Showing papers in "Neohelicon in 2022"

Storytelling for a republic of childhood: rebranding China’s national images in children’s literature

Abstract: This article delineates the discursive trajectory of Chinese children’s literature and explicates its specific storytelling strategies to integrate nation and narration, tradition and modernity, nationalism and internationalism. At the intersection of nation building, storytelling and comparative literature, it is argued that Chinese children’s literature, developed from a comparative perspective and as an alternative vision of Paul Hazard’s “universal republic of childhood,” not only manifests paradoxical literary features, given the asymmetry of global literary distribution and power relations, but also converges with and enriches world children’s literature in China’s ongoing process of raising its cultural soft power. The paradox inherent in globalising Chinese children’s literature leads to the reconceptualisation of translation and cross-cultural readability of genres as essential to a richer construct of national images on the world literary map.

Falling in love with machine: emotive potentials between human and robots in science fiction and reality

Abstract: The rapid development of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) has dramatically changed human society, facilitating travels and interactions worldwide and, in the meanwhile, increasingly propelling human beings to withdraw to their own worlds. It is foreseeable that humans are likely to become growingly dependent on robots to fulfill psychological and emotional needs. In real scientific world, scientists and engineers in America, Japan, South Korea, China and elsewhere are making increasingly smarter robots (or cyborgs) capable of understanding and expressing human senses and emotions. In the ever cyborgized era of posthumanism, the dividing line between human and robot is becoming blurred. We have to rethink humans’ position in the world, to reassess the harmful idea of anthropocentrism and to learn to live with non-human in a symbiotic relationship. Technologies such as voice recognition, facial recognition and deep learning all accelerate the socialization of robots that show personal characters. This article focuses on the representations of human-robot emotions and emotional communications in recent science fictions and science fiction (SF) movies to explore how this relationship is imagined as a means to reflect on the ethical and technological challenges of this controversial issue both in fictional and real lives. This article also discusses the possibility of emotional/affective robots in the future, probing into the complicated entanglement of humanity and post-humanity.

On some aspects of the binary in the context of the ternary and the plural in Juri Lotman’s semiotics of literature

Abstract: Abstract The paper raises the problem of binarisms in Juri Lotman’s conceptual and text analytical system from a new perspective. The approach combines several focal aspects of examination. It consist of the parallel study of the application of the notion of binarism in cultural semiotic theory and its active role as a crucial methodological tool for literary text interpretation (the question is: how binary notions in scientific interpretive metatexts are related to the examined culture texts and traditions). Binary models are put into a context of ternary models as interpreted by J. Lotman and B. Uspensky in their 1977 article “The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (until the End of the Eighteenth Century).” The theory expounded by the two scholars is compared with Lotman’s overview of Russian literature of the classical period (1992) where he gives further details on the two models manifesting themselves in 19th-century authors’ poetics. In the paper, the role of the neutral, inbetween semantic sphere is accorded special attention so as to clarify the real nature of Lotman’s suggestion in indentifying the meaning-creative energy of this middle, mediatory semantic zone. Through the investigation, the coherence of Lotman’s oeuvre is revealed, which refutes the possibility of interpreting the functionalisation of binary notions and their different uses within the framework of the structuralist or the poststructuralis paradigm. The universal cultural nature of thinking in oppositions is interpreted in concrete terms of the semiotic principles of meaning-engendering, explaining the issues of semantic difference (deviation), meaning-transformation (text-dynamics), the shift from binarism to plurality, and semiotic mediation. The paper ends with outlining future perspectives in the investigation of the problem of binarisms.

(Selbst-)Zerstörung der Schuld—Chance der Entschuld(ig)ung: Schuld und Schulden in der Lyrik von Attila József

Abstract: Abstract The article examines the questions of guilt and debt in the Hungarian poetry of the late modern period, notably in the poetry of Attila József. An important characteristic of the concept of guilt in the modern era is that it unites the question of morality with that of the economy. This connection is confirmed by a current problem in the field of cultural studies: The German terms Schuld (guilt) and Schulden (debt) are viewed by recent cultural history research as significant driving forces and preconditions for cultural processes (both relate to shortages and errors which must be remedied, evened out, effaced or indeed generated or multiplied) which give rise to social and historical ties and determinations. This research attempts to formulate cultural strategies and solutions for dealing with the problem of unrestrained growth and the moralisation of debt. My article examines these issues as a problem of language (the language of poetry). Whilst Attila József ’s poetry does address the need to search for opportunities to forgive—both morally and financially—and to break the determining ties of moral and financial indebtedness, József believes this is only possible by implementing a certain manner of speech or a type of language whose forgiveness of debt and guilt alike as well as its liberating effect cannot be achieved by strategies, methods or practices.

