla.

In this paper, I will analyse these translated texts and will delve into the issues such as politics of translation in the ‘third world’, language politics in colonial situation, role of translation in dissemination of texts, traditions in different locations such as India and Africa etc. More importantly the objective would be to analyse how these translated texts of Africa can be a case study of ‘contact and reception’ of different colonial histories.

Reading African Literature in Bengali: A Study from Bangladeshi Perspectives

2022-11-22T13:27:42+04:00

Literature is usually defined by its content, not by its language. Modern African literature has reached the international readership mostly in English language. Africa, with its more than two thousand languages, can be comprehensible to a huge number of monolingual or bi – lingual readers of the world through translation. In Bangladesh a vast majority of readers are monolingual and they can read only in Bengali language. So, to be comprehensible to the Bangladeshi readership African literature requires to be translated into Bengali. Many prominent translators have translated and are still translating a good number of African literary texts. But it is noticed that the speed and impulse which are invested in translating a European or American or Latin American literary text are not employed in translating an African literary text. It may be because of the gap of communication with African cultures and languages and the linguistic limitations to negotiate with the creoles and pidgins used in African literary texts. Besides, it cannot be denied that translation is never apolitical. True, translation brings about re – creation through intertextuality and negotiations between two diverse cultures and languages. Interaction today is possible to a remarkable extent through internet and hi – speed communication media. But in postcolonial situation in context of neo – colonization and crony capitalism, economic realities and psychic boundaries deeply impact the process of fortification of the dialogues between two diverse cultures, inevitable for translatability. How the translators respond to the spatial context of the source texts is also important for the re – creation and authentication of the translated texts. This paper seeks to investigate the reading of African literature in translation in Bangladesh.

Reading the Cultural Politics of Transnational Anti–Colonialism in Sultan Somjee’s Bead Bai

2022-11-22T13:28:58+04:00

The Indian Ocean World has garnered attention in the past few decades for its long durée trade networks, cultural exchanges and religious economies which mark this space as a complex world – system, phenomenologically diverse, layered arena of sovereignty; which the European explorers enter comparatively late by the the sixteenth century (Michael Pearson; Phillipe Beaujard). However, by the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, the political and economic structures of the pre – existing Indian Ocean World were heavily influenced by the colonial powers which had managed to get a foothold across the littoral spaces, especially the British colonial control over the East African and Western Indian shoreline (Sugata Bose). This development from 1880s to mid twentieth century was significant, as it marked the highpoint of not only colonial hegemony, but also the simmering anti – colonial discourse across the Indian Ocean British colonies, hinting towards the potential of a transnational anti – colonial imaginary in the first few decades of the long twentieth century.

In literary works emerging from the context of an Asian African heritage which often draw from longer oceanic histories of Asian presence on the Indian ocean littoral, especially in East Africa, it is impossible to overlook the ideological contradictions which shape the public sphere inhabited by Africans, Asians and colonial masters. Sultan Somjee’s ethnographic novel Bead Bai (2012) emerging from his inquiries into the material culture of the Asian African community could be read as an literary – cultural text engaging with the historical context of this oceanic, transnational anti – colonial imagination. The novel frames stories within stories, of a young girl born in the syncretic Satpanth Ismaili Khoja community, but connected because of her midnight moment of birth, with the revolutionary African female leader Mary Muthoni, who in the 1920s led the rebellion against the oppressive kipande system after Harry Thuku’s arrest, the not so non – violent ‘Gandhi of East Africa’. Through this literary text, Somjee has captured the multilayered interracial political and cultural alliances between the Asian diaspora in East Africa, and the Kenyans, when both the colonial subjects became increasingly disillusioned with the exploitative imperialist policies. In my paper, I would read the cultural politics within the public arena as sketched within the novel from the lens of the larger politics of the Empire across the Indian Ocean World, and the echoes it carried for the development of an anti – colonial imagination in the Kenyan context specifically. Were these echoes one – way (from India to East Africa), or can comparative structures of anti – colonial sentiments be traced in these two constituencies of the Empire? The novel presents a nuanced picture of the Asian diaspora which has merged its beliefs and epistemological structures with their African context, thus creating a nuanced and politically charged public sphere in the first few decades of twentieth century, which will be the subject under study in this paper.

A Postcolonial Native in Colonial Africa: An Exploration of the Travelogue Kappirikalude Nattil

2022-11-22T13:30:51+04:00

I would like to understand the Indian Migrants’ experiences of African colonialism in the context of Kappirikalude Nattil (In the land of Kappiris); a Malayalam travelogue written by SK Pottekkatt in the 1950s. I also try to bring a comparative perspective of colonial experiences in the African and Indian contexts. Kappirikalude Nattil is a travelogue about Africa written from the perspective of an Indian writer in the post – independence period. The perception of concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘nationalism’ considerably vary for an Indian citizen who migrated to Africa which was still under British rule. Due to his Indian identity, his social position in the Africa and his approach to colonization are different from the Native Africans. Similarly, the tools of oppression used by the imperialist powers for colonization in Africa subtly differ from the hegemonic apparatuses they employed in India. Awareness of linguistic dominance, racial dominance and racial discrimination plays a pivotal role in imperial oppression. Also, the colonial modes of power employed over the Indian immigrants are different from those employed over the Africans. The main reason for this is the large class differences among immigrant Indians and as differences in the capacity for political transactions and economic inequality. The difference can be seen in the general life scenarios of Malayalees, Tamils and Gujaratis in Africa. According to Homi K. Bhaba's mimicry theory, the attitude of Indian immigrants towards African natives confuses British imperialism and results in a hybrid culture. This reading will give you a better idea of the defences adopted by the British government against Indian immigrants to strengthen their colonial power.

Possessed by Africa: Bengali Adventure Heroes in African Jungles

2022-11-22T13:32:09+04:00

The early adventure narrative written in Bengali, following the English model of literary travelogue shows the construction of the character of a travelling hero and traces his journey through difficult and unknown terrains, often portrayed as yet – to – be – discovered. These novels experimented with sending their heroes to overseas destinations among which Africa became one of the most dominant settings. While the actual travel writings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century focussed on the travels of the Bengalis to popular destinations in Europe, Africa became the wild unexplored land where the literary characters found a suitable landscape to prove their heroism. These texts, most effectively, lay out the setting of Africa, which got stereotyped as a land synonymous with hazardous natural environment, wildlife, and the indigenous population as wild as the forests. Africa thus becomes the essential other of both urban and rural Bengal in literature. This paper will discuss such early Bengali adventure novels and will try to analyse why Africa became a common setting in these narratives. Since the authors of such novels have mostly never travelled outside India, the representation of Africa and its inhabitants is largely based on what the authors were reading themselves. As such, this paper will try to relate this portrayal of the deep dark region of Africa with the rise of the pedagogical knowledge of geography under colonial education policy which brought in the notion of race and the associated discrimination among the Bengalis. The paper will show how the construction of the concept of Africa in the Bengali adventure narratives is a reflection of the long discussions on European race theory featured in geography textbooks of colonial Bengal.

A Framework to Accommodate the Plural: ‘Double Occupation’ as a Mode of Postcolonial Criticism

2022-11-22T13:33:29+04:00

My paper argues that the contemporary theories of postcolonial criticism have inadequacies in accommodating the plurality of experiences in the pre/post – colonial literature. And hence the paper proposes ‘double occupation’ as a better mode of approach towards postcolonial criticism. First, this paper explores the image of Africa in TD Ramakrishnan’s novel Mama Africa (2019) and Meena Alexander’s poems “Manhatten Music” (1997), “Art of Pariahs” (1996), and “Port Sudan” (2002). The narrative in Mama Africa unfurls through the perspective of the protagonist Tara Vishwanath who is an African author of Indian origin. TD Ramakrishnan writes in Malayalam whereas Meena Alexander's poems are in English; which are shaped by her diasporic experiences in Sudan as a Keralite or as an Indian. Located in the horizon of ‘Afro – Indian’ experiences, her three poems reflect on the issues of exile, affinity to roots, migration, and hybrid identities. As an example, the paper attempts to locate these works in the theoretical framework of Homi K Bhabha’s ‘hybridity’ and shows how the literary experience of cultural hybridity goes beyond Bhabha’s theorisations. In literature, the colonizer – colonized relation is constituted in diverse modes of interactions. Hence this paper calls forth a critical approach that can accommodate the plurality of experience as well as the analytical dimension of criticality. Inspired by Oren Lieberman’s idea of ‘double occupation’ and Lyotard’s theorisation of ‘figure/ground’, my paper argues that postcolonial criticism should simultaneously 'occupy' the plurality of ‘post conditions’ and the ‘normative definitions’ of criticality. While assuming a shared postcoloniality, the contemporary critical theory focuses on the ‘figure’ which denotes, in this case, the normative features of the postcolonial writings. And the heterogeneity of the postcolonial experiences gets blurred in the ‘ground’.

Transnationalist Negotiations in the Bangla Eyewitness Accounts of WWI

2022-11-22T13:34:58+04:00

My paper will explore how three Bangla eyewitness accounts of the First World War, a neglected body of literature, represent transnationalism as a lived experience in conversation with and in the interstices of the statist discourses of patriotism and nationalism.

Out of these texts, Abhi Le Baghdad (Take Baghdad Now; 1958) by Sisir Prasad Sarbadhikari records the multi – layered engagements of the author (a private of the Bengal Ambulance Corps) with the British, the Arabs, the Turks, the Germans and the Armenians that often undercut the official narratives of hostility and peace. Further, Paltan Jibaner Smriti (Memories of Army Life; 1940) by Mahbubul Alam consistently evokes Bengali sub – nationalism as a frame of reference for recording his experiences as a member of the 49^th Bengalee Regiment posted in north – western India and Mesopotamia. Alam’s account exposes the sectarian and regional biases operative within the construct of Bengali identity, while also registering his discomfiture about the prospect of fighting against his co – religionists in the name of national pride. A more striking piece of life – writing is Kalyan – Pradip (The Lamp of Beneficence; 1928), where the 80 – year old author Mokkhada Devi reminisces about his grandson Dr. Kalyan Mukherji, who succumbed to an epidemic as a POW in Mesopotamia. Mukherji’s reservations about coloniality and disenchantment with nationalism (as evident from his war – time letters quoted in the book) militate against the sectarianism of Devi’s commentary.

These eyewitness accounts are never far from the perspective of the tourist and they frequently resort to cultural stereotypes when describing the racial other. Besides, they never seek to transcend or negate an irreducible substratum of Bengali identity. The paradigm of community forged on the front line and in the POW camps is necessarily provisional and transitory, but these texts reveal surprising ways of inter – personal bonding that cannot be exhaustively theorized. These texts, my paper will argue, embody a form of transnationalism that is necessarily enabled by state agencies and mediated by cultural identities. Although operating across political/cultural divides, the transnationalism portrayed in these texts is posited on such divides.

African Tongue, Indian Blood: The Case of Swahili Authors of Indian Descent

2022-11-22T13:36:14+04:00

Chotara is a Swahili word which signifies someone or something “of mixed origin.” The etymology of the word is unknown. It might have derived from Arabic shatara, which means “half”, but according to Iqbal Akhtar, the word has its root in Sindhi chuto, or “impure.” The probable Sindhi origin of the word signifies the influences of Indic languages on Swahili which began with the settlement of Gujarati and Sindhi traders or vanias (as they were usually called in Zanzibar) in the East African Coast during18th and 19th Century. Though in modern Swahili chotara refers to any racial mixing, in the 19th century East African coast this word was used as a pejorative to denominate people having parents from Africa as well as India. During this time, most of the traders from the Indian Subcontinent, who settled in the Swahili coast, were followers of Shia Islam and belonged to the Khoja Community. This community soon gave birth to a new racial order, namely chotara, and a hybrid culture, taking elements from Swahili and Gujarati. The religious and literary expressions of the Khojas which owed heavily to the Gujarati local tradition of vratkatha got merged with the indigenous Swahili literary tradition. Interestingly, after more than two or three generations, in the 20th century, the authors, who came from this mixed background often chose Swahili as their literary language. Farouk Topan translated Gujarati plays into Swahili, Ahmad Nassir created taarab music having Swahili words and Indian tune and thus created a cross – cultural literary space where both the cultures interact. This paper attempts a close reading of the literary works of the Swahili authors of Indian descent from Kenya and Tanzania and wants to explore how they negotiated with their racial and cultural position in form and content.

An account of contact: Teaching literatures from Africa in India

2022-11-22T13:37:32+04:00

Teaching Achebe’s Arrow of God to a class of 4thyear undergraduates made me perceive a series of fault lines about the idea of shared postcoloniality. Through this paper I will try to give an account of what I understand as fault lines of post colonialism as is perceived in the majority of Indian academia, how postcolonial identity becomes celebratory selves and how these assumptions of homogeneities lead to dangerous notions of uniformity.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a mandatory site that every disciple of postcolonial studies pays homage to. My reason for choosing to teach Arrow of God was to avoid paying that homage and bring in a fresh perspective, and more so to point out the complexity of narrative and writing which was not Western in either form or content.

During our few first readings the concept of shared postcoloniality worked well but it started getting difficult when Achebe continued breaking boundaries of narrative immanence in order to offer an interpretation. The problem arose as on one hand; we were presented with fictional events whose criterion is not referential truth but rather plausibility within parameters established by the text itself. on the other, we were presented with an explanatory voice that makes interpretive claims—truth claims – of a wholly different order than those made by the narrative itself.

In the second preface to the novel Achebe writes “We should be ready at the very least to salute those who stand fast, the spiritual descendants of the magnificent man, Ezeulu, in the hope that they will forgive us.” Colonialism itself appears, as an expression of a way of life that is, in itself and of its own nature, aggressive: an aggression that can express itself as well through mediocrities and ambitious cynics as it can through heroes and true believers. And this way of life is, essentially, us: a category that includes the postcolonial generations – the “us” of Achebe’s preface and trying to locate this historically became an exciting exercise.

Beware of Women: Analyzing the market literatures of Nigeria

2022-11-22T13:38:47+04:00

In 1940s pamphlet literature burgeoned into a profitable industry in the market town of Onitsha, in Nigeria. As the pamphlets, also referred as ‘chapbooks’, were printed, and circulated in the market town of Onitsha this genre of literature came to be popularly known as Onitsha Market Literature. According to scholars like Obiechina (1973) Onitsha Market Literature is the ‘literature of the mass’ and it soared to popularity due to its cheap retail price and the lucidity of language. Obiechina further argues that Onitsha Market Literature represented the ‘sentiments of an emergent urban culture’. The most interesting characteristics of these pamphlets was the didactic element, which dominated the thematic core of both the fictions and non – fictions. The central concern of these pamphlets was the intention of the writers to educate and guide the audience. The authorial intentions were sometimes clearly identified through the titles of the pamphlets; Beware of Women, Why Boys don’t trust their girlfriends? My seven daughters are after young boys, A Woman’s Pride is her husband; etc. According to Stephanie Newel (1996) Onitsha pamphlets presented a ‘new female identity’, which was a product of ‘decolonization’ and ‘urbanization’. However, what structured this ‘new female identity’? Who were the authors of these pamphlets? Were there any women authors, who were also instrumental in creating this ‘new identity’?
Around 1970s another form of ‘literature of the mass’ started making a mark in the urban areas of Kano, Sokoto, Katsina, Kaduna and Zariya. However, as Kano was the lead in the production of these texts the pamphlets, produced during this period, came to be known as the Kano Market Literature. According to Novian Whitsitt (2003) Kano market literature possessed aesthetic, thematic, and social similarities with the Onitsha ‘chapbooks’. Thus, like Onitsha Market Literature, did Kano Market Literature also aim at creating a ‘new female identity’? How did ‘decolo¬nization’ and ‘urbanization’ affect the Market Literature of Kano? Therefore, the aim of the proposed paper is to find possible answers to the posed questions.

This Time for Africa: The Challenges of African Studies in India

2022-11-22T13:40:32+04:00

Fortunately, at least one hopes that is the case, as Africanists, we no longer have to inhabit the bizarre predicament of proving the existence of African Literatures. Those of us though who choose to think of the literary production of an entire continent in the plural, still find ourselves having to explain such a position, which is not perhaps the worst thing to have to do. Those of us who endeavor with disciplinary models such as African Studies outside of the African continent, with no ostensible ties to African literatures, languages, cultures, histories and realities besides academic often find ourselves faced with the question, “Why Africa?” In this paper I seek to examine precisely such interrogations. Examining a history of African Studies in India, this study will attempt to present an account of the motivations and ramifications for academic and literary engagements with African realities in South Asian contexts. In the final analysis, I will be exploring the possibilities for alternative modes for the conceptualization of decolonization that such intercultural work across the “Global Souths” offers. To such an end, I will be examining not only curricula for African Studies at Indian universities and the pedagogical approaches that frame them, but also a more general awareness of African realities through cultural transactions in Indian languages besides English. Thus, venturing a response to questions such as, “Why Africa?” through an understanding of what an engagement with African realities—literatures, cultures, languages and histories, has and continues to offer to our understandings of the realities we inhabit in South Asian contexts such as India.

Mourning for Collective Redemption: A Reading of Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying

2022-11-22T13:41:56+04:00

Literatures of Africa often reflect the violence and deaths that are endemic to the postcolony in a way that allows the writers to reflect, address and cope with the overwhelming tragedies that shape their emerging identities and nationhood. “Transitional” literatures, especially those of South Africa, bear the additional burden of negotiating with a horrific colonial past and the disillusionment of the new present that fails to deliver on its promises of freedom and equality that ought to have come with the official transfer of power. Zakes Mda’s novel Ways of Dying (1995) offers an introspective account of a community looking inward to contemplate on its own culpability in the violence that affected its people. It challenges the conventional notions of the colonizing “other” as the perpetrator of violence towards a victimized agency – less colonized “self” by offering a nuanced understanding of a heterogenous populace that in their own varied ways sought to grapple with the new post – Apartheid government. Mda’s novel focuses on rebuilding and reparations which cannot be limited to the discursive and cultural, but must happen in material terms rooted in the everyday.

My paper would address how grieving and loss allows a community to come together to rebuild itself, heal and repair old hurts to envision a future that is based on care and nurture. Mda’s novel warns against a complacence that comes with self – governance that the struggle is over, thus problematizing teleological readings of postcolonial literatures – that the freedom from colonial powers marks an achievement and end of struggle, thus is cause for celebration. Instead, it argues for decolonization as a “anticipatory discourse” that must be dialogic, and shows how mourning can be seen as resistance, as a different kind of political discourse.

Reading Contemporary African Science Fiction as Afrofuturism

2022-11-22T13:43:26+04:00

When one looks at discussions of Afrofuturism, too often the focus is on African-Americans, or others of the Diaspora. In this paper the focus will be on African authors of the twenty-first century. South African authors and their SF, such as Lauren Beukes (Moxyland, Zoo City), and Henrietta Rose-Innes (Nineveh), examine the continuing impact of apartheid, and the role of women. At the same time, the anthology AfroSF (Nnedi Okorafor and others ed.) is compelling evidence for those who persist in thinking of Africa as a country, not the second biggest continent, of the wide range of African SF. Here one examines how the conventional sub-genres of SF can be used in remarkably original ways, bringing out the Afrocentric dimensions.

The limitations of studying comparative literature as an independent discipline in Iran

2022-11-22T13:45:14+04:00

In this article I am going to discuss the limitations of practicing comparative literature in Iran as a discipline. The absence of an independent comparative literature department in Iranian universities has led to confusion of scholars of this field. Among Iranian literary scholars, comparative literature is often considered as a subcategory of world literature, and world literature to them is English or rarely French literature.

This narrow definition originates from the fact that the foreign languages departments in Iran are isolated departments with national formation structure. These separate sections insist on sufficiency of having national perspective and each of them only focus on one language or literature such as English, Arabic, French, etc. Nevertheless, these are languages with transnational status which cannot be looked at as detached units. As a consequence, there is no opportunity neither to study literature of other languages nor to look at them from a comparative viewpoint.

This restricted scope in defining these broad terms and excluding the transnational scope from their studies is one of the reasons why comparative literature has not found its proper place in the country’s academic circles. Comparative literature, for Iranian literary scholars, is limited to comparing an Iranian author’s work with one by an English or American author and to find their similarities and differences. However, the most important part of this effort which is reaching a conclusion from this comparison is most of the times ignored.

Moreover, comparative literature, an interdisciplinary field in nature, requires the collaboration of different academic departments such as literature, art, psychology, sociology, history, etc. However, in Iran this collaboration does not happen easily or lasts for a long time.

Addressing these problems and obstacles which has blocked the path of comparative literature in Iran and suggesting solutions will be effective in growth of this discipline.

American Studies in Shiraz

2022-11-22T13:47:12+04:00

This paper critically engages with the discipline of American Studies in the context of postrevolutionary Iran. On the one hand, the study of American culture from the Middle Eastern perspective is an inherently comparative project. On the other hand, given the neocolonial origins of American literary and cultural studies in mid twentieth – century Iran, and the postcolonial subversion of the practice in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, American Studies is in dire need of a new paradigm in contemporary Iran. This paper begins with a conversation with Brian T. Edwards’ essay “American Studies in Tehran” (2007), a self – reflective account of the author’s visiting professorship at Tehran University. Embracing Edwards’ transnational remapping of American Studies, and articulating the urgency of further decentering the discipline from the Iranian centre to its periphery, I will propose an American Studies in Shiraz whereby the transnational, comparative, and decolonial study of global American culture will lead to “rethinking comparativism” (as proposed by Spivak) in Iranian academia. This paper, therefore, concludes by reflecting on what the panel hosts describe as the “disciplinary adjustments […] needed for the practice of Comparative Literature in the Iranian context.”

Cultural Translation in Reverse: The Case of German – Iranian Literature

2022-11-22T13:48:54+04:00

There is a growing number of literary works written in German by authors, often women writers, of Iranian origin, background and heritage. Born in Germany or migrated at an early age, German is their language of choice in writing literature while an active command of written Persian is not necessarily given anymore. Despite the cultural and linguistic distance, topics and themes of their works often include – although not necessarily in an exclusive way – narratives of migration from Iran or historical and cultural references to Iranian/Persian culture, and they often feature Iranian main protagonists and characters. In contrast to the wide range of popular memoir literature, this new type of writing aspires to and successfully achieves the higher echelons of literary production, addressing an extended, culturally diverse German audience. This is evidenced not only by access to recognized and well established literary publishing houses, but also in renowned literary prizes, they receive. Among the authors that can be named as part of this rather heterogeneous group of writers are Sudabeh Mohafez, Nava Ebrahimi and Shida Bazyar. The present paper first tries to locate these authors and their writing inside both the German and Iranian literature tradition and setting from a wider comparative angle. As a case study, it will focus on the works of Sudabeh Mohafez, in particular on her collection of short stories “Wuestenhimmel, Sternenland” (2004) and its Persian translation, published in Iran as “Aseman – e kavir, sarzamin – e setaregan” in 2007. What happens to such writing in the process of reverse cultural translation, once it its translated into Persian for an Iranian audience in Iran or for a still primarily Persian reading diasporic generation of Iranians abroad?

Renegotiating the Contemporary Iranian/Persian Literary Landscape: Afghan – Iranian Prose Literature

2022-11-22T13:53:34+04:00

The growing body of works by writers of Afghan heritage in Iran, focused on the experience of war and displacement, has led to the emergence of hyphenated Afghan – Iranian prose literature. Novels and short stories written by Mohammad Hoseyn Mohammadi, ʿAliyeh ʿAtayi, and Ziya Qasemi are among the examples. Written in (Afghan) Persian, demonstrating a high degree of literary quality, and published by first – rate Iranian publishers of contemporary literature, these works unsettle the sociocultural definitions of margins and center in Iran. Apart from this, having conveyed their stories across the Afghan/Iranian geopolitical borders, they have created a textual locus within which the transnational implications of modern and contemporary Persian/Iranian literature as a field are renegotiated.

In the present paper, I will discuss the significance of this literature on two levels: First, I will situate this literature within the Iranian contemporary literary system by taking into account the literary content of these works as well as their reception. Second, I will focus on the implications the emergence of this literature has for modern and contemporary Persian/Iranian literature as a disciplinary field. What is this literature about and what is its impact on what we define as the contemporary Persian/Iranian literary landscape.

Children’s Literature and Comparative Literature: Hansel and Gretel in the House of Step-Parents

2022-11-22T13:55:46+04:00

Children’s Literature and Comparative Literature are presented not as an independent disciplines, but as “subdisciplines” in either Persian Literature departments or Arabic Literature departments in Iran. I intend to compare the lesson plans issued by the ministry of science for these two “subdisciplines” and try to see the outline of the courses often presented in both, and bring to light the big absentees in them. This study is mostly descriptive and probes into formally published lesson plans which might not be practiced in the actual classes. I am well aware that the actual experience of attending comparative literature classes, and children’s literature classes in Iran would offer us a deeper insights into the way these two “subdisciplines” have been academized. However, I suppose the lesson plans published by the Iranian Ministry of Science are important references that determine the contours of academic children’s literature and comparative literature in Iran and therefore should be interrogated in order to pave the way for significant changes. At the end of my talk, I will pose some questions about the ideological implications of including common compulsory courses in both “subdisciplines” which would lead to the abortion of the interdisciplinarity of both children’s literature and comparative literature.

Pandemics and Monsters: The Historical Origins and Modern Manifestations of the Amabie Legend

2022-11-22T13:57:26+04:00

During the initial weeks and months of the COVID – 19 pandemic, amid the gloom and doom of a global health crisis, one of the more whimsical hashtags that began trending on Japanese Twitter was #amabie. A hashtag for a beaked, mermaid – like creature with long hair, a scaly body and three legs, Japanese folklore has it that the Amabie can ward off epidemics if one shows her picture to other people. In a tongue – in – cheek manner, Japanese Twitter users began sharing various images and illustrations of this 19th century “yokai” monster, ranging from the “kawaii” to the erotic. By spring, the Amabie had even captured the imagination of people outside Japan: both the Guardian newspaper and the New Yorker magazine ran stories on this creature.

What went unremarked, however, is the eerie resemblance the beaked Amabie has to the beak – like masks so – called “plague doctors” in Europe wore in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Hired by local municipalities to treat patients who had come down with plague – like symptoms, plague doctors were medical professionals tasked with the unenviable task of combating bubonic outbreaks. Their hazmat – like protective gear, first invented in Naples around 1620, consisted of a head – to – toe waxed fabric overcoat, a mask with crystal eye openings and a beak shaped nose, typically stuffed with herbs and spices.

Is it mere coincidence that the Amabie also has a beaked, avian visage? I don’t think so. Her appearance in mid – 19th century Japan (rising from the ocean to ward off epidemics) more or less coincides with the growing presence of European traders in Japan, many eager to share their “advanced” Western medical knowledge. My paper will examine the historical origins of the Amabie legend and trace its pop – cultural manifestations in contemporary Japan.

The Image of 'Sick Vimalakirti' in Song Poetry

2022-11-22T14:00:23+04:00

There is a story in the Vimalakirti Sutra（维摩诘所说经） is that Vimalakirti was not ill and deliberately pretended to be sick. The Buddha sent Manjusri to visit Vimalakirti. Vimalakirti took the opportunity to debate Dharma with Manjushri. Vimalakirti used all kinds of metaphors to describe the nature of our body which is "impermanent"（无常） and constantly changing and will eventually die and disappear. We will be tortured by various internal pains and mental troubles. It is a state of “selflessness”（无我） and changes with the fate. It is "empty"（空）, because the body is not real, so the body is empty. Buddhism engages in the analysis of the body with a detached perspective, so the pain is not terrible. It is part of our life process. If people can realize the essence of life, they can be free from all kinds of ailments.

The image of the sick Vimalakirti was accepted by the literati in Song Dynasty and integrated into the poetry creation. Literati in Song Dynasty often used the allusion of Vimalakirti's illness when recording their illness or their friends' illnesses. They use metaphors to regard themselves and others as sick Vimalakirti. This literary phenomenon usually has three characteristics: First, They used the image of Vimalakirti to display kindness and concern for the patients. Second, they accepted and appreciated the image of the sick Vimalakirti. and they used the image of sick Vimalakirti to surpass the pain caused by illness in their lives.Third, it emphasizes that Vimalakirti has the characteristics of being ill and healed together with all beings. The image of sick Vimalakirti is used to express the personal ideals of Song Dynasty literati who worry about all beings and enjoy the happiness of all beings.

L’épidémie comme chronotope

2022-11-22T14:19:15+04:00

De la quarantaine au confinement et de la peste au covid – 19, les pratiques adoptées ou imposées pour lutter contre une épidémie ont toujours conjugué des mesures d’isolation des individus ou des communautés. Celles – ci ont un effet tant sur le plan spatial que sur le plan temporel, en un effet de convergence que la littérature illustre volontiers sous les espèces de ce que la théorie littéraire, depuis Bakhtine, désigne comme chronotope. Dans une coupe diachronique à travers divers ouvrages et divers genres de la littérature européenne, incluant Il Decameron de Boccaccio, Der Tod in Venedig de Thomas Mann, La peste d’Albert Camus et The Stand de Stephen King, la présente communication entend dégager les traits chronotopiques spécifiques d’une littérature de l’épidémie afin d’en comprendre les applications possibles. Puisque le chronotope ne peut être réduit à ses caractéristiques formelles mais soutient une vision du monde, quelle serait celle que véhiculerait la littérature de l’épidémie et de quelle manière pourrait – elle apporter quelque éclairage sur la présente crise pandémique?

The Epidemiology of Amabie: Prophetic Creatures in Japanese Folklore and Popular Culture Yuriko Yamanaka

2022-11-22T14:20:54+04:00

The word “monster” comes from the Latin word “monstrum” which is derived from the verb “monere”, meaning “to warn”, and had originally referred to bizarre events and creatures that were considered precursors or portents to natural disasters and other calamities. Pandemic imaginary has caused the proliferation of discourses and images of monstrous beings in many cultures over the ages. Monster representations may be a kind of “antibody” which resurfaces from the substratum of a culture in times of crisis, to neutralize and tame the fear of the uncertain.

In Japan, various monsters have historically emerged from the anxiety and fear associated with epidemics and social unrest, such as the kudan (human faced cow), or amabiko (three – legged monkey – like beast). They are called yogenjū, or “prophetic creatures”, by Japanese historians and folklorists who specialize in the study of yokai (uncanny, fantastic creatures in Japanese lore).

The amabie, an aquatic creature with long hair, a beak, scales, and three fishtails, is such a yogenjū which survives in a single handbill from the late Edo period (mid – 19^th century). The revival and rapid spread of the amabie image during the initial Covid – 19 lockdown period and consequent months, was a unique opportunity to observe the process of transmission and transmutation of this image, thus to study the epidemiology of monster representation as an ongoing, real – time phenomenon. In this presentation, we will apply the “epidemiology of representation” approach by anthropologist Dan Sperber, to analyse how the amabie was revitalized in the creative outburst on social media by professional and amateur artists, emblematized in the governmental infection prevention campaign, sanctified as pseudo – talismans by shrines and temples, and then commodified. What made this particular “pathogen” (i.e. image) so virulent? What was the “conducive environment”? Who were the “susceptible hosts”? And how did it “mutate” over time?

Metaphors of Illness: An Analysis on The River and The Hole

2022-11-22T14:22:35+04:00

While the existing scholarship concerns the negativity of metaphoric disease, this paper negotiates the productiveness embedded in the metaphor of illness, through analyzing Tsai Ming – liang’s films, The River (1997) and The Hole (1998). In The River, the male protagonist gets afflicted with neck pain after playing a corpse in a murky river; in The Hole, the two protagonists refuse to leave a building where there is an epidemic outbreak and consequently become stranded and isolated. Illness thus indicates specific spaces within which the protagonists experience loneliness and frustration and turn to external spaces for survival: in The River, the space is the exploration of sexual preference while in The Hole it is the musical fantasy. However, those outer spaces unavoidably drive the protagonists back to reality and revise their intersections with the world, through which they reconstruct personal interactions and regain vitality. In these films, Tsai proposes an alternative way to demonstrate Susan Sontag’s theory about the metaphor of illness (1968; 1989): illness is the act of growth, despite its metaphoricity for immorality, pollution, and punishment. Through a two – fold scrutiny, this paper also argues that illness in the films is both metaphor and resistance of metaphor. The idea that illness can be interpreted as both isolation and connection, as well as pollution and regeneration, illustrates the ambiguity in Tsai’s films, which leads to the questioning of the interpretation itself. Faced with the “new normal” in a post – pandemic era, this paper wants to negotiate the discursivity of the metaphor of illness.

Writing in a Time of an Epidemic

2022-11-22T14:24:23+04:00

Prima facie, so far it has been and still is impossible to offer a proper study of the literary manifestation of covid19 – the epidemic is not over yet; one doesn't have yet an historical perspective of it; writing, and moreover publishing, require time.

However, there are early sprouts of writing on covid19. We shall discuss Dana Freibach – Heifetz's book, In the Desert of Things ("Numbers, Deuteronomy"), which was written in Hebrew during the first two months of the epidemic (2 – 3/2020).

The book is composed of 113 fragments in various genres, which spread a fan of voices, sights and feelings of life under the epidemic – from everyday details (e.g. the engagement with food) to more cultural and philosophical layers (like concepts of inside and outside), combining realism with a world of dreams and fantasy. These micro – stories create a collage of images that captures the new reality. The book was published in two versions: one is only textual, and the other incudes 36 color photographs by the artist Yoram Kupermintz, that create a rich dialogue with the texts. The book was self – published, and financed by a Headstart project.

Our talk examines the relation between the stylistic characterizations of this book – the form of fragments, various genres, and the combination of the texts with visual images – and its nature as a book which was written right in the eye of the Covid's storm. We will also relate to the book in the context of the changes in the book industry and the literary market and their cultural implications,

This talk is a collaboration of the author, who is also a philosopher, and a literary researcher, who aim together to bring new perspectives of literature under Covid 19 and the unique attributes it brings.

Global Avant – gardes in the Spanish and Lusophone Speaking World: A Decentred and Social Network Approach

2022-11-22T14:26:27+04:00

For decades, debate over the centre – periphery model, dominant over dominated, North versus South has raged amongst scholars, and a consensus on the role of Southern Europe and non – European regions in modern cultural processes has been established. New modernist studies moved beyond a Euro – US American – centred view and consider global modernisms instead. However, studies addressing the transnational nature of modernism tend to deal with Anglo – American, French, or German modernism, overlooking global Spanish and Lusophone avant – garde as a research object. This paper proposes to use some examples related to the deve¬lopment of modern cultural processes in the Spanish – and Lusophone speaking world to push forward the theoretical and conceptual discussion on how to entangle cultural transfer and global literary studies in a dialogue that can include new analytical categories to grasp the trans – regional, trans – historical and trans – cultural realities of other spaces beyond North America and Central Europe. Specifically, I will test the agency of Ibero – American cultural mediators (Spain, Portugal, and Latin America) being active individuals or collective agents (in literary journals, translation or cultural institutions) to examine how the experience of movement and the formation of social historical networks impacted in the production and distribution of knowledge. All the examples are grounded on the following assum¬ptions: 1) an understanding of global literary history as decentred, dynamic, and characterized by multiple spaces where cultural goods flow and circulate in different directions and channels; 2) a flexible comprehension of time that allows us to work with multiple temporalities and non – linearity; 3) a multi – scale analysis of cultural mediators with a special focus on women, and 4) the study of movements (physical and intellectual), networks, connectivity, intersections, and their resulting effects, that can be measured in terms of relations, impact, success, or failure. In this respect, I will show how Ibero – American mediators questioned this centre and periphery dynamic, as well as built a transnational and mobile elite, helping them revitalize European culture, but also their local milieu.

Latin American women in the circulation of avant – garde film: peripheries of the periphery?

2022-11-22T14:30:09+04:00

This presentation aims to analyse the fundamental role of two Latin American women in the circulation of the avant – garde film Un chien andalou (Buñuel 1929). To do so, I will retrace their transnational networks and discuss the idea of Latin America as a peripheral space and in the various histories of modernism. The focus on Latin American women is doubly rebellious since they have been considered as the “periphery” of the “periphery”. Indeed, Un chien andalou was world premiered in Paris on the 6^th of June 1929 in Studio des Ursulines. After its success, the film started to circulate worldwide. The premieres of the film in the two Latin – American cinema industries first developed –Argentina (1929) and Mexico (1938) – , were arranged through the social networks of the Argentinean Victoria Ocampo (1890 – 1979) and the Mexican Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903 – 1993). This coincidence highlights the pioneering role of these women, located in the so – called peripheries, and their position of cultural mediators in the transnational circulation of the avant – garde. Thus, this paper will reply to the following questions: Which were the specificities of their social networks for allowing the transnational circulation of the avant – garde? And, how their peripheral location affected the way their social networks functioned?

Within a digital humanities framework and the use of data mining, I will trace the circulation of Un chien andalou in Latin America and unearth the central role of these Latin American women, as well as show how their social networks were durable, wide and strong enough to facilitate the circulation of one of the most celebrated avant – garde films. From a broader perspective, this case study challenges our understanding of the double peripheral position of Latin American women in the global history of cinema.

Active Thought and Future Perfect: The Belgrade Surrealist Circle

2022-11-22T14:31:45+04:00

This talk examines the ideas of a perpetually transformative, mutually corrective interaction of thought and matter, and of the capacity to anticipate – through – irrational/not yet rational, as proposed in Outline for a Phenomenology of the Irrational (Nacrt za jednu fenomenologiju iracionalnog, 1931), written by Belgrade surrealists Koča Popović and Marko Ristić. These dynamics being intrinsic to art production and reception, according to Popović and Ristić, “real art” is always future – oriented, and it gestures specific moments in the future. I am keen to revisit the Belgrade Surrealist Circle’s avant – garde practice of “active thought” in its global context of the day but also through its own future perfect—which includes, among other accomplishments, Popović’s and Ristić’s vital work in the establishment of Non – aligned Movement and witnessing of the birth, life, and death of the state and community for which they fought as artists and activists. Such rereading, my hope is, will allow me to assess wider questions: how the belief in the interaction of thought and matter can be used non – teleologically (pace Hegel) and how it relates to various modernities, relationships between the so – called “centres” and so – called “peripheries,” retrograde and prograde temporal moves, questions of legacies and projects, anti – modernist and over – modernist modernisms, and cultural colonisation and decolonisation. These are all dynamics and questions of primary significance for the examination of fringe modernist avant – gardes as well as the fine – tuning of the hermeneutic tools and practices we use to assess and describe global communities, diachronically and synchronically.

Unexpected Apparitions: European Modernist Haiku as World Literature

2022-11-22T14:33:01+04:00

During the age of the “historical avant – garde,” the haiku want from being almost unknown in Europe to become a generative literary form for poets writing in a wide range of languages. Far from limiting themselves to exoticist themes, these poets engaged with many of the central issues of modernist poetics and indeed modernity more broadly. My talk will present European haiku written about the First World War as a context for tracking the form’s afterlife in the postwar avant – garde, focusing primarily on French – language poets and critics with some connection to surrealism (Julien Vocance, Pierre Albert – Birot, Paul Eluard, Paul – Louis Couchoud, and Yvan Goll).

Despite the form’s well – known tendency to focus on the here and now of a fleeting moment, these haiku were, I argue, continuously reinscribed in historicizing, nationalizing, and globalizing discourses. The wartime poems, for example, represented – in tone and imagery, but also in their use of scale – a kind of anti – epic, disavowing the epic’s traditional values by attempting to locate history in small moments and anonymous details. More broadly, the European modernist haiku can be productively read in relation to a Lukácsian critical tradition that finds in modernism a confrontation between isolated sensory impressions and a drive toward totality. In sum, the modernist haiku explored the problem of the modernist epic, even the modernist long poem, albeit in the smallest of literary forms. At the same time, critics considered the significance of this “new” form in relation to the historical context of both Japan’s expanding empire and the postwar discourse of European decline, compelling questions about what we would today call world literature, including the question of whose “world” this avant – garde would be for.

Niko Pirosmani: Between the Local, the National and the Global

2022-11-22T14:34:22+04:00

Georgia’s most celebrated twentieth – century painter Niko Pirosmani (1862 – 1918) experienced a belated and largely posthumous rise to fame. On the eve of World War I representatives of the Russian avant – garde, followed closely by central figures in Georgia’s national revival, sought to interpret and recode the textural and thematic “unevenness” of Pirosmani’s canvases as a naïve yet artful combination of historically distinct forms. The recovery of Pirosmani’s legacy is thus the story of two distinct interpretive aesthetic models competing but also colluding in the artist’s canonization: the cosmopolitan discourse of modernist primitivism and a nationalizing discourse of local particularity, both superimposed onto a vernacular local practice. These two discourses, along with the artistic works they sought to interpret, offer us an exemplary case of the triadic (and not merely binary) scale of centre/periphery relations: the global, the national and the local. To analytically distinguish these scales, and examine how they functioned in tandem in the history of Pirosmani’s canonization as an exemplary figure of the international avant – garde, is the goal of my paper. My talk will draw from the Georgian and Russian archive of the revolutionary era, including the writings of contemporaries such as Ilia and Kirill Zdanevich, Grigol Robakidze, Titsian Tabidze, as well as later scholarship, both historical and theoretical.

The Strike Film as World Picture

2022-11-22T14:35:44+04:00

A scholarly truism holds that we cannot grasp global capitalism through any one image, narrative, or viewpoint, but only through necessarily partial attempts at totality. Since (at least) Eisenstein’s generative failure to film Marx’s Capital as “libretto,” the cinematic avant – gardes have sought a film form adequate to apprehend this always partial totality. The two major waves of avant – garde cinemas – the experimental films of late silent and early sound period (1925-1934) and their reiteration in the global militant experimental films of the “long 1968” – were particularly invested in film’s particular material and indexical relationship to global capitalism. On their view, film was the global medium poised to apprehend global capitalism’s invisibilized itineraries and constitutive asymmetries. In this context, the strike film – a nexus of the political and aesthetic avant – gardes – provides a unique approach to the problem of scale. Its impetus and principal subject is a local demand in a particular worksite. Yet it is not content to remain there: through experiments in film form, it aspirationally seeks to scale out to global capitalism.

To explore the problem of scale in the strike film, I compare examples of documentary strike films from the two waves of avant – garde cinemas. The first, Misère au Borinage (Henri Storck and Joris Ivens, Belgium, 1934), recounts a mining strike through the frame of global upheaval, where Brazil and Pennsylvania grant us access to the titular Belgian conflict. The second, Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’ La hora de los hornos (Argentina, 1968), among the most prominent of experimental leftist films of the second wave, deploys montage to scale national – urban Peronist labor struggles up to the status of Global South allegory. I analyze how both documentaries seek to apprehend the ostensibly local strike as, per Rosa Luxemburg, a “gigantic, many – colored picture of a general arrangement of labor and capital.” Ultimately, I am also interested in how a focus on the strike film might shed light on methodological debates surrounding the intersection of world cinema and world literature studies.

The "Chinese Experience" in Gender Studies: An investigation Centered on The American Sinologist Beata Grant

2022-11-22T14:37:38+04:00

Since the Republican era, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and other sages introduced Western technology and ideas, accepting them under the guise of "science" and "democracy", to the present time, scholars pursue Chinese storytelling and emphasize cultural self – confidence, what have been changed is the posture of the entire Chinese nation. In the process of dialogue between Chinese studies as a cultural resource and Western scholarship, the American sinologist Beata Grant is a typical example. Taking the dilemma of American gender studies as awareness of the problem, extracting the facts of gender studies in American sinology, and with a unique perspective of entry, Beata Grant focuses on the center from the margins of women, converging Chinese experience to nourish America, and her path of sinology research is both typical and special. Investigating the origins of Beata Grant's research on Chinese women, talking about her gender research themes, and finding her cross – literary perspectives, we can not only understand the results of Beata Grant's gender research, but also get a glimpse of the connection between American gender research and Sinological research.

Exploring the paratexts of Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art” translated by Bonnie Mc Dougall

2022-11-22T14:44:37+04:00

Drawing on Genette’s theory of paratext, the paper explores the paratextual features in Bonnie McDougall’s English translation of Mao Zedong’s seminal work “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”(the Talks). It is found that the heavily – annotated paratexts in the translation have performed the following functions: (1) situating the historical context in which the work was first delivered. (2) seeking the aesthetic common ground between the Talks and the theories of literature in the West by comparing the key words and terms in both the original and the translation; (3) tracing the literary origins of the Talks and creating the intertextuality between the paratexts and its main text. Although they sometimes lead to misunderstandings which arise from the translator’s imposed interpretation, these paratexts not only represent the literary framework underlying the Talks, but also provide for the target readers enlightening perspectives and useful reference to understand the Talks.

Empson’s Milton’s God and His Chinese Experiences

2022-11-22T14:45:47+04:00

William Empson had 2 teaching experiences (1937–39;1947–52) in China before his writing of Milton’s God. There are papers discussing his influence on Chinese Milton scholars: there are dozens of students who were inspired by his courses dedicated to promoting Milton studies in China, among them Yang Zhouhan, Yin Baoshu, Wang Zuoliang, Zhao Ruihong, Jin Fasheng are the founders of Milton studies in China. This paper tends to map out that how Empson’s Chinese experiences in turn exerted influence on his own Milton studies, which typically displayed in his Milton’s God. The paper mainly argues from three aspects: 1) Chinese non – Christian belief and the Communism acted as a promoter which put Empson’s early propaganda against the God into practice. 2) The reception of Satan in China has an impact on Empson’s attitude towards Milton’s God. Both the influence of Romantic poets and the Luxun Tradition make Satan a hero in China, which concurs with Empson’s view of Satan. 3) The Chinese patriotism Empson experienced during the wartime made him concede to Milton’s God: Empson found that the monster – like God seems almost decent in Milton’s poem. He compares Milton’s belief in God with Chinese people’s patriotism in the wartime, and points out that the two sentiments are not contradictory. In this way, Empson construct a more complete, moral consistent Milton in his book. Besides, the interactions reflected in Empson’s Chinese experiences is also a typical cross – cultural case that deserves our further investigation.

Is it an Orientalist Hallucination, a Sinologist Interpretation or an Aesthetic Commonality? – A Reflection on American Representations of Chinese Poetry and Culture from Pound to Ginsberg

2022-11-22T14:47:07+04:00

Abstract: This article discusses the connections and interactions between Chinese and American modern poetry. It claims that it is inappropriate to overinterpret the representation of Chinese language and culture in American poetry from popular orientalist or sinologist perspective, which easily neglects the more complicated historical and cultural possibilities in the aspects of poetics, translation and cultural exchange. By taking an overall view of the issue, it tries to reveal a more individualistic, dynamic yet collective cultural interaction between Chinese language, culture and modern American poetry, which is a process to achieve a cosmopolitan aesthetic commonality.

Translation and Identity Formation in Transcultural Communicating Practice –Analysis of Representation of China in the First Half of Twentieth – Century

2022-11-22T14:48:40+04:00

In this paper, I analyse the representation of China in the twentieth – century in the prose and poetry of two modernist authors through the textual tensions among utopia/dystopia/heterotopia, specifically Franz Kafka’s ‘The Great Wall of China’ (1917) and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (1885 – 1972) and Cathay (1915). Drawing on Foucault’s concept of heterotopia as a way of thinking about space in real and imaginary terms, as well as its political implications, I consider the two writers translate China into utopias/heterotopias for their own identity formation. This approach allows my paper to make observations about the poetics of each author, the modernist reception of China in terms of cultural translation, and the translatability of Chinese thought in terms of intermediality. This paper identifies the atemporality in both authors’ approach to China, revealing the dispassionate identification of Chinese and Jewish culture in Kafka versus the subjective identification of real and imaginary China in Pound. I analyse the gaps between the superimposed factual plane and imagination, in order to examine how they translate, accept Chinese culture and philosophy in the horizon and crisis of modernity, how they speak of ‘China’ (textual China) for the aim of mirroring the self, how Chinese philosophy is transplanted as medicine (Pound) for the modern European spirit. Drawing on a broad range of research, this paper synthesises and brings into dialogue scholarship on hermeneutics, aesthetics, and cultural studies in several different languages. I propose to reinvigorate utopia’s inherently critical nature as critical utopias, heterotopia and meta – utopia being involved as emanations. The synthesising remarks that compare Kafka with Pound will show that they are both conducting comparative studies, transcultural interpretations; they both reject unifying views of identity, and both accept Chinese poetics, philosophy in formal and spiritual sense.

Song of the Dark Ages – Brecht in Exile and "Chinese Role Model"

2022-11-22T14:50:40+04:00

A close reading of the works about Chinese elements, Chinese thoughts and Chinese themes created by the German writer Brecht in exile (1933 – 1947) in the 20th century shows that the "Chinese Role Model" had a certain impact on Brecht's artistic creation and life in exile.This influence could be embodied through the creative translation of "exile poet" Bai Juyi, the imaginative processing of "Chinese wise man" Lao Tzu and The Good Man in Sichuan created under the influence of Chinese opera.Put the three together for investigation, we can not only see Brecht's courtesy to Chinese wisdom and recognition of Chinese culture, but also help us to further explore the deep motivation behind it, so as to see how Brecht completed his thinking of survival and art by learning from foreign oriental culture during his 15 year exile life times, which also represents the survival path of the German generation of exiles in that dark era.

Writing China and the Formation of Mark Twain’s Post – humanism in his Later Works

2022-11-22T14:52:13+04:00

This article looks into the mapping of Mark Twain’s writing from humanism to post – humanism with special attention to the influence of his Chinese – related writings on the shift from humanism to post – humanism. By having a comprehensive analysis of Twain’s non – fictional and fictional works such as his journalistic and political articles, “The Fable of the Yellow Terror” and “Three Thousand Years among Microbes”, I argue that Twain’s anguishing works toward the end of his life cannot be neatly defined by the preoccupation of existential pessimism or as the “great dark writing” that overlook his consistent concern with human nature. Instead, reflecting upon the place of human beings in the universe, Twain’s later writing manifests a intricate state of post – humanism that challenges the anthropocentrism which puts human’s rights and interests as priority above other livings objects. In the mapping process of his pos t – humanism, his earlier encounter with Chinese immigrants as the victim of racism and his involvement into the movement of anti – imperialism as expressed in his outcry against the presences of imperialism in China as well as his sympathy and support for the Boxer Movement, have enabled Twain to wrestle with the dilemma of racism, nationalism and any other types of centrism. His bitter contemplation over international politics, racial equality and cultural differences is further developed into an audacious and courageous plan of seeking a way out to reconsider human race’s relationship with other living objects ranging from living animals to microbes in a post – humanistic context by the end of his career.

A Study of Reception and Influence of Chinese Science Fiction Writer Liu Cixin in American Culture

2022-11-22T14:53:29+04:00

Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin won Hugo Award for his The Three – Body Problem in 2015. The spread and influence of Liu’s works in America is being a new phenomenon for American to understand Chinese science fiction. Netflix will make the TV series for The Three – Body Problem. People including American former President Barack Obama and mass all love to read and discuss it. This paper argues the reasons for Liu Cixin’s reception and influence in America. First, it meets the demands of American readers because of the fade of American science fiction in the golden age. Contemporary American science fiction writers would like to focus on realism theme instead of imaging cosmos and space war. Liu Cixin brings them back to the good memory of science fiction writing in the golden age and invokes them great aspirations to re – explore the universe. Second, the economic and cultural development of China attract the world. People want to know and understand what China would do when the world is involved into the great disaster. It is a complicated cultural competition in the reception of The Three – Body Problem. Third, Liu Cixin imagined cosmos sociology and arose the hot discussion for Three Body era and Three Body civilization. The power of imagination is the originality of the literature. It transcends the national and state boundary and link the world together. Liu Cixin and his The Three – Body Problem present the worldiness of Chinese science fiction and call for the science fiction community go beyond the language and culture in the world. It is a new type of world literature.

Transgressing the Wall: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Philosophy of Daoism Potential for Utopianism in The Dispossessed

2022-11-22T14:55:10+04:00

Daoism, as one of the greatest indigenous philosophical traditions of Chinese culture, exerts a strong influence on the American fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s worldview and her storyworld, especially in The Dispossessed (1974). Although scholars identify The Dispossessed observes utopian traditions in the history of political thought and literature, there has not been a comprehensive discussion on how Le Guin’s Daoist philosophical and utopian insights resonate with the mode of modern utopian thinking, and how they are represented, problematized and interpreted in the novel. This article aims to demonstrate how Le Guin’s Daoist philosophy of Yin – Yang, with mutual generation and promotion beyond balance to one harmony, collides with modern utopian thinking, including Ruth Levitas’s work on utopian ontology, Lucy Sargisson’s transgressive and Tom Moylan’s critical utopian theory. By examining the political systems of the two planets, Anarres (anarchism) and Urras (capitalism), the protagonist physicist Shevek is endowed with a perspective to interrogate two contradictory sets of beliefs with his judgment. The recurring motif of the wall separated two planets and the discovery of the General Temporal Theory work miracles in a Taoist manner. Rather than processing an ideal society, The Dispossessed attempts to elucidate a viewpoint that there is never a perfect and ideal utopia, but we may strive for a multi – balanced utopianism in a dialogical way. The novel offers a dual perspective meditation between two planets, and each of these worlds is essential to the survival of the other. In light of this, Le Guin embraces the outlook of Daoism and pursues a balanced Taoist utopianism, promoting the fusion of Chinese and western culture.

“The Chinese Chameleon” – Revisiting Angela Carter’s “New – fangled Orientalism”

2022-11-22T14:57:07+04:00

British writer Angela Carter is famous for her subversive writings, her exuberant allusiveness, and above all, her dazzling postmodernist techniques in bringing everything together. Noticeably, Carter’s writings are permeated with Chinese elements and references despite the fact that she had visited China herself. On the one hand, as a literary element, the image of China is historically interwoven with the Gothic literary tradition in presenting Western imagination of the Orientalist other. On the other hand, with the rise of postmodernism and critique of Orientalism, this Orientalist image of China constructed by Eurocentrism was and is still under deconstruction. Given that Carter is highly conscious of both critical theories and her own creative writings, her (re)representation of the Orient comes not as a mimicry of tradition, but a deliberate divergence from the traditional orientalist discourse which allows further critical reflection of it. Thus, Carter’s individual perspective including her experience in Japan and her self – professed political commitment of her writings merit special attention. As Carter’s artistic style and political ideas develop, her “new – fangled Orientalism” under such critical reflection also takes different shape.

The Wu Wei (inaction) Thought of Daoism and its Influence on German Literature in the 1920s

2022-11-22T14:58:19+04:00

The thought of Wu Wei (inaction) is an important part of Daoism. In the aspect of governing the country, it means that the monarch should not act rashly to reach the realm of “when you need do nothing, there is nothing you cannot do”. In terms of individual behaviour, it contains the thoughts of transcending opposites, conforming to the laws of nature and complying with Dao. From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, a large number of Chinese classical works were continuously introduced into the German – speaking world through the translation and publication of the scholars such as Richard Wilhelm. Consequently, an “oriental fever” represented by Daoism swept through the German intelligentsia. From the perspective of acceptance, this paper will start by recounting the historical background and will then analyze the reasons for the absorption of the idea of inaction in German literary circles from three perspectives: a national cultural introspection after the defeat of Germany in the World War I, the impact of western industrial civilization on German culture, and the rise of expressionist literature. In the aspect of influence, this paper will look closely at select German literary works of the 1920s such as The Magic Mountain and Steppenwolf in order to explore the embodiment, integration and alienation of the idea of inaction in these works, and then discuss its influence on German literature of that time.

The Influence of Chinese Cinderella “Yeh – Shen” on the Evolving Images of Cinderella in the West

2022-11-22T14:59:41+04:00

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Chinese Cinderella story “Yeh – Shen” was discovered and translated into English. In the 1980s, its recurrent popularity made it a household story. As the earliest complete Cinderella – type story ever recorded, “Yeh – Shen” provided legitimate support for Cinderella’s becoming of “the people’s princess”, a tendency toward a everyday girl image. Based on this argument, the Eurocentric fairy tale genealogy of “Basile – Perrault – Grimms – Disney” should be revised as “Perrault – Grimms – “Yeh – Shen” – Basile – Postmodern”. Along the new genealogical sequence, the Chinese influence in the evolution of Cinderella images will be revealed, and Angela Carter’s postmodern feminist rewriting of “Cinderella” will provide a convincing text testifying to such influence.

Interesting Times

2022-11-22T15:01:03+04:00

Terry Pratchett, the fertile fantasy writer sometimes took special cultural practices, periods, phenomena to ignite the fantasy. The location is still the Discworld, his trademark fantastic universe, but the story still works as a parody of something known from our round world. The parody, however, never functions as the exclusive, not even the main layer of meaning.

The 1995 novel Interesting Times, as the title already implies, uses classical Chinese culture as the main source of inspiration. It does not show deep knowledge of Chinese culture; it rather works with commonplaces but tends to reinterpret them in the highly original and witty manner that is characteristic of the author. Politics made in the imperial palace, cruelty, extreme oppression appear as negative stereotypes, while highly sophisticated art and craftsmanship, astonishingly developed ancient technology counterbalance them on the positive end. Pratchett’s interpretations of Chinese cuisine, stable social order, and the easy assimilation of barbarian conquerors during the history function as neutral but enlightening commentaries.

Pratchett’s parody is always universal, resulting in a carnivalesque laughter in the Bakhtinian sense. He does not allow exception for his general critique of cultural and social phenomena, which is always based on a humanist value system.

On Blandness: Chinese Imports in Roland Barthes’ Category of the ‘Neutral’

2022-11-22T15:02:21+04:00

Among the numerous trips by left – wing Western European intellectuals to Maoist China, the 1974 visit by a group of French intellectuals associated with the journal Tel Quel, including Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, is probably the most notorious. Today, however, it is mostly dismissed as politically naïve and at best treated in terms of an anecdotal history of events. Without belittling the dimension of political naiveté, my paper proposes a different approach to this trip and its literary harvest in order to bring out the productivity of the encounter with China in view of the respective intellectual and aesthetic projects. I would like to illustrate this by taking Roland Barthes' writings on China as an example.

After his trip, Barthes did not write a Chinese counterpart to his famous book on Japan, L'Empire des signes (1970), but only published a newspaper article entitled “Alors, la Chine?” – an article

that was much criticised for abstaining from any clear assessment of the political situation in

China. Yet, as I will show, the article develops the travel impression of a certain blandness (fadeur) in China into complex semiotic, aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological considerations. My paper will further explore the extent to which this notion of fadeur gains relevance for Barthes' subsequent thinking and writing. In particular, this question arises in connection with his interest in le neutre (the neutral). Undoubtedly, the category of the neutral is well present in Barthes’ writings before his trip to China, but with his lecture course “Le Neutre” at the Collège de France in 1977 – 8, this category comes to the fore. By examining his notes for this course, my paper analyses how the ‘blandness’ encountered in China, but also references to Chinese literature and philosophy including the Daoist principle of wu wei, feed into his reflections.

Influence and Reinvention: the "Chinese princess" Judith Gautier and The Book of Jade

2022-11-22T15:03:56+04:00

In 1862, Le Marquis d’ Hervey de Saint Denys published the first French translation of Tang poetry, Poems of the Tang Dynasty, and five years later, Judith Gautier published another collection of translated poems, The Book of Jade. While the Poems of the Tang Dynasty frequently gained recognition in sinology but failed to reach the general public, The Book of Jade had the opposite fate, not attracting enough attention in sinology but being well received by the general reader and influencing poetic luminaries from various countries such as Hugo, Verlaine and Pound. Judith Gautier, who calls herself “a Chinese Princess”, has made it her mission to spread Chinese culture, but Judith has never been to China, and the China she presents is an “imaginary” China influenced by some secondary sources and her Chinese acquaintances. Once the focus is shifted to the female characters in her work, it is easy to see that for almost half a century, Judith looked at European reality through the lens of China as the “other”, reflecting the plight of women in French reality. The imaginary “China” became the locus of her unique feminine thought, while the charismatic female characters prompted Western readers to wonder, identify and yearn for the real China.

Chinese poetry and imaginings of world literature

2022-11-22T15:05:20+04:00

This paper examines the role Chinese poetry has played in imagination of world literature in recent decades. The relationship between Chinese and Anglo – American literature elicits heated debates in European and American literary and cultural theories. This paper reviews Stephen

Owen’s criticism of Bei Dao’s poems and the controversy and draws into question EuroAmerican – centrism that often treats literature from the so – called periphery as merely a variant of or apprentice to that of the so – called centre. It also discusses how conceptions of world literature, put forward by scholars such as Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, are to some extent trapped in centre – periphery, local – global dichotomies. It further analyzes Xi Chuan’s poems and proposes a networking mode as an alternative to reimagine world literature. The different imaginings of world literature demonstrated in various discussions of Chinese literature are important responses to the transformation from Cold – War opposition to global integration.

A Study of the Images of China from Pearl Buck, Bill Porter to Peter Hessler

2022-11-22T15:06:42+04:00

As time goes by, native American writers learn about China and Chinese through various channels, and portray the images of China in their eyes into their literary works. Among them, some writers learn about China through others’ literature, mass media, etc., while others have had experiences in China, or gone to China in person to explore Chinese culture they long for, and put the images of China in their eyes into words in their works. Given the topic and length of writing, this thesis selects three native American writers who have had a long – term Chinese life experience and their masterpieces to research on: Pearl Buck, Bill Porter and Peter Hessler. In addition, imagologie in comparative literature is selected as the theoretical framework to study on the images of China in their literary works.

The essay aims to make some contributions to the study on the theory and application of imagologie and its practical significance. Through the images of China in Pearl Buck, Bill Porter and Peter Hessler from the perspective of the American, on the one hand, it may be conducive for American readers to have reflection on the themselves and the US. On the other hand, reviewing the changes of the images, it may be helpful for Chinese to reflect on the past, take actions at present and look forward to the future.

From Rivers to Roads: The Depiction of the Chinese Revolution in East German Documentaries

2022-11-22T15:08:48+04:00

While the burgeoning Asian – German scholarship in North America has valorised the intercultural relation between China and Germany (Li 2010; Shen 2014; Zhang 2017), the interplay between Chinese and German socialism, particularly in the cultural arena, has remained understudied. In fact, the Chinese Communist Revolution not only led to a structural transformation in China, but also had an impact on the ways in which other socialist states and revolutionary regions engage with their own conceptions of socialism.

In this paper, I will focus on the depiction of the Chinese revolution in East German documentaries in the 1950s. In particular, I will examine Lied der Ströme (Song of the Rivers, 1954) by the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and China – Land zwischen gestern und morgen (China – A Country Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, 1956) by Joop Huisken, Ivens’ mentee. Both films showcase China in the form of ethnographic travelogues, while foregrounding a sense of political solidarity. In depicting six major rivers across different continents – the Volga, Mississippi, Ganges, Nile, Amazon and the Yangtze, Ivens’ film places China in a setting of international workers’ movement, celebrating the significant role of Chinese workers in transnational socialism. Huisken’s film, by contrast, focuses solely on the construction of Chinese socialism and highlights the rapid development of infrastructure in the early 1950s China.

In scrutinising the depiction of natural and urban spaces in these two documentaries – rivers in Ivens’ film and railways/roads in Huisken’s film, I argue that, produced from a perspective of socialist solidarity, they challenge the kind of orientalist depiction of China exhibited in other Western cultural products. At the same time, the Chinese revolution serves as a form of selfreflection, through which artists in East Germany could envision their own blueprint of socialism and strengthen their understanding of the socialist ideals.

A Comparative Analysis of Auden’s War Poetry of Spain and China

2022-11-22T15:11:18+04:00

Both Spanish Civil War and Sino – Japanese War have been described as great causes and exerted the political and emotional impact on British opinions. One can find a genuine interweaving of Spain, China and British anti – fascism at the level of individual lives and careers of particular intellectuals and writers. In 1937, Auden and Isherwood were commissioned to write a travel book about an Asian country, they opted for China. Journey to a War could be taken as a watershed for Auden, precipitating him to have a reflection on his affinities with the British Left, the validity of political writing and the relationship between art and politics. After his experiences in Spain and China, Auden headed for a new intellectual destination.

The Study of Chinese Folk Literature from the Perspective of Comparative Linguistics

2022-11-22T15:45:51+04:00

This paper offers an interpretation of Alexey Veselovsky’s historical poetics in his theory of comparative linguistics. It reveals the impact of Veselovsky’s poetics on the study of Chinese folk literatures in Russia, along with the study of other Chinese folk cultures. Through an in – depth research in this direction, this paper thus unfolds the characteristics of the study of Chinese folk literature in Russia, while addressing the unique picture of the heterogeneous Chinese folk literature from the perspective of comparative linguistics.

Soong Tsung – Faung and the First French History of Modern Chinese Literature: La Littérature chinoise contemporaine

2022-11-22T15:47:05+04:00

Soong Tsung – faung(1892 – 1938) was a drama theorist and a pioneer of the modern Chinese drama movement. He was also a typical intellectual studying in France in the period of the Republic of China, and introduced Chinese literature to the French world very early. In 1919, His book La littérature chinoise contemporaine was publised by Jounal de Pékin. This French history of Chinese literature systematically introduced modern Chinese literature to the French world for the first time. This book consists of 23 chapters and a preface by Albert Nachbaur. Chinese novel, poetry and drama are the main contents, and the introduction of the May Fourth New Culture Movement is the focus of this book, the modern magazine New Youth is the emphasis and its achievements such as Hu Shi's drama Lifetime Event and Yu Pingbo's new poetry Spring Water have been translated in time by the author. This paper will introduce the specific contents of this book, discuss the self – realization and cultural identity construction of Chinese intellectuals in the eastward spread of Western learning in the early 20th century, and investigate its current significance in the communication between Chinese and foreign literature.

Translation and Identity Formation in Transcultural Communicating Practice – Analysis of Representation of China in the First Half of Twentieth – Century

2022-11-22T15:48:16+04:00

Influence of Mao’s thoughts and praxis on Raymond Williams

2022-11-22T15:49:35+04:00

As a radical Marxist thinker, Raymond Williams not only read widely the works of the founders of Marxism and other Marxist thinkers, but also paid high attention to the revolutionary praxis in Russia as well as China. However, Williams obviously rejected Stalinism in politics and culture, and denounced his cruel treatment of the peasants. Williams was very much disappointed by the so – called revolution, and began to question the real meaning of it. At the mean time, when hearing about the Cultural Revolution in China, Williams expressed quite positive views about it, especially about Mao’s policy of taking the mass line. For Williams, sending the young intelligentsia to the real lived life of the peasants is brilliant, which truly combines the theory with praxis, a meaningful effort to abridge the border between lived experience and academic, between leading revolutionaries and the vast ordinary people, between country and the city, between the old generation and the new one. The endeavor to cross the border has been a life – long career for Williams, who suffered from the split of dual identity. In his one and only drama Koba, Williams presents his concern for the alienation of the revolution, which necessarily results in the normalization and naturalization of the new established political power. Hence, Mao’s cultural revolution provides a way out of this, to re – politicalize the society, which for Williams should be a long process of cultural change, rather than a class struggle for political power, so as to avoid the alienation of the revolution.

Cultiver le rêve insensé

2022-11-22T15:50:54+04:00

À partir d’ouvrages de Lewis Carroll et de diverses tentatives surréalistes et de textes de Luigi Malerba, il s’agira d’explorer les possibilités, les contextes et les poétiques d’un onirisme fondamentalement ludique, dénué de signification tangible.

The Dream Effect

2022-11-22T15:52:08+04:00

In 1968, Roland Barthes published a short essay on the ›reality effect‹. Basically, the term refers to the existence of non – significant descriptive details, »apparently detached from the narrative’s semiotic structure« (Barthes), whose sole function is to create an illusion of ›realism‹. Undoubtedly, Barthes’s term has its problems. But it may turn out to be useful in an analogical transfer to the poetics of fictional dreams – as what I will call the ›irreality effect‹ or ›dream effect‹.

If fictional dreams try to imitate the peculiarities of real dreams (which is by no means obligatory) they must have at least some of the following characteristics: (1) strong visualisation (requiring an extensive use of the descriptive mode); (2) bizarreries (i.e. various deviations from the reality principle); (3) metamorphoses (i.e. fluid identity of persons, objects, actions); (4) discontinuities of time and space; (5) lack of causal motivations, etc. These will create the dream effect.

But how do these specifics of dreams influence the process of semiosis? Basically, there are three options: (1) Oneiric qualities can mark dream elements as carriers of meaning (following semiotic conventions which we know from satires, parables, and similar genres). (2) They can (this is the closest parallel to Barthes’s argument) have no meaning (at least none that can be easily identified). In a semantically over – determined realm, as which dreams are considered in many dream theories, they will, however, act as free – floating significants which increase the ambiguity of dreams. (3) Intensified oneiricity in combination with low – key semanticity can foreground a reader or observer response which is focused less on finding a meaning than on enjoying the dream effect in itself.

My paper will outline different variants of this conflict between plausible oneiricity and signification by analysing fictional dream representations from various periods of literary history.

Sense-less Dreams Free Senses – Synaesthetic Aspects of Dreams and Writing: Walser and Soseki

2022-11-22T15:53:20+04:00

In dream the dreamer recognises intimate experience intermingled with unpredictable switches and turns. Dream unfolds within the familiar an unknown sometimes surreal environment with an abrogated temporality. Is it an outbreak of Freudian covetousness or an emergence of the Lacanian imaginary? According to Lacan language is characterized by the symbolic, which suppresses the imaginary. Every language though contains metaphors that combine different domains of perception in a non – mimetic way.

When for example acoustic signals trigger optical or olfactory sensation, neurology speaks of synaesthesia. Recent research suggests that synaesthetic perception is not necessarily limited to synaesthetes: it is a stage of neurologic development in early childhood which can leave lasting traces. Synaesthesia can be experienced by many people in one way or another, e. g. by stimulants. Synaesthetic metaphors are rooted in our coenaesthetic perception ("the general feeling of inhabiting one's body that arises from multiple stimuli from various bodily organs" Merriam – Webster.com Dictionary), that is why we accept and ‘understand’ them against logical, rational and scientific evidence. In my paper I will argue that first of all dream is coined by the multi – sensual constitution of human perception as Michel Serres describes in “Les Cinq Sens” (1985).

In dreams we are largely free of constricting cultural rules, be it morality, law, style or genre. Synaesthetic metaphors could be traced back to that multi – sensual experience. Whether Romantic or in the ‘écriture automatique’ of Surrealism, writers of all times were aiming for a style echoing dream. A comparative look at texts by Robert Walser and Natsume Soseki will examine that thesis of a synaesthetic dimension of language.

The Dream as an Event in the Work of Richard Weiner

2022-11-22T15:54:47+04:00

The Czech poet and novelist Richard Weiner (1884–1937) is considered to be one of the most important Czech writers of the first half of the 20th century. His early work was influenced by Expressionism, while in the later period it showed influences of the French avant – garde, especially Surrealism and Le Grad Jeu group, with which he was personally associated. The dream and the contemplation of the dream permeate Weiner's work from its beginnings, but central to his work is his prose Lazebník: Poetika (Feldsher: A Poetics) in which he puts forward an original theory of the dream and defines himself against several different influences. Firstly, the researches of the Marquis d'Hervey de Saint – Denys, then surrealist poetics, especially in the texts of André Breton. In addition, the influence of psychoanalytic theories is evident in his work, and also of the work of Marcel Proust. Weiner treats the dream as a radically different element of reality. The dream, he argues, cannot be interpreted or fixed because these activities cancel or reduce what is essential to the dream. The specific autonomy of the dream appears in two aspects that could be described as ontological – existential. As a reality in its own right, the dream is completely independent of the human being, it comes to a dreamer (repeatedly) without a possibility to be influenced; and the dream as an event, not as a coded message or sign, on the other hand, is determinative for the destiny of the human. In this paper I will attempt to outline Weiner's "theory" of the dream, to show the role of the dream in his work and to place it in a theoretical context.

The Chinese Dream: National Rejuvenation and Suspension of Political Agency

2022-11-22T15:56:12+04:00

This paper elaborates on the ambiguity of a political rhetoric that builds on the dream metaphor. Xi Jinping, since 2013 the President of the People’s Republic of China, helped the formula of the “Chinese Dream” (Zhongguo meng) to prominence, which he characterised as: “a dream about history, the present, and the future. [...] The Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation will be realized ultimately through the endeavours of young people, generation by generation” (Xi 2017). First ridiculed as an unnecessarily hazy concept, the Chinese Dream remains a crucial ingredient in the internal discourse on the country’s future. While Western analysts have interpreted Xi’s dream as the project of accommodating the population’s prosperity with continued Party control and rediscovered Confucian values (Feng 2015; Bisley 2015), dissidents have criticised the notion as a “pipe dream” (Xu 2020) and argued that such imprecise rhetoric “does not even make sense logically [...], it is preposterous that we are making the entire Party study it” (Cai Xia, 2020).

My presentation will inquire into the ambiguity of the term “Chinese Dream”, which has occasioned a plethora of publications that paraphrase Xi’s dream – related speeches as well as critical essays that connect the hazy dream rhetoric to specific fields of application, e.g. to the ecological crisis. Although the “Chinese Dream” obviously draws on the “American Dream” with its focus on middle – class wealth accumulation, the term also inherits the Buddhist undertones of the dream metaphor, which represents a dominant trope in traditional literature in China. Drawing on contemporary Chinese novels, including Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide (Huang Chao, 2013) and Zhao Defa’s Anthropocene (Ren Lei Shi, 2018), I will argue that the “Chinese Dream” contains a strand of meaning that endorses the wholesale rejection of classic political agency in favour of quasi – metaphysical defeatism.

Romantic Dream Poetology in Wim Wenders and Peter Handke’s Wings of Desire (1987)

2022-11-22T15:57:41+04:00

In the lecture Unmögliche Geschichten (Impossible Stories) from 1982, Wim Wenders divides his films into two groups as follows: “In the first group (A) are all black and white films [...]. The other group (B) contains color films that are also based on existing novels. On the other hand, the films of group (A) are based on an idea of mine – idea is a very imprecise term: it includes waking dreams and experiences”.¹ The opening scene of one of Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire)––premiered in 1987, one year before the fall of the Berlin’s wall and after Wender’s 7-year long stay in the USA–– shows according to Wender’s description of group (A) a black-and-white film montage of images (such as of the sky, clouds, airplanes, angels, and children) and Peter Handke’s poem Lied Vom Kindsein. How does Himmel über Berlin suggest Wender’s “waking dream”? And, how is Wender’s dream language in Himmel über Berlin related to Handke’s romantic understanding of literature? Handke’s poem demonstrates literature as fundamental “otherness” of the rational discourse similar to the dream.² Himmel über Berlin invokes visually and poetically topoi of the romantic poetology such as the bourgeois novel (Bildungsroman), Doppelgänger, melancholy, dreams, angels, and children.³ For instance, the protagonists Damiel and Cassiel are angels from a magical world between waking and dreaming, between heaven and earth. They can only observe the real world, but cannot intervene in people’s lives. The female protagonist Marion moreover dreams of becoming a trapeze artist. While angels and dreams function as aesthetic vision of a unity in romanticism––for example in Novalis’ Hymen an die Nacht (Hymns to the night, 1800) – for Rainer Maria Rilke, angels are mediators between life and death, heaven and earth, and broken figures of “transcendental homelessness”.⁴ Do the angel and dream mediate between East and West Germany and embody the lost community in German post-war history? Does the film montage itself imitate a dream, referring to Walter Benjamin’s Kunstwerk-essay? Does the dream function as “otherness” following Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of dreams? The dreamy montage articulates a desire for a German identity and unity, and yet it deconstructs the very “idea” of national identity itself.

Deciphering Dream Omens in Chinese Tradition: Cases of Cezi in Late Imperial Xiaoshuo Literature

2022-11-22T15:59:05+04:00

As a tradition that was originally linked to divination, Chinese oneirology includes many narratives that recount how a dream carries a hidden meaning that may reveal future events or explain ongoing ones. Dreams were indeed considered to be messages sent by the entities of the invisible world, so that the living may cope with their lives. The classical literature of leisure, notably the “small talks” (xiaoshuo 小說), was pervaded with stories of dream omens to be deciphered. Among the various techniques of dream interpretation was the “fathoming of characters” (cezi 測字), which bears many other names, and that consisted in manipulating the Chinese characters seen in a dream, or manipulating the characters that one could get out of a dream content. Dream enigmas appeared quite early in the literature of leisure, but we shall here focus on the Qing period (especially the 17^th and 18^th centuries) to show how persistently through Chinese history cezi appeared as a way to elucidate dreams. Examples of how people made sense of dreams through cezi are numerous in xiaoshuo literature, and this paper will provide a few examples drawn from collections such as Wang Jian’s 王椷 (unknown dates) Collected Talks of the Autumn Lamp (Qiudeng conghua 秋燈叢話) (1780), Yuan Mei’s 袁枚 (1716 – 1798) What the Master Would Not Discuss (Zibuyu 子不語) (1788), and also Cao Xueqin’s 曹雪芹 (1715?–1763?) Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng 紅樓夢).

Dreaming of a sailor – or dreaming at the bottom of the sea. Musically making sense of dreams in operas by Richard Wagner and Christian Ofenbauer

2022-11-22T16:07:06+04:00

The question of the artistic means by which dreams can be constituted as making sense – or not making sense – arises in a particular way for the medium of music: For in an art form practically devoid of terminological language, it seems especially difficult to depict sense or its absence. The proposed paper therefore examines dream scenes in two operas in order to explore the devices of musically making sense of the dreams that are part of the operas’ respective narratives.

Wagner’s Flying Dutchman (1843) includes Erik’s dream report: While Erik speaks of the unknown sailor he has dreamed about, the musical motif of the Dutchman is heard in the orchestra. Thus, as Sabine HenzeDöhring argues, not only is the mystery of the identity of the sailor from the dream resolved musically, but the finale of the opera is also anticipated. Wagner’s work with motivic correspondences proves the dream to be, on the one hand, a foreshadowing with regard to the storyline and, on the other hand, as integrated into the overall musical form: In this way, sense is made of the dream in two respects.

Almost 160 years later, the contemporary Austrian composer Christian Ofenbauer (*1961) based his opera SzenePenthesileaEinTraum (2000) not only on Kleist’s tragedy Penthesilea, but also on images taken from his own dreams. These dream scenes take place at the bottom of the sea and have no relation to Kleist’s text. Instead, they apparently function to disrupt the continuity of the opera as a meaningful entirety and represent something »other« within the scenic – and sonic – reality.

The suggested paper will explore the two examples by analysing the respective motivics, form, harmony and time – dramaturgy. Thus, it proposes to conceive them as two different concepts of musically making sense or non – sense of dreams.

The Domestication of Dreams – A Comparative Analysis of Lou Andreas – Salomé’s Literary, Autobiographical and Academic Writing

2022-11-22T16:08:32+04:00

Long before Freud’s remarks in Der Dichter und das Phantasieren (1921), the analogy of dreaming and writing has been recognized, for example by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834) who indicated poetry as a ‘rationalized dream’, or Jean Paul (1763–1825) who specified dreaming as ‘involuntary poetry.’³ Assuming that every writing on dreams (deliberately or unconsciously) is an autobiographical writing, it seems necessary to consider the author’s individual perspective on this phenomenon, in order to make sense of their literary portrayals. Lou Andreas – Salomé seems to be an ideal example for such an attempt, as her autobiographical as well as her academic texts feature insights on her shifting and developing ideas concerning the significance of dreams. By the examples of Die Geschichte von der Gänseblume und von den Wolken (1924 for children), Das Paradies (1899), Wolga (1902 for young adults) and Fenitschka (1919 for adults), I will demonstrate that the individual meaning of these literary representations unfolds in connection to her biographical and scientific texts. In her writing for young children as well as in her biographical texts on her own childhood, dreams represent an idealized idea of childhood, while the dreaming child is depicted as an artist to be. In her novellas for young adults as well as within her biographical dream reports, the surreal space of dreaming is connected with the ambiguous sphere between childhood and adulthood. As will be shown, these representations feature a prophetic dimension. Similar to her own adult profession, the protagonist of Fenitschka is equipped with psychoanalytical knowledge and articulates her own interpretation. In order to make sense of Andreas – Salomé’s literary representations of dreaming children and young adults, they will be read with contemporary psychoanalytical sources, but also her own dream reports and scientific publications.

(Late)-modern Paths into Dreamscapes of Deep Meanings? (Alfred Kubin, Sylvia Plath, Terézia Mora)

2022-11-22T16:10:15+04:00

Jung's doctrine which combines archetypes and individuation starts in his Liber novus with a scene of loss of speech: “The spirit of the depth took my mind and all my knowledge and put them at the service of the inexplicable and the absurd.” (L.N.: 229) This space of the otherness notably concerns literary outsider characters with possible mental disorders walking between the fluid borderlands of waking – and dream states where also the norms responsible for the perceived social exclusion become visible. The 20^th century transition from authoritarian states to democratic – liberal societies was accompanied by a process of increasing individualization, which caused a replacement of the formerly dominant neuroses by the widespread disease “depression” which is described in Alain Ehrenbergs La Fatigue d’être soi.

My lecture focusses on literary representations of dreams by three authors covering this era whose oeuvres make use of surrealistic, fantastic and paradoxical dream elements operating at the limits of the unspeakable.

Alfred Kubin's The Other Side (1909) takes its readers from modern Munich to the dream – realm of Patera which functions according to pre – modern absolutist rules, where so – called “Traummenschen” with “longing for depth” seem to be continuously dreaming. Consequently, the first – person narrator awakes only after the appearance of the American Hercules Bell and a surrealistic vision of the breakdown of Patera. In contrast, the first – person narrator – a depressive psychiatric secretary – in Sylvia Plath's Bible of Dreams (1977) already looks back on the downsides of modern societies in her meta – dreams: Therein, she sees all the patients’ nightmares she has archived, which pour out as streams into the depths of a gigantic dream – lake lined with ancient dragons. In Terézia Mora's The monster (2013), the aesthetic of depth already results from the division of the pages by a horizontal line which symbolizes the frontier between two worlds and two timelines. The perceptual world of the Hungarian migrant Flora relies significantly on a paradoxical, insoluble dream logic.

Les rêves dans Les Mystères d'une âme et Une page folle

2022-11-22T16:11:32+04:00

Les Mystères d'une âme (Pabst, Allemagne, 1926) et Une page folle (Kinugasa, Japon, 1926) sont deux films où des rêves se trouvent mis en scène. Dans chacun des deux, les rêves apparaissent liés à la névrose ou à la folie, et leur interprétation pose un problème crucial. Pabst en fait un élément essentiel d'une cure psychanalytique entreprise par un spécialiste, tandis que Kinugasa et son scénariste, l'écrivain Kawabata, confient au seul spectateur le soin de donner un sens aux rêves faits par le gardien de l'asile psychiatrique où se déroule l'histoire. Il peut sembler à cet égard que le premier film exprime la confiance en la raison : le personnage du psychanalyste distingue les mauvais rêves de la réalité, les analyse et les met hors d'état de nuire. Une page folle, au contraire, paraît remettre en cause le pouvoir de la raison. Les cauchemars s'y enchevêtrent à tel point à la réalité qu'il devient difficile de les en discerner, ils semblent se dérober à l'interprétation, et le gardien de l'asile donne l'impression de sombrer dans la folie. Cependant, le but de notre exposé est de montrer que les choses ne sont pas aussi simples : d'une part, dans le film de Pabst, les explications du psychanalyste ne permettent pas de rendre compte des rêves de son patient dans toute leur complexité ; d'autre part, Kinugasa donne une cohérence aux rêves de son personnage, qui ne se réduisent pas à des divagations insensées.

Doxa et paradoxes du rêve. Ou les étrangetés oniriques dans Le Marchand de passés (José Eduardo Agualusa) et La Route de la faim (Ben Okri)

2022-11-22T16:12:52+04:00

Si Le Marchand de passés de José Eduardo Agualusa est un récit des rêves où il se passe des choses étranges, où Félix, l’albinos se lie d’amitié avec Eulálio, un gecko qui parle et où l’on passe sans crier gare d’un monde à l’autre, La Route de la faim de Ben Okri atteint le sommet des bizarreries oniriques fantastiques avec le monde des « abiku, spirit – children », qui sont des « enfants – esprits » qui ont malheureusement quitté « the world of pure dreams, where all things are made of enchantment, and where there is no suffering. » Roman où les frontières du rêve et du réel de fiction se brouillent, s’entremêlent comme l’on passe du rêve à la fiction ou de la fiction au rêve dans Le Marchand de passés. Je focaliserais mon attention deux rêves appartenant à ces deux œuvres et j’essayerais de m’interroger sur le pourquoi et le comment de ces fantaisies onirico – romanesques, le pourquoi et le comment de ces traversées quasi – fantastiques de ces deux univers de la fiction et du rêve où le vraisemblable et l’invraisemblable se confrontent constamment et où le lecteur se demande s’il ne rêve pas debout.

Dreams and Nightmares in Artistic Print Cycles by Max Klinger and Max Beckmann

2022-11-22T16:14:07+04:00

In his print cycle »Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove« (1881), the German artist Max Klinger (1857–1920) combines personal dreams and fantasies to create an overall appearance in which the waking world and the dream world become blurred. While the pictured location of the cycle and the desire of a woman, symbolized by the fetishized glove, originate in Klinger’s life, he shifts the story of fulfilment and failure of love into a pictorial dream sequence. The cycle includes dream markers presenting both the dreamer himself as well as fantastic creatures. The dream – like structure is

further emphasized by means of pictorial narration, distortions of scale, and unsettling juxtapositions.

Like the Glove Cycle, the print cycle »Day and Dream« (1946) by German artist Max Beckmann (1884–1950) shows biographical links between work and artist. Beckmann was clearly influenced by Klinger’s innovations in the field of printmaking, especially print portfolios. The fact that Beckmann renamed the cycle shortly before it was published highlights the importance of the dream theme for the artist. Furthermore, the title provides a reading instruction of the otherwise seemingly heterogeneous work for the recipient. Similar to Klinger’s cycle, the nightmarish and phantasmagorial in »Day and Dream« is evoked by the dream – immanent narrative, distortions of proportion, and evocation of the uncanny.

Using topoi of dreams and nightmares, both print cycles reflect on biographical events of the artists in past, present, and future. Dream – like scenarios are used to investigate factual concerns, wishes, and emotions. Further, the recipients try to make sense of the dreams and the dream – like appearances and structures by deciphering allegories and symbols and associating them with both biographical and world – historical interconnections.

Dream Reports and the Question of Meaning

2022-11-22T16:15:42+04:00

In the course of the 20th century, dream reports emancipate themselves from being an object of study in psychological research and become a literary genre. In numerous publications, the authors not only refuse to interpret their dreams, but they also intervene in the reading experience by explicitly rejecting (at least a certain, especially psychological direction of) interpretation (cf. f. ex. Vierordt 1922, 11; Yourcenar 1938, 33 f.; Okopenko 1998, 203; Cixous 2003, 18). In their prefaces and afterwords, the authors generally admit that dreams do have meaning – even if they don’t want this meaning to be deciphered.

Some publications go beyond such introductory reflections to explore and negotiate the question of »making sense«. Henri Michaux’ dream reports in Façons d’endormi, façons d’éveillé (1969) are accompanied by extensive interpretations which often exceed the dream narrative in terms of length. In my paper, I would like to analyse the effect of these interpretative passages on the dream report itself and on the reading process (1). Furthermore, they display an awareness of traditional and modern dream theories. Dreams and their contemplation have lost their »innocence« (Michaux, 13): far from being spontaneous, original and natural, they are already informed and, to some extent, shaped by discourses. Hence, a second question of my paper will be how the authors’ interpretations navigate between different theories and methods and how they reflect on them (2). In Hans C. Artmann’s Grünverschlossene Botschaft: 90 Träume (1967), theories and methods positioning themselves outside of the dream report, aspiring to »make sense« of them, become objects of the oneiric narrative themselves. The interpretation process is carried out in a hyperbolic way, thereby creating a parodistic effect: »If, in the morning, pocelain dolls with dissecting knives frighten you, and you fear losing your manhood […], don’t say a word, get up and draw a green seven in your notebook« (7), Artmann writes, humorously linking Freudian symbolism to prophetic dream theories and traditional number symbolism.¹Comparing primarily French and German examples, my paper will explore how collections of dream reports negotiate the question of meaning and how they deal with interpretative theories.

A critical overview of Tobias Barreto´s Outline of Comparative Literature (1877) and Hutcheson Macauley Posnett Comparative Literature (1886) please acknowledge receipt

2022-11-22T16:17:38+04:00

The connection between nationalism and cosmopolitanism existed in the very disciplinary origins of comparatism. As we know, even the first periodical dedicated to Comparative Literature, the Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, founded in Hungary in 1877 by Hugo Meltzl and Samuel Brassai, was seen locally as a vehicle to disseminate Hungarian national literature abroad, and not as a vehicle for transnational comparatism (Levente; Codău). Its editors, in 1878, responded to the accusation of “foreignism” by stating that ACLU was, ultimately, a Hungarian periodical that emphasised content for the readers of Hungary. Alexander Beecroft (2019) has already used Meltzl as an example, saying that the comparative literature project began in the peripheries, perhaps because inhabitants of peripheral or provincial cultures are forced to think comparatively (at least with regard to dominant cultures), while members of dominant cultures can more easily treat their cultures in isolation. In addition to Meltzl, Beecroft cites Hutcheson Macauley Posnett, Professor of Classics and English Literature at the University of Auckland and the author of Comparative Literature (1886), because both worked “on the peripheries of the Eurosphere”. We could add to the list Tobias Barreto (1839 – 1889), the Brazilian author of Outline of Comparative Literature in the 19th Century (Traços de literatura comparada do século XIX, 1877). This paper will contribute to the insertion of Barreto in the history of 19th Century comparatism.

Rewrite the History of a Chinese – American Female: Narratology of The Lost Daughter of Happiness

2022-11-22T16:19:22+04:00

In her novel The Lost Daughter of Happiness Chinese American writer Geling Yan depicts the life of a Chinese prostitute in US society one hundred years ago. By analyzing the narratology of the novel, this essay discusses the issues of the male gaze, as well as Orientalism from the perspective of postcolonial feminism. The resistance against the dominating male – Western narration in the US history prevails in the novel. In the first chapter of her work, Geling Yan evokes readers’ identification with her heroine in their cognitive experience by adopting the tactics of second – person narrative, which puts the reader at the site of an objectified Asian female. The trick turns the table on readers. Being different from the readers of American history books that record Chinese prostitutes, the readers of Yan’s novel are no longer the subjects of giving judgement. Instead, they are forced into an shocking illusion of being judged with naked body by an authority. With the superimposed points of view, Yan intentionally keeps the superimposed underpainting of male gaze and Orientalism, and re – imposes a new perspective to fight against those stereotypes of Asian females. In this way, Yan rewrites the cultural history of Asian – American female by substituting “history” with “herstory”.

Décoloniser les savoirs. Essai sur le roman africain contemporain

2022-11-22T16:20:34+04:00

Il fut une époque où la poésie était à l’avant – garde du combat politique et littéraire des écrivains africains pour se défaire du joug colonial. Puis, vint l’âge du roman et du théâtre. Cependant, aujourd’hui le roman semble avoir pris le pas sur les autres formes et genres dans ce combat. Qui plus est, le roman ne s’est pas contenté de remettre en question seulement l’ordre colonial dès les années 1950 dans les soubresauts de la décolonisation politique, mais il s’est engagé aussi à combattre l’ordre postcolonial stricto sensu, ses relents néocoloniaux dès les indépendances africaines en 1960 jusqu’à nos jours et à remettre en question enfin l’épistémè de cette époque pour parler comme Michel Foucault. C’est cela que je qualifie de processus de décolonisation des savoirs. Le roman africain contemporain entre ainsi en résonance avec la pensée théorique de cette époque pour questionner l’ordre de l’existence et de la vie en Afrique postcoloniale.

L’ambition de ma communication est de réfléchir à cette problématique à partir de quatre écrivains, à savoir V.Y. Mudimbe, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Abdelwahab Meddeb et Assia Djebar.

Travelling both ways: Cultural imaginations crossing frontiers in Roberto Bolaños 2666

2022-11-22T16:22:12+04:00

The US – American/Mexican frontier is a space where transnational myths and dreams collide – those of the ‘Wild, Wild West’ with its expansionist endeavour of the early colonial years and of the ‘American Virgin Land’ with the imaginary ‘Gate to a better Life’, which the frontera represents for mainly Hispanic immigrants. Still, it is also a place that is usually not centrally perceived but negotiated as a borderland, as Heike Paul claims in her monography The Myths that made America, where she adds: “The American West is constructed as a site of individual and collective quests for land and dominance”¹ and has become “a preeminent symbol of exceptionalist ‘Americanness’ around the world.”²

While US – American dreams are promised to become reality, “[h]atred, anger and exploitation are [also] prominent features of this landscape”,³ nowadays dominated by narratives of violence and drug smuggling. Roberto Bolaño, who sets the centre of his global novel 2666 in this supposed edge of civilization, creates “a literary space with a particular suggestion of profound connections between relatively isolated events in Mexico and the best and worst of European history.”⁴

The novel challenges the concepts of ‘Western’ hegemony and Latin American liminality, puts the notion of “World literature” up for discussion, and shall be examined as a laboratory for cultural exchange.

Othering the Black in the Three Orders: Heart of Darkness and Benito Cereno

2022-11-22T16:23:32+04:00

In the mid – to – late nineteenth century, both Heart of Darkness (1899), the masterwork by British novelist Joseph Conrad, and Benito Cereno (1855), the political novella by American writer Herman Melville have vigilantly but ambiguously touched racial issues. Both novellas tell the story of the white protagonists – Kurtz and Cereno – who die of horror after seeing the “heart of darkness”. And the two novelists’ contradictory stance, both attacking and defensive, on colonialism and slavery has made the two texts comparable in the similarities and differences of British and American writers’ attitude toward racial matters in the nineteenth century. Previous studies have mainly focused on the two novelists’ racial stance and the theme of horror and evil from the perspective of post – colonialism, reader – response theory and philosophy. Drawing upon Jacque Lacan’s Three Orders, particularly the notion of the “other/Other”, this paper seeks to set the complex relationships between blacks and whites in the Three Orders, suggesting that blacks have been passively othered by whites as the Lacanian other and they are also the Lacanian Other who have progressively othered whites. In the Imaginary order, Conrad more radically denounces colonialism; in the Real order, Melville challenges the racial stereotype of blacks more directly. Finally, in the Symbolic order, both novelists have inspiringly explored the possibility of blacks being the dominant Other, but both end with the conclusion that a black government will be dark, enigmatic and hopeless. Although Conrad and Melville still take an ambivalent stance on racial issues, they have made brave and profound attempts for the racial equality.

Playing a Literature: a Literary Anthropological Study of Online Games

2022-11-22T16:24:50+04:00

Online games is a type of literature from the the point of view of literary anthropology. How does online games affect literature？In the time of Internet, literature stretched itself from real world to online space, which has changed the formation of literary texts and the way people put literature into practice. As a typical phenomenon which is worth studying, there are three points need to be discussed when studying online games from a literary anthropological point of view: 1) how do game players having literature when playing online games? 2) what makes the texts produced by online games different from the other ones? Generally speaking, there are two first – level texts behind every online game which separately functions in telling the story and controlling game players' operation; meanwhile, series of sub – level texts are made while game players are playing. On the one hand, these sub – level texts grow from the first – level ones; on the other hand, they would not be formed without game players' peculiar body movements, such as tapping the keyboard, clicking the mouse, controlling the game handle and ganging up (to play the game in a team via voice chatting), etc. In consequence, real world intertwines with online space, making a human – machine interaction system and forming a special experience of literature in the time of Internet. Based upon literary anthropology, the following research studies online games as literature and deeply investigates game players as the authors of the texts, aiming to explain how literature is produced and how the identity of game players are constructed and realized.

The Influence of Manchuria Experience on Abe Kobo`s Post – war Novels

2022-11-22T16:26:04+04:00

The Japanese writer Abe Kobo spent sixteen years in Manchuria in his early years and returned to Japan after World War II, which provides a unique colonial experience for his work. The alienation of social relations, the reemergence of war memories, and the crisis of national modernization revealed in his postwar novels are closely related to Abe's dual identity as both a Japanese expatriate as the aggressor and one who grew up in China, the invaded side. His depictions of post – war Japanese cities, which reflect the period of rapid economic growth in Japan and the view of urban he developed in the colonial Chinese city Fengtian (Shenyang), use the imagery of walls, cocoons, sand caves, and other enclosed spaces to express the spiritual desolation and the alienation between individuals beneath the surface of prosperity. His colonial experience enabled him to capture keenly the changes in social relations in postwar Japan that were foreign to him as a returned expatriate at the time, and deepened his questioning of the ambiguous homeland and the traditional collectivism that are major themes throughout his novels.

Poetry slam in Brazil: Decolonial and counter-hegemonic practices

2022-11-22T16:27:28+04:00

Poetry slam, a spoken poetry competition, is characterized in Brazil as a cultural movement led by peripheral subjects who highlight the multiple forms of discrimination against silenced, marginalized, and invisible social groups. From this theme, the purpose of this work is to discuss the delegitimization of the literary quality of these productions that can be defined as “performed oral literature”, in the terms of Ruth Finnegan (2005). Such questioning of their aesthetic value indicates that it is not canonical poetry, possibly because it is linked to popular culture, in addition to not being concerned with the cultured norm of the language and prioritizing orality, so despised in a graphocentric society. However, as Rita T. Schmidt (2008) points out, there is a recent revolution in literary studies, which proposes a review of the criteria that determine whether a work belongs or not to literature. For this investigation, the selection and analysis of poems and respective performances by different poets in some Brazilian slam tournaments, recorded in videos and made available on various networks, is used as a basis. What can be observed in this research, still in progress, is that these poet – slammers propose a decolonial look (CASTRO – GÓMEZ; GROSFOGUEL, 2007; QUIJANO, 2000) at their histories by re – signifying them in their counter – narratives, seeking empowerment and emancipation through the spoken word, which is the reason why the content matters more than the form, while claiming (and affirming) the relevance and legitimacy of what they produce.

Postcolonial Strategies in Latin America’s Literary and Cultural Discourses

2022-11-22T16:28:58+04:00

Postcolonial Studies has had considerable impact upon Comparative Literature. Its challenge to the ethnocentric character of the discipline, that bases production on a dichotomy focused on uneven and hierarchic perspectives, has caused a rupture in Comparative Literature's main axis. By refusing to approach the literary and cultural production of former European colonies as extensions of what was produced in the metropoles, postcolonial critics have raised important questions regarding Western academic assumptions that have resonated in recent international scholarly debates. In this paper, I will examine some of these issues, especially those based on appropriation, and discuss the role they play in Latin America, where, although political independence from Europe was achieved almost universally by the mid – nineteenth century, cultural and economic dependence is still a heavy burden.

Rewriting the past in Teoria Geral do Esquecimento (2012) and O Vendedor de Passados (2004)

2022-11-22T16:30:28+04:00

The novels Teoria Geral do Esquecimento (2012) and O Vendedor de Passados (2004) by José Eduardo Agualusa feature characters who, on opposite sides of history (a colonist and a colonized) reconstruct and reposition their identities in the tumultuous social and political context after independence and the end of the civil war in Angola, between the 1970s and the beginning of the 21^st century.

The problematic relationship of the characters with their memories is structured from, and around, concrete places such as Ventura's house and Ludovica's apartment in the “Invejados” (the envied) building, which becomes the ultimate location vis – à – vis post – colonial reality. Life within these places is regulated and circumscribed by political and social phenomena linked to the violence of colonialism and its repercussions. Ludovica’s and Ventura's efforts to isolate and barricade themselves from the outside world generate a tension between the space they inhabit and the world that surrounds them.

Throughout the action, the limits of these houses are dissolved and invaded by the radical transformations that from the outside interfere with the inside, reorganizing and intervening in the characters' awareness of their identities and memories, forcing them to acknowledge their biographies, which leads them to a historical repositioning. This process takes place through the infiltration and contamination between colonial history, the consequent civil war, and the characters' biographies.

My comparison of these two novels focuses on how the tension between the colonial reminiscences and the new postcolonial narratives are materialized in the biographies of the protagonists on different sides of history. These protagonists reenact and rewrite the postcolonial problematics of cultural memory in their countries, they do so by rewriting the past as a way of (dis)enabling the nationalist, post – independence Angolan narratives.

Les écrivains de la diaspora vietnamienne (Việt kiều) ont-ils une place dans la littérature postcoloniale?

2022-11-22T16:43:56+04:00

A certains égards, le Vietnam est un cas d’école dans l’Histoire des décolonisations. Les successives guerre d’Indochine (1945-1954) et « guerre du Vietnam » (1954-1975) peuvent être considérées comme des modèles de victoires exemplaires contre l’impérialisme capitaliste occidental. Or, ces conflits sont aussi à l’origine de l’exil de nombreux vietnamiens, réfugiés de guerre et/ou du régime qui s’instaure au Vietnam à partir de 1975.

Dans les différentes et parfois contradictoires représentations des guerres du Vietnam, les vietnamiens de la diaspora (en vietnamien, les Việt kiều) sont souvent réduits au statut d’anciens Vietnamiens du «Sud pro-occidental» – notamment parce que certains ont bénéficié de privilèges pendant la période coloniale – ou d’actuels «réfugiés» en Amérique du Nord et en Europe. Leurs descendants, qui ont la nationalité et les codes culturels de leurs pays de résidence, n’ont donc pas grandi dans les territoires anciennement colonisés.

Pourtant, dans leurs productions littéraires, certains écrivains issus de la diaspora vietnamienne reviennent sur leur histoire familiale pendant et après la période coloniale ; cherchant à combler les trous de mémoire de l’Histoire, ils constituent une sorte d’archive de contre-mémoires qui s’érigent contre les imaginaires coloniaux – infériorisation et exotisation des populations indigènes –, tout en se distinguant des revendications anticoloniales. Leurs récits, en français ou en anglais, questionnent l’historiographie des différentes guerres, ainsi que les problématiques de l’identité et de la mémoire à l’issue de l’expérience coloniale et de l’exil.

Ainsi, alors qu’ils s’expriment dans des langues coloniales et n’ont pas grandi dans les anciens espaces colonisés, ces écrivains ont-ils une place dans la littérature postcoloniale ? Quelles seraient, alors, les spécificités de leur hybridité culturelle au regard des théories postcoloniales ?

Nous chercherons à explorer ces interrogations en faisant dialoguer les romans graphiques autobiographiques de Marcelino Truong, Clément Baloup, Thi Bui et GB Tran.

Fiction and the Conflict of Worlds

2022-11-22T16:47:58+04:00

Literary theory has a rich history of understanding the internal structure of fictional works as worlds, most productively by referencing the Leibnizian notion of possible worlds. On the other hand, a tendency in contemporary philosophy (in different guises, this tendency can be seen in the works of philosophers such as Jean – Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Rancière) has recently developed the idea that the multiplicity of worlds is no longer confined to the realm of possibility, but has become actualised. Simultaneously inhabiting multiple worlds has, according to these philosophers, in fact become a part of the human condition. The paper will argue, first, that such a proliferation of actual worlds implies that “world” should be understood today as a fictional category, making the world – building devices of literature relevant for understanding the contemporary experience of reality. Second, drawing on Rancière’s conception of social fictions and politics as a conflict of worlds, the paper will explore how the fictional structure of such multiple worlds affects our understanding of inclusion, exclusion, and marginality in the globalised social reality.

