Imaginative Work Research Articles

Effective Methods and Techniques of Study of Autobiographical Fiction in Senior Forms of a Secondary School

The study of the literary work of the writer in the context of his biography contributes to the emergence of a more profound interest in certain aspects of life and creative work of the writer in the pupils. This methodical technique is creative in nature, since when analyzing the particular episodes of imaginative literary works of various genres, the teacher must guess what to rely on. This paper, by considering the novel “The Long Way” by M. Elebaev, depicts the peculiarities of certain methods and techniques of study of autobiographical fiction in higher forms of Secondary General School. Senior pupils are positively showing interest in the personal life of the writer, if they have developed an idea that any work of great talent is created on the basis of the personal experience of the writer. This means that literary works reflect the author's concept, his attitude to the phenomena of reality depicted by him. The importance of such methods and techniques as disclosure of genre nature, explanation of the meaning of the term “autobiography”, finding a place of autobiographical fiction in the world classics should be noted as methodical specifics of the study of autobiographical fiction. Experience has proven that only after these book knowledge and practical knowledge and information will the analysis of autobiographical fiction in Kyrgyz literature be effective. In the analysis of autobiographical fiction, such techniques are used as the conversation with the pupils, work with the geographical map, brief lecture, reading and discussion of passages of the literary work associated with historical events of that era, charting the hero's connection with other people, copying out the toponyms and the names of historical figures from the text of the literary work, reading of opinions on the literary work, work with dictionary.

Review: Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure, by Peter H. Christensen

Peter H. Christensen Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017, 204 pp., 77 color and 66 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780300225648 Indispensable—if ubiquitous and seemingly ordinary—components of everyday life, infrastructures shape how space and time are organized across multiple scales. As sizable interventions on the land, they require a sustained investment of substantial human, economic, and material resources. Consequently, infrastructures engender productive avenues of inquiry, and in recent decades, following the imaginative work of historians of technology and geographers, architectural and urban historians have begun demonstrating a keen interest in this subject. With his astute site and period selection, Peter H. Christensen introduces a valuable international geopolitical dimension to this literature. Germany and the Ottoman Railways presents the world of complex interactions and unexpected synergies that occurred between a waning, yet still sovereign, Ottoman Empire and the robustly industrial neophyte German state as it entered the colonial race long dominated by Britain and France. This was neither internal colonization to achieve territorial cohesion nor imperial colonialism for resource extraction and labor exploitation, but, in its ambiguity, Christensen suggests, the railway project opened up a vast gray zone for tactical interventions by actors from both countries, despite the obvious asymmetries between them. Examining railway construction from inception to completion, Christensen traces changing loyalties, opportunistic moves, and the ebbs and flows of enthusiasm, funds, and resources. The volume consists of two parts. In the first, chapters titled “Politics,” “Geography,” “Topography,” and “Archaeology” examine constructions of knowledge and imagination, moving from the abstract macroscale of geopolitics to the microscale of archaeological remains in specific sites. Next, chapters titled “Construction,” “ Hochbau ” (meaning aboveground structures), “Monuments,” and “Urbanism” explore the generation of physical form at successively larger scales. By the late nineteenth century, reform-minded Ottoman officials had recognized how railroads could …

Yury Dombrovsky: Myth versus ‘agonizing truth’

The article discusses the problem of the non-existent biography of Yury Dombrovsky, and sets out to disprove the myth created by the newspaper Novaya Gazeta about KGB’s persecuting and eventually murdering the writer in retaliation for his novel The Faculty of Useless Things [Fakultet nenuzhnykh veshchey]. Facts manipulation, replacement of the truth with personal beliefs and conjectures, and, ultimately, letting a work of imagination invade the reality – those are just a few examples of global mythologizing, or the post-truth reality, one of today’s biggest challenges. To a certain extent, an article is written in response to the last year’s scandal covered by Novaya Gazeta, which published the article A Brawl with Phantoms [Draka s prizrakami], only to follow up with a refutation co-written by the newspaper’s own reporter O. Khlebnikov and Dombrovsky’s widow K. Turumova-Dombrovskaya. The paper is based on the aforementioned controversial article, revised and expanded for the publication.

