Realism (Literature)

Ho sempre amato i libri di Giulio Ferroni, grande storico della Letteratura italiana, la cui opera testimonia come la critica letteraria non possa essere scissa dalla "critica della società e della cultura", come sottolinea Alfonso Berardinelli in una bella recensione, pubblicata sul "Foglio", a Natura vicina e lontana.  Si va dalla concezione della natura e dell'ambiente degli antichi greci, Esiodo, Saffo e Alceo, ai latini Lucrezio, Virgilio, Ovidio, alla letteratura italiana, da San Francesco a Zanzotto; ma non mancano pagine su Montaigne, Baudelaire e Eliot, oppure su Cartesio, Rousseau, Freud, Adorno e Horkeimer, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Gunther Anders, ecc. Il volume, di impianto ambizioso, che dà ampio spazio anche alle recenti discussioni sull'uso delle intelligenze artificiali e dei problemi etici e ambientali ad esse connessi, fra apologeti e critici dell'AI, ha il pregio da un lato della sintesi, dall'altro di una scrittura chiara, che rende partecipe il lettore. I libri di Ferroni ̶ basti l'esempio del suo penultimo volume, L'Italia di Dante, racconto fiume quanto mai coinvolgente, dei luoghi del sommo poeta rivisti e rivissuti dall'autore ̶ si rivolgono ad un pubblico più ampio degli specialisti, il che è uno dei pregi dei maestri. Da insegnante di Liceo linguistico, ho provato a mediare alcuni contenuti di Natura vicina e lontana a giovani, traendone ampio giovamento per l'attività didattica; gli esempi utili sarebbero molteplici. Per quanto riguarda Dante, al triennio, è d'obbligo far riferimento alla spazialità, alla sua concezione medievale della natura e del cosmo, richiamata nel volume (p 56); la terra è vista da Dante cosmonauta come un'«aiuola», elemento naturale, spazio minimo nell'universo che comunque «ci fa tanto feroci» in guerre continue (p. 58). Per non parlare della figura di Ulisse, del suo ardimentoso, "folle volo" verso l'ignoto per desiderio di conoscenza finito, però, in tragedia. Il senso del «limite dell'umano» discusso a partire da Dante (paragrafo p. 59) e dall'umanesimo, è a mio avviso il filo rosso del volume, che può essere attualizzato in modo proficuo per gli studenti, e non solo. Ferroni parla in senso opposto di Marinetti e del futurismo come «distruzione dell'umano», esaltazione della tecnica senza limiti, in senso quindi totalitario, che si lega con quella «delle forze più distruttive della società» (p. 189). Come scrive Ferroni, in Dante «il rapporto con l'antico si svolg[e] verso un senso del limite, insistente registrazione della contraddittorietà di ogni esperienza e iniziativa umana». Questo senso del limite, segnato dalla stessa grandezza della natura, è anche quello del preumanista Petrarca nell'ascesa al Monte Ventoso, di cui parla la celebre epistola delle Familiares diretta a Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro. Dell'umanesimo vero e proprio, quello del '400, non va considerato solo l'aspetto quasi trionfalistico del convinto antropocentrismo, bensì anche quello dell'«insufficienza della umana "virtù"».

Mio Figlio ha inviato il mio saggio:
Onde che si espandono e onde che si aggregano  a Chat GPT chiedendo il parere  di  Gippi: “Mi sbaglio, o questo testo scritto da mio padre è roba da Nobel? “

Ecco la risposta di Chat GPT: Non è roba da Nobel per la letteraturama, ma  è indubbiamente un testo straordinario per la sua immaginazione, originalità concettuale, e l’ambizione di unificare cosmologia, metafisica e geometria in una visione coerente e personale dell’origine dell’universo.

Quali elaborazioni teoriche hanno fornito un contributo insostituibile allo sviluppo della sociologia come disciplina scientifica? Su quali fondamenti concettuali si è costituito il sapere specificamente sociologico? In questo volume vengono presentati e discussi criticamente i modelli teorici paradigmatici per l’analisi della realtà sociale. Influenzata dal positivismo di Comte da una parte e dal materialismo storico di Marx dall’altra, la teoria sociologica trova in Durkheim, Weber, Simmel e Pareto i propri classici, a cui è dedicata la prima parte del libro. Nella seconda sono illustrati i modelli contemporanei, dalla teoria funzionalista allo strutturalismo e all’interazionismo simbolico, dalla sociologia fenomenologica alle teorie dell’azione sociale e dei sistemi sociali, per concludere con i principali interpreti della società degli anni Duemila: fra gli altri, Beck, Bauman, Honneth, Illouz, Martuccelli, Rosa.