Thinking Outside the Box: Theorising Marginality through Creativity

2022-11-22T16:49:21+04:00

A common test for creativity is the so – called Nine Dot Problem, where one needs to connect nine dots with a limited number of lines. It is only possible to solve the puzzle by drawing the lines outside the implied “box” delineated by the dots themselves. In this presentation, I will reflect on how going to the margins of the literary field has been used as a strategy for creativity by writers. I will also raise the issue of whether such a strategy is still feasible at a time when literature appears to lose its autonomy or: its distinctness as a field.

Contemporary Poetry, the Marginal Elite in World Literature?

2022-11-22T16:50:41+04:00

I examine how contemporary poetry occupies a marginal position in world literature, and what different understandings of marginality it offers us. I offer examples from contemporary French and multilingual poetry including: Michèle Métail, Caroline Bergvall, and Ryōko Sekiguchi.

World literature is dominated by the novel, whereas poetry seems to survive in the margins. Firstly, poetry’s marginality can be understood as an elite aesthetics rather than the position of being powerless or silenced because poetry still holds significant cultural capital and is perceived as highbrow. But poetry’s marginality is also about the resistance of the minor to the mainstream. Namely, poetry resists easy commodification and the global literary market’s exchange logic. For some, poetry retains the truth – telling power of literature and is less obliged to cater to the middle – class international reader’s taste, to which the global novel is seen to have capitulated (Apter; Snyder).

Nevertheless, we should acknowledge that contemporary poetry does have planetary significance. E.g. The growth of eco – poetry since 2000 attests to poetry’s ability to respond to global issues such as climate change, migration, racial inequality. But this planetary and socially relevant poetry carries a caveat: that we increasingly only value poetry that concerns “global challenges”, the buzzword in funding calls and research statements. This raises the question of value, which is central to the logic of marginalisation.

The relation between contemporary poetry and contemporary art could rethink poetry’s marginality within and beyond world literature. ‘People might not want to read poetry, but they do want to listen to it’ (Kubin). The rise of poetry performances since 1990s (Edmond) has relegated poetry increasingly to the gallery space, emphasising audience participation. Poetry’s key question is not ‘what is poetry?’, but ‘when is poetry?’. This shifts the concept of marginality from the spatial to a temporal, contextual paradigm.

The ‘Imperative to Right’ and the Right to Marginality

2022-11-22T16:51:54+04:00

The paper takes as its point of departure Jean – Luc Nancy's essay "From Imperative to Law" (1983), which elaborates on Immanuel Kant's difference between Law and Right: Nancy defines the "imperious and unconditional" character of Right as not of this world and not conforming either to existing laws or to their forms and procedures.

In this context, the critical remark of Nancy Fraser comes to mind, who speaks of a "triumph of apoliticism" in the work of "French Derrideans". Nancy's early – 1980s philosophical project of a philosophical re – tracing the political was based on the insight that philosophy's immediate engagement with politics is necessarily subject to the ominous omnipresence of the political. The philosophical outcome of this insight, Fraser argued, amounted to a retreat from the political. Against the backdrop of this philosophical – political problem, I ask whether related insights and critiques apply to literary and theoretical strategies that are committed to making claims in the name of the marginal, excluded, and dispossessed.

From Areas of Confinement to Zones of Contact. Concepts of Marginality in and the Limits of Literary Theory

2022-11-22T16:53:11+04:00

Literary theory has developed a wide spectrum of concepts of marginality, ranging from attempts at sharp demarcation to zones of exchange. While the poetological efforts of early formalism, for example, aim to establish an understanding of aesthetic difference, theorists such as Bakhtin prefer to focus on thresholds as spheres of intensified dialogue, and Lotman discusses the periphery as a site of transgressive communication. The talk considers these concepts against the backdrop of a basic question: to what extent does literary theory, in these models of edge, threshold, and periphery, reflect not only on boundaries in literature, but on the limitations of theoretical systems themselves?

Margins, Borders, Tendrils, Twines: Thinking with Plants as Cosmopolitics

2022-11-22T16:54:27+04:00

Ignored or relegated to the outer margins of philosophy for centuries, plants have encroached upon 21^st century thought together with the realization that the planetary crisis of the Anthropocene requires, in addition to the sustained critique of capitalism, significant shifts in Northern/Western epistemologies. Thinking with plants cultivates the “ecology of practices” of a “cosmopolitics” in Isabelle Stengers’ sense, in which “cosmos” stands for not for one, but for “multiple, divergent worlds,” and the translative, sometimes bewildering articulations between them.

Strange Cases

2022-11-22T17:18:40+04:00

For a theory of marginality, the "case" represents a category that is as pertinent as it is strange. Rules can be applied to particular cases, from particular cases one can arrive at rules, and what is more, rules are supposed to be confirmed by exceptions. In my lecture I would like to discuss these casuistic difficulties with regard to literary hermeneutics, referring to some strange case histories in literature (Kleist, Poe, Stevenson, Charms).

Margin to Centre, Major to Minor

2022-11-22T17:20:05+04:00

The marginal has today become so central, so preferred, so desired, that it is hard to identify a form of marginality that remains marginal as such, while the centre has become so excoriated that it has acquired a certain marginality. Similarly, the old distinction between major and minor which used to be the preoccupation of literary critics exercising their authority in the form of exquisite judgements about literary quality has been inverted by Deleuze and Guattari’s reinscription of a minor literature as intrinsically of more interest and even power, even if ironically their subject, Kafka, is undoubtedly a “major” author, but a major author who has now been made rereadable by being reassigned to the “minor”. In current forms of aesthetic judgment, the minor has become the major. Marginality, eccentricity, liminality… but what does the eccentric even mean if the centre itself has been queered and is out of place?

Biofiction: the worldwide rise of a rogue genre

2022-11-22T17:21:27+04:00

A provocative transgression under the pen of Marcel Schwob, who invented the genre in 1895 with his Vies imaginaires, a postmodern game in Borges or Bolaño, a challenge to literary theory in Hildesheimer or Nabokov, biofiction or biographical fiction has gone in a few decades from a marginal to a worldwide genre: countless are now the writers wishing to tell singular destinies, preferring the power of the imagination to the rationalism of scholarly biography. This globalization of biofiction is all the more striking as it affects a genre, often influenced by the philosopher Michel Foucault, which makes the existence of the marginalized, the criminals, the outcasts, the invisible, its central subject. It is this centrality of a rogue literary genre that I would like to reflect upon.

Minor not Marginal: Contemporary Jewish Memory Writing in Turkey

2022-11-22T17:22:41+04:00

Turkish occupies a peculiar space in the world republic of letters (Casanova 1999). With the foundation of the Turkish Republic and ensuing reforms in language, imperial polyglossia was reduced to monolingualism. The twenty – first century witnessed a resurfacing of multilingualism, with languages and cultures of minorities occupying public space and shaping the literary. The visibility of the minor, however, has not reduced questions of hierarchy, marginality or precarity. Minor contexts map the multilingualism of the cultural landscape, emphasise the marginal positions, and question the power dynamics and the paradoxes within world literary space. Reconsidering the role of the ‘minor’ in debates on the poetics and politics of language, this paper introduces minor representations in the Turkish context, to think through and beyond the binaries of centre and periphery, native and foreign. Its particular focus is contemporary Jewish memory writing.

Recent work on the Jewish experience in Turkey place emphasis on memory writing as a collective process with political and practical implications (Behmoaras 1997, Ender 2016, Kuryel 2018, Margulies 2006, 2018). Jewish memory writing conjoins the contrasting experiences associated with the minority position, ranging from inclusion to exclusion, from belonging to alienation, with inflections of Ladino, the language of the Sephardi and a language of intimacy, familiar but not mastered. Ladino has a peculiar status, minor and marginal, but also transnational. A language with a worldwide network, Ladino may work as a lens to reconsider totalities of Turkish and Jewish identities, and thereby question and debunk hierarchies between guest and host, centre and periphery. Reconsidering Ladino within the Turkish context provides a lens to reassess the relationality of size and space in minority questions and on the poetics and politics of language.

Freedom from the Margins: The Practice of Existential Aesthetics

2022-11-22T17:24:16+04:00

During the cultural cold war, Lebanese writers found themselves torn between Marxism and existentialism: the first seemed to promise programmatic and inclusive agendas for change, while the second would work against Marxism’s supposed restriction of individual freedom. The debate hinged on the two terms “ilzam” (compulsion) and “iltizam” (commitment), and unfolded through conversations with Sartre. In between the two terms, writers negotiated their own tension between aesthetic detachment and writerly responsibility. These negotiations unfolded in translations and literary journals and debated the social form and relevance of the aesthetic experience. The writers experienced these struggles across transnational alliances and through a consciously global framework: they did not think that they were borrowing other’s “modernities.” Rather they thought of their work as critically participating in a global conversation about the social relevance of the aesthetic experience. Repeatedly in their manifestos, they represented local literature as partaking in world – making, their own and others. In the many Arab writers’ conferences, they expressed solidarity with writers across the global south while also translating Sartre, Beauvoir and Pound with no introductions or citation marks to set them apart from the local literature; rather, what we see is that these aesthetics from the supposed “margins” saw themselves as participating in a global discourse on the social function of the aesthetic experience. In this paper, I focus especially on two figures – Lebanese Suhail Idris and Layla Baalbaki – who produced existentialist novels inspired by Sartre and Beauvoir but mobilized the concept of freedom (hurriyya) differently. I examine the debates in prominent journals around the time of the novels’ publication, to situate the fiction in relation to the directives laid out in the journals. I am interested in how they understood the aesthetic versus aesthesis (feeling), and how the forms they produce navigate these two while proposing a distinctly vernacular definition of freedom (both of the writer and the subject of aesthetics). The talk ends by commenting on the broader philosophy of practice of aesthetics from the margins in the region.

The Language of World Literature Nikolai Marrs Utopian Linguistics

2022-11-22T17:25:41+04:00

The most controversial Soviet linguist Nikolai Marr (1865-1934), was one of the early critics of Indo-European linguistic theory. In his view, Indo-Europan theory served the political, indeed imperialist, the interest of a particular group who limited its study of languages to the written sources.

Instead, Marr assumed that linguistics should study all world languages and do not limit itself to written sources. Marr believed that language first developed as a sign language and was only later replaced by a spoken language. He did not consider language families impermeable and claimed that each language was related to another to some degree. All humans were involved in the collaborative language creation process. Since language was not a natural feature of humans but an instrument that humans had created during their evolutionary development, it had changed and evolved along with material development. Thus, in a classless society, people will speak only one world language, but not one of the imperial languages such as English, French or Russian. The world's new language would be an artificial creation based on elements of all the written or non-written languages of the world. Regardless of how utopian this idea was, it addressed the problem of inequalities and asymmetries in world literature that persist and are repeatedly discussed in postcolonial theory and were implicitly or explicitly addressed in the soviet project of world literature.

Marr's critique of Indo-European linguistics was recently taken up by Siraj Ahmed in his book "Archeology of Babel. The Colonial Foundations of the Humanities", though without naming Marr. Marrs and Ahmed's criticism of the humanities leads me to another point relevant to the Soviet project of world literature. Despite the well-known criticism of Marrs new science of language, Marrs theory expanded the boundaries of the understanding of literature, which I want to explore in my paper. According to Marr, language in its entirety should move from its origins through non-written languages to its culmination in literature in our modern sense. Thus, literature was only the tip of the iceberg in a broad work on language. There was work on language with speech as a minimal form of literature, and elaborated aesthetic language was its maximal form. This controversial but broad understanding of literature included gropes hitherto excluded from the discussions about world literature. By these groups, I mean language groups without a tradition of writing and social groups within established literary nations with hitherto no access to writing and aesthetic culture - think of the experiment of proletarian literature. Both groups formed a "pool" for "small literature". Small literature, understood in this way, means maximising a social group's generally available minimal literary potential with a robust emancipatory connotation.

In this way, world literature and small literature concepts can be linked together: they complement each other. The overcoming of the national understanding of literature is inscribed in both. Both imply the necessity to take a position on the conventional forms of literature as their rejection, overcoming, productive appropriation, further development, or new forms.

War and Peace: the Mongolian Empire and the Goryo – Korean Renaissance

2022-11-22T17:31:18+04:00

Giving an overview of the global disruption of peace caused by the Mongol invasions and conquests in the thirteenth century, I’d like to revise the notion of peace first, and then argue that the fragmentation of a peaceful system does not necessarily breed chaos but smaller – scale systems around the world with unfolding symmetry. Taking the “Ryo – Mong War” that lasted for 26 years (1231 – 1257) as an example, I will illustrate how Goryo – Korea came to connect its local reality to a new global reality through the efforts to overcome the national crisis and restore the national peace under the Mongol Empire. Despite the horrors and devastations caused by the war, Goryo – Korean intellectuals could expand their vistas, arguing that the ideal world (Zunghwa) cannot be ruled by force. They adjusted themselves to new normalcy of the global system, run by the Mongol Empire, and produced a great number of ethnographic accounts of who they are as a people and nation – state, trying to revive and surpass ideas and achievements of classical antiquity of China and Korea. In this respect, I will suggest the transnational memories of the Mongol Empire may work as a useful past that provides a reference point for an imaginaire beyond the 20^th century Pax American paradigm of peace toward the 21^st century Pax Metaverse AI – paradigm of peace.

The Unreachable Harmony in a Re-constructed World: Three Influences in Jin Yong’s Novels

2022-11-22T17:33:31+04:00

The world of knights – errant back in the ancient times created by Jin Yong, a contemporary Chinese historian and writer, has been a shared imagination of over 100 million readers. This paper discusses how the history of wars and the idea of peace in the dynasties of China are re – constructed in Jin Yong’s best – selling novels. Instead of presenting a kind of chivalry to rescue the world from the warring chaos, Jin Yong often disturbs and meanwhile fascinates his readers with the insolubility of problems in history. A knight – errant in his ripe years was posed with the question: how to stop fighting. At some critical moments, his innermost working showed the influences of Confucian and epicurean cultures alternatively. The ending of the realistic plots of Jin Yong’s stories are usually tragic or semi – tragic, featuring the insolubility of various social and individual problems. However, the implicit themes of his works go beyond the choice of gain or loss, and move on to the philosophy of forgiveness and non – duality, highlighting the third influence of the Buddhist culture. In this sense, the unreachable harmony in the re – constructed histories is a reminder of the diversity of worldviews and the importance of recognizing the insolubility of worldly problems.

Cultural Dynamics Addressing Global Imaginaries

2022-11-22T17:36:19+04:00

Global imaginaries of Egypt stretch back to ancient Greek philosophers and historians, culminating in Alexander the Great’s invasion of Egypt as part of his aspired empire. This research will be focused on Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign/ expedition (1798) to Egypt, motivated by fascination with a longstanding imaginary Egypt in France’s expansive projects, since the crusade of Saint – Louis. However, the cultural exchange between Egyptian ulama and French scientists accompanying the expedition in the embattled city of Cairo has transpired into mutual interchange of knowledge. Eminent figures like Hasan al – ‘Attar, and al – Moallem Yacoub – among others – have reassessed pathways for a breakthrough with old institutional systems and the independence of Egypt from Ottoman rule. Imaginaries of Egypt were addressed by a national cultural dynamic enabling its people to participate in the transition to modernity at a relatively different pace, as a result of geopolitical factors.

The main objective of this research is to reread national paradigms that challenged global imaginaries in the past, in the process of drawing strategies of cultural change in the twenty – first century, a century identified with potential technological and economic risks. The ensuing changes in cultural values require a reconsideration of institutionalized systems, as well as established cultural structures of signification. This calls for a transdisciplinary methodology requiring a critical reading of history, a philosophical reading of modernity, navigating eighteenth century Arabic, French, and English chronicles, updated sources in that area, along with related critical writings.

Nation, Genre, and the Poetics of Nowhere: Atwood’s Ustopian Fictions

2022-11-22T17:37:30+04:00

Margaret Atwood’s novelistic focus has shifted from a realism set in recognizably Canadian places (Surfacing, The Robber Bride) to speculative dystopian fictions set in a near – future of postnational upheaval (the Maddaddam trilogy, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments). The Maddaddam trilogy depicts the world order of competing nation states crumbling into a unified global order organized by a giant corporation that wipes out the human race, replacing it with genetically programmed humanoids. Its success is facilitated by nation – states consuming themselves to death; if a sense of Canada remains, it lurks as an absent presence as a nation – state dependent on resource extraction and consumption, thus complicit in a political – economic order that leads to mass extinction.

Echoing her spatio – topical shift, Atwood’s literary fame has grown from national to global dimensions, aligning her with other intersections of literary celebrity, world literature, and science/speculative fiction in the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson, and in SF/fantasy film, manga and anime such as Akira, Dragon Slayer, Fullmetal Alchemist and Evangelion. Atwood’s near – future dystopias thus join a global literary rumination on global warming, genetic manipulation, and neoliberal capitalism. But they also provoke questions about dystopian science fiction as an index of national obsolescence, as well as literary fame and accessibility. Does scientific speculation rather than the social realism of the nation redeem literary fiction? Do Atwood et al. register a neoliberal suspicion of art, while at the same time critiquing neoliberalism? Atwood’s style has always been elliptical; her tone ironic, even sarcastic; and while her prose could never be called lyrical or ‘beautiful’ it is immensely readable and accessible. Thus in her form and content she joins a globalized literature of big ideas pitched towards an Anglo – influenced progressive readership.

Shakespeare in the Alley: the role of a hypercanonical world artist after 1989

2022-11-22T17:38:56+04:00

Secular modernity in the European West may have arisen, and been enshrined in various ways in the founding documents of new or remade nations (e.g. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, or the various French constitutions, or the post – WWII constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany, or the various quasi – constitutional documents of the United Nations and the European Union) as peace – oriented responses to the cruelty of recent war and the necessity of free exchange of ideas to undermine monological tyranny, whether founded on religion or on statism. One cultural response in the English speaking world to secularization in the 19th century was the attempt to enshrine high culture, specifically a canon of the high humanities (literature, art, music) alongside a robust development of public education, as a substitute for a national religion. The Arnoldian hope was that the best that has been thought and said, made available to a broader educated public, might sustain a thoughtful, moral national and international conversation around values that would lead to peace and orderly development. Shakespeare held a central place in this secular scripture for English speaking people. The idea in its developed form embraced academic freedom for a humanities professoriate (a secular priesthood) thereby protected to constitute an oasis of informed and relatively disinterested commentary and perspective on the worlds of commerce and technology and politics that surrounded but also sustained the universities. To a considerable extent, this model of the university humanities has spread throughout the world, interacting with the various contemplative practices and privileged textual traditions of non – European cultures, though national commitments to the academic freedom of professors vary alongside commitments to individual freedoms for citizens.

The world wars of the twentieth century obviously cast doubt on the efficacy of this Arnoldian plan as a recipe for Eurocentric peace, but belief in the high humanities continued to shape the gigantic expansion of university humanities education in the period that followed allied victory in the Second World War. One could, generalizing recklessly, characterize the so – called Pax Americana (with its awful but local wars in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere) as, from this viewpoint, a struggle between a more monological and statist form of secularism (Communism), and a less monological and statist form of secularism (American capitalism). Meanwhile, conflicts based on religious nationalism in, for instance, India and the Middle East showed that secular rationality was by no means dominant everywhere. The Cold War was good for world universities and their humanities departments.

We seem now to be undergoing what Simon During has called a second secularization, in which the high humanities no longer enjoy a semi – sacred special place as suppliers of a stabilizing vocabulary by which to measure and judge innovations in the political or technological sphere. Professors of literature feel residual, and attempt in various ways to engage with what feels emergent: critical race theory, intersectionality, digital humanities, post – coloniality, gender politics, and (as we are doing) globalization, in so doing trying sometimes to demonstrate that their authors can be hip. While such attempts risk pathos, they also signal will – to – innovate and a continued commitment to the high value of the texts now engaging with others on others’ terms, rather than standing tall as objects to be engaged with on their own terms. As Bob Dylan puts it in Subterranean Homesick Blues, “Shakespeare’s in the alley, with his pointy shoes and his bells, talking with some French girl who says she knows me well.”

While a paper can only sketch such a claim, I will suggest that, in the US and the English – speaking world generally, the end of the Cold War in 1989 established a new uneasy “peace” of the kind other papers on this panel discuss, and I will discuss how this "peace" has influenced Shakespeare studies.

Inside the Global Imaginary of the Pax Britannica: Nationalist Intersections, Planetary Texts from before and after the two World Wars

2022-11-22T17:40:32+04:00

This paper takes a revisionary look at the Pax Britannica and the Pax Americana. At their peak, neither of them effected a peace but, rather, a global set of wars, land grabs, and sociocultural despoliations. Peace studies themselves have, perhaps inevitably, thereby (d)evolved into today’s Security Studies. Yet, as if a pastoral, planetary coexistence were attainable, myriads of literary, cultural, and thought workers in earlier eras have already located it, not only in the aftermath of the violent or at its margins, but also, by turns, pressing up against the violent, eluding, or transforming it. Through reconsideration of two novels on either side of the previous century’s two World Wars—Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm of 1883 and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart of 1958—this paper reflects, first, the recent rise in “weak theory” and, second, the current eco – critical turn in modernist studies to the planetary to reconstruct ordinary moments of the concomitance of millennial destruction with, variously, the pacific, pacifying, and peaceful.

World Literature and Digitization

2022-11-22T17:42:36+04:00

My paper deals with the relationship between the term "world literature" and the current phase of digitization. While "world literature" in the 19th century assumed that literary texts emerge in the exchange between localizable cultures and their languages, the origin of literary objects today is no longer so easy to locate – especially when they emerge in and from the "Net". How can language contact be conceived when Internet texts are principally written in a globalized English or translated by algorithms? And can we speak of different cultures of the digital between which a transfer takes place? With these questions, my paper will also work towards an updating of the term "world literature" and underline its importance for today's comparative literature.

Percolated Images of the ‘Orient’ in texts of the Early German Enlightenment

2022-11-22T17:43:57+04:00

In the 19^th century, as Andrea Polaschegg put it so fittingly in her 2012 book on orientalism, Germany did not have colonies in the ‘Orient’ but an elaborate science on it. Using Edward Saids study as a foundational text, this relation has been examined especially for the 19^th century. But what about the 18^th century, the early Enlightenment? In a letter Sidonia Hedwig Zäunemann (1711 – 1740) is asked to argue why a beautiful foreign woman is found to be more beautiful than a European one – and compares the beautiful “Mohrin” in her answer with rare manuscripts from the East. Moreover, she speaks of towns like Indonesian Batavia, of the Serail, Turks, Mussolmans as well as precious Persian carpets and fabrics (tafta). She parallels that to ancient times, referring to the towns of Tyrus and Zoar as well as sovereigns like Cambyses, Xerxes, the Parthians – gained knowledge, she must have drawn on, and it is this epistemological level my paper would like to address. Various texts from the late 17^th and early 18^th century, descriptions of journeys to faraway countries, but also poems – mostly translations from French literature – might have been known to Zäunemann, as well as contemporary newspaper articles. It is the time of the Russo – Turkish – War in 1736 which captivated not only her attention but probably triggered an overall broader interest in the Ottoman Empire. She herself states that the Asiatische Banise, referring to the contemporary bestseller, is by far judged as more readable than the stoic philosopher Seneca, not to forget the success Händels opera Xerxes was in London in 1738. On closer inspection, in early Enlightenment, examples of cultural transfer seem to be everywhere – at least as percolated images of foreign cultures.

Who are “Prometheus’ Heirs”? Cultural Circulations of Prometheus Narratives in Discourses of Literature and Labour

2022-11-22T17:45:13+04:00

The cultural transfers of the antique figure of Prometheus are legion. These varying narratives go back to different representations: on the one hand, Prometheus is a trickster who brought toil to mankind and tore them from their primeval paradisiacal state (Hesiod, Diogenes); on the other hand, it is the philanthropist who brought culture and craftsmanship to mankind with fire, enabling them to master nature (Aeschylus). Prometheus can be found as a symbolic figure for civilisation, culture and progress, for science, technology and industry, or for rebellion, emancipation and self – realisation, in many genres and genres and is referred to in literary as well as in political, philosophical and cultural studies texts. As a creator figure, Prometheus is invoked in reflections on literature; as an image for autonomous human agency creating the human world through work, the figure illustrates debates about human labour.

Both “literature” and “work” describe a relationship of human agency and the world, the conception of which is subject to historical change. Both relations are discursively shaped. This paper explores how these relations are elaborated in literary texts with reference to the Prometheus figure. The paper compares fiction and non – fiction – texts that take the Prometheus figure as a starting point to reflect on the relationship between literature and labour. The narrator in Friedrich Schlegel’s novel “Lucinde” (“Idylle über den Müssiggang”), for example, resorts to the Prometheus figure to describe pointless, painful work, which he distinguishes from literature. In a completely different context, Christian Berthold and Jutta Greis refer in “Prometheus’ Heirs” (1996) to the literary reception of Prometheus to describe post – industrial forms of work. The paper proposed discusses the dynamics of the cultural circulation of Prometheus narratives in the context of reflections on concepts of literature and labour and asks for postcolonial and posthumanist perspectives on the topic.

Heterolingual Quotation and Cultural Transfer

2022-11-22T17:46:25+04:00

Quotations are among the most prominent features of (literary) texts that allow us to trace and reconstruct cultural transfer, particularly if the source text and the quoting text are at some linguistic distance from one another. This contribution aims, firstly, at giving a theoretical account of such heterolingual quotations, based on the results of recent scholarship in literary multilingualism. This, secondly, gives the opportunity to ask in how far heterolingual quotations imply elements of a theory of culture.

According to literary multilingualism scholarship, it is not sufficient to analyze how literary texts make use of ‘multiple languages’. Texts must not only be granted the capacity to make use of various linguistic repertoires on different levels of linguistic structure, but also the potential to alter these repertoires. This view of linguistic diversity challenges a (post – )Saussurean paradigm of langues in the name of a Bakhtinian notion of speech governed by centripetal and centrifugal forces.

Applied to heterolingual quotation, this description of linguistic diversity also enriches Bakhtin’s description of intertextuality. There are considerable degrees of freedom when it comes to preserving the wording and the ‘lingualism’ of quoted text, i.e., the degree to which it adheres to an identifiable idiom (Sprachigkeit). Text can be adapted, translated, alienated or otherwise altered, and all these techniques always imply statements concerning its significance, i.e., its cultural value. The same holds regarding the accuracy of the reference. Mere allusions to the source give different connotations to the cultural relation thereby established than exact citations. Taken together, all these techniques, which will be presented using examples from European literature from Montaigne to recent pop – novels, provide a toolbox for modelling cultural relations, both concretely (with regard to ‘the cultures’ associated to the respective texts) and on a more general level (concerning ‘culture’ as such).

Literary Represenations of Cultural Encounters in Digital Space

2022-11-24T14:45:32+04:00

This paper examines literary represenations of the Internet as a ‘place’ of and a tool for cultural transfer. The focus thereby lies on forms of intercultural processes between the virtual, seemingly transnational, ‘Internet culture’ and the physical, local ‘IRL culture’: cultural areas with their own specific communication systems, social norms and rituals. By analyzing novels such as Tommy Pico’s IRL (2016), Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance (2009), Olivia Sudjic’s Sympathy (2017) or Mithu Sanyal’s Identitti (2021), I will explore literary presentations of asymmetric power dynamics between the digital and material world like the dominion of the English language, forms of cultural appropriation or of double consciousness, and unsuccessful translation processes. Of particular interest in this context are virtual encounters that entail negative or simulated cultural relations between online and offline lives.

How to distance oneself: Pseudotranslations as imagined cultural transfers

2022-11-24T14:48:24+04:00

Pseudotranslations – original texts which signal that they are translations – ask their readers to imagine cultural transfer, often using what Shklovsky calls defamiliarization.

Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721), a famous example for imagined cultural contact in 18th century literature, supposedly presents to the public the private correspondence of two Persian travellers visiting France. While the first edition of the Lettres persanes maintains plausibility as a faithful translation of authentic letters containing two Persian travellers’ perception of early Enlightenment Europe, this fiction of translation neither meant to deceive readers, nor did it do so. Rather, its invitation to shift perspectives by describing everyday items and concepts in unfamiliar terms (Jean Starobinski calls this "voluntary aphasia") was enthusiastically accepted as an epistemologically valuable act of imagination.

Linguistic defamiliarisation based on pseudotranslations' imagined cultural transfer may also be driven by aesthetic experiments: Craig Raine's poem "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" (1979), imagining cultural contact between Martians and Britain, gave the "Martian Poetry" movement its name, to which Christopher Reid's Katerina Brac (1985), a purported translation of a volume of Polish poetry by the eponymous poet Katerina Brac, contributes. The movement hoped to gain "fresh" metaphors and images by writing English poetry as if it had been translated from a foreign language and culture.

I want to focus on pseudotranslations ascribing texts to imagined writers from other cultures as epistemological and creative trope. Clearly, this practice has some problematic implications such as possible exoticism, orientalism or appropriation. Connecting examples of defamiliarization in pseudotranslations to the notion of critical distance and to the concept of the writer as a medium for inspiration coming from outside, I want to show how some fundamental poetological concepts are tied up with distancing from oneself as invoked by imagined cultural transfer, and think about possible, less problematic alternatives.

Web novels as vehicles of cultural transfer across the globe. Re – negotiations of cultural histories between East and West

2022-11-24T14:50:01+04:00

Web fiction is becoming increasingly popular. Since the beginning of the 21st century the global impact of web novels has steadily expanded. The serial form of publishing proves to be most attractive while the transposition into various media forms also seems to enhance the worldwide spreadability and dispersion of narratives. It is hardly surprising that the internet publishing form is favourable to cultural exchange stimulating the circulation of narratives around the globe. The production and translation of Chinese web novels and their enthusiastic reception in the West (U.S., Canada, U.K., Spain, Germany, Russia etc.) may serve as a prominent example for this transnational and transcultural dynamics of contemporary reading on the web. Since Chinese web novels are being read by millions of overseas fans, mostly in English translations, they have significantly been termed „the country's most successful cultural export“. In how far do the international readers‘ interests encompass Chinese history and culture and to what extent are the publications in question aimed at a transnational global concept of social interaction beyond the limitations of a specific cultural heritage? What exactly are the literary characteristics and requirements likely to encourage a fast proliferation across the globe? These reflections are to be examined in detail with reference to different sub – genres of the web novel and the dynamics of their translation and reception processes.

Sources of Serendipity: The Tale of Three Princes of Serendip as a Phenomenon of Literary and Cultural Transfer and as an Object of Comparatist Practices

2022-11-24T14:51:28+04:00

The set of stories around The Three Princes of Serendip has become famous as the literary fairy – tale tradition which inspired Horace Walpole, creator of the gothic novel, to coin the highly versatile notion of ‘serendipity’ in a letter to Horace Mann from January 28, 1754. The Urszene of serendipity shows the three travelling princes – who are destined to become famous (and soon notorious) for repeatedly discovering “things they were not in quest of” – as they skilfully reconstruct the whereabouts of a runaway camel in a detective – like manner by looking at tracks and traces on the ground and comparing them with other findings. The story that includes this famous scene originates from narrative traditions in Persia, India and neighboring countries in the Middle Ages which can be seen as interesting examples of very early non – Western versions of the classical detective or ‘investigator’ story. The Three Princes tale was presented in a European language for the first time in 1557 when Cristoforo Armeno published his work Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del Re di Serendippo in Venice. Further translations and rather loose adaptions of the ‘exotic’ oriental tale and into other European languages followed, including Xavier de Mailly’s French version from 1719 (which would directly inspire Walpole’s conceptual invention of ‘serendipity’) and leading up to Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa. In the late 19^th century, the fairy – tale tradition of The Three Princes also got into the focus of vivid scholarly discussions in the early days of comparative literary studies in the German – speaking world. The debates about the origin of the tale in medieval Indian and/or Persian sources in journals such as the Zeitschrift für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte und Renaissance – Litteratur represent an early example of specific scholarly practices that would later be institutionalized under the disciplinary rubric of Comparative Literature – and in many cases, these debates themselves originated from serendipitous philological findings of which their discoverers were “not in quest”. My contribution seeks to firstly analyze the historical reception of the fairy – tale of The Three Princes of Serendip as an exemplary phenomenon of literary transfer across linguistic and cultural borders as well as an exemplary object of comparatist scholarly practices and, secondly, to discuss the role which ,serendipity‘, a concept that would not exist without this specific literary tradition tradition, may play in such processes.

Academic Glocalization and Interdiscipline: A Case Study of Literary Anthropology in Sichuan University of China

2022-11-24T14:52:49+04:00

As the product of knowledge globalization, Literary Anthropology is a reflection of the relationship between globalization and localization. In China, growing from grew Comparative Literature, Literary Anthropology is seen as a way to study Comparative Literature in the future. As a new interdiscipline, Literary Anthropology borrows freely from anthropologic methods, making it different from both Anthropological Poetics and Literature. It is not only based upon the new methods and theories, but also rethinks the issues of science and human being.

This paper studies Literary Anthropology in Sichuan University of China as an individual case, aiming to present how one glocalization of scholarship which has long been marginalized develop. Specifically, there are three points need to be discussed: 1) the influence of local tradition;2) the disciplinary boundaries between literary, anthropology and literary anthropology;3) reinterpretation of interdisciplinary research.

However, it is necessary to pay attention that the case of Sichuan University reflects only one aspect among the multiple because Literary Anthropology is a global phenomenon. Therefore, the following paper uses glocalization as a method for it combines both micro and macro vision. Consequently, it shows that instead of confining to one certain place, a focus on a series of commonly fundamental problems about interdiscipline from a perspective of globalization is a must.

Mór Jókai’s Popularity Home and Abroad

2022-11-24T14:54:56+04:00

Mór Jókai wrote a huge oeuvre which gained him immense popularity and high canonical status in Hungary. The novels that contributed to the canonical status in the nineteenth – century mostly concerned (recent) Hungarian history and the Hungarian national character. He never hesitated to adulate the national consciousness. The nationalist content, however, could hardly contribute to his also immense success in English, German, Polish, and Russian translations. He was an excellent romancer, and his intriguing plots with exuberantly Romantic fantasies might make him popular abroad while putting him on a lower level of the literary hierarchy than what he conquered in Hungary. The nationalist content could only give his works an exotic flavor in Western European context. But the reception in China was different. There the literature of the European periphery appeared as a possible model for the modernizing movement. The national pride of a backward and oppressed nation that longs for progress was definitely encouraging. The Polish and Russian reception could combine both attitudes.

Magyars in the Capital of Modernity: Geopoetical Meanings of Paris in 20th century’s Hungarian Literature

2022-11-24T14:56:14+04:00

The history of Hungarian literary modernity seems to confirm Pascale Casanova's famous but much – debated thesis on the Paris – centered structure of world literature and its impact on the birth of national modernities all over the world. Endre Ady’s Új versek (New Poetry) of 1906 was a landmark for modern Hungarian literature, and the volume sets up a mythological landscape of Paris as opposed to the cultural belatedness of the Globus Hungaricus at that time. From that moment, generations of young Hungarian writers made their pilgrim to the French capital seeking for consecration to be a modern artist often to import innovative artistic and cultural ideas to their homeland. The chapter surveys and analyzes the changing meanings of Paris in Hungarian literary texts and the ambiguous effects of literary and social – cultural modernization’s attempts from the beginning of the 20th century to the Hungarian Neo – avantgarde movements in the seventies.

Uneasy Alliances: Visvasahitya, Comparative Literature and National Literature in India

2022-11-24T14:58:00+04:00

My paper concentrates on uncovering the collusions and collisions that characterize the relationship between the concepts of Rabindranath Tagore’s Visvasahitya (‘World Literature’ in Bangla), National Literature and Comparative Literature as it has been practiced in India.

While the relationship between WL and NL has often been one of opposition and animosity in the European context, it has taken on new and different dimensions in the multilingual Indian context. The study of Indian Literature, as equated with National Literature, is rendered more complex because of the diversity of languages in India, leading scholars like Nabaneeta Dev Sen to suggest that the study of Indian Literature is essentially Comparative Literature in practice.

As Comparative Literature has evolved in India, it has often paradoxically embraced the study of Indian Literature as a core object of study. How have institutions sought to negotiate the claims of NL and WL/VS as they have evolved their curriculum to bring it in tune with their quest for relevance? My paper will try to throw light on this question in its various manifestation through a study of curricula and extra – curricular practices in institutionalized spaces doing Comparative Literature in India. In trying to do so, I shall focus not only on developments within named Comparative Literature departments but also on spaces related to English Studies and Comparative Indian Literature. I shall also try to understand how recent developments related to the study of National Literature within Comparative Literature may be tied up with the development of a ‘culture of translation’, which is, as I shall argue, a recent trend in India.

State, Capital Flow and New Wave Chinese Science Fiction as World Literature

2022-11-24T14:59:29+04:00

Originating at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, New Wave Chinese science fiction (SF) had kept circulating as a national genre within the territory and remained largely invisible to the rest of the world for nearly two decades. After 2010, it accelerated its pace of internationalization via translation, and several works winning both critical acclaim and popular readership in the anglophone world attested to the success of the project. This paper will thus focus on the genre’s change of status and discuss the mechanism that brings about the change.

The translation project, in André Lefevere’s terms, takes the three forms of state patronage, institutional patronage and professionals’ initiation, of which the agent of state (and its various forms) occupies the central place. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production and matrix of capitals, it is found that the state 1) exploits its own economic capital by directly supporting major SF translation projects financially under national translation initiative; 2) weighs social, cultural and symbolic capital when choosing the works/author to be translated, collaborating translators and partner publisher in the United States; 3) bestows symbolic capital upon institutions and certain professionals by way of policy support and authoritative validation via media reports, which, to some extent, empowers the two parties to undertake translation projects on their own to amplify the impact. The paper concludes that the consecration of New Wave Chinese SF, a dominated literary genre (in Pascale Casanova’s terms) to be circulated in the international literary market as world literature, is the result of the Chinese state’s active rendering of various capitals in the field.

Net Literature as New Form of (World) Literature?: The Case of The Founder of Diabolism

2022-11-24T15:01:43+04:00

In the 20^th century, colonization, global migration, and the creation of multinational postcolonial nation – states had blurred the boundary between national literature and world literature to a large extent. In the new century when Internet has connected most of the people and their cultures in the world, a new form of literature comes to its heyday: net literature. This paper takes The Founder of Diabolism – one of the most popular Chinese net novels both at home and abroad – as a case study to examine if and how net literature has complicated the issue of national literature and world literature. As it turns out, while geographical factor has mostly been absent from its chain of transmission, its cultural particularity has always been emphasized; while multimedia and technology produce different cultural variations of it in different areas, the core of the story has been always preserved. The case indicates that while net literature shows the virtualization and diversification of literary circulation around the world, it is nevertheless almost always accompanied by the idiosyncrasies of national literature, which proves the ongoing fusion of world literature and national literature.

Antisystemic Movements and World Literature: Reread What Is World Literature?from a World – Systems Perspective

2022-11-24T15:03:23+04:00

David Damrosch’s What is World Literature? is viewed as a classic work on world literature. Focusing on the national, cosmopolitan and strategic dimensions of world literature, this article attempts to analyze What is World Literature? from a world – systems perspective, aiming to explore the correlation between antisystemic movements and world literature. This study finds that antisystemic movements are closely related to American scholars’ re – proposing the world literature concept. Domestic and international antisystemic movements are important motivations for the United States to advocate this concept, and world literature in return plays a vital role in mitigating the contradictions caused by antisystemic movements, and serves as an important cultural tool for the United States to implement its globalization strategy. What is World Literature?’s elaboration of world literature profoundly demonstrates the universal relationship between literature and politics, and stimulates scholars to consider what kind of world literature should be constructed.

Translating the Proletariat in Esperanto: Nakagaki Kojirō, (Inter)national Literature, and (Un)translatability

2022-11-28T14:38:24+04:00

During the 1920s and early 1930s, proletarian Esperantists translated local struggles of disenfranchised people through literature, letters, textbooks, and dictionaries across various parts of the world in a universal lexicon of the international auxiliary language Esperanto. But how could such putatively universal meanings be rendered in a planned language? Was Esperanto capable of representing something that national languages could not? Could it successfully transmit the diverse proletarian experiences into a single semantics? These questions warrant further investigation, especially when read aside theories on language and translation. Esperanto was based solely on translation and was developed as a written language because it lacked native speakers in its infancy. In order to use Esperanto as a language for a world literature of the proletariat, writers had to acquire high proficiency in Esperanto while also rethink the relationship between national and world literature.

In this presentation, I discuss Nakagaki Kojirō’s (1894–1977) Esperanto Translation Laboratory (1934) to examine translation theories set forth by proletarian Esperantists in relation to the production of a world literature in Esperanto. Nakagaki started learning Esperanto at the Seoul Esperanto Society in Korea. Observing the colonial violence in Korea while reading through many leftist works, Nakagaki was determined to use Esperanto as “weapon” in favor of class and ethnic conflicts. Upon his return to Japan, he continued to publish Esperanto learning materials and was among the founding members of the Japanese proletarian Esperanto movement. After years of experience teaching and translating Esperanto, he published Esperanto Translation Laboratory.

Examining Nakagaki’s translation manual, I aim to illustrate how he grappled with the difficulties of Esperanto translation, especially the problem of equivalence and accuracy between meanings of words from different languages. Through translation, Nagakaki explored possibilities to open up the Esperanto lexicon to non – European words to alter the Eurocentric vocabulary of Esperanto into a more international language suitable for a world literature.

Is Translation Integral: World Literature in the Digital Communications Circuit

2022-11-28T14:40:39+04:00

“Network” is affirmed to be a fundamental character of world literature based on Goethe (Strich, 1998). Precisely, world literature is defined as “a mode of circulation and of reading” (Darosch, 2003). Darosch (2003) further reified this multiculturalist concept into circulation, translation and production, which are depicted as components of the communications circuit by Darnton (1982) from a book historian’s perspective. In these discussions of literature, paper editions seem to be the main carrier of literary content in the Gutenberg Era when printing free knowledge exchange globally. The key question, however, is if the printing – based literary tradition is still stable in face of the technological waves, especially the invention of the “Internet network”.

Taking the examples from Chinese Internet literature (CIL), this paper argues that translation, together with other literary adaption means, form an integral cross – cultural character to world literature and that book translation alone cannot fulfil the task of literary representation. CIL is mostly written by the general public with the majority as genre fiction. The lowered threshold for writing, reading and translating brought CIL the carnivalesque feature in contrast to the elite writing traditions in China after the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Not only literature is exhibited in digital forms, but all reader reviews are inserted between the lines through hyperlinks. These paratextual laughter/hate – oriented reviews are considered to be an inseparable part of CIL whereas none of them has been translated. On the other hand, many of CIL’s international readers are attracted by its adaptive mangas and drama first. It seems that all the digital literary adaptation means together idealise the perception of world literature and that the traditional gatekeeper roles to decide which is canonical and worthy is depressed to some extent.

Gender as a Mediation between World Literature and National Literature

2022-11-28T14:43:13+04:00

I would introduce a specific interactive gender angle into the discussion between world literature and national literature (argued within the wider framework of the theory of post – diasporic dispersion [of cultural creativity], which I am developing). My focus is individual movement and societal amalgamation, consequently – a hybrid multi – scaling of the pertaining literary production and responsiveness to it.

As gender performs language and language performs gender, both as an own and each other’s medium, they also create/demarcate a resisting literary territory that in a fluctuating way can read as individual as much as national as much as world(ly) one, weaving its autonomy into layers and scales of identification and be – longing.

This presentation probes such mediation of gender – lingual performance, exemplified comparatively in two major 20^thcentury European (polyglot) women writers, the poetess Anna Akhmatova (Russian – Ukrainian[Tatarian]) and the prosaist/poetess Ingeborg Bachmann (Austrian[Carinthian]). Their utterly preferred writing languages, Russian and German, within two (re)‘imperializing’ post – World – War – I/II structures – the socialist Bolshevik and the national(ist) Austrian, rewrite each of these structures from within. Furthermore, they do so from the opposite positions of an enforced immobility of Akhmatova and high mobility of Bachmann, one ‘staying in the native land’ (poems 1922 – 4) to witness to violent socio – political processes, the other leaving the native land, keeping her German language as her ‘house moving through all languages’ (1961 poem Exile).

Related also to this ‘im – mobility condition’, I examine the dynamics of gender in each’s work – Akhmatova employing the crashing power of femininity, Bachmann subverting gender roles (suspicious of the feminist politics efficacy) to expose the roots of the millennia – long victimization of women. It is the way gender evolves and mutates in each’s work that navigates national and worldly aspects of their production as well as their individual cogency in performing what could read as national and/or world literature.

Simenon's commissaire Maigret and crime fiction – a case of Belgitude in a world literature paradigm?

2022-11-28T14:44:34+04:00

From the point of view of French – language high literature, Simenon, at the beginning of his success from the 1930s onwards, despite his temporary affiliation with the house of Gallimard, was a marginal author in every respect: a Belgian living in France who had written vast quantities of trivial and trashy literature (of which he was proud) before turning to the minor genre of the detective novel with the invention of the famous commissaire. And yet Georges Simenon became probably the most read, most translated and most filmed author in the world in his time. There is a lot of Simenon in the character of commissaire Maigret: both come from humble backgrounds, and the inspector's relationship with his criminals, marked by understanding and sympathy, is in keeping with Simenon's sympathetic view of his characters. Maigret is a petty bourgeois, married to a kind of mother – substitute; he has no children, but maintains a fatherly relationship with his subordinates. He does not care about circumstantial evidence, preferring to trust his knowledge of the milieu, his imagination and his empathy. He is not an analytical mind, nor are there any action scenes with him. No doubt, with this profile Maigret is a bizarre outsider in the world literary panorama of investigator characters, as his creator was one in the literary world. Yet the stories of which he is the hero and mediator consciousness are translated, read and filmed all over the world (Maigret has been played by actors from France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Serbia, Russia, and Japan).

This paper addresses the question of the relationship between Simenon's and Maigret's world literary success and reputation on the one hand, and their original and inherent marginality on the other.

A Cosmopolitan Canon: Portuguese National Literature as World Literature

2022-11-28T14:45:44+04:00

The case of literatures written in Portuguese presents a interesting case – study for the relationship between national, language – specific, and international canons. The colonial relationship between Portugal and Portuguese – speaking countries escapes an understanding of colonialism as shaped by the British and French experiences, since Portugal’s relationship to its former colonies operated under what Boaventura Sousa Santos identified as an intermediary space between Prospero and Caliban: whilst Portugal was the nominal colonizer, it frequently acted in the interests and under the influence of Britain. Nonetheless, the Portuguese elite’s dependence on the colonial project became especially evident as it crumbled: the independence of Brazil had a decisive impact in ushering in liberal reforms in the 19^th century, as the independence of the African colonies in late 20^th century was inextricably linked with the toppling of Salazar’s regime and the ushering in of democracy. During these processes, the formation of a Portuguese literary canon was shaped by the circulation of texts and people that reflected the worldview of this elite.

In this paper, we shall see how the central authors of the contemporary Portuguese literary canon — defined also in terms of popular perception through the school system— are consistently tied with the either the crown or the state in a project of nation building anchored in colonial expectations towards the Global South and a peripheral relation towards Northern Europe. The result is a constant awareness of foreignness in the texts of Gil Vicente, Camões, Vieira, Garrett, Eça de Queirós and Pessoa, as well as a need to measure themselves against authors and literatures emanating from the core countries of the world system—at times learning productive processes of emulation (Castro Rocha, 2015) from authors coming from the former colonies, becoming a form of cosmopolitan national canon.

The Retranslation of Walden and its Canonization in China

2022-11-28T14:46:50+04:00

The paper holds that retranslation is the main path leading to canonization of foreign works. Thoreau’s Walden, a masterpiece in American literature, has now become a great work of world literature through translation. It has been re – translated for nearly 40 times in China ever since its first translation in 1949 showing no sign of aging, inviting future translations to join in the translational event. This paper maps the retranslation history of Walden, compares and contrasts different versions and examines the the motives and reasons of that re – translating which include such factors as the pursuit of literary quality, ideology and market. Walden has found its way in students’ Chinese textbooks. Famous writers and poets such as Wei – an and Hai – zi who read these translated versions were greatly inspired by Thoreau. Retranslation plays a major role in the process of canonization of Walden in China.

The Realism Effect as Over – Codification in Marin Preda’s Novels and Essays

2022-11-28T14:48:45+04:00

Marin Preda (1922–1980) was one of the leading literary personalities in Romania during the communist period. A charismatic figure, author of a complex work both acclaimed by critics and popular with the general public, the writer defined his age not only in aesthetic but in moral and historical terms. Two of his phrases, “the obsessive decade” (firstly used in an interview) and “the age of scoundrels” (in the novel Cel mai iubit dintre pământeni/ The Most Beloved of Earthlings, 1980) are still widely used by Romanian intellectuals to describe the intricacies of literary and moral responsibility.

This paper will investigate two aspects of realist writing in his novels and essays, in order to assess the adherence to a realist poetics with a writer whose fiction blends in numerous influences ranging for traditional to modernist. One the one hand, the function of factual details such as character’s names or toponyms, on the other hand, the forms and stakes of authorial commentary will be interpreted in light of a certain pact with the reader that aims at overcoming the ideological limitations of the time. The reception of Preda’s novels both before and after the fall of communism will also be taken into consideration.

Subversive “Realism”: Style, Latency, and Politics in the Novels of Ladislav Fuks

2022-11-28T14:50:23+04:00

The Czech author Ladislav Fuks (1923–1994) made his literary debut in 1959 in a literary journal and published his first book in 1963. During the 1960s he became one of the most acclaimed Czech writers with an international reputation; in the 1970s and 1980s he belonged to prominent authors of the „normalization“ period in communist Czechoslovakia and even had the privilege to travel in the West and stay there for longer periods of time; after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 his popularity was overshadowed by this engagement. From the very beginning, his literary style in a remarkable way combines certain typical techniques of realist writing (esp. the construction of characters, time and space and the role of descriptions and details) with methods of repetition and genre hybridisation including detective story, horror, sci – fi, and dystopia. This results in a subversion of literary codes and can be read as an interesting variant of postmodernist literature, foregrounding the atmosphere and latency of meaning. The aim of my paper is twofold: first, to demonstrate how this sophisticated écriture evolved in relation to the official political interventions into the literary field, without completely loosing its edge even in the most „heteronomous“ of Fuks’s works; second, to relate the style of Fuks’s novels to his public self – presentation, his literary posture, including the negotiation with the doctrine of socialist realism as well as his queerness.

Le dilemme du regroupement. Espace des possibles et enjeux de lutte dans le champ littéraire roumain du dégel

2022-11-28T14:51:43+04:00

Objet de réflexions, critiques et reconstructions permanentes depuis quelques décennies déjà, la théorie sur le champ littéraire de P. Bourdieu semble rester encore fertile et gratifiante dans son effort de mettre en relation des trajets, des interactions et des dispositions des acteurs de l’espace littéraire, dans les conditions d’une autonomie relative par rapport au champ politique .

La présente communication se propose d’explorer les configurations du champ de la littérature roumaine après la déstalinisation, dans les conditions d’un contrôle politique modifié pendant le dégel et, également, d’une économie dirigée qui change la structure des pôles du champ. En utilisant les noyaux de la théorie des Règles de l’art, mais aussi la réflexion post – bourdieusienne (G. Sapiro, N. Heinich), on essaiera de dresser l’image d’un espace littéraire toujours sous contrainte idéologique, qui essaie de rétablir un certain degré d’autonomie relative après l’expérience du réalisme socialiste. La réflexion tentera de rendre plus claire l’image des modalités dont la littérature roumaine gère la contrainte après 1953, en examinant la structure de l’espace des possibles et les principaux enjeux des luttes symboliques dans le champ (les coordonnées de la pratique littéraire « esthète » et son rapport à la littérature engagée ; le choix des genres et des mécanismes textuels ; le rapport entre la grande production idéologisée et la production restreinte etc.), on cherchera à identifier les articulations possibles entre les variables de la contrainte idéologique et leurs réfractions dans le champ littéraire.

Realism and/or the Avant – Garde: Georg Lukács and the Czechoslovak Discussions of Realism after the 20th congress.

2022-11-28T14:52:50+04:00

In the years following the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, the practice of literature as well as its theory underwent significant developments. Among the most important changes was a shift in the conceptions of realism and its relation to experimental writing. This paper will examine the dichotomy of modernism and avant – garde to realism in Georg Lukács’ The Meaning of Contemporary Realism and the debates about the avant – garde and realism in 1960s Czechoslovakia. Lukács’ book constitutes a famous reiteration of modern aesthetics of realism – his ideal of critical realism is supposed to surpass both socialist realism and modernism. Whereas Lukács tends to conflate the avant – garde with modernism and criticizes it as an elitist and formalist movement, the Czech Marxist literary theorists of the 1960s as Milan Kundera, Květoslav Chvatík, and Růžena Grebeníčková are all in their specific manner weakening the opposition of modernist and avant – garde writing to realism (Kanda, 2021). One significant element of the Czechoslovak contributions is their return to the Czech communist intellectuals and artists of the 1930s (Bedřich Václavek, Jiří Weil, and Vladislav Vančura), firmly connected to the avant – garde movement in the early 20th century. The paper will attempt to determine whether the works of Kundera, Chvatík and Grebeníčková provide fruitful polemical impulses to Lukács’ critical binarism, or whether they are to be better understood as strategic attempts to widen the scope of realist (and therefore politically acceptable) art.

La position de l’artiste dans LE MONUMENT d’Elsa Triolet

2022-11-28T14:53:59+04:00

Elsa Triolet, écrivaine, femme aux multiples talents, critique littéraire, journaliste, résistance française d’origine russe, dans ses romans traite des sujets variés : la solitude, la position des femmes dans la société, la deuxième guerre mondiale...Apres cette guerre, dans les années de guerre froides, l’écrivaine s’oriente vers d’autres sujets et dans son roman éponyme intitule Le Monument (1957) elle évoque la position de l’artiste dans les régimes totalitaires. Inspire directement de l’affaire du portrait de Staline fait par Picasso en 1953 et de la déstalinisation, l’écrivaine, dans ce roman retrace la vie du jeune sculpteur Lewka qui se suicide parce qu’il n’a pas pu supporter les critiques concernant son œuvre.

C’est pourquoi dans notre communication nous analysons tous les faits historiques qui ont influencé l’écriture de ce roman et nous montrerons comment Elsa Triolet représente le rôle et la position de l’artiste dans les régimes totalitaires. La deuxième partie de notre étude montrera comment ce roman annonce la déstalinisation dans la littérature française.

Communist Women and Alternatives to Socialist Realism: Alexandra Kollontai and Sabitri Roy

2022-11-28T14:56:07+04:00

Socialist Realism, as promoted by Gorki, Zhdanov, or even by Lukacs, was never the only framework within which communists wrote fiction. While socialist realism arose in 1928 – 1932, the fiction of Alexandra Kollontai can be seen as an attempt to create a different model. Her collection The Love of Worker Bees, especially the novel Vasilisa Malygina, was anything but a typical socialist realist novel which takes up gender and class in an interlinked manner. This novel also focussed on class solidarity rather than the wisdom of the party, examining the meaning of sexual liberation under socialist construction, Kollontai presented a critique of what she saw as an emergent new hierarchy, and also challenged the re – inscription of patriarchal norms, mild as they were in the mid – 1920s compared to the 1930s.

In Sabitri Roy’s novel Paka Dhaner Gaan (abridged tr. Harvest Song), there is a deep realism, but hardly framed within the canons of Socialist Realism. In Harvest Song, there is a very sympathetic examination of women’s double burdens, and a recognition that the communist argument about economic independence for all is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for women’s emancipation, especially in looking at their roles in holding the community together, as well as in matters of control over sexuality. The tebhaga movement itself both brings many women as well as men peasants together but also reveals the double burden of the women. But there is also a sharp counter – positioning of middle – class women’s perceptions with poor peasant women’s perceptions.

Angare: a New Trend in Indian Literature

2022-11-28T14:57:17+04:00

Angare, a collection of short stories, was published in 1932. Edited by Sajjad Zaheer, with contributions from young writers like Ahmed Ali, Mahmuduzzafar and Rashid Jahan, the book raised a tremendous furore in India. Sajjad Zaheer was the guiding factor behind the publication and he himself contributed five stories. The conservative Indian intelligentsia called it loud and obscene and unacceptable to refined literary tastes.The book was eventually proscribed by the British. Now the question is: Why did a small collection of nine short stories and a one act play, written by young and virtually unknown writers, create such a tremendous impact on the rich literary tradition in India, instead of fading into oblivion for being improper and objectionable?

The reaction can be explained if the general attitude of the writers is taken into account. These writers, residing in England, had been profoundly influenced by the genre of socialist realism as expressed through contemporary European progressive literature. Colonial India, with its inherent contradictions, along with imperial exploitation and the surging nationalist movement, gave them the necessary impetus so that they too, like their European counterparts, began to feel that literature did indeed have a role to play in influencing the society, one that could be used to emancipate the downtrodden from different levels of exploitation. Angare was a collection of realistic and often unspoken stories of ordinary men and women, vastly different in their portrayal of society as compared to that in earlier established literature. It was as if their intention was to consciously and deliberately jerk the readers into the realisation that literature was not just romantic and pedantic portrayals of elite thought and life. A new genre of literature thus emerged in India, that of progressivism, its new perspective threatening to replace the old.

Cultures of Socialism in Africa: Language, Nation and Unification

2022-11-28T14:59:15+04:00

The Arusha Declaration of 1967, delivered by Julius Nyerere, has often been hailed as one of the most comprehensive explications of what came to be known as “African Socialism”. The words “Uhuru na Umoja” united the people of Tanganyika in their struggle for emancipation from British colonial rule, and later would go on to define the early years of the now independent United Republic of Tanzania. A call for freedom and unity, or the understanding that freedom could only be realized in unity, in a now independent Tanzania became a vision for collective national progress and development. Often misunderstood or misrepresented as merely an influence of western notions of socialism, Ujamaa as Nyerere repeatedly stated was based on communal and familiar structures already endemic to East African cultures. However, Ujamaa was neither a form of postcolonial nativism that sought to remedy the colonial by a return to the precolonial. Nyerere had a clear understanding of Tanzania’s “Post – ” condition, and Ujamaa became a means to use extant indigenous forms of cultural and social organization as the basis for economic growth.

In this paper I propose to look at the Ujamaa movement in Tanzania within in a context of postcolonial African socialisms, particularly as a political device for the creation of a lexicon for unification in contexts of culturally and linguistically plurality. To that end I will examining Nyerere’s political philosophy alongside the cultural, linguistic and literary impacts of Ujamaa in East Africa.

Finding the Working Class Hero and Reliability of Docu – Novel

2022-11-28T15:00:33+04:00

This paper shall look at the construction of protagonists in the novels of Akhtaruzzaman Elias and Debesh Ray. It will also address the reliability of Docu – novel to keep an account of the exploitation and oppression of the ruling class. Some ‘leftist’ authors portrayed peoples’ resistance against socio – political oppression and substantiated the narrated event with real data, statistics and official reports. By this way they presented a ‘realistic’ view and resisted the ruling class’s propaganda to normalize oppression in a class – based caste – discriminated society. In ‘Yuddha Paristhiti (1996)’ Nabarun Bhattacharya mentioned reports from some booklets to portray violence perpetrated by the State. Ashok Mukhopadhyay, Debesh Ray and Mahasweta Devi too presented data and official reports to justify the dialectic of truth – claims in the texts. Is this a more sustainable/reliable literary model in the post – truth era than the socialist – realist model?

In the political novels of Elias and Debesh Ray, the protagonists, despite being landless farmer or urban proletariat, lack the qualities of a so called ‘social – realist hero’. Their morale, values and class consciousness differ from a prototyped protagonist of a Bhadralok – centered novel as well as a typical protagonist of the social – realist model. They too suffer from psychological complexity and ‘political unconscious’ but at the same time they defy the individualistic approach to deal with the crisis of a ‘modern man’. They incorporated myths, fantasies and oratures to construct multi – layered narratives where subalterns dream, fight and etches the real consciousness and the real praxis. Elias’ model of novel writing rejects the wishful thinking of socialist realism. In ‘Chilekothar Sepai (1986), three protagonists represent their class but Elias refuted a purely black and white canvas dotted by faultless and angelic workers and peasants. How do they represent the class conflict of the Indian subcontinent? How Elias and Ray avoid the contamination of wishful thinking despite being Marxist?

Attempting a Socialist Realist Recasting of the Bangla Literary Historiography: The Discussions Generated in the late 1940s

2022-11-28T15:01:36+04:00

In 1947 the Second Congress of the Communist Party of India (CPI) dumped the previous General Secretary, P.C. Joshi, and opted a left line promoted by the Communist International, but with domestic requirements as argued by Bandyopadhyay. One of the Political Bureau (Politburo) members, Bhawani Sen, wrote in the Bangla periodical Marxbadi, as did Pradyot Guha, a well – known party activist, both writing under different pseudonyms. Guha’s article in Marxbadi No. 4 generated a big debate concerning progress and reaction in literary historiography. Both Parichay, the most important cultural magazine with strong CPI influence, and other periodicals pitched in. This was a vast debate, and in this paper, my aim is to focus on one core area – the attempt to question the concept of a ‘Bengal Renaissance’, and the idea that it consisted of a collectively progressive trend. In doing this, however, it is possible to find sweeping generalizations that need much questioning. Thus, there is an uncritical acceptance of the myth about Deenabandhu Mitra’s Neel Darpan as a staunch supporter of peasant revolts, while drawing a straight line from Ram Mohan Roy, through Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, to Rabindranath Thakur, as opponents of progress and real reform. Winding through this entire debate was an attempt to relate the conception of a two – stage theory of revolution with the discussions over what was progressive in literature and culture, in other words, the idea that because the ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ had not been completed, it was allegedly ‘Trotskyism’ to link progressivism to only the proletariat and the communist party. This paper will look briefly at these as well, and examine the actual views of Trotsky, contrasting that to the different interpretations of Zhdanov that motivated most of the participants.

Heretics of Innovation

2022-11-28T15:30:07+04:00

In his discussion of the history of the Jewish community of Bohemia, Vaclav Zacek describes how an obscure eighteenth – century figure, Jonas Wehle, exemplifies “the modern Bohemian.” The leader of the Prague Frankists, a practicing Sabbatean, Wehle remains within the Jewish community, although he no longer adheres to traditional Judaism. That lack of adherence motivates Wehle’s continuous conflict with rabbinic authorities. For Zacek, Wehle’s conflict with Prague’s “religious orthodoxy” turns “the Bohemian countries” into “the scene of a persistent and bitter struggle between rabbinical orthodoxy” and the promotion of heresies by “Jewish mystics and messianists, addicted to innovation.” While Zacek elevates a dispute between Judaism’s gatekeepers – the rabbinate – and what would appear to be a minor sect within the Jewish community – a Jewish false messianic movement — to the status of a controversy preoccupying all of Bohemia, he takes as a given nonetheless the pervasiveness of kabbalistic ideas circulating within a social milieu beyond the control of Judaic authority. Zacek implies that Jewish mystical content saturates Czech culture. His use of “innovation,” precisely the German word, Neuerung, suggests that Czech and German readers understand the German word to refer to the esoteric practices of “Jewish mystics and messianists.” By reproducing the term his sources use, he also reveals that the practice is recognizable to non – Jews too. Several years later, Heinrich Heine adopts the term, “Neurung,” in his last works as he attempts to position his writing in relation to his Jewish identity so that he transforms “innovation” from a signifier of apostasy to a signifier of the modern Jewish subject’s redemption. This paper explores the implications of “heresies of innovation” and German Jewry’s reimagining of such heresies in the registers of German idealism in order to discuss how kabbalah becomes a literary phenomenon of modernity.

Jewish Mysticism and Difference Feminism in Anna Lesznai’s Early Love Theory

2022-11-28T15:31:29+04:00

Anna Lesznai’s radical imagining of sex and its use for transcendental purposes heavily relies on Jewish mystical ideas, intertwined with Otto Weininger's theory of gender binarism and Martin Buber's dialogue principle. In her early love theory –part of feminist discourse at the turn of the twentieth century – Lesznai describes szerelem as female love, using religious language and ideas from Jewish mysticism, especially those resembling Kabbalistic Hassidic concepts, and ultimately compares sexual union to yihud – unio mystica with God. Working within the patriarchal understanding of the biological definition of gender and of the concept of "female difference," Lesznai’s difference feminism rooted in the belief that certain personality traits and skills are inherently gendered, reverses the hierarchy by placing women in the position of power, thus turning Jewish mysticism and Weininger’s gender philosophy on its head.

Cohesion and Shame: Ethical Resolution of Dostoevsky and J.M.Coetzee

2022-11-28T15:32:57+04:00

The spiritual crisis of man is the common theme in Dostoevsky’s and J.M.Coetzee’s works. Dostoevsky dramatizes religious tragedy experienced by Russian in 19^thcentury , whereas Coetzee represents the soul tragedy evoked by certain circumstances. Dostoevsky advocates salvation as the answer to ethical conflict and the cohesion conception of Orthodox Church enables characters to immerse into the human community and connect to each other in the conviction of brotherhood and love. Because Orthodox Church believes everyone is responsible to each sin, even though he commits no sin. As long as there remains one degeneration, salvation and resurrection will not advent. Shame is the key word of Coetzee’s fictions. It generates in the tension formed by aversion to oppression, desire for transcendence and relentless questioning the ultimate reconciliation. He tries to detach from the religious perspective, struggling to engage in the bitter exploration of ethical resolution at the level of secular morality. His characters fail to achieve mutual understanding, restricted to the subcelestial world, and direct each other to alienation and isolation instead of solidarity. Unlike Dostoevsky whose fictions pursuit religious solution, Coetzee chooses to invite readers to live through the twisted ethical situation without a clear ending provided.

Literary Resolutions and Ethical Conflicts in Devotional Poetry

2022-11-28T15:34:14+04:00

In this paper, i consider devotional poetry in Brajbhasha and Dakkhni, written in the 17^th and 18^th centuries in the north and south of India respectively. Though born in the ethos of idol worship, polytheism and legitimacy for social stratification, this poetry criticises the ethos through the philosophical and religious vocabulary of monism and pantheism, expressing devotion through the aesthetic mode of erotic love. Thus, the thematic s, the languages chosen and the repertoire of signification available are apparently contrary to the beliefs and practices of the poet’s professed religion: hence rather than being an instrument for conflict resolution, this literature itself signals a conflict in the established belief system which it exposes through its aesthetic function. I enquire whether the configuration and economy of literature as an experiential domain is incommensurate with the domain of institutionalised religion, and whether literature as a textual practice may be treated as an ethical discourse when it resists being freighted by substantive or materialist ontologies.

Apple of Sodom: Interpretation of Nick in The Great Gatsby from the Perspective of Ethical Literary Criticism

2022-11-28T15:35:16+04:00

Based on ethical literary criticism, this article focuses on Nick, who is often ignored by scholars, to analyze his moral weaknesses as a character in the story level and explore how he abuses his narrative functions to cover up his defects in the discourse level. Opposed to previous articles praising Nick as a moral benchmark, this study finds that with complete control over the narration, the implied author has left clues for the implied readers to spot Nick’s moral problems: under the drive of animal factor, he indulges himself in frivolous relationships and sexual life, and makes a wrong ethical choice facing Daisy’s extramarital affair, then triggering the final tragedy. Besides that, Nick has a mental paralysis of speculating on others with snobbish values without realizing it, which renders him a representative of the Jazz Age. Moreover, he tries to hide corruption by abusing his narrative power, and thus descends to the satirized object of the implied author. This ethics – centered perspective not only offers the implied readers a novel understanding of the character and the theme, but also invites them to participate in the story interpretation to obtain moral enlightenment. Additionally, this article emphasizes the implied author’s appeal for the return of orders through Nick’s characterization, and then restores the ethical nature of literature.

In Quest of a Feminist Comparative Methodology for Interrogating Transnationalism: Problematizing the “Women’s Question” in the Travel Narratives of Krishnabhavini Das and Nabaneeta Dev Sen

2022-11-28T15:36:42+04:00

One of the basic approaches to the understanding of transnationalism involves the (re)construction of spatialities. The question of space is also cursory to the comparative praxis. Even the gender polemic in South Asia is unthinkable without considering the epistemologies of spaces. Therefore, in my study, I shall try to build a methodology of interrogating transnationalism from a comparative and feminist vantage, thereby “re – inventing” comparative literature and pedagogically re – vitalizing it. To do so, I shall delve into a diachronic reading of the travel narratives of Krishnabhavini Das (1864 – 1919) and Nabaneeta Dev Sen (1938 – 2019), and critically decipher the politics of complicities and resistances towards creolization, by a gendered individual outside her national territory. Following Mara De Gennaro’s idea of “non – territorial (as opposed to extraterritorial) comparative literature”, I would like to read the subjectivities of not just two women, but also of intervening and transforming spaces (and therefore, of collectivities) that they inhabited and deconstructed with their travelling. The diachronic study shall become interesting and relevant once the status of India’s political independence with respect to Krishnabhavini and Nabaneeta’s times of travel, are taken into cognizance. The antahpur, that Krishnabhavini carried subconsciously in her journey to England had transformed by the time Nabaneeta was travelling and writing. However, the antahpur, being an inherited space of comfort and conflict for a woman, had not totally disintegrated during Nabaneeta’s time. I would like to extend and problematize the “women’s question” by carefully probing into this transforming gendered heterotopia of Bengali Hindu women by placing it at the crossroads of transnational and transcultural interactions, made possible by women’s travels. The concerned travelogues also stand as major social critiques of their times that affirmatively ‘used’ the différance between home and the world, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, to subvert the phallocentric and parochial significations of the nation. Both Krishnabhavini and Nabaneeta, when read comparatively, shall also bring forth a dynamic study of the literary, linguistic, religious, bodily, sexual practices of women across times and borders. Thus, the study whilst building a comparative methodology towards transnationalism, shall inevitably also attempt to reformulate a South Asian feminist historiography.

After – lives: The Transnational and the Local in the Fiction of Abdulrazak Gurnah and M.Mukundan

2022-11-28T15:38:18+04:00

The present paper critically examines the complex dialectic between the transnational and the local in post – colonial societies in Africa and Asia with reference to the works of two major novelists, Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Nobel – Prize Winner and M. Mukundan, a major Malayalam novelist who has won the JCB Prize for Literary Fiction in 2021 and also the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres of the Government of France in 1998. Abdulrazak Gurnah revisits the scarred past of his native Zanzibar, which is now part of Tanzania in the light of the complex relations between memory and history, in an attempt to retrieve the past completely erased by the European narratives of colonialism. His novels like Paradise and Afterlives capture the cultural amnesia that renders the past undecipherable. M.Mukundan belongs to Mahe, a former French colony in the heart of north Kerala, in the south of India. In a series of very sensitively written novels, he has examined how the cultural identity of modern Kerala, is made up of multiple strands that extend to many other countries, making it impossible to speak of monolithic ethnic identities. In novels like Mayyazhipuzhyude Theerangalil (On the Banks of the Mayyazhi River, 1980), Daivathinte Vikrtikal (God’s Mischief, 2002) and Pravasam (Exile, 2008) he portrays a past which is marked with several crossings of borders, departures and returns. A comparative study of this kind will help us bring out how the Asian and African social imaginaries converge or diverge along the axis of complex movements of history. We need to factor in the cultural past of the Global South into the idea of the transnational to comprehend the nature of circulations and exchanges among different post – colonial spaces.

Travel Narratives of Bangla Literature: A Comparative Literary Analysis

2022-11-28T15:39:37+04:00

After the establishment of colonialism in different parts of the world, forced as well as voluntary displacement had created often varied, complex and violent experiences. Categories such as ‘colonial’, ‘post colonial’ gave nuanced expressions to all those experiences. There are literary examples in the world literature where these stories have described about the universal –global ethos of human civilization whereas there are writers who will talk about the local fragmented histories of ‘little’ people. Travelers from different European nations ‘explored’ different colonial locations to establish the different but stereotypical images of the ‘other’. But interestingly in later point of time, travelers from colonized locations traveled to other parts of the world and the ensuing travel narratives create varied experiences of colonialism, racism faced by these travelers.

In late nineteenth century – early twentieth century Bangla literature we come across an assortment of travel narratives where people like Indumadhab Mullick travelled to China, where as women travelers like Hariprava Takeda, Abala Basu, Sorojnalini Dutta travelled to Japan and wrote travelogues called Chin Bhromon, Japane Bhanganari etc. Rabindranath Thakur visited different countries of Europe but he also visited China, Japan, Bali etc. Interestingly, one of the reasons behind Rabindranath Thakur’s visit to Bali was to encounter the influence of ancient Indian civilization on the societies of Bali, Java etc. Consequently Rabindranath published Europe Prabasir Patro, Javajatrir Patro etc. All these travelogues bring together issues such as nationalism, colonialism, languages and identity politics. But all these travel narratives can be different case study of contact zones where colonizer – colonized interactions or interactions between different colonized locations can be encountered.

In this paper my objective would be to analyse these travel narratives of early twentieth Century Bangla literature to understand the politics of cross cultural exchanges in South Asia. Simultaneously I will discuss how these narratives can be case study of contact and reception of different cultures.

Ambedkar in/on Films and Possibilities of Reconstituting the Cinematic

2022-11-28T15:41:17+04:00

Ambedkar as image or thought was absent in Bollywood and regional films of India until late. The earliest visualization of Ambedkar is arguably as a framed photo in Jabbar Patel’s Marathi film Sinhasan in 1979. His absence in the three hour long internationally produced biopic Gandhi (Attenborough 1982), is particularly conspicuous given that the visual document covered the period of Indian nationalist movement up to 1948, a period which had witnessed the emergence of Ambedkar as an indispensible political and social reformer with a vision towards an alternative, non – Hindu, anti – caste modernity. The period post 2000s however has witnessed the production of films which represent Ambedkar in various ways. Ambedkar figures in dialogues, graffiti, photos, memories, slogans, etc. Both realist and popular traditions in cinema engage with the image of Ambedkar, although in disparate ways. In this paper, I intend to trace the trajectory of Ambedkar representations in cinema and analyse how it imagines a Dalit popular which transcends nationalistic understandings of caste and modernity. Caste is deconstituted from the frozen frames of nationalist conceptualization which restrains it to tales of despair, pasts of humiliation or of upper caste reformist zeal. Ambedkar appears as a determining presence in visualizing a Dalit popular that reconstitutes a parochial concept of caste and its representation in cinema. These films imagine a Dalit popular of hope lived in by communities of outcastes bought together not by a shared past, but by a common present in a transnational world. The concept of cinematic is expanded to incorporate the everyday of caste lives determined by heterogenous forms of global transactions, the manifestations of which would be analyzed in the paper.

Situating Sita: Mapping Mithila in South Asian Literatures

2022-11-28T15:42:20+04:00

In this paper, I wish to revisit the ways in which Mithila region of Indian nation has been narrated in Maithili Ramayana written by Laldas. What this paper aims is to unravel the narratives of suffering of Sita in Ramayana and Helen in Odyssey in order to explore the question of justice by looking at respective texts in order to situate Sita in the domain of South Asian literatures.

The purpose of my paper is to engage with South Asian narratives of 'Sitaramkatha' which have contributed a great deal to the making of an inspirational character called Sita in a theoretical discussion so as to foreground the fact that certain trajectories which the representation of region and nation charts in Maithili Ramayana present not only a serious indictment of modernity but àlso a deep sense of disillusionment with nationalist ideals and aspirations which promoted the idea of progress. Moreover, narratives of suffering, sacrifice and survival of subaltern, Sita are much more complex amd nuanced than that of Homer's Helen in Odyssey.

A Comparative study of Postcolonial concerns in Chinua Achebe’s Novel Things Fall Apart and Akhtar Mohi – u – dins Novel Zath Butrath (The Earth and its Origin) in the context of Global South and South Asian Perspective

2022-11-28T15:43:38+04:00

In the sixteenth century, European colonization of Africa contributed significantly to European economic development. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart Known as the magnum opus of African Literature, attempts to present the pre – colonial state of the Igbo Culture. The transition in the book from pre – colonial Africa to an Africa that felt the European presence is in terms of style, remarkable. He narrates the story of an Igbo individual who witnesses the emergence of European institutions among the neighboring villages as well as his own while fabricating the personal account of Okonkwo, and while explaining the influence of the cross cultural encounter on him, which ultimately leads to his tragic death.

Similarly, passing over the period of centuries Kashmir has the authentically recorded events of long successions of struggles, between, rulers and usurping uncles, cousins, brothers, ministers, nobles and soldiers. In the meanwhile the Moghuls finally established themselves in Kashmir. Akbar finally in 1856 merged Kashmir as his dominion which remained as a dependency of the Mughal emperor for nearly two centuries till British colonists came and took over the reins in their hands. British in turn did a very heinous and shameful act of selling the Kashmiris to the Dogra’s as this again was a purely commercial act of profiteering. Akhtar Mohi – ud – din , a Kashmiri novelist in his novel Zaat – Butraat (The Earth and its Origin) writes about all these agonies faced by the people of Kashmir under Dogra rule. He writes about the nature of sufferings and heinous exploitation that was so rampant during Dogra rule in Kashmir. Common people were suffering

and were overloaded with the imposition of taxes. Life had become very difficult to live, peasants and artisans had to pay the taxes on their production and wages.

Comparative Literature, put in simple terms: means the study of text, belonging to the writers of different regions, written in different languages. In Comparative literature one studies the literatures across the world. The work done in the Comparative Literature helps readers to understand the relation between the thought and philosophy of different writers belonging to different countries. Achebe and Akhtar being writers of different languages share certain common traits. Both Achebe and Akhtar have a revolutionary temperament and, both believe that Imperialism is a curse, it had devastated great cultures and civilizations.

The concept of Global South Literatures registers a new set of relationships between nations of the once colonized world and their connections with the Colonizer. The colonial encounter is the foremost determinant for emerging literatures in India or the subcontinent. The process through which the new nation comes into being, the trauma of Imperialism, the formation of national identities in a situation of political instability all contribute to the vast body of literature, not in English, but in the regional languages as well. The paper attempts to show how literature refracts outside its domain and cannot therefore be studied in isolation from them. Both Achebe and Akhtar try to explore the aftermaths of Imperialism in their countries. Achebe, an African novelist and Akhtar a Kashmiri fiction writer share common experience of colonization as a process of dehumanization.

Broken Dreams in a Dimension of Displacement: Mediating Memory in Bhisam Sahni’s Tamas,Intizar Hussain’s Basti and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

2022-11-28T15:45:17+04:00

Migration and a deep sense of being uprooted is a recurrent theme in World literature. The trauma of dislocation turns out to be an overwhelming reality for the immigrants. Migration is not just a change of physical environment but also spiritual. In fact it is a dream which has turned sour. Memories and histories of the past continue to haunt the surviving generations of the affected families and locates itself through its resurfacing in some form or other in our present. The present paper will focus on this homelessness, dislocation, mourning, shattering of dreams and explore the different dimensions of displacement. For this purpose I have selected three reputed novels Tamas, Basti and Exit West. Tamas by Bhisham Sahni is a novel based on facts collected by the author to reclaim history of India. Set in the backdrop of partition of India in 1947, it reflects on how the political decision to partition the region led to polarization among Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities in Punjab. It documents the lives of common people caught in a conflict of identities. Basti by Pakistani writer Intizar Husain depicts the human denouement that followed partition of the Indian subcontinent and looks back at the aftermath of partition. It is a hazy combination of political history and personal memory and recreates the desolation and temporariness of the past. While the first two novels dwell on the theme of perils of forced migration, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid problematizes the plight of the migrants to the so called tolerant nations. What kind of life do these migrants lead there, is shown in its brutal reality.

Voices of Cultural Resistance: Gauhar Jaan and Iqbal Bano

2022-11-28T15:46:43+04:00

Resistance has always been directly related to courage. .Mark Twain was of the view that courage is resistance to fear, it is mastery on fear and not absence of it. The paper explores the lives and times of two subcontinental women artistes – – Gauhar Jaan of India and Iqbal Bano of Pakistan who lived life on their own terms. Their lives are more than narratives of personal experiences. Each one’s life was a testimony on the way historical and political events had impacted their lives. Creativity in the arena of music has ever been the prerogative of men and it has always been associated with masculinity. Hence many women, despite possessing creative talent, have had to take a back seat and pursue music only as a hobby. The paper focuses on these two women artistes who defied conventions by attempting to pursue music all their life. Gauhar Jaam 91873 – 1930), an Indian singer and dancer from Kolkata redefined Hindustani classical music by incorporating technology with it which most men artistes were afraid to experiment with .She flouted government resolutions in Kolkata and would go around in her four horse driven buggy for which she even paid an amount of a thousand rupees to the viceroy as fine. Iqbal Bano (1935 – 2009) resisted and challenged the Zia – ul – Haque regime which had tried to limit women to the private sphere with a campaign called ‘Chadar aur Chaardiwari’ meaning ‘The Veil and the Four walls of Home.’ She sang the revolutionary poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s composition to resist the cruel regime. The paper concludes with how these two women artistes redefined music and played a significant role in the preservation and perpetuation of music traditions.

Transnational Recognition of the Indigenous Culture and Literature in a Global Society (South Asia and Beyond)

2022-11-28T15:47:47+04:00

Transnational, though often been associated with border – crossing, either through Diasporic literature or through translation, can also be looked upon as a set of issues which cross the political borders of the nation and is significant in the Indigenous Culture and Literature in a global society.

The rights of indigenous peoples have, over the past three decades, become an important component of international law and policy, as a result of a movement driven by indigenous peoples, civil society, international mechanisms and States at the domestic, regional and international levels. It was the result of decades of negotiation between States and indigenous peoples, coming together in a spirit of partnership to endorse the Indigenous Declaration. It applies human rights to indigenous peoples and their specific situations, thereby helping to reverse their historical exclusion from the international legal system. (UN Human Rights)

This paper considers few such issues reflected in the indigenous culture and literature of the communities spread over in global society which includeTribals in India, First Nations in Canada, Indigenous in the United States, Aborigines in Australia, Maori in New Zealand and indigenous people in the discourse of Human rights and Adivasis in the terminology of Asian activists . Now, in political context they are being described as belonging to “the Fourth World category of literature”. It will be argued that it would be simplistic to perceive them as divergent victim groups of any shared epochal phenomenon such as colonialism, imperialism, modernity or globalisation. This paper will analyse the Indigenous Culture and Literature of the South Asia in the context of related countries with a view to engage in an interesting exploration of the current socio – political, ecological and economic situation faced by them.

A Tale of Loss and Belongingness: Migration, Identity and Womanhood in Qurratulain Hyder’s Sita Betrayed

2022-11-28T15:48:56+04:00

The days that followed August 1947 when the Indian subcontinent was free from the shackles of colonial rule, were filled with most inhuman acts of physical violence. But other than the episodes of physical violence there were lesser – known narratives of divided families, abandoned parents and siblings, and shattered loves and trusts. Qurratulain Hyder’s Sita Betrayed narrates the story of Sita in India post – Partition. Sita the eponymous character of Hyder’s novel belongs to the first generation of migrants. Born in 1927 she goes on to become a victim of Partition. This historical event of the Indian subcontinent brought problems of identity, displacement, hybridity, fractured nature of collective consciousness and most importantly the sense of homelessness for its women.

This paper would attempt to elaborate on how diasporic and exilic energy can have a

gendered perspective. It would also raise questions on the scope and limitations of women attaining historical and affective belongingness. Sita Betrayed would also attempt to untangle the nuances involved with the idea of cosmopolitanism and question whether, even today, can we accept women with a cosmopolitan identity?

Local South and the Curse of Origin

2022-11-28T15:49:56+04:00

When “origin,” “where you come from” (what one is unappealably supposed to be by birth) rules and legitimizes one’s behavior and weighs heavily on the course of one’s future, people either have a place or are dis – placed or mis – placed. In this sense, there are only traditional societies, societies based on filiation rather than affiliation.

Beginning with two parallel case studies of recent novels, Sethu’s Aliyah and Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home, this paper will address the question of “origin” –whether ethnic, religious, or assigned by other collective identity markers – as the one that describes the “Global South” as a collection of minorities.

It will be shown how – whereas in the so – called Global North “origin” is still supposed to be an unquestionable given that coincides with an established locality – both individual and collective identities have become usual objects of doubt, suppression, conflict and resistance in the so – called Global South. In literature and film, these phenomena are manifested in the historicization of the characters’ destinies as well as in narrational and structural features of the narratives concerned, inducing a modernist aesthetics of rupture, innovation and experimental reconfiguration that owes more to the quest of a striking figuration than to any imitation or influence of Western modernity.

Returning to Tagore’s Gora and Ghare Baire, we can see how, over a century ago, an “Indian” perspective on universalism and belonging can help us redefine the divide that the Global North/Global South rift tries to embody under inappropriately geographical banners in contradiction with the globalization it seeks to denounce.

Transnational Digital Ecology as Space for Resistance: A Case Study of Refugees of Global South and South – east Asia

2022-11-28T15:52:42+04:00

The phenomenon of Refugees from Africa and Asia or what we call the global south is a contemporary global concern that offers a deep insight into the study of power dynamics between the global north and the global south. The struggle for spaces of discourse and narratives exemplifies the significance of the digital ecology as enabling transnational spaces for resistance and assertion. The plight of these refugees unable to cross the physical borders but able to connect digitally with each other and the international community demonstrates the transnational space of resistance afforded by the digital ecology in the present times. Though ‘non – citizens’, their ability to be netizens nevertheless has enabled them to initiate a transnational resistance and visibility of their plight. One of the greatest refugees groups emanating from the global south is from the country of Myanmar in Southeast Asia – the Rohingya refugees of Myanmar. The Rohingya refugees and diaspora groups in Australia, Canada and the United States have been using digital platforms such as YouTube – based digital platforms Rohingya Vision and The Arkan Times along with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to connect with each other and the world. Taking advantage of proliferating smartphones and social media platforms, the Rohingya digital diaspora is contributing toward the development of transnational political engagement and identity. The present paper seeks to investigate the digital ecology as a transnational space for resistance and political engagement by the Rohingya diaspora and refugees by studying their use of digital platforms and how it has enabled them to bring visibility amongst the international community “forging linkages among non – state actors” across the global north and the global south and south – east Asia.

Translation and Transnationalism: A study of memory, migration and spirit translation

2022-11-28T15:53:54+04:00

Translation is often understood as a transfer of a text in a language into another. But is it the only type of translation that exists? What of something that can be described a spirit translation. A translation where the language does not change, but the spirit of one language is drawn into the corporeal self of another language. Quite often transnationalism becomes difficult to identify when only the conventional idea of translation is considered. What remains unexplored is the veritable treasure trove of transnational elements in works that are only translated in spirit. Such spirit translations can be found in several of the works of the early poets in India. Taking into consideration such poets who at the turn of the century are immigrants to a foreign land. A strong yearning for their mother land generates these spirit translated works. These poets now transplanted in a different clime and land write in alien languages acquired secondarily.

This study will primarily attempt to understand the nuances of such works that have the spirit of a language but the body of another. It will further explore the role that such works play in creating and fostering transnationalism. With special emphasis on the poetry of Toru Dutt, the study will juxtapose transnationalism and translation. The major aim of the paper will be to try to establish the role of such spirit translations in fostering transnationalism in the Global South.

Caucasian Literatures Meet South Asian Literatures: Exploring the “Indian Caucasus”

2022-11-28T15:55:25+04:00

Shelley‟s Prometheus Unbound features a place named “Indian Caucasus” (Acts I and II). This imaginative merging of the Hindu Kush mountain range in Central and South Asia and the Caucasus Mountains is Shelley‟s departure from the Greek source as well as his invocation of places related to civilization. Referencing this rather unusual coupling of South Asia and the Caucasus, the present paper aspires to explore the connection and inter – animation of the literatures of Caucasus and that of South Asia. The Caucasus region chiefly incorporates South Caucasia or Transcaucasia (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) and North Caucasus („Russian‟ republics including Chechnya, Adygea, Ossetia and Dagestan) while South Asia comprises eight countries including Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. The paper unfolds in two ways. On the one hand, it traces the typological affinities (similarities without factual contact) between Caucasian and South Asian literatures; for example, due to the Caucasian countries‟ complex interactions with several imperial invasions (from Sasanian and Persian to Russian), their literatures are informed by Persian and Arabic literatures, a trend which is evident in South Asian literatures as well. It is thus worth noting how the Persian poet Jami has been postprocessed in, say, Georgia and Azarbaijan, and India and Bangladesh as well. On the other hand, this paper explores the genetic contact (similarities due to factual contact) between and the inter – animation (or lack thereof) if any of Caucasian and South Asian literatures; for example, it is worth inquiring the amount and nature of translation (and lack thereof) of Caucasian literature in the South Asian languages and vice versa. The paper contends that in the context of the increasingly mutating world relations, in what Shashi Tharoor and Samir Saran dubbed the New World Disorder, it is important that South Asia explores and initiates fresh areas of cross – cultural exchange, brings interliterary relations in more productive conversations, and accentuates a globalectic ethic.

Exploration of Womanhood and the Assertion of Self: A Comparative Study of Meghna Pant's One and a Half Wife and Bapsi Sidhwa's The Pakistani Bride

2022-11-28T15:56:35+04:00

The images of women in South Asian novels have undergone a change in the last three decades. Earlier women were conceived as a symbol of self sacrifice and suffering. In due course of time women writers affected by Western Feminism have explored the alternative ideal of self assertion. From the suffering women in the novels of Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai et al. to the recent subversions of the traditional image in the works of Chitra Fernando, Anees Jung, Bapsi Sidhwa and Taslima Nasrin, the women have come a long way. The recent writers explore the wonderful consequences of Indian women renaming self and experience. Individually they have gained a name collectively an identity. Their new strength the stems from personalities defining their own terms lending grace to living. To voice a pain to divulge a secret was consider sacrilege, a breach of family trust. Today voices are raised without fear and are heard outside the walls of homes that once kept a woman protected and also isolated. The feminist writers have emphasised a new perspective of woman. They have rebelled against stern patriarchy and male chauvinism.

Meghna Pant's One and a Half Wife reveals the struggle and circumstances faced by a woman, Anara Malhotra, entangled in the Indian orthodox culture. Being the only girl child of her parents she always dreamt of American education and also of a prince like groom to support her the rest of her life. Though she migrated to USA alongwith her parents, she could not be able to assimilate that Americian culture and mentality to that of Indian beliefs. The novel has also highlighted the effect of divorce on the life and honour of women is general and Anara Malhotra in particular. The victims stood against the old orthodoxy and degraded mentality of the society and ultimately succeeded to discover themselves.

Bapsi Sidhwa's The Pakistani Bride throws light on women's zest for life, their adaptability and indomitable courage. All the women, be it Zaitoon, Carol or Afshan though they, become victims in the patriarchal social set up, they are very much conscious of their preservation of the life. Sidhwa thinks that life must be preserved at all cost by women since one can fight oppression only when one is alive.

The present paper intends to present a comparative stance of two South Asian novels – Meghna Pant's One and a Half Wife on the one hand and Bapsi Sidhwa's The Pakistani Bride on the other. Both the writers have tried to depict the inner psyche of their women characters in their own way. While Pant has focused on her characters coming out of the Indian orthodox culture and establishing their identity in the patriarchal set up, Sidhwa, through her marginalised characters has tried to give voice to hitherto silenced women.

Transnationalism in the Migrant Characters of Bangladeshi Origin

2022-11-28T16:01:01+04:00

South Asian experience of transnationalism can be closely observed through its literatures produced by diasporic writers of this origin. When the first generation Bangladeshi migrants struggle to make a balance between two cultures and values, the second or third generation descendants are keener on digging for roots and identity. They grow up in a pluricultural/plurilingual surrounding where they are in an ongoing dialogue with the news, culture, value and history of the significant others from the country of their origin. The third gen descendants become a part of that dialogue when they look for their origin. Schuerkens argued that “the transnational migrant links the different contexts and contributes to changes in both” or vice versa. Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, Zia Haider, and Tahmima Anam tell such stories of transnational migrants of Bangladeshi origin in Brick Lane, White Teeth, In the Light of What We Know, and The Bones of Grace. The nation is not their characters’ sole point of reference, rather it is themselves and their sense of identity that is in the center of everything.

Focusing Cultural Affinity among South Asian Cultures cutting across Geo – Spatial Barrier: Rabindranath Tagore and his Multidimensional Creativity

2022-11-28T16:03:47+04:00

In a jet – set globalized world where change is the only constant as an aftermath of phenomenal progress in science and technology, we are at ease to interact with various cultures, pertaining to various countries, nations and groups. But it is indeed amazing that even in nineteenth century, a poet and litterateur of astounding magnitude in British ruled – India – Rabindranath Tagore, the first Nobel Laureate of Asia could visualize the idea of a one world across geo – political boundary. Notwithstanding his multiple visits to Europe and America, his fascination for Asian countries has been revealed through his five trips to Japan, China, Ceylon, Persia etc. In his attempt to trace the root of affinity among these cultures of South Asian countries, he had imbibed inspiration from their literature, art and above all entire lifestyle and this cultural interaction has been delineated in his travelogues like Way to Japan, In Persia etc. Japanese style of short poem Heiku composed in two/three lines had impressed him so much that he started writing Heiku poems in Bangla. Japanese drawing, flower decoration, tea ceremonies etc. were so favorite to him that he requested his nephews to visit Japan just to get training in that art.

The most poignant expression of this cultural interaction between Tagore and South Asian countries was reflected in the idea of Visva Bharati, his cherished institution where South Asian impetus is distinctly visible. The dance technique, choreography and music which he invented for his musical and dance dramas reflect profound impact of Sri Lankan Candy dance and other techniques. In the same token, Sri Lanka, bent on westernization at the cost of their indigenous culture, could make a cultural revival under the influence of Tagore.

In the present paper, there will be a humble attempt to show how cultural pluralism among diverse South Asian cultures could materialize through the aegis of Tagore, how he could institutionalize these diverse influences in his institution through exchange programme of teachers and students and above all how this idea of ingrained oneness was permeated in his creative works, in essays, travelogues, art and fine arts like dance. Tagore’s reception in South Asian countries and the impact exerted by him vice – versa can be cited as an example of cultural assimilation.

What do you see and hear from down below: Mapping the cultural and literary history of the Subaltern within India

2022-11-28T16:04:59+04:00

Many concepts – Truth, Nation, History, Language, the Literary – have been de – centred and destabilized. What they entail is elusive and remains in a constant state of flux. What we have encountered in this age is a fresh consciousness towards inescapable contamination due to blurring outlines. Spivak writes:

“On the ethical register, pre – capitalist cultural formations should not be regarded in an evolutionist way with capital as the telos… It does… operate as a baseline critique of the social Darwinism implicit in all our ideas of development…” (33)

It is widely believed that the consciousness towards crossing boundaries, interdependence, crosscultural exchange and the openness towards alterity is a more recent phenomenon. It is indeed a recent phenomenon, but in its capitalistic form. Mapping the historical, cultural and literary activities of the Subaltern, one finds out that the consciousness in question has its roots in the history and culture of the Subaltern – cultural practices which display openness towards alterity, interdependence on nature and cross – cultural absorption and exchange; a life – honouring, regenerative force which precedes the telos Capital. With Capital as telos follows a Globalization which is State – obliging in nature and renders the Subaltern as mere collateral of the development and evolution it brings about.

We delve into the works of Perumal Murugan, Mahasweta Devi, Vachanakars from the Bhakti movement in Karnataka, Baby Kamble and a few other Dalit authors, and tribal literatures from India. We trace the literary history of the subaltern, through Kathputli artists, and understand how history in the hands of the subaltern frees itself from the clutches of singular, transcendental truth and makes space for the would be or the will have happened. Learning from below we take cognizance of the convergence of all disciplines, from Humanities to Science, at a point where the Subaltern proliferates and claims itself as the all – encompassing life force – working within History, Literary studies, Cultural studies and the laws of Nature and Science.

Appropriating Feminist Paradigms in Transnational Configurations: A Comparative Study of Bharti Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Chimamnda Nigozi Adichie’s Americanah

2022-11-28T16:07:04+04:00

The historical patterns of global events which bring together women from the Third World, the women of color, the native, enslaved and immigrant carries forward the legacy of colonialism and predominant structures of global patriarchy. At the same time, the configurations of transnationalism unravels profound yet unexplored implications of movement of people, texts, languages and art forms across the world. Admittedly, the transnational feminist paradigms with emphasis on colonialist legacies and social, political, economic and political oppression of women across the globe challenges the belief that women from different regions have the same subjectivities. On this note, the paper aims to investigate appropriations of feminist paradigms, such as US multicultural feminism or negofeminism through a closed and contextualised analysis of Bharti Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Focussing on spaces of conflict and contradiction which paves path for spaces of possibility and collaboration, the paper makes a comparative study of Jasmine and Americanah as transnational feminist texts through an exploration of the relationship between global feminism and transnational cultural patterns that affect women of color and women from the Third World, thereby, seeking to propose that cross – racial, cross – national and cross – disciplinary strategies must be developed to overcome institutionalised barriers.

Tracing Cultural Syncretism in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill and Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café

2022-11-28T16:08:09+04:00

Considerable critical attention has turned towards the cross – breeding of cultures and hybridity in much of recent post – colonial analysis. Although attempts have been made to confine the use as a contemporary phenomenon, the long term historical interactivity of cultural transaction as a constant feature of diasporic experience cannot be ignored. In fact, hybridity goes all the way down as the founding experience of the earliest cultural contacts and encounters. Aijaz Ahmed also points out that: “the cross – fertilisation of cultures has been endemic to all movements of people…and all such movements in history have involved the travel, contact, transmutation, hybridisation of ideas, values, and behavioural norms” (“The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,”Race and Class, 36,3:1 – 20).

The present paper analyses Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill and Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café with a view to develop the idea of thinking about ‘hyphenated’ cultural fictions in the terms of ‘syncretism’ which has more value as a sociogeneric category than the concept of ‘hybridity.’ In a sense, the term hybridity tends to refer to an individual situation whereas syncretism acknowledges wider, ongoing, and historical processes of a more social and collective nature. It also suggests appropriation, making over, and customising in an eclectic and creative way.

Wah’s Diamond Grill (1996) explores Chinese – Canadian history, racialised politics, and the third space of a neither/nor, both/and identity. The book is rooted initially in the Diamond Grill Chinese restaurant owned by Wah’s father, and the restaurant remains throughout as a site in which, the writer speculates on a range of issues relating to his immediate family and beyond them to the complex, contradictory and often brutal history and politics of diasporic communities since the beginnings of migration to Canada in the nineteenth century.

In Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café (1990) the epicentric narrative figure is Ka Ying Woo who pieces together the tangled and the hidden history of the Wongs which starts in 1892 when Wong Gwei left China for British Columbia. The novel is based primarily in Vancouver’s Chinatown. It is an interpretive and transformative narrative, giving voices to a legacy of the repressed and the silenced.

Transnationalism and Global Cultural Dynamics in Brick Lane and Exit West

2022-11-28T16:09:19+04:00

This paper examines and explores two texts – Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003) and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017) – where characters migrate from two Asian countries, Bangladesh and Pakistan, to the West. The two authors Mohsin Hamid from Pakistan and Monica Ali from Bangladesh are settled in England now.

The title of the novel Brick Lane is borrowed from the actual hub of Bangladeshi migrants in England where Nazneen has come by way of her marriage. Nazneen tries to balance the old native traditions with the new possibilities she finds in her dialogue with culture of the host country. The novelist raises several issues of identity and hybridity of cultures and tongues related to transnationalism.

Exit West, as the title suggests, is a story of two refugees – Sayeed and Nadia – who migrate from an unnamed city where they have to follow the societal norms. Due to the war conditions and stifling religious norms they escape through magical doors to the island of Mykonos and from there to London and later to Marin in California to find their separate ways.

Immigrant identity and acculturation has been discussed and debated frequently in the literature of diaspora writers. Integration with the host culture is a dream of the migrants but non – acceptance and discrimination and 'going back' home are the reality of the day. In the present situation, the immigrants are believed to be a threat to the host country’s culture. However, they are also agents of cultural diffusion.

Both the writers examine how migration affects individuals and cultural change in the host and the home countries. These texts have many similarities but there are stark differences too. Mohsin in Exit West exposes perpetual mobility and porous borders and predicts the rise of nativist paranoia and racial intolerance. Monica Ali divulges effects of cultural exchange in the host and the home countries and also envisages the 'going home' syndrome.

This paper proposes to take up issues of ethnic identity, migrant identity, cultural disparity, and urbanization. And explore the dynamics of cultural diversity to see if there is cultural convergence or cultural polarization? Are the migrants happy with their new found diversity and hybrid identity? Do they wish to reclaim their lost identity? How do Refugee/migrants adapt to the culture of their host country? How are they different from earlier generation? The paper will also discuss the differences in adaptability to the host culture by the male and female characters.

Delineation of Inner Spaces and Angst within Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice – Candy Man: A Comparative Stance

2022-11-28T16:10:31+04:00

The recent women writers from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh exemplify the issue of gendered self – representation and feminist concern. Their works realize not only the diversity of women but the diversity within each woman. They are incorporating their experiences to make new, empowering image for women, instead of limiting the lives of woman to one ideal; they push the ideal towards the full expression of each woman’s potential. Indian land is known for its unity and diversity. It has been a witness to the most horrific as well as terrible atrocities that have ever been committed in the history of humanity. The harrowing situation of women during partition has been quite popular among the literary writers. The present study tries to delineate the wounded soul of women during the partition of India in 1947. It has described the condition of women as delineated by Amrita Pritam in Pinjar and Bapsi Sidhwa in Ice – Candy Man. The paper aims to present a comparative study as to how both the writers share different perspectives of women during partition in their masterpieces – Pinjar and Ice – candy Man respectively. In both the novels we get a clear glimpse of the atrocities of partition and the ultimate tragedy shattering the lives of women across the boundaries. Both the novelists have described the pangs of women’s suffering in a realistic way. Amrita Pritam has tried to present an Indian identity in her description of Puro’s journey of transformation from Puro to Hamida, her loss of identity and agony while on the contrary Bapsi Sidhwa has given her own description through the character of Ayah, who was kidnapped by the Ice – candy man.

Though both the novels centre around the theme of partition and the plight of women, their struggle and suffering due to the perpetrators of violence either in the name of culture, religion or societal norms during partition, the writers have tried to analyse the situation in their own way. Of course in presenting the condition of women during and after the partition both the writers have the same views. However, Sidhwa has delved deeper by depicting the trauma in a more realistic way through her feminist lens. The present paper intends to present a comparative stance of both the characters – Puro on the one hand Ayah on the other in term of pangs and trauma they suffered in the hands of their near and dear one’s against the background of partition.

