Lorand Gaspar : L’épistolier poète-chirurgien

This article argues for the distinctive nature of cognition involved in correspondence, arguing that this cognition is highly creative and in corollary, arguing that this cognition is positioned within social and cultural conditions that must be considered in a full analysis. The author argues that letters are often written from the perspective of an “embodied epistolary present,” the letter writer’s temporal, spatial, and corporeal viewpoint depicted through the use of present tense and other markers. The author further elaborates the relationship between correspondence and common ground. The embodied epistolary present facilitates the “imagined copresence” of writer and recipient (possible through conceptual blending), which the author describes as “the fictitious conceit that a recipient is present to serve as an interlocutor during the writer’s embodied compositional present.” Like the face-to-face conversation that it simulates, epistolary discourse depicted with imagined copresence relies on the common ground shared by the writer and recipient; the author argues that the common ground also shapes other discourse modes present in correspondence including narrative episodes and reporting. The author further shows that epistolary discourse reflects cultural norms, shaping what writers include and elide. To demonstrate all these points, the author draws examples from the letter collection Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert, 1795–1821, edited by Margaret Law Callcott (1992). Calvert was a plantation mistress in postrevolutionary Maryland who corresponded with intimate relatives in Belgium; as such, Calvert’s letters demonstrate both the imaginative work that letters deploy and the common ground that shapes epistolary content.

The article is an analysis of the epistolary discourse of the Kazakh poet Khamit Yergaliyev, a famous representative of the literary activity of the second half of the last century in Kazakhstan. The aim of the work is to linguistically investigate the correspondence of the poet, laureate of the State Prize of the Republic of Kazakhstan, with a focus on revealing his subjective stylistic and grammatical peculiarities as a bilingual.The study is based on the analysis of epistols from the personal archive of Hamit Yergaliyev, as well as using scientific publications and written materials stored in the National Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Emphasis is placed on the importance of studying epistolary discourse in both scientific and creative communication with contemporaries in order to form a linguistic picture of a certain time period.The scientific significance of the study lies in the possibility of revealing the characteristic features of the construction of discursive constructions of letter writers, which will give an opportunity to shed light on the various linguistic approaches used in the creation of communicative act in the conditions of bilingual component of the ethno-linguistic landscape of Kazakhstan. Such a study is important for a deeper understanding of linguistic dynamics and cultural aspects of communication in Kazakhstan.

This article suggests the significance of letters as texts in the long 18th century. It provides a survey of past and present critical approaches to letters in the period, and outlines the various ways in which scholars use letters in their research. The article argues against the tendency to conceive of the letter as a distinct literary genre, and rather suggests that scholars should think in terms of a broader epistolary discourse.

