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.
An accident as old as humanity, shipwreck involves a wide range of metaphors that fuse familiarity and exoticism, allegory and specificity, providence and godless catastrophe. In exploring ...Cervantes’s approach to this topos, this study identifies how the metaphor conveys an incisive political commentary in Don Quixote, a literary and spiritual reflection in Persiles, and a troubling self-projection in Journey to Parnassus. Unveiling the continuities of Cervantes’s use of this motif provides intriguing insights into the experiential fractures and literary exploits of the author as he embarked on the difficult journeys of his last works and years (1614–1616).
The book of Genesis opens with the creation of the world by means of speech. "God said: 'Let there be light,' and there was light" (Gen 1,3). Scholars have considered this creation through speech a ...prototypical speech act. However, the recurrence of this motif in later chapters of the book is often overlooked. This article argues that the "speech as a means of creation" paradigm functions as a literary motif in subsequent stories of the Primeval History. The discussion will revolve around the initial appearance of the paradigm, its later manifestations, and the relationship between them, focusing in particular on the formal realization of the linguistic category of the speech act as a literary motif.
Cattle raiding as a motif figures prominently in early Castilian literature. The author attempts to explain why by describing cattle raiding as symbol and practice. Cattle raiding is a master motif ...in early literature from Greek myth to the Bible to medieval European epic to the early literature of Mexico. It is also a practice associated with certain economic, ideological and ecological conditions, not the least of which are scarcity, a political border and arid zones. Information about cattle raiding in Castile is found in legal documents (fueros), historical chronicles and in the poetic record.
We consider some of the chapters in Matt Kaplan’s The Science of Monsters and his rationalising conjectures (some of them rooted in hypotheses by Adrienne Mayor), and discuss or provide supplementary ...data, including concerning occurrence in modern art or literature.
Puede considerarse que la versión de Ruano de la Haza (2004) de Celestina (ca.1499/ca.1502) de Fernando de Rojas se trata de una adaptación para ser representada. Uno de sus principales rasgos ...temáticos y estructurales es la inclusión de una versión libre del soliloquio de Pleberio, que no sólo concluye sino que también encabeza esta versión. En consecuencia, la audiencia recibe una edición caracterizada por una estructura circular, de forma que conoce el desenlace de la historia desde el principio, independientemente de si ya la conocían o no. La prefiguración o foreshadowing se ha considerado tradicionalmente por la crítica (e.g. Kayser-Philips 1974) como un elemento estructural de Celestina, que se ha relacionado asimismo con la perspectiva adoptada por el autor. En este contexto, la finalidad del presente artículo es estudiar si esta forma de ironía se ha visto reflejada en la versión de Ruano de la Haza, y, de ser así, sus formas, motivos y propósitos, aun teniendo en cuenta que la audiencia conoce el desenlace desde el comienzo de la obra..
Ruano de la Haza’s 2004 version of Rojas’ Celestina (ca.1499/ca.1502) can be regarded as an adaptation of the Spanish work intended to be represented on the stage. One of its formal and thematic peculiar traits is its inclusion of a free rendering of Pleberio’s soliloquy, which becomes both the Prologue and a closing monologue. As a result, the audience receives an edition with a circular structure, and gets familiar with the denouement of the story from the very beginning, regardless of whether they have been familiar with it or not. Foreshadowing has traditionally been regarded by criticism (e.g. Kayser-Philips 1974) as a structural element of Celestina, which is also linked to the ironic perspective adopted by the author. In this sense, this paper sets out to study whether this form of irony has been reflected in Ruano de la Haza’s edition, and, if this is the case, the ways, the reasons and the purposes for which it has been so done, no matter if the audience knows the denouement of the plot from the beginning.
