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The study uses the category of disgust in order to analyse the representation of the human body and the corpse in one of the most influential medieval treatises, the De Miseria Condicionis Humanae (1195) written by Pope Innocent III, and its little known old French adaptation Double lay de fragilité humaine (1383) by Eustache Deschamps. Analysing how both use disgust as an aesthetic means, which appeals to emotions and turns off reason, helps to point out the pedagogical and moral function of the texts. The comparison between them shows that Deschamps stays faithful to his Latin model, but that he nevertheless has to make certain modifications in order to adapt the prose text into a lyrical form. Furthermore, this approach clearly elucidates what differences there are between the conceptions of the human body and death in the two texts, revealing at the same time divergent theological points of view.
Women in Caribbean culture traditionally occupy the role of guardians of collective memory, as tellers of stories, legends and myths. Through oral tradition, they transfer the cultural and family knowledge from one generation of women to the next. We will offer an analysis of oral transmission as a way of preserving a memory of women in Le livre d’Emma (2001) by the Québec author of Haitian origin, Marie-Célie Agnant. We will primarily analyze the transformation of communicative memory into cultural memory, following the distinction by Jan Assmann. We will interpret the oral transfer as a possibility to stabilize, to legitimize female memory and to inscribe it into the female body.
Unaufhörliches Suchen – Gaddas Roman Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana als carmen perpetuum
(2016)
Gadda’s novel Quer Pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana tells the tale of two crimes committed in Rome in the 1920s. The search for the perpetrators turns into a pasticciaccio brutto (an awful mess), challenging the reader with its linguistic complexity and a myriad of references to history and culture; the large number of allusions to antiquity is particularly striking. References to Virgil’s Aeneid and to Rome’s mythical past do not constitute a mere transfer, but document a creative approach of transformational nature. Deformation and inversion are part of this process, changing the μορφή not only in formal terms, but also within the plot itself. These transformations of both form and content are read as Metamorphoses and analysed in comparison to Ovid’s homonymous work. The perpetual, never-ending quest for truth in Gadda’s novel necessitates a perpetual, never-ending narrative, which is conceptually related to Ovid’s carmen perpetuum.
The present study is concerned with a critical discourse analysis of the speeches of the Italian politicians Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Renzi in different situations. The aim of the study was to find out how historical and speech contexts influence discourse structures and argumentations, and if any similar speech patterns or speech strategies were used. The results show that both politicians in many cases tend to utilize similar speech patterns to achieve different aims; each of them shows a preference for particular words, structures and strategies. It is noteworthy that one of the important differences between speeches of Berlusconi and Renzi is the use of various speech strategies. While Renzi uses these strategies to create an image of himself as a young and honest politician, Berlusconi makes use of them to defend himself or attack his opponents.
This article deals with the reception of Dante and Goethe in Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s and Hector Berlioz’s compositions La Vita Nuova and La Damnation de Faust. Although Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nova and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust belong to completely different genres and epochs, the texts provide the basis for the oratorio-style works from the Romantic era, which justifies a comparative analysis of the latter. The examined reductions, extensions, modifications and rearrangements of the texts in the libretti – which were compiled almost entirely by the composers themselves – as well as the instrumental parts and the use and functions of the orchestra, the choir and the soloists, portray the intermedia relations between literature and music in the selected compositions. The chosen examples will show that the common idea of setting literature to music and the translation studies concept of intersemiotic translation are not appropriate for all literature-based pieces of music, as the analysis of both works demonstrates that with regard to vocal music a distinction should be made between the musicalization of literature and the literarization of music.
Economic, academic or artistic cooperation among actors of different countries or disciplines offers numerous new perspectives, but it also confronts the ones profiting from it with several challenges. First, identity has to be firmly established, which requires intercultural skills, such as role-distance, empathy and tolerance for ambiguities. Secondly, a third space is required in which meaning can be newly negotiated to make the partnership succeed. This paper proposes that even within one and the same language-group, one can speak of intercultural communication. A particular collaboration between Portuguese-speaking comic artists will be introduced, raising questions of the conditions necessary to make such a cooperation work. Answers will be provided according to the decisions the artists made in their publications.
