European Texts Research Articles

«Принцип Златовласки» в романе С. Рашди «Кишот» (2019): соотношение прецедентных имён, лингвокультурем и экзотической лексики

The twelfth novel (“Quichotte”) by the English-speaking writer of Indian origin Salman Rushdie was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2019. Like many other literary works by the Booker Prize winner of 1981, the analyzed novel testifies to the necessity of following the Goldilocks Principle when resorting to precedent names, culturally-loaded words and loanwords from non-European languages. In order to effectively convey his ideas to the target reader the author juggles with exotic loanwords (84 lexemes), culturally-loaded words (52 lexemes) and over 100 allusions to European and North American texts, persons and phenomena. The exotic loanwords and the culturally-loaded words contribute to the depiction of the place, time and characters; however, the intertextual elements perform an evaluation function and an aesthetic function.

Autres plumes littéraires d'expression française au Maroc ed. by Rabia Redouane

Reviewed by: Autres plumes littéraires d'expression française au Maroc ed. by Rabia Redouane Joan Listernick Redouane, Rabia, éd. Autres plumes littéraires d'expression française au Maroc. L'Harmattan, 2019. ISBN 978-2-343-16838-8. Pp. 274. This volume contains a series of critical essays on texts by Moroccan authors, chosen not only for the quality of their work, but for the fact that they are little known outside Morocco. In her introduction, Rabia Redouane points to the diversity and development of Moroccan literature, highlighting its reception by several critics (Marc Gontard, Abderrahman Tenkoul, Najib Redouane, Khalid Zekri, and Annie Devergnas-Dieumegard, [End Page 212] in particular). Redouane, the author of Femmes arabes et écritures francophones Machrek—Maghreb (2014), establishes the relationship between themes and style. She then succeeds in selecting essays that forefront this link. The thematic focus of the primary authors presented runs the gamut from the disenchantment of a lost youth to the condition of women in Morocco, taking into account the role of Islamic fundamentalism. Taken as a whole, the essays paint a picture of a contemporary Morocco, the troubling aspects of which preoccupy the authors. In one of the most interesting essays, Mimoso-Ruiz analyzes how Mokhtar Chaoui transforms the magical realism of Haitian literature to suit Moroccan culture. "[U]n printemps avec des rivières de sang et des montagnes de cadavres," writes Chaoui, referring to the Arab Spring. Mimoso-Ruiz also explains that Chaoui draws from the conventions of the fable and fairy tales to use animals as metaphors. In fact, this recycling of codes drawn from French and Francophone literature occurs in other texts examined in this volume. As mentioned in Mésavage's essay on Mohammed Laallaoui: "Aussi la mythologie grecque, le théâtre français classique, une légende marocaine et une certaine modernité dégradée se marient-ils pour créer un effet insolite et original qui lie le passé et le présent de trois cultures" (160). But such plurality of influences is used to express its own specific reality: the texts often find their inspiration in pan-African themes, even while resonating stylistically with European (and in particular, French and Francophone) texts. The critics in this volume do not seem to pick up on this distinction. This collection should be of interest to scholars of Maghrebi literature who want to broaden their corpus of study. As the essays are short and not meant to be an exhaustive study of the authors' works, they pique our interest without satiating it, and point in directions where new research would be fruitful. Thus, Redouane does succeed in enlarging the canon of Moroccan writers whose work deserves analysis. Joan Listernick Boston University (MA) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