يتميز فن التصوير قدرته على استيعاب مختلف الأساليب والأفكار والمفاهيم . وهو ما حدث على مدى الحركات والمدارس الفنية في مختلف الحقبات التاريخية . بداية من أساليب محاكاة الطبيعة وصولا الى محاولات التعبير عن انفعالات الفنان الذاتية . أحيانا يلجأ الفنان إلى إعادة التفكير في ما هو مألوف في الحياة وتحويله الي غريب . ويبحث عن رموزا خفية مثل الأشباح والمرايات والقرين والظل والشبيه للتعبير عن مشاعره المختلفة والمتباينة . هناك العديد من الأعمال الفنية التي يمكن أن نطلق عليها غريبة أو تحتوي على ألغاز وغموض وغرابة ، مما يدفع إلى البحث وراء الانعكاسات والدلالات . مثل استحضار الماضي في الحاضر ، تجسيد الميت في الحي والحي في الميت . اظهار الظاهر في الباطن والباطن في الظاهر ، تجسيد الخفي في المتجسد و المتجسد في الخفي . وقد تعتمد على كسرالحدود الزمنية والمكانية ، او تكرار الاماكن والإيقاعات مثل الخطوط والأشكال والثيمات . من الممكن أن يحتوي العمل الفني على مشاهد تشبه الحلم والخيالات الرمزية ، او تركيبات غير متوقعة للاشياء . كما قد تتمثل الغرابة في أعمال فنية تحتوي علي تلقائية وعفوية بدائية أو تأثيرات عشوائية . وغير ذلك من الأشياء الغريبة مثل الألعاب والدمى الكبيرة ، أو شخصيات مشوهة أو أشكال هجينة بين الحيوان والإنسان أو بين حيوان وحيوان آخر . كما قد تحتوي الأعمال الفنية على تناولات مجازية أو خفية عن الموضوعات الدينية او المحرمة .قد تحتوي اللوحات على تجسيد حالات الهلوسة التخيلية مثل لوحات الاتجاه السريالي الذي انتهج منهج الغرابة في أعمالها باستخدام تجاور الغريب الغامض والمشوه للأشياء والموضوعات بهدف إحداث ثورة في التجربة الإنسانية ، وخلق توازن بين الرؤية العقلانية للحياة مع قوة اللاوعي والأحلام. الكلمات المفتاحية: الغريب ،المألوف،الهجين ،السيريالية ، التصوير Abstract The art of painting is characterized by its ability to absorb various styles, ideas, and concepts. This is what happened throughout the artistic movements and schools in various historical eras. The methods of simulating nature to the attempts to express the artist's subjective emotions. Sometimes the artist resorts to rethinking what is familiar in life and turning it into strange. And he searches for hidden symbols such as ghosts, mirrors, companions, shadows, and similarities to express his mixed and different feelings. There are many works of art that we can call strange or contain mysteries, ambiguity, and strangeness, which prompts the search for reflections and connotations. Such as bringing the past into the present, embodying the dead in the living, the living in the dead, and manifesting the outward in the inner, the inner in the outward, and Embodiment of the hidden in the embodied and embodied in the hidden. It may depend on breaking temporal and spatial boundaries, or repetition of places and rhythms such as lines, shapes, and themes. The artwork may contain dream-like scenes, symbolic fantasies, or unexpected combinations of objects. Strangeness may also be represented in works of art that contain spontaneity, primitive spontaneity, or random effects. And other strange things such as large toys and dolls, or distorted figures, or hybrid forms between an animal and a person, or between an animal and another animal. Artworks may also contain allegorical or hidden approaches to religious or taboo subjects. Paintings may contain the embodiment of imaginary hallucinations, such as the paintings of the surrealist trend that adopted the strange approach in their works by using the juxtaposition of the mysterious and distorted stranger to objects and subjects to revolutionize, the human experience, creating a balance between the rational view of life with the power of the subconscious and dreams.

This article is devoted to the transformations that literary communication has undergone on the Internet. The author describes how literary criticism and its role in the digital medium has changed, indicates the deep cultural changes resulting from the development of forms of communication in social media, and characterizes how the Internet has transformed literature. New media has given rise to new literary genres; it has also altered literature itself, recasting it in a hybrid form on the border between the literature and audiovisual media. The ongoing changes do not pose a threat to printed literature, but are an expression of the strength of the Internet’s impact on literary communication and its participants. It is necessary to refrain from easy evaluations of the ongoing processes and to focus on accurately describing, analyzing and interpreting them as a new and relatively unknown part of the expanding literary field.

When the Spanish colonizers reached Pampanga, a province in the northern part of the Philippines, the meeting between the East and the West meant an impact of the grafted civilization over the conquered people. Religious and cultural hybridization (Bhaba 1994) inevitably took place in Pampanga. Kapampangan verbal art modestly welcomed an alien counterpart and a cultural synthesis in a “liminal space” took place. What the Spaniards introduced—religious literature, metrical romances and the zarzuela—to advance their imperialistic cause pressed on the folk and blended naturally with the Kapampangan sensibility. Kapampangan literature took on a hybrid form that came to be an incitement for the movement of the province’s literary history. Mariano Proceso Pabalan Byron, a Kapampangan poet, was the first to domesticate the form and content of the zarzuela, a Spanish literary genre. He, together with other writers such as Crisostomo Soto, established a zarzuela tradition and produced masterpieces. The enthusiasm for the zarzuela lasted for decades even after World War II; poets like Jose Gallardo easily adopted the favorite literary genre of his predecessors. The genre was most welcome because its elements constituted their familiar world. The zarzuelas that were produced reveal the constant appropriation of the native values and beliefs in the foreign literary form.

