Canonical Texts Research Articles

HERSTORY FEMALE IDENTITY: POSTMODERN FEMINIST REVISION OF FEMALE CHARACTERS IN ISLAMIC NARRATIVE IN MOHJA KAHF S HAGAR POEMS Aya ELBABLY

Contending with the re-reading and re-writing of history that has always excluded women from its grand narratives, postmodern feminist writers have always sought to revise canonical texts from a gynocentric perspective. Through their revisionary fiction, they aimed at challenging the subordinate, marginal and invisible position of the women characters in these texts. In place of the alleged objectivity of these accounts, postmodern feminist revisionist writers transform these ancient tales while employing female insight to re-narrate the story of humanity, yet through women’s perspective. Thus, they create new texts to challenge the fundamental gender stereotypes, namely the binary images generated by the ‘collective male fantasy’ of women as divine/demonic. This reclamation additionally shatters the imposed silence upon women, while granting these female characters the voice and agency they were denied. This paper demonstrates Mohja Kahf’s re-writing of the female characters, Hajar, Balqis and Zuleikha in her poetry collection Hagar Poems (2016). Kahf re-envisions the Islamic narrative by recollecting these women’s stories from a postmodern feminist revisionist perspective. Such re-appropriation of these female figures unsettles the traditional linear Islamic history that conventionally focuses on male characters and recreates these eminent women in new archetypal forms. In effect, this paper draws upon the critical theories of postmodernist revisionism, using Adrienne Rich’s seminal concept of ‘Re-vision’ and Alicia Ostriker’s feminist revisionist mythmaking theory, along with postmodern feminist historiography and in particular Linda Hutcheon’s theory of historiographic metafiction, in addition to Islamic feminism. Hence, the paper displays how Kahf recasts these notable women to create a dialogue between the past and the present. Her revisionary feminist re-narration renders a possible divergence to the patriarchal symbolic and problematizes the androcentric basis of history. Finally, the paper demonstrates how Kahf’s poetry reinforces modern Muslim women’s agency and enriches their subjectivity.

“Love thy fellow man”: about the history of creating of the Spiritual Concerto for bass and mixed choir on canonical texts and sayings of the Holy Fathers of the Church (Essay)

From the editorial group: While leaving the general concept of the publication as a collection of scientific papers unchanged, the editors found it possible, on the occasion of the 105th anniversary of Kharkiv I. P. Kotlyarevsky National University of Arts, to publish the material that, despite the lack of generally accepted signs of scientific study, may be of interest to the national and world music community and be useful to musicologists. The author of the only article in this additional rubric – a wellknown composer and teacher Viktor Muzhchyl – shares with readers his own memories about the history of creating one of his most famous works, a number of apt observations and deep reflections...

La masculinidad hegemónica dentro de un ambiente represivo: La ciudad y los perros de Mario Vargas Llosa

This article analyzes the construction of the male characters in La ciudad y los perros by Mario Vargas Llosa, a canonical text of Latin American literature, to provide a new reading focused on the discourses of power and sexuality. Thus, it is examined whether the repressive environment of the military school in which the cadets are immersed serves to reinforce gender codes or, on the contrary, to show multiple ways of “being a man”.