Image of the Anonymous Detective: Eduardo Mendoza's Breaking and Construction

2022-11-28T16:39:56+04:00

From a cultural perspective, naming changes the naturalness of human beings and has a role in shaping characters. In the traditional impression, most of the protagonists of the story have a distinctive name “as a necessary representative symbol of a group or individual in social interaction.” Eduardo Mendoza, an outstanding Spanish writer of the generation of ‘68, has carried out bold literary experiments on his popular fictions. From 1978 to 2015, he has successively published 5 novels in the anonymous detective series (El misterio de la cripta embrujada, El laberinto de las aceitunas, La aventura del tocador de señoras, El enredo de la bolsa y la vida, El secreto de la modelo extraviada), in which contradicting the normality of detective novels, he banteringly creates an atypical detective image – a psychopath without name. This article will focus on the discussion from two perspectives of narrative techniques and satirical connotation, analyzing the “breaking” and the “construction” of Mendoza's literary expression through the anonymous detective, with the introduction of related concepts of semiotics, meta – narrative, etc. The “breaking”: The symbolic role of the identity on a name has been broken. Readers’ scrutiny of this character no longer bases on the traditional cognition and prejudice of the detective group, designed by the authoritative discourse system from the American detective fictions; Furthermore, the weakening of identity brought about by the nameless and vague image also makes the background of the times and social contradictions in the story relatively prominent and better discussed. The “construction”: On the one hand, he develops a kind of new detective fiction with national characteristics during the Spanish transition period. Borrowing parody techniques, the exaggeration and self – deprecating presented by the funny anonymous lunatic detective gets the similar inner souls of Don Quixote and of the classic images in Spanish traditional vagrant literature; On the other hand, the uncertainty implied by anonymity increases the space for reader's imagination and reflection, meanwhile, compared to each of us outsiders, which is being trapped by names, identities and various orders, the author also expresses profound thinking and satire through the image of the anonymous lunatic detective. In those ways, Mendoza has succeeded in constructing his own unique discourse system of the detective fiction.

Représentation de la foule et démocratie. Une étude démographique de Callirhoé et du théâtre grec

2022-11-28T16:41:20+04:00

Selon une convention aussi ancienne que la littérature, les foules ont la capacité de parler d’une seule voix. Certaines sont cependant plus bavardes que d’autres : dans Callirhoé de Chariton d’Aphrodisias (1^er siècle apr. J. – C.), le plus ancien des romans grecs, une foule sur trois prononce au moins une réplique (contre le 10 % des foules dans Les Ethiopiques et Les Ephésiaques et 5 % dans Leucippé et Clitophon et Daphnis et Chloé). Dans cette communication, nous nous proposons d’étudier le rapport entre la représentation des foules dans Callirhoé et les enjeux politiques du roman. Nous nous appuierons, outre que sur leur temps de parole, sur leur fonctionnement républicain (qu’il s’agisse des habitants d’une ville ou des armées de rebelles, elles élisent un chef) et sur la réactualisation de la distinction traditionnelle entre foules grecques et perses, ces dernières n’ayant le droit d’élire qu’une reine de beauté (V, 4). Une comparaison avec les foules et les chœurs du théâtre grec permettra d’éclairer le sous – texte démocratique de cette représentation, ainsi que l’éventuel rapport d’imitation entre Callirhoé, dont l’intrigue se déroule au 5^e siècle av. J. – C., et le drame athénien classique. Notre étude mobilisera, en complément des méthodes d’analyse littéraire traditionnelle, l’approche démographique élaborée par Françoise Lavocat (2020).

(Not) Naming the Other: Altering the Conceptualization of Difference in Lyric Poetry

2022-11-28T16:43:51+04:00

In Kunwar Narayan’s poem in Hindi titled “Ek Ajeeb – si Mushkil” (A Strange Problem), the speaker intends to hate particular communities but his hate is defused each time he thinks of a particular name which belongs to these communities. For instance, he wants to hate the English who colonized his country, but his love for Shakespeare overpowers his hatred for them. When one thinks of a community or a crowd, often one thinks of it as a mass of nameless people with one common trait which marks its identity irrespective of individual differences. The anonymous other who is part of this community is thought of as just another person of the same type. As soon as the other is named, the difference that individuates them is concretized. Naming turns the other from a general idea to a particular entity; one can relate to them as an individual subject and not as an abstraction. The act of naming grants alters the conceptualization of difference and grants a singular subjectivity to the other, opening up a space for dialogue. As Martin Buber notes, “Were there no genuine dialogue, there would be no poetry.”

In this paper, I will be reading select lyric poetry written in Odia, Hindi, Urdu, English et al and look at how the anonymous and the crowds are treated in lyric poetry. In lyric poetry, the speaker is mostly anonymous but the one spoken about may or may not be named. I will study how (not) naming informs the speaking/reading self’s approach to difference and shapes the possibility of a dialogue between the self and the other as presented in these poems. I would attempt to show how a pluralistic approach to alterity, instead of a binary one, makes the interplay between identity and difference in these poems more fruitful.

Binary Construction of Characters in Death in Venice: Aschenbach and the Anonymous Crowds

2022-11-28T16:45:47+04:00

Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is an intensely lyrical and aesthetic stream – of – consciousness about Aschenbach who desperately loves a young and handsome boy in his trip to recuperate in Venice and ends up in death. In the novel, there is only one character with name, that is Aschenbach who is also the narrator of the work, where the plot of the novel develops fully in his consciousness. Other characters are the anonymous and the crowds who are nameless and always neglected in the readers’ expectation and researchers’ consideration. Yet, all the characters in the novel are carefully designed for something like all the props on the stage. As a result, this paper tries to decode the character construction in the novel to reveal Thomas Mann’s writing techniques. It is found that the novel adopts a binary construction of the characters with and without names and shapes a sharp contrast between Aschenbach and the other characters in the following dimensions such as the solid – character and the illusory – character, the major character and the minor character, and the whole character and the part character. From the three dimensions, the sharp contrast reveal that solid – major – whole character is the character with name who is the protagonist of the novel. His character construction follows a solid – major – whole description, which means that the reader can obtain his full information to stand in his shoes to understand his feeling and his emotion, the extreme form can make the reader be the character in the novel. While the anonymous and the crowds are written in an illusory – minor – part way and they appear or disappear when it is necessary. They have no names and always are greeted as the boatman, the manager, the waiter, etc. They are in the opposite of the solid – major – whole construction and the reader can skip them in reading. But they exist to function the plot development and the character completeness, which is a superb symbol of the author as a writer.

Foules vulnérables

2022-11-28T16:47:01+04:00

Les foules, les masses constituent dès les travaux de Gustave Le Bon un objet de réflexion pour les historiens, sociologues psychologues, et dans le sillage des grands totalitarismes du XX^e siècle, ces foules sont objet de méfiance. Puissance, irrationalité, versatilité, adhésion aveugle à un chef charismatique, fanatisme idéologique sont censés les caractériser.

Or, au début du XXIe siècle il semblerait que dans un contexte de menace terroriste, les foules soient objet d'un autre type d'attention; elles ne sont plus un danger mais une entité frappée en son coeur par la folie meurtrière ou la répression brutale. Dans La Foule innocente, Denis Salas aborde les questions juridiques relatives à la reconnaissance du statut de victime mais aussi la question, plus complexe, de l'anonymat et de la nécessité de donner une identité à des victimes qui n'ont pas l'aura héroïque qui s'attache aux actes spectaculaires mais requièrent des rituels commémoratifs, une attention spécifique, une reconnaissance qui leur est propre. A partir de L'Attentat de Khadra et de deux films (Un pays qui se tient sage et La Fracture) et à partir d'une réflexion sur la violence terroriste mais aussi la brutalité policière contre les foules, cette contribution retracera le chemin qui mène d'une lecture péjorative de la notion de foule à celle qui semble émerger aujourd'hui, dans une revalorisation de l'anonymat et le passage d'un paradigme politique révolutionnaire à un paradigme démocratique de la multitude comme expression de l'altérité politique.

Anonymous characters in French and English novels of the first half of the 19th century

2022-11-28T16:48:05+04:00

Based on an ongoing research project that focuses on the census of fictional characters in narrative fiction of the first half of the 19th century, in England and France, I propose to present a statistical study on unnamed characters.

How many of them are there? What proportion do they represent according to genres and authors? Is the treatment of nameless characters identical in the sentimental, historical and realistic novels? Are they rather men or women? What is their social status? What kind of information does the story provide about them?

The database that has been created allows us to answer these questions, and to shed new light on what we might call the invisible proletariat of the novel.

The hypothesis I would like to put forward is that the composition of the anonymous population is essential in the appreciation of a fictional world. It is also decisive in that of what I call the demographic style of an author, a genre, an era.

Keeping One’s Own Pace; Otherness in the Crowd

2022-11-28T16:49:16+04:00

Crowds and the solitude of the individuals who are part of the crowd have been in the foreground and background of a lot of literary narratives especially those set in an urban context. They have been used to represent the fragmentation and otherness felt by the modern man. The madness of the crowds has also been the central theme of narratives featuring mob lynching and riots, discussing the power and mindlessness of the mob.

Pertinent observations about the volatile nature of crowds in the socio – political world have been made by critics such as Mary Esteve in Aesthetics and politics crowd American literature and Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Charles Baudelaire, unlike most of the approaches which consider the crowd as an oppressing and negative phenomenon, celebrates the masses in his poem “Crowds” where he depicts the crowd as a chance for the individual to be involved in their living world.

In this paper, I shall try to analyse the engagement of the individual in the crowd and with the crowd, through Anand’s Malayalam novel ‘Aalkkoottam’ (The Crowd), and other select narratives which engage with the concept of otherness and the theme of ‘individual in a crowd’. ‘Aalkkoottam’ features a group of individuals in a metropolitan city trying to ‘¹keep their own pace in the crowd’. The narrativization of otherness and how the crowds are wielded as an instrument to signify otherness are topics of interest in this paper. The paper undertakes this critical reading by drawing on conceptual frameworks developed by major existential philosophers.

The "Ornament of the Crowd" between Text and Image: Functions of Anonymous Crowds in Representations of the City

2022-11-28T16:50:29+04:00

Among the numerous depictions of the city in literature as well as in the pictorial art of the 1920s, essential elements are street alignments, factory buildings and the crowd: pedestrians, passengers, workers, schoolchildren, customers, soldiers, athletes, spectators, and onlookers symbolize a life that has been greatly changed by industrialization and modern transportation. The mass fills the streets and buildings, it is impressive or even terrifying – but in any case, individuals dissolve into the mass. If at all, figures known by name emerge from the crowd only in brief moments (for example, in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer). Crowds even tend towards abstraction: the contemporary architect and cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer identified the Ornament of the mass in the strongly symbolically charged depictions of crowds – his text with the same title is from 1927.

My lecture will analyze the representation of anonymous crowds in three very different but almost contemporaneous works: in Dos Passos’s metropolitan novel Manhattan Transfer (1925), in Walther Ruttmann’s film Berlin, Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), and in Frans Masereel’s The City (1925), a history without words consisting of one hundred woodcuts, precursor of the graphic novel. A reading with Kracauer of the anonymization and abstraction of crowds and a comparison of representation through text, image, and film will help define the functions of the crowd in the 1920s metropolitan narrative.

“Granny Wang” Archetype in Traditional Chinese Novels

2022-11-28T16:51:33+04:00

Compared to classic poems or prose, traditional Chinese novels contain more sociocultural interactions among the working-class that has been long ignored by the mainstream imagination. Old hens with folk careers, literally translated into “Three Gu Six Po”(三姑六婆) in Chinese, possessing a diminished presence in all accounts despite their ubiquitous appearance throughout Chinese society. In these texts, “Wang Po”(Granny Wang, 王婆) is often a representative member of the “Three Gu Six Po”, more a term that expresses the character’s social position than it is an identifying “name”. They may be nuns, midwives or matchmakers, simultaneously presenting as deeply layered supporting characters as well as vital plot devices to the main story’s progress. Therefore, it is valuable to examine the representation of the “Wang Po” archetype in traditional Chinese novels and consider what it implies about the society she occupies. In particular, I want to study the frequent appearance of this “Wang Po” character in Ming-Qing-era town novels, such as All Men Are Brothers, The Golden Lotus, Cases of Lord Shi, et cetera. I make two assertions:

Firstly, we can learn about career norms, social status and patterns of life of these “Three Gu Six Po” during the Ming and Qing dynasties by using “Wang Pos” as an example. Characters like “Wang Po” may simultaneously be powerful due to their social roles within the domestic politics sphere while marginalised and diminished because they are women and of a less respectable working class. Furthermore, the development of social stereotypes and contemptuous attitudes towards “Three Gu Six Po” can also be explored by studying these texts.

Secondly, as a unique character archetype to Chinese novels, “Wang Po” has deep semiotic and narrative meaning. While “Wang Po” can occasionally be vivid characters, they mostly take on a very flat and templated personality, rendering this character more so a literary device than a deeply nuanced representation of a real person.

Different from servants or witches in western countries, “Wang Pos” are both professional and a locus of domestic power in China, and gradually become a special character archetype that is hardly seen in the global literature space.

On the Identity of Nameless Characters in Abe Kobo`s Novels

2022-11-28T16:52:40+04:00

This paper focuses on characters without names who are confused and struggling with their collective identity in the fictions of Japanese post-war writer Abe Kobo. He not only creates protagonists without names or with initials, but also reflects on groupism and individual existence in post-war Japan by depriving characters of names, as in "The Wall – The Crime of Mr. Karma" where the protagonist loses his name and thus everything, or by having them renamed, as in "Dendrocacalia Crepidifolia" where the transformed "Mr. common" is named a plant by the representive of state power and in "Secret Renzezvous" where "I" accepts the codename M-73F to give up the name and self to a monitoring system. These works are rooted in the 1950s, when there was no possibility of free development and self-affirmation in a political climate of disillusionment and repression, and in the period of rapid economic growth and modernization after the 1960s, when lonely and powerless people longed to escape from urban life but without a hometown to return to. And "The Red Cocoon" and "The Flood" warn that the lack of individual identity will lead to the rebellion of the crowds and the collapse of society. The reflections on names and identity reflects the influence of Abe's ideological shifts from existentialism to surrealism and then to communism on his pioneering works.

Reading Against the Grain of Orientalism: Bint al – Shᾱṭi’’s Revision of the Classical Arabic Literary Canon

2022-11-28T17:35:19+04:00

The Arab cultural awakening (Nahḍah) saw a swathe of revisionary scholarship on literary history: Jurjῑ Zaydᾱn’s (d. 1914) Tārīkh Ᾱdāb al – Lughah al – ‘Arabiyyah, Ṭᾱhᾱ Ḥusayn’s (d. 1973) Fῑ al – shiʾr al – Jāhilī (1926), and al – Khῡlῑ’s (d. 1966) Fann al – Qawl (1947). These works represent a variety of perspectives reflecting changes in the understanding of Arabic literary heritage. While Zaydᾱn and Ḥusayn’s works were informed by orientalists, al – Khῡlῑ’ and his students – who were also Ḥusayn’s students: Bint al – Shᾱṭi’ (d. 1998), Shawqῑ Ḍayf (d. 2005), Muḥammad Mandῡr (d. 1965) and Maḥmῡd Shᾱkir (d. 1997) chafed against oriental scholarship. They proposed instead a thorough revision of traditional paradigms based on a thorough study of heritage (Awwal al – tajdῑd qatl al – qadῑm fahman).

My paper sets out to examine Bint al – Shᾱṭi’s revisionary reading of the Arabic literary canon (selection criteria, selection process, and classification) in her Qiyam Jadῑdah lil – Adab al – ‘Arabῑ al – Qadῑm and her leading role in the recovery of neglected women such as Umm al – Rasῡl, Nisᾱ’ al – Nabiyy, Banᾱt al – Nabiyy, Sukaynah Bint al – Ḥusayn, al – Sayyidah Zaynab, and al – Khansᾱ’ al – Shᾱ’irah al – Ulᾱ, and their inclusion in university curriculum.

“My Name is Tawaddud”: An Arab/Muslim female intellectual challenges established gender epistemologies

2022-11-28T17:36:37+04:00

This presentation attempts to explore the role of an Arab/Islamic intellectual in communicating and renegotiating knowledge across several generations and across cultures. It reads the socio – cultural critical work of the Moroccan feminist writer Fatema Mernissi (1940 – 2015) through the lens of Tawaddud, the famous slave – girl in the court of Harun Al Rashid who was known for her unmatched erudition and extraordinary sagacious mind. Mernissi marvels at how “in the medieval Orient, despots like Harun Ar – Rachid appreciated defiantly intelligent slave – girls” like Tawaddud while “in enlightened eighteenth – century Europe, philosophers like Kant dreamt of silent women” (Mernissi 1965:94). I will argue that by adopting Tawaddud as her role model, Mernissi seems to assert that in the Arab/Islamic tradition women have always been at the centre of the very structure of knowledge, where the preservation and circulation of cultural memory are made possible through different carriers of culture that include such forms as narratives, songs, texts and rituals. Mernissi's deployment of such female figures as Shahrazad and Tawaddud in the famous compendium of stories The One Thousand and One Nights has a two – fold role. First, it aims to deconstruct western Orientalist views of Arab/Muslim women in general. Second, it aims to promote and ultimately construct a sexually differentiated structure of the female speaking subject. Such a new speaking subject is no longer understood as an ahistorical object, but rather as a body linked to, and interwoven with, a plurality of systems: political, cultural, economic, and historical. The new feminine subject is a site of contestation where socio cultural and political struggles play out, are heard by all, refashioned and retransmitted on a woman's own terms. Mernissi’s double role as social dramaturg and decolonial feminist attests to her profound and paradigm – shifting contribution to modern Arab production of knowledge.

Arabic Literature: Challenges for Translation

2022-11-28T17:37:50+04:00

In recent years, Arabic literature has made tangible progress into acceptance as part of world literature, due largely to translation. This border – crossing process is not, however, without limitations and challenges. This panel sheds light upon the process of translating Arabic literature into other languages in general and into English in particular. It first aims to present a brief history of translation from Arabic into other languages, together with significant milestones that accompanied this process. It then explores the challenges faced by the Arabic literature in its translation journey, starting from the selection process and factors that govern it, through the translation strategies and then the publication and distribution processes.

Vers les modèles culturels excentrés – Le Cas de la traduction arabe de la littérature géorgienne

2022-11-28T17:39:23+04:00

Pour développer la critique de la traduction, les traductologues ont fourni des efforts à même de mettre en lumière la nature culturelle et politique de la traduction d’une part, et d’autre part l’interaction du sujet traduisant avec l’activité complexe de lecture ainsi que le lien très étroit existant entre les écrits en langue cible et la traduction comme forme particulièrement poussée de réécriture.

Se basant sur le lien entre Traduction , Lecture et Écriture , nous tenterons dans cette étude d’analyser le rôle de la traduction arabe de littératures tenues éloignées par rapport à de présumés centres –(La littérature géorgienne entre autres ) – dans le renforcement de la tendance nouvelle de la créativité littéraire arabe , caractérisée par le franchissement des frontières culturelles et la critique de l’eurocentrisme .

New trajectories in Postcolonial narratives: The Predicament of the Immigrant in the Host Country in Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans

2022-11-28T17:40:34+04:00

During the last few decades Postcolonial studies have evolved to a considerable extent. The abundance of Postcolonial writings and rising polemical debates among Postcolonial writers, scholars and critics are benchmarks that marked the evolvement of Postcolonialism in the realm of intelligencia. Among the most prominent and innovative key – figures of Postcolonial and diaspora writers is Laila Lalami. This paper seeks to explore new routings in Postcolonial writings. Therefore, the dynamic shift from locality to cosmopolitanism inscribed within Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans (2019) will be discussed. How the migrant’s moving identity is manifested in the Western host country through the prism of the Self and Other dynamics will be given much emphasis. Methodologically speaking, Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism will be used as a tool to discuss the polyphony of the novel; by the same token, this study draws upon Postcolonial theory; concepts such as displacement, moving identities, and Homi Bhabha’s third space will be used as tools of analysis.

Alternative media Role in Spreading Local Arabic Cultures: Arab creativity in the Global Cultural Dialogue

2022-11-28T17:41:34+04:00

This study seeks to investigate the following points:

The globalization of local cultures and their inclusion in the global dialogue.
Harnessing the mechanisms of scientific research in modern technology sciences to highlight the bright interface of the local Arab cultures. and creating cultural propaganda directed from the countries of the South to those of the North.
Encouraging Arab researchers to undertake digital research projects and publish them in contemporary media.

The Western Travel Writing in the Arab World: In – between Writing and Imaginary Representations

2022-11-28T17:42:56+04:00

This study falls within the framework of displaying a re – imagining of global literatures in general, and the travel text in particular as a matrix of visions that transcend identities, cultures, and races.

The travel text functions beyond publication and reporting limits to the imagination, poetry, stories, and other elements. By analysing Pierre Loti’s In Morocco, the main aim of this paper is to rethink Moroccan cultural history through the ‘French Other’, who draws lines between Western and Arabic societies (French / Moroccan). From the methodological perspective, through the exploration of the concepts of comparative description, cultural memory, narration of history, and cultural comparison, the cultural approach reveals how the travellers can imaginatively cross patio – temporal, cognitive, and language boundaries between French and Moroccan cultures on the one hand. On the other hand, the cultural approach seeks to disclose the European hegemony and centralism that wove a fixed image of the other / the marginalized / the subordinate…etc. This paper will be tackled from the following axes:

Crossing from travelling report to transracial literary fiction.
Crossing between different cultures spatially, cognitively, and linguistically through the centralization perspective.

Mnemonic Border Crossing on Egyptian Grounds: Novelists Reimagining the Past, Readers Reshaping Cultural Identity

2022-11-28T17:44:06+04:00

Over the past two decades, Egyptian novelists have been crossing temporal borders and topographical terrains in what critics have marked as a burgeoning fascination with historical narratives. Works by established authors or debut novelists whose combined literary prowess, linguistic mastery, and epistemological ability to redeem the past and embrace alternative perspectives have taken the market by surprise setting the bar quite high. The fascination, gaining momentum, became steady creative interest in representing history, producing historical meaning, and generating historical thinking; all metamorphosing into narrative projects (e.g., trilogies) or individual works. Unfazed by the postmodern “ironic distance” and the negativity of a “nostalgia revival”, authors set out to “challenge and critique official historiographies and other dominant images of the past” (often prefabricated and prepackaged) which have long compromised Egyptian identity. They reimagine what history has forgotten, what other historical fiction has missed, turning the imaginary and fictional into inventive and enjoyable acts of memory, “an activity” Mieke Bal argues, “occurring in the present, in which the past is continuously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future”. An equal fascination with those “memory texts”, combined with an enthusiastic reception from readers, has met the momentum, which coincided with an expanding Egyptian readership very much connected to the spread of highly modernized and stylized bookshops, e – book clubs over social media, and marketing strategies that brought readers back to the reading shelf, and catered for the retro stance. The present study explores Egyptian mnemonic narratives, like the acclaimed trilogies of novelist Reem Bassiony, The Mamluk Trilogy اولاد الناس: لاثلاةاا الاااسلةاك ) 2017(and Ibn Tulun Trilogy) 2021(ن قطةةع : ثلاثيةةا ن ط لو ون, and Jewish Exodus novel The Papers of Shamoun Al – Masry (2021) أورنق شةة عون ن صةة by debut novelist Osama El – Shazly, and their contribution to the new Egyptian historical novel as identity projects.

Thwarted Movement of Body in Media Art, between Defiguration and Embodiment

2022-11-28T17:45:37+04:00

This study examines the characteristics of mechanical images as representatives of media art that models artistic body, to examine where the experiment between ‘defiguration’ of technical reproduction and ‘embodiment’ of media work is headed. The purpose of this study is ultimately to expand the trend of modern media art and its discursive possibilities across the humanities and technologies. But as a start, I will focus on the existing connections between the body art and media art and move on to the relationship between humans and new media/machine. Today’s media studies involves much of technology discourse, rewriting cultural manifesto for the age of artificial intelligence. The information discourse in this age of A.I. requires an understanding of media that represent the intelligence itself beyond being just the tools. Through this, this study will examine what kind of body media art, which explores the communication method between the medium and the body, embodies in what kind of world. It will be comparable to the cloud of Phantasmagoria, which has always succeeded in deluding in the crossroad of technology and art. In short, employing Deleuze's concept of a machinic phylum, I will argue that media art conduct experiments on the coexistence and intersection of new species/existences, above human beings, machine, and nature. Defiguration refers to forms that are not the identical organ belonging to human/nature, and the newly created body cannot be constrained to the same plane of gravity. The media – as – nature such as clouds represent the free movement of human in media, made from defiguration and embodiment.

Wearable technology in Media Art: in the case of post – mediatic form

2022-11-28T17:46:56+04:00

When Marshall McLuhan stated, “Clothing, [is] an extension of the skin…” (Understanding Media, 129), the technologies were already out – running over imagination. Further into ‘Extensions of Man’, media are extensions of not only our bodies but also our psyches. In the centuries before the technology changed our perspective on media as a conceptual object; thus, forcing us to accept the technology to question ‘How to write traditions in post – mediatic turn in the Art?’ This presentation discusses the roles and meanings of (visual) media in a mediatized society which are inter – transmedial visual art mediums as creative methods. As well as how the performative motifs surface in contemporary arts; especially wearable technology in performance arts. Such as a video installation & performance artist ‘Bill Shannon’ who explores body – centric video installations through technology to incorporate movement practice of ‘extension of the skin’ as McLuhan stated. The two main aspects of this discussion are; 1) how have media developed from the time of early cinema up to current new media as a form of Art; 2) How technology changed along with post – mediatic turn in cultural forms. These aspects will try to discuss through Bill Shannon’s arts covering the possible outlooks; how digital media facilitate new approaches of wearable technology in the influence of media and hardware versus traditional concepts of Art.

Our Belief on Body Experiencing the Virtual World

2022-11-28T17:48:06+04:00

This presentation attempts to analyze how our bodies perceive and experience Virtual Reality(VR). It begins with comparing the ways of visualization of VR with the ones of cinema. While they both present images, I point out that one of the crucial differences is related to subjectivity, the mode of viewer’s reception. Cinematic viewers are induced to forget their bodies under the circumstances of ‘blackbox,’while in contrast, VR viewers are constantly forced to move and act according to what they are shown. It does not mean that VR technologies enforce viwers’ subjectivity, but rather their ‘belief’ on subjectivity. In other words, it summons our belief of ownership of the viewing experience through actions with our body. It seems like we have control over our body in VR, but in fact, we are needed to move according to the constructed world, not by ourselves. The notion of Psychotechnics suggested by Hugo Munsterberg and some contemporary discussions in cognitive science are brought into this discussion. I argue that the body, allowed to participate in the virtual world, functions more in the psychological layers, which deserves more of our focus.

Traduction comme Jetztzeit chez Benjamin

2022-11-29T11:17:43+04:00

Benjamin dans son essai Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers (1923) conçoit, entre autres images, la traduction comme vie. Ce seraient là les conditions minimales pour la survie (Übertleben) de l'original, sa continuation dans une vie historique et sublime (Fortleben), dans laquelle l'original change, évolue et grandit, atteignant la rédemption lorsqu'il touche l'atmosphère la plus haute et la plus pure de la langue. Lors de sa transformation, la traduction ne récupère pas entièrement le texte original, car elle se tourne toujours vers un texte passé qui est encore vivant dans le présent, en lui donnant une vie différée, mais qui n'est pas guidée par l'idée d'une succession homogène de l'original, comme une marche incessante et linéaire de progrès (Fortschritt). Au contraire, le concept de Jetztzeit chez Benjamin, temps saturé de « maintenant », permet aux textes littéraires une vie révolutionnaire agglomérant de manière synchrone le présent et le passé. Dans ce scénario, c’est au traducteur la tache de libérer le texte original de cette tension, énergie motrice du « saut du tigre » dans le passé, de la traduction à l'original lui – même. En résumé, ce travail cherche à comprendre l’idée de la traduction chez Benjamin comme Jetztzeit, une temporalité sous tension qui pousse l'original au futur à travers une vie sans cesse renouvelée, mais éphémère. La traduction est un maintenant et, en tant que telle, elle ne peut pas être reproduite, c'est un instant, c’est unique, généré par le traducteur dans lequel le présent rompt avec l'original supposé encapsulé dans le passé, le faisant survivre dans le maintenant dans a une expérience de réélaboration, une recomposition qui regarde le futur, la certitude de la périssabilité de la traduction elle – même.

Hantises de l’ingestion: représentations contemporaines et mythologie ancienne. Blasted de Sarah Kane au miroir de Procné et Philomèle

2022-11-29T11:20:20+04:00

Les questions de partages alimentaires et d’ontologie des chairs sont d’une actualité évidente, au point de paraître archétypales sinon artificielles pour d’éventuels détracteurs des approches critiques contemporaines, accusées de céder au présentisme. Or, ces questions non seulement sont posées en des termes philosophiques depuis l’Antiquité mais elles sont problématisées théâtralement grâce à des scènes de transgression qui permettent d’en déployer les différents aspects. Cette communication souhaite relire le scandale suscité par la scène d’anthropophagie de Blasted de Sarah Kane (1995) à la lumière des représentations de la vengeance cannibale à l’époque de la première modernité (Correr, Parabosco, Shakespeare).

Ethics and Literature: the present change in the light of the past

2022-11-29T11:22:22+04:00

In the last ten years, ethical issues have become central to literary production: the debate on gender and ethnic equity, on environmental or animal issues, for example, are not only addressed in novels as political issues, but as moral problems concerning the individual commitment of the reader. Whether critics are opposed or in favour, it is clear that a change is underway. The rise of self – help novels and the emphasis on reparative literature are a sign of the increased importance of ethics in literary production and reception. According to Niklas Luhmann (1989), this change is not new, but has been recurring cyclically, in times of crisis, since the Renaissance. In order to understand today's changes, it is therefore interesting to study their history. Around 1570, a major change in mentality brought about a paradigm shift which, in some respects, could help explain the present change. Late Renaissance literature was also seen as a form of self – help, the religious turmoil of the time led to increased reflection on the didactic power of literature, and the rise of censorship led to a theorisation of the ethical issues of the text and its power of persuasion. The case of Boccaccio's Decameron, which was considered a linguistic and ethical model at the beginning of the 16th century and was banned and burnt at the end of the century as an immoral book, will allow us to better understand the links between ethics and literature in Western society, in the past as well as in the present debate.

Translation, Activism and Dissent in Contemporary Protest Movements in India

2022-11-29T11:24:03+04:00

Taking a cue from Mona Baker’s call to bring translation as a central practice in the political arena if networks of solidarity “are to become more effective and reflect the values of horizontality, non – hierarchy, and pluralism that inform contemporary protest movements” this paper maps out the space of translation within the political economy of contemporary protest movements in India. The paper sees translation as a range of modalities and types of interactions that make visible and audible the voice of the other as intimately linked and enmeshed with the voice of/for the self. I explore instances of multilingual translations in contemporary protest movements in India as acts of affiliation and activism, nurturing networks of solidarity “across and along side communities of difference”, as conversation, and as “integral elements of the revolutionary project”. Such ‘public’ translations are constantly negotiating to reflect, to challenge and to transcend boundaries of space, time, and language. The paper further explores how translation not only acts as conversation, but also shapes the very spaces of protests, in the process translating the streets through its interaction with bodies gathered in these public demonstrations as a basis for political action and political collectives.

Translation and Bibliotherapy as Healing: A Comparative Approach to Reparation

2022-11-29T11:25:14+04:00

Translation and bibliotherapy, though they are cost – effective and versatile, can be deemed as a supplementary treatment to support the good mental health. This paper examines translation and bibliotherapy as healing with a comparison of uses in terms of their approach and effect to reparation for ensuring a good mental health. Their differences lie in that translation is vertical and output – based, whereas bibliotherapy is horizontal and input – based with the similarity of the use of mental and cognitive activities, such as translation and reading. The choice of the genres in literature also exerts differences on the effect of translation and bibliotherapy as a means of healing and reparation. Through qualitative research for the findings, it is found that translation and bibliotherapy can be considered as a cost – effective and efficient supplement for supporting the good mental health.

Uneasy Alliances: Visvasahitya, Comparative Literature and National Literature in India

2022-11-29T11:26:58+04:00

My paper concentrates on translation in the context of India, a space that is essentially multilingual. In a country that has around 700 languages, translation has a particular importance. I focus on how hierarchies and injustices can be challenged and dismantled through translation in a context like this.

My paper focuses particularly on the hierarchies between the 22 ‘scheduled’ languages and the other 700 – odd languages that co – habit the Indian linguistic national imaginary. What role can translation play in suturing the rifts between such language communities, and in remedying the discrepancy between these communities? In trying to answer this question, I shall look closely at the translational activities of the Centre for Translation of Indian Literatures (CENTIL), Jadavpur University, which focuses primarily on indigenous and marginalized languages. What is the potential of the collaborative workshop mode that CENTIL uses with respect to such translation projects? Does it hold any special promise to expand the national imaginary to make it more inclusive, and to enrich the literary/oral culture of ‘marginalised’ language traditions, and to contribute to a more inclusive model of heritage as envisaged in the UN Sustainable Development Goals? These are questions I shall try to negotiate with.

I would also take up the case of Bangla Dalit literature, a relatively recent corpus, which is curiously finding recognition and respectability through a spurt of English translations aimed not only at the rest of India but also at a global audience even as the original body of works continues to be published by niche publications, and largely ignored by ‘mainstream’ Bangla publication houses.

Translation and Identity Formation in Transcultural Communicating Practice – Analysis of Representation of China in the First Half of Twentieth – Century

2022-11-29T11:29:45+04:00

Translation and Transmission of John Keats in China (1949-1979)

2022-11-29T11:34:21+04:00

The years of 2021 witnesses both the bi – centennial anniversary of John Keats’s death, and the centennial anniversary of the Chinese translation and transmission of his poems. The latter one – hundred – years history can be divided into three stages: the beginning in the first half of the twentieth century (mainly during the period of Republic of China), the development from 1949 (when People’s Republic of China was founded) to 1979 (when the Great Cultural Revolution ended), and the flourishing new stage since China’s Reform and Opening up. It is generally assumed that Keats’s works are underappreciated during the first thirty years after the founding of People’s Republic of China, and thus the translation and transmission of Keats in China has been less discussed than necessary. This paper sorts out data concerning Keats being translated, introduced, and transmitted in the years of 1949-1979, and makes comments on the achievements obtained by Chinese translators and scholars. It attempts to argue that Chinese translators and scholars have made continuous efforts, and contributed considerably in the following fields: the translation of Keats’s poems and letters, the composition and translation of literary history textbooks and literary theory textbooks concerning Keats, the studies and transmissions of Keats’s poems and letters, etc. The translation and transmission of Keats in China (1949-1979) have inherited the tradition created by Chinese Keatsian scholars in the first half of the twentieth century, and laid solid foundations for the translation and transmission of Keats in China’s New Era of Reform and Opening – up.

Migration and/as Translation: Negotiations of New Forms of Sexual Subjectivity and Reparations of Colonial Legacies in Nina Bouraoui’s Autofictional Writing

2022-11-29T11:36:40+04:00

As Walter Benjamin has famously remarked, the translator’s task lies in “aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the [original] work in the alien one.” This paper argues that these very echoes and their reverberations reflect the performativity of translation and/as counter – translations as they intersect with the social, historical, and cultural conditions that produce them, thereby exposing translation not only as a socially – mediated and ideologically – constructed practice, but as one that is potentially dissident and resistant to unimpeded correspondence or reciprocity between and within languages. The performativity of translation is complicated further in the autofictional work of queer writers from the Maghreb who have emigrated to France, thus providing a discursive space to translate their emergent sense of self textually into literary form through the crossing of borders, a translation that is never a simple reiteration or reflection of the self in its present understanding at the time of writing, but always already a performative enunciation of identity, but only partially or contingently so. Given that the processes of migration and diaspora incite strategies of agency, resistance, negotiation, and struggle in the overlapping spaces between cultures in the attempt to bridge geographical distance from the homeland, while negotiating new identities alongside the pressures of a foreign space in the culture of settlement, migration and translation operate together as mediating between hegemonically – defined identities, geopolitical spaces, and cultural practices where alternative modes of perception and identification are negotiated, while remaining constituted by residues of difference that refuse domestication, equivalence, or complete integration. In this sense, migration and/as translation serves as a metaphor for queer as a transgressive practice that disturbs and destablises the legacy of imperial relations and essentialized notions of origins, producing new, unassimilable circuits of gender and sexual difference.

These highly complex textual and political strategies respond to the fact that queer francophone writers from the Maghreb, such as Nina Bouraoui, negotiate and produce new translations of sexual subjectivity as a shifting site of signification and meaning given that Franco – Maghrebi spaces of sexual dissidence are inflected by globally – circulating discourses and embodiments of queerness, reducible neither to received conceptions or norms of homosexuality, presently or historically, in the Maghreb, nor to Western forms of sexual identity or sexual politics. These translational performances, which will be examined in Bouraoui’s autofictional trilogy Garçon Manqué, Poupée Bella, and Mes Mauvaises Pensées, occur within the French language as its received meanings are transgressed and reworked through the processes of translocation and transcultural negotiation, yet not without acknowledgement of a history of colonialism, as Bouraoui reminds us early on in Garçon Manqué, which takes place in her Algerian homeland, prior to her family’s emigration to France, ‘je viens de la guerre,’ a reference to the French – Algerian War of 1954 – 1962 which ended colonial rule in Algeria, and which she did not witness personally but has inherited its effects. The paper argues that migration and/as translation operates in Bouraoui’s work as a mode of being and as an interminable process, as a way of negotiating shifts in meaning between Algerian cultural heritage and lesbian identity in the space between two different cultural worlds, and as a way to rethink and repair the personal effects of the historic colonial wound of French – Algerian relations whilst living in France.

Scattered speculations on translation and/as repair

2022-11-29T11:38:04+04:00

While the idea of reparative reading practices (Eve Sedgwick) have been around for a couple of decades my paper is an attempt to speculate upon translation as a generative act of reparation (Gayatri Spivak, Emily Apter) while keeping visible the idea that ‘repair’ also comes to us from other, more ‘making’ disciplines like design. To do this I will engage with two recent theoretical provocations that I believe also serve as productive points of departure for thinking together translation and repair: Fred Moten’s take on repair and/as making, and Arturo Escobar’s decolonial arguments about rethinking the relationship between design and the humanistic disciplines.

Translation and Bibliotherapy as Healing: A Comparative Approach to Reparation

2022-11-29T11:39:13+04:00

Cuir/Queer Translation and Planetary Repair

2022-11-29T11:40:38+04:00

Puerto Rican writer Raquel Salas Rivera publishes self – translated bilingual volumes of poetry that challenge the colonial status – quo, reflect the impact of climate change, mourn the loss of friends and the violence against queer and trans individuals, explore cuir joy, and craft new language that would include him and all his non – binary identities. In this paper, I draw on concepts of eco – translation in which the translation environment expands to include all elements of a global discursive supply chain. Through this framework, I illuminate the way Salas Rivera maps new relationships with embodied experiences outside of limiting gender binaries onto new political and environmental relationships between Puerto Rico and the USA and between human societies and the planet in the age of the Anthropocene. His “Note on Translation” in Elegy ends with a demand: “learn to love what you cannot consume. decolonize to heal” (4). In this paper, I take up this challenge and learn from Salas Rivera to identify ways of using translation to build solidarity that rejects colonialist and consumer – driven frameworks to instead repair or invent other ways of being.

Don Mee Choi’s Radical Historiographies

2022-11-29T11:42:09+04:00

This essay attempts to think through two things: 1) what a feminist refusal to translate might look like, and 2) what the implications of such a gesture might be with respect to our engagements with history as written and lived practice. Reading two works by Korean / American poet and translator Don Mee Choi—2016’s Hardly War and the 2020 translation manifesto Translation is a mode = Translation is an anti – neocolonial mode—this essay considers how Choi narrates key events in the (still – ongoing) Korean war across different registers in English and Korean, with an emphasis on the political work her refusals and omissions perform. Choi’s anti neocolonial politics—shaped as they are by “the knowledge that not only our lives and struggles are interconnected, but that our languages are also interconnected by histories of imperialism, colonialism, and militarism, and by increasing economic interdependence” – recognize translation work as an ambivalent historiographic practice, one with the capacity to recuperate and remember, but also to injure and cause harm. Though Choi explores the negative valences of translational refusal through her treatment of media accounts of the Korean War, her own refusals to translate are offered up in service of the forgotten victims of this forever conflict. By refusing to translate these subjects out of history, Choi writes them into a distinct counternarrative—a counternarrative that is now part of a crucial dialogue with other feminist translators and activists working through the legacies of war and imperialism in the Asia Pacific region.

Trans – Cultural Fan Fiction as Translation, and the Reparation of Being a Chinese

2022-11-29T11:43:14+04:00

Being a Chinese is not without trauma when facing the Western civilizations. The feeling of being inferior remains even as China witnessed a rapid growth over the past decades, as the national history education keeps reasserting China’s failures when encountering the West (like the history of being colonized). Western discriminations and hostility against the Chinese are also readily accessible through the internet, aggravating the cultural conflicts.

In this paper, I will argue that by writing and reading Chinese fan fiction based on Western source texts, Chinese people achieve an interaction with the West which repairs the trauma that they feel for being Chinese. “Fan fiction” refers to the re – writings of already existing texts, and I pay special heed to one Chinese re – writing of Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice of a Poor Noble Princess (2013) by Fengliu Shudai. The fan fiction then is a Chinese version of the English classic, and broadly speaking, a translation of it. In this translation, the heroine of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is translated to be a Chinese girl who interacts with the English environment in which she lives. Thus, on the one hand, the fan fiction offers a narrative space where the author, together with readers, fantasize their desired interactions with the West, in which the English environment is in return depicted as an inferior other to the Chinese heroine. On the other hand, the validity of Chinese heroine requests a recognition from the English environment for it is endowed with the authority of the source text, hence reaching a reconciliation with the West. A trans – cultural fan fiction, as a type of translation, thus provides an opportunity to form a dynamic interaction between the Chinese and the Western which dissolves a traumatic and antagonistic relationship.

Translation as Fission: repairing towards eco – holism

2022-11-29T11:44:22+04:00

Richard Feynman’s statement, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" (1959) compelled us to look beyond conventional laws to comprehend the nature and motion of nanoparticles, which do not obey orthodox physical laws such as Newton's. Following his statement, I argue, that we must descend and search for unconventionality that will challenge the compartmentalization of the world around geographies of inequality. In the Global North, conceptual comprehension of translation was impeded by the dominant cognition of obliteration of difference through translation. That would be an existential dilemma if translation can be seen as a ‘recovery’ (Mukherjee 2004). In order to destabilize the very primacy of the ‘original’, I will incorporate the Assamese term for translational act ‘bhāṇgani’, literally means ‘to breakdown’, ‘to disrupt’, and hints a splitting or fission of the mūl (original). A more nuanced understanding of the word recommends moving away from the Global North's hegemonic idea of translation. Incorporating a north – eastern Indian term will further politicize the issue of inclusion and exclusion.

We know that exciton – fracturing larger atoms releases huge quantities of renewable, carbon – free energy. Similarly, bhāṇgani, I argue, alludes to re – assemblage the original text into a new text that survives in the new realm, where the translator works as an external actor and the process releases energy, rewiring the translator's creative brain towards environmental patch – up, reminding Benjamin’s idea of translation as a patchy work (1955). In the process of fission, the original text's structure is broken up into bits, which are then reassembled into a new text bearing the imprint of new environs. Using etymological understanding of bhāṇgani, can we then design a new paradigm, dubbed 'translation as fission,' to achieve restitution through molecular bond breaking and forming? Can we heal environmental calamities and sustain world peace and ecological holism by using ‘eco – translatology' (Hu 2020) and a phrase from the Global South?

Teaching the Translation of Crisis: Climatic and Pandemic

2022-11-29T11:45:34+04:00

There is an intracultural, intralinguistic translation problem when it comes to climate change. As George Marshall asks in his 2014 book Don’t Even Think about It: “no scientist will ever be able to say with complete certainty that any particular weather event is caused by climate change. But why does this prevent all discussion?”

We are currently in the midst of a public health crisis that has people turning to information on daily risk levels. This kind of reporting has such a direct bearing on our ability to plan our day – to – day lives that it has come to be as important to staying informed as checking the weather report.

And yet reports of extreme weather usually come too late for us to plan around – making them the great exception to the urgency of weather reporting. But even if extreme weather were predictable, we would still respond to it the way we respond to other weather reporting: as something out of our control. Not so with the pandemic. The discourse around the global pandemic is charged with calls to solidarity (and dissenting cries for individual freedom). But while the pandemic has created a sense of urgency surpassing the weather and a sense of personal responsibility that was bound to be politicized, climate change continues to look like a faceless problem of the future.

This paper will compare the two crises from the perspective of teaching, having taught courses that put these two topics front and center, both of them in the context of a translator training department at the University of Mainz. Translator training is a matter of attunement to rhetorical nuance and cultural context – every bit as it is about foreign language abilities and intercultural competence.

Oriental text as a tool for reconstructing the dialogical structure of artistic reflection in the late lyrics of M.U. Lermontov

2022-11-29T12:56:57+04:00

One of the urgent tasks of modern literary comparative studies is the study of the logic of the formation of artistic consciousness and reflection as one of the principles of its self – development. In this regard, the problem of artistic comprehension of the theme of the East, Eastern culture by M. U. Lermontov, despite many years of research interest, has not exhausted its potential in scientific discourse.

In the report on the material of "oriental works" of the mature lyrics of Lermontov ("Dispute", "Dream", "Cliff", "They loved each other ...", "Tamara", "Date", "Leaf"), the logic of evolution will be considered the artistic world of the poet in the framework of the search for originality in the Russian – West – Eastern artistic interaction. A comparative analysis of the artistic interpretation of this topic in the works of Russian and European authors – contemporaries of Lermontov will allow highlighting and comprehending both the universal and the creatively individual in understanding the problems associated with the reflective worldview and its relativistic functions in the mature Lermontov.

The object of the research is the reflective type of consciousness as one of the basic principles of image creation and generation of meaning in Lermontov's lyrics.

The methodological basis of the research was the work of M.M. Bakhtin, A.F. Loseva, U.M. Lotman, R. Barthes, M. Foucault, J. Derrida, J. Deleza, U. Kristeva and others.

Angel vs Demon in A. Rubinstein`s/P. Viskovatov`s and A.F. Offerman`s librettos which are based on the poem “Demon” by M. Lermontov

2022-11-29T13:01:08+04:00

The scientific report considers the libretto "The Demon" by A. Rubinstein/P. Viskovatov and the German translation of the self – titled by A. F. von Offerman. One of the main purposes of this paper is to identify the main differences between the original text and its translation into German. The second important purpose is to compare two characters of the texts: Demon and his foe – Angel.

It is a fact that the libretto is based on the original text of the poem, but it is worth mentioning that tests went through several transformations. These transformations significantly have changed the original ideas of the poet. The last scene of the libretto of the poem “Demon” is considered to be the ideological culmination, which signified the phenomenon of the Demon's moral death. The noted scene plays an important role not only in the Russian libretto but also in the German one. It seems reasonable to consider Tamara`s death of vital importance to the libretto because this scene decides the essence and fate of the Demon's existence: a return to the bosom of God or his final fall. In both texts, to achieve a high goal, the Demon is confronted with two obstacles: on the one hand, he cannot find Tamara's love, and on the other hand, the Demon does not heed the moral suasion of the Angel. This character is controversial in many means. Though Angel is considered to be his foe, he is also Demon`s spiritual mentor. Angel`s destiny is to show the way to the Demon`s salvation, or to his final chord.

Phenomena of M.YU.Lermontov

2022-11-29T13:02:29+04:00

Russian poet, novelist, dramaturgy M.YU.Lermontov is a world – wide known master of XIX century literature. Born in 1814, 15 years after birth of A.S.Pushkin, Lermontov inherited his artistic majesty and became equally significant for Russian literature and culture. Lermontov was killed in a duel (1841) being 26 years and 9 months of age, however he left after himself a great literary legacy: more than four hundreds of lyrical poems, about 40 narrative poems, five plays, three novels, and others. The main theme of Lermontov’s writings was a mystery of human soul. This phenomena received poetic reflection in passionate lyrics of Lermontov,s early period and in greatest lyrical cycle of last year of his life (1841), such as in the verse ‘I come alone on the road’. Philosophical, spiritual problem of a man as a subject of being was the deepest idea of the Lermontov’s poem “Demon”. The novel “Hero of our time’ became a reaction to the most pressing question: what is the existential essence of human life. The major intimate issue of Lermontov’s works founds as a quest for ideal love.

The nature of the Caucasus as perceived by Russian romantics and exiled Polish poets

2022-11-29T13:03:43+04:00

The Caucasus in a poetic aspect was opened to the Russian reader by romantic writers -- A.S. Pushkin, A.S. Griboyedov, M.Yu. Lermontov, Decembrist poets.

The nature of the Caucasus became a source of romantic inspiration, a kind of East, which was a necessary component for all poets of that period.

In fact, at the same time or one decade later, after the uprising in Poland, thousands of its participants, also members of secret Polish national liberation organizations were exiled to the Caucasus after the uprising in Poland. The exiles created in Georgia, in fact, a branch of Polish romantic poetry, in the years 1830-1850. the so-called group of "Caucasian poets" functioned.

Undoubtedly,, the perception of the Caucasus by Russian and Polish authors contains many common features that are defined by the philosophy and poetics of romanticism. However, there are also undoubted differences.

The nature of the Caucasus is admired by Russian poets, the mountains are a symbol of greatness and beauty. Polish authors, of course, also poeticize the mountains, many of the exiles saw them for the first time and are amazed at the grandeur of the harsh nature.

But a different feeling prevails among them. The exiles were sent to the Caucasian War, hundreds died in campaigns and battles. For Polish poets, the mountains of the Caucasus often evoke feelings of anxiety, sadness, and anxiety . They realize that they have been torn out of their native environment forever and are forced to participate in a war that they consider unjust.

The image of Prometheus is given a new interpretation by the "Caucasians" - one of the cross-cutting ones in their work. It is projected onto personal destiny. Prometheus is perceived not as a hero who made people fire; in his figure one can feel not a gigantic charge of achievement, but precisely the fact of captivity and dependence. That is, the first part of the myth is, as it were, taken out of the brackets, is not present in the text and even in the mind. The main thing in the myth is the tragic side of the consequences of the heroic deed - punishment.

When Late Qing Intellectuals’ “Imperial Eyes” Encountered Asian Imaginations: To Revisit Su Manshu and His Writing of Java

2022-11-29T13:06:38+04:00

Homing in on Su Manshu蘇曼殊 (1884 – 1918), a revolution monk in late Qing China, and his political editorial “A talk on Nanyang” (Nanyang hua, 南洋話), this paper aims to unpack the dynamic relationship between the late Qing intellectuals’ pan – Asian imagination and the anti – colonialist sentiment in the context of global imperialism in the early twentieth century. Instead of depicting and highlighting Java or Nanyang itself in his writing, Su Manshu stressed the historical role that overseas Chinese played in exploiting and constructing Java. This, however, resulted in the writing of Java without Java, which alludes to the hierarchical power difference of the China – Java relationship at the time. When Su Manshu evoked an intimate tie between China and Java to resist against the Western colonialism, he failed to criticise the binary opposition between the white race and the yellow race. In Su Manshu’s envision, replete with the reference to anti – colonialism, Nanyang emerged not only as an anti – Western discourse to overcome the west – centred universal civilizational imagination, but also a method to re – orient the status of modern China in Asia. Moreover, it should be emphasized that Su’s Sino – centric understanding of the China – Java solidarity resonated with other late Qing intellectuals’ observation where Nanyang was considered to be subordinated to China. Such findings thus allow us to uncover the subtle and blurry demarcation between imperialism and nationalism which has not been thoroughly examined in the historical analysis when searching for modern Asian order in the period from 19^th to 20^th century.

The 1957 Asian Film Week: An Alternative Imagination of “Asian Cinema”

2022-11-29T13:07:37+04:00

Drawing on archival materials at Shanghai Municipal Archives, this paper traces the forgotten history of the Asian Film Week held in China in 1957. It engages with two recent discussions of cultural politics during the Cold War era. First, studies on Chinese cinematic relationships with the world during the Cold War either highlight the Soviet influence on or the Western elements in Chinese cinema, but ignored the cinematic interconnectedness and cooperation between China and other Asian countries. Second, there is a growing interest in the network among anticommunist filmmakers in Asia, especially the Asia – Pacific Film Festival from the 1950s to the 1970s, leaving the efforts and experiments from the other side untouched. With a historical examination of the 1957 Asian Film Week held by and in China, this paper suggests that the models of Sino – Soviet alliance and Western influence may not cover all the practices of cinematic exchange between China and the world during the Cold War, and the imagination of “Asian Cinema” did not limit itself to one version only. Screening films from 15 Asian countries simultaneously in 10 Chinese cities, this Film Week became a most prominent cultural event in the late 1950s China. This paper traces the emergence and development of Asian Film Week in the context of not only the marginalization of Asian films in Western and Soviet film festivals, but also the efforts of the “free Asia” to claim “Asian Cinema” or “Asianness” during the Cold War. It investigates how and to what extent this Film Week as a conscious attempt acted to build an alliance among Asian filmmakers, articulate anti – imperialist agenda and aesthetics, and construct a transnational “Asian cinema” as an alternative to Hollywood, Soviet cinema, and the other “Asian cinema” from the anti – communist bloc.

Asian Phonocentrisms: Between History and Method

2022-11-29T13:09:16+04:00

Phonocentrism is many things: a set of assumptions about natural languages; an anthropological ideology; a theory of subjectivity; a basis for world literary history –to name just a few. But for scholars of early modern and modern East Asia, phonocentrism is often understood to be a Western concept whose intrusion into Asian grammatological discourse is a microcosm of the East–West encounters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This paper begins, by contrast, with a key moment in the history of phonocentrism in transregional Asia, namely the cosmo – semiotic discourses of Esoteric Buddhism (circa 9^th century) that string together diverse actors and networks in Central Asia, the High Tang Empire, and Heian Japan. Beyond its factual inaccuracy, the scholarly neglect of such moments is itself symptomatic of erasures and biases at work in the study of Asia today: modernity, as a concept, functions not only as temporal differentiation of textual and material sources but also as the ground for deep methodological and epistemological divisions within the field. What does it mean that the usual story of modernity not only assumes but requires that Asian phonocentrisms do not count toward an understanding of modernity itself? And how might thinking Asia as Method counteract this repression carried out in the name of historiography? Moving beyond the East–West paradigm and other world – historical binary analytics that share in its logic requires a radical historicism, a historicism that begins with multiplicities and differences in premodern, transregional Asia. Cautioning against nationalistic antiquarianism and the replacing of one superficial center (e.g. “the West”) with another (e.g. Yao – to – Mao conception of “China”), I advocate for attention to ground – level de – and re – territorialization of ideas and practices instead of the traditions bestowed by sages.

Revisiting Takeuchi Yoshimi’s “Asia as Method”: Ethics, Embodiment, and the Ends of Criticism

2022-11-29T13:10:48+04:00

This paper proposes a re – reading of the leading postwar Japaneses intellectual Takeuchi Yoshimi’s famous notion of “Asia as Method” alongside his early interest in the I – novel (shishōsetsu) form and his writings on Lu Xun. Specifically, I take as my point of departure Takeuchi’s appreciation of Lu Xun as “a tenacious seikatsusha (participant in life),” a characterization that, I contend, lies at the foundation of Takeuchi’s commitment to a form of positive and engaging criticism—criticism as action, as it were. Tracing Takeuchi’s appreciation of Lu Xun the seikatsusha to an earlier interest in the I – novel, exemplified by his undergraduate thesis on the Chinese writer Yu Dafu’s confessional writings, I explore how Takeuchi’s understanding of Lu Xun as a quotidian subject who establishes and renews his integrity through daily struggles coalesces with—and indeed provides guidelines for—his own struggles during and after WWII, which in turn contribute to the envisioning of the project known as “Asia as Method.” In so doing, I seek to rediscover a thread in Takeuchi’s thinking by establishing connections between critical moments in his intellectual career that have heretofore only received attention on their own. Setting aside the conventional understanding of “Asia as Method” as a reconfiguration of referential frameworks (namely, from the East – West binary to intra – Asian comparison), this paper demonstrates instead that underlying Takeuchi’s project is an ethics of reading—or, better, an attempt to reconceptualize criticism as an ethical undertaking. As such, I argue, Takeuchi’s thesis sheds light on an alternative, embodied way of reading and to participate in current methodological dialogues in literary studies, such as Rita Felski’s urge to go beyond the detached form of literary scholarship characterized by what Paul Ricoeur identifies as a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” Joseph North’s critique of the “historicist contextualist paradigm,” and debates over modes of reading variously labelled “paranoid,” “reparative,” “surface,” “historical materialist,” etc.

Two Poets, One Moon

2022-11-29T13:11:59+04:00

Only a few decades ago, Western scholars of comparative literature tended to argue that any English – Chinese comparison was “futile or meaningless” (Yu, 162). As this discipline evolves, however, this previous notion is being replaced by the perspective that “a glimpse of the otherness of the other can produce new perspectives on our own faces in the great mirror of culture” (Hayot, 90). My thesis contributes to this stream of innovation by bringing into comparison the function of the moon in Su Shi’s “Water Melody” and in Samuel Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode”, finding that in both poems, the moon functions to foreground the poets’ psychological experiences and acts as an agent in the resolution of emotional conflict in the poems and lives of the poets. The purpose of this work is to broaden the field in which both English and Chinese poetry are understood to exist by examining each through the lens of the other. Both “Water Melody” and “Dejection” have been examined to the point of exhaustion in each of their relative traditions, but bringing them into new light may reveal previously unseen angles. For example, this research finds that Susan Stewart’s theory of eighteenth – century English nocturnes is highly compatible with twelfth – century Chinese nocturnes, and this foreign theory can breathe new life into an ossified conversation. In a dissonant example, the familiar Western associations of the moon as an evil omen, recalling vampires and werewolves, can feel bizarre when imagined from the perspective of Chinese associations of the moon with family reunion. This comparison, in addition to exploring these two poems and poets, ultimately creates a destabilizing effect by which a reader may be induced to move beyond the traditions, to a point where Weltliteratur is no longer the goal, as it was for Goethe, but instead a starting point.

Rearranging Comparative Clusters: Chinese and Persian Literature During the Mongol Empire

2022-11-29T13:48:41+04:00

There has been very little scholarly work done to date to compare Chinese and Persian literary traditions. The reason for the lack of comparison between these fields seems to be that they exist in different fields and academic departments; for example, those who study Chinese literature tend to study Japanese and other East Asian work while those who study Persian are likely to compare it to Arabic and other Middle Eastern work. These “comparative clusters,” as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak refers to them, create strict linguistic or regional groups of comparison, rather than cultural or historical.

Spivak also wrote that comparative literature must broaden its horizons in order to stay relevant and reinvigorate itself as a discipline. Comparative literature is starting to break away from this Eurocentrism, yet the very idea that it need do so is still in its infancy. Non-Western literary traditions are either bound by these “comparative clusters” or they are bound to Western traditions. This study examines Chinese and Persian literature during and before the Mongol Empire in order to build the field of their comparison around a significant cultural and historical era that provides motivation to reach across linguistic boundaries in order to find cultural comparison. As such, this field includes elements that inform a study of literature during the Mongol Empire in specific, such as nomadic culture and its influence, Persian literature and writers during the Mongol Empire, Chinese literature and writers during the Mongol Empire, and Silk Road studies. It will also include a case study in which some of these elements will be placed in literary-analytical comparative context in order to begin the work that this study hopes to introduce. All of these components will provide the foundations for the future field of comparative Chinese and Persian literature.

The Differences that Asia Makes

2022-11-29T14:06:03+04:00

For decades now, comparative literature in the Western countries I know fairly well (the US and France, and to a lesser extent, the UK, Italy, and Germany) have been grappling with the necessity of adjusting their theoretical apparatus to accommodate texts from India, China, Korea, Japan, and other major Asian traditions. Sometimes this accommodation has come in the form of statements of difference: Asian literatures are different from European-derived literatures because they are not X, Y, or Z (X, Y, and Z standing here for properties typically thought to be typical or necessary qualities of literature; it doesn’t matter for the present discussion just what they are). But as knowledge of different periods, genres, and styles of Asian literature has grown, these clear-cut distinctions have come to appear partial if not simply misleading. Moreover, attention to the differences within Asia (no longer represented by a few masterpieces from a few major cultures) have made the problem of an adequately descriptive theoretical vocabulary even more resistant, for no single profile of “Asian literature” holds across such diversity. Rather than synchronic typology, the way to broaden and complexify our understanding of the venerable “East and West” literary topic lies through a more exhaustive literary history, a multi-local chronological account of what has been written, translated, commented, and preserved in this area. A return to literary history is not necessarily a step backwards from theory, however: it assigns theory new tasks and new criteria of relative success.

Proposal Title: “Between Direct Translation and Indirect Translation: A Comparative Study of the Thai translation of the Korean Novel Please Look After Mom”

2022-11-29T14:07:29+04:00

Shin Kyung – sook’s Please Look After Mom, the Korean novel was first introduced in Thailand in 2012 as an indirect translation version from the English translation. After that, a direct translation version from the Korean original was published in March 2020. Considering the specificity of literary translation, this study aims to compare the Thai direct and indirect translation versions of Please Look After Mom in terms of faithfulness and perfection in translation.

Survival of Cruelty and Fear in Literary Translation

2022-11-29T14:08:37+04:00

Omission in literary translation is often subject to heavy scrutiny and criticism, but omission is likely to be intentional on the part of the translator, calling for more academic focus on what omission intends to generate through what is lost in omission in translation. The Good Son is the first English translation of You – jeong Jeong’s Korean novel, and it would be too much to expect the nearly 400 – page full – length Korean novel to survive in its original length and form under the harsh circumstances of the English translation and publication markets. Nevertheless, the English translation of Jeong’s novel, published by Penguin in 2018, with a significant portion of reduction and omission, in addition to the title change from ‘The Origin of Species’ in Korean into ‘The Good Son’ in the translation, has made an impressive debut in international book markets, with its translation copyright successfully sold to more than 20 countries, consequently proving the substantial level of dynamic equivalence between the source text and translation. In the English translation of The Good Son, translated by Chi – young Kim, the same translator of Kyung – sook Shin’s Please Look After Mom, significant reduction and omission have been made in the translation of the psychopathic son’s paranoid flashback monologues on his brutal matricide, while more focus is placed on the physical cruelty of his mother’s death. Without critically disrupting the narrative flow of the novel, the strategy of omission has resulted in speeding up the narrative development, tightening up its mounting tension and suspense, and enhancing readers’ reception of the cruel tragedy of human evil, all in accordance with crime fiction convention, which also demonstrates the priority of genre characteristics in translation over general convention of literary translation practice.

Translating Untranslatable Emotion: Tabucchi’s saudade

2022-11-29T14:10:20+04:00

Tabucchi, a translator and researcher of Portuguese literature, including Pessoa, attempted to translate into Italian “Saudade,” a unique emotion of the Portuguese. And he translated ‘saudale’ through literary texts such as Notturno Indiano, Requiem, and Per Isabel: Un mandala, which could not be translated as a single word or expression. In this presentation, I would like to consider the translation of emotions that could not be translated by the translator and writer Tabucchi.

Translating the Subaltern: The Problematic of Englishing Malayalam Dalit and Adivasi Narratives

2022-11-29T14:12:47+04:00

For centuries the dominant Literature had been the preserve of the elite. The representations of the subaltern and their experiences were either absent or biased. With the emergence of Subaltern Studies, the power relations in the literary products of the ‘nation’ were re – examined. At the same time the Subaltern Studies Group itself had to face the criticism of being elite in nature. The question of alternative histories that they proposed is widely considered as an important contribution to different marginal sections. As a result, literatures that fiercely challenge the dominant hegemonic systems and structures and projecting a subaltern perspective and aesthetics emerged in India. It includes dalit studies, feminist studies, disability studies, queer studies etc. The hegemonic voices of the ‘normal’ were challenged by various literary as well as non – literary efforts from different subaltern groups. The so – called ‘normal’ was called into question and alternative perspectives from the standpoint of marginalized sections emerged. The subaltern literature(s) are often considered as resistance narratives as they project their resistance and identity assertion. Translations of regionally produced subaltern literatures into English and other languages provided a wider audience for them. Despite the international readership attained through Englishing, there exist serious issues of language, culture and politics in Englishing the subaltern texts. As an alien tongue which is geographically and culturally alienated from the context of Indian/ Malayalam subaltern discourses, how English perceives the complex social formations of caste, gender, culture and dialects of local contexts is a new area of interest in research. Furthermore, there exists a politics of market/publication behind the translation of subaltern texts. The agenda behind translating subaltern texts is often the commodification of the subaltern subject, experience and culture, as they are the new interests of literary and academic worlds. Through this paper I intend to focus on the issues and politics involved in the process of translating the subaltern. Since it is difficult to cover all categories of subaltern literatures, the research focuses on dalit and adivasi literary discourses in Malayalam, especially those belonging to the genre of life narratives. Dalit and adivasi life narratives support the agenda of asserting the identity and documenting the protest of the larger dalit movements. The very act of dalit writing can be conceived as translation as it involves the act of translating the culture and literature that are originally based on orality to the written form, which is more or less related to the ma(le)instream and thus an act of mainstreaming the subaltern. Transforming the marginal that rests upon the ‘oral’ to the mainstream which celebrates the ‘written’ is a complex process of translation. Hence, every dalit writer is a translator who actively participates in the process of translating his/her community’s past/present which includes the culture and language in to the written present. This cultural and linguistic translation becomes complex as they are not simply adopting the mainstream savarna form of written literature. Rather the mainstream written models that fit into the rigid rules of the “literary” are breached with new experiments. Rather than negating the written, the dalit literature quarrels with it, tries to break its standards, brings the cosmology of orality and the carnivalesque into the written. The study of this complex process of dalit translation is also aimed at by this study. It tries to engage with the novel ways in which the dalit writer – translator establishes him/her – self with in the ‘written’ along with challenging it. In the case of dalit life narratives, things are much more complex. As many of the Keralite dalit life writers are illiterate, often there exist a second person as transcriber, who may or may not belong to the dalit community. This mediation often creates problems as the life writer gets alienated from his/her life itself and the transcriber becomes the authorial voice and his/her subjectivities (ideology/culture/language/experiences) influence the narrative. Such mediation should be studied in detail to examine the politics of power and language. The projected Kerala mainstream culture that is of course the savarna one and the standard savarna language is entirely different from the dalit culture and dialects. Moreover, they differ among different castes and sub – castes. These facts should be looked at seriously. The different caste – based dialects that the dalit writers celebrate create the problems of untranslatability even into the so called standard one. Modern dalit writings also bear testimony to the transformation of the passive dalit object into an active, resisting subject. Also the Dalit and Adivasi narratives are noted for the alternative ecological understanding and the Eco – protests that they embody. The proposed research also tries to locate the dalit and Adivasi narratives in the larger context of Environmental humanities. How these narratives transgress their local contexts and place themselves in the global environmental concerns? How Englishing these texts aid in such a process? Thus, the research focuses on the multiple translations related to dalit writing like the oral to written, margin to mainstream, passive object to active/resisting subject, local to global etc.

Comparing or Translating? Who is Afraid of Comparative Literature in the Classroom?

2022-11-29T14:15:13+04:00

English literary scholars in Korea are asked to approach the canonical literatures written in English from Western canonized perspectives, which the scholars are expected to acquire from major Western works of criticism. However, the same scholars are also bound to approach the English literatures from their own Korean cultural perspectives and backgrounds as they are not English native speakers. This might inherently differentiate them from Western English literary scholars, which might justify a tangible space for a comparative approach with a claim that all the Korean scholars of foreign literatures are obliged to become literary comparatists. Nevertheless, the discipline of ‘comparative literature’ has not been successfully established in Korea as an academic field even without a single academic department of comparative literture in colleges for the past 60 years despite the historically early and pioneering establishment of the ‘Korean Comparative Literature Association’ in 1959, one of the first academic associations in the field of humanities in Korea. While a literary translation of foreign literatures into Korean has a long history in the practice of literary study in Korean academics, the discipline of comparative literature which is inseparable from the practice of literary and cultural translation has been much alienated in the Korean academic setting for diverse reasons including the resistance of the Korean scholars of foreign national literatures. This paper intends to examine the status of ‘comparative literature’ in college classrooms in Korea and how the interdisciplinary nature of ‘crossing – over’ of comparative literature has been wary of a potential threat or contamination in the context of the vested rights of foreign national literatures over comparative literature.

Against the Monopoly/Monology of ‘Literature’ in the Pedagogy of Comparative Literature: Cultural Studies other than Multiculturalism

2022-11-29T14:16:53+04:00

This paper questions the status of cultural studies as a new field of comparative literature. Literary studies centered on European culture, seem to have adapted to modern times, from postcolonial discourse to the cultural discourse. From this perspective multiculturalism appears to be the answer in the end. But I would argue that it is another form of ‘literature’ study, as it follows the same classification of literature of nations and ethnicities. Emily Apter once pointed out the ambivalent vigilance of post – colonial researchers toward new cultural discourses, to explain why comparative literature with histories of exile should reach out to the solidarity of multiculturalism as evidence of openness to newcomers(i.e. the cultural studies) in the field. Yet, recent cultural studies such as film/media studies are not new disciplines that can only be entered in the field as a beneficiary of solidarity. The study of media may have started late in academia, but it is the study of the sensorial experiences which far precede letter – based literary culture. In addition, media studies examines the way in which the real can still be traced within this symbolic culture of writing and letter.

In addition, technological discourse centered on the media will possibly lead the 21st century education in which humans, machines, nature, and animals coexist with a new identity and species. Instead of being a tool to teach literature and identity politics of the same past, film/media studies allow us to imagine life and existence outside of national, ethnic, language & national literature, that is, in a direction that liberates us all.

Piracy or Pastiche? Comparative Literature to (un)think about Pirates in Japan

2022-11-29T14:18:13+04:00

Teaching comparative literature in the Japanese archipelago is not an easy task. For many university students, a foreign country is an ocean away. The need to learn about foreign cultures is not fully realised because most of the students can graduate from university, enjoy culture and entertainment without a good command of a foreign language. How can we comparatists do for such university students to realize the necessity and interest of comparative literature? Is it possible for them to acquire a critical perspective on the way in which their own culture has been revitalised by the influence and sometimes appropriation of foreign cultures? Here, I would like to present a case study of pirates. There are countless stories about pirates, but it is fair to say that the stories originated in Britain. So it is not difficult to take a story about pirates and point out that it is a pirate version of, say, Stevenson's Treasure Island. However, the task tends to be a nationalistic affirmation of the status quo, which may only confirm the ingenuity of the present improved work. In first case, it would be useful to relativise the work from the perspective of historical research. The point of view that pirates were self – governing organisations, independent of their origins, allows us to see that the story of pirates still follows the model of the nation – state. Secondly, it is useful to look for the absence of what should be there. By comparing works from different periods and different countries, we can rather easily find the absence of a subject or a depiction which should have been in the work. By doing both of these things, the students may come to realise the importance of making comparisons, rather than just accepting or rejecting the works around them.

Can we build a bridge over the sea? Teaching Comparative Literature in East Asia

2022-11-29T14:19:35+04:00

For several years starting in the mid – 2010s, I was involved in education on international student exchange between Japan and Korea, and between Japan and Taiwan, as the organizer of a short – term study abroad program for undergraduate students. In this program, dozens of students studied and stayed together for two weeks, traveling back and forth between Fukuoka and Pusan, Fukuoka and Seoul, and Fukuoka and Taipei. They discussed common issues in East Asia, such as the declining birthrate and aging population, the acceptance of foreign workers, and disasters. The students, who were very nervous when they first met, came to understand each other through classes and fieldwork and eventually became invaluable friends. I have seen them tearfully bid farewell many times.

While participating in this program, I have been asking myself whether it is possible to build a cultural bridge in East Asia through literature. I have engaged in literary research mainly in Japan and Korea, sometimes introducing Korean literature to Japanese students and giving lectures on Japanese literature in Korea. These classes and lectures were, of course, significant, but I have realized that we should have a broader framework rather than from the standpoint of the national literature of each country.

I believe that the framework of comparative literature is the perfect academic field to provide such an opportunity. In actual classes, I have encouraged students to discuss the possibility and problem of cultural exchange and friction through the novels written by Korean residents in Japan. In addition, from the perspective of reconsidering the history of Japanese literature, I have attempted to describe the history of the modernist literature within the framework of the East Asian region. In this presentation, I would like to discuss what comparative literature can do in East Asia based on these practices.

The Global and the Multilinear: Notes for a Typology of Novelistic Networks

2022-11-29T14:22:29+04:00

According to Alexander Beecroft, the defining formal feature of the global literary ecology is the “entrelacement,” or a poetics of intertwined story lines. Adopting a narratological and New Formalist methodology, this paper sees multinearity as an increasingly significant response to the challenges of narrativizing the material and social processes that underlie globalization. From A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki to The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (to name but two examples), the global novel builds on an orchestration of disparate story lines to convey the interconnectedness of planetary forces, but also the economic rifts and social inequities that traverse the contemporary world. The paper develops a typology of these contemporary “network narratives” (to use David Bordwell’s terminology). In some instances, multiple story lines are connected by way of chance encounters between characters (coincidence plots); in other cases, it is the global circulation of a material object that brings the characters together (object – oriented plots); in yet other narratives, the progression revolves around kinship (family sagas) or a sense of fatalistic entanglement (predestination plots). The paper argues that these narrative forms seek to negotiate the tension between two imaginative and affective positions: the characters’ inescapable moral and material entanglement in globalization and a longing for enchantment that represents a nostalgic or utopian alternative to globalization.

The ambivalent role of translation in the internationalization of Georgian literature: the case of Nino Haratischwili and The Eight Life (for Brilka)

2022-11-29T14:23:39+04:00

This paper departs from the idea that translation held an ambivalent role in Georgia’s guest – of – honour presentation at the 2018 Frankfurt Book Fair (Kvirikashvili forth.), where Nino Haratischwili, a writer living in Germany, writing in German, published by a German press, presented often as a German author in the German literary criticism and awarded numerous German literary prizes, was chosen as one of the two spokespeople of Georgian literature at the opening ceremony, seemingly contradicting Georgia’s cultural brand: whereas the Georgian delegation deemed language the main distinctive feature of Georgian literature, granting language a central place in the communicative strategy, she does not wield the “unique” Georgian language. While choosing a German – writing author as the spokesperson of Georgian literature renders translators invisible (Venuti 1995) in the process of exporting small, peripheral or less – translated languages and leaves unacknowledged the unequal distribution of symbolic capital and power relations among different languages, translation and language play a meaningful role in the novel itself, which escapes naturalising language difference (Walkowitz 2015). This analysis aims to see what combination of local and global elements and themes (Roig – Sanz, forth.) made of Haratischwili, with her hybrid identity and a book ̶ The Eight Life (for Brilka) ̶ that tells the story of six generations of women in a Georgian family while it captures twentieth century world events as they interlock with that story, the most suitable writer for Georgia to showcase their culture to the world. The paper also aims to observe how this case study responds, if it does, to the idea of the global novel (Ganguly 2016, Ganguly 2020).

Endangered Species: The Non – Human Narrator and Planetarity in the Novel of the Twenty – First Century

2022-11-29T14:24:50+04:00

Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrator in Klara and the Sun (2021) and Richard Power’s Bewilderment (2021), are two novels published at a time where the cry for environmental responsibility has reached fever pitch, and during a pandemic that has challenged social and economic structures throughout the world. Ishiguro and Powers have been nominated previously for the Man Booker Prize and International Booker Prize in fiction, respectively, making them important global literary figures. Both novels are set in times where ecological collapse has become an inevitability, and where humans adapt to new environmental demands by either creating AI that provides services, as is the case in Klara, or developing technologies that seek to combat disease, as in Bewilderment. Regardless of the circumstances surrounding the protagonists, both novels center around questions of what it means to be human and what it means to belong: to belong to a family, a nation, a species, nature. Largely, the narrators arrive at such crucial questions as they explore and experience grief on a planetary level, and it is the novels’ scope of planetarity that will be central to this paper. What is planetarity? What are the actors in its construction and deconstruction, and what space(s) do humans occupy, even while they themselves sense their own status as ‘endangered species’ encroaching. Narrated from the perspective of an AI (Klara), and from the perspective of a grieving widowed husband (Bewilderment), and published at such a pivotal decade of human history, the novels under question seek to represent and animate new subjectivities and the narratives that stem from these spaces.

‘Futures Past’, Pasts Future? The experiences and the semantics of historical time in global novel

2022-11-29T14:26:18+04:00

Literature expresses the way different persons from different societal configurations feel the world and translate these feelings into written language. That is how traditionally historians and sociologists analyse cultural productions in general, trying to understand human interpretation, circulation, and the reception of a thought in different historical contexts. Koselleck (1983) breakthrough work about the past (experience) and the future (expectation) tried to get the semantic of the historical time by looking at how human interpretation changed in a specific historical context that he called the Neuzeit – modernity understood as the situation in which the expectation of a better future became detached from the past experiences. Twentieth century novels, such as Stefan Zweig (18811942) Brazil, Land of the Future (1941), expresses the meaning of this new semantic of historical time in which the horizon of expectation diverged from the past experiences. However, this paper develops the hypothesis that there is an important transformation going on since the last decades of the twentieth century. When it started to appear a new semantic of historical time in which the future became the new dark age, and the past became something to be recuperated for the sake of the future. To develop this analysis, we will look at novels such as Parable of the Sower (1993) by Octavia Estelle Butler, The Year of the Flood (2009) by Margaret Atwood, and Huaco Retrato (2021) by Gabriela Wiener. They will be discussed considering the quest about how to understand the new semantics of historical time that is present in the contemporary global novel.

Combining Scales through Affect in the Planetary Global Novel

2022-11-29T14:41:07+04:00

Global novels often struggle with the scaling of human histories to geological histories that help build planetary views. As Dipesh Chakrabarty and Bruno Latour have argued, this scaling understands humans as geological agents, yet problematically so. Recently explored by scholars like Marco Caracciolo and Debjani Ganguly, these narrative scaling strategies are yet to be fully drawn. In this chapter I propose that affects can help establish the connections between human individual histories and planetary histories. I explore the affects of unrest, quietness, and presentiment as paradoxical forces in our capacity to predict and anticipate climate change scenarios in Elisabeth Filhol’s novel Doggerland (2019). Relating personal lives and relationships between characters, between characters and place, and between collective and geological histories, the novel reveals the force of pre – sentiment and pre – history memory for anticipating future histories. As Doggerland proposes, affect works as a narrative strategy to address the problem of combining scales in the global novel’s interest for planetarity.

But the combination of scales through affect can be also considered outside of the text so as to observe the ways in which the global novel’s interest in reaching out to geological histories so as to engage with planetarity manages to combine different forums of reception and circulation which are generally quite apart. In light of the growing interchange of scientifically – based geological history with the affective individual histories in literature, how does this combination impact the circulation of a global novel like Doggerland in the diverse fields of concern about the scientific past and future of our planet?

Rewriting, Scale Shifting and the Worlding of the Novel” Neus Rotger – Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

2022-11-29T14:52:03+04:00

Rewriting previously canonized works is an increasingly widespread (and award – winning) narrative strategy among novels of global circulation. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017), Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte (2019), or Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The Perfect Nine (2020) are but a few examples of this tendency that has become a trend and arguably a trait of the global novel. Combining formal analysis with attention to the mechanisms of scale shifting in the literary market, this paper addresses the booming production of contemporary rewritings as formal devices with the potential to rescale literary works as world literature. The paper develops the notion of rewriting as networks of transhistorical and transcultural significance that produce lines of continuity and rupture in time and space. Rewriting a text from the past, transforming it, implies the encounter in the present between works and readers situated in disparate contexts. An encounter full of tensions and anxieties of all kinds: of influence, of dissent, of appropriation, of falsification. Through the analysis of a selected corpus of novels, we will see how the act of rewriting, often announced from the title or other paratextual elements (cover, flaps, epigraphs, interviews, reviews), is substantiated in a recurrent series of narrative strategies: the recovery of minority plots and characters, the change of narrative point of view, temporal and geographical displacements, adaptation of themes and motifs, recourse to metafiction. It is therefore generated at the level of form, but it is also a mechanism that helps literary works to shift scales and attain a wider readership, thus compelling us to attend to the patterns of circulation and consecration through which these rewritings travel and acquire new value.

Going global from blog to novel. A reading of Beirut, I Love You, by Zena el Khalil

2022-11-29T14:53:24+04:00

Beirut Update is the name of the blog through which the Lebanese artist and performer Zena el Khalil documented, since the summer of 2006, the scenes of the Israeli attacks from her Beirut apartment. The digital platform became a must – see for those seeking to understand how life passed in the Lebanese capital during the war and quickly received international acclaim and was publicised on various news portals including CNN, BBC, The Guardian, The Nation, or Spiegel Online. In 2008, that experience was transformed into a novel: Beirut, I Love You was published by Saqi Books, a London – based independent publisher of North African and Middle Eastern books. Between autofiction and memoirs, the novel documents situations such as perverse interrogations, refugees forced to live crowded together in a camp, the random movement of borders, the contradictions of being a woman in a war – torn city, or the poisoning of the population due to bombings and armament waste. It was translated into several languages including Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, and Italian.

This paper has two main goals. First, to carry on a reflection on the literary representations of global issues and their local manifestations such as war, environmental crisis, cosmopolitanism, or gender politics in order to consider how El Khalil’s novel queries or contributes to global discourses. Second, to expand the discussion on the assumption of the novel as the most suitable form to transfer the experience of globalization. If one of the main distinctions between digital literature and printed publications is that the former offers the possibility of interaction and of building a sense of the collective, what is lost and what is gained in the transformation from digital to print, from blog to novel? How can examples like El Khalil’s help us to better conceptualize the novel in the global era?

Icons of Trauma and the Global Novel: Visual Portrayals of Violence in Elsa Morante, Svetlana Alexievich and Elena Ferrante’s Works

2022-11-29T14:54:58+04:00

While there has been a paradigm shift in the global visibility of gendered violence heralded by the #MeToo movement from 2017, a palpable increase in violence against women and deep – seated gender inequalities are a worrying global trend that has been further exposed by the current pandemic. With gendered violence forming an intrinsic part of the imaginary of the contemporary global novel, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels provide a powerful gateway into the unacknowledged stories of the traumatized female subject and the global hegemonic norms that shape them. Ferrante’s works narrate the lives of women as vulnerable to structural violence and systematic erasure in a patriarchal system whilst building on a lineage of female – authored narratives that centre on the ‘dissymetries of power that impact on women’s lives’ (Boehmer), as previously explored in the works of Elsa Morante (de Rogatis and Wehling – Giorgi, Allegoria 83).

My contribution will explore Morante and Ferrante’s fictionalisation of the unacknowledged, silenced stories of the female subject through the lens of trauma studies, with a specific focus on the visual, imagistic dimension. Given the difficulty of translating traumatic experience into linguistic memory, both authors’ works show how traumatic events are often ‘registered in a specific, imagistic way that stands outside normal memory creation’ (Luckhurst). In fact, I will show how the texts’ photographic or oneiric pictures synechdochally mirror the complex temporality of trauma. Read through the poetics of trauma, the textual pictures provide a powerful semiotic code to negotiate the horrors that leak through the façade of the texts’ realist mode. The visual focus of their novels not only offers a productive interpretive key to reread Balagov’s masterful filmic adaptation of Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War (Beanpole, 2019) and its privileging of a female – focalised narrative, but it also provides a particularly productive lens through which to reconsider these powerful tales of resistance against global structures of violence.

Endangered Species: The Non-Human Narrator and Planetarity in the Novel of the Twenty-First Century

2022-11-29T14:56:19+04:00

Applying the triple distinction ‘major’ vs. ‘small’ vs. ‘minor’ literatures: interliterary contacts in Sofia and Tiflis/Tbilisi between 1918 and 1924

2022-11-29T14:57:58+04:00

Minding (Dominguez et al 2018, 281 – 287) and following (Ljuckanov 2014), I will apply the triple distinction 'major' vs. 'small' vs. 'minor' literature to the analysis of textual artifacts from the Russian southern (post)imperial periphery/margin/outskirts. I will explore, first, translations of Bulgarian national 'classical' poetry published by Russian refugees – becoming – emigres in their newspapers from 1920 – 1924, focusing on the translations of two works central to Bulgarian national literary canon both then and now: "The new cemetery of Slivnitsa" by Ivan Vazov (representative of the phase of 'Realism' in Bulgarian literature) and "Armenians" by Peiu Iavorov (indicative of its 'early modernist' phase). (Both phasal designations will be reconsidered with the aforementioned triple distinction in mind). I will explore, second, a festschrift published in Tiflis in 1919 containing tributes by Russian, Georgian and Armenian poets in the respective languages. Ca. 1918 – 1919, each of the three nations experienced a dramatic turn in their status on the territory that became Republic of Georgia on 26 May 1918: from a titular nation of an empire, Russians became a Prothean entity definable as refugees, emigres, and an ethnic minority; from a vernacular plurality (and imperial minority), Georgians became a small nation – state; from a 'vehicular' plurality/minority in Tiflis/'Georgia' (and imperial minority), Armenians became an ethnic minority in a nation – state, with its own nation – state as Georgia's neighbour.

Azeri Turkish Narratives of Iran

2022-11-29T15:00:00+04:00

Iran holds the second largest population of Turkish speakers after Turkey. However, official use of and publication in this language was strictly banned during the reign of the Pahlavi Dynasty (1925 – 1979). The suppression of the minor languages was modelled on the western concept of monolingualism and part of the Pahlavi’s struggle to establish a homogeneous nation – state. After the 1979 Revolution, the ban was no longer in effect. However, writing in any language other than the official Persian is still frowned upon as a separatist act. The author is often regarded as a dissident and traitor to the nation’s integrity. For the writers in minor languages, it might involve language shame. They must constantly justify their turn to the mother language and emphasize their rejection of separatist tendencies. One might add other incentives for not publishing in Azeri Turkish to these hindrances, which I will turn to in my presentation.

Nevertheless, the number of writers turning to their mother tongue of Azeri Turkish in creating a literary field has been on the rise, particularly after the Iran – Iraq war (1980–1988). This presentation will address the delayed birth of a small literary field, its development and the present state. The study is concentrated on modern narratives (novels, novelettes, short – story collections and biographical memoirs) published in the book form. The complicated hindrances on the route of publishing in Azeri Turkish that account for this literary genre’s delayed appearance will be sketched. Furthermore, I will provide a historiography of such literature within the cultural, social and political background of Iranian Azerbaijan province (mainly the city of Tabriz where most of these narratives are set and where they are mainly published). Finally, I will analyze the tensions with the linguistic and literary authority of “the centre”.

Small Literatures in the Global Context of Historical Crisis The modernist Experience in Georgia in the years 1910 – 1920

2022-11-29T15:01:06+04:00

When reflecting on small literatures, in particular to what extent their characteristics fit into the global pattern, the question of the historical – political mutations specific to the space in which they emerge and develop arises from the outset. The literatures of small nations, those which are – as Kundera puts it – «confrontées à l’arrogante ignorance des grands» and «voient leur existence perpétuellement menacée» (Gauvain in Bertrand & Gauvain 2003: 31), are formed in a particular climate and do not quite free themselves from what binds them to their past, but also to contemporaneity (Brozgal & Kippur 2016). Thus, even purely aesthetic texts, devoid of any extra – literary imprint, bear the mark.

It is in this precise context that we will examine the Georgian avant – garde and modernist movements that emerged in the 1910s, in the midst of the crisis of world events (the First World War). The creation in 1916 of the Symbolist group “The Blue Horns” was initiated by the founders, of whom some had recently returned (due to the War) from France – the country that, together with Belgium, directly influenced Georgian Symbolism. This crisis was followed by a second one – this time on a more local scale (the Bolshevik Revolution), which resulted for Georgia in the political recovery of independence in 1918 and the simultaneous flourishing of the aesthetics of the avantgarde. There was a third stage in the development of avant – garde movements – the occupation of Georgia by the Red Army in 1921. From this moment onwards, the avant – garde gradually plunged into an aesthetic crisis, which was caused, on the one hand, by the ideological pressure they were under (the gradual banning by the Bolshevik authorities of "formalist, decadent" and "petty bourgeois" tendencies, which became more pronounced around 1928), and, on the other hand, by the idea opposing the Bolshevik authorities (i.e. the shift of avant – garde aesthetics towards nationalism and patriotism).

Our contribution will be articulated around these three moments of historical crisis that take place on a global scale and to which the modernist and avant – garde movements attempt to respond in their own way on a local level. This response is based on the critique of this crisis and on an aesthetic of 'negation' (Larsen 1990: 6 – 7) that will constitute a 'discourse of crisis' (Liska 2007: 200) versus the political – historical events. In order to better understand these changes in the modernist literary trend, we will place the latter in the broader context of the development of Georgian literary historiography.

To answer these questioning, the works of three writers will be discussed: Titsian Tabidze's Poems (1916 – 1918), Paolo Iashvili's 'Multicoloured Balloons' (1924), and Mikheil Javakhishvili's 'The Thief' (1928). Composed between the 1910s and the end of the 1920s, they show the different stages of what constitutes the experience of modernism in Georgia and refer to a crisis that is at the same time historical, aesthetic and political and that affects the local and more generally – European space, simultaneously.

Big problems for small literatures: Goan literary history and its (non)place in the historiography of South Asian literatures

2022-11-29T15:03:46+04:00

The literature of Goa – one among the smallest states of India – has a rich corpus of texts written in four different languages, both European and vernacular, dating from the period of Portuguese colonial rule (1505 – 1961) and after. Although Goan literature is characterised by multilingualism, its history has only been written in Portuguese by members of the Catholic community (1864 – 1971). In most of the cases, this historiographical corpus neglects Hindu authorship and literary production in vernacular languages, such as Marathi and Konkani. The idea of Goan literary history has been built on the ruins of the Portuguese Empire, it reproduces the national model of European literary histories (HUTCHEON, 2002) and follows the teleological patterns of the narrative model (PERKINS, 1992). Based on exclusion criteria, Goan literary historiography is an interesting case study to reflect on theoretical and methodological tools for writing the history of literatures considered to be “small” or “minor”, or in a more generic way, of literatures raised in the shadow of great literary systems, such as Portuguese literature, but also Indian literature. As a matter of fact, if Goan literary historiographies performed an act of exclusion, Goan literary history is in itself an object of exclusion, since it was excluded from most, not say all, Indian and South Asian literary histories, or overviewing works. When thinking of a sustainable model of comparative literary history for Goan literature, what should the comparative frame be? Would a national Indian frame be too narrow and a South Asian frame too loose? Is it possible to challenge and criticise great conceptualisations, such as that of “South Asian literatures”, starting from small contexts? Can we address the problems of small literary histories as unsolved problems of big literary historiographies? These are among the many problems that my proposal wants to bring to light.

Hearing the Voiceless Voices: Literary Historiography of Post – war Zainichi Korean literature

2022-11-29T15:05:19+04:00

In this presentation, I will discuss perspectives required for a historiography of minority literature, focusing on the Post WWII Zainichi Korean (Korean residents in Japan) literature. In my book Towards a Zainichi Korean Literary History: The Polyphony of Voiceless Voices（2014 in Japan, 2019 in Korea), I presented early Zainichi literary history from 1945 to 1970 as an element of the cultural decolonisation of Zainichi Koreans. That was the first attempt to write a history of Zainichi literature, shaped by intercultural and interliterary processes.

The bilingual nature of this history was the main characteristic of this study, breaking with the conventional academic approach wherein Zainichi literature is only recognised as a monolingual literature written in Japanese. Beginning with the acquisition of literacy in Korean by Zainichi women in the immediate post – war period, the book depicts literary history chronologically on a strategic basis by revealing this long – neglected blank period. This was an attempt to overcome the weaknesses of the generational approach adopted by previous studies. Beyond bilingualism and women's illiteracy, this literary history highlights the hitherto overlooked issues of North – South conflict amid the Cold War, influences from North and South Korean literature, and migration or self – exile between Japan, South Korea, and North Korea. Taking these formerly overlooked points into account enabled the voices of Zainichi Koreans who have long been muted to be heard.
Having clarified the above – mentioned aporias, including male – centrism, authoritarianism in literature, monolingualism, and Cold War conflict, the next step will be to argue for the necessity of expanding the concept of literary works themselves. That is, an examination of ego – documents such as memoirs, diaries, letters, and travelogues is essential. Another major task is to unearth, collect, and preserve the related materials.

Perspectives and problems of regional literary histories

2022-11-29T15:06:33+04:00

With the recent growth of globalization and migration, the expansion of the European Union and with strong criticism of the meta-narratives of national literature, the regional trend of modelling and researching literary histories has become increasingly relevant, especially for small literatures. Literary historians are becoming less and less interested in the idea of national uniqueness of literatures established in the 19th century. The intensive democratization processes in post-Soviet societies inevitably encourage their literary historians to move from closed national literary models to open pluralistic comparative cultural models. Several examples of this trend are: Czesław Miłosz Native Realm (Rodzinna Europa, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001), History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures (ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope, John Neubauer, Amsterdam). : Johns Benjamins Publishing, 2004-2006), Baltic Postcolonialism (ed. Violeta Kelertas, Amsterdam: Rodopi Editions, 2006), We Have Something in Common: The Baltic Memory (ed. Anneli Mihkelev and B. Kalnačs, Tallinn, The Under and Tuglas Literature Center of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, 2007) etc. In all these works, the history of literature is researched and modelled according to the regional comparative principle, which unites various national cultures in certain aspects. How important and promising are regional memory-building efforts for individual historians of small literatures? And what problems do historians of such research face? The paper seeks concrete answers to these questions.

Is the canon dangerous? (The case of Lithuanian literature)

2022-11-29T15:08:41+04:00

The paper proposed should concentrate on the main problems of the periodization of Lithuanian literature and on the issues of the historical development of small literature (Lithuanian) under the specific circumstances (while being incorporated into Russian Imperia and later into the Soviet Union). The main questions to be answered: 1) does chronological point of view reflect the real situation of the development of national literature? 2) How much can the main literary trends be influenced by the canon and by the attitudes of the authorities of literary field towards the canon? 3) What possible ways of constructing literary history could be most productive? The answeres to those questions may be found after a close look at marginalized (during particular historical periods) Lithuanian authors, who were discovered by literary researchers later and whose creative works made significant influence of younger generations of writers.

From Methodological Nationalism to Regional and Comparative Perspectives: Histories of Latvian Literature in Twentieth and Twenty – First Centuries

2022-11-29T15:09:49+04:00

The first histories of Latvian literature that could be named professional only appeared in the early decades of the twentieth century. They were stimulated by swift transformations of national culture and marked an attempt to create a literary system of one’s own that would match those already established in larger cultures. The proclamation of an independent state was a further boost in this process while institutionalizing cultural practices and taking care of national art. Thus the rise of Latvian literary histories had been linked, on the one hand, to the internationalization of cultural activities, while, on the other, it also included an obvious effort to draw borders and underline the importance of literature in vernacular. The tension between poetics and politics remained vital for literary history writing during the Soviet regime in the second half of the twentieth century as well as at the turn of the twenty – first. The thirty years of independence have, once again, been characterized by tensions between methodological nationalism that underlines the role of culture in the nation building and preservation of cultural memory, on the one hand, while also trying to live up to the obvious intellectual need to open up to the world in order to evaluate national culture in regional and comparative perspectives, on the other. A detailed inspection of these tensions is the main goal of the proposed paper, while at the same time putting the specific observations in a broader context of the possibilities, aims and role of small cultures in forming part of the world literary system.

Multilingualism as Challenge of Luxembourgish Literary Historiography

2022-11-29T15:10:59+04:00

Multilingual Luxembourgish Literature emerges around 1815, in the wake of the independence of the Grand – Duchy of Luxembourg at the Congress of Vienna. While French and German were constitutionally defined as the languages of the country in 1843, Luxembourgish was considered as a lowly dialect with no official status to speak of. The difference in the cultural, political, social and economic status of the languages and the cultural value judgements linked to them also had a significant impact on literature in the three languages. On the one hand, it led to a hierarchy of aesthetic potential of the literatures and on the other to a separation of literatures in literary historiography and in metaliterary discourse. While the hierarchy of languages and literatures has shifted greatly over time, the writing of literary history of multilingual Luxembourgish literature still remains a challenge.

As this short description makes clear, the case of Luxembourgish Literature offers itself as a compelling case study to investigate literary historiographical methodologies and underlying ideologies in the light of recent studies on literary multilingualism (Kellmann 2000, Yildiz 2012, Gramling 2016, Dembeck & Parr 2017). The studies invariably highlight the necessity to revise literary historiography’s traditional monolingual norms in order to reinstate multilingual literary traditions and practices. In a first step, this paper will therefore investigate Luxembourgish literary historiographical practice in the 19^th and 20^th century and showcase how the models of international literary historiography adopted were inefficient to account for writing in different languages. To overcome the separation of literatures in the different languages, the paper will, in a second step, outline a roadmap or a preliminary model that acknowledges the specific cultural framework within which multilingual Luxembourgish literature is produced.

Patriotism for Cosmopolitanism: Postcolonial Reading of Vazha-Pshavela’s essay “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism”

2022-11-29T15:12:48+04:00

Supposedly, the most difficult problem of Georgian postcolonialism is how we can maintain a critical distance from the nationalistic mood in its canonical works. Of course, when the Russian rule of Georgia was (is) being extended, nationalism was the primary form of resistance to Russian imperialism. At the same time, however, we must be aware that postcolonial critics sometimes charge natioalism with parochial ethnocentrism and chauvinism.

One of the most eminent poets of the 19^th – century Georgian literature, Vazha – Pshavela (1861–1915) makes a quite important and interesting declaration about this problem in his essay “Cosmopolitanism and Patriotism” (1905). He insists that persons first come to love the environment where they are born and raised, and then, based on this patriotic consciousness, develop a cosmopolitan reason for fraternity. Especially, when considering the time’s historical context, it is natural to understand that the poet supports patriotism against cosmopolitanism; even so, we must pay be attentive to the fact that he does not deny cosmopolitanism completely. In his works, a kind of affection for place, which could be understood as the ecocritical term “sense of place,” can be observed. However, the poet does not imagine the mountainous area merely as a place where a certain ethnic group (should) lives dominantly but where another group lives also (yet they are antagonizing each other), along with nonhumans that are being represented as anthropomorphized. In a word, he creates a “bioregional” place in his imagination. Here, patriotism does not mean intolerant and ethnocentric emotion but could be construed as what is open to all dwellers in the bioregion(s) and therefore should become a foundation for a cosmopolitan world.

Politics and Poetics: Scientific Literature on Russian – Georgian Literary Relations in the Post – Soviet Period

2022-11-29T15:14:02+04:00

In the post – Soviet period, literary relations did not remain beyond political influence. The place of reflection on the socio – political context of the collapse of the Soviet Empire proved to be the literary processes of the mentioned epoch. Relicts of political discourse can be found not only in fiction but also in scientific literature. Analyzing Soviet problems in this way has led to an expansion of the post – imperial / postcolonial study area.

In this paper, I will discuss the works created as a result of the fundamental research conducted by German Slavists, Mirja Lecke and Elena Chkhaidze “The Development of Russian – Georgian Literary Relations after the Perestroika”. This study was widely recognized in the Slavic world. The materials discussed are E. Chkhaidze's monograph “Politics and Literary Tradition: Russian – Georgian Literary Relations after the Perestroika” (2018) as well as several important publications by Mirja Lecke dedicated to these issues.

In her monograph, Elene Chkhaidze introduces the concept of “Imperial Literary Tradition”. Therefore, by analyzing artistic and scientific material, she maintains that this tradition is formed, developed and broken in parallel with the formation, development and disintegration of the empire. The literary process, as a full – fledged event, also depends on political factors. The scholar's work is based on the rich history of Georgian – Slavic studies. To analyze the current problem, she uses modern, interdisciplinary approaches of Western European and American scientific schools.

E. Chkhaidze's work contains many complex theoretical concepts – trauma, nostalgia, nations and nationalism, semiotics of the city (Tbilisi), the city as a place of struggle and life, a meeting place for people of different nationalities, hybridism, in the research special attention is paid to post – Soviet Russian conflicts.

Post – Soviet / postcolonial events in Georgia and Russia are viewed not in the “East – West” but in the “North / South” prism. The study covered works of art, critical literature and research by Georgian and Russian – speaking authors living in Georgia, Russia and abroad until 2014. A complete overview of the trends and scientific papers of the scientists of the Soviet and post – Soviet periods is given, on which the researcher relies. This is the first and only such study of the post – Soviet period.

It should be noted that this vector of German comparative literature, with its methodological concepts, will be of great help not only in the process of studying the inter – literary relations of not only Georgian – Russian but also of the former USSR republics.

Event model of the autodiegetic narrative: German experience of the 18-21 centuries

2022-11-29T15:15:49+04:00

The paper's aim is to determine the structure of episodic memory presented in autodiegetic narration. To achieve this goal, it was investigated whether the cognitive model of events is applicable to autodiegetic narratives: event segmentation theory was adapted to the structural narratological categories. Namely, it was determined that Genett's term discourse denotes the organizing principle of episodic elements in long – term memory. The other component of the narrative, what Genett called story, is understood in our research project as episodic elements. The third component of the narrative – narratee corresponds to the memory process or narrative.

The research results show that each episodic memory has a conceptual framework, which is set by comments of the narrator autobiographer at the beginning of the paragraph, then follows the formation of the event model of the experiencing autobiographer, which in turn consists of perception, evaluation and action. By the research results it was established the criteria of change of the event model: at the beginning of the paragraph is given recollection clues/entities, to which representing memory is connected. As soon as in the narrative this entity is changed, it is marked as a change of the event model.

To collect the quantitative data, systematic taxonomy was created and based on it the autobiographical text of Goethe "Poetry and Truth" was annotated. The collected data were visualized and thus models of the event were established.

Until the ICLA congress it is planned to carry out comparative research with the same theoretical framework and methodology. The results will show whether the cognitive model of events established in relation to Goethe's autobiographical text has universal value for the study of autodiegetic narration. Autodiegetic narratives in German literature from the 18th to the 21st century will be taken as the research corpus.

Georgian Symbolism: Reorientation of Cultural Centre and Redefinition of National Identity

2022-11-29T15:16:56+04:00

The subject of interest of the paper is the identification of the cultural, world – view and esthetic basis of Georgian Symbolism and how the socio – political changes shaped its characteristics.

After being more the century part of the Russian Empire, In the 1910s (1918 – 1921), Georgia obtained independence for a few years, but from 1921 was forced to become one of the members of the Soviet Socialist Republic. As for a cultural context, the beginning of the 20th c. is considered a period of stagnation. Subsequently, the significance of emerging the first symbolist group, “Blue Horns”, with clearly stated purposes and esthetic position was a big event. As a result of the drastic transformation of the social formation, in parallel with the revolutions and World War I, Georgia faced the necessity of re – conceptualizing the national identity.

The main goal of the symbolist poets was a renewal of Georgian literature and its inclusion into the western context. A group of young poets attempted to broaden the area of thought and modernization of Georgian culture not only with their art but also through their public activities. They transformed the well – established notion of centre – periphery relations and declared Tbilisi as the cultural centre, thus rejecting the status of the cultural periphery.

The birth of Georgian Symbolism coincides with the short period of independence of Georgia. From the 21st century perspective, identifying the importance, features and place of Georgian Symbolism is crucial to place Georgian literature in the context of European modernism and to understand the development of Georgian literature.