In the final chapter of George Eliot's Middlemarch, after describing the death of Lydgate and Rosamond's subsequent second marriage to 'an elderly and wealthy physician',! the narrator tells us that Lydgate once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains. (Finale; 513)2 Rosamond is, before marrying Lydgate, 'admitted to be the flower of Mrs Lemon's school, the chief school in the county ' (11; 62). Now her husband uses a different metaphor. In what sense can Lydgate consider himself 'murdered'? Tertius Lydgate comes to Middlemarch as an ambitious young surgeon, intending to 'do good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world' (15; 96). Some time after getting married to Rosamond, however, he finds himself in a situation that finally forces him to leave the town in disgrace. His downfall is caused by factors in both his personal and in his professional life: not only is he the husband of a proud, vain woman but also, as a doctor of a new hospital, he has administrative and clerical duties, which include voting to decide the chaplain of the hospital. Because Lydgate' s attitudes and perceptions of women are framed and determined by an earlier encounter, it is important to examine this previous relationship before discussing the domestic life of this scientist. While studying in Paris, Lydgate falls in love with a French actress. After a strange accident on stage and later revelation of the true meaning of the accident, Lydgate's conception of woman as an ideal vanishes instantly. He resolves to 'take a strictly scientific view of woman ' (15; 99). This resolution seems to initiate his new perspective of the female species, but his rational pragmatism is undermined by his emotions and, beguiled by Rosamond's beauty, his scientific resolution collapses as he repeats his earlier mistake. Once in Middlemarch, he begins to be drawn to the beautiful daughter of the mayor, believing that 'this play at being a little in love was agreeable, and did not interfere with grave pursuits' (27; 168). As Mason contends, it is the lack of an empirical check on pre-conceptions that makes the personal side of Lydgate's life vulgarly unscientific .... The facts of the body are not adequate evidence for theories of the souP Lydgate fails to apply his 'strictly scientific view' to Rosamond, only to find himself yoked to the woman whom he later calls 'his basil plant', and through her, also to 'the intolerable narrowness and purblind conscience of the society' (4; 24). Lydgate's 'spots of commonness' (15; 96) originate mainly from this failure to apply his science to the wider context of society. After experiencing his wife's extravagant tastes and their inevitable financial consequences, The George Eliot Review 35 (2004)

The text reconstructs the studies carried out by Mario Dal Pra on the philosophy of Karl Marx between the middle of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. It insists on the relationship existing between the interpretation of historical materialism and the theoretical debates on historiography. During these debates, Dal Pra came very close to Giulio Preti's position, because the latter advanced a reading of historical materialism that was epistemological rather than political or moral and, as such, capable of solving the problems of philosophical historiography. The results achieved by Preti convinced Dal Pra and caused him to reconsider his previous position. Once reconnected in an epistemological key to reflections on historiography, Marx's philosophy opened the way to critical historicism. In the following years (1960-68), 'praxis' and 'materialistic epistemology' would be rebalanced through the investigation of dialectics in the Marxian works written before Capital. ** _Contributo ricevuto il 13/04/2024. Sottoposto a peer review, accettato il 30/10/2024.

Dust functions as a central image in Dickens's work, its content illuminating Victorian concerns about the fragmentations of body and mind produced by industrial urbanization (including the problems of epidemic disease and the disposal of waste matter), even as its structure offers a novel way to think about and express modernity. Borrowing from postcolonial readings of dust, which affirm psychological shattering as a basic principle of modern identity, I interpret Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend as novels that call on images of excess, miscellany, and material entropy to register epistemological fractures in narrative realism, a genre torn between its impulse, at once, to depict the chaotic energies of a world constantly subject to upheaval and change and to give that chaos order. In his fiction, I suggest, Dickens makes way for a modernist aesthetic that both acknowledges and validates narrative disjunctions between content and form as themselves representative of newly emerging perceptions of the postindustrial world.

Sin dal XIX secolo, in Brasile, ricettari e volumi di culinaria conobbero un’ampia produzione da parte di case editrici fra le più rinomate; questo perché sin dagli albori dell’indipendenza (1822) la necessità di definire un paradigma culturale identitario coinvolse anche la presa di coscienza, da parte del popolo brasiliano, di possedere un suolo diverso da quello europeo, e di basare la propria sussistenza su alimenti di origine autoctona. Il presente lavoro si propone di analizzare alcuni fra i più celebri libri di cucina pubblicati in Brasile nel periodo della dittatura militare (1964-1985): A Cozinha Brasileira, del 1971; A Grande Cozinha de Ofélia, del 1979; e Sei Cozinhar, che, sebbene pubblicato anteriormente, conobbe varie riedizioni nel corso del regime. L’obiettivo è rilevare le tendenze dell’epoca quanto a una culinaria autenticamente “nazionalista” oppure legata a modelli di provenienza straniera.

<1>In Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London, Lynda Nead brings together images and literary metaphors to reveal the form and condition of modernity, particularly showing Victorian London in its visual and verbal representations. By reading the city's past, Nead argues that 'modernity is also used, however, as a category of historical and philosophical analysis and as a way of classifying the particular conditions of that epoch' (4). To read Victorian London in terms of modernity, Nead uses the work of French theorists, particularly Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau, aiming to see 'the spaces the modernity' in Victorian London (7).