ПРЕДЫСТОРИЯ ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЙ ИМАГОЛОГИИ: ТРАДИЦИЯ КАК ЦЕЛЕУКАЗАНИЕ

Focusing on the history of Russian imagology, the article aims at identifying the origins of the imagological interests in research and public thought in Russia in the first and second thirds of the 20th century as well as research approaches of that time that may be required by modern imagology. This analytical insight arises from the endeavor of contemporary scholars to update and develop the imagology paradigm. The Patriotic War of 1812 and the entry of Russian troops into Paris in 1814 gave a powerful impulse to the imagological interests in Russian society. These events highlighted the irrational nature of European stereotypes and provided an opportunity for the Russian intellectual elite to observe how the European image of Russia evolves depending on the historical situation, which, in its turn, induced the Russians to collect and conceptualise the information about the image of Russia in European texts of different epochs. The Rossica Department in the Imperial Public Library was opened for the scholars to do bibliographic research of foreign publications about Russia. Commenting foreign essays about Russia was an important part of Russian academic and journalistic activity. Such publications regularly appeared in Syn Otechestva, Otechestvennye zapiski, Severnyy Arkhiv, Sovremennik, Biblioteka dlya chteniya, Russkiy vestnik, and Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniya. The first imagological research proper was V.A. Klyuchevsky’s Skazaniya inostrantsev o Moskovskom gosudarstve [Legends of Foreigners about the Moscow State, 1866]. Without a critical analysis of foreign sources, the historian uses excerpts from different foreign texts to reconstruct an integral image of the Moscow state in the European consciousness. Although the first Russian imagological researches appeared in history, they laid the basis for the development of literary criticism. The book collection “Rossica” allowed Russian and foreign scholars (M.P. Alekseev, B.L. Modzalevsky, E.V. Tarle, M. Kadot) to study the Western literary opinion about Russia. Yu.M. Lotman relied on the imagological observations made by V.A. Klyuchevsky and his followers. Methodology of Soviet imagological research in literary criticism (M.P. Alekseev, B.G. Reizov, A.K. Vinogradov) was guided by the principles of history. These facts give grounds to speak about the formation of the Russian tradition of imagological researches, which has two characteristics: 1) following the principle of historicity and 2) focus on the functioning of the image of Russia in European literature of different epochs. In this context, it seems relevant for the Russian imagological works to focus on the phenomenon of “reverse reception” in Russian literature of the 19th century, that is on the Russian writers’ endeavor to comprehend the European image of Russia (to create a “meta-image”) and to oppose this image with their own holistic idea of Russia and its national features.

Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England by David K. Coley

Reviewed by: Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England by David K. Coley Frank Swannack Coley, David K., Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture), Columbus, The Ohio State University Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 236; 10 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$99.95; ISBN 9780814213902. Death and the Pearl Maiden tackles a literary mystery that has puzzled late medieval scholars. The plague known as the Black Death, which caused millions of deaths in Europe and England, is hardly mentioned in late medieval English literature. David K. Coley offers a complex, multifaceted, and often brilliant explanation of why the unflinching descriptions of the Black Death’s devastation in European texts make England’s underwhelming literary response disturbingly conspicuous. Coley focuses on four Middle English works preserved in the British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x, article 3 (Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) written at the height of the endemic between the 1370s and 1390s. Coley argues that the collected poems powerfully meditate on the plague and its cultural aftermath, eschewing a direct account. His argument uses trauma as a literary tool because traumatic events negotiate the fraught space ‘between acknowledgement and suppression’ (p. 6). The need to voice untold horrors becomes muted by their very nature. Coley’s analytical method is split between providing insightful readings, and self-critical comments. Early in the Introduction, he admits that the texts being examined contain no substantial evidence of engaging with the plague. He adds that his thesis is entirely speculative and based on allusive references. [End Page 195] His admission, however, becomes a critique of the New Historicist approach requiring that literature has a direct and clearly traceable engagement with historic events. Throughout the study, the pattern of anticipating the critical response to his readings enables Coley to add another layer to his speculative insights. Death and the Pearl Maiden examines first the second poem from the MS Cotton Nero A.x, Cleanness. The poem’s descriptions of dismemberment and death graphically adapted from the Book of Genesis resonate with the Black Death. By looking back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife acts as a ‘traumatic witness’ to catastrophic events (p. 34). She embodies Coley’s thesis as being a readable symbol for an unspeakable traumatic event and its silenced victims. The analysis of Pearl begins with an illustration of Christ’s crucifixion from the Holkham Bible (1327–40). As it precedes the Black Death, the image is startling both in its prescience and how it undermines Coley’s thesis. The illustration shows Christ’s body covered with blue-black spots and sores. Coley’s point is that the illustration provides a common context in which the sins of the world can be absorbed into any pestilence-influenced text. The illustration also shows that because Pearl contains many references to bodily sores and swellings, it does not necessarily signify the Black Death. Perhaps in recognition of such criticism, Coley augments his argument through the poem’s references to odours and summertime that resonate further with the medieval experience of the plague. Patience adapts the biblical story of Jonah, who, fleeing from God’s command to go to Nineveh, ends up in a whale’s body for three days. Before analysing the poem, Coley discusses intriguing research on the psychology of flight. Rather than escaping the terror, flight involves fleeing to familiar enclosures, even if it means more danger. By magnifying Jonah’s notion of flight without refuge in Patience, Coley provides a convincing historical context to the futility of trying to escape the Black Death. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Coley examines the female character Morgan le Fay. He argues that she represents the cultural changes the Black Death thrust upon England. The plague’s devastation of over half of England’s population created a labour shortage, giving aristocratic women greater autonomy in social and economic affairs. As the monstrous sorceress and crone, Morgan le Fay personifies the immoral female sexuality associated with the spreading of the Black Death. Furthermore, as the Lady of the Manor’s associate, her influential presence in...

