Mort De Research Articles

At the End, Writing

Abstract This article reads Beckett’s poems “Mort de A.D.” and “What is the Word” for how they voice and incorporate notions of formal and epistemic endings, or the lack of an ending. These two poems, written in different phases of Beckett’s career, are useful in mapping a shift in Beckett’s ‘problems’ with endings. Putting Beckett in conversation with the contemporary Italian philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Franco Berardi, specifically their analyses of “infancy” and “conjunctions” respectively, this article pays close attention to Beckett’s poetics of ending, or rather the impossibility of writing about the end.

Of monsters and men: Reading Daniel with the Liber de Morte (Metz Epitome)

Daniel sees Antiochus IV Epiphanes as a latter-day Alexander. When interpreting Antiochus’s death, the author draws on a Ptolemaic court tale of an animal prodigy that foreshadowed Alexander’s own demise ( Liber de Morte Testamentumque Alexandri Magni). Extensive and specific commonalities between Daniel and Liber de Morte suggest that MT Daniel, no less than the OG version, originated in Egypt. Intended readers are the maśkîlîm who fled there during and after the Antiochene crisis. While the visions interpret the death of Antiochus, the tales speak to the maśkîlîm’s hopes for a new life under Ptolemy VI. This paper advances scholarship by proposing that inspiration for Daniel’s Babylonian court setting, and for its apocalyptic imagery, came to our author courtesy of the Ptolemies, a Greek dynasty who used a birth anomaly tale set in Babylon to drive their political agenda in Egypt.

Suficiente luz y suficientes sombras. Descripción fenomenológica de la muerte de Cristo en los escritos de Blaise y Jacqueline Pascal

Le Mystère de la mort de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ, by Jacqueline Pascal, constitutes a work of interest, in which not only the literary virtues of Blaise Pascal’s sister are reflected, but also a glimpse of her “phenomenological” capacity. After an approach to the biography of this 17th century author, an analysis of the work and its philosophical and theological scope, in connection with the writings of Blaise Pascal, is presented, as a reference to her genius and the impact of the influence of Port-Royal’s thought.

La amplicatio del locus amoenus en los prefacios de Juan de Mariana

The following paper will approach the symbolic and rhetorical space of the locus amoenus in Juan de Mariana’s works De Rege et Regis institutione, first published in Toledo in 1599, and De morte et immortalitate, that were included in Mariana’sTractatus septem in Cologne in1609. Theprefaces to both worksfollow thestructure of a Ciceronianlocus amoenus, as it wascommon among the humanist scholars. This configuration of the philosophical discourse according to the Roman author can be found in Lorenzo Valla, Jerónimo Osório, etc. However, there are rhetorical differences between Mariana’s prefaces, especially when regarding the use of Latin. It is our aim to point these differences out, which are mainly based on the use of the rhetorical device of amplificatio. Furthermore, the ten-year distance between both texts reveal the evolution of Mariana’s style in Latin. We will indicate the structural function of the locus amoenus inside the texts and deconstruct the structure. Finally, we will establish similarities between the texts as a means to indicate the aspects in which Mariana evolved in his writing, paying attention to the modifications that embellish the text by means of various rhetorical devices.

O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis ou o romance como viagem

“The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis or the novel as a journey” takes part in the reporting referred in the general framework of the travel motif. e de Lisboa, em meados dos anos 30 do século XX. From Viagem a Portugal (1981) to A Viagem do Elefante (2008), including A Jangada de Pedra (1986), the journey constitutes a point of departure for questioning the return, identity, history, and the sites that were toured. In O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis, the journey leads to a rediscovering of urban spaces, of historical figures and of interpersonal experiences. Finally, the journey leads to other dimensions (symbolic, political, etc.), going far beyond wandering around the city of Lisbon, in the mid-1930s.

DEATH OF GOD, NIHILISM, HUMAN EXISTENCE. GABRIEL MARCEL AND FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

In the lecture Nietzsche: l’homme devant la mort de dieu, Gabriel Marcel highlights the extraordinary topicality of Nietzsche’s thought and figure. The French philosopher seems to say to his hearers: Nietzsche is here, among us, he does not belong to the past, but, on the contrary, he is the most contemporary of contemporaries. Nietzsche’s philosophy of the death of God is a mine of ideas and insights that need to be enhanced. There is still much about him to be discovered. Nietzsche, then – and nihilism as such – is by no means outdated, precisely because, Marcel exclaims, before claiming to have left him behind, it is better to make sure we have reached him.