Body in transit, body as foreign, body in rebellion: Murata Sayaka and the “female” challenge

2022-11-29T15:21:46+04:00

One prominent feature of the contemporary Japanese literary scene is the emergence of female writers impacting the readership with a renewed sensibility of the bodily self, challenging the normative understanding of the body with boldness of imagination that throws into question the very meaning of the human. At the forefront of this trend is Sayaka Murata, who made a sensational debut with her prize – winning work, Convenience Store Woman (2016). Murata brings to light the illusion of normality that dominates our everyday life and “unmasks” the human in simple, easy – to – read language. In Earthlings (2018) Murata urges us to look at the mechanism of propagation of the inhabitants of the planet earth, seemingly suggesting that we break down the gender binary altogether. And it is not Murata alone who has embarked on such audacious challenge against the normal. Her female precursors who struggled to liberate themselves from the expectations of traditional “women’s literature” also dealt with the body, sex and the pressure to reproduce. What is particularly striking, I argue, is that Murata’s work, together with new writings by her fellow female poets and novelists, appears to be enjoying wide resonance in a way earlier female writers did not, as the humanity is being forced to question the very meaning of the human, of propagation and of a belief in progress.

How to Live (and Die) in Different Places at Once: Transnational Narrative in Itō Hiromi’s The Thorn – Puller

2022-11-29T15:23:01+04:00

Although borders shape our existences in many ways, we live in an increasingly transnational, even post – national era. If one collected all people who living outside of the country where they were born, they would form a population only slightly smaller than that of China or India. What does that mean for Japanese literature? Until recently, most assumed Japanese literature was written in Japan by Japanese people writing in the Japanese language, but now that some of Japan’s most important and prolific writers are living outside of the country and some of the Japanese language’s most creative are not ethnically Japanese, those assumptions no longer hold.

This presentation examines the implications of transnationalism for Japanese literature by looking at the recent work of Itō Hiromi—a fiercely independent poet famous for writing bold writing about motherhood and the female body. In 1990s, she relocated to California but continued to shuttle back and forth across the Pacific to take care of her slowly dying parents. During this time, her literature took a transnational turn as she began to write about the life of immigrants, drawing inspiration from her own experiences.

Her stylistical innovative 2007 book The Thorn – Puller is an account of her transpacific life. Weaving together autobiography with Japanese folklore, literature, and pop culture, this imaginative book attempts to forge a new mode of storytelling for our transnational world. The book’s richly polyvocal nature reflects the complex, uprooted experience of modernity in which narrative, ideas, stories, and legends shape experience as much as the places where those stories originated. This book shows us our lives can never be reduced to the physical. Instead, we all live within intertextual collections of memories, stories, myths, and tales—a complex multicultural fabric of knowledge that transcends physical experiences and cartological locations.

Poetry as a Means of Survival: why do we still need “women’s poetry”?

2022-11-29T15:24:09+04:00

Poetry can give voices to those who are unheard, unrecorded and unspoken. Though more and more contemporary women poets are reaching the wider reading public in recent years, many women are still forced to be silent. Especially in the country like Japan, which ranks 120^th out of 156 countries in the Global Gender Gap index in 2021, women are still struggling to speak out.

This presentation examines those unspoken stories of silenced women from some of the recently published poetry collections of Japanese women poets, Soon to Become a Witch (2021) by Kawaguchi Harumi (b.1962), Go, Alone (2021) by Park Kyongmi (b.1956) and Fly Low Marvelously (2019) by Abe Hinako (b.1953), and discuss how they use startling and disturbing imagery to depict women’ lives, which are so often untold and unheard. These collections present the stories of women, mothers, daughters and schoolgirls who are unable to verbalize or even to recognize their own pain or angst; a girl facing sexual assaults from her father, a wife suffering from domestic violence, a control – freak mother who cannot control her jealousy over her daughter’s sexual attractiveness, a Korean – Japanese woman who is trapped in a family curse passed down from her female relatives.

These women’s stories are transnational. In Anglophone poetry, these women’s issues may be considered ‘out of fashion’ and some may even argue much has changed. However, it does not mean they are all solved because we know these issues still exist in many regions of the globe. Silenced women tend to become isolated because they cannot share their own stories. I argue poetry can connect those isolated women and reassure they are not alone. By analyzing these recently published poems, I hope to argue the importance of (re)telling, (re)imagining and (re)sharing women’s experiences through poetry.

Reimagining the Wartime Past: Nakajima Kyōko’s The Little House (2008–10)

2022-11-29T15:25:18+04:00

Contemporary women writers around the world are finding different ways to engage with the past, to reframe history and canonical texts in which they have been ignored or marginalized. In Japan too, women are producing compelling works that pay particular attention to voices and stories that have been overlooked or suppressed in the broader framework of a “normative” modern Japan.

In this paper, I focus on the critically acclaimed, bestselling author Nakajima Kyōko, who challenges established ideas and stories by writing through the lens of the Other, and engaging in a playful, yet powerful use of intertextuality. I particularly focus on Chiisana ouchi (The Little House, 2008 – 10), which rejects simple notions of familial ties and heterosexual romance in the context of the wartime past. Through multiple narrators, minority representation and unexpected use of literary figures and texts, Nakajima’s work questions the stability of accepted Japanese history and literature.

Revisiting Qutb – ud – Din Bakhtiyar Kaki’s “Sacred Geography” along the Silk Road through Performance, Visuality, Text

2022-11-29T15:26:46+04:00

The exchange of people, cultures and ideas between India and Central Asia has been ongoing for centuries especially through the silk road where not just commodities, but cultural and civilisational viewpoints were also exchanged. Sufism was one such important cultural exchange as Sufi saints from Central Asia settled in different cities of South Asia. These travelling Sufis who came along the silk road played significant roles in establishing cultural connections between India and Central Asia through intermeshing of ideas, practices and performances.

The most popular order of Sufism in India came in the 12^th century through Moinuddin Chishti who travelled from Chisht to India and settled in Ajmer after moving all over central Asia and some parts of north India, including Delhi. Mu‘in – ud – Din Chishti chose Qutb – ud – Din Bakhtiyar Kaki (1173 – 1235) who was born at Ush, in Central Asia as his spiritual successor^.To mature his knowledge and experience in Sufism, Khwaja Qutbuddin travelled across the silk road to various places in Afghanistan, Persia and Iraq. He later travelled to Multan and then finally settled in Delhi. He was popularly known as Kaki due to a miraculously producing Kaak (a form of bread popular in Central Asia), a miracle attributed to him in Delhi. This paper attempts to locate the traveling Sufi Qutb – ud – Din Bakhtiyar kaki’s journey within the said temporal and spatial framework via the reception of Kaki in public memory through oral and visual practices in South Asia.

It also offers an textual analysis of “Fawaid – us – Salikin” (contains his teachings and sayings), which is considered a masterpiece on Sufism in Persian written by Hazrat Qutbuddin himself; it contain references to the cities and culture of Central Asia which are a gateway to the memoryscape of his travel across the Silk Road. Thus this paper aims to re – visit the “sacred geography” of Qutb – ud – Din Bakhtiyar Kaki in performance, visuality, text, hagiography and public memory across the Silk Road.

Journeying Across the Silk Route Via Shah Jo Raag: Travel, Space, and Sufism

2022-11-29T15:28:34+04:00

The Silk Route in the history of cultural exchange has been a prominent bridge connecting the East and the West. Thereby, producing the term Eurasia. Along with the trading practice, what mediated between the two were ideologies, religion, material, art, and performance. It was the migration and settlement that gave rise to a new synthesis of cultural paradigms. One such outcome of this amalgamation is the performative tradition of poetry.

Sufism as the mystic form of Islam, got spread through this route and travelled all the way from Arabia to Central Asia and made its influential impact in South Asia. The wandering Sufis not only charted the sacred landscape but brought a new element of Sama (musical performance and dance in devotion). Shah Jo Raag is one such form of devotional poetry, that is sung at the shrine of its composer and cult Sufi – Shah Abdul Latif, at Bhit Shah, Pakistan. Its context is based on

Shah Latif’s collection of verses (Risalo), which has Qissa (folktales), Hamd (poetry praising God), Waqiya (anecdotes) and other forms of poetry. These verses carry spatial and spiritual metaphors that are a gateway to the memoryscape of the Silk Road. Thus, this paper will be an investigation and a transmedial journey from the oral performance of Shah Jo Raag by Raagi

faqirs at Sindh (South Asia) to the cities, culture, and traditions of Central Asia. The sonic form of lyric will be a departing point into the spiritual realm of Central Asia, the space from where the genealogy of Shah Latif can be traced, and into the spatio – geography of the cities mentioned in the verses in Risalo. Thereby, tracing and establishing the link between Central Asia and South Asia through mobility of various forms.

Pari in Indian Theatrical Public Sphere

2022-11-29T15:29:35+04:00

The emergence of Afroeurasian world system, in particular the silk roads and the subsequent Arab expansions established extensive links within Asia, leading to a variety of circulations, ideas, trade, material culture and art forms. Though generally differentiated in terms of Hindu and Islamic categories within the region of South Asia, emergent cultures of such a contact were highly pluralistic and incorporated the prevailing multilinguality and pluriculturality, cosmopolitanism and vernacularisms, intermedialities and other aesthetic conventions. Within this context, the present paper attempts to see the development of the category of ‘Pari’ in India. Though central Asian in origin, Pari in India has overlappings with several flying divinities, the Hindu Apsaras andGandharvas, Tantric Buddhist Dakinis and characters in folk and popular culture. In order to explore the cultural dimensions that Pari had reached by the nineteenth century, the study of IndarSabha, a play written in 1853 by Agha HasanAmanat, attached to the court of Wajid Ali Shah at Lucknow is undertaken. The play incorporates all the three dimensions of a medieval Indian performative public sphere, the scripto – centric, phono – centric and body – centric, with 31 Gazals, 9 Thumris, 4 Holis, 15 songs, 2 Choubolas and 5 Chands. However, it is the performances of Parsi theatre companies, starting from the 1880s, that diffused the theme of Pari as a personification of a new sensibility that was emerging due to modernity, not only across India but also in South East Asia. The centrality of Pari within the play and the performative public sphere on the one hand and the development of a new sense of aesthetic sensibilities within the theatrical public sphere on the other is also going to be explored.

Silken Thread(s) of Qissa: Secular and Sacred Geography of Converging Cultures

2022-11-29T15:30:47+04:00

The movement of people across the globe has been instrumental in the enhancement of trade, communication, and cultural reciprocity. One such instance of converging cultures is the fecund literary genre of qissa (legend or folktale). The qissa tradition lies at the nexus of Perso – Arabic and Indian vernacular aesthetic forms (specifically the Punjab region) offering vital insights into the process of production and consumption of narratives that travel across spatial and temporal boundaries. This paper proposes a study of Sohni – Mahiwal Qissa, one of the famous tragic romance tales of the Indian subcontinent. At the heart of its plot lies the trade route between Bukhara (Afghanistan) and Delhi of eighteenth – century India. Tethering the Eastern and Western countries, the Silk Road has enabled an exchange of not only goods but also cultural and religious practices. By the same token, the Persio – Arabic genre of qissa traveled to India with the caravans only to thrive in the regions of medieval and early modern Punjab and gradually making its way into verses composed in a few other vernacular languages. Its migratory behaviour has endowed it with features of what the scholars of transmediality studies call ‘participatory culture’.

The public mediations of Sohni – Mahiwal Qissa have percolated into diverse audio – visual media and occasions direct or indirect references in verses emerging from folksongs, Sufism, nationalist discourse, etc. This makes the narrative a perfect site of intersection of public memory, performative traditions, and vernacular historical consciousness as the sacred and the secular patterns of the region(s) are interwoven within the fabric. This paper maneuvers to identify ways in which the form and content of the tale transform within specific religious and secular spaces while maintaining its inherent idiosyncrasies as the characters essentially become the site of performative memory.

Spatiality, Mobility, and Femininity: Mapping Movement of Pari in Haryanvi Folktales

2022-11-29T15:32:00+04:00

The proposed paper surveys folktales from Haryana in order to investigate cultural encounters between various religious belief systems and their impact on constructions of femininity as reflected in folk narratives about Pari. The figure of Pari, in folktales of Haryana, is morally ambiguous and occupies a liminal space between the good and the evil. Their representation appears to be a conflation of cultural figures of Pari from Persia, Apsara from South Asian cultures, and Dakini from Tantric and Buddhist subcultures. The paper will employ ideas of travel, mobility and spatiality in order to trace the trajectory of the idea of Pari travelling from Persia to the Indian subcontinent, and its incorporation with ideas about supernatural female beings in existence within the culture of Haryana. A close study of these folktales and their content can reveal remnants of the cultural concepts of femininity which may have travelled along with these tales. Their subsequent integration could have transformed the concept of supernatural female figures in the folk imagination. The second part of the paper would investigate the mobility of the female characters within the folk narrative space, and their temporal and spatial location in culturally specific contexts. These readings can give us insights into the cultural ideas of travelling vis – a – vis domestic and socio – cultural public spaces. The paper will also explore the dialogue between the cultures as a result of historical encounters, and the dialogue between folk texts and the culture within which it is produced and received. As a consequence of these dialogic relationships, one can trace how notions of femininity and its relationship to space travels across geographies and manifests in folktales of a region.

Safar, Ishq, and the Traveling Sufi: Making of a “Sacred Geography”

2022-11-29T15:33:17+04:00

The narratives from pre-modern South Asia reflect, enhance, and engage with the contemporary Sufi spiritual and socio-political currents, positing the Subcontinent within the field of literary-cultural-material transactions across the Silk Road. The idea of Safar (or, travel) emerges as crucial to the propagation of Sufi thought and expression in South Asia, marking the Perso-Arabic paradigm of exchanges as a cognitive and affective space of contact. The trajectory of traveling Sufis can be visited to understand the gradual formation of a certain “sacred geography” along the Silk Road, connecting present day “central” and “southern” parts of Asia with fluid exchanges of ideas, material, and spiritual practices. The paper intends to locate the 9^th Century traveling Sufi Mansoor al Hallaj’s journey within the said temporal and spatial framework via the reception of Hallaj as a thematic in performance/ lyric and visual practices in South Asia. The gradual transformation of Hallaj’s journey towards the ultimate fanaa, following years of seeking and hijr (longing in separation) – both physically and metaphorically – into the emergent thematic element in Sufi expression, can be traced across media and at inter-medial junctures. The paper would explore the lyric by Sufis in performance in pre-modern South Asia, tracing the traveling thematic expression of “the Hallaj matter,” centering around the idea of an all-encompassing divine Ishq (love), capable of delivering fanaa through self-annihilation. The paper would trace the ways in which Hallaj’s persecution for claiming anal-haq (meaning “I am God”), has travelled across spaces in pre-modern Central and South Asia, exploring the later Sufi performative lyric in Farsi, Punjabi and Urdu; and extend the reading of the same to the pre-modern visual presentations in the form of miniature painting procured from Dilli and Kashmir, with a focus on the processes of narrative-making across media and via intermedial transactions. In the process, the paper aims to re-visit the invisibilized narratives of a “sacred geography” in performance and material cultures across the Silk Road.

Thinking about Comparative Literature today: shifting objects, changing methods

2022-11-29T15:34:56+04:00

My paper will focus on the evolution of the relations between theory and philosophy in theoretical thinking about comparative literature. What does a contemporary theory of literature purport to do, and how does it construct its objects in a rapidly evolving field of practices, where the relation between global and local, mainstreams and margins has evolved as well? Resting on a few instances of recent critical reassessments of theoretical issues about comparative literature, I will endeavor to outline the consequences this evolution has on the way theoretical thinking about literature can account for itself today.

The problem of ‘minoritization’ in comparative and world literary studies

2022-11-29T15:36:44+04:00

This paper focuses on the problem of ‘minoritization’ in comparative and world literary studies. It questions the extent to which comparative theories of world literature recognize the ‘minor’ in rethinking the universal. Proposing ways in which minoritized languages and literatures can be recognized as having more cultural agency than is currently acknowledged, it aims to generate a new dynamic for refiguring naturalized notions of the universal.

Multilingual Pedagogies and the Public Humanities

2022-11-29T15:38:05+04:00

How does comparative literature resist dominant language hegemony in our institutional spaces? Inspired by activist interpretation practices, I am interested in creating multilingual spaces and learning experiences that would affirm the centrality of translation studies and linguistic diversity in academic life. My article “Building Language Justice” (Translation Review 2020) focuses on the USA, but I would like to brainstorm international and creative strategies to incorporate multiple language traditions in research and teaching.

Matthew Reynolds – Collaborative Language(s)

2022-11-29T15:39:07+04:00

This paper will consider language(s) in the context of scholarly collaboration. Typically, collaboration assumes a shared metalanguage, even when literature in several different languages is being discussed. But is it possible to imagine, and indeed plan, modes of collaboration in which linguistic diversity is more active in our practice, just as it is in the writing we research? – In which thinking can happen through the collaboration of language(s)? This paper will explore the question both in theory and in practice, working with Naoki Sakai’s concept of ‘heterolingual address’ and David Gramling’s idea of ‘translational monolingualization’, and bringing them into conversation with recent collaborative works led by Caroline Bergvall such as Language Stations and Conference of the Birds.

Multilingualism as Method: Material Culture, Global Networks and Comparative Literature

2022-11-29T15:40:33+04:00

How do we steer away from direct influence and parallel studies in comparative literature but still privilege intercultural dialogue? The literary world is saturated with traces of cultural encounter, including languages, bodies of knowledge, such as Orientalism, objects, such as silk, jade and porcelain, and food and drink, such as bread, noodles and dumplings, coffee and tea, whose itineraries of travel around the globe resonate with the Silk Road, the most famous global network of circulation and cultural exchange. The Silk Road haunts many literary works inhabited by people, things, ideas, ideologies and even entire cultural institutions that have come from far and wide to partake in the construction of their textual world. Tea, a staple feature of contemporary fictional worlds, is a good example. The history of tea’s origins and proliferation, and of its production and consumption as well as attendant technologies, material culture, rituals and spaces, has been mapped fully so that it would be possible, in fact, easy to track the global movement of tea, the rise and development of teahouses, and the intercultural dialogues embedded in the practice of tea consumption and, more importantly, in tea aesthetics. A multilingual reading of tea against the backdrop of the cultures of the Silk Road(s) allows us to reconstruct intercultural dialogues in literary texts across time and space, and to move beyond East – West influence and parallel studies and beyond translation as circulation.

‘Interliterariness’ and Comparative Literature: Romantic Poetics, Systemic Approach, and Humanistic Ideals

2022-11-29T15:41:53+04:00

Interliterariness, as a concept in the field of Comparative Literature, is characterized by the Slovak comparatist Dionýz Durišin as ‘the basic and essential quality’ of literature involved in the interliterary process. Due to Durišin’s versatile employment of theoretical sources and its geo-political implications, the concept has not received its deserved attention and is limited in application, as is pointed by Marián Gálik, among other scholars. This essay is at an attempt to shed some light on the potential of the concept of ‘interliterariness’ in envisaging a future of Comparative Literature as a discipline, in face of its perpetual crisis. In doing so, the essay is not confined to Durišin’s own interpretation, but rather relates the concept and its implications to the early stage of Comparative Literature, originated in Romanticism, and tries to seek its contemporary resonances and affinities with theoretical configurations of other comparatists, including Claudio Guillen, Franco Moretti, and Jonathan Culler. It is also mentioned in this essay why ‘interliterariness’ is proposed as a viable concept more suitable for defining the object of Comparative Literature, instead of substituting the latter for a study of intertextuality.

Nothing but Fashion: Effacement of Subjectivity by Representation in Literature and Arts

2022-11-29T15:46:13+04:00

The paper focuses on the representation of women in public positions by means of fashion and posing. The baroque age is considered as the first time in human history when symbolic representation and self – representation in paintings, architecture, and performing arts were widely used to establish power. As representation is based on media, it is understood as a re – codification of external appearance, a re – writing of a specific ensemble of codes.

Special emphasis is given to the depiction of women who became iconic figures in this form of staging: In her novel Blonde (2000), Joyce Carol Oates argues as well as Elfriede Jelinek does in her play Jackie (2003) that women in public positions, such as Marilyn Monroe or Jacqueline Bouvier – Kennedy – Onassis are depicted by media in a manner that does not allow to develop a proper subjectivity: “I am not flesh, […] I am the dress! My silhouette never changes,” says Jackie in the 2003 play by the Austrian Nobel Prize laureate. Both Oates and Jelinek uncover and criticise the creation of public figures by media and scrutinise the mechanism of effacement of subjectivity going hand in hand with this procedure.

Indeed, this form of codification of a female public figure has a long history as a glance at the portraits of the Spanish Infanta Margarita Teresa (1651 – 1673) by Diego Velázquez, Pablo Picasso and others show: In these paintings, the same reductionist features are used to create an iconic figure.

Besides concepts of intermediality and of representation, the paper uses theoretic support from Roland Barthes’ seminal essay Système de la mode (1967) and from Barbara Vinken’s Philosophy of Fashion (Mode nach der Mode, 1993, et al.).

What is the Neo – Baroque? A Critical Reassessment

2022-11-29T15:47:36+04:00

The notion of ‘neo – baroque’ has been employed in the most diverse fields – from art history to philosophy, from media studies to cultural history – to describe a wide array of phenomena in contemporary culture that can be analysed in the light of 17th century’s baroque culture. This paper aims to reassess the heuristic value of this idea and interrogate its relevance for understanding today’s mediascape.

My talk will be divided into 3 sections. In section 1 I will discuss some of the most relevant definitions of the neo – baroque developed after the publication of Deleuze’s seminal essay Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque (1988). Section 2 will take the works of British artist and director Peter Greenaway as ideal case studies for exploring the return of the baroque in contemporary cinema. Section 3 will explore the possibility of developing a new theory of the neo – baroque by cross – fertilising and re – elaborating some of the theories developed over the last decades.

The Neo – baroque Film adaptations of Wojciech Jerzy Has

2022-11-29T15:48:41+04:00

This presentation is a response to a remark of a disgruntled viewer that the films directed by the outstanding Polish filmmaker Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925 – 2000) actually constitute one and the same movie. Paradoxically, this condescending and shallow observation captures precisely the neo – baroque morphogenesis of Has’s cinema.

To cinema cognoscenti Wojciech Jerzy Has, trained originally as a painter, has been familiar since the 1960s as the director of the esoteric, black and white, Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie (Saragossa Manuscript,1965) and the intriguing color film Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (The Hour – Glass Sanatorium, 1973), an adaptation of short stories by a Polish – Jewish writer Bruno Schulz. Indeed, all Has’s feature films are adaptations of novels by Polish, Scottish and French writers. The director’s neo – baroque films provide a site for his cultural polemic with the writers hailing from various cultural backgrounds.

I explore the enfolding continuum of all Has’s films as a neo – baroque cinematic artifice: a Wunderkammer – like labyrinthine junkyard situated at a crossroads of Modernity’s looping spatial and temporal paths; an arch – fold which runs from linguistic expression through visual complexity of the cinematic montage to the rich materiality of reality, from the title of Has’s first film Pętla (Loop/Noose1957), to the images of gigantic sea – shells in the end of his last movie Niezwykła podróż Baltazara Kobera (The Tribulations of Balthasar Kober, 1988)

How Wojciech Jerzy Has connects in his films the theatricality inherent in the neo – baroque experience with its fundamental exaltation of otherness is best understood through the lens of Christine Buci – Gluksmann’s “baroque reason”. The director employs neo – baroque as an “anti – proprietary expression” invoked by Monika Kaup and C.A. Salgado’s neo – baroque’s conciliatory capacity inherent in the assimilation of marginalized influences by the discourse of the center.

Beatus et Possessus: Sacred Rituals and Crisis of Faith in Requiem for the Living

2022-11-29T15:50:18+04:00

Without risk there is no faith. Faith is precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the individual’s inwardness and the objective uncertainty (Kierkegaard 210). Faith which is the cornerstone of the religious life cannot be grasped by any means of concepts other than the religious experience of the faithful. The sacred rituals is the greatest example of one’s faith in God. It is the symbol of highest form of love – agape – the love to God and love to thy neighbour. Requiem for the Living presents a “Mother of Faith”, Juana Mammanji (Grand Mother), the matriarch of a Luso – Indian household, who were devout Latin Catholics. The novella presents a chain of faith spanning through generations that kept the whole community together, left broken with the present descendant Osha. Mammanji becomes the blessed in her community by helping out her family and community to live a meaningful life by following the sacred rituals while Osha was possessed by the specter of the glorious past, losing himself in his fallen state. Mammanji becomes the God’s faith – ful by reviving her community with His sacred dictums as revealed through her while Osha becomes faith – less by abstaining from his path to be a beacon to his community. The customs and religious traditions of the community emerged out of Juana Mammanji from her lived experience has been left with no heir when it comes to the present.

Dream on Monkey Mountain as a ritual play

2022-11-29T15:51:34+04:00

Dream on Monkey Mountain is a masterpiece by the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. Many critics analyze it as a dream play in the western tradition while it can be categorized as a ritual play when put in the context of Afro – Caribbean cultural tradition.

On the one hand, it uses spirit possession to structure the play. Part I and Part II can be regarded as separate rituals initiated by the possession of the white goddess. The ritual atmosphere is established by the use of African drum, song and dance, and mask as in an Afro – Caribbean religious ritual. The structure corresponds to the cyclical time view in African cosmology instead of the Judeo – Christian concept of linear time. The cyclical structure is to question the Western progressive concept of history, which is a thematic concern of the play.

On the other hand, in content the play stresses the balance and reciprocity between human and nature in African cosmology. First of all, the main characters all bear animal names, which not only displays the colonial stereotype of the inferiority of the colonized but also stresses their spiritual connection to nature. The transformation of the tree to coal and then to fire or diamond is another important metaphor. Humans, like coal, must experience transformation through interaction with the earth and the immediate environment.

The clash and integration of the Afro – Caribbean religion and the Western play brings about the new genre of West Indian ritual play. West Indian playwrights including Derek Walcott uses this genre to reflect on their cultural legacy and their new identity after independence. The emergence of the genre shows the strong creative potential of Caribbean culture and Caribbean people.

The Liminal Space of Theyyam: Intersections and Interruptions

2022-11-29T15:52:47+04:00

Occupying the liminal space between dance, theatre, and ritual, the Theyyam of Kerala is a unique blend of the ritualistic and the ‘aesthetic’. My paper attempts to study this performance tradition as a ritual practice that goes beyond binaric paradigms such ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’. As Farley Richmond puts it, rituals serve to “punctuate, set off, and frame performances”. Ritual performances are engendered and embedded in the cultural fabric of the society and cannot be abstracted out of these social processes. Thus, when one observes a Theyyam performance, one encounters the history and cultural life of Northern Malabar. The literary texts (thottams) of the performance narrativise the legends, often of figures who have suffered social injustice or trauma in their livestake on the forms of Theyyams. They also enumerate the diverse customs and practices of the community. In Theyyam, one observes that the efficacy of the performance not only depends upon the proper recitation of the texts (thottams), but also on the “mode of life of the medium and how well the deity comes onto the body. (Bruckner and Schombucher 607). Hence, ritual efficacy becomes the organisational center of this performing tradition. Similarly, unlike other theatrical performances, Theyyam cannot be staged at all times of the year and involves strict adherence to ritual considerations of time. The deity thus possesses the performers only during these specific times and is contingent on the vrutanastanas that accompany the performance. Here, the ‘aesthetic’ cannot be separated from its culture – specific context and the distinctions between ritual and theatre, and essentialised notions of ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ are constantly blurred.

The Philosophical Bases of Shota Rustaveli’s The Man in the Panther Skin (MPS): From Neoplatonism to Levinas

2022-11-29T15:54:37+04:00

Rustaveli’s poem contrasts King Rostevan and Tariel, the mysterious man in the panther skin, and their opposite ways of thinking and acting: Rostevan thinks and acts rationally, Tariel is impulsive. These characteristics are based on Aristotle’s idea that both humans and animals perceive reality, but only humans draw logical conclusions from perceptions. Animals are impulsive: they react to their perceptions on basis of instincts and reflexes. Additionally, Aristotle assumed that humans and animals do not change but stay human or animal, respectively. Neoplatonists assumed the existence of other unchanging categories—or hypostases – – in addition to humans and animals, but the Pseudo – Dionysios and Iamblichus argued that humans, after all, can change: into angels, the category between humans and the One, the Supreme Being. Additionally, Rustaveli allows for a change of animals into humans as well when describing Tariel’s change from an impulsive animal into a rational human. This change enables Tariel to find a rational solution to his problem and free Nestan – Darejan. Anticipating Hegel, Tariel becomes his and Avtandil’s synthesis, as he combines his and Avtandil’s characteristics: love for Nestan – Darejan and logical thinking. Avtandil changes into his antithesis, when he accepts Tariel’s priority: freeing Nestan – Darejan, but does not change into a synthesis, as he is only a secondary hero. Hegel states that “Self – consciousness … has lost its own self, since it finds itself as an other being,” without explaining why self – consciousness acts. Rustaveli provides friendship as the explanation, anticipating Levinas who posits that an individual feels a “guiltless responsibility” towards an Other. First Tinatin and then Avtandil help Tariel because they feel this “guiltless responsibility” toward him. Hence Rustaveli is curiously modern in his anticipation of Hegel and Levinas.

The Concepts and Realities of the Eastern Culture in "The Knight in the Panther's Skin"

2022-11-29T15:55:46+04:00

To the present day the research on The Knight in the Panther’s Skin (hereinafter KPS) in connection with the Eastern Muslim world has been conducted in two main directions:

KPS and literature composed in the Muslim world (for example, parallels with Nizami, Ferdowsi, Fakhraddin Gorgani etc.);
KPS and the confession of the Muslim faith: this includes the works, which agree or deny the presence of the Muslim understanding of God, world, romantic love and the relationship between men and women in the KPS.

The Muslim religion of the heroes is emphasized by the mention of various realities of the Muslim culture (Musapi (Koran) which is repeatedly mentioned; the attitude of the characters of the poem to wine; the weapons made by the renowned gunsmiths of Khorezm and Basra; metaphors associated with the symbolism of stones which have long been known in the East, etc).

When analyzing the concepts and realities of the cultures of the East in KPS the most significant is the concept of mijnuroba (love). Substantiating his own understanding of mijnur in the Prologue, Rustaveli refers the reader to the Arab culture. Presenting the suffering from love as an incurable malady obtained a special literary and aesthetic meaning in the poetry of the Bedouin (Udhrah) tribes of Central Arabia in the 7^th and 8^th centuries, the poets of which wrote verses on a fatal and almost mystic love that could bring only ordeal, with death being the only possible way out of it. The main motifs of the Udhrī lyrics (loss of consciousness, shedding tears of blood, roaming the plains, etc) acquired greater meaning and depth not only in Sufi poetry, but in the KPS and Troubadour poetry.

Yet, the conventional motifs, which are typical for both concepts – mijnuroba and Islam – are encountered in Rustaveli’s work only as readymade formulae, which are given a different interpretation as a result of literary revision.

The passage from Nonnus’ Dionysiaca in The Knight in the Panther's Skin?

2022-11-29T15:57:03+04:00

Traces of the Greco – Roman tradition within Rustaveli’s work are still being discovered to this day, as, in author’s view, is clearly demonstrated by a new instance of the reception of Greek myths in The Knight in the Panther's Skin. This piece of reception is related to an episode of Avtandil’s adventure described in the chapter “Avtandil’s Departure from Phridon to Seek Nestan – Daredjan”, where the main character, who epitomizes goodness as a defender of the oppressed, is disguised as a merchant, and strives alone to come to grips with pirates.

Pirates appear in fictional works that depict historical events, as well as in legends and myths. Amongst the latter, one of the most archaic and, at the same time, – popular plots in the Western and Eastern worlds is the myth about Dionysus and the Tyrrhenian Pirates. This narrative is upheld in the Homeric Hymns and later cited by Euripides, Ovid and Nonnus. In contrast to relevant passages belonging to Homeric Hymn 7, Euripides and Ovid, Nonnus characterizes Dionysus not as an innocent victim who accidentally encounters pirates while drunk with wine, but a hero fighting against greedy buccaneers, who himself entraps the pirates. Certain parallels that go well beyond the level of typological similarity can be observed between the above – mentioned episode from The Knight in the Panther’s Skin and the given passage from the Dionysiaca. By comparing excerpts from these two works, it becomes evident that the author of The Knight in the Panther’s Skin should have been familiar with the myth of Dionysus and the Tyrrhenian Pirates and, moreover, with the variant of the literary adaptation found in Dionysiaca of Nonnus. It seems quite organic that Rustaveli’s The Knight in Panther’s Skin, where traces of Neo – Platonism have been pointed out by a number of scholars, would have used the Dionysiaca permeated with the spirit of Neo – Platonism.

In the Knight in the Panther’s Skin by Shota Rustaveli and Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

2022-11-29T16:03:42+04:00

In The Knight in the Panther’s Skin by Shota Rustaveli, the syntagma “native land” was mentioned twice. It has binary meaning: directly it means the homeland (“the native land is mine”, 544) allegorically – the paradise (“They gave me the native land so desired for me” 812). The concept of the homeland has the binary meaning in the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri as well. The poet defines its metaphorical sense: We should imply the heaven as the homeland (91).

In the both texts the biblical concept is apparent: the paradise was Adam’s homeland, once lost and returning to it became the eschatological aim of the humans. Naturally, there are deep internal ties between the worldly and heavenly homeland: the heaven is a divine idea of the worldly native land (archetype). “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands” (The Acts of the Apostles 17:26). Thus, the individual is born at predetermined time and place, to seek for God. The purpose is mystic and its understanding takes place with the person’s self – comprehension (“who is he, where came he from, where is hi and where will he go” David Guramishvili).

In The Knight in the Panther’s Skin God is “who fixes the bounds” (792,3) and in the Divine Comedy the homeland and mother tongue is determined by Lord: the nature gives the men the mother tongue / and what kind of speech this should be, is ruled by the Lord” (127).

In the Christian literature the heaven is frequently mentioned as the divine Jerusalem or Zion and the world as Egypt. Dante also applies such paradigmatic eloquence as well: That’s why he was allowed to come from that darkness of Egypt here, to Zion (55).

For both poets, the invisible stairs from the worldly homeland to the heavenly one is the faith, realized in the lifestyle of the characters, serving to lord, homeland and human being.

Medieval period, royal power, king, deification, de – deification

2022-11-29T16:05:34+04:00

The idea of equality of the royal power with the divine has been existed since ancient times. In different cultures of the ancient east, the royal power was associated with the mythical conception of the reign of god.

The idea of deifying of the monarchs was accepted by the Hellenic and Rome empires.

In biblical tradition the king is blessed by Lord but this is distinguished with significant special characteristics.

According to medieval Christian teaching, the king is blessed but this is about the institution, rather than about any specific person (king); the king’s title implies special responsibility to Lord. Later, in Byzantium, this teaching has distorted, The Emperor of Byzantium was regarded as the god in this world, sacral figure.

In Georgia, irrespective of common religious – cultural area, the situation was different from the one in Byzantium. In Georgia, there was believed that the king was blessed by the Lord but he was not deified.

In the said context, particular attention should be paid to Queen Tamar’s unknown Chronicler and the texts of the praises. The Chronicler has written that Queen Tamar was “elevated as the fourth to the Trinity”, she could be seen “as the fourth by the side of Trinity”, Chakhrukhadze mentioned Tamar as “substitute of son, equal to her father”; Shavteli said “she is blessed three times like the son for her father”.

There are different opinions about the above mentioned phrases. According to one of the views, Tamar is deified and grounds for this could be the ideology of the state or the Queen’s supporters or existence of Georgian messianistic idea etc.

Similar to the number of scientists, we regard that Queen Tamar was not declared as of the “divine nature”. Supposedly, the Chronicler’s words mean that Tamar was elevated (“co – elevated”) by the Trinity as the “fourth” as the saint king and therefore, it can be seen with the Trinity, in the divine depths as “four”, similar and elevated. We regard that “four” should be attributed generally, to the saints (including Tamar, as the saint king).

In our opinion, the above words in the praises should be regarded in the same context as well.

For the Re – understanding of the Kimenic Issue

2022-11-29T16:06:38+04:00

The beginning of Georgian writing is rightly connected with ecclesiastical writing. Its important and valuable flow is created by the hagiographic literature, about which a thorough assessment was made in the scientific circles at the very beginning of the philological research, which deals with genre identification, typology, stylistic features, frameworks, etc. of hagiography. Nevertheless, Georgian hagiographic material is rarely found in international studies, this rich and diversified literature is little reflected in medieval scholarly works. It is conceivable that in addition to the historical context, we should also look for the reason in the specificity of the terminology. According to K. Kekelidze, hagiography is divided into Kimenic and metaphrasical writings. Often this division leads to misunderstanding, as similar terminological divisions can not be found in hagiographic studies. By classical and admitted definition, Kimen is a term used in exegetical writing to refer to a specific explanatory text in any Bible book. Byzantine commentators used to call Kimen the text and thus separated it from their own commentaries. According to K. Kekelidze's observations and the opinion shared among Georgian scholars, this term later acquired a new meaning, first in Georgian ecclesiastical figures, and then – in hagiographic writing – it referred to the initially described and unadulterated life – martyrdoms. Therefore, the texts referred as Kimen in Georgian literature relate to hagiography before metaphrase Here, however, the difference is naturally noticeable: the former is characterized by simple style and composition, story and structure, while in the latter these markers are subtle and more complex. It is necessary to reconsider what we mean by the term Kimen. What corresponds to them in international studies; What are their chronological frameworks, which original Georgian texts do we consider as monuments of Kimenic hagiography and which translated texts should we attribute to it.

Widowhood: A Cultural Study and Its Impact on Diasporic Female Identity

2022-11-29T16:08:51+04:00

From the South – Asian perspective widows are considered as inauspicious and harbinger of bad luck. They are subjected to abusive practices, such as violation of human rights, and physical and emotional violence, under the pretext of social and cultural taboos. However, this paper explores how widows contest stereotypical norms, as established by the conventional South – Asian society, in the diasporic context. Through a comparative analysis of the female characters in the novels of Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age (2007), Jhumpa

Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003), Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989), and Krutin Patel’s film, ABCD: American Born Confused Desi (1999), I argue that widowhood provides some sort of emancipation to these diasporic women. The narratives highlight the struggles that the characters, Rehana, Ashima, Jasmine and Anju, respectively, undergo after the demise of their husbands. Women are considered to be the bearers of their home culture. When diasporic women migrate from their home countries to the host nation, along with their physical displacement, they also carry their cultural traditions with them. So, even when they are away from their homeland, the widows are expected to abide by their native traditions. However, despite the struggles, these widows have been able to gain agency to some extent, which would not have been possible in the presence of their husbands owing to the stereotypical notion that men make all the important decisions in the family and women are expected to conform to them. Although it has to be acknowledged that the nature of their agency varies. While Ashima, Jasmine and Rehana are able to assimilate in the host culture

Anju finds it difficult to adapt to the American traditions. Furthermore, I will probe into the intersectional differences, such as differences in class and age that exist between the widows, which have a significant impact on their identity formation.

Representations of Widowhood: A Comparative Inspection of Cross Purpose, The House of Bernarda Alba and Reshmi Rumaal

2022-11-29T16:16:30+04:00

The ideas of widow and widowhood have often been reminiscent of loneliness and endures the loss of a male partner. The patriarchal system that intends to control the female body and mind through social conditioning, categorizes widows as remainders – of relationships, wars, partitions, ethnocides and genocides. The connotation of being a left over not only debars widows of socio – economic utility and significance but also acknowledges them as a burden on society waiting to be removed. Contesting these rigid beliefs, the paper shall explore the idea of widowhood through Albert Camus’ Cross Purpose (also known as The Misunderstanding), Federico Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, and Tripurari Sharma’s Reshmi Rumaal. The analysis of these dramatic texts shall unveil the consequences, struggles, succumbing and defiance of confinements of widowhood. It will show how the text incorporates and enlists the action and (potential) performance of the same. Most importantly, the paper shall comprise of the moments of intermingling of these texts and how the nuances of widowhood associate, dissociate and interject across European cultures and Indian contexts. The purpose is to unlock the dramatic language of widowhood that is based on circumstantial/ advertent absence of a male figure in the larger cosmos of war, Nazi occupied France, control, and an imposed period of eight years of mourning exhibited in the texts respectively.

Self and Society: A Study of Dalit Widow Narratives

2022-11-29T16:17:40+04:00

Carrying with themselves dual identities imposed upon them by the regressive society, women bear the identity of ‘Dalit widows’. Their already suppressed existence as Dalits is further pushed towards the periphery wherein their subaltern centurial oppression overlaps with them being branded as widows. The gendered identity of Dalit widows questions their social, economic and material realities which do not provide them with the agency to question the backward elements of the traditional culture they are a part of. This paper would investigate the (lost) self of widows that gets submerged in the societal customs and traditions through short story narratives, using ‘The Poisoned Bread’ by Bandhu Madhav, ‘Mother’ by Baburao Bagul, and ‘Slur’ by S. R. Harnot. The ideas of personal freedom as well as personal dignity which could be imagined by a Brahmin widow are somehow absent in the narratives created around the subject of Dalit widowhood.

Activation of the cinema code in the text

2022-11-29T17:30:18+04:00

In this work there are studied the cinema narrative techniques worked out by the Georgian futurists. The Georgian futurists demanded that literature should be divided into the cinema staged, they wanted a word to be cinematographed and they proclaimed Charlie Chaplin to be the head of the literary school.

Formalistic searches of the twenties (20^th century) were reflected in the works of quite a few Georgian authors. The started process that was interrupted in the Soviet period, still did not disappear. Like futurism, not only technological robotics is included in Zura Jishkariani’s novel, but the narrative is cinematographic and in general is matched with the screen codes. The writer often uses television inclusions directly in the sequence of the story. Perception in the novel always is implied as a screen image and the narration is a context of this screen image.

Activation of the cinema code in different forms is studied and analysed in the works of Rezo Gabriadze, Kote Jandieri and Archil Kikodze, that is expressed by bringing into the composition films, cinematographic methods, cinematographic narration of the object to be depicted.

Interaction and Reconstruction of Chinese Mythological Texts and Cinema Narration – the Case of Nezha

2022-11-29T17:31:24+04:00

As one of the earliest glorious dawns of human civilization, Chinese mythology, with its symbolic, imaginative and wild narrative carrier, has become a literary form with powerful appeal and vitality, creating a historical precedent for shaping national spirit and personality ideals. The innovation and intervention of emerging science and technology have constantly enabled the expression forms of Chinese classical mythology. Mythological texts are regarded as the frames of cinema narration. Since the Ming Dynasty in China, various mythological texts with Nezha as the motif have been widely circulated among the people and are well – known. In recent years, there are many films based on Nezha, such as Nezha: Birth of the Demon Child and New Gods: Nezha Reborn. With the support of numerous digital technologies, these two animated films have turned the pictures and shots into narrative symbols for constructing imagination space and aesthetic meaning in the cinematographic text. Through the encoding and decoding of symbols, the space of cinema art imagination has been constructed. This paper will take these two films as examples to focus on the innovative reconstruction and modern transformation of Chinese classic mythological texts, exploring how literature affects cinema narration and how cinema reconstructs the traditional mythological texts in the respective contexts, which finally reflects the mutual reflection of digital science and poetic literature.

Translating Culture in Chinese Animated Films

2022-11-29T17:32:34+04:00

As China plays an increasingly dynamic role in international society, attention to its cultural relevance is also on the increase. This is indicated in the popularity of recent Chinese animated films adapted from Chinese folktale, such as Monkey King: Hero is back (2015), White Snake (2019) and Ne Zha (2019) in the Western market. But while these films offer Western society a new window to access Chinese culture, they also pose challenges presented by their innate Chinese elements which differ significantly from Hollywood’s conventional presentation of Chinese culture. Audiovisual programme offers an effective way to help reduce misunderstandings, but it is not perfect as the audience can still decode the information that run counter to the message intended by the producers.

Looking to the performance of the Chinese animated films both at home and abroad, this paper aims to evaluate the relationship between subtitling and the success of a Chinese animated film. Interlingual translation may be the main focus of subtitling, but semiotic items should be taken into consideration from the perspective of multimodality. Since most Chinese animated films are adapted from Chinese folktale which contains rich cultural elements that are highly context – dependant and exclusive to Chinese cultural community, the translation of these cultural items will no doubt affect the delivery of the films and their reception by the target audience. The extent to which cultural translation plays a role in the making of these animated films thus deserves further attention.

Based on a selection of Chinese animated films, this paper will compare the English subtitles with their original Chinese lines to determine how cultural translation can facilitate intercultural communication in the media.

“Alankara” in Classical Indian Art Theories

2022-11-29T17:34:12+04:00

“Alankara” originally means “ornament, embellishment, decoration and beautification” in Sanskrit. The theory of Alankara was was firstly put forward in the encyclopedic treatise Natyasastra, then it existed as a regular and independent subject as rhetoric or figures of speech in Sanskrit poetics beyond dramatology. Besides, the theory of “Alankara” in Indian arts was evolved from Natyasastra. To be more specific, there are musical Alankara represented by the decorative tone system, the theory of Alankara in dance represented by the makeup and pure dance performance, and the theory of Alankara in fine arts characterized by its highly decorative lines, colors, compositions, etc. In all, there are both similarities and differences based on the analysis of “Alankara” in various art theories.

Transmedia adaption of Les Misérables and its reception in China

2022-11-29T17:35:18+04:00

Adaption of Les Misérables, the well – known novel of Victor Hugo, keeps appearing in different forms in different countries. Film, TV series, musical, animation, comics, games... these varied adaptions are not always faithful to the original and sometimes adapters make great changes according to their own needs. Based on the comparison of adapted works selected from east and west countries, my study tries to analyze possible factors that may affect the adaptation and study the reception of these adapted works by Chinese audiences. The variation theory is used during my study in order to explore impact of different cultures on adaptation and reception of literary classics.

On the Art of Adaptation in Soinka's King Baabu

2022-11-29T17:36:23+04:00

Soyinka's King Baabu was created in 2001. It was double influenced by Ubu Roi by of Alfred Jarry and Shakespeare's Macbeth. There are many similarities between the three plays in the plot, characters, thematic ideas and artistic techniques. Soyinka applies the framework of Shakespeare's Macbeth; Babu, Ubu and Macbeth are typical of careerists, conspirators and tyrannical monarchs in the history of world drama. King Baabu is a highly targeted satire, with the same distinct political tendency as Macbeth and the absurd and irrational ideas similar to Ubu Roi; both King Baabu and Ubu Roi adopt exaggerated, ironic and "black humor" artistic techniques. The clever reference from the ideological art of Macbeth and Ubu Roi fully shows Soinka's superb adaptation art.

Mass Communication of Chinese and Western Poetry Comparative Research Result – taking Chinese mainstream TV media civilization mutual learning variety show „The Synthesis of Civilizations“ as example

2022-11-29T17:37:32+04:00

A large – scale seasonal variety TV show“The Synthesis of Civilizations”has been recorded by CCTV, which aims on showing cultural exchanges and civilizational communications between China and the world. It is expected to be broadcast globally in prime time, through convergence media in 2022. In addition to “Chinese Poetry and Western Poetry”, the program also includes “Chinese Painting and Oil Painting” “Chinese Garden and Western Garden” “Chinese Traditional Dance and Western Ballet” and other contents. This article intends to focus on this variety show of mutual learning among civilizations in China, the first in the mainstream TV media under the construction of official discourse, and discusses the mass communication access to academic achievements related to “Comparative Study of Chinese and Western Poetry” and other related issues.

The first question need discussing here is “Why Chinese and Western poetry”. We can discover from this TV show that poetry becomes the spokesman in literary field. After the interview with the core team members, we can see that the reasons are multifaceted. Firstly, Chinese Tang poetry masterpieces are produced enormously and Tang poetry often represents the self – confidence of Chinese literature. Secondly, compared with novels or essays and other forms, poetry has high public awareness, especially for Chinese audiences, they are more familiar with poetry than other forms; thirdly, as a TV program with a total length of 60 minutes, compared with the comparative study of other forms, the content, artistic conception and image of Chinese and Western poetry are more easily conveyed through TV lens, video materials and new media technology.

The next question: parallel studies have new values in the process of cross – media, cross – context and cross – boundary communication. For a long time, in comparative literature studies, simple comparative studies of “X+Y” type are not well renowned. But when taking “poetry” as the way to show the communication and dialogue between different civilizations in TV programs, the parallel study of Chinese and Western in the type of “X+Y” has become a necessary choice. Under such wide research options, parallel studies excel in their focus on the research problem toshrink the research scopeI, their shortening the psychological distance of the audience in the premise of “common” and capability to better show the similarities and differences of specific research objects in a short time.

The final question: whether such mass communication program is beneficial to the academic study of Chinese and Western poetry or not? And more and more non – professionals concentrate on comparative research, how does this situation become a positive factor for subject development? Interdisciplinary research requires cross – research perspectives. In the context of new media, with the development of VR, holographic projection and other new technologies, technological innovation has facilitated the acquisition of comparative literature information, material mining and viewpoint presentation. While disseminating the research results of comparative literature, can convergence media stimulate literary research to discover new research problems and expand new research ideas? These problems are undoubtedly worthy of academic attention.

Imagination, Fictionality, Reality: On the Experimental Nature of Science Fiction

2022-11-29T17:39:34+04:00

Science fiction is a narrative that combines science and technology with fantasy, and imagination endows science fiction with the experimental nature. It is capable of strikingly predicting the development of technology, examining the local consequences of technological development or social trends, and reflecting the comprehensive impacts of technological changes on the operation mode, behavioral trajectory, social networks, and psychological functioning of human society. With multiple and composite narrative structures, science fiction attempts to use logic and reasoning to make reasonable assumptions from a fictional perspective. On the conceptual level, it reflects the future form of certain ideas; and on the social and cultural level, it seeks and displays the possible course of history aided by specific imagination and deformation of time and space. Science fiction is a kind of literary thought experiment, which fuses scientific imagination with literary fictionality to reveal the reality of a particular period and prompt people to think about different ways to the future.

Revaluation of “Dao”: the Ecological Reading of Le Guin’s Science Fiction

2022-11-29T17:41:32+04:00

This article first re – examines the underestimation of “Tao” in the research of Ursula K. Le Guin in the West, and believes that Western science fiction research has long lacked attention to ecology and Taoism, and underestimates or even deny Le Guin’s ecological “Tao”. This article cites Chinese ecological aesthetics and believes that Le Guin incorporated Chinese Taoism into her science fiction writing, which not only proposed critical ecological thinking, but laso challenged the Western science fiction tradition and the dualistic world view.

This article attempts to explore the ecological perspective of Taoism by revaluing Le Guin’s ecological “Tao”. This article believes that aesthetics and politics are intertwined with each other, and the duality blends, which can be concentrated in the ecological vision of Le Guin’s science fiction. This article explores the dual meanings of aesthetics and politics of Le Guin’s ecological “Tao”and attempts to enrich the critical connotation of Taoist ecological aesthetics.

Finding theology in contemporary Chinese fiction

2022-11-29T17:42:38+04:00

Literature can offer a space and hope for a possible creative theology, and this is true also of the contemporary literature of China. In 1923 Lu Xun expressed his hope that literature was capable of transforming the spirit of the Chinese people, Chinese fiction has drawn upon the ancient wisdom of China to explore possibilities after the Cultural Revolution in works that are sometimes banned in the Peoples Republic of China but increasingly have a world readership in English translations. They may be compared with some of the ideas of liberation theology in the western tradition.

Buchi Emecheta's Identity Reconstruction in Head Above Water

2022-11-29T17:44:19+04:00

Buchi Emecheta，as a diasporic Nigerian write，had won a well – known reputation because of her literature works，including one autobiography Head Above Water published in 1986 as one of Heinemann’s African writers Series. Just like other African writers with the characteristics of diaspora at that time, Emecheta also experienced the confusion of identity. This paper will focus on her autobiography Head Above Water to explore the process of her identity reconstruction from three aspects: Identity confusion – – female image under the gaze of the other; identity pursuit – from attachment to independence; identity reconstruction – the establishment of female subjectivity. Her identity reconstruction is not only reflected in the literature works, but also beyond the written works. As a visiting professor of Calabar University, Emecheta gave speeches on many occasions. She spoke for black women both in and out of her works throughout her life, which helped subvert the male – dominated African literary tradition in some degree and reconstructing the subjective status of African women.

A Comparative Analysis of qidian.com and webnovel.com: From the View of Digital Humanities

2022-11-29T17:45:23+04:00

Being ignored by mainstream scholars, cyberliterature has become an integral part of contemporary recreation for people living in the world greatly changed by the revolution in information technology and consequent social upheaval. Chinese cyberliterature, benefitting from fast – growing digital culture industry, has developed successful industrial model represented by “qidian.com”, a famous website for internet users to read and write cyberliterature, ranking 9087 in global internet traffic. The launch of its international version “webnovel.com” in 2017 marks a strong, well – tested, and sophisticated cyberliterature industrial model entering global cultural market. By comparing these two websites from the view of digital humanities, this research is expected to analyze differences between their scale, functions, sorts of works, and two versions (original and translated) of a specific text existing in both websites. Based on data analysis, several conclusions will be inferred such as the advantages, limitations, and influences of “qidian – mode” facing unfamiliar and complicated international surroundings. After that, drawing inferences about the future direction of cyberliterature industry becomes available and reliable. In conclusion, though encountering several problems while launching the international version, “qidian – mode” with Chinese characteristics and standards provides a practical model for development and industrialization of cyberliterature around the world. The popularity and expansion of qidian.com proves that comparative literature should not only pay its attention to specific texts and traditional schools of literature, but also comprehensive changes of literature in internet era.

Imagination, Spirit and Daemon: English Interpretation of 神Shen in Ancient Chinese Literary Thoughts

2022-11-29T17:46:37+04:00

神 shen is a key word frequently used in the Ancient Chinese Literary Thoughts with multiple meanings. The character was originally related to primitive belief. Later, the literatti during the Six Dynasties (around AD 220–589) began to use it in aesthetic criticism, as in discussion on the temperament and personality of the painters and writers, the classification of works, or even the process and methods of creation. Different schools of thoughts viewed the term differently, which has shaped the understanding about it. Generally speaking, the term acquired the meaning of subtle change and variation from the original reference of spirits and gods, later indicates the spirit, temperament, personality, minds and such human elements, and finally becomes a key term related to imagination in writing in the field of arts and literature. In the west tradition of imagination, one sees a different but not without common route. Translators and critics use terms such as Imagination, Spirit and Daemon to interpret shen, each focusing on different aspects of this term. A comparative study of these interpretation shows how people view the author’s role and the process of literary creation in history.

The Returning to the Land: An Analysis of the Construction and the Liberation of the other in Life & Times of Michael K with a Perspective of Discourse Criticism

2022-11-29T17:47:35+04:00

As one of Coetzee’s representative works, Life & Times of Michael K is highly appreciated not only for its artistry but for its revelatory insight in Coetzee’s views of South African society and human existence, which claims a crucial position in criticism of Coetzee’s early works. From the perspective of discourse criticism, this paper analyzes how the social hierarchy presented in this novel achieves the production and control of the other, and how Mickael K cancels his identity of the other and regains his liberty by escaping and ploughing. Through the position and the attitude presented in the novel, the paper tries to reveal Coetzee’s understanding in identical equality and human liberation, as well as his heroism in modern context.

White in Existential Guilt: Athol Fugard and The Train Driver

2022-11-29T17:48:37+04:00

Athol Fugard is the most important playwrights in South Africa, who has a near – 50 – year writing on black,white and colored individuals in his country. Out of a liberal conscience and guilt, his works used to function as statements against Apartheid. After liberation in 1994, rather than as a kind of testimony, “The Train Driver”, the combination of special South African theme and Western techiques and a culmination of blindness and white guilt.The study will try to figure out the definition of “existential guilt” mainly from this play by means of “content and form dialectics”. The theatrical techniques will be analysed to present styles and features of Athol Fugard. In The Train Driver, the one – act form, monologue, dialogue and are worthy of great attention. In conclusion, the form of the play represents a further development of Brechtian theatrical device, a confession of his guilt, a record of personal psychology and also an ideal domain of Utopia for dealing with the past.

How Can the Masses Be Politicalised? – Re – examining Ngugi’s Linguistic Revolution

2022-11-29T17:49:40+04:00

In Ngugi’s idea of linguistic politics and his linguistic practices, critics tend either to identify his decision to relinquish English in favour of Gikuyu as precisely that of tribalism, or to regard his writing in English as a failure in his resistance against the power of Western discourse. However, Ngugi’s linguistic revolution cannot be simply regarded as the binary opposition between African tribalism and the Western cultural imperialism. Rather, his linguistic revolution embraces twofold propositions. He uses the Western language as the link that binds the intelligentsia and the writer himself to work on the anti – colonial revolution, on the one hand; while to reach the masses directly and mobilise wider action of decolonization, he seeks to deprivilege the languages of the new elites with modes of communication more accessible to the general populace and to adopt a more overtly polemic style to politicise the masses, on the other. In the new millennium, there is a new hint in Ngugi’s linguistic revolution. He seeks to deconstruct the hierarchy of language and fight against the monolingualism, actualizing mutually cultural understanding between different centers, and the unite of “The Wretched of the Earth”. In this way, he attempts to establish the “Republic of man and works” where many languages and cultures coexist freely and equally, forming a cultural politics united in a utopia.

From the Recognized Subject to the Ethical Subject: Susan’s “Substance” and J. M. Coetzee’s Ethics

2022-12-02T14:34:32+04:00

“Substance” appears frequently in the narrative of Coetzee’s Foe whose protagonist, Susan Barton, consistently inquires why she has no “substance” and how she could manage to be a substantial being. An etymological study demonstrates that “substance” is a philosophical concept that shares basic connotation with “subject”. It is argued here that Susan’s “substance,” a key concept in the novel, is problematized by Coetzee as a narrative strategy to express his understanding of “subject” or “existence”. Susan’s initial endeavor to gain “substance” through demonstrating her rationality and obtaining the recognition of her “self – consciousness” by the dominant “self – consciousness” eventually evolves into her realization that the essential attribute of being a substantial subject is to be responsible for the existence of the other. Susan’s shift in her understanding of “substance” indicates Coetzee’s insistence on the ethical responsibility of the subject. The analysis of Coetzee’s understanding of the subject in the context of Hegel and Levinas further indicates that Coetzee echoes Levinas in that both value more of ethics than of “being recognized”. For Coetzee, a substantial being could only be actualized when the subject shoulders the ethical responsibility for the other.

Mo Yan’s Reception in China and a Reflection on the Postcolonial Discourse

2022-12-02T14:38:55+04:00

As one of the most excellent and unique contemporary Chinese writers, Mo Yan has exerted extensive influence on Chinese readers, and his works have also caused various controversies over the past 30 years. His winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature, rather than ending such controversies, has only intensified the disputes centering around his works. The author of this paper tend to argue that the controversial style and themes of Mo Yan’s works are necessitated by the interconnected yet different contexts of China and the rest of the world, only by means of which can Mo Yan let his voice be heard. It is this paper’s contention that a critique of Mo Yan’s work as distortion and condemnation of the image of China catering to the Western stereotypes is but a product of postcolonial theory misplaced in the Chinese context, which represents a Western cultural neo – colonialism, as well as a narrow – minded interpretation veiling the uniqueness of Mo Yan’s creativity.

Emotional and Ecological Grief of Overseas Student Life: Su Xuelin in the 1920s

2022-12-02T14:40:34+04:00

One unanticipated effect of three years of pandemic has been the disruption to the hundreds of thousands of student exchanges and resident periods abroad that would usually enliven student minds and create a new empathy and understanding of different perspectives, often retained through an entire career. The benefits to learning a different culture in situ, and knowing in person, for inter-cultural understanding are great, as they permeate through circles of acquaintance on return. Two of Su Xuelin’s best known writings of the 1920s, Lü tian 绿天and Jixin 棘心 offer an excavation of the emotional anxiety of distance from family and home coupled with the rejection of native ways of doing and seeing things, played out in the everyday cares and national pride of a young female student. This paper considers Su’s intense attachment to France in her prescient ecological awareness, and her emotional attachments to mother and husband narrated through the language and metaphor of Catholic faith.

Mother as an Imagery and a Metaphor in Life & Times of Michael K

2022-12-02T14:41:44+04:00

While the mother imagery is of vital importance for the protagonist K in J. M. Coetzee’s fourth novel, Life & Times of Michael K(1983), not much research has been done with regard to this imagery. This essay interprets the triple meanings of the mother imagery: “Anna K as K’s mother, Anna K and Mother Nature, Michael K as gardener mother”, and analyzes the role it plays in the transformation of K’s identity and self – identification as a gardener who strives for the war – tortured land.

On Anna Seghers' acceptance of China in the 1920s and 1930s

2022-12-02T14:46:16+04:00

Anna Seghers is a famous German anti – fascist writer in the 20th century and a famous proletarian revolutionary fighter, her work is notable for exploring and depicting the moral experience of the Second World War. Born into a Jewish family and married to a Hungarian Communist, Seghers escaped Nazi – controlled territory through wartime France. She returned to Europe after the war, living in West Berlin (1947–50), which was occupied by Allied forces. She eventually settled in the German Democratic Republic, where she worked on cultural and peace issues. She received numerous awards and in 1967 was nominated for the Nobel Prize by the GDR.

Throughout the life of Seghers, whether she studied Sinology in Heidelberg and Cologne in her youth, or joined the the Communist International and paid close attention to the revolutionary movement led by the Communist Party of China, China's influence on her was manifold. As we can see, there are many descriptions of China in her works. Although she never visited China in the 1920s and 1930s, we can still feel her interest in the Chinese revolution in her work. The communicating across cultures has a two – way influence. On the one hand, we can clearly see her acceptance of China, whether it is the traditional Chinese ideology and culture or the creative inspiration brought by the Chinese revolutionary movement. On the other hand, when we read the literature of Segers, we see China a hundred years ago and the proletarian revolutionary movement in China. In this way, we can see ourselves through the eyes of the other, adding a different perspective to this great history.

Why We Still Need Feminism? A Comparative Reading of Nüjie女诫 and Proverbs 31

2022-12-02T14:47:27+04:00

The oppression on women is a universal problem. In the west, the Bible has been regarded as the root of this oppression, and in China, it is Ban Zhao, a female scholar in Han Dynasty who has been criticized because she wrote a book called Lesson for Women to discipline women’s behavior, teaching women to be humble and subordinate to men (father, husband and son). Proverb 31 illustrates a “women of virtue”, setting a perfect woman model for women in Christian world. This paper is going to compare these two works, trying to see the commonality and differences of Chinese and Western mind – set in treating women. The author thus argues why feminism as a necessary education for Chinese women today is still needed.

What happened, When Du Fu Spoke in English? Reflections on translatable and untranslatable issues

2022-12-02T14:50:25+04:00

Du Fu (712 – 770) is one of the China's greatest poets and the most outstanding representative of Chinese culture. Many excellent poems of this Tang Dynasty poet are already very difficult to translate into modern Chinese, what happens when they are translated into English? This article attempts to take Stephan Owen's English translation based on Qiu Zhaoao（仇兆鳌）'s "Detailed Notes on Du Poems（《杜诗详注》）" as an important case, combined with other relevant English translations, to analyze the untranslatable factors in the translation process. In this way, it not only deepens the understanding of the complex connotation of Du Fu's poems, but also explores the significance of translation for activating cross – cultural interpretation and understanding.

Song of the Dark Ages – Brecht in Exile and "Chinese Role Model"

2022-12-02T14:51:33+04:00

John Steinbeck’s interest to Taoism is derived from his friend Ed Ricketts, the marine biologist, who was fascinated by Lao Tze and his Tao Teh Ching. Taoism is not only reflected in Steinbeck’s depiction of characters and creation of plots but also incorporated in his philosophical thinking. The contradiction of the “detachment” of his characters and the “sentimentalism” of his plot criticized by scholars can be explained as a result of the impact of Taoism. The “detachment” implies “non – action” (Wu Wei) which does not literally mean to be aloof but to follow the natural laws and accept the reality. While the “sentimentalism” contains what Taoist scholars called as perspectivism which accentuates seeking the common ground and reserving the difference so as to achieve the goal of identification. Both the “detachment” and “sentimentalism” consist the two aspect of Taoism and guarantee the author’s creative thinking as a whole.

Inheriting and Rewriting: An Analysis of the Intertextuality in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea

2022-12-02T14:52:35+04:00

Much scholarship on African literature has focused on searching for a method to locate the African literature within the literary system. Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2021 Nobel Prize – winning writer, has his own way of forming intertextual relationships with the Eastern and Western literary classics to establish a unique position of his works in the literary system. By the Sea is Gurnah’s sixth novel in which the readers can observe the traces of several Eastern and Western classics. Starting from this important sample, this article attempts to analyze the intertextuality between By the Sea and Eastern and Western classics such as A Thousand and One Nights, Heart of Darkness, Bartleby, the Scrivener, etc., and to figure out how Gurnah inherits and rewrites the classics in various periods and places to present the rich meanings of African literature and acquire a unique position of his own work in the literary system.

Translation, Re – creation, and Sinicization: Reception of Little Red Riding Hood in Modern China from the Perspective of the Variation Theory

2022-12-02T14:53:44+04:00

The classic European fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood (LRRH), was first translated into Chinese in 1909. Over the next half – century, several Chinese translations and a series of adaptations emerged, bearing both the original story and some local characteristics, namely Confucian ethics, enlightenment thoughts, and the wartime atmosphere. Using the Variation Theory of Comparative Literature, this paper reviews the history of the translations and adaptations of LRRH in China, and analyses the variations that occurred during the process. We argue that the reception of Western fairy tales in modern China is not a simple transformation on the linguistic level but a re – creation, based on a specific historical context, traditional culture, and practical needs. The reception of Western fairy tales is closely related to the development of Chinese literature in general and Chinese children’s literature in particular in modern China. Our research shows that the history of how LRRH has been received in China reflects the process by which China has borrowed from Western literature and assimilated the exotic elements into its own literature and culture.

Literature as Event: from the Interpretation of Bakhtin’s Cultural Poetics

2022-12-02T14:54:53+04:00

Event has been extensively pored over in literature in recent years. Some noted thinkers of our time, including Heidegger, Deleuze, Badiou, Žižek, Foucault, Eagleton, etc..have made great contributions to the framework of event. This article revisits Russian literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin’s eventthoughts in his philosophy and cultural poetics. In his ActPhilosophy,Bakhtin proposes ‘EventofBeing’ to interpret existence in terms of ontology, epistemology and value ethics. From this starting point, Bakhtin in his cultural poetics conceptualizes literature as event. Firstly, literature as event perceives itself an act or event that is temporally and spatially constituted, rather than a solid object. And as irregular occurrences, event of literature destines to undergo a process of changes and transformations and predicts new emergence. Secondly, featuring in its inherent discourse characteristics, literature as event is internal intertwined with other social and historical events while at the same time self – sufficiently develops. That is, instead of being perceived as reflective and a passive recorder to its historical society, literature is actually active with its own subjectivity to enter into dynamic dialogue with other events, and in some cases serves as a spiritual power in forging society and history. Therefore, literature as event places itself between concrete entity and dynamic process, textual discourse and social history context, etc.. This reflects a ‘interological’thinking, that is, literature exists in the relationship with other as something ‘between’. Clearly, Bakhtin's thoughts on literature as event would shed lights on our understanding towards world literature and literary history writing.

African Existentialism in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

2022-12-02T14:57:33+04:00

The famous Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah’s debut novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) is one of the most reviewed and commented African literary works. Many critics, especially those from western perspectives, regarded this novel as an excellent follower of western Existentialism exemplified by J.P. Sartre and A. Camus. As for many African critics, influenced by western critical comments, and/or upset by the dirty and stinky scenes with strong scatological images throughout this novel, they labeled Armah as a detached westernized writer and reproached him for representing post – colonial Ghana and Africa in an unrecognizable and inappropriate way. Different from the above two kinds of reactions toward this novel, I argue that Armah created a kind of African Existentialism which is essentially different from western Existentialism in terms of the origin, causes and nature of absurdness, and the methods of confronting absurdness. Such differences are not the consequences of imitation with low quality, but a combination of political insight and artistic creation based on African cultures.

Imagination, Fictionality, Reality: On the Experimental Nature of Science Fiction

2022-12-02T14:58:37+04:00

An Inverted Reputation at Home and Abroad – Brief Analysis on Han Shan Poems’ “Coldness” in Chinese Mass Culture

2022-12-02T15:00:08+04:00

Though there has been a long historical period of “Canonization of Han Shan’s Poem” in Japan and 1960s’ “Hanshan Fever” in the US, the “Hanshan” condition of “being popular abroad but cold at home” remains undeniable. By acknowledging the fact that the contemporary domestic academic researches on Hanshan poem are inspired by foreign fever, this article first reexamine the generation of Hanshan poem from the background of Chinese poetic tradition and Zen language system, try to reveal the historical context of “Hanshan fever” abroad, then reconstruct Hanshan’s representation and portrait in others’ culture’s “canonization” and “anti – tradition” processes. Finally, it pointed out that the contradiction of both being “non – classical” and “non – public – oriented” judging from Chinese traditional poetic system, leads to both Hanshan’s inevitable obscurity in China and popular opportunity in Japan and the US. This feature can also empower the reflection on its time value when “classics popularization” is right on trend.

Maoism and Zanzibar Revolution

2022-12-02T15:02:04+04:00

The independence of the People’s Republic of China has encouraged revolutions in different countries and regions. However, it seems that the influence of Chinese intelligence services on Zanzibar is less knowable than those provided by the Soviet Union or the East Germany. Although the four main figures of the Umma party were all pro – Chinese, they prefer to eschew their “Maoist” identity. Actually, Babu, one leader of the party, was one of the first readers of Mao Tse Tung’s New Democratic Revolution. Another leader, Issa, has went to China several times. He was extremely impressed by the sacrifice which Chinese communist have done during the Long March and also Maoist admonition: “walk on two legs”. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to lay bare the influence of these experience gained from Maoism and the applications (including the establishment of the Ummar party and the overthrow of the ZNP government) of them in Zanzibar which brace the revolution. This paper finds that the Maoism has is diversified operation in Zanzibar socialists’ fighting for independence.

Mutual Learning among Civilizations through Comparative Literature Construction of Museum Discourse and Mutual Learning among Civilizations

2022-12-02T15:03:39+04:00

As one of the main fields for cultural dissemination, the museum preserves rich resources of cultural relics that carry the shared memory of the people along “the Belt and Road”（“B&R”）. The museum promotes cultural exchanges of the regions along “B&R”, and emphasizes a positive and far – reaching impact on their social development and national ideology. Acting as the historical basis, the museum also helps the countries along “B&R” to build “a community of shared future” as a “community of shared interest”. Utilizing museums to carry out cultural exchanges, the countries along “B&R” can deepen the consensus, acquire common knowledge of their shared heritage, and also restore and rebuild their sense of “community with a shared future”. Making the rich collections of cultural relics in the museums along the“B&R” come alive, the cultural dissemination can be promoted, the values of cultural heritage can be shared and spread to the greatest extent, and the confrontation and conflict of civilizations can be better replaced by the mutual learning of different civilizations. The museums along “B&R” and their collections of cultural relics have precipitated the historical development of each country, and have also formed their own unique discourse tradition and narrative logic which not only convey different cultural values and spiritual temperaments in a specific way, but also strongly reflect the ability to spread the image of various countries and nations. By sorting out and analyzing the representative cases of mutual exchanges of museums along “B&R”, this article attempts to summarize and extract the characteristics of the discourse and narrative logic of various countries' use of museum resources for cultural communication. Combined with significant theories such as cross – cultural communication theory, this article also tries to analyze the important role of museum discourse in promoting mutual learning among civilizations and advancing the connectivity of people – to – people exchanges in the digital age and to discuss the feasible theory, method, and path for museums to participate in the construction of discourse system with Chinese characteristics.

“Carnal” Text with “Abstinent” Translator: The Tension of “Sex” in English Translation of Chin P’ing Mei by David Tod Roy

2022-12-02T15:04:56+04:00

In 2013, the complete English version of Chin P’ing Mei has eventually come out after 30 – year – long work of David Tod Roy. Encountering Chin P’ing Mei, Roy, Born in a missionary family, has devoted whole life to express his own appeals and admonitions for “abstinence” beneath the “carnal” original texts. This article will meticulously research on Roy’s way of dealing with “sexual descriptions” in his translation version. On foundation of analyzing the translation itself, a variety of vice text will also be taken into consideration, including annotations attached to the translation, course notes from his lectures at the University of Chicago and interviews he previously accepted. Finally, it is pointed out the fact that Ray’s “faithful” restoration of the “sex” tensions in translation version is in fact heavily tinged with literary criticism. He hopes to not only rehabilitate Chin P’ing Mei from mass prejudices, but also reflect his “abstinence view” when understanding this most “carnal” classical Chinese literature.

Study on Kim Taeg-young’s Inheritance and Innovative Development in Chinese Biographies Compared with Liang Qichao’s Biographical Theory

2022-12-02T15:05:56+04:00

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries，the historical mission of anti-imperialism, anti-feudalism and saving the nation borne by the Chinese and Korean people, the historiography thought of saving the country by history, and the political thought of saving the country with the new people constitute the internal and external factors of Kim Taeg-young’s inheritance and Innovative development in Chinese biographies compared with Liang Qichao’s biographical theory. Comparing their biographies, they both have in common are that they take biographies as history, objectify the narrative attitude, strengthen the personality of the protagonist by means of interweaving narrations and discussions, and contrast, and probe the historical role of the protagonist in the social historical background. As for the differences, Liang Qichao almost chooses heroes as the protagonists of biographies while Kim Taeg-young is inclined to choose ordinary beings as protagonists, and Kim Taeg-young’s patriotism experiences the transition from the feudal scholar-official’s loyalty to the emperor before the exile in China to the modern intellectual who supports reform and revolutionary democracy after the exile in China. Besides, Liang Qichao’s biographies are combination of classic Chinese and spoken Chinese of Qing Dynasty which is called new literary form, while Kim Taeg-young insists writing the biographies in classic Chinese.

Structural – narrative analysis of the texts by Besik Kharanauli and Charles Bukowsky

2022-12-02T15:07:50+04:00

“Structural – narrative analysis of the texts by Besik Kharanauli and Charles Bukowsky” is to understand the poetry of Georgian and American authors with the help of modern literary methodologies, to allocate their narrative and structural characteristics and to define their specificity and importance in both Georgian and world postmodernist literature.

The topicality of the research matter is provided by the structural – narrative analysis of creative works by mentioned authors, – the Georgian free verse has not been discussed in the context of these particular methodologies. consequently, such attempt is innovative.

Implementation of the project will help us to understand the works of the two authors of 20th – 21th century in the framework of structuralism and narratology, to figure out how the Georgian poetry reflects the modern world, how it resembles the postmodern discourse.

Modernization of National Identities in the Context of the New Weltliteratur

2022-12-02T15:08:50+04:00

Literature and national identity face the following challenges today:

Goethe’s Weltliteratur notion has been extended. Literature overcame national models, creating geographically and qualitatively altered (thematic, linguistic practices) literary world.

The main feature of the new Weltliteratur has become the existence of intercultural or "third space". This space is mostly formed by texts, written not locally, but abroad or reflect migration topics.

We have named this the intercultural – migration literature.

Identity, considered to be the marker of stable condition before, today is subject to mobile environment; constantly transforming and socializing.

Leading European and American universities have long been researching identities in literature created abroad; as for Georgia: process of search for national identity’s markers in national literature has already started, while national identity’s studying in texts written abroad is a novelty.

Based on newWeltliteratur theory we created interdisciplinary methodology that appeared to be a good instrument for researching national identity in texts written abroad.

In this literature, the dominant of cultural memory, as well imagology with modern oppositions, evaluation of the national from distance, create essential representations of identities:

– Oppositions of ethnocultural models or traditional/modern values are evident;

– Cognition of strengths and weaknesses of national identity under mobility condition of migration is possible;

– Relation of national culture – character with global environment is reflected;

– It is possible to realize what is today important in national mentality, what is the degree of its adaptation to the global. Today we see more characters for whom the tendencies of adaptation to external environment, search for alternatives is a priority.

Eventually, contexts of modernization of national identities, consciously or unconsciously, are formed in this writing.

Aforementioned topics are discussed based on Zurab Guruli’s and Elif Shafak’s texts.

Cultural Policy and the Study of Comparative Literature

2022-12-02T15:10:55+04:00

During the Soviet period, political correctness was a major requirement in the field of literary history and theory. Since 1960 – 1970 literary relations have been established as a course at the universities. Significant emphasis was placed on Georgian – Russian literary relations, as this particular field of literary relations had a special ideological significance. In the late 1970s, and especially in the 1980s, first with Perestroika and then with the collapse of Soviet regime, Georgian literary critics began to re – evaluate the perspectives of literary theory and the teaching and research of comparative literature. The new generation of scientists were less concerned with Soviet regulations.

Clearly, any trend and culture policy is determined by any turning point in history. If we recall our recent past, it must be said that after the Rose Revolution, following the country's declared Western course, a new generation of literary critics clearly followed the European system of periodization, or "Eurocronology", as the American anthropologist of Indian origin Arjun Apadurai calls it. From the same period, a number of studies have been conducted in this direction, where the periodization of Georgian literature follows the European one (obviously, taking into account the national peculiarities). One of the pioneers of this trend is, for example, the collection "Georgian Literature of the XVI – XVIII centuries. At the crossroads of Eastern and Western cultural – literary processes", published in 2012 by the Institute of Georgian Literature. Researches of this type, in addition to their educational function, also have a strategic position – strategic insofar as bringing the issue of periodization to the forefront brings subjects and events in line with a certain cultural orientation and, on the other hand, raises the issue of cultural orientation. For example, Irma Ratiani's article "Reconstruction of the European Concept in Georgian Literature" is a particularly important in this respect and the word "Reconstruction" in the title can be considered as a unifying concept of the collection itself: ‘The claim that the reconstruction of the Western literary concept in Georgia is linked to the Russian cultural and literary influences formed in the 19th century seems to have no basis. Georgian literature was already on a chosen path – it was a path to Europe, Christian Georgian writing."

From National Literature to Migrant Literature: Horizons of the New “Weltliteratur”

2022-12-02T15:12:14+04:00

The boundaries of national literature are subject to constant change. At different times, national literature is considered in linguistic discourse, national discourse, and so on. At the same time, world literature, as Goethe called it, "Weltliteratur", was significantly enriched by unified literary contexts.

Migrant literature, which was established by new visions and experiences in the late twentieth and early twenty – first centuries, had an impact on several literary processes simultaneously, both on national literature and on intercultural aspects, which creates general literary trends.

From a perspective, migrant literature, as a kind of combination of poetics and politics, is denoted by different terms: Gastarbeiter literature, literature of emigrants and immigrants, literature of foreigners, literature of migrants, literature of guests, literature of labor migrants, literature of minorities, intercultural literature, multicultural literature, transcultural literature, literature in an intercultural context, interspace literature, etc. However, it is also worth noting that migrant literature has already its permanent character and main characteristics, thereby it already has a nationwide qualitativeness.

Migrant literature can be viewed as a new "Weltliteratur". As a new synthesis of languages, cultures, influences and, at the same time, an artistic representation of original visions and experiences.

In the report, we will talk about the national and intercultural aspects of migrant literature as issues of the new "Weltliteratur".

Three Medes – Modernist and Postmodernist Reception of Medea Myth in Georgian Literature

2022-12-02T15:14:12+04:00

Greek mythology has made character of Medea of Colchis the indivisible part of world cultural heritage. For centuries character of Medea has maintained its significance and comprised source of inspiration for the representatives of various spheres of fine arts. Of course, regarding the contexts of the epochs (conceptual and esthetic position) and author’s intent, some motifs of the Argonauts’ myth and character of the woman of Colchis have been changing. One part of the creators sees in it a murderous mother, the other part a vengeful wife or a traitor, while others see Medea as the first feminist woman.

Our aim is to consider, on the one hand, the first attempt at a literary interpretation of the Greek tragedian – Euripides' Medea – as a mythological hero, and, on the other hand, the modernist and postmodernist receptions of the Medea myth. In particular, we will analyze the texts of two Georgian writers working in Germany at different times: the novel by modernist author Grigol Robakidze „Maggie Georgian Girl“ and the play by modern author Nino Kharatishvili „My and Your Heart [Medea].“

Within the scopes of the report we we shall attempt to find out the conceptual relation and influences of the characters of Georgian writers using comparative analysis, on the one hand, with the mythological tradition of Medea and on the other hand, with the tragedy of Euripides „Medea“; Introduce both modernist and postmodernist reception of the Medea myth in Georgian literature and highlight the international significance of the Colchis for Georgian culture.

Westernisation or 'insularisation'? Geographical imgination across the Black Sea

2022-12-02T15:47:29+04:00

I will try a comparative reading of two literary attempts to change a national geography, both coming from the Black Sea region. The first one is the early modernist antology – mystification 'On the Isle of the Blessed' (1907) by the Bulgarian poet and actually 'Kulturträger' Pencho Slaveikov. The second one is the post – modern novel 'Santa Esperansa' (2004) by the Georgian novelist Aka Morchiladze. The former one can be read as an attempt of un – fastening the national territory from the central and north – eastern Balkans and make it float between two looser and wider geographies: of (post)Ottoman space and of the 'turning – its – back – to – concrete – topography' early modernist imagination. The latter one – as an attempt to create a second Georgia in the West, and as a post – modernist commoditisation of both realist/postsymbolist preoccupation with material topography and early modernist neglect of it. Both find a remedy in savoring of fragments of (post)Ottoman timespace and both tend to 'Italianise' their respective national chronotopes (the former through allegories and allusions appropriate to early modernism, the latter through the kind of materialisation made possible through surrealism and firmly established after the literary discovery of alternative history/ – ies). Through 'insularisation' of the respective national spaces, both books exhibit discontent with a fully embodied earthly existence, mainly but not only on individual vs. collective level respectively. One can speculate that 'On the Isle of the Blessed' both invoked and prohibited Bulgaria's entry into the First Balkan War (1912 – 1913) which put to an end exactly the condition of postponing of choice, of holding a plurality (or at least duality) of options which actually made Slaveikov's mystification possible; and the (un)welcoming anticipation of/contemplation on the Georgian 'Revolution of Roses' (2003). In my talk I will remain with the speculations, lacking knowledge to ground them historically and biographically.

The Futurology of Postcoloniality in Georgian Literature

2022-12-02T15:49:47+04:00

The goal of the present paper is to discuss the challenges of the contemporary Georgian literature from the standpoint of colonial and postcolonial theory. At the present stage Georgian literature faces the challenges of reflection of global knowledge and tendencies, but not as a passive recipient of the global changes. Rather it should transform or create new narratives and new identities based on heterotemporality and hybridization (Chakrabarthy, Canclini) where the main focus is on the so called empty time filled with new contents, such that on the one hand local literature would maintain local diversity and on the other hand become the part the global literature.

Obviously post – colonial experience of the country opens possibilities for the contemporary Georgian literature to orientate in the global literary context using certain methodological strategies. We discuss some of them such as postcolonial utopia, postcolonial dystopia and postcolonial heterotopia based on the three contemporary Georgian fiction texts, such as ,,The Shy Emerald “by Aka Morchiladze (2013); ,,Small country” by Lasha Bughadze (2018) and ,,Chewing daybreak sugar free by Zura Jishkariani (2018).

Global Significance of Local Mnemotops in the Georgian and German Fiction of Post – Communist Era

2022-12-02T15:50:48+04:00

In Fictions of Memory spaces function as repositories of time so that landscapes and other locations might be seen as media of the Cultural Memory, places of recollection – mnemotops. Mnemotops are often focal points of national self – images and help to (re)construct national identity after the social, political and cultural ruptures. Mnemotops might also convey traumatic memories that are mostly hidden and need to be deciphered with regard to the corresponding trans/cultural context. The Georgian and German fiction of Post – Communist Era contain a broad range of such mnemotops. Squares, statues, buildings, certain towns and other places gain additional significance if seen in the scope of global societal and cultural changes. By exploring and comparing the mnemotops represented in the Georgian and German literary texts of the Post – Soviet time it can observed how the post – totalitarian identity is constructed both on a local and a global level. Analyzing the spatial dimension of those texts will allow to trace back the historical figures, events and power relations that made crucial impact on the formation of post – communist auto – and hetero – images. With this purpose a number of texts will be selected from the Georgian and German literature after 1990 and examined by means of theoretical categories established in the Memory Studies and Imagology.

La mer Noire dans la représentation de la population riveraine de la Géorgie

2022-12-02T15:52:08+04:00

La mer, vecteur de découvertes, d’échanges, est également un puissant moteur de création et d’inspiration au niveau littéraire et artistique (François Bellec).

L’objectif de la présente communication est de poursuivre l’étude de la symbolique de la mer Noire dans la poésie géorgienne, le sujet auquel nous avons déjà consacré deux investigations dont les résultats ont alimenté la publication de deux articles. Dans le premier, nous avons effectué une analyse comparée de la symbolique de l’eau [la mer] dans la poésie géorgienne et française, dans le deuxième, nous avons étudié la représentation de la mer, en générale, de la mer Noire, en particulier, dans les poèmes recueillis dans les régions de la Géorgie orientale, dont la population n’a aucune expérience maritime. De ce fait, dans les poèmes analysés, la mer sert à la création de différentes images symboliques exprimées en métaphores et comparaisons, plus particulièrement, en hyperboles, sans aborder le côté pragmatique de la mer.

À la différence de la représentation de la mer dans les poèmes populaires de la Géorgie orientale, dans les poèmes recueillis dans les régions littorales de la Géorgie occidentale, la vision de la mer est plutôt commerciale. De ce fait, les chantres populaires de ces régions, y compris les Lazes, traitent plus particulièrement de thèmes de la pêche et de la navigation, tout en offrant la symbolique ambivalente de la mer. Ainsi, dans ces poèmes, on retrouve les fonctions pragmatiques attribuées à la mer – se nourrir, s’approvisionner, commercer.

The literary map of the conflict

2022-12-02T15:53:28+04:00

The entire 19th – 20th centuries were particularly significant for Georgia: In specified periods this country was forced to accept itself in a new political order: At the beginning as a colony of the Russian Empire, then – temporarily as a democratic republic, then as a member of the Soviet Union, and finally as a free post – Soviet country. Even the literature of that time had strongly marked reflexive nature: it operated as a medium of formation of the social mind and shaped national discourse. The main lexical units of this discourse were avto and hetero images. Alongside these images were literary images of the political – geographical map of Georgia, among which – markers of the national landscape and the literary passage of the situation existing in the border/conflict zones (mostly – within the limits of illegal borders near Russia).

The emotions of the character that are represented in the zones of the border area, the specificity of the language and its relation to ongoing political processes – these very aspects will constitute the main issues of the presentation. These points will be presented chronologically: 1) Literature of the 19th century: The works of Ilia Chavchavadze, Aleksandre Kazbegi, George Eristavi, 2) Literature of the beginning of the 20th century:The works of Demna Shengelaja, Grigol Robakidze,

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, 3) Literature of the end of the 20th century: The works of Nugzar Shataidze, Guram

Odischaria, Beqa Qurchuli, Shorena Lebanidze, Zurab Jishkariani, Irakli Kakabadze, Irakli Shapatava, Tamta Melashvili, Tamar Pkhakadze, George Sosiasvili. The literary works of the above – mentioned authors emphasize the consciousness of the characters, who cross the geographic border of the country voluntarily or forcedly, and their attitude towards the "North", the "East" and the "West". The voices of these characters are voices of political minorities and they represent the protest because of the violation of the political borders.

Lecture mythocritique de la mer Noire

2022-12-02T15:55:34+04:00

Iphigénie et les siens, Médée et les siens. Des histoires de familles entremêlant évidemment amour et haine, désir et jalousie. Tout un fatras narratif dont la littérature occidentale s’est abondamment nourrie. Ne faut – il dans les deux cas considérer la mer Noire que comme un décor contingent et simplement lié à une implantation politico – culturelle hellénique sur place ? Mais les mythes doivent bien, eux aussi, habiter ou se poser quelque part et ils échangent alors avec leur environnement des valeurs esthétiques et symboliques. En d’autres termes : pourquoi la mer Noire ? Celle – ci présenterait – elle des spécificités qui la rattacheraient aux énoncés mythologiques véhiculées par Hécate et par sa prêtresse ? Les deux figures sont éclairées par la condition exilique qu’elles rencontrent dans leur destin. Est – ce là le secret qui les unit à la mer Noire, espace d’échanges et de migrations ? La présente communication reprendra ce questionnement en l’articulant sur une lecture d’œuvres antiques ou modernes.

What place for the Black Sea in the construction of trauma?

2022-12-02T15:57:16+04:00

In Between Past and Future, Arendt, focusing on the crisis of education in US, observes that a “crisis forces us back to the questions themselves and requires from us either new or old answers”, and certainly not respond with ready – made ideas – with « preformed judgments », with « prejudices » (Arendt 1961: 174). How do the literatures that face the historical, aesthetic crisis react to the latter, especially when it concerns minor or minority literatures? If minor literature "is not that of a minor language", but "rather that which a minority makes in a major language" (Deleuze & Guattari), the term could not be applied to Georgian literature. Would it be better to speak of “small literature”? These issues will be addressed together with those posed by literature in the face of history, when its own survival is called into question. Our proposal is to examine Georgian literary works composed in exile in France in the years 1920 – 1950, in parallel with those written under the Soviet regime. Coming from the world upheavals, in contact with the major literatures, how do these texts understand the trauma and the traumatic experience (Toros 2021; Merridale 2000) that they are subject to and what place for the Black Sea (real and/or imaginary space)?

Imagining a post – Russian Transcaucasus: on the fringes of “semiospheres”

2022-12-02T15:58:38+04:00

The long – lasting Russian hegemony in the Transcaucasus has resulted in a flexible yet coherent set of tropes, motifs, and attributions that affect not only representations of the area in Russian cultural production, but also in local and global imagery. The paper I propose presents literary and graphic works, written in various languages after the year 2000, that aim at overcoming dominant Imperial Russian views of the Transcaucasus and its multiethnic inhabitants.

While gravitating towards Georgia, it strives to transcend the national paradigm by also including literary representations of Azerbaijan and Armenia. My aim is to develop a typology of post – Russian literary imaginations of the region that may consist of 1) a post – Soviet approach that includes the Russian – Caucasian relationship into universalist liberal narratives (for example Aka Morchiladze, Viktoria Lomasko), 2) a global Russian re – assessment of Soviet geocultural and geopolitical thought in its countercultural tinge (Aleksandr Ilichevskii) as well as 3) a transcultural memory work that interweaves Russian imperial, nationalist and Western neocolonial narratives (Nino Haratischwili).

Georgian Literature and Mapping Georgia in the 19th and 20th Centuries

2022-12-02T15:59:39+04:00

Within the last two centuries, Georgia’s appearance on the world political map has changed few times: in the early 19^th century the territories of Georgian kingdoms were swallowed (Said) by the Russian Empire and disappeared from the map; after the dissolution of the Empire, it reappeared as the free Georgian Democratic Republic, until being swallowed again by the Bolshevik Russia; Georgia was invisible to the global world, within the red – coloured large territory of the USSR until its collapse; since 1991, the country restored its independence and international borders, and has now its own small place on the world map.

Although the global processes around Georgia were conditioning these changes, the local Georgian reality, at all stages, had its clear responses to the situation, which were mainly developed within the literary texts. We may see that Georgian literature is a space where national aspirations are verbalized and national goals are developed. On the other hand, when the Empire/USSR needed to control the national/societal moods, foremost, literature was the space that had to be tamed (Bakradze) and through which the discourse of the colonizer had to be communicated and indoctrinated.

The paper will also discuss, how the Western/global cultural tendencies – respectively, modernism in the early 20^th century and postmodernism in the late 20^th century – played their role in the development of not only pure cultural, but also national priorities. We can observe that in certain local cultural reality, the adoption of the global cultural/literary tendencies can intensify not only aesthetical innovations, but also the search for national self – representation, and contribute to the goals of relocating the nation on the cultural and/or political map.

Tbilisi as the meeting place of different oriental and occidental phenomena

2022-12-02T16:00:42+04:00

With its diverse population, Tbilisi, commonly referred as the meeting place of oriental and occidental phenomena, has always been the model of a multiethnic, multiconfessional, multicultural city in the Caucasus. The study of the relevant literary corpus (of Georgian, European or Russian authors) of Tbilisi texts in the general context of literature on Georgia implies the consideration of this literary – urbanistic model as a crossroads of cultural worlds, as an intersection between East and West that is both a borderline and a passage – a liminal region that instead of separating has rather the function of mediating.

This multicultural environment generated the eternal question: "Asia or Europe?" – as a reflection of the continuous process of defining Georgian national identity and cultural belonging. Something that possibly became determinative not only for European authors but also for the Georgians’ auto – identification of their own existence as a culture situated at the hinge of West and the East.

By analysing the accounts of different western travelers, this paper tries to identify the strongest impacts on the cultural construction of the diverse and multiethnic image of this city/country. Along these lines, I ask the following questions: who constructed this image – is it a self – portraiture as self – representation of Georgian cultural memory? Or a picture of Georgian culture created and imposed by foreign authors?

Thus the paper aims to trace how the features of Tbilisi’s symbolic profile are reflected both in a portrait of Georgian culture created by foreigners, as well as in its self – portrait, which obviously patterns the transformation of Georgian cultural self – perception in the literature of the last two centuries. Intertextual references illustrate how the representations of the capital city in Georgian literature are informed by the receptions of the city in foreign – language fiction and documentary prose since the nineteenth century.

Key words: cultural construction, self – portraiture, multicultural city, identity, Asia or Europe?

When Literary Space parts Ways with Physical Geography for a Critical Benefit: The Missing Islands of the Black Sea

2022-12-02T16:02:59+04:00

Among the most important factors that differentiate the fortunes of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean comes the role the islands played in history. Whereas numerous islands served as stepping stones in connecting the lands surrounding the Mediterranean, thereby facilitating their integration, their conspicuous absence in the Black Sea became a formidable obstacle in an already notoriously inhospitable sea. The Black Sea has only very few islands, fewer of them are inhabited, and those by only a small number of people. In any case, they disappear from sight in maps because of the scale effect, as they are quite small by geographical standards. There is thus no puzzle to intrigue our minds, and physical geography can count them out easily. Human geography is another matter, where even the very few could matter.

More relevant for us here is the importance the ‘missing’ islands can acquire albeit in a literary space. This paper explores two path – breaking novels that deliberately contest the historical legacies of this geography by inventing and introducing islands that incite the reader’s imagination for a critical reflection on the other courses history could have taken, what historians and social scientists call the ‘historical alternatives’. This paper focuses on Vassily Aksyonov (1981, 1983)’s The Island of Crimea and Aka Morchiladze (2004, 2006)’s Santa Esperanza. The former engages the reader on a counterfactual exercise with Crimea becoming an island off the coast of Soviet Russia, inspired by Communist China troubled by a maverick Taiwan at arm’s length. The latter has a more nuanced and sophisticated formulation where a British dominion of three islands comes into being and survives as safe haven for multicultural coexistence as long as it could, in relation with the fragilities imposed across the sea. Fictive islands can thus sometimes play a greater role than real islands.

Searching for fraternity: 19th Hungarian travellers in the Caucasus

2022-12-02T16:05:54+04:00

Early nineteenth century Hungarian cultural consciousness actively engaged in searching for the ethic and linguistic origins of Hungarians. These ethnographical and linguistic searches, according to the established scholarship, focus on finding fraternities with the Finno – Ugric, or, alternatively, with the Turkic peoples with whom Hungarians shared the territories of the Russian steppes. Less documented are the theories of Caucasian origins, which joined to these imaginings from the early 1830s, with travellers visiting the region with an increasing frequency and describing their experiences of travel with details of geography, visual arts, linguistics, and culture. Though inspired by a search for ethnic and linguistic collectivities, these volumes offer glimpses into the contemporary culture of region through a dual lens of Eurocentrism and fraternal curiosity. The paper will sketch out the image that Hungarian travellers formed of the region during the 19^th century on the basis of the work of János Besse (Tudósítások a Kaukázus mellékéről /Reports from the Caucasus , 1829), István Nogel (Utazása Keleten /Travels in the East, 1847) and Mór Déchy Utazasaim a Kaukázusban /My travels in the Caucasus, 1907).

The Dialogue between Eastern and Western Poetics and the Oriental Elements in Western Literary Theory

2022-12-02T16:07:33+04:00

Oriental literary theory, a huge and profound system, should be also in the scope of the study of comparative literature and the reconstruction of world literature. Only then, through cross – civilization dialogue in this era of globalization, differences, or similarities between Eastern and Western poetics would show those exchange influence and mutual learning of civilizations between the East and the West. In the cross – civilizations dialogue of Eastern and Western poetics, world literature is enriched by its heterogeneity. Innovated and developed with its interaction and supplement. Both the comparative literature study and the world literature would come to life by this change. In the past, the influence of the Western literature to the Oriental literature and Oriental literary theory have taken lots of focus. However, the influence of Oriental culture and the infiltration of Oriental elements never absent in the generation and innovation of contemporary Western literary theory. In this article, the Chinese elements in contemporary Western literary theory would be focused. Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Valerie, Pound, Richards, Derrida, Foucault, Jung and Lacan, all their literary criticism ideas and theoretical system construction are influenced by Chinese traditional culture. Form which would show the finding of the deep relationship between Western Literary Theory and Chinese culture. And meantime could be new vision of Chinese and Western comparative literature study.

Chinese Literary Theory’s Journey to the West in the Twenty-first Century: from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory

2022-12-02T16:19:19+04:00

This article focuses on how Chinese literary theory is presented in the West in the twenty – first century, using The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory as examples. Western research circles in the twenty – first century strive to include non – Western literary theory in international anthologies or encyclopedias of theory and invite non – Western scholars to write on theories from their own traditions. This is a great breakthrough for writing world literary theory and for the cross – cultural communication of Chinese literary theory. “Going global” is not complete, however, because very few works by non – Western literary theorists are included, and detailed and mutually relevant content within East Asian and in particular Chinese literary theory invites further attention. This article argues that, although the goal of “going global” is not complete, the inclusion of non – Western elements, especially the Chinese cultural tradition and re – writing of world literary theory or literature, is a necessary writing strategy in the theoretical mosaic of the twenty – first century.

Literary Representation for Silence and Chinkon on trans-national poetics the introspective-ness and talkative-ness of the cases of Japanese “dual-national” writers

2022-12-02T16:20:24+04:00

In Japan, within the Japanese common customs, to remember the dead through chinkon (鎮魂: the idea of “repose of souls” or a kind of literary requiem) is considered to be a natural and inevitable thing, since ancient times. To “commit,” “transmit,” and “preserve” the catastrophic memories of disasters and wars, including individual events, has been paid the careful attention and a quite rich method and literary tradition has been accumulated. At the same time, in other words, the same applies to "silence" and "not writing. Is this kind of Oriental religious consciousness a unique cultural aspect? Or are they universal in world literature? In fact, this is not only the most important question when considering the history of Japanese literature, but also from the perspective of international literary history and modernist literature.

This presentation deeply reflects issues relating to the consciousness of the introspective – ness and talkative – ness, focusing on the expressions of Silence and Chinkon of poetics by Japanese “dual national” writers in the US; such as Yone Noguchi (1874 – 1948) and Shigetsu Sasaki (1882 – 1945). Their experimental English poetry and essays in the early 20^thcentury, that were appreciated by their contemporaries in the US and Japan, were not unrelated to the global interest in Eastern Traditional Aesthetic and Eastern religion; such as Buddhism and Zen.

We consider the expressions of the ways of coping –with memories – of the uniqueness and the characteristics of Eastern literary basis. And then, we have to think of the use of Silence, and Chinkon expressions, and how they were employed for what, for whom. Modern literature in the 20^th century, both in the US and Japan, were not isolated from each other. They developed in constant dialogue between the aesthetics and traditions of the West and East.

The Horizontal Development and Innovation of Literature from the Perspective of Civilization Mutual Learning

2022-12-02T16:21:31+04:00

Comparative literature is essentially a discipline that studies the laws of horizontal development of literature, culture, and civilization. The openness and marginality of comparative literature determines that its most basic characteristic lies in its horizontal "cross – border". Although scholars have long recognized the law of variation in vertical development, and established a systematic theory. However, the comparative literature circles all over the world have not paid enough attention to the law of variation in horizontal development. The thesis analyzes the cross – lingual, transnational, and cross – cultural communication and interaction process of world literary classics, and finds that world literary classics are actually the result of the variation of the exchanges between various ethnic literature. The formation of world literary classics is also closely related to the horizontal development and communication of literature. Thus, variations studies in comparative literature not only reveals the important law of cultural innovation and the path of literary classics innovation, but also finds the creativity in the variation of cultural and literary communication, as well as the innovation in the variation of literary interpretation.

The Trials of Oscar Wilde:A Process Perspective Based on the Social Drama Theory

2022-12-02T16:23:17+04:00

Wilde’s crime was not the private act of sodomy,but his public performances.His trials can be read as an elaborated stage that could be resolved by what Victor Turner calls “social drama”.It was a thoroughly collaborative enterprise and various groups participated in the social drama,for example,court, media and characters portrayd by his own.Wilde’s fame as an author, the stature of the marquess, and the salacious nature of the testimony led to a frenzy of public interest in the case,countless newspaper articles,cartoons,and even poems were published to keep up with the British public’s appetite for information about the trials. During the trails,Wilde was quoting what he had said in a previous improvisational moment.While none of the elements were precisely original,the effeminate behavior,the epigrammatic wit and the speech defending sodomy.Therefore,this theatrical production is a mere copy or quotation. This essay, based on an understanding of the trials as social drama, examines how Wilde became the scapegoat for fin de siecle Britain.

A Comparative Study of Chinese and Indian Classical Poetic Style Theories

2022-12-02T16:24:20+04:00

Both China and India have rich and profound style theories of classical poetics. Chinese classical poetic style theories attach great importance to personal style, experience a process of continuous enrichment, flourishing and declining, have rich and varied style types and expression methods. Meanwhile, Indian classical poetic style theories attach importance to the language style and ignore the personal style. The similarities of Chinese and Indian classical poetic style theories lie in the fact that they both have a four – in – one style core of content, form, method, and effect, and agree that different styles can be combined. The reason is that Chinese Unity of Man and Nature and Indian Brahman Atman Aikyam both have the characteristics of unity and harmony. The differences between Chinese and Indian classical poetic style theories are that: First, Chinese classical style theories focus on individual style, while Indian classical poetic style theories refuse to tell it in detail. The first reason is that China has lyrical tradition and India has epic narrative tradition. The second reason is that most Chinese literature is written by individuals, while most Indian literature is written by oral groups. Second, Chinese and Indian classical poetic style theories present different features in terms of style types. The reason lies in their different aesthetic objects and ranges. Third, Indian classical poetic style theories emphasize the language style, while Chinese classical poetic style theories are relatively weak in language style. This reason is that China has a writing tradition and values writing (hieroglyphics), while India has an oral tradition and values language (phonetics and semantics). Fourth, Chinese classical poetic style theories contain the content of the Time style, while Indian classical poetic style theories do not involve it. The reason is that China believes in the Unity of Man and Nature, while India believes in Brahman Atman Aikyam.