Software copyright content: Library law and facilitation

Software copyright content: Library law and facilitation - IJLSIT- Print ISSN No: - 2582-1555 Online ISSN No:- 2456-9623 Article DOI No:- 10.18231/j.ijlsit.2019.006, IP Indian Journal of Library Science and Information Technology-IP Indian J Libr Sci Inf Technol

Mining for Reality in Late-Stage Capitalism: Reading Murakami Haruki and Don DeLillo Towards a New Literary Realism

This paper articulates an unexplored convergence between authors Murakami Haruki and Don DeLillo. I contend that these authors share similarities in style, content, and context, particularly in their responses to the epoch Murakami calls late-stage capitalism. Focusing on Murakami’s short story ‘A Folklore for my Generation: a Prehistory of Late Stage Capitalism’ (2007) and DeLillo’s Mao II (1991), I examine each author’s profound concern with the status of literature and representation within this age, arguing that the task of fiction for these two writers is to represent reality in a mode not reducible to the bare fact. I find theoretical support for this reading in the philosophical work of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and draw out from OOO’s philosophical realism the possibility of a new literary realism which not only defends the status of fiction as the genuine possibility of a non-reductive relation to things in the world, but a constructive response to the forces of late-stage capitalism, be they the reductive models of the market, mass-culture, or so-called ‘facts’ themselves. In studying the intersection where these writers cross between Japanese and American contexts within the moment of late-stage capitalism, this essay opens the space for a new understanding of each of their oeuvres more widely and demonstrates the fruitful viability of working in a cross-cultural, cross disciplinary for the possibility of novel, constructive, and imaginative work for the future of literary studies.

Towards the Systematic Theory of Imagination : "Old Melody in a New Song: Aesthetics and Art of Psychology", by: Tateo, Luca (Ed.).

"An old melody in a new song: aesthetics and the art of psychology" provides comprehensive analysis of the history of 'psychological aesthetics' and considers ways of its future growth. Jovanovic (2018) and Allesch (2018) trace the process of the conception of Aesthetics by Baumgartner, who related aesthetic experiences with sensual and cognitive processes. Subsequently, studies on aesthetic experiences developed predominantly either in objectivist or subjectivist directions, rejecting systematic approaches. Reductionist views prevailed till the appearance of the theory of imagination in cultural psychology. Imagination is considered as a higher mental process. It is the process of exploration through and by means of systematically organized thinking-feeling-acting processes, beyond what is already known, available, achieved or typical. Imagination is activated occasionally, when existing conditions aren't satisfactory in some way or new challenges arise. Imagination is the synthesis of top-down and bottom up processes (Tateo 2018b) and has a transformative power for individuals and sociocultural systems. Particular case studies of the role of music (Klempe 2018), participatory art and the exploration of the meaning of pilgrimage to Ikea (Kristensen 2018) illustrate the work of imagination in terms of systematic interrelatedness of sociocultural factors with individual meaning-making and affective processes. This paper provides the review of inspirational theoretical and empirical material which could serve as a foundation for further advancement of culturally and psychologically informed theory of aesthetics and imaginative processes. It aims to contribute in building ground for moving beyond the reductionist limits and in the construction of systematic approach to human mind.

Memory in T/Rubble: Tackling (Nuclear) Ruins

The 1945 bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to have recently started to recede back in the memory of Western culture. 9/11 and the age of global warfare which we are in have averted our gazes away from that past, in our tremulous expectations of the next traumatic event. In the twentieth century, poets like Tony Harrison have tackled this delicate topic, while Japanese culture has in many ways been forced and willing to reconsider its own agendas and sense of identity from those ‘ground zeroes’ onwards. In both A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), one of the most famous and truly global writers of our times, Kazuo Ishiguro, has offered his own complex views on the still vulnerable sites and lives those events ‘created.’ In these two novels, he attempts to rememorialize the numerous competing and often contrasting memories of the lit(t)eral aftermath of the Bomb: he recuperates and interpellates collective and individual pasts, and manages to construe unstable texts which mimic the urban spaces invaded, reconfigured by and in their human and material rubble, as much as in the irretrievable traces which mark its vanishing. I Harrison and Ishiguro to verify the unreliability of memory, its radically vulnerable state, but also the possibilities of recuperation, recovery and resistance works of imagination may offer.

Intimate ethnography and the anthropological imagination:

ABSTRACTIntimate ethnography is work of the anthropological imagination that models dialectical thinking in its approach to people, topics, and analysis. Rooted in particular intellectual, cultural, political, and anthropological currents, intimate ethnography comes when the need to engage larger publics in rethinking and recounting lives lived and experienced is increasingly urgent. An example of such work,My Father's Wars, centers an intimate Other as the subject of my research, a transnational life story in the context of historically constituted violence. Intimate ethnography illustrates feminist ethnography and illuminates the dangers of ethnonationalism; requires the crafting of an evocative, compelling account through the writing itself; and offers the possibility of an afterlife for anthropological work in the public sphere and thus of anthropology as an intervention in public discourse. [dialectics,intimate ethnography,violence,feminism,transnational history,political economy,public anthropology]

