Textual Strategies Research Articles

Postcoloniality in corporate social and environmental accountability

Using a discourse analysis of interviews with corporate managers and their published corporate sustainability information, this paper argues that corporate social and environmental accountability (CSEA) in a postcolonial context (Sri Lanka) is a textual space wherein local managers create a hybrid cultural identity through mimicking. It examines how local managers embrace and appropriate global discourses to reimagine their local managerial circumstances. They deploy a set of textual strategies – imitation, redefinition, innovation, and codification – to translate CSEA into a hybrid ‘textual(real)ity’ (i.e., interspace and duality between accounting text - textuality - and material practices - reality) whereby the global context is textualized as local and the local is contextualised as global. Nationalism, cultural ethics, and poverty enter this textual(real)ity as discursive elements that reactivate locality. A cultural notion of philanthropic giving, dana, gives local cultural authenticity to this textual(real)ity while the national politico-economic identity of poverty textualizes CSEA as a national development strategy. The paper also critiques whether these postcolonial dynamics can promote agonistic accountabilities. It contributes to the accounting literature on postcolonialism, imperialism, and globalization discourses.

Investigating Differential Learning Outcomes of Students in Physics Using Animation and Textual Information Teaching Strategies in Ondo State Secondary School

Background The study investigated the main effects of animation information and textual information on students' performance and improving students' attitude towards physics. Material and methods The study adopted the pre-test post-test control group design. The population was made up of SSS 2 students in Ondo State. Three Local Government Areas were randomly selected from the 18 Local Government Areas of Ondo State. Simple random technique was used to select three schools in the selected Local Government Areas. The schools were randomly assigned to two experimental groups namely animation and, textual information strategy and one control group. Two instruments were used for the study. Results One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Scheffe Post-Hoc pair-wise comparison Analysis, and two-way Analysis of Variance was used. The results showed that there was a significant main effect of animation and textual strategies on students performance in physics. The results also showed that there was a significant difference in the post test attitudinal score of students' exposed to the strategies with the effectiveness in the order of animation, textual, and conventional strategies Conclusions The study concluded that computer- based instruction such as animation and textual strategies could enhance learning outcomes in Physics in senior secondary school irrespective of students' sex.

<i>Ursamaior,</i> de Mário Cláudio: sete estrelas, um corpo cadente

<p>No ano 2000, o escritor português Mário Cláudio lança <em>Ursamaior</em>, romance que não escapa à tendência do autor de ficcionalizar dados do real. O livro, juntamente com <em>Oríon</em> (2003) e <em>Gémeos</em> (2004), compõe o que Maria Theresa Abelha Alves denomina a “Trilogia das Constelações”. O primeiro elemento desse tríptico romanesco expõe diversas formas de violência, entre as quais uma desgastante cena de estupro sofrida por Jorge, última estrela a compor a constelação de <em>Ursamaior. </em>Partiremos, portanto, dessa cena, de modo a refletir sobre o papel preponderante do lúdico sobre o corpo enlutado, aos moldes do que propõe, por exemplo, Walter Benjamin, na <em>Origem do drama barroco alemão.</em> Igualmente, procuraremos enfatizar o jogo intersemiótico que estabelece diálogo entre a literatura e outras linguagens artísticas, neste romance, notadamente, o cinema. Por fim, a escrita será entendida como forma de sutura de almas e corpos dilacerados, ou ainda como forma de reorganização do caos, destacando-se o caráter neobarroco do par luto-jogo, além da autorreflexão e da metalinguagem como estratégias textuais não raro evidenciadas pelas obras marioclaudianas.</p><p>---</p><p> </p><p><strong>DOI:</strong> <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/abriluff.2017n18a411" target="_blank">http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/abriluff.2017n18a411</a></p>

ELF e la promozione turistica online del made in Puglia: esempi di ritestualizzazione del sito web PugliaPromozione