ЧЕЛОБИТНАЯ КАК ИСТОЧНИК ДЛЯ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ ИСТОРИИ РОССИЙСКОГО ОБЩЕСТВА XVII-XVIII ВВ.: СТРУКТУРА И ЭВОЛЮЦИЯ ФОРМУЛЯРА

The article is devoted to analysing a petition, a frequent source of the XVII-XVIII centuries. Despite numerous publications on this issue recently, there are no fundamental works covering the development of this genre in Russia in the early modern period. The paper is intended to compensate for the existing gap. Using the form analysis, the author traces the changes that occurred in the Russian state administration system over a long chronological period. The researcher concludes that, regardless of numerous reforms of the XVIII century, the form of petition developed mostly in the natural way. In this connection, the statement that during Peter the Great’s reign, the West European text models prevailed is dubious.

The Magic Lantern as a Lens for Observing the Eye in Tokugawa Japan: Technology, translation, and theRangakumovement

AbstractThis article explores the thoughts and ideas associated with magic-lantern technology in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Japan. Its primary focus is on trends in Japanese thought from the 1770s until the 1820s, with specific reference to theRangaku(‘Dutch Studies’) movement. The article examines connections between the magic lantern and a wider discourse within Japan on epistemology, knowledge about nature, and the study of the human body, centring upon the device's vital role in the endeavour to understand the workings of the human eye. Through this lens, a fresh perspective is offered on the role of critical analysis in the translation and interpretation of European texts in Tokugawa Japan, as well as on the shifting prominence of empiricism and deductive reasoning in Japanese epistemology. In this way, the history of the magic lantern is used to look beyond the prevailing West-centred narrative of global technological and intellectual development.

The ant as metaphor: Orientalism, imperialism and myrmecology [W. T. Stearn Student Essay

Myrmecological texts that circulated in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth century can be interpreted, from the perspective of the post-colonial theory of Orientalism, as belonging to a wider body of colonial-era European literature that has historically portrayed New World peoples and animals as the “Other”. In implicit ways, colonial-era literature on ant behaviour reproduces the Orientalist dichotomy of civilization and savagery. At different times, the ant colony has been portrayed, somewhat paradoxically, as both a civilized society in miniature and a foreign savage order. On the one hand, some British myrmecological texts rendered the ant as a symbol of Britishness and civilization: the elevated image of the ant reflected the imperialist trope that non-white people were inferior, savage Others. On the other hand, the ant colony was portrayed elsewhere in British myrmecological literature – and in other European texts that were translated into English and circulated in Britain – as a dangerous, merciless and aggressive Otherness itself. Accordingly, in these texts, the ant and the “native” are depicted as accomplices who share an antagonism toward the colonial project. Both these positive and negative representations of the ant reflect and reproduce Orientalist tropes, which have historically been used to emphasize the perceived inferior status of non-white colonial subjects.

