The Old Nordic Middle Voice in the pre-literary period: Questions of grammaticalisation and cliticisation

Author(s):  
Kjartan G. Ottósson
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Diran

Agamben describes his posture as a reader as one of seeking a text’s Entwicklungsfähigkeit, or capacity for elaboration.1 In examining Agamben’s practices of reading, we can attend to the opposite phenomenon: the counter-elaboration that a text, in having being read by the philosopher, performs upon Agamben’s own thought. This reciprocal elaboration might constitute a paradigm for Agamben’s use of reading, according to his own idiosyncratic definition of use as an event in the middle voice, in which (according to a definition of Benveniste) the subject ‘effects an action only in affecting itself (il effectue en s’affectant)’ (UB 28). With this definition in mind, we could say that Agamben effects a text (he writes) only to the extent that he is also affected by another text (he reads). This is why Agamben’s position as a reader proves particularly important to any assessment of his work, quite aside from the problem of influence or intellectual genealogy. For this same reason, however, assessing Agamben’s relation to Antonio Negri – a figure with whom, by most measures, he is at odds – poses an unexpected challenge: how can Agamben’s thought be a use of Negri? Answering this question means not only assessing the critical distance between the two thinkers, but also taking this distance as a measure, in the Spinozan sense, of mutual affection.


2020 ◽  
pp. 290-293
Author(s):  
E. V. Sharygina (Novikova) ◽  
V. I. Novikov

Malygina’s book portrays Andrey Platonov in the context of the literary period in which he was active. Malygina also summarizes the history of the journal Krasnaya Nov, the Krug Publishers, and the Pereval Group. While depicted as particularly close to Pilnyak due to his expressionist tendencies, Platonov, however, remained faithful to the utopian ideal of ‘proletarian literature’ and reserved tongue-incheek comments for Soviet literary aristocrats. Although a fi   ce critic of Soviet reality, Platonov cherished his own ‘Soviet project’ – he envisaged a truly revolutionary, progressive ideal of a genuinely democratic nature. The literary period in question is shown to have a complex structure, unyielding to ideological abstractions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-308
Author(s):  
Ethan C. Jones

This article responds to the innovative and stimulating research by Ellen van Wolde in a previous volume of Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. She claims that the Niphal is middle voice and can be passive, ‘if (and only if) an external argument, coded as an external Agent, is present’. My research however, demonstrates that such a description of the passive is both inadequate in view of the world’s languages and incongruent with Niphal. In addition, my response lays bare how such a prescription of the middle voice to the Niphal in the Hebrew Bible is circulus probando and unconvincing.


Language ◽  
1936 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Walter Petersen
Keyword(s):  

2010 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary L. Baker
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 156-166
Author(s):  
Karthick K ◽  
Thiruveni V

Until the Sangam literary period (till 200 AD), Tamil language was secular and Tamil literature was created with an emphasis on virtue in both internal and external life. After that, religious literature started appearing in Tamil language. Tamil grammar texts are based on literature that appeared in different periods. Thus the “Pulamai ilakkanam” (grammar for scholarliness) composed by Vannacharabam Dantapani swami reveals the literary context that prevailed in the 19th century when he lived. Pulamai ilakkanam shows the author's religiosity and the religious beliefs and devotion in the field of education and literature at that time. Grammar is the rules for creating literature. If so, constructing Tamil scholarliness in relation to a particular religion would be tantamount to narrow down the breadth of the Tamil language. Based on the content of Pulamai ilakkanam and the literary context of the time, this article discusses the dominance of the religions over Tamil literature and the use oflanguage by religions for their development.


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