Abstract – Today, the promotion of local luxury services worldwide by means of websites, brochures, blogs and social networks has become standard practice especially in the tourism industry, in which tour operators and providers of accommodation facilities inevitably have to make their promotional campaign and services available in a language other than Italian in order for them to be considered and received by a wider audience and attract as many tourists as possible. Over the years, for several reasons, this language has proven to be English (Crystal 2003); notwithstanding this, in many cases the “effective” translation has turned out to be a merely literal transposition of Italian concepts and terminology into English, where the socio-cultural schemata (Carrell 1983) of the target audience have not been properly taken into consideration. The National Institute for Statistics (ISTAT) reports an increase in tourism fluxes across Italy in 2015, with Puglia displaying an increase by 10% if compared to data in 2014 (http://www.enit.it/it/studi.html) – which makes it worthwhile to invest in the promotion of the made-in-Puglia brand across the world and likewise attract investors to Puglia as well. The present paper considers the Italian website of PugliaPromozione (www.agenziapugliapromozione.it/portal/home), i.e. the regional tourist board and provider of promotion services in Puglia, and compares it to its English version which is made available online (http://www.agenziapugliapromozione.it/portal/en/home). This website aims to promote, among other things, the made-in-Puglia brand and its peculiarities, including food, wine, art and culture, sport, entertainment as well as traditions and spirituality. By contrasting the English version of the website on the basis of their readability index (i.e. the Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease ; Kincaid et al. 1975; Flesch 2016) and by adopting a corpus-driven methodology (cf. also Centonze 2016a, 2016b) we shall put emphasis on their weaknesses in terms of accessibility; in addition to this, we shall provide some possible examples of re(con)textualization strategies (Widdowson 2004) in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF; Seidlhofer 2001, Guido 2008) which would enhance the understanding, the readability and the reception on the part of the target audience.

‘A house divided’

HGTV (Home and Garden Television) is an American cable channel devoted to property TV, with programs that combine lifestyle and reality, demonstrating the rewards of home investments. Despite the focus on domestic property and the well-styled home, the programs are generally considered bland, and the cumulative impact of the network’s simple, formulaic programs is considered relaxing and even comforting. But some HGTV programs prominently feature domestic conflict as part of their repetitive narrative formula, disturbing the domestic ideals that the network promotes. While pat endings for individual episodes restore domestic harmony and unity through new (or renewed) domestic space, domestic disputes serve as a persistent reminder of everyday domestic discontent. This emerges in the shows with narratives that highlight conflict – House Hunters, House Hunters International and Love It or List It. But the implications resonate further in the context of the broader esthetic-textual dynamics of HGTV. Repetition within episodes, between episodes of any given show, among many different shows, and in the programming schedule makes the ‘happy endings’ as transitory as the domestic disputes that dominate individual episodes. HGTV programs are lifestyle–reality hybrids that promote quality lifestyle through reality-styled drama. The same textual strategies that demonstrate quality lifestyle also open the door to a lingering sense of domestic unease.

I Am Nel: Becoming (In)Coherent Scholars in Neoliberal Times

In the neoliberal academy, scholars must regularly create multiple texts (e.g., statements about research agendas, CVs, tenure-related research narratives) about themselves and their work to produce themselves as subjects whose research can be described, quantified, and slotted into commonly accepted categories (e.g., fundable, high impact, quality, data driven). In this article, we question what is lost when it becomes natural and desirable to be recognizable as a singular and coherent brand within neoliberalism. Specifically, we make coherence visible as a mechanism of neoliberal audit culture rather than a stable scholarly goal. To do that, we engage with various textual strategies and media that enable us to think of and enact coherence differently again and again. We hope working both within and against coherence as a mechanism of neoliberalism opens a perpetual sensitivity about authorship, ownership, and coherent scholarship and welcomes the unknown and unforeseen in our academic careers.

Finding a Tongue: Autobiography Beyond Definition

The outset of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man presents a stage of life and language that is commonly evoked and, at the same time, systematically avoided in autobiographies as well as theoretical approaches to language: infancy. This textual strategy refers back to Augustine’s Confessiones, one of the most canonical autobiographies, reading it as a mainstay for an unconventional hypothesis: Rather that understanding infancy as an early stage of, or even before, language, Joyce expounds that the condition called infancy – the openness for receiving language while being unable to master it – accompanies all speech, be it childlike or eloquent. The article analyses Joyce’s text as one instance of a general paradox of autobiographical writing: initial aphasia. Setting out with birth or infancy, autobiographical texts precede articulate discourse. In Joyce, this paradox appears as starting point for a poetical – rather than theoretical – thinking about language, and language acquisition. This article was submitted on September 22nd 2015, and published on April 9th 2017.

