Bl. Ladislaus of Gielniów is commonly regarded as the first major literary figure in Poland to write in Polish, as well as Latin. He is also the most important writer among the friars of the early Franciscan observant reform movement in Poland, which grew vigorously there after the visit of St. Giovanni of Capestrano in 1453. There, they took on the name of "Bernardines" to distinguish them from the Conventual Franciscans, after the cult of St. Bernardino of Siena, (...) which Capestrano promoted so strongly on all his travels.1 The Bernardine contribution to the development of the Polish literary language was significant, and the Bernardine contribution to the development of popular... (shrink)

Publication date: 14 June 2017 Source: Author: Muhammad Hussein Oroskhan, Sayyed Mohammad Anoosheh By the 1930s, the Iranian society was driven toward modernization. Consisted with the concept of modernization, feminism ushered a whole new era in Iranian history. Besides, the outbreak of World War II and the consequent abdication of Reza Khan afforded women a golden opportunity to fight for their rights and emancipations. This movement was also supported by the famous male writers of the time among whom Jalal Al-e-Ahmad (...) marked a prominent place. He was keen enough to properly explore women's situation in his works and notice the drastic effect of modernization upon women's situation. Hence, in this study, we try to investigate Al-e-Ahmad's short story entitled “Pink Nail Polish” 1948 with respect to Bakhtin's Carnivalesque's theory. Furthermore, it is shown how Bakhtin's new literary mode can create the excellent chance of studying Iranian women's situation properly. Finally, we explain that due to the drastic change of Iranian women's situation towards modernity, they may lead a double life if their rights are not respected. This can lead to a disproportionate relationship between the husband and the wife as the marital infidelity becomes rampant. (shrink)

In contemporary literary Hindi there is an abundance of Perso-Arabic loanwords which often function similarly to words of Sanskrit origin. Despite their semantic proximity, each of them can have different connotational meanings and cultural associations. Furthermore, depending on the context, one of them will be preferred to the other. This situation can become an issue when translating from Hindi into Polish. In this paper, I will investigate whether these loanwords should be considered as a third language in translation. (...) If this is the case, they make the text a multicultural one, and, thus, raise the question of how to translate them into Polish, being at the same time focused on a monolingual recipient and their cognitive comfort while not impoverishing and distorting the process of translation. Moreover, I will propose an approach which can be of assistance in achieving this goal, relying on French and Latin loanwords used in the Polish language. (shrink)

This article is concerned with writing in Poland since the collapse of Communism. It focuses mainly on the generation of Polish writers who made their debut around the time of the collapse of Communism and whose work has since begun to appear in English translation. It considers the changing focus of the post-Communist generation of writers, asks how the translations of their work represent Poland to the world and what these works might indicate about changes within contemporary Polish (...) literary and political culture. In particular the article looks at recent fiction from Polish Women Writers and themes in recent writing including the ideas of Poland as Post-Communist, Post-nationalist, Post-Jewish and Post-German. (shrink)

This article is framed by a wider interest in how literary careers are made: what mechanisms other than the personal/biographical and the text-centred evaluations of scholars influence a writer’s choices in persisting in building a succession of works that are both varied and yet form a consistently recognizable “brand.” Translation is one element in the wider network of “machinery” that makes modern literary publishing. It is a marker of success that might well keep authors going despite lack of (...) sales or negative reviews at home. Translation rights can provide useful supplementary funds to sustain a writer’s output. Access to new markets overseas might also inspire interest in countries and topics other than their usual focus or the demands of their home market. The Australian novelist and playwright Thomas Keneally achieved a critical regard for fictions of Australian history within a nationalist cultural resurgence, but to make a living as a writer he had to keep one eye on overseas markets as well. While his work on European topics has not always been celebrated at home, he has continued to write about them and to find readers in languages other than English. Poland features in a number of Keneally’s books and is one of the leading sources of translation for his work. The article explores possible causes and effects around this fact, and surveys some reader responses from Poland. It notes the connections that Keneally’s Catholic background and activist sympathies allow to modern Polish history and assesses the central place of his Booker-winning Schindler’s Ark filmed as Schindler’s List. (shrink)

