During the second half of the twentieth century, the humanities saw increased interest in the broadly defined theory of culture and theory of politics, and in their study in a pragmatic cultural ...context. This was due to the influence of postmodernism, as well as pragmatism and neo-pragmatism. This approach is developed in cultural studies, which stress the importance of interdisciplinary research, combining the semiotic and cultural perspectives. The humanities have experienced a series of watersheds or turns (such as the linguistic, interpretative, political and communicative turns), and in particular the cultural turn. In consequence, the boundaries of various scientific disciplines are becoming blurred, while the scope of theoretical literary research is expanding. The integration of humanistic disciplines has intensified. This has an effect not only on the philosophical and theoretical study of language and literature, but also on the theory of politics and theory of law. As a result of these changes, various cultural objects—politics, the law, literature—have become the subject of complementary research. Cultural research assumes the cultural intertextuality of different semiotic objects, especially of text and discourse. This paper describes the influence of cultural studies—as a legacy of cultural determinants—on the law and literature movement. It also answers the question of what that movement can derive from cultural studies. The paper provides an overview of key trends, which may receive more detailed treatment in future studies.
Reading groups are an increasingly popular phenomenon in contemporary life, offering a space for readers to share literary and personal experiences. Although there is a growing body of research into ...reading groups, few studies have considered in detail the language used by readers as they debate the meaning of texts. This article offers a close analysis of interaction in reading groups, focusing on a meeting held by a book club in 2009. Employing a mixed-methodology approach, combining conversation analysis and communities of practice, this study analyses the reading group’s interaction in fine detail while also accounting for elements of group dynamics that influence the talk in this specific community of readers. I consider how members go about articulating their interpretations of the stories in the context of the reading group, focusing on the way that members present these interpretations as reasonable and valid. Three features of interaction are found to be important to this: category entitlement, the ‘oh’-preface and X then Y structures. I conclude that the interpretations offered in the reading group are necessarily socially situated and are inextricable from the interactive context in which they are produced.
In this article, we are trying to interpret the artistic expression of the relation between man and woman in the prose of a Czech writer, Jaroslav Durych (1886–1962). We highlight how Durych’s ...literary work portrays the mutuality between man and woman and how it grasps the question of its sense. At the same time, while regarding literature as a symbolic expression of human way of being, we want to enter into dialog with this literary quest and formulate a theological answer to it. The theological starting point of our approach is the idea of Trinitarian anchoring of the dual unity of man and woman. The conclusion of our interpretation is that Durych’s prose illustrates the journey of male and female mutuality as a journey of human transcendence and as a moment of a new determination of man in the mystery of unconditional love. In this way, Durych refers not only to the nuptial mystery of man and woman but also to its grounding in the mystery of Christ.
In this paper we present a case study in which High School freshmen in Brazil produce literary interpretations. The paper is based upon the theory of genres and registers by Eggins and Martin (1997) ...and on Bakhtin (1981) and Voloshinov (1973). We demonstrate by means of examples taken from students’ texts that activities such as a debate in which students perceived how different their points of view were and the practice of writing summaries and accounts may have originated texts in which students showed more self-assurance by the end of the semester.
In diesem Open-Access-Buch widmet sich Anna Maria Olivari der Forschungslücke der Vertonung von Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus. Sie untersucht ein Korpus von 13 unterschiedlichen Kompositionen aus dem ...Bereich der Neuen Musik (Opern, Monodramen, instrumentale Werke), die zwischen 1952 und 2011 entstanden sind und bisher wenig bis gar nicht rezipiert wurden. Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus ist in vielerlei Hinsicht ein breit erforschtes Werk, jedoch nicht in Bezug auf seine Vertonungen. Der Vergleich zwischen Roman und Komposition ist im Forschungsparadigma der Intermedialität angesiedelt und ermöglicht die Rekonstruktion der kompositorischen Rezeptionsgeschichte von Doktor Faustus. Die Rückkopplungseffekte zwischen Text und Musik lassen Thomas Manns Roman neu lesen.
