Documents found
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191.More information
AbstractPoets of Bifurcated Tongues, or on the plurilingualism of Canadian-Hungarian Poets — This article aims at an analysis of the plurilingualism of four poets of Hungarian origin, living in Canada: Robert Zend, George Vitéz, László Kemenes Géfin and Endre Farkas. Before examining the poems themselves, the various concepts of plurilingualism and the aspects of grouping these poems, including the code-switching strategies used in them, are reviewed. The base language and the nature of code-switching is discussed with a special emphasis on the relationship of grammatical units, intra- and intersentential switches within contexts where plurilingualism occurs. The first three poets have become bilinguals as adults: they form part of Hungarian literature as well as of Canadian writing. The last one, however, has a childhood bilingualism and is considered an English-Canadian Poet. Since they have a twofold minority status (Hungarian origins, plus writing in English in Montréal), analysis of these poets requires a special approach. The main hypothesis of the article is that, when using more than one language within the same work, the author is able to reach special effects which would be otherwise impossible. These poems, plurilingual in nature, also show that, for these authors, language is of multiple use: not only is language a tool of communication, but also the theme of some of their poems: they are often self-reflexive, making formal and semantic experimentation possible.
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192.More information
This essay explores the complex issue of Romantic visual enthusiasm –the power to self-generate images – which was seen as both a danger and a necessity to the project of constructing a visual culture for the nation at the end of the eighteenth century. I look at a range of important texts on this issue, beginning with an analysis of the contradictory responses which emerge in John Ireland's 1798 discussion of Hogarth's 1760 Enthusiasm Delineated. Ireland's discussion is significant as it reflects the concerns of his publisher John Boydell, whose Shakespeare Gallery was beginning to falter by the end of the 1790s. The positions adopted by Henry Fuseli (a key artist in Boydell's project), George Cumberland (a harsh critic of Boydell) and William Blake (passed over by Boydell) provide a map of the debate over visual enthusiasm. Hogarth's satire represents the enthusiastic audience as inappropriately sexualised and includes an image of monstrous fertility in the figure of Mary Toft. Blake's phrase ‘happy copulation' from Visions of the Daughters of Albion reproduces the association of looking, sexuality, and the female gaze found in the satire. But Blake's positive image of enthusiastic looking is mirrored by the negative account of the power of transformative viewing in the repeated formula ‘He became what he beheld'. In Europe, Blake produces a version of Fuseli's Titania and Bottom as a critique of the power of the literary gallery to limit the scope of the political imagination. Blake's powerful response to the experience of the London galleries and his complicated account of the construction of the viewer within the gallery space is suggested in his poetry of the 1790s in which enthusiastic viewing is both celebrated and feared.
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193.More information
In several compositions, Brian Cherney has reflected on the Holocaust and its impact, exploring how music can respond to such tragedy; his recent engagement with the poetry of Paul Celan is a natural extension of these preoccupations. This article offers a close reading of Cherney's choral setting of Celan's Tenebrae. The composer incorporates several additional texts that create a genealogy of the poem, from biblical passages to fragments of Dante and Hölderlin to accounts of the Holocaust itself; he arranges these texts to highlight semantic and sonic features of Celan's work. Perhaps Cherney's boldest move is his insertion of Hebrew letters, linking his composition to the long tradition of Lamentations settings—a link cemented by a quotation from Couperin's Leçons de Ténèbres, which provides important motivic material. Through these additions, Cherney turns the poem towards us, inviting us to respond to its call for reflective witness.
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194.More information
The article deals with performances of memories and identities by and about Jews from the Middle East and North Africa region, with a focus on Jews of Libyan descent. It acknowledges the complexity that intrinsically characterizes these sources in terms of the heterogeneity of their contents, but also the political implications inherent to their transmission and communication. What is needed, however, is to make this complexity readable, and to make it readable, the author suggests making it visible. To achieve this goal, the author proposes adopting a new research approach which takes inspiration from the field of digital humanities, to assist in thinking spatially and visually about the performances of memories and identities. This can bring about a kind of methodological reconciliation between the researcher, the complexity of the data, the necessity to transform them into accurate research results and the responsibility to effectively communicate them to the larger public.
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198.More information
In Morley Torgov's The Mastersinger from Minsk, Inspector Herman Preiss, a poor pianist but a great music lover, and his mistress, the cellist Helena Becker, are confronted with Richard Wagner, threatened with ruination on the first performance of his new opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, in Munich in 1868. Based on historical facts, Torgov's fiction builds a strong case against Wagner, a highly divisive figure and a notorious anti-Semite, and re-opens the debate whether a work of art can be considered independently from the artistic genius who conceived it.