Why Genre Matters:A Case for the Importance of Aesthetics in the Verse Memoirs of Marilyn Nelson and Jacqueline Woodson Richard Flynn (bio) In a 2016 article in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Giselle Liza Anatol discusses Jacqueline Woodson's memoir in verse, Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), in light of the "postcolonial Gothic," arguing that reading the book as Gothic (in the tradition of African-American Gothic works such as Virginia Hamilton's Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush or Toni Morrison's Beloved) may help disrupt "the stark border that has arisen between realist genres and fantastic ones in literature for young people" (405–6). She laments that Woodson's book "will be discussed primarily—and perhaps exclusively—as a work of African American realism, as literary nonfiction, or as aligned with the conventions of bildungsroman or life writing" (405). Anatol argues that the "dualism" she identifies as "the stark border" between the genres of realism and fantasy "only serves to inhibit the publishing world's acceptance of narratives that refuse to fit into easy categories and thus restricts the publication of more texts by African American and African diasporic writers who have been raised in cultures that refuse such sharp distinctions." Anatol's argument is compelling. However, except for a footnote in which she notes that it is a "stunning collection of poetry" (417), she does not discuss Brown Girl Dreaming as poetry. For there is another stark border in the field of children's literature studies, the border between children's fiction and other genres of children's literature, especially poetry. Mike Cadden has described the verse novel as a hybrid form that occupies a "place between poetry and drama . . . drama and the novel," a form that "serv[es] as a nexus among the three genres," by combining "the [End Page 109] most complementary aspects of those forms" ("Verse Novel" 26). He argues that critics "may be pursuing a false choice by insisting that the verse novel be one thing or the other." The "'problem' of the verse novel," he argues, does not lie in "reconciling the poetic and prosaic" (21). Looking at the verse novel as a hybrid affords the teacher with considerable pedagogical possibilities. "Studying the verse novel," Cadden writes, "will build in students an appreciation for other blends and crossovers so common in contemporary literature, such as multimedia texts, multigenre texts, intertextuality, and cross-audience texts" (26). Nevertheless, there is a problematic subtext in Cadden's discussion in his suggestion that a focus on the poetic qualities of verse novels is a dead end because, especially in the case of novels composed of free verse lyrics, the authors aren't writing poetry at all, but "enjambed prose written to emphasize a preferred pace and rhythm of speaking to the self" (22). While Cadden includes poetry as part of his potentially productive hybrid, he dismisses the necessity of paying critical attention to poetry and poetics in evaluating the book-length verse narrative. Emphasizing "novel" over "verse," he underestimates the importance of the verse novelist's skill as a poet. If a verse novelist indeed produces nothing more than "enjambed prose," that would seem to me to represent a significant aesthetic failure. In From Tongue to Text, Debbie Pullinger discusses the differences between the lyric and the narrative that "have important implications for thinking about children's poetry" (25). "Where narrative's concern is with external events and its mode is retrospection," she writes, "lyric's is on internal events and its mode is introspection" (20). This is not to say that "lyric and narrative [are] mutually exclusive" (20)—Pullinger offers the example of lyrical prose—but as she notes, citing a number of critics including myself, "children's literature critics used to swimming strongly in the clear flow of narrative fiction often seem to find themselves stranded when they enter the muddy puddles of poetry" (5). The works I will be discussing in this essay, Marilyn Nelson's How I Discovered Poetry (2014) and Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming are, strictly speaking, verse memoirs1 rather than verse novels. In his contribution to this special issue, Cadden discusses the common peritextual features that Woodson's...

