Well-known Text Research Articles

When Is a Menorah a “Menorah”? Text and Realia from Asia Minor

Abstract Menorahs found at sites in Asia Minor have been a primary indicator of the presence of Jewish communities in its cities. Menorahs were found in all three of the structures identified as synagogues in Turkey. This article addresses the following question: When is a menorah a “menorah”? It first discusses a translation conundrum related to a well-known text addressed to Jesus’ followers in seven cities in western Asia Minor by John, the author of Revelation. It then provides an extended discussion regarding menorahs and symbols identified as menorahs at sites in Rough Cilicia in southeastern Asia Minor. Finally, it assesses each one so as to determine whether it could properly considered a menorah.

Nacionalismus vs. internacionalismus. Karel Hlaváček mezi Moderní revue a sokolstvím

The paper deals with the concept of nation, or Czechness, in the views of the poet, theoretician and artist Karel Hlaváček (1874–1898). In the mid-nineties of the 19th century, Hlaváček belonged to the inner circle around the magazine Moderní revue. In this environment, issues related to national identity, especially in the field of art and culture, but also in the political and social context, were often discussed. At that time, however, Hlaváček was also active in the Sokol association, whose national, i.e. Czech, dimension was not negligible. The texts he published in the Sokol press often differed significantly from those in the pages of Moderní revue, even in terms of the concept of the nation. The difference between the well-known text Nacionalism a internationalism (Moderní revue, December 1896) and his extensive study of Sokol as a social movement, which he published a few months later in the magazine Sokol (October 1897), is absolutely crucial. Hlaváček’s views will be placed in the broader intellectual context of European decadent art.

A poetics of “Wind in a Box”

Abstract This essay is a re-application of the language codes of Roland Barthes and Jonathan Culler’s concept for Structuralist Poetics. The approach I use explores the codes demonstrated in Barthes’ well-known text, S/Z with slight modifications for their application to poetry. The concepts borrowed from Mr. Culler are from his book of the same title: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Cornell University Press, 1975). Culler’s main argument is that there must be other, un-attempted strategies combined with conventional approaches in literature of that time period. His answer to this problem was to develop a set of linguistic-based concepts to compensate for the reader in the analysis of literary works. I have applied in this essay my approach based on Culler’s methodology and the language codes of Roland Barthes: semantic, symbolic, cultural-referential, actional and hermeneutic. I apply Culler’s concepts to a reading of poetry followed by an application of the language codes as a further development of my work in revitalizing this never-before applied method.

The Dichotomy of Ekāyana in the Satipaṭṭhānasutta: Inclusive or Exclusive Meaning

This paper presents the ambiguity of the term ekāyana in the Satipaṭṭhānasutta in the light of inclusivism and exclusivism perspectives. Ekāyana is a familiar term in Buddhist Studies and Satipaṭṭhānasutta is a well well-known text in the Theravada insight meditation cycle. Ekāyana can be rendered in various ways according to the subjectivity and interpretation of each translator; thus, the term is ambiguous. This paper highlights the problem of Buddhist translation studies through analytical studies on several translations of the term. According to comparative analytical studies on different translations of ekāyana in the Satipaṭṭhānasutta, the researcher finds that interpretivism in translation is inevitable because finding the real meaning of a Buddhist term is an impossible task. Understandably, a translator of Buddhist texts imposes his interpretations when translating from ancient times until the present.

Reālisms un ideālisms 19. un 20. gadsimta mijas latviešu literatūrā

The article traces late 19th and early 20th-century theoretical discussions of the concepts of realism and idealism and their impact on Latvian literature, paying attention to the terminological and ideological aspects and the poetics of literary texts. The introductory part explains the topicality of research on realism and idealism. The main body of the article traces the genesis of realism and idealism in 19th-century European and Latvian literature by using the up-to-date methodology of literary studies and the humanities. Detailed attention is paid to the late 19th and early 20th-century discussions in Latvia that explain the historical use of these concepts. By scrutinizing the available material, it is possible to conclude that concepts of realism and idealism are historically rooted and interactive. It is, therefore, possible to state that literary practices at times substantially deviate from 19th-century theory, where both concepts are used inconsistently and at times polarised. The up-to-date theoretical approach based on the methodology of cultural studies and new historicism that accentuates the polyphony of an age helps to reveal the many-sidedness of 19th-century literature and provides an insight into the possibilities and meanings of the concepts of realism and idealism. Such an approach opens up new potential for interpreting well-known texts by Latvian writers.