Genre Evolution of the Psalm and Ecclesiastical Miniature

"The article deals with the evolutionary processes of development of psalm and ecclesiastical miniature genres in choral music from the Renaissance to the present. It has been found that the wide possibilities of creating liturgical and non-church, concert and stage spiritual works gave the way to the enrichment of canonical канонічних principles of such traditional genre models as psalm and ecclesiastical miniature with individual stylistic features. Accordingly, gaining more and more popularity in church and secular music practice, psalms and ecclesiastical (prayer) miniatures have acquired nmiew qualities – canonical flexibility, genre mobility, openness to style and stylistic syntheses and authorial individualization in both textual and much more in musical aspects. The research methodology is based on historical-typological, genre-stylistic, and analytical methods. The historical-typological method relates to the problems of historical evolution of psalm and ecclesiastical miniature genre models, genre-stylistic and analytical methods allow to come to reasonable conclusions about the peculiarities of prayer texts in choral compositions created by modern Ukrainian composers. Traditions of Ukrainian spiritual music and at the same time the modern tendencies of the musical language are brightly shown in choral compositions. It is noted that the level of correlation between traditional and innovative referrence to psalm and ecclesiastical miniature genre models is determined by the individual creative approach of a certain composer, which requires making references to ecclesiastical texts and creating unique motets on their basis. Keywords: choral genres, psalm genre model, ecclesiastical (prayer) miniature, Ukrainian choral music, canonical texts. "

Contextualist Approach to Teaching Antisemitism in Philosophy Class

This paper argues for a ‘contextualist’ approach to teaching antisemitism in philosophy class. The traditional ‘systematic’ approach emphasizes recognizing and dismantling antisemitic aspects in canonical philosophical texts. The introduced contextualist approach broadens the perspective, treating philosophy as a continuous debate embedded in cultural realities. It focuses on historical controversies rather than isolated arguments, includes the voice and the perspectives of the oppressed, and so has the potential to broaden traditional philosophical canons. In the second half of the paper, we provide a case study of the contextualist approach, applying it to the ‘Berlin antisemitism controversy’ of 1879/80. We argue that the contextualist approach is particularly valuable when dealing with antisemitism as it teaches students to analyze arguments within the socio-political landscape and to identify antisemitic elements. The students thereby acquire the skills to discern antisemitic argumentation in other contexts as well. We suggest that this approach could be used to teach other debates in the history of philosophy, especially those tackling race, sex, and gender issues.

A Study of the Early-Stage Translations of Foxing佛性 in Chinese Buddhism: The Da Banniepan Jing大般涅槃經 Trans. Dharmakṣema and the Da Fangdeng Rulaizang Jing大方等如來藏經 Trans. Buddhabhadra

The Da fangdeng rulaizang jing大方等如來藏經 (Skt. Tathāgatagarbha-sūtra), translated by Buddhabhadra佛陀跋陀羅 (358–429) is one of the early Chinese Buddhist canon texts where the term foxing佛性 (Jp. busshō; Buddha-nature) is clearly used to express Buddha-nature. However, the term foxing cannot be confirmed in other extant translations of the Tathāgatagarbha-sūtra. Another early text in the Chinese Buddhist canon, the Da banniepan jing大般涅槃經 (Skt. Mahāparinirvāṇa-mahāsūtra), translated by Dharmakṣema曇無讖 (385?–433), also used the term foxing, which cannot be correspondingly confirmed in the surviving Sanskrit fragments of this scripture. Some significant differences in foxing between the Sanskrit fragments and Dharmakṣema’s translation of this sutra belong to the first twelve fascicles of Dharmakṣema’s translation completed under his collaborators’ support when he had not mastered the Chinese language. It is very likely that Faxian法顯 (337–422) translated a version of the Mahāparinirvāṇa-mahāsūtra that featured buddhadhātu as foxing. Buddhabhadra, in the same period, translated a version of the Tathāgatagarbha-sūtra, in which he favoured the term foxing over a literal translation of the Sanskrit. As another contemporary monk with these two, Dharmakṣema translated the Mahāparinirvāṇa-mahāsūtra, going further than Faxian by using the term foxing regularly. These texts influenced the Dilun monastic tradition地論宗. Among these, the term foxing and its Sinicism explanations played the most significant role, influencing the whole of the Chinese and even East Asian Buddhist thought.

Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel, by Teresa Huffman Traver

Reviewed by: Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel by Teresa Huffman Traver J. Russell Perkin (bio) Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel, by Teresa Huffman Traver; pp. viii + 133. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $59.99, $44.99 ebook. In Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel, an excellent monograph in the Palgrave Pivot series, Teresa Huffman Traver discusses Catholicity, defined as an appeal to a religious universal "that could transcend not just denominational barriers, but also national ones." She argues that both Catholic and Protestant Victorian novelists "used Catholicity as a way of articulating a religious form of cosmopolitanism" (2). The literary analysis is organized with reference to three mid-Victorian religious contexts: post-1845 Tractarianism, the Papal Aggression crisis, and the rise of ritualism. Catholicity is considered in relation to domesticity and ideas of Englishness, and the result is a study that illuminates the authors on whom Traver focuses, while also generating insights that could be applied to many other texts. The range of reference in Traver's study is commendable, moving from canonical texts such as Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) through novels that are mainly important in the history of Victorian religious controversy, such as John Henry Newman's Loss and Gain (1848) or Margaret Oliphant's The Perpetual Curate (1864), and including some extremely obscure Tractarian, Catholic, and anti-Catholic novels. The length limit of the Palgrave Pivot series (25,000–50,000 words) means that Traver remains very tightly focused on the main argument, and I sometimes found myself wishing for more discussion of the relationship between Catholicity and other forms of Victorian cosmopolitanism. For example, the contrast in Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857) between the cosmopolitan and heartless Stanhope family, who spend most of their time on the Italian shores of lake Como, and the quintessentially English Septimus Harding is determined by a variety of factors, some of them religious, but others social and cultural. However, perhaps this just suggests that Traver has opened up a rich vein for further exploration. A topic arising in several chapters is the effect of religious conversion on romantic relationships, especially the difficulties involved in mixed marriages between Catholics and Protestants. This theme is first addressed in chapter 2 where, by reading Villette in the [End Page 349] context of Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791), lady Georgiana Fullerton's Grantley Manor (1847), and Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (1841), Traver finds an effective new lens through which to discuss Brontë's novel. Two chapters focus on the ways in which domestic affection and the desire for a home can find themselves opposed to religious conviction, sometimes compelling the believer to seek a new home, perhaps as a member of a celibate religious community. In what is probably the strongest part of the book, Traver reads Elizabeth Shipton Harris's From Oxford to Rome (1847) and Newman's much better-known reply to it, Loss and Gain, alongside documentation of the long and complicated legal saga of Pierce and Cornelia Connelly, a married couple who converted to Roman Catholicism and consecrated themselves to religious life, after which the husband sought to reassert his conjugal rights, leading to a dispute over the competing jurisdictions of English law and Catholic canon law. The events of the Connelly case began in the mid-1830s and extended into the 1850s. In her discussion of Loss and Gain, Traver argues that Newman reverses the cause-and-effect relationship generally seen between conversion and celibacy, presenting the latter as a cause of conversion and portraying Roman Catholicism as a cosmopolitan religious ideal. Because of his canonization in 2019, interest in Newman as a thinker is strong, but Loss and Gain, which was once required reading for Victorian scholars, has dropped out of sight in literary studies. By means of an approach that is both carefully historicist and attentive to the novel's relationship to generic models, and especially to Harris's From Oxford to Rome, Traver indicates a way to reignite literary interest in Newman's neglected text. The question of the effect of conversion to Roman Catholicism on marriage...

Medieval Things: Agency, Materiality, and Narratives of Objects in Medieval German Literature and Beyond

Medieval Things: Agency, Materiality, and Narratives of Objects in Medieval German Literature and Beyond

Seeing Whiteness in the Nineteenth Century and Beyond

This essay argues for the importance of teaching the history of the idea of whiteness in nineteenth-century studies. It picks up questions from other fields of study and popular discourse—"Why does whiteness escape observation and examination? How might we learn to see its presence and power?"—and places them in the Victorian classroom. Strategies and texts for helping students think about whiteness as part of both critical race and nineteenth-century studies include approaching canonical texts from new perspectives, incorporating non-literary forms of media for analysis, and introducing students to critics like Toni Morrison and Richard Dyer.