This essay investigates the distinction between major and minor characters by analysing the contemporary literary reception of a minor figure from one of the most canonical works in world literature: Ismene, Antigone’s sister in Sophocles’s Antigone. While Sophocles’s tragedy continues to elicit a startling number of rewritings and adaptations, the last two decades have seen a remarkable increase in rewritings which bring the heroine’s sister Ismene, a minor character in the original play, to the forefront. This multilingual, multi-generic, world literary corpus engages with Ismene’s relationship to heroism and sacrifice, moving away from tragedy and instead turning to a variety of genres: monologues, short stories, non-tragic plays, comedies, as well as hybrid forms that incorporate intermedial references. While much has been written about postcolonial and feminist rewritings of canonical Western texts, very little has been said about the attachments which secondary figures might elicit in peripheral literatures and minor authors. This focus, as this essay will show, helps refine notions of agency, solidarity, and connectivity in theories of the minor. The analysis presented here underscores the aesthetic, generic, and political implications of the revisionary representation of minor figures by contrasting Jeremy Menekseoglu’s theatrical rewriting Ismene (US, 2004) and Lot Vekemans’s monologue Zus van (Sister of, The Netherlands, 2005) as two distinct modes of engaging with Ismene as a paradigmatic minor figure. Pursuing the genre-theoretical and political questions raised by what Jeremy Rosen has termed “minor-character elaborations”, this essay identifies the practice of rewriting as a key literary strategy to decentre the major position of certain figures and genres in world literature. In dialogue with Rosen’s theoretical work, I argue for an aesthetic, enunciative, stylistic understanding of genre, which is best able to raise both the question of the minor character and that of minor-character elaborations within debates surrounding the minor.

In his article Monomedial Hybridization in Contemporary Poetry Jan Baetens argues that the debate on hybridization tends to overemphasize the blurring of boundaries between signs and sign types in all possible forms: combination of types within a given work (multimodal image-texts, comics and photo-novels, sound poetry, etc.), adaptation and remediation of one sign type by another one (filmic adaptations of novels or novelizations of films, for instance), and, more generally, the simultaneous elaboration of works in various (the phenomenon that Jenkins called convergence or trans-media storytelling). While all these hybridizations have become mainstream today, if we take into account Mitchell's thesis that there are no visual media by which he meansthat there are no 'pure' media, it becomes possible to draw attention to a more traditional, but perhaps more challenging and disturbing practice of sign usage: the crossing of borders between literary genres and text types, which may involve also the mixture of styles, modes, traditions, audiences and introduce new forms of genre hybridization

The research aims to explore the dynamics of the emergence in the written speech of various addressers – on the one hand, standard, stereotypical, commonly accepted forms of addressing the addressee, and individual, non-standard addresses that do not belong to the regularly repeated elements peculiar of the author’s epistolary art, on the other. Accordingly, the objectives include 1) a search for criteria to distinguish the stereotypical forms of address, 2) the establishment of epistolary address models formation, and 3) the comparison of new vocative models emergence dynamics in terms of the gradual rise of the total amount of letters in various addressers. To achieve the aforementioned aim, we have utilized the descriptive method, content analysis, and linguistic modelling approach. To distinguish between the vocative formations regularly used by this or that letter writer and nonstandard, unique writer’s individuality-embodying addresses, we have introduced a one-per cent statistical threshold. This made it possible to attribute to the stable components of the addresser’s behaviour those address models whose verbal implementations had reached over 1% of the total number of addresses in this author’s epistolary. The number of models that had crossed the one-per cent statistical threshold appeared to be much lower than the number of non-standard addresses, yet, in total, regular vocative formations implemented in the letters of any addresser quantitatively exceed the non-usual vocative constructions. Consequently, to provide an accurate picture of the correspondence party’s written speech stylistics, it is necessary to explore the relationship between the regular and irregular in their written speech. To compare the dynamics of the rise of the models that had crossed the statistical threshold, and all the address models recorded in the letters of various writers, we built a diagram that compares the number of letters (a horizontal axis) and the number of vocative formation models implemented in those letters (a vertical axis). The results of comparing the dynamics of vocative models formation in the array of letters by A.F. Koni and V.G. Korolenko arranged in chronological order suggest that, as a rule, the commencement of the correspondence is accompanied by standard and commonly used vocative figures, which we consider to be the stereotypical elements of addressers’ speech behaviour and meet linguistic and ethical standards of written communication. In the case of prolonged correspondence, the individual peculiarities of authors’ vocative art find their expression in a continuous flow of letters. The emergence of new vocative models that become productive in the middle or even at the terminal stage of correspondence by this or that addresser is possible, but it depends on extralinguistic factors (the change of communicants’ social status, the expansion of correspondents’ circle etc.). The dynamics of the rise of stereotypical vocation formations largely follow certain general rules of speech generation; the introduction of irregular address models in epistolary discourse depends on a wide range of communication conditions and characterizes the addresser’s individual style. Further research perspectives are connected with the need to clarify the extralinguistic factors affecting the distribution of the stereotypical and irregular address models in the dynamics of written speech generation, as well as with the consideration in this respect of other structural features of a letter.