This article considers literary representations of the body in female mysticism from a transdisciplinary and comparative perspective. It is one of the first studies to provide a comparative reading ...of three female authors of the Middle Ages: Mechthild of Magdeburg’s
Das Fließende Licht der Gottheit
(c. 1250), Elsbeth of Oye’s
Leben und Offenbarungen
(c. 1340) and
The Book of Margery Kempe
(c. 1440). The literary depiction of bodily urges ranges from erotic encounters as a representation of mystical union, to longing, suffering and despair in order to be a living example of
imitatio Christi
. Through analysing relevant excerpts of the three mystical texts, which illustrate the yearning for physical pain (the
vita
of Elsbeth of Oye) and differing accentuations of sexuality (
The Book of Margery Kempe
,
Das Fließende Licht der Gottheit
), the instrumentalisation of the female body for salvific purposes becomes clear. These carnal manifestations of divine love can be viewed as major motifs structuring the texts rather than giving unmediated and ‘documentary’ evidence of their authors’ experience.
Getting Under Your Skin FFRENCH, PATRICK
The Comparatist,
10/2017, Letnik:
41, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
I want to approach, in this essay, some of the forms of “doubling”—between skin and text, text and skin—that are at work in Sebald’s writing. I will argue that there is in these forms a high degree ...of reflexivity, such that it is in his attention to the literary endeavor as such, particularly to the work of other writers or scholars of literature, that Sebald comes closest to the skin. I will also argue that Sebald subjects the skin to a variety of more or less subtle forms of aggression, forms which move, in broad terms, between the extremities of contraction and expansion, between the skin as shrunken or desiccated relic, and the skin as a surface susceptible to loosening, layering, and forms of contagious consumption. Anzieu’s “psychic envelope,” the “multiply folded surface” Kay draws from Deleuze, are rendered in Sebald as a surface prone to catastrophe and conflagration, to an erasure or effacement of the world; Sebald’s surfaces seem destined in this sense to fade to black. And yet, something remains; towards the end of the essay, through a return to Santner’s commentary and a subsequent recourse to Walter Benjamin, I will address the questions posed by this paradox of loss and retention. In an essay on Bruce Chatwin titled “The Mystery of the Red-Brown Skin: an approach to Bruce Chatwin,” included in the posthumous collection Campo Santo, Sebald comments on the “avidity” with which Chatwin approaches the undiscovered. Avidity, which later in the essay semantically generates the idea of promiscuity, both terms qualifying Chatwin’s writing and life, are also, for Sebald, associated with death, since he later describes Chatwin’s writing as “a late flowering of those early traveller’s tales going back to Marco Polo where reality is constantly entering the realm of the metaphysical and miraculous, and the way through the world is taken from the first with an eye fixed on the writer’s own end.” This latter point announces the theme of mortality and associates avidity and promiscuity with the risk of an untimely end. There follows the first of a series of references to canonical texts of French literature. Sebald refers to Flaubert’s “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator” as “one of Chatwin’s favourite books”; but the slight impetus here surely bears the heavier weight of a line in Sebald’s writing, connecting the motif of skin to that of mortality. In effect, Flaubert’s tale serves ostensibly as the basis for a commentary by Sebald on the psychological type of its author Gustave Flaubert, a “profoundly hysterical disposition,” which Sebald then somewhat nonchalantly attributes to Chatwin.
In this article, I argue that the alliterative poem,
St. Erkenwald
, is a Middle English innovation on Old English and Anglo-Latin parchment riddles. By examining
St. Erkenwald
in light of the ...parchment riddles by Anglo-Latin riddlers Tatwine and Eusebius, and riddles contained in
The Exeter Book
, as well as the description of an ancient book in Matthew Paris’
Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani
, I show that the
Erkenwald
-poet reimagined the motif of the talking piece of parchment as an ancient pagan judge. The
Erkenwald
-poet’s reimagining of the parchment riddle as an allegory of reading has perhaps been obscured by what I argue is an unnecessary emendation to the text.
Little has been written about the rhetorical structure of the works of the Mexican playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcon y Mendoza. This essay analyzes three key aspects of his style that find expression ...in the vast majority of his plays: adynaton (the appeal via the impossible); the utilization of motifs derived from the emblem tradition as a way to evoke a verbal image imbued with deeper meanings; and the frequent use of proverbs and refrains, a device that appealed to all members of the corral audience and communicated traditional wisdom with great verbal economy and humor.
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