Literary Interests Research Articles

МИФ О РАЗРУШЕНИИ ХЕРСОНЕСА: ЭПИЗОД ЛИТЕРАТУРНОГО ОСВОЕНИЯ КРЫМА

In travel literature of the 19th century (P.I. Sumarokov, V.B. Bronevsky, I.M. Muraviev-Apostol, E.D. Clark, F. Dubois de Montpere, K. Omer de Gell and others), there was a legend that ancient Chersonesus was destroyed to extract building materials for the construction of Sevastopol. The objective data analysis shows that it is a literary myth that originates from the work of P.S. Pallas “Observations Made During Traveling Over Southern Provinces of the Russian State in 1793–1794” (1799–1801). The scholar argued that the “destruction” of Chersonesus was a consequence of the active construction of Sevastopol in the 1780s–1790s. In 1818, P.S. Pallas’s viepoint was supported by N.M. Karamzin, whose History of the Russian State tells (with reference to P.S. Pallas) that Chersonesus was destroyed “to take stones to construct houses in Sevastopol”. Since then, this version of the events has become a commonplace in almost any text about Chersonesus. At the same time, some European authors (E.D. Clark, K. Omer de Gell) used this “common place” as an instrument of political propaganda. It has been documented that only four objects of modest scale were built out of Chersonesus stone in 1783: a chapel, a smithy, a pier and an admiral’s house. Then, they started to produce building materials in F.F. Mekenzi’s estate and in the Inkerman quarries, which made the industrial extraction of stone in Chersonesus impractical. Why did the experience of the first city constructions entail such generalizing conclusions in P.S. Pallas’s book? The reconstruction of the historical situation allows to single out two main reasons. That time Crimea was considered a fragment of classical antiquity acquired by Russia. The remains of ancient constructions became the primary object of literary and research interests. However, the first travelers were deceived in their expectations, since in Crimea they mostly found medieval monuments erected on the site of ancient ones. Modern archaeologists know that in the 6th – 7th centuries ancient Chersonesus was completely rebuilt, which explains the scantiness of ancient traces. However, in the era of P.S. Pallas, it was easier to explain the absence of antique artifacts by the destruction caused by those who built Sevastopol. Yet there was another reason. Sevastopol quickly became the most populous city on the peninsula. This led to spontaneous development and unauthorized extraction of building materials, including the territory of Chersonesus. It was impossible to tackle the problem of protecting ancient monument at the level of local initiatives and funds. The exaggerations found in P.S. Pallas’s writing can be explained by the awareness of the spontaneous threat to the ruins of the ancient polis. A small fragment of the text written by P.S. Pallas about the destruction of Chersonesus was rather a signal of alarm calling for measures to preserve the settlement, than a strictly historical statement. This signal, relayed by many literary texts, eventually caused the required reaction – Chersonesus became an object of historical heritage protection. However, at the same time, P.S. Pallas’s text turned into a mythologeme, firmly entrenched in literary ideas about the history of Chersonesus and Sevastopol.

Guillermo ArriagaSalvar el fuego

Books in Review are denuded. She shatters her constructed marital idyll, revealing her dead husband as a controlling megalomaniac, given to cruel condescension and predatory engagements with his young assistants. The literary pursuit of this suburban New England septuagenarian widow becomes a channel for the undulations of her unquiet mind, an attempt to preserve the passing of her ungrieved life. “That was what I meant to write all along–my story, my last lines. My name was Vesta,” she writes, eerily replacing Magda’s name with her own. Written and shelved in 2015, the novel emerges from the drawer at a time when isolation is the mechanism of daily affairs, uncannily reflected in the distanced and misanthropic Vesta who is steeped in several layers of self-imposed isolation. Death in Her Hands is not a book of answers; reading it in the midst of social loneliness generates great excitement but little comfort . Typical of Moshfegh’s novels, this one is just as unpredictable and sparks in its readers a confused curiosity as it hiccups along a hallucinatory trail. Vesta wants to insist on life, and for a while the novel pretends to share her insistence. But it resolutely refuses to allow her any safe harbor, which is perhaps its most brutal inclination. She is betrayed by her two companions (her husband and her dog); the narrative strongly hints that the note—the fount of Vesta’s artistic obsession —is only a prop from a detective game her dying neighbor is playing. “Don’t you know there is no life after death?” she is asked, puncturing the aorta of her literary memorialization. Moshfegh toys with the possibility of suggesting art as an antidote to death and oblivion; after all, Vesta is given a book to aid her in her mourning. But this life buoy is quickly yanked away the moment we get too comfortable in the safety of that idea. Cruelty is Moshfegh’s sleight of hand. Ashmita Chatterjee Kolkata, India Guillermo Arriaga Salvar el fuego Miami. Alfaguara. 2020. 659 pages. GUILLERMO ARRIAGA’S Salvar el fuego has garnered him the prestigious Alfaguara Novel Prize for 2020. A major figure in Mexican cinema, Arriaga is an internationally recognized screenwriter, director, and producer. Salvar el fuego, his most ambitious fiction, contains many of the themes as well as the narrative techniques that characterize both his films and previous novels. Salvar el fuego has four main characters: Marina Longines, a wealthy and ostensibly happily married woman with three children who is a choreographer and owns her own dance company; José Cuauhtémoc Huiztlic, a man imprisoned for killing his father, who was a distinguished indigenous scholar; Francisco Cuitláhuac Huiztlic, José’s brother; and El Máquinas, an elite hitman for a drug cartel, whom José meets in prison when he is serving a sentence for killing his father. Once he has done his time, José looks up his prison buddy who, when José becomes hospitalized with serious infections from insect bites, gets his cartel boss to pay for his treatment. This act precipitates events that lead to José killing of a young hired assassin and a police commandant, actions that earn him a trip back to prison with a fifty-year sentence. Marina is close to a wealthy gay couple, Pedro and Hector, who are patrons of the arts. They sponsor cultural events and literary workshops at the prison where José is serving his sentence. They invite Marina to have her company present their work there, where she meets and falls in love with José, something that rips her from her comfortable upper-class life and stable marriage and threatens her existence. Through these characters, the novel lays bare the gulf that exists in Mexico between the wealthy and poor and the lack of justice and opportunities for the latter. At the beginning of the novel, José describes Mexico as a nation divided between the haves, who live in fear they will lose everything they have, and the have-nots, who live in rage for what they do not have. The scourges of political corruption, machismo, and the violence fueled by the drug trade also receive treatment in the novel. In Salvar...

