Literary Dialogue Research Articles

Futuristic Flight: Science beside the Emotive in the Early Writing of Charlotte Brontë

As a solitary mention within her juvenilia tale ‘Tales of the Islanders’ (1829), Charlotte Brontë’s fictitious reference to air balloon flight suggests a wider social and literary context for its author’s understanding of this new scientific phenomenon. This article examines the wider textual presence of this awe-inspiring invention and how her seemingly simple reference to balloons ultimately aligns her from an early age to a wider, Romantic female discourse, particularly to the writing of Mary Shelley. The prevalent references to balloon flight in newspapers, magazines and books available to Brontë at the time, imply a familiarity with these dialogues, which is ultimately suggestive of the material she read and was subsequently inspired by to include in her own writing. Brontë’s reference to balloons associates her work with a Romantic discourse contemporary to her, specifically a female one, which situates her as a young writer alert to the literary dialogue of the time, hinting at a style she would later use in her novels, one which juxtaposed scientific invention in the Industrial Age beside an emotive poetic voice.

Dana Gioia's transcultural ecopoetics: The Latin legacy of a California poet

This article discusses Dana Gioia's poetics of place in its intersections with the author's multiple diasporic legacies (Italian, Mexican, mestizo), which he often refers to as ‘Latin’. It explores the forms of cultural poiesis that has been fashioned by the Californian environments of diaspora and the role played by nature and the environment in the linguistic and literary dialogue resulting from the cultural transitions between America (both the USA and Mexico) and Italy. Gioia's ecopoesis is read as an aspect of the poet's ongoing engagement with public culture and commitment to preventing the decline of poetry's cultural importance. It restates his effort to reconnect poetry with the everyday lives of a wider and diverse reading public, stressing the importance of getting to know one's own specific locale more deeply. Gioia's environmentally oriented poems can thus be comprised within ‘a new third wave of ecocriticism, which recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries’ (Adamson and Slovic). Their transcultural vision crosses the frontiers separating the different cultures synthesized by the author's Latin self-identification and represents a crucial space for negotiation and imaginative creation tapping into the language of poetry to find ways to actively address our urgent environmental crises.

Literary Dialogue Across Cultures in the Context of Multiple Data Integration: New Essays on Comparative Literature and Poetics between China and the West

Abstract This study uses a two-stream multivariate data embedding network and FLAT model to effectively integrate text structure and linguistic information to enhance the performance of named entity recognition. In addition, named entity recognition and literary narrative analysis were carried out using linear chain conditional random field and Apriori algorithm, and literary character narratives and knowledge graphs were constructed. Finally, the characteristics and differences between Chinese and Western literature are deeply explored through econometric analysis and character similarity analysis, and it is found that the differences in geographic environment and socio-economic characteristics profoundly impact Chinese and Western literary art and poetics. The most fundamental difference between Chinese and Western societies lies in the commercial character of Western socio-economics, while China is more rural. The study reveals the uniqueness and intersection of the two civilizations in literary creation, providing a new perspective and theoretical support for cross-cultural academic dialogue.

Pragmatic architectonics of the literary dialogue: absurdity as the form and content of protagonists’ speech

The article is devoted to the pragmatic analysis of the dialogical texts in the novel “Catch-22” by J. Heller forming the intersection of the absurdist literature representatives’ theoretical views on the surface structure and semantic content of characters’ interpersonal relationships. The research is aimed at identifying the specificity of meaning generation as a mechanism of the author’s poetics of the absurd. In particular, this poetics is systematically reflected in the mechanical verbatim reproduction of a verbal stimulus by a reacting character. Applying a comparison analysis with the relevant contexts from S. Beckett’s absurdist play “Endgame”, in which the opposite trend is observed, it is established that there is a complete reduction of meaning in an effort to focus readers’ attention on the problematic nature of genuine effective communication in the modern world. It is revealed that in the context of J. Heller’s novel and S. Beckett’s play the pragmatic diversity of repetition as a means of constructing characters’ dialogical communication is associated with the contrasting interpretation of philosophical ideas of existentialism. For J. Heller repetition is an epistemological category reflecting the character’s dominant cognitions in the process of orientation in the hostile universe. The author’s implications such as the character’s subconscious fear, his permanent existential anxiety about the need to survive in an extreme situation, increased suspicion or dispassionate indifference towards the interlocutor, the protagonist’s ironic reaction to incompetence, irrationality of the actions of representatives of the authorities and auxiliary units of the flight garrison are revealed. Repetition in the characters’ speech is also associated with the desire to maintain the phatic contact with the interlocutor, whose state of affairs borders on mortal danger. The main character’ dialogical activity as an antihero is considered. It is concluded that in the novel “Catch-22” J. Heller subverts the absurdist literature basic principles, implemented through the reproduction of the characters’ dialogical speech. The author of the novel focuses readers’ attention on the relevance of preserving the traditional postulates of dialogical communication, and on the creative power of language structures and models in interpersonal interaction.