Roger Lüdeke, <i>Zur Schreibkunst von William Blake: Ästhetische Souveränität und politische Imagination</i>

In contrast to William Blake’s popular twentieth-century reception, which was dominated by his fans’ fascination with his visionary art and lyrical poetry, a substantial proportion of his recent academic audience has carved a poet-persona whose religious diction is closely linked to his opinions about the American and French Revolutions, as well as the 1790s, the decade of political repression in Britain. The main achievements of these academic interpretations, based on archival work and derived from historical contextualization, Lüdeke finds to be summarized in Jackie DiSalvo’s introduction to Blake, Politics, and History (1998). In his own nearly fifty-page introduction Lüdeke frequently returns to Jon Mee’s chapter in that collection. What starts off as a narrowly focused assessment of Blake studies and historicism soon expands into a complex discussion of the “defining tension between the religious and the political” (“konstitutive Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Religiösem und Politischem”) (9). Taking his starting points from Eric J. Hobsbawm and Jürgen Habermas, as well as Mee and Saree Makdisi, Lüdeke summarizes the outcomes of the research on the public sphere and its self-declared prophets, enthusiasts, antinomians, millenarians, and dissenters. Critics, he asserts, now perceive religion as a mode of compensation, affecting, in turn, the interiorization and aestheticization of art (12-13). Lüdeke wants to reconsider certain investigative leads and to reexamine the relationship between the political and the religious by focusing on radical and protestant discursive practices and textual strategies (14).

Cortázar, Fuentes y Molina en los confines de lo humano: tres cuentos de vampiros

La figura del vampiro en la literatura hispanoamericana constituye una constante. Su permanencia a través de los siglos dentro de las letras del subcontinente americano invita a preguntarse por el lugar que ocupa este arquetipo gótico en el imaginario de los escritores latinoamericanos contemporáneos. El presente trabajo tiene por objeto de estudio la figura del vampiro en los cuentos de “Reunión con un círculo rojo” (Julio Cortázar, 1977) “Vlad” (Carlos Fuentes, 2004) y “La máscara del dios vampiro” (Mauricio Molina, 2006). A través del análisis de estos relatos se lleva a cabo un análisis de la representación de la figura del vampiro en la literatura hispanoamericana contemporánea. Asimismo, se examinan las estrategias textuales utilizadas por cada uno de estos autores para plasmar su visión del mismo, así como la significación que el mito vampírico reviste para cada uno de ellos. En último término, se postulan algunas de las posibles claves que explicarían su preeminencia en la cultura contemporánea.

ТЕКСТОВІ СТРАТЕГІЇ УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ ДРАМАТУРГІЇ (на матеріалі антології актуальної драми «Майдан до і після»)

The interest in modern Ukrainian drama is growing stronger among literary scholars, who consider a fairly wide range of issues, and the development of textual strategies in Ukrainian drama stimulates the thinking. The latest decade is especially relevant for research in view of the social and historic changes that are happening in our country as they become one of the themes for the playwrights’ works. The purpose of this paper is to trace and outline the variety of textual strategies used in drama texts making part of the «Maidan. Before and After» anthology (2016). In doing this the following tasks are performed:– studying the problematics and themes of selected plays; and– formulating the types of textual strategies in drama texts included in the anthology.The methods used for research include empirical (traditional literary analysis, inter-textual analysis) and theoretical ones (structural and comparative methods).We focus our attention on the textual strategy because the author’s strategy remains in an artist’s mind, the staging strategy is implemented by the director, and the perception strategy is formed by the spectators as an unpredictable response to the director’s skill in implementing the staging strategy.Among the corpus of drama texts reviewed in this paper we have singled out the main types of textual strategies: the «local scene» strategy («Labyrinth» by O. Viter), monodramatic strategy («Third Prayer» by Y. Vereshchak, «Pussy in Memory of Darkness» by N. Nezhdana, «Bogdan-2014» by O. Skoryk), geographic strategy («Out-of-place Child» by O. Mykolaichuk-Nyzovets, «Pussy in Memory of Darkness» by N. Nezhdana), historic strategy («Bogdan-2014» by O. Skoryk), religious strategy («Nativity Play 2015» by N. Marchuk), etc. The playwrights create timely pieces that are fit for both implementation on stage and reading. There is also a tendency towards combining several textual strategies in one play: the monodramatic strategy is often combined with the historic and geographical ones. The monodramatic strategy is also the most common one used by the playwrights.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction & the Reinvention of Wonder by Sarah Tindal Kareem