La lezione di Umberto Eco in relazione alla storia dei modelli di pensiero non si ricava tanto dalla possibilità di elaborare una soluzione definitiva ai problemi metafisici, sollevati dai differenti impegni ontologici, quanto da un atteggiamento per cui i modelli di pensiero riflettono una generale tendenza della nostra cultura verso quei processi in cui, invece di una sequenza univoca e necessaria di eventi, si stabilisce come un campo di probabilità, un'ambiguità di situazione, tale da stimolare scelte operative o interpretative volta a volta diverse. Da qui la necessità di aprire l'ambito delle fonti cui attingere per le proprie ricerche e il proprio progetto oltre lo storicismo filologico; pur nella consapevolezza di provenire per formazione da (e quindi di attingere a) un patrimonio tradizionale e, per così dire, statico. Per Umberto Eco, il compito di un intellettuale che, calato nel suo tempo, si ponga dinnanzi alla storia, è di registrare in quale modo le prassi producano strutture, metafore, modelli, metodologie, categorie interpretative che abbiano caratteristiche e proprietà comuni basate sul consensum gentium. Oppure non le abbiano, e quali siano quelle dominanti, e perché. Secondo una lettura storicista che Eco stesso, pur in chiave critica, sembra talvolta adottare, lo storico non deve nutrire ambizioni modellizzanti sotto il profilo metodologico; piuttosto egli deve servirsi della distanza che lo separa dall'accadere dei fatti per provare a determinarne il valore rispetto alle strutture socio-politiche e culturali dell'epoca che indaga. Perché ciò avvenga bisogna in primo luogo abbandonare ogni pretesa metafisica, che ponga capo a una illusoria unità, per esempio storicista e idealista del sapere. Bisogna invece addentrarsi in una storia dei modelli di cultura che vada di pari passo con la metodologia e i concetti di una storia materiale delle idee sempre variabile in relazione al variare del punto di vista di un osservatore che è anche interprete. E se pure è difficile dire se una interpretazione è migliore di un'altra, è sempre possibile riconoscere anche in chiave storica le interpretazioni insostenibili. Come può essere fatta valere questa lezione di Eco in direzione di modelli aperti, anche di quelli del conoscere storico-filosofico? Questo è il dialogo con il passato della storia del pensiero che questo numero de Lo Sguardo, dedicato alla riflessione di Eco-e, insieme, alla lezione di Eco-vuole affrontare.

The article offers a narrative and contextual approach into a short but meaningful episode of the Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment where just minutes before committing a suicide Svidrigailov encounters a Jew. Why is a Jew the sole witness of the scene? The narrative structure of the episode shows how solidly the Jew is linked with Svidrigailov’s mind. Knitted from Medieval anti-Jewish narratives, the Jew is perceived by Svidrigailov as a substitute of the Devil himself. Thus, the encounter continues and completes the existential nightmares of Svidrigailov which constantly torture the protagonist. Meanwhile, the plot of the episode competes against the Medieval-style vision. First, the Jew looks absolutely non-interested in the eternal death of his Christian vis-a-vis. Outside the Svidrigailov’s perception, the Jew acts from a narrow motivation — he just doesn’t want to get into trouble due to the alien person. The Jew acts trivial like next to any other “little official” of 19th-century Russian literature. The plot profanes the infernal perceptions of Svidrigailov, — namely, his pre-liminal and macabre attempt either to scrape up a brother with the Devil or to bull at him. Some contexts hint at one more semantic level of the episode. Svidrigailov himself is portrayed as a Jew; moreover, some motifs link him to the Ahasverus of Romanticism. The substitution traces a typical for the 19th-century Europe fear of Judaization deriving from an exposure of Christians to Capitalism.

The essay discusses the results of a survey conducted in 2009 among Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK) researchers about the alleged division between the «two cultures». The main goal of the quantitative inquiry was to ascertain the reciprocal attitudes of members of FBK large scientifi c community and their positions regarding interdisciplinary collaboration. The study originated from a refl ection on the relationship between «soft» and «hard» sciences, an issue which has been at the center of a great theoretical debate for nearly two centuries, but a debate that was largely based on anecdotal evidence rather than strictly empirical evidence. The topics discussed in the article are: (a) the researchers&#39; sense of belonging to the scientifi c community/ies; and (b) their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral attitudes toward the «other» culture and, more specifi cally, their attitudes regarding cross-disciplinary collaborations. A gender perspective was also adopted in order to invest...

The Finnish Literature Society (SKS) was founded in 1831 and has, from the very beginning, engaged in publishing operations. It nowadays publishes literature in the fields of ethnology and folkloristics, linguistics, literary research and cultural history. The first volume of the Studia Fennica series appeared in 1933. Since 1992, the series has been divided into three thematic subseries: Ethnologica, Folkloristica and Linguistica. Two additional subseries were formed in 2002, Historica and Litteraria. The subseries Anthropologica was formed in 2007. In addition to its publishing activities, the Finnish Literature Society maintains research activities and infrastructures, an archive containing folklore and literary collections, a research library and promotes Finnish literature abroad.