REVISIONISM: CHALLENGING THE CANON THROUGH THE REVISIONARY NARRATIVES OF WIDE SARGASSO SEA AND FOE

Revisionism is the exercise of revising or reforming of one’s point of view to a previously held belief or accepted viewpoint of a situation. In literature, revisionism is the retreading of a canonical text through a different point of view. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is one such retelling of the story of the canonical text of Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, from the viewpoint of the minor character Bertha Mason. While Jane Eyre tells the story of a simple girl, Jane Eyre, and the happy ending of her romantic narrative, this paper will study Wide Sargasso Sea as a revisionary text that picks up the minor narrative of Bertha Mason as Antoinette, a Creole heiress, making it a tragic feminist grand narrative of postcolonial response to the romantic tale of Jane Eyre. Similarly, J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe is a revisionary text based on the canonical text Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Placing a woman in a male dominated world, the novel Foe highlights the issues of patriarchal oppression, colonial oppression, authorial tyranny, and language and power, which remain hidden in the romantic canonical narrative of Crusoe’s adventurous life and his valorous escape from the island where he was stranded for twenty eight years. This paper will trace the difference of a woman’s life and journey than a man’s in a world ruled by patriarchal laws. Moreover, this paper will establish the novel Foe as a revisionary text that retells Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe from a realistic and colonial point of view instead of a heroic tale.

Early Japanese Literature from Kojiki to Kaifuso: Subject Matter and Compilation

This paper attempts to introduce the early Japanese literature, historically. In this attempt, it covers the early modes of writing Japanese literature, use of Chinese for writing Japanese literature/history, the creation of Kana script system and its subsequent usage by the later writers. The paper deals with the emergence of early canonical literary works such as ‘Kojiki’, ‘Nihonshouki’, ‘Fudoki’, and ‘Kaifuso’, their subject matter and modes of compilation. It also discusses the existing comparative literary research undertaken so far to provide an idea for further work in this area. And this paper excludes the canonical text, ‘Manyoshu’ as there are a plenty of scholarly works and a direct translation of Volume ten of Manyoshu already available in Tamil.

The protective sacral formulas-parittās in buddhist texts of pāḷi canon

The article comprises an analysis of Buddhist texts with protective verbal formulas - parittās. It is based upon research of the Buddhist canonical and non-ca-nonical texts of Tipitaka - Pāḷi Canon. Special treatment is given to the three-fold ‘functional’ classification of Theravada canonical texts - Suttas and Jātakas, containing parittās. Following the classification, one can distinguish ‘protective’ parittās (equivalents of folk spells); ‘benevolent’ sacral formulas, which grant the success in the good undertaking; ‘soteriological’ ones, the main goal of which is to obtain the nirvāṇa. It comes out that parittās can be mundane with strictly utilitarian aims and super-mundane that have transcendental goals. The multi-functional characteristics of parittās are summarized in the article. The article comprises an analysis of plots of the non-canonical Theravada text "The Questions of King Milinda” that contain the critical discussion on parittās. As a result, the author concludes as follows. Despite Buddhist doctrinal critics of parittās reciting the fact of discussion of this practice in non-canonical Theravada texts confirms the value of parittās chanting in the tradition of Southern Buddhism.

The Rest is ‘not’ Silence: Rereading Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad as a Counterwriting Practice