Reviewed by: Eighteenth-Century Fiction & the Reinvention of Wonder by Sarah Tindal Kareem Lorna J. Clark Sarah Tindal Kareem. Eighteenth-Century Fiction & the Reinvention of Wonder. Oxford: Oxford, 2014. Pp. xiv + 278. $99. "A footprint materializes mysteriously on a deserted shore; a strawberry birthmark reunites a kidnapped child with his long lost parents. . . ." Examples of moments of wonder in eighteenth-century novels launch Ms. Kareem's argument that essentially "eighteenth-century fiction solicits wonder at and about the real, that is, at and about everyday experience." The argument has three important implications: it challenges the view that the process of secularization during the Enlightenment precludes the capacity for wonder (even though belief in the supernatural would diminish); it counteracts the association (pace Ian Watt) that the "rise of the novel" is associated with realism; and it theorizes wonder as an element of reader-response. Building on Michael McKeon's work on the origin of the novel and Catherine Gallagher's views on the nature of fictionality, Ms. Kareem's main assertion is that eighteenth-century fiction solicits wonder at and about the real, that it discovers wonder in daily life. Ms. Kareem defines two kinds of wonder: wonder at, associated with astonishment, [End Page 59] and wonder about, associated with curiosity. Both are usually intermingled, especially in reading fiction, so readers feel engrossed and skeptical at the same time, which is part of the aesthetic pleasure (they feel as though they witness events without believing in them as real). Second, Ms. Kareem positions herself in the discussion that links the age of Reason to the "disenchantment" of the world by moving away from the binary opposition of these terms (wonder and reason) and questioning the whole notion of a shift from belief to skepticism in the eighteenth century. She sees the eighteenth-century novel as embracing both (suggesting that they are not mutually exclusive) and reaching "a balance between engrossment and reflection," so that fiction is read in a state of "ironic credulity." In line with other critics who espouse the "phenomenology of narrative enchantment" and turn to magic to find "an analogy for fiction's effects," Ms. Kareem sees a "new paradigm of fiction as enchantment" taking hold in the mid-eighteenth century, but argues that skepticism, rather than being antithetical, is actually a component of this wonder. One of the main concerns of her book is to outline the "textual strategies" used to produce wonder when reading; there are four in particular: "delayed decoding . . . suspenseful plot devices; estranging descriptive language; and the switching between different narrative points of view," which allow her to "theoriz[e] wonder as a reader response." Hume and other Enlightenment philosophers, especially Scottish and German, are essential to her argument, as are Shlovsky and his concept of defamiliarization, Todorov and his theory of the fantastic, Iser and his reader-response theory, together with recent affect theory. The method adopted is to place realist works beside "more overtly fantastical ones," reading one in light of the other, in order to defamiliarize them and break down the apparent "dichotomy between realism and the marvellous." Interesting pairings result. After the first chapter's theoretical model, the four subsequent chapters illustrate her four narrative strategies. Despite Watt's positioning of Defoe and Hume as representing "ideological opposites," Kareem presents them as aligned: both use the mode of Protestant spiritual autobiography and the image of the shipwreck, so Hume's philosophy can be seen as "a secular reinterpretation of Puritan spiritual anxiety." Fielding's Tom Jones and Walpole's Castle of Otranto may seem unlikely bedfellows, but both evoke a response of "engrossed suspense" in the reader to produce a gap "between belief and disbelief," and a "meta-fictional admiration" for the interconnections between things. An outlier is the fourth chapter, intended to show what Ms. Kareem calls "artful fictionality," the deliberate and skeptically grounded suspension of disbelief induced by fiction that defamiliarizes the act of reading. The text chosen is Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785), a collection of travelers' tales attributed to a Hanoverian baron but actually written by philosopher Rudolph Erich Raspe. It is a curious...

Textualization Strategies, Typological Attempts, Digital Databases: What is the Future of the Comparative Charm Scholarchip?

