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‘Excitement struggles with the restraint of form and language and the artifice of verbal repetition… runs riot.’ The repetition is more pronounced and personal here than in another Lesbia epigram, no. 70, where ‘the repetition dicit…dicit makes it certain that Catullus had [Callimachus, Ep. 25 Pf.] in mind’. Poem 70 illustrates how Catullus might allude to and adapt a Hellenistic model in expressing his personal feelings; while the longer elegiac poems in particular (and 66, the translation of Coma Berenices) show the depth of his engagement with Callimachean literary technique. We should not be surprised to find Callimachean elements here too, given the demonstrable correspondences with poem 68 in particular, a composition noted for its use of Alexandrian artifice. But while there are close echoes of the high emotion, the doctus poeta of 68 seems to be largely missing from 107. Here Catullus exults ipsa refers te / nobis (5–6); there his mistress se nostrum contulit in gremium (132).

In this qualitative study, nine adolescent girls between the ages of eleven and fourteen (M=12) reacted to how romance is depicted in The Hunger Games book and film series. Although some feminist researchers have been disappointed in the series ending, arguing that it reinforces post-feminist, repronormative and heteronormative ideas, most of the participants in this study felt that the inclusion of romance was appropriate for protagonist Katniss Everdeen, stating that this did not take away from what they saw as the “girl power” message of the series. Study participants believed that authors write heterosexual romance as a way of appealing to adolescent girl readers; several girls, however, expressed their desire to see this change. Furthermore, study participants provided alternative endings to the series that did not always include heterosexual romance or marriage for Katniss, thereby providing a nuanced critique of heteronormativity and gender roles in the series.

Scholars have generally recognized the Ottoman poet Nefʿī (d. 1635) for his refinement of the panegyric in Turkish and his skill in its unflattering twin, the invective. They have thus paid little attention to the fact that he composed poems in Persian, and sufficient to compile a collection of them, simply viewing his output as a byproduct of his taste for the fresh style emanating from the East, particularly India, with no consideration of other factors at play. The article addresses this contextual gap by situating Nefʿī's engagement with the fresh style in relation to wider efforts at poetic renewal and also to literati disputes about the extent to which the fresh style and other currents from the East ought to be adopted and assimilated, in which differing formal and generic preferences, as well as linguistic and rhetorical concerns, were central. The article ultimately suggests that Nefʿī's overall work should be seen as part of those wider efforts that also aimed at making Ottoman practice distinctively fresh.

Este artículo trata de recordar a los autores y personajes del cómic italiano de los últimos 40 años de todos los géneros y para todo tipo de lectores que se han dado a conocer en publicaciones españolas. Entre los personajes más emblemáticas destacan: Lupo Alberto, Martin Mystère, Pimpa , Tex Willer, Cocco Bill, Corto Maltese o Valentina.

Howard Goldblatt is recognized as one of the most renowned translators of Chinese literature. He has translated more than fifty books, including novels by the Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan. His other t...

This article examines two approaches to postdictatorship cinema: trauma theory, which has been especially popular in reading this corpus, and semiotics, which has regained popularity in film analysis in general but is not often employed when analyzing postdictatorship films. The article claims that, though highly productive in the 1990s, trauma theory has become less fruitful after decades of continuous scholarship and after the emergence of administrations that have made the representation of the dictatorship the center of their public policies, such as kirchnerismo in Argentina (2003–2015). While trauma theory yields ahistorical analyses, a semiotic approach that takes into account how indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs merge in the cinematic field allows for historical interpretations that are more adequate for reading postdictatorship films, especially after 2003. The article first outlines the main tenets of the two approaches (trauma theory and semiotics), then assesses their suitability for historical interpretation via a brief analysis of Andres no quiere dormir la siesta , a 2009 Argentine film on the country’s last dictatorship. Resumen Este articulo se propone examinar dos aproximaciones al cine postdictatorial: la teoria del trauma, que ha sido especialmente popular para leer este corpus, y la semiotica, un acercamiento que ha vuelto a ganar popularidad en el analisis filmico en general pero que no es frecuentemente utilizado en la interpretacion de este tipo de peliculas. El articulo argumenta que la teoria del trauma, aunque productiva en los anos noventa, se ha vuelto menos fructifera despues de varias decadas de produccion academica constante y de la emergencia de gobiernos que, como el kirchnerismo en Argentina (2003–2015), han puesto la representacion de la dictadura en el centro de sus politicas publicas. Mientras que la teoria del trauma resulta insuficiente para leer historicamente el cine postdictatorial, una lectura semiotica de como los componentes indiciales, iconicos y simbolicos se combinan en la imagen cinematografica resulta mas apropiada para llevar a cabo una interpretacion historica, especialmente despues del 2003. Luego de delinear estas dos aproximaciones, el articulo las reevalua mediante un breve analisis de una pelicula argentina reciente sobre la dictadura militar, Andres no quiere dormir la siesta.

This article examines how Zeyā al-Din Barani may have imagined that contemporary audiences would consume his Tārikh-e Firuz Shāhi. Would it only be read visually or also read aloud (directed at the ear rather than the eye), and thus be received aurally, or would it even be performed in front of a larger audience? The plot and protagonists of Barani's story on Moʿezz al-Din Keyqobād present a tragedy that develops around a sultan doomed to fail. An examination of the set-up of Barani's narrative reveals that it contains numerous textual devices that would enable a storyteller to perform the story, using the text as a kind of tumār. As tragedies are written for the stage, not the study, these features of the text indicate that matters of orality, which are crucial for many genres of premodern Persianate courtly literature, are also relevant to the Tārikh-e Firuz Shāhi.

The author analyzes the monograph “Utopian discourse in Russian culture of the late 19th – 21st century. Literature. Painting. Cinema”. The review determines the position of this book in modern science of projective models of the future. A key aspect is the continuity of previous studies on the category of utopia, and above all, B. F. Egorov, whose memory the book is dedicated to. The transition of modern art beyond the utopian genre is noticed. This confirms the appropriateness of the discursive technique. The author emphasizes the relevance of the traditional conversation about environmental problems and expresses bewilderment at the disregard by Western philologists of Russian fiction and scientific literature. As an unquestionable advantage of the monograph, its modern anthropological approach to the psychological details of private narrative utopias is noted.

This essay explores the film collaborations of Franco-Egyptian filmmaker Safaa Fathy and Franco-Maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida, offering an extended reading of their court-métrage, Nom à la mer (2004)—a film about language, exile, and loss, made by a pair of wanderers both keenly interested in the spectral effects of translation as they haunt the filmic medium. Nom à la mer is a cinematic rendering of the French translation of Fathy's original, Arabic-language poem, recited by Derrida in voice-off as Fathy's camera focuses on a single, highly overdetermined site in a small Andalusian town. This essay reads the film as both an artefact of the pathos of translation and as a scene of valediction, played out by both collaborators on grounds simultaneously intimate and historical.

James Joyce’s Ulysses has had a profound impact on the Argentine literary imagination, renewing and redefining style, language, and narrative technique, as part of an expansive legacy that kicked off with Borges’s early reception of Ulysses and fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’ in 1925 and gained increasing momentum throughout the twentieth century, peaking with the stylistic fireworks ignited by Cortázar’s experimental novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) in 1963. Yet this impact, I suggest, raises not only stylistic but also ideological questions, as well as problematic issues of canonicity and literary genealogies. In this essay, I engage with one of the most significant works of the Argentine Joycean tradition: Juan Filloy’s modernist masterpiece Caterva (1937), a work which I define here as a ‘Ulyssean’ novel. In what follows, I insert Caterva within the long arc of Argentina’s Joycean novelistic tradition in a reading that destabilises previous critical narratives from which it had been erased, while mapping out new transnational affiliations with Joyce. My claim is that Joyce’s and Filloy’s modernist novels intersect stylistically and ideologically through their use of rhetorical devices emulating the movement of trains and trams as quintessential symbols of modernity, but in a manner that foregrounds British imperialism as the engine powering infrastructure projects in Ireland and Argentina respectively within the intricate global networks of Empire.

This article looks into fictitious meals and the use of culinary recipe form in experimental and procedural literature, namely, works of constrained writing associated with OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle). The recipe form is first scrutinized from the procedural, structural, and historical viewpoints, also concerning its lesser-known imaginative and esoteric genealogy. In addition, its connections to the notions of narrativity and fiction are discussed. The recipe's relationship to action is depicted by a simple procedural model. There is a metaphorical and conceptual, but also formal and operational, similarity between the coded procedures of cooking and writing. A recipe is a procedure, a script for an infinity of possible meals, and a literary procedure is a recipe for writing. It is not surprising, then, that Oulipian writers have utilized the recipe form in their food-related works. Four such literary recipes (by Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, Harry Mathews, and Alastair Brotchie) are closely examined, after discussion of key concepts of Oulipian poetics from the culinary viewpoint. The article's special point of reference is the parodic, satirical, absurd, and other humorous meanings that literary recipes often seem to produce, which is linked to the operational and structural dimensions of the recipe—its comically posited procedural form.

Myths provide a fertile ground for adaptation and appropriation. The preoccupation of writers with the stories and characters from the margins leads to interesting variations of age-old stories. As a consequence, the familiar stories are re-worked and transformed as an act of subversion. The embedded mythical framework in the revised text enriches its meaning infinitely. This paper is an attempt to understand Atwood’s text as trying to fill in some gaps in Homer’s Odyssey. As a feminist writer, Atwood re-visits the canonical text from a new perspective. She attempts “not to pass on a tradition but break its hold over us” (Rich). The re-writing of grand narratives becomes a strategy whereby a shift in power becomes possible. Atwood’s text is subtitled ‘The Story of Penelope and Odysseus’ making the shift quite clear. The narrative voice alternates between Penelope’s disembodied spirit from the underworld and the chorus of her twelve, faithful maids. The Penelopiad, in this way, becomes a polyphonic text where the different voices blend and clash and no final, authoritative meaning is possible. The re-working, thus, becomes an act of liberation.

In any work of art, from literary to visual, theatrical and cinematographic, the presence of shadow, most of times associated with the presence of light, emerges as a particularly motivated sign. The very act of placing a shadow in a specific context makes the shadow subject to the same area of interpretation as the rest of the artwork. Within each artistic field, there are lots of meanings associated to shadow: from philosophical, theological and psychological to symbolic and metaphorical. According to the artistic medium it belongs to, the metaphor of shadow is usually engaged in creating and modifying the atmosphere, in visualising images, in diminishing or increasing the dramatic intensity and mainly in accumulating meaning. The present study intends to explore the transposition of the metaphor of shadow from its allegorical roots, as in Plato’s allegory of the cave, into new artistic environments such as literary and cinematographic. Be it employed in the service of an idea, as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet or used for creating a visual and cinematic effect as in Zeffirelli’s homonymous film, the metaphor of shadow adapted its means of expression in order to extend the area of significances.

In an article published in 2004, Picart and Frank examined the use of stylistic and thematic elements Holocaust cinema can borrow from the horror film. Their argument at the time was constrained by the availability and their choice of primary texts, but the recent emergence of what has been called ‘prestige horror’ invites viewers to revisit their critical arguments and positions. Since ‘prestige horror’s’ aesthetic strategies tend to challenge conventional definitions of the horror genre, revisiting Picart and Frank’s argument proves most productive in the context of a Holocaust film, Frank Pierson’s Conspiracy (2001), which, in turn, operates in creative dissonance with some of the conventions of Holocaust cinema.

En este artículo me ocupo del discurso de don Quijote sobre la Edad de Oro. Se estudia el discurso como un discurso ficticio dentro de una obra ficcional. La utopía contenida en el discurso es explicada como un elemento central del Quijote de Cervantes y el discurso es considerado como un eje activo y dinámico de esta obra. La oposición que hay en el discurso entre el tiempo presente y el tiempo pasado es vista a la vez como estructura social y cultural no solo del discurso, sino también de toda la obra por la activación de la analogía como fundamento de la construcción literaria del Quijote. Las perspectivas y los instrumentos que ofrece la Retórica Cultural se emplean para elucidar la composición del discurso y su papel en la totalidad del texto en el que está inserto. La conciencia de la importancia de las voces de los personajes en el Quijote permite centrarse en el discurso como uno de los principales resultados de la función de las voces en la novela en la construcción del protagonista y como representación de la sociedad. Por ello el discurso de don Quijote sobre la Edad de Oro es un componente imprescindible de la obra.

In the theatrical realization there is a double textuality: dramatic and spectacular. Taking this in consideration, the playwright controls the possible stage montage of his work in the stage directions in the dramatic text, since these are explicit indications about the idea that has the author of the staging of his work. In this work is made a review of Cervantes stage indications in his comedies and is revealed his knowledge of theatrical mechanics and the scenic space of his time, as well as his stage director attitude.

This essay examines the role of female readership in the work of the Argentine writer Roberto Arlt. I argue that the conflicted and embodied status of the reading public in Arlt’s work is crystallized in the female (or feminized) reader of romances. Through this figure, the Arltian text reveals the pervasiveness of normative sentimental discourse, and narrates how this discourse circulates, impacts, and is absorbed by the bodies of its readers. These critiques emerge quite clearly in Arlt’s novels, where the author enjoys greater freedom of expression. However, his periodical publications and theater necessarily employ a more oblique critical strategy. Focusing on his aguafuertes, the short story “Eugenio Delmonte y los 1300 novios” and the play Trescientos millones, I show how Arlt interpolates his readers as readers of romance while also enacting a rupture in the boundary between the work and the medium in which it appears, encouraging the reader’s awareness of the influence of those media in her daily life.

The essay explores Paul Muldoon’s elegy for the fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson with a view to showing that “The Triumph” seeks to evoke a ground where political, cultural and religious polarities are destabilized. As the various intertextual allusions in the poem are traced, it is argued that Muldoon seeks to revise the notion of the Irish shibboleths that, as the poem puts it, “are meant to trip you up.” In lieu of this linguistic and political slipperiness, “The Triumph” situates Carson’s protean invocations of Belfast and traditional Irish music as the new shibboleths of collectivity.

The tragedy Prologue written in 1960s is analyzed in the broad context of the history of its creation, Anna Akhmatova’s biographical myth and world culture. The article mentions the problems of academic publication of the text and presents materials for scientific commentary on it. The incompleteness of the play is viewed in connection with its heterogeneous character combining lyrics, drama and epos, verses and prose, tragic and comic, ancient and modern, East and West, national and global, culture and everyday life, written and oral styles.

Since their first screen appearances in the 1930s, zombies have enjoyed immense cinematic popularity. Defined by Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead as mindless, violent, decaying and infectious, they successfully function as ultimate fiends in horror films. Yet, even those morbid undead started evolving into more appealing, individualized and even sympathetic characters, especially when the comic potential of zombies is explored. To allow a zombie to become a romantic protagonist, however, one that can love and be loved by a human, another evolutionary step had to be taken, one fostered by a literary association. This paper analyzes Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies, a 2013 film adaptation of Isaac Marion’s zombie novel inspired by William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It examines how Shakespeare’s Romeo helps transform the already evolved cinematic zombie into a romantic protagonist, and how Shakespearean love tragedy, with its rich visual cinematic legacy, can successfully locate a zombie narrative in the romantic comedy convention. Presenting the case of Shakespeare intersecting the zombie horror tradition, this paper illustrates the synergic exchanges of literary icons and the cinematic monstrous.

The image of Death, embodied in the image of a beautiful maiden, is considered in the article through the analysis of references in the novel diptych by B. Akunin The Mistress of Death and The Lover of Death (the Erast Fandorin series) to one of the most important primary sources, the drama by A. Blok The Little Show-Booth. The study shows that Akunin's method of deformation was replaced by a postmodern deconstruction with a splitting into two images, of Columbine and of Maiden-Death, each of which is dominated by one of the hypostases of the heroine of The Little Show-Booth. These transformations appeal in their development to the opposition in Akunin’s novels of two points of view on fate, dialectically interacting, which correlate with the adventurous exposition and with the inevitability of personal destiny idea, oriented towards the “classical” tradition. The result of the analysis is a new formula of the genre of Akunin's novels, since their poetics goes out of the ordinary framework of criminal literature, as a transgressive phenomenon in the field of mass literature, as postmodern novel, in which the uncertain intertextuality accentuates, align with plot details, the problem of heroes’ self-identity.

What are the affordances of reading apocalyptic fiction under apocalyptic conditions, when a realism without apocalypse hardly seems realistic at all? What does it mean that our attempts to imagine...

This article deals with Calchas’ prophecy and Diomedes’ and Ulysses’ interventions during the mustering of the Greeks at Aulis in Statius’ Achilleid (1.514–52). It will be argued that Calchas and Ulysses embody two different approaches to the generic tensions of the new epic which Statius’ poem represents. Calchas, the old uates of the Homeric tradition, seems unable to fully understand the ‘poetics of illusion’ enacted by Thetis and Achilles in disguise, as is clear from his vision. His point of view is skilfully complemented by Ulysses, who turns out to be the true uates, as well as the perfect leader for Achilles’ rescue. As the only figure who can face the fluid and ambiguous reality of the poem and its literary dynamics as well, Ulysses also stands as a poetic voice himself; through his speech, Statius reflects upon the tensions of his epic and the poetic effort needed to channel the narrative from the peaceful setting of Scyros to the martial horizon of Troy.

