Thisis A Exerpt

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, 2021

Callaloo, 2015

2014

e core idea of this paper is that the genuineness of attitude and the poetic methods of some authors stems from acknowledging the liquidity of the Mediterranean; namely, the diversity and its multi-faceted nature marked by constant semantic extension. Due to the Mediterranean, the linguistic, cultural, historic and religious self-perception of the spotlighted authors reaches far beyond the framework of provincial confinements and shortsighted historicism. e river, the position of the delta and the sea are inexhaustible vehicles of meditations and memory structures. ey deflect the narrative from the pathway of definitive interpretations and fixed intersections. ey, as water resource and a combination of territories, do not cease to denounce and mock the system of privileges and cultural prejudice. In the art of Ottó Tolnai, István Domonkos, Katalin Ladik, László Végel, Ferenc Maurits, Pál Böndör, Attila Balázs and Ottó Fenyvesi the question of identity is firmly rooted in the problem of birth, travel and migration, to the position of the pimp, the guerilla, the joculator, the travelling musician, the Yugoslav Sindbad, the artist as a hooligan and the rocker. eir cultural and regional identity, consisting of several equally indispensable elements, has always favoured a kind of affinity which can be characterized as a complex artistic attitude. is attitude operates as a poetic dialogue, as a predisposition to local, marginal and specific phenomena, or as a sensibility for marginal ways of speaking, seeing and being.

Paper presented at Signs of the World: Interculturality and Globalization, 8 th World Congress of the IASS-AIS, Lyon, 7-12 July 2004. , 2004

Interculturality is not only a contemporary phenomenon. It has always existed where and when different cultures meet and interact. Literary texts produced in such environments can be seen as traces of the dynamics of intercultural interaction in a particular time and place. In the present paper, I will examine a text of this kind produced on the island of Cyprus during the period of the Crusades. The Crusades, the great military and colonising movement of the 12 th and 13 th centuries, certainly involved a meeting and conflict of cultures in the area of the Middle East. The Crusaders, members of the western European feudal nobility, and their allies, the Italian mercantile republics, chiefly Venice and Genoa, were catholic Christians. They brought with them their own political and ecclesiastical institutions: among them, a catholic clergy, the catholic liturgy and associated religious practices, including religious drama. In the areas where they settled, they encountered an indigenous population of farmers and merchants which was ethnically and religiously mixed: Muslim, Jewish, and several different varieties of Eastern Christians, on Cyprus mainly Greek Orthodox. Probably because of the nature of the theatrical spectacles which survived into late antiquity, the Orthodox church of Byzantium seems to have always been adamantly opposed to the development of any form of religious drama. But with the establishment of a western European dynasty on the island of Cyprus as a result of the Crusades, western forms of religious drama were apparently introduced on the island, because there exists a Greek Passion Play from Cyprus, usually dated to the late 13 th century. This paper will attempt to add to our understanding of this text by examining, from a semiotic perspective, first, what the historical and cultural context can tell us about the text as sign; second, how the text as a message intervenes within this context to say something to its contemporaries; and finally, what the text as a trace of a communicative process can tell us today about the dynamics of the intercultural relations of its time and place.

Mimesis Journal, 2024

This paper comprehensively explores the national-literacy identity of the Renaissance poet Ludovik Paskvalić, through a study of four of his poems, in which the poet's close relationship with the Republic of Venice is reflected. Despite the note about his identity that the poet himself left on the cover of his printed Italian songbook entitled Rime volgari, the scientific and professional public often placed Paskvalić in different, often inaccurate, identity frameworks. The reasons for the poet's inclusion in the corpus of Italian or Venetian Renaissance poets can be found in Paskvalić's prominent Italianist activity, in his linguistic virtuosity in the Italian language, which was not his native language, as well as in the fact that until today the scientific public has not managed to find Paskvalić's literary legacy in his mother tongue. Thus, the Renaissance poet from the Bay of Kotor first found his place in Italian and world anthologies, and many years later in scientific studies from this side of the Adriatic Sea. Wrong premises regarding the poet's national identity often had a negative impact on the analysis of his verses. The aim of this paper is to use the example of four of Paskvalić's poems dedicated to the Republic of St. Marco from his collection in the Italian language, the occasions and contexts in which the poems were written are analyzed to shed light on the poet's identity through the explanation of his attitude of full respect and admiration towards Serenissima. The method is of a comparative, research and literary-historical character, based on combinatorial research about the author, through the analysis of four of his poems dedicated to the capital of the Republic of Venice. In this way, for the first time, attention would be paid to the analysis of the opening and closing songs of the second part of the Italian songbook, completely excluded from the significantly larger number of other songs from the same collection that have been analyzed in detail so far according to their stylistic and typological characteristics. Our research strongly supports the claim that the writer's national identity should be based on an understanding of the wider context of the time and space in which he created, as well as his own determination, which can be read from his work, but also from other testimonies.

Studies in Scottish Literature, 2001

The waves come with joy around thee: they bathe thy lovely hair. Farewell, thou silent beam! Let the light of Ossian's soul arise! (Ossian, I, 452-53).

Prism[s]: Essays in Romanticism, 1995

EXCERPTS: "If literary history were a stage and literary historians were the magicians, Ossian would have to be considered the appearing and disappearing elephant of the magic act: a phenomenon of overwhelming proportions conjured up from an empty box, made to parade on the stage for all to see and admire in wonder for a time, and then made to vanish into thin air again, as if it had never existed." "The translations of Ossian/Macpherson's poems contributed to breaking down existing literary and cultural paradigms wherever they were introduced, i.e., everywhere in Europe. With their emphasis on nature, sentiment, and heroic tra¬dition, these poems, in whatever language they were presented, provided an alternative, or an anti¬dote, to the dominant values and standards of the Enlightenment and Neoclassicism." "One reason the poems remained popular outside of the British Isles may be that the Scottish nationalism implicit in the poetry and perceived as a menace in Britain was either of little consequence in other countries or was actually perceived as an attractive feature. In fact, in places like Germany and Italy, which were belatedly aspiring to nationhood in the nineteenth century, a discourse that seemed to champion the cause of native nationalism while opposing foreign domination appealed greatly to patriotic intellectuals and political leaders struggling for national independence."

Journal of American Folklore, 2001

The poems of Ossian, as presented to the world of the 18th century by James Macpherson, had an enormous influence on the course of Romanticism and the growth of folkloristics through key figures such as Johann Gottfried Herder. Controversy still surrounds the compilation of the poems because of Macpherson’s free use of source material. The question of "authenticity" was the original reason for attacks on Macpherson and his methods, but in the present context of concern for the nature and study of folklore, this issue seems less important than Macpherson’s own complex personality and motives, which involve not only his shifting identity but also his attitude toward his sources and his English-language audience, and shed light, as well, on the process of "recomposition" and on the difficulty of "translating" cultural meanings.