The essay starts with a short presentation of the critical 'school', its representatives and main principles. The article concentrates on three essays by Albert Beguin, Jean-Pierre Richard and Georges Poulet. The critics situate Hugo's work in a large context: from primitive myths to modern poetry and philosophy. They analyze two texts in particular, 'Dieu' and 'La Fin de Satan', and point out the principle of polarity, the prevailing image of chaos and some other motives like metamorphosis, confusion or fog. They compare Hugo's work not only to the myths but also to the dream, and try to sketch his unique concept of the status of the poet, which is similar to God and to the whole universe.
Theodor Adorno asked whether lyrical poetry is at all possible after Auschwitz. The consequences of the Second World War disturb both the philosopher and the priest. In what way can we justify our existence? The author seeks a solution among poets writing about the encounter of man and God: T. Rózewicz, D. H. Lawrence, Z. Herbert, E. Lasker-Schüler, J. Seifert, and Cz. Miłosz.
The medieval poet and composer Zavis is known as author of religious and secular poetry, written in Latin and in Czech. Scholar works - both of musicologists and literary historians - mostly focused on his love song 'Jizt mne vse radost ostava', looking for its correct musical reconstruction and the proper place within the late-fourteenth-century vernacular literary tradition. The article deals with Zavis' less studied works, which represent typical additions to the repertory of the Latin liturgical poetry. It revises the hitherto authoritative Muzik's interpretation of the Zavis' 'lai O Maria, mater Christi' and its transmission, brings analysis of his tropes 'Kyrie Inmense conditor' and 'Gloria Patri et filio', and compares Zavis's output to the typical or exceptional works of the late-fourteenth / early fifteenth-century. The chants which can be today attributed to Zavis, show a strong influence by the late-medieval German repertory, knowledge of the chants once performed (only) in the St Vitus' Cathedral, and reveal a surprising link to the contemporary poetical repertory in Northern Italy. Following this, new arguments arise supporting older hypothesis about the identification of the autor ‘Zavis' as the influencial church official Zavis of Zapy.
The author seeks here to link Havel's well-known dramatic output with his visual poetry, which is far less known. The notion of the double bind, the author argues, is a predominant trope of Havel's oeuvre. By applying Grelling's paradox to Havel's visual texts, the author illustrates the techniques Havel uses to produce logograms whose visual representation contradicts the verbal message conveyed by them.
The environment of this South Asian country is immersed in the water element. The seas and rivers, their intricate delta channels, surrounded by vibrant green jungles, rice fields and floating villages, colourful boats and fishermen - all this creates a poetic essence of Vietnam visuals, projected to nearly every film. It forms also the key to the cultural topography of the country with a turbulent history with alternated and mixed influences of Chinese, French, American and Soviet. The military paradoxically intertwines the lyric, Confucian severity meets Taoist poetry and creates in this "country floating on the water" theatre of dramatic counterpoints. The author provides a comprehensive analysis of the situation of filmmaking in the turbulently changing Vietnam society. She examines the degree of authenticity and impact of non-national initiatives, whether during the French colonial rule, during the protracted war, until the new expansion of cinema after a peaceful reunification of Vietnam and its first inroads into the context of the most advanced film cultures.
This reflection is a short summary of reading and partly of a work experience with the texts devoted to Slovak literature. They come approximately from the half of the last century. This experience points the title of formulated thesis. Writing about poetry was particularly focused on older personalized line (empathic or critically distant), and stressing more evocation of the work, dealing with the character of an author and methodically progressing a structural line. Inspirational confrontation with transformation in poetry that happened in the end of the 50s and the 60s evolved several interpretational initiatives concentrated on semantically complicated contemporary poetic texts. Fiction, modernized in all transformations, would more correspond with all articulated constituted 'worlds' than contemporary poetry with intermediate self-understanding of society, with its official or alternative explanation and with the 'world' opening explosiveness, contemplativeness, fragmentariness, etc. Analogies of narrative fiction and historiography interpretation could help in a less conflicted transposed fiction in treating history of literature. An experience that makes rather problematic usual work with literature of a strong poetry sort can serve as a reminder: history is not only stated by 'subsequence' and 'similarity' of facts (in all methodological travesties still always by Comte's provenience), but it has non spectacular dimension 'in actu' evolving semantic ruptures, explosions, epiphanies, illuminations, or catastrophes.
Theatrum mortis humanae tripartitum (1682) by the Carniolan polymath Johann Weichard Valvasor (1641–1693) can be classified under the genre of allegorical moral-didactic poetry, very popular in the Baroque age. The chapter Varia genera mortis, where 35 death cases are presented in short epigrams by Valvasor and illustrated with engravings made after the original drawings of Slovenian draughtsman Johann Koch, has so far not been an issue of scholarly research, despite its interesting iconography. The article focuses on the iconography of the Varia genera mortis, its artistic context and its genesis. For the first time the direct literary sources of author’s inspiration are identified and his relation to the tradition of the Renaissance and Baroque genre of picturesque death stories established.