The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques

Reviewed by: The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques Jacques Pothier (bio) The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques "Endless the Medusa, and Perseus endless …" Eudora Welty, "The Wanderers" Danièle Pitavy-Souques needs no introduction to the readers of this journal. An internationally famous Welty scholar, she is the author of two books in French, La mort de Méduse: L'art de la nouvelle chez Eudora Welty (The Death of Medusa: The Art of the Story by Eudora Welty, 1991) and Eudora Welty: Les Sortilèges du conteur (Eudora Welty: The Witchcraft of Storytelling, 1999) and is well known for dozens of articles. Some of the chapters of the present book were originally contributions to this journal. When she died in 2019, she was working on a book-length collection of eight of her essays on Welty published between 1979 and 2014, with the addition of a new essay on "Flowers for Marjorie" and a short general introduction entitled "The Eye That Is Language." Pearl McHaney can be credited with completing this project in record time as a superb homage to her friend Danièle's labor of love and mind—McHaney's Preface begins with an overview of a career centrally devoted to Welty studies, but also to promoting the study of Northern American women writers—a scholarly powerhouse who also worked hard to empower women. It is common enough to praise Eudora Welty's visual talent and to refer to her experience as a photographer, as this title does. It is less common to point to Welty's training as a painter and to compare her approach with that of Matisse, told by his art professor Gustave Moreau to go into the streets and who remembered: "We were forcing ourselves to discover quickly what was characteristic in a gesture, in an attitude" (qtd. in Pitavy-Souques [End Page 165] 67–68). Pitavy-Souques points out that Welty's approach to photography was just the same: to catch "the moment in which people reveal themselves" (Welty, qtd. in Pitavy-Souques 68). Pitavy-Souques similarly trains her eye, and teaches the readers to train theirs, on the details of Welty's stories that she identifies as keystones to her modernist constructions. She does not explore the stories with a privileged theoretical approach but with a discipline, an ethic—close reading (39, 42, 140) as a way to face the challenges of a demanding art: "Welty's fiction, with unusually strong and complex texts that require close reading to apprehend their richness and endless narrative experimentation" (4); the text's "narrative functioning deserves the closest attention" (7); "a close study of the narration shows that it is just the reverse" (14); "Let us look closely at 'A Memory'" (22); "the contents are manifestly transgressive and as such deserve close attention" (40); "Close analysis reveals the working of Welty's creative imagination" (96); "Close reading invites one to read 'Flowers for Marjorie' as the bold dramatization of self-begetting" (119; all emphases added). This story, she explains in the last essay written with the present volume on her mind, along "with the title story, is the most intriguing text of A Curtain of Green" (39). Close analysis is indeed necessary to catch what makes Welty's writing tick. In this collection, Danièle Pitavy-Souques pays special attention to the volume The Golden Apples, "that great book about writing" (125). The first and seventh chapters ("Technique as Myth: The Structure of The Golden Apples" and "Eudora Welty and the Merlin Principle: Aspects of Story-Telling in The Golden Apples") explicitly deal with the story cycle, but in her quest for metafiction, she makes extended references to the rest of Welty's abundant oeuvre: her novels, photographs, and essays. What Pitavy-Souques particularly enjoys is unpacking the most challenging narrative structures in Welty. Although not indebted to a school of criticism, she draws extensively on an exceptionally wide intellectual background, just as she convinces the reader that Welty, a southerner by biography, trained in the North and an active traveler, was widely open...

