Archvillain or Scapegoat: René Girard visits the abbey of The Name of the Rose

Summary The intensification of research on Lithuanian translations of Italian literature and Italian translations of Lithuanian literature over the past twenty years is paralleled by the growth of interest in Italian literature in Lithuania. However, the existing research on diverse linguistic and cultural characteristics of texts translated from Italian into Lithuanian and vice versa has been sporadic, thus leaving much to be done to uncover links between the two languages and identify translation-related issues. The present article looks into one of the issues, namely, the lexical analytical construction of the Italian language and its translation into Lithuanian. Fictional texts by two representative Italian contemporary writers, Alesandro Baricco and Umberto Eco are chosen as a source of data including over three thousand pages of the source language (SL) and the target language (TL) texts. The results are compared with similar studies on translation of French literary texts into Lithuanian. The study on the translation of lexical analytical constructions in Italian literary texts translated into Lithuanian uses the theoretical framework and methodology provided by the Italian School of Semiotic Translation represented by Umberto Eco and Bruno Osimo among others. The study adopts a holistic approach to the analysis of lexical analytical constructions in Lithuanian translations of Italian literature. Comparative quantitative study has revealed three translation strategies: reformulation, translation without changes and remodelling. Reformulation has been identified to be the most frequent translation strategy. Its frequency was five times higher than that of translation without changes. The latter strategy was twice more frequent than the strategy of remodelling, which, accounts for less than ten per cent of all translation cases. Uses of calque or omission as translation strategies were not found. Comparison of quantitative results regarding the distribution of translation strategies adopted in the Lithuanian translations of Italian and French literary texts and a qualitative analysis of examples revealed similar tendencies in translation choices. It is important to note that changes of lexical analytical constructions into noun constructions were one and a half times less frequent in the translations of Italian literature than in the translations of French literature. Italian and French lexical analytical constructions were replaced by noun constructions in cases when in the SL text these constructions designated object and result but not action. Thus, it can be assumed that lexical analytical constructions in French literary texts were relatively more frequent than those in Italian literary texts.

Bu çalışmada, yönetmenliğini Todd Field’ın üstlendiği Tutku Oyunları (2006) filminin Girardcı bir analizi yapılacaktır. Tom Perrotta’nın Little Children isimli kitabından uyarlanan film, Amerikan taşrasında yaşayan bir grup insanın arzu ve nefret dinamiklerini konu alır. Tutku Oyunları, arzunun ve nefretin taklitçi doğasını göstermesi bakımından edebiyat kuramcısı René Girard’ın romansal yapıt kavramı bağlamında incelenmeye elverişli bir anlatıdır. Girard, Romantik Yalan ve Romansal Hakikat: Edebi Yapıda Ben ve Öteki adlı eserinde arzuyu ve özneyi yücelten romantik yapıt ile arzunun mimetik yapısını görünür kılan romansal yapıt arasında bir karşıtlık kurar. Girard’ın teorisine göre romansal yapıtlar, teorisyenin üçgen arzu olarak isimlendirdiği model üzerinden arzunun dolayımlılığını görünür kılmaktadır. Tutku Oyunları filmi de merkezine aldığı karakterlerin arzularındaki mimetik yapıyı deşifre etmesi bakımından romansal bir yapıttır. Çalışmanın amacı Girard’ın teorisini sinema çalışmaları açısından bir imkân olarak değerlendirdikten sonra Tutku Oyunları filmindeki arzunun mimetik yapısını metin analizi yöntemi ile incelemektir. Bu çalışma sadece bir film analizi uygulaması olmanın ötesinde filmi günümüz kültürüne dair bir yorum olarak anlayan teorik bir mahiyet de taşır. Girard’ın romanlar üzerinden yaptığı hem kültürü analiz etme hem de kültüre dair teorik bir bakış geliştirme çabasına benzer şekilde bu çalışma da sinemayı hem analiz etmeyi hem de sinema üzerinden günümüzün kültürüne dair bir yorum getirmeyi amaçlamaktadır.

