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Summary:
In this paper we study the evolution of locative relative adverbs from Classical to Late Latin and Early Romance Languages. The focus is posed on a corpus of Iberian chartae from the 9th–10th centuries.
Abstract
J.J. Grandville’s Un autre monde (1844) is a parody of nineteenth-century utopianism. One of the themes that the artist and his anonymous collaborator (the author Taxile Delord) are interested in exploring is the way in which the public’s desire to contemplate and, indeed, to possess visions of alternative modes of existence had led to the commodification of utopianism in their day. In the book, the artists’ use of parody shows how the products of the imagination occasion a series of derivatives not unlike––and often rigorously identical to––the paratext. I will argue that these paratextual elements are places where the text’s discourse is transformed and assigned a “use value.” But how, exactly, does Grandville use parody to reveal––and to undermine––this derivative function of the para- and the meta-textual? And what can this tell us about the proliferation of paratextual hermeneutics in our day?
Abstract
The epistemological shift represented by postmodernism and its aftermath has liberated Medieval Studies infusing the field with energetic and controversial studies that have made the field one of the more vigorous (and interesting) in the humanities. Play, humor, relativism, indeterminacy, differential repetition (multiple copies as opposed to an original), performative mimesis, postcolonialism, gender, sexuality, and other concepts associated with postmodern sensibility configure contemporary medieval studies in radically different ways from those of earlier paradigms. These studies undertake to define “a new Middle Ages.” This is not the neomedievalism of late modernism that Umberto Eco described a few years ago. It is rather the period itself, stretching from roughly the 3rd century to the beginning of the 16th century C.E. The contemporary fascination with a period so different from our own, so radically “other,” points to a sense that, despite its alterity — or perhaps because of it — the Middle Ages have something important to tell us about ourselves and our age. It would be difficult to deny the role that popular culture — the many films, books, television shows and other mediatic phenomena — has played both in popularizing and in liberating medieval studies. Besides a flexible approach, these studies also share with popular culture a fascination with the historical context, but in ways only found in the best fiction and film go further to discover means of demonstrating what the historical artifact has to communicate to us: how, for example, it can interrogate or confirm the insights opened by new intellectual paradigms. They show that the challenge lies in finding a way to connect the mind and the world not only for the historical material, but also for the contemporary scene. This article will explore some recent examples of writing the new Middle Ages.
Abstract
This article tackles an under-explored aspect of Castel’s alienation in El Túnel: the conflict between the author and his work. Like many artists, Castel finds himself isolated from the pedestrian mainstream. However, in opposition to other misunderstood artists who discover in their works an aesthetic connection that compensates somewhat for their social alienation, Castel is distanced not only from the public with whom he attempts to communicate via his literary creations, but he is no less so from the works themselves. At war both with society and the higher imperatives of his artistic impulses, Castel struggles in vain to connect with his art and those it reaches. He remains aesthetically disenfranchised and socially marginalized throughout the work. As his narrative drifts off into an inconclusive silence, the reader comes to understand more fully the complex interweave that characterizes the aesthetic encounter. At the point where artistic consumers consider the quixotic work of a distant author, definitive conclusions matter less than the struggle to identify that elusive conjuncture between the explicit and the poetic, the accessible and the impenetrable, the chaotic and the coherent: bipolar tensions that endow the aesthetic enterprise with is enduring omnipotence.
Abstract
The “examens” that accompany Corneille’s dramatic opus are in fact, adjuvants, written after the fact. As defensive meta-commentaries wherein the focus rarely departs from an attempt to demonstrate how his plays do or do not conform to theoretical prescriptions, they are prefaces in name only: publishers have tended to displace them in advance of the work despite their “belated” appearance relative to the work. Displacement is, however, not to be overlooked. For if the pasted additives known as the “examens” suffer at the level of insightful texts, they do adopt significance as paratexts. In his extra textual writings, Corneille the theaterician and Corneille the theoretician jockey for discursive supremacy, and it is ultimately the theaterician who emerges victorious. The more he reviews his plays, the more muted becomes the voice of the disciplined theoretician, and conversely, the more assertive the voice of the theaterician. Shortly after Rodogune, it will be noted that Corneille becomes more eager to defend rather than condemn his creative instincts, and less hesitant to criticize the rules themselves. Corneille’s decision not to engage in a theoretical examination of his final works suggests that at the end of his career, as at the beginning, Corneille believed his primary commitment was to his own aesthetic vision.
Latin phenomena, and this indicates a more advanced development toward Romance languages at the Northern Italian group. Finally, the Western sample could be described as typically forecasting the vowel system of the Western Romance languages, with the
During the winter of 1479–1480, Pope Sixtus IV determined that humanist Raffaele Maffei from Volterra (1451–1522) should join the cardinal Giovanni d’Aragona, who had been sent as papal legate to Matthias Corvinus’s court. This paper illustrates Maffei’s impressions of his trip, as they emerge in a published but little known letter addressed to his friend Niccolò Lisci, as well as in the eighth book of his famous encyclopedia, the Commentarii Urbani . Although the Hungarians’ bellicose nature and their Spartan habits impressed the Italian humanist, Maffei was truly amazed by the incredible cultural flourishing of the Corvinian court.
This study offers an overview on the influences of English on the farthest Romance language, Romanian. The author provides a long introduction on cultural contacts between the two nations and two states. She points out that the main period of influence concerns the 20th century and shows how English loan-words are becoming part of this Romance language.
In the present article, we examine the word order of the late medieval Toscan dialect. The analysis is based on a corpus which dates back to the end of the 15th century, the Motti e facezie del Piovano Arlotto. First, we briefly present the word order of the late medieval Romance languages. Then we focus on the word order of the late medieval Toscan dialect and we show that all the characteristics observable in the medieval Romance languages (V2 phenomena, inversion, separation of the finite and non-finite for of the verb, etc.) are to be found also in our late medieval corpus. The apparently problematic case of the V1 order is given an account compatible with the old system (even though it assumes the presence of an adverb before the subject in the base order), and this account is also confirmed by examples which contain compound verb-forms.