The two articles of «Langage» and «Langue», published in 1765 in the 9th volume of the great French Encyclopédie by Diderot and D’Alembert, treat some essential philosophical questions on the human ability of communication with linguistic signs. Nevertheless, as the two authors Jaucourt and Beauzée did not share completely identic points of view, the comparative lecture of both articles reveals a complementary perspective, particularly relating to the origin of language as a divine gift or humans’ creation for communicative needs. A further aspect of divergence concerns the textual composition of the article « Langage » as a structured informative text, and the article « Langue » as a long and freely composed writing including personal remarks by the author. The following article deals with the potential of approaches to the Encyclopédie in modern linguistics, concretely demonstrated in the comparative analysis of these two articles.
Multilingualism is part of our everyday lives and has recently entered the medium of film. Based on the linguistic diversity of Spanish-speaking countries, the present paper explores multilingualism as a key competence of foreign language learning. Since film provides students with audiovisual access to multilingual situations, a selection of educational videos that form parts of German textbooks will be critically explored concerning the presentation of multilingual phenomena. The results will be discussed in order to contribute to the systematic acquisition of multilingual skills in the sense of language and cultural awareness during classroom learning.
This article seeks to analyse urban representation in José Cardoso Pires’s Lisboa – Livro de Bordo (1997), a book dedicated to the author’s home city Lisbon, by focusing on its prevailing nautical and maritime imagery. This imagery as well as its tendency to design Lisbon as a city-ship shall be examined with regard to spatial construction in the Livro de Bordo. Urban sailing as well as the recurrent representations of the Portuguese capital’s spaces as heterotopias will be interpreted as approaches to subvert institutional and homogenic discourses on Lisbon.
The present paper is concerned with the use of English cognitive verbs like think, mean and guess as well as with fixed expressions that contain these verbs like guess what (?) or think about it in Portuguese online discourses. In the qualitative analysis of examples retrieved from the Corpus do Português (Web/Dialects) I mainly focus on the syntactic behavior of the expressions under survey, also comparing their use and function in the English language. In the final part of the paper I reflect about possible reasons of the employment of English elements in Portuguese conversation.
This paper discusses complementation strategies in Spanish, focusing on a specific construction most speakers are not aware of: the complementation clause preceded by the verb conocer. Not being a typical complement-taking verb, conocer surprises with a stable and persistent presence throughout the centuries, from Old Spanish to Modern Spanish. After giving an introduction into the field of complementation clauses and one of its main focus of study, grammatical mood, this study uses empirical data from the corpus programs CORDE, CREA and CORPES XXI to show the usage and prevalence of the construction in question. In doing so, this analysis gives a quantitative insight, exemplifying the results with several examples from all ages.
The history of intellectual and cultural contact between West and East is very complicated and contradictory. A long time ago, eastern culture attracted the attention of many writers, orientalists and researchers, who headed east not only to study and describe the fascinating eastern civilizations, but also to analyze their different literary, historical and scientific aspects.
The new mysterious but exciting environment inspired the orientalists to record and describe what they experienced regarding the architecture, the nature and the people. The attractive eastern natural views which are distinguishable from the monotonous western environment – especially after the industrial revolution – helped them to find new prospects.
The East has been coming into focus since the middle ages, when the church campaigns started to study Islam as the prevalent religion in this area. The orientalist motivations were not only religious, but also followed economic, colonial and scientific agenda, which lead to a plethora of specialized research, stories, novels and analytical studies. A close look at the orientalists’ works will provide us with an overview of eastern civilization. Therefore, their works are considered as a mirror reflecting their point of view to the east and the north of Africa, especially to pharaonic Egypt.