In the article I present an overview of transformations in approaches to textualizing and typologizing folklore texts over the past 150 years using the example of incantations from anthologies to digital databases with a view to highlighting the new horizons digital databases can open up for research. In the first part of the article, I show how the textological characteristics of the incantation genre and the often implicit questions of researchers influenced the textological strategies of classic incantation editions. These primarily typological considerations largely determined subsequent potential interpretations. Using the dimensions of comparability established by Lauri Honko (phenomenology of tradition, the historicity of tradition, and ecology of tradition) I summarize recent attempts at classification by international folklore studies of charms pointing out the pitfalls and shortcomings of typologies as well as the fundamental incompatibility of the different typological conceptualizations. In the second part of the article, after briefly describing the responses of computational folkloristics to the textological, typological and comparatist problems of folklore texts I come to the conclusion that the elaboration of an international guide to textology, standardizing the textualization techniques of digital editions of incantations, would be more important for comparative studies than the creation of further national and international incantation catalogues. To this end and to generate discussion and debate I conclude with the outline of a set of possible multidimensional textological features to be taken into consideration in the creation of future digital databases of verbal charms.

Marie-Laure Ryan, in collaboration with Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu. Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet

Marie-Laure Ryan, in collaboration with Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu. Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative:Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet Katarzyna Kaczmarczyk (bio) Marie-Laure Ryan, in collaboration with Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu. Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet. Ohio State UP, 2016. 312 pp. Paper $39.95. ISBN: 978-0-81425-263-5. PDF eBook $19.95. ISBN: 978-0-81427-407-1. The title of this book well represents both the aim of the authors and the final outcome: the meeting of two disciplines, narratology and geography, in the cross-fertilization through bidirectional movement of tools, concepts, and problems. It does not, however, reveal either the full identity of the book or the leitmotiv that glues it together; it is a book about maps and it is itself a map, a map of remapping two disciplines by proposing “space as a key concept for narrative theory, and narrative as a key concept for geography” (225). It shares a lot of properties (both limiting and promising) with maps, partly because of the close affinity of geography with cartography, and partly because narratology is perceived by the authors as similar to cartography: the former recognizes and makes note only of particular properties of the terrain, the latter is “not the interpretation of individual works but the exploration of regularities found in multiple narrative texts”—those regularities obviously need a distance to be perceivable, a distance of a map. Let us start with the all-encompassing view of the book, scale: 1:50,000,000. It could be divided in two parts, conceptualizing two motions: first—from geography to narrative; second—from narratology to geography. In the first part, Marie-Laure Ryan examines the topic of space in narrative theory, the role maps play as both extra- and intra-diegetic entities, the usability of the concept of mental maps for narratology, and various functions of space in digital media, particularly “forms of spatiality and … how they lead to new narrative genres and narrative experiences” (11). In the second part, Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu propose to develop what they perceive as a neglected field of inquiry, namely the narratology of spatial narratives—stories “positioned in the environment … sign-posted and draped across cities, historical sites, and everyday environments” (138) and; consequently, they discuss the narrativity of street names, historical and heritage sites, and museum exhibitions. The last—extremely valuable—chapter brings together two perspectives and proposes questions and research aims for the future narrative geography and geographical narratology. [End Page 113] Medium scale, let us say 1:800,000, allows us to see particular chapters. The one entitled “Narrative Theory and Space” provides a “common narratological background” (8) for the rest of the book. Ryan analyzes both “the textual strategies through which space is presented in narrative” and “the spatial categories that underlie [the story’s] semantics” (18). The reader is guided through a rich—though fragmented and scattered—tradition of literary research on space (from Bachtin, Stanzel, and Lotman to Lakoff and Johnson and Deleuze and Guattari) and introduced to distinctions grounded in geographical tradition. Particularly compelling in their simplicity and usefulness are a distinction between a map and a tour (borrowed from Linde and Labov) understood as “global structuring principles of narrative space” (31) and between strategic versus symbolic design, which enables Ryan to argue convincingly (albeit cursorily) with Stanzel’s identifications of perspectivist description with third-person narrative and aperspectivist with first-person. Two chapters, “Maps and Narrative” and “From Cognitive to Graphic Maps,” read as one coherent argument. The bidirectional movement is repeated on a medium scale: we are presented with maps that are parts of narratives and with narratives that take a form of maps. In the spirit of media-conscious narratology, Ryan asks about the media specificity of narrative maps and limits the type of stories that can be successfully represented through maps: “It takes a narrative based on a steady progression through space to lend itself to this type of spatio-temporal representation” (69). Three chapters, “Narrative Theory and Space,” “Maps and Narrative,” and “Space, Narrative, and Digital Media,” are full of theoretical distinctions and handy tools and...

