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Given Tournier's own indication that the story of Taor in the last part of "Gaspard, Mechior & Balthazar" came to him from Edzard Schaper's "Die Legende vom vierten König" and Henry van Dyke's "The story of the other wise man", this article compares the three texts in order to determine their respective theological perspectives. It is argued that Schaper's and van Dyke's respective tales constitute meditations on the sheep and the goats pericope from Matthew 24. Tournier's tale, on the other hand, involves a different theological focus: the first temptation of Christ from Matthew 4:14 as this pericope relates to Deuteronomy 8:2-3. This shift in focus makes food central to the spiritual journey of Tournier's protagonist: the gluttonous Taor makes a symbolic transition from "living on bread alone" to living by "every word that comes out of the mouth of God" (the bread of the Eucharist). It is argued that because Taor begins his journey from the spiritually immature (from a Christian perspective) position of the Israelites in Exodus 16, his starting point is pre-Christological and, therefore, his journey is far greater than those of Schaper's and van Dyke's respective protagonists. The latter possess rudimentary Christological knowledge right from the start and therefore undergo less extensive spiritual metamorphosis than does Taor.
Este artigo trata do desenvolvimento dos estudos da tradução na Europa, no siculo XX. O maior enfoque está na mudança da perspeciiva de pesquisa, da comparação entre línguas para a confrontação de textos e da focalização datradução como atividade pragmática para a investigação do pensamento do tradutor (perspectiva cognitiva). Paralelamente à discussão dos conceitos teóricos, comenta-se também o desenvolvimento institucional dos estudos da tradução.
Popular culture is always in process; its meanings can never be identified in a text, for texts are activated, or made meaningful, only in social relations and in intertextual relations. This activation of the meaning potential of a text can occur only in the social and cultural relationship into which it enters. (Fiske, 1991a: 3)
Many critics have pointed out the importance of revelation by John of Patmos as an intertext in Michel Tournier's "Le roi des aulnes" [...]. They normally refer to the apocalyptic ending of the novel as the most obvious link with the Johannine text. This connection is obvious not only because the final scene is the destruction of Kaltenborn castle with all its inhabitants (and by extension the destruction of the entire Third Reich), but also because there are direct references to revelation in Tournier's text [...]. However, the importance of Johannine discourse goes well beyond this overt intertextuality.
This article deals with Michel Tournier as a writer of hypertexts. The first chapter of "Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar" is considered with respect to two possible unmarked hypotextual connections. The first is a short story by Anatole France entitled "Balthasar", and the song of songs is the key element that connects France's and Tournier's texts. The second is an episode from Genesis which I term "The sister-wife Hoax". The main concern in this study is the issue of human dignity as it relates to race and sexuality.
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 argument proceeds from the documentary hypothesis in modern biblical studies. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that the 1st 5 books of the Old Testament were written by four different authors at different times. These authors are known as J, P, E and D. Their writing was joined in the 5th c. B.C.E. into what became the Pentateuch and the first part of the Old Testament. The result of this joining was a series of contradictions and redundancies in the final text as we have it today. Readers of the Bible who seek to read it as one coherent text try to naturalize these contradictions by what I call "stitching." Stitching involves putting coherence back into the Pentateuch by accounting for the contradictions and redundancies in terms of plausibility and common logic. Modern authors who write versions of Old Testament stories, such as Thomas Mann in his "Joseph and his brothers", also engage in stitching. I demonstrate how Mann stitches a number of important episodes from the Patriarch saga. I discuss the effect of this process on the story line. I compare that to two other recent instances of biblical stitching in modern fiction. And I conclude with the argument that stitching in modern biblical hypertexts stems from the need for coherence in the modern realistic novel. This post-enlightenment coherence impulse is contrasted with myth and the latter's tolerance for loose ends and less than coherent narrative.
In the beautifully situated villa of the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin overlooking Lake Wannsee, the Third International Colloquium for Beckett Translators took place from 3rd to 6th October 1998. The financing had been realized with the help of the European Commission and the Berlin Senate for Science, Research and Culture.
The point of my explanation is simply that in its "deep-structure" even 'A Handful of Dust' (and 'a fortiori', as we shall see, other novels by Waugh) attaches itself to the mode of the historical novel, which is only in a very qualified way the descendant of the epic, as Lukacs would have us believe.
In the present context of the triumph of capitalism over real socialism, this article points out that, despite their ideological differences, both systems are bound to the same conception of history-as-progress. In contrast, it recalls Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history, marked by the critique of progress in the name of a revolutionary time, which interrupts history's chronological continuum. Benjamin's perspective is used to study the conflict of temporalities among the Soviet artists in the two decades after the October Revolution: on the one hand, the anarchic, autonomous and critical time of interruption – which is the time of avant-gade –, on the other hand, the synchronization with the ideas of a progressive time as ordered by the Communist Patty; this is the time of vanguard, whose capitalist Counterpart is fashion.
In view of the tremendous success of Victor Klemperer's diaries testimoning his personal experience as a Jew in Nazi Germany, this article discusses the specific contribution of witness literature to the knowledge of history. During the Holocaust period, in the face of death, true historical knowledge was essentially reduced to personal experience. Klemperer's clandestine journal exposes how the collective trauma affected everybody through the daily speech patterns, dictated by the Nazis' appropriation of the German language. In this memory of Alltagsgeschichte as a critical history of language can be seen the specific contribution of Literature of testimony. The function of Klemperers chronicle of 'Lingua Tertii Imperii' to develop the readers linguistic sensitivity, in order to enable them to reappropriate their language.
