TEMPORALITY OF THE NARRATIVE OF CONTEMPORARY TRAVEL LITERATURE (Based on Cees Nooteboom’s work)

Using a corpus of accounts from travellers who visited Europe between the 1750s and 1850s, this article examines the conscious and unconscious influence of time in travel literature. Taking into account the editorial freedoms that have emerged since the mid-18th century, the study examines the central role of date in the travel narrative, and then focuses on the study of short chronology, narrative temporalities and the explicit expression of the sense of time.

This article explores a structural shift in techniques of representation in eighteenth-century travel literature as a reaction to the changing needs of cameralist governance, one in which space is no longer grasped as enyclopedic and all-encompassing. Instead of being understood as static territory, space is increasingly represented as a dynamic and continually updatable dataset. As a consequence, travel literature itself goes in search of new representational modes appropriate to this new understanding of space. And as I show, the medium of the book becomes increasingly problematic in this regard. As early modern travel literature (ars Apodemica) largely splits in the eighteenth century into statistics and geography on the one hand and literary travel experiences on the other, each of these categories requires new forms of mediation for their successful presentation. Common to both, however, remains a desire to communicate an immediacy of perception through representation. Taking Friedrich Nicolai’s Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781 as my primary example, I show how the medium of the book arrives at its own media boundary, one whose transgression necessarily results in failure because it can no longer account for an epistemological divide that has already transpired. This difference has far-reaching implications for the place of the book within the humanistic sciences today.

Rereading Travellers to the East aim to offer a new perspective on travel literature, the question of nation-building and the history of orientalism. Rereading Travellers focuses on the rereadings to which early modern travel literature about Asia has been subjected by different actors involved in the political, economic, cultural and intellectual life of post-unification Italy. The authors highlight how this literature has been reinterpreted and reused for political and ideological purposes in the context of the formation and reformation of collective identities, from the Risorgimento to the Fascist regime and the early republic. By showing the potential of the notion of rereading, the volume outlines a history of the political and cultural legacy of travel literature which goes well beyond Italy.

Modern travel literature is the research material used in the article, and particularly how it represents a particular vision of multiculturalism. One can make use of contemporary travel reports as an example of nowadays very popular branch of literature relating to other cultures, thereby confirming the consequential status of multiculturalism as a socio-cultural aspect. As the methodological basis of the work, modern literary and cultural onomastics, and onomastics of discourse have been selected. Discourse is understood as a communication phenomenon of a higher level, concentrating various components and not only verbal ones. Furthermore, it is motivated by social, ideological, and cultural factors which are manifested in different forms. The crucial methodological context is the adoption of discourse linguistics as an extensive research program that can help to create the additional context of the proper names observed in travel literature. The aim of the work is to highlight the main discourse strategies concerning the multiculturalism aspects of proper names present in modern travel literature. Three primary strategies were identified i.e. assimilation, exoticisation and neutralisation. Depending on the strategy adopted, the proper name relates to the ideological level of discourse to a varying degree, it also profiles the Known–Other/Strange relation, approximates given cultures or reflects their disparateness. As one can see, the research has identified many different points of liaison between proper names and the ideology of the text and, what is more, the creation of the world in a chosen discourse. Moreover, it confirms the thesis that proper names, analyzed on the discourse level, requires a context approach revealing its whole semantic and functional potential in microtext as well as macrotext.

Everyone knows that literary modernism is related to blues tradition, but no one knows just how. The common preoccupation with boundaries, however, gives us the clue we need as we cross over from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in our literary travels. Dominant culture’s customary estimation of the kinship between jazz and modern literature is well represented by the primitivism that both presumably share, a primitivism whose language and assumptions D. H. Lawrence, for example, makes abundantly clear in his reading of Freud in 1921. However unintentionally, Lawrence’s metaphor of “the darkness” (1921, 5) into which Freud the explorer descends links modern imagination with expansionism and colonialism, and links them both, as Lawrence’s American disciple Norman Mailer will go on to show in The White Negro (1957) and An American Dream (1965), to a negotiation with the savage energy assigned to blackness as though it were the eruption of pure natural force. Like nature in blues tradition, however, nature in modernism is more often the occasion for a meditation on form than the expression of a primitive state paradoxically-and problematically-represented by black culture and its achievements.

Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception

Notes on Contributors

The Romantic period saw the first generations of professional women writers flourish in Great Britain. Literary history is only now giving them the attention they deserve, for the quality of their writings and for their popularity in their own time. This collection of new essays by leading scholars explores the challenges and achievements of this fascinating set of women writers, including Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley alongside many lesser-known female authors writing and publishing during this period. Chapters consider major literary genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, travel writing, histories, essays, and political writing, as well as topics such as globalization, colonialism, feminism, economics, families, sexualities, aging, and war. The volume shows how gender intersected with other aspects of identity and with cultural concerns that then shaped the work of authors, critics, and readers.

Travel and Modernist Literature

Following the strong program in cultural sociology, I propose a strong program in the sociology of liter-ature, which treats literary pieces rightly as relatively autonomous cultural entities and “independent var-iables”. To outline the epistemological foundations of the new research program, I compare how social knowledge comes into existence through the sociological text and the text of literary fiction. I discuss the representation of social reality in interpretive research, with Isaac Reed’s book Interpretation and Social Knowledge as a starting point. To claim literary autonomy, I outline some of the aspects which social the-ory shares with literary fiction. I am mainly interested in how social theory and literary fiction mediate social knowledge to their readers via the aesthetic experience. I identify two main categories of social knowledge mediated by literature: existential understanding and Zeitgeist. Discussing the sociological treatment of several novels, I look at how these two categories intertwine and support each other to create colorful, sensitive, but also robust and deep social knowledge, which condenses aesthetic, existential, and non-discursive aspects of social experience together with the “big picture” of whole societies. I argue that only by overcoming the often-assumed inferiority of literature in sociological research can sociology real-ize its full potential in understanding the meanings of social life.

Abstract: Discussions of interart relations have often relied on a rhetoric of sexual perversion to reaffirm artistic borders, from G. E. Lessing's Laocoön (1766) to twentieth-century theories of medium specificity. This article considers the "perversity" of interart relations embedded in Lolita , Nabokov's novel of pedophilia. While the commingling of the arts is a key aspect of Nabokov's visual poetics, the logic of this principle is interrogated in Lolita . Whether perceiving Lolita as a visual image or imagining a mural of their sexual union, Humbert repeatedly attempts to transfigure his temporal narrative into the spatial realm of the visual as a means of preserving his "nymphet" from the corruption of time. This, I suggest, is analogous to Nabokov's own artistic efforts to escape the temporal progression imposed by sequential narrative form by appealing to the visual arts. By examining Lolita within the context of a long-standing discourse that sees relations between the sister arts as perverse, I argue that the novel's overt transgression of sexual taboos discloses an underlying aesthetic anxiety about the transgression of interart boundaries, in particular the novel's aspiration towards spatial form. Central to this is the novel's reworking of the Pygmalion myth, one of the foundational myths not only about artistic creation, but about the artist as a transgressive figure who violates aesthetic as well as erotic laws. The article ultimately concludes that, in Lolita , Nabokov revalorizes the sequential aspect of narrative (and the temporality of re-reading) as a positive attribute of novelistic form, not as something to be overcome in imitation of painting.

There have been numerous calls to incorporate narrative more explicitly into social science methods. Towards that end, this paper identifies a range of choices concerning the analysis of narrative data. I argue that preserving the most basic features of narrative (sequential structure) is helpful, but that incorporating more aspects of narrative (such as the focal actor(s), narrative voice, and evaluative context) creates some interesting possibilities in the area of collaborative systems research.

In conjunction with the development of interdisciplinary studies in linguistics (language philosophy, psychology, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, etc.), scientists have undertaken multiple research directions, aimed at elucidating various aspects related to the interaction between language and ontic reality. The increasingly obvious role of the anthropocentric paradigm has directed modern linguistics beyond the multitude of disciplines related to linguistics, to completely new avenues of research. In the modern literature it is issued the idea that any statement can contain both the basic aspect, which is the logical-objective, and the emotional-appreciative; in other words, the logical content transmits certain information, while the emotional-appreciative one highlights the position of the speaking subject towards the received information. The amazing variety of linguistic means capable of externalizing a wide range of affective states belong to a multidimensional paradigm at the lexical, morphological, syntactic, stylistic level, etc. , thus favoring sound arguments for consolidating the pan-emotional theory, according to which every expresses word in a language carries an emotional connotation. A pragmatic investigation of the subject matter analyzes what concerns the individual imaginary world of individuals based on their own experiences and perceptions, rather than real world phenomena. In the present approach, we set out to analyze the emotional reactions generated by psycho-emotional states. Such a reaction would be, in our opinion, explicit or implicit, the emotional reply, related to the notion of appreciation as a component of the modal system expressed in speech. Based on modern research, the subjective attitude of individuals is examined in direct connection with the practice of speech, as an inherent part of it.