Literature of testimony between oblivion and deliberate omission

Prison camp texts constitute a very important stratum of 20th-c. literature. On their way to the reader, they overcome the barriers of fear and reluctance to immerse oneself into a complex and traumatic narrative, a recurrent risk of oblivion, and repeated suppression by censorship — on behalf of the authorities and educational institutions as well as society in general. Russian and Polish literature about gulags not only shares the same trauma and publication destiny, but also common topics, methods, and approaches to describing the unutterable experience. Two writers that embody this process — Herling-Grudziński and Shalamov — never met in person, but succeeded in conveying essential messages to the reader about the destructive and corrupting effect of a prison camp, the senselessness of forced labour, and the dehumanization and degradation of a person trapped in such an environment. The literary dialogue between the two authors contains a powerful system of reference for the study of 20th-c. Polish and Russian prison camp prose.

Machiavellis Kriegskunst: Die Lehren des Libro dell’arte della guerra

Abstract For the most part, Machiavelli’s Libro dell’arte della guerra has been studied as a military treatise, which had produced different interpretations and applications. Whereas military historians assumed that Machiavelli somewhat underestimated the role of the so-called gunpowder revolution, recent scholarship stresses the political dimensions of the text and its reception in different contexts. This article focuses on the poetics of the dialogue, which cannot be reduced to propositional contents. Instead of teaching specific strategies and tactics of warfare, the Libro engages its readers in a military dialogue in a more radical sense. It enacts the very dynamics of war and battle by staging the complex and often contradictory conditions and foundations of speech and (military and political) theory on the one hand and its potential interactions with conflicting historical realities on the other. By combining different generic traditions of the literary dialogue from Plato to Cicero and Petrarch it performs a Machiavellian arte della guerra as the very form of military and militant intervention which concerns not only the practice of warfare, but human activity as such.

Frances Burney (Re)reads The Winter's Tale: Women's ‘Nature’ and Sociability in Evelina and The Woman-Hater

The article examines two works by Frances Burney: her debut novel Evelina (1778) and one of her later plays The Woman-Hater (1800–1802) as appropriations of and returns to the tropes present in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (1623). The investigations explore Burney's particular interest in the roles allotted to women within familial sociability at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries while the adaptive strategies employed by her are scrutinised to highlight their potential of questioning the existing social paradigms and power structures. The conclusions show that the literary dialogue into which Burney entered with earlier authors both reflected and prompted social change occurring at the time of the production of the novel and the play.

Motifs of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from Dead House’ in Hans Fallada’s Novel ‘Wer einmal aus dem Blechnapf frißt…’

The novels ‘Notes from the Dead House’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky and ‘Wer einmal aus dem Blechnapf frißt…’ (‘Who Once Drinks from the Prison Chalice’) by Hans Fallada are analyzed in terms of literary connections. The relevance of the study is due to the need for a comprehensive and multifaceted examination of Hans Fallada’s literary dialogue with Fyodor Dostoevsky. A number of similar motifs are identified, as well as the fact that there are allusive “cross-references” between the characters of the novels. It is noted that both authors show the destructive influence of imprisonment on the criminal’s personality. It is emphasized that in both novels, the criminal is deprived of the ability for spiritual revival, and the writers criticize the unjust social system that pushes the “little” person to break the law. Drawing on the traditions of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hans Fallada shows in his novel that life for prisoners, both in prison and after release, is akin to being in a “dead house”, as it deprives the “humiliated and insulted” heroes of the opportunity to change their fate. It is concluded that comparing the novels “Notes from the Dead House” and “Who Once Drinks from the Prison Chalice” allows for identifying similarities in their ideas and outlining perspectives for further research on the reception of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s artistic experience in Hans Fallada’s work.

Liminality, Madness, and Narration in Hassan Blasim’s “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” and “Why Don’t You Write a Novel Instead of Talking about All These Characters?”

The fiction of Hassan Blasim addresses the horrors of contemporary Iraq and centers on the crisis of identity that is part of the immigrant’s experience. Blasim’s protagonists try to forget past traumas related to their homeland by developing new identities ingrained solely in the present. Yet, the past resurfaces in the form of nightmarish dreams, madness, and fractured narratives where fiction and reality intersect and overlap. Inhabiting a constant state of liminality imprints itself on the body and psyche of the border crossers and leads to their physical or mental demise. Drawing on theories of madness, liminality, and narration advanced by Shoshana Felman and Michel Foucault, I analyze Blasim’s two short stories “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” and “Why Don’t You Write a Novel Instead of Talking About All These Characters?” I argue that the imaginative space of literary narration, an in-between, liminal space between reality and fiction, is the space where ethico-political paradoxes and the absurdity of real-life trauma, death, and chaos are transformed into a meaningful literary dialogue that can expand reality and offer new spheres of understanding of the trauma that shapes the lives of Blasim’s characters.