“No Anxiety of Influence” – The Significance of Variation Theory in Mutual Learning of Civilizations

2022-12-02T16:25:26+04:00

Throughout the development of comparative literature theory of pre – Chinese school, it is obvious that there is anxiety about "influence," so that the sound of "stagnant water" constantly appears in the crisis. By differentiating influence, accepting influence, absorbing influence and then transforming it, the Variation Theory innovates theoretical development from the perspective of inter – civilization.The significance of"mutual learning among civilizations" is revealed in the context of focusing on "differences," studying "differences" and constructing "differences."

Sanskrit Poetics in China (1949 – 2021)

2022-12-02T16:26:37+04:00

The past seventy years have been witnessed a significant transformation in the study of Sanskrit poetics in China. A few reviews of the trends and achievements of Sanskrit poetics studies were made years ago. However, there has been some new changes in recent years. Then it would be proper to make a modest attempt to present the details of the latest developments in the study of Sanskrit poetics in China especially between 1949 and 2021. The study of Sanskrit poetics was initiated by Jin Kemu’s introductions and translations. And it was nourished by his student Huang Baosheng, whose Compilations of Sanskrit Poetic Works and Classical Poetics of India have been on the top of reading lists for Chinese scholars of Sanskrit poetics. Then it was Cao Shunqing who brought Sanskrit poetics forward into the study of Oriental literary theories as a whole in his work, An anthology of Oriental Literary Theories, and argued that it was of the same importance for scholars to study the Oriental literary theories and the western. In recent years, one of the major innovations in this field was Yin Xinan’s translations of some Sanskrit theoretical works on music, dance and paintings besides the traditional literary theory. In terms of the study of Sanskrit poetics, the major contributors are Jin Kemu, Huang Baosheng, Yu Longyu, Cao Shunqing, Hou Chuanwen, etc. Particularly, Qiu Zihua studied Sanskrit poetics from the perspective of Indian aesthetics, while Ni Peigeng mainly studied the theory of rasa. Another achievement has been made was explorations into Sanskrit poetics from a comparative analysis, such as Yu Longyu’s Comparative Studies in Chinese – Indian Poetics, Yin Xinan’s Comparative Studies of Sanskrit Poetics and Western Poetics and so forth. Furthermore, there has been some studies on Sanskrit poetics’ influence on the poetics of Tibet, Mongolia, etc. And Sanskrit poetics were employed to interpret literary works by some scholars like Huang Baosheng.

Category and Discourse of Purusa in Ancient Indian Literary and Art Criticism

2022-12-02T16:28:03+04:00

The image of Purusa, derived from Rgveda, had a profound influence on culture and people’s ways of thinking in India. And it also had been constantly interpreted by philosophers and literary theorists. This thesis will mainly focus on the origin and development of the concept of Purusa, explore it in ancient Indian literary and art criticism, and try to understand the Purusa concept embodying the features of ancient Indian literary and art criticism and the Indian nation.

Yugen aesthetics in Junichirō Tanizaki’s literature

2022-12-02T16:37:09+04:00

Yugen aesthetics thought was first conceived in the kadou and kagaku of Japan in the Middle Ages. “Yugen” is not only a concept of style, but also a concept of value. In the latter level, “Yugen” has a universal aesthetics value. Into the Edo era, the word “Yugen” was almost no longer used, until the twentieth century, this is the era of rediscovery of “Yugen” aesthetics. Junichirō Tanizaki once used the word “Shadow” to refer to “Profundity” and reinterpreted the beauty of “Yugen” in Japanese culture from an aesthetics standpoint. Tanizaki’s sense of the “Yugen” aesthetics is also reflected in his literary creation, so this paper will take the “Yugen” aesthetics as the entry point to explore and analyze the “Yugen” aesthetics consciousness in Tanizaki’s literature.

The Modern Interpretation of Chuang Tzu's English – Rendering Journey Within the Context of World Literature

2022-12-02T16:38:31+04:00

After Chuang Tzu was translated into English, it has successfully circulated among world literature and exerted a remarkable influence across the globe. This paper reviews Damrosch’s definition of world literature and reexamines the development of Chuang Tzu studies in the English world during the past century. Based on the refraction of culture, the force of translation and the inclusiveness of literary appreciation, it explores the factors in the success of Chuang Tzu as world literature from the perspectives of the production, outcomes and reception of the translation and reveals the mechanism of cross – cultural literary circulation, which provides insights into the translation and promotion of Chinese literature and ancient classics. The research indicates that the core value of translation during ancient Chinese classics translation should be emphasized. Besides, the translation should cater to the target readers on the basis of careful consideration of the source culture and host culture so as to promote the practice of Chinese culture “going out”.

A Study on the Female Discourse in Alcott's Work Novels

2022-12-02T16:39:27+04:00

This article is a study of the relevance of Alcott's work novels and female consciousness. The ideology of "separate spheres" prevailing in American society in the 19th century confined women to the family most of the time, but both in reality and in the literary imagination, women were constantly expanding their space outward. The work narrative in Louisa May Alcott's novels reproduces the process of women moving from "private sphere" to "public sphere". This article attempts to interpret this process, read Alcott's work novels in detail through the method of intertextual dialogue between the novel text and other texts, as well as the study of the social and historical context of the novel text, and explore the existence predicament of American women and the evolution of ethical ideas in the 19th century. This research has certain reference significance for gender consciousness and literary writing.

Chinese Culture in Intercultural Communication: uncertainty and selectivity of content

2022-12-02T16:40:20+04:00

This study seeks to understand how Chinese Culture content practice in intercultural communication in today’s culturally diverse China, explore whether an ingroup (Sojourners) over outgroup (Chinese) intercultural transformation exists and how it reshapes sojourners acculturation process and social identity in this new environment. Drawing on qualitative – semi structured interviews with 41 foreign residents and 28 local communities in Chengdu, China, the study highlights different multi – layered cultural power structure and practices that Sojourners in China face. Through a combined underpinning of cross – cultural adaption (Young Yun Kim, 2001) and acculturation strategies (Sam & Berry, 2006), the study focuses on how these practices re – shape sojourners’ Chinese culture acceptance around cultural power. However, uncertainty and ambiguity are emphased in the eastern culture context, which leads to content selectiveness in government – driven intercultural communication model. This highlights the significant role of local community and societal practice that can impel culture communication in different groups, and provides new insights in ICC theories.

On Opera Studies of British and American Academic Circles in Recent Ten Years

2022-12-02T16:41:26+04:00

In the field of the opera studies across the world, British and American academic circles have always been in a leading position, affecting the breakthrough and development of the studies related to opera and dominating the important academic discourse power. In the recent ten years, great achievements have been made in the field of opera studies of British and American academic circles. In contrast, there is no academic monograph or doctoral dissertation especially on organizing and studying this great achievement in China. Therefore, this dissertation takes “opera studies of British and American academic circles in recent ten years” as the research object to study the relevant literature of opera studies of British and American academic circles in recent ten years as comprehensively as possible; to collect, screen and arrange the relevant complicated study results, and summarize the new achievements of opera studies in recent ten years, including the re – discussion about the basic issues of opera, the study of performance practice, the study of media and interdisciplinary studies, the summary of opera in the 20^th century and a new opportunity for the digitization of opera in the 21^st century. The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a path for domestic academic circles to master the latest trends and achievements of opera studies of British and American academic circles, and also expect to make some contribution to the domestic opera studies.

Research on university spirit from the perspective of cultural comparison between China and foreign countries

2022-12-02T16:42:21+04:00

This study focuses on the connotation, extension, formation factors and effect generation of university spirit in the global vision and multicultural background, and puts it into the perspective of Chinese and foreign cultural comparison to explore the similarities and differences between Chinese and foreign university spirit, so as to analyze the existing space, available space and Realization path of Chinese and foreign civilization exchange, mutual learning and mutual learning represented by university spirit. Through the comparative study of Chinese and foreign universities established earlier and representative universities, it is found that just as the importance of spirit to individuals, groups and organizations, university spirit has guiding significance for the development and function of universities, and also occupies the position of "core in the core" in the social value demonstration and spirit leading role of universities; At the same time, the university spirit has both collective commonality and individual differences. Once it is relatively solidified and formed, the university spirit will have a long-term stability and inheritance, and will also become a unique identification of the University. The collective commonality of the university spirit is more reflected in the significance of the functions of the University, Its unique charm and strength lies in the mission and responsibility of "the Lighthouse of human civilization" and "the ideal home of human spirit" in the inheritance and progress of human civilization. The individual differences of university spirit are more produced in the historical inheritance and process shaping of University individuals, which is reflected in its unique role. In addition to the above findings, the similarities and differences between Chinese and foreign university spirit also show unique charm due to the similarities and differences between Chinese and foreign cultures. As a sample of exchanges, mutual learning and mutual learning between Chinese and foreign civilizations, it has wider significance and deeper representativeness and demonstration.

Otherness in oriental and Azerbaijani literature: between medieval and modern periods

2022-12-05T15:14:51+04:00

In modern times, most conflicts are based on "I and others" identification. One of the sources that can answer the question of "how this practice has been in the past" is literature. This paper deals with otherness in ancient and medieval literature, limiting otherness as a foreigner and a person from another religion. There is a unique warm attitude to strangers in Azerbaijani folkloric texts.

In ancient and medieval literature, both oral and written, foreigners are often presented at the main character's level, and the plot is constructed on love between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl. On the folklore epic samples are a plot on "Qanlı Goja's son Ganturali" (16^th century), "Kitabi – Dada Gorgud" a plot on "Qanlı Goja's son Ganturali," "Asli and Kerem" (created since 16^th century). In authorship literature, among these works are popular Ferid – ed – Din Attar (1136 – 1221), H. In Javid's (1882 – 1941) works on the plot of Sheik Sanan, a Muslim boy falls in love with a Christian girl and goes through many trials in this path of love. In the twentieth century, this motif was observed in many Azerbaijani writers' texts such as N. Narimanov (1870 – 1925) ("Bahadur and Sona)," Gurban Said (1905 – 1942), "Ali and Nino," J. Jabbarli (1899 – 1934) ("In the 1905 year") Elchin (was born in 1943) ("Mahmud and Maryam").

This motif was more connected with the mythological plots and worldview in dastans – folklore; in the XX century author, Husein Javid's Sheik Sanan plot on the love of foreigner embodied Sufi views from the Medieval period. However, for 20^th – century literature, this theme was developed within of historical and political prism.

Medieval Sexualities, Transmission and Productive Censorship: A Study of Azerbaijani Translations of the Thousand and One Nights during the Soviet period

2022-12-05T15:16:51+04:00

As one of the most celebrated world literatures, the Thousand and One Nights through its complex translational journey has exercised an undisputed influence on the storytelling practices with which medieviality and beyond amused itself again and again. The prodigiously sensual text of the Nights is particularly renowned for its depictions of sexualities which is beyond what is perceived to be normative. As follows, while the narrative is about medieval sexual life, many of the themes and motifs addressed are astonishingly pertinent to our modern society. A close reading of the Azerbaijani translations – a relay translation published in eight volumes between the years 1973 – 1978 and based on the intermediate Russian text of 1959 “Khudojestvennaya Literatura” edition of the Nights translated by Mikhail Alexandrovich Salye – has revealed that the text harbors many interesting translation strategies in the transmission of sexually suggestive elements, including non – heteronormative and queer sexualities. Since the Azerbaijani translation was published during the period when homosexuality was still declared a crime in the Soviet Union makes our present observation all the more intriguing. By applying the concept of “productive censorship” which Brian James Baer defined as “artful evasion of censorship restrictions” (21) to the translated text, this study aims to focus on the transmission of “obscene” elements and erotic references with particular attention to the same – sex desire and queer sexual relationships to demonstrate how the Azerbaijani translators managed to get over the powerful censorship mechanisms actively employed by the Soviet state.

Between hubris and magnanimitas: a common topica? A few notes on Nizami's Iskandar and Dante's Ulysses

2022-12-05T15:18:08+04:00

The paper proposes a comparison between the character of Iskander depicted by Nizami and some ancient and medieval examples of Alexander’s character seen from Western perspectives. We will reflect on the ways in which the plural identity of this 'fantastic universal' (Vico) is shaped and is nourished by the different representations or self – representations of the identities of the peoples and cultures in which his adventures take place and are narrated. How are interpreted in the different geographical, historical – political, and religious contexts the common sources between East and West – starting from the Greek ones – reported by scholars of the immense narrative constellation of the Alexandreid? To what extent do the recurring topoi – folkloric, literary, philosophical, political – configure a common topica? Together with the constants and variants focused by historical poetics in the jagged Eurasian territory, what imaginative paths does Iskander / Alexander's journey translate and imprint on the map of such varied horizons of expectation? If the overcoming of the limit of the ecumene and of the very human possibilities is a constitutive trait of the figure of the travelling leader, the possibility to approach Iskander to Dante's Ulysses through the mediation of Alexander recalls and tests notions such as hubris and magnanimitas in non – Eurocentric contexts.

Philosophy of Nasimi in the context of the unity of man and creator

2022-12-05T15:19:33+04:00

This work examines the philosophy of the medieval Islamic Azerbaijani poet Nasimi, which is associated with the substantiation of the unity of man and the creator, the absolutization of anthropotheism. This idea has similarities with the statements of the Ancient Greek sophist Protagoras (5th century BC) and the Christian theologian Pelagius (5th century AD). The influence of Nasimi's philosophy on the subsequent establishment of anthropocentrism and humanism in Europe is also logical. Before tracing this ideological chain и, the author highlights the historical connection of the Arab-Muslim culture with the culture of antiquity, then with the European culture of the Renaissance and modern times. Due to several well-known historical events, the creations of antiquity in the Middle Ages became the property of the Arab-Muslim world. Then, as the ecclesiastical force weakened, they returned to Europe, became the basis of new philosophical teachings and scientific theories. This kind of circulation of ideas had an impact on the development of anthropocentrism and humanism. Revealing the history of great ideas, their understanding by contemporaries, transformation in the public consciousness, and actualization under favorable circumstances allow revealing the relationship and dynamics of the interweaving of anthropo-, socio-cultural genesis.

1921: Dante à la frontière. Espace et temps de la réception de la "Divine Comédie" entre les Alpes et les Balkans

2022-12-05T15:21:25+04:00

Le sixième centenaire de la mort de Dante Alighieri, en 1921, marque un paysage culturel complexe, dans lequel différentes instances, événements et stratégies se croisent, nous invitant à réfléchir à la double valeur du seuil spatio-temporel. Dans la perspective géo-sémiotique ici adoptée, le centenaire est une dimension intertextuelle qui implique certains mécanismes d'interaction - entre la politique et la littérature, entre les arts et les idéologies.

Parmi les nombreuses initiatives, l'édition bilingue des essais et des traductions de la Divine Comédie, réalisée par le jeune Alojzij Res, revêt une importance particulière: deux volumes imprimés en italien à Gorizia et en slovène à Ljubljana, accompagnés des planches du peintre croate Mirko Rački et du graveur slovène Tone Kralj.

Ma contribution vise à reconstituer les circonstances de la réalisation de l'œuvre, alors que le dialogue entre l'Italie, la Slovénie et la Croatie devenait de plus en plus difficile, dans le transit décisif menant à l'ère du nationalisme et du totalitarisme. La présentation vise à mettre en évidence le rapport antithétique entre l'espace et le temps dans la réception de Dante en 1921 dans les villes frontalières de l'Adriatique, après la chute de l'Empire des Habsbourg (Trieste, Fiume, Gorizia): d'une part, la lecture nationaliste et anti-historique qui efface le temps pour exalter la valeur spatiale; d'autre part, la lecture qui dévalorise l'espace pour faire voyager le texte dans le temps et exploiter toutes les ressources qui libèrent le potentiel révolutionnaire et cathartique de la poésie.

Writing the Margins: Plural Perspectives on Transgender Lives from Transgender Activists in India

2022-12-05T15:25:05+04:00

The Supreme Court of India in a judgement of 2014, affirmed recognition of transgenders. This was hailed as a great step forward. However, a more nuanced understanding shows that the verdict also increases greater state and social control over gender marginality and gender expressions that question the binary. This contradictory judgement compels me to look at literary articulations of transgender activists, examining the plural, often quite divergent perspectives that occur.

Manobi Bandyopadhyay tells of the conflict between the physical and the mental orientation, and hegemonic concept of physical identity and gender performativity. Her writing also sharply questions by implication the component of the SC verdict where transgender seems equated with hijra. In Living Smile Vidya’s I Am Vidya, the focus is on the transformation from the supposed to the real, which in a way is also a journey from the centre to the margin. A Revathi’s, The Truth About Me looks at the violence, trauma and degradations that transgenders face, especially when being a hijra and being a sex worker appear the main occupations before them.

Finally, Kalki Subramaniam’s We Are Not The Others, reinserts the transgenders in the world in its totality, and in a combination of poems and essays, sets out to challenge, and subvert binary visions based on traditional culture, such as Krishna, the male god protecting Draupadi when she is about to be disrobed, in a poem that both invokes that image and then rejects it.

This study will be based on autobiographies and other writings of Indian transgenders, and also on theoretical insights developed by Indian queer activist – scholars. It will examine the problems involved in the interaction between Indian lived reality and terms originally developed in the West.

Albertine in Anne Carson’s queer journeys: from Stesichoros to Proust

2022-12-05T15:27:07+04:00

Defying binaries and established categories, Anne Carson’s oeuvre operates at the intersection of prose and poetry, word and image, classical and contemporary worlds, literature and criticism, and challenges the boundaries between self and other, male and female, myth and reality. If in Geryoneis, Stesichoros rewrites Hercules’ tenth labor from the point of view of Geryon, in Autobiography of Red (1998), Carson rewrites Geryoneis transforming the imperialistic drive into a passionate love affair that leaves the red – winged monster in desperation. The two characters, renamed and middle – aged, meet again in Red Doc> (2013), a sequel explicitly “haunted by Proust.” In these hybrid verse novels dealing with Eros and Thanatos, time, memory and loss, Carson mocks literary scholarship and publishing conventions experimenting with the materiality of book form (L. Plate), questions of authorship and even the possibility of meaning. To deal with “the desert of ‘after Proust’,” Carson publishes a year later, The Albertine Workout (2014), a list of 59 reflections (plus appendices) on Proust’s novel, emphasizing the pathologies of the Albertine cycle and repeating platitudes of Proustian criticism. However, during a preview reading of this work, she claimed that this naïve rewriting of one of the most paradigmatic works of queer culture is not hers but rather the first academic treatise of the queered mythical monster that serves as a protagonist to her novels (J. Thorp). Thus, this paper aims at examining how Albertine’s story, as the queerest aspect of the Recherche (Landenson), becomes the opus of Geryon as embodiment of otherness in terms of gender, race and humanness, emerging from within a series of translations, rewritings, metamorphoses and textual migrations. It will therefore focus on gender configurations across time and literary landscapes beyond familiar territories.

"Break Fences; Build a Garden" – August Wilson's Spatial Writing of Black Female in Fences Writing Back to Their Eyes Were Watching God

2022-12-05T15:30:34+04:00

Although usually read as a work to reflect the whole community of African Americans’ living experience and oppression, Fences written in 1987 by August Wilson as one of his "Pittsburgh Circle" series contains a deeper revelation for black women, the peripheral group within the already marginalized ethnical minority. On that ground, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God , the first classic among black feminist novels shall be recalled for discussion since the two female protagonists enable a intertextual reading of spaces in terms of black female subjectivity construction in a hostile world treating them as the double Other with their despised gender and race. In this paper, the author adopts a perspective of space studies from Michel Foucault, Edward Soja and bell hooks to dig out the relationship between the process of space expansion and black women’s construction of subjectivity to prove that Rose and Jenny as the representative figures of black women, their status of being an Other's other would not change before they actively break free. And through the analysis of their constructing process, the author proves that a powerful, flexible and inclusive "Thirdplace" or "heterotopia" represented by the image of garden for them serves the crucial role for the marginalized group to stand down to earth. Thereupon, powerful discourses from a black woman get generated and are able to spread afar quite influentially through sisterhood to their community or next generation.

“I think where I am”: decolonizing gender, race and ethnicity at the periphery of the West

2022-12-05T15:31:43+04:00

We live in times of fear and violence, real and symbolic, as the tentacles of covid 19 took by assault the world we live making all the more visible the inequalities among nations, the fragility of democratic political systems and, in some latitudes more than in others, the precariousness of human lives. Precariousness has been a hallmark of peoples in Latin American history since the so called “discovery” by European conquerors during the sixteen century. Specifically in Brazil, under the rule of the Portuguese imperial state, colonial governments consolidated their power by establishing laws of forced labor for indigenous peoples and by deploying slave traffic policies that lasted for almost four centuries. The numbers are staggering: in the first century of contact 90% of the aboriginal peoples was exterminated and during the last four centuries 700 of the 1.200 nations were wiped out of existence. As of today, there are only 305 ethnic groups, some running the risk of extinction. As to the black people, 4.8 million of Africans were brought to the country and sold as slaves from 1550 to 1888, the oficial date of the abolition which in fact, did not end the suffering of the black population. According to the Brazilian Institute of Geographical Statistics, besides the population living in shanty towns around big cities, there are 100.000 communities of “quilombolas” in the country rural areas, with a total of 2 million persons who keep their ancestral traditions and have become guardians of the forests, a role that has placed them in constant danger given death threats by encroaching white landowners. As to women in general, according to data from the ONU, of the 25 countries with the highest rates of feminicide in the world, 14 are in Latin America and in the Caribbean. And in Brazil 3 out of 5 women murdered are black women whereas white women suffer mostly from physical abuse and rape. The patriarcal colonial legacy of violence, prejudice and hierarquies of gender, race and ethnicity outlasts to this day, perpetuating a cycle of subalternization, suffering and loss of human lives. This means that the concepts of european modernity such as democracy, progress, rationality and universal citizenhisp were and still are tokens of a priviledged class of white men. As educators and comparatists I believe that the challenges of the present demand an expansion of our ways of thinking in order to perceive and embrace new angles to approach questions related to otherness,

oppression and belonginess alongside questions of gender. The present proposal was inspired by Mary Louise Pratt’s essay “Comparative literature and global citizenship”(1995) where she afirmas that besides being an academic endeavor, comparative literature is also a form of cultural citizenship in the so called globalized world and that is the reason it has become a powerfull instrument of intelectual renewal in the studies of literature and culture, and also of politics, I would add.

I intend to develop the topic in two parts. First, I will address the genealogy of decolonial thought in Latin America, with comments on Anibal Quijano´s seminal essay of 1998 “ Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento em America Latina” (Coloniality of power: culture and knowledge in Latin America) where he discusses the idea that the relation modernity/coloniality/decoloniality is not just the naming of an event but a complex relational structure of power. In this context I will raise issues in relation to Brazilian literary histories, all written in the XX century, by arguing that their content derives from a patriarcal, ethnocentric and racist hegemonic structure and as such they function as a form of cultural colonialism and its embedded epistemic violence. As a couterpoint, I will comment on the mappings of the research project “Brazilian women writers of the XIX century”, carried out by a group of women scholars across the country over a decade. In the second part, I will address decolonial feminism to highlight the rising of subaltern voices, women writers of color and of diferent ethnicities whose production, philosophical and literary, engender symbolical mappings of cultural identities and tradicional knowledges. They do not only challenge the old/new colonialism of minds and bodies that has become a trademark of the present government. They are decolonizing Brazilian literature and deconstructing the myth – making of the patriarcal white national imaginary rooted in the image of the people as “one”.

Inclusive Uncanniness, Uncanny Inclusiveness: Gender and Forced Migration

2022-12-05T15:34:03+04:00

This presentation aims to approach a theoretical conceptualization and (re)mapping of gender in situations of forced migration. Pertaining to that, I probe the concept of societal inclusiveness along with the concept of uncanniness. Be it caused by a (post)war violence, political threat, or economic scarceness, forced mobility is often an unwelcoming ‘home’ to itself. Further, the resulting migratory situation is un unbearably heavy test of endurance and desire – for the incoming population, and of the humanity/altruism within the prescribed security – for the host mainstream cultures; however, on both sides involving a personal disposition, emotional judgement, critical consciousness, imaginative drive. It is such points of a personal inflection of these migratory encounters (where precarity and privilege lay bare each other’s randomness within a wider human and global condition) that enable the turn of the scale in recognizing and working through the uncanny undercurrents of the processes of inclusiveness, articulated in theory and literary production.

Itself a sub – territory of this complex dynamics – psychological, cultural, and societal, gender needs to be closely approached, interpreted, and/or (re)mapped. By connecting theories of nomadic affectivity (Deleuze, Guattari, Braidotti), creative borrowing (E. Said), relating narratives (A. Cavarero), and singularity (S. Weber), each stressing a different aspect and carrier of im – personality (as “We”, “I”, “You”, “It”), I will discuss how mutations of gender in the in – between spaces of migratory contacts can contribute to societal merging and worlding of literatures.

(Re)Mapping Masculinity in Northern France: The Novels of Édouard Louis

2022-12-05T15:35:16+04:00

The French writer Édouard Louis’s most recent novel, Changer : méthode (2021), is an autobiographical novel in which the author narratively revisit the terrain of his youth in Northern France as well as his earlier renditions of it in En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (2014) and Qui a tué mon père (2018), seeking to understand who he is and how he and his parents, specifically his father, came to be who they are. Narrative and writing are the means of this enquiry into gender, and how it intersects with social class, ethnicity, sexuality and geography; a narrative enquiry that reflects on cultural definitions and understandings of masculinity and their lived experience across the narrator’s trajectory from Hallencourt to Amiens to Paris in the early 21^st century, focusing on how synchronously but differentially available configurations of white masculinity in France inscribe on the body, are incorporated in it, or are rejected by it, as the one (re)makes his body in one of its images (Eddy Bellegueule becoming Édouard Louis) in its performance of it, whereas the other one is destroyed (as in the case of the father) in his performance of it. Revisiting the terrain of masculinity through its social and cultural geographies and topographies, this paper engages with the novels of Édouard Louis as narrative enquiries into the poetics and politics of gender in contemporary France.

Gender and Mapping Fourth Wave Feminism

2022-12-05T15:36:26+04:00

This presentation takes the theme of remapping gender as its prompt for (re)conceptualizing fourth wave feminism. It engages current scholarship (e.g., Chamberlain, Parry, Rivers) and works through several complex questions such as what are some of the key differences between fourth wave feminism and the previous waves? Is the concept of gender relevant in fourth wave feminism? How does the fourth wave mobilize itself and find ways to build solidarities or alliances? For the intents and purposes of this presentation, my research will concentrate on the intersection of gender and social media. Building upon key third wave terms such as queer, performativity, and heteronormativity, I argue that the new movement has articulated its own more appropriate vocabulary, e.g., expanding the language beyond the second and third wave acronym LBG(T) to LGBTQIA2S+ is one example. Gender identity thus holds a lot of personal significance; for example, one of the movement’s main inroads into the mainstream has been challenging restrictive or inaccurate personal pronouns in workplaces, institutions, and other public settings, including digital meeting platforms. Many influencers and celebrities have also used social media to tell their stories; e.g., Demi Levato recently shared their identity as non – binary on Instagram and Janelle Monáe publicly announced their non – binary identity via Twitter. My work further aims to show that gender remains a meaningful way to build solidarity and alliances such as with movements like #MeToo. Rather than coalitions forming exclusively on a binary basis of sex and/or gender, fourth wave feminists encompass a more – inclusive, intersectional group of people with varying genders and sexualities who are working to disrupt systemic patriarchy, the cis – tem, privilege, and toxic masculinity (most often associated with white cis – het men).

Process of National Identity Forging: We vs Others

2022-12-05T15:40:07+04:00

Identity is nothing but boundaries. In establishing boundaries, the pivotal role belongs to others. Accordingly, while observing the identity forging process, conceptualization of others deserves a special attention. And this is true for all types of identities, among them the collective – cultural ones, i.e. ethnic and national identities.

In the period of national consolidation, we vs others dichotomy assumes great topicality: the cultural elite of the given we – group tries to strengthen the border lines with outside world and maximize differences against the other we – groups. At the same time, the elite of nationally mobilizing community attempts to minimize inner differences (eliminate otherness) so that to make the native entity socially and culturally solid and homogeneous. This strategy finds its reflection in the national identity narrative in which the topics associated with othering and making and remaking of boundaries are accentuated.

The aim of the presentation is to grasp the conceptualization of others through the Georgian case study. It is focused on the nineteenth century, i.e. epoch when rooted in remote past Georgian ethnic community transformed into the modern nation. Georgian literary fiction serves as a source of the representation. The choice of the source of this type (often neglected in traditional historiographies) is conditioned by the nature of the research question which is formulated in spirit of the “New History” allowing the scholar to extend the “territory” of the history discipline and investigate social perceptions and not only actual occurrences.

The obtained data allows to represent the nineteenth century process of Georgian national consolidation: one can see how Georgian intellectuals were concerned with conceptualization of others in order to add the relevant saliency and visibility to Georgian identity.

Laxalt family’s Basque American correspondence after Sweet Promised Land

2022-12-05T15:47:08+04:00

Dominique Laxalt is a Basque who became famous following the novel Sweet Promised Land written by his son Robert Laxalt in 1957. The novel relates the harsh adaptation to the life of a shepherd in the American West and the impossible definitive return to the native land, after decades of emigration and the journey made with his son Robert in the Basque Country (Ezkerra and Olaziregi 2009, Laraway 2019). As a result, the novel is an illustration of the altered identity of Basquae Americans (Totoricaguena 2014, Douglass 2005, Decroos 1983).

We have examined the very rich correspondence of the Laxalt family where we can see a double alterity of identity, apart from that of Dominique Laxalt himself. It concerns, on the one hand, that of Dominique’s American children, concerning their interest in the Basque language and the Basque Country (notably Robert’s, long before his novel) and, on the other hand, the fascination of the Basque Country’s relatives for the American life of the Laxalt family (and the success of Paul Laxalt in politics). But these letters also bear witness to the changes in society and the economy of the Soule of the 1960s.

The dozens of letters sent by Dominique Laxalt’s children and sisters, nieces and nephews are, in a way, a continuation of the novel Sweet Promised Land, since they allow us to know the family events after the novel. But, above all, the letters show that the journey recounted in the book is a catalyst for the close ties between the Basque and American Laxalt families.

Transformation of Identity in the ‘Bertso – Event’: Three Experiences of Crisis

2022-12-05T15:49:26+04:00

Unlike in written literature, in oral improvisation an aestheticized message is transmitted and received "here and now". Bertsolarism –spontaneous oral improvisation in Basque – is evanescent, the moment of creation and reception of the artwork are the same, and this characteristic endows the discipline with a great transformative potential –like any other stage performance–: it has the power of making the participants transform into something. The “bertso – event” is by definition an “identity shaper”, either causing psychological, affective or somatic transformations in the individual, or by reinforcing the feeling of belonging to a community. But for this process to happen, it is essential to provoke experiences of crisis among listeners, blurring the preset codes and guidelines, approaching ambiguity, and, ultimately, putting the participants in a “betwist and between” state, until they reach a catharsis –and, finally, an identity transformation–. Paradoxically, bertso situations are usually very rigid. Both the bertsolari and the listeners are very clear about what they expect from each situation –be it a bertso – dinner, an open – air performance or a championship–, and that reduces the chances of provoking trance moments among the participants. However, there have been strong shock situations throughout the history of bertsolarism: some caused by the bertsolari itself, some caused by the public, and others caused by unforeseen circumstances. All of them have shaken the identity of the participants in some way. Three experiences of crisis will be analyzed below: the “whistle” of the listeners to Xalbador in the 1967 General Championship, the moment in which Uztapide was suddenly speechless at a 1972 performance, and the boycott of Jon Sarasua in the final phase of the 1991 Gipuzkoa Championship.

„If the sky in Basque country looks like the sky in Georgia?“

2022-12-05T15:51:47+04:00

Already ancient writers, historians and geographers have talked about two Iberias: One was west Iberia (Iberia of Spain) and the second was east Iberia (Iberia of the Caucasus). Therefore, two theories and versions existed about the kinship of Georgians and Basques. According to the first theory, Basques came in the Caucasus region and specifically, in Georgia from the Iberian Peninsula. According to the second theory, Basques left Georgia several thousand years ago and settled in Spain. But we have the third, alternative theory about the Georgian – Basque kinship and I’ll start my narration and speech discussing this topic.

As usual, when discussing such topics, one relies on and uses for reasoning toponymy, similarities between languages, etymological parallels, likeness between traditions and customs, ethnogenesis or even characteristics. But in our case, we are most importantly interested in Basque – Georgian literary parallels and that is why I’m going to talk about Basque and Georgian literary history. The comparisons between the two will be made by eras, subject matters and problems. I’ll try to explain why Basque literature developed differently from Georgian literature in some centuries and the opposite – why Georgian and Basque literature processes are sometimes alike. And certainly, I’m going to talk about the present and past roles, functions and importance of literature for these two ancient nations.

Frank Bergon’s Fiction: From Black To White

2022-12-05T15:52:57+04:00

Basco. That is the how Basque Americans in the US West are referred to nowadays. Basque Americans enjoy not only the acceptance, but rather the fascination of the American community. However, it was not always so. For decades Basque Americans were derisively called Black Bascos. Basque children were frequently be picked on at schools or playgrounds. Adults were often ruthlessly rejected by the mainstream and were given jobs that no one else wanted, such as sheep herding.

The aim of this presentation is to analyse how the term Basco has shifted from being demeaning to entailing pride. To do so, the fiction of the Basque American writer Frank Bergon will be analysed. His novels, Shoshone Mike (1987), The Temptations of St. Ed and Brother S. (1993), Wild Game (1995), and Jesse´s Ghost (2011) comprehend the identity variations over four generations. So far, Bergon is the only writer to have illustrated the linear history of Basque Americans in the West and how they have shifted from being The Other to being part of the US community.

Bergon´s four novels, based on true events, capture the essence of the West through the writer´s first – hand experience as a Basque American. Bergon, a third – generation Basque, is proud of his ethnic heritage, as he expresses through the character, Jack Irigaray, in Wild Game. Shoshone Mike recreates the killings of three Basque shepherds in the hands of a Shoshone family. Through this novel, we learn about first – generation Basques, who usually gathered in close circles and whose interaction with Anglos was scarce. Bergon´s second novel recreates the nuclear conflict of Yucca Mountain, 100 miles from Las Vegas, through the monk St. Ed Arrizabalaga. Jesse´s Ghost reveals, for instance, how countless Basques were obliged to shorten/modify their surnames to sound more Anglo.

Basques, Mi’kMaqs and Inuits: Transoceanic First Nations encounters in comic and graphic novels

2022-12-05T15:58:07+04:00

In 1978, Parks Canada underwater archaeologists discovered the remains of the whaling vessel San Juan in Red Bay. By then Basque cartoonists Gregorio Muro ‘Harriet’ had started to work on one of his major works, Justin Hiriart, a long graphic novel on the Basques’s presence in the North Atlantic coasts in the early 17th century. Well known for their mastery at the sea, Basque fishermen and whalers were in many cases the first Europeans the First Nations met. Historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and even geneticists have studied their presence in the North Atlantic. Whereas the Basques were actively involved in the colonization of Central and South America, it was not the case in the North Atlantic coast of America. Unlike the French and the English, the Basques did not aim to settle or conquer these lands. Following historical data, the relationships between Basques and First Nations seem overall to have been rather friendly, as reflected in the sentence “apaizac obeto” (the priests better) adopted by various Algonquin tribes as a welcome formula towards Europeans. Drawing from an anthropological perspective, this paper will focus on how contemporary Basque popular culture, and especially cartoons and graphic novels have disseminated largely unknown pieces of history. It will focus on the way the encounter with the Other is portrayed, paying attention to the way Native Americans are depicted, far from usual stereotypes – the role of the villain being incarnated by settlers and colonizers. Part of these images are grounded in historical documents, recalling the existence of intercultural connections. Adopting a decolonial perspective, the analysis of these materials stresses the need to investigate the historical evolution of discourses and representations as well as their incarnation in contemporary forms.

Conflicting memories and families in conflict: Identity and otherness in contemporary Basque literature

2022-12-05T16:00:07+04:00

Contemporary Basque literature shows a clear interest in our conflictive past. A growing number of works deal with the Spanish Civil War, Franco's dictatorship or all that we commonly call the ‘Basque conflict’. Although there is a variety of literary perspectives and approaches, we can observe some recurring motifs that may be especially significant for understanding the negotiations on memory and identity in the Basque Country. Specifically, we will analyze some narratives in which that Other who can be represented as a perpetrator or as a political opponent (a Falangist, a terrorist), also appears as a relative, as a member who destabilizes the family genealogy, and provokes an identity crisis, both individual and collective. From this perspective, we will analyze novels such as Atertu arte itxaron (Agirre, 2015, translated into Spanish as Los turistas desganados) or Soinujolearen semea (Atxaga, 2003, translated into English as The Accordionist's son), but also chronicles such as Gurea falangista zen (Barandiaran, 2021, ['Ours was Falangist']). This analysis will lead us to reflect on the problematic (de)construction of Basque identity in the present, and on the main role played by our conflicting memories in this process.

National identity in a global world; otherness in a country without a state. The case of Basque Contemporary Literature

2022-12-05T16:01:31+04:00

Basque literature has had complex relation with the creation of national identity (as defined by Gellner (1983) and Anderson(1991)) insofar as the Basque Country remains divided between France and Spain; the socio – political ramifications of such territorial divide manifesting in diglosia, heterogeneous identities and opposed national and political projects, which have hindered the raise of a national literature understood as an alliance between the interests of the state and the cultural interests. Conversely, the border divide and the political divide have had an impact on the literary representations of a national landscape (Thiesse, 2010). The present research aims to explore how contemporary Basque authors relate to the aforementioned situation in a context of globalization, connectography and the shift of paradigm from states to global – cities and information and professional supply networks (Khana, 2017).

The result is a myriad of strategies that explore the relationship between author and national landscape encompassing the distancing from the homeland (Bernardo Atxaga); representations of the material and symbolic implications of a homeland divided (Eider Rodríguez); the search for the national identity elsewhere, by exploring the maps and the journeys of Basque whaler – ships (Aurelia Arkotxa); and the desire to transcend a national cultural system by developing branding and marketing strategies in the global market (Kirmen Uribe).

Identitatea eta Bestetasuna: Euskal Literaturaren Eta Georgiaren Ikuspegi Konparatiboa

2022-12-05T16:02:51+04:00

Identity and otherness are concepts that have driven human self – conception(s) at least ever since the Renaissance and have consequently also contributed to social and cultural change. Especially since the postmodern era identity is conceived as dynamic, shifting, fluid, multiplistic, fragmented, (Berzonsky, 2005), configured inextricably in relation to the other(s) and to power (Lyotard 1979) and further intersectional (Crenschaw 1991).

Both concepts, of great tradition in comparative literature (Skulj 2000), are also concepts of great relevance in Basque and Georgian literature. National and gender identity, for example, and consequently otherness, have undergone a strong evolution in Basque contemporary literature. Some of the main issues related to the topic identity/otherness are the contrast between modern and postmodern Basque identity (Kortazar, 2007; Esparza 2017), the literary critical approach to cultural memory as a central contribution to the critical reflection on Basque identity (Olaziregi, 2018, 2019, 2020), the diverse literary approaches to the Basque conflict (Ayerbe, 2019), and the representation of Basque identity in the Basque Diaspora (Totoricagüena 2004). All of them and furthermore have contributed to this process of construction of identity and renegotiation with the other.

In the case of Georgia, after independence and the Civil War, its literature has experienced a new flowering. In this new literature, the redefinition of the Georgian national identity, which differs substantially from that inherited from the korenizatsiya, stands out. Georgia is approaching Europe and the United States at the same pace as it is moving away from Russia, confronting self – perceptions and the idea of the other. Finally, the unresolved territorial conflicts that Georgia is facing

are also noteworthy. Their imprint, as in the Basque case, can also be perceived in literature and in the two concepts we are dealing with.

This panel seeks to discuss key issues related to identity and otherness in Basque and Georgian literature in order to establish a dialogue between them. On one hand, this panel will aim at identifying and comparing the most relevant milestones in both literatures as to the conceptualization and eventually renegotiation of Basque and Georgian identities. On the other hand, we are interested in debating the contributions made by Basque and Georgian authors to a critical approach to the Basque and Georgian cultural identities respectively. Furthermore, the reciprocal reception of Georgian and Basque identity in the translated literature can offer a further perspective on the topic of the panel.

We are thus interested in hosting presentations which focus on these and related issues, outlining new fields of inquiry and scholarly discussion.

Cultural Translation and Translational Comparative Literature

2022-12-05T16:11:07+04:00

In the strange interstitial space of the klein bottle neck, simultaneous centripetal and centrifugal vortex of double cross – cultural experience in transcultural modern and contemporary literature and culture can be slowly revealed as far as we are disciplined with keen eyes and delicate ears. This strange locus of multiple interstices include such pairs as inside and outside, consciousness and unconsciousness, self and other, nature and culture, and voice and vision. Thus, what appears to be untranslatable in terms of the cultural difference can be transculturally approachable, if the reader contacts the strangeness, listens to the other's voices, and opens his/her heart to the cross – cultural initiation beyond the space of monocultural untranslatability. Also, when the reader performs an insurgent and/or passionate, entertaining, differential act of cultural translation, the transculturally encoded hybridized texts will lay bare their truths. In this context, the purpose of this presentation is to provide the context of the Korea East – West Comparative Literature Association (KEASTWEST) Sessions.

Aesthetics versus Politics: A Comparative Study of William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” and Yu Chi – hwan’s “Daffodil”

2022-12-05T16:12:50+04:00

This essay presents a comparative study of the poems of William Wordsworth and Yu chi – hwan, twentieth – century Korean poet. There are some aesthetic similarities between Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” and Yu’s “Daffodil,” including their uses of daffodils and the first – person point of view, but this essay focuses on their differences in perspectives. While daffodil in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” serves to show the speaker’s strong aesthetic sense of imagination, daffodil in Yu’s “Daffodil” symbolizes the hope of freedom from the Japanese Occupation of Korea. By examining the images of daffodils between the twp poems, this paper explores how each writer’s mind demonstrates their aesthetic/political representation of the image of the daffodils.

Reading Yeats among Korean Modernists in the Early 1900s

2022-12-05T16:16:02+04:00

William B. Yeats, the Irish nationalist poet, has been introduced to Korea in the late 1890s but gains popularity among Korean Modernists after the failed 3.1 Uprising of 1919, which claims the end of Japanese colonial rules. Many disappointed Korean young scholars and writers try to build a modern (or revolutionary) literary tradition turn their eyes to Irish writers like Yeats to seek an alternative model from which they can refer. This presentation explains the historical and political backgrounds of Korea and Irish nationalism, foundation of Korean Modernism, and acceptance and adoption of Yeats into Korean literature system.

Korean Pansori as an adaptation of the Western Masterpieces an Cultural Translation

2022-12-05T16:18:39+04:00

This paper intends to study the Pansori creation of the Western masterpieces, which may be called as one stream of the Korean performing arts. It has closely observed the trend of transfiguration that is realized when the Western canons created through “choice and exclusion” are translated into and performed by the Korean Pansori creators, based on the cultural translation theory. In the process of translating the Western canon into Korean Pansori, the translators had to depict political consciousness at some point, inevitably. Due to this, a decentering of the Western canon was achieved, and the cultural translation theory was very effective for further discussion. This paper shows that the cultural translation activities of these creators have realized the cosmopolitanism with a lower layer's cultural sensitivity, that opens a door to communicate and understand among people from different nationalities and background.

The Poetics of Postmemorial Nostalgia in Paul Muldoon and Agha Shahid Ali

2022-12-05T16:23:42+04:00

Paul Muldoon and Agha Shahid Ali share the poetics of postmemorial nostalgia. As the concept of postmemory theorized by Marianne Hirsch refers to both inherited trauma and creative reinvention of the past, the two poets maintain a subtle tension between politics and aesthetics in their nostalgic imagination. As postcolonial and transnational subjects, they reimagine in playfully melancholic manners the experiences of the previous generations that bear witness to the British colonial history of Ireland and Kashmir, respectively, and its aftermath of contemporary sectarian violence. Their postmemorial nostalgia can be discussed in terms of three poetic forms. First, they use poetic structures, such as sestina and ghazal, to provide a rich space for imaginative reconstruction of the traumatic past. Second, their rhyming sounds work in a tension between closeness to and distance from the past, which creates their ironic attitudes toward the past. Last, their association techniques lead to the affiliative working – through that pursues mnemonic solidarity among those who have inherited painful memories.

Georgian Literature as Part of World Literary Heritage

2022-12-05T16:28:21+04:00

Literature in Georgia has always performed the function of an intellectual leader: due to its high-quality writing, the country has always represented a significant landscape of the world literary and cultural process.

Despite the fact, that Georgian history and cultural consciousness begin already within the pagan period, at the ancient pre-historical stage, the history of Georgian writing starts from the era of Christianity, from 4^thcentury. The first literary piece – ‘The Life of St. Nino’ - is dated back almost to the same period.

Georgian literature is a Christian in its essence and belongs to the European wing of writing, however, due its geopolitical location, keeping dialogue with Eastern mode of writing as well.

The history of Georgian literature spans more than fifteen centuries.

Georgian literature is a literature of a small country, but not a minority literature; it cannot dictate rules or cannot control the world literary space, but throughout its fifteen-centuries-old history it was eager to be at the center of the global, important, influential literary processes and reflected these processes with the constant awareness of its inner dignity.

“This pipe is not a pipe” or: Shared past and cultural legacy in transition from a prism of national literature and a new Zeitgeist

2022-12-05T16:29:31+04:00

This talk will be on my own experience of various understanding of "common" questions, from established scholars to PhD students from various backgrounds, especially for last decade. Launching AzCLA in 2004 has given me an opportunity to arrange international projects with conferences, workshops, panels and forthcoming publications and to build a theoretical platform for a cultural bridge between common past and divided present by bringing together scholars of western ("developed") countries and post – socialist countries (so – called 'post – colonial' by the developed countries) to avoid abusing labels in scholarship and to promote mutual understanding.

These topics encompass theory of shared past and its modern interpretation; criteria for national literature and culture; stereotypes on parallels between the end XX century transition and earlier collapsed identities; how contemporary people have shaped societies with distinct social attitudes and behavioral norms for regulation of communication through centuries using medieval epics as a source for cultural anthropology.

Suggested talk is based on the gaps between local and international experience and will resume AzCLA conferences and contribute to researches exploring on how downfall of countries and political borders impact comparative literature as a field; how local literatures and cultures from small areas can contribute to the comparative literature and cultural studies in general and local (from a perspective of a person who went from living in one united country (Soviet Union) to a divided one with new political identities).

AzCLA suggests more common platforms for sharing experience between local and international, young and established scholars; maybe series on the proposed topics by each CLA or authors under the ICLA umbrella with the motto “sharing experiences for better mutual understanding.”

On Death in Literary Studies

2022-12-05T16:32:54+04:00

One of the most controversial and hotly debated concepts in contemporary literary theory is that of “crisis”. Philosophers and theorists speak about the “death of the author”, the “death of literature”, post – humanism and trans – humanism (which is also a kind of “death of man”), and so on. However, these “alarmist” claims seem to point rather to internal changes and evolutions of paradigms and models than to the actual ends of domains and concepts. Moreover, they are also successful devices for drawing public attention and critical acclaim, for conferring prestige to their conveyors. My point is, evoking Theodor Adorno’s “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, that the latest global calamities of the pandemic and of the war in Ukraine demand a more moral use of the term „death”. The metaphorical and abstract grand – narrative of the “end of man” fades away when we are confronted with the tragic and concrete realities of people suffering and dying in horrible conditions. Without ignoring the failures of anthropocentrism and the valid criticisms concerning the attitude and position of the human species within the planetary ecosystem, this paper engages with the possibility of ideologically – driven ethics giving way to a “humanism” tout court (not new – , not after – , not non – humanism), predicated on the imperative of caring about actual individuals in pain.

On the Relation between Academic Societies and the Government in Japan

2022-12-05T16:35:13+04:00

If time permits, I would like to talk about the controversy that erupted between the Science Council of Japan (SCJ) and Japanese Prime Minister Suga’s administration in October of 2020, a political and academic controversy that remains unresolved to this day. I believe the controversy sheds light not only on the precarious state of the humanities and social sciences in Japan but also the ever – present risk posed by governmental interference in matters of academic freedom.

The SCJ is the Japanese government’s top academic advisory council, representing more than 800,000 domestic scholars in virtually every academic discipline. The Council’s governing body, called the General Assembly, consists of 210 members serving staggered 6 – year terms. Although the Council is nominally under the jurisdiction of the Prime Minister, in practice the members of the General Assembly are appointed by the Prime Minister following the recommendations of the selection committee of the SCJ. In other words, the Prime Minister’s appointments are strictly pro forma in nature. But in 2020, in an unprecedented move, Suga withheld the nomination of six academics from the list of 105 scholars recommended by the SCJ. All six scholars hailed from the social sciences and the humanities. Although Suga never really spelled out the reasoning for his veto, lest anyone harbor doubts, all six of the rejected academics had voiced opposition to controversial security legislations enacted by the government during the tenure of Suga’s predecessor Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Hundreds of domestic academic associations issued formal statements of opposition (including the Japan Comparative Literature Association), and 200 academic organizations beyond Japan’s borders also voiced concerns. In response to the growing swell of opposition and media pressure, Suga’s Liberal Democratic Party issued a proposal to convert the SCJ into an organization independent of government oversight, in effect threatening to withdraw full or partial state funding.

Suga’s term in office was short. In October of 2021 the ostensibly more liberal Fumio Kishida replaced Suga as prime minister. But when the SCJ requested Kishida to reconsider his predecessor’s controversial rejection of the six academics, Kishida refused to renege on Suga’s decision.

I want to analyze some of the reasons for the weakness of the SCJ, as compared with similar academic councils abroad, and consider the vital role national academic councils perform not just in Japan but internationally.

After-lives: The Transnational and the Local in the Fiction of Abdulrazak Gurnah and M.Mukundan

2022-12-05T16:36:56+04:00

Comparative Literature in India, as a discipline, has struggled long to break away from the legacy of orientalism and Indology. In the wake of the assertion of emergent sections of society, such as dalits, women and minorities, the unitary impulse in the cultural domain has lost its legitimacy. The developments in literary and critical theory have contributed to this shift further. However, a hegemonic view of Indian literature, rooted in the grand narrative of a monolithic Indian tradition still finds favour with many critics and commentators. India is a multilingual country of more than twenty major languages with their separate literary traditions that go back to the early centuries of the second millennium. The radically oppositional world – views in regional cultural traditions resist co – option by powers of assimilation and domestication. Regional traditions with their multilingual and pluralist ethos, subscribe to divergent cosmologies and modes of expression, ranging from the folk to the transnational. The challenge before the comparatist in India is to explore the polyphonic voices of the literary universe cutting across many ideologies and social formations, in all their diversity, without losing sight of the larger cosmopolitan orientations that inform and animate the local and the regional . Over the years, English has become the major ‘link’ language into which prominent Indian authors get translated. English translations cannot reflect the thick plurality of the subliminal, experiential regional worlds. Comparative literature in India is deeply implicated in translation studies as translations into English have to be supplemented and complemented by insightful, interdisciplinary comparative studies.

CompLit in Taiwan: Translatorially and Essentially Incomplete

2022-12-05T16:38:12+04:00

Since the birth of comparative literature, death has been shadowing its growth and development. Scholars of this field seem to be constantly required to sustain the anxiety of an academic discipline whose identity is perpetually precarious. The indeterminacy of identity, however, is essentially rooted in Taiwan culture and literature, because of a history of colonization by the Dutch, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese, and recently the geopolitical tensions between the US and China, with Taiwan being part of the first island chain. The in – betweenness of Taiwan’s geopolitical position also features the comparative literature studies in Taiwan. This presentation will map out the historical development of the comparative literature studies along with translation studies in Taiwan, demonstrate the current local debates (is it dying?), and contend that CompLit studies in Taiwan, corresponding to Taiwaneseness which is inherently embedded by creolism, syncretism and hybridization via translation politics, will continue to live on in a way that will never be completed.

The concept of “Living between the cultures and literatures” in the context of contemporary comparative literature education

2022-12-05T16:39:48+04:00

The study has an aim to analyze the cultural aspects that address the issue of “migration” in the contemporary culture and its relation with the education in the context of comparative literature. The concepts of understanding the culture of the Other through the literature and other forms of presentation the ways of adaptation and the way of life of people who are changed their linguistic, professional, ethnic or national coordinates and leave their country of origin is traditionally in the core of the discipline comparative literature.

The category "between" in the title of the study is close to and always implies consequences related to the transfer from one culture to another and from one social context to another. The act of migration actualizes a series of phenomena that affect the relationship between the culture that has been left and the approach to the culture that is being inhabited. Although it seems that we usually speak only about spatial dislocations in the era of globalization, the way in which the problems of the law and rules in the right oriented cultural practices are activated raises the question of problems related to the possibilities of building the relations between immigrants’ culture and the culture of the domicile population including the topics of acceptance, resistance, setting borders, violence. Those concepts are historically constant in the sphere of comparative literature and culture as topics of conflict between the humanity and the retreatments of totalitarian systems developed in a way they are active in the past, especially in the twentieth century or in more rigorous modalities today.

In this context the culture and literature are understood as a systems of values bound to the humanity of a man, his rationality, ethical awareness, or his ability to take care of the Other and by that way for himself. It is not different function of literature, especially comparative literature in the past and in the present days. But, in these considerations, the classical notion of man and his humanity related to ethics, history, or sociology is problematized as ruined aspects of being in the world. Deleuze and Guattari's theory of "deterritorialization" shows that the contemporary world is neither nonhuman nor posthuman, but ahuman. How do we, think the

world – without – us rather than the world – for – us? Is a future coexistence possible or even desirable or should we succumb to a “cosmic pessimism” (G.Deleuze & F.Guattari, D. Haraway, R.Braidotti, E.Thacker, P. MacCormack)?

The topics in the comparative literature education in the study are related to documentary and fictional narrative texts that are relevant in the epoch of the twentieth and twenty – first century. They raise the question of different statuses in the social hierarchy of groups, of those who belong to a different race, class and nation and “to the positions between” them. The difference expressed as a feature of cultural practices and capital in financial and symbolic terms becomes the basis for re – examination of the mechanisms of psychological and sociological being who write, translate or work in the field of the “world republic of letters” (P.Casanova).

These are the key topics in the education in the humanities that are marginalized today although the importance and the need of comparison in the presentations of human position in the world which goal is to become “a place of good life”. Also it is important to actualize the meaning of stigmatization of the "foreigner" as “nonhuman.”

By analyzing the “process of migration” in the “new” cultural environment represented in the literature or other cultural products, the study is focused on the individual process of tirelessly seeking and trying to build her/his “own place.” This issue of the so – called the "between" of cultures is followed by a process of re – examination of the forms of traumatized life as a consequence of the conflicting status of the individual who is migrated from domestic community to other and different community and culture. The study analyzed narratives primarily from the perspective of sociological aspect and the law. At the end it is a method on which is based the understanding of contemporary comparative literature as a “world republic of letters.”

The status of people in the context of global and local cultural practices is often based on the elementary existential problems associated with the possibilities or limitations of life in unstoppable movement from one to another place or confinement in migration camps as places of bordered life related to deportation which points out to the totalitarian concepts of the past actualized in the contemporary culture as defense of the domicile culture in its national color and excluding the differences of the “foreigners”.

The Rhetoric of Videogame between Dispositio, Elocutio and Inventio

2022-12-05T16:55:55+04:00

The hegemony of digital culture has imposed a shift in the way of understanding narrative logics, which can no longer ignore a transmedia perspective. The task of comparative literature should be to study the new narrative modes using its own tools – especially rhetorical ones – through to a comparison between the different media that takes into account the specificities of each one. The aim of this intervention is therefore to study the rhetoric of the videogame, the figural set suitable for its specific narratives. From the figurality of dispositio, we have different perspective modes through the camera control and the camera angles between first person, third person or isometric. In elocutive figurality, we find direct effects on the level of expression such as photography between the use of light and colors, or the difference between the use of music in a diegetic and extra-diegetic way. Finally, the figurality of the inventio can be reread according to the intuitions of Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism relating to the degree of stature of the character: based on the freedom offered to the player and his way of interfacing with the physics of the game – intended both as the environment that like the other characters –, the videogame can change its narrative arrangement, now configuring itself according to a mythical mode – the player has full control of the surrounding world as it is totally superior to it, as in Minecraft and in the crafting games –, or romantic mode – the player has more limited control but can still intimately affect the structures, as in the latest Zelda or Portal –, or high-mimetic mode – the player has no control over the environment, but is superior to other characters as in most video games centered around the combat system –, and so on.

Media Ethnography and the Non-archived: An Archaeological Exploration of Transient Media Forms in Bengal

2022-12-05T16:57:54+04:00

Lack of archival materials and objects appears as a primary challenge to follow the framework of media archaeology while conducting research in history of media and communications in India. This paper will try to look at video halls and video tapes as the transient media spaces and objects. In case of West Bengal, video tapes and video halls are important part of media history about which little has been written or researched. While researching on these transient media forms, media ethnography becomes the primary method. This paper will try to look into the process of writing media history of scarcely archived media forms following the method of media archaeology an question how media ethnography becomes the most important process in cases of absence of archival materials. This paper will also try to enquire how media ethnography unfolds a different narrative of media history which is otherwise absent in the material archives or institutional records. As a result, the history of the intermedia transactions shaped through media ethnography presents different histories of other media like film and television also. I argue that this new media history formed through media ethnography also uncovers newer dimensions of cultural history of Bengal.

Digital Cultures of Horror in Mónica Ojeda’s Fiction

2022-12-05T16:59:36+04:00

The Internet is a world in which all kinds of people with different interests, motivations, and worldviews flock and have interactions with each other. These interactions have given rise to diverse digital cultures, some of which are part of the so-called Digital Cultures of horror. As an inhabitant of the contemporary world, Mónica Ojeda is aware of these cultures’ dark themes and environments and how they shape the world, so she has used them to create her fiction and depict reality. Mónica Ojeda describes the horrors of the Internet and digital cultures in her novels Nefando, where she touches on the subject of the Dark Web and its perverse and violent content through a creepy videogame; and Mandíbula, where she unveils how the digital folklore stories of horror called creepypasta induce fear and affect the lives of a group of teenagers. With this in mind, this paper aims to expose how Mónica Ojeda’s fiction represents the crossroads between horror and technology and the digital cultures that exist on the Internet.

The specifics of storytelling in the Georgian internet media

2022-12-05T17:00:41+04:00

The accelerated developmental tempo of modern communication technologies puts media face to face with new challenges and necessitates changes both in form and in content. The domination of the digital media has set new requirements to the author of a media-text who needs to tell a story concisely, reflect daily life, and raise topical problems and social, economic or political issues.

Telling a story in multimedia sphere, i.e. storytelling, fosters the advancement of narrative journalism. We concentrate exactly on this phenomenon in the presented research and underscore its importance through qualitative content analysis of specific examples.

We consider the theory of technological determinism of communication as the most relevant one for the present research. This theory establishes the connection between the dominant communication technology of a period and the main characteristics of society. We will also refer to the two-step flow of communication model developed by American sociologists, Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld. According to this theory, ideas are first transferred to influential personalities, and afterwards, from those personalities, they are spread throughout wider societies.

We pay special attention to postings. We chose the original texts of those authors, opinion-makers, who meet the following criteria: professional competence, numerous followers (subscribers) in social networks, intensity of updating status and discussion of topical themes.

In addition to facebook statuses (mini-blogs), we overview multimedia forms of social network storytelling such as: blogs, podcasts, vlogs, longreads, etc. The mentioned forms enable an author to present the story from manifold sides through diverse visual, verbal means, and through audio, video and photo sources and to deliver exhaustive, flawless, and interesting material to audience.

Observing the posts of popular authors helps us to follow the dramaturgy of storytelling, the process that highlights the specifics of relationships between authors and readers in social networks.

Media as Methodology: The Transition and Debate of Moving Image

2022-12-05T17:01:44+04:00

In the digital age, digital technology has disturbed the former methods for distinguishing based on the material and perception, and the later principles of differentiation based on the allocation model, receive-display mode and consumption plan. Meanwhile, remediation is becoming progressively the mainstream mode of presentation of moving image in contemporary society. Thus, this study analyzes the medium transition of moving image and its significance from the perspective of transmedia and interdisciplinary. It explains the visual collectivity that characterizes the symbol of modernity with perspective as its representation and the relations between optical centralism and the modern dominated regime. Taking as its theoretical starting point the difference between video art and cinema dispositif as well as the intertextuality of video art and painting, such as planimetric, panorama, etc., this study discusses the visual occlusion and cavalier perspective in moving image along with the embodiment spectatorship. Examining a case study of the multiple projection, this study delves into the deviation of the operation about the screen from the transparency. In addition, it dissects the undoing of medium specificity and media essentialism as well as the challenge to the narrative context of art history posed upon by Live Cinema which combines cinema and theatre. The continuous deterritorialization and reterritorialization alienate the moving image into some kind of ambiguous and anxious state of “schizophrenia”, giving spectators the possibility of critical engagement.

Deconstructing Medea Myth: Giwi Margwelashvili’s “Medea of Colchis in Kolkhoz” and Christa Wolf’s “Medea. Vocies”

2022-12-06T15:11:22+04:00

The myth of Medea, the youngest daughter of the King Aeëtes of Colchis, has been interpreted and reintepreted in the world literature numerous times. It finds variant representations in the works of Euripides, Sophocles, Pierre Corneille, Franz Grillparzer, Akaki Tsereteli, Otar Chiladze and others.

Giwi Margwelashvili (1927-2020) and Christa Wolf (1929-2011) describe the society under totalitarian regimes through the deconstruction of the Medea Myth. However, myth is filtered through their own personal experiences and sensibilities.

Why should the monumental statue of Medea read Christa Wolf’s “Medea. Voices“? – asks Giwi Margwelashwili in his surreal “Medea of Colchis in Kolkhoz“. “Medea. Voices“, Christa Wolf’s best-known novel, was written after the author had worked as an informant for Stasi. In this autobiographical novel the tragedy of Medea is used as a background for representing two totalitarian systems and their consequences, the painful reality of the “divided heaven”, ordeal and alienation in the united Germany. Christa Wolf’s Medea is a refugee in Corinth, unable to return to Colchis just as the author herself, frustrated with socialist Germany, is unable to return there but she fails to find a long-awaited homeland even in united Germany.

In Giwi Margwelashvili’s autobiographical text Colkhis has become Kolkhoz where the main protagonists are the statue of Medea, the vaccum cleaner Polyp Polymath, the irreal reader “Me” and Vakushi who is the author’s double. It is the latter who orders Polyp Polymath to hand over Christa Wolf’s novel to Medea. Both texts are variant representations of the trauma caused by the immigration and alienation. By deconstructing Medea myth, they emphasize the devaluation of values. In order to establish new values, it is necessary to return to the book and not leave the author entrapped “between two covers”.

The Changing Forms of Discourse: Painting; Philosophy; Film ICLA 2022

2022-12-05T17:04:33+04:00

Contemporary poets engage with multiple media. Whether they collaborate with painters, filmmakers, or comment on political events, their discourse changes with the object of their attention. The French poet Michel Deguy (b.1930) is exemplary in his choice of multiple subjects which inspire his poems and essays. Trained as a philosopher, Deguy has had a sustained dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy in recent years. Nancy has replaced Heidegger whom he translated and whose thought engaged him in his early years. Deguy and Nancy have both addressed the enduring vestiges of Christianity and how these symbols have mutated at a time when Christianity has lost its ethical force. He has also produced over thirty artists books with the engraver and mixed-media specialist, Bertrand Dorny. Deguy has used his comments on Dorny’s collages to express his aesthetic principles, for example in the 2004 artist’s book, Chirurgie esthétique and his thoughts on ecology in his 2011 collaboration, Écologiques. In his 1990, collective volume, Au Sujet de Shoah, Deguy initiated a serious analysis in his exploration and celebration of Claude Lanzmann’s epic documentary Shoah. More recently he has been the object of Marie-Claude Treilhou’s documentary, Comme si, Comme ça. He has used the film format to summarize his major thoughts on poetry and poetics. Currently, he is using the immediacy of the internet to convey his thoughts on current political events, and questions of social justice. This presentation identifies the specificity of Deguy’s discourse when he addresses images in painting, philosophical and political questions, and film. What are the common rhetorical and argumentative strategies? Which rhetorical forms and arguments does he favor in each separate medium.

An Existential Interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in W.H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror

2022-12-05T17:05:55+04:00

W.H Auden is one of the most prominent figures in the 20^th century English poetry, who during his prime years of creativity took interest in existential school of thought. Therefore, in the author’s later poems his existential views are presented. In my paper I aim at the analysis of the existential interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror.

The Sea and the Mirror is considered Auden’s one of the most famous poems, where, he masterfully illustrates human existential issues and arising conflicts. Fear, anxiety, desperation, and depression have become mundane parts of life leading humans to suffering and alienation. Therefore, Auden is concerned with how one should live and survive in this chaotic and absurd state of being, what the ultimate meaning of life is and how to achieve harmony within oneself.

The Sea and the Mirror is not an effort to continue or explain The Tempest, Auden uses its narrative structure and characters to illustrate them through his existential lens. The poem is divided into three parts resembling a triptych painting, an art form unifying three pieces of art.

Auden employs the Sea as a purgatorial symbol for transformation of his characters, the so-called “Sea change” (reference to the song of Ariel). Therefore, Auden represents characters’ reflections on past and future, and demonstrates their existential journey. Additionally, Auden introduces the idea of three stages of life and displays the metamorphosis of his characters from the perspective of inter-movement from the aesthetic through ethical, and to the religious stages. Auden’s existential worldview was significantly shaped by Danish Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, whose influence is evident in Auden’s later works. Like Kierkegaard, Auden was interested in thorough investigation of the affairs of human existence. Hence, in my paper I intend to discuss Auden’s existential interpretation of Shakespeare’s play as related to Kierkegaard’s concept of Anxiety, faith and the three (aesthetic, ethical and religious) stages of life.

Tentative Title: Reading ‘Difference’ in the Fiction about Partition of Bengal (1947) in Bangla and English: A Comparative Study

2022-12-05T17:07:20+04:00

The Partition of Bengal in 1947 was a political-historical event that generated great literary production in many languages, specifically in Bangla and English. Partition fiction in Bangla is a cross border phenomenon, while Partition fiction in English has relayed the experiences of the Partition at a global level. In spite of the apparent similarity of categorization of the Partition narratives in both English and Bangla as being constituted through the narrativization of the experience of the Partition of Bengal in language, it must be noted that language itself is a medium of difference. The paper proposes to perform a comparative study between Partition fiction written in English and Partition fiction written in Bangla, and understand how the two differ from each other in their literary interpretation of the political-historical event of the Partition of Bengal in 1947.

Difference as a fundamental existential condition had been established by Edmund Husserl in his conception of the world through the I-thou relationship. But he had emphasized that a shared horizon of the world formed the backdrop of the I-thou relationship. Maurice Merleau-Ponty extended this idea of Husserl in his Phenomenology of Perception to ideate the presence of intertwining worlds in the relationship of difference between the self and the other. Eventually it was Hans-Georg Gadamer who suggested the existence of horizons beyond the shared worlds of experiences that could be used to understand the relationship between the self and the other.

The evolution of perception of difference is crucial to my proposed paper as I want to point out that Partition Fiction in Bangla and Partition Fiction in English belong to different literary horizons. Literary horizon will be elaborated in the paper as literary histories, intentionality of the authors, and the targeted readership in each language. Select novels on the Partition of Bengal of 1947 in Bangla and English will be analyzed to show the difference in their constitution, interpretation, and reception in each language.

The category of the underground in the selected films of Andrey Zvyagintsev

2022-12-05T17:08:51+04:00

Andrey Zvyagintsev is regarded as one of the best-known contemporary Russian film directors. His movies are most often discussed in the context of the development of religious, metaphysical or transcendental cinema. This presentation is planned to offer a new perspective of looking at Zvyagintsev filmography, which is the tradition of Russian literature. The talk will focus on the analysis of three episodes of TV series Black Room (Чёрная комната, 2000) - which constitute his directorial debut - from the point of view of the category of the underground. Firstly, the selected category will be introduced in the broad context of its functions in the Russian space of culture. In this regard Juri Lotman’s findings will be taken into account. Secondly, the comparative study of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Zvyagintsev’s episodes Bushido, Obscure and Choice (Выбор) will be presented, focusing on thematic, structural and aesthetic solutions used by both artists. The interpretation will show the films as the critical discussion, update and reconfiguration of the category, which is primarily associated with Dostoevsky’s novels. Besides, the talk will examine the presence of other intertextual elements in Zvyagintsev’s films (e.g. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi driver or Jorge Luis Borges’s aesthetics of onirism). The conclusions should lead to the new understanding of the categories of the underground and the underground man encompassing both Russian and world literature and culture.

Android Actors and Artificial Authors: Re-Imagining Theatre in the Algorithmic Age

2022-12-05T17:10:21+04:00

This paper aims to evaluate two seemingly different but overlapping theatrical approaches, namely Oriza Hirata’s “robot theatre” and Annie Dorsen’s “algorithmic theatre.” Juxtaposing Dorsen’s and Hirata’s approaches to acting, drama and the performing arts allows us to interrogate their shared philosophical underpinnings. Both Hirata’s and Dorsen’s theatrical projects expose and critically engage with the desire to anthropomorphize robots/machines. Their work reminds us that theatre does not need to be imagined as a territory that solely belongs to the human. This poses a challenge not only to the act of acting, but also to spectating. Hirata’s robots/androids and Dorsen’s algorithms act and interact with human actors, complicating the putative difference between them. Accordingly, they also play with spectatorial expectation. Both directors remodel the dramatic stage as a locus for the exploration of inhuman potential. The dramatic effects their plays achieve, thus, disturb traditional meaning-making processes, soliciting self-commentary on the nature of their own dramatizability. Both playwrights’ unique approaches to theatre and the performing arts necessarily generate philosophical questions. How does their limitation of anthropocentric positionality and simultaneous initiation of robotic/algorithmic potentiality allow us to re-imagine theatre in the algorithmic age?

Re-Beginning a sur-rationalist literary criticism. Gaston Bachelard’s spectres in Edward Said humanistic philology

2022-12-05T17:16:16+04:00

Leading exponent of French historical epistemology and author of numerous books on poetic imagination, Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) is one of the key figures of the 20th century. Although Bachelard's thought has received great consideration from philosophers, literary theorists have generally expressed little interest in his works which are regarded as repertories of literary themes. However, I believe that in the works of some literary comparatists (especially those influenced by "French theory") we could find the "specters of Bachelard"(Ch. Alunni) which determine specific analytical practices and ethical attitudes. The basic aim of this paper is to promote the enhancement of Bachelard's contribution to the theory of literature’s history. By way of example, I investigate in particular Bachelard’s presence in one of the most influential comparatists of the 20th century: Edward Said (1935-2003). In the first part of the paper, I analyze the specific impact that Bachelard's concepts of "sur-rationalisme" and "rêverie" have in the overall argumentation of Said’s Beginnings: Intention and Method (1974) and Orientalism (1978) respectively. In the second part, I reflect on Said's indirect acquisition of some fundamental paradigms of Bachelard's historical epistemology through the mediation of Michel Foucault. It is important to underline how Said, while praising Foucault's archaeology, is unable to renounce an epistemology devoid of the dictates of humanism, and thus he is in substantial agreement with Bachelard's personalist epistemology. Lastly, I discuss the concept of "beginning" in Bachelard's epistemological and aesthetic work and how it finds in Said an interpreter capable of applying it into his militant philology. Both authors, especially in their later works such as La flamme d'une chandelle (1961) and On late style (2006), seem actually to base their critical and creative activity on an aesthetics of participation that is for them the true télos of literary theory.

Resistance, deaths and ideals in an Argentinian graphic novel Christiane Kazue Nagao

2022-12-05T17:17:25+04:00

On the border line of opposing ideological positions that gave rise to fierce confrontations, the graphic novel La niña comunista y el niño guerrillero [The Communist Girl and the Guerrilla Boy] of María Giuffra was conceived.The voices of ten children –witnesses and victims of violence of the civic-military dictatorship developed in Argentina between 1976 and 1982, in which 30,000 activists were killed in clandestine circumstances and their bodies hidden– take shape in this publication.

The book deeply mobilized its readers, citizens who are sensitive to the institutional violence exerted in these latitudes. According to the Aesthetics of Reception (Jauss, 1977), this occurs when there is a convergence between the structure of the work and its interpretation, two aspects that we analyze in this presentation.

The author intends to be faithful to what she heard. In her aesthetic proposal, the voices of the narrators are modulated in different graphics; filled with violence and death, her images move across the page without respecting limits. The bodies of the children in the foreground are the counterpart of their missing parents, and their love for their children is glimpsed in the profuse symbolism of tear-streaked faces and profuse little heart drawings .

Once the book was completed, four decades after the dreadful events, when the fires of passionate enthusiasm of their parents' ideological and partisan struggles is fading away, the narrators express an interesting version of “revenge”: to be happy. The message of the book in which violence is shown without extenuations seems to inspire in readers a hope of happiness, an essential transformation, perhaps the only valid one for social change: never more hatred, but love for life.

In Her Own Words: The Image of Ice, Snow and Glass in A. S. Byatt’s Possession

2022-12-05T17:19:06+04:00

In “Ice, Snow, Glass”, a beautifully-written essay included in On Histories and Stories, A. S. Byatt discusses how stony and frozen images have triggered her own imagination, which include the undisturbed whiteness of Snow White, the power of mathematical reason and beauty of Snow Queen, and the at once dead and not dead queen Hermione as an art in itself in The Winter’s Tale. The image of ice, snow and glass could be a distance as well as an intimacy, as a way to protect art from biological cycles or repetitive generations. I will explore how the image of ice, snow and glass are depicted and represented in her celebrated novel, Possession, and argue that readers can get closer to her literary landscape with reference to her own thoughts on images.

Les écrivains « archéologues » de la mémoire en quête de l’identité

2022-12-05T17:20:29+04:00

L’histoire littéraire connaît d’innombrables exemples où les écrivains explorent leur mémoire, l’histoire de leur ascendance, pour n’en citer que Marcel Proust, James Joyce ou plus près de nous, Georges Perec, Le Clézio, Romain Gary…, le mode d’écriture que l’on qualifie d’archéologie de la mémoire.

Le commun entre l’archéologie et la littérature, c’est qu’elles effectuent une fouille de la mémoire historique. La différence consiste dans le fait que le propre de la littérature est de mêler la réalité et la fiction. Ainsi, les romans (récits) de deux écrivains de notre choix – Dora Bruder de Patrick Modiano et La part du fils de Jean-Luc Coatalem - font preuve de ce mélange de la réalité et de la fiction, puisque, comme l’affirme Modiano, "L'imaginaire peut dire quelque chose du réel […] on peut arriver, par l'écriture, à une sorte d'intuition de ce que pouvait être le réel ».

Ce que l’on peut observer comme le trait commun de l’écriture de ces deux écrivains, c’est qu’ils s’intéressent à des personnages qui disparaissent, à leur destinée, ce qui détermine le choix de thèmes qui sillonnent leurs textes et qui peuvent se résumer en un seul mot : le manque, et qui déterminent l’originalité de leur style, les deux se montrant comme de véritables archéologues de la mémoire, relevant et conservant le moindre document, qui relate l’époque de l’Occupation, insignifiant au premier abord, afin de réunir des informations à propos des personnages disparus. De ce fait, les deux textes portent sur les problèmes éternels de l’identité, sur les rapports et les valeurs familiaux, sur les « dégueulasseries » de la guerre qui déchirent les vies humaines.

Aussi, pour notre communication, avons-nous décidé d’analyser ces deux textes du point de vue d’une quête identitaire pour montrer qu’à travers la quête de l’identité de leurs personnages, les écrivains sont à la recherche de leur propre identité. Ils rejoignent ainsi les écrivains « archéologues » de la mémoire, partageant la réflexion de José Saramago « Nous ne sommes que la mémoire que nous avons“ que Jean-Luc Coatalem met en exergue à son roman.

Spectrality and its Translatability: Filmic Adaptation and the narrative of the Leftover Space

2022-12-05T17:22:16+04:00

Translating a verbal text into a filmic one may serve the purpose to highlight and foreground the conditions in the original text by bringing to it more substantial experiences through spatial and temporal articulations. In this paper, the relationship between an original and its translation is explored as to demonstrate that the translation is a fusion of the ambiguous resemblance and the unstable dissemblance of the original through interconnecting forces operating behind the construction of images, manifesting, what Walter Benjamin terms, coextensivity between the image and the script, the visual and the verbal. This is particularly viable when applying on filmic translations of horror stories, especially ghost narratives, as the audience is seeing the not seen which is, borrowing from Sontag, “not a ghost, but a ‘ghost.’” The discussion also focuses on the connection between the Hong Kong as a city in the text and the visualized spaces of spectrality in the adaptation.

Vernacular Visions: Primitivism and the Imagination of Nature in early-Soviet Georgian Avant-garde

2022-12-05T17:23:39+04:00

This paper interrogates the status of the concepts of primitivism and nature in Georgian avant-garde art writing, visual art and film between 1915 and 1930. The notion that nature was not only the preeminent site of national imaginary, but also “the finest teacher” that the new Georgian art could have, which can be found in Davit Kakabadze’s early cogitations on art (1915), is a significant and polyvalent gesture. On the one hand, it unquestionably ventriloquizes the metropolitan modernism’s “invention” of the primitive (paradigmatic of this process was the Russian modernists’ “discovery” of the genius of the self-taught Georgian artist Pirosmani in 1912). But on the other hand, Kakabadze’s all but Romanticist imagination of nature speaks of a paradoxical presence of a bucolic, naïve and pre-modern sensibility at the heart of modernist art in Georgia. Going further in the history of the Georgian avant-garde, this phenomenon is more than palpable in the developed, futurist phase of the movement. In the important collection of Georgian Futurists H2SO4 (1924), the poet and soon-to-become filmmaker Niko Shengelaia celebrates primitive cultural forms (knife dancing and horse riding), which, he argues, perform by different means the same cultural function as the futurist art in Russia (e.g. Meyerkhold/Forreger’s theatre): they both “destroy” traditional art forms. Finally, at the end of the Soviet avant-garde experiment, when many of the Georgian avant-garde artists embraced the constructivist/productivist extension of the declining avant-garde ideology (Kalatozishvili, Ghoghoberidze, Shengelaia), the idea of nature continues to resonate strongly. By drawing on several film from the period for which Kakabadze was set designer (Salt for Svanetia [1929/1930] and Buba [1930]), the paper will reassert that the imagination of nature has remained the pivot of Georgian-Soviet vernacular vision of modernism.

The Situation of Literary Criticism in the Post Critique Period

2022-12-05T17:25:07+04:00

The situation of world is getting more individual at some points. Especially after 1960s, people learned and practicized a different way of living. This situation effected every aspect of life included literature. When we consider about the logic of literary criticism we must accept common rules and common perspectives. But in such an individual era how can we determine this “collectivism” or should we accept this kind of a collectivism? This complexity lead to consider about literary criticism in a more individual way and this causes a kind of fragmentation and uncertanity at the basis of literary texts. After this “individualist” era, how will the literary criticism draw a road map? Can it be evaluated by hermeneutics or just fragmentation? Do people still need a big story? How can we determine the common rules of literature after the idea of fragmentation which started with post structuralism, especially after postmodernism?

An Ecological Readingon Latife Tekin's "Ormanda Ölüm Yokmuş"

2022-12-05T17:26:16+04:00

Latife Tekin is one of the important writers in Turkish Literature. Her way of writing is full of symbols, images and implications. Each of her book can be commented through different theories or approaches. “Ormanda Ölüm Yokmuş” apparently tells the story of Yasemin and Emin, but the story is surrounded with many different images, metaphors and objects which have deeper meanings. The book’s name in English is “There is No Death in Forest”, so in this study the book is analyzed by using ecological approach. When we consider about the last situation of the world (global warming, climate crises and other natural disasters), this approach is growing importance. Also, her way of writing style is so different from classical way of writing. She doesn’t tell a story by starting at the beginning as a whole fictional structure. Her way of writing style is full of fragments and this has also a meaning for postmodern literature. In this study, this book is analyzed by considering ecological approach with postmodern literature. It is tried to follow the path which started with postmodern liteature and ended with ecological problems of the new world. It is evaluated that at which point postmodern literature’s problems could be seen on the basis of ecological approach.

Do Posthumavist Conditions Fictionalize a New Collectivity?

2022-12-05T17:27:21+04:00

With postmodernism, individualization has come to the fore. However, can it be said that individuality has tended towards a new integrity, especially as a result of events such as the climate crisis, technological developments and pandemics in recent years? This integrity is not caused by the physical being together of individuals; but it is an experience that signifies a mental unity. As a result of this mental integrity, can it be said that the increase in writings on ecology, nature and the world, based on the fact that global disasters are a kind of unifying force, causes imaginary partnerships? In this context, Plague Nights, written by Orhan Pamuk, reflects an experience similar to what happened in today's Covid-19 period. Although the plague epidemic mentioned in the work passed in 1901, it is seen that there were similar experiences. In this study, an evaluation will be made in the context of common images, fears and experiences of humanity based on the novel Plague Nights.

Archipelagic Thought and Comparativism: a critical approach to common problems

2022-12-05T17:28:31+04:00

The recent growth of fields such as Island and Archipelagic Studies can have, I will argue, an impactful role in the practice of Comparativism. Part of that being that their theoretical contributions have introduced an understanding of contemporaneity that works at vaster, wider, more interdependent and yet more ill-definable scales of difference. Some of its epistemic vocabulary, composed by “complex geo-aquatic metaphors” (DeLOUGHREY 2001, 40), has helped with repositioning, and, perhaps more substantially, redefining the scales at which bodies interact and coexist in the midst of our geosocial continuums (CLARK & YUSOFF 2017).

At the same time, this unveils a series of (old) new questions, as is evidenced in Jonathan Pugh’s critical approach to the intra-disciplinary tensions in Archipelagic Studies between Frantz Fanon’s neo-materialist problematics of knowledge and Timothy Morton’s “affirmational-turn”, defined as “explicitly about affirming the humbling powers of morethan-human relations in the Anthropocene” (PUGH 2020, 65). These seem to be problems, in some way or another, shared with scholars of literary comparativism, particularly in the moment of the discipline’s most dynamic turn since the advent of contemporary WorldLiterature.

Conceptually inspired by Carlo A. Cubero’s 2017 analyses of the social impact of plantations in the creation of a trans-Caribbean identity, we will be considering the implications of applying Pugh’s criticism and Yousoff’s appeal for a geosocial conscience to the problematization of the Archipelagraphies (DeLOUGHREY 2001, 40) of the North-eastern Atlantic, in particular the macro-archipelago of Macaronesia. I hope to do so by devoting some attention to cross-reading early Twentieth-Century landscape photography from the archipelago of Madeira, compiled by Lourdes Castro (1930-2022), the 1994 poetry book Canções da Terra Distante (Songs of the Distant Land) by the Madeirean poet José Agostinho Baptista and, thirdly, the 2003 poem Maroiço by the Azorean Manuel Tomás.

The Choice between Dragon and Snake: the Chinese Royal Image and its cultural metaphor in the XVI Century’s Europe

2022-12-05T17:30:15+04:00

For five centuries, The History of the Kingdom of China has always had an essential influence in international academic circles. The book was written in 1585 by the Spanish politician, scholar and missionary, Juan González de Mendoza (1545-1618) in Spanish and the first edition was published in Rome in the same year. Mendoza was appointed as ambassador in 1581 and left from Spain to China to meet the emperor Wanli in the Ming Dynasty, but finally, the mission was suspended and he never got to China by all his life. He wrote this book on the journey back to Spain via Mexico with rich references of Chinese histories collected there, as Mexico is a necessary transfer station between China and Spain in that period. It is an encyclopedia about China, where he constructed a complete image of China from the material to the spiritual level for the XVI Century’s Europe. Moreover, the image was followed by entire Europe as a model for the next 200 years to describe China. Among different Chinese images in his book, Mendoza used "serpiente"(spanish) instead of "dragon" to build the Chinese supreme imperial image. It makes the author a strong interest in exploring the following three questions in this article: First, how did Mendoza use the snake totem to construct the Chinese emperor image? Second, did it present a positive or negative image? Third, Why did Mendoza use "serpiente" instead of "Dragon" to build China’s image? The author dated back to the XVI Century to reconstruct the relationship between knowledge, discourse and power in the rationalization of the Golden Snake kingship image, and to interpret its cultural metaphor in the XVI century’s Europe. The article has conducted an in-depth discussion on these three issues based on two ancient books with significant academic value, ignored for a long time by investigators: the original Spanish edition of Mendoza’s book published in 1586 in Madrid, recognized as the best edition by the same Mendoza and the world's first Spanish dictionary published in 1611.

Through the Lens: the photographic imagination of J.M. Coetzee

2022-12-05T17:33:26+04:00

This paper will explore how the Nobel winning writer J.M. Coetzee has not only absorbed, combined, re-worked and transformed a vast range of textual sources in his fictions, but in key instances used visual media, in particular photographs and films to develop his stories. Coetzee’s literary interest in images is traced back to his early photographic experimentation during his school years, and an argument is developed that traces the insistent visuality of the fictions back to this seminal youthful encounter with the camera. Coetzee’s proficiency with the camera and his expertise in the darkroom, impacted on the novels in which photographs not only frequently feature, but where the writing is also shaped in other ways: a conspicuous use of framing, point of view and light effects. These photographic aspects are present in all of Coetzee’s fictions but this paper will pursue this analysis with regard to his most well-known novel, Disgrace (1999).

Decoding and Encoding from Printed Page to Screen

2022-12-05T17:34:37+04:00

In the adaptation from the printed page to the screen the discursive and aesthetic properties of the original text come into question. The visual in acting for the camera ads or may even detract from the original literary images by defining what originally appear as “points of indeterminacy” in the written text. The semiotics of film in such novels as Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (1987), directed by Niki Caro (2002), Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), directed by Garth Jennings (2005), and Patrick Ness’ A Monster Calls (2011), directed by J.A. Bayona (2016), pertain to adaptations that transform the original literary text. What stands out in a cinematic adaptation is the new visual and spoken encoding that takes place and even the use of metonymic and/or symbolic devices that may be absent or unclear in the original written work.

I propose to illustrate through the three texts above the semiotic aspects of the literary text that move on the screen into new semiotic, pictorial, receptive and performance practices and theories that involve linguistic and extra-linguistic values, which add new readings to both the cinematic performance and the literary text. The texts on the big screen may continue to be the site of cultural, social, historical and mythological contests, but additionally the overlap of text, acting and filming bring about an iconized and/or symbolic material that reinforces the encoding intended by the director and not necessarily by the original literary text. This meaningful characteristic in turn gives new information to the audience’s perception of both the cinematic and the literary text. Hence, I will show that a dialectical tension between the literary text and the cinematic text is always present and that invokes new readings.

Topoi in Old Georgian Prose

2022-12-05T17:36:08+04:00

The use of repeated motifs or "commonplaces" is frequently found in the texts of old Georgian literature - hagiographic, historical, secular works. This rule is especially topical in the literature of the 5th-12th centuries, although the mentioned rhetorical device is not alien to texts of the later period too.

"Commonplaces" or topoi, as Ernst Robert Curtius called them, take on canonical form in hagiographic literature. Topos creates a stylistic background of the literary work. It is a special form of speech, figure the unexpected appearance of which changes and activates the course of reasoning and thought.

In Old Georgian writing, topos is a rule of narration, part of a canon, compositional detail. In this respect, it is a unit carrying a poetic function. Although, at the same time an aesthetic function, that serves the focusing of attention, mobilization, freedom of perception and feeling, establishment of stylistic integrity stands out in it.

In the author's hands, the topos, as a figure of speech, is a signal, means of expression that creates a contrasting background in the text in order to highlight what is to be said, to turn thought and details into the main episode.

Topos as a "commonplace" is a stylistic necessity. Where a topos is, there is a style, or "fact of style."

The chronotope of Old Georgian prose is typologically very close to the biblical chronotope. Here memory fixes the unity of event, place and time.

Time and space in Old Georgian prose is an image and repetition of the biblical time/space prototype, which is an eternal substance from which more and more times and spaces flow and repeat. For instance, Grigol Khandzteli’s deed is an emanation of the eternal labor which is biblical Abraham’s merit. The protagonist’s life and work is presented in the biblical context. Biblical time and space in a literary work or historiographical text turns into a "commonplace" with a predetermined, easily identifiable sign.

From Stagnation to Depression: The Conceptual Construction of yiyu in China

2022-12-05T17:37:17+04:00

There is a conceptual history of depression (yiyu) in China long before it threatens mental health worldwide. Through revisiting the semantic derivation of yiyu, this paper unfolds how the modern usage of yiyu overlaps with the conceptual constructions surrounding literature, medical texts, official historical records, and popular culture. It provides an understanding of how this emotional problem and disorder has been defined and perceived.

In the classical Chinese language, the word “yiyu”, which could be traced back to the Han Dynasty (BCE 3rd- BC 1st Century), was a compound word of “yi”(press) and “yu”(stagnation). Gradually fixed was yiyu's referral to the emotional state of sadness and stagnation, with a pathogenic dimension that might cause death. Only with the introduction of western medicine knowledge at the turn of the twentieth century did yiyu become an equivalence of the western psychiatric notion of “depression”, which embodied the pursuit of modernity. After the Maoist era when psychiatry lost its validity, contemporary writings relocated yiyu within institutionalizing and thematizing the patient identity of depression, which signaled the re-emerging psychiatric paradigm of understanding depression in a new social context.

The post-covid normal makes both emergence and promises of people’s emotional toll, especially in China where the pandemic begins. Through chronologically comparing the meaning of yiyu, this paper identifies a socio-cultural context of depression but also demonstrates the local continuity of depression that has not been fully grasped. It prepares the ground for further research on Chinese beliefs in health/illness, individual/social, and life/death relationships.

The self-referential of comics: Graphic Narrative and metanarrative in Eleanor Davis’s Why Art?

2022-12-05T17:38:32+04:00

The literary tradition, as a syncretic system of literary texts, is always in motion and is constantly being reorganized as new texts emerge. Comics are one of such new texts. The function of images as an independent narrative medium in the genre of fiction has not been fully explained in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and comics may be a quality medium to fill this space. Written by American author Eleanor Davis, Why Art? is a quite untraditional full-length graphic novel as it gives up the common narrative style and chooses a more alternative track, and reflects a strong sense of self-referential. Based on the study of this comic work, this paper unfolds with the iconographic tradition starting from W. J. T. Mitchell's concept of "the pictorial turn," and follows the path of narratology to explain the artistic qualities of narratives in which the two media, images and words, coexist, and to explore the meaning of metanarratives in comics (or graphic novels) and its place in genology.

The vision of the landscape in Juan Rulfo: The aesthetic worldview in literature and photography

2022-12-06T13:03:18+04:00

The present work investigates the Weltanschauung (the aesthetic worldview) about the landscape in the works of Mexican writer and photographer Juan Rulfo. By appealing to modern and postmodern art and aesthetic theory (by Malcolm Andrews and Roland Barthes, among others), comparative theory of literature and visual art (by W.J.T. Mitchell and René Wellek, among others), and literary and artistic research on landscape (by Octavio Paz and Adam Ansels, among others), we propose that the Rulfian landscape is not only “seen”, but also “perceived” and “articulated” in various different aesthetic dimensions. In light of this, with the purpose to better reflect this Rulfian “vision”, we appeal to the term “worldview”, an adaptation of the German word Weltanschauung. The present work starts by a brief revision of Rulfo’s view of the landscape and his earlier aesthetic experience, with the purpose to find out how the landscape becomes his “invented memory” in his literary works and the punctum (the incidental but personally poignant detail) in his photography. After that, we provide an interpretation of the Rulfian landscape worldview in both historical and socio-cultural domains that are tightly connected to his literary and photographic production: for example, the “eroded” rural landscape, the “euphemistic” view of the urban and rural landscape, and the revolutionary and post-revolutionary discourse in his “ideological” landscape in the Mexican (and more generally, Latin-American) context. The general finding of the present work is that Rulfo's landscape Weltanschauung is the product of various different and potentially conflicting aesthetical mechanisms and living environments at different stages or levels, in which the complex system of “perceptual, intellectual and spiritual” epistemology is found to play an important role.

Album – chronicle of the epoch Foreign language records of Vakhtang Gambashidze’s Album

2022-12-06T13:06:20+04:00

Manuscripts, like humans, often have unusual fate. Who knows where they travel, where they appear, what stories they collect; and then, when blizzards are low, they quietly wait for their time! Indeed, Vakhtang Gambashidze’s album is a chronicle of the epoch.

A handwritten album of the sanatorium “Patara Tsemi”, founded by a famous Georgian doctor and a public figure, encloses the records of XIX-XX century Georgian and foreign celebrities, writers, scientists, doctors, and politicians. In the album are collected 144 different types of records – poems, essays, impressions, congratulations or only signatures – written in 1904-1946 in Georgian, Russian, French, English, Ottoman Turkish, and Spanish languages.

The album comprises signatures of the Great Britain Commissioner in Independent Georgia, Kartvelologist Oliver Wardrop and his family members; The signature of the well-known Kartvelologist Robert Stevenson; the essay of the Chief Doctor of French Sanitary Mission in the Caucasus Louis Dartige; the signatures of the British siblings: Louis Ernest Meinertzhagen and Mary Amelia Meinertzhagen; the signature of the Bishop of Gibraltar – Harold Jocelyn Buxton; the record of the British officer Neil Stuart, ending with the verse of the famous Scottish novelist John Buchan; the unknown up to now work performed in watercolor by the Polish artist Zygmunt (Zyga) Waliszewski, Vakhtang Gambashidze’s pencil painted portrait by V. Poyarkov.

Vakhtang Gambashidze’s granddaughter Nathela Nikoladze-Villecourt handed this treasure over to the motherland. The album was granted the status of a movable monument of cultural heritage of Georgia.

Vakhtang Gambashidze dreamt about publishing this “Golden Book”, as he would refer to it. In 2020, his dream came true, and the phototype edition of the album was published. It encloses the printed versions of the records, annotated indexes and comments and the trilingual essay about Vakhtang Gambashidze’s life and work activities.

The artistic range of "Dancing Snake"

2022-12-06T13:07:35+04:00

The artistic range of a literary work is mainly crossed by the symbolic spectrum. It is due to the universal essence of the symbol that the boundary between the authors of completely different epochs or cultures disappears and a kind of character tandem is created. A vivid illustration of this is the unforgettable dance of the snake in the artistic thinking of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and Anna Kalandadze (1924-2008).

The snake is perceived as a mystical zoomorphic symbol in heterogeneous aspects and therefore - creates a different artistic range. The "biblical biography" of the snake traverses the eternal footpath of evil or goodness and therefore captures the creative imagination.

The "dancing snake" with Charles Baudelaire is Jeanne DuVall's double, an unusual literary symbol with mystical eroticism. As a precondition for all this, we can consider Baudelaire's fateful affair with Jeanne Duvall.

Thus arose in "Flowers of Evil" a "dancing snake" paired with the author's muse, which accurately expresses the unusualness of Baudelaire's creative vision; Baudelaire, like no one else, could see a grain of goodness tainted with iniquity, possess a sense of beauty in extreme ugliness. All this ambiguity of feelings is best expressed in the symbolism of the serpent.

With Ana Kalandadze, "Snake Dance" creates a completely different artistic range. Probably this is why the author (1946) originally published the snake dance without a title and only later - in the 2004 edition it was called "The Serpent Prays". It is conceivable that the length of the years revealed the mystery of prayer in the ritual dance, which somehow created the independent symbolic link - the infinity of mysteries.

These literary illustrations outline the snake’s universal range in artistic thinking and creates some kind of esoteric labyrinth.

Framing the Center: Bed as a Liminal Space in James Joyce’s Ulysses

2022-12-06T13:08:41+04:00

James Joyce represents the artistic space of Ulysses as a two-layered, historic and mithopoeic, chronotope. Dublin depicted scrupulously in the novel serves as an archetypal model, the city situated at the center of the world. The symbolism of the center, according to Mircea Eliade, is equivalent to transcending the temporality of the secular world and entering a sacred time-space. If the reader zooms in the Joycean urban borderland, another local and “autonomous center” will be visible.

The paper discusses the bedroom of Leopold Bloom and the bed itself as a single spatio-temporal dimension. In Ulysses the bedroom becomes a liminal space, while Bloom lying in the bed embodies the candidate of initiation awaiting rebirth. "The childman weary, the manchild in the womb" - this is how Joyce describes his wandering character who returns home and lies like an embryo in the dark night, as if he has returned to the maternal womb. The foetal condition of Leopold Bloom symbolizes his parodic transition from the profane to the precosmic mode of being. Thus, the bed represents the threshold reconfiguring spatial and temporal indicators.

The bed with its four corners is discussed as an image of the quaternary pattern of modeling the universe. Thus, it attains the universal symbolic quality. In “Ithaca” Bloom is referred to as “a square round egg”. Quite interestingly, according to the cosmogony myths of multiple cultures, the very first element of creation, where the gods came into being from, is the cosmic egg (“the world egg”). Bloom, Joycean Sindbad, lying in his “sin bed” resembles the parodic god creator, who is expected to establish the New Hibernia of the future, Bloomusalem.

McMurphy as a Fighter Against The Totalitarian System in Ken Kesey’s Novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”

2022-12-06T13:09:46+04:00

Beatniks and Hippies were the rebellious young people. They were foundation of counterculture in the 1960s and they defined everything in future American literature.

The main writers of this era were: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs who originally met in 1944 in New York City to form the core of this literary movement. Their cult writer was Ken Kesey, who voiced the main message of this generation in the novel: " One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." This book published in 1962 and became bestseller.

For each character, Ken Keys has selected special features that allow the reader to focus on the details that are necessary to create a unified picture of the novel. In presented report I am going to discusses and analyze the symbolic face of McMurphy as a Fighter Against Totalitarian system. Also, he is seeking hero who wants to find his own” Holy Grail” and this grail is liberty. Because the walls of hospital are an allegory of totalitarian state and its head and main representative is nurse Retched, this means that McMurphy is a warrior with the system. He is the main tool in this war. One of the important symbols which is between people and hospital stuff is glass shield. Behind this miss Retched controls all processes that taken place in the clinic. It is also figurative that McMurphy repeatedly smashes this glass whit his own hands, which is so polished that it seems invisible. Real democracy is brought by him. He restores the values that were lost. He argues that life alone is not important, there are principles that go far beyond that. It will make you realize how important is it to break down totalitarian and all non-democratic systems. It may not happen right away, but fighting for it really make sense.

Ballads about brothers’ rivalry

2022-12-06T13:10:54+04:00

The development of folk ballad took a long process before it was formed into a literary genre. However, by moving to literature, the ballad has not lost its dramatic character. The form of the story and the poetic side of the work were determined by the author's worldview, moral criteria and taste. In this regard, it is interesting to observe ballads created on a single theme, which belong to different eras and cultures.

The report discusses the Scandinavian folk ballad "Alf from Odersk", Heinrich Heine’s "Two Brothers" and the Abkhazian poet Demirti Gulia’s "Eshsou’s Pistol". All these three ballads tell the stories of the confrontation between two brothers and the reason for their enmity is a woman.

Some of the Scandinavian heroic ballads are based on battles narrated in ancient sagas, but folk singers formed the story of the ballad according to their discretion. It had more drama, more charm. The story of “Alf from Odersk" is taken from Hervor's saga. The Norwegian singer changed the story to add more intensity to it.

Heine's ballad is based on a German legend in which the brothers confronted each other, but the battle between them no longer took place. Heine gave the ballad a romantic character. In his verse the brothers’struggle is eternal.

Dimitri Gulia, the founder of Abkhazian literature, presents the conflict of the brothers in a different way in his ballad. Eshshaw's attempt to kill his older brother is answered by the older brother with wise behavior, thus preventing the conflict forever.

A comparison of these ballads shows how the same story can change the work of different authors, how they interpret the same story differently and formulate it differently artistically and ideologically. It is this difference that enriches the poetic mosaic.

An Argument for Academic and Educational Attention to Popular Fiction Novels with Multilingual Content, Cultural Diversity, Sociopolitical Depth, and Inspirational Value

2022-12-06T13:11:52+04:00

The two American and Australian bestselling novelists Morris West and Trevanian (the pen name of literary scholar Rodney Whitaker) have created models of sophistication for their protagonists that could be considered as cultural and educational ideals for current and future generations. Against the background of realistically constructed social, political and economic environments, both authors address wider human, cultural and philosophical issues, such as criticisms of cultural imperialism or Western commercialism, East-Western cultural and linguistic differences (such as between the Far East and the West, especially Japan and China, and Europe and the United States), or human ambition and achievement in individual and international balance and in certain historical and sociocultural contexts (such as post-war times, economic crises, or global cultural confrontations). Both authors excitingly match their highly educated, socially reputable and usually multilingual protagonists with antagonists who, while possessing more economic influence or political power, are endowed with less educational, idealistic and humanistic attributes and considerations. Both Morris West and Trevanian portray their characters and life worlds within stories that are involving to read due to their contemporary relevance, cultural depths and insights, as well as due to their sophisticated prose and style. Yet most importantly, their protagonists’ activities and ambitions are inspiring to incorporate into our (or our students’) own professional and educational aspirations, or personal cultural pursuits. This research exemplifies the literary skill, storyline involvement, cultural intrigue, humanistic value transmission, and inspirational power of both authors with excerpts from two of their most popular and globally bestselling novels, namely Trevanian’s Shibumi (1970) and West’s The Ringmaster (1991). The overall aim is to recommend these works to students and teachers of language and culture (for literature and cultural studies, classrooms and syllabi, but also beyond), and to bring their critically acclaimed content firmly into the educational and scholarly fold.

T.S Eliot’s Early Poetry and John Donne’s “Metaphysical” Poetics

2022-12-06T13:13:00+04:00

The works of the “metaphysical” poet John Donne can be freely considered as one of the biggest influences of the twentieth century English poetry. It was because of the modernist writers that Donne came to be popular again in the modern world. Modernist poets saw their own ideas and aspirations in Donne’s raging, controversial, highly intellectual poetry, possibility of which they gained from the poetics of “metaphysical” verse itself.

In terms of “getting back” to the “metaphysics”, 20^th century literature greatly owes to T.S Eliot. In his critical theories and poetic practice Eliot not only analyses Donne’s poetry, but he also regenerates “metaphysical” poetics in his own works. Thanks to T.S Eliot this knowledge was later shared with all Anglo-American modernist poetry.

One of the most important artistic techniques which is so characteristic of both Donne’s and Eliot’s poetics is” metaphysical” wit. It tends to create such a surprising effect, that is achieved by comparison and drawing of tottally different ideas and images together. In order to express wit "Metaphysicians" use conceit - a complex, widespread metaphor that can express both intellect and fantasy at the same time.

One of the most famous examples of a conceit in Donne’s poetry is found in his late poem called “Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness”. Here the author identifies himself with a map, whereas he calls the doctors cosmographers. The same artistic effect is noticed in Eliot’s famous poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. In this poem the stillness of the evening is compared to a patient “etherized upon a table”. There are lots of such imitations of Donne’s poetry in Eliot’s works.