COVID-19 pandemic has once again raised the long-standing problem of trust in science and scientists. However, many approaches tend, on one hand, to analyze science as if it were an entirely autonomous entity – and thus to attribute the causes of the decline in trust to factors external to it; on the other hand, these approaches address the question of trust in a dichotomous manner, in terms of presence or absence of it. Rather than assuming a causal and linear direction that proceeds from one domain (‘the outside’ of science) to the other (science), we will draw on those perspectives that investigate the ways in which science interacts with other subsystems. This article aims to propose a more nuanced approach that can contribute to overcoming binary categorizations such as the one that distinguishes between processes internal to the scientific community and factors external to it; such categorizations are somehow implicit in the widespread use of concepts like ‘infodemic’, ‘disinformation’ or ‘pseudoscience’. To this end, two research directions were followed: first, two conflicts between experts that animated the public debate in Italy during the Sars-Cov-2 outbreak and forced scientists to interact following different social subsystems logics were analyzed. Second, in order to go beyond a binary view of trust and to further reveal attitudes toward science and scientists, we conducted a pilot study on a sample of online readers of two Italian newspapers. Overall, a more nuanced view of the issue of trust toward scientists emerges, which is expressed in five different attitudes toward them, and which takes into consideration both the way in which scientists communicate and the philosophy of science they implicitly express in media interactions.

Fiona Littlejohn’s paper undertakes a comparative reading of two city novels set in London and Berlin in times of economic depression in late 1920s. In both novels, Gabriele Tergit’s Kasebier erobert den Kurfurstendamm (Cheesebeer Conquers Kurfurstendamm) and J.B. Priestley’s Angel Pavement , female and male characters respond differently to a changing urban environment: paper shows striking similarities in perception of city under aspect of gender and generation. In both texts women’s experiences of living city contrast starkly with men’s views of a lifeless city. While two middle-aged male characters perceive effects of modernisation as an alienating threat to traditional patriarchal values, very same phenomena provide younger female characters with spaces for mobility and liberation. Both men project their fears, as Littlejohn argues, on urban landscape; they respond to its threats by retreating into ‘non urban spaces’, as interior of private home, or by clinging to rural niches within city. The two professional women, on other hand, are travelling through city on their own, which helps them to break free from constraints of domestic interior. However, these liberating journeys are not independent of their economic situation. In Priestley’s novel horizon of female protagonist’s urban journeys is restricted by her income. This leaves her dependent on financial resources of a male companion, whose company is also crucial for gaining access to places which are normally no-go areas for women. This paper explores questions of class, as well as gender, and serves to challenge notions of City and its images in literature, such as those which exclusively identify urban modernism with universalising tendencies, when dominant discourse in modernist literature identifies experiences of isolation and strangeness as the reality of all human (Raymond Williams). In texts by Priestley and Tergit two female characters, both of whom are from middle class backgrounds, differ in their perceptions of harsh economic realities of city life in late 1920s. Priestley’s protagonist responds to her negative perceptions of commercialisation by taking imaginary flights of fantasy into sheltered scenes of bourgeois family life or into travel literature, where women visit exotic places as companions to adventurous men. This heroine leans towards romanticised perceptions of her surroundings which also mirror contemporary imperialist values. Tergit’s text, on other hand, provides a female protagonist with a more realistic perspective, one which also contrasts with escapist fantasies of her male counterpart. Here woman is shown as being more at home in city. Walking about freely without ‘any particular purpose’, she is not dependent on a male companion. This construction of a female city dweller challenges, according to Littlejohn, gendered concept of the flâneur , which is prevalent in literary perceptions of City. However, different perspectives on gender relations employed by Priestley and Tergit do not, in end, prevent either woman from being deserted by their male lovers - who leave city on their own in order to explore other spaces.