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Popularization and/or Trivialization of Philosophy in Voltaire's NarrativeCandide or Optimism

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Majksner I., Oswald T. V.

CLEaR

2016

vol. 3

issue 2

32-39

Voltaire produced his works within the literary-historical period of Classicism and Enlightenment, in which the prevalent role of literature was educational. The period also dictated what genre, theme, style and structure authors should follow. However, more and more changes of literary genres appear, and the process of stratification of literature into high and trivial takes place. The aim of this paper is to describe the polarization of two mutually different processes involved in the literary shaping of Voltaire's philosophical narrative Candide or Optimism. In Voltaire's narrative, the popularization of philosophy, in order to simplify and illuminate the philosophical writings of G. W. Leibniz, results in the changes of style and content that become understandable to the general readership since they work within the scheme of an adventure novel. In this process, trivialization does not affect only the genre, but is also present in other parts of literary analysis and interpretation such as the theme, motifs, structure, characterization, narrative techniques, stylistic features, and so on.

Cultural Memory in the Novel Unterstadt by Ivana Šojat-Kuči

100%

Sabljić J., Oswald T. V.

International Journal on Language, Literature and Culture in Education

2016

vol. 3

issue 2

110-126

Unterstadt (2009) by Ivana Šojat-Kuči can serve as an example of a literary and artistic intervention in the process of cultural oblivion. It is a novel that has won numerous literary awards in Croatia for its innovativeness. For the first time, it tells a story in which minority culture members themselves narrate about their ideologically suppressed family memory in order to imaginatively (re)construct the past, considering the needs of re-examining the destiny of a bourgeois family of German ancestry in the town of Osijek. Themes such as reminiscence, remembering and raising awareness of the town space are a textual polygon for telling the story as a family saga about the destiny of women in four generations – great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and daughter. Remembering and reminiscence are considered as social and cultural constructs that arise out of mutual interaction between the members of a specific family and community. Thereunto, the role of remembering and forgetting in the process of establishing historical events, female identity and the town’s toponymy as cultural/material objects should be determined, and vice versa, the role of culture-moulded objects in memory formation should be defined. There are three methodological approaches or perspectives to the reading of the novel. First, the historiographic layer of the novel is analysed, followed by the analysis of the town as a physical givenness and a cultural construct – a point of intersection of different identities, but also as an area of trauma. The issue of oblivion and reminiscence of the German national minority in the context of specifically female history is tackled as the third perspective. The novel Unterstadt is an example of a text presenting the mechanism of official remembering and forgetting and re-creation of the past by using the discursive act of narrating human fates conditioned by great historical events.

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1 CLEaR

1 International Journal on Language, Literature and Culture in Education

2 Oswald T. V.

1 Majksner I.

1 Sabljić J.

2 2016

Search results

Popularization and/or Trivialization of Philosophy in Voltaire's NarrativeCandide or Optimism

Cultural Memory in the Novel Unterstadt by Ivana Šojat-Kuči