Н.М. Языков и граф Д.И. Хвостов: диалог романтика и классика

The article is devoted to the relationship of prominent representatives of opposite literary trends: the romanticist N.M. Yazykov and the classicist count D.I. Khvostov. Starting as a poetic game, the communication of two poets gradually developed into correspondence. The history of their dialogue is recreated on the basis of lifetime poetic publications and epistolary materials from Yazykov and Khvostov collections in the Manuscript Department of Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. For the first time, the correspondence of two poets is introduced into scientific circulation. The work reveals the nature of their creative connections, outlines the facets of literary interests and assessments, complementing the picture of the history of literature in Pushkin's time. The article specifies some facts related to A.S. Pushkin.

Michael Longley's Poetics of Painting

Michael Longley's Poetics of Painting Jack Quin (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jeffrey Morgan, Light from Two Windows (acrylic on canvas, 125 x 95 cm), Belfast Waterfront [End Page 54] the welsh painter jeffrey morgan's seated portrait of Michael Longley, Light from Two Windows, meticulously records the poet's eclectic art and literary interests scattered around a room in County Mayo. The painting includes two portraits of Buster Keaton, a picture of Billie Holiday, Robert Fagles's translation of The Iliad, and a couple of notable art books, one on the Japanese artist Hokusai and one on the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi.1 There are a number of curious found objects dotted around the room as well, including a dolphin's skull on the windowsill and an impossibly balanced swan's egg atop a tower of books, which playfully alludes to Brancusi's ovoid sculptures in marble. Through the window is a glimpse of the Mayo countryside with a wedge of swans flying past. Morgan's portrait is the inspiration for Longley's ekphrastic poem "Watercolour" from The Ghost Orchid: Between a chicken's wishbone on the mantelpieceAnd, on the window sill, a dolphin's skull, I sit,My pullover a continuation of the lazy-bedsYou study through the window, my shirt a runningTogether of earth-colours, wintry grasses, brackenPainted with your favourite brush—goose-quill and sableFrom a hundred years ago—and with water:One drop too many and the whole thing disintegrates.In this humidity your watercolour will never dry.2 [End Page 55] The mantelpiece with a chicken's wishbone does not appear in the painted portrait. Rui Carvalho Homem suggests that the object is visible from the perspective of the sitter rather than the perspective of the painter, a reminder that the poem is about sitting for a painting and not merely an ekphrastic account of the finished work.3 Besides the accumulated objects within the room, Longley observes Morgan's painterly technique; how the stitching of the pullover appears as "a continuation of the lazy-beds / You study through the window," and how his red-brown shirt is "a running / Together of earth-colours, wintry grasses, bracken." Morgan remarked that he even thought of his landscape paintings as portraits or self-portraits through the snapshots of domestic interiors, where the accumulation of background objects such as spongeware bowls, clothes, and "everything embod[ies] for me certain aspects of my own mundane domestic existence."4 Longley's eye for detail is borrowing from the language of art history to imagine his portrait as a blending of natural elements: the running together of patterns and colors framed by the window into the central seated figure, drawing the eye downward from the window to the sitter, in this case a serendipitous alignment of the landscape with the sitter. Morgan's portrait was executed during Longley's sabbatical in County Mayo after more than a decade working for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Beyond his friendships and familial ties with many painters and sculptors, Longley's lifelong engagements with the visual arts extend from collaborative artist books to exhibition catalog essays, reviews, interviews, and the organization of inter-arts events for the Arts Council. He has collaborated with painters and illustrators on a number of limited editions of his own work, including Out of the Cold (1999), Sea Asters (2015), and Ghetto (2019) with illustrations by his daughter Sarah Longley. He has written a number of prefaces and essays for exhibition catalogs including the work of David Crone, Brian Ferran, and Felim Egan. In the late 1960s to 1970s he wrote a range of articles and interviews for the Irish Times on Gerard Dillon, Colin Middleton, and others. He has contributed ekphrastic poems to gallery exhibitions that explicitly pair writers with artworks in their collection, including A Conversation Piece: Poetry and Art in 2002 with the Ulster Museum and the collections of the National Museums Northern Ireland, and in 2015 the National Gallery of Ireland's exhibition Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art. As assistant director of the Arts Council, he edited and contributed the...