The Right to a Compensation In Case Of Long Delay of Flights: A Proposal for a Future Reform

The European Court of Justice case law on Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 has set out the right to a standardized compensation in case of long delay of a flight, a right which is not recognized according to the wording of the Regulation. The procedure to amend the European text is currently on a standstill, something that constitutes an opportunity to debate the future of the referred right. This article presents several options, showing a preference for coming back to the wording of the Regulation and not to recognize the right to a standardized compensation in case of long delay. A second proposal, more realistic, consists on replacing the lump sum compensation for one calculated on the basis of the ticket price. The arguments offered in the article concern both an abstract and a specific dimension, that is, both the rationale behind the current rule and its content are considered. The first set of arguments focuses on the justification for regulation and on some EU goals, such as enhancing consumer protection and fostering the internal market. The second set of arguments highlights some criticisms raised against the European Court of Justice (ECJ)’s case law and the fact that the current rule distorts competition because it favours certain business models, something that may ultimately harm European consumers.

Rearranging the figures on the tapestry: what Japanese direct translation of European texts can tell us about kanbun kundoku

From the earliest stages of reading and writing in the Japanese archipelago, the methodology of kanbun kundoku (vernacular reading of literary Sinitic) has been an important means of engagement with Chinese texts. The kanbun kundoku process of glossing and syntactic rearrangement transforms a literary Sinitic source text into a kind of ‘translationese’ that preserves as closely as possible the diction and structure of the original while making it accessible to readers who may have little or no competence in spoken varieties of Chinese. Yet whether this process should be understood as fundamentally a form of translation is a matter of debate among scholars. In this article, I argue that looking at the early modern phenomenon of ōbun kundoku, by which Japanese scholars applied kundoku methodology to European languages (including Latin, Portuguese, Dutch and English), can offer a valuable perspective. These forms of direct translation are an important although comparatively under-studied aspect of Japanese encounters with European texts and they offer an instructive perspective on kanbun kundoku: the longstanding Japanese method of engagement with foreign-language texts that was their inspiration. The theoretical writings of Japan’s early modern scholars of Dutch unmistakably acknowledge a basic commonality between these two forms of kundoku while also clarifying the ways in which the application of kundoku to European languages was distinct from application to literary Sinitic.

Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association

Reviewed by: Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association Ana Schwartz (bio) Annual Meeting of the Modern Language AssociationChicago, 01 3–6, 2019 Two years ago, at one of three panels sponsored by the Society of Early Americanists at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Philadelphia—the panel that anticipated American [End Page 879] Literature'srecent "Post Exceptionalist Puritans" special issue—a senior scholar asked the three participants to reflect on how our field might ensure that early American texts remain relevant to our students, the scholars and researchers of the future. At its most basic, the question expressed a desire to engage productively with fellow early Americanists, particularly the relatively junior panel participants, regarding the question of relevance. Most everyone in the room seemed to believe that at least some of the value of studying early America is the opportunity to reveal continuities between the social and political contestations preserved in the texts of the past and the social and political contestations taking place in the present. Yet a meaningful and somewhat dissonant concern remains latent in the original question, a concern that expresses itself in the question's implicitly jeremiad tone. That is, in addition to expressing an avowed commitment to future generations of young scholars, the question seems also to express an anxiety—an anxiety unusually dynamic within early American texts themselves—regarding the possible loss of certain priorities and presumptions that earlier generations of scholars understood as foundational, so much so that the field seems unimaginable without them. 1 Put otherwise, for many students, both formal and informal, both within and beyond our classrooms, early American themes such as the legal and scientific institutionalization of race as an instrument of domination, the systematic undermining of sovereignty and self-determination beyond the borders of the nation-state, and the dispossession from ancestral territories are and have long been intimately relevant concerns. Though the study of these topics and the recognition of this infelicitous relevance is not unique to junior researchers, 2the task of articulating this relevance and, perhaps, making these themes lessoppressively relevant has in recent years precipitated a turn in larger numbers from newer members of early American literary studies to archives and methods from beyond the received boundaries of the field, an expansiveness that, given the material structures of the academic institutions within which our scholarship takes place, might feel threatening to the security of the discipline. Researchers from beyond the field of early American studies, as the 2019 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association made evident, have drawn richly from early American texts and contexts, and are, in turn, offering methods and approaches that might dynamically answer the troubling appearance of a gap between our students' interests and our canonical objects. [End Page 880] The Society of Early Americanists sponsored four panels at the 2019 MLA meeting. Two took place back-to-back on the first day; two back-to-back on the third. At the first panel, "Disavowed Roots," organized by Jordan Stein, R. J. Boutelle, Jared Hickman, and Jerome McGann shared new work that variously approached the task of extricating early Americanist scholarship from the racist premises on which it was inaugurated. Boutelle discussed immanent critiques of the nation's founding documents authored by participants in the early Colored Conventions in the nineteenth century; Hickman reassessed the endorsement of American exceptionalism conventionally attributed to that phrase's coiner, Louis Hartz, in texts like The Liberal Tradition; and McGann outlined the distorting remediations produced by conventional literary-historical approaches to texts like Indian treaties, which, he observed, were experienced differently between participating parties. Such distorting remediation was one of the shared preoccupations of the second society-sponsored panel, Steffi Dippold and Lauren Coats's "Beyond Recovery," anticipating the forthcoming Early American Literaturespecial issue of the same name. Tacitly engaging recent work in adjacent fields, six panelists lingered over various overlapping questions about the ethics of engaging with compromised archives, questions already being taken up beyond our field. 3The breadth of these object lessons was impressive. John Pollack began with identifying the first—and frustratingly indecipherable—Indigenous American words recorded in European texts...