Walking and Swimming with Umberto Eco Guy P. Raffa Hurricane Warnings As hurricane Humberto ominously approached the Caribbean islands and the eastern seaboard of the United States, areas already pounded by Erin and Felix earlier in the summer of 1995, The New Yorker announced, in an anticipatory review, the imminent publication of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, L’isola del giorno prima, translated into English (of course) by William Weaver. 1 Set into motion by a storm and subsequent shipwreck, Eco’s novel seemed almost to time its American debut with the arrival of the hurricane bearing the Italian author’s name. (Fortunately, this storm, unlike its two predecessors, petered out before making landfall.) In addition to the review published before the appearance of Weaver’s English translation, there appeared not long after the novel arrived in U.S. bookstores an essay by Weaver himself containing selections from his “translator’s journal.” Among the entertaining anecdotes and reflections told by Weaver is his recollection in the very first entry that Um, as he refers to Eco in his journal, had included a set of “instructions for translators” along with the voluminous printout of the novel. Weaver makes surprisingly little of this formalized gesture of authorial intervention in the translation process, remarking only that Eco’s translators were told “not to use words [End Page 164] that came into existence after the 17th century” (16). However, literary critics familiar with Eco’s prodigious cultural output over the past thirty-five years may well wonder if the primary goal of the semiotician and novelist, particularly in his recent writings, has not been to provide a definitive set of “instructions for interpreters.” In the first part of this essay, therefore, I shall attempt to extrapolate such a set of interpretive guidelines from one of Eco’s latest major theoretical statements, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Delivered as the 1993 Charles Eliot Norton lectures, these essays were published in 1994, the same year in which L’isola del giorno prima appeared in Italy. Attentive to how literature “works” (as opposed to why and for whom), Eco makes a strong case for what I call a “functional approach” to the act of interpretation. Insofar as Eco’s own fiction functions as, in Maurizio Viano’s formulation, “narrazione teorizzante” or “teoria narrata” (“Ancora su Il pendolo di Foucault” 160), I turn to L’isola del giorno prima in the second part of this essay to examine Eco’s dramatization of the major issues at stake in his scholarly work. 2 I find that reader-oriented interpretive theory and praxis, which Eco presents in Six Walks as a theoretical foil to his functional hermeneutics, figure in the novel as the primary threat to the philosophical, even physical, well-being of Eco’s young protagonist. However, not satisfied merely to show how Eco’s theory and fiction “reflect” one another, I aim throughout this essay to disclose certain limitations to Eco’s own arguments in favor of interpretive limits. 3 Thankful that Eco’s own interpretations, as well as his novels and critical theory, are subject to interpretation, I think it important to consider why certain readers may be less welcome than others to walk and swim in Umberto Eco’s fictional and theoretical universes. 4 [End Page 165] Walking (or Tripping) through Eco’s Woods In Six Walks Eco advances his functional approach to literature and criticism by describing the literary text as a “lazy machine” requiring collaboration on the part of the reader (28, 49). He thus identifies and discusses many of the strategies, techniques, models, and mechanisms employed by creative writers to construct this narrative machine. Addressing himself to a broad audience, Eco provides useful and generally clear expositions of such theoretical issues as the story-plot-discourse distinction (32–36), narrative time (54–73), and the model reader and model author (9, 15–16, 24, 115–16). Eco makes ample use of his previous scholarship and fiction in Six Walks—particularly Opera aperta, The Limits of Interpretation, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, and Il pendolo di Foucault—to investigate the “rules” of narrative (for which fiction shares much with games). These rules (a function primarily...

