In 1839, the 22-year-old Nik’oloz Baratašvili composed the long poem Bedi Kartlisa (The Fate of Georgia), in which he tackled one of the issues of modern Georgia: whether the choice made in 1783 by King Erek’le II to draw up a treaty of friendship with the Russian Empire had been beneficial for Kartl-K’axeti. In the course of the poem Baratašvili maintains a stiff attitude, never siding for or against the choice of Erek’le II. Much more instinctive and impetuous is the attitude of the 20-year-old Giacomo Leopardi, who, faced with Italy in chains, is overwhelmed by an individualistic romantic impulse. In his songs, he desires greatness for his homeland and the glory of ancient times when people ran to die for it, he states his aversion to foreign rule and his hopes for Italy’s resurrection.  

Homeland in the Poetry of Nik’oloz Baratašvili and Giacomo Leopardi

Culture is the cumulative deposit of knowledge, traditions, beliefs acquired by a human community in the course of generations: ethics is one of the most important of such beliefs. As for the intercultural communication, the discipline which studies a cultural dialogue about various issues across different communities, since the eighties of the last century it has been the object of various theories, based on experimental data collections: among them the ‘Values Orientation Theory’ by F.R. Kluckhohn and F. Strodtbeck, the ‘Cultural Dimensions Theory’ by G. Hofstede and the ‘Theory of Basic Values’ by S.H. Schwartz. One of the goals of this paper is to give a closer look at those theories. In the same period of time an ‘ethical turn’ manifested itself in western literary studies, after a long period of post-modernist disengagement, by initiative of J. Gardner, M. C. Nussbaum and J. Habermas, among others: the same happened in China in the eve of the new millennium, owing to the studies on comparative literature by Nie Zhenzhao. Literary works constitute an important vehicle of ethical intercultural communication. A second goal of the present paper is that of suggesting a ‘constructivist approach’ in the cultural dialogue between the western world and China, combining the results of those theoretical models with a comparative analysis of literary works chosen ad hoc, as recently done by Xu Zhilin in her comparative study of female images in ‘A leaf in the storm’, by Lin Yutang, and ‘Gone with the wind’, by Margareth Mitchell, from the perspective of Hofstede’s Cultural Dimension Theory.

https://www.journals.aiac.org.au/index.php/IJCLTS/article/download/6029/4293

Ethical Intercultural Communication between the Western World and China

Aers, David, and Thomas Pfau. “Exploring Christian Literature in the Contemporary and Secular University.” Christianity and Literature 70, no. 3 (Sept. 2021): 263–75. Ahmed, Rizwan Saeed, and Akhtar Aziz. “Modernist Sense of the End and Postmodernist Illusion of the End.” Philosophy & Literature 45, no. 1 (Apr. 2021): 121–37. Albayrak, Gökhan. “Conflict and Contact: From John Donne’s ‘Dialogue of One’ to T. S. Eliot’s Monologue.” Celal Bayar University Journal of Social Sciences/Celal Bayar Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 19, no. 3 (Sept. 2021): 1–12. Alhusami, Mohammed Abdullah Abduldaim Hizabr. “Tradition Versus Modernity in Laila al-Juhani’s The Waste Paradise: An Intertextual Approach.” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 11, no. 10 (Oct. 2021): 1197 ff.

T. S. Eliot Bibliography 2021

The present paper analyses the lyrical expression of ‘cosmic pessimism’ contained in the “Night song of a wandering shepherd in Asia” of the Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1836), a central figure of the European literary and cultural landscape of the first half of the 19th century, who was acclaimed as ‘the greatest Italian poet after Dante’ by the British cultural critic Matthew Arnold. The ‘song’, composed in the period 1828-1829, bridges neoclassic and romantic sensibilities: it is composed of 143 verses without rhyme, subdivided into six parts, called ‘stanze’ and the scenario is that of a night in a desert landscape where a flock is sleeping, while the shepherd addresses himself to the moon, posing her unanswered questions about the meaning of life.

/pdf/cosmic-pessimism-in-giacomo-leopardi-s-night-song-of-a-22oulj5pxm.pdf

Cosmic Pessimism in Giacomo Leopardi’s “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia”

The purpose of the present paper is to study the impact of Cambridge Literary Criticism (CLC) on Chinese scholars, since the visit to Peking’s Tsinghua University by Prof. Igor Armstrong Richards, the initiator of CLC, in 1929, until present times. That first encounter signed the beginning of a fruitful intercultural communication activity between the two countries, which lasted for a decennial. Those contacts between the British literary world, imbued with the scientific spirit that was the basis of ‘Cambridge Criticism’, was very stimulating for the Chinese academic world, of that was being born. Unfortunately, those contacts were forcefully interrupted in 1939, in the raging of the anti-Japanese war. They resumed, with fruitful results, toward the end of last millennium, when the Chinese government issued a “Program for Education’s Reform and Development in China”. In present times the new movement of ‘Ethical Literary Criticism’ is developing in China by initiative of Prof. Nie Zhenzhao, from Peking’s ‘Central China Normal University’, who took inspiration from the works of the Cambridge literary critic Frank Raymond Leavis.

/pdf/the-encounter-between-cambridge-literary-criticism-and-china-49pppmqnx0.pdf

The Encounter between Cambridge Literary Criticism and China

In medieval times the plague hit Europe between 1330 and 1350. The Italian novelist Giovanni Boccaccio, one of the exponents of the cultural movement of Humanism, in the introduction (proem) of his “Decameron” described the devastating effects of the ‘black plague’ on the inhabitants of the city of Florence. The pestilence returned to Western Europe in several waves, between the 16th and 17th centuries. William Shakespeare in “Romeo and Juliet” and other tragedies, and Ben Jonson in “The Alchemist” made several references to the plague, but they did not offer any realistic description of that infective disease. Some decennials later Daniel Defoe, in his “A Journal of the Plague Year” (1719), gave a detailed report about the ‘Great Plague’ which hit England in 1660, based on documents of the epoch. In more recent times, Thomas S. Eliot, composing his poem “The Waste Land” was undoubtedly influenced by the spreading of another infective disease, the so-called “Spanish flu”, which affected him and his wife in December 1918. Some decennials later, the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus, in his novel “The Plague”, symbolized with a plague epidemic the war which devastated Europe, North Africa and the Far East from 1937 to 1945, extolling a death toll of over 50 million victims. Those literary works offered a sort of solace to the lovers of literature. To recall them is the purpose of the present paper, in these years afflicted by the spreading of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

/pdf/plague-and-literature-in-western-europe-from-giovanni-nyin7ahbc3.pdf

Plague and Literature in Western Europe, from Giovanni Boccaccio to Albert Camus

Thomas E. Eliot devoted several essays to Dante Alighieri, declaring that he considered the Italian poet the most universal of all poets of the continent. Dante’s recourse to visual images to enunciate very abstract philosophical and theological themes, finds its counterpart in Eliot’s use of the ‘objective correlative’ to evoke in the reader sensory experiences. Purpose of the present paper is to investigate about the influence exerted by the author of the “Divine Comedy” on the great innovator of the English literary landscape of the 20th century, utilizing to that purpose the scripts by T.S. Eliot himself.

/pdf/thomas-s-eliot-s-eyes-on-dante-alighieri-4qvpqlukjr.pdf

Sha Ha

Papers

Cosmic Pessimism in Giacomo Leopardi’s “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia”

The Encounter between Cambridge Literary Criticism and China

Plague and Literature in Western Europe, from Giovanni Boccaccio to Albert Camus

Ethical Intercultural Communication between the Western World and China

Thomas S. Eliot’s eyes on Dante Alighieri