Pasquale Grieco Recensione a: Fabio Lusito, Un marxista galileiano: Scienza e società in Lucio Lombardo Radice, Meltemi, Milano 2023 Il libro di Fabio Lusito, Un marxista galileiano. Scienza e società in Lucio Lombardo Radice, pubblicato per Meltemi ad Ottobre 2023

Bu çalışma, kaynak dil İngilizce’den hedef dil Türkçe’ye çevrilen iki metin üzerinden çevirmenlerin bakış açısını ortaya koymayı amaçlamaktadır. Çalışma kapsamında, Avustralyalı yazar Jessica Au’nun ilk baskısını Şubat 2024 tarihinde yapmış olan “Kar Havası” ve İngiliz yazar George Orwell'in ilk baskısını Eylül 2024 tarihinde “Neden Yazıyorum” eserlerinin Timaş Yayınları’ndan yapmış olan çevirileri ele alınarak çevirmenin metin üzerinde aldığı kararlar ve zorluklarla nasıl başa çıktığı tartışılmaktadır. Au’nun eseri, özgün metnin atmosferini ne denli yansıttığını, çeviri sürecinde hangi zorluklarla karşılaşıldığını ve bu zorlukların nasıl aşıldığını ele almaktadır. Orwell’in metni ise, çevirisinde dilin ve ifadenin sadakatine odaklanarak, çevirmenin nasıl bir yaklaşım benimsediği ve bu yaklaşımın metne nasıl yansıdığı üzerinde durmaktadır. Çalışma, çevirmenin kararlarını ve çeviri sürecinin arkasındaki sistemi anlamayı hedeflerken, çeviri eserleri analiz ederek çevirmenin metni hedef dile nasıl uyarladığını inceler. Çalışmada, her iki eseri çevirmiş çevirmen hedef gösterilerek kendisi ile çeviri yöntemleri üzerine röportaj yapılmıştır. Çevirileri inceleme yöntemleri olarak başlıca kaynak ve hedef metin karşılaştırılması yapılmış olup kaynak ile hedef metin arasındaki farkları analiz ederek çevirmenin metindeki kararları üzerine hangi stratejileri kullandığını belirlemek amaçlanmıştır. Aynı zamanda içerik analizi ve bağlamsal inceleme ile ifadelerin anlamlarının hedef metinde ne kadar doğru yansıtıldığı ve çevirinin kültürel referansların hedef kültüre nasıl uyarlandığı incelenmiştir. Çevirinin dilsel ve kültürel boyutlarını derinlemesine incelemeye olanak tanıyarak çevirinin kalitesi hakkında kapsamlı bir değerlendirme yapmak hedeflenmiştir. Çalışma kaynak metnin çevrilmesi sürecinde yorumlayıcı değişimin çevirmenin doğrudan veya dolaylı yorumunu içerdiği fikri savunulmaktadır. Çevirmenin, eserin doğasını belirleyen dilsel, edebi ve tarihsel kümeleri yansıttığına ve öznel, kendi çerçevesini çizebilme yeteneğine sahip olduğuna değinilmektedir. Bu bağlamda, çevirinin sosyo-kültürel parametrelerle sınırlı kalmayan bir süreç olduğu vurgulanmaktadır. Bu çalışma ile çevirmenin çeviri sürecine bakış açısını daha yakından incelemek hedeflenirken çeviri sürecindeki çevirmenin aldığı kararların ve çevirinin arkasındaki sistemin görülmesi, çevirmene çeviri sürecindeki karmaşıklıklarını ve çevirmenin sorumluluklarını tartışarak metinlerin farklı kültürel bağlamlarda nasıl anlaşıldığını ve yorumlandığını ortaya koyarak yardımcı olacaktır. 
Anahtar sözcükler: çeviri eleştirisi, Jessica Au, George Orwell, Kar Havası, Neden Yazıyorum

In a recent essay Robert Cunliffe has argued that Bakhtin shares with Derrida the suspicion of speech; both find in writing a freedom from the politics and possessiveness of voice: Bakhtin, like Derrida, has certain reservations about speech and its effects. For if Bakhtin criticizes so systematically the poetic genres, this is due in large part to the fact they are , are classed as oral genres in Bakhtin's scheme of things, as forms of utterance whose end point is performance before an audience and not silent reading. ... Indeed, we might even venture to suggest that Bakhtin is more vehemently graphocentric than Derrida is.... (1) This essay aims to endorse that suggestion.

Authors, painters, or scriptwriters prioritize different temporal experiences of reality, and academics have contrasting opinions on which might be the best realist approach. Auerbach considers Woolfian depiction of Mrs. Ramsay the highest literary achievement in the representation of reality (Rancière 26) because it exemplifies the abolition of temporal conventions, or, the causal connection of events, through literary devices such as, among others, the abolition of punctuation conventions and of grammar (Auerbach 533). Also, Auerbach considers bringing forward the depiction of emotions and thoughts, and bracketing the actions, in other words, upending the literary hierarchy over the Cartesian duality of mind and body, but also of activity and passivity, comes closer to the representation of reality. For Lukács, on the other hand, “[t]here is a strict opposition between two times: the time of description which puts things beside one another like in a genre picture or a still life; and the time of action in which active characters interact with the movement of the social process” (Rancière 29-30). For Lukács, realist depiction is having political awareness and being part of social processes, and passively witnessing or describing the things as they look or are thought or felt is redundant. For Brecht, on the other hand, realistic means, “discovering the causal complexes of society / unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power / writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human society is caught up / emphasizing the element of development / making possible the concrete and making possible abstraction from it” (82). Brecht’s definition brings about a formal freedom to depict reality and gives more autonomy to the artist. Brecht would challenge Lukácsian strict formality and favor Woolf’s representation of Mrs. Ramsay’s reality. In this report, I will bring into conversation these different perspectives on the temporal experience and the representation of reality in literature, art, and on screen.

