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There is hardly any ancient work as complex and multi-layered as Apuleius’ novel Metamorphoses. Whether we regard it as a mere sophisticated literary entertainment, or a religious lesson disguised as fabula Graecanica, it certainly offers many angles of research. The aim of the paper is to examine one of its most significant aspects, namely its multicultural character. Although modelled on a Greek narrative and taking place in completely Greek environments following the Greek literary tradition, it undeniably possesses an air of Romanness. The author lets his characters fluctuate somewhere between Roman and Greek, urban and provincial, local and imperial, barbarian and sophisticated. In many places, Lucius, Apuleius’ alter ego, refers to the relationships between different cultures, especially Greek and Roman, not to forget African with respect to Apuleius’ origins. But we have to look even further and see the novel as a fictitious world of its own, playing on readers’ expectations, prejudices, as well as historical and cultural background. To understand the novel, one must try to uncover these subtle nuances reflecting the tastes of its readership. The paper tries to answer the question how Apuleius treats his target audience which was, no doubt, composed of a very multifarious mass of people, without losing sight of the famous Quis ille? – a paradigm of Apuleius’ approach in this novel, in which the questions asked never seem to expect any answers, and even if so, not just one is tenable.
Ahn, J.D. - Hong, S.H. - Park, Y.K. (2009): The Historical and Cultural Identity of Taekwondo as a Traditional Korean Martial Art. International Journal of the History of Sport , 26(11): 1716–1734s
Abstract
Translation as a bridging means of communication across language-cultures has a double role to play: it both constructs and deconstructs, or deconstructs and constructs, the national cultural identity of the source and target texts. The present paper attempts to explore the nature of this double role of translation. By looking at what is constructed and deconstructed in the translation process, and how, it argues a ‘reciprocal’ relationship between the two, emphasizing that neither the ‘deconstruction’ of the source nor the ‘construction’ of the target is to be taken in the absolute. While the core area of what is regarded as a particular cultural identity is distinct, the peripheral areas are by no means as clear-cut. The more access there is to other cultural identities, the more cultural ‘common ground’ there may be between one’s own identity and the identity of the Other, hence the less distinctive the identity of One is from that of the Other. The paper argues that the reciprocal relations between the various processes in translation are in fact the reflection of an underlying postulation, namely the relativity of cultural identity in translation. To support the argument, the paper makes a case study of Lu Xun and his bother’s translation of Short Stories from Abroad by examining both the reasons behind its initial reception failure in Chinese society, and the reasons that can be used to account for an opposite view that the seemingly failed translation has in fact been a positive contribution to the evolution of modern Chinese literature.
Abstract
“Collective memory” emerged as an object of scholarly inquiry only in the early twentieth century. The scholarly boom began in the 1980s with two literary events: Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory and Pierre Nora’s introduction “Between Memory and History”. Each of these texts identified memory as a primitive or sacred form opposed to modern historical consciousness. In recent years, scholarly attention has been shifting to the cultural processes. It has become increasingly apparent that the memories that are shared within generations and across different generations are the product of public acts of remembrance. In this essay, the author attempts to distinguish four layers of cultural identities in the 150-year-old history of China since 1840, by having recourse to the transformation processes of the Western material and cosmological beliefs, with two central questions in mind: (1) how are these layers transmitted or preserved? (2) To what extent have they been accepted in that time society?
Using a case study, this paper examines how EU standards of geographical indications (GIs) can integrate into Hungarian socio-embodied patterns. It uses apricots from the underdeveloped Gönc region of Hungary as an example, defined in the EU GI context as a local resource of cultural identity. The collective memory as a cultural heritage of the Gönc region is examined in relation to products and services that have existed for generations. The aim of this paper is to provide evidence that without geographical circulation, exchange, and appropriation of products, the associated knowledge of innovation strategies, innovation capabilities, and the market outcomes of firms in the food industry does not provide absorptive capacity. It suggests that innovative responses to existing isolated economic services could provide coherence among the three pillars of sustainability, given policy and institutional innovations designed to foster innovation and expand markets.
To be born into exile
Kelemen Mikes and the 19–20th century Hungarian literary exiles
The paper deals with the roles the literary and political legacy of Kelemen Mikes (1690–1761) and his Letters from Turkey have come to play in Hungarian literary emigration. Unlike Mikes’s 19th century cult, which interiorized exilic experience inasmuch as it provided an allegory for domestic political claims, in the 20th century the consecutive exilic waves (1944–45, 1947–48, 1956) increasingly identified Mikes with a peculiar exilic consciousness, which they felt to mirror their own in various ways. Accordingly, the figure of Mikes was designed, mainly in essay and in poetry, to represent and reinforce a wide range of diverse political and literary self-images, from nationalism to apolitical aesthetic modernism, from the experience of the Hungarian writer as a castaway to that of genuine human foreignness.
, which are associated with notions of Danish cultural identity in my work. 6 Therefore, I aim to present the perspectives of the people in the project (to study how they think and behave in local time and place), in order to document their principles
traditions of this town situated near the border of the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen, whose predominantly German-speaking population oscillated from the 1880s onwards between loyalty to Hungary and its own cultural identity. Did the reception of
Abstract
The notion of legitimation was adopted from Max Weber who defined it as the basic form of authority and power. The author uses the notion of legitimation as a tool of undertaking exploration into the discourses of cultural theories and debates on them. Focusing on the current debates on cultural legitimation, the article examines the different discourses on modern Chinese culture: “aphasia” in modern Chinese literary theory; “Westernization” in modern Chinese poetry. The author argues that the two discourses question the legitimation of modern Chinese culture by expressing an anxiety of cultural identity in the process of the great transformation from traditional to modern culture. By drawing on the relations between re-traditionalization and ontological security, the article presents the complicated relation between traditional and contemporary construction of Chinese cultural identity. In conclusion, the author critically reflects on the misunderstanding of cultural identity and makes the claim that identity on the basis of multi-cultural values is always open for endless alteration.
La Mediterraneità come Sintesi di Culture
L’esperienza Linguistica e Letteraria Maltese
Abstract
This essay seeks to identify the main aspects of the cultural identity of Malta as a microscopic manifestation of the various traits which may build up the Mediterranean culture. It outlines the historical development of the ancient language spoken by the Maltese and explains how Maltese literature eventually became a document of the historical and cultural identity of the whole population. Malta is an island, and this fact determines diverse components of Maltese identity. The concept of an islander is thus interpreted as one of the main sources from which the Maltese view of life derives.