Interesovanja učenika trećeg i četvrtog razreda gimnazije za čitanje lektire

The culture of reading, and interests of students in the school reading, changes from generation to generation. We have opted for gymnasium students of the third and fourth grade because we regard them as active readers with developed reading tastes and habits. Students who have home libraries and are surrounded by books, and whose parents have a higher level of education, read more on average than those who have no books at home and live in a less developed cultural and economic environment. Information about student literary interests is set as a methodological requirement and growing scientific attention is paid to it. The paper analyses the research findings on reading interests of students of the third and fourth grade of the general secondary education in schools in the City of East Sarajevo. All data should indicate: the level of reading culture that has been achieved; whether students regularly read the required reading and works outside the compulsory programme; which topics they are interested in; which works they prefer to read; and whether there are differences in interests depending on the gender of students, their academic achievements, and family and socioeconomic opportunities. The method of systematic empirical non-experimental research was applied.

Simone Poggi’s Neo-Latin Fables: a Jesuit in the Footsteps of Phaedrus

The Italian Jesuit Simone Maria Poggi (1685-1749) was an outstanding member of the “Academy of Arcadia”, where he was known as Nimesius Ergaticus. He wrote ten books of Latin fables under the inspiration of Phaedrus. These apologues were published posthumously by Giuseppe Boero in 1883. In their composition, the Jesuit from Bologna used iambic senarii, the metre employed by Phaedrus, and tried to adapt the Roman fables to his time and circumstances. In this article, I will offer an overview of Poggi’s Latin fables paying special attention to his prologues, epilogues and programmatic fables, in which, following Phaedrus’ example, our poet gives many clues about his sources and literary interests along with autobiographical issues. I will focus my research on Poggi’s relationship with his predecessors and on his conception of the fable not only as a literary subgenre but also as a very useful educational tool. Summing up, my aim will be to show that Poggi’s fable collection constitutes a remarkable and curious product of Phaedrus’ influence on Neo-Latin literature in the eighteenth century.

Conversations with Galileo: A Fictional Dialogue Based on Biographical Facts

CONVERSATIONS WITH GALILEO: A Fictional Dialogue Based on Biographical Facts by William R. Shea. London, UK: Watkins Media, 2019. xi + 115 pages, including notes and further reading. Hardcover; $14.95. ISBN: 9781786782496. *Have you ever wanted to engage in an extended conversation with a famous person whose work and historical milieu you have studied carefully for many years? William R. Shea, one of the world's leading Galileo scholars, invites you to sit down, relax with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, to engage in a conversation with Galileo. Conversations with Galileo: A Fictional Dialogue incorporates many of Galileo's own words taken from his works or letters. This slim book will allow you to experience how such a dialogue may have transpired. *Shea, a Canadian historian, was Galileo Professor of the History of Science at the University of Padua, Italy from 2003-2012, the very university where Galileo once taught. He has authored many books about Galileo and the Scientific Revolution. The latest, co-authored with Mariano Artigas, are Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius (2003) and Galileo Observed: Science and the Politics of Belief (2006). Conversations with Galileo is part of a series of books published by Watkins Media Ltd., offering conversations with luminaries such as JFK, Oscar Wilde, Casanova, Buddha, Charles Dickens and Isaac Newton. *First, a word about the format of Conversations with Galileo: A three-page introduction by Dava Sobel, author of Longitude (1995) and Galileo's Daughter (1999), is followed by a short (21-page) biography by Shea entitled "Galileo (1564-1642): His Life in Short." Then we are offered 13 chapters dealing with a vast range of topics. Each chapter then begins with Shea posing a leading personal question. These questions cover what, I suspect, most people would want to ask Galileo: questions about censorship, the earth as a planet, scientific failures, what do you take the Bible to say, relations with the Roman Catholic Church Congregation of the Holy Office, also known as the Roman Inquisition, and the Congregation of the Index, other church officials, and, perhaps a final question: what is your claim to fame? The Galileo I remember: the rebel, the seat-of-the-pants philosopher, the "heretic," the defender of the Copernican world-picture, and the creator of a "science of motion" (appearing in the last chapter, "His Claim to Fame") are all present. *So, what more would you want to ask? To me it was surprising to see what else Shea does in fact ask. There are conversations/chapters dealing with "Family Burdens," "Wine, Women and Song," "The Burdens of Teaching," "Moonlighting," "Mind your Horoscope," "The Plague," and "On Art and Literature." This is a Galileo with a human face, with human foibles, jealousies, amorous interests, financial pressures and responsibilities, work-load issues, social conventions, concerns about the plague and social distancing, and literary interests. These are subjects which are usually hidden or absent in many accounts of Galileo's exploits. For instance, we learn of Galileo the lutenist and of his musical family: his father Vincenzo, his brother Michelangelo (a court musician to the grand duke of Bavaria in Munich). We meet his children: his two daughters, Virginia and Livia, who both entered a convent, and his son Vincenzo who had no scientific interests. We also learn about Galileo's life as a student. At seventeen, Galileo attended the University of Pisa to study medicine and "natural philosophy" (science in our parlance). He attended lectures for four and one-half years without acquiring a degree (which was quite common at the time) but did develop his mathematical interests. These are only a few of the personal details in Galileo's life which Shea explores in this book. *All in all, this is a delightful and inviting book, carefully constructed, written in an engaging style, and easy to read. Don't let the poorly designed cover keep you from picking it up. This is a good read for anyone wanting to get a look behind the scenes and meet an illustrious natural philosopher as he lived his rich and complex life. *Reviewed by Arie Leegwater, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI 49456.

El Encomio de los ingenios sevillanos, en la fiesta de los santos Inacio de Loyola y Francisco Javier (1623), de Juan Antonio de Ibarra

Abstract Encomio de los ingenios sevillanos is a collection of poems from a poetic contest honoring Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Francis Xavier, promoted in Seville by an influential corporation in the commercial field. Juan Antonio de Ibarra’s presentation of the poems in this collection has several meta-literary considerations. The celebration of the contest by the initiative of this civil corporation, several editorial details in the book or its author’s literary links and interests allows us to contextualize the prominence of this meta-literary component and its main purpose: the exaltation of current local poets, continuing with the brilliant trajectory in Seville.

