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This introductory analysis on the subject of werewolves in the Greek and Roman worlds in its legendary, mythical, scientific and medical dimension emphasizes an intrinsic combination of negative and positive aspects, human and non-human factors, and ancient and modern components, laying the groundwork for the study of the gendered duplicity of the werewolf's Self in the modern and contemporary literature of southern and northern Italy. In this presentation of the werewolf motif on the Italian literary panorama from the 19th to the 21st century through an overview of short stories and novels, we will examine the writers who have combined ancient rural legends with metropolitan reveries to underscore the complexity and obscure double life of the werewolf.
Musil uses the word 'Dichter', 'poet', as a dignified title reserved for artists of great achievement (different from 'Schriftsteller', 'writer'). His use of the word emphasizes the importance of the specifically poetic qualities of literature (and of the poetic sensibility of criticism,) not as an idle objection to the contemporary merging of literary works with either pure sensation and feeling, or with other forms of discourse. Focusing on "Törless", as well as on Musil's notebooks and essays, this article shows how Musil understands the relationship between rational thinking and the latent ideas and thoughts that emerge within the poetic dimension (the 'other state of mind' or 'other condition.') This approach illuminates Musil's conception of "precision and soul" - the interlocking of sensitive perceptiveness and intellectual rigor - as a necessary pre-condition for valuable literature and valuable life.
The flâneur has been depicted in several different ways in 19th as well as 20th and 21st century literature and criticism. The focus of this brief paper will be on the roles given him in English writings from or around the time of the 1848 revolutions in France and Germany, in which the flâneur comes to represent not only a street idler, but also a critical traveller to, and observer of, the continental city and its revolutionary activities.
Research has contended youth is an "invention" of the 18th century. This thesis does not contest the fact that youth was already known and accepted as a stage in life even earlier. Certain basic anthropological patterns of youthfulness, for example nonchalance, instability, recklessness, exaggeration, bashfulness looking forward to the future and the ability to make friends have been rhetorically implied, repeated and cited as a matter of course since the time of Aristoteies. The pointed thesis that the concept of youth only arose in the 18th century accentuates that youth as an autonomous way of life is a characteristic of the Modern Age.
It can hardly be disputed that the theme of popularity is central to the Enlightenment. Popularity is the sociality equivalent to the individual appeal: 'Dare to know.' Parallel to this runs the following imperative: 'Dare to encourage your neighbour and your fellow man and woman to think on their own – even though they do not belong to the erudite elite.' It is also undeniable that Romantic authors and philosophers polemically attempted to tear down the popularity project of the Enlightenment, their main criticism being its tendency towards mediocrity. It is less well known that Romantic authors and philosophers themselves, around the turn of the nineteenth century, made popularity their central concern. To quote Friedrich Schlegel in the journal Athenaeum: 'The time of popularity has come.' This article explores the Romantics' alternative conception of popularity, with especial reference to Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the Grimm Brothers. To this end, it is helpful to reconstruct the background of the Romantic attempt to create an independent concept of popularity: the debate between Immanuel Kant and the German popular philosopher Christian Garve on the necessity, possibilities, and limits of popularity.
Whether minorities such as the Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand, the San across Southern Africa and the Métis in Canada, or native majority peoples such as the Aymara and Quechua in South America: indigenous peoples" lifeworlds have been transfigured by the difficulties originating from a history of conquest, settlement and suppression. The imperialist strife of European empires and the atrocities committed by their gang of "explorers" – including "this person Cook" in the South Pacific, Columbus in North America, Cortéz in Mexico, Gomes in West Africa, or van Riebeeck in South Africa – was aimed at enforcing European values and institutions, destroying, silencing or marginalizing indigenous cultures and societies as inferior "others." Unsurprisingly, the disruption of formal colonialism in the second half of the 20th century held no inherent improvement for the concerns of formerly colonized peoples. ...
During the Black Revolution, LeRoi Jones used a radical adaptation of Dante to express a new militant identity, turning himself into a new man with a new name, Amiri Baraka, whose experimental literary project culminated in "The System of Dante's Hell" in 1965. Dante’s poem (specifically, John Sinclair's translation) provides a grid for the narrative of Baraka's autobiographical novel; at the same time, the Italian poet's description of hell functions for Baraka as a gloss on many of his own experiences. Whereas for Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, Dante marks a way into the world of European culture, Baraka uses Dante first to measure the growing distance between himself and European literature and then, paradoxically, to separate himself totally from it. Baraka's response to the poet at once confirms and belies Edward Said's claim that Dante's "Divine Comedy" is essentially an imperial text that is foundational to the imperial discipline of comparative literature. That Baraka can found his struggle against imperialist culture, as he sees it, on none other than this specific poem suggests the extent to which it is a richer and more complex text than even Said imagined. To see exactly how Baraka does this, Dennis Looney proposes to read several extended passages from "The System of Dante's Hell" to take stock of its allusiveness to the Italian model. For all the critical attention to Baraka, surprisingly no one has undertaken the necessary work of sorting out his allusions to Dante in any systematic way.
Stories can elicit powerful emotions. A key emotional response to narrative plots (e.g., novels, movies, etc.) is suspense. Suspense appears to build on basic aspects of human cognition such as processes of expectation, anticipation, and prediction. However, the neural processes underlying emotional experiences of suspense have not been previously investigated. We acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data while participants read a suspenseful literary text (E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman") subdivided into short text passages. Individual ratings of experienced suspense obtained after each text passage were found to be related to activation in the medial frontal cortex, bilateral frontal regions (along the inferior frontal sulcus), lateral premotor cortex, as well as posterior temporal and temporo-parietal areas. The results indicate that the emotional experience of suspense depends on brain areas associated with social cognition and predictive inference.