Feminist pedagogy, originating in social constructivism and critical theory, offers an instructional approach for a more democratic and diverse curriculum and pedagogy. Extending from feminist pedagogy is Black feminist pedagogy, which offers a more specialized instructional approach for underrepresented populations in education. Both feminist pedagogy and Black feminist pedagogy foster a unique intersection for institutions of higher education whose historic mission integrates race and gender as part of its targeted efforts. This study examines ways feminist pedagogy and Black feminist pedagogy are integrated into the undergraduate music program at Spelman College, a historically Black college for women. Using Barbara Coeyman’s four principles of traditional feminist pedagogy for women’s studies in music and the general music curriculum (i.e., diversity, opportunities for all voices, shared responsibility, and orientation to action) as a theoretical framework, the following three components were examined for this study: content (curriculum and course design), context (structural influences of gender and race), and pedagogy (classroom instruction and learning outcomes). The analysis of data ascertained through triangulated measures of interviews, observations, and document collection provided suggestions as to how music educators can design and teach within a music environment that is socially and culturally inclusive for all students.

Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of <i>Peer Gynt</i>

In this article I have attempted to use Umberto Eco’s semiotics of the text in order to analyze the famous “parable of the banquet,” which has come down to us in three versions from the gospels of Luke (14,15–24), Matthew (22,1–14) and Thomas (logion 64). In particular I have tried to consider (i) the socio-cultural context, or in other words the Sitz im Leben of the community within which the parable was written; (ii) the narrative structure of the parable, with the narrative nodes that stimulate the reader to cooperate in the work of interpretation and to draw inferences; (iii) the way in which the Model Author is portrayed in the text; (iv) the kind of Model Reader who is prefigured in the parable. The analysis has shown how in the parable of the banquet, the original level (deriving directly from the preaching of Jesus) characterized by a salvationist and social slant is always overlaid with another level that is hortatory, pedagogical or ecclesiological, and which takes on different connotations according to the different contexts. Generally the Evangelists are suggesting to their communities that they make changes in their behavior ranging from renunciation of wealth to the resetting of social ties, from a stance of constant vigilance to the practice of an active faith, from healthy detachment from worldly frivolity to a rigorous asceticism. Thus the editorial layers reveal differing narrative nodes in function of particular interpretative responses, different Model Authors and different Model Readers.

German scholars make a distinction between the subjective theory of legal interpretation (to get to know the legislator's will) and the objective theory of legal interpretation (to get to know the meaning of law), used in combination in legal practice.81 When finding a place for Eco's theory between them, it should be emphasised that Eco's model analyses not the intentions of the author, but the directives of the text. Text as a generative scheme and a syntactic-semantic-pragmatic grasp82 of its internal structures determines its interpretation. Accordingly, the law directs its reader. The model Reader is thus inscribed in the text. As introduced in a practical way in the current article, at all levels of actualised content – discursive, narrative, actantial and ideological – the peculiarity of law text is that the Model Reader is helped to actualise the right structures, stimulated by the author (legislature). The reader's ability to recognise codes and subcodes, to actualise the narrative structures of fabula, topic and frames, and the capacity to recognise ideological structures is directed by the text at all levels. Knowing this, and keeping it in mind, helps lawyers to interpret laws with maximum adherence to the text. Therefore it is possible that, in parallel to traditional interpretative canons, lawyers to try to take into account Eco's schema, which reminds them of their duty to be led by the text. The central question for juridical interpretation – uniformity – is assured by the ability of a text to create its Model Reader's competence. This is why the outcome should be more in accordance with the rule of law. Legal interpretation is, as a practical matter, an act of power83 and therefore should not be totally unconstrained. Eco's semiotic theory reminds us that each norm, in a similar way to a sign, contains a set of instructions84 for interpretation. These aspects of cooperation between the author and the reader – textual strategy that leads to partnership between the reader and the author85– consolidate the rule of law in interpretation of law-texts, a key point made by Umberto Eco. Turning back to the starting point concentrating particularly on the research potential of law and literature, I agree with Dunlop, who has suggested that research ‘about’ law will inevitably address much bigger questions than research ‘in’ law.86 It may be that the strongest benefit of Eco's interpretive account is highlighting totally different aspects as juridical interpretative theory. Differentiating discursive, narrative, actantial and ideological levels in law and finding a set of instructions from each of these levels makes the peculiarities of legal texts evident. At the same time finding meaning in a text in methodologically different ways helps to broaden the view of lawyers and may therefore have a self-reflectory as well as educative effect.