Vasyl Stus and Osyp Mandelstam: on crossroads of poetic worlds

The article focuses on the coincidences in V. Stus’s and O. Mandelstam’s biographies and notes the psychological and typological similarities of their personalities as well as their fascination with the German language and natural sciences (biology, chemistry). Both writers’ literary interests were alike, they were especially focused on the works of such Russian authors as A. Pushkin, A. Herzen, A. Blok, B. Pasternak, N. Gumilyov, M. Lermontov, F. Tyutchev, and others). Among world classical writers, Stus loved the works of J. W. von Goethe most of all, and Mandelstam admired the works by Dante Alighieri. The paper also deals with Stus’s translations from R. M. Rilke and Mandelstam’s translations from F. Petrarca. The critical activity of Stus and Mandelstam is also mentioned, in particular, O. Mandelstam’s essay “Conversation about Dante” and V. Stus’s paper about P. Tychyna “Phenomenon of the Age (Ascension on Calvary of Glory)”.
 Stus’s letters and manuscripts reveal his attitude to the works of O. Mandelstam, whose poetry appeared in Stus’s life at crucial points. Stus referred to it during his imprisonment in the Soviet camps and tried to understand the problem of “poet and power”. A comparative analysis of the fragments from Mandelstam’s poems, cited in the works by the Ukrainian poet, and the original texts written by Mandelstam revealed сertain deviations. Stus used repetitions instead of the ‘forgotten’ words, which is a general characteristic of his own poetics.
 At the textual level, the poems of Stus and Mandelstam are future-oriented. It can be observed in the appeals to the reader used by each of them in a specific way: the Ukrainian poet speaks as a ‘son’, while the Russian one as a ‘teacher’, echoing the practice of Pushkin. Both poets loved their homelands very much and were attached to it; both of them could not imagine their life outside the motherland. In their texts, Mandelstam and Stus created the images of a dead city, a prison state, emphasizing the impossibility of the poet’s existence in his own country.

Writing and Power in the Roman World: Literacies and Material Culture

Writing and Power in the Roman World: Literacies and Material Culture

Художня література як засіб формування підлітка як суб’єкта пізнавальної діяльності

The purpose of our research is to justify methodological backgrounds for the purpose of investigating subjectivity of a personality and to test empirically the level of person’s formation of teenagers. Methods of the research. The following theoretical methods of the research were used to solve the tasks formulated in the article: a categorical method, structural and functional methods, the methods of the analysis, systematization, modeling, generalization. The questionnaire method was used as the experimental one. In order to conduct the empirical part of the research, the author’s questionnaires were developed for both parents and teachers. The results of the research. The empirical research that lasted since 2017 to 2019 was described in the article. The task was to identify the specifics of the literary environment of pupils. This task was considered essential, and determining the level of the development of a teenager as a subject of cognitive activity was an additional task. It was noted that the substantive aspect of communication between adolescents was characterized by the imbalance of their interests in relation to different directions of literary culture. The latter one is largely represented by fantastic and detective literature. There is also a general tendency to displace literary classics out of the literary interests of adolescents. At the stage of questioning the attempt was made to pre-imagine the degree of the development of a teenager as a subject of cognitive activity due to the influence of the literary environment, which had been determined at the level of studying the pupils’ thoughts on literature, the specifics of their literary reality which had been reflected, the means of mastering literary culture. The empirical data obtained indicated a rather weak expression in adolescents’ orientation towards another person, penetration into their inner world of the person in a situation of a real communication with other students and teachers. Conclusions. Thus, a comparison of four types of pupils (two experimental and two control classes) within the possibilities presented by the questionnaire leads to the conclusion that the level of the development of adolescents as subjects of cognitive activity is equally low, according to different literary environment of pupils, which is determined by studying in a case of different programs. Teens, as a rule, are not able to carry out the internal dialogue with the text, to substantiate their own position, that is the subjectivity of pupils is not properly developed through either a regular curriculum or a specialized program in the course of «World Literature».Increasing the time for quasi-communication of pupils with the literature provided by the program of its in-depth study leads to some positive results, but does not itself eliminate the problem of under-development of a teenager as a subject of cognitive activity. The subjectivity is emphasized to be formed provided by such a deliberate influence of a teacher on pupils, which will change the personal position of teens in literature. One way to achieve this position may be to overcome teens’ misunderstanding of literature as a particular form of quasi-communication, established in the course of questioning.

KİTABÜ’T-TEVARİH WHİCH BELONG TO NECMEDDİN TARSUSİ WHO İS A QADI İN DAMASCUS: (REVİEW, TRANSLATİON AND EVALUATİON)