Pseudotranslation as Passage into History: Murat Gülsoy's Gölgeler ve Hayaller Şehrinde as Transmesis

The use of pseudotranslation as a textual strategy in the Ottoman and Turkish literary fields has been explored from various perspectives by Turkish translation scholars, often as part of an investigation of the ideological and political entanglements of translation and of cultural conceptions of translation....Based on a textual and peritextual analysis of the novel, as well as printed and personal interviews with Gulsoy, I will discuss the writer’s motives in writing a book that reads like a translation and in foregrounding translation as a self-reflexive tool. This exploration touches upon a rarely studied aspect of pseudotranslation and provides an analysis of an apparent paradox: the use of pseudotranslation, essentially in the form of a literary forgery, to circumvent expectations of realist historical fiction and create a more self-aware reading experience.

Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept by William Fitzgerald

374 BOOK REVIEWS MARGARETHA KRAMER-HAJOS Dartmouth College, Margaretha.T.Kramer.Hajos@dartmouth.edu * * * * * Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept. By WILLIAM FITZGERALD. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 240. Hardcover, $55.00. ISBN-13: 978-0226 -29949-5 Evoking the triple triumph held by Octavian after the battle of Actium, Vulcan’s shield in Aeneid 8 displays multiple ethnic groups in a wondrous and variegated array drawn from the far corners of empire. Such assortment highlights the Roman concept of variety as both an aesthetic and a political idea, an ancient precursor to our modern concept of diversity. Rich in such examples, William Fitzgerald’s book, Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept, offers a deeply engaging exploration of the classical roots and manifestations of varietas as an idea that circulates in multiple, overlapping discourses of antiquity— philosophical, imperial, aesthetic, linguistic—with a force-field that continues to shape contemporary thought. With a far-ranging discussion that begins with nuanced philological probing of the semantic fields of varius, including its Greek brethren (e.g. poikilos, daidalos), Fitzgerald unpacks the manifold ways that the ‘varietas complex’ radiates through different genres, authors, tropes, and historical periods. The reader encounters patchwork juxtapositions that exemplify varietas not only as the subject of Fitzgerald’s book but also as a principle organizing his selective analyses. Through five chapters, an introduction, and conclusion, Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept provides provocative readings of disparate texts that call attention to a neglected aesthetic vision inherited from antiquity. The introduction lays out the “why” of the book, challenging the normative critical pursuit of formal ‘unity’ in the works of classical authors, and advocating instead for a principle of “non-assimilation” or an aesthetics of variety that eschews balance and embraces the rhetorical abundance of copia. Chapter 1 excavates the rich veins of Greek and Latin meanings that run through words etymologically or semantically connected to the ‘varietas complex’ in passages of English poetry, including Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare, Pope, and Louis MacNeice. Classical authors—Cicero, Catullus, Ovid, Horace, Vergil and Plautus—serve to explicate and display such semantic range, with a focus on the visual and phenomenological meanings of varius and its kin. In the second chapter on “Variety’s Context,” Fitzgerald gives an erudite and hopscotch overview of scholarly, philosophical and artistic defenses and BOOK REVIEWS 375 formulations of variety, exploring particularly the conceptual nexus of varietas, nature, human artistry, and God. Displaying a masterful and varied range of his own, Fitzgerald juxtaposes the role of varietas in the theodicies of Christian texts with Vergil’s deployment of the concept in the first Georgic. Questions of aesthetic pleasure in relation to varietas dominate the rest of the chapter, with analysis of its temporal dimension as a corrective to boredom and satietas, and its visual aspect, often expressed in metaphors of jewels or mosaics, as ultimately an aesthetics of political diversity; thus, Flaubert’s Salammbo evokes ethnic variegation as a brilliant multiplicity symbolized by the heterogeneous sparkle of precious stones. Further examples drawn from contemporary art, whether the Haida sculpture of Bill Reid or the video installations of Nam June Paik, as analyzed by Fredric Jameson, demonstrate the relevance of varietas as a concept with a claim on our multicultural society. This chapter puts to rest any doubt that such classical concepts persist as hermeneutic lenses for self-reflection. Chapter 3 homes in on three specific Latin authors, Pliny the Younger, Lucretius, and Horace, to examine how they engage variety as an aesthetic principle that shapes the world-view of their texts. Here, Fitzgerald eschews the wide-ranging analysis and broad scope of the previous chapters and focuses in depth on varietas as a textual strategy. For Pliny, it serves to alleviate the anxiety of a single pursuit, reinforcing provisionality and intermittency as characteristics of the elite life (88). Lucretius, in turn, prizes variety as nature’s abundance, or copia (recalling, as Fitzgerald indicates, the connection with Ciceronian rhetoric). The Epicurean author’s analogies between the multiple permutations of language and the variously arranged atoms of the universe are provocatively set against the verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The discussion of Horace in this chapter...