reviews don’t shed drops / of blood or sweat.” Such a stance with regard to literature and its conditions of possibility, materially evinced again and again in this collection, has liberating implications for writers of any sort—and for readers, too. Warren Motte University of Colorado Danica Vukićević. Visoki fabrički dimnjaci. Kraljevo, Serbia. Narodna Biblioteka Stefan Provovenčani. 2013. isbn 9788681355374 Danica Vukićević, a Serbian poet from Belgrade, offers us feminist social criticism in an often-fragmented free-verse form in Visoki fabrički dimnjaci (High smokestacks), her short sixth collection of poems. Her line lengths vary as do stanzas and lengths of parts—there is no uniformity here. Usually a poem is presented in one stanza with lines that vary from one to eleven words. Sometimes she is playful with words or makes up words, as in an untitled poem that begins “Let the dead continue to deaden,” or when she combines three words in one as “coldbrightshiny ” to describe the world and to say that this world “disappears and will again disappear and disappearing.” The poems also have little to no punctuation, and the ideas are disconnected fragments not always told from the first person . The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet is interspersed with the Latin alphabet , borrowing from German such as “Sieben gegy Theben” and other foreign or English/international terms, such as “pizza.” Most of the poems seem to be social commentary. Children speak to a dead father, apologizing and describing the conditions in a socialist state. In “Two Aunts,” a portrait of two women who gave their lives to the state—one as a worker in a hide factory and another as a mother upset about missed chances in life and a lack of self-fulfillment. In another poem, the speaker wonders if she’s a terrible mother who writes poems and has forgotten to send “a snack with the kid or who swears in front of her daughter.” She writes mockingly about women who are always hoping for something, while the men in her poems don’t notice difficulties. Besides having several poems composed of lists, she also writes an elegy about her grandfather, about visiting his grave for All Saint’s Day with her grandmother as a child and not understanding why people ate there as if with the dead and brought hot coffee in a thermos. She ends the book with a poem that begins “Humanity is utopia” and ends “I, the herald of freedom . . .” These are intriguing poems, although the book’s title doesn’t seem to fit the collection as a whole. The feminist background of the author is clear. This is provocative material that begs for attention from its audience. Biljana D. Obradović Xavier University of Louisiana Miscellaneous Umberto Eco. The Book of Legendary Lands. Alastair McEwen, tr. New York / London. Rizzoli Ex Libris / MacLehose. 2013. isbn 9780847841219 / 9780857052872 One only has to read two or three of Umberto Eco’s books to discover that he has made the study of lies and forgeries central to his work in both fiction and nonfiction. Eco is one of the most influential and popular public intellectuals in Europe. His thinking covers everything from semiotics to narrative structure, from Kant to popular culture. Eco is also a serious academic scholar whose work has influenced a generation of young scholars. And then, of course, there are his novels. The Book of Legendary Lands is the fourth book in an ongoing series Eco is publishing with Rizzoli . Putting the merit of the text aside for the moment, these books, and The Book of Legendary Lands in particular, are beautiful artworks in themselves. The books are printed on high-quality paper and feature a number of spectacular photographs and illustrations. This collection is at home equally in research libraries as well as on coffee tables. Quite simply, they are centerpieces of thought and artistic expression. And although the books are fairly expensive (they cost just under $50 for a hardback), they are worth the investment by any selfrespecting bibliophile. The Book of Legendary Lands contains fifteen chapters, bookended by an introduction and comprehensive appendixes. Like the other volumes in the series, each chapter contains...