Abstract
Taking a cue from the interpretive difficulties faced by Socrates and his interlocutors in Plato's Theaetetus as they struggle to determine the meaning of Protagoras' homo-mensura doctrine ...(HM), I argue that Protagoras, or early Protagoreans, used HM to speak on the relativity of literary criticism. For evidence I adduce an overlooked passage of the anonymous Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi, which contains an ethical formulation of HM. This formulation of HM, compatible with the portrait of Protagoras from Theaetetus, explains the concern for literary interpretation latent in two sections of the Certamen. From the evidence in the Certamen, we may infer that HM was directly related to Protagorean education in civic virtue, part of which included a study of how to read and listen to texts.
Za (zgodnjo) humanistično recepcijo grške tragedije je značilna aristotelizirajoča intepretacija v skladu s tedanjim razumevanjem Aristotelove misli o tragediji; v tem okviru je bila Sofoklova ...Antigona razumljena predvsem kot moralni nauk, medtem ko o literarni in filozofski kompleksnosti, zaradi katere je postala v zadnjih treh stoletjih eno najvplivnejših del svetovne literature, tam ni sledu. Po drugi stran pa je tudi v sodobni kritiki mogoče zaslediti dobro argumentirane sodbe, da nemajhen del tovrstnih odmevnih modernih intepretacij Antigone temelji na pretirani intelektualizaciji tragedije (M. Heath) in da je bil moralni nauk pomembna in pričakovana funkcija atiške tragedije v izvornem kontekstu. Če dopustimo, da je v Antigoni moralni nauk, ni nujno, da ga razumemo tako preprosto, kot ga je opredelil npr. Kamerarij; pač pa ga lahko z dobrimi razlogi interpretiramo kot opozorilo na nenadomestljiv pomen individualnega človeškega bivanja za spoznavanje resničnosti in etično življenje.
Članek s pomočjo Girardove teorije mimetične želje analizira osrednji odnos v romanu Vitomila Zupana Potovanje na konec pomladi, in sicer med profesorjem slovenščine in njegovim občudovanim dijakom ...Tajsijem. Tajsija bomo tako razumevali v okviru Girardovega koncepta modela želje, ki profesorju predstavlja orientir glede izbire lastnih objektov želje, obenem pa tudi želeno identiteto. Profesor se vedno bolj spreminja v Tajsija in pride do pojava obsedenosti, ko se zdi, da prek profesorja govori in deluje le še Tajsi. To predstavlja enega od aspektov subjektove transformacije v občudovani model. Pri tem bomo mimetično teorijo dopolnili z Žižkovim branjem Lacana ter ugotovili, da transformacija v drugega poteka tudi na simbolni ravni prevzemanja mesta drugega v strukturi odnosov. Transformacija v občudovani model pa naj bi v končni fazi subjektu prinesla spoznanje, da polno bitje brez manka ne obstaja.
Christine Brooke-Rose is fascinated by the notion of indeterminacy, and throughout her career draws parallels between the science of uncertainty and the shifts in thinking engendered by quantum ...theory and the experimental literature of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeterminacy is an ambiguous term when applied to the literary text. If we call a text indeterminate we might mean that it has contradictory meanings or is open to multiple, equally weighted, possible interpretations, ones which the text itself does nothing to resolve. Here I offer a reading of Brooke-Rose's novel Such (1966) which argues that the novel is less indeterminate than it is about indeterminacy; that it does not so much present ambiguous or contradictory interpretive lines as offer a reflection on what the act of interpretation does, and what it might make happen; that it does not withhold knowledge from the reader so much as make the reader question the ways in which knowledge is itself implicated in the world around us. In the end, the novel offers us what amounts to an ethics of indeterminacy, suggesting that we should be wary of all acts of interpretation, and alert to their potential for malignity or invasiveness.
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