Memlükler dönemi ilim adamları tarafından sultan ve devlet ricalinin destekleri ve teşvikleri ile çok yönlü zengin bir edebiyat meydana getirilmiştir. Bunda vakfiyeler aracılığıyla inşa edilen dört mezhebe ait medreselerin faaliyetlerinin de olumlu etkisi olmuştur. Şafiiler başta olmak üzere bu medreselerde Hanefî, Maliki ve Hanbeli mezhebine mensup müderrisler ve kadılar yetişmiştir. Bu atmosferde yetişen âlimler İslami ilimlerin her alanında kendini ifade etme imkânı bulmuş; özgün ve derinlikli eserler ortaya koymuşlardır. Eserlerin başında tarih, teracim ve tabakat türü eserler gelmiştir. Hemen her mezhepte kurucusundan kendi dönemine kadar etkin liderlerin biyografisinin yapıldığı tabakat, teracim ve vefeyât türü eserler yazılmıştır. Bununla beraber muasır kişilerin kaleme alındığı eserler de kaleme alınmıştır. Söz konusu çalışmayı yapan âlimlerden biri de Türk asıllı, dedeleri Tarsus’tan Şam’a gelmiş olan Necmeddin Tarsûsî’dir. İlmiyi sınıfı bir aileden gelen Tarsûsî, “Ürcuze fi Vefeyâti’l-Aʻyân min Mezhebi Ebî Hanîfeti’n-N’umân” adlı eseriyle Ebû Hanîfe’den (ö. 150) Alâaddin Türkmânî’ye (ö. 750) kadar Hanefî âlimlerin vefat tarihlerini konu edinen vefeyat türünden bir eser ortaya koymuştur. Ayrıca Kitabü’t-Tevârîh adıyla 664 yılından kendi zamanına kadar Şam’da kadılık yapan Hanefî kâdılkudâtların başka bir ifadeyle muasır hanefî âlimlerinin biyografilerini de yazmıştır. Çalışmamızda incelediğimiz eser de Kitabü’t-Tevârih’tir. Kitabü’t-Tevârîh, Tarsûsî’nin 54 bölümden oluşan el-Feâidü’l-Fıkhiyye adlı 1000 beytlik manzumesinin ve ed-Dürretü’s-Seniyye fi’l-Fevâidi’l-Fıkhiyye adlı şerhinin 13 beytlik son bölümüdür. Eserin bu bölümünün çalışma konusu edilmesinde bölümün Şam tarihçileri olarak bilinen Nuaymî (ö. 927) ve İbn Tolun’un (ö. 953) eserlerine kaynaklık etmesi yatmaktadır. Bununla ilgili çalışmamız da yayın aşamasındadır. Özellikle İbn Tolun’un “Kudâtu Dımaşk” olarak bilinen “es-Sağru’l-Bessâm fi Zikri men Vülliye Kadâe’ş-Şâm” adlı eserinin ilk dokuz Hanefî kadısı neredeyse Kitabü’t-Tevârih’in aynısıdır. Bölüm h. 664 yılında Şam’a kâdılkudât olarak İbn Ata’dan başlayarak h. 746 yılı babası İmadüddin Tarsûsî’nin kadılığı bırakıp kendisinin geçmesini ifade etmesiyle son bulmaktadır. Eser, kadıların doğum, vefat ve kadılık tarihlerini ebced sembolleriyle ifade eden nazımla başlamıştır. Sonra da şerh edilerek dokuz kadının hayatına dair önemli bigiler verilmiştir. Şerhte sembollerin karşılığı olan tarihlerin açıklamasına ilaveten, kadıların hocaları, öğrencileri, ilgi duydukları eserler, öne çıktıkları yönler, görev yaptığı medreseler, tayinleri, terfileri, azilleri, bazılarının da edebi yönleri ele alınmıştır. Bu yönüyle teracim özelliği taşıyan eser Moğol istilası, halkla münasebetler, iktidar ulema ilişkisi gibi siyasi ve sosyokültürel yönü ortaya koymasıyla da tarih niteliği taşımaktadır.

Radical Togetherness: African-American Literature and Abolition Pedagogy at Parchman and Beyond

This article makes the case that the student-centered learning paradigm that I have aimed to establish at Parchman/Mississippi State Penitentiary as a member of a college-in-prison program represents a prison abolition pedagogy that builds on Martin Luther King and Angela Y. Davis’s coalitional models of abolition work. Drawing from Davis’s abolition-framed conception of teaching in jails and prisons as expressed in her autobiography and her critical prison studies text Are Prisons Obsolete?, I argue that the learning environments that I create collaboratively with students at Parchman similarly respond to incarcerated students’ institution-specific concerns and African-American literary interests in ways that lessen, if only temporarily, the social isolation and educational deprivation that they routinely experience in Mississippi’s plantation-style state penitentiary. Moreover, I am interested in the far-reaching implications of what I have theorized elsewhere as “abolition pedagogy”—a way of teaching that exposes and opposes the educational deprivation, under-resourced and understaffed learning environments, and overtly militarized classrooms that precede and accompany too many incarcerations. As such, this article also focuses on my experience of teaching about imprisonment in African-American literature courses at the University of Mississippi at the same time that I have taught classes at Parchman that honor the African-American literary interests of imprisoned students there.

Editors’ Letter

Editors’ Letter

How Does Affective Disorder Relate to Creativity? The Pathography of the Chinese Writer Yu Dafu

Background: Yu Dafu, arguably one of the greatest writers in modern Chinese history, is characterized by critics as having a sentimental and decadent style. His life is clearly marked by mood bipolarity, and it seems that his creativity was affected by extreme emotional states. However, this link remains unclear. Methods: Yu’s self-assessments in his works and letters are analyzed from the perspective of current psychiatric classifications. Examples are extracted from his writing career and habits to help illuminate the relationship between mental disorders and literary creativity. Results: Yu’s writing career seems to be divided into four blocks. He was in a deep depression when he studied abroad and taught in China and experienced a hypomanic episode afterward, when he created a magazine and fell in love. The pattern of his mood changes is consistent with the symptoms of bipolar II disorder. His maintenance of a high degree of literary productivity alongside his anguish during depressive episodes may suggests mixed states. Conclusions: Mood changes shaped Yu’s life and writing career. Depressive and hypomanic moods enhanced his creativity in several ways, and some situations in his life indicate that writing and literary pursuits also have reverse effects on one’s mental state. The perspective that mental disorders are seen as a certain profile of literary career can help us to better understand the writers.