Umberto Eco's theory of semiotics has taken an evolutionary path of development. A Theory of Semiotics, first English edition of Eco's semiotics theory, was a detailed explanation of his theory of signs.1 major criticism of this work, a lack of references to specific literary texts to elucidate theory, led to Role of Reader.2 This book repeated theoretical basis of first book, but it also included a major section of specific literary texts such as Sue's Les mysteres de Paris and Allais's Un drame bien parisien. Eco reaches most recent stage of his theoretical work with Name of Rose, a novel which was published in Italy in 1980 and translated into English in 1983.3 In this novel, as one critic suggests, Eco has moved from theory to semiotic fiction.4 As Eco himself says in closing line of his introduction to Role of Reader: [a]fter having to let semiotics speak abundantly about texts, it is correct to let a text speak by itself about its strategy (RR, 40). In The Theory of Signs and Role of Eco explains evolution of semiotics during past twenty years.5 During sixties, semiotics focused on theoretical foundation of signs or sign-tradition. During seventies, there occurred a violent shift from signs to texts; emphasis in theory shifted from considering what constituted a sign to formation of text. third stage (from end of seventies to present) does not center on generation of texts but their reading. Eco believes that current theory is concerned with the recognition of reader's response as a possibility built into textual strategy (TS, 35). According to Eco, reader plays an active role in textual interpretation because signs are constructed according to an inferential model. . Signs are beginning of a process that leads a reader to an series of progressive consequences (TS, 44) and are devices that evoke meaning for reader. This open quality of signs postulates an active role on part of their interpreter (TS, 45). By defining this vital theory of signs as moving reader to an infinite number of possibilities for interpreting a text, Eco argues that semiotics has moved beyond simply listing elaborate patterns for understanding signs and texts (a frequent criticism of theories) to importance of reader in understanding signs found in text. In Role of Reader Eco identifies possible reader as Reader, who deals interpretatively with codes within a text just as author deals generatively with codes. Model Reader and author thus co

The Third Position is one of the marginal currents in contemporary political thought. This current was represented by the International Third Position established in 1989. The values, concepts and arguments for the annihilation of parliamentary democracies and forms of contemporary international relations put forward by this organization raise the question: is the political thought of the Third Position (represented by the International Third Position) a fascist one? In the present article the author has formulated a hypothesis, according to which the political thought of the International Third Position is an ideology that meets the defi nition criteria of fascism. To verify it, the author used the theoretical framework presented in a lecture by the Italian writer and intellectual Umberto Eco (1932–2016) delivered in 1995 at Columbia University. The main method of verifying the hypothesis was a critical analysis of the elements of political thought of the International Third Position and comparing it with the features (symptoms) of fascism formulated by Eco. The source material for the analysis include documents of the International Third Position, as well as documents of political parties and organizations that make up the ITP from Italy and Poland. An important source were the ideological and journalistic texts written by the leaders of this movement from the UK, Poland and Italy. In the article, each of the fourteen features of fascism proposed by Umberto Eco was analyzed in the context of the thought of the Third Position. The research hypothesis has been positively verified. The political thought of the Third Position does indeed meet the defi nition criteria of fascism.

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age

Progressive education programs have increasingly conflicted with the growing preference for data-driven evaluations and testing in U.S. schools. This qualitative descriptive study examined how progressive educators navigate the tensions between their beliefs and teaching practices amidst high-stakes accountability in the United States. The target population included progressive education educators currently working in progressive programs across America. The study was grounded by the theoretical framework of dilemmatic spaces of Fransson and Grannäs (2013). Data sources for this qualitative descriptive design included a questionnaire utilizing the Beliefs About Primary Education Scale (BPES) and a semi-structured interview. Data analysis incorporated descriptive statistics and reflexive thematic analysis to address the problem statement. The findings revealed four key themes that highlight the beliefs and practices of contemporary progressive educators and their experiences in high-stakes educational settings. The identified themes were Freedom to Teach My Values, Accountability Not Tied to Standardized Tests, Challenges to My Beliefs, and Adapting to Changing Times. Recommendations for future research include studies on progressive educators in various contexts, dilemmatic spaces, high-stakes testing environments, and principled resistance.

