Niniejszy artykuł podejmuje zagadnienie motywu bydła domowego (Bos taurus taurus), który przez autorów biblijnych został wykorzystany do przedstawienia przymiotów Boga i Jego działania. Głównym celem ...tego studium jest wskazanie zoologicznych i kulturowych podstaw symboliki biblijnej związanej z hodowlą wspomnianego gatunku. Jest bowiem wysoce prawdopodobne, iż takie cechy bydła, jak siła, żywotność czy niezależność stały się główną przyczyną odniesienia jego obrazu do Boga. Kolejne punkty tego opracowania zawierają: (1) krótkie omówienie roli bydła domowego w wierzeniach i obrzędach starożytnego Bliskiego Wschodu, antycznej Grecji i Rzymu, (2) wyjaśnienie, dlaczego dobra znajomość tych zwierząt hodowlanych, jaka niewątpliwie cechowała starożytnych, zaowocowała uczynieniem z byka symbolu mocy Boga, (3) prezentację niektórych kwestii związanych z biblijną symboliką rogów bydlęcych.
The Croatian Glagolitic medieval literature consisted mostly of religious texts (e.g. hagiographies, visions, debates/contrasts, Miracles of the Blessed Virgin, dialogue poems, miracle and morality ...plays). Some of them contain the motif of fasting and prayer as well as the benefits of self-renunciation, allowing men to become purer and better in their relationships towards both themselves (through fasting and self-renunciation) and other people (through good deeds and almsgiving), and to achieve a closer relationship with God (through prayer). The motif of fasting and prayer is frequently found in texts of various themes, forms, and genres over the centuries. It was present in European Christian literature from its beginnings to the early modern period, making it a long-standing motif. During the Middle Ages in Europe, that motif was most notably found in moral-didactic and pastoral texts, but also in narrative prose texts. Three Croatian Glagolitic manuscript codices were chosen for this research: Oxford Miscellany (15th c.), Berčić Miscellany (15th c.) and Gršković Miscellany (16th c.), as collections of texts exhibiting motifs of fasting, prayer and works of mercy. The recombination of the motif in different contexts (as a sermon in a debate, as a motif in a legend and as a starting point of a moral-didactic text) reflects the memory-based nature of medieval culture – that which is adopted as one’s own, can be recombined rather freely. The three Glagolitic codices list Biblical figures and saints who found salvation from evil through fasting and prayer (e.g. Isaac, Lot, Susanna, Daniel, three young men in the fiery furnace, Saint Thecla, and Saint Margaret) and those in various ways blessed by God (e.g. Moses, Elijah, Joachim and Anne, the apostle Paul, Saint Nicholas, Saint Benedict). The list of characters is consistent to a large extent in all three manuscripts. The tone and style of the texts indicate that they were intended not only for a smaller religious community, but also for a wider audience. Two important features of Croatian Glagolitic prose are present in the analysed texts: polyfunctionality, because the texts combine practical (e.g. pastoral, moral and didactic) functions with the aesthetic function; and the openness of the form, because themes, motifs and images always appear in new combinations and contexts.
The fourteenth-century Libro del cauallero Zifar may seem at first dogmatic and straightforward. The chivalric hero through his Christian faith achieves his dream of restoring royalty to his lineage. ...However, closer examination reveals that the author has set up subtle ironies that target a society that requires the best of its citizens and the most pious Christians to hide their identity out of fear of dishonour and rejection. For example, Zifar becomes poor when the king he serves marginalizes him. His misfortune continues when he loses his children and his wife. Things begin to look better when he courts the princess of Mentón, but this is only possible because he silences his former life. By returning again to the motifs of his previous marriage and humble origins, the author constructs a situational irony that plays on the reader’s expectations and highlights the unjust exigencies of social class in medieval Spain.
This study argues that the breadth and depth of influence of Fernando de Rojas’s
Celestina
on Federico García Lorca’s
La casa de Bernarda Alba
is much greater than previously acknowledged. García ...Lorca borrowed from Rojas not only motifs, images, and characterization, but also symbols, structure, and the effusive rhetoric that characterizes Celestina and Melibea’s mode of expression. Lorca’s
La casa
contains a microcosm of the social institutions and cultural dynamics that predominate in
Celestina
’s world and, by extension, in Rojas’s society. In this comparative analysis, I hope to show the far-reaching influence that
Celestina
has had since its publication in 1499 up to the twentieth century. By reading Lorca’s play from this perspective, I also uncover new levels of meaning that help us interpret
La casa
based on the systems of intertextual relations that underprop
La casa
’s foundations.