These very parallels of Donne’s and Eliot’s lyrics are discussed in my thesis, where I try to demonstrate how the influence of the 17^th century poetry worked on Eliot’s early poems.

Theoretical Relation of English Modernism to the Enlightenment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

2022-12-06T13:14:09+04:00

According to popular belief of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the dominance of Renaissance ideals led to the natural degradation of European society, the loss of values, and the eventual catastrophe. The main problem and the 'culprit' of this process, according to the 'crisis thinkers' such as F. Nietzsche, T.E. Hulme, T.S. Eliott and I. Babbitt, was a seemingly unrelated figure, the 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Modernists, often with very personal and scornful remarks, attacked Rousseau and his ideology, accusing him of creating dangerous nihilism and moral anarchy that had virtually destroyed the civilisation of the West. The paper examines the origins, grounds, and consequences of this notable controversy. It highlights the attitude towards Rousseau in regard to one of the most important features of Modernism - the tendency of revaluating European cultural traditions. There is also an analysis of the system that made Rousseau a ‘dangerous’ thinker and an object of endless polemics for Modernists. In this regard, special attention is paid to the reflection of nature and man within both Renaissance Humanism and Modernism. The paper clearly highlights two opposing ideologies in the history of literature and culture, on one side of which are the Modernists and 'crisis theorists' while on the other, figuratively, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Finally, the paper demons¬trates not only the tendency of revaluating cultural traditions, but also the crucial role of Renaissance Humanism and anti-Rousseau polemic in the ideological construction of Modernism.

Between Words and Images - Eccentric Artists and Their Constructions of Reality in Recent German Literature

2022-12-06T13:15:07+04:00

The aim of this paper is to analyse a set of eccentric figures and constructions in Contemporary German Literature from the 1960s to 2006. I have chosen the following characters: Hieronymus [Fluchtpunkt by Peter Weiss (1965)], Henry [Der Turmbau by Eva Zeller (1983)], Fabian [Deutsche Mechanik by Steffen Kopetzky (2005)], Carla Adelung, Adina’s mother [Kraniche und Klopfer by Axel Brauns (2006)], and Alfred Irgang [Der Sammler by Evelyn Grill (2006)].

The aim of this paper is to examine how the main characters are eccentric. They are obsessive collectors and devote themselves to the construction of artistic projects and “symbolic universes” or “world-models”, according to a constructivist view of reality (Ernst von Glassersfeld 1981; Paul Watzlawick 1981; S. J. Schmidt 1984), through the sensorial and emotional experience in accordance with a phenomenological perspective (Gaston Bachelard 2007). Having in mind the differentiation between outer space and inner space, always associated with time and memory, the main questions addressed in this paper are:

How do the fictional artists perceive and interpret reality and the world around them to build their artistic (aesthetic) projects?
What type of relationship do the characters establish with their objects and creative works?
How are particular objects, metaphores, symbols and images used as key elements in creating imaginary or alternative worlds? [For example: vagabond, efficient employee, wild garden, refuse container, tower [refers to The Tower of Babel], castle, warehouse.]
How does the visual dimension of recent literary texts relate to contemporary media in societies dominated by images.

I want to show that the artistic practice of the selected characters intend to compensate the loss of memory, of meaning and of an order that we can verify in German contemporary society, but also in other capitalist societies in the world. In this interdisciplinary approach the relationships between image and word, art and literature are important aspects to be considered.

Variation of Classic Paradigm in New Context

2022-12-06T13:16:29+04:00

We frequently encounter the interesting variations of classic literature paradigms in Georgian and World Literature. From this point of view, distinguished one is “Host and Guest” by Vazha- Pshavela, one of the main heroine – Aghaza may be considered as a significant variation of paradigmatic face of Antigone of Sophocles. Antigone and Aghaza exist in different time – space but they are in the dimension, where all kinds of conditional limit is abolished. Their demonstration in inter textual context outlines metaphysic relation of these two compositions – “Antigone” by Sophocle and “Host and Guest” by Vazha-Pshavela. Both of them represent heroines who are seeking the truth. Both of them expressed immortality of humanitarian ideas with their self-sacrificing decisions. Both of them became sacral sacrifice, who are still excited today by readers, they make the readers to open their eyes and to seek for the truth. Dramatic stories of Antigone and Aghaza are related to each other. Both of them made difficult but principal choice, they opposed to the views established in the society. Communion of readers with both tragic stories evokes in them not only spiritual, but also aesthetic catharsis.

In metaphysic dimension they are spiritual sisters because they are related to each other with devotion of high level of moral and ethics, also with controversy which is revealed by them with breach of “written laws”. Both of them – Antigone and Aghaza create their own destiny by themselves. They have realized that they are part of humanity as a whole and its soundness is depended on them. Both of them consider universal regularity of human behavior as important, according to that kindness, justice and love is the first one. Both of them express courage, great spiritual power and they overcame the barriers created by people and not by God.

Behind The Father Figure: A Closer Look at Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent and Natsume Soseki’s Sanshirō

2022-12-06T13:17:27+04:00

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), being among the most celebrated contemporary writers from the mid XIXth and the early XXth centuries, lived through and bore witness to the turbulent age of modernization in their respective countries of Russia and Japan in their bid to join the highly industrialized Western powers. Both Dostoevsky and Soseki display in their works keen psychological insight into the fundamental changes on both individual and social levels which the rapid modernization process brought about, and the questions raised in their literary work continue to be just as relevant (or even more so) as they were more than a century ago.

In this paper I will mainly look at two coming-of-age novels, Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent (1875) and Soseki’s Sanshirō (1908), and discuss the relations between the main characters Arkady and Sanshirō respectively and the father figures in their lives, the role they partake in the young boys’ tumultuous rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood in the big city and the symbolism behind it.

I will argue that the similarities, evident in the two works, in terms of the father figure representing not only the older generation but the past itself, as well as the complexities of coming of age on one’s own terms while building on those two aspects, reflect the authors’ multifaceted perspective on the modernization process in Russia and Japan, its influence on society, and the dangers of erasing history in exchange for progress.

Towards a (History of) World Literature through Images

2022-12-06T13:18:48+04:00

This paper discusses the hypothesis that studying the visual characteristics of books makes it possible to question the linguistic borders which impact the circulation of literary works. By taking into account the material media of literary expression and its graphic counterpart, it also allows us to challenge the main issues of world literature, and go beyond the logocentrism prevailing in this field.

It is indeed surprising that our understanding of world literature remains strictly verbal, and even one of the greatest contributors to its definition, Martin Bodmer, the Swiss collector, based his thinking on how the genesis of literary works appears in the materiality of their form, whether manuscript or printed. Goethe himself, at least insofar as his discussions with Eckermann attest, mentions some old master drawings among the objects that gave rise to the first developments of the notion of world literature (on January 10^th 1825).

Hence, the attempt to conceive a form of world literature through images, starting from the “Future of the Book”, that was theorised in 1926 by Lazar Lissitzky as a medium for a “new plastic language”^[1], which actually resembles the one he used in 1922 for About Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale in Six Constructions.

It is not insignificant that both Lissitzky and Bodmer were primarily interested in “hieroglyphic” rather than “alphabetical” books. Though they both reflected on the contributions of Gutenberg in order to consider a universal literature, Lissitzky did so

in a process of development while Bodmer considered it already at a standstill. This is evidenced by their writings, not only El Lissitzky’s “Future of the Book”, but also the many writings Bodmer devoted to world literature^[1]. The latter did not necessarily promote the graphic component of the works he studied, even though he considered extending his collection and thus his conception of world literature to drawings and coins in 1938, and, going back even further prior to the origins of writing, by studying fossils in the 1960s^[2].

In addition to these conceptual undertakings by theoreticians of world literature or book artists, what I intend to address here is the question of the method needed to establish a world literature through images.

The tune of “Bella Ciao” has once again evolved into an anthem of resistance after its efficacious use in Netflix original ‘La Case de Papel’ (Money Heist)

2022-12-06T13:22:47+04:00

With an impressionistic lyric, the song originally rendered the everyday toils of the mondine- the migrant female rice weeders in northern Italy from the late 19th century to the first half of the 20th century. The song was reimagined as the melody of singing truth to power in 1940’s anti-fascist movement by the Italian artisans to fit the narrative of their struggle.

The expression “speaking/(singing) truth to power” is not limited to any specific time and place. The landless peasants in Bengal, oppressed by the landlord/jotedar/moneylender dominated agrarian system under the British rule, launched the ‘Tebhga Movement’ in 1946 demanding the two-third share of their seasonal harvest. This peasant movement with a sharp political consciousness had got its emotive articulation through various songs- instinctively set in popular rural folk tune. The resonance of the anti-fascist ‘Bella-ciao’ seemed to be transmitted to Bengal in 1940s through the footsteps of Marxist consciousness of class-struggle. My study focuses on re-reading of the folksongs and the narratives of the women-participants in the Tebhaga movement along with the mondine ‘Bella Ciao’ to draw a cross-cultural map of articulation/formation of resistance by the people living at the margins.

Archpriest Pkhakadze – the Disciple of the Grand Inquisitor: Apocalypse, Power and Religion in the Short Story The Drought by Aleksandre Kutateli

2022-12-06T13:24:49+04:00

The Drought, a short story by Georgian writer Aleksandre Kutateli (1898-1982), draws a picture of one of the regions of Georgia at the beginning of the twentieth century when the country was a part of the Russian Empire and the revolutionary unrest was gradually stirring up there.

The story describes a Georgian village where the drought and the epidemic outbreak is raging, ruthlessly destroying the plants, the animals and the people. Such state of affairs inspires apocalyptic fears and feelings among the village residents.

The characters in the story fall under two categories: the people with religious sentiments and apocalyptic expectations, on the one hand, and the characters with a revolutionary spirit, who plan to change the existing order in state and are getting ready to establish a new policital order, on the other hand. As the epilogue of the story tells, it is the young revolutionary forces that achieve victory when the communist government is already established in the country.

One of the protagonist of the story is an archpriest named Iakob Pkhakadze, a well-educated clergyman with no personal belief, who uses the religious feelings of the others in order to gain power over the people and to control them. This character seems to understand religion the same way as the Grand Inquisitor from the novel The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) did. It seems plausible to suggest that Kutateli, while perceiving Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor and creating his own image of archpriest Pkhakadze, was inspired by the work of Vasily Rozanov (1856-1919), namely The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, as this book had a notable impact on the twentieth-century modernist writers in general, and on the Georgian modernists in particular.

L’espace de la cuisine dans l’imagerie publicitaire et dans l’imaginaire romanesque d’écrivains et d’écrivaines contemporaines

2022-12-06T13:27:17+04:00

L’histoire de la cuisine dans le sens d’art gastronomique n’est plus à faire, et un nombre important d’études littéraires mettent en rapport l’univers des sensations gustatives et olfactives, les plaisirs de la bouche ou à l’opposé le dégoût et la nausée avec le pouvoir des mots, la « cuisine » de l’écrivain.^[1]

Ma recherche porte plus sur un sujet moins étudié et sans doute moins présent dans les œuvres de fiction contemporaines : non plus la cuisine que l’on prépare mais la cuisine où l’on prépare, l’espace de la cuisine, sa forme, sa grandeur, son emplacement, ses fonctions dans l’univers romanesque d’un nombre d’écrivains et d’écrivaines. L’espace de la cuisine constitue un objet d’étude pour des sociologues comme Luna Béguin qui relie l’espace de la cuisine dans un contexte domestique et familial et une théorie des genres^[2], ou des femmes architectes comme Tula Amir qui a étudié l’impact de la construction de villes dortoirs israéliennes sur les modes de fonctionnement d’une jeune famille normative (moyenne d’âge des parents : 35 ans, deux à trois enfants, propriétaires de l’appartement, revenus mensuels réunis : autour de 3000 euros). Parmi les nombreux sujets traités, la cuisine ouverte sur le salon est décrite par Amir comme un « piège » qui se referme sur les femmes.^[3]

Dans le contexte socio-politique contemporain en France, que nous dit la littérature de fiction sur l’espace de la cuisine ? dans quelle mesure les représentations de cet espace reflètent les rêves et les fantasmes nourris par les magazines d’architecture intérieure, d’une part, et, révèlent les frustrations et les tensions au sein d’une famille d’aujourd’hui ?

Dans le cadre du congrès de l’ICLA, je propose une mise en rapport entre une série de photos de cuisine tirées de magazines d’architecture intérieure comme Art et Décoration, Le Journal de la Maison, et Marie Claire Décoration, entre 2000 et 2021, et des représentations de cuisines dans Trois femmes puissantes de Marie Ndiaye (2009), Le Bonheur de faire l’amour dans la cuisine et vice-versa d’Irène Frain (2004), et Intérieur de Thomas Clerc (2013). Mon objectif est de penser les rapports entre la photo et l’écriture, et d’amorcer une première esquisse des représentations de l’espace de la cuisine dans la fiction en suggérant que cet espace est habité par des tensions et des conflits latents à la fois intérieurs et relationnels.

Internationalisation of crime and the transnational turn in South African crime fiction with specific reference to the crime thrillers of Deon Meyer

2022-12-06T13:30:38+04:00

Increasingly, in South African crime fiction, attention is given to the transnational movement of criminals and to the trafficking of humans, animals and other contraband items. Political intrigue also crosses borders, often implicating South Africans and, specifically, South African law enforcement. In the field of diaspora studies and in transnational postcolonial theory, scant attention has been paid to these nefarious movements across national and continental borders, but in crime fiction, and now specifically in South African crime fiction, the depiction of transnational crime syndicates is both an established and popular theme, reflecting a reality in which organised crime wields far-reaching power and influence in ways often invisible to civilians. South African crime fiction with a distinctly transnational focus offers a unique perspective on international criminal organisations and on migration and diaspora, while shedding light on post-apartheid South Africa’s transnational relationship and ties. Moreover, this particular trend pushes the literature beyond the confines of national race themes, to explore intersectionally a global network of neocolonial systems and structures. This paper sets out to investigate the internationalisation of crime and the transnational turn in South African crime fiction with specific reference to Cobra (2014) and other crime thrillers by the popular South African author Deon Meyer.

Musicalization of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” Eleventh Episode

2022-12-06T13:31:55+04:00

At the beginning of the twentieth century English writers were challenged as the mimetic modes of depicting reality suffered crisis. Modernist writers increasingly detached themselves from the Senecan principle of imitating nature, which shaped and moulded the narrative for centuries. Instead, the modernist focus shifted toward the representation of the mental state of man, which led to the adoption and elaboration of diverse narrative techniques, including the introduction of musical forms to the realm of literature. The musical element in literary modernism does not refer to mere phonetic imitation of musical sounds. The combination of music and literature in modernism implies the conscious adaptation of musical structures. Musicalization of literature involves the transformation of musical forms like fugue, sonata, quartet, etc. in such manner that syntactic structure of the texts becomes musical. Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, Thomas S. Eliot, Andre Gide, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce and other great modernist writers of the twentieth century employed this poetic method. Such interrelation of musical and literary forms is of special importance in James Joyce’s works and, namely, in the case of “Sirens” — the eleventh episode of Ulysses. Most major scholars unanimously agree that the that “Sirens” is based on fugue, is specific, fuga per canonem. The author himself wrote of this in a letter to Harriet Weaver, expressing his determination to style this episode in the form of a fugue. Not many studies are dedicated to the issue of musical poetics of “Sirens” as well as its significance to the poetics of myth in “Ulysses”. The paper will analyze the artistic implication of the musical structure of the Joycean fugue in the eleventh episode of “Ulysses” and its relation to the overall mythological layer of the novel.

The Types of Heroes in the Medieval Anglo-Saxon Epic and Georgian Mythological Tales

2022-12-06T13:32:58+04:00

The hero, as the main constituent of fiction, experienced a palpable, almost absolute devaluation from medieval literary texts before William Thackeray declared the arrival of a novel without a hero and since then, with varying degrees of success, writers have tried to bring back the hero in fiction but mostly in vain.

It should not be surprising that similar processes take place in the texts of geographically and culturally distant literatures. The current research is about the hero of Anglo-Saxon heroic epic “Beowulf” and the hero of the Georgian folk ballad Iakhsari.

A comparative analysis of these two heroes would have been artificially forced and would not have aroused any scientific or literary interest had it not been for one important detail which is common and strangely connects these two, as I already mentioned, geographically and culturally distant texts and heroes.

This important detail refers to the special location of the heroism committed by the characters. Both heroes fight the evil enemy of the people and both fight the monster or devil (giant) in the lake, particularly on the bottom of the lake.

This remarkable detail became one of the important reasons for the translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic “Beowulf” into Georgian (by Paata and Rostom Chkheidze) in 1989, from Barton Raffel’s Translation into new English; in the commentaries of the translation, the similarities between the deeds of the heroes (Beowulf and Iakhsar) were mentioned, which was stated earlier by the writer Otar Chkheidze in the biographical novel, “Novel and History’.

Since then, no detailed comparative analysis of the heroes has been conducted.

Our goal is not to study the mythological archetype of heroism – diving in the lake, exploring the depth, the cycle of death and life - but to identify the heroes and phenomenon of heroism in the early Medieval (may be earlier) Anglo-Saxon and Georgian literary texts.

Why should a young person read Ulysses?

2022-12-06T13:33:59+04:00

When Miguel de Cervantes created Don Quixote as a parody of Chivalric romance, he, naturally, needed some sort of audacity to overstep the sluggish literary existence, but it was only a writer’s courage.

When Henry Fielding wrote The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews as a parody to sentimental novels, of course, he, too needed certain audacity to overstep sluggish literary existence, but again this was only a writer’s courage.

However, when James Joyce created Ulysses – the parody to heroic epic, a writer’s courage was not enough as he had to endure the imminent social and political wrath.

Friedrich Nietzsche had already blazed the trail for him, Franz Kafka and T.S. Eliot.

That was a real risk and he was a real daredevil to write Thus spoke Zarathustra as a manifest of the new epoch as well as a prophecy to the Czech reality where the godless society existed but they would rather hypocritically lie to themselves and be drunk on illusions than face the horrendous reality. The only truth uttered was just in whispers.

And Friedrich Nietzsche had to overcome this whisper and say aloud that something which people concealed even to themselves.

He knew Ireland, and so did Europe and America thanks to the great writers, but if Joyce was to show this world to the West in a way new to them, he had to prove a simple truth with his dramatic and somewhat tragic life, that is: no matter how torn you are from your homeland externally, you can never escape that mysterious force called missing your own roots. It will drag you down, and incapacitate you.

He had a reason not to trust his compatriots and to reproach them for crucifying Charles Parnell instead of fighting along with him to gain independence.

In his short stories and novels, he portrayed that ingratitude, moral declination and spiritual emptiness, hypocrisy and treachery, the urgency for self-reproach and atonement. And if the remnants of the light could finally get through, it had to be through national roots and spirituality as is portrayed in Ulysses with utmost acridness; the novel which had to become one of the trails for humanity to lead them into a new era.

Musicality of Lithuanian Poetry: Codes of a Different Speaking

2022-12-06T13:35:16+04:00

Research on the interactions between literature and other art forms, observed since syncretic art appearnce, took off at the 18th century. These studies gained momentum in the second half of the 20th century, when temporal arts were developing in many different aspects, and innovative methodologies and modern points of view were applied. These multifaceted and multidisciplinary connections between temporal arts are systematized in W. Wolf`s general concept of intermediality. Following this concept, the musicality of literature should be analyzed not only in cases of direct interaction of both arts (vocal genres), but also through their intermedial references. Explicit references take the form of music thematization, images, and implicit references - evocation, formal imitation, partial reproduction. The paper will provide an aspect-based overview of the musicality of Lithuanian poetry, emphasizing the most typical features of musicality: transformations of vocal genres, musical images, principles of imitation of music forms and analogues, etc. The study is based on works by W. Wolf, E. Tarasti, A. Ambrazas, V. Kubilius, J. Girdzijauskas, V. Bobrovskis, V. Vasina - Grossman, R. Tūtlytė, and others; comparative methodology is applied.

Littérature et ballet au XIXe sicèle

2022-12-06T13:36:55+04:00

Ma proposition est en cours de développement. Mais je travaille sur la danse et la littéraure en Europe pendant la période romantique. J’espère que j’aurais un accord de principe jusqu’à ce que je termine ma communication.

Inter-literary Influence: Goethe in Iqbal

2022-12-06T13:38:05+04:00

Ikram Chughtai in his paper called “Goethe in Urdu Literature” mentions that Iqbal was the first to introduce Goethe to writers of the subcontinent through the many notable tributes he has paid to the philosopher in his works. One of the reasons Iqbal was so impressed by Goethe could have been his impartial intellectual inclination towards Islamic cultural history, and his creative approach towards Oriental Islamic traditions. Iqbal was of the opinion that “a real insight into human nature you can get from Goethe alone”, as he wrote in his Stray Reflections(108). Iqbal’s many such elaborate and remarkable tributes to Goethe are what introduced him to the subcontinent’s Urdu writers. Goethe in spite of the range of his study had not gained much fame in the subcontinent, but it was Iqbal’s Payam-i-Mashriq, which he wrote in response to Goethe’s West-eastern Divan, that really led to Goethe being known in the region. Even in his personal diary, Iqbal refers to the philosopher Goethe more often than the other thinkers that he has mentioned.

Through this study, I want to see how Jauss’s theory of reception can describe the reception of the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German philosopher and writer, in the works of Allama Iqbal. Much work has been done on Goethe and Iqbal, for Iqbal’s adoration for Goethe is very evident in his work, not just through direct mentions of Goethe and some references of his life or place of burial, Weimar, but also through the ideas in his work which can be seen as fashioned from Goethe’s ideas. Having found this work to be similar to the analyses I had made on which to look at the effect of reception, I shall use them to provide the contexts for this exploration.

Words and images according to the Russian Formalism and its surroundings

2022-12-06T13:39:22+04:00

In his 1923 article “Illjustratsii” Yuri Tynianov polemically discusses the editions of poetic texts accompanied by illustrations. In 1922 Viktor Shklovsky, just arrived in Berlin, publishes a review firmly hostile to a staging of Charles Dickens 'The Cricket on the Hearth” and deals with the "question of staging and illustrations", as the subtitle of intervention states. Consistent with the theoretical presuppositions of OPoYaz, both Tynianov and Shklovsky insist on the specificity of verbal art and its untranslatability into an image. Yet in the same 1922 Tynianov publishes “Oda kak oratorsky zhanr”, who initiates the reflections of mature formalism on the literary system in its internal dynamics and in its constitutive interrelation with the “extra-literary series”, starting with the various artistic series. In addition, the two scholars will collaborate in the next years with Boris Eikhenbaum and other opoyazovtsy to develop an intersemiotic theory of cinema and also will participate in the collective enterprise of the young Soviet cinema. Meanwhile, in Gustav Shpet “Esteticheskie fragmenty” (1922), the presentation and stratigraphic analysis of the structure of the word from a phenomenological point of view is accompanied by a series of considerations on contemporary art. If here Shpet thunders against the mixture of the arts, at this very moment he directs the Philosophical Department of the GAKhN, an academy that hosts interdisciplinary seminars in which the arts collaborate and contaminate each other in the empirical and theoretical dimensions. Starting from these and other examples (in particular related with the constructivist experience of VKhuTeMas very close to Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “LEF”), the contribution would like to reflect on the seeming antinomic connection between the desire for specification typical of the Russian formalists and the constant effective interrelation between the arts that characterizes their critical and creative activity.

Pandemics and Monsters: The Historical Origins and Modern Manifestations of the Amabie Legend

2022-12-06T13:40:52+04:00

During the initial weeks and months of the COVID-19 pandemic, amid the gloom and doom of a global health crisis, one of the more whimsical hashtags that began trending on Japanese Twitter was #amabie. A hashtag for a beaked, mermaid-like creature with long hair, a scaly body and three legs, Japanese folklore has it that the Amabie can ward off epidemics if one shows her picture to other people. In a tongue-in-cheek manner, Japanese Twitter users began sharing various images and illustrations of this 19th century “yokai” monster, ranging from the “kawaii” to the erotic. By spring, the Amabie had even captured the imagination of people outside Japan: both the Guardian newspaper and the New Yorker magazine ran stories on this creature.

What went unremarked, however, is the eerie resemblance the beaked Amabie has to the beak-like masks so-called “plague doctors” in Europe wore in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Hired by local municipalities to treat patients who had come down with plague-like symptoms, plague doctors were medical professionals tasked with the unenviable task of combating bubonic outbreaks. Their hazmat-like protective gear, first invented in Naples around 1620, consisted of a head-to-toe waxed fabric overcoat, a mask with crystal eye openings and a beak shaped nose, typically stuffed with herbs and spices.

Is it mere coincidence that the Amabie also has a beaked, avian visage? I don’t think so. Her appearance in mid-19th century Japan (rising from the ocean to ward off epidemics) more or less coincides with the growing presence of European traders in Japan, many eager to share their “advanced” Western medical knowledge. My paper will examine the historical origins of the Amabie legend and trace its pop-cultural manifestations in contemporary Japan.

Analyse comparée des images aquatiques chez M. Yourcenar et Othar Tchiladzé

2022-12-06T13:42:06+04:00

L’objet de notre recherche est l’analyse comparée de l’auteur géorgien et français, Othar Tchiladzé et Marguerite Yourcenar. Formés au sein des cultures très différentes, avec des visions divergentes, l’analyse comparée de leurs œuvres se présente comme un défi pour les chercheurs : d’un côté nous avons l’universalisme et l’humanisme européens de M. Yourcenar, de l’autre – la préoccupation par le destin de son pays de Othar Tchiladzé. Mais c’est exactement cette différence qui nous attire dans le contexte de notre étude visant l’analyse de l’inconscient de l’œuvre et les structures des significations personnelles et collectives cachées derrière des images. Cette analyse a pour objectif de trouver les réponses aux questions: est-ce que la dichotomie homme/femme, européen/non européen sont valables quand il s’agit de la création ?

L’article de M. Claude Benoit Morinière « Vers une féminisation de l’imaginaire: images liquides dans quelques romans de Marguerite Yourcenar » m’a encouragé à m’engager dans une étude thématique des œuvres de Othar Tchiladzé et me mettre à l’analyse du réseau de significations créé par l’anima/animus bachelardienne et de la valeur inconsciente dissimulée derrière des significations apparentes des images aquatiques qui s’entrelacent avec l’image de la mort dans l’œuvre de Othar Tchiladzé «Le Théâtre de Fer» et celle de M. Yourcenar «Mémoires d’Hadrien».

Pour réaliser cette recherche nous allons nous appuyer sur l’analyse syntaxique, sémantique et celle des structures narratives pour discerner et relever les structures dominantes et répétitives des images, des symboles et des mythes pour dévoiler les particularités des images personnelles et collectives nées au sein des œuvres de M. Yourcenar et O. Tchiladzé.

Representations of Traditions Against Infectious Diseases in the Texts of the Nineteenth Century Georgian Writers and the Epoch Socio-Political Context

2022-12-06T13:43:24+04:00

Our interest in this issue has arisen from main global problem - the Corona virus pandemic. We wondered how the nineteenth century is represented in the texts of Georgian writers, how Georgian folk rituals and beliefs against infectious diseases are presented in the texts of the nineteenth century Georgian writers: Nikoloz Natidze-Melania, Niko Lomouri, Anastasia Eristavi-Khoshtaria. The research aims to find out whether the reflection of rituals and beliefs in the stories of the above-mentioned writers is their artistic means, or the way to show the spirit of the epoch and the worldview of the time – serious socio-cultural changes taking place in the nineteenth century Georgia, the desire to show their position about these changes or innovations. The texts of the writers we have selected are important from the standpoint that Anastasia Eristavi-Khoshtaria is a woman writer standing at the forefront of Georgian gender writing, Nikoloz Natidze– a clergyman, and Niko Lomouri, a well-known teacher. Therefore, important are the events seen and appreciated through the eyes of a clergyman, woman writer and teacher. All three stories, especially Lomouri’s and Eristavi-Khoshtaria’s, pose the issue of women's rights, and are the best examples of Georgian children's writing. This interdisciplinary research, based on archival materials and scientific literature, showed that all three texts depict the customs related to infectious diseases as an artistic way of expressing current significant socio-cultural and, consequently, mental changes. By using the beliefs related to infectious diseases, the authors inform readers of their position on the most important, current epoch-making events. The Georgian experience of fighting epidemics, seen by the three mentioned authors, conveys socio-cultural processes that are generally characteristic of European context.

Harold Bloom's "Theory of Influence" and its Georgian Explications

2022-12-06T13:45:16+04:00

The essence of Harold Bloom's theory of influence is: Literature is inherently antagonistic, as evidenced by the fact that each author rivals and struggles with his predecessor. The poet radically transforms the texts of his predecessors, which Bloom calls "misreading" and which, in turn, is driven by "fear of influence". This fear is realized in the form of peculiar tropes or tropes of "fear of influence" in the new text. That is why fear and anxiety are always rhetorically recorded in new works created in the wrestling with previous texts. An explication of Bloom's theory is Zaza Shatirishvili's early text, in particular his monograph Galaktion's Poetics and Rhetoric, in which the author discusses Galaktion Tabidze’s birth as a "powerful poet" in the context of Theory of InfluenceFrom 1915 onwards, famous Georgian poet Galaktion Tabidze created texts confirmin g that he had become a "powerful poet" after he had been the epigone of Akaki Tsereteli, a "powerful poet" from XIX century. It is after Akaki's death that the invariant motif of the "dead (dead) father" appears in Galaktion's poetry. For Galaktion, the only authentic self-title or name is "King", which was shared throughout the subsequent poetic tradition. If Akaki is read behind the "dead father", the king-poet is, in a sense, a new Rustaveli - the triumphant alter ego of Galaktion.

Re-Imagining ‘A Story of Denmark’: A Comparison between Uchimura Kanzō’s ‘A Story of Denmark’ and Henry Leach’s ‘Reclaiming the Heath’ from the Perspective of the Nordic Reception

2022-12-06T13:46:45+04:00

In 1911, Uchimura Kanzō made a presentation titled ‘A Story of Denmark: Faith and Trees Helps the Land’ and published it in the same year. In this presentation Uchimura talked about the afforestation in Jutland after the Second Schleswig War. He explained that Denmark chose afforestation to the third war, to become one of the richest counties in the world. Enrico Dalgas and his son made efforts towards the afforestation.

According to one account, this story impressed so much the Japanese Christians around Uchimura, that they considered Denmark as an ideal agricultural country. Some of them introduced Danish Folk High Schools (Folkehøjskole) — institutions for adult peasants’ education, originally conceptualized by the Danish pastor N. F. S. Grundtvig, subsequently establishing Japanese Folk High Schools modelled after Danish Folk High School between late 1920s and 1930s. Later, these schools were used as training centres for Japanese colonists of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia.

In this proposal, I argue Uchimura’s ‘A Story of Denmark’ from the perspective of the Nordic reception. Today, the story is considered as an expression of his pacifist ideas and as a proof that Nordic countries are ideal and happy. Contrastingly, I hypothesize that the story was compatible with Japanese colonialism of the first half of 20^th century and that the ideal image of Nordic countries strengthened the colonialism. To this end, I compare Uchimura’s ‘A Story of Denmark’ with Henry Leach’s ‘Reclaiming the Heath: How Denmark Converted a Desert into a Farming Country’, which N. Suzuki claimed as the original material of ‘A Story of Denmark’ (‘Uchimura Kanzō’s life and thought’ (Iwanami, 2012)). I argue why Uchimura changed the theme from ‘reclaiming the heath’ to ‘afforestation of the land’, to draw attention to its link to Japanese colonialism, focusing its relationship to idealization of Nordic images.

Paradoxes and Absurdity as a Means of Expression in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

2022-12-06T13:47:55+04:00

Conrad often uses the rhetorical figure of catachresis - a combination of semantically incompatible words or rhetorical figures that express the absurd. In regular speech, phrases like “wilderness had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know”, or “[silence] that couldn't talk, and perhaps was deaf as well” would represent a logical absurdity. They can only be perceived in a figurative sense, as symbolic images, and it is only when they acquire the rhetorical quality that they become catachreses. There is no explanation for what such images mean with Conrad, because they do not have any specific meaning.

What we find in Heart of Darkness is not a metaphorical thinking in the regular sense - a regular image always has a specific tenor that connects its vehicle with reality because the image itself is taken from that reality. In contrast, Marlow's figurative references are vague, paradoxical, and at the same time highly suggestive - like those that can be encountered in an alchemical treatise or an esoteric text. In fact, it is the system of veils behind which nothing is hidden. It is these ‘veils’ or non-referential images that create the absurdist hyper reality of Conrad’s Africa.

The ‘dream reality’ described by Marlow, or ‘unreality’ as he calls it, is a fascinating device with correlates Conrad's artistic method with the recent postmodernist idea of hyper reality. Africa of Heart of Darkness is quite perceivable as a "simulated" reality, as it is essentially non-mimetic and constructed from the chaos of Marlow's extremely subjective impressions. The reality imagined this way clearly resembles an artistic analogue of J. Baudrillard's non-referential reality, which also represents a system of signs with no denotations, or in case of metaphoric thinking, vehicles with no tenors. There is nothing behind the non-referential system of signs, only the absurd, ‘emptiness’, and ‘nothingness’ manifested in horror.

Structure of Shota Rustaveli’s stanza

2022-12-06T13:49:18+04:00

The necessity of the existence of living links between poetics and linguistics is best of all revealed through studying poetic models. One of them is parallelism as a means of thematic and compositional unity and basis for the phonetic and syntactic structures of a quatrain (stanza) not only in “The Knight in the Panther's Skin” by Shota Rustaveli (12^th century), but also in many cultures, such as ‘‘the old Greek poetry and the antiphonies of ecclesiastic music up to the brilliance of the old Greek, Italian and English poetry (Gerald Manly Hopkins).

The most common varieties of poetic parallelism that Shota Rustaveli uses within a line are gradation (especially climax), repetition, and enumeration. This poetic model is so comprehensive in “The Knight in the Panther's Skin” that it can serve as a basis for restoring many of the garbled passages to their original form and explaining the meanings of many disputed words. These types of tropes reflect the distinction between the semantic field, the synonymic series and the thematic group. In fact, such a distribution has no exceptions, unless it is opposed by the basis of Georgian verse: the quantitative division of syllables both in the whole quatrain (stanza) and in a separate line. The paper also deals with comparative parallelism and phraseological expansion, which is a kind of poetic parallelism, due to the semantic inseparability of set expressions.

Each quatrain of the poem requires thematic and semantic unity, for which various types of tropes are used. One is to combine two sentences expressing the same thought in a line. In “The Knight in the Panther's Skin”, each sentence of the quatrain often refers to the same fact of objective reality, which serves to expand the basic information given in the first line. This is often achieved by a metaphor.

In the last part of the paper, the connection between the poetic theory presented in the prologue of the poem and the principles of the thematic, phonetic and syntactic unity of each quatrain (stanza) will be considered.

Metaphors of Illness: An Analysis on The River and The Hole

2022-12-06T13:50:24+04:00

While the existing scholarship concerns the negativity of metaphoric disease, this paper negotiates the productiveness embedded in the metaphor of illness, through analyzing Tsai Ming-liang’s films, The River (1997) and The Hole (1998). In The River, the male protagonist gets afflicted with neck pain after playing a corpse in a murky river; in The Hole, the two protagonists refuse to leave a building where there is an epidemic outbreak and consequently become stranded and isolated. Illness thus indicates specific spaces within which the protagonists experience loneliness and frustration and turn to external spaces for survival: in The River, the space is the exploration of sexual preference while in The Hole it is the musical fantasy. However, those outer spaces unavoidably drive the protagonists back to reality and revise their intersections with the world, through which they reconstruct personal interactions and regain vitality. In these films, Tsai proposes an alternative way to demonstrate Susan Sontag’s theory about the metaphor of illness (1968; 1989): illness is the act of growth, despite its metaphoricity for immorality, pollution, and punishment. Through a two-fold scrutiny, this paper also argues that illness in the films is both metaphor and resistance of metaphor. The idea that illness can be interpreted as both isolation and connection, as well as pollution and regeneration, illustrates the ambiguity in Tsai’s films, which leads to the questioning of the interpretation itself. Faced with the “new normal” in a post-pandemic era, this paper wants to negotiate the discursivity of the metaphor of illness.

The Vernacular Dissemination of the Fantastic in the Persianate Cosmopolis: The Case of Badr al-Munīr

2022-12-06T13:52:15+04:00

The advent of printing technology in Arabi-Malayalam and the subsequent changes opened the literary production to a new phase of genres of imaginations. As Dilip M. Menon says in his discussion of lower caste lives in Malayalam novels “(t)he late nineteenth century in India saw the happy coincidence of the first stirrings of nationalist sentiment as well as the emergence of a new artefact of the imagination—the novel.”(41)^[1] But in the context of Arabi-Malayalam, a parallel literary engagement within the space and time of Malayalam,^[2] the artefact of the imagination was materialised and inaugurated through a fantasy work, that too in the poetry. Moyinkutty Vaidyar’s (1852-1892) famous piece of poetry popularly known as Badr al-Munīr Husn al-Jamāl marked the beginning of this moment of imagination in Arabi-Malayalam, a language that has been formerly housing exclusively genres of devotional substance. It is with Badr al-Munīr that Arabi-Malayalam opened itself to the non-religious imaginary.

The genres of imagination in Malayalam have been analysed only with its similitudes with the development of novel genre in Europe, and never been comprehended as part of a world that constitutes the larger territory of ‘Persinate cosmopolis’^[3] as I call it. In this paper I intend to examine the genre of fantasy and its trajectories across a wide region of Persianate Cosmopolis with active orbits through Indian Ocean littoral.

The paper selects the text of Vaidyar’s Badr al-Munīr (1872) and takes a historical detour into its rhizomatic trajectories across borders of regions, languages, cultures, times and genres. Vaidyar’s adaptation traces back to its Urdu original Sihr al-Bayan (1785) by Mir Ghulam Hasan Dehlavi in Delhi. I particularly examine these two texts taking into account its history of publication and its popularity through years till date which would give a diachronic view of the fantastic genre in the region. With that backdrop, I look at a Malayalam novel titled Bhadramuni: Oru Puthiya Kadha published in Kerala in 1905.^[1] This novel takes the liberty of an independent retelling of the story, but placing it in a different context of region and religion in order to appropriate the fantastic for the targeted audience. Outside the textual form, the story takes another genric form in a play. I could find out an undated advertisement^[2] of a play/drama named Benajīr Badr-e-Munīra performed in Calicut by a troupe lead by a certain Sayyid Qadir Ussan. The ad summaries the plot in which it is clear that it is inspired from the Urdu orginal rather than Vaidyar’s text in Arabi-Malayalam. Along with these mentioned texts, I take into account different adaptations and translations of the work in genres such as gramophone records, play performances, films, etc. that delineate the circuitousness of the fantastic across genres, regions and times. The selected texts would enable a deep examination of the vernacular dissemination of the fantastic with its multi-noded circuitous pattern.

Arabic Literature: Challenges for Translation

2022-12-06T13:55:35+04:00

In recent years, Arabic literature has made tangible progress into acceptance as part of world literature, due largely to translation. This border-crossing process is not, however, without limitations and challenges. This panel sheds light upon the process of translating Arabic literature into other languages in general and into English in particular. It first aims to present a brief history of translation from Arabic into other languages, together with significant milestones that accompanied this process. It then explores the challenges faced by the Arabic literature in its translation journey, starting from the selection process and factors that govern it, through the translation strategies and then the publication and distribution processes.

Literature as an Alternative History

2022-12-06T14:23:32+04:00

Politicians and historiographers describe the history of armed conflicts as a chronicle of military successes and defeats. And only a writer sees war as a manifestation of accumulated moral, social and mental problems with tragic outcome for both the losers and winners alike.

«Abkhaz theme» in modern Georgian literature is associated with the name of Guram Odisharia who said “Politicians, journalists and historians start a war and generals continue” and then did his best to save the last threads of human relations between yesterday’s friends and neighbours, not yet fully torn apart by those politicians and generals” (an autobiographical book “Return to Sukhumi” (1995), a wonderful short novel “The Cousin” - a true story of genuine humanity against incredible and boundless atrocities of an ongoing war).

This brutality is described in the scary short novel of another veteran of Georgian-Abkhaz conflict Gela Chkvanava “The Toreadors” (2006). Marina Elbakidze’s novel “The Exchange” (2012) is a certain continuation of Gela Chkvanava’s story, since it describes the exchange of the prisoners of war and combatants’ bodies. A soulful novel of Nugzar Shataidze with exotic title “Trip to Africa” (2014) describes a trip but not to Africa but to the Abkhaz town Tkvarcheli – a home town of boy who is orphan with alive parents. A literary debut of Tamta Melashvili “The Rhyme” (2015) tells a story of the three days of 13-year old Georgian girls from the village of Georgian-Ossetian conflict. The events unfolding on these territories according to the “Russian scenario” during a 2008 “August War” is depicted with documentary preciseness in the novel of Guram Megrelishvili and Tamaz Demetrashvili with intriguing title “iratta.ru” (2010). Zaza Burchuladze in his “modelled chronicle” under the title “Adibas” (2011) continued a “Russian scenario” in the wake of the events of August 2008, using a grotesque form: “Russian troops marched into Tbilisi! And despite a “golden youth” is enjoying sun on the fashionable swimming pool…”

The Georgian prose of the last decades, step by step “cleaning” a real historic retrospect, tacitly acquired a function of “alternative history” – hoping to create a

moral alternative to the chaos of value-based opinions and assessments, being so peculiar to the post-Soviet societies torn between authoritarianism and democracy.

The avant-garde on a planetary scale: in the middle of colours

2022-12-06T14:25:00+04:00

The aim of my presentation is to underline the importance of Western esoterism in its Theosophical and Anthroposophical forms in Russian and Georgian Symbolist movements. In particular, I am going to discuss the presence of karmic ideas in Andrey Bely’s travelogue Veter s Kavkaza [A Wind from the Caucasus] (1928) and Grigol Robakidze’s novel გველის პერანგი [The Snake’s Skin] (1926).

My previous research (Ponomareva 2005) establishes links between karmic ideas and Bely’s ornamental prose. Bely defines karma as “the artistic culture of inner life” (RGALI, f.53, op.1, n.81, l.95) and illustrates these ideas further in Veter s Kavkaza (1928), using colours to encode them. His last novels are also dedicated to the discussion of Anthroposophical concepts rather than to providing any narrative ideologically accepted in the USSR in the late 1920s. The following Bely’s words were recorded by Zaitsev on 5 February 1931, after Bely received a confirmation that his other novel, Maski [Masks] had been approved by Soviet censors: “In Masks, I had been playing an extremely complex game with All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). And I won it” (in my translation and cited from Spivak 1988).

My hypothesis is that Robakidze could be familiar with the concept of karma. The notion is discussed in The Snake’s Skin where the presence of colour symbolism is also significant. Robakidze’s studies in Tartu (1901) and Leipzig (1902-1906) as well as the establishment of Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Tiflis in 1919 might be named as sources of his information on Western esoterism.

In addition to avoiding the strict censorship of the Soviet regime, the use of these ideas by the Symbolists might be also related to their intention of giving cosmic dimensions to their avant-garde writings, in which imagination, inspiration and intuition are important on a planetary scale.

Plagues and Pandemics: When Will the Plots Change?

2022-12-06T14:26:11+04:00

From ancient times plagues have appeared as initiating events in works of canonical Western literatures demonstrating anger of the gods at certain human offenses or evil actions, for which acceptable atonement must be made to end the deaths and devastation. This pattern appears from Homer’s epic The Iliad into the twentieth century, perhaps most notably in Camus’s The Plague, and even, some might argue, through the AIDS era. In these literary works, plagues afflict specific peoples or places, efforts are usually made to seek and punish the evil doer(s) or find a scapegoat who can be punished or make acceptable atonement, while civic measures are implemented to try to contain the disease, usually to a specific location or population, leaving others relatively safe. Characters’ most important ethical decision is whether to stay and help fight the disease or try to escape and save themselves. We argue that worldwide pandemics, such as the so-called Spanish flu of 1918 and the currently raging coronavirus and its variants, should bring changes to the older plot patterns because a single person or community may not be identifiable either to blame or atone for a particular offense, pandemics by definition cannot be isolated or contained, and new variants may emerge as quickly as new treatments and vaccines become available. These new pandemic plots should acknowledge effects the Anthropocene era has had on the health of the planet on which such diseases develop. In our presentation, we will discuss features that a literary work about the coronavirus might have if it were to introduce plot differences between canonical works of plague literature and potentially canonical works of pandemic literature. We acknowledge that such literary works could appear first in non-Western literatures, and we call on our international colleagues to alert us if so.

From heroic values to everyday life: the Refugee Crisis narrated by Ai WeiWei and Ana Luísa Amaral

2022-12-06T14:27:55+04:00

In 2021, Portugal dedicated a whole exhibition to the Chinese artist Ai WeiWei named “Rapture”. Among many pieces was displayed Odyssey Tiles (2021), a reworking of the 2016 Odyssey, made now with 180 Portuguese handcrafted tiles and centered on the Refugee crisis. Coming from a different context but with a similar sensitivity for this humanitarian conflict, we can find some poems by the Portuguese author Ana Luísa Amaral, from the book What’s in a name?

These artistic examples I have just introduced explicitly dialogue with one of the foundational Western narratives: The Odyssey, attributed to Homer. This canonical text has been possessed of a social function over time: that is to encourage and strengthen a certain community. In some ways, we could say that they were used to reinforce the idea of the European civilization against the

barbarians.

Although WeiWei’s and Amaral’s work respect some of the formal codes of the original text, they also embrace an everyday discourse, which I would like to present as a tool of rethinking the way Europe constructs itself. Using the same scenario (the Mediterranean Sea), the same story (a trip in a postwar period) and even the same forms of creation as the original text, they focus on those who are normally marginalized. They dislocate the center of the narrative and then build their discourses not from the inside of the “Fortress Europe” (Lutz 1997; Kofman and Sales 1998) but from the point of view of the “subalterns” (Spivak 1985) and their ordinary actions. As Amaral herself has argued several times, if we give more importance to the little actions we do ordinarily, the world would be a better place, because war is precisely the opposite of everyday life.

Deciphering Dream Omens in Chinese Tradition: Cases of Cezi in Late Imperial Xiaoshuo Literature

2022-12-06T14:29:02+04:00

As a tradition that was originally linked to divination, Chinese oneirology includes many narratives that recount how a dream carries a hidden meaning that may reveal future events or explain ongoing ones. Dreams were indeed considered to be messages sent by the entities of the invisible world, so that the living may cope with their lives. The classical literature of leisure, notably the “small talks” (xiaoshuo 小說), was pervaded with stories of dream omens to be deciphered. Among the various techniques of dream interpretation was the “fathoming of characters” (cezi 測字), which bears many other names, and that consisted in manipulating the Chinese characters seen in a dream, or manipulating the characters that one could get out of a dream content. Dream enigmas appeared quite early in the literature of leisure, but we shall here focus on the Qing period (especially the 17^th and 18^th centuries) to show how persistently through Chinese history cezi appeared as a way to elucidate dreams. Examples of how people made sense of dreams through cezi are numerous in xiaoshuo literature, and this paper will provide a few examples drawn from collections such as Wang Jian’s 王椷 (unknown dates) Collected Talks of the Autumn Lamp (Qiudeng conghua 秋燈叢話) (1780), Yuan Mei’s 袁枚 (1716-1798) What the Master Would Not Discuss (Zibuyu 子不語) (1788), and also Cao Xueqin’s 曹雪芹 (1715?–1763?) Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng 紅樓夢).

A Hong Kong Polly: Sima Li

2022-12-06T14:30:01+04:00

This paper sets out to show the crucial influence of Joyce’s early story ‘The Boarding House’ on Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang’s Jiutu (The Drunkard) in the characterisation of adolescent female character Sima Li to the extent that she can be seen as the adaptation of Polly in Joyce’s story. It uses the approach of adaptative intertextuality to examine similarities and differences between both adolescent female characters from three perspectives. The first section of this paper begins examining the everyday behaviour of the character Sima Li, and then turns to Polly who is described as ‘a little perverse Madonna’ (D 62) by Joyce. By comparing the personalities of Sima Li and Polly, it attempts to reveal the same dualistic features of both characters. The second section examines the game of love between Sima Li and Jiutu and between Polly and Doran through which to demonstrate that both ‘The Boarding House’ and the story of Sima Li in Jiutu have the similar plot. The final section compares the intended ending of both female characters, while it pays close attention to the changes in Sima Li after her love game with Jiutu so as to distinguish Sima Li from Polly and to underscore her Hong Kong identity. This case study, therefore, responds to the existing criticism on West-East literary comparison through a modern Hong Kong literature example that represents a dynamic negotiation between Europe and Asia, past and present, traditional and modern.

Panait Istrati’s Après seize mois dans l’U.R.S.S. (1929) and Eleni Samios’ La véritable tragédie de Panaït Istrati (1938): testimonies upon the USSR

2022-12-06T14:31:01+04:00

Journeys and learning are defining multifarious experiences for the French-Romanian writer Panait Istrati (1884-1935) and his friend, Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957). During their trip in the USSR in 1928, Marie-Luise Baud-Bovy and Eleni Samios joined them. Recent studies about their voyage have not explored two related volumes: Istrati’s Après seize mois dans l’U.R.S.S. [After 16 months in the USRR] (1929) versus La véritable tragédie de Panaït Istrati authored by Samios (first Spanish edition 1938, French edition 2013). This first comparative analysis presents Istrati and Samios as writers coming from capitalist countries connected by ethnic affiliation (the Greek community) as well as leftist political views.

Istrati and Samios outline the vast and considerable reforms undertaken by the Soviet regime while presenting the opinions of the locals: full commitment, partial support or (un)disclosed resistance. However, Istrati was already an established novelist in France, yet Samios was the partner of a rising author, Kazantzakis. How do such differentiations in terms of gender, age and experience impact their perceptions upon the East-West connections and divide? What are their emotional and intellectual response towards the Soviets where status and power had reconverted values and relationships? Beyond sporadic anecdotic or jocular touches inspired by various events or reactions showing a closer or more distant rapport with the other, be it among the four travellers or the locals, the key concern of both authors is to understand how individuals cope with change. Time, distance and confession are the key variables shaping these two works switching from occasional reportage, briefly spiced up by cultural or historical references, to interior monologues or essayistic fragments. Ideological and cultural clashes complement their naturally-driven confluences and interactions. To this day, these two testimonies stand out as particularly able to inspire reflection and transformation across geographical, social and cultural borders.

The Divine Wisdom of Madness and Love

2022-12-06T14:32:52+04:00

The paper aims to discuss the impact of the medieval Arabic literary tradition of love and madness on Shota Rustaveli's “The Knight in the Panther’s Skin” from the perspective of modern literary-critical approaches and Niklas Luhmann's Sociological Theory.

In the medieval Arabic literary tradition, love and madness symbolize a close spiritual connection with the divine, paths that are closely related to each other.

Why specifically the madness? If the recognition of established norms in society is equated with common sense, then it becomes easier to see how madness turns into one of the best literary symbols of the universal rebellion. Madness is a symbol of rebellion against “common sense” and turns a madman into an almost poetic perfection. The main storyline of Arabic adab literature regarding the theory of love from the very beginning unconditionally considers that love is madness and a person who falls in love often - if not always - goes against all reasoning. Love is blind or makes a person blind. Lovers are considered to be particularly inclined to go mad. These works of adab perfectly show the public's fascination with the irrational and extravagant - those aspects of love that are beyond the worldly mind and common sense and that can reveal the best and most noble in man. This charm of the strange, extravagant, or extraordinary behaviour of those who have lost their common sense in love, and yet their usefulness for literary purposes, seems to help the public realize that in a whirlpool of such reckless action there may be undeniably deep and paradoxical wisdom, which is beyond the comprehension of an ordinary mind. For such wise madmen obsessed with love, there is no boundary between their imagination and their actions in life.

A permanent or transcendental connection with the Absolute is established only through symbolic channels. Therefore, the prototypical personality of one who has achieved such a form of union enjoys universal appeal. The path to such an union is precisely love, enveloped in divine madness, which turns love into a mystical union, an attempt to reconcile the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and the irrational.

“The Castilhos and their kin: A network of (luso)-asian writing in Portuguese”

2022-12-06T14:37:24+04:00

We find signs that the family of Portuguese writers and intellectuals the Castilho sought to have a significant cultural presence in most of the Portuguese colonies, through various publications. Goa and Macao are some of the spaces in which they participated with sporadic collaboration in the local press, but also promoting works such as the “Almanaque de Lembranças Luso-brasileiro”, an almanac directed by a member of the family and published regularly since the 1850s. This periodical collects a large part of the 19^th century literary production (especially poetry) coming from Asia, Portugal, and East Africa, which is the one we are most interested in here. To critically read this production (which we intend to do here) allows us to build a comparative look between the peripheral spaces of the Portuguese-speaking literary traditions in the 19^th century. The aim of this paper is to inquire how the relationship of Portuguese intellectuals like the Castilhos with Portuguese-speaking literary communities, especially in Asia, allows us to observe a quite different map of what would later come to be called Portuguese-speaking literatures and what critical-theoretical consequences we should draw from it.

Le thermalisme en France et au Japon : traditions historiques et représentations littéraires

2022-12-06T14:41:11+04:00

Les anciens croyaient que l'eau mystérieuse jaillissant de la terre et guérissant les malades était un cadeau des dieux. Traitant surtout des œuvres littéraires français et japonais, cette communication analyse la diversité des perceptions et des représentations des stations thermales.

Hippolyte Taine notait, dans le Voyage aux Pyrénées, que « Rome a laissé partout sa trace à Bagnères. Couchés dans les baignoires de marbre, ils sentaient la vertu de la bienfaisante déesse pénétrer dans leurs membres ». Quant au Japon, dans Les Coutumes d’Iyo, daté au VIII^e siècle, le Petit Prince qui est mourant, baigne dans l’eau thermale et ressuscite rapidement. Les stations thermales ont ainsi des relations profondes avec les mythes.

Cependant, les différences entre les deux pays apparaissent particulièrement au Moyen Âge. L’épidémie de peste du XIV^e siècle découle en grande partie du déclin des Spas en Europe. On croyait que l'une des causes de la peste était la baignade et que la peste provenait du courroux de Dieu contre les hommes. En revanche, au Japon, la baignade se trouve toujours recommandée, car Bouddha prêche l’importance de l’ablution qui nettoie les impuretés du corps et de l’esprit.

En dépit des différences entre ces deux pays, le thermalisme inspire clairement les écrivains français et japonais surtout dans le domaine de récits de voyages. Montaigne raconte ses expériences de baignade et les effets bénéfiques de chaque Spa dans Journal de voyage. Au Japon Bashô Matsuo, le plus célèbre poète de Haiku, a parcouru le Japon de 1687 à 1690, a également décrit stations thermales. Différent à Montaigne, Bashô donne de l’importance au Haiku. Par exemple, quand il est resté dans un village thermal, il a exprimé son imagination poétique dans un Haiku.

Même aujourd’hui, les eaux thermales continuent d’inspirer non pas seulement les écrivains mais aussi les artistes.

Figures du psychologue dans la littérature chinoise contemporaine

2022-12-06T14:43:02+04:00

La psychothérapie, depuis son installation en Chine dans les années 1980, a connu un grand essor à partir des années 1990. En parallèle avec cette croissance, le rôle du psychologue a émergé dans la littérature chinoise. En nous penchant sur cinq œuvres romanesques de quatre auteurs chinois : Enquête sur une psychotique (Dui yige jingshenbing huanzhe de diaocha 对一个精神病患者的调查, 1985) de Xu Xiaobin 徐小斌, Déclin et prospérité (Shuai yu rong 衰与荣, 1987) de Ke Yunlu 柯云路, Le psychologue est là ? (Xinli yisheng zaima 心理医生在吗？, 1998) de Yan Geling 严歌苓, Sauver les seins (Zhengjiu rufang拯救乳房, 2003) et La psychologue (Nü xinlishi 女心理师, 2008) de Bi Shumin 毕淑敏, nous allons étudier l’évolution de l’image du psychologue dans la littérature chinoise contemporaine, qui reflète dans une grande mesure le processus de réception de la psychanalyse en Chine.

Dans le roman de Xu, deux étudiants en psychologie tentent de soigner une psychotique moyennant une «thérapie par transfert», basée sur une compréhension totalement erronée de la notion du «transfert»; Ke met en scène un «conseiller de vie», qui, tout comme les bons conseillers dans les romans classiques, donne des «bon stratagèmes contenus dans un sachet de brocart», sans se soucier du besoin et du désir des patients ; dans l’œuvre de Yan, on constate une influence prononcée de Garl Rogers, notamment de sa thérapie centrée sur le patient ; et les deux romans de Bi montrent un grand changement dans la compréhension du métier et des méthodes thérapeutiques de l’écrivaine, ainsi que la situation actuelle de la psychothérapie en Chine, marquée le manque de réglementation.

Interface between West and East: Postmodernism and Contemporary Indian English Fiction

2022-12-06T14:44:17+04:00

Even though various critical, literary and cultural theories propounded in the West have found ready acceptance in the Indian academia and been applied widely to Indian literature, particularly the one produced originally in English language, yet the current domination of postmodernism encounters a somewhat different reception in the creative field. Postmodern thought and literary styles have served as a guide to many a novelist but not all are enamoured of it. Again, it has been noted that some of the Indian philosophical concepts find an echo in postmodern philosophy, but at the same time, some native literary traditions have also impacted the practice of postmodern literary principles. Thus, Salman Rushdie has advanced the cause of postmodern literature significantly through his use of magic realism and intertextuality, even as he has also popularized the Indian epical narratological style. My paper studies this interface between the Western and Indian paradigms. More than 1400 novels were published originally in English by Indian authors during the first two decades of the 21^st century. Many of these novels reflect postmodern tendencies. In this paper, after discussing briefly the evolution and main features of postmodernism along with their convergence with the Indian creative and critical paradigms, I explore its impact on language, style and narratology as also the thematic aspects of novels based on history, myths, margins, globalization, dystopia, etc., in both serious and light fiction categories. Apart from taking in a broad view, the writers whose texts have been quoted to buttress the assertions include Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ashwin Sanghi, Kiran Desai, Chetan Bhagat, Aravind Adiga, Ashok Banker, et al.

Russia versus Europe or Collusions of Civilization in 17-18 Century after Contemporary Lithuanian Writer Kristina Sabaliauskaite

2022-12-06T14:48:14+04:00

In her newest book “Empress of Peter” (part I 2019, part II 2021) Kristina Sabaliauskaite, who is a doctor of art research and is specializing in European cultural archives, writes about Peter the Great attempt to connect Russia with Europe. Sabaliauskaite writes about it from the point of view of his wife, Marta Skowronska, who is becomming Empress of Russia. She comes from polish lithuanian roots and this makes her integration to Russia’s society very special, painfull and dramatic. Sabaliauskaite exellently describes these unbelievable tensions of being inside a tsar family as a female and being capable to survive in dreadful circumstances. Author describes cataclismatic Russian-European relationships. Her intensive style of writing is full with typical Russian language expressions and historical issues, which desribes horrific images of terror. It helps to understand Russia and it’s contemporary collusions with the West – it makes Sabaliauskaite’s new book even more impressive and tempting to read to enrich the needed knowledge.

To Study Russian Literature in English: The Perception of Maurice Baring and Dmitry Merezhkovsky in Modern Japan

2022-12-06T14:49:51+04:00

This paper examines the perception and influence of the English books and the English translations of the studies of Russian Literature in modern Japan, especially the works of an English man of letter and scholar of the Russian literature, Maurice Baring (1874–1945), and the works of a famous novelist, poet, religious thinker and literary critic, Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky (1866–1941). Their books were widely read among the Japanese intellectuals in the early 20^th century. As the previous studies have indicated, Russian literature became a worldwide craze in those days, and Japan was also one of the countries where it gained popularity. There are some studies of the Japanese translations of Russian literature in modern Japan, which revealed that the greater part of them were translated not from Russian originals, but from the translations in the Western languages. On the other hand, it is not well known that the characteristics of Russian literature were received in Japan at that period by books written in the Western languages other than Russian, such as English, and research to elucidate this reality has not progressed sufficiently. We analyze the English books and the English translations of the studies of Russian Literature by Baring and Merezhkovsky in the collection of Natsume Soseki (1867–1916), one of the most famous writers of modern Japan and an avid reader of these books. We discuss their texts, and line drawing and comment writing by Natsume in these books, reviewing the reception of them in Japanese newspapers and magazines in the early 20^th century. This paper shows that it is essential to understand the reception of Russian literature in Japan not only from the bilateral perspective between Japan and Russia, but also from a broader international perspective, such as the trilateral relationship between Japan, Britain, and Russia.

Fictions of Memory: Life Through the Prism of Death

2022-12-06T14:53:58+04:00

The paper is a comparative study of three novels from three different cultures analyzed within the context of cultural memory studies. The three texts are analyzed as instances of what Brigit Neumann terms “fictions of memory” a term that denotes not only novels that take memory as their subject matter but also the imaginative and literary representation of the process of memory through mimesis and fiction. (Neumann 2010) Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal (2001), Andre Brink’s “Before I Forget” (2004), and Adel Essmat The Commandments (in Arabic 2018) are life narratives of three elderly men approaching death who, almost compulsively, narrate their lives, particularly their love lives, to an audience in the second person. The analysis focuses on the ordering and manipulation of time of remembered events, (Genette 1980; Ricoeur 1984) as well as the choice of the narrative consciousness to represent the events (whether the present consciousness of the narrator, or the consciousness of the past experiencing self, or an interplay of both). The three novels use different techniques regarding the manipulation of time and the choice of narrative voice in creating their fictional message. They all share an expressed desire to implicate others in the story as testified by their use of second person method of narration, though for different ends. The three texts also share a tendency to reassess revered values that changed throughout the lives of the narrators, the comparison of which highlights significant cultural specificities. The desire of the narrators to link their individual stories to wider circles of collective and national histories additionally give each narrative its unique cultural meaning and provides.

Men, Animals and Stones: Ethical Reflections in Murdoch’s The Green Knight

2022-12-06T14:56:02+04:00

Iris Murdoch is a contemporary British novelist and philosopher whose moral philosophy is centered on the concept of “Good”. It’s claimed that by attending to “the other”, one can remove fantasies and illusions, achieve “unselfing” and approach “Good”. Murdoch was deeply influenced by Eastern religious philosophies such as Buddhism and Hinduism, and she has been studying Heidegger’s philosophy for nearly thirty years and has been deeply influenced by his philosophical thoughts. Heidegger: The Pursuit of Being is her unpublished manuscript on the philosopher. “The other” not only covers individuals, but also animals and material entities. Thus, in the context of both Eastern and Western religion and philosophies, the paper investigates the relationship between self and other individuals, self and animals, and self and stones in her penultimate novel The Green Knight, thereby examining her ethical reflections.

Eastern and Western Literary Paradigms in Georgian Romanticism

2022-12-06T14:57:22+04:00

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, a national variant of literary Romanticism emerged in Georgia as a result of contact with European and Russian literatures. It is an indisputable fact that Romanticism was imprinted with specific features in every country. According to some scholars, "the 'Romanticism' of one country may have little in common with that of another, that there is, in fact, a plurality of Romanticisms, of possibly quite distinct thought-complexes" (Arthur O. Lovejoy). Perhaps this statement is radical, but it is a fact that we encounter essential differences between the national variants of Romanticism. In the paper we will discuss upon one of the peculiarities of Georgian Romanticism, which was manifested in the synthesis of Eastern and Western literary standpoints.

If the East was a foreign, exotic world for Western European and Russian romantics, for Georgian writers it was perceived as a native space. Georgian literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was strongly influenced by Oriental literature (especially Persian). Oriental impact was also preserved to some extent in Georgian Romanticism. In the works of the first generation of Georgian romantics - Alexander Chavchavadze and Grigol Orbeliani - on the one hand, the eloquence characteristic of Eastern literature, oriental tropology, the use of constant, sometimes faded Imagery (especially in love poetry), the cult of ebriety, are preserved. On the other hand, signs of Western literary standpoint appears in the works of these poets - Romantic perception of nature, romantic concept of love. New literary genres are established (Epistolary lyrics, literary tale, lyrical poem, autobiographical narrative).

The works of the next generation of romantic poets (Nikoloz Baratashvili, Vakhtang Orbeliani) are even more free from the influence of Eastern poetics, however, on the whole, in Georgian Romanticism, Eastern and Western paradigms coexist peacefully side by side.

Chinese Influence on American Literature: Ha Jin and The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai as A Case Study

2022-12-06T14:59:32+04:00

The influence of Chinese literature on Western literature happens in many ways. This paper takes one of the most famous Chinese migrant writers, Ha Jin, and his The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (2019) as a case study to examine if and how Chinese migration literature has played its role in exerting Chinese influence on Western literature. As a Chinese migrant writer residing in America and writing in English, Ha Jin is endowed with dual cultural identity. In other words, he belongs to Chinese culture and American culture at the same time, and his works can be regarded as both Chinese literature and American literature, where the two overlap each other. Through Ha Jin and his migrant writing, Chinese literature is structurally written into American literature and becomes part of American literature. Before The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai, there was no comprehensive English biography in Li Bai. If reading the book carefully, it is not difficult to find that Ha Jin follows the Chinese literary tradition of “诗言志” (poetry expressing will) to map the life of Li Bai, which can be seen as the endeavor of bringing Chinese aesthetics into American literature.

East-West dichotomy in Georgian Cultural Thinking before and during the Soviet Period

2022-12-06T15:02:33+04:00

Georgia lies on the border of Europe and Asia and the dichotomy “East-West” until the soviet period for Georgians mostly considered juxtaposition of Asia and Europe (the Islamic and the Christian worlds). This subject has been thoroughly investigated in the article “East-West cultural discourse as seen by Georgian poets of the nineteenth century”.

In the Soviet period this opposition has been changed. One of the identifiers – “The West” was very frequently used in the period and meant “the capitalist world”. The other – “East” was almost never mentioned but implied “the socialist camp”. This dichotomy was also expressed merely by pronouns “we” and “they”.

It is very difficult to give a realistic picture of the cultural and critical thinking of the Soviet period according to the publications of the time because anything that has passed through the soviet censorship can be false and not reflect authentic ideas of the authors. Archival materials, black copies of the literary works, personal letters and diaries are much more reliable in this aspect.

One of the Georgian authors of the period who writes much about the above-mentioned dichotomy is Guram Rcheulishvili. His nine short-stories published in the Soviet period don’t give any material for our investigation but in the six volumes of his works published in 2002-2007 there are lots of fiction and non-fiction texts about the subject that give us a good basis for sound reasoning. Guram Rcheulishvili started writing soon after the 1956 9 March Tbilisi massacre and continued for four years. He died at 26 but had very interesting views, ideas and refleions on the happenings and situations around him and in the other part of the world.

Mitho-Folklore Paradigms in Georgian Medieval and Modern Literature „According to the Romance „Amirandarejaniani“ by Mose Khoneli and the novel „The Cry of the Goddess“ by Grigol Robakidze )

2022-12-06T15:04:23+04:00

The time distance between the creation of above mentioned literary works is rather long despite it is possible to reveal how undying mitho – folklore images of the Goddess of hunt Dali and her son-demigod Amirani nourished the Georgian literature. The story of parturient Dali, underlay the motif of birth of dermigod Amirani by goddess Dali. She died after the son ‘s birth - Amirani inherited Dali’s mythological symbols . The story continues with Amirani’s exploits and ends with his punishment . Legend of Amirani is spread all over Georgia as well as mythological stories on Dali. Dali reveals not only the features of hunting Goddess, but of the Moon deity, of Morning Star and moreover of the Mother Goddess that embodied fertility. In mythological narratives Dali’s nature is two-fold. If hunter observes her laws , she gives him success and if not she becomes cruel and evil.

Under the demand of the time ( XIIc.) the author of the Georgian medieval secular prose romance ‘’ Amirandarejaniani ‘’ borrowed images from the epic story of Amirani for developing the idea of chivalry- for an idealization of the hero, knight, his noble deeds meeting an extraordinary challenge before claiming his honor. On the other hand , modern writer Grigol Robakidz (XXc.) faced more serious challenges of epoch: re-examination of every aspect of existence , first of all intrinsic worth of the individual.Hence the story of two characters -of the noble woman Ivlite (mortal spitting image of the Goddess Dali ) and young hunter Tanbi depicts their struggle for personal freedom.

Emigration and identity: ‘White Russian’ literature in Italy

2022-12-06T15:06:03+04:00

After the Russian revolution and Civil War, Europe, including Italy, was flooded with masses of emigrants from the former Russian Empire, who, regardless of their ethnic origin, were considered there as 'White Russians'. The emigrants created their own dispora’s literature, in the bosom of which they tried to comprehend the causes of the catastrophe and find their place in European civilisation. The most significant literary works were created in Paris (I. Bunin, B. Zaitsev, P. Krasnov, etc.), which - through such intermediaries as E. Lo Gatto - found their Italian readers. The emigrant writers who lived in Italy (M. Pervukhin, A. Amfiteatrov, M. Semyonov, Yu. Danzas, etc.) primarily produced journalism in an anti-Bolshevik vein, which was supported by the Mussolini regime. The novel Ex Russi by R. Küfferle, a native of St Petersburg, though can be regarded as a landmark, attempting to make sense of the diaspora’s identity. The work of Essad Bey, a Baku native who emigrated to Berlin, stands out: having mystified his origins and presenting himself as a Muslim prince, he published widely in Italy his texts and also introduced the first book on emigration itself, White Russia. Italian official circles of the time were wary of emigrants from the former Russian Empire, suspecting communist, socialist and republican agitators among them and imposing a tacit police control.

“Laughter” or “Tears”?

2022-12-06T15:08:05+04:00

The clarification of the functions of the marginal details is important for complex themes and motifs of “Doctor Faustus”. We consider two details – 'laughter' and 'tears' – in the context of the strings of words that run throughout the text space of “Doctor Faustus”. Adrian Leverkühn's “laughing” in its basic meaning points to the loneliness of the individual, to the isolation of man from the rest of the world and to the closedness within himself. “Tears” have been used throughout human history, and particularly in the Christian religion, as a symbol of mourning, repentance, and catharsis. In the novel, the tear detail serves as a counterweight to evil and cruelty, and consequently signifies the victory of good over evil, of the genuinely human over the inhuman, the satanic. In this meaning, the teardrop detail is contrasted with the leitmotif detail “of laughter”. On this basis, one can state that in the text under study there is an antithesis of evil and good, or of the victory of evil and the triumph of good, represented in the novel by two leitmotif details: “Laughter” D “Tears”.

We trace the joint movement of the word-row details “laughter” and “tears” throughout the text, infer their meaning in the main character's life, and determine the frequency of their use in the text.

Quantitatively, laughing details dominate very strongly, but towards the end the tearing details already predominate. The crux of the matter is that the string of words ends with a teardrop detail.

In summary, it can be said that at the end of the work Adrian Leverkühn is no longer laughing, he is crying. So here is the triumph of good over evil. Adrian Leverkühn moves away from the Devil and approaches the God.

The Meeting of East and West as Literary Theme in Arabic Novels of 20th Century

2022-12-06T15:09:30+04:00

The conference paper provides discussion of the issue of meeting of east and west and confrontation of the cultures in the Arabic Novels written from 30s to 60s of the 20^th century. Interesting similarities can be found in the novels dealing with the issues of meeting of east and west and based on these similarities certain literary universalities can be found in the themes taken for discussion of Arabic prose. The fables of the novels are similar: the main character is in the center of meeting of two – eastern and western cultures, he is brought up in the traditional Muslim family, leaves for Europe to receive education where, as a result of collision with the western values, suffers mental block, the problem of cultural identity is very acute. The main character is confused, he transforms and after many years returns to his native country absolutely changed, though, after sharing European civilization and cultural traditions, feels estranged in his native country, and his self-identification crisis becomes deeper. In sculpturing of the main character the significant role is given to on one hand European and on the other – eastern woman. The metaphor of romantic relations is some kind of norm in such novels, they symbolize different cultures. In relations with the western woman the main character attempts to join her culture and later, after returning to his native country, he strives for reintegration with the eastern society through marriage with the eastern woman.

In Arabic literature of 20^th century, the novels dealing with the meeting of east and west, describe psychological development of the main character transformed after meeting with the western culture and attempting to get the sense of purpose, place in his society. Protagonist’s intention is to reconcile two different sets of cultural values. It is the impression that such texts are the hybrid literary place for the writer where he attempts to create the third space from reasonable synthesis of the eastern and western values.

An Analysis of the Metamorphosis Plots of Indian Mythology

2022-12-06T15:12:24+04:00

Metamorphosis refers to the transformation between humans and animals, plants as well as inanimate objects. Metamorphosis plots can be found in the myths of all nations all over the world, and Indian myths are no exception. Metamorphosis plots in ancient Indian mythology can be classified into three categories: general transformations, gods’ incarnations and reincarnation. General transformations are the most common metamorphosis in mythology. Whether it is a god, a human or a monster, it can metamorphose into other forms. The gods’ incarnations are numerous in Indian mythology. Three major gods have repeatedly come down to maintain the order of world. The reincarnation theory is a special product of Indian metamorphosis. The causes of these three kinds of the metamorphoses are different, but they are closely related. Firstly, the original thoughts of the primitives are the fundamental reason, and they thought that there is no clear boundary between man and other natural things. This thought has developed into a philosophical concept of "Brahmatmaikyam", which is not only an important cause of gods’ incarnations, but also created the strong tolerance and vitality of Indian culture. Secondly, the primitive view regards soul as the essence of life. By entering the reincarnation cycle, old lives come into new bodies and realize the metamorphosis. The reincarnation of soul developed into a reincarnation system in Indian culture. Both reasons are based on universal primitive thoughts, but after the development and creation of the Indian, they were tagged by Indian cultural characteristics and so distinguished from other nations’ systems; at the same time, metamorphosis has become a mythological method for Indians to bridge the gap between its own culture and other cultures and to construct a cultural community.

The Variation of Minimalism Music Techniques in Chinese Contemporary Music

2022-12-06T16:18:54+04:00

Minimalism music is one of the most influential music genres in the 20th century. Since its introduction into China, contemporary Chinese composers have realized the variations of its techniques in pitch, rhythm, structure, timbre and phase shifting based on the local context. This paper, from the perspective of Variation Theory, analyzes the specific cases and causes of minimalism music’s variation in Chinese contemporary music. According to the Variation Theory, heterogeneous civilizations can promote the creative transformation of culture in the process of collision and blending. By studying the variation cases of minimalism music, we can explore the difference, innovation and internal law of interrelated music phenomena, so as to present a diversified and closely connected world music landscape.

Romantic irony

2022-12-06T16:22:37+04:00

Irony theory originated from ancient Greek philosophy, inherited from Socrates’ ironic aphorism, and inspired by the New Criticism and postmodern irony trend. There is no precise definition of irony in Western poetic philosophy, and irony has been subject to controversy in the discourse of literary criticism. Irony is not only a rhetorical style, but also a form of paradox and a poetic discourse. In the early German Romantic era, irony made a leap from rhetoric to aesthetics, and this leap was essentially a revolution of poetic philosophy, in which logic and transcendence reflected each other, and poetics and philosophy were interwoven and fused. We search for the philosophical foundation of romantic irony, explore the double power of irony theory, and ask about the real demands behind ironic words, in order to outline the evolutionary trajectory of F.Schlegel’s thought and theory, so as to discover the theoretical foundation laid by early German Romanticism for the development of European and American literature.

Pour une littérature internationale déglobalisée Le cas de la littérature arménienne au XXe siècle

2022-12-06T16:23:53+04:00

À l’ère de la mondialisation, la littérature est de plus en plus perçue dans une approche globale. La littérature comparée, héritant de la Weltliteratur, est devenue le lieu d’un rapprochement entre les littératures nationales, auquel a succédé l’approche transnationale consistant à examiner invariants et différences au-delà de la typologie traditionnelle ayant pour socle la nation. La course à la globalisation amène même à concevoir une ère «posttransnationale».

Or, la perception d’une littérature selon des caractéristiques nationales (du point de vue culturel ou linguistique) a-t-elle toujours une validité ? Dans quelle mesure est-il possible de concevoir une littérature internationale déglobalisée, sans pour autant tomber dans une approche strictement locale ? On cherchera à examiner, à partir de l’exemple arménien au XX^e siècle, la possibilité d’une littérature à la fois universelle et nationale. En faisant partie du vaste corpus de la littérature mondiale, la littérature arménienne perd-elle pour autant sa dimension nationale ? Et cette dimension propre à chaque nation ne réside-t-elle pas dans la différence d’expression d’une langue à l’autre et d’une culture à l’autre, y compris dans la formation des courants majeurs et des marges?

En fait, une littérature dite « nationale » tient forcément compte de la complexité du monde dans laquelle elle s’inscrit. Elle fait partie d’un ensemble tout en ayant ses spécificités. Altéritaire dans son principe même, puisque traduisible, elle parle de l’autre dans une langue autre… pouvant à son tour être (re)traduite dans la langue de cet autre qu’elle évoque! Le cas s’illustre particulièrement dans la littérature arménienne contemporaine qui, dans une même langue, exprime aussi bien le patriotisme que la dénationalisation; la culture, l’acculturation et l’hybridation ; le terreau national et l’exil en diaspora; la nostalgie et la plénitude. En définitive, il semblerait que la littérature internationale, déglobalisée, exprime le foisonnement des relations mondiales et l’irréductibilité de ses composantes: c’est là son fructueux paradoxe.

(Trans)cultural Voices of the East and the West in Jhumpa Lahiri’s and Anita Rau Badami’s Literary Creations

2022-12-06T16:26:03+04:00

The present paper aims to develop a comparative perspective on Jhumpa Lahiri’s and Anita Rau Badami’s visions of transcultural interactions as illustrated by their fiction of migration. Contemporary writers of Indian origins living in the USA and Canada, Lahiri and Badami place their Indian protagonists in transnational regimes of belonging, either engaged in mobility across physical borders, between India, America and Canada and/or connected by various networks of (tele)communication. Consequently, the theme of migration/border crossing, so prominent in their literary creations translates as dialogues and intersections between Eastern and Western cultural paradigms. This discussion focuses on the transnational literary space created by the two authors in order to highlight processes of cultural (ex)change experienced by the Indian characters, whether at home or abroad. Because most of the protagonists are female (trans)migrants engaged in various patterns of transition, the argument will examine the intersection between Hindu gender and caste ideologies, North American discourses of identity and theories regarding mobility, empowerment and belonging. Therefore, the present research sets out to establish whether the act of crossing physical/national borders also entails a process of cultural transgression that may possibly lead to syntheses between Eastern and Western cultural models. Moreover, the argument also aims to establish whether the protagonists’ transnational experiences generate hybrid identities, and whether one can identify nuances of this cultural hybridity. Which cultural values are negotiated/reshaped in the transition from India to America and Canada? Are there instances of non-migrant characters which transgress conventional roles without crossing the physical borders of nations? Do these authors present transnational mobility as an empowering mechanism across generations?

Philosophy and Poetry

2022-12-06T16:27:38+04:00

The article observes the Self-image structure in the works of Georgian Romanticist poets (Al. Chavchavadze, Gr. Orbeliani and Nic. Baratashvili), which is compared with Self-conception in the philosophical system of I.G. Fixte. It has been found that in these poet’s works cognizing of Self essence is realized in the same ways, which is observed in philosophy, that is, the Self poetic image has a notional structure. After that the problem of genesis of notional and picturesque thinking and their correlation in the antique epoch are being analyzed. It is mentioned that during the antique epoch, while appearing abstract thinking the image carried out the function of notion, but at the of Romanticism epoch, when the object of philosophical reflection was the most important notion – Self’s notion – the image (in particular, Self~s image) was carrying out the same function.

Oriental World in a Modern Novel

2022-12-06T16:29:07+04:00

In the cultural sciences, the West and the East are seen as two fundamentally different types of worldview and social order; “They constantly interact, assimilate each other's values, enrich each other“ - says researcher J. Stidman. If earlier it was thought that Eastern and Western cultures did not intersect, as the famous English writer R.S. "The West is the West, the East is the East, and they will never meet," Kipling said.

West and East are distinguished by many characteristics, including a view of the world and the definition of a person's place in it. The novel "Princess Diaries" by the American writer Jean Sesson tells the story of these two different worlds, which are works of the epistolary genre characteristic of Western literature. In it, an Arab princess tells the story of the unjust status of Arab women in the form of diaries. One of the main problems of modern life is the so-called gender problem, which was talked about openly in the 70s of the 20th century. An unusually bold woman who can resist an unjust tradition. The own voice of the author is lost in the work, we can assume that it has each narrator, which is one of the distinctive features of postmodern literature.

Based on an ideological-artistic analysis of literary Orientalism, the work "Oriental World in a Modern Novel" discusses the interplay of Eastern and Western traditions, the status of women, their role and struggle against injustice, disenfranchisement, the topic of historical East-West culture and the issue of confrontation.

Lu Xun, Nietzsche, and the Power of Self-Transcendence

2022-12-06T16:30:47+04:00

“My works are too dark, because I feel that only ‘darkness and nothingness’ are ‘existent’; yet I am still determined to fight against them in despair, therefore, I voiced many contentious views.” This self-appraisal by Lu Xun (1881–1936), the greatest 20^th-century Chinese writer, captures the extraordinary engagement with nihilism that lies at the heart of his thinking. Rather than taking nothingness as a sheer negation of life that should be eliminated, Lu Xun’s resistance to nihilism embraces nothingness as the constitutive exteriority of existence, as the necessary risk that life has to face in order to renew and recreate itself. This distinct stance is crystalized in his conception of the power of self-transcendence, which places the tension between being and nonbeing at the heart of living and affirms the self-transcending momentum of power as the new ground of meaning.

This paper examines the notion of the power of self-transcendence that Lu Xun upheld in his response to the crisis of meaning in modernity. Besides providing a basic explication of this notion in the context of Lu Xun’s thinking, I also explore its broader intellectual significance through a global comparison with Nietzschean philosophy, which exerted a formative influence on Lu Xun during his youthful years. On one hand, Lu Xun’s conception of the power of self-transcendence strikes a deep resonance with the Nietzschean project of overcoming nihilism, as both hinge upon the affirmation of nothingness as the constitutive exteriority of life. On the other hand, while Nietzsche’s primary objective¾in response to the metaphysical tradition of Western culture¾is to break open the spiritual enclosure of being to the vital becoming of life, Lu Xun’s particular concern¾in response to the correlative thinking of Chinese culture¾is to inculcate a greater sense of differentiation into the immanent flow of life.

A Review of Zhang Xudong's Land, Life and Samsara – Reading Life and Death are Wearing Me Out from the perspective of structuralism literary theory and western sinology

2022-12-06T16:32:27+04:00

In the 1980s and 1990s, structuralism was translated and introduced into the mainland China along with the Western cultural boom, but there are still few papers that study Mo Yan's novels from the perspective of structuralism. Zhang Xudong, in his article Land, Life and Samsara—Reading Life and Death are Wearing Me Out analyzed the linguistic features and themes of Mo Yan's works by five codes extracted in the structuralism literary theory, which can enrich the theoretical methods of Mo Yan studies in China and play a positive academic influence in the exchange between Chinese and Western literature. Meanwhile, Zhang Xudong’s native consciousness as a Chinese sinologist and his awareness of the historical context of contemporary China also made him shorten the distance between Western theory and the experience of Chinese works in the sinological areas, playing a unique bicultural cross-border role.

Palimpsest Pirates: Modern Japan’s Piracy of British Maritime Culture and Nautical Narrative

2022-12-06T16:34:10+04:00

In 19th-century Britain, the fate of Carthage, which was in conflict with the Roman Empire, was often referred to as a cautionary tale for commercial empires. Similarly, in late 19th-century Japan, when powers struggled for dominance, the British navy, merchant marines, and nautical fiction were presented as models for ideal maritime states. As a result of accelerated modernization and expansionism from the 1920s onward, Japanese imperialism came into conflict with British imperialism. Furthermore, the promotion of maritime trade and security was heavily promoted as a way of undermining British supremacy in the East. In this Anglo-Japanese context, the vice-admiral G. A. Ballard emphasized in The Influence of the Sea on the Political History of Japan (1921) that Japan was historically not an isolated island nation but a maritime empire. The restructured discourse of history, which drew on the discourse of the yellow peril, exacerbated and popularized a discourse in Japan that stated that Britain had established its hegemony through piracy. It is hardly surprising that the Spanish Black Legend that circulated in Britain was adapted for this purpose. Similar to how Spanish conquest and plunder was exaggerated to justify British privateering, British piracy was used as propaganda in Japan. Ironically, Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) was appropriated and adapted primarily as a popular nautical narrative. Another source of inspiration was British explorer John Davis, who was killed off Sumatra by his captive Japanese pirates in 1605, and the work of fiction Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in which the namesake wandering sailor denounces British colonialism and describes his capture by Japanese pirates.

The 1960s as a landmark of Ukrainian literary emancipation

2022-12-06T16:35:31+04:00

The term “global sixtieth” has persisted in historiography since the 2000s denoting the revolutionary movements united by common discontent with political, socioeconomic, and cultural status quo. Although its national literary manifestations differed, they appear to be interconnected regarding the attempts to establish other political and aesthetical orders. The comparative literary research under J. Ranciere's concept of disagreement explores the liberation effect the 1960s manifested in Ukrainian literature contrasted to American and French. It is stated the former pursued double emancipation through popular poetry – from the imposed ideological system, and centuries of national oppression.

In the Free Bloc of ostentatious civil liberty, the 1960s literature is marked as aesthetically and ideologically modernized. American literature expands towards the colonized voices (Black Arts Movement), the gender spectrum (B. Friedan, S. Plath, G. Greer), and the anti-establishment alternatives (Ken Kesey, R. Brautigan, T. Wolfe). A European counterpart is represented by avant-garde tendencies (Tel Quel, Oulipo, Le théâtre de l'absurde) complemented by feminist and postcolonial as well (écriture féminine, Afropessimism, Négritude reinterpretations). Such “erotics of art” advanced countercultural direct opposition to the dominant faith and ultimate values of the pre-revolutionary era.

In Soviet Ukraine, deprived of the freedom of speech and direct action, the literature field becomes a battlefield for evasive maneuvering. Instead of countercultural gestures, Ukrainian poets (M. Vingranovskiy, L. Kostenko, V. Symonenko) initiate new popular literature, different from the demands of socialist realism. It promotes engaging genres as lyric poetry and romance, approaching popular leitmotifs as national self-awareness and personal values – themes, deafened under the totalitarian reign of the USSR. Thus, what is called to reestablish the partition of the perceptible is, paradoxically, popular poetry. As the aesthetical spectrum of the coevals was reached only 30 years later, popular literature played an ambivalent role of making literary Ukrainian 1960s a decade of both cultural retardation and liberation through intentional latency.

On the Images of Dystopia and Heterotopia of “Future Shanghai” in Western Science Fiction Movies

2022-12-06T16:36:39+04:00

“Future Shanghai” in Western science fiction movies presents two kinds of city images, which are dystopia and heterotopia. The image of dystopia is filled with violence and crisis, or being closed and restricted, or alienated and indifferent. Meanwhile, as the image of heterotopia, the city seems strange, isolating, or mixing. These kinds of city images are the blending of other space and future time, fiction and reality in “Future Shanghai”. Approaches from representation to simulacra are adopted to construct “Future Shanghai” in western science fiction movies. As a narrative space, “Future Shanghai” plays the role of story container as well as narrative momentum. In reality, Shanghai’s sense of the future and of place become the basis for “Future Shanghai” construction. The enlightenment from “Future Shanghai” in western science fiction movies is mainly human beings’ fear and anxiety of the hidden crisis of science and technology development behind the dystopia and the self-projection of the west to the east behind heterotopia. At the same time, the value of science fiction movies can be found as well on the city’s “Future Archaeology”, and the limitations of science fiction movies to the construction of city image.

Depictions of Mad Women Figures in Turkish and Japanese Literature of the late 19th - early 20th Century

2022-12-06T16:37:42+04:00

Focusing on female figures, this research aims to clarify the reception of western discourse on madness in Japanese and Turkish novels influenced by naturalism. It approaches the issue of madness through the lenses of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) who pointed out socio-cultural embeddedness of madness and its role in defining the limits of “normality” in the West.

During the late 19^th century, madness became one of the centerpieces of that-time literary works. Among the dominant literary movements of that period, naturalism was notable for amalgamating culturally motivated and scientific approaches to mental disorders. Notably, Japan, and Turkey (Ottoman Empire) experienced modernization and westernization around the same time. Towards the end of the 19^th century, naturalism was among the main motives in both countries’ literature. For example, hysteric and mad female protagonists were depicted in such literary works as Tōson Shimazaki (1872-1943)’s Rōjō (1903) and Ahmet Mithat (1444-1912)’s Hayal ve Hakikat (1892). Each country had its unique accumulated knowledge on madness. A famous example is “Layla and Majnun”, an Arabic love story where protagonist descends into madness due to his love which arguably takes its origins in Sufi philosophy. On the other hand, Japan had “Monogurui Noh”, a theater where a central character loses the beloved one and goes insane. It is evident that while the perception of madness for both countries was inseparable from sacredness in earlier times, the late-19^th-century literary works unprecedentedly linked female madness to the discourse of (ab-)normality.

This article argues that despite thematic diversity, both countries’ authors had a tendency of depicting women who had deviant social behaviors by labeling them as mad. On the other hand, following differences exist between Turkey and Japan. While Turkish writers used hysteria for validating their portrayals of mad women with scientific proofs, Japanese authors tended to have more traditional depictions of a mad woman that consequently gave a way to stigmatic images imprinted with sexuality.

Persian court poetry and troubadours’ lyrics: commune features poetics

2022-12-06T16:38:56+04:00

The first researchers of medieval poetry of the East and West made the same claims to the poetry of the Provencal troubadours and Persian court poets of the X-XII centuries, declaring both traditions of versification monotonous and boring. Only since the middle of the twentieth century, when the attitude towards the Medieval era radically changed, the process of serious study of the categories of medieval culture, the principles of artistic consciousness and normative poetics began. A comparison of the motives of the author's self-consciousness in the poetry of the Provencal troubadours and Persian court poets of the X-XII centuries gives a picture of the generality of the principles of creativity and the criteria for the perfection of poetic word.

This commonality is manifested not only in the competitive nature of poetic practice, but also in the specifics of the components of aesthetic impression. The report uses concrete examples of the use of similar motifs from Persian and Provencal lyrics to show the poets' attitude to their work as a craft, their awareness in the use of decorating techniques, their dialogue with each other. With all the difference between the two poetic traditions, they show common ways of learning and connecting to the chain of predecessors. The combination of normativity and individual authorial initiative inherent in both literary communities is dictated by common ideological attitudes characteristic of the entire medieval social order. The poetic schools are formed and function on the basis a single standard of poetic language, in which the prestige of education and elegance is high. In this context, the cult of the erudite poet develops with his high social status and the significance of his functions in the court universe. The discussion of poetics and style in poetry itself is a characteristic feature of both traditions.

Comparative Analysis of Knut Hamsun's "Pan" and Mikheil Javakhishvili's "White Collar"

2022-12-06T16:41:04+04:00

Scandinavia and the Caucasus are culturally distant, just as geographically. On the other hand, in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries socio-political situation in Georgia and Norway has fueled national identity in the literature of both countries. This contradictory situation creates an affluent area of study for comparative literature, Which has already been realized in K. Loria's articles about Christian Krog and Egnate Ninoshvili, Henrik Ibsen, and Vazha-Pshavela, and what is especially interesting for us about Norwegian neo-romanticism and Georgian modernism. Knut Hamsun's "Pan" and Mikheil Javakhishvili's "White Collar" are remarkable examples of Norwegian neo-romanticism and Georgian modernism.

"Pan" and "White Collar" belong to the same era and combine their themes and similarities between the characters. The main character of both novels is a young man faced with a choice between two lives. On one side is rural, primitive life; on the other is the bohemian life of modern society. The lives in "Pan" and "White Collar" are represented by female characters, so it is promising to compare the works from a gender perspective. However, the perspectives are even more diverse. For example, both novels depict naturalism and scientific-technological themes.

The "White Collar" was published in 1926, 32 years later Hamsun "Pan." Due to the similarities, it is impossible to avoid the issue of possible influence, especially since Javakhishvili himself was an avid reader and intellectual. He spoke several foreign languages, and by that time, "Pan" had already been translated into those languages. In addition, Javakhishvili was well acquainted with the work of the great Norwegian author Henrik Ibsen, about which in 1906 he published a fascinating article in the newspaper "Iveria." Given these circumstances, it is likely that Javakhishvili is familiar with and even considers this novel by Hamsun. We will try to take a deeper look at this issue in our article.

Echoes of Darkness: Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, Petrofiction, Ecology & the Metonymy of Global South Oil Extraction in Nigeria’s Delta Region

2022-12-06T16:42:06+04:00

This paper examines the Nigerian novelist Helon Habila’s book Oil on Water from a broadly ecocritical perspective. Ecocentrism is examined and interrogated as a theoretical framework while simultaneously being brought into dialogue with the more well-known and well-established paradigm of postcolonialism.

Oil on Water is a leading example of the genre of petrofiction and of literature’s ability to represent and critique the flow of oil (from Nigeria) to the wider world and uses oil as a metonymic device to understand the outward trajectories of resources and the inward trajectory of excavation, exploitation and abandonment which characterise the Global North’s relationship with the Global South.

By turning a critical eye to the novel, narratives of economic exploitation and resource control in Nigeria’s Delta region are examined through a literary-critical perspective which aims to locate literature’s discursive power to represent and understand the ecological devastation being wrought on Nigeria’s Delta region.

These extractive industries in the Global South are placed under scrutiny to understand their role in the persistent underdevelopment of African society in the time of the post-colony as well as the psychic and somatic effects that they have on indigenous communities in Nigeria and the implications this has for a wider, more global critique of the extractive capacities of late-stage capitalism and the environmental destruction it entails.

The novel Oil on Water’s echoes and illusions to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are also examined from an explicitly ecocritical perspective to draw attention to and relate the parallels and differences between colonial and postcolonial regimes of order and their attitudes towards nature and ecology. Thus, drawing explicit parallelism between the capitalism of Conrad’s colonial time and how these apparatuses have evolved over the course of the last century and the implications this has for local ecology and Global North/South relations.

The Crisis of Sovereignty and the Return of Melancholy in Post-WWII American and Persian Fiction

2022-12-06T16:43:30+04:00

This paper investigates the relationship between melancholy and the development of American and Iranian literary discourses as responses to the crisis of postwar sovereignty. While situating itself against the complicated backdrop of US/Iran relations since the Second World War, it explores the impact of religion on the formation of political sovereignty and on representations of the self in Post-WWII Persian and American fiction. Working at the intersection of political theory, psychoanalysis, and literature, it begins with the “Tehran Conference” in 1943. The Conference, which took place at the Soviet Union embassy behind closed doors, was the first Allied meeting with Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in attendance. However, the new Iranian sovereign, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, appointed after the Allied invasion and occupation of Iran (1941-1946), remained unaware and excluded from it. What took place in this room during the meeting was crucial not only for the trajectory of the postwar world but also for its setting, Iran, located at the frontier of empires and one of the major oil-producing states. The interdisciplinary approach of this paper offers an alternative perspective on this scene from the Second World War history. In juxtaposing these south-north narrative worlds, this paper makes lines of connection and comparison across the boundaries of American and Iranian cultures that have existed on two sides of a political divide ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and its aftermath. Although these literary discourses are different and the products of two very different traditions, this paper shows how they are involved in an inverse yet complementary relationship. It identifies a dialectical power relationship between the two forms of political sovereignty that shape these aesthetic works across this divide.

Borges and the literary space of the avant-garde in Latin America

2022-12-06T16:45:00+04:00

“When I came back from Europe in 1921, I came bearing the banners of ultraism. I am still known to literary historians as ‘the father of Argentine ultraism’” (Borges 1971, 155). In his autobiographical essay, originally published in The New Yorker in 1970, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges recalled the avant-garde project developed in Buenos Aires in the early 1920s. Although he later distanced himself from the avant-garde aesthetics, Borges was a dedicated member of the ultraist group (initially in Spain, where the movement was created, and later in Argentina) as remarked by Serge Fauchereau: “Devenu plus tarde conservateur, Borges n’aura de cesse de minimiser sa copieuse contribution aux publications ultraïstes.... Ses propres manifestes sont pourtant les plus consistant du mouvement” (Fauchereau 2016, 309). Analyzing Borges’s texts concerning ultraism published in the early 1920s and his personal correspondence from the period, the presentation will assess the cosmopolitan and national elements characteristic of his literary project (Sarlo 1993). Secondly, it will be evaluated how these elements, which according to Sarlo are combined to form a distinct literary space (“las orillas”), might define a specific center/periphery model of literary circulation.

Exploring Transdisciplinary Futures of Global South: A South-South Dialogue in Translation Studies

2022-12-06T16:47:38+04:00

Since the late 1960s, a substantial quantity of literature has been produced in response to the discussion over the North-South split. South is a notion that deals with geographical representations of inequality. It is useful for assessing difficulties affecting peripheral civilizations, but it does not have much to say about issues affecting countries that are classified as 'Northern' societies. The geographical region that has been termed as 'Global South' has always been considered at the receiving end of ‘theory’ with no exception in the field of translation studies Translation Studies, like other disciplines of social sciences and liberal arts, has treated the Eurocentric ideas as universal and thereby homogenized the differences by non-recognizing the non-European ideas. When we discuss translation studies discipline in the Global South or form syllabus, have we ever referred “Equivalence theory”, “Skopos theorie”, “Polysystem Theory” as Western translation theories. We have not because we have internalized these theories from Europe as universal and the concepts from the non-European space as ‘other’, as ‘area’. The Global South in terms of knowledge production or if we think specifically from the context of the discipline of Translation Studies, has been non-recognised, silenced, disregarded, and marginalised.

The idea of ‘non-recognition’ therefore, should be used as a weapon, political, social, racial, academic to challenge the subtlety through which the Global North operates and tags everything as ‘global’, ‘universal’. Can the notion of the South be applied to areas of social life that are not directly related to development differences, such as those involving the formation of one's own identity? In terms of knowledge generation, the South has shown to be an excellent location to dump the theories of Humanities, Natural / Pure Sciences from the Global North without taking into consideration the fundamental difference between these two halves. Can we, scholars from Global South challenge the unidirectional traffic of knowledge production and theorisation of it in the Global North and then setting it as a homogenous ‘norm’ in the Global South? The paper argues that a South-South dialogue is necessary which will try to erase the ‘universal’ imagination of the discipline by thinking deeply and discursively about alternative discourses of translation as a field of study from Global South.

The Paradoxes of Marginalit(ies)

2022-12-06T16:49:29+04:00

This paper discusses some of the barriers to the comparative study of Indigenous literature alongside non-Indigenous literature. These barriers include the Eurocentrism of traditional comparative literature, certain aspects of postcolonial theory and, above, all the assumption that Indigenous and Western epistemologies belong to separate and incommensurable worlds. It examines some recent theoretical and critical approaches that offer ways to bridge the two worlds and make comparative literature an ethical space of mutual respect and understanding.

The paper proposes to deal with marginality in the formation of the epistemic canon (“the mainstream”) and the production of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences. By employing the vocabulary of marginality (“marginal,” “margins,” “luminal,” “threshold,” as well as dichotomies such as “minor-major,” “center-periphery”), it is proposed to shift from a discussion of the canon in terms of just one category of “marginals” (a certain race, class, gender etc.) to considering this complex concept in terms of a plurality of players and factors related to marginality broadly defined, some of which have little or nothing to do with power structures and dichotomies. Marginality is thus conceived of as an epistemic category and not as a power status.

At the heart of the argument lie the following questions: What is the relation between the concept of marginality and the construction of the epistemic canon in social and human sciences? How can such a theory account for the creation and dissemination of knowledge? The general goal is to explore the role of marginality—conceived of as epistemic category rather than power status—as well as the periphery-center dynamics. The idea of marginality, as illustrated by marginal authors, can shed fresh light on the explicit or tacit rules undergirding the formation of the canon as well as the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

Magical-realistic motifs and mystic rituals in modern Georgian and Latin American novels

2022-12-06T16:50:26+04:00

Typological analogies are often revealed in fiction texts that are created in different cultural-geographic areas. This fact can be accounted for not only by similar fundamental changes in economic-cultural spheres but by many other reasons as well. Such analogies are particularly frequent when revealed through the usage of the method of magical realism.

The present research analyzes such analogies. For this purpose, we will compare a novel by Peruvian Nobel Prize Winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, Lituma en los Andes (Death in the Andes) (1993), with the novel by a renowned Georgian writer Otar Chiladze, A Man Was Going Down the Road (1973), and with the novel, published one year ago, Notes of a Kipchak who Lost One Eye or Deshti-Kipchak (2020) by a modern Georgian writer Beka Kurkhuli.

The novel by Mario Vargas Llosa bears very interesting resemblances with both Georgian texts. Alongside the story that unfolds realistically, in both texts, by Beka Kurkhuli and by Llosa, there exist parallel planes, or levels, where the actions develop through mythical time-space dimensions and the real characters of the novels simultaneously become the partakers in secretive, mystic-magical rituals (the Goddess of the desert Guli in Kurkhuli’s novel; and an evil creature Pishtaco in Llosa’s novel. Both creatures eat humans).

As for the resemblances between the novels by Otar Chiladze and by Llosa, semi-real and semi-mystical location – dining room – can be singled out. In Chiladze’s novel it is a forty-stepped cellar of Bakha. In Llosa’s novel, it is an underground dining hall of Dionysius. These locations play significant roles in unfolding the plots in both novels and even define the destinies of the main characters to a certain extent. All three authors refer to myths as archetypes and as alternative realities of reflecting and transposing modern contexts.

The analysis is based on one of the universal research methods, semiotics, through which certain functional meaning-bearing signs, symbols, codes and structures in fiction are decoded and interpreted, and therefore, typological nature of the mentioned analogies is underscored and validated in all three novels.

The Time of Others: The Present-tense Novel as a Challenge to Normative Temporalities

2022-12-06T16:51:32+04:00

Since the mid-2000s, both research and the press have been following the global rise of the present-tense fiction with growing attention. The initial apprehensions about the present-tense novels, such as them being merely a “bad influence” of Hollywood, have given way to appreciation of their heterogeneity and narrative complexity. Yet an idea of why the present tense has been on the rise is still lacking.

Building upon recent studies and my own postdoctoral research, I propose in this paper a new perspective on the present-tense fiction. I argue that its historical rise throughout the 20th century and its recent popularity are due to a narrative asset of the present tense: its ability to convey non-normative temporalities. The present-tense use creates a temporal relation between the narrative act and the narrated events that is inexplicable in terms of linear and teleological concepts of time. Instead, a present-tense narrative can convey ‘fuzzy’, circular, suspended, and other non-normative temporalities, which often manifest a break with the past as the main source of meaning production and a profound uncertainty of the future. This is why the present-tense narration often lends a voice to marginalized subjects such as trauma-ridden people, queer, disabled, and Other narrators; it features in several postcolonial novels and has been especially prominent in feminist fiction. Surveying several noteworthy examples of present-tense fiction from Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964) to JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), and complementing them with examples of German and French present-tense narratives, I demonstrate that the present-tense fiction is not a 21st century trend but a phenomenon with deep roots in the 20th century literatures of and about minorities.