Kohelet: Der Prediger Salomo by Melanie Köhlmoos

Reviewed by: Kohelet: Der Prediger Salomo by Melanie Köhlmoos Annette Schellenberg melanie köhlmoos, Kohelet: Der Prediger Salomo (ATD 16; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015). Pp. 253. €44.99. The commentary on Ecclesiastes by Melanie Köhlmoos replaces the older work by Walther Zimmerli (1962) in the ATD series. K., who is professor of OT at the University of Frankfurt, offers a fresh and stimulating commentary, which reflects her research interests in literary theories (textual strategies, etc.) and intertextuality. [End Page 327] In five introductory chapters, K. lays out her views on the book of Ecclesiastes, addressing questions such as its place in the canon, reception history, genre and structure, the connection with Solomon, topics and theology, author and formation. Like most scholars, she considers it most likely that the bulk of Ecclesiastes originated in the middle of the third century b.c.e., but she also points out that this date remains hypothetical (p. 71). Regarding the author of the biblical book, K. argues that the "biographical" information in 12:9-10 might be as fictional as the Solomon fiction. Both serve to legitimate the author of the book, who uses the alias of Qoheleth and "hides" behind his mask of being Solomon. Nevertheless, the author still reveals a lot about himself, for example, through his language (Late Biblical Hebrew), the distance to the Torah, critical wisdom, and the "unmarked" intertextuality. In K.'s assessment, the work of Qoheleth was later expanded through redactional additions (p. 72). More concretely, she maintains that there is a layer of additions (1:2-11; 2:12*, 16; 3:9, 15; 9:5-6; 11:9*, 10; 12:1-12) that goes back to an editor Z (for Zweite Generation = "second generation"), who might have known Qoheleth, as well as several other additions (1:1; 3:17*, 18*, 21; 4:14-16; 5:12-16; 7:11-12, 23-29; 8:1, 10, 16-17; 9:11-12; 10:18-19; 11:9*; 12:13-14) that are not connected with each other but were added at different times. K. does not explain her redactional analysis in detail but points out that it is less based on assessments of content (and so-called contradictions) than on observations on language and style. Nonetheless, she also observes tendencies of the later additions, for example, that Z reinforces the "pessimistic" inclination of Qoheleth, enriches his argument with cosmological aspects, and argues against eschatological-protoapocalyptic traditions. Concentrating primarily on formal characteristics (mention of Qoheleth; passages in first person, second person, third person), K. analyzes the structure of Ecclesiastes as follows: 1:1; 1:2-11; 1:12–12:7; 12:8; 12:9-14, with 1:12–12:7 further divided into 1:12–4:16; 4:17–10:20; 11:1–12:7. She directs attention to the structuring phrases and elaborates on their implications for the book's genre. With "words of Qoheleth" (1:1; cf. 12:9-12) and the keyword "truth" (; 12:10), later redactors point out the book's status as an authoritative text. With Qoheleth's self-introduction as "king" (1:12) and the dominance of speeches in the first person, the book imitates the ancient Near Eastern tradition of royal testaments and has analogies in OT farewell speeches (e.g., Joshua 23; 24; Deuteronomy). And with the expression "says Qoheleth" (1:2; 12:8), finally, the framing passages present the book as narrated speech and the speaker (Qoheleth) as an authoritative person. Köhlmoos gives much weight to the implied identification of Qoheleth with King Solomon. She points out that this fiction is neither explicit nor complete; the book is not pseudepigraphic. Rather, "Solomon" is a mask of the author, meant to direct the reception of his work (p. 37). Though the fiction is most obvious in 1:12–2:26, K. concludes that it continues throughout the book. In her view, Qoheleth reuses the figure of Solomon to participate in the Solomonic discourse of his time, taking stands vis-à-vis the Solomon traditions of Kings, Chronicles, and Proverbs. In the actual commentary, K. offers, for each passage, a German translation with detailed notes, followed by a thorough analysis...