American Literary History in Pieces

Abstract Daniel Diez Couch’s American Fragments offers a scholarly analysis of the fragment, a mainstay of American print culture in the early national period. In American Fragments, Couch argues that fragments were central to both American aesthetics and American political culture. Insisting that the fragment was an inclusive and progressive form that invited readers to consider the relationship between a part and the whole, Couch shows how fragments helped Americans understand themselves and their place in a democratic republic. Couch’s book is deeply researched, and it provides insightful readings of well-known texts like Hannah Fosters’s The Coquette, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, and Washington Irving’s Sketch Book while also introducing readers to a host of poems and other shorter writings that appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and gift books throughout the early nineteenth century. The original research in American Fragments is engaging, and it is also emblematic of a new wave of scholarship enabled by the widespread digitization of books and newspapers in that it introduces so many new texts that are difficult to connect to existing timelines and canons. In this respect, Couch’s book also reveals the limitations of the monograph as a tool for revisioning our collective scholarly project.[R]ight now, the scholarship pushing us to reimagine our literary past is running ahead of the forms in which it might be published.

Reflexivity and New Metanarratives. Contemporary English-language Retellings of Classical Mythology

Abstract The turn of the millennium has brought a revival of interest in the ancient Greek and Roman texts. Obviously, the legacy of antiquity is a permanent feature of Western literature and visual arts; yet, its contemporary manifestation has taken a novel form, that of a retelling. It is a new trend in which a well-known text belonging to the canon is given an unorthodox interpretation, which exposes the ethnic, class, and gender prejudices present in the original. Mythological retellings are often written in an accessible manner containing features of genre fiction, which makes the revised version palatable to ordinary readers. A characteristic feature of mythic fantasy is the shift of focus from heroic exploits to private life as well as putting previously marginal characters into limelight. The retellings are a consequence of new, reflexive research angles that have appeared in the field of the classics.

RECONSTRUCTION OF PERFORMANCES BASED ON PLAYS BY A.N. OSTROVSKY IN A.A. GRIGORIEV’S THEATER CRITICISM

The article describes the formation of the technique of reconstruction of an on-stage performance in the theater criticism by A.A. Grigoriev. The author analyzes a well-known text on theater criticism, which has “Poverty is No Vice” by A.N. Ostrovsky, a play staged in the Alexandrinsky Theater in the early 1860s, as the subject of Grigoriev’s attention. The analysis reveals the emergence of the “theater centered” approach in the 19th century Russian theater criticism: A.A. Grigoriev is one of the first to masterfully analyze the stage texts (performances), based on A.N. Ostrovsky’s plays. The critic pays tribute to A.N. Ostrovskiy’s skill of a playwright, and places the actor’s art, which occupied an important place in the national theater of the mid-19th century, in the center of his attention. The author of the article considers a number of reconstructions of the actor’s work in the play “Poverty is No Vice” made by A.A. Grigoriev. The description of the actors’ work in the roles they perform allows the critic to be evident in his sharp judgments about their professional skill. The comparison of the reconstructions of the actors’ works by P.M. Sadovsky Sr. (Maly Theater, 1854) and P.V. Vasilyev (Alexandrinsky Theater, 1863) as Lubim Tortsov enables seeing the skill advance of a theater critic describing an actor’s art. The article also focuses on the role of reconstructing an on-going play in the process of training a theater critic in a modern theater school.