Elias KhouryChildren of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam

an endless stream of garbage. The adults, aloof, smoke cigarettes, throw soirees, drink espresso, and traipse the rocky terrain in impractical yet glamorous shoes. Johanna Stoberock’s Pigs comes in the wake of an increase in climate fiction, or cli-fi, where the Anthropocene and humanity ’s relationship to a changing climate are dramatized. While the climate is not necessarily dramatized, the environment in Pigs can certainly be menacing. The ocean, as the children experience, changes its mood. It will suddenly burn, leaving welts and scars. One has to suspect the ocean’s hostile demeanor is a possible response to chemical waste and garbage infecting the water, but it might also be a reflection of the children’s relationship to their environment, a work of imagination and psychology. Or fantasy. Stoberock isn’t clear. The children are harmed. The irresponsible adults, rendered grotesque by Stoberock, do nothing. Yet it is the world’s garbage, rather than the natural environment, that relentlessly encroaches. Pigs strays from a strict cli-fi categorization. Instead, the book takes on a mystical quality with elements of fable, allegory, and fantasy. Comparisons to the work of postmodern fabulist Italo Calvino are well placed. While the narrative is clear in its critique of systemic modern excess and the burden placed on future generations, Pigs is rarely didactic and never condescending. Stoberock ’s straightforward prose is filled with energy that advances the linear plot. With its sincere, omniscient narrator, the reader is privy to the children’s distinct thought processes , their search for memories from before their life of feeding trash to pigs, and their dreams of escape from the island and, worse, its cruel and careless adults. Pigs is effective and engaging; the reader wants, more than anything, the children to find freedom and escape. While Stoberock explores themes of nostalgia, innocence, and of returning home, we come to understand the potential impossibility of that return. The possibility of nowhere to turn. Although the majority of Pigs is told linearly, the children’s tale is interjected with short, fragmentary chapters where the narrator considers how the island looks from a distance from various points of view. “Always,” the narrator muses, “from a distance, the island was far away. Always, it was just out Books in Review ELIAS KHOURY Elias Khoury Children of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam Trans. Humphrey Davies. Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2019. 428 pages. Adam Dannoun, a melancholic Palestinian self-exiled in New York and the protagonist-narrator of Children of the Ghetto, suffers from literary issues. “I’m not based on any model,” Dannoun insists in his notebook. “My story sums up nothing but itself, and I don’t want to be a symbol.” Nevertheless, the story of his life as he recounts it is a patchwork of allusions to canonical works by Palestinian and Israeli writers, and his death restages that of exiled Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein, who fell asleep with a burning cigarette in his New York apartment in 1977. While Dannoun is a literary-insider joke, he is also a complex narrator trying to confront his past. This is not the first time Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury tackles the “Palestinian story” as a narrative problem. His epic Gate of the Sun (also translated by Humphrey Davies) collected countless stories of the Palestinian Nakba —the defeat and expulsion of Palestine’s inhabitants with the establishment of Israel in 1948—demonstrating the collective force of storytelling and oral history. In My Name Is Adam, the first title from the trilogy Children of the Ghetto, Khoury explores a similar constellation linking historical trauma, silenced memory, and narrative form—yet this novel’s stance on the possibilities and ethics of narrative is much darker. The notebooks that make up this novel, Khoury tells us, were saved from the fire that killed Adam Dannoun: these are his notes for two novels, never completed, which Khoury presents in unedited form. The first, which suggests that Dannoun would not have made a great writer, is an attempt to write the forgotten story of a minor Abbasid108 WLT AUTUMN 2019 of focus.” Using repetitious phrasing, these fragmented chapters build in intensity. Moreover , they reveal how Stoberock plays with...

Imagination in Action

The intention of this article is to study the role of imagination in science. We are going to examine the communicative role that imagination plays in interdisciplinary scientific interaction. We are referring to that specific kind of interaction in which science is the object of research that is to a complicated situation in the contemporary science studies. We posit that the interaction between different disciplines engaged in the study of science is far from being concordant. This is especially true of the history and philosophy of science. Currently, the situation is such that, on the one hand, the philosophical reference to the historical research of science has proved being constructive in nature. On the other hand, historians remain mostly indifferent to the philosophy of science, seeking no methodological guidance from philosophers. Revealing the reasons for such an asymmetry of interests, and, as a consequence, the failure of the constructive interaction of history and philosophy of science, we analyze one hypothesis which directly refers to the work of imagination in the Kantian sense. Next, we determine that Kant's appeal to imagination opens the way for another interpretation of both the work of imagination and, as a result, the interaction of history and philosophy of science. We demonstrate why the analysis of the role of image, associated primarily with art, becomes relevant in modern research of science. Additionally, we turn to imagination, not just as a transcendental condition of knowledge but as an effective tool to organize specific research practices of interdisciplinary interaction. Therefore, an important component of our research is an appeal to a “successful” example of the synthesis of historical and philosophical research of science, which is the contemporary historical epistemology, in which one can see imagination in action.