The tragic complexity of Purgatory

Abstract: Abstract The text is part of a broader study on the perception of tragic perspective compared with our contemporary tragic sense. In addition to have a particular narratological relevance, the persistence of tragic level in the second cantica of the Comedy produces a decisive effect in Dante’s discourse, and proposes a different meaning of Allegory. One of the results of this investigation concerns the dramatic language, which is determined where Dante’s allegorical representation takes place, whereas the Allegory itself is forbidden by the variables of the tragic discourse, and is impossible to realize. However, the tragic perspective of the second Cantica is not constant, as in Hell , and it has its specific climax , marked by the acceleration of the time, the space of waiting, the crisis of salvific destiny, wich, in the arc od Dante’s narration, bind the characters to doubt and to need to overcome the tragic and irresolvable condition of being without destiny.

La lettura schellinghiana della Divina Commedia

Abstract: Abstract I filosofi dell’idealismo tedesco, fra cui in primo piano Schelling, hanno scoperto il significato universale di Dante per la civiltà europea. L’autore nel saggio esamina questo ruolo di Schelling. Le questioni principali che egli mette a fuoco sono le seguenti: la singolarità del genere della Comedia, il problema del rapporto della poeticità e del carattere concettuale nell’opera e il problema dell’allegorismo. Nel tratteggiare tali problemi l’autore raffronta le soluzioni di Schelling con quelle di Lajos Fülep, il seguace ungheree del filosofo tedesco, e con quelle di Gorgio Lukács. Parole chiave

Virgilio nel Purgatorio di Dante: poesia, politica e morale

Abstract: Abstract La presenza di Virgilio nel Purgatorio di Dante è complessa e problematica: si tratta di un regno proprio dell’aldilà cristiano, che il poeta latino non ha mai visitato prima e le cui dinamiche gli sono in gran parte ignote. Perciò la sua funzione di guida è messa ripetutamente in discussione, specie nei primi canti, e poi si esaurirà con la sua scomparsa e sostituzione con Beatrice. Al centro del percorso di ascesa c’è l’incontro drammatico e rivelatore con Stazio, che deve il proprio essere poeta ma anche la propria conversione e la propria salvezza a Virgilio, che invece da tale salvezza resta escluso. Ma la poesia di Virgilio è citata continuamente anche nella seconda cantica, e offre tra l’altro numerosi esempi morali del vizio punito nel sistema degli esempi delle cornici purgatoriali, oltre a essere, con il suo poema imperiale, un punto di riferimento per la poesia politica di Dante, riferimento ben presente nella parte centrale della cantica, ma invece trascurato nella parte iniziale e in quella conclusiva, in coincidenza con i momenti di maggiore difficoltà per la guida e di più severa correzione dei suoi testi. Il saggio passa in rassegna questi aspetti della presenza di Virgilio proponendo anche una chiave di lettura che cerca di tenere insieme i suoi aspetti positivi e quelli negativi.

Burning: silenced rage in Lee and Faulkner

Abstract: Abstract This article presents a cognitively informed cross-cultural study of how rage is silenced in two narratives: Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 film Burning and William Faulkner’s 1939 short story “Barn Burning” that Lee’s film is inspired by. While earlier readings of Burning have privileged the individual aspects of the violent rage that is central to the film, a cognitive reading expands the scope by revealing how emotions are always embedded within social systems beyond the individual. This article draws on neurocognitive research as well as feminist investigations of affect to argue that such an expansion is needed to imagine non-violent expressions of rage. Tracing the violent and patriarchal genealogy of silenced rage from Lee to Faulkner, this article offers a comparative reading of intertextuality that focuses on how emotions are expressed in the father-son relationships in the two stories. Specifically, it considers how legal systems and the patriarchal family shape how characters express emotion. By exploring the possibilities for non-violent expressions of rage, the article ultimately considers the political ramifications of considering rage as primarily individual and suggests that we can discern relationships between social systems and expressions of emotion by attending to how complex and culturally situated emotions—like rage—travel across global translations and adaptations.