Falling Knights: Sir Gawain in Pre and Post Malory Arthurian Tradition

The present study traces the development of Sir Gawain’s traits in the Arthurian legend through an analysis of Arthurian literature in early medieval works, in transition, and in modern cycle. It aims to show what makes Sir Gawain a multiple character and how his plastic character has appealed to the literary, political, and social taste of the time of his creation and recreation. The focus will be upon the roles that the new characteristics of Sir Gawain should fulfil and the reasons which stand behind this transition in his character.The study examines the representation of Sir Gawain as a heroic knight in mainly three texts from the medieval and modern English Arthurian tradition: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae Sir Thomas Malory’s De Morte Arthur, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Some references are made to other contemporary texts. These texts range from literary to history, providing a broad overview of the many ways in which history and romance approaches the question of the roles of knighthood and chivalry through the figure of Sir Gawain.By exploring these narratives in their historical and social contexts, the present study explains why Sir Gawain maintains certain characteristics across a particularly eventful period in English history, as well as why certain characteristics change drastically. It will also offer new insights about public perception of medieval notions of knighthood and chivalry.All translated quotations from Historia Regum Britanniae are taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of Kings of Britain, translated by Sebastian Evans (London: Dent, 1963). All Latin quotations from Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British are taken fromWace, Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British, edited by Judith Weiss (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002). All quotations from the Arthurian Section of Layamon’s Brut are taken from Layamon, Layamon’s Arthur: the Arthurian Section of Layamon’s Brut, edited by W.R.J. Barron and S.C. Weinberg (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001). All quotations from Idylls of the King are taken from Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the king, edited by J. M. Gray (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983).

Apocrypha Hiberniae II: Apocalyptica 2

Apocrypha Hiberniae II: Apocalyptica 2

A Jumble of Writings: Commentaries on Aristotle’s De Longitudine et Brevitate Vitae Attributed to Adam of Buckfield

Abstract The translatio vetus of Aristotle’s De longitudine et brevitate vitae – a medieval text also known under the title of De morte et vita – was commented upon by the Oxford Master Adam of Buckfield in the thirteenth century. Inventories record two commentaries, which are either anonymous or unclearly ascribed. These writings are usually attributed by modern scholarship to Buckfield, though not always on convincing grounds. In the present article, I offer a more accurate, expanded overview of some so-called Buckfield commentaries on the translatio vetus, distinguishing between four individual texts. In order to characterize these writings, and to have a solid basis for addressing the authenticity problem, one passage from each commentary is scrutinized within the scope of a case study.

'It was Pessoa that was consuming us': On Lisbon and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

'It was Pessoa that was consuming us':On Lisbon and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis Jerónimo Pizarro Abstract One of José Saramago's most celebrated books, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), owes its celebrity, in part, to the dialogue established with Fernando Pessoa, through the figure of the classic heteronym Ricardo Reis, whose biography is silent about the date of his death. What is lacking in many comparative studies between Pessoa and Saramago is a return to the genesis of the 1984 novel, which was written after the great impact that, in the future Portuguese Nobel, the reading of The Book of Disquiet (1982) had. This article is dedicated to discussing the place of Pessoa, and of The Book of Disquiet in particular, in Saramago's work, based on a critical and archival research of materials related to The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Resumo Um dos livros mais celebrados de José Saramago, O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (1984), deve, em parte, a sua celebridade ao diálogo estabelecido com Fernando Pessoa, através da figura do heterónimo clássico Ricardo Reis, cuja biografia é omissa relativamente à data da sua morte. O que falta em muitos estudos de índole comparatista entre Pessoa e Saramago é um regresso à génese do romance de 1984, que foi escrito depois do grande impacto que a leitura do Livro do Desassossego (1982) teve no futuro Nobel português. Este artigo dedica-se a discutir o lugar de Pessoa e, em particular, do Livro, na obra saramaguiana, partido de uma pesquisa crítica e arquivística dos materiais referentes a O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis. Keywords Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Portuguese literature, literary archives, novel, The Book of Disquiet, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis Palavras-chave Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, literatura portuguesa, arquivos literários, romance, Livro do Desassossego, O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis was published in 1984, just after José Saramago had read the most remarkable book by Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, released in 1982, almost fifty years after the death of Pessoa. I believe that Saramago, whose consecration was recent (in this regard, it is worth mentioning the glorious sequence of Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, 1977, Raised from the Ground, 1980, and Baltasar and Blimunda, 1982), when he read this book, was shaken to the core. Suddenly, the writer born in Azinhaga do Ribatejo would have understood that the writer born in Lisbon was much more than a poet. In that posthumous Book, Pessoa was looking to assert himself as a new emperor of the Portuguese language, like Father António Vieira whom Pessoa honoured as such,1 not without dreaming that the same epithet could one day apply to himself, making him a Super-Vieira.2 In the end, Pessoa wanted The Book to be the product of the unexpected conjunction of at least two titular figures, Vieira and Verlaine,3 and for those that rushed to place Pessoa as a poet, The Book would reveal a writer of prose, and a great writer of prose at that. I imagine that after reading The Book of Disquiet, Saramago, who admired Pessoa, would have exclaimed: 'but wait, it wasn't enough to be a poet, or better, four poets? There was also Bernardo Soares?' Naturally, this is just speculation, but it is important to note that after Saramago read The Book he did not write The Year of the Death of Bernardo Soares, or make big references to the bookkeeper of the city of Lisbon. Instead, he rescued Ricardo Reis (whom he had read when he was young and for whom he developed an unambiguous fascination) and wanted to write his book about Lisbon, as someone who did not want, literarily, to lose a city. [End Page 78] Let us remember that the Manual of Painting and Calligraphy is to a certain extent an Italian book, containing this celebrated phrase: 'for my part, I can say that I shall always visit Italy in a state of total submission, on my...