Future History: Global Fantasies in Seventeenth-Century American and British Writings by Kristina Bross

Reviewed by: Future History: Global Fantasies in Seventeenth-Century American and British Writings by Kristina Bross Alison Searle (bio) Future History: Global Fantasies in Seventeenth-Century American and British Writings kristina bross New York: Oxford University Press, 2017 248 pp. Kristina Bross's wide-ranging analysis of seventeenth-century British and American writing is politically engaged, carefully researched, and methodologically innovative, even speculative, in the theoretical approaches it interrogates and adopts. As she notes in her preface, "the texts that are the focus of my analysis are the literature of an early moment of globalization that in many ways parallels our own, right down to debates about the legality of torture" (xi). Bross's "lens on the past" is deeply grounded by the "events of [her] own moment" (xi) and this intimately energizes and informs every aspect of her exploration of English archives and the technologies and fantasies that shaped globalization in the early modern period. Her preface briefly contextualizes the way such "presentist motivation" has impacted early American studies, noting both the dangers and affordances that deliberately incorporating a consciousness of the present into one's study of the past offers. By way of Roland Barthes's concepts of studium and punctum, Bross develops her concept of "the Archive": this "can masquerade as a repository of objective truth" because "archival materials are created by particular technologies that make them seem complete or even 'objective'" (xiii); it can immure the past and "shelter to forget" (xv). One of Bross's goals is to puncture the assumption that "people in earlier times" were isolated and conditioned only by local allegiances: her "rather idiosyncratic literary history … encodes the personal and discursive connections among early modern English writers and travellers" (xv) and analyzes how "in their works they navigated the changing political, economic, and … religious systems … that connected them from the West to the East Indies," though "such imaginative work is always contingent on its own contexts, even our own" (xv–xvi). Bross's study consists of a theoretical introduction followed by five discrete chapters that are each accompanied by a coda. Each chapter offers "a historicized analytical framework," while the codas explore Bross's research paths, "analyzing the archival scaffolding that makes early modern material available" (18) and facilitating "inscriptions of the global imaginary [End Page 591] that are hard to categorize or fit into a literary history and that depend heavily on critical speculation" (19). Chapter 1 examines a pamphlet debate about eschatological status during the 1650s and "demonstrates the way that East-West connections mattered even in works that had little direct concern with English experiences in America or Asia" (24). The global vision of these pamphlets is rooted in Christian prophetic understandings of the coming millennium: the first, A Brief Description of the Future History of Europe, from Anno 1650 to An. 1710 (London, 1650), which gives Bross her title; the second, William Lilly's Monarchy or No Monarchy in England (1651). The coda analyzes an annotated copy of Lilly's pamphlet held by Purdue University, and Bross examines the implications of its cataloguing as a work of economic history. She then seeks to interpret the marginal notes in this copy, suggesting that they "constitute a third voice in the debate and dialogue about millennialism initiated by Lilly and the author of Future History" (47). These form the basis for a speculative extrapolation: "I've named the voice in my head that speaks these words in the margins Elizabeth Wilcocks, though I readily admit that I've no evidence that she wrote any of them," but by imagining the marginal comments "as connected, they create a compelling dialogue that gets us out of the closed print conversation between Lilly and the author of Future History" (52). Chapter 2 demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary interrogation if one is properly to study "global currents of thought and belief" (53) by way of Thomas Gage's travel narrative The English-American His Travail by Sea and Land (1648). Bross categorizes Gage as both an early modern cosmopolitan and as an expert: someone who could "adapt and learn from the examples of rivals and predecessors" and offer the "specialized knowledge" necessary for the...

