In this paper we look at the cantata Stojanka majka Knežopoljka Mother Stojanka from Knežopolje, composed by Vuk Kulenović in 1988, based on the famous war narrative poem written by his father ...Skender Kulenović. We posit that Vuk Kulenović took path of least resistance when composing Stojanka majka Knežopoljka, and instead of composing music that would amplify the expressiveness of his father’s verse, he enveloped them in music that may be complementary to the verse but not immanent to it.
The short story Wash that was a source of inspiration for the novel Absalom, Absalom! is a subtle representation of the class conflict in the Southern slave system. Beyond that, however, Faulkner ...also alludes to more intense and deeper human realities: humanity in the face of humiliation and destruction. The use of the symbols is indicative in the construction of the short story. The “whip” and the “scythe”, therefore, come to represent the people who choose to wield them, reflecting not only their social classes but also the roles they fulfill in the story. Thus, if at the beginning the class distribution seems to be in keeping with the slave ideology promoted in the Southern plantation romance, with the whip representing the rich class and the scythe the poor farmers, by the end of the story, the utter inhumanity of the planter is exposed and the dream of the aristocracy is torn apart. The scythe, then, becomes the symbol of revenge and rebellion, the weapon of “Death”. The paper will focus on complex the meaning of these symbols in the context of a revenge story with echoes from the Greek tragedy.
Although frequently present in Romanian folklore (just like in the imaginary of any community) as a broken taboo, so far betrayal has not been intensely researched in this particular context. In ...Romanian folktales betrayal brings to the fore one’s self-consciousness and one’s chosen way of living one’s own life, as well as the collective perception (i.e., evaluation and sanctioning) of a behaviour that breaks (thus undermining) well-established social and moral norms. Besides its symbolic meaning, an act of betrayaldefinitely has a hermeneutic value too, since it involves destructuring – restructuring of a certain status quo.From the phenomenology of evil in Romanian folktales (the subject of a book I am working at) I selected several aspects – namely: establishing of the truth; the final ordeals; the motif of the treacherous mother/ sister/ wife – which I analyze in the present study, seeking to determine: how and why, at some point, archaic/traditional family relationships cease to be functional because of an act of betrayal; what symbolic functions and significance betrayal has in folktales; how and why the hero’s or another actant’s body bears the consequences (settling the problem) of betrayal acts.
This idiosyncratically titled paper is motivated by an attempt to answer the unexpectedly difficult question about betrayal as a fundamental theme or motif in literature—literature in general, from ...the first known such work, Gilgamesh, through Greek and Roman mythology, fairy tales and folk tales, medieval romances, Dante, Cervantes and Shakespeare, to Goethe, Tolstoy and Joyce, to Anne Sexton and Philip Levine. Our tentative answers: betrayal may represent the fundamental human conflict, as it undermines two of man’s essential claims to existence—identity and communication; evil is more powerful than good; betrayal is a prominent form of cognitive dissonance; and all of these are “illustrated” in five betrayal poems by William Stafford, Anthony Hecht, Frank O’Hara, Anne Sexton, and Philip Levine.
Benito Pérez Galdós; Spanish literature; realism; The Forbidden; betrayal.Benito Pérez Galdós is the most illustrious representative of Spanish realism. In his acceptance speech on his reception into ...the Royal Spanish Academy, the author says that the novel is an ‘image of life’ and that in all of his work, he forces himself to show the most faithful reflection of the real life. The Forbidden tells the story of José María, a man who falls in love with Eloísa, his married cousin, and, because of this, he betrays her husband’s friendship. He seduces the woman with expensive gifts and makes her accustomed to luxury. The husband dies and the hero is filled with remorse, and he no longer feels attracted to the senseless woman who is able to ruin him. So it is her turn to betray, and she replaces him with an older man. She goes to Paris with her new lover and when she returns, she visits José María to say that it is him whom she loves. However, José María doesn’t love Eloísa anymore, but instead he loves her sister, who is married. José María is always attracted by ‘the forbidden’.
The reputation of Judas Iscariot is well established: he denounced Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, to the Roman authorities for the derisory sum of thirty deniers. He embodies the traitor that no ...reason can justify. The literary fortune of this first anti-hero is unprecedented in Western litera-tures. A revolution would have been accomplished by the discovery of an apocryphal gospel attributed to Judas, whose Gnostic testimony would alter the whole perspective of the Christ drama: just as Christ fulfilled the Father’s will, the disciple would have sacrificed his public integrity by fidelity to Christ, his master. The special status occupied by Judas in the pantheon of archetypal characters problematizes the freedom of the characters in the fictional worlds: in history, in litera-ture, in religion. Do these immortalized beings in the collective imagination still have the slightest freedom? As a result, the Gospel of Judas seems to rehabilitate a Judas Herald of Christ, opening literature to the edification of evil.
The present paper deals with the issue of faith and betrayal from the contemporary Spanish intellectuals’ perspective during post Civil War times, a historical period which stands out because of its ...high degree and scale of unilateral violence. Due to limits of extension, our approach is just a mere outline of the subject, focused on the specific case of one personality of the 20th century Spanish thought and culture: Julián Marías Aguilera (1914-2005), a philosopher whose vast written work, mainly essays, covers a long period of time, almost to the end of his days, and has enjoyed a remarkable dissemination within the boundaries of the Spanish speaking countries. Marías is one of those intellectuals who decided to remain in their homeland and carry on there with their activities, despite the Civil War and their being harassed by the dictatorship that followed. After a brief approach to his life and circumstances through his own written work, the floor will be given to his son, the writer Javier Marías (1951-). Through some of his own writings, Javier Marías broadens the considerations on the faith and betrayal of the intellectuals, with particular regard to his father’s case.
Drawing upon critics such as Walter H. Sokel and Mark M. Andreson, I intend to explore the direct and implicit meanings of one of Franz Kafka’s most intriguing polysemic terms – Verkehr. The ending ...of Kafka’s 1912 short story The Verdict (Das Urteil), a piece of writing he considered emblematic and fundamental to his poetics, directly involves the representation of traffic, Verkehr in its most usual sense, a flux of life that continues after the protagonist’s suggested violent suicide. But Verkehr also means sexual intercourse, and Kafka explored this unusual semantic territory by using several sexual connotations in his writing and in his private observations concerning the act of writing. As he wrote The Metamorphosis shortly after, Kafka indirectly employed the same type of suggestiveness in order to reveal Gregor Samsa’s estrangement from the “traffic” of social and familial life.
The relationship between faith and betrayal involves thinking of the way that various forms of language relate to one another: faith seems to associate with a language following the right path, ...while, on the contrary, betrayal is consistent with a language which strays. We believe that in his Diary of My Time Georges Bernanos is denouncing the Church’s betrayal of faith. In order to do that, he has to blend the denunciation speech and the speech of pure faith, which can be seen as the language of childhood. This article wants to show that Bernanos tends to asymptotically push language towards this ideal idiom: the “original” language of childhood, i.e. the language of pure faith. But such project seems doomed never to be accomplished.
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