The ideological construction of the Western literary canon sparked heated arguments, particularly after the 1980s, in the context of 'opening up the canon' issue. Since then, contemporary women writers have questioned the monolithic perspective of the literary tradition which has systematically ignored the experiences of women, minorities, and those from lower classes. As a reactionary yet strategic move, contemporary women writers have produced 'counterwritings' through rewriting canonical texts in order to undermine the patriarchal conventions of the literary pantheon and transform it into a polyphonic narrative entity through which the voices of the silenced, exploited and marginalized are heard. In Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (2001), Christian Moraru defines 'counterwriting' as a revisionary and critical rewriting practice that "work[s] on – and, again, obsessively work[s] through — other bodies of writings" because mythic stories "explain us," they are "founding-texts" (2001, p. 8). This article explores Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's (1939- ) novella The Penelopiad (2005) as a contemporary revisionary myth-making practice in the light of Christian Moraru's 'counterwriting' concept. The article will provide a theoretical background to discuss ‘counterwritings’. It then deals with Atwood's motivation for producing a 'counterwriting’, as well as how she relies on the source text while being unconstrained by its restrictions using postmodern narrative strategies. The article also sheds light on how a founding myth of the Western literary tradition has been used as a reference point in a counterwriting to question the authority of its source text, Homer’s The Odyssey.

Soft charisma as an impediment to fundamentalist discourse

The Anthroposophical Society in Sweden is, in the view of many of its members, going through tough times. Times of crisis and the search for a collective identity often inspire the formation of ideological rifts within a larger religious community. One way of responding to challenges is by turning to doctrines and texts stemming from a purportedly pristine past for guidance – in other words, by developing a fundamentalist discourse. A striking fact about the Anthroposophical Society, in Sweden as well as internationally, is that such returns to a set of canonical texts by the founder of the movement appear to be self-defeating. There are deeply rooted structural features within the Anthroposophical Society as an institution that impede any one voice from gaining significant traction and imposing a collective identity upon the movement. This article uses the example of the Anthroposophical Society in Sweden and the conundrum it repeatedly faces when addressing a perceived crisis in order to formulate a model of charismatic leadership that more generally accounts for the lack of success of fundamentalist discourses in religious movements with certain types of organisational culture.

Introduction: The New Approaches to the Quantitative Structural Analysis of Chinese History

This essay describes the papers published in this issue as (mostly) belonging to one problematic and methodological field, thus composing one scientific school or tradition. The main traits of this school are briefly outlined in the beginning. The papers written by the founder of the school, D. Deopik and his coauthor B. Ganshin comprise the first part of the issue, together with the papers of A. Andreeva and A. Kozhukhov. These papers are united by the problem of the era names, their functions, and correlation between them and real political process in the history of various empires, which existed on the territory of East Asia. The two papers comprising the second part of the issue, written by V. Bashkeev and V. Glazunova, have a common period of studies, that being the Western Han Empire. The last two papers of the issue are authored by O. Bonch-Osmolovskaya and M. Tseluyko. They deal with the problems of canon studies in China, researching exegetic tradition and the contents of ancient canonical text Shujing, respectively. Each paper presented in this issue either broadens or deepens the field of studies for their common scientific school, meaning that it either includes a new hitherto untouched (in this specific scientific school) problem and proposes a distinct approach to solving it or outlines a complication of the already existing problem, proposing an additional method for solving it. The only exception is the paper of O. Bonch-Osmolovskaya, which does not belong to the same scientific school as other papers on the issue but represents a good point for reflection and comparison.

