We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
Cultural contacts can be highly stimulating for literary production, enriching literature and providing new creative impulses. In regard to German medieval literature, its supreme achievements came about as the result of encounters with other European cultures, predominantly with the ancient Greek and Roman culture and medieval French culture, but also with the Celtic and Oriental cultures through the mediation of Latin and French literature. Important roles in this process were played by dynastic relations, travelling patrons, writers and manuscripts, as well as feasts or even the Crusades, since all of them offered various opportunities for cultural exchange. Well-educated ladies were mostly the ones who initiated and valued the translations of literary works, especially after their marriage and moving into a foreign country.
More...
The paper analyzes the impact of the Victorian Age culture on Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair. Realistic representation of new social relationships within the fictional world of the novel plausibly reveals the mechanisms of power and domination in the context of the Victorian Age. The Victorian morality as an acceptable cultural model of thinking and comportment, the laws of the market and the logic of the consumer society make up the constitutive parts of this fictional world of Vanity Fair. These intertextual connections reveal how the novel interprets history, social relationships and moral norms. Thackeray shows the commerce’s dependence on high politics and the dependence of an individual on economic changes and events.The aspiration for the possession of money motivates the actions of the novel’s characters. Marriage, as one of the social and economic categories, represents one of the ways to obtain one’s social goals as well as a simultaneous response to the demands of the society. Thackeray’s ironic, parodist, and satirical narration reveals some less noticeable aspects of Victorian culture. Intertextual connections between the novel, history and Victorian society establish a creative dialogue, even with different forms of reality.
More...
This comparative study analyzes the intertextual connections between Samuel Beckett’s short prose and the works of Dante Alighieri, Alphonse de Lamartine, Voltaire, and Plato. The paper is focused on the quotations from The Divine Comedy,The Poetic Meditations, Candide, and The Symposium, which are present in Beckett’s late story entitled The Lost Ones (Le Dépeupleur). Based on Gérard Genette’s analysis of intertextuality, paratextuality, and other forms of transtextuality, this study interprets how Beckett describes a strange cylindrical world, inhabited by lonely creatures that are searching for their lost ones: by creating an ironic distancefrom the visions of love represented in the works of Dante, Lamartine, Plato, and Voltaire. In addition to offering a detailed analysis of the allusions and other forms of intertextual relations, the paper points to the differences between the paratextuality of the French version of Beckett’s story entitled Le Dépeupleur and the paratextuality of its later English version entitled The Lost Ones.
More...
The city as a postmodern cultural form manifests itself as several interlaced layers which facilitate processes of communication and interpretation. This matrix may at certain points most vividly project elements which would speak of the city as of an industrial machine, or those which would generate a version of its own reality through sequences of ones and zeroes within screens of liquid crystal. However, in the symbolic domain, the city simultaneously also emits messages which are not always clearly defined, messages that belong to history, heritage, the mythic – deposited in the city’s own history and in the histories of all the cities since the beginning of time. This paper examines the city as a system of communication and as a symbol [881мирна радин сабадошof Western civilization and its interaction with its inhabitants as active participants in the process of creation and interpretation of urban culture, through the analysis of two novels by the contemporary American writer Don De Lillo, Underworld and Cosmopolis. The paper highlights some of the most relevant interpretations of postmodern criticism related to the phenomenon of urbanity and its transformations, as well as the conflict between the mythic and the urban, particularly in the symbolism of the labyrinth. Through the analyses of the novels and through its intertextual links with other literary works which incorporate mythic into the contemporary – the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert, a story by J.L. Borges, “The House of Asterion” („La casade Asterión”), and Victor Pelevin’s novel Helmet of Horrors (Шлем ужаса) – one of the goals of this paper is to accentuate the myth’s power of transformation within the mediated structures of contemporary postmodern culture.
More...
By analysing literary characters, as agents of thematic, motivational and ideational function of the literary work, the paper will attempt to shed light on the juxtapositions love/passion, life/death, young/old, fact/fiction, which represent the inside and the outside of all relations among characters, and which, at deeper semantic structures, enable the recognition of the assumed role – the mask, and the substance lying beneath it. Special attention will be paid to the phenomena of beauty and shame, which take on their own meaning in the textual tissue of Miloš Crnjanski’s play. The pre-Easter atmosphere – the period of Shrovetide games – is observed through the prism of the carnival, and inevitably implies the excess of vital energy,and it is within this framework that we will analyse the specific, outrageously sumptuous theatrical metaphors which use a wide range of images such as dance, play and masquerade. Crnjanski stylizes his characters as decadent passionate people, while the language he employs is decoratively picturesque, reflecting “the horror induced by the common speech” of common life. The dominant topic of this “poetic comedy”– eroticism – ironically put forward and introduced with the aim of unmasking the cult of female sexuality and the image of the glitter of nobility suggestively alludes to the world lacking substance effected by the motives of transcendence and illusion.
More...
Branko Miljković’s critical texts “Poetry for Children and Sensitive Persons”(“Poezija za decu i osetljive”, 1955), “Poetry for Children” („Poezija za decu”,1956) and “If Trees Could Walk” („Kad bi drveće hodalo”, 1959), are discussed in the context of a poetic identification and the critical reception of children’s poetry in the 1950’s, as well as in the context of his (auto)poetic reflections. Although he never systematically pursued the ontology of the children’s poem, Miljković hinted at it in his texts about French poetry and Grigor Vitez’s collection of poems. His attitude towards poetry for children, as poetry in its most universal sense, concerning the general relativization of reception boundaries and the delineation of immanent poetic characteristics (naiveté, lyricism, musicality, rhythm, playfulness, humour, irony, sensibility, anthropomorphisation), functionality (both aesthetic and educational)and the question of its evaluation – live on as part of relevant appraisals of this poetic expression.
More...
This paper analyses the unusual viewpoint and the cyclical composition of Milovan Danojlić’s novel "Godina prolazi kroz avliju" (The Year Passes Through the Courtyard). The entire narrative space of this novel is limited by the title itself– although the broadly conceived temporal level leads to the characteristic chronicle structure, this work can equally be considered a singular novel of space.The place that the Boy inhabits and lives in is a space that essentially determines him, and it represents a village avlija (courtyard), a corner of the Earth where the collective life and personal, internal and exceptionally intimate awareness of the world and the people in it intersect.
More...
The work primarily detects and exposes rival models of understanding of growing up. In the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment, marks and criteria of the successfulness of maturation are the independence of thought, gaining advanced and finally complete autonomy. Maturation is, especially in Kant, interwoven with the pathos of freedom, resistance to tutors and every patronage, but also with pointing out the responsibility, legality and purposefulness of the freedom that equally resists enthusiastic enticement and the rhapsodic craze.
More...
The Second Serbian Uprising is an important theme in historiography and oral national history. In comparison to official historiography which, as a rule, offers general and statistical evaluations, this paper excerpts, chronologically, various tellings, mainly orally given, that demonstrate how tradition preserves memorable, singular,unusual and characteristic historical anecdotes.
More...