David K. Coley, Death and the Pearl-Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2018, 220 pp.

David K. Coley (Associate Professor of English, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia) has produced an intriguing new book examining the four poems of the Pearl Manuscript, Cotton Nero A.x. – Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – in the context of late-medieval English and European plague treatises, texts, and discourses. Coley considers the Black Plague as a cultural trauma, which deeply affected the poet, who, motivated either by subconscious post-traumatic feeling or conscious artistry, used the same language and exempla used in plague texts in key passages of his poems. Coley indicates that his goal in the book <?page nr="470"?>is “to investigate how the history of the medieval plague experience might be simultaneously forgotten and remembered in late medieval literature” (5) and, more specifically, to examine:

ГАСТРОНОМІЧНА ГУМОРИСТИКА У ЛІТЕРАТУРІ ЄВРОПЕЙСЬКОГО СЕРЕДНЬОВІЧЧЯ: ТОПОСИ ТА ІСТОРІОГРАФІЯ ПИТАННЯ

The article looks at topoi in gastronomic images of European medieval humoristic texts and seeks to examine the connection between food and comic discourses. The author shall also highlight how these images were evaluated and interpreted by scholars of a different methodological background. The attention is paid to motives in gastronomic humour and comic plots related to food, which were widely spread in Western culture. Gastronomic humour is displayed through examples that are to be found in such medieval literary genres as farce, fabliau, Schwank etc. The study aims to propose a common food comic code, explain the principles of its implementation in the text and show its typical constituent elements. The essay starts with an examination of anthropological and social factors that might have shaped and symbolically and functionally determined gastronomic humour. It is assumed that mouth has a significant role in the processes of organization of nutrition and laughter on the bodily level. Then the author overviews in detail the literary origins of gastronomic jokes tracing their formation from the antique comedy. The development and establishment of food comedy are shown through examples from medieval urban literature. Attention is also drawn to the context in which the text functions, in other words, the specifics of its implementation in time and space. It is revealed that nutrition often appears as a background for comic plots, and culinary spaces are typical locations in humoristic stories. According to their professional activity comedy characters are also closely related to food. It is noticed that the food itself becomes a subject of conflict in a comic situation. Main characters actions are concentrated around the food, drinks or dishes. Another aspect of gastronomic humour involves a situation where eating resembles defecation. A typical comic tool on its own is the analogy between having a meal and sex. The paper also describes the features of food that often appear in humoristic texts and therefore has a higher level of comic value.