Euripidés Médeiájának magyar fordításairól

This study is dealing with two Hungarian translations of Euripides’ Medea. The translation made by Grácia Kerényi was produced in the second half of the 20th century, whereas the version by Zsuzsa Rakovszky was published at the beginning of the 21st. The difference between the translations regarding their textual strategies, the professional background of the translators and the final goal of the works is abysmal. Grácia Kerényi was an expert of ancient literatures, her translation was published in the official and renowned collection of Euripides’ work, Zsuzsa Rakovszky on the other hand translates predominantly from English, and her version was inspired by the request of the theatre. The study contains three parts: in the first the author analyses Kerényi’s Medea in the context of the philological reconstruction, in the second, the author examines the same text modified and revised by Fruzsina Magyar, who was the dramatic advisor of the theatre performance in Szolnok, and the third part reflects on the problems of validity, poetical force and immediacy in the translation of Zsuzsa Rakovszky.

Metadiscourse in Posters is Both Textual and Visual

Interest in genre analysis is far from declining. Just as information technology is moulding communication and how people communicate in the twenty-first century, scientific communities, academic members and other knowledge-dissemination means are also changing. Because academic and professional genres are not an exception, the impact of visual information on scientific communication is rendering multimodal analysis an increasingly necessary aspect for genre analysis to consider. This book responds to this new reality in the sense that it presents a multimodal genre analysis of academic poster presentations at conferences. The study aims to explore the textual and visual metadiscourse strategies used by poster presenters in order to make their research clear and to interact and engage with their readership. Due to the inexistence of reliable and representative data of the academic poster genre, a corpus of 120 posters from three disciplines (Law, Clinical Psychology and High Energy Particle Physics) had to be created by the author to find out whether there were any cross-disciplinary differences in the linguistic and visual metadiscursive resources of this rather under-researched genre.

Crime and Testimony: Life Narratives, Pardon Letters, and Microhistory

Late medieval and early modern pardon letters are among the best sources of ordinary people's voices in the premodern period. The stuff of social history, these legal documents allow us access to nonelite social actors and masculine spaces of sociability. Yet they also represent a genre of life narrative that profits from the insights of literary and feminist theory. This essay reads the rich harvest of fifteenth-century Burgundian pardon letters as collaboratively authored textual performances as it explores the relationship of these micronarratives to the writing of microhistory. Vehicles of self-presentation and sources of social history, the pardon letters expose the textual strategies through which those accused sought to perform their innocence. In so doing, the letters reveal something of the vast and shifting terrain of sex, station, status, and sociability in late medieval Burgundian cities.

L’affirmation d’un pouvoir communal et des aspirations mémorielles d’une famille : le cartulaire municipal de Libourne

Crouzier-Roland (Nathalie), The Municipal Cartulary of Libourne : the Material Evidence for the Affirmation of Communal Power and of the Memorial Ambitions of a Family, Annales du Midi, vol. 129, Nr 298, April-June 2017, p 165. The municipal cartulary of Libourne (1392-1479) contains numerous prescriptive texts concerning the city, Bordeaux or Guyenne as well as a magnificent “ page juratoire”. The Libourne elite used it while developing textual strategies and iconographies, in order to assert themselves and to define and sanctify community identity and power. This urban discourse rose up to confront French monarchs and representatives of the Church and of Bordeaux by the means of acts which were included in it or, on the contrary, hidden from them. Finally, the paternity of the codex, a stake of power and family memory, was disputed between two families who attempted to link the cartulary to their name without, nonetheless, harming the discourse of the urban community. Urban and individual speech, municipal and familial cartulary, the Livre velu embodied together memorial strategies and expressed several forms of power.