We may consider narratology - the structural study of narratives - in two ways, each of them implying a slightly different 'before' and 'after'. First, this important endeavor in 20th century literary studies may be regarded as the study of a specific narrative 'logic', the formal structures that unite all narratives, fictional and factual, literary and non-literary. Secondly, narratology may be regarded as the study of specific 'texts' with specific cultural functions - storehouses of 'memory' on the one hand and, on the other, 'meaning-generating devices' integrating human action with time and place, ending up in cognition, identity, values, pragmatic norms, etc. In spite of the fact that both trends diminish the role of the specific medium of a given narrative, focusing instead on a general logic or on general functions, both of them refer 'de facto' to literature as a primary field of study; moreover, they are both children, twins one might argue, of the linguistic turn at the turn of the last century, and they both 'de facto' constantly refer to language as a primary field of study. This paradigmatic shift emphasized a specific medium and its specific logic in a general perspective without losing grip of the specificity. A lesson may be learned if we quickly repaint the history and perspective of this turn in a few broad strokes.
My point of departure is Benjamin's "Lehre vom Ähnlichen," since this text elaborates a theory of reading and writing based on the concept of "nonsensory similarity." The "strange ambiguity of the word reading in relation to both its profane and its magical meaning", which is often cited in Benjamin criticism, is derived from a precise figure, namely the constellation as a model for writing and the concomitant practices of anagrammatical dispersion.
The Book of Job from the Old Testament is juxtaposed in detail with its hypertext in Thomas Mann's novel: the chapter where Jacob mourns for his "dead" Joseph. An argument is made that Mann's awareness of rabbinical literature creates a connection with the Akedah tradition, i.e., different ways of dealing with the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham in Genesis. The notion that Abraham actually does kill Isaac, as suggested by a medieval rabbinical text, is interwoven into the analysis of Jacob's mourning for Joseph who appears as an Issaac-like sacrificial victim in Mann's novel. A connection is established between Abraham, Job and Jacob as figures whose children are claimed by God, and their reactions to this test are compared.
Film review: The Matrix cult
(2003)
Much of the semiotic discussion around the deeper structures of "The Matrix" has tended to center around positive ethical and philosophical systems. Thus, numerous critics have pointed out the Christian subtext in the film with Neo as Christ and Morpheus as John the Baptist (James L. Ford: 8). The Garden of Eden story has been superimposed on "The Matrix" as well with the implication that just as Adam's and Eve's awakening to knowledge makes Christianity possible, so too, Neo's awakening will lead to the salvation of humanity by a Christ-like figure (cf. James S. Spiegel: 13). Others have picked out connections with Joseph Campbell's monomyth concept where the hero must depart from the familiar world, go into a netherworld and return morally transformed (A. Samuel Kimball: 176, 198). There is also the Platonic interpretation where the passage toward the light from the famous cave allegory is read into the awakening process of "The Matrix": "The theme of appearance versus reality is as old as Plato's Republic. And while perhaps no writer or artist has improved upon his cave allegory in presenting this theme, the Wachowski brothers' The Matrix might be as effective an attempt as any since Plato, in cinematic history anyway" (James S. Spiegel: 9). Buddhism and its notion that reality is illusion appears as an equally convincing model for reading "The Matrix" (James L. Ford: 10). Even Gnosticism has been used as an interesting semiotic framework for the film (Frances Flannery-Dailey and Rachel Wagner: 10-12).
In his book "Fiction and Diction", Gerard Genette bemoans a contradiction between the pretense and the practice of narratological research. Instead of studying all kind of narratives, for Genette, narratological research concentrates de facto on the techniques of fictional narrative. Correspondingly, Genette speaks of a "fictional narratology" in the pejorative sense of a discipline that sets arbitrary limits on its area of study. In his objection, the narratology that literary scholars practice considers fictional narrative to be at least the standard case of any narrative. In other words, what is merely a special case, within a wide field of narratives, is here elevated to narrative par excellence. According to Genette, narratology does not omit the domain of non-fictional narratives from its investigations with any justification, but rather annexes it without addressing its specific elements.
What are possible ways in which this perspective, which Genette criticizes as truncated, can be set right? Can the problem, as outlined, simply be solved by expanding the area of study in narratological research? Or are there not, perhaps, important differences between fictional and nonfictional narratives which seem to encourage narratological research, understood as a fundamental discipline of literary study, under the heading of "fictional narratology"?
In order to come to an answer here, we will first discuss the problem of differentiating between fictional and non-fictional narratives, as well as the possibility of a connection between narrative and fictionality theory. Second, we will expand our considerations to encompass pragmatic and historical aspects of narratives in order to delineate the scope of our proposal.
A remarkable indictment and conviction following the sale of an ‘obscene’ comic book invites us to examine arguments brought forth to describe a specifically childlike reception of new media, as usually suggested by those who would motivate legal restrictions for such media. Trying to explain some perceived contradictions on the surface of these arguments, we discuss whether it is the failure or rather the extreme success of texts that is marked as ‘dangerous’ in such contexts.