Moving Pictures

Abstract After briefly exploring various conceptions of the Europe-Asia divide, the paper observes how one panoramic image of Tobol’sk – a Russian town in the heart of Eurasia – traveled through several early modern manuscripts. While it is well known that the Dutchman Nicolas Witsen had a hand in the production of the western European texts that featured the Tobol’sk panorama and that the Tobol’sk panorama Witsen reproduced was a copy of one by the Siberian cartographer S.U. Remezov, this paper wonders if amateurish panoramas by Nicolaas Witsen may have inspired Remezov’s Tobol’sk panorama. While questions about this panorama’s history and textual “travels” remain, this preliminary inquiry and speculation remind us to be attentive to unexpected dynamics and modes of early modern transmission.

Patients, Practitioners and Lodgers: Male Sexual Health Patients’ and their Healers’ Use of Location in Early Modern Medical Encounters

Patients, Practitioners and Lodgers: Male Sexual Health Patients’ and their Healers’ Use of Location in Early Modern Medical Encounters

Translating Lotman and Bakhtin from Russian into Spanish in Cuba: Desiderio Navarro’s work on critical thinking development

ABSTRACTIn post-1959 Cuba, Desiderio Navarro became an autodidact translator and actively participated in the process of social transformation. Capable of performing quality translations into Spanish from more than 15 languages, mostly from Eastern Europe, he has often been the first to translate and publish a solid corpus of East European texts in different fields of theory, from ‘orthodox and heterodox Marxism; Structuralism; Reception Theory; to the Postmodern Poststructuralism.’ Applying complexity thinking as main frame of reference, particularly the principle of organizational recursion, provides a context to explore the downward causative power of semiosis on reality. I intend to show in this article how the translation of Lotman and Bakhtin into Spanish by Navarro contributed and continue to develop the critical-thinking capabilities of several generations of Cuban intellectuals and artists. If development is a controversial concept, one even ‘doomed to extinction’, it is time to further problematize it.

Africanizing classical European playwrights (Shakespeare and Molière)

AbstractThis article analyses Shakespeare and Molière's enduring appeal in various African countries and the diversity of their plays’ adaptations. The starting point is the discrepancy between the two playwrights, Shakespeare in Africa being an artistic phenomenon (a controversial one in some quarters), while the adaptation of Molière remains mainly the domain of school curricula. This article will first provide a historical overview of activities related to the introduction of Shakespeare and Molière's works in Africa. Second, it will set out to analyse the varied adaptation and “Africanization” of both playwrights’ work. It will shed light on the political and scholarly disputes over the incorporation of these authors in school curricula after independence and examine the ways in which these classical European texts were domesticated in Africa.

Teaching Life Writing Texts in Europe, Part II

Introduction to Teaching Life Writing, Part II

The Homoerotics of Orientalism

The Homoerotics of Orientalism

Prime traduzioni di Borges in Italia: 1927-1937

The article identifies the first stages of Borges reception in Italy on the basis of some translations and scattered critical interventions that have been neglected by previous criticism. Attention is devoted to the years between 1927 and 1937, a period when three different translators published Italian versions of four Borges’s poems. These one attest the Italian focus on Borges’ avant-garde poetry as an important representative of innovation in Argentine literature. They are at the same time the oldest translations of Borges’ texts in Europe, all prior to the French translation made by Néstor Ibarra in 1939. The analysis of this material reveals some aspects that allow us to connect these texts to the same cultural context, in which are particularly important (personal and cultural) relationships within the Italian-Argentine community.

First Translations of Borges in Italy: 1927-1937

The article identifies the first stages of Borges reception in Italy on the basis of some translations and scattered critical interventions that have been neglected by previous criticism. Attention is devoted to the years between 1927 and 1937, a period when three different translators published Italian versions of four Borges’s poems. These one attest the Italian focus on Borges’ avant-garde poetry as an important representative of innovation in Argentine literature. They are at the same time the oldest translations of Borges’ texts in Europe, all prior to the French translation made by Néstor Ibarra in 1939. The analysis of this material reveals some aspects that allow us to connect these texts to the same cultural context, in which are particularly important (personal and cultural) relationships within the Italian-Argentine community.