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The ways in which Self and Other are represented in fiction play a significant role in the formation of racial and other stereotypes in any culture. This article is a reading of the children's book "The Brave Rabbit in Africa" (1931) by Slovak modernist author Jozef Cíger-Hronský. It attempts to point out and analyse the ways in which racial and national identities are constructed in the written text of the book. Arguably, the story deploys colonialist motifs typical of Western literature in order to appraise the modern, civilized identity of the young Slovak nation.
In "'Preventing Malicious and Wanton Cruelty to Animals': Historical Animal Welfare and Animal Rights Education," Andreas Hübner outlines future historical animal welfare and animal rights education, sketching concepts and themes such as animal agency and historicity as well as the relational, spatial, and material practices employed between humans and animals. Hübner then historicizes present-day attitudes toward anthropocentricism and discusses educational and learning processes that (can) help to overcome human-animal dichotomies in the history classroom. Hübner presents subject-specific recommendations for critically integrating topics into future curricula and shows that it is possible to teach in a way that acknowledges the role of nonhuman actors. He thereby challenges conventional human-centered narratives of historical learning.
Taking her cue from Margo de Mello's "Teaching the Animal", Maria Moss employs a hands-on, didactic approach to teaching human-animal studies (THAS), introducing texts that she has used in her seminars in the past - from philosophical background materials and sociological surveys to novels, short stories, and poems. In her article, "'The skin and fur on your shoulders': Teaching the Animal Turn in Literature," Moss uses texts that "look at the animals from inside out," ending with a discussion of SF and chimp fiction. From James Lever's "Me Cheetah" to George Saunders's story "Fox 8", she focuses on animal agency within the narrative form, presenting texts that feature animals as narrators. Once we acknowledge that notions of language, cognition, and thinking about the future are no longer limited to human narrators and that "storying" is no longer specific to humans, Moss writes, interspecies storied imaginings mark one possible alternative to the long history of human dominance and exceptionalism - not just in life, but in literature, too.
This article contributes to the European history of musical nationalism with regard to operatic debates in the eighteenth century. The investigation reveals that within operatic debates national categories were used for all levels of the multimedia genre of opera: music, text, composer, and actor. Moreover, the relationship between national character and national taste was a highly critical point: there was general agreement that only outstanding aesthetic abilities enable composers to go beyond their own particular national character. Only in this respect could aesthetic abilities stand above national taste, which was said to be shaped by national character.
Herder's concept of a national literature [...] serves as a differential category formulated in opposition to the concepts generated by universalistic rationalism and the Classicist aesthetics which is based on it, this being an aesthetics which is incapable of accommodating cultural difference. Thus Herder's concept is to be read – primarily as one looking for ways of conceiving cultural difference syncronically as well as diachronically.
Italy has experienced a high number of earthquakes. However, the identity of "the Italians" has not yet been defined by their "landscape of wounds." Referring to an earthquake in central Italy (Amatrice) in August 2016, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published a controversial caricature of two wounded Italians standing alongside the "Lasagnes," a pile of bodies layered like the well- known Italian pasta dish. By analysing the caricature's text, intertext, and context, while drawing on imagology and geopoetics, this article aims to show how earthquakes are linked to Italian cultural stereotypes and national identity.
Early in his life Pasolini showed interest in Dante: in a letter sent to Luciano Serra in 1945, he declared that 'la questione di Dante è importantissima'. He later reaffirmed his interest in Dante in two attempts to rewrite the "Commedia": "La Mortaccia" and "La Divina Mimesis". [...] In 1963 he mentioned "La Divina Mimesis" for the first time. [...] Critics have mostly focused on the work's unfinished condition as a sign of the poetic crisis which Pasolini experienced at the end of his life. Scholarly interpretations of "La Divina Mimesis" can be divided into three main groups: the first strain can be primarily attributed to a 1979 essay by Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, four years after the publication of La Divina Mimesis. Bàrberi Squarotti attributes Pasolini's difficulty in completing his rewriting of the "Divine Comedy" to the author's ideology. The work's intermittent irony and its unfinished state are good indicators of the impossibility of recreating Dante's achievement, in particular the Dantean ideology. [...] The second strain of interpretation stresses the work's linguistic dimensions. The period when Pasolini conceives of the project of "La Divina Mimesis" corresponds, according to his repeated declarations, to a time of dramatic change in the Italian linguistic context. [...] Finally, the third type of interpretation locates "La Divina Mimesis" in the theoretical context of Pasolini's final conception of poetry. Here critics stress in particular the difference between the poet's intentions and the final result.[...] These three interpretative strains share the conviction that, in comparison with its model, Pasolini's project ends in failure. It is a failure in at least three senses: on the level of its ideology (not as strong as Dante's), on the level of reality (because of the linguistic standardization of Italian society), and on the level of aesthetics (even though the author pretends that his failure possesses an aesthetic value). This paper would like to question this conclusion: by redefining the object of mimesis and its conditions Davide Luglio tries to understand the reason why the author decided to print his work in a form that at first sight appears ill-defined and fragmentary.
Vsevolod Garshin's "Four Days" is the story of a wounded soldier left for dead on a deserted battlefield: During four days of physical and mental agony, he reassesses his formerly idealistic attitude towards war and ends up condemning it as something far from glorious and noble. However, the importance of Garshin's short story in literary history is not so much its anti-war message as the innovative nature of the form used to convey that message. Garshin was the first to explore the potential of direct interior monologue (hereinafter: DIM): a technique which seeks to create the artistic illusion that the reader is eavesdropping on a character's inner discourse without any mediation on the part of a narrator [...]. Because Garshin's text anticipated many of the devices later used by such masters of the genre as James Joyce and William Faulkner, the form of "Four Days" merits close analysis.
The 1935 Fox Films "Dante's Inferno" (directed by Harry Lachman) traces the rise and fall of an entrepreneur. Its protagonist, Jim Carter (played by Spencer Tracy), begins the story as a stoker on a cruise liner. The narrative opens with a burst of flames from the ship's boiler, and the ensuing scene goes on to show the protagonist competing at shovelling coal for a bet in the sweltering engine-room. Interspersed are shots of the superstructure directly above with a number of elegant and vapid passengers following the game below. This initial sequence thus concisely conveys the main features of the film's social agenda through imagery that anticipates that of two of its later 'infernal' sequences. [...] Spectacular admonition and concern about the ruthless pursuit of wealth are the main features which link this "Inferno" of the thirties to the one that had appeared some six hundred years earlier. Wealth and avarice were, of course, demonstrably serious concerns for Dante: as Peter Armour, for example, has shown, there is a recurrent and pervasive concern with money, its meaning, and its misuse throughout the "Commedia". So it is not surprising that the "Inferno" should also have been appropriated by social critics some hundred years before the 1935 Hollywood fable. [...] Some of the narrative and visual patterns in "Dante's Inferno" imply an uneasy underlying vision of the movie industry and its practices. Other productions, publicity, and journalism of the time reinforce suggestions of such a metafictional approach to movies, morality, and the market in the 1935 "Dante's Inferno".
This article reads Fred Moten's collection "B Jenkins" as literalizing the poetic appeal to the mother tongue to reveal its mediated essence. Approaching its first and last poems in terms of Friedrich Kittler's techno-psychological history of the family casts Moten's detuning of natural language in terms of cultural mastery streaked with affirmative disfluency. With the 'cant', slang slides towards a broader awareness of the limits of knowledge. There, language may emerge for perceiving the role of the technological mother tongue in our postnational age.