In this paper I present Jan Nepomucen Miller’s universalism, i.e. his own conception of literature, which pursues the right to compete with its Romantic model. Universalism, whose elaboration of the philosophical premises took place in the years 1923-1925, never received a complete and finite form; it only indicated a certain option for which the whole, universality and universum was more important than a part. Although this conception proved to be a Utopian project, without its driving force, being too far from (...) the reality to support the spiritual values of the Polish culture, it constitutes (especially in our interwar thought) one of unique attempts to create a culture based on a non-Romantic canon of values. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 133-152 [Access article in PDF] Benjamin Franklin in Jewish Eastern Europe: Cultural Appropriation in the Age of the Enlightenment Nancy Sinkoff * Figures In 1808 an anonymous Hebrew chapbook detailing a behaviorist guide to moral education and self-improvement appeared in Lemberg, Austrian Galicia. Composed by Mendel Lefin of Satanów, an enlightened Polish Jew (maskil in the Hebrew terminology of the (...) period), Moral Accounting (Sefer Heshbon ha-Nefesh) was a crucial weapon in Lefin's lifelong literary war against Hasidism, the new Jewish pietistic movement which had captured the hearts and souls of much of eighteenth-century Polish Jewry. 1 The core of Moral Accounting was a boxed grid, seven lines by thirteen, which correlated, respectively, to the days of the week and to thirteen virtues in need of improvement. The grid was to be used daily throughout a thirteen-week cycle which repeated four times during the course of a year. Addressing a traditionally-educated Jewish audience, Mendel Lefin did not disclose the gentile source of the method of moral self-reform, but he did acknowledge that it was not his innovation: "Several years ago a new method was revealed, and it is [such] a wonderful invention for this [kind] of [moral] education that it seems that its renown will spread as quickly, if God desires it, as that of the invention of printing which brought light to the world." 2 [End Page 133] The creator of this "wonderful invention" was none other than Benjamin Franklin, whose "Rules of Conduct" first appeared in 1791 in the second part of his English Autobiography. 3There has been a noticeable interest recently among historians of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) to map carefully, region by region, the nuances and varieties of the Jewish encounter with modernity. 4 Nonetheless, Haskalah scholars have generally regarded Mendel Lefin's use of Franklin's technique as a confirmation of their view that the impetus for the Haskalah among East European Jewry lay in its exposure to the West in general and to the Berlin Haskalah's Western orientation in particular. 5 They have viewed Moral Accounting as merely a translation of yet another text of the European and American Enlightenments into Hebrew, and they have paid little attention to the Polish context and orientation of Lefin's work. 6 Implicit in this view, too, was the problematic assumption that translation of a text is an uncritical, acquiescent act. Mendel Lefin's wholesale adoption of Franklin's "Rules of Conduct," implied, first, a static, unidirectional influence of a Western text on an East European and, second, that Franklin's work itself had a fixed, absolute meaning which Lefin simply appended to his Hebrew book. Yet the appearance of the "Rules of Conduct" in Hebrew and [End Page 134] Lefin's use of other Western and non-Jewish texts were anything but mechanical. 7Not only Lefin's Jewishness but his Polish origins and Polish orientation make the assumption of passivity particularly acute. Effaced from the map of Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, Poland's history has not been integrated into general historical treatments of the Enlightenment. 8 Just as studies of the Jewish Enlightenment describe a trajectory from Berlin to Austrian Galician to Russia, so do general interpretations of the European Enlightenment draw a line from Germany and France to Russia, bypassing Poland. For example, in Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich's important book, The Enlightenment in National Context, Poland is nowhere to be found. 9 Yet Poland, too, had an Enlightenment (Oswiecenie), beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, which was stimulated by many of the same forces that spurred change in the West: the desire to reform antiquated political systems, to liberate education from religious dogma, and to create a rational state apparatus. In Poland the Enlightenment had its own national coloring; it was sponsored not by a rising bourgeois class but by royal and noble circles (and thus lacked the social critique of the Enlightenment in the... (shrink)

The Southern Garden Poetry Society: Literary Culture and Social Memory in Guangdong. By David B. Honey. Hong Kong: the Chinese University Press, 2013. Pp. xiv + 258. $45.