The most frequent cause of backtranslation is the need for identifying trouble spots in the translated text in order to correct them. The target-text, retranslated into the original language is then confronted with the source-text. Many recent publications point out to the fact that the backtranslation should be considered as a helpful translator’s instrument rather than a threat. In the present paper the possibility of backtranslation of poetry is proposed. Could backtranslation be useful in case of literary translation? The discussion presented in this paper is based on the translations into Polish of a selection of poems by a modern Spanish poet Ana Maria Fagundo and their retranslations. The author refers to Anna Wierzbicka’s concept of cultural scripts and a universal semantic metalanguage in order to respond whether the presence of backtranslation is justified in the process of poetry translation.
The article discusses the collection of correspondence between Karl Dedecius and Czesław Miłosz. This edition shows, on the one hand, Dedecius’s work style, interpreting poetics and role in popularizing the Polish poet’s work in Germany. On the other hand, it presents Miłosz as a translator. The author draws attention to the fact that the project “Dedecius-Miłosz” is patronized by the Dedecius Archive at the Słubice Collegium Polonicum, which collects materials interesting for researchers of translation practices and literary communication between authors and translators.
One of the obvious experiences of the past 150 years is that while the post-Enlightenment secularized society is breaking away, occasionally openly opposes the institution of conventional religious life, the themes and discourse of the modern and postmodern literature still preserve their attachments to Christian traditions. In the first part of the paper, the author describes the change from the end of the middle ages to the present that led to this state focusing on the development of the relation between theology and literature. Past the changes of horizons of modernity and post modernity, the characteristics of the oeuvre of several significant poets and writers of the 20th century are determined by religious approach and the use of religious motifs. János Pilinszky, considered to be one of the most significant poets of Hungarian literature after World War II, belongs to them. In the second part of the paper, the author examines the way how the religious experience of modern man is reflected in his poetry.
The purpose of this article is to analyze the works of Angolan women poets published after 2000. Their poems were not deeply analyzed by literary critics whose analytic efforts are focused on the works of well-known authors such as Ana de Santana, Alda Lara and Ana Paula Tavares. This article focuses on the more recent development stages of Angolan women poetry through the poems of not yet very famous poets such as Amélia Dalomba, Maria Celestina Fernandes, Leila dos Anjos, Ana Branco, Alice Palmira, Carla Queiros, Cecilia Ndanhakukua and Kanguimbo Ananaz. The will of transforming the world through writing and the deep conviction that literature has an important social role to accomplish are the evidence of the feminist ideological engagement of these poets.
Dvorak's compositions created and spread around 1900, especially his opera Rusalka, touch on the aesthetic problem of rapport between the arts. What impact had the literary atmosphere here, especially on the librettist Jaroslav Kvapil? His multifaceted career, impregnated by the principles of the ‘parnassians' and symbolists, explains the eclecticism of his work - influenced by Maeterlinck and Schopenhauer, but also by Kytice by Erben.The poetic works of the young Kvapil, such as his Rusalka, document his links to an ideal of communication without words, which, disordered by its nature, is a type of non articulated language.
The article is an attempt to approach the poetry of Emily Dickinson through some of the principles of cognitive literary studies. In the first part the focus is placed on the first approaches to literary cognition in Slovak literary theory and on the nature of cognitive literary studies. The second part is a reading of some of the poems of the 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson from the point of view of traditional criticism as well as cognitive literary studies, with a particular emphasis on the way the writer cognises the world around herself. Her poetic vision is presented as iconic expressions of mental experiences aimed at gnomic compression of the final image. She is characterised as a poet who “thinks through images” and her poetry as a fusion of the conceptual and figurative search for the truth.
This article is concerned with research on the reception of poetry amongst adolescent readers. Unlike a number of other research projects aimed at the external aspects of reception, the intention here was to discover and describe readers’ experiences by means of an exact statistical method in combination with the expressed thoughts of the respondents, and then to use these results in the teaching of literature at primary and secondary schools. The researchers focused on the reception of poetry from around the world (including the Czech Republic), which had topics related to nature. in the selection of verse, the researchers sought to ensure that each work represented the poetry of a given historical period or artistic trend as faithfully as possible. The texts were presented to the students anonymously. The researchers sought to ensure that the respondents used only the texts to make their assessments, excluding extra-literary information. In the search for a suitable tool to research the reception of lyric verse about nature, the researchers started from the ‘semantic differential’. In a number of initial investigations they managed to isolate three factors, which they call ‘intelligibility’, ‘evaluation’, and ‘expressiveness’. These provide important information on various aspects of reception. The obtained results offer insight into the actual process of perceiving poetry and the readers’ psychology, and also help to determine the axiological preferences of young people today. The research confirms the existence of striking differences in the reception of poems of various historical periods, and also demonstrates which poems are preferred by which categories of respondents. One particularly important discovery has to do with the means of perceiving an artistic text in which the individual students’ personal associations play a substantial role. These associations work together to create the meaning of a text in a reader’s mind and, because of their diversity, enrich the resulting discussions. They can then be fruitfully employed to motivate readers to find a way into the poems.