Despite its geographical and linguistic proximity to the Arabic language, the Mahri (or Mehri) language (ISO 639-3: gdq) of Eastern Yemen and Western Oman has remained a non-written language into the ...present era. While older generations of Mahri speakers never considered the prospect of a written idiom for their language, recent years have witnessed efforts to compose and circulate texts in the Mahri language. These circumstances have yielded a poetic praxis that traverses the domains of orality and literacy; they also enable us to identify lexical and syntactic characteristics that betoken where in the shifting terrain of oral and literary composition a poetic work occurs. I will examine the appearance of one such lexical and structural motif – the dispatched messenger – in a recently composed collection of Mahri language poetry, The Dīwān of Ḥājj Dākōn (2011). Embarking from the notion of textual autonomy developed by Chafe, Olson, and Tannen, I argue that the sudden appearance of the messenger motif in Ḥājj Dākōn’s poetic collection is a by-product of his adoption of a written practice. In this way, we can establish that a stance of rhetorical detachment is a hallmark feature of an emergent written practice, even at its earliest stages.
This article examines the presence of the unclothed body in the comedia nueva, both when it appears on stage and when it is referred to off stage. It begins with a brief examination of what desnudez ...actually meant in practical terms in the corral theaters (and moralists' responses to states of undress). The study goes on to analyze in more detail some of the main implications and resonances of nakedness in the minds of Golden Age audiences. These are important for characterization, including the establishment of a character's poverty, madness, or vulnerability; for dramatists' attempts to establish time and place; and, above all, because of the eroticism of the unclothed body which is linked to pictorial traditions. Examples are taken from full-length comedias by a variety of playwrights, supplemented with the exploration of analogous motifs in seventeenth-century visual culture, to highlight its role in helping the audience imagine these scenes.
The present paper analyzes semantic and syntactic deconstruction in Saint John of the Cross and Stéphane Mallarmé, which is closely connected to the motif of stutter in both their works. It will be ...shown that, in each case, this motif describes language’s outlying district, an intermediate space between speech and silence, and an ongoing and simultaneous process of dissolution and manifestation that involves the poetic word on the one hand, and the transcendent signified (God in the case of Saint John, mainly the “Spirit” for Mallarmé) on the other.
Eduard von Keyserling’s novels show a great variety of narrative devices. Contrasts are pervasive, sometimes culminating in polarities, as frequently noted in Keyserling scholarship. Contrasts may in ...the course of a novel be modified, as by attenuation or intensification, or expansion and/or deepening. Contrasts may also be shown to be inappropriate in their initial appearance; reversals of certain components of contrasting complexes may occur. Significantly, whereas contrasts and polarities in their binary appearance usually tend to stress uniqueness and individuality, by the very fact of their recurrence, and their reference to other, similar binary opposites, these contrasts are shown to be indicative of a framework of
similarity
rather than
contrast
. Many other devices, mostly overlooked by critics, also occur, such as parallelism of figures and situations, doubling of characters, the use of leitmotifs and symbols. They, too, become recognizable as tending towards sameness rather than difference. Moreover, the play with identities and variants, with leitmotifs, with linguistic links and echoes, with borrowings and anticipations, and, especially in the later novels, with symbols, is repeated among the novels themselves. Intertextuality therefore eventually takes precedence over contextuality, and hence there is established a universe which is a coherent one and, though limited in space and time, complete in itself. This universe is one inspired by a
Weltanschauung
in which determinism appears to prevail over freedom of action; the analysis of structural and narrative elements undertaken here reveals their function as delineating and supporting this world-view. To see the characteristic of Keyserling’s art, therefore, as showing a divorce from the world as constituted, or an assessment of Keyserling’s novels as instances of a non-committal art for art’s sake, is ill conceived. That narrative patterns are undeniably employed in the cause of novelistic and
aesthetic
considerations by no means implies that they are not at the same time employed to advance a significant, though ambivalent view of the world.
Syncrisis as literary motif in the story about the grown-up child Jesus in the temple (Lk 2:41–52 and the Thomas tradition): The article explores hermeneutical solutions for the negative response ...from the child Jesus towards his biological parents in the Lukan temple story (Lk 2:41–52). The ‘wisdom’ of the child who acts in an ‘adult-like’ way is interpreted as a syncrisis. This literary motif is explained by an analysis of the contrasting positive and negative acts of the child Jesus towards teachers of the Torah in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
The title of this article, "Tears in Translation", emphasizes two aspects of Sappho's works that are central for an understanding of the poetic corpus of Spanish Romantic poet Carolina Coronado, ...especially the poems that she wrote as homages to the Greek classical poet. On the one hand, there is the ragged or torn state of Sappho as a source, which allows her translator(s) to fill in the blanks and to pour themselves into the process of translation. On the other hand, the second meaning of tears (lágrimas) alludes to Sappho's and Carolina Coronado's complex uses of liquid motifs for the transmission/translation of affects/emotions in their poems. Assuming an implicit correlation between the translation of texts and the transmission of emotions embedded in them, "Tears in Translation" is an attempt to give visibility to a liquid poetic genealogy and acts as a transhistorical vessel/transfusion linking the bodily fluids overflowing in the work of Carolina Coronado, the main Spanish female Romantic poet, and Sappho's original texts.
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