Readers’ Interest of Students of Pre-Revolutionary Russia

The article considers the reading activity and book priorities of students of the Kiev Polytechnic Institute of Emperor Alexander II in 1904—1912. The author studied the readers’ interest using the analysis of student questionnaires and library loan books of the early twentieth century, as well as reports on the activities of the Institute and memoirs of students and teachers. The fundamental library was created at the establishment of the technical University in 1898. Professors and students used loan services and reading room of the Institute library. Since 1905, the library began to keep statistical records of the loan books and magazines. The article presents the data on the loan books and magazines in 1905—1909. Requests for reading of books significantly exceeded the library’s capacity, so students independently organized the library-reading room, where the books and magazines were purchased taking into account the needs of students. The work of the student library was aimed to help students in solving problems of cultural leisure and intellectual self-improvement; especially young people in extremely difficult financial situation were in urgent need of loan services. The most popular among students were books about history, love and travel. Politically active young people were interested in literature on philosophy, theology, economics, and to a lesser extent, on specialized technical subjects. To better characterize the reading activity of students, it is important to understand their social status, which largely determines the worldview and aesthetic interests of young people. The author presents statistical data on the social and education status of students of the Institute for 1905 and 1907. In the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, in comparison with the capital’s technical universities, there were many Jewish students actively participated in the anti-government movement. They preferred to read literature on social, legal and philosophical issues, including illegal ones. Priorities in choosing genres and authors of works in many ways help modern researchers to understand the literary interests and worldview of young students of the early twentieth century, as well as to recreate the socio-cultural portrait of pre-revolutionary students.

Note from the Editor

CLA JOURNAL 1 Note from the Editor March 2020 will be remembered for many reasons, but what will surely set it apart in the history books was the gradual realization during the final weeks of a relatively mild winter that America--indeed the world--was witnessing in slow motion the fast-moving onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout March 2020 and the months that followed, we sheltered in place, venturing out in masks, gloves, or sometimes improvised gear to gather essentials only. During these stressful months--and even earlier, we were soon to learn--infections from this virus led to a staggering worldwide loss of life as the relentless, equal-opportunity killer took down seniors and children alike. Within a matter of days, collateral damage from the virus upended carefully laid plans for conferences, graduations, vacations, weddings, concerts, and sporting events. The80thAnnualConventionof theCollegeLanguageAssociation(Afrofuturism: Diasporic Visions) was not spared from the succession of postponed or cancelled events. Decision-makers moved reluctantly but quickly to devise contingency plans. In an historic announcement to the CLA membership, then-President Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper wrote, “Your CLA Executive Committee has decided to take the extraordinary action of postponing our April 2020 convention–-a decision that CLA fortunately has not had to make since WWII, when three national meetings were cancelled. Following quickly on the heels of Dr. Harper’s announcement was welcomed news that the April 2020 CLA Convention had been rescheduled for March 3-6, 2021 at its original Memphis, TN location. Although birthed amid the onset of an historic upheaval, CLAJ 63.1 does not take up the subject. Instead, the six essays that appear here had their origins during earlier, virus-free moments. Topics range from films by Abdul Ben-Abdallah and Haile Gerima to the science fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell. Agnieszka Tuszynska’s essay,“Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley’s Papers,” offers a reevaluation of Willard Motley’s engagement with the subject of antiblack racism with the hope of a subsequent reassessment of his place in the canon of African American literature. The author argues that the reason for the lack of critical attention to Motley’s work lies in his status as an African American author who became defined early on as a “raceless” writer and challenges calls for scrutiny of his papers--a scrutiny grounded in what he calls archival intimacy. Such archival intimacy requires a holistic study of a broad range of the author’s personal and literary pursuits, leading to a deeply contextual reading of any works produced by the author. Trent Masiki’s essay,“Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell,” examines how U.S. writers use African 2 CLA JOURNAL Note from the Editor American music in speculative emigration narratives that contextualize and critique the state of U.S. race relations. It explores the relationship between Afro-Zionism, contributionism and messianism in the short stories “Way in the Middle of the Air” (1950) by Ray Bradbury and the “The Space Traders” (1991) by Derrick A. Bell, one of the founders of critical race theory. Using cultural poetics and close textual analysis, I examine how the writers of these short stories use Negro spirituals, the blues, and hip hop to express their ambivalence, if not pessimism, about emigration as a solution to the permanence of racial discrimination and terror in the U.S. William Cunningham’s essay, “Quiet Places in Jesmyn Ward and Natasha Trethewey” builds upon Kevin Quashie’s description and analysis of the inner landscape of black expression in The Sovereignty of Quiet. The essay argues for a spatial analog of quiet as revealed in the works of Natasha Trethewey and Jesmyn Ward. It asserts further that Trethewey’s use of telescoping imagery on a still photo demonstrates an intentional and intersectional discourse of quiet that shapes individual identity while also being contained within the landscape. Connecting TretheweyandWardthroughtheiruseof undergroundspaces,theessaydemonstrates how characters in Salvage the Bones access quiet spaces in order to better understand their environment, articulate their own desires, and survive natural and social forces bent on their destruction. Kwangsoon Kim...