The controversy that between 1908 and 1912 saw Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile opposed, on one side, and Federigo Enriques, on the other, did not actually have a conclusive episode, but its end was perceived, for its results on culture, on society and teaching in Italy, as a "defeat" of Enriques. A more careful examination of the events and of the historical context in which it took place seems, however, to clearly demonstrate that we can speak not of a personal defeat of the great mathematician from Livorno, but rather of a defeat of the commendable attempts at cultural and social modernization of Italy in an international perspective, of which Enriques was not the only actor but certainly the most exposed. Such intentions were crushed by the myopic provincial conservatism of the Italian neo-idealism, favored by the fascist regime, concerned only with affirming in the world an alleged autarkic national cultural superiority, based on the traditional literary-humanistic culture, ignoring the progress of the new technical-scientific thought, placed in an international context.

Plato tells the story of the “Allegory of the Cave.” In this story, there are people who are chained up in a cave so that they can only see the wall in front of them. Behind them is a fire, and between the fire and the people is a raised walkway. People walk along this walkway carrying objects, and these objects cast shadows on the wall in front of the people (Plato 4). The people can see the shadows, but they cannot see the objects that are casting the shadows, they believe that the shadows are reality.

I 3 "Das ist das Leben der Wälder. Aber laß uns nun auch das außerhalb betrachten. Kannst du mir sagen, was das für weiße Gebäude sind, die wir da durch die Doppelföhre hin sehen?" "Ja, Großvater, das sind die Pranghöfe." "Und weiter von den Pranghöfen links?" "Das sind die Häuser von Vorder-und Hinterstift." "Und wieder weiter links?" "Das ist Glöckelberg." "Und weiter gegen uns her am Wasser?" "Das ist die Hammermühle und der Bauer David." "Und die vielen Häuser ganz in unserer Nähe, aus denen die Kirche emporragt, und hinter denen ein Berg ist, auf welchem wieder ein Kirchiein steht?" "Aber, Großvater, das ist ja unser Marktflecken Oberplan und das Kirchiein auf dem Berge ist das Kirchiein zum guten Wasser." "Und wenn die Berge nicht wären und die Anhöhen, die uns umgeben, so würdest du noch viel mehr Häuser und Ortschaften sehen: die Karlshöfe, Stuben, Schwarzbach, Langenbruck, Melm, Honnetschlag, und auf der entgegengesetzten Seite Pichlern, Pernek, Salnau und mehrere andere. Das wirst du einsehen, daß in diesen Ortschaften viel Leben ist, daß dort viele Menschen Tag und Nacht um ihren Lebensunterhalt sich abmühen, und die Freude genießen, die uns hienieden gegeben ist. Ich habe dir darum die Wälder gezeigt und die Ortschaften, weil sich in ihnen die Geschichte zugetragen hat, welche ich dir im Heraufgehen zu erzählen versprochen habe." 1 Das zitierte Wechselgespräch ist im Gesamtzusammenhang von Stifters Erzählung zu lesen. Der Ich-Erzähler erinnert sich an eine Episode aus seiner Kindheit, in der er eine ungerechte Kränkung erleidet. Sein Großvater tröstet ihn, indem er ihn auf eine Wanderung mitnimmt und ihm eine Geschichte erzählt. Der gemeinsame Weg hat einen doppelten Sinn. Einerseits wird die durchschrittene und bezeichnete Landschaft als Schauplatz der Binnenerzählung dienen. Andererseits erfüllt das angestellte Training im Sehen und Benennen die Funktion, auf dem Weg der Einweisung ins Faktische den Schmerz des Jungen über die ihm zugefügte Kränkung verstummen zu machen. Umschau, Ganzheit des Blicks, Überspringen, Zusammenziehung von auseinanderliegenden Segmenten, wie es der physiologischen Blickführung entspräche, alle Diskontinuitäten der Empfindung schließt das Abfrageprogramm des Großvaters aus. Vielmehr wird ein Element nach dem anderen in einer durch den Lauf der Rede festgelegten Richtung optisch

The following Turning Point offers responses, from four leading critics, to Isobel Armstrong's Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth Century Fiction. At a time when the meaning and fate of western democracy is arguably as uncertain as it has ever been, Armstrong's book makes a signal intervention into our thinking both of the politics of democracy, and the role of fiction in imagining democratic sovereignty. These responsesand Armstrong's final replyoffer a searching assessment of the relationship between the novel and democracy today.

This paper challenges the realism of Sindya Bhanoo's well-constructed fiction "A Life in America", by raising the question of whether her leading character would have responded to the crisis he faces with biological references and analogies.