The chapter explores commonalities between Mimetic Theory and two contemporary Muslim philosophers of dialogue, Fethullah Gulen and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. The comparison draws on Sufi concepts of negative and positive actions and parallels within Girardian theory. In the case of each of the three thinkers aligned here, the challenge of promoting a dialogical interchange while avoiding relativistic of core religious conviction (Christian and Muslim) is acknowledged. In this regard, those passages in the Qur’an which proclaim that human diversity and plurality are a part of God’s plan are highlighted. The author affirms the claim that Islam is indeed part of the ‘Abrahamic revolution’ and that Girard’s theoretical framework can be adapted to non-Christian faith traditions.

Reviewed by: Crime Fiction as World Literature ed. by Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen Eric Sandberg Nilsson, Louise, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen, eds. Crime Fiction as World Literature. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Pp. vii+301. US$135.00 hardcover, US$32.35 paperback, US$28.88 ebook. It is something of a critical commonplace-or perhaps it would be better to say a rhetorical flourish-to bemoan the scholarly neglect of crime fiction. This is a genre that is, as the editors of Crime Fiction as World Literature, Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen, point out, “a significant participant in the international sphere of world literature” (2), and one that is both hugely popular and tightly entangled with elite literary production (3). Crime fiction, on the one hand, accounts for seven of the top ten most frequently borrowed authors in the British Public library system, at least of works intended for adult consumption, such as James Patterson and Agatha Christie, both of whom appear on the list (“Most Borrowed”). It is, on the other hand, closely associated with high-culture figures such as Umberto Eco, whose 1983 The Name of the Rose is an overt detective novel with a protagonist, William of Baskerville, directly linked to the most famous figure in the genre, and Jorge Luis Borges, who continued and extended Edgar Allan Poe’s groundbreaking exploration of the genre’s potentials in stories such as “Death and the Compass.” Crime fiction thus clearly deserves the sustained attention of literary scholars. To be fair, despite the ritualistic complaints of crime fiction scholars-and I am as guilty as any in this regard-the genre has received a fair measure of attention. On “crime-novel-ridden campuses,” as the editors note, scholars are working hard, and have been for some years now, to understand the genre’s popularity (2–3), not to mention its particular aesthetic effects, its entanglement with modern technologies [End Page 433] and ideologies, its relationship to questions of race, gender, and sexuality, and much more. There are now several scholarly journals dedicated to the study of crime fiction, including the venerable McFarland publication Clues and the newly-launched Crime Fiction Studies from Edinburgh University Press, and the number of monographs and edited collections published annually in the field easily reaches double digits. This is, admittedly, a sparse academic crop when compared to the superabundance of work dedicated to, say, Virginia Woolf-or, of course, modernism more generally -but it certainly represents more scholarly interest than is accorded to some other forms of popular fiction-romance, for instance, or the spy novel. The editors of Crime Fiction as World Literature have, however, identified an important exception to this rule. “To date,” they note, “studies of crime fiction have largely been confined to individual national or at most regional traditions” (3). This means that the “complex, overlapping disjunctive networks and sub-networks” (3) within which crime fiction is created and read in a global context tend to be ignored. Consider, for example, the way a Japanese police procedural, inspired both by American generic models and an indigenous crime writing tradition, might be influenced, both in terms of composition, distribution, and reception, by the global success of, say, Scandinavian Noir, yet remain in other ways a resolutely local cultural artefact responding to and shaped by Japanese linguistic and cultural norms. This process of intersecting local and global factors gains another level of complexity when the resulting work is translated into English or another global language, and marketed internationally. Nilsson, Damrosch, and D’haen also point to the undue prominence regularly, indeed almost inevitably, given to British and American crime writing. Peter Messent’s The Crime Fiction Handbook, mentioned here in this context, may well be, as I believe, the single best introductory volume on the subject currently available, but it is true that of the fourteen key works to which Messent dedicates an individual chapter, all but two are from Britain and America. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s The Laughing Policeman and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are the exceptions-both...

Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic