scholarly journals Η απαιτητική ανάγνωση των εικόνων στα εικονογραφημένα βιβλία του Σαραμάγκου

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 68
Author(s):  
Ioanna Kaliakatsou ◽  
Aggeliki Giannikopoulou

Postmodern picturebooks have gained increasing importance in the field of theory of children’s literature, because they «Provide the most accessible examples of postmodern eclecticism: the breaking of boundaries, the abandonment of linear chronology, the emphasis on the construction of texts, and the intermingling of parodying genres» (Pantaleo and Sipe 2008). Τhese picturebooks invite a more active reader. Mc Callum (1996) notes that metafictive narratives pose «questions about the relationships between the ways we interpret and represent both fiction and reality». Trites ( 1994) also identifies that the changes in picturebooks reflect «the sort of cultural fragmentation that seems to be the hallmark of the postindustrial age» As today's children live in a world characterized by fragmentation, decanonization and interactivity literacy educators focus on the ways in which literacy education will need to change in order to develop student’s «self-knowledge about reading» (Ryan& Anstey, 2003) and enrich reader’s capacity to decode the rapidly change, rich in symbols, visual culture. (Callow, 2008, Goldstone, 2001, Walsh, 2003, Serafini, 2004 O'Neil, 2011 ) Saramago’s picture books are a good example of work that disrupts expectations of the reader through the self-reflexive narrative structure of the visual text. While the verbal text tells rather a simple fairly story, the visual language in pictures evoke multiple levels of meaning, depending on how the reader (children or adult) chooses to interpret it. One common aspect of the illustrations in both books is the self referential qualities of the illustrations that reveal the process of memories restoration and perception. The illustrators of the books employ a range of metafictive devices that self consciously draws attention to the status of the memories as artifacts and systematically poses questions about the way we recall the past. In this paper we examine fifth graders’ responses to several metafictive devices in Saramago’s picturebooks. The books were read and discussed in depth over a two week time period, where the children participated in small groups and whole-class interactive read-aloud sessions. The fifth graders noticed many of the visual elements and took them into account for the (re)construction of the story, such as intertextuality, indeterminacy in illustrative text, disruptions of traditional time and space relationships, pastiche of illustrative styles, illustrative framing devices including a book embedded within another book, description of the creating process. The data concerning children’s reading of both books lead to the conclusion that ten-years-old children paid great attention to the illustration and did not confine their readings only to words. They have incorporated the visual text in the construction of the story, and proved that they can decipher many of the challenging visual puzzles of both books. The study concludes that using visual literacy in the classroom can help children to develop a “critical eye” and to negotiate our visually rich contemporary culture. Key-words: picturebooks, metafiction, childrens’ perception, memories

Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

This chapter addresses Edgar Allan Poe’s relation to postmodernism in three parts. It first considers the postmodern elements of Poe’s writing with an emphasis on hoaxes, metafictional self-referentiality, fragmentation, and an overall postmodern suspicion of metanarratives. Next it offers an overview of how Poe’s fiction has been used by poststructuralist theorists—notably, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Barbara Johnson—as well as critics including Dennis Pahl, Michael J. S. Williams, J. Gerald Kennedy, and Louis A. Renza, to illustrate poststructuralist claims about the nature of the self and language. Finally, it explores how the postmodern elements present in Poe’s fiction make him attractive to modern sensibilities. This final section considers the commodification not just of Poe’s writing but of Poe himself—how his biography and image themselves become postmodern narratives available for appropriation and exploitation in the contemporary culture of the Gothic.


Behaviour ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 96 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 17-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Geissmann

AbstractSiamang gibbons produce long and complex duet songs. The hypothesis that duetting may act as advertisement of the presence and the status of a mated pair has repeatedly been suggested for duetting birds. If a pair bonding effect of the duet is actually attained through a partner-directed learning effort resulting in a pair-specific duet, the learning investment should be concentrated into a time period as short as possible in order to avoid competitors. Therefore, after the formation of a new pair, an increase of singing activity should be expected. In order to test this prediction, the singing activity of a pair of captive siamang before and after a partner exchange was compared. In the newly formed pair, an increase in singing activity was observed. Additional observations on a second new pair show a similar trend. In this case, both new mates remained in their familiar place so that their singing activity was unlikely to be affected by the process of establishing a new territory.


PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (3) ◽  
pp. 718-722 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Fitzpatrick

I was invited by the MLA committee on the status of graduate students in the profession to speak at a convention workshop entitled “Keywords for a Digital Profession.” My keyword was obsolescence, a catchall term for a multiplicity of conditions; there are material obsolescences, institutional obsolescences, and purely theoretical obsolescences, each type demanding a different response. I spent years pondering theoretical obsolescence while writing The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. The book argues, in part, that claims about the obsolescence of cultural forms often say more about those doing the claiming than they do about the objects of the claims. Neither the novel in particular nor the book more broadly nor print in general is dead, and agonized announcements of the death of such technologies and genres often serve to re-create an elite cadre of cultural producers and consumers, ostensibly operating on the margins of contemporary culture and profiting from their claims of marginality by creating a sense that their own values, once mainstream and now decaying, must be protected. Two oft-cited reports of the National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk (2004) and To Read or Not to Read (2007), come to mind; like numerous other expressions of anxiety about the supposed decline of reading, each rhetorically creates a cultural wildlife preserve in which the apparently obsolete can flourish (United States). These texts suggest that obsolescence is, in this case at least, less a material state than a political project.