Note from the Editor

CLA JOURNAL 1 Note from the Editor March 2020 will be remembered for many reasons, but what will surely set it apart in the history books was the gradual realization during the final weeks of a relatively mild winter that America--indeed the world--was witnessing in slow motion the fast-moving onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout March 2020 and the months that followed, we sheltered in place, venturing out in masks, gloves, or sometimes improvised gear to gather essentials only. During these stressful months--and even earlier, we were soon to learn--infections from this virus led to a staggering worldwide loss of life as the relentless, equal-opportunity killer took down seniors and children alike. Within a matter of days, collateral damage from the virus upended carefully laid plans for conferences, graduations, vacations, weddings, concerts, and sporting events. The80thAnnualConventionof theCollegeLanguageAssociation(Afrofuturism: Diasporic Visions) was not spared from the succession of postponed or cancelled events. Decision-makers moved reluctantly but quickly to devise contingency plans. In an historic announcement to the CLA membership, then-President Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper wrote, “Your CLA Executive Committee has decided to take the extraordinary action of postponing our April 2020 convention–-a decision that CLA fortunately has not had to make since WWII, when three national meetings were cancelled. Following quickly on the heels of Dr. Harper’s announcement was welcomed news that the April 2020 CLA Convention had been rescheduled for March 3-6, 2021 at its original Memphis, TN location. Although birthed amid the onset of an historic upheaval, CLAJ 63.1 does not take up the subject. Instead, the six essays that appear here had their origins during earlier, virus-free moments. Topics range from films by Abdul Ben-Abdallah and Haile Gerima to the science fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell. Agnieszka Tuszynska’s essay,“Raceless No More: In Search of Race in Willard Motley’s Papers,” offers a reevaluation of Willard Motley’s engagement with the subject of antiblack racism with the hope of a subsequent reassessment of his place in the canon of African American literature. The author argues that the reason for the lack of critical attention to Motley’s work lies in his status as an African American author who became defined early on as a “raceless” writer and challenges calls for scrutiny of his papers--a scrutiny grounded in what he calls archival intimacy. Such archival intimacy requires a holistic study of a broad range of the author’s personal and literary pursuits, leading to a deeply contextual reading of any works produced by the author. Trent Masiki’s essay,“Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell,” examines how U.S. writers use African 2 CLA JOURNAL Note from the Editor American music in speculative emigration narratives that contextualize and critique the state of U.S. race relations. It explores the relationship between Afro-Zionism, contributionism and messianism in the short stories “Way in the Middle of the Air” (1950) by Ray Bradbury and the “The Space Traders” (1991) by Derrick A. Bell, one of the founders of critical race theory. Using cultural poetics and close textual analysis, I examine how the writers of these short stories use Negro spirituals, the blues, and hip hop to express their ambivalence, if not pessimism, about emigration as a solution to the permanence of racial discrimination and terror in the U.S. William Cunningham’s essay, “Quiet Places in Jesmyn Ward and Natasha Trethewey” builds upon Kevin Quashie’s description and analysis of the inner landscape of black expression in The Sovereignty of Quiet. The essay argues for a spatial analog of quiet as revealed in the works of Natasha Trethewey and Jesmyn Ward. It asserts further that Trethewey’s use of telescoping imagery on a still photo demonstrates an intentional and intersectional discourse of quiet that shapes individual identity while also being contained within the landscape. Connecting TretheweyandWardthroughtheiruseof undergroundspaces,theessaydemonstrates how characters in Salvage the Bones access quiet spaces in order to better understand their environment, articulate their own desires, and survive natural and social forces bent on their destruction. Kwangsoon Kim...

The Music of Joseph Joachim by Katharina Uhde

Reviewed by: The Music of Joseph Joachim by Katharina Uhde Robert W. Eshbach The Music of Joseph Joachim. By Katharina Uhde. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018. [xxv, 506 p. ISBN 9781783272846 (hardcover), $99.00.] Music examples, illustrations, appendix, bibliography, index. In early middle age, Joseph Joachim abandoned his creative life as a composer. He never made explicit his reasons for doing so, but for him to have given up such an essential part of his artistic identity they must have been acute and compelling. "Only he is a genuine artist," he wrote to Bettina von Arnim, "for whom art is not a pendant that he can put on or remove at will" (p. 59, my trans.; original in Ver -steigerung 155, am 5 Juli 1929; I. [End Page 268] Autographen aus verschiedenen Gebieten; II. Handschriftlicher Nachlaß der Bettine von Arnim; Dritter und letzter Teil [Berlin: Karl Ernst Henrici, 1929], 59). What could have caused him to renounce such a deeply felt vocation—one which held such promise of success? Donald Tovey hints at various explanations for Joachim's decision, among them the momentous personal and aesthetic rift that occurred midcentury between the advocates of a gradually evolving musical art rooted in "timeless" canonic texts and principles, and the radical "progressive" party that gathered around Franz Liszt in the 1850s. This "War of the Romantics" was the first great questioning of the meaning and utility of the classical canon, founded upon the works of Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach, and expanded both backward and forward in time. It is likely that this increasingly acrimonious and partisan dispute played a substantial role in Joachim's decision. Tovey suggests this, citing Joachim's lasting distaste for "musical metaphysics, what with Wagner and Liszt and the eternal jabber of their disciples" (Mary Grierson, Donald Francis Tovey: A Biography Based on Letters [London: Oxford University Press, 1952], 104). Like Feliz Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Johannes Brahms, Joachim preferred to speak through his tones; he avoided musical diatribe, and he never engaged in journalism. Therein lies much of the interest and significance of Katharina Uhde's The Music of Joseph Joachim: the first and only comprehensive exploration of the evolution of Joseph Joachim's musical thought. In the pages of Uhde's monograph we experience the maturation of one of the greatest minds of the long nineteenth century as represented in his music. Though Joachim's compositions never enduringly entered the repertoire, much less the canon, with Uhde's guidance they offer a fascinating in sight into their creator's musical, personal, intellectual, and spiritual journey, while illuminating the milieux in which his early life unfolded. Uhde is perhaps uniquely qualified to take on a task of such magnitude and intellectual challenge. The scope of her researches is astonishing: there seems to be no archive she has not visited and no scrap of paper she has not examined, interpreted, and contextualized. Her command of the secondary literature is similarly comprehensive, encompassing aspects of history, biography, literary criticism, psychology, music analysis, and performance practice. A performing violinist of significant attainments, an engaging writer, and an erudite as well as indefatigable scholar, Uhde leads us confidently on an excursion of potentially bewildering complexity. From the beginning, Joachim was a reluctant composer, lacking in selfconfidence. As a youth, he was admonished by his uncle Wilhelm Frigdor for his fecklessness: "When he is older, if he stands there merely as a violin player, then he is nothing" (family correspondence, Vienna, 2 December 1844, bequest of Agnes Keep, British Library, Music Collections, Add. MS 42718). Yet it was in his compositions that he worked out his deepest concerns: his obsessive infatuation with Gisela von Arnim; his identity as a Hungarian, a Jew, a German, and a Victorian Englishman; his dual musical life as a virtuoso and a composer; his scholarly and literary interests; and his conflicting allegiances to mentors and friends. There was never a composer for whom the struggle to find a style was so fraught with personal consequences. The poor public reception of his profoundly serious works may have played a part in steering Joachim away from a composing career. "You know what little sympathy my music has met with...