The dead ends of photogénie. From cinephilia to cinephobia and back: Albert Serra’s La mort de Louis XIV and Roi Soleil

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s threefold treatment of the figure of Louis XIV through a film, a performance and a video installation, in order to examine the role of negativity and deferral in his relationship to cinema as a medium. By analyzing Serra’s classical understanding of photogénie as an expression of destructive plasticity, I delve into the structural cinephobia that undergirds his films. I suggest that the mystery at the core of La mort de Louis XIV is not death but the cinematic image itself, not the body as matter but rather the body as a virtual image capable of traversing and surviving different temporal organizations. Through this reading, Serra’s cinema emerges as a false promise to see through and beyond the two-dimensional image that transforms desire into an optical illusion.

Positioning in Personal Games: Perspectives of the Author-Player Persona in Memoir En Code: Reissue

In creating autobiographical narratives through games, there exists a new theoretical problem in the game-player tension: how may a game creator relate their own story through a medium that relies primarily on another (the player) to execute? The blurring and shifting lines between the game creator and player resemble the same death knell Roland Barthes sounds for the literary Author in “La mort de l’auteur” (1967). This paper proposes a more nuanced theory for understanding the ‘player positioning’ of autobiographical games with a triangulated framework. The player position is a player/author persona collaboration that facilitates a shared presence in the game space through various ratios of three positions: the player as the protagonist, protagonist-proxy, and witness. Through a close reading of the autobiographical game Memoir En Code: Reissue by Alex Camilleri, the paper explores how the player may perceive the autobiographical game. Viewed through the protagonist, protagonist-proxy, and witness lens, the paper interrogates how the player position alters the nature of player-author identity within the game. It offers an approach for considering how the different perspectives of the author-player persona offer meaningful game(play), and argues for the shifting presentation of the author-player persona as an effective negotiation of a shared experience in the design of autobiographical games.

Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’s <em>La deuxième mort de Toussaint Louverture</em>

In “Trans-Atlantic Interrogation: Fabienne Pasquet’s La deuxieme mort de Toussaint Louverture,” Mariana Past situates the Haitian-Swiss novelist’s understudied narrative within the context of Caribbean letters and the Haitian literary tradition, then discusses the broader, intertextual implications of Toussaint Louverture’s “second” death for Haiti and the trans-Atlantic world. To what end does Pasquet deploy the aged ghost of a Haitian revolutionary icon being invoked by German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist in the Fort de Joux castle-cum-prison within France’s remote, mountainous Jura region? What is at stake when the diasporic writer reincarnates a legendary German poet as protagonist, placing him in conversation with a deceased Haitian general? By reassessing Louverture’s enduring revolutionary possibilities and reframing his colonized subjectivity, Pasquet’s innovative text makes an important cultural gesture towards decolonizing Haiti's standing with respect to the West. Through dying anew, and dying “better,” Louverture is able to recognize and recover an African past encompassing a wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual power that he previously disavowed in his quest to be “free and French.”

A literatura da Shoah no Brasil: o frágil corpo humano em A morte de um carrasco, de Joseph Nichthauser