2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-220
Author(s):  
Joseph A. Stramondo ◽  

Both mainstream and disability bioethics sometimes contend that the self-assessment of disabled people about their own well-being is distorted by adaptive preferences that are only held because other, better options are unavailable. I will argue that both of the most common ways of understanding adaptive preferences—the autonomy-based account and the well-being account—would reject blanket claims that disabled people’s QOL self-assessment has been distorted, whether those claims come from mainstream bioethicists or from disability bioethicists. However, rejecting these generalizations for a more nuanced view still has dramatic implications for the status quo in both health policy and clinical ethics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 64-73
Author(s):  
Irena DIMOVA

The proposed article examines two problems – the poetic formations (generations and groups) and the manifestations of "narcissism" in poetry. Two Slovak authors, representatives of different literary formations, are analyzed - Michal Habaj of the so-called Text Generation and Katarína Kucbelová of the ANesthetic Generation. Both their affiliation to these creative associations and the nature of the latter is discussed. In order to understand these literary phenomena, we use Karl Mannheim’s concept of generation and Michał Głowiński’s approach to literary groups. The interpretation of selected texts by the two poets is based on the view of contemporary culture as a "culture of narcissism" (Kr. Lash) and on the reflection on this concept, which we find in a literary-critical article by Katarína Kucbelová herself on Michal Habaj. Her reflection on the fragile boundary between narcissism as a theme and narcissism as deficiency of interpreted work we try to apply on her own poetry texts. The selected poems are from her poetry book “Duals” (Duály), which identifies her as part of the so-called ‘new sincerity’ in Slovak literature. In her texts, Katarína Kucbelová thematizes the closure of the lyrical self within its own existence, in which the presence of the other is allowed only as a concept or an idea. Michal Habaj's experimentalism in “Poems for Dead Girls” (Básne pre mŕtve dievčatá), on the other hand, "opens" his textual world, binds him to many discourses and distances him from the self.


2000 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-43
Author(s):  
Sonia Sikka

AbstractThrough a reading of Nietzsche's texts, primarily of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, this article develops a phenomenological description of the variety of intoxication exemplified in conditions of drunkenness, or in states of emotional excess. It treats Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a literary expression of such intoxication, arguing against attempts to find a coherent narrative structure and clear authorial voice behind this text's apparent disorder. Having isolated the intoxicated characteristics of Thus Spoke Zarathustra - its hyperbolic rhetoric and emotions, its lack of balance, its injustice, its shifting and conflicting moods, and its self-contradictions - I then offer an interpretation of the work, and by extension of intoxication itself, in terms of Nietzsche's model of the self as a dynamic multiplicity of forces. At the same time, I argue for a multiple and dynamic conception of personality in general.


2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torben Juel Jensen ◽  
Marie Maegaard

The article presents a real-time study of standardization and regionalization processes with respect to the use of past participles of strong verbs in the western part of Denmark. Analyses of a large corpus of recordings of informants from two localities show that the use of the dialectalenform of the past participle suffix has been in decline during the last 30 years. Theenforms are replaced by three other forms, one of which is (partly) dialectal, one regional and one standard Danish. The study indicates that a regionalization process has taken place prior to the time period studied, but that it has now been overtaken by a Copenhagen-based standardization process. The study also shows interesting differences between the two localities, arguably due to the geographical location and size, and to the status of the different participle forms in the traditional local dialects.


2005 ◽  
pp. 97-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Sharpe

This inquiry is situated at the intersection of two enigmas. The first is the enigma of the status of Kant's practice of critique, which has been the subject of heated debate since shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. The second enigma is that of Foucault's apparent later 'turn' to Kant, and the label of 'critique', to describe his own theoretical practice. I argue that Kant's practice of 'critique' should be read, after Foucault, as a distinctly modern practice in the care of the self, governed by Kant's famous rubric of the 'primacy of practical reason'. In this way, too, Foucault's later interest in Kant - one which in fact takes up a line present in his work from his complementary thesis on Kant's Anthropology - is cast into distinct relief. Against Habermas and others, I propose that this interest does not represent any 'break' or 'turn' in Foucault's work. In line with Foucault's repeated denials that he was interested after 1976 in a 'return to the ancients', I argue that Foucault's writings on critique represent instead both a deepening theoretical self-consciousness, and part of his project to forge an ethics adequate to the historical present.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 1197-1202
Author(s):  
Mohammed Abdullah Abduldaim Hizabr Alhusami

The aim of this paper is to investigate the issue of intertextuality in the novel Alfirdaws Alyabab (The Waste Paradise) by the female Saudi novelist and short story writer Laila al-Juhani. Intertextuality is a rhetoric and literary technique defined as a textual reference deliberate or subtle to some other texts with a view of drawing more significance to the core text; and hence it is employed by an author to communicate and discuss ideas in a critical style. The narrative structure of Alfirdaws Alyabab (The Waste Paradise) showcases references of religious, literary, historical, and folkloric intertextuality. In analyzing these references, the study follows the intertextual approach. In her novel The Waste Paradise, Laila al-Juhani portrays the suffering of Saudi women who are less tormented by social marginalization than by an inner conflict between openness to Western culture and conformity to cultural heritage. Intertextuality relates to words, texts, or discourses among each other. Moreover, the intertextual relations are subject to reader’s response to the text. The relation of one text with other texts or contexts never reduces the prestige of writing. Therefore, this study, does not diminish the status of the writer or the text; rather, it is in itself a kind of literary creativity. Finally, this paper aims to introduce Saudi writers in general and the female writers in particular to the world literature.


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