This article sets off to discuss the intertextuality of some of Andrea Camilleri’s detective novels which offer a variety of implicit and explicit signals of the bonds between them and the prior texts, and also display the cultural competence of the protagonists — and, thus, of the author (an imposing assembly of thirty names — from Homer to R. Musil to G. Simenon). On the primary semantic level (the linguistic level), the distinctive elements are realised as citations (e.g. songs, poems, proverbs) and direct and indirect references to the names of literary and filmic characters, names of authors and their works’ titles. The fictional world, i.e. the secondary semantic level, abounds, too, in distinctive elements (such as similar situations, events, structures, characters and the descriptions of their looks). The numerous references to the literary tradition document the writer’s striving to ennoble detective fiction and protect it from the negative impact of the homogeneity of modern culture.
The author analyzes the ways in which Witold Gombrowicz played with traditional culture in his play 'Wedding'. Gombrowicz polemizes with traditional culture, by using aspects of the grotesque, reversal of traditional meanings and depreciation of symbols, as well as with its symbolic spheres, such as home, king and marriage. Gombrowicz creates a world that is deprived of a center, the eternal 'axis mundi'. The king does not symbolize the embodiment of a cosmic tree, nor is he holy, nor powerful. His office is only a social and historical cultural convention. Home is not the foundation of a community. The fate that Gombrowicz prepared for his protagonist shows how man is helpless in the face of the reality that surrounds him, including the human one, and in the face of the void of a universe deprived of traditional (ethical and ontological) points of reference. For Gombrowicz, a literary drama - or more generally, art - is a place to search for cultural dimensions outside the traditional norms. This search is permeated with a sense of the tragedy of human existence, just as in all of this author's works.
Martin Heidegger understood colere as “proper dwelling” and “cultivation,” referring thus to the original Greek meaning of the term. For the author of Sein und Zeit, colere and cultura were essentially identical with the notions of fysis and ethos signifying, respectively, “being of reality” and a “place” in this reality. Thus, human beings are cultural, if they dwell properly in the world, at the same time allowing the world to freely be in its own truth. In this way pre-Socratic Greeks werein-the-world; in this way, too, human beings can exist after jumping into “other beginning,” i.e. after making the effort of “curtailing” the history of metaphysics and replacing culture with cultura. Modern culture — and “cultural” man with it — are for Heidegger the final stage of metaphysics, characterised by total mechanisation and objectification of reality, the ontological principle of which is the will of power.
The main purpose of the article is an attempt to demonstrate that spirituality can become one of the more important terms defining culture. We indicate that the so-called new spirituality is a useful term explaining many phenomena in modern culture. We present various contexts and uses of both lexemes, both in the humanities and in social sciences, as well as in non-religious and non-academic contexts. In our approach spirituality is a term of universal and suprareligious nature. It defines human striving for transgression — in and outside religion — both in the social and in the individual dimension, striving in the name of values considered by an individual as higher, positive, good. New spirituality is defined here as related to today’s mediatised and technicised Western culture. It is strongly individual and does not require any institution as its environment. It denotes an area of human life where human beings concentrate on working on their consciousness in cooperation with their corporeality.
The history of the notion of 'Humanism' reflects various intellectual trends in European and universal culture since the early modern period up to the post-modern era. Their common and basic element was the classical idea of humanity (the Greek paideia and the Latin humanitas) with its origins reaching back to Mediterranean antiquity and its 'media', the so-called 'bonae artes' or 'bonae litterae'. The paper deals with a fundamental question: How is the idea of humanism with its ancient and early modern (i.e. Renaissance and post-Renaissance) background and its modern formula present in the contemporary paradigm of the human sciences? Other questions seem to be equally important: What were the main characteristics of reflection on humanism in the 19th century and how were they continued in the 20th century and in contemporary Renaissance studies, particularly in Polish? How did the notion of humanism function as a philosophical and political metaphor of the outlook in life? How did humanism influence the development of national and European identities in its political and cultural sense? What was its impact on the religious ideas of Christianity? All of these problems seem to be pivotal questions of contemporary culture.
The article is devoted to the difference between the ways of cultivating mythologies referred to here as “strong” as well as “weakened” mythologies characteristic of modern culture. The sources of this “weakening” may be found in the secularisation process, conceptualised in a variety of ways. In the present author’s approach, the ways of cultivating “strong” and “weakened” mythologies do not constitute a historical sequence — as could be concluded from a simplified secularisation thesis — but, rather, two extremes of a certain continuum. The author analyses the models of cultivating mythologies that can be placed within this continuum; worthy of note among them are: participation, mimesis of participation and mimesis of trace. What is also important in the present reflection is a re-interpretation of the notion of participation mystique in the spirit of the concept of cultural practices.
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