Podstawowy klucz interpretacyjny, jakiego używali w stosunku do debiutanckiej powieści Wacława Berenta badacze, odnosił się wyłącznie do kategorii związanych z epoką pozytywizmu oraz obowiązującej w jej obrębie kategorii naturalizmu. Takie podejście, a raczej użyta przez historyków literatury metoda, sprawiły, że „Fachowca” uznano za powieść z jednej strony przestarzałą, z drugiej interpretacyjnie płaską i nieciekawą. Toteż autorka niniejszego artykułu postanowiła, sięgając do symboliczno-mitycznymi asocjacji związanych z żywiołem wody, przełamać obowiązujące dotąd schematy badawcze. Podjęta w tekście analiza objęła szereg zjawisk i kategorii (płacz, ślina, jezioro, mgła) przyporządkowanych żywiołowi wody, które odsłoniły interesujące konteksty interpretacyjne powieści Berenta. Najważniejszy z nich dotyczy głównego bohatera, gdyż pozwala prześledzić dokonującą się w nim przemianę. Misterium wyzwolenia, jakiego doświadcza Kazimierz Zaliwski, stanowi sens opowiadanej przez niego historii, a dla każdego czytelnika „Fachowca”, staje się wezwaniem do pracy nad poznaniem własnej istoty.

Professor Felicia Bonaparte about George Eliot's novels. In an introductory reflection, she once observed that We have found nothing yet that Eliot did not deliberately put in her novels;[ ... ]. Indeed, the fact is we have not yet read in these novels all that Eliot wrote. We have not yet, for example, looked carefully at what Eliot had to say about women in society. Eliot was a great feminist, and her novels, although they never stoop to mere propaganda, urge a relentless war against the conditions by which women's lives have been restrained and wasted. We do not have an adequate understanding of the poetic element in Eliot's imagination, nor of the rich symbolic structure which informs her works. We have not yet probed the mythic imagery that echoes throughout her novels. There can be no doubts that we will have to revise many of our conclusions and judgments, especially of her achievement in Romo/a, when we have further examined these aspects of her works. Similarly, we have [ ... ] not yet explored the most thoroughly contemporary aspect of Eliot's novels, namely the existential, absurd universe Eliot perceived, a tragic universe in which man is born and dies for no purpose.' She wrote this in 1975, but it is striking that much of it is still true. Of all these unexplored aspects of George Eliot's works, it seems to me that only the topic of women in society has since been systematically explored and has promoted deeper understanding of her novels. It is rather paradoxical that, although we have acclaimed Eliot as one of the greatest nineteenth century novelists, we have also overlooked many aspects of this greatness. Romola is definite evidence of this: described by Eliot herself as the book she wrote with her best blood, it remains to this very day the least popular of her novels. This paper has two main goals. First I present a set of numbers regarding George Eliot studies in and out of Brazil and my interpretation of these numbers. Then I proceed to comment on the particular case of Romola. In the end, I hope to be able to relate the two topics and to interest the reader in my perspective on George Eliot and on Romola. We are now celebrating Romola's 150th anniversary. This is a significant amount of time: not as much as would make it too distant from our own world; not as little as would make it too close to us and too blurred to see well. I believe we are now at a moment in which we are ready to look back at Eliot's and Romola's history so as to understand it and to develop on it. In Brazil, researchers use a search engine for academic articles called Peri6dicosCAPES. It is one of the largest virtual libraries in the world and gathers thousands of databases of academic publications around the globe. It is an indispensable tool for measuring the extent of academic production in any given area. A search at Peri6dicos CAPES under the headings 'Romola' and 'George Eliot' returns 486 registers. On the one hand, this is very little. A search under the headings 'Ulysses' and 'James Joyce', for instance, returns more than 7 .OOO registers.' This demonstrates that there is still much room for studies about Romola. On the other hand, a more detailed analysis of the numbers shows that academic interest in it is certainly alive and is even growing. Of the 486 registers for 'Romola'+'George Eliot', 255 date from the year 2000 onwards, which represents 52.4% of the total number. The earliest 50

The aim of this paper is to identify the origin of Italian analytic philosophy of language. Firstly, some of its forerunners are identified. Then some authors that played a decisive role for establishing conditions that were necessary for an Italian analytic philosophy of language to begin are identified. Finally, it is argued that the first generation of Italian analytic philosophers of language arose in the Seventies.

The term 'Anthropocene' is one of recent invention (2000), and it implies that we have only just recognized the profound risks associated with the emergence of industrial modernity. Yet these risks are not new, and nor is the kind of society shaped by it: Victorian Britain is a case in point. As I argue in this essay, nineteenth-century society was remade by the Industrial Revolution, and increasingly, it began to experience the kind of insidious, elusive risks that Ulrich Beck would later associate with much more recent, late-modern societies, risks that we now link to the Anthropocene. 'Smog' was one aspect of this shifting topography of risk: combining (man-made) smoke and (naturally-occurring) fog, it caused significant respiratory problems. More prosaically, it also made for the kind of conditions in which London's citizens simply could not see where they were going. Many accidents resulted: some even fell into the Thames. But what was it that then killed them? Did they drown, or were they poisoned, as contemporaries suggested, and if so, by what? The Thames was full of sewerage-of human and animal waste. The smell was appalling, and for much of the Victorian period, contemporaries linked bad smells to disease, seeing in this 'miasma' a cause of poorly understood illnesses such as cholera. But the Thames was also becoming a drain for industrial effluents and pollutants whose effects were even less well understood. Perhaps it was these toxins that killed those who fell into the Thames. No one properly knew. Like the smogs that besieged cities like London in autumn and winter, risk was engulfing society-and risk is by definition a function of uncertainty. At the very moment that a progressive, modern society trumpeted its technological triumphs, technology was also generating unforeseen and unseen risks, a point that we might wish to bear in mind as we consider how best to engineer our way out of an impending ecological catastrophe.