The article investigates citizens’ letters addressed to officials in the second half of the 20th century. The authors show that people perceived the government as a multicomponent structure. People addressed their letters to the leaders of the Soviet State, to the central government and local authorities, to various social institutions, as well as to journals and newspapers. Soviet citizens often addressed their letters both to the central newspapers such as Trud (Labour), Izvestiia (News), Krokodil (Crocodile) and to local ones. Soviet citizens wrote their letters hoping to solve their everyday problems as well as in response to propaganda and agitation. To understand the specifics of this epistolary discourse, one should investigate both the issues discussed in a letter and its format: politeness formulas, emotions, arguments, etc. The research shows that Soviet citizens treated authorities through the prism of social and political guidelines and patterns. The chronological analysis enables the researchers to explore the evolution of the interaction between citizens and authorities and the dynamics of citizens’ confidence in the actions of the government. The research shows that in the second half of the 20th century citizens viewed the actions of the government with growing criticism. In their letters, citizens did not express requests, they criticized. The ideology experienced a crisis, the gap between common people and authorities was growing, letter writers were more demanding, social trust was gradually declining to increase during the Era of Perestroika. The authors conclude that social transformations had a great impact on the interaction between society and authorities.

Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education

The crime fiction genre is one of many clichés, including isolated locations, technology struggles, law enforcement errors, red herrings, and more. These clichés interact with various class, gender, language, and religious identities that influence how investigations evolve and how the genre is received by its audience. Tana French’s The Secret Place (2014) and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer (2018) all interact with these genre conventions through isolated boarding schools and mansions on hilltops, law enforcement errors, investigative dynamic duos, and more, but the most significant of genre conventions is their consideration of the scapegoat and its functionality. In this essay, a scapegoat is a character knowingly forced to endure the blame and punishment for another’s actions. While these pieces follow genre conventions in the presence of a scapegoat, each piece of literature juggles red herrings and the class-based scapegoats in new lights. These pieces transcend the genre by forcefully calling out the class-based scapegoat, considering the perspective of the scapegoat, and vindicating the scapegoat. This essay will investigate the role of the scapegoat within The Secret Place and My Sister, the Serial Killer within the context of literary crime fiction genre conventions with Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) as a framework to examine the significance of class, race, and violence in the decolonization of literary crime fiction. Tana French and Oyinkan Braithwaite transcend genre conventions established by wealthy, white English authors such as Agatha Christie by confronting contemporary issues through their consideration of the class-based scapegoat. This confrontational transcendence utilizes scapegoats to call out the marginalization and oppression of diverse populations by privileged individuals and subsequently replace the traditionally privileged individuals with the previously marginalized people.