The Campization of Migration: Exploring the Literary Representation of Asylum Seeker Accommodation Post-2015

2022-12-06T16:52:50+04:00

Doreen Massey once noted that, “[w]hatever the abstract concept of place which people hold, there will always be differences, debates, even struggles, about how places are viewed.” (1994: 118f.). Massey concluded that we need to move beyond the social construction of space by also incorporating the spatial construction of the social, i.e., the extent – so Wendy Wolford – to which the physical environment “is internalized, embodied, imagined, and remembered.” (2004: 410). Employing the term of spatial imaginaries, Wolford goes on to define the spatial construction of the social as “cognitive frameworks, both collective and individual, constituted through the lived experiences, perceptions, and conceptions of space itself.” (ibid.).

In the aftermath of large refugee arrivals in 2015, EU regulations and national asylum laws were tightened, especially those regarding reception and accommodation. Indeed, René Kreichauf (2018) points to a concept of ‘campization’ of asylum seekers. Inspired by the transnational turn in modern languages research and the intense political debate around the treatment of asylum seekers, the proposed paper seeks to explore the literary engagement with the reception and accommodation of asylum seekers. Specifically, the paper seeks to take a closer look at the literary representation of the live worlds of asylum seekers in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, Gingen, Gegangen (2015), Rodaan al-Galidi’s Hoe ik talent voor het leven kreeg (2016), and Melatu-Uche Okorie’s This Hostel Life (2018), which are set in Germany, the Netherlands, and Ireland respectively. Central to all three texts is the accommodation of asylum seekers in large-scale, utilitarian and spatially isolated centres which – in a first step – will be analysed by a close reading, taking lead from Kreichauf’s aforementioned claim of campization, Michel de Certeau’s L'invention du quotidien and Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir. In a second step, the paper will return to Doreen Massey and Wendy Wolford’s notion of the spatial imaginary and explore what the authors’ spatial construction of the social means in aesthetic terms, both for the asylum seekers as well as those providing asylum, i.e., the German, Dutch, and Irish community. In a third and concluding step, the paper then seeks to briefly reflect on how these representations relate to their readership and to what extent they act as a literary intervention in the current debate(s).

«Les mots des autres pour le dire»: Voix vulnérables et expérience relationnelle dans quelques textes de Laurent Mauvignier

2022-12-06T16:55:03+04:00

La question relationnelle se retrouve avec éclat dans le paysage littéraire actuel. Les auteurs contemporains s’emparent de projets d’écriture qui englobent plus largement les vies ordinaire, minuscules ou les états de vulnérabilité. Cette littérature remédiatrice[1] donne à entendre la voix des « sans-parts^[2] » et met en lumière les liens faibles^[3] ; embrassant la relation^[4] pensée par Édouard Glissant. Ma communication empruntera cette porte d’entrée vers l’expérience intérieure et son rapport au monde, à travers quelques textes de Laurent Mauvignier. Dans ses textes, la relation à soi-même et à l’autre s’y décline à travers les voix de vies « mineures » ou marginales, bouleversées par un événement dramatique. Au sein de ces livres de voix où polyphonie et monologues intérieurs abondent, la voix comme présence au monde, contribue difficilement à la possibilité d’un nous. J’analyserai comment l’écrivain informe la question relationnelle « à l’épreuve des liens^[5] », en quête d’un ouvert: enfermés dans une parole empêchée, ces êtres en rupture cherchent à entrer en relation et éprouver leur rapport au monde. Mauvignier creuse un «langage intérieur» infiniment riche, afin de dire la blessabilité (injurability) et la vulnérabilité existentielle des sujets

Underneath the Literary Space of Transgender Authorship, the Emergence of an Inoperable Community

2022-12-06T17:12:47+04:00

This communication aims to present an outline of the literary production of transgender authorship in contemporary Brazil from a double perspective: 1) of a production that emerges in contraposition to a literary field that historically has violated transgender existences as much as by stigmatization of characters as due to the impossibilities of this authorship in the ‘National’ literature; 2) and by the power of initiation of an inoperable community, as stated by Jean-Luc Nancy (2016). A production that I identify as, according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri (1977), “minor literature” because of three aspects: 1. written in a language that aims to give life to characters whose experiences of gender and/or sexuality dissidence make the dominant identitarian system, the cisheteronormative system, raves; 2. with a strong connection to the political context; and 3. an individual enunciation that brings to bear the collective action. A variety of voices destined to confirm the literary as a fractured locus of identitarian hegemonies and by doing so, establishing a powerful place of communication for singularities. It is a production that germinated in 1982, with the publication of the autobiographical text A queda para o alto, by Anderson Herzer, but since 2012 has been flourishing with the increase of publications in different textual genders. Considering the lejeunian parameters, this autobiographical production consists of 16 works until 2021. In regards to the fictional and poetical production, according to the research started in 2017, there are at least 50 works. A production that, from the margins, establishes itself in the national literary field as a significant part of the Brazilian Literature and, despite the hegemonies, are also a significant part of the World Literature. An irrefutable invitation to meet characters questioning their being in the world and who, for that reason, keep a powerful common ground to be shared with others.

A Study on the Female Discourse in Alcott’s Work Novels

2022-12-07T12:32:45+04:00

This article is a study of the relevance of Alcott's work novels and female consciousness. The ideology of "separate spheres" [1] prevailing in American society in the 19th century confined women to the family most of the time, but both in reality and in the literary imagination, women were constantly expanding their space outward. The work narrative in Louisa May Alcott's novels reproduces the process of women moving from "private sphere" to "public sphere". This article attempts to interpret this process, read Alcott's work novels in detail through the method of intertextual dialogue between the novel text and other texts, as well as the study of the social and historical context of the novel text, and explore the existence predicament of American women and the evolution of ethical ideas in the 19th century. This research has certain reference significance for gender consciousness and literary writing.

Récits d’enfances mineures dans les Amériques Noires

2022-12-07T12:34:11+04:00

Au croisement des études culturelles, postcoloniales et de genre, ma recherche interroge la notion de littérature mineure à partir de l’œuvre d’auteurs et d’autrices du Brésil, de la Caraïbe et des États-Unis, qui écrivent à la fois pour les adultes et pour les enfants. Pour les deux lectorats, leurs ouvrages portent sur l’histoire et la mémoire esclavagistes et coloniales et leurs répercussions dans les sociétés américaines contemporaines. Ma thèse de doctorat identifie les caractéristiques de cette littérature de jeunesse postcoloniale selon une approche relevant à la fois de l’étude des poétiques comparées et de la sociologie. Elle examine les processus de minoration ou de légitimation à l’œuvre lorsqu’un·e écrivain·e périphérique et minoritaire publie dans un genre littéraire ou un secteur éditorial considéré comme mineur, la littérature de jeunesse. Pour le Congrès de l’ICLA, je souhaite présenter une étude comparée des récits d’enfance (autobiographiques ou non) de quatre romancières contemporaines afrodescendantes nord-américaines et brésiliennes : Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Carolina Maria de Jesus et Conceição Evaristo. Il s’agira d’étudier la poétique des «enfances mineures» dans un corpus à plusieurs échelles de minorité(s), constitué de plumes du canon postcolonial, primées et traduites internationalement, mais aussi de voix plus marginales et encore peu reconnues dans leur pays. Les romancières de la favela appartiennent en effet à ce que la critique brésilienne nomme parfois le «quilombo» éditorial, du nom de la contre-culture de résistance des esclaves marrons.

Life Narratives: Racial Issues

2022-12-07T12:35:51+04:00

The objective of this article will be a comparative analysis of two literary works. One is the trajectory of Carolina Maria de Jesus, 60 years ago, with her “Quarto de Despejo” (Dump Room) (2020 edition) and the other is the repercussion in 2020 of José Falero’s work, “Os Supridores” (The Suppliers). Within this comparative analysis, the question we ask is the same that makes us think about the, among many, reflections on racism in Brazil and how it all appears – or disappears – in the works of male and female black authors. This is the hypothesis that emerges: after so many years the literary situation, literature with black characters and male and female black authors, does not seem to take a different direction. The narratives of the two authors would not have changed regarding the social horizons of the places where they live. The comparative and social analysis will provide these elements in Carolina's autobiographical speech, a life narrative, and in Falero's speech, in literary fiction of youngsters working in a supermarket. And, in this sense, it will also listen to the recent speeches of contemporary writers such as Paulo Scott, Jeferson Tenório and Itamar Vieira Júnior.

Unconscious Motifs and Gender Trouble in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood

2022-12-07T12:39:58+04:00

The above-mentioned article reviews unconscious motifs and gender trouble in Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood. American modernist writer, a member of minorities due to her sexual orientation, had always been considered as an eccentric and audacious person in Parisian society. The characters of Nightwood have to fight against their unconscious that is presented not only as the event of specific period of mankind but the problem existing from ancient times to modern life.

Djuna Barnes shed light on topics and issues that had rarely been discussed publicly, including non-traditional sexual orientation, the characters’ search for status as members of society, and a permanent conflict between conscious and unconscious. These topics are presented within a fictional setting, whereas great importance is attributed to the symbolism of decoration together with the appearance of the characters and each of their gestures. Through the above-mentioned devices, the novel creates a sense of spaciousness and despite presenting one specific epoch, it does not belong to any given period of time because it can be associated with the Elizabethan tragedy as well as with king James’s epoch.

In the article I do analyze the sexual experiences and unconscious desires of Robin Vote, Matthew O’Connor, Nora Flood and Jenny Petherbridge. Robin represents the troubled nature of an animal and child with bisexual desires. Matthew O’Connor is the mythological Tiresias who appears in the novel as a hermaphrodite Parisian gynecologist. Nora Flood and Jenny Petherbridge present lesbian characters with childhood traumas.

“Homelands” in Comparison: Global (In)securities and New Marginalities Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies (2020) and Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland (2017)

2022-12-07T12:41:21+04:00

The paper will read Ayad Akhtar’s acclaimed novel, Homeland Elegies (2020), a fictional memoir that attempts to examine the socially fragmented landscape of the United States during Trump’s presidency alongside Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (2017), a non-fictional book which explores how a growing section of the US working class, facing ongoing poverty and insecurity, has become “houseless”. Interrogating the reach of Trump’s “antisystem” rhetoric to find accolades in his own Pakistani family well as amongst of his AfricanAmerican friends, Akhtar’s novel offers a caleidoscopic vision of the US and reflects upon the ways in which economic neoliberalism reinforced by post-9/11 anxieties led to the nationalist configuration which Michael Moore called “Trumpland.” Bruder’s Nomadland, on the other hand, unveils of how a subculture of nomads, most of them senior citizens who have fallen victim to unemployment, mortgage fraud, job loss, healthcare debt, among other problems, found themselves entering into mobile but highly precarious existence on the road, living in campervans and other motor homes. By evoking imagery associated with the western genre and its role in American history, Bruder’s book and its filmic adaptation by Chloé Zhao, challenge the myth of the white picket fence American “Home,” complementing Akhtar’s vision of migrant communities in the US to show values such as stability and social security have been discarded from current notions of “Homeland.” This paper will finish by contextualizing the above texts within a larger corpus of works to show how these visions of home(lessness) have also found echoes also outside the US. Securitarian policies and configurations of “Home/land,” reinforced after 9/11, led to increasingly biased and discriminatory visions of “Home” and “Security,” whose inhospitable visions of “Home/land” in different parts of the world.

Language and Power: Mutualities Between Malayalam and Arabi-Malayalam and the Making of Mappila Literary

2022-12-07T12:42:35+04:00

The paper largely looks at the history of Arabi-Malayalam, a linguistic form popular among the Mappila community of Malabar region of present state of Kerala, India. I intend to examine Arabi-Malayalam in two historical contexts: (i) Arabi-Malayalam as a linguistic form which is almost defunct now in terms of literary productions is studied along within its mutualities, conflicts and correspondences with Malayalam, emphasizing on the peculiar discursive designs that Malayalam as a linguistic edifice exercises on the inferior vernacular. The study particularly concerns about the historiographical strategies and administrative policies that facilitate to perpetuate the hierarchy and to widen their attributed cultural currency. In other words, the study closely looks at the strategical manoeuvres and epistemological formation of the larger context in which Malayalam manages to perpetuate its dominance over other vernaculars including Arabi-Malayalam. In order to perform the discussion, I work closely with four selected historiographical texts in Malayalam that span across a period as wide as more than a century (1870-2008). I hope that will help to look into the concerned topic diachronically keeping the tendencies of formative phases in view. (ii) Arabi-Malayalam, arguably a scriptorial variant of the dominant regional language Malayalam,^[1] the advent of the printing technology in the mid-nineteenth century has made positive and negative impacts to its growth. Printing technology helped Malayalam to standardise itself into a homogenous whole with mass-produced textual aretefacts, which in effect led to repudiation of Arabi-Malayalam into the cultural periphery. In the larger politico-cultural milieu, this standardisation and linguistic unification led to a considerable shift in the very notion of ‘literacy’. With the state of Kerala being formed in 1956 on the basis of the language spoken in the geographical area, a large population of Mappilas, who had been engaging with Arabi-Malayalam, turned illiterate in the State’s point of view.

Translation as Negotiation of Identity

2022-12-07T12:48:47+04:00

Since translation is a process of transformation or rewriting of a textual material from one language into another, it is a transformation or rewriting of identity. This recreated identity is tripled .The translator is plagued with three identities: his (subjective or social identity), the writer’s, and the reader’s (role or professional identity); i.e., the Self and the Other. The question is which identity has priority over the other in translation? Given the fact that the translator himself approaches a text with orientation, this requires to search the topic from different perspectives of identity: subjectively, socially and professionally. In case that the translator fails to reach reconciliation between the three identities he may resolve to a translation that is ethnocentric (or centered using domestication strategy), or to a decentered one (using foreignization strategy). This ultimately depends on how the translator approaches the text and the attitude with which he sees himself, target culture, and his profession.

This paper will take up the discussion of identity and especially focus on central notions of Homi Bhabha’s cultural theory and their applicability to Translation Studies. It will attempt to illustrate this in the light of the implications of Bhabha’s key concepts on the phenomenon of translation whereby the term “identity”, notably in the context of translation, has to be re-defined taking particularly into account the practice of “negotiation” conceived of as the continuous production of new meaning.

Cultural construction in the translation of Wolf Totem

2022-12-07T12:51:41+04:00

Wolf Totem is a successful semi-autobiographical novel published in 2004, which is about a Chinese student who was sent in 1967 to Inner Mongolia region of China at the peak of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Goldblatt translated the novel form Chinese into English, and the translation which is very hard because it is full of culture-loaded words achieved tremendous success. According to Bassnett’s cultural translation theory, the translation process is also a process of cultural construction of the culture presented in the novel .The significance of this paper lies in the analysis of the translation of culture-loaded words in the English version of Wolf Totem from the perspective of Bassnett’s cultural translation theory. It finds out Goldblatt strives to achieve cultural equivalence, and takes domestication as the major translation strategy. Bassnett’s cultural translation theory can help translators select appropriate translation strategies, so as to promote communication between cultures.

On minor/small literatures and difficult pasts: literary mnemonics between the local and the global

2022-12-07T12:52:45+04:00

Whether it is mapped on the coordinates of imagined communities or not, literary discourse plays an important role in the ways in which different collectives engage with their respective difficult pasts. It portrays and performs memory, but can also evoke various responses: from empathy and solidarity to protest and moral outrage. One can imagine that a normative approach to “world literature” would focus on the positive aspects of memories shared on a global scale, but likewise that the coming to terms with local histories in smaller literatures somehow need to manage its position vis-à-vis global representations. An important question therefore is to what extent the status of a literature as minor or small correlates to the ways in which collective or cultural memory unfolds – especially if the latter is considered against global notions of Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit. If collective or cultural remembering materializes in the tension between the local and the global, what effect does the status of the literature, in which these memories are expressed, have?

The trajectory of Afrikaans literature is thought-provoking, in that its engagement with the South African Apartheid past could be read against the background of both collective memory (positioned between the local and the global) and a small literature with a minor status. This paper will explore some of these issues, with specific reference to Afrikaans narrative fiction of the 1990s: both the literature of the time and its critical reception to a large extent have conformed to a normative politics of regret. The hypothesis is that the latter can directly be related to the socio-political position of Afrikaans, which represented a combination of minor and major elements. The exploration of these elements furthermore can illuminate some of the dynamics of the South African memory culture.

Reading African Literature in Bengali: A Study from Bangladeshi Perspectives

2022-12-07T12:53:49+04:00

Literature is usually defined by its content, not by its language. Modern African literature has reached the international readership mostly in English language. Africa, with its more than two thousand languages, can be comprehensible to a huge number of monolingual or bi-lingual readers of the world through translation. In Bangladesh a vast majority of readers are monolingual and they can read only in Bengali language. So, to be comprehensible to the Bangladeshi readership African literature requires to be translated into Bengali. Many prominent translators have translated and are still translating a good number of African literary texts. But it is noticed that the speed and impulse which are invested in translating a European or American or Latin American literary text are not employed in translating an African literary text. It may be because of the gap of communication with African cultures and languages and the linguistic limitations to negotiate with the creoles and pidgins used in African literary texts. Besides, it cannot be denied that translation is never apolitical. True, translation brings about re-creation through intertextuality and negotiations between two diverse cultures and languages. Interaction today is possible to a remarkable extent through internet and hi-speed communication media. But in postcolonial situation in context of neo-colonization and crony capitalism, economic realities and psychic boundaries deeply impact the process of fortification of the dialogues between two diverse cultures, inevitable for translatability. How the translators respond to the spatial context of the source texts is also important for the re-creation and authentication of the translated texts. This paper seeks to investigate the reading of African literature in translation in Bangladesh.

The Role of Translations in the Study of Literature of Ancient Times: Gilgamesh, The Iliad, and the Bible

2022-12-07T12:54:54+04:00

Teaching ancient literature through translations is a challenge that arises for a comparatist. Very few know the ancient languages, especially those that were spoken in the ancient Near East, such as the Akkadian, Sumerian, and Hittite. The author of this essay regrets not knowing these languages and as many other scholars have to rely on translations in modern languages, especially English, French or German. Gilgamesh was written some four thousand years ago. It is considered the oldest literary work of mankind. As a parameter of this, it is enough to remember that the famous Homeric poems appeared about 1500 years after this Sumerian epic. The legend tells the story of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian king and founder of the Mesopotamian city of Uruk (Iraq today) who ruled the region around the year 2700 BCE, and his journey in pursuit of glory and honor, whose ultimate goal was to conquer immortality. Among the various themes in Gilgamesh epic, for the purposes of this essay, two are highlights for a close reading: friendship and flood in comparison with the Iliad and the Old Testament, respectively. Gilgamesh’s lament for the death of his friend Enkidu keeps striking similarities with Achilles’ lament for the death of Patroclus, killed in battle in the Trojan War: ‘Hear me, O young men, hear [me!] / Hear me, o elders [of teeming Uruk,] hear me! / I shall weep of Enkidu, my friend, / Like a hired mourner-woman I shall bitterly wail.” The great flood by which gods sought to destroy mankind also appears in the Old Testament, ‘For six days and [seven] nights, / There blew the wind, the downpour, / The gale, the Deluge, it flattened the land.” The immortal Uta-napishti fills the role of Noah of Genesis. The translations into modern languages beginning in the mid-19th century greatly contributed to the knowledge of the once unknown Sumerian epic.

Traduire les mots “autres” des littératures minoritaires

2022-12-07T13:04:55+04:00

Les littératures minoritaires des espaces francophones sont en général très peu traduites dans les pays qui ne font pas partie de la francophonie et, malheureusement, la littérature québécoise n’échappe pas à cette règle. Bien qu’il existe plusieurs écrivains québécois qui sont très connus en France (à titre d’exemple Michel Tremblay; Réjéan Ducharme, Jacques Poulin, etc.), la littérature québécoise à la différence de la littérature française est très peu traduite en Italie. La question que l’on se pose est la suivante : pourquoi ne traduit-on donc pas plus la littérature québécoise en Italie ? S’agit-il juste d’intérêts économiques des maisons d’édition qui ne veulent pas risquer d’investir des ressources dans des écrivains inconnus aux lecteurs italiens ? Ou bien faut-il chercher les raisons de ce désintérêt dans la nature linguistique des textes québécois, c’est-à-dire dans le caractère du français utilisé qui pose problème ? Il est vrai qu’à cause de leur spécificité linguistique, un grand nombre de textes québécois apparaissent à première vue comme hermétiques et pourraient donc décourager certains éditeurs italiens. Il est également vrai que les textes littéraires écrits dans les aires francophones représentent très souvent de vrais défis pour les traducteurs, car ils doivent se confronter à une langue diatopiquement marquée véhiculant de plus un grand nombre de culturèmes qui nécessitent la mise en œuvre de stratégies particulières pour les rendre dans la langue cible.
Dans notre communication, nous nous proposons de comprendre quelles sont les stratégies mises en œuvre par les traducteurs italiens pour ce qui est de la traduction des régionalismes qui caractérisent le français du Québec. Nous analyserons un grand de traductions publiées en Italie (Poulin, Ducharme, Dickner, etc.) et chercherons à comprendre comment l’Autre et les mots de l’Autre sont transposés dans la langue de Dante.

How to Translate the Speechless Other?

2022-12-07T13:06:49+04:00

My paper investigates literary approaches to fellow creatures who cannot talk. I will read Philip Gross’ collection of poems, entitled Deep Field (2011) – a lyrical story about his old father who has lost all his five languages in aphasia – in comparison with the poetic translation of animals and „lifeless” materials, performed by the same poet (The Water Table, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009; A Bright Acoustic, 2017) or by other experimenters like Craig Foster, the human protagonist in an Oscar winning documentary My Octopus Teacher (2021). Such experiments of getting in-between reveals translation as gesture-resonance in shared kinetic spaces with the Other. By the art of learning, poetic language ceases to be a conventional medium of symbolic exchange (alone), it becomes refined and very intensive gestures of attention that make possible inversions in the teaching process between teacher and student, human and animal or human and material environment. At the end I will draw conclusions concerning the possibilities of gesture translation beyond metaphoric reduction.

Theory and Practice of Minor Cinema: A Comparative Perspective

2022-12-07T13:08:00+04:00

The paper proposes to examine the history and theory of “minor cinema”, referring back to the key aspects of “minor” as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their text Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (the deterritorialization, the political aspect, and the collective value) and elsewhere. Tom Gunning’s pioneering appropriation of their concept in an essay Towards a minor cinema (1990) describes amateur and outsider film practice as the new avant-garde, in contrast to the established and institutionalized art, as a cinema that celebrates its marginal identity, fashioning from it a revolutionary consciousness. Gunning's reading continues to inspire texts on amateur, experimental and adjacent marginal film cultures, from Los Angeles to Switzerland (not the least in countries like Sweden that benefit from exemplary archival film practice). The notion of „minor cinema“ has been disseminated further across film studies, again in film cultures like Nordic that have historically defined themselves in contrast to the Hollywood dominant, notably in Mette Hjort's analyses of contemporary Danish as a “minor cinema”. David N. Rodowick, on the other hand, referred back to Deleuze's claim that "if there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet“, and criticized identity politics and common identification of “minor” with demographic minorities. Such a reading, Rodowick claims, reifies the subaltern subject no less than the cultural hegemony it is trying to combat, whereas minor cinema, just like fiction, should produce “collective utterances (énoncés collectifs) whose paradoxical property is to address a people who do not yet exist and, in so doing, urge them toward becoming”.

One Specimen of Byzantine Hymnography and its Georgian Translation

2022-12-07T13:09:18+04:00

Georgian hymnography began with the translations of Byzantine hymns, followed by the development of an original hymnography. Numerous examples of Byzantine theological poetry have been translated into Georgian over the centuries.

The translations of the greatest representative of Georgian culture - George the Athonite (1009-1065) deserve particular attention for the study of Byzantine hymnography. His goal was to bring Georgian translations as close as possible to the Greek originals.

“Lenten Triodion" of George the Athonite’s redaction is a unique collection, which in its completeness surpasses similar Byzantine collections known in the specialist literature today. It contains numerous hymns of 14 Byzantine hymnographers. Among them is an important component of Great Lent - the hymnographic canon for Great Saturday, which is a compilatory. The author of the second part - last “four chants” is a prominent representative of Byzantine hymnography - Kosmas of Jerusalem.

The question of the authorship of the first part of this canon - "four chants" is controversial in the scientific literature.

The earliest data about it is preserved by Theodore Prodromes. According to him, these “four chants” belonged to ninth-century female hymnographer Kassia, but it was deemed appropriate to attach it to the hymn of Kozma of Jerusalem. Therefore, Mark Sabbaites (IX-X cc.) was assigned to rework this hymn. Some scholars hold that this canon entirely belongs to Kozma of Jerusalem.

In the "Lenten Triodion" of George the Athonite, at the beginning of this compilatory hymn there is an indication to the other author - Theophanes. The “Triodion" of George the Athonite’s redaction is the earliest source for studying this issue. One should also take into account the great accuracy in attribution to the authors of the hymns which George the Athonite demonstrated.

Thus, according to the testimony of Georgian “Triodions” under George the Athonite’s redaction, one of the authors of this renowned specimen of Byzantine hymnography is a well-known hymnographer of the 9th century - Theophanes the Confessor.

Translating Sensations: The Task of Translating Rayuela’s Chapter 68 into Chinese

2022-12-07T13:14:48+04:00

According to Guattari and Deleuze, a literary work is a cluster of sensations, a compound of percepts and affects that the author creates by manipulating language. This manipulation is the style of the author and the essence of any literary work, and it is, perhaps, the most difficult aspect to recreate in literary translation. Taking into account that, in Rayuela, Julio Cortázar came up with a dynamic language that broke the conventions of the reading act to make readers active participants in the creation of the text, this paper intends to briefly analyze the Chinese translation of Rayuela’s Chapter 68 by Sun Jiaming, to determine whether it keeps the nature of Cortázar’s original text, which, according to the German scholar Walter Benjamin, is the main goal of a good literary translation and the task of literary translators.

Women, feminism and prostitution in the trilogy of Neel Doff (1858-1942), study of the original texts and the Dutch and German translations Translating difference: The Other in Other Words

2022-12-07T13:20:59+04:00

The Belgian writer Neel Doff wrote her entire work in French, although it was not her mother tongue. Her autobiographical trilogy is built around her past as a prostitute, placing the ‘other’ at the heart of her work, recalling the existence of several cleavages: what is the life of this ‘other’, the prostitute, seen as an object by men? What is the life of this ‘other’, as an extremely poor girl (third of a large family weakened by the ‘symphony of hunger’), rejected by society? And what is the perception of the ‘other’, the translator (male or female), who must translate this story?

One of the objectives is to determine, by comparing Doff’s work with her Dutch and German translations, whether the feminist point of view show through in the texts in the three languages and if so, if it appears in the same way. I’ll also analyse how the experience of Keetje, the writer’s alter ego, as a woman and prostitute (universal and local subject at the same time) is expressed in the translation.

The question arises whether different translational strategies depending on the gender of the translator can be observed. To answer these questions, a portrait of each translator will be drawn. I shall argue that the choices made by the translator can only be understood if we know the person who translates a given text. Then, the extracts dealing with prostitution will be analysed according to Venuti’s concept of foreignization (making the other, the foreign, visible) and domestication, as well as Berman’s theories of retranslation. Those extracts will also be studied in the light of the feminist translation theories of de Lotbinière-Harwood and von Flotow: feminist translation and feminist writing are closely related since they both intend to, among other things; redistribute women’s roles in language.

Imposters by al-Hariri – Adequate Artistic Translation or Domestication

2022-12-07T13:22:47+04:00

The interest towards the foreign, magic, mystical Orient first appeared in the epoch of antiquity. It was strengthened in the period of crusades. Later the process of idealization and exoticization of the Oriental World was facilitated by the widespread tales of “The Thousand and One Night”.

There is a quite long-standing tradition of translating Arabic Literature into the Western languages. The interest of the West to the Orient was reflected in these artificial translations too. But one can observe the process of adaptation and remaking of original Arabic pieces of literature (not only folklore or oral one). It’s natural thing that the remaking of the Arabic texts continued in the colonial period too. Taking into consideration taste and demands of the receivers was more important for European translators than the allegiance to the origins.

The situation was changed in post-orientalist era. Many old translations were neglected and new translations of the classical Arabic pieces appeared. To this new age belongs Imposters – the English translation of the Maqamat by al-Hariri written in the 13^th century. The book was issued by the New York University Press in 2020.

Discussing Persian, Hebrew, Latin, French, German, English, Russian translations of Maqamat made before, one can keep an eye on the attitude to this Arabic masterpiece in different cultures and ages. In my presentation I’d analyze the Imposters as translation made by the modern prominent American scholar Michael Cooperson trying to answer the further questions: Is his work exact artistic adequate of the origin? What is the most important to the translator in the 21^st century? Has the attitude to the oriental texts in the epoch of globalization changed or not?

Translating the Subaltern: The Problematic of Englishing Malayalam Dalit and Adivasi Narratives

2022-12-07T13:24:24+04:00

For centuries the dominant Literature had been the preserve of the elite. The representations of the subaltern and their experiences were either absent or biased. With the emergence of Subaltern Studies, the power relations in the literary products of the ‘nation’ were re-examined. At the same time the Subaltern Studies Group itself had to face the criticism of being elite in nature. The question of alternative histories that they proposed is widely considered as an important contribution to different marginal sections. As a result, literatures that fiercely challenge the dominant hegemonic systems and structures and projecting a subaltern perspective and aesthetics emerged in India. It includes dalit studies, feminist studies, disability studies, queer studies etc. The hegemonic voices of the ‘normal’ were challenged by various literary as well as non-literary efforts from different subaltern groups. The so-called ‘normal’ was called into question and alternative perspectives from the standpoint of marginalized sections emerged. The subaltern literature(s) are often considered as resistance narratives as they project their resistance and identity assertion. Translations of regionally produced subaltern literatures into English and other languages provided a wider audience for them. Despite the international readership attained through Englishing, there exist serious issues of language, culture and politics in Englishing the subaltern texts. As an alien tongue which is geographically and culturally alienated from the context of Indian/ Malayalam subaltern discourses, how English perceives the complex social formations of caste, gender, culture and dialects of local contexts is a new area of interest in research. Furthermore, there exists a politics of market/publication behind the translation of subaltern texts. The agenda behind translating subaltern texts is often the commodification of the subaltern subject, experience and culture, as they are the new interests of literary and academic worlds. Through this paper I intend to focus on the issues and politics involved in the process of translating the subaltern. Since it is difficult to cover all categories of subaltern literatures, the research focuses on dalit and adivasi literary discourses in Malayalam, especially those belonging to the genre of life narratives. Dalit and adivasi life narratives support the agenda of asserting the identity and documenting the protest of the larger dalit movements. The very act of dalit writing can be conceived as translation as it involves the act of translating the culture and literature that are originally based on orality to the written form, which is more or less related to the ma(le)instream and thus an act of mainstreaming the subaltern. Transforming the marginal that rests upon the ‘oral’ to the mainstream which celebrates the ‘written’ is a complex process of translation. Hence, every dalit writer is a translator who actively participates in the process of translating his/her community’s past/present which includes the culture and language in to the written present. This cultural and linguistic translation becomes complex as they are not simply adopting the mainstream savarna form of written literature. Rather the mainstream written models that fit into the rigid rules of the “literary” are breached with new experiments. Rather than negating the written, the dalit literature quarrels with it, tries to break its standards, brings the cosmology of orality and the carnivalesque into the written. The study of this complex process of dalit translation is also aimed at by this study. It tries to engage with the novel ways in which the dalit writer-translator establishes him/her-self with in the ‘written’ along with challenging it. In the case of dalit life narratives, things are much more complex. As many of the Keralite dalit life writers are illiterate, often there exist a second person as transcriber, who may or may not belong to the dalit community. This mediation often creates problems as the life writer gets alienated from his/her life itself and the transcriber becomes the authorial voice and his/her subjectivities (ideology/culture/language/experiences) influence the narrative. Such mediation should be studied in detail to examine the politics of power and language. The projected Kerala mainstream culture that is of course the savarna one and the standard savarna language is entirely different from the dalit culture and dialects. Moreover, they differ among different castes and sub-castes. These facts should be looked at seriously. The different caste-based dialects that the dalit writers celebrate create the problems of untranslatability even into the so called standard one. Modern dalit writings also bear testimony to the transformation of the passive dalit object into an active, resisting subject. Also the Dalit and Adivasi narratives are noted for the alternative ecological understanding and the Eco-protests that they embody. The proposed research also tries to locate the dalit and Adivasi narratives in the larger context of Environmental humanities. How these narratives transgress their local contexts and place themselves in the global environmental concerns? How Englishing these texts aid in such a process? Thus, the research focuses on the multiple translations related to dalit writing like the oral to written, margin to mainstream, passive object to active/resisting subject, local to global etc.

Ukrainian Brides, Tractors and Charade The Challenge of Translating the Work of Marina Lewycka

2022-12-07T13:27:50+04:00

As a daughter of Ukrainian migrants, Marina Lewycka was born in 1946 in a refugee camp in Kiel (Germany). Shortly after her birth, her family moved to English where Lewycka grew up and received secondary and tertiary education. Her debut novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian was published in 2005 and received international acclaim. Her book was translated into 35 languages and won a number of literary prizes, including the Wodehouse Prize for comic writing.

The novel is set in the Ukrainian community of Peterborough and tells the tale of Nikolai, a 84-old man who intends to marry Valentina, a much younger Ukrainian women, whom he wants to save from a miserable existence in her home country. Concerned about Valentina’s motives, Nikolai’s daughters try to prevent the wedding, which their father attempts to conceal from them. Written in a humorous tone, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian presents a particular challenge to its translators. The novel is marked by a play with registers, switching between Standard English, colloquial language and faulty English pronounced with a strong Ukrainian accent. Furthermore, the book features numerous cultural references, not only to a specific Ukrainian migrant sub-culture in the UK but also to Ukrainian soviet history.

In this paper, I shall explore the English and German translation of Lewycka’s book and analyse the different choices made by the translators. The task of translating references to a particular cultural environment is especially demanding when the latter does not exist in the same way in the culture of the target text. Thus, the translators have to turn into cultural mediators in order to communicate the hybrid culture of Ukrainian migrants living on the margins of British society to a Francophone and German-speaking readership.

English Translations of Chapter One of the Tao Te Ching: An Interpretation from the Perspective of Intercultural Communication

2022-12-07T13:29:13+04:00

This paper cites three English translations of chapter one of the Tao Te Ching by three translators from three distinct cultures, namely Arthur Waley from the UK, R. B. Blakney from the US, and D. C. Lau from Hong Kong, China, and examines the cultural interpretation of these translations from the perspective of intercultural communication. The paper analyzes the English translation of the Chinese word “道”(Dao) with application of the theory of cultural adaptation in intercultural communication for renditions of the Chinese original into English, hence making the target text culturally equivalent and relevant to the source text. Through a probe into the cultural backgrounds reflected in these three English translations, the Speech Code Theory in intercultural communication is utilized for analyzing the translation of the second sentence in chapter one of the Tao Te Ching. These translations helped to bridge cultural differences in translations by adopting the shared speech codes. The paper also emphasizes the importance of intercultural communication for translators and/or interpreters in terms of effective cultural, strategy-based tools for successful translation and interpretation.

Besik Kharanauli's latest metapoetic books - at the crossroads of tradition and innovation

2022-12-07T13:30:53+04:00

Besik Kharanauli called the "intersection of prose and poetry" an innovative, alternative genre which has been established by him in Georgian literature in 2020s. In his metapoetic collections ("Eh, Bessarion", "The Great Drinking"), Kharanauli talks about the latest hard times, caused not only by the pandemic, but also by the movement of man’s soul, national pain, and blowing of the dream.

In our view, Besik Kharanauli's lyrical poems reflect the spiritual kinship of the poet's work, on the one hand, with Nikoloz Baratashvili's lyrical judgment and the attempt to answer the main epochal question ("The Fate of Kartli"), and on the other hand, with Galaktion Tabidze's lyrical poems ("Talking about lyrics”, "Akaki Tsereteli"). Besik Kharanauli put forward the eternal, cardinal question about the purpose of the poet and poetry as the main issue of the modern Georgian lyrical poem, lyrical cycles.

Along with the lyrical poem, Besik Kharanauli creates the basis for alternative poetics, i.e., a "poem in prose". The poem in prose is known to be based not on a narrative but on a subjective-evaluative aspect. Northrop Frye notes that the form of a poem affects the semantic structure, absorbs the meaning. Andrei Bely seeks rhythm in both verse and prose and thus destroys their genre nature.

Denying the genre peculiarities of prose and poetry, their specificity, B. Kharanauli creates new metatexts: semantics and rhythm are united by the principle of free, unlimited expression of thought. The author is completely free in self-expression. In these metatexts, the traditional restrictions of prose or poetry, especially verse, are removed. In a lyrical cycle of "Songs during the Pandemic", the informativeness of the narrative, the documentary, the laconicism are determined by aphorisms. All poetic phrases are divided into metro-rhythmic periods (5/4/5, 5/5/4/3, etc.). In all the texts, there is a minimal rhythmic impulsivity.

The poetic tradition of Besik Kharanauli’s innovative metatexts is based on 19-th century original or translated Georgian poetry and Galaktion's lyric poem "A Conversation about Lyrics".

Besik Kharanauli's "Pandemic Songs" is a new form of defeating by poetry and assimilation of "non-fictional space", the poetry of the future. The poet recognizes the need to unite story and emotion, prose and lyricism as a means of overcoming the global, pandemic spiritual crisis and anxiety.

Domesticating Otherness: Culture-Specific References in French Covers of Bob Dylan’s Songs

2022-12-07T13:32:10+04:00

One recurrent obstacle when translating foreign literature is the challenge of transferring the multiple Culture-Specific References that make sense to the source audience but are much less meaningful – if not entirely obscure – to the target audience. The presence of footnotes as a way to overcome this obstacle is a subject that is often discussed among translators. In the case of song translation, however, footnotes are not an option at all. In addition, the Target Work must be readily understandable in order for it to be as effective as the Source Work. This excludes the possibility of leaving the reference untranslated, as is sometimes the case in a novel, with the assumption that the readers will close the book and do some research before they go on with their reading. As a result, the various strategies adopted by song translators range from domestication – adapting the reference by replacing it with a similar one borrowed from the target culture – to deleting these traces of Otherness altogether. I shall study several examples of songs written by Bob Dylan and adapted into French by various translators (Hugues Aufray, Roger Mason, Sarclo…) in order to scrutinize the choices that were made by these performers from the 1960s to today.

Re-telling the Story: Mainstreams and Margins

2022-12-07T13:33:32+04:00

In the story of world literature, how should we include cultures that have been deemed minor? In responding to that question, I will focus on the importance of narrative technique in the work of comparativists.

Let us consider three ways in which scholars have related the marginal to the canonical mainstream of world cultural history. In the first, comparativists show how peripheries were parts of a larger system of world literary production. In the second, comparativists reveal how the ‘peripheral’ had a greater impact on the ‘mainstream’ than is now remembered. Sometimes, scholars describe the prominence that such individuals achieved in their lifetimes and beyond. Sometimes, scholars describe how the modern Western canon depends on earlier, historic literatures far more than has been acknowledged (for example, the impact of Sanskrit writings on the nineteenth-century United States). Third, scholars show how a neglected or marginalized literature ought to be of large significance to us now: they explain its forgotten value and importance.

The last of these three ways both includes and exceeds the other two. All three assert the value of including what was deemed minor within their re-telling of the story of the world literature. However, the first two ways share a limitation: they only tell the story of the ‘marginal’ insofar as it is within the dominant system of literary production and dissemination. Truly to assert the value of the marginalized is to assert the importance of telling its story as part of literary history, irrespective of the impact that it had (or did not have) on the dominant system. Comparativists must therefore create narrative techniques that tell the story of what is of value in literature across the world so as to reactivate its potential.

Emil Cioran and Samuel Beckett: Stylistic Proximities

2022-12-07T13:35:31+04:00

My paper compares two exiles: the Romanian-born philosopher and essayist Emil Cioran and the Irish playwright and prose writer Samuel Beckett, born in a language (Romanian and English, respectively), but switching to another (French), after their arrival in Paris in 1937, thus, producing what Rebecca L. Walkowitz called in her book Born Translated “self-translated” works.

The first section establishes a series of affinities between the two, as revealed by their encounters, correspondence and Cioran’s Cahiers (1957‑1972). The second and third sections look into their contemplation of death and of the suicidal act, establishing what Peter Fifield called “stylistic proximities” between their works.

Literary paradigms of Adam Mickiewicz “Faris” in the world poetry

2022-12-07T13:36:40+04:00

In the conversation with Eckermann in 1827, Goethe raised the issue of existence of the world literature, which takes into consideration existence of common tendencies and literary paradigms in the world poetry.

The European literary and thinking traditions were repeatedly depicted in Georgian literature of the XIX century. First Georgian Romanticist poet N. Baratashvili with the essence of his works stands next to the European Romanticists. There are often parallels made between A. Mickiewicz’s “Faris” and N. Baratashvili’s “Merani”. It is noteworthy that Mickiewicz’s “Faris” was for N. Baratashvili one of the sources of inspiration for “Merani”. In 1842 he wrote his masterpiece. We see a number of poetic similarities in these two poems.

The idea of “Faris” is that a self-sacrificing rider goes at full speed on his steed. On his way he encounters a lot of obstacles, but he never gives up and strives for his goal.

During the study, our attention was drawn to the poem of Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi “Az Én Pegazusom” (“Merani”). Petofi wrote the poem in 1847. He knew Mickiewicz’s poetry and with its content, artistic faces, symbolic meaning Petofi’s poem reveals great similarity with both Mickiewicz’s “Faris” and Baratashvili’s “Merani”.

In 1828 Mickiewicz’s “Faris” was written. His literary paradigms are not only the poems of Petofi and Baratashvili, but we can see this paradigm in the poetry of René François Armand (Sully) Prudhomme as well as in other authors.

Symbolically all poems express aspiration of the human for freedom.

Realist Sublimity of the Marginal: A Brief History of Hong Kong Literary Magazines

2022-12-07T13:37:54+04:00

A serious and continually recognized intention to represent reality, termed as “realist sublimity,” occasionally looms out of the genealogy of Hong Kong print culture, which has drawn scarce academic attention by far. It is performativity-ridden to form subjectivity and a powerful inertia of reflexivity. As a historically succeeded drive of literary creation towards a generally admired reflection of the shared real (not necessarily in the form of “realism”), realist sublimity has been long sustaining the aura of remembrance that connects Chinese intellectuals to an imagined community of creative ideals, especially during political vicissitudes.

The sublimity of factual representation requires historical investigation upon its contradictive nature: powerful as a morally recognized weapon (as Chinese leftist writers adopted to actualize and validate the Communist regime from the late 1910s to the late 1940s) but fragile as an easily side-streamed and censored ideology. While literarily recording the real in “late-capitalist” Hong Kong (which prefers visual, meaningless, and ahistorical products in Fredric Jameson’s [1989] sense) is encountering imbricated pressure from a tailor-made national security law, this presentation sets out to suggest that the spiritual existence of realist sublimity is supporting the strength of a local print culture to afford responses to parochial dynamics. From foregrounding the newspapers in the early colonial era, such as Chinese Serial (1853-1856), Chinese Mail (1871-1946), Universal Circulating Herald (1874-1947), Waisan Daily (1879-1909), and Yut Post (1885-1889) to interpreting the foreword of the first issue of Fleurs des Lettres (2006- ), it illuminates the history of Hong Kong literary magazines.

Myths and Legends in the Oral literature of the Tribal Of the Tribal people of South -West Rajasthan (Banswara and Dungarpur district), India

2022-12-07T13:39:09+04:00

The present study is an attempt to examine and explore the oral literature of the tribal community of South Rajasthan particularly the districts of Banswara and Dungarpur which known as Wagad region and the dialect used by the tribes of this area is called Wagri or Bhili dialect. It is needless to say that large numbers of dialects have disappeared over the years. One major disadvantage of the modern education that it has destroyed the dialects of the indigenous society. And as a result of that badly damaged the spectrum of culture of this communities. Same is the case with the tribal people of wagad region (South -West Rajasthan of India). As the tribal youth are getting educated and coming into the contact of the main stream society, they move away from the dialect and their culture and as a result of that the Wagri dialect is also on the verge of extinction. The tribal youth do not show any interest in their songs and stories. The real problem why the tribal oral literature did not get proper attention or the message did not come out in the limelight, because of the lack of education in this backward area. Some of the local writers tried to depict the content of the oral literature in the local dialect or at the most in Hindi. But it did not get any commentary in English, because the native users of the dialect don’t know English language and the scholars of English do not have the excess to the dialect and this gap resulted in the oral literature and its meaning remaining untold in English language. Therefore, the main objective if the present study would be to present the hidden meaning and the message which the tribal community has to convey through their oral literature. The investigation would attempt to collect translate codify explain and analyse the oral literature for the benefit of the international audience. A sincere effort needs to be made to collect and explain 4 the songs, the proverbs and the stories of the tribes. They have a typical way of singing and dancing, there proverbs are full of practical wisdom. They are known for their art of story-telling. All these characteristics a tribute to the tribal culture which the present study would held upon. Most of the philosophy of oral literature of tribes is based on myths and legends. There is no individual composer of the oral literature and it is a community endeavour which has been passed on from one generation to next generation and therefore there is no individual bias present in the oral literature and obviously it is closer to humanity in comparison to any other piece of literature written by any other individual author. All the tribal songs and stories are full of the description and depiction of myths and legends.

Tribes are believed to be the first settlers on any given piece of land. Tribes are called Adivasis which means the First settlers. They have been very backward illiterate and savage community. The most remarkable characteristic of tribal community is that they live in an isolated secludet lifestyle in natural surroundings. All their activities are influenced by the nature and traditionally they depended for their livelihood on nature and that is why the sociologists call them animist or nature lovers. Tribal people have a typical behaviour, they are full of excitement and lead a carefree lifestyle within their community, they sing and dance enthusiastically and excitedly within themselves but they shy away if there is any external interference or exposer. The young tribal girls sing so loudly the voice comes from the depth of heart. When they are unaware of any outsiders’ presence in the same way as it has been described by the great nature poet, William Wordsworth in his beautiful poem ‘Solitary Reaper’- They hold her single in the field the solitary high land laws reaping and singing by herself, stop here or gently pass. The Wagad tribal girl is very much like the Wordsworth ‘Solitary Reaper’. The oral literature of this area has been conserved and sustained over the ages through oral traditions, the creator and composer of which is the entire community. With the fast spread of development and education, the life of the people is changing rapidly and rural youth are moving towards the urban area for a better life but in this struggle and the rough and tough nature of present race of the youngsters, the dialect is fast getting replaced by Hindi or English and as a result of that the oral literature is facing a threat of extinction. With this concern in the mind the scholar has deliberately chosen this 8 particular area for research. Therefore, the research area of study here would be the tribal oral literature of Banswara and Dungarpur dist. Which is known as Wagad region and particularly the portrayal of myths and legends which has always been a major source of attraction and curiosity of the community. Oral literature is full of mythical description almost every village in Wagad region has some mythical story attached to it. This reminds of the famous novel by the Indo-English novelist Raja Rao ‘Kanthapur’ in which the novelist gives an interesting description of the myth attached to deity Kanchama of the Kanthapura village. The villagers have great faith in Devi Kanchama and they believed that the Goddess had fought with and killed a dangerous demon to protect the village and that is why the colour of the soil around the Kanchama temple is red. Similarly, in tribal villages also there are large number of stories attached to their deities. They have stories of supernatural elements. There is no derth of the presence of witches, ghosts, nimbs and such supernatural agents in their songs and stories which keep the audience particularly the young children awestruck. In almost every village the parents, advise their children not to go near the big tamarind tree or the Pipal tree after sunset. They would tell them that a witch lives on a particular tree. Certainly, this are superstitious beliefs but it’s a part of their culture. Another major element of oral literature is the portrayal of legendary characters whom the tribes’ worship as their role models and path finders. The heroes who fought for the welfare of the community who stood up against the atrocities of the feudal lord or who sacrificed their life for the sack of the common cause. Such characters in the tribal history of the community became a subject of the oral poetry and songs and stories and are remembered as legends for them.

Aimé Knepper’s Enrôlé de force and Luxembourg’s Mischkultur

2022-12-07T13:42:47+04:00

Although its tiny size makes it easy to dismiss as a quaint curiosity, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is the home to culture whose mixedness is unique in Europe. Aimé Knepper’s 1984 memoir Enrôlé de force: Déserteur de la Werhmacht is an important literary exemplar of what Luxembourgers call “Mischkultur,” or mixed culture. This is a term that is typically used to discuss the country’s education system, which gradually moves from instruction in

Luxembourgish (in early childhood), then to standard German (in primary and early secondary), and then into French (throughout secondary). This linguistic mixture is the subject of a rich scholarly literature in educational studies. But it is also a useful way of understanding Luxembourgish culture as a whole, very much including its literature. Knepper’s Enrôlé de force is an important example for that literary tradition because it is written in French (something that is itself relatively unusual in the country’s literature) but it has as its subject the degree to which the occupying Nazis considered the inhabitants to be basically German, something that the locals resisted in every way that they could. Although the Luxembourgish language seemed to provide a sense of distinctiveness, the fact is that it is a Germanic dialect, one that is not exactly mutually comprehensible with standard German but is not also so distant from it. French, on the other hand, being as thoroughly a part of Luxembourgers’ culture as it has long been, allowed them to manifest a substantial linguistic difference from those occupiers and thus give the lie to the sense that they were just another part of the great German race that was finally being unified under the Reich. Enrôlé de force, a memoir of a young man’s conscription into the German army and the long road he took to sneak his way out of it, is thus an important exemplar of this influence of Mischkultur on the evolution of Luxembourgish identity. The European ideal of “In varietate concordia” is nowhere more visible than in the Grand Duchy, and Knepper’s memoir, although it is clearly a minor work in terms of aesthetic complexity, warrants a central place in discussions of this key problématique in post-WWII European culture.

Neorealism in Norwegian and Georgian literature

2022-12-07T13:44:10+04:00

As in Norway, a whole generation of great writers died in Georgia at the beginning of the 20th century. This is precisely the time when literary tendencies emerge in both Norway and Georgia, which are clearly realistic, but nevertheless differ significantly from classical social realism. The tendencies now manifesting themselves could be called Psychological Realism, Inner Realism, Ethical Realism. The characters often find themselves in a moral conflict, constantly faced with various dilemmas; the view of women as psychological and sexual beings changes, etc. This is the kind of literature in Norway united under the concept of Neorealism, with authors such as Undset, Duun, Falkberget, Uppdal and even the late Hamsun. Neorealism is a rather special Norwegian literary historical concept. At any rate, it is not used in all national European literary histories. In the Norwegian tradition, the term is identified with a literary trend that was important in Norway in the first part of the 20th century, especially from the moment the country gained independence in 1905 and until 1940, when the Second World War came to Norway. Much more rarely the term is also used in Georgia. One of the greatest figures in Georgian literature of the last century, Mikheil Javakhishvili called his prose Neorealism as early as in 1926. Since then, this term appears sporadically in writings about Georgian literature from the first part of the 20th century. When the authorship of other Georgian writers from this period (Aragvispireli, Kldiashvili, Kiacheli) are analysed in a comparative perspective, one finds many of the features that characterise Norwegian Neorealism. One could contend, therefore, that Neorealism as a scholarly concept should be systematically accepted to define a trend that played a decisive role in literary Georgia of that time.

Slovak Literature after 1989

2022-12-07T14:02:32+04:00

The desire for freedom led the Eastern art of the 20th century to a definition of freedom and democracy. Various artistic forms followed, which diverged from the ruling power structures. Thus, Eastern art was both a “release” and a “rising up”, particularly with its sharp criticism of totalitarian regimes. Paradoxically, hints of the old regime also appear in the 21st century. In the study, we attempt to capture ways of expressing opposition to totalitarianism in Central Europe.

Globalisation and minor literatures: on Norman Manea’s literature of exile and translation

2022-12-07T14:03:38+04:00

Globalisation is often understood as accelerated economic progress, low barriers to trade, the facile circulation of goods and people, and multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. In literary production, globalisation is also the circulation of “minor literatures” and their integration into debates about what constitutes the (Western) literary canon. Often, such debates address questions of cultural hegemony and hybridity. Some attention is also given to translation and the work done to make such “minor literatures” available to a language of global circulation. However, less attention is paid to the material conditions in which writers produce work in a language of limited circulation and cultural influence.

As such, my paper will be focusing on the barriers to publishing facing writers in a “minor language”, writing for a global audience. In order to illustrate these barriers, I will be focusing on the writings of Norman Manea, whose reflections on exile and translation provide a fruitful starting point. Born in Romania in 1936, Manea’s relationship with the Romanian language has always been fraught, even as he refers to it as his “motherland”.

The site of both joy and pain, Manea’s experience of Romanian is one of exile, at first internal and later made real, as he eventually leaves the country. My paper will therefore analyse the ways in which Manea approaches his exile: as a political dissident in communist Romania, he writes to lay claim on a language deadened by ideology, and to rebuild a self lost to surveillance and dictatorship. As an exile, Manea continues to write in Romanian, to an audience unfamiliar with the language and the culture that denied him, which raises questions about translation and the performance of the self in a globalised society.

Galaktion Tabidze and Friedrich Schiller

2022-12-07T14:04:43+04:00

One of the main goals in Galaktionology is to understand Galaktion’s poetry in the global context, to analyze his works in consideration of foreign intertexts. Galaktion’s relation with European literature have been a research subject decades ago, but in spite of existing tradition, this issue requires more comprehensive, profound and thorough study at the modern stage.

Research Center for Galaktion of Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature has started to prepare a new academic edition of GalaktionTabidze’s works since 2014. The precious reviewing of the handwritten sources of poet’s works, decoding of written across texts and observing on the creative process have disclosed noteworthy, previously unknown facts for comparative research. Many cases have been revealed when at first glance ordinary written-across texts made on autograph hint at the origin and genesis of the work.

Our article deals with one such case.

According the background of the inspiration source - Schiller’s “Wilhelm Tall”, it is clear that Galaktion’s poem “Stormy weather” is not just the verse reflecting the enraging of the natural disaster, but it demonstrates the poet’s assessment of the Soviet 30s: consideration of the original source helps us to understand and perceive the other idea of Galaktion’s verse. With reference to Schiller’s work, „Stormy Weather“ can be interpreted as an allegory. Galaktion Tabidze points to the tyranny, the cruelty of people and the divine retribution. We believe that the endings of both pieces of writing are very significant and meaningful; in Schiller’s drama evil gets punished, and Tabidze’s poem ends on the note that suggests eternity of the stormy weather. Thus, Understanding the main message of William Tell as a primary source helps us to analise and appreciate the deeper layers of the Georgian poet’s work.

Origins of literature and historiography in Central Eastern Europe in the 11th-15th centuries: typological problems

2022-12-07T14:06:05+04:00

Central Eastern Europe can be described as a fragmented, multi-ethnic place. At the same time, it is the Second Europe, formed after the baptism campaigns of the 9th and 10th centuries, and with its own a unique path. It has been between East and West, adopting and absorbing different traditions, and from the very beginning of the region's formation, we can trace the need of different peoples to make sense of their presence, expressing this in a written culture. In spite of the liturgical literature that first appeared in the region, another pattern of literature emerged, which can be called historiography. The description of the genesis of the state and the nation in this type of work has emerged as a starting point. The author, before he began to record events which he more or less knew, had previously been the subject of legends or his own fantasy. The main aim of this paper is to typologize the problems of early historiography as a literary genre, highlighting the region's characteristic features.

Music as an Instance of Postcoloniality: Rethinking the relationship between Music and Literature as a Point of Resistance

2022-12-07T14:07:10+04:00

The Western tonal music has achieved a global hegemony in the past few centuries. The modern theory of Western music which foregrounds tonality with equal temperament and harmonious polyphony has a mere history of three centuries, but it has successfully spread all over the world acquired semblance of universality. In truth, theoretically speaking, it is a very specific system largely based on the theological perspectives of the West. The rules of the cadenza, which call for the resolution of the disorder and for the return to the tonic, is closely related to the Christian theology. This very specific musical system has spread and become dominant due to the imperialistic expansion of the Western political powers.

Curiously, the domination of the Western music has not only affected the musical scenes of the non-Western cultures, but to other cultural activities, including the literary. As the Western harmonics requires the stable pitch, it has prioritized integral harmonic overtones and marginalized non-integral ones. This has led to the strict distinction of musical tones from other tones (noises). Heterophonic music in the postcolonial cultural loci which normally combines human voices and musical accompaniments has been outlawed as the former contain a great deal of non-integral harmonic overtones. Instead, Western-style chanting in vocal representations with stable pitches has been made authoritative. Vocal music has become more and more ostracized in favor of (harmonic) instrumental music, expelling literary elements out of musicality.

This paper, mostly on the basis of the scrutiny into the process of Japanese acquisition of Western musical theories in modernity, attempts to demonstrate how it has distorted both musical and literary experiences of the Japanese culture and to explore the ways to restore musicality in its full sense in the “postcolonial” setting.

Central European path to worldliness or world literature from the point of view of so-called small literatures

2022-12-07T14:08:12+04:00

In the current discussions on world literature (E. Apter, P. Casanova, D. Damrosch, M. Juvan, F. Moretti, H. Soussy, etc.) it is often pointed out that world literature, resp. the text that endeavours for this designation, is directly related to the significance (size) of the country and to the universal spread of the generally accepted language, i.e. especially to economic, not purely aesthetic factors. Despite the unquestionable dominance of these factors, works from so-called small literatures also become part of the world literature. They establish their "worldliness" on the particularism of the "regional" or "local", not on the power of extraliterary moments, but on the ability to constitute the world using the aestheticization of national images. In our study, we will try to characterize four literary-historical examples (K. Čapek, W. Gombrowicz, I. Horváth, S. Márai) to refer successful or less successful attempts to become a world author through their "Central Europeanism" and also depict "structural" mechanisms, how to achieve this ideal goal. If Čapek attracts with his universality of his humanistic ideas expressing fears of the threat of modern civilization, the Slavic Proust Gombrowicz speaks to the contemporary reader using an intuitive anticipation of postmodern grotesque. Similarly, Márai embodies the nostalgic feeling of a Central European intellectual longing for the once powerful Habsburg Empire, and Horváth seeks artistic inspiration for his dream visions in French culture. Despite the genre and thematic differences, these authors are connected by their inclination towards the West. At the same time, they all demonstrate the thesis that in this distinctive and indigenous (in terms of values) "interspace" between the West and the East, there is no "pure" national literature that does not synthesize a diverse foreign element. It is obvious that the way of this aestheticization of local "peripherality" implies their possible paths to "worldliness".

Queering the Kitchen: Reimagining Intimate Spaces and Queer Bodies in South Asian Literature

2022-12-07T16:00:35+04:00

The relationship between women and nature is often interlinked naturally, and considered overlapping to such extents that one often misses the complexities that underlie. In this regard, various postcolonial novels in South Asia focus on the tales of nature and women that try to move beyond the mainstream understanding of the ‘natural’ relationship between women and nature, while bringing forth the disruptive circumstances that mainly the South Asian women face. Novels like Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island or The Hungry Tide, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Anita Desai’s The Village by the Sea, or T.S. Pillai’s Chemmeen portrays an ambivalent relationship between the dualisms that encircle us. The nature-culture dualism is one of the many that involve the power dynamics between the oppressed and the oppressor. And it does put forward the grey area that lay beneath these binaries like the gender dynamics associated with care which in turn gets linked to nature. My paper will focus on the complex relationship between women’s association with care and nature through various postcolonial South Asian fictions. It will talk about the postcolonial ecofeminist theories and methodologies that can be derived from these novels, and try to look beyond the normative understanding of women, care and nature.

Portraits en demi-teinte des genres et des sexualités dans les littératures contemporaines française et germanophone, entre (hétéro)normalisme et pratiques queer

2022-12-07T16:03:01+04:00

À l’heure où les individualités prennent de plus en plus de place dans les sociétés occidentales contemporaines, une forme d’universalisme persiste malgré tout : celui qui considère la femme comme un groupe uniforme et homogène, réuni par la lutte contre une oppression commune. Même si de nombreuses chercheuses, à commencer par la regrettée bell hooks, se sont attelées à démontrer l’inverse, on continue d’entendre chaque année, pour le 8 mars, la désignation de « journée internationale pour les droits de la femme », parfois abrégée en « journée de la femme ». Comment les littératures contemporaines se positionnent-elles par rapport à cette uniformatisation, alors qu’elles se veulent en principe le reflet de ces sociétés des singularités dans lesquelles elles prennent racine ?

Pour répondre à cette question, deux exemples littéraires seront mobilisés : la trilogie Vernon Subutex (2015, 2015, 2017) de l’auteure française Virginie Despentes et le roman Schoßgebete (2011) de l’écrivaine germano-britannique Charlotte Roche. La première partie de cette étude sera consacrée à la définition du terme «(hétéro) normalisme», pour montrer que les protagonistes féminines des textes choisis sont encore très marquées par les normes de genre et d’hétérosexualité en lien avec leur classe sociale. Ces normes les guident notamment à travers les rôles de compagne et de mère. La seconde partie de l’analyse sera, elle, dédiée aux stratégies de contournement et de détournement de ces normes. Tandis que Vernon Subutex présente des pratiques ouvertement queer de retournement du stigmate, Schoßgebete propose une stratégie de sortie de l’(hétéro)normalisme et d’épanouissement de l’individualité qui se révèle aussi émancipatrice qu’incertaine.

Le journal intime chez Gide et Forster: une stratégie contre-hégémonique

2022-12-08T14:43:26+04:00

À la fin du XIXe siècle, en France et en Angleterre, deux jeunes hommes — André Gide et Edward Morgan Forster — décident de commencer à écrire un journal intime. Ils sont inconnus, ils vont tous deux devenir célèbres, deux figures majeures de la littérature européenne. Pourtant, dans leur journal intime se fait jour une révélation, sous forme d’un aveu progressif, le désir pour les individus de même sexe. Ces deux journaux intimes, quoique d’envergures différentes, révèlent une différence d’abord pressentie comme une singularité, mais dont les exemples écrits se multiplient dans la littérature, et qui va devenir une forme de vie reconnue dans les décennies qui suivent.

Nous souhaitons nous intéresser au Journal intime de deux écrivains, en tant que forme sémiotique au sein de laquelle se joue une stratégie de négociation entre un individu et une société. Cette stratégie non seulement va informer le discours des deux journaux, mais va devenir aussi un élément décisif de la production romanesque des deux auteurs.

Notre analyse portera sur une portion significative des deux journaux intimes de Gide et de Forster.

Nous nous fondons entre autres sur les travaux du Professeur Jacques Fontanille, spécialiste reconnu de la sémiotique, ainsi que sur l’analyse du discours, dans le cadre offert par la littérature comparée. Nous voulons montrer que la négociation sémiotique au sein des journaux intimes permet à la fois de gérer la pression sociale en matière de sexualité (sous la forme d’une stratégie contre-hégémonique) et, par le biais de la conscience de soi dans l’écriture, de poser d’une manière moderne la question du désir comme clé dans le gouvernement de soi.

At the end of the XIXth century, in France and Great-Britain, two young men — André Gide and Edward Morgan Forster — decide to start writing a diary. They’re unknown, they’re going to be both famous, two major figures in European literature. Yet, in their personal diaries emerges a revelation, in the shape of a progressive admission, the desire for same-sex individuals. Those two diaries, although having different statures, reveal a difference felt like a singularity at first, but the examples of which become more frequent in literature, and which is going to become an acknowledged way of life in the following decades.

We wish to consider those two writers’ diaries, as a semiotic form inside which a negotiation strategy is at stake between an individual and a society. This strategy will not only inform the discourse in the two diaries, but will also become a decisive element in the fictional production of those two writers. Our analysis applies to a significant part of the two personal diaries of Gide and Forster. Our study is founded, amongst others, on the theoretical work of the Professor Jacques Fontanille, renowned specialist in the field of semiotics, and on discourse analysis, within the framework that offers comparative literature. We would like to show that the semiotic negotiation within personal diaries enable at the same time to cope with social pressure regarding sexuality (under the shape of a strategy of counter-hegemony) and, by means of self-consciousness in writing, to raise in a modern way the issue of desire as a key in the government of the self.

The Depiction of Women in Pauline Corpus and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Modern African Womanist Criticism

2022-12-08T15:03:06+04:00

Humanities scholars, especially those in Biblical criticism have given much attention to themes arising from biblical and ecclesiastical boundaries in their critical variants. However, in spite of the impressive body of existing literature in this field, little or nothing has been done on the comparative study of biblical and African literature. Using the African method of biblical criticism (comparative and liberation hermeneutics), this study examines the depiction of women in Pauline corpus (New Testament) and Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart' (African literature) by arguing that, although Paul’s and Achebe’s literary genres differ in this instance, similarities exist in their depiction of women in their various societies. Gathering data from instances of selected modern African women in Africa who have locally and globally competed and achieved excellence and recognitions, it critiques the negative depiction of women in Pauline corpus and Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart.’

Le geste au sein des nouvelles formes de réalismes dans les fictions de la sexualité et du genre Genre-care-bande dessinée-littérature contemporaine-geste

2022-12-08T15:04:31+04:00

Sur un corpus contemporain des années 2000, je me propose d’étudier Aude Picault et Ian McEwan. Dans une perspective intermédiale je me propose d’analyser la manière dont les auteurs font preuve d’une nouvelle forme de réalisme pour incarner les inégalités de genre, notamment en ce qui concerne les relations sexuelles et érotiques. En étayant leur fiction sur des enquêtes en sciences humaines et en histoire, il s’agit pour les deux auteurs de proposer une histoire du XX^esiècle au prisme de l’intimité et de la sensibilité (Sur la plage de Chesil, Ian McEwan, Idéal Standard, Aude Picault). Or ce savant travail qui infuse leurs récits ne prend jamais le pas sur le pacte fictionnel. Ni autobiographiques, ni documentaires, leur approche, partagée, cherche à incarner au plus près du personnage, jusque dans le geste intime et érotique, les pièges du genre. Au prisme d’une poétique du geste nous étudierons la manière dont ces projets littéraires et iconiques participent à divers degrés d’une poétique du care, qui met en lumière et rend palpable des rapports de genre jusque-là invisibles. La fiction en littérature comme en bande dessinée se pare alors d’une ambition de justice.

Medea of Three Different Eras - Woman’s Artistic Image as a Reflection of Epochal Tensions (Corneille, Legouve, Anouilh)

2022-12-08T15:06:43+04:00

The consideration of prominent artistic images being especially sensitive in reflecting the problematic issues, tensions, and challenges of their day is widely recognized. Medea is one of the leading female figures among these outstanding images. The story of the Colchian maiden proved to be one of the best matrixes for the comprehension of socio-political problematics of various eras and the discourse regarding the multiple ideological and philosophical topics.

Analysis of how French dramatists of different epochs—Corneille, Legouve and Anuilh—interpreted Medea’s image to articulate the dominant issues of their respective eras will be the central piece of the paper.

Pierre Corneille, French playwright of the neoclassical period, regarded Medea’s story appropriate for reflecting on topical issues such as allegations of Satanism and witchcraft pertinent in 17^th century France. Ernest Legouve, another French dramatist and theorist of women’s rights, responded in his own way by reworking the Medea myth to the women’s emancipation movement taking place in France during the 1850s. Jean Anuilh, on the other hand, a prominent French existentialist writer of the 20^th century, has used Medea’s story to make his audience meditate upon significant philosophical issues –meaning of preserving one’s identity, different approaches towards life, compromise vs. radicalism, etc.

The paper will discuss the novelties introduced by these dramatists in their reworking of the original Medea story—be it changing of the fabula, the personages, the artistic tools, etc.—while focusing to research the authors’ commitment to the development of the respective interpretative trends of Medea.

The conclusion of the paper will add useful insights to (1) the study of interrelations between literature and contemporaneity; (2) comprehension of artistic images as denominators of epochal tensions; and (3) research on Medea’s abovementioned receptions in the context of the various interpretative trends of this “multidimensional” figure.

Gender Aspects of Shio Aragvispireli's Stories

2022-12-08T15:08:21+04:00

Gender, which has changed from a grammatical term to a socio-cultural construct, is a topical scientific problem and is being studied intensively from a culturological and scientific viewpoint. Gender theories developed considerably in XX century based on the studies by Simone de Beauvoir, Levi Strauss, Freud, Jacques Lacan, and other well-known scientists. These works cover philosophical, anthropological, psychological and historical aspects as well, and show the complexity and diversity of this issue, which is due to the fact that in this or that socio-economic and political system the stereotypes of female and male role models are closely linked to the values and cultural traditions of the society itself.

The issue of the status of women is particularly acute in the second half of the nineteenth century in America and Europe. The discussions around the gender situation in Georgia can also be observed from the mentioned time period. The topic of equality between women and men is discussed in the publicist letters by famous Georgian figures of the second half of XIX century: Ilia Chavchavadze, Akaki Tsereteli, Sergey Meskhi, Niko Nikoladze, etc. They respond to the letters of European thinkers, and consider the role of women and men in the advancement of society to be equally important and also analyze the difficult reality in this regard.

The complexity of the inevitable and necessary process of changing the social role of women in the society, which is full of traditional, and often of false clichés, has been well demonstrated by the Georgian literature of XIX-XX centuries.

In this regard, Shio Aragvispireli’s stories should be distinguished. The prose writer raises the issue of gender equality in a number of works, showing the established clichés in society, which are primarily related to moral issues and personal freedom. The writer reflects on overcoming social and psychological pressures, revealing that without going through a complex and contradictory process of changing consciousness no society can overcome the reality oriented to social inequality and false beliefs.

Feminism, post-feminism and postmodern feminism reflections in contemporary Georgian poetry

2022-12-08T15:09:30+04:00

Literature is the best space for the reflection and provocation of any type of social and cultural formation and changes. Accordingly, literary texts create the most reliable, honest and time-sustainable fiction “tractates” of such changes.

The third wave of feminism appearing at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, which was based on postmodern, poststructional and postcolonial theories, conducted the revision of feminism and looking at it from a new perspective. The third wave feminists attempt to achieve their goals through cultural activities and to declare their messages in such a form. Post-feminism, which provides for understanding of already, achieved results of feminist movement and means looking at feminism not from anti-feminism, but from a different angle, in the belief of its critics is antifeminist.

In addition to actively responding to women discrimination, postmodern feminism defines that society consists of not women and men, but of human beings. Different groups may be formed based not on their sex and gender affiliation, but other similar features and viewpoints; therefore, women will not be able to realize themselves just by means of one – women voice.

Similar tendencies have been reflected in contemporary Georgian literature too, including the poetry. It is noteworthy that nowadays there is unprecedented large number of writer women in Georgia, literary representation of who is seen with different topics, discourses and positions. Modern poet women have freed themselves from modesty, looked right in the eyes of strict and patriarchal reality and flatly refused to become second – man’s assistant person.

Research material of the presented report are contemporary Georgian poetic texts. Materials have been researched based on hermeneutic, analytical and comparative methods.

Mère Patrie, mère sainte, mère courage : représentations de la maternité à l’épreuve de la violence armée

2022-12-08T15:13:42+04:00

Alors que les colloques et les ouvrages traitant du combat féminin se multiplient dans les sciences sociales, il semble important d’étudier ce sujet également à travers un prisme littéraire. Dans la plupart des représentations littéraires des femmes en contexte de violence armée, la maternité s’avère jouer un rôle essentiel. La maternité se charge alors de nombreuses significations, de la mère au sens propre du terme à la mère nourricière et à la Mère Patrie. Or, ce surinvestissement du motif maternel rend ambivalent le statut des femmes en contexte de guerre. En effet, parce que les femmes, définies avant tout comme des mères, sont représentées comme ne participant pas aux combats armés – en dépit parfois de leur volonté –, il semble de prime abord que leur statut de combattantes soit invisibilisé, voire nié. Cependant, la maternité en contexte de violence armée peut également prendre une autre dimension. En effet, dans sa composante sacrée et mariale, elle pourrait au contraire ne pas se réduire à une représentation normative de la féminité mais plutôt être une forme de stratégie pour prendre part au combat. En faisant dialoguer différents modèles de maternité combattants, tels qu’on les trouve chez Bertolt Brecht (Mère Courage et ses enfants, 1941), Renata Viganò (Agnès va mourir, 1949), ou encore Ghassan Kanafani (Oum-Saad la matrice, 1969), on se demandera si la représentation de la maternité permet aux femmes de s’approprier la violence guerrière, traditionnellement considérée comme masculine. Il sera donc question de comprendre si ce surinvestissement du motif maternel défait, ou non, les femmes d’une représentation normative de la féminité.

Identity as a dialectic of sameness and selfhood - the peculiarities of forming a narrative identity in the texts of Georgian female authors

2022-12-08T15:15:50+04:00

The experience of human time is articulated narratively, on the one hand, and the world shown in narrative works is always temporal, on the other. According to Paul Ricoeur, the idea of a story depends on the (re)configuration of its time experience. With this argument Ricoeur expresses a supposition on the compatibility between the actual reality and the reality of a literary text - which he calls reference. Thus, the function of cognition and construction of extra-literary reality are attributed to literature. The category of gender is insignificant in the researcher's analysis, but its theoretical foundations include important issues that connect time and gender, since gender is also related to experience: the world of experience conveyed in the text offers an alternative model of the contemporary real world organization.

Narrative identity is perceived as unstable because it is formed by combining the historical and fictional dimensions of the narrative and, similar to a story, can be told in a new way. For this reason, narrative identity is presented as something that can be con-figured and re-figured. Therefore, revealing and analyzing the conditions and causes of changes in the fictional texts of Georgian female authors will enable us to identify and analyze the peculiarities of constructing narrative identity, as well as to reconstruct images of epochs. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to determine the role of time experiences in the interrelation between the fictional world of the text and the reality of life.

The theoretical framework of the research is the time existence of Paul Recoeur's concept of "Me, myself", for which the researcher uses the concepts of sameness and selfhood, which are dynamic components of identity, enabling the altered versions (variations) of self to be integrated into time. The concepts of sameness and selfhood represent two extremes of identity. Both aspects of personal identity reinforce the assumption that "Me, myself" " is unique and permanent over time. The texts of Ekaterine Gabashvili, Safo Mgeladze and Keti Nizharadze have been selected as objects of analysis. The analysis of the texts reveals the connection between the world constructed in the literary texts of women authors and time experiences, and the real (actual) world and how the processes taking place in the real world is reflected in the writings of women.

Lived Experience and Ambiguity: Reconstructing motherhood through the lens of Feminist Killjoy in Avni Doshi's Burnt Sugar

2022-12-08T15:17:13+04:00

Avni Doshi's Burnt Sugar (2020) narrates the story of a mother who refuses self-abnegation of her desires for the sake of her child, Antara. The daughter witnesses the consequences of free will and her mother's choices, resulting in an existential crisis where she becomes obsessed with how the world perceives her. The novel oscillates between the daughter internalising the ideologies of patriarchy and acknowledging her mother's humanity. The suffering and shame of being treated as an outsider create a sense of alienation in the daughter. The narrative refuses to present a romanticised notion of motherhood. It offers motherhood as a liminal space where women must reconsider the boundaries between themselves and the child. Using Sara Ahmed's understanding of happiness as a result of submitting to socially sanctioned destinies of family and marriage, the paper questions the fates of women who refuse to accept them. The novel dances on the edges of abstract notions of motherhood inconsistent with embodied experiences of motherhood. The visceral language of the novel emphasis on maternal ambivalence. Simone de Beauvoir emphasis on motherhood as a choice. While the mother is intensely bound to her child, she is also an individual with free will. The novel deals with ambiguity by forcing the readers to see Tara as an individual and not just in the role of Antara's mother. Doshi's narrative framework reclaims the existence of mothers as beings with their desires, yearnings and choices and not just padlocked in the role of givers and nourishers.

Marginalité, violence et désir: réfraction du corps et de la sexualité dans le théâtre de Giovanni Testori et Bernard-Marie Koltès

2022-12-08T15:18:28+04:00

REMHFWLIGHFHWWHVRXPLVVLRQHVWGe proposer une réflexion comparée sur les différentes façons G H[plorer le genre et la sexualité dans l° XYUH de Giovanni Testori et de Bernard-Marie Koltès, deux auteurs qui partagent G HPEOpHXQHLQWHQVHéducation catholique et une profonde remise en question des costumes bourgeoises, ainsi que sur les enjeux qui sont mis en cause avec un théâtre fondé sur la violence des émotions. Pour faire cela, il faudra premièrement aborder la question des divergences qui opposent les personnages féminins et masculins dans le corpus des deux auteurs, pour se concentrer ensuite sur les situations dramatiques où sont mis en scène des évènements archétypaux TXL KDQWHQW O LPDJLQDLUH polymorphe des deux dramaturges, dans lequel de nombreuses couches de mythologèmes se déposent. En effet, le recours au mythe, classique ou biblique, pour exprimer OHVREVHVVLRQVGHODVH[XDOLWpQHV DSODWLW jamais en banalisation ou parodie dans les deux auteurs: on verra comment dans les réécritures transfigurées de Testori, principalement dans la Trilogia degli Scarozzanti, un discours sur la sexualité est exaspéré sans cesse entre le questionnement sur le mystère de la naissance HWO pODQGHVHréunifier avec le ventre maternel. Par conséquent, une importance remarquable sera donnée jO exploration des scènes liminaires de «premières fois» R O H[SpULHQFHFRUSRUHOOH SHUPHW GHFRQFHYRLU O écriture littéraire de Koltès comme un théâtre « de la virginité perdue » (Scarpa 2014), une démarche qui ± V LQVFULYDQWVRXVOD paternité rimbaldienne ± aspire à DSSUpKHQGHUWRXWFHTXLUHSUpVHQWHO extrême altérité par rapport à la culture occidentale cartésienne, F HVW-à-GLUHOHFRUSVGHO $XWUHOH1RLUHWO $IULTXH et à V LQWHUURJHUVXUOD quête infinie et viscérale du désir.

An Analysis of Love Again From the Perspective of Feminist Naratolog

2022-12-08T15:20:25+04:00

Elderly women is one of the important themes in the novels of British writer Doris Lessing. Love Again is a masterpiece of her later years describing and recording the emotional experience and situation of elderly women. This novel is based on the emotional experiences of Sarah, a screenwriter who is getting older, while planning and rehearsing a play. It tells the emotional dilemma of an older woman who suffers after being entangled with several young people, and the process of her gradual self-restructuring and gaining emotional freedom through constant reflections and choices. This essay starts from the current situation and emotional dilemmas of urban elderly women. With the help of Susan Lancer's theory of narrative voice in feminist narratology, it takes "missing" authorial narrative voice, "blurred" personal narrative voice and "wheel of speech" collective narrative voice as the entry points to interpret the works, analyzes the connection between women's growth and narrative voice, reveals the social moral constraints and ethical values carried by elderly women, and explores the emotional crisis and the way out for urban elderly women.

A Literary Model of the Broken Gender Lens

2022-12-08T15:21:30+04:00

The broken gender lens, based on androcentrism, gendered polarization and biological essentialism, are considered one of the most significant challenges for today’s world. Views about powerfulness of men and insignificance of women as a second sex have been entrenched in social institutions of various countries, ethno-cultural ways of life, and human minds since ancient times when monotheism took prevalence over polytheism.

The equality of male and female deities in pagan beliefs stayed in the past. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam made radical changes in views about men’s and women’s roles. A man is regarded as God’s favorite human who is above everyone, while a women is viewed as his subordinate whose function are confined to in-door activities and reproduction. Based on the aforementioned, humankind’s history is men’s history.

There are compositions whose authors try to break gender lens of their societies. The bestsellers such as The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischwili, The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hossein.

The main characters of these novels are women who live their lives in rather complicated times of their respective countries. Totalitarian regimes, wars, depreciation of moral and values exacerbates women’s predicament and sexual oppression. However, it is such political, social, economic, and ethic pressures that make them belligerent individuals who are able to oppose cruelty and even to arm themselves, to commit murder, to use their charm for the sake of a very difficult mission. In the world of masculine opinions they maintain their femininity and do not turn into so called manly women.

Positions of the authors of the three novels are focused into a single idea: history is written by both men and women. The gender lens are broken and there comes a new reality of equal rights.

Blogosphere as a source of alternative sex pedagogy

2023-01-20T14:23:31+04:00

I examine Indian sex blogosphere as alternative source of sex pedagogy in the present times. The sex industry is a network of symbolism. The symbols include blogs, sex toys, sex fantasy, visual materials among other things. The sex blogosphere reorients traditional notions of sex and sexuality. Blogosphere converts sex into a network of lifestyle performances and consumptions. I analyze sex blogs that are written by digital lifestyle magazines. The commercial websites selling sex and wellness products also produce blogs. Both the spaces allow some amount of autonomy to talk about sex. Women, men and people of non-binary genders find a conversational space through blogosphere. I discuss the ways in which these blogs shape, reorient and regenerate DIY sex cultures. The DIY sex culture generating from sex blogosphere is non-traditional and customized.

Where is the Solution in Case of Moral Degradation Acceording to Guram Dochanashvili's Novel "Boulder on Which Once there was a Church"

2022-12-08T15:23:07+04:00

"Boulder on Which Once there was a Church"expresses the moral degeneration and spiritual crisis of post-Soviet Georgia in the 90s, which is opposed by the eternal ideals and the phenomenon of faith reflected in art.

The novel presents an inner monologue of one person, unworthy (author alter ego). This reality is tragic, because the works depict people desperate for the brutality of the civil war, and the question "Where did it all begin" is constantly heard and repeated like the refrain "Where is salvation?"

In order to escape from the devaluation of spiritual values and to save the nation, according to this book, it is necessary to return to eternal values. Only a material welfare society is doomed to degeneration, and the only solution is to return to the Christian faith, which implies the establishment of moral ideals and moral purity.

One of the best parts of the novel is the postmodern texts created as a result of the use of artistic forms of Georgian oral tradition. The whole work is a combination of tests of different genres: it is a peculiar collection of essays, notes and small novels or memoirs written about distinguished writers and musicians.

All of this is perceived as an attempt by a person in a tragic post-Soviet environment to escape the unacceptable, soul-destroying reality and find spiritual peace in the eternal realm of beauty and the Christian faith.

Imagining a post-Russian Transcaucasus: on the fringes of “semiospheres”

2022-12-08T15:24:17+04:00

The long-lasting Russian hegemony in the Transcaucasus has resulted in a flexible yet coherent set of tropes, motifs, and attributions that affect not only representations of the area in Russian cultural production, but also in local and global imagery. The paper I propose presents literary and graphic works, written in various languages after the year 2000, that aim at overcoming dominant Imperial Russian views of the Transcaucasus and its multiethnic inhabitants.

While gravitating towards Georgia, it strives to transcend the national paradigm by also including literary representations of Azerbaijan and Armenia. My aim is to develop a typology of post-Russian literary imaginations of the region that may consist of 1) a post-Soviet approach that includes the Russian-Caucasian relationship into universalist liberal narratives (for example Aka Morchiladze, Viktoria Lomasko), 2) a global Russian re-assessment of Soviet geocultural and geopolitical thought in its countercultural tinge (Aleksandr Ilichevskii) as well as 3) a transcultural memory work that interweaves Russian imperial, nationalist and Western neocolonial narratives (Nino Haratischwili).

Refugee Trauma in Teona Dolenjashvili’s Novel The Bird Won’t Fly Out

2022-12-08T15:25:25+04:00

Research of cultural concepts of traumatic memory is becoming increasingly relevant in the scientific discourse. The in-depth study of the aforementioned topic has to be conducted by considering the historic memory, which creates basis for the range of researches in different directions of humanitarian sciences. Scholars agree that the 20^th century wars, psychological stress and historic memory have made the world to face new challenges, which, of course, was also reflected in theoretical discourse.

In post-soviet Georgian literary narrative there are numerous fiction texts reflecting the collective trauma, the main marker of which is the representation of epochal tragedies, on the one hand, and subjective point of view and approach of writer towards the topic, on the other hand.

Reflection of conflicts in Abkhazia and Tskhinvali was represented in Georgian literature in various ways, which is shown in the interpretations of national identity as far as the tragedies taken place in the homeland allow to understand the historic memory and to correctly perceive moral values. In this regard, interesting is Teona Dolenjashvili’s novel The Bird Won’t Fly Out is the most interesting. The text is based on real stories of refugees from Abkhazia and Syria, allowing the author to present the essence of displacement, as of one of the most painful problem of the epoch, in the global context. Nata, refugee girl from Abkhazia carries the stigma of displacement. She has escaped from the burning Sukhumi at the age of six, yet he constantly lives with these painful memories that have not been eased even by time. Furthermore, the trauma forced on her in her childhood, has forever changed her worldview, and even as a famous photojournalist, she is constantly haunted by the war.

This novel fits perfectly into the theoretical framework of postcolonialism and trauma. With sharp emotional passages the author manages to highlight the displacement (being a refugee) as a collective trauma, concept, against the background of war, the most destructive event for the humankind.

Post-Yugoslav Literature in others’ languages: Memory and identity among second-generation writers

2022-12-08T15:26:35+04:00

There have been many discussions about the common cultural space embracing the former Yugoslavia countries. Under the term of “post-Yugoslav literature,” scholars have argued the importance of works produced by exile writers, such as Dubravka Ugrešić and David Albahari, and their potentiality to transcend the national boundaries. Is the post-Yugoslav literature a transitional phenomenon, as some critics contend, or will it be a lasting legacy? To consider this question, this presentation will examine and compare two works written by the younger generation of novelists, Sofija Stefanovic and Pajtim Statovci, who wrote in their adopted country’s language. Stefanovic’s novel Miss Ex-Yugoslavia (2018) chronicles the story of a young woman who left Serbia in her childhood and grew up in 1990s Australia. Statovci’s first novel, My Cat Yugoslavia (Finnish: Kissani Jugoslavia) (originally published in 2014, translated into English in 2017, and translated into Serbian in 2020) explores two intertwined stories: The first story follows a young man who moved to Finland from Kosovo as a child, and the second story begins with the youth of his mother, set in the 1980s Kosovo. The novels of Stefanovic and Statovci differ greatly in their style and structure. In addition, the protagonists’ attitudes towards the Yugoslavia era are diagonally opposite: one is inclined to nostalgia, and the other is prone to resentment. Nevertheless, there are interesting affinities. One such example is the personification of Yugoslavia, which is traditionally represented as female but represented as male in both stories. With this clue to go on, this presentation will explore the question of memory, gender, and identity in an ever-changing post-socialist culture.

Postmodernist Experiment as a New Worldview Code in Post-Soviet Georgian Literature (Z. Karumidze's novel "The Wine-dark Sea")

2022-12-08T15:27:55+04:00

The post-Soviet reality in Georgian culture is distinguished by marking out a new creative orientation, which was conditioned to the desire of integration with the Western cultural-world. At the end of the 1990s, the disclosure of postmodernist tendencies in Georgian literature became obvious, which was clearly revealed in Z. Karumidze's novel " The Wine-dark Sea"(1996-2000). Postmodern indications were identified in Georgian artistic thought (mainly in theater, cinematography, paintings and partly in literature) much earlier, (than 1960s), however, in prose it had a sporadic and / or incomprehensible character. Therefore Z. Karumidze's novel can be considered as the first postmodernist text. It is created with a direct postmodernist purpose and also can be noted as an attempt to attribute Georgian literature to the modern world culture, which, at the same time, implies a desire to liberate from Soviet memory. Admittedly, this is a typical postmodernist novel including all its features (citation, centrism, rhizome, deconstruction, intertextuality, parody-irony, etc.). The author reinterprets traditional literature in an anti-narrative way. The novel has no narrative line, and is a peculiar mixture of allusions and mystifications. This is the first novel in Georgian reality where the plot is completely rejected. The whole text is an extensive art game and this playing field requires a well-trained reader. Noteworthy is that Zurab Karumidze is both a prose writer and a theorist, and based on his dual experiences he tried to manifest postmodernism in the Georgian cultural-worldview as a contemporary mindset and artistic thinking. This was once more conditioned by the suggestions of continuity of Georgian literature in international cultural processes and the desire to fully adapt to it.

The reception of the transformation/ transition of the 90s in German and Georgian literature

2022-12-08T15:30:27+04:00

For the Soviet Union, the 1990s turned out to be overburdened with socio-political events. At the turn of the century, the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a political entity. Georgia's independence was officially declared on April 9, 1991, and a new era began for the society, laden with economic problems, ethnic conflicts, civil war, generations of uprisings and drama. Consequently, Georgian writers and creators faced a significant challenge. It was, on the one hand, a necessity to engage in the ongoing literary processes in the world, in particular in democracies, and, on the other hand, to overcome the consciousness of a society that had escaped the Soviet establishment. The literature must destroy the model of total thinking and show the existence of a man on the verge of a turning point in the new political reality. The writing should reflect the drama of the birth of a new person from the totalitarian space, like the East German writers who were actively involved in presenting post-totalitarian aesthetics and created countless texts before or after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The research is based on the assessment of the current processes in Georgia in the 90s and the understanding of the problem of the issue of change in the Georgian literature on the basis of the signs of transformations developed by Prof. Piotr Sztompka.

The term transformation will be analyzed on the basis of outlining the trends of East German transformation literature and the analysis of literature reflected by 90s by Georgian critics and literary critics. This study is an attempt to analyze the current processes in the German transformation literature with understanding and experience of the analysis of the same transition period in Georgia in the 90s, which, of course, requires a more in-depth and large-scale cultural research. The aim of the research is to show how much it is possible to evaluate and analyze the period of transformation, the same transition period in Georgian literature?

Soviet Ideologemes and their Critique in Givi Margvelashvili's Fluchtästhetische Novelle

2022-12-08T15:31:27+04:00

German-speaking Georgian writer and philosopher Givi Margvelashvili (1927-2020), whose life was determined by the violent regime of the Soviet Union, criticizes the ideology of the Soviet Union in his metafictional works. The paper discusses his novel Fluchtästhetische Novelle (2012), in which a migrant author, along with the critique of the ideology, attempts to process a traumatic past and tries to selfmedicate. Fluchtästhetische Novelle is an auto-intertextual work. The pretext of the novel is Givi Margvelashvili's autobiographical work Captain Vakush (Kapitän Wakusch, 1991/1992) volumes I and II, which are discussed, summarized and interpreted in the novel. The work also sheds a light on the metaphorical terms and key symbols like “Goglimogli” (child's food: the egg yolk scrambled with sugar) and “Mamassachlissimus”, referring to dictator Stalin. Unlike Captain Vakush, the work Fluchtästhetische Novelle is built on metafictional narrative techniques and is a kind of metafictional experiment. The intertextual character Vakush in the novel is Givi Margvelashvili's alter-ego, thus the work acquires an auto-fictional character. The paper analyzes the purpose of intertextual, auto-fictional and metafictional elements in the work. Particular attention is paid to Vakush's introspective imagination, as this episode openly expresses the main message of the text. More precisely, the critique of Soviet ideology. In Givi Margvelashvili's artistic world, Western music and dance serve the same purpose, which aims to transform and deideologize the worldview of Soviet officials. The paper shows that in Givi Margvelashvili's artistic world, these (music and dance) and other Western realities have the ability to awaken Soviet officials and the population from an ideological slumber, to promote Western democratic values and to establish a true democracy.

Deconstraction of Modern Authors text in Post-soviet Azerbaijani Prose (Anar'a “Sixth Floor of a Five-Storey House” and “Bornbutterfly” by Ziyad Guluzadeh)

2022-12-08T15:32:26+04:00

In postmodern Azerbaijani prose, deconstruction is based not only on canonical texts and archetypes, but also on deconstructive versions of more modern literary texts. One of the most interesting works from this point of view is Anar's novel "The Sixth Floor of a Five-Story House". Anar's "Sixth Floor of a Five-Story House" is dedicated to one of the eternal literary themes - the defeat of two young people in the face of the unwritten laws of society, unrequited love. Anar's novel "The Sixth Floor of a Five-Story House" has maintained its popularity among readers since its inception. After the screening of the work, the images of Tahmina and Zaur became loved and recognized not only by readers, but also by the audience. Two new works based on the motives of this novel were written in the Azerbaijani literature of the independence period - Gunel Anargizi's novel "The Sixth" and Ziyad Guluzadeh's "BornButterfly". Gunel Anargizi's novel "The Sixth" was written in the form of Tahmina's diary. In Ziyad Guluzadeh's novel "BornButterfly", one of the interesting examples of postmodern Azerbaijani prose, ANAR'S novel "The sixth floor of a five-storey house" was completely deconstructed. Ziyad Guluzadeh creates an alternative plot to Anar's plot and presents one of the possible artistic solutions of Tahmina and Zaur's love destiny after marriage. Thus, the creation of a deconstructive version of "The Sixth Floor of a Five-Story House" in the novel "BornButterfly" conditions the acceptance of Anar's work as the main text and canonizes the novel. This novel also shows the beginning of the next stage of the deconstructive process in postmodern Azerbaijani prose through the deconstruction of closer literary texts in terms of time.

The Sea and Seafarers: looking at the literatures of the world from a maritime perspective

2022-12-08T15:33:40+04:00

The theme of the sea and seafarers, which I have been teaching for several years to science students from over twenty different countries at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, has led me to reflect on some practical and theoretical issues, thus changing an Undergraduate course into an intellectual odyssey per se.

This year, the students had to choose and present a piece of literature from their country related to the theme of the course, in order to share it with the other participants of the class. This assignment obliged the students to dive in the literary heritage of their respective countries. I had anticipated that the challenge would be of a very different nature according to the countries they came from, but I was confident that they could find something. I have not been disappointed. In fact, they brought to the surface some pearls that, due to my Western education, were unknown to me, making me realise two things :

- The first is the sheer scope and depth of the existing literary worlds which could turn so quickly a scholar into a simpleton;

- The second is about our methods to address the literatures of the world.

Is geography, a science which developed in the XIXth century around land bearings and also shaped the study of literature in academia the right way to contemplate our subject(s)? Some euro-centered definitions obviously fail to grasp their object, such as «Asian literature». More often than not, «national literatures» are in the same situation. Yet, comparative studies rely on those distinctions if only to show that they are ill-founded.

Comparative literature has always had all-encompassing and theoretical ambitions. Alongside the current trends of literary criticism such as post-colonialism and eco-criticism, I would like to argue that reshaping our perspective on cultural transfers according to a maritime perspective based on the three oceans of the world and its many seas, both open and closed, could offer a new and refreshing way to bring together the literatures of the world and help us rethink our binary distinctions about North and South, East and West, major and minor on our Blue Planet.

To See Self from The Other -- A Imagology Study in Rain and Sinking

2022-12-08T15:34:49+04:00

Somerset Maugham's Rain tells the story of a missionary in the South Pacific who tries to persuade a prostitute to mend her ways, but ends up falling victim to sexual desire. Sinking by Yu Dafu, a Chinese writer, tells the story of a young Chinese studying in Japan who could only alleviated his desire through peeping since he feels inferior about coming from a weak country.

The two texts were created in completely different times and spaces, and there are huge differences on the surface, especially between Eastern and Western cultures. However, the Imagology of the Comparative Literature builds a bridge between the two texts: the similarity is that they both take the image of the Other as a mirror image, from which they can see their own national image, and the variation of The behavior of the protagonist releasing his desires in foreign countries reflects similar humanity and different cultures.

Most of the classic imagology research texts take the images of foreign nations as the main object of expression, and attract curious readers with exotic customs, while the national images lurk behind the texts.The study of a single type of text naturally leads to the solidification of research conclusions.

The study analyzes the self-image from the images of others in the two works, and reveals the psychological, social and cultural factors behind the protagonists' sexual indulgences in foreign countries. The significance of the study is as follows: first, it reveals the literary function of the alien images as mirror images. Second, explore the comparative literature research value of this kind of special research text to fill the blank of discipline research. Thirdly, the study reveals the psychological, social and national culture common to the East and the West behind the images, which is a comparability of eastern and western literary works in imagology. The study provides a new paradigm for the study of eastern and Western cross-cultural literature.

The Affective Pleasure of Photobiography: Gazes and Mental Images in Roland Barthes and Eileen Chang

2022-12-08T15:35:50+04:00

The difference between word and image is like a territorial border. Although these two media are arguably complementary techniques and practices of manipulating signs and creating effects on the spectator, the affective pleasure underlying word-image interactions in literary texts is perplexing. Why do authors look at images? What exactly touches them in the picture? How do image and narrative afford differing sensual perceptions and drive the author to combine them in specific contexts? To address these questions, we need to move beyond aesthetical strategies of image-text and examine visual perception in the literary mode of description. Focusing on the issue of vision and literary visuality, which tends to be overlooked, this paper examines two photobiographies, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980) and Eileen Chang’s Looking at Each Other (1994). Both authors show a strong attachment with their mothers when looking at a photograph related to her – one represents Barthes’s mother at the age of five, and the other represents Chang at a similar age and was coloured by her mother; both authors reflect on the relationship between gaze, sensation, and affective visual memory in their viewing experience but implicitly represent it by setting up different intricately woven laceworks of gazes. I argue that the circulation of intimate gazes is paramount in understanding enjoyment in writing, and by extension, the reading process of photobiography. I suggest that gazes, either perceptually reciprocal or displaced, do not fall into a simple binary opposition of self versus other. Instead, they bridge the gap between the author as a writing subject and as the object of scrutiny and narration, word and image, photobiography’s form and content. Barthes and Chang gaze in order to look back on those looking at them; but they also look at their limited horizon, which is always being constructed by others’ looks, in order to question their own look.

(Foreign) Language against Forgetting

2022-12-08T15:37:02+04:00

"The Eighth Life: (For Brilka)" a novel by Nino Haratischvili (2014) and "Maybe Esther A Family Story" a memoir by Katja Petrowskaja (2014) are both German language works Both authors recount the passing on of memories and stories within a family over generations. In both stories, the family narrative is strongly influenced by the political events of 20th century world history. The personal confrontation with the consequences of the totalitarian regimes in Eastern and Western Europe proceeds differently in the families. Stalinism and Nazi dictatorship leave violent traces in the respective families but also in the individual biographies.

This paper will explore the question of how differently family history is passed on and how family stories, which are preserved in communicative memory and passed on orally (Welzer, 2011), relate to world history, which is stored in cultural memory (Assmann, A. 2018). "Families serve as a kind of switchboard between the individual memory and larger frames of collective remembrance. " (Erll 2011, p. 315).

In both books, however, the remembering, telling and (re-)constructing of family histories is also contrasted with forgetting (Haratischvili) and silence (Petrovskaya). "The score of Forgetting" and the "Silence" in Katja Petrovskaya's family history create gaps that are filled by fictional stories. Language, also the "language of the mute", is the medium used to work against forgetting. Two different methods are shown of how language can function as a tool of emancipation and what functions language takes on in the individual, the familial and cultural memory. Notably, the works were not written in the mother tongue of the authors, but in German.

Re-imagining Anthropocene: towards a post-anthropocentric planetary literature

2022-12-08T16:47:51+04:00

Scientific and cultural debates around the concept of Anthropocene – proposed by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to name our current geological epoch – have opened the literary world to new narratives, ideas, and theoretical horizons. Despite its ambiguity, the term reveals how human action has negatively influenced the Earth system’s equilibria, causing catastrophic events such as climate change, biodiversity loss, floods, and droughts.

In this context, philosophical and literary discussions have pointed out the necessity of a paradigmatic shift from the anthropocentrism of western cultures – based on the division between nature and culture, human and non-human worlds – towards more ecological, eco-cosmopolitan, and posthuman systems of belief.

Literary fiction contributes to the western culture’s paradigmatic change in different ways: I turn to new materialism, environmental humanities, and posthuman ecocriticism to propose a comparative analysis of narrative works of the Italian writer Laura Pugno and the French writer Marie Darrieussecq to support such theoretical discussions, underlying their value in our contemporary planetary and post-anthropocentric literary scenario.

“Onto a chilly aerial road to new worlds”: global affective landscapes of transience in Olga Tokarczuk’s and Amitav Ghosh’s writing

2022-12-08T16:49:34+04:00

In Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights (2005; 2018), the idea of movement as inevitable existential condition of humanity is developed through a meticulous and multidirectional exegesis from many cultural locations: the Orthodox heresy (hence the novel’s title, whose English version raises the idea of translation as creative transformation to yet another level); the “itenararium” of museums of medical science history, the comparative maps of world rivers and maps as world imaginaries, the exploration of heterotopias such as airports or subways and their no-place location in contemporary human geography. Mobility as that which makes us aware of our joint condition of transience and dislocation in not only space, but also time and, possibly, being, is a major concern in Tokarczuk’s writing. Local spaces which turn out to be inscribed in history’s shifting narratives, local communities which turn out to be but a temporary settlement in the process of permanent displacement and uprooting, and, last but not least, the transforming power of nature, seemingly passive and immobile, but in fact engaged in the ongoing process of complex metamorphoses, constitute a unique landscape of transience in Tokarczuk’s writing.

Amitav Ghosh’s unmatched work in tracing the routes of the human global connections and nascent cosmopolitanisms in various historical contexts, and his passionate involvement in investigating the history of colonization (extractivism, trade, genocide) whose contemporary correlate is the “great derangement” (2016) and the “planet in crisis” (2021) contributes a unique collection of local landscapes in transience as human and non-human ecosystems affected by the invading species, to keep to the ecocritical vocabulary to which his fiction is so sensitive.

In my presentation I would like to read comparatively how both authors engage the reconstruction of the local as a human and natural ecosystem in order to investigate its precarious ontology in colonial and global modernity and intimate the transformative affects generated by the loss of the sense of rooting and belonging on a global scale.

Economic Rationality against Ecological Reality: A Study in the Selected American Films (2000 to 2010): A Study in the Selected American Films (2000 to 2010)

2022-12-08T16:51:55+04:00

The American films such as I am Legend (2007); Deadline (2009); Turning Point (2009); Bomb It (2007); Crash (2004); Erin Brockovich (2000); Zeitgeist (2007) are a few of the selected films that have been undertaken for analyses to bring forth the human efforts and understanding for their existence. These films raise two questions for viewers and critics while creating empathy or delivering alienation-effect. The first is – How do the seeds of ambiguity are sown by anti-intellectual elements in order to configure ‘orthodoxies of modernity’? The second is – How has ‘post-modernity positioned social problems in the age of scientific rationalism and cultural constructions in the mindset’? (Pluckrose, Helen et al. 2018.The Necessity of Post-Modernism in Post-Truth Age. Ed. Kenneth Houston. Areo Magazine.com)

The selected films for the study have problematized, identified, and measured the welfare-alternatives and assets of the secular, materialistic, mechanized and techno-culture in contradiction to complex, stark reality of modern society of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The filmic text inadvertently displays one-dimensional man whose needs, inner desires and ambitions are de facto human values. That means episteme is hijacked, and it is a deconstruction tool of self-serving ideologues of moral panic. These film on one hand project an outcry for fear and alienation, suppression, discrimination, homelessness, fraught and environmental destruction, while on the other hand there is a quest to ensure a healthy, humane and happy life with dignity, quality, safety, security and equity. This primordial human need and fear suggests characters’ expectations and questions for ‘common sense’, but the same rationality represents the tragic truth of human life which is more into inhuman, illogical, invisible trap of human catastrophe, because the relativity of contextual logic and fragmenting trust are under the governance of power relationships which stands beyond the notions of common sense.