The study of the formation of the literary culture of the words of the "peoples of the nations" is impossible without analyzing the role of libraries of monasteries and cathedrals as centers of documentary memory of the Christian past. After all, the library, as a social institution, has always played an important role in the development of education, science, culture, and religious thought on a long path to its development.

The great achievement of mankind was the appearance of a printed book that not only significantly expanded the circle of readers, but also in comparison with the handwritten book contributed to the unification of canonical texts, in particular, such as Scripture, church service books, works of the Church Fathers, polemical and other religious literature. Consideration of the words "Japanese typography as the basis for the preservation and transmission of sources of Christian literary culture requires a brief description of (...) the essence of printing, not only as a means of mechanical reproduction of the text, but also a remarkable cultural-historical phenomenon. (shrink)

The literary scene of Kant’s day goes unmentioned by philosophical commentators. Yet some of its salient features have a clear relation to his problems and positions, not demonstrably causal in every detail, but too close overall to be coincidence in the random sense. Kant’s critical view of society and his establishing of an independent aesthetic realm parallel the themes, and the arguments in self-defence, of contemporaneous radical writing; his discussion of how to exemplify ethical arguments bears on the general (...) Enlightenment problem of how to embody abstractions persuasively, while his theoretical and practical difficulties over written style have consequences for the reception of his own work, and were responsible for divisions among writers of the day who might otherwise have made common cause. All this adds a valuable dimension to our understanding of both Kant’s aesthetics and his time. (shrink)

At all times, the book was understood not only as a means of preserving and transforming knowledge, but also as a means of knowing the world around us. At the same time, from ancient times it was a subject of knowledge. Gradually its theoretical phenomenon was formed. The book essentially is the most important form of consolidation and transfer of information in space and time. From the point of view of the theory of communication, the book serves as one of (...) the forms of existence and dissemination of semantic information, a means of organizing the work of individual consciousness into a sign system for the perception of its social consciousness. After all, the evolution of the book is inextricably linked with the history of mankind. She is the foundation on which the culture of peoples is built. It helps society to grow and improve, borrow and use all the mass of knowledge accumulated by mankind. The book is the most complete and comprehensive expression of the spiritual culture of mankind, since its origin and development are inextricably linked with it. (shrink)

Greek culture matters because its unique pluralistic debate shaped modern discourses. This ground-breaking book explains this feature by retelling the history of ancient literary culture through the lenses of canon, space and scale. It proceeds from the invention of the performative 'author' in the archaic symposium through the 'polis of letters' enabled by Athenian democracy and into the Hellenistic era, where one's space mattered and culture became bifurcated between Athens and Alexandria. This duality was reconfigured into (...) an eclectic variety consumed by Roman patrons and predicated on scale, with about a thousand authors active at any given moment. As patronage dried up in the third century CE, scale collapsed and literary culture was reduced to the teaching of a narrower field of authors, paving the way for the Middle Ages. The result is a new history of ancient culture which is sociological, quantitative, and all-encompassing, cutting through eras and genres. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to determine the place of Marxism in Polish literary studies of the 20th century. The starting point is Czesław Miłosz’s comment on the identity of Marxism and structuralism; the absence of the term ‘Marxism’ in the names of Polish workers’ parties and pro-Marxist academic discourse. Referring to political history, I suggest an explanation of this state of affairs, revealing the function of Marxism under different names in philosophical texts from the beginning of (...) the 20th century. To support my argument, I draw on documents from the newly discovered archive of Dawid Hopensztand. I use this archive to reconstruct his social biography and justify the main thesis about the permanent presence of Marxism in the works of such thinkers as Leszek Kołakowski, Zygmunt Bauman, and even Czesław Miłosz. (shrink)

O ye Gentlemen explores two permanent and vital strands in Arabic culture: the Greek tradition in science and philosophy and the literary tradition. More than thirty essays demonstrate that the strands freely interweave within the broader scope of Schrifttum.