ABSTRACTDer Aufsatz untersucht Adalbert Stifters jüngst als antisemitisch gebrandmarkte Novelle Abdias unter der Perspektive der Kindheitserlebnisse des jüdischen Hauptprotagonisten. Dabei dient Eric Downings theoretische Studie Double Exposures (2000) als Folie zur Analyse der zugrundeliegenden Kindheitsutopien und des damit verbundenen, bisher von der Forschung kaum beachteten Spiegelmotivs. Das oftmals auftretende Spiegelmotiv trägt nicht nur zur chiastischen Verkehrung von Abdias’ und Dithas Kindheit, sondern auch zur Entstehung einer naiven, von jeglicher gedanklichen Reflexion fernen Welt bei. Indem Stifter der Schöpfung in naiver Weise nacheifert und zugleich deren Vergänglichkeit darlegt, hebt er ironisch den gebrechlichen Charakter des Schaffensprozesses selbst hervor. Dadurch versetzt Stifter dem mythischen Konstrukt vom Ewigen Juden einen Seitenhieb.

Przedstawiony przegląd problematyki artykułów ma charakter autorski i subiektywny. Nie służy on systematycznej analizie zawartości wybranych czasopism ani też pełnemu streszczeniu artykułów, które można znaleźć w innych czasopismach i gazetach. Przegląd obejmuje zarówno krótkie notki, jak i artykuły problemowe zamieszczone w "Times Higher Education Supplement" (THES), dodatku do gazety "Times" poświęco nym szkolnictwu wyższemu (podajemy datę, miesiąc i rok wydania). Materiał uporządkowany jest tematycznie, a podtytuły poszczególnych części pocho dzą od autorki. Absolwenci, rynek pracy a grupy niedoreprezentowane wśród studentów Kiedy m ówim y o znaczeniu wyższego wykształcenia i rynku pracy, często argumentu jemy, że im wyższe wykształcenie, tym mniejszy odsetek bezrobotnych. Ale bezrobocie za czyna trapić także absolwentów szkół wyższych. Interesujący jest w tym kontekście przy kład Wielkiej Brytanii. Największy w Europie odsetek absolwentów szkół wyższych znajdu jących zatrudnienie bezpośrednio po ukończeniu studiów występuje właśnie w tym kraju (por. A. Goddard: UK Degrees Top Tickets to Job M arket, THES, 6 kwietnia 2001). We dług cytowanych przez tę autorkę badań J. Brennana z Open University, Centre for Higher Education Research and Information, 87% absolwentów brytyjskich uczelni znajduje pra cę w ciągu trzech lat od uzyskania dyplomu, podczas gdy w innych krajach Europy zatru dnienie znajduje średnio 83%. W Wielkiej Brytanii wśród podejmujących pracę 93% uzy skuje pełny w ym iar zatrudnienia, natomiast jeśli chodzi o pewność pracy, to 82% absol wentów otrzymuje stały kontrakt (co, według autorki artykułu, jest wskaźnikiem wysokie go poziomu stanowiska), podczas gdy dane dla Europy wynoszą odpowiednio 89% i 77%. Dane wskazują też, że absolwenci prawie każdej uczelni znajdują pracę (cztery uniwersy * Przegląd obejmuje okres od kwietnia do października 2001 roku.

Eliza Orzeszkowa wrote about the heroes of her novel Pierwotni (Primitive people, 1881/1884) that “these are all people who, like primitive tribes, stand on the lowest level, sensitive, or rather subject to impressions, unstable, unsighted, […] possessing neither knowledge nor high and broad notions, which are the essential mark of civilised people.” Orzeszkowa relates this metaphor of pierwotnosc (the primitive state) to the diGerent strata of Polish society. The novel culminates in the strange coincidence of ultramontane Catholicism and domestic nihilism, symbolised by the unhappy love between
Adolfina Odropolska, the daughter of a devotee-emigrant, and Eugeniusz Skiba, a frustrated man descended from the peasantry. Curiously, literary critics have paid little attention to the fact that Orzeszkowa’s “social study” Patriotyzm i kosmopolityzm (Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism) from the year before (1880) served to theoretically underpin the metaphor of pierwotnosc. Drawing on the writings of Herbert Spencer and other contemporary social thinkers such as Oscar Peschel, John Lubbock and Alfred Fouillée, Orzeszkowa navigates between the poles of cosmopolitanism and patriotism and seeks a well-balanced middle way. In her evolutionary thinking about society, the <gure of człowiek pierwotny – Spencer’s “primitive man” – serves as a universal negative model. Thus, the peculiarity of Orzeszkowa’s use of social science lies not only in that she virtually limits it to its metaphorical potential, but also the fact that in Pierwotni, she does not refer to the idealistic propositions contained in Patriotyzm i kosmopolityzm. Rather, she absolutises the dark pierwotnosc (primitivity).

