Literary Criticism

Kahlil Gibran is one of the most important writers of modern Arabic literature and one of the most successful poets of English in the twentieth century. He is undoubtedly a pioneer among Arab poets and novelists writing in English and the most important figure in the Émigré literary movement. His world-wide popularity is due in large part to his universal spiritual message of love and compassion. This study, focusing on both his Arabic and English works, seeks to explore the various contextual aspects that affect all of Gibran’s works since his birth in Mount Lebanon.  It also presents a critical overview of all his works for readers and critics that seek a deeper appreciation and a more comprehensive understanding of this literary genius. The study highlights the spiritual element which serves as the link that unifies his Arabic and English works and propels them to enduring literary and popular success across cultures. Keywords: Kahlil Gibran, Āmigré Literature, Diaspora Writers, ...

En 1185 moda en la ciudad de Man~kus, sede de la corte almohade, el filosofo andalusi> natural de Guadix, Abn Bakr Ibn Tufayl. Celebramos, por tanto, este ano el octavo centenario de su muerte> sin que haya habido, que sepamos, conmemoracion oficial alguna. Valgan, pues, las siguientes palabras como testimonio y reconocimiento de su importancia en el quehacer filosofico. Aunque varias fuentes arabes> entre ellas Averroes> nos informan que Ibn Tufayl escribio diversas obras sobre medicina y astronomia, lo cierto es que el unico libro que de el se nos ha conservadO es la famosa novela filosofica titulada Epistola de Hayy b. Yaqzarz, una de las obras escritas en arabe que mas cantidad de veces ha sido traducida a otras lenguas. Pues bien, quisiera destacar, a proposito de esta obra, un hecho que me induce a pensar que el filosofo de Guadix estuvo presente en el animo de los ilustrados europeos de fines del siglo xvii y del siglo Xviii. El escrito de Ibn Tufayl fue traducido...

Resumen: Angel Valbuena Prat fue catedrático de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid desde 1963 hasta su jubilación, en 1970. En esos años llevó a cabo una labor muy activa como profesor e investigador, mientras las ediciones de su obra maestra, la Historia de la ...

Las nupcias de Filología y Mercurio de Marciano Capela, la última obra de carácter enciclopédico de la Latinidad tardía, incluye, en su libro IX, la Música como la última disciplina liberal del número. A lo largo de este libro que cierra la obra, su autor condensa las teorías musicales antiguas que comprenden las técnicas elementales principales y las especulaciones músico-matemáticas de mayor dominio y crédito y añade, aunque en menor medida, ciertas aportaciones propias. Una de ellas es su tratamiento de los pentacordos, calificado por la crítica como «único» en la tratadística antigua y tardoantigua, no habiendo nada parecido en documentos anteriores, griegos y latinos, de teoría musical. Este trabajo presentará brevemente al autor y a su obra y se centrará en la explicación de los pentacordos y de los esquemas pentacordales como parte del engranaje harmónico tratado en paralelo con los tetracordos.

Rori Bloom’s new publication on the writings of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy and Henriette-Julie de Murat places the physical aspects of their fairy tales—items such as castles’ decor, accessories, food, and art—on par with the action of the tale. Setting aside the traditional dissection of narratives most often used to critique this literary genre, Bloom moves furniture and fashion front and center in her analysis, portraying d’Aulnoy and Murat not only as “chroniclers of material culture but also as explorers of æsthetic issues including the relationship between art and power, word and image, the technical and the magical” (1).

This article analyzes the reasons, the means and the potential of using animalistic characteristics in the description of humans in Greek postwar prose (G.P-W.P). It deploys several seminal works of the Greek writers Nikos Kasdaglis, Alexandros Kotzias and Spyros Plaskovitis using specific criteria for their selection. The analysis of the works reveals that the animalistic motif is used to show the dehumanization of humans, caused by the extreme social conditions during World War II and the postwar era, which marked this generation of writers, and its allegorical dimension.