Rewriting the Scribbling Women

Rewriting the Scribbling Women Nina Baym The new woman's movement in the United States developed around 1960, chiefly in reaction to society's massive attempt, after the end of World War II, to reverse the century-old movement towards sexual equality and social justice for women. Why society should have tried to do this, and just who "society" consists of here, are questions whose answers are far from clear. It is clear, however, that elite males were active in the project, and that among elite males, literary intellectuals were eager to help. Their particular cultural work consisted in articulating a rationale for the traditional view of woman's place, appealing both to the "natural order" of things and to the testimony of "great" works of the human imagination. They denigrated women's intellectual and imaginative abilities and obliterated or misrepresented women's contributions to culture and history. A perhaps trivial instance of this activity, which can nevertheless stand for countless others, is the treatment of Henry James's Bostonians by both Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe. Their introductions to paperback editions of this novel assumed that each and every woman's natural destiny was to serve as sexual playmate and helpmeet for a particular man.1 They both saw the physician Mary Prance as the most morally objectionable character in the entire novel. Howe, milder than Trilling, calls her one who has "denied her life as a woman," James's "warning" of what feminism would become if taken to an extreme.2 By "life" he means frequent, although monogamous, genital heterosexual activity. Actually, Dr. Prance is not a feminist, and cares only to be the best doctor possible; Howe ignores this as well as the fact that James makes her a good doctor and a contented human being. Howe does not respect the character's commitment to a worthy profession (as he surely would were she a man); indeed, the [End Page 137] practice of it, we must assume, is what has kept her (in his view) unfulfilled "as a woman." If the woman student reading this introduction of The Bostonians concludes that the character is intended by James as a warning against becoming a physician, she would be wrong; Howe is using the character for this purpose, which is his own. That the guardians of culture felt free to use "literary analysis" as a front for cultural indoctrination requires us to distrust the record they have made. Therefore, when we learned in school that women had not produced literature (learned it by never reading anything written by women), it was not enough to conclude that this silence was real and explain it as the result of suppression. Had we not all, after all, grown up on Little Women and Gone with the Wind? And didn't every specialist in American literature, even those who weren't writing on Nathaniel Hawthorne, know his reference to a "damned mob of scribbling women"? If Hawthorne was not hallucinating, there had once been enough women writers to constitute a mob. Nor was their work unknown; they were widely published and immensely popular. But—was it literature? When forced to the wall, our machismo hommes de lettres always have that rhetorical question ready. The fact that so many of the women writers of the nineteenth century (and the twentieth) were popular authors functioned rather to support an exclusionary tactic than to put it in question, for canons are composed of rare objects, and the popular by definition is not rare. The very success of large numbers of women authors could be read as a sign of the literary inferiority of their product, testimony to the triumph of vulgarity and commercial values over those of high art. The enterprise of "major" literature could thus be made into an undertaking reserved for the stalwart male intellect. To rescue the neglected men and elevate them to their rightful position of superiority to the women: that became a major cultural aim of the literary critic in the years following World War I, and even more in the years following World War II. One took women writers seriously by treating them as serious obstacles to the creation of...

A New and Familiar Form of Scholarship

A New and Familiar Form of Scholarship Edward L. Ayers (bio) Congratulations, first of all, to the staff of the William and Mary Quarterly for advancing our profession's experiments in digital history. The OI Reader is an elegant tool and Simon P. Newman's article an elegant use of that tool's capacities. Those of us interested in what the digital world might offer our ancient and honorable profession have been waiting for innovative and engaging work of this sort. Anyone who has tried to reconstruct the world of those held in slavery through the fractured documentary record has to be impressed with and grateful for the evocation of that world in Newman's article. The sounds, images, animations, and enhancements on display in "Hidden in Plain Sight" are a natural and welcome extension of the work of imagination demanded by those who write about a society where some people were not meant to be seen. I imagine that I was invited to join this conversation because I have been advocating such experimentation for a long time. Stumbling into the digital world in the early 1990s, I happened to be standing nearby when the World Wide Web appeared. With the help of skilled friends and allies, I began building a website, The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, in 1993, about six months after the Web's debut.1 The project extended the fundamental premise of historical scholarship— accountability to a fully transparent documentary record—to its logical culmination. Because the Web at that time could not transfer images, sounds, and animations with adequate fluidity, in 2000 Anne S. Rubin and I published a CD-ROM that integrated music, photographs, and animated maps. In 2003, William G. Thomas III and I published an experimental peer-reviewed digital article for the American Historical Review, "The Differences Slavery Made."2 [End Page 4] Our digital article differed in almost every regard from Newman's. Whereas "Hidden in Plain Sight" deftly integrates art and sound into a familiar article form, Thomas and I turned the entire concept of the article inside out. We displayed the ropes and pulleys of historical scholarship. We did not merely refer to other scholarship—we quoted extensively from it in a separate component of the article, described our relationship to it, and linked from that scholarship back into our analysis. We did not merely quote examples from our evidence; instead, we gave access to all of it in databases, graphs, tables, and entire document collections. We disassembled each of the components of our article into explicit arguments with which fellow scholars could engage. In short, we foregrounded the hypertextual and digital elements of the article, addressing our fellow historians more than a general audience. We did so in part to show that digital capacities actually enhanced scholarly contributions and could do so more rigorously than print on paper. No one has emulated our experiment. It asked too much of its authors as well as its readers, perhaps, or challenged the conventions of historical writing too frontally. That is why Newman's article and the OI Reader are so welcome. They persuade their way into professional discourse rather than barging in. Over the fifteen years between the American Historical Review article and Newman's piece, of course, we have lived through several more turns of the digital revolution. The once-rickety Web now delivers gigabytes of information in an instant. It dispenses more video than text, and sound and image are prominent. Simple animations have grown into multiplayer video games of enormous complexity. And apps such as the OI Reader integrate communication and presentation in stylish and seamless forms. The Quarterly has done its part well. The app installs in seconds and works fluidly. The layout evokes the familiar and elegant appearance of the journal, while the note-taking capacity offers a feature no print journal can. The standards and collaboration characteristic of the Omohundro Institute are evident in the acknowledgments and final product. Newman's article takes advantage of the visual and audible capacities of online media to enhance our ability to imagine hidden lives. Every tool serves a particular purpose...