The paper considers the subject of Ukrainian regionalism of the early Romantic age concentrating upon the expanse of the Ukrainian steppe. Ukraine became the privileged Earth for Romantics although the course of history separated her from the borders of Poland, she functioned as the cradle of Polish history and the national spirit in the creative awareness of poets. The Ukrainian steppe with it vastness gave feeling to a sense of history and spirituality.The paper examines interest within the motif of the Ukrainian steppe in the works of poets involved in the so-called “Ukrainian school”. Consequently calling upon famous names such us Antoni Malczewski, Seweryn Goszczyński or Bohdan Zaleski, through equally referring to less famous poets like: Tomasz Olizarowski and Maurycy Goslawski. The author pays attention to the way the Ukrainian steppe was portrayed, considers the sphere of the fairytale and mythology which manifests itself within supernatural figures inhabiting the Ukrainian steppe.
This study analyses the role and degree of political involvement in the process of constructing poets as cultural icons in Polish and Slovak literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The main focus is on the Polish poets Zbigniew Herbert and Czesław Miłosz and the Slovak poet Laco Novomeský, but research also takes into consideration other Polish and Slovak poets (Wisława Szymborska, Ján Ondruš, and Ivan Štrpka). This examination reveals an important political input behind constructing these poets as cultural icons using the symbolic potential that the poets accrued over the years and were able to represent. The dynamic character of icons (accelerated by great geopolitical and social changes in East-Central Europe), however, causes a constant re-semantization and partially diminishes their iconic status, especially for upcoming generations. Despite a rearrangement of the hierarchy of layers in their iconic status, the poets are always associated with their poetic work, and the notable quality of this work keeps their potential for remaining or becoming cultural icons regardless of political circumstances.
The text analysed in this paper is a poem by Sándor Weöres, entitled 'Theme and variations'. The eleven text sentence versions realize potential and fictitious semantic and syntactic language use in order to fulfil their pragmatic aim. That aim is to produce variations on the initial text sentence that may be taken to be an instance of standard language use, variations that are not primarily intended to perform linguistic communication as such. In them, it is not only natural emotive functions that direct the formulation of linguistic messages. Rather, they are code-oriented: driven by a syntactic-technical exploitation of the potentials of using linguistic signs with the highest possible degree of freedom. The fact that that procedure results in semantic and grammatical anomalies in part of the cases and that some sentences thus produced have no denotata whatsoever, hardly affects the evaluation of the whole text as a styleme, given that the whole of the text does not contain a message in the communicative sense. (Of course, the communicative contents of the first version is counted among the 'contents' of the text sentence versions.) All that is possible because the poem is an instance of the realization of the poetic function, one that can be presented in a quite simple manner.
The article shows the philosophical background of Kazimierz Hoffman’s poetry. The author points to Hoffman’s idea of the Divine, which creates all possible objects in the world and incessantly sustains their existence, treating it as the crucial point of his philosophical stance. Another question is devoted to a possible relationship between Hoffman’s philosophical views and the traditions of the philosophy of life and phenomenology. Worth examining are also some similarities between Hoffman’s concept of donation and the ethical standpoint of E. Lévinas. In conclusion to those considerations one could claim that in Hoffman’s poetry we experience an interesting kind of mysticism uniting the contemplation of the absolute order with the aesthetic, perfectionist attempts to write the “ideal poem” and to connect the metaphysical insight with the experimental form. In the article the author quotes extensively the most important hermeneutic conclusions contained in the book Poznawanie Kazimierza Hoffmana (“The Understanding of Kazimierz Hoffman”).
In the archaic era of Greek culture music and poetry were inseparably combined. However, over the ages this connection has been loosened to be finally broken. In the Augustan period the memory of musical past echoes in the poetry, of which an extensive collection is found in the writings of Ovid. The poet frequently refers to Greek musical experience from which he derives a multitude of examples, motives and similes. The most prominent feature of the references to music is symbolism which is revealed in numerous mythological contexts in a metaphoric depiction. The selected myths present the origin of music such as invention of musical instruments or contests between most celebrated musicians.
Focusing on the development of Lévinas' conception of art, the article describes the gradual reassessment of his original view, which sees a work of art as an 'eternal' stoppage of time. At a later stage, by contrast, the work of art is conceived as an 'expression' of the desire for the Other, that is, as a reference to the dimension from which diachrony stems, and also as an appeal to the responsibility for the Other. This is poetry, which makes a unanimous reference to the reality of time. Poetry renounces all synchronized objects intended by the consciousness. Poetry is the evocation of the Other, which manifests itself in the face of another person. As a refutation of the expression of objects, poetry points to the 'immemorial past' and 'pure future' of the Other.
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