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Abstract
“The same key would not open both, though a 'master key' might” Due to the traditional views on metaphor and narrative, they are usually discussed in different contexts as if they had nothing in common. However, during the last decades the theories of metaphor and narrative underwent a number of changes, and what was taken for granted in traditional literary criticism is no longer evident. In particular, it should be investigated whether metaphor and narrative are wholly unrelated or they have some kind of common structure. In this essay, the possibilities and difficulties of comparing metaphor and narrative theories are illustrated with the example of Max Black's theory of metaphor and Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the dialogical novel.
The paper claims that thematic approach has played an essential role in Polish literary criticism for the last fifty years. Although the typological criteria for thematic classification are usually disputed, literary works depicting the tragic experience of the Second World War do not lack the consensus of scholars in this respect. There has been intense debate over Jewish topics as literary controversy has been determined by external factors for the past half-century. Further complications may arise from the manifestation of demythologization and myth-creating tendencies in deheroizing and heroic forms in works on the Second World War. While these facts can be merely used as classifying factors in the case of existential-historical themes, the heroic and myth-creating approach indicates the posterity's negative aesthetic evaluation of works describing life in concentration camps.
'analphabète [ The Illiterate ] ( 2004 ). What literary criticism considers her most important literary achievement is her novel Le Grand Cahier [ The Great Notebook ] ( 1986 ), along with its sequels: La Preuve [ The Proof ] ( 1988 ) and Le Troisième mensonge
socialist realism be evident in their work. Socialist realism, the framework of which was developed by Soviet cultural politician Zhdanov, 21 became the dominant method of literary criticism in Hungary in the 1950s
generally eludes a large audience. Prizes also have the ability to make something generally elusive tangible, or at least to appear to be so, to a broad lay audience. In this context, prizes take on the same key functions as, for example, literary criticism
Duffy–Sheridan–Westerink–White (1969) . 29 Robert Lamberton osserva che “the elucidation of the ‘symbols’ seems to belong to the field of comparative religion rather than that of literary criticism” ( Lamberton [1986] 127–128). 30 Edwards (1996
Abstract
Since the end of the 1980s, when the term “postcolonial” first landed mainland China, postcolonialism or postcolonial theory has been vigorously traveling in China for nearly twenty years. From 1995 to 1999, postcolonial criticism prospered and aroused several consequential issues such as the problem of “aphasia” of Chinese literary theories and its reconstruction, “Postism” and its conservatism, cultural self-colonization phenomena, “the third world culture,” nationalism and the so-called “Chineseness” and so on. The articles and books published during the period witness the highest achievement of postcolonial criticism in China. But the hasty traveling of postcolonialism in China has elicited or exposed many serious problems in the circles of literary criticism and literary theories. Unhealthy academic ecology in China combined with the misappropriation of the Western source texts, provoking heated debates over nationalism, “Chineseness,” “aphasia” and intellectual responsibility. Through analyzing these complicated issues, the author intends to present his own understanding of the traveling and metamorphosis of postcolonial theories in the Chinese context, and to offer his critical reflections on the problem of how to borrow theories from abroad.
The letter of Marsilio Ficino was published under the title Dubitatio utrum opera philosophica regantur fato an providentia and summarised his tenets of Platonist-Humanist philosophy as it were. Based on his book of letters, this writing is part of a correspondence in which Ficino responds to Ioannes Pannonius of Buda, who, in his letter to Ficino — also published by the book of letters — criticised Ficino’s views. Literary criticism has been trying to identify the persona of Ioannes Pannonius for long. In the highly influential study of Florio Bánfi, Joannes de Varadino (Giovanni Unghero, Giovanni Varadino), that is, John of Várad, Augustine monk is identified as the supposed person. Bánfi’s views were reconsidered by Klára Pajorin in 1999, who reckoned that Ioannes Pannonius is John Vitéz the Younger. The author of the present study wishes to enhance the idea of Valery Rees (1999) who thinks that Ioannes Pannonius was created as a fictitious character by Ficino, and thus, the author reckons that the letter came in handy primarily against Savonarola and his followers because the correspondent from Buda raises those very topics on the bases of which Ficino can elaborate the sole decorous model of behaviour, the path that should be followed by the fictitious addressee as well.
In this article I offer an overview of the ways in which the term realism has been understood and used in Hungarian literary criticism, from the introduction of the term into Hungarian discourses in the middle of the 19th century to the post-1989 period, when the term had to grapple with the legacy of its appropriation by the Socialist regime. I examine three specific junctures in the critical trajectory of Realism: the introduction of the term in the 1850s, the uses and abuses of the term by Marxist ideologues, and finally the aversion towards the term that emerged in the post-Socialist era. In addition to examining pivotal moments in the history of this critical concept in Hungarian literary discourse, my inquiry also offers a critical perspective from which to consider an enduring anxiety concerning the achievements, past and future, of Hungarian literary culture, an anxiety that finds expression in a symptomatic concern with the ways in which tendencies in Hungarian culture do or do not relate to cultural developments outside of Hungary.
Abstract
In the American academic tradition, the freak show as a research topic appeared in the late 1970s, focusing on othered bodies and popular culture, considered revolutionary at the time. This article looks at the history of the discourses staged otherness provoked in the American context. While it was launched together with other discussions of othering – such as ‘the ethnic other’, which eventually led to the field of postcolonial studies – otherness based on physical difference led to discussions that established a perception of the freak show as an American phenomenon. Scholars like Leslie Fiedler used the othered body to cope with personal crisis, while Edward Said criticized Western European and American forms of colonial thinking. However, physical otherness seduced academics to argue along the dichotomies of self and other to eventually position the self. This article looks at this development historically, involving psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, literary criticism, and popular culture, to question the American element of the freak show and encourage a rewriting of its cultural significance.