Possessed by Sahitya

Possessed by Sahitya Ranjan Ghosh (bio) I think my relationships with mentors and friends changed only after they died. I am not an occultist nor a medium, but somehow they speak to me from the beyond. They are no different except perhaps a touch more urgent. —Harold Bloom (Giraldi 2019) The past is never dead; listening to the past has no expiration either. So when Harold Bloom stays possessed by memory, he professes his love with "with." I am tempted to see Bloom engaging with sahitya with its Sanskritic origin and valence that I have argued elsewhere as sahit (being with) and vidya (knowing).1 Possessed by sahitya here is the vital nexus. Interestingly, Bloom's "listening" to the voices and narratives in and from the past is integral to the formation of his sahitya, his connect with the inner self, his construction and conditions of knowing. Being possessed by memory is being possessed by listening—the powers and affect of an endo- and exotelic listening, a listening across, listening beyond. Literature reveals spaces as much as it casts spells to help listening to continue and grow in different proportions and degrees. Bloom is convinced that "high literature has three prime attributes: cognitive power, originality, aesthetic splendor. Only by a disciplined harnessing of emotion can any of these three come forth. What you call our 'new autocracy of emotion' is just stylized noise. It cannot touch the interdependence of criticism and literature because it is mindless. Culture is now cut off from fashion. Popular culture has become an oxymoron. Bad taste is not culture. There are still many valuable writers of imaginative works in our society. It seems to me that they prosper best when they take a stance apart from the immediate moment. Distraction is the enemy. I see no crisis in the reciprocity of literature and criticism because the culture industries are irrelevant to it" (Giraldi 2019). So "highest literature speaks to ourselves" and listening is as much a cultivation as it is a necessity. Listening for Bloom is critical attentiveness. Possession is not mere occupancy but staying occupied in and out of [End Page 325] time, in indexes and indices of the "untimely." It is through such listening as possession and being possessed as listening that literature begins to think. Bloom points out that "deep and constant reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self" (Giraldi 2019). It is a whole fresh debate, however, on how we configure and problematize "autonomous self." This "deep" reading is plastic in that sahitya reaches us in multiple ways as much as we reach sahitya in diversely invested persuasions. This accommodativeness of sahitya is possible both in its usefulness and uselessness, through unexpected wonder and "nexus"; it is about an experience of "reading" where changes occur on both ends of the interaction—sahitya changes our memory of it and simultaneously our possession of sahitya alters too. This projects the "interiority" of literary experiences contributing to the construction of the "autonomous self"—an aesthetic occupancy that teaches one to speak to oneself. Perhaps, Bloom's understanding of the autonomous self is closer to the conative and projective powers of the "literary" and the "post-literary." If writing is about building a revolt against the imperative of the given and the conventional, the quotidian and the obvious, then the struggle is to live in the interiority of sahitya; it is here that the post-literary becomes alive as well. If I were to go by Martin Heidegger's observation that a great thinker keeps recurring and expanding on "one great thought," Bloom's "possessed by memory" is another version of "anxiety" with a difference—a vexed sahit with the canon. "Literary" gnosis is a contributory paradigm to such formations of interiority where the "deep reading of a poem" becomes a way of knowing the "Real Me or self or spark."2 Here the endotelic listening to the "spark" generates the "knowing," the subject of poetic possession: this irreducible aesthetic oversights the ideological and the societal and corresponds with the spiritual. So the attentiveness to writers that Bloom confesses to having stayed possessed by keeps augmenting his "inner self" (Bloom 1994, 28). Would canon...