Hebrew Gomel: Space, Genre, Modernity

Abstract: This article explores the understudied role of Gomel as an important center of literary production during the emergence of Hebrew modernism at the turn of the twentieth century. Prominent writers such as Gershon Shofman, Yosef Haim Brenner, and Uri Nissan Gnessin fostered personal and literary dialogues in and with the city. By combining various methodological approaches—New Historicism, literary cartography, and regional history—we analyze the unique spatial dynamics that sparked Gomel's transformation into a laboratory of Hebrew modernism. While grounding our readings of Shofman, Brenner, and Gnessin in the spatial turn in literary theory, we argue that these three canonical Hebrew writers created literary texts that captured the urban experience of this eastern European Jewish metropolis. We trace the evolution of Hebrew texts written in Gomel from a synchronic perspective and construct a detailed description of the town's literary-cum-cultural history. At the same time, we focus on Gomel's broader historical and geographical status within the Pale of Settlement and demonstrate how each of the three writers used a different literary genre—the urban miniature, the novel, and the novella—to create a unique representation of Gomel's urban space. Furthermore, by focusing on the chronotope of Gomel, our readings of Shofman, Brenner, and Gnessin underscore that these texts are grounded in Gomel's urban fabric through particular forms of local belonging, rather than an abstract notion of "uprooted" existence.

Prerequisites for the Reception of Herzen in China at the Beginning of the 20th Century

The article analyzes the economic, political and cultural exchanges between Russia and China before 1900 and at the beginning of the 20th century, which were the prerequisites and the basis for the spread of Herzen's work and Russian literature in China. The article deals with the humanitarian traditions of Russian literature and the free spirit of Russian writers, represented by Herzen, which were in demand in Chinese literature of that time as well as in Russian. The article reveals the phenomenon of the perception of Herzen's literary and social ideas by Chinese revolutionary leaders (Liang Qichao and Li Dazhao). The author analyzes the similarities and differences in their perception and understanding of Herzen's ideas. The analysis of the factor of Herzen's reception in China is significant for subsequent Herzen studies in China, the study of the Russian-Chinese literary dialogue and the prospects of world literary development in the context of globalization. The beginning of literary Herzen studies in China gave impetus to the gradual transition of researchers to the study of the content, artistic form and other literary merits of Herzen's works.

«Самообладание» и «неудержимая ярость»: споры о вере в английском католическом сообществе XVII в.

Early Modern European culture abounded in various forms of public controversies. These included university debates, literary dialogues, printed polemical works, etc. The Reformation and the resulting confessional conflicts added numerous religious disputations. Religious disputations were closely linked to conversions to the ‘true faith’ and could be addressed to either national audiences or to relatively small groups. How were these ‘private disputations’ perceived and described by those who witnessed such events? In the 16th–17th centuries the European audience was well versed in the arguments of both Catholic and Protestant theologians. What, then, could be considered a victory when almost every argument of the disputants was predictable? The article presents an analysis of a disputation narrative — the story of the debates between an Anglican divine, William Chillingworth, and a Jesuit, Thomas Holland, which were held in 1634 at the house of Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland. The disputation was organized to help persuade the daughters of Lady Falkland, newly converted Catholics and future nuns Anne, Lucy, Elizabeth and Mary Cary, who experienced a religious crisis. The disputation narrative was part of the biography of Lady Falkland written by her daughters. The story was closely connected to the narrative of the conversion of the mother and the daughters to Catholicism. The process was presented as an “intellectual conversion” through rational arguments. However, the story of the disputation focuses not on the arguments but on the behavior of all the participants, and on their emotions. This is a reflection of the views of the 17th-century polemicists regarding the role of emotions and passions in the process of religious conversion and the search for truth.

Literary learning: A proposal for using literature for the acquisition of emotional competencies

The concept of literary learning is based upon the conception that there are learning processes which through the use of literary texts have a productive result. The linking element between both terms is the development of some competencies, in particular, emotional as well as discursive. By presenting these considerations, new answers to old questions, which are still discussed in the didactics of literature, are provided: Why is literary reading necessary in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT), what goals are being pursued, how should literary reading be directed, and which learning processes are intended? The article deals with the aesthetic experience of literature on the basis of a lesson example. It is aimed at the aesthetic perception whereby not only is a pleasurable reading understood, but also a critical examination of the represented reality in the novel. The result is a productive and dialectic literary dialogue, in which the topics of narration are a starting point to an aesthetic judgment that also requires the ability to empathize with the characters and situations, so that learners ultimately improve their discursive skills.