The Evolutions of Modernist Epic by Václav Paris

Reviewed by: The Evolutions of Modernist Epic by Václav Paris Derek Hand (bio) THE EVOLUTIONS OF MODERNIST EPIC, by Václav Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. vi + 215 pp. $80.00 cloth, ebook. Václav Paris's critical study brings together what appears to be a collection of unlikely literary bedfellows. Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, James Joyce's Ulysses, Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma are considered side-by-side as a means of demonstrating [End Page 733] new ways of comparing modernist novels from disparate places, times, and cultures.1 Each text, in its way, is unorthodox or marginal, certainly experimental in form and theme. They can also be judged to adopt the epic form in relation to how they are consciously concerned with national narratives and themes. The breadth of the critical engagement is impressive, ranging as it does between Ireland, Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Czechoslovakia. The choice of less canonical texts is also interesting because, as is always the case, in discovering less well-known authors and texts that have fallen between the cracks of critical appraisal, our appreciation of any given issue or theoretical concept is deepened and made more complete. The basic thesis, though, underpinning the engagement with these diverse texts, is simplicity itself. Each of these writers and texts is deeply concerned with ideas of evolution that are dominated by Charles Darwin's theory in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Their concern with this theory is not just confined to the realm of biology, but the way it underlines much thinking about evolution in numerous areas such as linguistics, national and communal development, and, importantly, literature. Paris contends that each author under consideration challenges and breaks down numerous monolithic concepts linked to Darwinian discourse at work in our usual approaches to modernist literature in the twentieth century. The genre of epic itself needs to be re-evaluated within this dominant frame of progression and development. T. S. Eliot's often-cited analysis of Joyce's Ulysses—that Joyce's utilization of the Homeric scaffolding gave shape and order to his novel—has had far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the use of epic in modernist literature.2 In one way, its prevalence suggests a pretty straightforward relationship between the past and the present, with the traditional epic form giving the semblance of coherence to the fragmentations of contemporary experience. That coherence—from Eliot's perspective—is something longed for rather than actually achieved. Thus, just as it gives some sense of shape, the epic's presence also simultaneously pinpoints the absence of a unitary culture in the modern moment. Coupled with György Lukács assertion that epic is an impossibility in the modern world because historical totality is no longer accessible or representable,3 the conclusion to be drawn is that epic is simply out of place, or time, in the twentieth century. Its appearance, then, only signifies a degeneration from the heroic past to the less-than-heroic present day. Paris's thesis works against such a reductive and simplifying perception, exposing the occurrence of epic in modern literature to an analysis that complicates and broadens our assessment of its workings in a variety of novels from a variety of locations. This last point is central to the overall argument made in The Evolution of Modernist Epic. The present study further develops the [End Page 734] hypothesis that the traditional approach to modernism that configured it as a solely metropolitan event is biased and misses the point that, in reality, what we have are modernisms that engage and interact with other modernisms. Thus the novels examined confront that metropolitan bias that in Darwinian terms positions them forever on the periphery, underdeveloped and outside typical ideas of progression. This critique of imperialism and its deployment of applied Darwinism is a very useful touchstone in this respect and opens up its singular dominance to a plurality of approaches and interpretations that undermines that dominance. Of particular interest is how this approach is applied to the work of Joyce...

How to Read the Analects Eight Hours a Day: The Variety of Dujing (Reading Classics) Experiences amid the Confucian Revival

Since the 1980s, the Confucian revival in contemporary Chinese society has grown as a local, national, and even global phenomenon (Billioud and Thoraval 2015; Hubbert 2019). While the Confucian revival is often perceived as propelled by the official endorsement of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), this article focuses on a grassroots Confucian movement called dujing that is conducted in private settings outside state schools by adherents of the pedagogy, often contradicting the official educational policy and mainstream habit of reading. Dujing mobilises students (aged 4 to 18) to spend intensive time (eight hours a day) on repetitive reading aloud of ancient canonical texts without pedagogical exegesis (Billioud and Thoraval 2015; Wang 2018), which entails relinquishing mainstream schooling. Based on immersive and embodied participant observation, this article illustrates why and how students, teachers, and parents have become devoted to the radical practice of reading classics. Combining social study of Confucianism and anthropological scholarship on language and reading, this article articulates how the experiential repetition, long-term commitment, listening, interaction, and discipline in dujing schools help participants make sense of the dujing reading practice as the pursuit of dao, although this reading practice does not involve immediate interpretative labour to make sense of the classical texts being read. By comparing two dujing schools that practice distinct methods of reading, this article also shows the internal dynamic that drives the development, split, and reflection of dujing.