GeoPick: Georeferencing Made Easy

GeoPick is a new web application aimed at providing a simple yet powerful georeferencing tool to the natural history collections community (Fig. 1). Its conceptual foundation is based on the Georeferencing Best Practices by Chapman and Wieczorek (2020), whose guidelines it intends to implement. GeoPick also provides a close and direct relation between the tool’s output and the Darwin Core standard (Wieczorek et al. 2012). In the past two decades, institutions across the world have devoted significant resources to digitise their collections and bring them closer to their final users (Nelson and Ellis 2018), i.e., the research, conservation and education communities, and to the general public. Georeferencing is an important part of the digitisation process (Nelson et al. 2012). It provides the link between the preserved specimen and the natural habitat where it lived (Bloom et al. 2017). However, there is a gap between the data that have already been digitised and made accessible through public repositories such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the expected fully georeferenced information, including crucial information on coordinate uncertainty and precision, which is needed to conduct rigorous studies based upon digitised specimens (Marcer et al. 2022). In order to determine the reasons behind this mismatch between optimal and actual georeferenced data, we conducted a global survey on current georeferencing practices (Marcer et al. 2021a), which was used as the basis for discussion in a workshop organised by the MOBILISE Cost Action that took place in Warsaw (Poland) in 2020 (Marcer et al. 2020, Marcer et al. 2021a). Among other recommendations that came out of the workshop was the need to develop more user-friendly tools that help georeferencers follow standards and guidelines in a more effective way. According to the survey, only 16 percent of respondents used a specific georeferencing tool such as GeoLocate (Rios 2019), while the rest only used general tools (Google Maps/Earth was reported by 47% of the respondents). Moreover, about 75% of the respondents reported only following in-house ad hoc protocols or none at all. This discouraging situation and the need for a tool that is easy to use, yet effective, was discussed informally with attendees at the 2022 Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) and Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) conferences. The current version of GeoPick is the first step towards a tool that is powerful, accessible and simple enough to help georeferencers follow standards and best practices in order to improve the data that are finally made accessible through repositories such as GBIF. In this first version, GeoPick implements the point-radius (Wieczorek et al. 2004) and shape (Chapman and Wieczorek 2020) georeferencing methods. It calculates the centroid or corrected centre when necessary, the associated coordinate uncertainty, the spatial fits of the point-radius and the footprint, and provides the digitised geometry as Well-Known Text (WKT). The tool offers a map navigator with reference cartography and editing tools to digitise points, lines or polygons representing the locality description of a given location. Data are finally exported via the clipboard in Darwin Core standard format. The tool also offers search functionality for geographic features from OpenStreetMap data through the Nominatim API. The user can search and import a geometry provided by Nominatim and use it as the basis of a georeference. Technical implementation: HTML and JavaScript browser front end that accesses a private API developed in R (R Core Team 2022). Source code availabe at GitHub. License: GeoPick is open source with a AGPLv3 license. Public URL: https://geopick.gbif.org (available starting October 2023)

Seshat and Lady Wisdom

Abstract The Demotic Book of Thoth has received surprisingly little attention in exegetical research, although it was a well-known text in Late Period Egypt. Since the Book of Thoth and Prov 1–9 are closely related in terms of dating, cultural background, and genre, a comparison of these two texts is overdue. To address this oversight, this article examines and compares the main female figures of both works: the goddess Seshat and Lady Wisdom. Previous research has pointed to Maat and Isis as archetypes of Lady Wisdom, but this article argues that Seshat must be considered as another goddess who exerted influence on the figure of Lady Wisdom.

Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France by Anne Linton

Reviewed by: Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France by Anne Linton Céline Brossillon Linton, Anne. Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge UP, 2022. ISBN 978-1-316-51182-4. Pp. 250. Anne Linton's book offers an important contribution to the history of sexuality by discussing intersex people, "individuals whose bodies, or senses of self, challenged binary sex" (2), otherwise known as "hermaphrodites" in the nineteenth century, in medical archives (first part of the book) and literature, both high and low (second half of the book). The archival research Linton has undertaken is massive, bringing to light over 200 newly uncovered case studies of gender ambiguous people from 1800 to 1920. She also analyzes how long-forgotten popular fiction influenced several well-known texts, allowing Linton to propose fresh readings of famous authors like Balzac, Gautier, and Zola. Unmaking Sex is the first book to explore why "hermaphrodism" was a central theme in nineteenth-century medicine and literature, and to discuss the social anxieties around those "gender outlaws" (2). Because of the Napoleonic Code (1804) which required the sex of the baby to be recorded on the birth certificate within three days of birth, Linton claims that many scholars have assumed that the nineteenth-century French had a very rigid binary vision of its individuals, but she shows that some doctors and authors actually challenged the concept of "True Sex" (the one-body-one-sex rule) as they realized that some individuals fell outside of this binary. Linton believes the literature supports the claim made by some doctors that the observation of the external body might not tell the whole story about someone. Some therefore advocated for adding a "neuter sex," "doubtful sex," or "third sex" category to article 57 of the civil code to better acknowledge the variation of bodies. Even though Balzac, Gautier, and Zola seem forward-thinking, she warns us not to "assign too revolutionary and subversive a status to our novelists" as they "also announce that non-normative identities have no place in nineteenth-century France" (134). A growing medical discourse connecting external signs of "doubtful sex" with mental deficiencies throughout the nineteenth century allows Linton to establish a link between the discourses around intersex and Zola's theory of degeneration, a connection which had been overlooked in scholarship. "Hermaphrodism" was sometimes therefore perceived as the result of "degenerate heredity," linking "doubtful sex" and teratology, and "hermaphrodism" with homosexuality. Throughout her book and then more specifically at the end, Linton draws parallels between those nineteenth-century sources and contemporary concerns and debates around intersex individuals in the United States. She discusses how medical protocols to assign gender at birth have been met with growing resistance and criticism since early sex assignment surgeries and treatments are considered damaging to the child. Mental health rather than sex assignment, and a more patient-centered medicine, are the path forward. Since France is the focus of the book, addressing the state of the debate around intersex [End Page 195] individuals from a medical, legal, and literary standpoint in France would have been a nice way to loop the loop, even though the discussion of the case of the United States is also invaluable. [End Page 196] Céline Brossillon Ursinus College (PA) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Amanda Sigler. Modernist Authorship and Transatlantic Periodical Culture

Magazines are characterized by chance encounters. Fiction sits beside news, poetry neighbours advertisements; authorial control jostles with editorial choices and the contingencies of print deadlines to determine how a work is first presented. Transatlantic little magazines are now generally perceived as instrumental to the birth of literary modernism, taking over the literary world to the extent that Ezra Pound proclaimed in 1930, ‘the work of writers who have emerged in or via such magazines outweighs in permanent value the work of the writers who have not emerged in this manner’ (‘Small Magazines’). In Modernist Authorship and Transatlantic Print Culture, Amanda Sigler attempts to reconcile the significance of modernist magazines with the element of serendipity that is inherent in the periodical form, asking ‘how intentional was Modernism?’ (p. 9). Sigler takes four well-known texts—Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—and puts them back into the periodicals in which they were all (at least partially) published. Part of Bloomsbury’s Historicizing Modernism series, Sigler’s book echoes editors Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning’s goal to ‘prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept “Modernism” itself’ (p. ix). If we turn back to the magazines, modernism comes to seem ‘more collaborative, more interactive, more closely tied to commercial culture, and more dependent upon chance juxtapositions and accident’ (p. 2).

Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A New World for the Republic of Letters

Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A New World for the Republic of Letters

Perpetua, Felicity, and the Paradox of Horror

The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity is one of the most well-known texts from the earliest Christian centuries. However, at its heart lies a paradox. The story describes the arrest, imprisonment, torture, and violent deaths of two young women. If events such as these were to happen right in front of us, most of us would turn away. Our sense of fear and horror might be magnified by a sense that we could also become victims of this kind of senseless violence. However, this literary account has held the attention and admiration of Christians since the third century. There has been an abiding desire to enter into this story, to live it (at least allegedly) through the eyes of one of the victims, and to relive and celebrate it through various cultic practices. How can we explain this? This paper explores the psychological appeal of the Passion through the lens of horror theory and what has been called the paradox of horror, associated with the paradox of painful art. By applying insights from horror theory, the paper explores the irresistible draw of a story full of elements that should provoke revulsion.

Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic by Katherine Bowers (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic by Katherine Bowers Margarita Vaysman Bowers, Katherine. Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2022. 264 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Works cited. Index. $65.00. In the last decade, studies of the Russian Gothic have become a healthy subfield, with new publications appearing every year. This growth is spurred on by the development of the field at large: interdisciplinary Gothic studies are booming globally, with three research centres in the UK alone (in Manchester, Sheffield and Stirling) and a specialized Gothic Studies journal, published by Edinburgh University Press. But it is also thanks to studies like Bowers's that this once marginal topic is now an important component of both academic discussions and curricula specifically in Russian studies. Writing Fear urges us to rethink our assumptions about an intriguing and understudied aspect of nineteenth-century Russian realist writing: its relationship with popular literary genres, especially the Gothic. While isolated cases, like Fedor Dostoevskii's interest in sensationalist newspaper reports or Aleksandr Pushkin's Gothic parodies, are well-known, no study so far has charted a sustained timeline of Russian realism's engagement with Gothic literature and art. In keeping with other excellent recent nineteenth-century Russian Gothic studies, like Valeria Sobol's Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (Ithaca, NY, 2020), Bowers's monograph focuses on both canonical and less well-known texts. Sophisticated close readings of the usual Gothic suspects like Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol´, Ivan Turgenev, Dostoevskii and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin are accompanied by chapters on the once prominent but now almost forgotten authors like Evgeniia Tur, Evgenii Grebenka and Boris Savinkov. This unusually wide span, as well as Bowers's impressive command of both recent global theories of the Gothic and primary Russian sources, makes Writing Fear invaluable for anyone reading, [End Page 157] or writing, about Russian realism. This book makes bold but convincing theoretical claims, while retaining an accessible tone that does not take its readers' knowledge of the subject for granted. Bowers's main argument does not only concern the presence of Gothic elements in Russian realist fiction, the scale of which has previously been underappreciated even in the landmark studies on the subject. Importantly, she also explains why the Gothic — as style, narrative mode and set of tropes — was so important for Russian realists: it allowed them to depict 'transgression, trauma, or injustice', 'engaging readers on the deeply affective level through building up fear' (p. 10). Bowers uses the term 'Gothic realism' ('moments when authors writing in what we recognise as a realist style turn to gothic narrative devices, using the genre as a tool to articulate a facet of lived experience through the affective engagement of the reader', p. 10), to discuss a range of literary phenomena. The introductory chapter, 'Russian Realism and the Gothic', charts the evolution of this term from its first use in Mikhail Bakhtin's unpublished dissertation to recent scholarly re-appraisals of Russian realism. Part one, 'Gothic Migrations', focuses on 'the way Russian writers began using Gothic elements outside of Gothic works' (p. 12). Chapter one, 'A Russian Reader's Gothic Library', provides a long-awaited update on the themes first explored by Vadim Vatsuro. Chapter two, 'Gothic Transmutations in Pushkin and Gogol´', focuses on the Gothic 'aesthetic, authenticity and parody' (p. 12) in Evgenii Onegin (1825–32) and Dead Souls (1842), two texts that were 'deeply influential in the development of Russian realist poetics' (p. 12). Chapter three, 'Russian Landscapes in a Gothic Frame', compares the 'Gothic narrative frames' (p. 13) of Ivan Goncharov's 'Oblomov's Dream' (1849) and Turgenev's 'Bezhin Lea' (1851). Chapter four, 'The Idiot: Dostoevskii's Gothic Novel', explores the effect of the Gothic on Dostoevskii's experiments with the novelistic form. Part Two, 'Gothic Realism', 'illuminate[s] the function of the gothic as a formal innovation within literary realism' (p. 13). Chapter five, 'Physiological Petersburg, Gothic Petersburg', focuses on Gothic urban landscapes, and the way writers like Nikolai Nekrasov used Gothic tropes in a didactic way. Chapter six, 'Gothic Subjectivity and the Woman's Question', compares the use of marginalized...