Defending Images in Pecock's Repressor: Caritas, the Absent Friend and the Sense of Touch

Reginald Pecock's defense of orthodox practices in the Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy is grounded in the biblical commandment to love God, which, following Thomas Aquinas's thoroughly Aristotelianized theology, is understood as friendship of man and Images are key tools—proxies for forms of presence—in the dual processes of learning and recollection that are needed to mediate friendship with God. In this context, the efficacy of physical images derives from the structures of human memory and imagination, which are reliant on sensory perception: physical sight thus aids the imaginative work of making present something that is absent. The paradigm of caritas as friendship surfaces powerfully in the Repressor's defense of images: Christ is the absent friend, an image of whom offers a form of presence essential to imagining, and so to loving, him. Aristotelian friendship's emphasis on presence and proximity, however, underpins Pecock's advocacy of the value of the physical image not just in terms of its appeal to the sense of sight, but also to the sense of touch: love for a friend, ordinarily fostered by presence and completed in touch, is mediated between God and man not only by seeing but also through touching an image. That Pecock's arguments about the lawfulness of image-use culminate in a powerful defense of those who caress and kiss images registers not only the strength of Lollard objection to touching images in fifteenth-century controversy, but also the under-recognized importance of touch to medieval understandings of memory, cognition, and love.

ПОДОЛАННЯ КОНФЛІКТІВ У СЕРЕДОВИЩІ УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ ПІСЛЯВОЄННОЇ ЕМІГРАЦІЇ: ДОСВІД МИСТЕЦЬКОГО УКРАЇНСЬКОГО РУХУ (1945-1948)

The history of Ukraine has got many examples of how different personalities were able to unite and direct their efforts in meaningful way for higher purpose. One of such interesting pages is an activity of Ukrainian Art movement (UAM) –unification of Ukrainian writers in emigration, who after the end of World War II turned up in camps for displaced persons in Germany and Austria. The leadership of union helped to create such climate in the organization that would maximize imaginative work and minimize confrontational points among its members. The peculiar quality check of the organization and its ability to withstand the devastating tendencies was a debate in UAM about relevant problems of searching for ways of development Ukrainian culture in emigration conditions. Its starting point was Y. Shevelov`s report «The styles of contemporary Ukrainian literature in emigration» (1945), which he pronounced at the First congress of organization. The reviewer proclaimed the mission of new organization - to create a nationwide and a sub-region writing, which can reach worldwide recognition. The main direction of its development Y. Shevelov determined the creation of deeply peculiar Ukrainian literary style. The idea of national-organic style has caused mixed reactions and criticism in the Ukrainian emigration environment. The national-organic style does not anticipate a forced imposition on his writers. This style does not mean an isolation of narrow national limits and departure from European influences and traditions. It includes only blind copying borrowed samples. Supplemented the concept of Y. Shevelov with his ideas such persons as I. Bagryany, Y. Kosach, I.Kosteckii and other representatives of UAM`s, who defended national origin in literature. The most irreconcilable opponent of Y. Shevelov and his theory of national-organic style became a literary scholar, critic, translator V. Derzhavin. There were several reasons for the conflict between these creative personalities among which, in particular, differences between generations, to which they belong. In the modern scientific literature one can come across for approval that a deepening conflict between Y. Shevelov and V. Derzhavin led to the split and termination of the organization activity. Such an estimate is untrue, because the real reason for the termination of the organization was hold at the 1948 a monetary reform in Germany and mass departure of Ukrainian emigrants from displaced persons camps to the other countries of the world. Well, conflicts, which took place in the history of Ukrainian Art Movement, did not lead to the division of the organization into hostile camps, as its members were united by the common purpose of creating new Ukrainian literature, that would take a worthy place in the world culture.

Satire, humour and parody in 21st Century Nigerian women’s poetry

21st century Nigerian women poets have continued to utilise the aesthetics of literary devices as linguistic and literary strategies to project feminist privations and values in their creative oeuvres. There has been marginal interest towards 21st century Nigerian women’s poetry and their deployment of artistic devices such as satire, humour and parody. Unequivocally, such linguistic and literary devices in imaginative works are deployed as centripetal force to criticise amidst laughter, the ills of female devaluation in the society. The major thrust of the study, therefore, is to examine how satire, humour and parody are deployed in selected Nigerian women’s poetry to reproach and etch the collective ethos of women’s experience in contemporary Nigerian society. The study utilises qualitative analytical approach in the close reading and textual analysis of the selected texts focusing mainly on the aesthetics of humour, satire and parody in challenging male chauvinism in contemporary Nigerian women’s poetry. Three long poems: “Nuptial Counsel”, “Sadiku’s Song” and “The Sweet, Sweet Mistress’ Tale” by Mabel Evweirhoma and Maria Ajima respectively were purposively selected. The choice of the selected poems hinges on the artistic vigour, especially the evoking of laughter, mockery and condemnation of hegemonic strictures through the use of satire, humour and parody. The paper employs Molara Ogundipe’s Stiwanism, an aspect of Feminist theory in the analysis of the selected poems. The poets have shown the interventions of humour, satire and parody as linguistic devices in condemning and highlighting peculiarities of women peonage in Nigeria.