Socialism Order of Worth and Analytical Adequacy Axiom

Boltanski and Thévenot (On justification. Economies of worth, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2006) constructed in their seminal work On Justification the Orders of Worth (OW) framework as a research program for further empirical and theoretical development. This article suggests two methodological additions to extend the analytical capacities of the OW framework: The Socialism OW and the analytical adequacy axiom. The polito-philosophical Socialism OW, which acknowledges '(collective) welfare' as its mode of evaluation (worth) and the higher principle of 'solidarity' as its test, is rooted in the political philosophy of Rosanvallon (The society of equals, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2013). In addition to the systematic justification of the canonical text, this article also offers a tabular presentation for the construction of a new OW in relation to the axioms. In the article, first, the existing OW are put under scrutiny discussing the test category of solidarity, which was added and creates an analytic overload for the Civic OW. Second, analyzing the case of the German binary statutory health system, comprising of a private (first-class) and a public (second-class) healthcare, the capacities of the existing OW are discussed to identify a blank spot in the OW framework for empirical analysis. Accordingly, the descriptive analysis of the German binary health system is less about how the system is justified, and much more about understanding how given OW operate within it as coordinative devices. This systematic analysis of a situation of (temporary) agreements, especially of investments in forms, amends the OW use for empirical analysis of critique and justification in a situation.

СПЕЦИФІКА ВИКЛАДАННЯ ПРЕДМЕТУ «ЛІТЕРАТУРА ЗАРУБІЖНИХ КРАЇН» У ЗВО

The article deals with the issue of teaching foreign literature. The role of literature in a classroom has been re-assessed recently and many now view literary texts as providing rich linguistic input, effective stimuli for students to express themselves in other languages and a potential source of learner motivation. The literature used in classrooms today is no longer restricted to canonical texts from certain countries e.g. UK, USA, but includes the work of writers from a diverse range of countries and cultures using different forms of English. Literary texts can be studied in their original forms or in simplified or abridged versions. An increasing number of stories in English are written specifically for learners of other languages. Literary texts provide opportunities for multi-sensorial classroom experiences and can appeal to learners with different learning styles. Literary texts offer a rich source of linguistic input and can help learners to practise the four skills – speaking, listening, reading and writing – in addition to exemplifying grammatical structures and presenting new vocabulary. Teachers should be ready to provide a background for the reading to take place. In an ideal situation, the preparation would help motivate the student to want to read, and a bit of creative imagination would also be required here.

Alexander Ryndin's 104 Psalm: the Problem of Expression of the Author's Will Within the Canon

The article considers the 104th Psalm from the all-night vigil cycle, dedicated to the memory of the father of Astrakhan composer Alexander Ryndin, who has a rich experience in church singing and the practice of composing on canonical liturgical texts. Biographical information about the composer and facts explaining the address to the composition on canonical liturgical texts are introduced into scientific use. The analysis uses an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the text, characteristic of liturgical musicology. It combines the actual musicological analysis and interpretation of the liturgical text in the traditions of Russian liturgy (from M.Skaballanovich’s point of view). Choral timbrization (differentiation of voices within the group) techniques, opposition and comparison of different choir groups were found in the psalm. Attention is focused on the stylistic reference point in the rules of church singing in the harmonisation of F.Lvov, a composer of classical-romantic style, not alien to sentimental notes. The principles of stylisation in the spirit of Old Russian chant arrangements, to the traditions of which the author also adheres, by composers of the new Moscow school are considered. The need to determine the measure of the author's will within the framework of the liturgical-singing canon, and the correspondence to the prayer states, characteristic of the evening service, are indicated. It is noted that taking into account their own auditory experience of perceiving other authors’ chants, the composer follows, first of all, the musical patterns of composition development. In this case, the original personal component significantly pushes the boundaries of the existing liturgical canon. A review of the methods by which it is possible to study original works on canonical liturgical texts is also carried out. The problem of secularisation, to which the traditional genres of Orthodox worship are subjected, is touched upon. It is associated with the renewal of the means of musical expression of choral music.