The yardsticks for ascension to national literature in Africa characterized by multiethnic compositions, cultural and linguistic differences remain controversial. The problem as it were has become a ...sore spot in African literary scholarship. The language factor seems to be the most critical in the entire polemics while the potential loss of works cast in the modes of European languages prone to disqualification is nightmare dreaded by writers. African intellectuals occupy two distinct semi-circles of opposition camps i.e. those who argue that works in ethnic languages (vernacular literatures) are national literature and those who insist that it is rather those in European languages. African literary scholars have therefore found themselves on the crossroads. Are Vernacular literatures or works in European languages the true national literature? Can intellectual tirades and altercations cease if a neutral stance is taken in the herculean task of founding national literature? This prescriptive essay followed the qualitative approach using Earnest Renan’s “What is a Nation?” as its theoretical framework to carry out the enquiry. It tackled the questions raised in the background and came out with the results that there is national literature module one and module two which neologisms also remain its recommendations. This order derives from the fact that there are two legitimate concepts of nationhood according to Renan. The essay proffers these as solutions to unending and contending sheds of opinions, arguments and controversies on the subject matter that is ever dogging the African literary circle. The study consequently recommends that these two terms be used to separate African literary scholars exchanging intellectual jabs.
Reading Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) makes it possible for Esperanza Cordero to imagine an idyllic site of empowered identity in The House on Mango Street. Yet, I argue that Esperanza’s ...transformed identity can only reside outside her original community and that her journey from the sad red house of Mango Street to her reconceived clean house at the end of the text is necessarily a trajectory of desired uprootedness that follows the script presented in The Water-Babies. Like Tom, Kingsley’s protagonist, Esperanza undergoes a metamorphosis to shed off the traits that categorize her as Chicana in order to embrace a remodeled subjectivity and, consequently, become an ontologically deterritorialized Hispanic.
This text wishes to draw attention to how four contemporary dramatists, while dealing with major historical themes and persons from the Medieval context till the present day, (un)consciously ...participated in building and stabilising of national and historical narratives within the Bosniak memory canon. How much was their creative view affected by the historical myths and did these plays serve as the artistic backdrop in the creation, or, better yet, redefinition and reinterpretation of identity of one of the three ethnicities in our country? Do the dramatists wish to fix the past today, or warn us of its eternal repetition mechanisms in which a man, as an individual, is always at a loss?
The paper is devoted to cultural heritage dictionaries with special reference to the oldest branch of English lexicography – author lexicography, comprising three hundred reference books of different ...types: concordances, glossaries, lexicons, indices, thesauri, etc. The article describes the main trends in developing author linguistic dictionaries for general and special purposes to single and complete works of G. Chaucer, W. Shakespeare, J. Milton, other famous English writers since the 16th c. up to the present days. The architecture of author encyclopedic dictionaries (guides, encyclopedias, companions) and onomasticons (dictionaries of characters and place names, who is who in … series) and their significant contribution to the English language, culture and society are discussed. The main accent is made on the digital era of English heritage lexicography, innovative features of modern printed and Internet author reference resources, aimed at certain target groups users’ needs and demands.
Indian author Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan, and Pakistani author Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel cracking India recount the events of the partition of India. Both the novels are written against the ...backdrop of India’s partition from different perspectives. The setting of Train to Pakistan is a rural Indian village called Mano Majra close to the India-Pakistan border in Punjab, whereas Cracking India mostly depicts the Pakistani city Lahore during the tumultuous period of partition. Despite this difference, both the authors are in dialogue with each other in terms of their treatment of India’s partition where they highlight how the partition disrupted communal harmony and incited violence in the Indian subcontinent. Both the authors speak to each other when it comes to the portrayal of India’s socio-cultural diversity, the increasing communal tension during partition, riots, and mass migration. In this essay, I will investigate how both the authors are in dialogue with each other when it comes to the portrayal of India’s partition through which they highlight the negative outcomes of the partition and call into question the success of the partition of India.
Dissociation of the Self – Apocalypse – the Aesthetic of Ugliness. The Influence of German Literary Expressionism on the Early Lyrical Work of Robert Reiter. The present paper focuses on the ...influence of German literary Expressionism on the early lyrical work of Robert Reiter. In his early period, Robert Reiter took inspiration from the formal language of German Expressionism, as well as from the notion of subjective expression or the dissociation of the self associated with it. He used the apocalypse-motif and the ideal type known as the “New Man,” and practised an “aesthetics of the ugly”, which played a central role in Expressionist literature. To support this thesis, this article analyses the early work of the poet in light of contemporary avant-garde tendencies, with a focus on the poem Terhes hajnalban In Pregnant Dawn.
This article examines representations of women’s travel experience in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia (2007) and Cheryl ...Strayed’s Wild. A Journey from Lost to Found (2012). Both authors rely on and, at the same time, subvert generic conventions of masculine and feminine traveling while creating their narrative personas. Alluding to pre-modern cultural meanings of travel and adopting the roles of spiritual pilgrims, the authors renounce their former lives, examine their past mistakes, undergo a transformation and finally regain control of their lives. Paradoxically, though going on a journey is a prerequisite for self-redemption, travel is no longer represented in these texts as an encounter and confrontation with the outer world but rather as a solipsistic practice.
The article examines the peculiarities in the formation of the Orpheus mythologeme in the ancient cultural tradition. An analysis of the works of ancient authors, including Pindar, Aeschylus, ...Euripides, Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil and Ovid allows to single out the specifics of creating the image of Orpheus. The latter is seen by the above-mentioned authors not only as a poet and musician who had lost his beloved Eurydice, but also as the founder of cult rites known as Orphic mysteries. “Orphism” as a system of religious and philosophical views became most widespread in the era of Peisistratus in the 6th century BC in Attica. Dionysus, revered by the Orphic, was important for farmers as a deity of eternal rebirth and powerful natural forces. In the ancient cultural tradition, the image of Orpheus develops under a double sign: both Apollo and Dionysus. The ideas of Orphic philosophy can be found in the religious and philosophical teachings of the Pythagorean school and in the writings of Plato. The original transformation of the Orphic-Pythagorean ideas and the mythologeme of Orpheus occurs in Virgil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which are also the subject of this article. The comparative historical analysis of artworks and philosophical treatises of antiquity carried out in the course of this study indicates that the mythologeme of Orpheus in the ancient cultural tradition is an example of the embodiment of the syncretic unity of art and religion in the archaic consciousness.
The paper analyzes works by the Serbian postmodernist writer Milorad Pavić. It attempts to prove that he possesses knowledge of royal art and uses masonic symbols in his writing related to geometry ...and architecture, including the radiant delta, compass, masonic gloves, and clepsydra. It is assumed that under the influence of these particular ideas, the writer creates the leading image of an architect and the motif of construction as freemasons believe in the Great Architect of the Universe. In the short novel Damascene, according to speculative masonry’s beliefs, the building of the church projects the building of a temple in a human soul. M. Pavić, as an architect, creates a structure of every novel, which he identifies with the golden section. This paper finds special symbols of the divine proportion in his prose, including snail’s shells, pyramids, and violins. A dynamic structure as an embodiment of the open work concept and a broad spectrum of themes provide artistic communication with a creative recipient. A reader has an opportunity to choose their own style of reading and solving textual puzzles because Pavić’s prose represents a wide variety of themes, symbols, images, and allusions that embody the secrets of Freemasonry, allowing for various interpretations.
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