Reading Anna Frajlich's Latest Volume of Poetry

Reading Anna Frajlich's Latest Volume of Poetry

The French Reception of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Belated Consecration

The French Reception of <i>Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</i>: A Belated Consecration

Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America by Axel Gasquet and Gorica Majstorovic

Cultural and Literary Dialogues Between Asia and Latin America by Axel Gasquet and Gorica Majstorovic

Deviant language in the literary dialogue: An English–Romanian translational view

Abstract Drawing on the scholarly acknowledgement regarding the experimental nature of dialogue in Modern and Postmodern literature, this article attempts at investigating the translatability of dialogic utterances displaying deviant language. The relevance of the study is given by the structural differences between languages, which oftentimes triggers the impossibility of rendering the dialogic information relative to the literary characters’ identity in the target language. The examples are depicted from several fictional texts, where part of the characters’ identity is constructed by the peculiarities of their speech which deviates, in a range of manners, from standard English. Such deviant language indicates the characters’ idiolectal, sociolectal or dialectal identity, as well as the broader social context in which they act. The examination of deviant language leads to findings concerning its structural variety and its essential role in completing some literary characters’ identity and, implicitly, its importance in translation. Solutions are suggested to the interlingual transfer of formally untranslatable deviant language of a grammatical, phonological and lexical nature, taking also account of criteria pertaining to functional aspects. The conclusions discuss structural, phonological and lexical possibilities of the target language, the translator’s creative engagement in the translation of deviant identity-marking language and suggest further research opportunities.

The Reception of Romanian Literature from the Republic of Moldova in Ukraine: Plurigenural Anthologies

In the present article, the author highlights an important aspect of the RomanianUkrainian literary dialogue: the editing by Ukrainians in the years from 1953 to 1977 of four plurigenural anthological collections from the literary creation and partly from the folklore of the Republic of Moldova. These editions are seen by the researcher as a significant contribution to the above mentioned dialogue. But the dominance of the ideological dictatorship in that period left its negative mark on several works included in anthologies – a fact that determined a value discernment of the material in each editorial unit. This action is accomplished in the hope that the dialogue discussed will be reopened in the upcoming years. Therefore, the author’s comments pursued several purposes: listing the writings that have devalued in the meantime showing the causes of this phenomenon; indication of the selection criteria and directions for the development of new volumes such as plurigenural anthologies.

Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled by Nicholas Allen

<i>Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled</i> by Nicholas Allen

VASYL STEFANYK IN CZECHIA: LIFETIME PERCEPTION IN REWIEWS AND TRANSLATIONS

The paper traces the perception of Vasyl Stefanyk’s works in Czechia, from the fi rst mention of him by Ivan Franko in the monthly “Slovanský přehled” in 1898 to the obituaries of the writer, who passed away at the end of 1936. Th e research outlines the genre spectrum of Czech publications concerning Stefanyk’s works (translations; reviews in periodicals; scholarly, educational, and reference editions) and the circle of authors that paid attention to Stefanyk’s writings. In particular, it specifi es the authorship of A. Proházka’s and V. Prach’s works assigned by cryptonyms. Stefanyk’s writings aroused the interest of the authors representing various literary directions and groups: Czech Modernism (František Šalda), the decadent periodical “Moderní revue” (Arnošt Proházka), a group of anarchist rebels (Stanislav K. Neumann), and the Masaryk’s movement of ‘realists’. Th e decadents and ‘rebels’ even showed a special aff ection for the Ukrainian author, as they were the fi rst to translate him in their magazines and published the writer’s earliest and most complete lifetime Czech collection “Povídky” (“Stories”) in 1905. Th ere were fi ve Stefanyk’s books published in the writer’s homeland during his lifetime, but the biggest attention of the Czech translators was drawn to the collection “Th e Little Blue Book”, and among the short stories – “Th e News”, “He Committed a Suicide”, “Maple Leaves”, and “My Word”. Among well-known translators were Karel Rypáček, Jaroslav Rozvoda, and Rudolf Hůlka. Alois Koudelka, Jan Máchal, Vincenc Charvát published critical works exploring the expressionist style and existential issues of Stefanyk’s works. Czech critics oft en took guidance from the discourse on Stefanyk represented by I. Franko, B. Lepkyi, and Lesia Ukrainka. Perception of Stefanyk’s writings developed into an engaging study of the writer’s works in the institutionally branched and aesthetically diff erentiated cultural environment of Czechia in the interwar 20th century. Th is interest helped to establish a closer CzechUkrainian literary dialogue.