Taking a look at Lot through the lens of Biblical Masculinity Studies, we see him constantly trying to meet ideals of a performance of hegemonic masculinity but failing to do so. This paper uncovers masculinity as the motor of the narrative in the Lot stories, especially in Gen 19. The stories make fun of Lot and his offspring, the Moabites and Ammonites, as “failed” men. This paper analyses how this is achieved by the authors. Masculinity and masculine traits are artistically and deliberately used as a highly idealised background foil in order to highlight Lot’s failure. Furthermore, the authors’ point of view is highly ideological. They are in a superior and dominant position from which they portray Lot and his masculinity. They do this from safe distance, since they themselves are not represented in the stories by a character.

Devotional practices in the later European Middle Ages were highly somatic, and they utilized the human sensorium to convey, incite, and engender knowledge and experiences of the divine. Reading does not normally stand out as one of the more somatic devotional practices, but as demonstrated by the example of theLegatus divinae pietatis, a devotional text written at the convent of Helfta around the end of the thirteenth century, reading was indeed imagined as a somatic, devotional experience that engaged the senses. In this article, I argue that theLegatusportrays a form of devotional reading that invokes all the senses in an effort to unite the book, the reader, and her community with the divine. Drawing on medieval conceptualizations of the human sensorium and theories of reading, my analyses of theLegatus’s sensual language, evocative imagery, and scenes of reading elucidate the embodied reading practices that theLegatus’s writers portrayed as fundamental to their communal, devotional lives.

This paper proposes a new synthetic account of the presence of Cicero as both character and source in Lucan's Bellum Ciuile. Lucan's treatment is derived primarily from Virgil's technique for creating intertextually complex characters, but further builds on Sallust's displacement of Cicero in his narrative of the Catilinarian conspiracy and on the declamatory practice of reducing the orator to a few prominent and recognizable traits. Cicero the character, as he briefly appears at the opening of the seventh book, is not simply an ahistorical caricature: he is constructed through a careful series of allusions designed to indict his use of violence in the suppression of Catiline. Other prominent aspects of Cicero in the tradition are displaced and transferred to other characters more important to Lucan's design, Cato and Pompey. Lucan's depiction of Pompey, especially his death and decapitation, draws on the language and affect of the tradition associated with Cicero, using Cicero's own words and the obituary of Cicero in the lost historical epic of Cornelius Severus. Finally, the language of Cicero's peace-making efforts in his correspondence, suppressed in Lucan's depiction of him as a warmonger, forms an important part of the narrator's own emotional evocations of the impending catastrophe of civil war. The combination of models Lucan uses is more broadly reflective of his technique in composing a historical epic.

In Theriaca 343–358, Nicander recounts a rather unusual myth. After Prometheus had stolen fire, Zeus was seeking the thief and, when men delivered Prometheus over to him, he gave them the gift of youth. Humans entrusted the ass to carry this load, but the ass was seized by thirst and sought the help of the snake, who demanded in return the thing he was carrying on his back. This is how the gift of youth given to men fell to the serpent’s lot. Ever since, inevitable old age has weighed upon them, while the snakes cast off their old skin and gain a new one. Like any digression in Hellenistic epic poetry, this parable certainly is intended to entertain the reader, yet it must have a more serious function: by showing that it was only out of stupidity that men gave away their invaluable gift to the ass, Nicander asserts the great value of knowledge for life. Remarkably, it is precisely in this passage that the poet has inserted the acrostic of his name. The idea that his poetic work will ensure the survival of his name for future generations, directly expressed in the closing lines, is here conveyed with the greatest refinement.

This article proposes an interpretation of Claudian’s preface to hisPanegyric for Mallius Theodorusthat places the poem in the communicative context of its recitation and in the literary frame of the panegyric. An analysis of the political messages in both poems, the panegyric and its brief ‘paratext’, reveals that the preface consistently uses the myth of the two eagles of Jupiter to indicate symbolically that the new consul is still upholding ‘genuine’ Hellenic culture in the West. This interpretation illustrates how Claudian’s poems for the new consul of 399 assume the Greek cultural heritage to be a part of the Roman identity and that they play a significant role in the poet’s agenda between 397–400, by progressively unveiling the anti-Byzantinism of the Western court.