The eye looks back: Seeing and being seen from William Bartram to H.P. Lovecraft

The paper focuses on the sense of sight and seeing in the selected texts of American literature from the late 18th century to the 1930s, i.e. from William Bartram to H. P. Lovecraft. Adopting a perspective of changing “scopic regimes” – conventions of visual perception presented in a number of literary and non-literary works, the author analyzed a passage from Bartram’s Travels to reveal a combination of the discourse of science with that of the British aesthetics of gardening. In Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes (1843) the main factor is the work of imagination dissatisfied with the actual view of Niagara Falls, while in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature substantial subjectivity is reduced to pure seeing. In Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Ktaadn” the subject confronts nature that is no longer transparent and turns out meaningless. In American literature of horror from Charles Brockden Brown through Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, the narrator’s eye encounters the inhuman gaze of a predator, a dehumanized victim of murder, or a sinister creature from the out-er space. To conclude, the human gaze was gradually losing its ability to frame or penetrate nature, bound to confront the annihilating evil eye from which there was usually no escape.

Puste miejsca w przestrzeni, puste miejsca w języku. Wokół Miejsca Andrzeja Stasiuka i dwóch opowiadań Zygmunta Haupta

Przedmiotem zainteresowania autorów są literackie przekształcenia miejsc południowo-wschodniej Polski międzywojennej (w dwóch opowiadaniach Zygmunta Haupta) oraz z czasów ustrojowego przełomu pod koniec XX wieku (jedna z „opowieści galicyjskich” Andrzeja Stasiuka). Punktem wyjścia uczyniono dwa doświadczenia dydaktyczne z utworem drugiego z pisarzy. Obaj pisarze ewokują w swoich utworach fenomen miejsc pustych, ogołoconych wskutek zawirowań historycznych, ale także wydanych na działanie „ślepej” natury. W toku analizy (wykorzystującej metodologię geografii kulturowej i geopoetyki) przestudiowane zostały językowe próby uchwycenia tekstury miejsc oraz problematyki czasu, wynikającej z doświadczania konkretnej przestrzeni. Istotnym elementem omawianych opowiadań jest żywioł pracy wyobraźni, za pomocą której artyści usiłują wypełnić terytoria dotknięte pustką. Jeszcze inna ważna kwestia to rozporządzalność miejsca w stosunku do znajdującego się w nim podmiotu.

Значення емоційного слуху й емпатії в мистецтві актора

The purpose of the article is to analyse the emotional hearing role and empathy as components of the actor’s work on a stage image in the improving modern theatrical pedagogical context. Methodology of the research is based on the main methodological principles: the objectivity principle, which allows the author to consider the emotional hearing role and empathy in the historical-art-pedagogical section in all their complexity, multidimensionality and contradiction, taking into account the totality of positive and negative aspects of their content; the scientific principle clarifies the causal relationships between scientifically verified knowledge that correspond to the current development level of the language science, emotional rumors and actor’s empathy and their significance in performing arts; the development principles and interaction, relativity, integrity, practicality provide an opportunity for authors to consider these phenomena complex and trace trends. Taken together, this methodology provides an opportunity to reveal the outlined problem significance in terms of practical art studies through the prism of pedagogical aspects. The scientific novelty. Researches by both psychologists and practitioners of theatrical art and teachers show the importance of emotional hearing and empathy in the human process and, in particular, stage communication. In the research course, a direct relationship was found between the emotional hearing level and the empathy of the actor and his artistic potency to create highly artistic stage images. Conclusions. It would be legitimate to say that speech and emotional hearing play an important role in the human perception process. In the actor art, they play a leading role, both in the acting imagination work in the creating an artistic image process, and in dialogical communication with partners on the stage and with the audience. For a modern actor, it is important to develop not only speech and emotional rumors, but also empathy there is the ability to experience both active and passive. It is also worth noting that the nature of improvisational creativity in the actor art is directly related to such characteristics as emotional hearing and empathy.