Melville and the Question of Meaning by David Faflik

Reviewed by: Melville and the Question of Meaning by David Faflik Jaime Campomar david faflik Melville and the Question of Meaning New York: Routledge, 2018. 153 pp. David Faflik’s Melville and the Question of Meaning explores the unusual and sometimes oblique ways in which Melville generates meaning for his readers. Its chapters draw on various theoretical and methodological perspectives, including sociolinguistics, formalism, cultural studies, and historicism, to guide readers through Melville’s writings: Moby-Dick, Pierre, Israel Potter, “Bartleby,” and others. Without being flagged as such, chapters seem paired. The first diptych focuses on the minute, unsuspected ways that Melville produces meaning; the second on his resistance to conveying meaning at all; and the third on the ways in which contemporary critics and artists appropriate his meanings and his strategies for conveying them. In the first chapter, “Young American Puns: Antebellum Wordplay and Democratic Manhattan,” Faflik portrays antebellum New York City as a dynamic linguistic environment that featured punning as a central aspect of everyday language. He establishes that punning offered an opportunity for disrupting and upending speech, one that cosmopolites seized. Faflik sees a relationship between the rise of punning in the streets of New York and the literary interests of writers of the Young America group, who became aware of the democratizing potential of punning in their own works. He notes that within the Young America circle, some ways of punning were more democratic than others. For instance, he contrasts the punning of an established figure like Cornelius Mathews with less established ones like Melville. He argues that Mathews’s attempts to garner the Shakespearean pun for subversive purposes were ineffective because they merged two dissonant linguistic registers—lower-class pronunciation and upper-class prosody—and so ended up solidifying the aristocratic structures Mathews sought to dismantle (19). Faflik regards Melville’s ear as much more attuned to the multilingual sounds of downtown New York. He tracks instances of “city speech” in Moby-Dick, Pierre, and “Bartleby” in which Melville puns in ruthlessly democratizing ways. For example, in “Loomings,” Faflik finds allusions to alcohol in words like “belted” and “dive,” slang for drinking and a basement bar, respectively. These hidden references [End Page 97] find thematic resonance in the multitudes’ thirst for water and situate readers within the raucous atmosphere of the antebellum saloon. Through similar examples in Pierre and “Bartleby,” Faflik shows how the pun becomes Melville’s minimalist mode of signifying the archetypal urban space of the 1850s. In chapter 2, “Melville’s Little Historical Method,” Faflik shifts to analyzing the meaning of narrative form in Melville’s only historical novel, Israel Potter. He argues that here Melville writes against the traditional panoramic modes of history writing exemplified in George Bancroft and William H. Prescott, among others, in which national events are organized around teleological masterplots. Israel Potter, in contrast, narrates a different kind of history that anticipates New Historicist preferences for what Faflik calls “little history” (35). Melville’s little historical mode is manifest in different aspects of the novel’s form. The most apparent are the protagonist’s geographical waywardness and the truncated nature of the story’s serialized episodes, which undermine popular teleological plotlines. However, the aspect of this mode that Faflik emphasizes is the anecdote as an essential narrative unit. In the predilection for the anecdotal, Faflik sees the realization of Melville’s theory of little history, a “formal indicator” that signals to readers that any macrohistorical narrative can be “reduced” to the microlevel of everyday occurrence (50). Faflik argues that for Melville these minor incidents are full of historical significance and meaning as well, and that they demand readers to reflect on them rather than on the grand schemes of history. Thus, anecdotes become disruptors of “the complacent perpetuation” of the historical panoramic form and instead favor a democratic mode that Faflik sees as Melville’s “ethical purpose”: a disposition to write a history “for and from” the masses (52–53). In chapters 3 and 4, Faflik directs our attention to a different kind of rhetorical strategy: the withholding of meaning as a productive type of otherness. In chapter 3, “Antebellum Apathy: A Study of Indifference in Melville,” Faflik...