In contemporary urban landscapes, traditional religious spaces, once defined strictly by physical boundaries of temples, churches, mosques, and other sacred places, increasingly exhibit ambiguity and fluidity. Driven by rapid urbanization, secularization trends, decentralization of urban planning, and a global resurgence of spirituality, religious practices and experiences frequently transcend conventional religious boundaries, integrating into diverse urban contexts. This study critically examines how religious spaces manifest ambiguity within urbanization, exploring mechanisms underlying their reconstruction in response to modern socio-spatial changes. Through interdisciplinary theoretical lenses such as spatial theory, post-secularism, and religious sociology, combined with case studies of diverse urban environments, the study elaborates on the structural, social, and spiritual factors influencing the reshaping of religious spatial boundaries. Findings indicate a marked departure from traditional spatial logic, highlighting the emergence of hybrid, ephemeral, and decentralized forms of urban religious spaces. The implications underscore a significant shift in understanding religion’s role within contemporary urban contexts, suggesting critical revisions for urban planning and religious governance.

MUjiCA, barbara. de Avila, Lettered Woman. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2009. xiv + 278 pp.For many, of Avila (1515-1582) remains quintessential mystic among pantheon of Catholic saints. If one were only to read her spiritual classic, Interior Castle, or view Gianlorenzo Bernini's amazing study in marble, Saint in Ecstasy, one might conclude that this was a woman so otherworldly, so rapt with visions, that her feet literally never touched ground. Over last thirty- five years, however, scholars of history, literature, and religious studies have worked to recover a different a fiesh-and-blood woman whose feet were very much planted on ground. Barbara Mujica's readable new book makes a significant contribution to this endeavor. In this, first full-length study in English of Teresa's extant letters, Mujica amply demonstrates how an examination of Teresa's efforts provides insight into workings of her personality, relationships, and (103).Mujica begins with an introduction, The Pen and Sword, which provides historical background necessary to understand Teresa's life and work as a monastic reformer and founder of a new religious order, Discalced Carmelites. She also situates as a writer of letters. saint probably composed thousands of letters during her lifetime, but even 450 that have remained contain a wealth of information on everything from court politics to remedies for rheumatism.In chapter 1, From de Ahumada to Saint Teresa, Mujica summarizes Teresa's life and reform efforts, highlighting personal and societal circumstances that would inspire her to devote so much of her time and energy to production of letters. This chapter also serves as an excellent review of recent literature on of Avila and Discalced reform of Carmelite order. I found particularly intriguing and convincing Mujica's discussion of Teresa's position as a member of a family of conversos (converts from Judaism and their descendants). Like so many conversos, her father and uncles were active merchants and property owners who were involved in numerous lawsuits. Mujica argues, would have had early exposure to world of lawyers, notaries, contracts, and licenses, and become acutely conscious of the importance of written word (23). This orientation toward writing and record-keeping would serve her well as she later engaged in her own legal battles and business dealings as administrator of some fourteen convents.Chapter 2, Teresa de Jesus: Woman of Letters, one of book's strongest, contributes to a growing body of scholarship on letter-writing as a literary genre, means of expression, and vehicle for life-writing in early modern Europe, especially for women. For letter-writing was a political tool as well, as she attempted to protect and promote her reform movement and direct a growing network of religious houses. Mujica traveled to Spain to examine Teresa's remaining autograph letters, and her attention to detail is readily apparent in this chapter. reader learns fascinating information about actual mechanics of letter- writing, such as types of pens used by state of her handwriting at various stages in her life, and logistics of postage and delivery. An ascetic who spurned worldly titles and honors, nevertheless understood strategic importance of deference and diplomacy when corresponding with elites who could aid Discalced Carmelite reform. Thus she took care to use fine paper and ink and paid almost obsessive attention to correct forms of address and other matters of epistolary etiquette (58).Although founded a new religious order for women, she had to deal with a great many men, some sympathetic to her cause, many skeptical or overtly antagonistic. In chapter 3, God's Warrior and Her Epistolary Weapons, Mujica uses Teresa's letters to reconstruct her protracted struggle to establish Discalced Carmelite houses for nuns, and later for friars, gain approval of ecclesiastical authorities in Spain and Rome, and separate her order from older, Caked Carmelites. …