Bal Sitaram Mardhekar (1909-1956) who started writing in the mid-nineteen thirties is a seminal figure who provides a kind of transition between the aesthetic romanticism in Marathi to the age of modernist avant-gardes that would emerge from the impact of World War II, Partition and Indian independence. Apart from examining various views of modernism, modernity and modernism in the Indian context, the current paper examines Mardhekar’s own theorization of modernist and avant-garde poetics in their shifting social and historical context. I argue for a need for a theoretical framework that explains the mechanisms underlying the poetics and politics of modernist Indian avant-gardes instead of seeing it as superficial, derivative and inauthentic phenomenon (‘bad faith’). It is possible, using Dionyz Durisin’s interliterary theory,  to read Mardhekar as an instance of interliterary phenomenon instead of the idea of ‘ influence’ which invariably brings in normative hierarchy between the influencer and the influenced  and placing the latter on a lower or secondary position.  Mardhekar’s works belong to the international modernist movements, and shares some of its basic features like the metropolitan background, impact of Euro-American avant-gardes, the themes of alienation, sexual agony, myths, existential angst, rebellion against the middle-class values,  cultural decadence and the desire to invent a tradition and so on

Keywords: Modernist avant-garde, Indian modernisms, interliterary theory, B.S. Mardhekar, Marathi poetry

Editor’s note: To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Italo Calvino on October 15, 2023, the journal California Italian Studies has published a special issue, edited by Anna Botta and Lucia Re, titled "Calvino's Memos: Between the Old and the New Millennium". Including in this issue is a chapter in translation from the ground-breaking, magisterial study of Calvino’s corpus by Domenico Scarpa, "Calvino fa la conchiglia. La costruzione di uno scrittore", published earlier this year in Italy. What follows here is a translation of the book’s introduction.

James Joyce's Bildungsroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an ode to growing up in a frustratingly restrictive world where one’s church, family, and country dictate the flow of one’s life. Stephen Dedalus’ poetic soul rebels against the norms suffocating him and frustrating his search for his true vocation. By pursuing his inner Apollonian and Dionysian drives—a Nietzschean concept—Stephen attempts to redefine himself in his own terms. Struggling with both his identity and artistic expression, the protagonist of the novel discovers meaning in actions resulting from his Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. The question of whether he will suffer failure in this pursuit, or if he will fly through life’s difficulties, remains up in the air

Panaetius of Rhodes. Introduction The existence of few texts about Panaetius is recognized. It is about establishing his biography and thought and discussing his role in the circle of the Scipios and his political position before the Gracchi revolution. Here we will maintain that it maintains an intermediate position, in which it wants to make the reforms within the framework of the law.

This essay analyzes the central architecture of critique. It argues that, across the humanities, critique has followed a uniform methodology, where in qualities like ambiguity, ambivalence, uncertainty, contradiction, and paradox have represented the main tools of not only critique and unmasking but also disclosure and transformation. Within teaching philosophy, critique has thus done more than to politicize the classroom; it has also ingrained an equation between pedagogy and therapeutic witnessing or confessionalism. For many, qualities like ambiguity and uncertainty have furthermore been imagined to bear distinctly ‘ethical’ fruits. This essay questions these staples of pedagogical theory, in particular the redemptive faith that paradox and contradiction will prove inherently critical and/or progressive. It therefore historicizes the architecture of critique, submitting that among other things the contemporary political climate challenges unbridled faith in those qualities. And i...

Literatura budzi zgorszenie. Zawsze budziła. To właśnie ją określa. Czytelniku, zostałeś uprzedzony: jeżeli nie chcesz się zgorszyć, wyrzuć tę książkę, nim będzie za późno. W przeciwnym razie – witaj i wiedz. To, o czym myślisz, że jest gorszące, nie zawsze takie jest.

Literaturę atakowano, opluwano, potępiano pod rozmaitymi pretekstami. Od dwóch i pół tysiąca lat jest oskarżana przez filozofów i teologów, kapłanów i pedagogów, uczonych i socjologów, królów, cesarzy i prezydentów. Książka ta dostarcza licznych dowodów nienawiści. Jednak nienawiść do literatury ujawnia ukryte oblicze historii literatury. To, które być może nadaje jej prawdziwy sens.

Since the 1980s, popular media, literature and theory have suggested that technology has induced a newly evolved, posthuman and postmodern cyborg consciousness. This article examines the premise of human evolution towards a disembodied `post-human' state in cyberpunk literature and film, as well as some influential cyber-theory. Rather than indicating a revolutionary change in human consciousness, both cyber-lit and cybertheory incorporate and reinscribe Western Christian narratives about human identity. Images of disembodiment tend to reaffirm traditional religious concepts of human reproduction, individual consciousness, spirit and body, and life after death.