No século XX, com a Primeira e Segunda Guerras Mundiais, viu-se o surgimento de um novo homem. Trata-se de um homem não mais dotado de forças heroicas capazes de resistir à violência dos novos tempos, mas de um homem fragilizado, vulnerável e debilitado. Esse sentimento de impotência tomou conta principalmente daqueles que foram vítimas dos regimes autoritários e totalitários. No contexto internacional, particularmente, após a Segunda Guerra, muitos judeus, devido à dizimação por que passaram e à violência que sofreram, saíram da Europa em busca de uma vida menos indigna em outros países do mundo. O judeu brasileiro Joseph Nichthauser é um exemplo de sobrevivente da Shoah nazista. Vítima da fome, das perdas irreparáveis, das doenças e dos trabalhos forçados, viu na escrita um meio para encontrar e atribuir um sentido para sua vida. Em 1972, publica Quero viver... memórias de um ex-morto, e, em 2003, lança A morte de um carrasco. O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar a violência e a opressão exercidas sobre os corpos dos judeus nos campos de concentração, a animalização a que eram submetidos, a desautorização de suas crenças religiosas e o próprio processo de imigração por que passaram, tendo como base o segundo livro publicado pelo autor. A reflexão sobre esses itens é importante porque permite a construção de uma nova ética, um novo ponto de vista para se pensar a humanidade, as relações humanas e as minorias. Para o embasamento desta proposta, buscou-se respaldo em autores como Elaine Scarry e Walter Benjamin.

Sabine, Mark. José Saramago: History, Utopia, and the Necessity of Error. Legenda, 2016

Beyond reasserting the author’s continuing commitment to a revolutionary socialist worldview, Sabine demonstrates through the detailed analysis of each of the five Saramago novels in question—Levantado do chão; Memorial do convento; O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis; A jangada de pedra; and História do cerco de Lisboa—the revisions that such a commitment entails in the face of the increasingly equivocal (and enabling) authoritarian forces of neo-liberalism and globalization that exclude subaltern voices.

Псевдоплатоническое бессмертие: диалог «Аксиох» и его прочтение гуманистами

The aim of this article is to trace the influence of Axiochus, an apocryphal text attributed to Plato, on Humanism. The dialogue, which belongs to the literary genre of “consolation”, addresses the theme of contempt of death and the immortality of the soul. The jurist Pedro Díaz de Toledo (1410/15 – 1466) translated it into Spanish in 1444 from a Latin version entitled De morte contemnenda, which Cencio de’ Rustici had translated eight years earlier, probably from the Greek codex provided by Joannes Chrysoloras, the Vaticanus gr. 1031. For his part, the humanist Beatus Rhenanus (1485 – 1547), the owner of five editions, revised and corrected in detail the text of a translation by Rudolf Agricola, proposing a number of amendments and changes that would appear in the Basel edition printed by Adam Petri in 1518.

Name, Voice and Body as Elements of (Im)mortality in Murilo Rubião’s O pirotécnico Zacarias and in Jorge Amado’s A morte e a morte de Quincas Berro Dágua

The article puts on the question of how name, voice, and body can be constituents of (im)mortality, and what role the posthumous empowerment of one's name and voice plays in storytelling. The considerations are exemplified by the stories O pirotecnico Zacarias by Murilo Rubião and A morte e a morte de Quincas Berro Dàgua by Jorge Amado.

Que faire de (la mort de) Pompée ? Analyse poétique et politique d’une tragédie double

This article proposes a double analysis, poetic and political, of the tragedy La mort de Pompée (The Death of Pompey, 1644) by Pierre Corneille. It shows the bold construction of Corneille who crosses two intrigues: an Egyptian one (what to do with the arrival of Pompey?) and a Roman one (what to do with the death of Pompey?). The French poet lends to Caesar, faced with the head of Pompey, a double reaction, worked by the tension between the joy of the defeat of his adversary and the magnanimity that he must manifest to hope to restore civil peace. By inventing a confrontation, absent from the historical sources, between Caesar and Cornelia, he introduces the question of the conditions of the end of the civil war. It thus appears that the poetics of the play unfolds a political thought. Corneille highlights the threat that imperial conquest outside Rome poses for civil peace.

Religious Art of Wojciech Łukaszewski in the Context of the Composer’s Spiritual Attitude

The article discusses the religious creativity of Wojciech Łukaszewski. He composed three works for a large ensembles and five religious songs for solo voice and solo voice with piano or organ. These works have religious connotations. Confessioni were inspired by the Confessions of Saint Augustine. In De morte Boleslaui Carmina, the composer repeatedly quotes the Polish song Bogurodzica. In works on religious subjects, he used the texts of Roman Brandstaetter, Gallus Anonymus and Roger Degrelle and three Polish carols. The article is the first attempt to explore this topic. An important material helpful in the analysis of the composer’s compositions and spirituality were his letters to Maria Patrzyk – his bride.