Presents the intellectual milieu of mid-Tang China, particularly the conservative defense of literary pursuits and cultural tradition in the face of political and social uncertainty.

This paper offers an anxious survey of factors inducing boredom or indifference in the readership of environmental writing and criticism. The first is the inertia of limited assumptions in writers and critics about how to engage readers’ attention, with inadequate ideas of what ‘genuine reading’ would be. Secondly and more insidiously, modern readers are usually now immersed in consumerist cultural contexts actively geared to encourage boredom as a market force. Reduced thresholds of attention become effectively a political agent, usually a (...) reactionary one. Next the question is asked: is ‘the reader’ a unified subject? That is, how far are environmental texts and fears unwittingly appealing to unacknowledged fantasies of violence and harm? A final threat to readerly engagement with environmental criticism in particular is that, as the conditions of the ‘Anthropocene’ worsen, just to engage more reading and readers on environmental issues comes to seem less and less adequate, even evasive, an academic theatre only of performing opinions. (shrink)

The subject of this study is the process of change which affected the teaching of philosophy in the secondary education system in the first phase of the Polish Enlightenment in the mid-18th century. Historians of science and philosophy have treated those changes as a spontaneous and uncritical attempt to include the problems of modem natural science seventeenth-century systems of philosophy, and ethical and social issues of the Enlightenment into the systematic exposition of Christian Aristotelianism, all despite the avowed opposition (...) to these modes of culture. Hence the contemporary so-called 'philosophia recentiorum' has usually been regarded as a form of eclecticism, that is as a form structurally and culturally inconsistent, transitory, incomplete and dependent. Emphasis has also been laid on the impact Ch. Wolff allegedly had on the first stage of the Polish Enlightenment, the impact then replaced by English and French influences. (shrink)

(2012). Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790–1805. By Stephanie M. Hilger. The European Legacy: Vol. 17, No. 7, pp. 948-950. doi: 10.1080/10848770.2012.718258.

Citizenship is usually seen as a product of modern nation-states, or of other political entities which possess institutional infrastructures and political systems capable of producing a coherent framework that defines the relationship between that system and its members. In this paper, we show that an early system of modern citizenship was created in the absence of a formal state, notably by the cultural elite of a stateless nation. The Polish case illustrates that an elite may become a dominant class (...) in the given society only later, and institutionalize that early citizenship system within the framework of a newly founded state. As a result of the legacy of the emergence of citizenship predating the restoration of statehood, the contemporary Polish citizenship model is influenced by a strong and largely overlooked cultural component that emerged at the turn of the 19th century. This model uses the figure of the intelligentsia member as its ideal citizen. Despite the dramatic political and economic changes in the decades which have passed since its emergence, this cultural frame, which was institutionalized during the interwar period, still defines the key features of the Polish citizenship model. Consequently, we argue that the culturalization of citizenship is hardly a new phenomenon. It can be seen as a primary mechanism in the formation of civic polities within the imperial context. Moreover, it shows that such processes can have many ambiguous aspects as far as their Orientalizing forces of exclusion are concerned. (shrink)

This study blends together ethical philosophy, neurocognitive-evolutionary studies, and literary theory to explore how imaginative discourse addresses a distinctively human deep sociality, and by doing so helps shape cultural and literary history. Deep sociality, arising from an improbable evolutionary history, both entwines and leaves non-reconciled what is felt to be significant for us and what ethical sense seems to call us to acknowledge as significant, independent of ourselves. Ethical Sense and Literary Significance connects literary and cultural (...) history without reducing the literary to a mere expression of something else. It argues that affective differences between non-egocentric and egocentric registers of significance are integral to the bioculturally evolved deep sociality that verbal art addresses-often in unsettling and socially critical ways. Much imaginative discourse, in early societies as well as recent ones, brings ethical sense and literary significance together in ways that reveal their intricate but non-harmonized internal entwinement. Drawing on contemporary scholarship in the humanities and sciences, Donald R. Wehrs explores the implications of interdisciplinary approaches to topics central to a wide range of fields beyond literary studies, including neuroscience, anthropology, phenomenological philosophy, comparative history, and social psychology. (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, (...) and invites us to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)