The research study aims to determine the possibility of a new meaning in the actions and conduct of the characters, self-deconstruction, resolution of human happiness in contemporary times, the possibility and potentiality of human choices, the idea of constructing a better world of self-actualization that is based on likeness and enabling aspect, the voice and redress of the dormant demands for social and economic justice for those who under the pressures of economic progress have been stripped of their identity, roots and entity. The democratic spirit, the public scrutiny, the economic rationality and technocracy dangerously sow explosive of rebel and negative variables of resignation, indifference, near nihilism, essentialism and pseudo intellectualism, which at surface level is a collective consciousness and engagement for empowerment, efficiency and ecology, but inside it is far from ‘physiogamic totality’ (German Painter, Johann Moritz Rugendas).

Penser la nature face à la technique

2022-12-08T16:53:57+04:00

Nous vivons dans un monde où l’opposition entre nature et techné tend à s’effacer devant la profusion d’artefacts technico-naturels qui envahissent progressivement notre environnement. Alors que les ordinateurs commencent à imiter et à incorporer des processus biologiques et que la science des organismes vivants se transforme en une puissante ingénierie, la frontière entre nature et culture devient de plus en plus difficile à tracer. En témoigne la littérature du XXIème siècle qui ne cesse de nous confronter à des objets ambigus, qui remettent en question l’ontologie « naturaliste » (Descola) imposée par la modernité occidentale. L’objet de cette contribution sera d’analyser quelques-uns de ces objets pour montrer comment la littérature réfléchit les divers modes d’intrication du naturel et du culturel qui ont toujours formé la toile de fond de nos actions et de nos existences. Qu’elle investisse les « non lieux » de la périurbanité, qu’elle mette en scène des hybrides d’organisme vivant et de machine qui récusent l’idée de „nature humaine“ ou qu’elle montre l’impact croissant de la technologie sur nos vies, la littérature contemporaine montre l’importance de mesurer le changement de paradigme que nous sommes en train de vivre afin de pouvoir infléchir son évolution et continuer à contrôler l’avenir. C’est ce qu’on cherchera à montrer à partir d’oeuvres empruntées à la littérature américaine (Richard Powers), autrichienne (Peter Waterhouse), anglaise (Ian Mc Ewan) et française (Michel Houellebecq).

Mots clé : nature, technique, culture, posthumain, paysage

We live in a world where the opposition between nature and techné is tending to disappear in the face of the profusion of technico-natural artifacts that are gradually invading our environment. As computers begin to mimic and incorporate biological processes and as the science of living organisms is transformed into powerful engineering, the boundary between nature and culture becomes increasingly difficult to draw. This is evidenced by the literature of the twenty-first century, which constantly confronts us with ambiguous objects that challenge the "naturalist" ontology (Descola) imposed by Western modernity. The purpose of this contribution will be to analyze some of these objects to show how literature reflects the various modes of entanglement of the natural and the cultural that have always formed the backdrop of our actions and our existences. Whether it invests the "non-places" of peri-urbanity, whether it stages hybrids of living organism and machine that challenge the idea of "human nature" or shows the increasing impact of technology on our lives, contemporary literature shows the importance of measuring the paradigm shift we are experiencing in order to be able to influence its evolution and continue to control the future. This is what we will try to show on the basis of works borrowed from American (Richard Powers), Austrian (Peter Waterhouse), English (Ian Mc Ewan) and French (Michel Houellebecq) literature.

Représenter les non-humains: imaginaire juridique et imaginaire littéraire à l’heure de l’anthropocène

2022-12-08T16:55:51+04:00

Comment représenter les entités non humaines et les milieux de vie à l’ère de l’anthropocène ? La question de la représentation, qu’on peut entendre dans sa dimension esthétique, politique mais aussi juridique, se pose à nouveau à l’heure où l’urgence climatique incite à considérer le monde non plus comme un territoire consacrant la prééminence de l’homme, mais comme un espace partagé entre humains et non humains, à inventer des récits qui intègrent différents actants et différentes formes d’agentivité. L’entrée de ces nouveaux protagonistes en littérature – animaux, plantes, mais aussi montagnes, fleuves, sédiments, ou encore bactéries – marque une volonté de décentrement ontologique qui découle en partie de la découverte, en biologie, de la nature symbiotique des relations entre les vivants. De nouveaux récits ont ainsi essaimé en littérature, mais aussi en sciences humaines et jusque dans l’imaginaire juridique contemporain. A partir d’un vaste corpus de récits littéraires contemporains, on se propose de cartographier ces nouveaux agencements. Ces oeuvres littéraires entendent participer à la construction d’un savoir sur le monde et enregistrer dans leur forme même les évolutions de notre rapport à la Terre, à ses vivants et à ses paysages. Elles érigent l’écriture en pratique d’exploration et de connaissance, et constituent le ferment d’un nouvel imaginaire animiste dont on trouve désormais aussi les traces dans certaines réflexions du droit contemporain. C’est la porosité de ces nouveaux imaginaires, littéraires et juridiques, qui fera l’objet de cette étude, en montrant comment la littérature modélise les questions juridiques autour de l’extension de la « personne morale » qui se pose avec acuité depuis deux

décennies, et comment à son tour le droit s’inspire et se trouve déplacé par des figurations littéraires qui ont à la fois une vertu critique mais, surtout, spéculatives.

Towards a Feminist Phenomenology of Blood Consciousness: Saturated Phenomena in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love

2022-12-08T16:57:12+04:00

The experience of being in the world can provide a new feminist praxis attuned to women’s lived experiences in society. Feminist Phenomenology believes in the idea that gender influences one's knowledge of the world. Sexual and gendered embodiment is as crucial as the formalistic accounts of experience. D.H. Lawrence's underlying belief insists on the impossibility of getting a holistic understanding of the world through the Cartesian approach. His idea of "Blood consciousness" discards the dualism between mind and body. The embodied body makes a statement in literature by its desire to disclose being. Being in the world is not always rational. Body as embodied consciousness can form a basis for knowledge. Jean-Luc Marion introduced the concept of saturated phenomena. These are phenomena that offer intuition that exceeds our intention towards that event. Literature can recognise these saturated phenomena where the events exceed the purpose of Being. Lawrence's novels are bursting with saturated phenomena. Blood Consciousness deals with excess. Women in Love (1995) critiques the androcentrism of phenomenology by engaging with women's world experience. The novel challenges the mind and body dualism by expressing the inseparability of physical experience in gaining a concrete understanding of the world. The corporal centred epistemology of Lawrence allows him to be a writer who understands phenomenology.

Rereading Kunikida Doppo’s On the Bank of Sorachi River from the Perspective of Environmental History

2022-12-08T16:58:17+04:00

Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908) is a well-known romantic poet and novelist. Many comparative studies have noted Doppo’s reception of William Wordsworth’s poems and essays, researching evidence in his depictions of the relationship between humans and nature. However, a few pay attention to the background of environmental change faced by individuals living in modern era Japan.

This presentation rereads Doppo’s On the Bank of Sorachi River (published at 1902. 11. 1 and 12. 1) from the perspective of environmental history. By referring to Chronology of Environmental History: 1868–1926 (Shimokawa Koushi, 2003), this study outlines the environmental protection movement before the creation of On the Bank of Sorachi River. Based on this research, the study indicates the significance of depictions of nature in On the Bank of Sorachi River, revealing that the work is not simply a representation of the love of nature that originated in Japan but also an endeavor by Doppo to raise public awareness of environmental protection. Lastly, the study might also help explain Doppo’s creative inspiration in the works of Wordsworth.

As my first stage of research, this study presents the element of environmental justice that arises in the literature of the Meiji period.

Georgian literature at the crossroads: cultural challenges from colonialreality to Europeanization

2022-12-08T16:59:32+04:00

Integration of culture with Euro-Atlantic cultural space is a significant challengeof the Georgian literature in the process of new historical regulation. The given issue is especially important for a post-Soviet period country. At that point the new genres, themes and images in the culture and literature gain specific meaning. The modern cultural process in searching for certain forms, which allow adapting Georgian culture with European standards.

The word “Europe” does not of course mean a leveled space, a united cultural or even political monolith. Europe has many, strong co-perception of common history, mutual intersections; there have been many events in the history of Europe which affected not just one specific country, although there is quite clear perception of different peoples, their lifestyles.

The discussion about Georgian culture being European, or non-European started in 1990’s; Degree of integration became decisive; Are we ready for Georgian culture to integrate with European cultural and Euro-Atlantic space? When speaking about Georgia we must consider two issues. To what extent our culture is compatible with general principles of liberal democracy, meaning to what extent our cultural-mental area can integrate with European countries considering its historical and cultural peculiarities.

In Georgia, just as in all other post-totalitarian countries the processes developed in the opposite direction: the so called violent model was dominant, which was against the essence of western civilization, when we first gain a country and then a country forms a new culture. The certain reflection of dominant culture is the direct result of the above mentioned; against this oppression which resulted in pseudo and fictional imagination of Georgian mentality and tolerance. Totalitarian consciousness prohibited fictional shows, mystical and sacral problematic, the so called “immaterial themes” in each field of arts.

These processes have been gradually revealed in Georgian culture/literature

which is reasoned by three main factors: I-freedom from totalitarian regime; II-tradition of integration of Georgian culture with European processes (at the boundary of XIX-XX centuries); III-critical-analytical and esthetic-democratic innovations in Georgian literature – new genres in new art reality.

Thus, Georgian culture is at the crossroads: the process of cultural exchange from a colonial framework to an open, free creative process is still in the present process with its multifaceted manifestations

A book as a witness of injury

2022-12-08T17:01:39+04:00

The object of interest in the proposed study is the phenomenon of the collection “queer poetry” «Under one cover» published in 2018 in Almaty (Kazakhstan) and uniting poets who consider themselves to be sexual or gender minorities. The significance of this phenomenon is justified by the fact that in the Central Asia this literary precedent is observed for the first time. Moreover, both the design and typography quality are very high. The collection is represented by the texts of 21 poets with a completely diverse geography of creativity: Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, the USA, Canada, Ukraine, Japan.The main of the research is to study a collection of poems with a marked title as the integrity of a higher poetic level. The author studies the texts of verses, their graphic accompaniment, interactive semantics of the title, compositional construction of the collection, its internal plot. The installation for confession is realized at the different levels of the book (from the cover to the super-idea). Some authors do this in an intentionally crude form but most of them create the hyperassociative style characteristic of this collection which makes it possible to hide the pain and discomfort of an injured consciousness behind highly intellectual poetry. The author of the article proves the representation of the personal and gender individuality of each author in the subjective, associative, spatio-temporal, subject-motivational, genre organization of texts. And the effect of generalizing the particular into the general become more interesting: in the context of whole poem collection the uniqueness of the idiostylistics of each author begins to transform into the intonation of the Book. This is the way of turning the collection into a book: in gaining collective queer consciousness as a kind of coordinate system which doing possible realization one's own identity.

Exploring the Thematic Shifts in Modern Poetry as a Response to Anthropocene: A Comparative Epistemological Study between American and Indian Ecopoetics

2022-12-08T17:03:08+04:00

Elements (earth, air, fire and water) are subjects of fascination in the ecocritical approach to contemporary American and Indian poetry, where a shift of thematic and poetic style is noticed to address the instances of increasing environmental crises; both in personal and global level. In this time of Anthropocene, a geological epoch caused by our anthropocentric worldview, there is a sharp call for us to be ethically responsible. In these poems, elements invite us to the imagination of possible futures against the background of climate emergency and techno-cultural transformations. An imagination of human-nonhuman enmeshment in the poetry of American and Indian authors could be a post-modern route to identify the self in light of the elements. This paper explores how, through thematic shifts, poets are addressing the binaries (human vs. non-human, now vs. then, self vs. other) to trigger an ethical concern among the readers.

The objective of this paper is an interdisciplinary transfer of knowledge which leads to a deeper insight into the instances of elemental ecocriticism in contemporary American and Indian ecopoetry by Forest Gander, Juliana Spahr, Vihang A. Naik and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. This paper intends to place nature from the margin to the centre and in interrelation with human beings – while studying the testimonies diachronically.

A comparative framework of contemporary (post-1980s) American and Indian poetry raises few key questions: how can ecopoetry be more vigorous and experimental to change conventional themes by pushing the boundaries of conventional ways of thinking to open new possibilities for us? How can contemporary ecopoetry rejuvenate experimental poetry to help us translate the other world into the other words and images?

A Comparative Diachronic Study of Eco-poetry from America and India: Changing Perceptions and Ethical Concerns

2022-12-08T17:04:31+04:00

In the beginning, nature poetry meditated on the encounter between the human and non-human world and revealed the different meaning of life, where ecological poetry questions form (both poetic and the traditional form) of the poetic persona as a single, coherent self as well as bringing imagination of biocentric perspective and ecological interrelatedness. Ecopoetry now is no longer an only subset of nature poetry that is related to certain conventions of romanticism.

Whitman’s imagination was “the global village,” a world brought closer and to some degree homogenized by rapid transport and communication, and “Passage to India” is a hymn for the global tribe, celebrating the grand connections – the opening of the Suez Canal, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the laying of telegraph cables across the oceans. Exploring this interdisciplinary subject, Forest Gander creates, with the help of three acclaimed photographers and ethical concern helps readers in the imagination of an empathetic relation in which the world itself is fundamental. On contrary to acknowledging the local ecology he is a poet who talks about the globe, China,

Besides these poets from America, this paper studies two Indian authors: ancient poet Kalidasa and Malayalam ecopoet Sugatha Kumari. Kalidasa was an ancient Indian poet who empathically drew human-nature relations. Kalidasa’s use of season to portray human emotions and how animal instincts are a part of human behaviour by referring to the sun, moon other elements and animate and inanimate objects was ahead of his time. Sugatha Kumari studies the reactivity between ecology and human society and the reflection of the dominant development on the longevity of the preserved environment.

This comparative study of ecopoetry of American and Indian authors on the evolution will help identify and distinguish Indian ecocentric literature from the western ecocentric canon through the different phases of the journey of ecocentric poetry in India and the West.

A fabled reading of a Korean story: The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly

2022-12-08T17:07:56+04:00

This paper endeavours to offer a critical reading of The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly through the lens of a fable in order to elucidate an illustration of eugenic restriction being transcended by transracial compassion.

This novel is translated from Korean and presents a farm of hens, mallard ducks, domestic ducks, dogs, roosters and weasels. In this setting, a hen, named Sprout, yearns for what is denied to her both genetically and environmentally.

Sprout is assigned the role of an egg-laying chicken, intended to lay unfertilized eggs for sale at the market by the profit-oriented farm owners. Her raison d'être is not to become a mother, as she wishes, but to provide a commodity. As such, the farm owners value their livestock selectively as per their ability to lay good quality eggs. Not only are her eggs defective and weak-shelled, but she is cordoned off away from any roosters. Her identity is defined eugenically according to her genetics and the orchestrated circumstances of her environment as well as how she is measured within it.

Furthermore, Sprout is unable to fly beyond floating in the air more than a few seconds. Despite this, she desires flight and this, due to her genetics, is even further beyond her than motherhood. She is thus presented as a somewhat pitiful creature who underperforms in her assigned role and is denied her wishes.

However, upon coming across and caring for a duck egg left behind after its father and the rest of its siblings were killed by weasels, Sprout becomes a mother to a duck. The novel describes the realised impossibility of her motherhood by conflating the sensation of flight with the fulfilment of finally attaining motherhood. This motif is further continued as Sprout comes to the completion of her role as her son grows to the point of being able to leave her and fly away with a passing raft of ducks.

At the close of the tale, her motherly compassion transcends all her bounds when she encounters a dying group of weasels. Previously depicted as a source of fear and horror, Sprout now sees a mother unable to feed her young and that her offspring will soon die for lack of food. Sprout offers herself as food and witnesses the weasel bringing sustenance to her children whilst floating above them in ethereal form; she has attained flight at last.

This essay thus offers transracial motherly love as an answer to the restrictive prejudices of eugenics. By means of this compassion, Sprout is able to acquire identity and self that was denied to her, even to an impossible degree. As such, this novel, when viewed as a fable, offers a release from the false boundaries of eugenics, making a point to name and validate the animals that contribute to this journey as opposed to the invalidation by the farm owners. This essay thereby proposes a reinterpreted approach to understanding ourselves and other beings that constitutes ‘a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within an understandable language.’ (Braidotti).

Consciousness for Justice and Question of Racial Perception: A Critical Study in Multicultural Identities Context

2022-12-08T17:09:53+04:00

The characters of James McBride, Toni Morrison and Mohsin Hamid’s novels struggle with their self- esteem and pride as well as with their conflicting cultural due to the harrowing ordeal of polarization, humiliation, hardships and racial sickness. Toni Morrison is a renowned African- American novelist who wrote elaborately in context of black women, her feelings, her self- contradictions. The Bluest Eye, Beloved reveal detailed analysis of these characters who portray the situation after post- civil era. It reflected pain, inner conflicts in regard to race, skin colour. Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye and Beloved problematize existential survival of men, women or children as African - Americans in the social milieu of discrimination and deprivation in the society of Whites in America and within the community of Blacks. . James McBride, distinguished novelist and a resident of New York City, is a writer of memorable memoir The Color of Water. His other works include Miracle at St. Anna, Song Yet Sung. He reflected on an eye- opening picture of America. James McBride’s memoir The Color of Water visualize the harmonious existence of multi-ethnics even in the environment that inflict alienation and marginalisation on minority on account of being African- American or Jewish – American in America. Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani writer who spent his childhood in the United States. He has stayed in Lahore, London, New York and California. He studied under Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Vates in Princeton University. His works include Moth Smoke, Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Mohsin Hamid has interpreted conflicting ideologies of multi-ethnic identities. His character in the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a Pakistani national, seeking fortune in America. The author questions the perception and suspicion of hegemonic whites of America who determined his life or death. The proposed theme attempts to cover The Best African American Essays: 2009 edited by Gerald Early and Debraj. J. Dickerson and Doris Lessings’ ‘The Sun between Their Feet’- Collected African Stories. Both the texts create opportunity for change. A voluminous literature describes the diffusion, employment and efficacy of movement repertoire” (Armstrong, Elizabeth A. 2002). These texts emphasized blacks consciousness, their struggle, their nationalism, their power in multicultural lives, their efforts of self-determination regarding their sustenance, their shift and their conflict as regards their preservation of culture. The theory of how black studies played in the dark images of blackness in not only the literature written by whites but also by African-Americans or by Africans has become a matter of problem framing discourse. The above mentioned texts leave immense scope to expostulate the historical shift in race relations; for understanding of cultural fusion; highlighting immigrant adaptation, multiculturalism and identity management in different immigrant groups in America or in Africa itself. The study becomes interesting from the point of self-conceptions, individual challenges, their renegotiation with the prevelant socio-political, legal environment that portrays their self-valorisation, validation of their memory, space and image, their vehemence against racial discrimination, their disillusionment to imitate whites’ standards and last but the least their fight against segregation within themselves and with whites. These books reveal contrast between homogenization of ethnic group and mobilization of cultural hegemony in context of perception and attitude of whites and blacks respectively. Hence these texts pose a challenge to the previous ethnic canons that romance with cultural relativity and historiography of the text that “has conveyed a picture of Black people as being docile and imitative, stupid and parasitic children, primitives and buffoons” (Wright, Bobby. 1969)

The Cosmopolitan Space as Break, Vulnerability, and Anonymity

2022-12-08T17:12:40+04:00

To be a citizen of the world is a paradoxical juxtaposition. How can we think of the world as a shared cosmos and how to think of a shared space in the uncertain and fragile world we live in? What connects us together? At this very moment, there is a virus (an impersonal, anonymous entity) that puts us in a shared space of horror, displacement, and vulnerability. It has shattered our sense of belonging to a home and of owning our bodies. Our bodies have effaced their borders and are hospitable to this anonymous other that dispossesses us from our realm of security. Yet, it has reminded us of our cosmopolitan existence, of our shared vulnerability, of the insecurity of homelessness that has rarely occurred so tangibly. It ties us together with a break and a rupture in our presumed accustomed life. This makes one contemplate on a global community not as unification but as a break from which there is no escape.

This paper comprises rethinking cosmopolitanism from an ethical and phenomenological perspective. It is a new rendition of cosmopolitanism as communication between the self and the world. I assume cosmopolitanism as unsettling, as being simultaneously dislodged from home and exposed to the alterity of the world outside. In this viewing of cosmopolitanism, there is a presumed necessity of imagining a space for our exposure to and transcendence from particularities. Assuming a space for cosmopolitanism, we should think of one beyond you and me as the site of opening toward an exteriority.

The researcher views the cosmopolitan space as the anonymous realm of the self being de-worled from its home through a break of exteriority and as those fleeting moments when the self loses itself in terms of identity and emplacement and through this fleeting vulnerability of existence opens a temporary connection with others. Also, this paper illustrates how literature as the realm for sharing of the spatial and temporal anonymity is a true cosmopolitan space.

Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” as a Narrative of Participatory Culture: Presenting Transracial identity to Overcome the Racial Presuppositions

2022-12-08T17:14:05+04:00

Evidence of racial segregation, its experiences, psychological outcomes and a voice for justice are common in the narratives of both black and white authors. In these narratives, readers have the chance to encounter the dialogues between the binaries of the white and the black characters.

We often find differences between documented history, state archive and narrated memory. As soon as history is regarded to be a discipline, its connection with the collective memory of a community happened to be more debatable and thoughtful, constrained by the standards of science and the regulations of evidence. Although the form of narration and the poetic objective are existing; the focus still lies on the documented factualness. Also, sociologists mostly do not ponder over memory and sufficiently about history. This paper intends to crack this long tradition by exploring the pervasiveness of the past and how significant a role the collective memory plays in the process of identifying. The idea of differentiating racial identities between two binaries can be put in a framework of cultural trauma. This research paper is structured along with a model that centres along with the theories of collective memory, cultural trauma and narrative on the basis of acquired or inherited knowledge which became conventional racial prejudices.

Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” portrays an interracial relationship between two girls; one black, one white. Morrison never exposes their races to us. Here each speculation unfurls the reader’s racial preconceptions. According to the Brechtian analysis, the musical performance version of this short story attempts to bring its readers within its sphere of dialogue and thus, invoking the collective participation from readers and audiences. Making their attributes unidentifiable from a racial lens, Morrison makes the binaries fluid and brings a comparative judgement to both catagorized roles and attached traumas.

Religious/Philosophical Movements – Bhakti Cult and Sufism: Interface with Literature

2022-12-08T17:15:52+04:00

The rise of vernacular languages and local dialects emerged the revival of classical myths in literature, there was in a way revival of Hindu Renaissance and Religious Reformation in the Mediaeval History of India. These languages materially aided in the development of national and human consciousness and self-realization. It indeed undermined the feudal order and universal religious intolerance and casteism in India. The vernacular languages established through their respective literatures fundamental truth, that there is a divine power and interference behind human force and the ultimate goal of individual and society is the social, religious, political unity and economic justice. Yet, there was gruesome picture of society in India where heretics were punished both by Hindus and Muslims respectively in their own communities, as it was treason to doubt the already prevalent teachings and principles of prescribed religions i.e. Hinduism and Islam.

The research study will investigate and recognize the writings of various saints from inter-state/regional areas of India during the mediaeval age irrespective of their caste, sect or religion. This research work will set a pattern of comparative analysis in context of representation, assimilation and enculturation. The great doctrines, philosophies and sayings will be studied logically in context of socio-cultural linguistics and spatio-temporal consequences on the state and circumstances of the orients, artists and litterateurs. How these transformed the political thoughts of the kings and emperors of mediaeval history of India? This scientific study of the available archives will cover the religious movements of this period especially how these enriched provincial languages and literature. The research project study will emphatically concentrate on the greatest merit of both these (Bhakti and Sufism) parallel religious movements, keeping in view the point that they freed the Indian society from the dogmatic beliefs, ritualism, caste and commercial hatred.

Literature Unrecognized: Thinking Comparative Literature Locally

2022-12-08T17:17:22+04:00

It is always assumed that the comparative study of literature can do best between literatures of different nations and different languages. But the gradual failure of single literature or national literature discipline to address the polyphony of culture and the existence of minor languages in its national boundary. This is only symptomatic that the minor literature and cultures are not studied as the literature of neighbour in the single literature discipline. The canonical culture and the speeches of the power ignore such languages and literature; therefore, the voices of the marginal communities are unheard. This practice of unrecognizing the cultural varieties and languages of the minor linguistic communities pushed India into a severe linguistic crisis causing continuous death of languages. This paper does not argue primarily about endangered languages. Still, the societies who are shadowed within the greater linguistic identity find their language, literature, and identity unrecognized in the structure they live in, which are addressed in this work.

This paper argues with reference to a few languages of West Bengal, the eastern part of India and different linguistic variants of the dominant language of the state Bengali. As a practitioner of Comparative Literature, I have introduced a course on “Language Situations in India and Other Literature of West Bengal”, besides this our independent organization called Calcutta Comparatists 1919, took a project on ‘Translation on Site’, to propose a series of translation and preparation of parallel corpus between the variant of Bengali or minor language, standard Bengali and English, to enhance the translation between minor languages, and linguistic variants into English. The ‘Translation on Site’ project aims to understand the text within the geo-cultural location of its origin and with its speakers and poets. Once such parallel corpus is prepared, translation will be more accessible between these neighbouring languages or linguistic variants. In this project, inside and outside the discipline, we are trying to locate Comparative literature locally by recognizing people’s geo-cultural identities. In our case, we are dealing with Manbhum, Sundarban, Mallabhum, Subarnaraikhik, Valley and Hills as the distinct geo-cultural identity of people. Though primarily under one greater linguistic identity, such specific regions have different varieties of Bengali or different other minor languages. Therefore, they have their vocabularies and literature particular to those geo-cultural regions that are unrecognized. So, we deal with Comparative literature locally and try to document and prepare archives of cultural utterances of different communities; this method is valuable for surviving with minor cultures and languages.

Voices of space: the literary landscape as a reaction to the hegemony of history

2022-12-08T15:38:19+04:00

Landscape, an interdisciplinary phenomenon by its very nature, lies at the boundary of different disciplines and constitutes a privileged starting point for studying the link between literature, the arts, society, and culture. Starting from the modern definition of landscape as a historical, subjective, and artificial object, this work aims to investigate how it can represent a tool to give voice to the victims of history. Specifically, the paper will examine poems from Antonella Anedda, Fabio Pusterla and Andrea Zanzotto’s works, with the aim of showing how poets use landscape elements to describe historical tragedies without interpreting them. In Italian poetry of the second half of the 20th century, many authors reflected on the need to reduce the role of the poetic subject, which was traditionally considered the origin of expression and the main point of view. These three poets attempt to transform poetry into a welcoming space, playing with multiple points of view and dwelling on marginal details, people or places that are generally excluded from the official history. Moreover, they share the idea that nature preserves the traces of history and can therefore represent a key witness to be interrogated and listened to for the reconstruction of forgotten historical events. In the work of these authors, the landscape thus constitutes the starting point for the structuring of an alternative discourse that opposes the hegemonic perspective of official history. Finally, the formal analysis of the poetic texts in a comparative perspective aims to show how landscape studies represent a fertile field for the development of a more general reflection on the links that literature has with historical, social, and cultural changes.

The Poetics of Eros Redefining the Global: Examples in the Work of Khlebnikov, Qabbani, and e.e. cummings

2022-12-08T15:40:46+04:00

Currently, my research explores erotic desire in the poetry of three Modernist poets and the formal innovation that desire generated in poetics, as elucidated in the works of Velimir Khlebnikov (Russian-speaking), e.e.cummings (English-speaking), Nizar Quabbani (Arabic-speaking).

The paper analyses how global modernism as a field opens new interpretative horizons to reconceptualize the terrain of world literature and comparative literature.

The adjective ‘global’ provides an illustration of the temporal, geographical, and aesthetic expansions (and cross-territorializations-reterritorializations), yet ‘global’ also displaces the national and local, modifying and muddying the neat demarcations that had to conform to European and Anglo-American models associated with the studies of Comparative Literature and World Literature, [1] creating notions of North/South and/or East/West, and thus dictating locations of innovations which other national literatures had to compare to and not the other way around.

Global modernist studies allows for new paradigms to develop in order to study the experimental literature of the world, stimulating various comparative strategies for reading modernism on a universal, planetary and even cosmological scale.

By rejecting the model of center/periphery that has dominated the fields of literary studies, certain scholars have questioned the scale of a singular modernity and instead suggests a polycentric model by mapping modernism from Central America to the Caucasus; by linking the peripheries of Latin America and Eurasia together, and demonstrating how these places were pregnant with modernism prior to and/or synchronically (rather than sequentially) with Western cities believed to embody modernist activity.

My work is intent on reconceptualizing modernism as a global phenomenon, by establishing the aesthetic autonomy of language experiments and transgressions that embody modernist verse in the peripheries and centres of English-speaking, Russian-speaking and Arabic-speaking poets. By revealing shared poetic topologies between the paradoxes of time and space, which of them is primary?

Modern Narratology and Comparative Literature

2022-12-08T16:11:57+04:00

Personally, my original purpose for being a doctoral student in Comparative Literature is to better understand literary works from home and abroad by establishing connections and a shared context. However, afterwards, I realized that there are too many arguments about what comparative literature is at the first stage of this discipline, and then as most students in this field, I am familiarized with a range of studies comparing different topics, themes, media of arts, cultural phenomenon and political ideologies etc. In other words, the focus of comparative literature seems to be located only within the questions of “what do the stories tell?” and “why are they told?”, while the question of “how are they told?” has not yet been answered sufficiently. Regarding this, we may make better use of modern narratology which has witnessed great development in recent years. By comparing the ways stories from different cultures and times are told, we may grasp the mechanism of understanding and do not have to draw from others’ conclusion anymore. To illustrate this idea, this paper will take two ancient “love” stories from East and West as an example, the story of Weisheng (“尾生抱柱”) in Chinese literature and the story of Hero and Leandro in western counterpart. Both stories are about dating, waiting and dying in water, and have been written and rewritten through long history in both cultures, while this paper will try to expound these two stories using narratological device, to see how they are told differently crossing cultures and times, so as to develop a better understanding of both. No matter for world literature or comparative literature, I believe the ultimate aim and achievement lie right in the word “understanding”.

The Postglobal Closet: Representations and Projections of Sexual Taboos in Twitter K-Pop Fanfiction

2022-12-08T16:13:16+04:00

The proliferation of (frequently gay) fanfiction based on K-pop idols in English or Spanish provides a good example of the current postglobal paradigm. Marginal cultures that had previously attracted few Western attention, such as Korean, are becoming hotspots that draw Western audiences and influence mainstream production in the Global North. However, when approaching experiences and perceptions of sexuality, important gaps exist between the referenced Korean society and the communities that produce and consume this fanfiction. To build their fictional Korea, authors tend to represent, project, or displace closet dynamics, taboos around same-sex attraction, and overall homophobia. To study this phenomenon, a sample of K-pop fanfics published in Twitter has been selected. The corpus is bilingual (English and Spanish). This covers the two biggest Western linguistic communities on the Internet, including Panhispanic communities and international English as koine. Both texts and reader interactions are analyzed to ascertain how Otherness is negotiated when approaching orientalized, queer-perceived people/characters. To what extent do imaginaries of the sexualized Orient shape these dynamics? Are closet-related plots a reality-effect device or do they work as generic topoi to drive the narrative?

Queering the Kitchen: Reimagining Intimate Spaces and Queer Bodies in South Asian Literature

2022-12-08T16:15:07+04:00

The kitchen is a space of sharing, a space of intimacy, and to the heteronormative imaginary it is a space where culinary subjects of the next generation are reproduced, a space that strengthens the patriarchal structures of family and kinship. South Asian Literature can be an effective tool in locating queer bonds in domestic spaces, where there are resistance and reclamation of intimate spaces and queer bodies. In the Sri Lankan novel, Bodies in Motion by Mary Anne Mohanraj, we see one of the many characters Mangai, is marked as the queer subject from the very beginning. It is her kitchen that is a space of queer intimate relationship for her; it is her body that is resilient in this space which is otherwise a site of violence. For Heer in Tehmina Durrani’s Pakistani novel Blasphemy, it is domestic spaces like kitchen and the courtyard that goes beyond the bedroom: the space of her violence and creates a space of intimacy, which strengthens bonds of sisterhood between her and Kaali, the maid by going beyond the connotations of sexual urge. My paper will try to look at these South Asian novels, by focusing on how the queer kitchen brings forth possible alternate forms of care that moves beyond the heteronormative patriarchal society’s idea of women and care, how these intimate spaces try to create a space of bond, keeping in mind the body politics of queer women. It will try to address and decipher questions like what happens to the queer kitchen? What is the ultimate destiny of queer intimacy in the domestic spaces within the South Asian Context? My paper will try to reformulate a new methodology in regards to culinary narratives and the associated queer potentialities in the context of South Asia.

Comparative Studies on Literature and Dance: An Interdisciplinary and Cross-cultural Approach

2022-12-08T16:16:29+04:00

Comparative studies on literature and art have not been categorized in the disciplinary history of comparative literature until Henry H. H. Remak’s declaration in “Comparative Literature: Its Definition and Function”. Within this scope, relationships between literature and music, painting, sculpture, and even architecture are most often tackled with, while the relationship between literature and dance remains a minority concern. Reasons for such a lacuna lie in, from an ontological point of view, dance’s immediacy and ephemerality. A further and root reason can be traced to the mind/body dualism culminating in Descartes’ philosophy that is inscribed in Western cultural tradition which has been dominated by the privileging of the rational thinking mind and the negation of the body since the enlightenment. In addition, dance is also neglected because of the presumed ‘femininity’ of the art. Since scant attention has been paid to the relationship between literature and dance in comparative literature, the author of this paper tries to forge dialogue between the two fields by proposing four approaches focusing on the interaction/interplay between them from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective. These four approaches include, first, “dance of the text,” mainly alludes to analysis of dance adaptations of literary works. Then, “text of the dance,” indicates analysis of text about dance writing, which may encompass autobiographies of dancers or choreographers teeming with their dance philosophy that is influenced by literary figures and their works. While “dance and the text” chiefly analyze how the social ethos which is featured by specific dance boom influenced literary creation and aesthetics, lastly, “dance in the text,” is about analysis of dance encoded in literary texts, such as dance’s manifold metaphors and functions in literary narrative and their broader social and cultural references.

Qu’est-ce qu’un genre mondial ? Vocabulaire générique et choix d’étiquetage dans les discours critiques sur la littérature mondiale

2022-12-08T16:17:37+04:00

Dans une perspective épistémologique et métacritique, on se propose d’étudier ici les usages discursifs de la critique quand elle s’attache à commenter la littérature à l’échelle du mondial.

La mondialisation de la littérature implique en effet la création de nouvelles catégories génériques, parmi lesquelles la plus utilisée demeure « World Novel ». Elle suppose également le transfert ou la mise en équivalence de termes génériques d’un espace, d’une langue et d’une culture à l’autre, à l’image du genre perse du divân que Goethe adaptait en même temps qu’il élaborait sa Weltliteratur. Or, si la littérature mondiale n’est pas un phénomène nouveau, il reste cependant à étudier le lexique et les stratégies discursives liées à l’usage de ces catégories, que celles-ci préexistent à la littérature mondiale où qu’elles en soient le fruit. Une telle approche suppose des interrogations de deux ordres que nous étudierons au cours de cette réflexion.

Les premières ont trait à la constitution logique des genres littéraires, c’est-à-dire leur statut en tant que catégories générales et classifiantes, quand on les transpose d’une échelle locale à une échelle mondiale. La question posée concerne autrement dit la «mondialité» d’un genre: de quelle façon un genre dit «mondial» se réfère-t-il, de façon plus ou moins exhaustive, à un corpus de textes? Jusqu’à quel degré sa nomenclature définitionnelle peut-elle s’assouplir pour être transposable et, idéalement, applicable à tous les espaces du monde?

Les secondes interrogations ont trait à la mise en discours de ces catégories. Elles concernent davantage les commentaires dans leurs modalités d’écriture et les usages institutionnalisés qui ont cours : quelles sont les expressions spatialisantes et quelles sont les langues privilégiées pour désigner et caractériser cette littérature mondiale ? La prédominance du roman dans le champ de ces études (rebaptisé tantôt World Novel, tantôt Modern Epic) nous incitera à évaluer quelles sont les catégories les plus mondialisables, et si tel est le cas, aux dépens de quelles autres ces catégories dominent l’espace mondialisé de la littérature.

(Not) Naming the Other: Altering the Conceptualization of Difference in Lyric Poetry

2022-12-08T16:19:22+04:00

When we are called upon to reimagine literatures of the world and re-evaluate categories like the global and the local or the mainstreams and the margins, it begs the question: for whom? Or from whose perspective and from what spatio-temporal location? What is considered as local by one might not be so for another and what is considered as marginal from one point of view might be central from another perspective. Ideas like the centre and the periphery, world literature and regional literature(s), the global north and the global south, postcolonial literature et al which often from a part of our engagement with literature come from particular contexts and relate to the question of location in space and/or time. These categories often tend to function dichotomously and hence homogenize large bodies of literary texts from diverse cultural locations by putting them in one of the two possible brackets in order to interpret them and limiting the multiple possibilities or ways of reading them. This homogenizing tendency reduces difference embodied in the other to known terms ignoring its essential singularity. Openness towards the other and an ethical approach to difference are essential to the practice of comparative literature and we must rethink our existing categories while dealing with literature. Comparative literature is a situated interpretive practice predicated upon plurality which takes into account the question of location in reading. And we must use categories that facilitate this located reading without being reductive or homogenizing. This paper is an attempt to articulate some ideas on how the practice of comparative literature be grounded in the reality of plurality, on an ethical approach to difference and on a dialogue with the other so that we can look beyond binaries and dichotomies and foreground the joy of understanding that literature gives us.

Order and disorder in the library of Comparative Literature

2022-12-08T16:21:09+04:00

If we were to single out an everlasting concern among scholars of Comparative Literature, then that summed up by the question “What are the typical procedures denoting our discipline?” would certainly do. “Comparing” has been the damnation of comparatists, dauntingly looming on the theorizations of the various “turns” attempted in the past few years and on the death-sentences provokingly uttered by the most influential critics. What’s at stake is the grounding reason of our practices. The concept of World Literature has notably provided this ground because it allows the redistribution and reframing of former Euro-centric narratives and national canons (a concern that thanks to Spivak has come to mingle with the very conception of Comparative Literature, and not anymore with the sole field of Postcolonial studies). After all aren’t the theoretical reflections of Franco Moretti, David Damrosch, Haun Saussy or Susan Bassnett attempts at tracing an order in that vast merging chaos that World Literature is? In this intervention we argue that disorder ought not to be entirely discarded for it could serve us as criteria for comparison, hence for the recasting of the methods we employ in our research. Too often have we pondered on the content of our library and too little on the position of its books. In this new configuration of the library serving Comparative Literature, we find that chanced (yet not arbitrary) juxtapositions constitute the occasion for dealing with yet-to-be traced histories of literature and for accessing minoritarian or forgotten literatures. Edward W. Said warned us that “affiliation” also risks of reproducing filiative design, but our concept of an embraced “ideal disorder” can release unexpected motives in literary criticism. Finally, we contend that the editorial project of the Italian publishing house “Adelphi” can be taken as an established example.

Literary hybridizations and contemporary representation of space. “Dissonant” space in selected works by DeLillo and W.G. Sebald

2022-12-08T16:22:24+04:00

The representation of space in contemporary literature finds various examples and interpretations. During the past few years, the critical debate over the notion of “space” has not only considerably progressed: it has also seen a series of theoretical bifurcations explored with methodologies from distant scientific fields. In one of his most interesting essays, Gilles Deleuze went back to the famous Shakesparean verse of Hamlet "Time is out of joint", in order to retrace the relationship between time and movement operated by Kant, proposing a reading of space that released it from time’s hegemony. Slipping into a more urbanistic theorization, Michel De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, began to conceive the figure of the pedestrian in direct interaction with the urban space as an “act of enunciation” necessary to establish a discourse between space and subject. Another of the most acclaimed critics who dealt with such a revalorization of spaces, investigating its most emblematic relations with historical and cultural traditions, is Edward Said. In such a book like Culture and Imperialism, one of its aims is to propose a systematic review of the effects that colonialism had on communities exploited by a dominant power. The tendency towards hybridization that characterizes the critical debate on space finds one of the pillars of contemporary European research in Bertrand Westhpal's Geocriticism, which seeks to open up the field of research on space to the different fields of human sciences.

An author like W.G. Sebald, in some of his most known works –Austerlitz or The Rings of Saturn – includes a series of photographs of the described places in order to create a parallel dimension to the textual one, revealed by the images. The story progression denotes constitutive research in the narrative scenario’s orchestration dependent on expedients that corroborate the image of space told through real and documented elements. This explains the reason for a hybrid writing, which often tends towards a more essayistic format, which, thanks to the collection of historical and anecdotal data, composes a reliable setting on which history can be based.

The preconditions for approaching this problem are also rooted in in a narrative structure of post-modern ascendancy. An author like Don DeLillo builds his poetics from the perception of a differently connected (or fragmented?) reality that modifies the perception and dimension of the spatial-geographical framework. Let’s think at White Noise or the more monumental Underworld, in which the security guaranteed by a capitalist and extremely secure urban model produces a curiously uncertain style of writing, where musical motifs, advertising signs, voices in the streets, continually break into the text, almost as if they wanted to reveal the fractures in a spatial texture that is in fact fundamentally dissonant. These examples allow us to reflect on how much space representation issue has tremendously evolve over the years, and how a comparative approach makes it possible to investigate a series of literary cases (marked by potential hybridity) that propose solutions of an evolving transition.

Anthropology of Otherness, Anthropology of Polishness: Witkiewicz, Malinowski, and Conrad in the Tropics

2022-12-08T16:25:13+04:00

In this paper I consider the modes in which Bronisław Malinowski and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz conceived of their Polishness against the background of British colonial enterprise, through their reading of Joseph Conrad’s works, especially Lord Jim. In 1914, Malinowski, the founder of British social anthropology, and Witkiewicz, a Polish philosopher, playwright, and painter, sailed together to British Ceylon and Australia. During their journey, they read and discussed Conrad’s Lord Jim. As a result of that journey, and with great debt to Conrad’s writings, Malinowski published his Argonauts of the Western Pacific, and Witkiewicz wrote his three “tropical plays”. While the events that inspired Malinowski’s and Witkiewicz’s respective works took place when Poland was absent from the maps of Europe (since 1795), the works themselves were not written and published until after the country regained its independence in 1918, thus spanning a key period in the country’s modern history. Malinowski’s and Witkiewicz’s explicit interests as writers-intellectuals were, first and foremost, in understanding and recounting their experience of non-European otherness, of the tropics, and of British colonialism. However, as I will argue, a negotiation of their sense of Polishness forms an implicit subtext to these writings, pointing to a crucial question at the time, namely that of (new) Poland’s place in the modern world.

My paper engages directly with the theme of the Congress in exploring the complex relationship between cultural centres and (semi-)peripheries. It examines how “minor literature” writers felt, simultaneously, the need to situate their national tradition within the prevailing socio-political paradigms, whilst realising the “otherness” of their experience. It also emphasises the mediatory role of Western European literature in first encounters between the European “Other” and the non-European “Other”.

Existential motives in the drama of the absurd (Samuel Beckett - "Waiting for Godot"; Goderdzi Chokheli - " Human Sadness")

2022-12-08T16:26:37+04:00

In the history of cultural development of the mankind, the issue of the essence of a human and universe has always been acute. Changing the epoch led to the changes in the philosophy of life. The issue of existence is conceptualized by the Antique, Medieval, Renaissance and Modernism periods in different ways. The development of scientific fields and techniques leads mankind to crisis - existential philosophy and later drama of absurd appears in Western Europe in the XIX-XX century and it takes a global form which covers all fields of art. Within the scope of the research we will discuss the following novels - “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett and “Human Sadness” by Goderdzi Chockheli.

Georgian culture is one of the oldest in the world, with its traditions, worldviews and attitudes. The processes that came from the West, such as romanticism, realism, symbolism, and others, appear with some peculiarities in the Georgian social-cultural environment. Existentialism and drama of absurd has been identified with peculiarities decades later due to historical and political situation in Georgia. The thesis examines the tendencies of existentialism, the drama of the absurd, and the influence of national motives. Also, interesting interpretations of face-symbols were revealed. We present the ideological-aesthetic similarities and differences between Georgian and Western literary texts. The research is based on the works of representatives of Western European life and existential philosophy: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, Berdyaev, Sartre and Camus. Problems, characteristic to existentialism and drama of absurd, are presented in the novels to be studied: conflict between a human’s inner world and life circumstances; alienation, pointless life, absurdity, loneliness, abandonment, the problem of choice. The person cannot find the internal "me" as well as his place in the world.

Regardless of temporal, geographic or sociocultural differences, there are archetypal issues that are always relevant. One of many, the knowledge of the essence of man and the world, in the context of existential philosophy and in the drama of the absurd, is clearly reflected in these novels.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Georgian Expressionistic Drama

2022-12-08T16:29:58+04:00

The following study aims to determine general philosophical, theoretical and poetical concepts of expressionistic drama and analyze how this genre was revealed in the field of Georgian literature.

The essential philosophical base of expressionistic movement is decisively related to Friedrich Nietzsche’s theories (especially the concept of overman, concept of eternal return, Apollonian and Dionysian concepts. We aim to underline how Nietzsche’s ideas are reflected in the expressionistic paradigm and how Georgian authors have transformed them in their expressionistic works.

To underline the key elements of expressionistic drama, we analyze Nietzsche’s Theory of Tragedy, which is given in his first work The birth of Tragedy from The Spirit of Music. Besides, based on the analysis of 1910s German expressionistic dramas (including works by Ernst Toller, August Stramm, Georg Kaiser) and expressionistic manifest by Kasimir Edschmidd (“Uber die Expressionismus in der Literatur und die neue Dichtung”) we determine general poetical and formal elements of expressionistic drama.

Based on this theoretical background, this paper aims to analyze Georgian expressionistic drama, which includes works by Konstantine Gamsakhurdia and Grigol Robakidze. Konstantine Gamsakhurdia is considered as one of the most prominent and influential modernist authors in Georgia. Regardless of the fact, his expressionistic drama The Eternal Shell has not been analyzed in Georgian criticism yet. Accordingly, this study is the first attempt to determine its theoretical and philosophical aspects applying comparative and hermeneutic method of analysis;

Grigol Kobakhidze’s expressionistic dramas (Maelstorm, Londa and Lamara), which have been staged multiple times, are significant as they have close connection with the European expressionistic dramas and movies (especially: Metropolis by Fritz Lang). These dramas convey the alienation of fragile modernist world, where “God is dead” (Nietzsche) and the human is left alone suffering in anticipation of inevitable catastrophe.

We think that Georgian expressionistic drama is subtle and noteworthy part of the European expressionistic movement; So, this research is attempt to discover connections, similarities and differences between Georgian and European expressionistic literary paradigms.

1922-2022: How to Critically Inherit Modernism ? Gender Issues in Anne Carson’s Reading of Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu

2022-12-08T16:31:37+04:00

1922 is no ordinary year in the history of European and Anglo-American Literature. Also known as Modernism's annus mirabilis, it is in fact the year in which James Joyce's Ulysses, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room were published. But 1922 also marked the publication of Paul Valéry's Charmes, as well as the completion of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duineser Elegien, Giuseppe Ungaretti's Il porto sepolto and Wallace Stevens's Harmonium, all of which were published almost simultaneously the following year.

Coincidence or circumstance, two concerns seem to be shared by these works: on the one hand, the more or less explicit desire to take an overall view of the traumatic events of the First World War; on the other hand, the desire to enter into a critical dialogue with tradition ( of the novel, of poetry, of language) and its exponents. Just as Eliot, in his famous The Tradition and the Individual Talent, peremptorily posited that the value of an author can only be established by placing him ‘among the deads ones[1]’ and comparing him with them, so the heirs of Modernism seem to be aware of the impossibility of simply getting rid of tradition. Conceived as a reservoir of shared images that guarantee to individuals their allegiance to a society, tradition has ceased to be organized as a series of authority figures arranged in a linear and compartmentalized pattern over the centuries, resulting in everyone seemed to have acquired the right to draw from it at will and establish 'a permanent parallelism with the present’[2]. The task of writers and of those who master the fragments of this tradition is no longer to struggle alone against the force of the past, but rather to convey their experience in a form that can connect with other authors and themes scattered across space and time.

In 2017, Anne Carson publishes The Albertine Workout. In this lyrical essay, she intends to solve (i.e. to work out) the mystery surrounding the character of Albertine, as well as to reflect on the way Proust reiterates gender bias in female

desire. Carson's use of quotation reinforces both the irony and the seriousness of this aim: ‘By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after the another, the different human personalities with which she had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance. She was animated now only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different from my own, more alien, and yet one that belonged more to me’[1]. Mixed with fragments from Barthes, with digressions on Beckett or on Zeno's paradox, the Proustian quotations allow Carson to criticize the basis of the analogy built by the Narrator: ‘Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia’[2]. And yet, despite the explicit wish to reread.

The Prisoner in the light of its female protagonist, Carson's text cannot be reduced to an anti-Proustian pamphlet. On the contrary, the author admits that, just as Marcel loved Albertine as an ideal object on which to cast his literary ambitions, so too did she love the Recherche for the intellectual desire it aroused in her. The Albertine Workout thus provides us with material to reflect on the relationship that contemporary authors - especially the ones who can be considered 'erudite' - have with their Modernist models.

Cyber Identity and Cybercrime as Rhetorical Performances with Literary Significance: A Case-study of TwitterNG

2022-12-08T16:33:34+04:00

The claim that we are a network society explains the reason why internet users easily assume rhizomic identities and fictional geographical locations that could be false – all of which are potential props for cybercrime. As Moliere’s Scapin the Schemer reveals, rhetorical performances of deceit are capable of creating multidimensional narratives. Several studies have examined the activities that constitute and define cybercrime as a criminal act as well as the dynamics around it, especially using the perpetrator/victim approach. But there is a need to study social media engagements between cybercrime schemers and their victims (a word which I do not use lightly) as literature because of the literary devices and rhetorical performances that underscore the acts. By analysing carefully selected posts from incidents of cybercrime on TwitterNG as primary source of data, this paper argues that the deployment and use of character development, setting, impressive plot structure, performative and figurative language, conflict, climax and resolution provides enough justification for literary scholars to begin to look at, study and analyse cybercrime engagements as literary texts.

Free Verse and Freedom of Expression in Soviet and Post-Soviet Georgian Poetry

2022-12-08T16:36:16+04:00

The paper will discuss the role of the free verse in diversifying the poetic process in Georgian literature of Soviet/Cold War period and after. The intensification of this role in Georgian poetry of the period of the Thaw is related with works by Lia Sturua and Besik Kharanauli. These poets state to oppose the mainstream of Georgian poetry which was based on realist aestheticism and conventional poetic principles; thus, their poetic choice can be seen as an alternative to dominant literary tendencies.

We can assess the appearance of the free verse in Georgian poetry of the period of the Thaw as a revolt against the conventional verse and dominant literary principles cultivated by the majority of Georgian poets. In this period, one the hand, the Socialist Realism aestheticism is still strongly imposed from the Soviet centre, on the other – Georgian poets create nationally minded poetry with meter. The free verses developed by the smaller group of Georgian poets oppose to both poetic tendencies, while suggesting the forms and themes which are more comparable to the texts appearing in the Western literatures beyond the Iron Curtain.

When carrying the mission of altering and opposing to the existing reality, their poetry becomes a scene in which everyone has own role to play - the poet can be anti-poet, and poetry - an anti-poetry (Kharanauli); the process of writing is compared to the surgery and the writing desk - to the surgical table (Sturua); the poet is suggested to be a performer, expressing own fear and pain playfully.

Post-Soviet Georgian poetry inherited the aestheticism of alternative poetry, and follows the principles developed in Georgian and Western poetry on the basis of freedom of expression.

Drawing Comparisons between Afrofuturism and Anime by Reading Afro-Animatic Webtoon Red Origins through the Lens f Interactive Storytelling

2022-12-08T16:37:28+04:00

Afrofuturism has become a rich literary landscape with sub-genres that pull from diverse forms, mediums, and literary geographies in telling stories that concern African and Afrodiasporic lifeworlds. Afro-Anime, the sub-genre that is of interest in this study, draws heavily from West African mythologies, Central Asian anime or manga literature, and Western superhero sci-fi or fantasy tropes to create narratives that reflect the mythos of a futuristic Africa. An example of Afro-Anime is Red Origins, a webtoon that uses texts, comic illustrations, and songs to tell the story of Nigerian-American teenagers who gain Igbo cosmological superpowers which they use to fight against war in futuristic NeoAfrica. Due to the mediatic eclecticism exhibited by Afro-Animatic works like Red Origins, this study argues that they should primarily be analyzed using contemporaneous interdisciplinary concepts like interactive storytelling. Although heavily mediated by gaming technology nuances, interactive storytelling in its barest manifestation means telling a single story by merging words, images, and sounds. It finds a place amongst concepts like transmedia, intermedia, crossmedia, all of which are gaining momentum in the fields of literature and digital humanities. This proposed discussion intends to analyze Red Origins through the lens of interactive storytelling. Despite arising skepticisms about the literary quality and practicability of interactive storytelling, doing a close reading of Red Origins using this interdisciplinary concept will yield groundbreaking results. It will allow for an exposition into how 21^st-century Afrofuturist creators merge different mediums to narrativize postcolonial experiences and aspirations. Also, it will serve as a framework with which to comparatively draw connections between Afrofuturism and Asian manga/anime. By the end of this discursive study, it is hoped that scholars will consider interactive storytelling as an innovative framework for comparative inquiry into global literary products consumed in this age when literature has become more than just words.

Analyse comparée des images aquatiques chez M. Yourcenar et Othar Tchiladzé (Mémoires d’Hadrien/Théâtre de Fer)

2022-12-08T16:38:48+04:00

L’objet de notre recherche est l’analyse comparée de l’auteur géorgien et français, Othar Tchiladzé et Marguerite Yourcenar. Formés au sein des cultures très différentes, avec des visions divergentes, l’analyse comparée de leurs œuvres se présente comme un défi pour les chercheurs : d’un côté nous avons l’universalisme et l’humanisme européens de M. Yourcenar, de l’autre – la préoccupation par le destin de son pays de Othar Tchiladzé. Mais c’est exactement cette différence qui nous attire dans le contexte de notre étude visant l’analyse de l’inconscient de l’œuvre et les structures des significations personnelles et collectives cachées derrière des images. Cette analyse a pour objectif de trouver les réponses aux questions : est-ce que la dichotomie homme/femme, européen/non européen sont valables quand il s’agit de la création ?

L’article de M. Claude Benoit Morinière « Vers une féminisation de l’imaginaire : images liquides dans quelques romans de Marguerite Yourcenar » m’a encouragé à m’engager dans une étude thématique des œuvres de Othar Tchiladzé et me mettre à l’analyse du réseau de significations créé par l’anima/animus bachelardienne et de la valeur inconsciente dissimulée derrière des significations apparentes des images aquatiques qui s’entrelacent avec l’image de la mort dans l’œuvre de Othar Tchiladzé « Le Théâtre de Fer » et celle de M. Yourcenar « Mémoires d’Hadrien ».

Barbary Captivity Narratives: Imperial Experiences Lived Through Ordeals

2022-12-08T16:40:57+04:00

Privateering was an important economic, military and diplomatic factor on the early modern transatlantic stage, its influence extended from the early Mediterranean basin to the post-revolutionary America. Pirates under different flags used to “legally” plunder ships and coastal regions of enemy countries. And the human cargo made a crucial part of the pray for corsairs of the Ottoman Empire and privateers from Europe. Some of those who were taken as captives by pirates wrote down their ordeals and a number of the texts have survived throughout history. The Barbary Captivity Narratives were written by European individuals who experienced captivity at then called “Barbary States” in North Africa. This genre dating back to the 16th century kept being published and read in western society as privateering went on unceasingly until the end of the 20th century.

My argument on Barbary Captivity Narratives is that this genre represents significant but neglected part of the imperial experience of early modern Europe. On the one hand, collective cultural memories of the Other was shaped by individual storytelling. The captives offered some of the first impressions for western society about the Maghreb and its Muslim culture. By mixing with the local population at a very intimate level, these men and women with diverse backgrounds provided multi-dimensioned views to the public about the customs, people and daily life in North Africa. While a sense of imperial Self and the oriental Other is always evident in their writings, the Self is often questioned, challenged or event converted when physically and mentally traumatized during captivity. Barbary captivity narratives offer a microscope of how different identities meet, clash and mediate and most importantly--how individual narratives can break away from typical colonial discourse, thus provide pluralistic views of the imperial experience.

Playing a Literature: a Literary Anthropological Study of Online Games

2022-12-08T16:42:17+04:00

Online games is a type of literature from the the point of view of literary anthropology. How does online games affect literature？In the time of Internet, literature stretched itself from real world to online space, which has changed the formation of literary texts and the way people put literature into practice. As a typical phenomenon which is worth studying, there are three points need to be discussed when studying online games from a literary anthropological point of view: 1) how do game players having literature when playing online games? 2) what makes the texts produced by online games different from the other ones? Generally speaking, there are two first-level texts behind every online game which separately functions in telling the story and controlling game players' operation; meanwhile, series of sub-level texts are made while game players are playing. On the one hand, these sub-level texts grow from the first-level ones; on the other hand, they would not be formed without game players' peculiar body movements, such as tapping the keyboard, clicking the mouse, controlling the game handle and ganging up (to play the game in a team via voice chatting), etc. In consequence, real world intertwines with online space, making a human-machine interaction system and forming a special experience of literature in the time of Internet. Based upon literary anthropology, the following research studies online games as literature and deeply investigates game players as the authors of the texts, aiming to explain how literature is produced and how the identity of game players are constructed and realized.

Transcultural narrative of gender, power and the urban space: Chinese rural migrant women in literary translation

2022-12-08T16:43:50+04:00

As a significant embodiment of Chinese subalternity, the subject formation of rural migrant women presents the multiple power dynamics in the course of modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation in contemporary China. The individual and collective experience of rural migrant women has been narrated in contemporary Chinese literature, demonstrating their lives and struggles that are intertwined with class, gender and geography disparities. In women’s writing, the subject constitution of this marginalised group is usually characterised by resistant forces and new configurations of female agency that defy and redraw the mechanisms of power. A few novels depicting Chinese subaltern women in the urban space have been imported into Anglophone countries through translation, such as Sheng Keyi’s Northern Girls and Wang Anyi’s Fu Ping. They present vivid records of how these women negotiate their rural and female identities in major cities in contemporary China, and how their labour plays a part in the condensed process of Chinese modernity. Across linguistic and socio-cultural boundaries, the English translation of these literary works takes place within different discursive paradigms from the original ones, which are generated by the ideological and poetic orientations that constitute the images of Chinese subalternity in the West.

This paper probes into the transcultural reproduction of novels depicting Chinese female subalternity, illustrating how the literary representation of rural migrant women and the power dynamics constructing the modernised urban space are reconfigured in the English translation. Through analysis of textual, paratextual and contextual elements, I will examine how the paratextual framings of the English versions present the image of the gendered subaltern in China, and how the translators approach the original texts, in order to demonstrate how the female agency, power relations and cultural politics in the subaltern narration of the Other are rewritten in a hegemonic language, within the Western discursive paradigms.

Do you speak Translationese? A study of pseudotranslations on Chinese social networks

2022-12-08T16:45:02+04:00

The term Fanyi qiang 翻译腔 means literally “tone of translation”. Rather pejorative, it refers to a certain type of translation in the context of translation studies, which should be avoided or even eliminated according to a prescriptive vision and which is close to what Eugene Nida call “translationese”. However, in literary criticism and in everyday use, the Chinese word means a style of writing that reads as if it has been translated from a text written in another language, so it is even closer to the literal meaning of “translationese” (“translation” plus the suffix “-ese” which means having the qualities or characteristics of something) than Nida’s usage of it.

Pseudotranslations that appear on Chinese social networks under the name of fanyi qiang have both meanings of the word. On the one hand, they are netizens’ parodies of “translationese” in Nida’s context, which is what they consider as typical style of translation. On the other hand, with their parodies, netizens have created a number of translation-like texts, which are characterized by their conscientiously foreignized discourse. Unlike pseudotranslations in Western literary history, these short texts posted and spread on Chinese social networks by amateurs are mostly just a game with other netizens, but their various approaches to fabricating translationese represent both a perception of translation and a perception of the Other: languages of the Other, poetics of the Other.

Self-concealment and Imposture: Beyond the Double Invisibility of the Female Translator

2022-12-08T16:46:18+04:00

With the purpose of showing the cultural contributions to the contemporaneity of female writers, artists, and intellectuals in general, so often silenced and forgotten, we’ve seen recently the (re)discovery of these protagonists of the Spanish Silver Age, from the Gender Studies, as well as from the Spanish Contemporary Literary Historiography. The recovery of female writers and artists of that period constitutes not only a way out of "anonymity" for these women, in a process that is, without any doubt, of absolute justice. It also involves necessarily a revision of the canon of the Spanish Silver Age, questioning the assumptions and interpretations consolidated in our critical tradition, incorporating a large amount of literary/artistic production that remained silenced and/or unpublished, as well as identifying the patriarchal nature of our cultural and artistic élites, at the dawn of modernity. One of the most striking cases of this group of "silenced" women of our Silver Age is María Lejárraga, an essential and also very active literary figure of the Hispanic Modernism. Several circumstances -starting with her own decisions, since she assumed as pseudonym the name of her husband, “Gregorio Martínez Sierra” from the beginning; a fact that was aggravated many decades later, during the Franco regime and the exile- led her to become a true ghost, despite her great relevance for the Hispanic literature of the first half of the XXth century.

The Role of Oraliture in Creation of the Literary Third Space: The Caribbean Case

2022-12-07T14:59:09+04:00

The Édouard Glissant’s unique analysis of the Caribbean cultures shows the way out of the Bhabhian postcolonial conflict as presented in the notion of the cultural Third Space. The rhizomatic rather than dualistic nature of the cultural phenomena introduces from below theoretical and functional equality of the spaces marked to this day by the economic and political forces of the former colonial empires.

It is the differentiation of the cultural sources and attentive, philosophical interpretation of all pieces constituting, as Walcott states, broken, then reassembled Caribbean vase, that presents the factual, dynamic image of a culture immerged in the global world, the Glissantian Tout-Monde. This image, reinforcing the ever-changing relations between the local and the global, gives back the power of creation in the hands of the artists, activists and people experiencing the reality of cultural métissage.

The literary aspect of the cultural Third Space presents itself as one of its most creative and interesting facets, enabling the relevation of multi-source Caribbean in all of its complexity. The postcolonial writer, the Glissantian errant (fr. erreur), reflects on the notion of literary writing influenced intertextually by the oral and written, echoing equally, but non univocally, in the works of Namba Roy, Black Albino (Jamaica) and Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnifique (Martinique). Using different linguistic, structural and intertextual methods in the recreation of the Caribbean totality and its cultural complexity, the authors give life to the difficult, conflictual, but functional synthesis of oral and written storytelling, transporting the valuable pieces of memory into the modern cultural landscape.

In the Time of Empires: Inter-imperiality in Jamal Mahjoub’s In the Hour of Signs

2022-12-07T15:02:33+04:00

Jamal Mahjoub’s In the Hour of Signs depicts one of the tumultuous periods in Sudanese history, namely the Mahdist War in the late nineteenth century. The novel focuses on the Mahdi and his followers’ rebellion against the Khedive’s rule and the arrival of the British forces to help the Ottoman officials to regain control over the territory. Mahjoub presents a compelling and rather exceptional narrative about empire(s) given that it portrays British and Ottoman forces as two imperial powers not necessarily competing with each other but joining forces to control the land and suppress the uprisings. While the narrative meticulously draws attention to the delicate power relations and the tension between these two forces, it also conveys the perspective of the Sudanese toward them, thus creating a triangular structure with the presence of two imperial powers and the local population on the same territory. By going beyond the colonizer-colonized divide, the novel invites a comparative reading of the representation of imperial powers present on Sudanese soil as well as the Sudanese reaction to this complicated web of relations. In this paper, I will analyze the spatio-temporal representation of late nineteenth-century Sudan within the framework of this triangular relationship among different parties. In doing so, I will argue that the inter-imperial relations between the Ottoman and the British necessitate a more nuanced approach to comprehend the status of the Sudanese as well as the power imbalance between different empires.

Représenter la préhistoire à l’heure de l’anthropocène ou comment juger le caractère dominateur d’Homo Sapiens

2022-12-07T15:03:50+04:00

Les menaces que l’être humain fait peser sur la planète sont telles que P. J. Crutzen et E. Störmer ont proposé, dès la fin du XXe siècle, le terme d’anthropocène pour nommer l’ère caractéristique de ces débordements. La littérature de fiction a particulièrement décliné cette situation sous la forme d’anticipations apocalyptiques ou post-apocalyptiques, et dans le genre actuel de l’écofiction. Il est cependant une autre manière d’interroger la puissance destructrice et autodestructrice de l’être humain, qui consiste à réinterroger ses origines et son évolution. Les premiers romans préhistoriques (prehistoric fiction en langue anglaise, prähistorische Romane und Erzählungen en langue allemande, novela y ficción prehistórica en langue espagnole…) coïncident avec le XIXe qui, en tant que siècle de l’expansion industrielle et des développements scientifiques et techniques, est parfois considéré comme le début de l’anthropocène. Il a également vu fleurir la théorie de l’évolution par sélection naturelle (Darwin), bientôt suivie de pensées du déclin de la civilisation occidentale (Spengler, début XXe…). Celle-ci, opposée parfois grossièrement aux «pays du sud» (Amérique latine, Amérique du Sud et Afrique essentiellement), se voit aujourd’hui accusée de polluer le monde, après avoir colonisé une grande partie de celui-ci, sur un mode viril décrié par les études de genre, et sans aucun respect du vivant, ce que dénonce l’écocritique. Je propose donc de voir comment quelques romanciers, essayistes et artistes plasticiens pensent les origines de l’humanité pour dénoncer le mépris de cultures non productivistes par des cultures dangereusement dominantes, et pour inviter à d’autres modèles de développement. Après les mythes religieux, les fictions du bon sauvage, la littérature de l’anthropocène s’inspire-t-elle des sciences de la préhistoire pour éclairer des conflits entre cultures, entre sexes, entre «races» et repenser la vie dans un monde global?

“The Buried Past”: Childhood Trauma in Nadia Hashimi’s Sparks Like Stars

2022-12-07T15:05:19+04:00

[U]ntold histories live in shadow graves. (Hashimi 8)

It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. (Freud 322)

The present paper aims at revisiting the notion of childhood trauma and its inescapable repercussions on the future life of the traumatized subject via reading profoundly Sparks Like Stars (2021) by the AfghanAmerican writer Nadia Hashimi. Being a native of Afghanistan which has always been associated with fanaticism, terror and warefare, Hashimi attempts in her novel to engage the reader in the sufferings of Sitara Zamani–the daughter of the chief adviser of the exiled Afghan president Sarder Daoud and the only surviving member of the ruling family after the pro-Communist coup in 1979–who has escaped from the harrowing incidents in her country to the United States of America. After spending many years in the United States, Zamani suddenly discovers that she has not succeeded in burying her past traumatic memories; particularly after the events of 9/11 and the United States’s ceaseless attacks on Afghanistan. The paper offers deep insight into Zamani’s relentless quest for healing from her buried sorrows by coming to terms with her painful past.

Rewrite the History of a Chinese-American Female: Narratology of The Lost Daughter of Happiness

2022-12-07T15:07:15+04:00

In her novel The Lost Daughter of Happiness Chinese American writer Geling Yan depicts the life of a Chinese prostitute in US society one hundred years ago. By analyzing the narratology of the novel, this essay discusses the issues of the male gaze, as well as Orientalism from the perspective of postcolonial feminism. The resistance against the dominating male-Western narration in the US history prevails in the novel. In the first chapter of her work, Geling Yan evokes readers’ identification with her heroine in their cognitive experience by adopting the tactics of second-person narrative, which puts the reader at the site of an objectified Asian female. The trick turns the table on readers. Being different from the readers of American history books that record Chinese prostitutes, the readers of Yan’s novel are no longer the subjects of giving judgement. Instead, they are forced into an shocking illusion of being judged with naked body by an authority. With the superimposed points of view, Yan intentionally keeps the superimposed underpainting of male gaze and Orientalism, and re-imposes a new perspective to fight against those stereotypes of Asian females. In this way, Yan rewrites the cultural history of Asian-American female by substituting “history” with “herstory”.

Perspectives on the Development of Literature in the Context of the Colonial Regime and the Independence of the Country

2022-12-07T15:08:56+04:00

While the national literature has been developed for centuries under the conditions of the colonial regime, it is natural for the reader to find difficulty in distinguishing between fictional works created in the conditions of freedom and the colonial regime.

If we analyze this issue with the example of our country in mind, then we must confront both the literature created under colonial rule and in the time of freedom. Indeed, it is through such a comparative analysis that we can then identify the literary peculiarities characteristic of both eras.

At the same time, it is natural to consider the author's creative individuality as well as the paradigmatic features of each epoch in which the author is inculcated.

Considering all of this, we can analyze, on the one hand, the work of Shota Rustaveli (12th century, Golden Age of Georgia), and on the other hand, the work of Nikoloz Baratashvili (19th century, a country that became a province of Russia). These two literary works provide an excellent platform for discussing the most fruitful conditions for literature development.

In this case, the subject of relative controversy will be the hero-knight of the epic ("Panther-skinned"), and on the other hand the lyrical "Meran" character - also a rider who, like the first, tries to cross the border of destiny over to a promised land of harmony.

It is important to recognize that "Merani" is as highly acclaimed as Rustaveli’s “Vepkhistkaosani." If the classical epic tradition is perfectly found and manifest in Rustaveli's poem, then "Merani is the most brilliant example of lyrical self-expression characteristic of romantic poetry" (Guram Asatiani).

Lastly, we should not assume that this research will necessarily lead us to a banal conclusion, one in which the literature produced under colonial rule inevitably reflects a process of resistance or obedience to the current situation. The solution to the current situation is often to isolate oneself from reality. An even more effective way to escape colonial influence is to focus on a different cultural space which, in turn, carves a whole new modern paradigm for considering the national interest.

This research is relevant and timely and, thus, we hope its results will be read with enthusiasm and appropriate interest. And, perhaps more importantly, we hope that these dual perspectives of literature (colonial, independent) will be thoughtfully acknowledged.

Medea from Colchis to Kolkhoz: Post- and De-Colonial Aspects

2022-12-07T15:10:25+04:00

Givi Margvelashvili in his postmodernist book - "Colchis in Medea Kolkhoz" - takes us into an interesting artistic game, which develops in the author's imagination, in the field of meta-realism. Here Medea is the symbol of ancient Georgia), while "Kolkhoz" is the symbol of Soviet Georgia.

In Kolkheti, on the Black Sea coast, a statue of Medea erected near the territory of the "Soviet Citrus Farm" ("Citrus Zovkhoz") comes to life and engages in dialogues saturated with irony, with the author.

From the many masks and interpretations of Medea, the postmodernist writer’s Medea is distinguished by the fact that, following the famous German writer Christa Wolf's "Medea", she develops the rare version of an innocent Medea who did not kill her children (they were killed by Greeks who put the guilt of the horrible crime on the shoulders of a barbaric woman from an unknown tribe ); the writer (real and unreal, Vakushi #1 and Vakushi #2), in fact, achieves to prove Medea's innocence, purification from sin, and consequently liberation from her complexes. It replaces the endless centuries-old sorrow, mediocre sadness and pain expressed in Medea Stone, with a funny dance that is Medea's catharsis, an attempt to change her tragic fate.

The postmodernist writer tries to free the heads of Homo Sovietikus from the Soviet Kolkhoz ideology and their complexes, by one imaginary character Polyp-Polimat’s (a flying vacuum cleaner with an attached EU flag) tentacles. It is difficult for a writer to get used to such a reality: how did the ancient civilization end its existence in the Soviet reality, in the Kolkhoz?! It is also unacceptable for him to present the symbol of the greatness of Colchis - Medea as an archetypal model of cruelty! That is why he is trying so persistently change the character’s tragic fate, petrify the tragic seconds!

The experimental game full of humor and irony of the postmodernist writer is aggravated by deep philosophical ideas and existential problems, "anti-thematic" and "meta-thematic" reflections.

Translation of Strange Encounters with Beautiful Women and Construction of Early Asianist Discourse

2022-12-07T15:11:37+04:00

As one of the products of Japanese national consciousnesses, Asianism arose in Japan at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. This ideology quickly swept through other Asian countries with the introduction of Western ideas such as global geography, the hierarchy of civilizations, and the Yellow Peril. Originated as a reaction of Asian countries to Western colonialism, Asianism finally developed into a national independence movement. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process of developing early Asianist discourse in late Qing China via Liang Qichao's translation work Jiaren qiyuji 佳人奇遇記 in 1898, which was published by Xinmin She 新民社 and serialized in The Complete Works of Qingyi Bao 清議報全編, Vol. 3, No. 13. This novel is the translation of Shiba Shiro's 柴四郎 political novel Kajin no Kiguu 佳人之奇遇 (Strange Encounters with Beautiful Women), which was published by Hakubundo 博文堂 between 1885 and 1897. In the first half of the novel, the protagonist Tokai Sanshi and the two female revolutionaries, Honglian 紅蓮 and Yulan 幽蘭, hope to fight the Western invaders through a union of weaker nations. It shows that Asianism originated in the independence movement of the invaded nations around the globe. The two female revolutionaries split up from Tokai Sanshi in the second half of the novel, however, because the latter became a nationalist and advocated for acts of expansionism and aggression. The bifurcation of the two parts symbolizes the process of Asianism's transformation from one based on "the same culture and species 同文同種" to one based on nationalist expansion. The history of the novel's translation demonstrates that early Asianism was based on a shared fate of colonization and was centered on opposition to Western imperialism and a focus on Asian culture and values. However, when Japanese expansionism emerged, Chinese intellectuals became aware of Japan's Asianism dangers. They rejected simplistic expressions such as "oppressed yellow Asians" and "white oppressors," and began to consider the threat from within Asia.

Illusions of Freedom. Third Space Created by Maroons: Fact and Fiction

2022-12-07T15:12:55+04:00

The main focus of the proposed papers will be examining portraits of escapees from slavery in chosen texts of American and Caribbean Literature (Nubia Kai „I spread my wings and I fly”, Namba Roy „Black Albino”, Simone Schwatrz-Bart „Pluie et vent sur Telumee Miracle”, Patrick Chamoiseau „Texaco”). After a presentation of historical data concerning Maroons and their independent habitats set up in jungles, mountains, or swamp territories, various literary representations of Maroons and their communities will be analyzed. This study will focus on discerning crucial characteristics formed by Maroon communities and the traces they left in identity definitions, which then one can see in key literary texts written by authors for whom themes related to slavery are an essential part of cultural heritage. Comparative conclusions will follow.

The Theme of War in Georgian and German Baroque Literature

2022-12-07T15:14:02+04:00

The fierce Thirty Years' War in 17th century Germany (1618-1648) and the internal political chaos in 18th century Georgia (political fragmentation), the foreign aggression of the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Iran against Georgian Kingdoms (Kingdom of Kartli, Kingdom of Kakheti, Kingdom of Imereti) became the subject of poetic creativity, in particular, in the works of the famous German Baroque writer Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664) and the poem "Davitiani" by the representative of Georgian Baroque, Davit Guramishvili (1705-1792). War is considered here as an apocalyptic event that not only destroys the homeland politically and economically but also war is regarded as a universal catastrophe, because it destroys all perspectives on human existence, making the course of history lose its meaning. The lyrical characters of these authors reflect this hopelessness and meaninglessness with the baroque characteristic of Baroque, the deep sense of vanity, and the high style of Baroque poetry (genus grande), which makes the theme of war more apocalyptic than apocalypse itself.

Rethinking the Story of the Surami Fortress: Multicultural and Anti-imperial Dimensions of Georgian Novella and Films

2022-12-07T15:15:17+04:00

The Surami Fortress (1859-1860), a 19-the century novella by the Georgian writer Daniel Chonkadze (1830-1860), was filmed twice as full-length movies in the 20^th century, by the Soviet-Georgian cinematographers. The first Georgian film based on a literary text, The Suram Fortress (Film Department of Gansakhcomi, 1923, 65 mins.), was directed by Ivan Perestiani (1870-1959), one of the founders of Georgian cinema, the film director, script-writer and actor of Greek descent, born in Russian city. Later, the famous Georgian film director and artist of Armenian descent, Tbilisi-born Sergo Parajanov (1924-1990), created his film The Legend of Suram Fortress (Film-studio Georgian Film, 1984, 88 mins.). Thus, the novella, which itself depicts the multiethnic Georgian society, inspired two film-directors who had a diverse ethnic/cultural background, but were dedicated to the idea of Georgia’s cultural uniqueness and unity.

The author, Dainel Chonkadze, created the text which carries strong patriotic messages; at the same time, he supported Georgia’s cultural diversity, he was the first to work on Georgian-Ossetic dictionary, he researched and collected Ossetic folklore. The novella and films all deal with the themes and problems related, on the one hand, with Georgia’s national self-identification and, its deep historic/cultural roots, ancient history of statehood and future goals of being established as a nation-state; on the other hand, they represent the role of various ethnic communities in Georgian history and culture.

While the novella is a multi-layered text and can be interpreted from different angles, the idea of self-sacrifice of the hero for the sake of survival of the fatherland is central in it. This dimension was not ignored also by film-makers, although the Soviet literary criticism was suggesting to read the text solely as a revolt against the serfdom. The novella and films were developed in the times of Russian domination in Georgia (the Russian Empire, the USSR), and, obviously, convey some hidden anti-imperial messages; however, they seem to be intentionally vailed by the author and film-makers through medieval setting and/or metaphoric language. The novella and films all deserve rethinking while rewriting Georgia’s cultural history.

Le repésentation postcoloniale dans le “Cycle indochinois” de Marguerite Duras

2022-12-07T15:16:16+04:00

Dans les dernières décennies les études postcoloniales constituent un champ de recherches des études littéraires, de sciences sociales et d’histoire. Dans cet article nous nous sommes intéressées à la représentation de l’Indochine coloniale et l’évolution du discours colonial dans l’œuvre de Marguerite Duras à travers une lecture contextuelle d’un choix de ses textes “indochinois”. Marguerite Duras est née en Indochine française où elle a passé son enfance et sa première jeunesse avant de partir en France pour ne jamais revenir dans son pays de naissance. Dans son œuvre textuelle nous retrouvons les deux aspects de la représentation coloniale que sont la fiction littéraire et la propagande officielle. Les textes de fiction dont le cadre est l’Indochine sont avant tout le “Cycle indochinois” (ou “la Trilogie indochinoise” ): Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950), L’Amant (1984) et L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991).

Ces romans semi-autobiographiques ont pour protagoniste centrale la jeune fille d’une famille française appartenant aux petits blancs de la colonie. Les trois textes de notre étude contiennent de nombreux éléments intertextuels qui se réfèrent à la nature de l’Indochine, à l’urbanisme colonial, à la population coloniale, aux relations entre colonisés et colonisateurs et au drame familial.

Notre recherche postcoloniale va être concentrée sur la question suivante : Quelle représentation de l’Indochine coloniale est constituée par les textes, et par quels signes sont transmis la présence et la politique de domination coloniale? Le fait que deux des textes (L’Amant et L’Amant de la Chine du Nord) sont écrits après la décolonisation de l’Indochine en 1954, donne lieu à étudier s’il y a continuité ou un changement de perspectives dans ces textes par rapport à Un Barrage contre le Pacifique. Puisque le contexte social, historique et culturel est différent d’un texte à l’autre, ainsi que d’un genre à l’autre, il nous est possible de suivre l’évolution de la pensée durassienne sur le colonialisme français durant plus d’un demi-siècle.

Rosana Paulino and Marcelo Brodsky: Images as a way to refound history

2022-12-07T15:17:23+04:00

My presentation will focus on the works of two important Latin American artists who had their work recognized from the 1990s onwards: Rosana Paulino (Brazil) and Marcelo Brodsky (Argentina). Both artists appropriate photographic images to recontextualize the history of violence that marked modernity, as well as the parallel history of coloniality. His works “reinvent”, today, a past that needs to be reinstated as a means of resistance to the new fascisms. Paulino appropriates 19th century colonial photographic images to reframe them; Marcelo Brodsky does the same with photographs of the German colonies in Africa and with images of struggles against dictatorships from the second half of the 20th century to the present day. Both artists are representative of a new and essential art of critical memory. They are agents in a new “war of images”, in the terms of filmmaker Harun Farocki. They build a new “Bildraum” (image space), which opens up new spaces for playful action (“Spielräume”, in Walter Benjamin's expression).

Soviet Trauma and the Discourse Analysis of Narratives in Oral History

2022-12-07T15:23:43+04:00

February 25, 1921 was a tragic day for Georgia - since then for the next 70 years our country has been under the influence of a totalitarian communist regime. Unfortunately, many events of the Soviet period that in various scales are traumatic in the history of our country, have not yet been properly studied or evaluated, especially from the memory perspective. This is highlighted by the fact that even in history textbooks or among scientists, the traumatic perception of this or that Soviet event has not been completely analyzed in order to assess the regime accurately. All above mentioned facts, in their turn, lead to heterogeneous attitudes on the part of the society towards the seventy-year history of the last century.

The "favour" for the Soviet past is especially felt in the villages of Georgia, in spite of the traumatic events of the Soviet Union that took place there in full force (genocide, collectivization, the terror of 1937-38, World War II, deportations, etc.). We think this is due to the fact that in villages the elderly rarely discuss or re-evaluate the Soviet past, while the young generation is unaware of the whispered stories of that time, as well as the experiences hidden because of fear or shame caused by memory politics.

Studying the totalitarian communist regime stories embedded in individual memory from a modern perspective view is important for understanding the traumatic perception of the Soviet past. Our research is based on the oral histories recorded over the last two decades. Discourse analysis of oral histories reveals that trauma plays an important role. They serve as a dividing line, according to which the narratives are divided into three significantly different periods: "this", "before" and "after".

Deux cases de „roman-monde“: „Tout-monde“ de Édouard Glissant et „Midnight's Children“ de Salman Rushdie

2022-12-07T15:24:50+04:00

L’exposé souhaite comparer les romans Tout-monde (1993) de Édouard Glissant (1922-2011) et Midnight’s Children (1981) de Salman Rushdie (1947- ) en les lisant comme cases d’étude du «roman-monde» théorisé par le même Glissant dans Poétique de la Relation (1990), c’est-à-dire comme la réécriture «créolisée» de la structure discursive du colonisateur.

La migration de la propre terre d’origine (Martinique et Inde) vers la terre du colonisateur (France et Angleterre) fait percevoir aux deux écrivains ses natures de «hommes-traduits», c’est-à-dire de sujets entre-deux cultures et histoires. Dans les deux romans cette expérience permet la déconstruction de l’auctorialité occidentale vers la création d’un «auteur-rhizome»: un «pacotilleur» d’une « mer d’histoires » qui se démultiplie dans des différentes « identités-relation » dialoguant dans le texte. Il en découle une structure romanesque qui nie la logique narrative occidentale cause-effet, s’appuyant sur le retour «à spiral» de motifs thématiques et formels, sur la déconstruction du canon grâce à l’hybridation des sources et des genres littéraires à la fois européens, américaines (Glissant) et orientales (Rushdie), et surtout sur la polyphonie des voix et des langues. En fait la langue du colonisateur (français et anglais) ne vient pas abandonnée (comme dans autres expériences postcoloniales), en revanche elle est «créolisée» à travers des processus d’oralisation et de pluralisation à partir du créole, de l’italien e de l’anglais (Glissant), du dialecte de Bombay, de l’urdu et de l’arabe (Rushdie).

Presentation title: Anticolonial Intellectuals in Non-Aligned Yugoslavia

2022-12-07T15:26:26+04:00

In 1968, Aimé Césaire’s play The Tragedy of King Christophe was performed at the second BITEF theater festival in Belgrade, two years after being performed at the First World Theater of Negro Arts in Dakar. That same year, Agostinho Neto presented his translated book of poetry at the October Meetings of Writers in Belgrade. In 1975, Léopold Sédar Senghor participated in the Struga Poetry Evenings and awarded its most prestigious award, the Golden Wreath. During the era of decolonization, these and other writers/intellectuals carried enormous prestige due to their status as both anticolonial leaders/revolutionaries and thinkers devoted to developing a new cultural expression and an anticolonial critical discourse. As Yugoslavia developed its Non-Aligned foreign policy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, its writers, intellectuals, and journalists – who were in many cases former revolutionaries and partisans – wrote about European colonialism and the various movements of liberation, developing an anticolonial intellectual discourse that, in many tropes and rhetorical moves, echoes the more familiar critical texts by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and CLR James. Thus, for example, the travelogue Crno na Belo [Black on White] by avant-garde poet and novelist Oskar Davičo, whose travels in west Africa overlap with Yugoslav President Tito’s own trip in 1961, could be said to figure as the literary and critical accompaniment to an emergent political narrative. I will consider this text side by side with contemporaneous Yugoslav travelogues, and literary and cultural criticism, to think about Non-Alignment also as an attempt to develop an anticolonial intellectual discourse in Yugoslavia that is intertwined with the politics of national liberation. These texts often quote and analyze anticolonial poetry and prose; describe conversations with anticolonial intellectuals-revolutionaries in the Global South; address the necessity of developing an independent cultural policy; include subaltern narratives in an attempt to “give voice” to the colonized; and highlight the biases of colonial epistemology. While their occasional Eurocentric biases and blind spots should in no way be glossed over, they make a contribution to the concurrent development of global anticolonial intellectual discourses. It is important to reconstruct these early networks of intellectual solidarity between the Global East and the Global South since, according to Monica Popescu (At Penpoint, 2020), contemporary scholarship tends to privilege Western postcolonial theory starting in the late 1970s – and more recently, I would add, the contemporary articulations of decolonial theory – while “early” anticolonial intellectual work is often downplayed as merely “pioneering” and compromised through its embroilment in the violence of national liberation.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Postcolonial Trauma Narrative

2022-12-07T15:28:59+04:00

The attempt to identify a distinct trauma novel has been a recent literary critical task. For such a recent literature, there is already an emergent canon of writers and works, and even an implicit aesthetic for the trauma novel. This cluster of trauma fictions opens with Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).

Whitehead (2004) argues, that the narrative of trauma literature departs from the conventional linear sequence. Eaglestone’s (2004) formulation of the features of the genre suggests it is marked by interruptions, temporal disorder, refusal of easy readerly identification, disarming play with narrative framing, disjunct movements in style, tense, focalization or discourse, and a resistance to closure that is demonstrated in compulsive telling and retelling.

Beloved, a novel about the murderous legacies of slavery in America, elevated Toni Morrison to major cultural pre-eminence: the book won the Pulitzer Prize and in 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel was intended to give some inner consciousness and humanity to the historical record of atrocities inflicted against African and African–American people as a consequence of institutional slavery. The book helped establish some of the basic narrative and tropological conventions of trauma fiction. It was soon regarded as a formative text in literary trauma studies, which has produced a torrent of academic commentary.

Morrison tries to throw the reader into the midst of ‘compelling confusion’ at the opening of each chapter, a discordance that only slowly works to provide the places and spaces. The dynamics of the narrative of the original text are characterized by the variability of emotions and confusing interchangeability of the past and the present, which requires observation from the reader.

The protagonist of the novel, Sethe, provides an interesting parallel to the mythical Medea, as both characters resort to murder in search of a solution. A parallel can also be drawn to Otar Chladze's novel "Avelum" – within the context of the impact of pain and historical trauma of the past.

This study presents a parallel corpus linguistic analysis of the original and the translation of Morrison’s Beloved. The aim of this research is to ask: Does E. Machutadze’s (2020) Georgian translation manage to keep the original text structure so that the aesthetic of the trauma novel is not lost? The findings suggest that the purpose of the ambivalent structuring of the original is lost in the translation. The translator tries to help Georgian reader to comprehend the text utilizing grammatical transformations. The Georgian translation loses the sociolinguistic markers of speech. Tony Morrison's dialectical language, African-American speak and sociolect is not to be found in the Georgian translation. Translation theorists refer to this translation strategy as "domestication" (L. Venuti, domestication).

Littérature française de voyage et formation de collections de culture matérielle: patrimoine colonial

2022-12-07T15:42:41+04:00

La mémoire fait partie intégrante de la littérature de voyage. La façon dont un voyageur conserve les souvenirs affecte la culture de l’écriture et génère des «galeries» d’images intangibles, qui à leur tour conduisent à la création des cabinets des curiosités: d’abord dans l’imagination, puis dans la réalité. La littérature de voyage française a une longue tradition de constitution de collections de culture matérielle et immatérielle. Les processus de colonisation ont eu un grand impact sur la perception des autres cultures et l'intégration de ces cultures au niveau du texte. Dans cet exposé je voudrais montrer comment la tradition orale et littéraire de XX siècle dans la littérature française de voyage liée avec l’idée de la mémoire, des musées de papier et avec le développement des idées anthropologiques et coloniales dans la littérature française de F.-R. de Chateaubriand jusqu’à C. Lévi-Strauss.

Theorizing the Linguistic Split in Algeria: The Case of Francophone Berber Intellectuals

2022-12-07T15:44:35+04:00

This paper analyzes the predicament of Algerian intellectuals on the eve of the country’s liberation from 132 years of French rule. Writing almost exclusively in French to a nation that mostly spoke Arabic and Tamazight while counting in their ranks an unusual number of Berbers compared to the makeup of the country, Algeria’s literary milieus could seem at first to align perfectly with the Deleuzian and Guattarian definition of a minor literature—an ethnic minority within a linguistic minority finding ways to summon a missing public and to channel national consciousness within a language that was and was not their own.

This narrative, seductive as it might be, goes against one of the central tenets of the Algerian state project. The goal, in 1962, was not to relate to the alien world formed by the major colonial society, but to produce an entirely new type of subject, and one whose definition hinged on a crucial choice: to decide whether French along Arabic and Tamazight could, and should become, an entirely Algerian language, or whether it should remain entirely foreign.

The intellectuals’ majority-minority—Francophone Berbers such as Kateb Yacine and Mouloud Mammeri—generally pronounced themselves in favor of the former position, while most in the seat of power chose the path of Arabization, which would ultimately triumph. While this position might seem typical of the subaltern intellectual forged by domination without hegemony, this paper argues that the very existence of this small elite, as well as their positive view of multilingualism, cannot be accounted for without writing the history of how they were targeted under colonial rule as a minority by forms of colonial hegemony rooted both in ideology—the myth pitting the “good” Berber against the “bad” Arab—and in policy—French schools opened for the Berber population specifically.

Travelling both ways: Cultural imaginations crossing frontiers in Roberto Bolaños 2666

2022-12-07T15:46:57+04:00

The US-American/Mexican frontier is a space where transnational myths and dreams collide - those of the ‘Wild, Wild West’ with its expansionist endeavour of the early colonial years and of the ‘American Virgin Land’ with the imaginary ‘Gate to a better Life’, which the frontera represents for mainly Hispanic immigrants. Still, it is also a place that is usually not centrally perceived but negotiated as a borderland, as Heike Paul claims in her monography The Myths that made America, where she adds: “The American West is constructed as a site of individual and collective quests for land and dominance”^[1] and has become “a preeminent symbol of exceptionalist ‘Americanness’ around the world.”^[2]

While US-American dreams are promised to become reality, “[h]atred, anger and exploitation are [also] prominent features of this landscape”,^[3] nowadays dominated by narratives of violence and drug smuggling. Roberto Bolaño, who sets the centre of his global novel 2666 in this supposed edge of civilization, creates “a literary space with a particular suggestion of profound connections between relatively isolated events in Mexico and the best and worst of European history.”^[4]

Chronotope and the Construction of Hybrid Identity in Leila Aboulela's Novel The Kindness of Enemies

2022-12-07T15:48:32+04:00

In Leila Aboulela's novel The Kindness of Enemies, two narratives of displacement are interlinked. Aboulela links a contemporary narrative and a historical narrative in a firmly time/place oriented novel. Each part of the narrative is divided into chapters with an all-encompassing title. Some of the chapters recount the contemporary narrative, while others recount the historical narrative. The shift from one narrative to the other is marked with time/place entry at the beginning of each chapter. Readers are continuously oriented in one narrative or the other. The alternating chronotopes do not only mark the shift between two historical periods, they also mark the shift between multiple world views. In the contemporary narrative Natasha, the main character and the narrator, is a Sudanese-Scottish academic. She lives in Aberdeen. Despite her determination to be assimilated, Natasha's hybrid identity hinders her full assimilation. The historical narrative invokes the figure of Imam Shamil, the muslim leader who unified the Caucasus against the Russian invasion. In the historical narrative Aboulela allows each displaced character to view the world from the side of the enemy. A very complicated question is posed as the narrative unfolds in The Kindness of Enemies: who are the enemies? The chronotopic representation of characters in the novel will be discussed in order to highlight the role Aboulela’s choices of time and place play in the construction of the hybrid identity of the main characters.

Georgian poetry in the face of repression in the 1930s

2022-12-07T15:50:12+04:00

The 1930s is one of the most tragic pages in the history of Georgian literature. As a result of Bolshevik rule, Georgian poets had to give up the search for versification and artistic-stylistic forms and, instead of developing modernist trends they almost wholly confined themselves to proletarian themes. In the 1910s-1920s, the highly enriched Georgian verse nearly stopped evolving.

The poets who failed to fit into a common pattern and tried to preserve their individuality were declared the "enemies of the people". They were faced with the choice of either to write Bolshevik poems or to be physically destroyed.

The poetry was focused on the theme of revolution and building of communism. Proletarian literature rejected patriotism and replaced it with internationalism.

Despite the threat of physical destruction, some Georgian poets still managed to adhere to the main path of the development of ancient Georgian poetry in the 1920s and 30s. Along with the older generation, a new generation of poets (Lado Asatiani, Mirza Gelovani, Aleksandre Sajaia, Giorgi Napetvaridze, etc.) appeared on the scene in the early 1930s. These poets were able to revive the forms of national versification under the guise of Soviet internationalism. They adapted the traditional long-meter (20- and 16-syllable) textual structure to the verses on patriotic theme.

The genre of ballad which occupies a worthy place in the works of the poets of "Our Generation" was also revived. Young authors turned poetic folklore into a source of creativity, and literary verse again came in close contact with folk poetry.

This is especially important because these poets managed to breathe new life into the traditional Georgian verse forms at a time when the Bolshevik regime was leading a broad struggle against "formalism."

Functions and ethical Implications of ‘reverse Appropriation’ as heterolingual Strategy in P.F. Thomése’s Izak (2005) and Koen Peeters’ Duizend Heuvels (2012)

2022-12-07T15:51:27+04:00

Heterolingualism, defined by Rainier Grutman (1997/2019) as the presence of foreign languages in the main language of a text, can often be observed in postcolonial literary texts. Indeed, according to Ashcroft et al. (1989/2002: 37), the postcolonial textual strategy of ‘appropriation’ brings imperial languages ‘under the influence of a vernacular tongue’ in order to subvert the former colonial power by the hybridization of its language. In the contemporary novels Izak (Thomése 2005) and Duizend Heuvels (Peeters 2012), both paratextually qualified as ‘intercultural’, a what I call ‘reverse appropriation’ takes place: Thomése and Peeters, born and bred in the former colonizing countries of The Netherlands and Belgium respectively, interweave the novels’ main language Dutch with vernaculars from the former colonized countries Indonesia and Rwanda. So far, such a ‘reverse appropriation’ has not been analysed as a heterolingual strategy in Dutch intercultural novels. I will therefore assess the forms and functions of this heterolingual strategy, drawing on the taxonomies by Radaelli (2012 & 2014), Suchet (2014) and Blum-Barth (2021). According to those, the embedded languages in a text can be obviously distinguished from the main language on the one extreme, or almost invisibly blend in with it on the other extreme. As the alterity of other languages in literary texts is not a given, but a discursive construction (Suchet 75), I will examine to what extent both novels’ ‘discursive mechanisms’ (Suchet 77-110) enhance or diminish the alterity of the featured vernaculars in relation to Dutch and to what extent a ‘reverse appropriation’ occurs. Furthermore, assuming that the way in which the vernaculars are staged in the text corresponds to the way the related cultures are viewed, I will gauge the ethical implications of ‘reverse appropriation’ induced by heterolingual strategies in the light of recent decolonial debates in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Interrelation of censors and editors during the second half of XIX century or the reaction of the Caucasus Censorship Committee to the work of editors

2022-12-07T15:53:36+04:00

Goal of any type of censorship (quite often – pseudo-goal) is protecting society. In a totalitarian state it gains different essence and scale. Its main task becomes protecting the ideology of a totalitarian state and punishing its opposers in different forms.

Caucasus Censorship Committee (1848-1906) was the main mechanism for the political and ideological control of Georgia and other nations of the Caucasus, which were part of the XIX century Russian Empire. The control mainly concerned the cultural-educational sphere, as other state institutions were under the Empire anyway.

Responsibility for the national-liberating tasks in Georgia in XIX century was taken by Georgian literature and press, therefore, censorship fought against them, killing the free opinion at its appearance. Censorship reviewed any kind of texts by Georgian writers, critics, playwrights and persons working in Georgian space in general – be it fiction, critical-publicist or scientific texts – and it was at the decision of censorship to publish, remake or to prohibit them. Not only creative freedom was restricted, but there was also pressure on national and public opinion.

Restrictions were expressed in taking out or remaking free pinion from an article or fiction work, its distortion; as punishment, a magazine could be closed down, an issue of a magazine could be banned or an editor could even be arrested. Repression censorship banned for prolonged period of time such well-known Georgian periodicals as, Tsiskari, Iveria, Droeba, Imedi and others; or even closed them down permanently. This happened to the first satire-humor magazine Khumara (Joker). Only one issue was published and the magazine was closed down; its editor Akaki Tsereteli was arrested for mocking a public servant…

In parallel with restrictions and punishments, Georgian literature, criticism, publicist work gradually transferred to defense regime and did not obey the ideological-political course of the Empire. Fiction, critical-publicist, scientific texts were being veiled, coded, disguised with symbolic-allegorical images; this is well confirmed by all the materials found in the texts by Georgian classics and non-classic writers and justifying statements sent by editors to censors.

Goal of the article is to show, from the work by the Caucasus Censorship Committee, the interrelation of censors and editor, based on the decrees, reports by censors and justifying statements by editors.

Institutional Formations post 1947: Tracing the Early Developments of Comparative Literature in India

2022-12-07T15:55:46+04:00

The idea of a national literature in India is quite different from any other nation-state due to the presence of numerous language based states which have their own corpus of literature. This paper will look into the formation of institutions and their structural changes post 1947, through which the process of reading Indian literature ultimately culminated into Comparative Literature in India. Establishment of the Sahitya Akademi, as a part of the nationalist idea of the Indian National Congress, will be one of the primary concerns of this paper. The Sahitya Akademi, a state funded body, has had a dialogue with Comparative Literature, since its initial years. The paper will question if this can be seen within a greater framework where Comparative Literature complements the Nehruvian idea of nation building. The structure of universities in India has largely been influenced by the British system; however, even before the Independence, there had been a nationalist inclination towards finding an alternative way of institutional education. This paper will only focus on departments or institutions of literature and will try to understand how the method and practice of Comparative Literature might have been related to the idea of nationhood and in turn, a national literature. Around the 1950s, in several universities across India, clusters of departments were established under the name ‘Modern Indian Languages’. This paper will enquire about the setting up of these clusters instead of independent single literature departments and also see if this idea of teaching literatures of different Indian languages separately, but with some sort of interaction, show any inclination towards the method that ‘Comparative Indian Literature’ subsequently follows.

Barbary Captivity Narratives: Imperial Experiences Lived Through Ordeals

2022-12-07T15:56:50+04:00

My argument on Barbary Captivity Narratives is that this genre represents significant but neglected part of the imperial experience of early modern Europe. On the one hand, collective cultural memories of the Other was shaped by individual storytelling. The captives offered some of the first impressions for western society about the Maghreb and its Muslim culture. By mixing with the local population at a very intimate level, these men and women with diverse backgrounds provided multidimensioned views to the public about the customs, people and daily life in North Africa. While a sense of imperial Self and the oriental Other is always evident in their writings, the Self is often questioned, challenged or event converted when physically and mentally traumatized during captivity. Barbary captivity narratives offer a microscope of how different identities meet, clash and mediate and most importantly – how individual narratives can break away from typical colonial discourse, thus provide pluralistic views of the imperial experience.

On the possibility of a Palestinian-Israeli unity in McCann’s Apeirogon

2022-12-07T15:58:03+04:00

With the recent growing interest in Border Studies and Border Theory in postcolonial/colonial contexts, contextualising Palestine is timely and relevant. Palestine is the epitome of a colonial state in which borders and boundaries of all shapes and forms are infested. The de-facto colonial state in Palestine invites multi-layered conceptualisations of borders and barriers, some of which are represented in Colum McCann’s Apeirogon (2020). McCann’s novel reimagines porous and permeable Palestinian/Israeli symbolic and physical borders instead of the commonly perceived rigid ones. This border crossing literary narrative demonstrates the possibility of a unity between the Palestinian Muslims, and the Israelis through what the text deems ‘common’ grief. Evoking Bhabha’s Third Space, the novel calls for an interstitial state between the Palestinians and the Israelis transcending religious, political, and ideological schisms between both parties. Reading the novel, several questions arise; two central ones are: How far are borders violated/crossed on the Palestinian/Israeli sides? What is the role of power elite in border-making and border-erosion in this colonial context? Analysing these questions, among others, in light of Border Theory and Border Studies, my premise is to investigate how far Apeirogon proliferates power and coercion exercised against the Palestinians.

Third Space of Gender and Sexual Orientation. Queer African Voices – A Comparative Perspective

2022-12-07T15:59:07+04:00

The idea of Third Space in the context of the colonial and postcolonial clash of cultures is part of the concept of cultural hybridization portrayed by Homi K. Bhabha in his most famous book, Location of Culture (1998). In Bhabha's conception, Third Space is a cultural "no man's land" that leads the individual out of the trap of binary oppositions and helps them navigate between colliding cultures, customs, and world views. It allows him to regain, at least partially, the balance in the disturbances of the division forces he experiences. This can be observed in different contexts: the Third Space concept involves categories like classes, gender, race, and other. In the proposed paper, I would like to examine novels of African and black diasporic writers such as Akwaeke Emezi (Freshwater, The Death of Vivek Oji), Chinelo Okparanta (Under the Udala Trees), K. Sello Duiker (The Quiet Violence of Dreams), Paul Mendez (Rainbow Milk) and Uzodinma Iweala (Speak No Evil) to compare different approaches of creating "Queer Third Space" in African and black diasporic context.