The orientalists who travelled to the east and expressed their passion to this old civilization in their writings influenced the literary movement deeply. But what do we mean by the term orientalism? Edward Saïd has defined this term in different ways. Saïd presented and interpreted it as a way of thinking, a historical phenomenon. Defining orientalism has become a problem indeed, and now it is carrying a number of meanings which do not match. Therefore, the aim of the study is to bring into focus the most important definitions of the term orientalism from the late 17th to the mid-20th century.
Peau d’Âme has often been regarded as an enigmatic and mysterious text which prevented a broad attention and interpretation since its posthumous publication in 1935. But putting the perspective on Pozzi’s Journal, particularly during the years 1920 and 1921, allows us to discover a significant intertextuality between both of them. Catherine Pozzi’s perception of space in her every day writing does not differ from her philosophical work, since for her the concepts of center and periphery do not form a strict dichotomy. It becomes superfluous in a world without limits. The perception and philosophy of Catherine Pozzi tends to go beyond the boundaries of space which allows us, as readers of these two forms of writing, to comprehend her vision of a spatial and temporal eternity.
After independence, in the sixties, sub-Saharan Africa including Francophone, saw moving to the head of his governments, dictatorial powers. Henri Lopès translated this in his work by a formal violence. We will study in this paper, the violence employed by the Congolese novelist in Le Pleurer-rire (1982): the technique of fragmentary. Our work is structured in three parts: the presentation of formal violence in Le Pleurer-rire, manifestations of postcolonial political system in this novel and the operation of the technique of fragmentary.
The normative use of past tenses is supposed to be a big challenge for learners of Spanish. Although they might understand the grammatical chapter in theory, adequate past tense use in spontaneous oral production is not guaranteed. Morphological errors, overgeneralizations of tenses and interferences with other languages characterize the interlanguage of the learners. Based on two corpuses, we analyse how the past tense use differs between secondary school students from Austria and Romance polyglots. Qualitative and quantitative analyses show that polyglot speakers surpass the secondary school students in some areas such as the distinction of verbal aspect. However, the students tend less to use the perfecto compuesto in an inadequate way in narration.
In the wake of the general tendency towards slow cinema which has been evolving in Mexican cinema, cinematographic devices have gained importance not only with regard to the construction of a persuasive narrative but also in terms of the aesthetic constitution of the movie itself. Not only is this observation evident in the absence of camera movements but also in the semiotic depth of mise en scène resulting from this circumstance. Natalia Almada’s movie Todo lo demás (2016) provides an impressive example of both the repercussions of this technique in the representation of loneliness as well as the suggestive power of the scenographical composition. Hence, the ensuing analysis of those scenes referring to water is to elucidate the semiotics of mise en scène and its influence on the representation of the main character and the repetitive routine constricting her freedom.
The present study focuses on Marion Maréchal-Le Pen’s self-representation on social media. Despite her youth, the niece of the party’s chairwoman and granddaughter of its founder is a distinguished member of the French radical right-wing populist and nationalist party Front National. The corpus-based analysis of her digital presence on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook on which this paper is based shows a specific use of linguistic and multimodal resources as a means of strategic framing of political content. In particular, an analysis of Maréchal-Le Pen’s use of searchable hashtags and @mentions referring to different political and non-political actors reveals it as a strategy of polarization between a constructed us and a negatively connoted them.
Investigations focusing on the social criticism in La Regenta (1884-1885) by Leopoldo Alas «Clarín» have constantly referred to the unmasking of society’s hypocrisy and provincialism through the implementation of satire and irony in the novel. This observation, though, has to be defined more clearly. Vetustan society, specifically the bourgeoisie, is characterized primarily by the incessant exhibition of supposed wisdom and intelligentsia in public to generate social prestige and power. By analyzing the narrative strategies which are related to the composition of the secondary characters, the role of two specific public venues (Casino and Theatre of Vetusta) and the (de)construction of P. Ronzal, P. Guimarán and S. Bermúdez in the novel, this article illustrates how false wisdom and pseudo-intelligentsia become central motifs regarding social criticism in La Regenta.