ІМПЛІЦИТНА КОНЦЕПЦІЯ МУЗИКИ В "DE CONSOLATIONE PHILOSOPHIAE" БОЕЦІЯ

The paper is an attempt to demonstrate the possibility and necessity of an implicit conception of music in Boethius. An explicit conception is something that is obviously present in a text. That is what is usually studied within the 'history of ideas'. Contrary to this, an implicit conception is an unconscious picture of the author's world, in which the basic concepts of explicit conception are grounded. Therefore, the implicit conception is a condition for the possibility of any explicit text. So, the well-known text of Boethius' "De institutione musica", which but replicates mostly Pythagorean views of music, is an explicit conception. We chose "De consolatione philosophiae" as the most representative and semantically loaded text by Boethius to look for his implicit conception of music. It is based on different but unconscious grounds. We read this text to look for unconscious semantics associated with the concept. Thus, the unconscious semantics of music should be studied using the psychoanalytic approach in its broadest sense. The approach asks for the cues of connotations of the terms used by Boethius. The history of reception of the text, including different translations, can show the way. We should bear in mind, too, that the text we read is the record of an internal dialogue, which brings forth a different ontological horizon. Besides, we should see the text as a texture of signs and symptoms, pointing to unconscious notions Boethius had developed. The necessity of such an approach and the relevance of the results obtained within it are discussed in the article. The guidelines for the reconstruction of the implicit conception of music in Boethius are outlined and the elements of this conception are proposed. By further development of the method demonstrated and applied in this paper we shall be able not only to understand Boethius better, but we can reveal the intrinsic contents of the basic concepts describing the realities culture scholars are working with.

Review: The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s

Review: <i>The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s</i>

Synagogues in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods: Archaeological Finds, New Methods, New Theories and The Synagogue in Ancient Palestine: Current Issues and Emerging Trends

Synagogues in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods: Archaeological Finds, New Methods, New Theories and The Synagogue in Ancient Palestine: Current Issues and Emerging Trends

“Reading” Pathologic 2: Russian Literature as a Trans-Medial Idea

This article offers an analysis of a recent Russian computer game, Pathologic 2, which simulates an epidemic in a Russian provincial town. Unusually, the game has widely been called a “literary” experience by both its players and creators. By making use of theories of narration and mediation from Peter Brooks, Friedrich Kittler, and Patrick Jagoda, I ask whether the medium of the digital game can ever produce an experience that is related to or informed by the concept of “literariness” in both a Russian Formalist and broadly intellectual sense. By exploring how Pathologic 2 incorporates material from well-known texts by Fedor Dostoevskii and Aleksandr Blok, I argue that the digital game reduces Russian literature to a “trans-medial” phenomenon, and that this reduction can be understood as one impact of twenty-first-century networked computing on literary activity and institutions. Moreover, I consider the impact of contemporary geopolitics on how the global industry of digital games understands Russia and, by extension, Russian literature.

An approach for cross-data querying and spatial reasoning of tunnel alignments

In mechanized tunneling projects, finding a low-risk and cost-effective alignment is an important task. Several alignment variants are usually created and each one is intensely scrutinized. Variants often have individual advantages and disadvantages and can lead to different constructive designs of a tunnel. In order to find the best alignment possible the variants have to be analyzed and evaluated based on requirements and evaluation criteria, such as safety, cost, built environment and operational requirements. To perform this evaluation and to enable comprehensive decision making, a holistic planning environment is examined that includes documents and models of different domains. In general, these domain specific data differ schematically and semantically, which consequently makes it challenging to combine and compare such diverse data. For this purpose, information from different sources must be linked and evaluated in a structured way. In particular, spatial relationships have to be investigated. Therefore, in this paper, ontology databases are utilized to merge BIM and GIS at data level to create an integrated model of the entire tunneling project. Relevant information for decision-making can then be derived, such as the location of private and public buildings that are in a certain vicinity of the planned alignment. On the one hand, the implementation of queries is a popular and frequently used approach to check for semantic properties. On the other hand, using a query language to derive information from geometric data can be challenging, due to the necessity of processing geometric data prior to and during query execution. Additionally, geometric definitions can differ in the considered coordinate reference system, the dimension or the structure. To handle geometry information by employing query languages, representations are methodically transformed to well-known text literals. A simplified and uniform geometric representation can be utilized for spatial reasoning, for example by adopting GeoSPARQL methods.