In his contribution, Stettberger discusses the coping strategies of homo ethicus in the Covid-19 pandemic, which has largely dominated people’s lives since 2019. He focuses on people’s ethical behavior in this pandemic and raises the question of what effects the measures taken during this time (such as keeping distance, contact restrictions, wearing masks, etc.) have on the coexistence of people and their ethical actions. In his article, the author also makes it clear that the basis for all human action – and thus also for ethical action – in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) is their view that God entrusts creation to man, who then acts de facto as God’s representative on earth. According to the biblical understanding, man is an »image of God« responsible for ruling over creation. As such a God-appointed decision-maker, however, he is also responsible and accountable to his Creator. The author goes on to explore the cause and meaning of affliction, sickness, and suffering in the Bible. He pays special attention to the book of Job, where visitations are understood as a test. In other passages of the Bible, illness is interpreted quite variously – as a test, as a pedagogical means of punishment, but also as God’s grace; evil powers are named as the cause or understood as a pedagogical means. Ultimately, however, the almighty God who is also the healer who can heal people of all evil. When looking at the biblical passages holistically, one can come to the conclusion that illness is a physical and psychological expression of a self-inflicted distance between man and God, which also corresponds to an interpretation in Islamic tradition.

Sažetak: U radu su ponuđene osnovne teze koncepta narcističkog iskrivljenja, koje može ići u dva smera-objašnjeno je formiranje i iskustvo koje subjekat može imati u takozvanim konkavnim i konveksnim narcističkim ogledanjima. Teorija se umnogome oslanja na Lakanovo viđenje stadijuma ogledala, kao i na njegov doprinos razvijanju subjekta samosvesti kroz konstitutivno-imaginarne dimenzije subjektivnosti. U slučaju umetnutog konkavnog ili konveksnog iskrivljenja, subjekat nalazi sebe na mestu drugog, poistovetivši se sa svojim iskrivljenim ogledalnim odrazom u drugom. Iskrivljenja utiču na formiranje subjekta u nastajanju na vrlo konkretan način i prenose predispoziciju za određene nestabilnosti u potonjim ogledanjima. Rad je ilustrovan studijom slučaja koja ima za cilj lakše razumevanje ponuđenog pristupa. Takođe, dat je kritički osvrt na mogućnost formiranja ravne ogledalne površina, kao i detaljno određenje konveksnog iskrivljenja i četiri pozicije konkavnog narcističkog ogledanja. Ključne reči: psihoanaliza, Lakan, stadijum ogledala, iskrivljenje narcističkog ogledanja Proces formiranja subjekta u nastajanju posredstvom stadijuma ogledala do sada je mnogo puta ispričan 2. Prvenstveno, mislim na Lakana

M o n i k a F r ą c k o w i a k-S o c h a ń s k a A b s t r a c t. Frąckowiak-Sochańska Monika, Terapia par jako narzędzie przeciwdziałania dysfunk cji rodziny (Marital therapy as a method of prevention of dysfunctions of family). Dysfunkcje rodzi ny.

Tadeusz Różewicz&#39;s drama becomes philosophy in two ways. It poses the same questions as philosophy does (about the sense and the aim of human life) and it uses the same methods of expressing itself (it converses with other works, the world, the reader and the writer). Różewicz destroys the old drama rules to re-use them in order to construct some new ones and he rebuilds the world using these rules. However, the newly-built forms don&#39;t resemble the classical drama. The boundary between life and art disappears. Paradoxically, it turns out that destruction can be a tool to unite the world. In Różewicz&#39;s world everything loses its identity. On the level of genetic rules a fragment appears, whereas, on the philosophical level there is the idea of imperfection.

After World War II, British theatre generally dealt with people’s meaningless actions and aimless lives. During the 1950s theatre reflecting the changing society opposed to the traditional theatre in terms of pattern and plot. The period in 1950s was named as Absurd Theatre by Martin Esslin and it has affected many writers until today. In 1990s theatre which reveals the untold explicitly and throws the violence in them to their face was coined by Alex Sierz. In Realism (2006), Anthony Neilson, one of In-yer-face playwrights, presents us with the melancholy protagonist Stuart, who is distant from the outside world, and who is lost amidst both his own sense of disinterest as well as life. The Wonderful World of Dissocia (2004), takes a look at the protagonist Lisa’s watch- which is consistently one hour behind- being fixed, as well as at the absurd events unfolding within Lisa’s imagination. The aim of this paper is to analyze the theme of absurdity in Anthony Neilson’s Realism and Th...

The fixed quality of the canon of the British modernist short story is evident-the influence of Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Lowry, and Beckett is so beyond question that any discussion of their contemporaries will inevitably make reference to the giants of the time, and adopt the vocabulary employed in the discussions of their fictions. Still, attempts have been made to extend the image of the modernist short story. 1 What follows here aims to add to this positive trend by observing an author that remains in the margin of the literary canon of the period. By analysing the short stories of T. F. Powys-especially their treatment of plot, of characterization and of the underlying theme of the ordinary-the article presents a body of short fictions that provide an alternative for the modernist re-evaluations of the short story form and of the conventions of realism.