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Taking Lorca’s much-discussed claim for the realism and reality of La casa de Bernarda Alba as its starting point, this essay muses on Spanish literature’s tendency to revisit its allegedly inherent realist tradition. It looks at how this tradition was being seen widely as a weakness and considers how Damaso Alonso attacked such views as a myth, arguing that Spanish writers lie in fact between the Scylla of realism and a post-realist Charybdis, since they frequently look back to the artistic achievements of the Golden Age. The essay also recalls how Menendez Pidal identified a special ‘Hispanic realism’ and revisits his own discussion of the realism of Lorca’s play. The essay briefly recalls the post-war current of realist writing, describes the critique offered by novelists and commentators such as Goytisolo and Castellet, and closes on a personal note in describing a robust and more recent defence of a great realist novelist which, bizarrely, involved a critique of a course taught partly by the ...

For a long time, discussion of "Scylla and Charybdis" has tended to be over-mindful of the "[n]o" that Stephen answers when John Eglinton asks him whether he believes his theory about William Shakespeare (LI 9.1067).1 For some, in fact, it is as if the whole production had turned out to be a shaggy-dog story with a weak punchline. I question this evaluation and begin by suggesting that Joyce would not willingly have wasted his reader's time like that, especially in an episode that he considered the final curtain of his book's first half.2 After all, that word "believe" is one that Ulysses has invited us to fuss over ever since Haines asked Stephen, "You're not a believer, are you?" (U 1.611), and received no straight answer. In "Scylla and Charybdis/' the word's chief exponent is, again, Eglinton, who uses some version of it nine times, often with significantly dif ferent senses. For instance, right after the question to Stephen, he remarks of one Herr Karl Bleibtreu that "he believes his theory" (U 9.1077), That is, he, at least, believes his theory, unlike a certain young person present whom Eglinton could mention. Bleibtreu's theory was that Shakespeare's plays were written by Roger Manners, the fifth earl of Rutland, He had other beliefs too. He was a highly vocal anti-Semite (it was he who informed Joyce, doubtless with scorn,3 that the original name of the eminent Shakespearean Sir Sidney Lee was Simon Lazarus Lee?JJII 411), a paranoid Teutonophile obsessed with protecting Germany's volkische literature from foreign contamination, and, by the time "Scylla and Charybdis" was being written, someone who was literally identifying with Napoleon.4 Bleibtreu was, in short, a nut and is clearly to be taken as one. Indeed, the whole library discussion occurs against a background of nutty ideas about Shakespeare, all devoutly believed in by various cranks. In the episode's dialectic, this lot occupies the hard right. True believers, they correspond to the Scyllan rock-monster?the one with six maws for swallowing you up. They represent one way of getting Shakespeare wrong. At the other extreme is the woozy whirlpool

A comparison between Odyssey's book 12 and Aeneis' book 3 shows some similarities in the handling of the myth: Scylla and Charybdis are hidden creatures, which the reader of both the poems can glimpse only behind the veil of the description of the seers Elenus and Circe. In the Vergilian version, however, there are traces of the rationalizations of the myth operated by Sallust and Lucrece.

The inventorying work which has been carried out in Poland unceasingly since the 1950s has provided the basis for carrying out large-scale iconographical and iconological research. The main subject of the research is sacred art dating from the late 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The majority of the works that have been studied were executed by anonymous artists working in provincial painting workshops. The message conveyed in the fine arts often does not provide the viewer with enough data to interpret it correctly, nor to gain a deeper understanding of the true meaning of church paintings. In the search for meaning it is essential to refer to the written word in its diverse forms. The character of sacred art largely determines the literary sources to which we refer. These consist primarily of collections of sermons, prayers and sacred songs. The use of the so-called indirect comparative method not only widens the scope of research through the use of selected examples of Polish religious texts but, most i...

The modern classical guitar is an instrument that has seen a great deal of change and experimentation in recent years with regards to its construction and concomitant sound production. Guitar builders are faced with the significant challenge of having to produce instruments that can adhere to aspects of playability and volume required of the modern instrument. This often results in having to sacrifice in some way the colour and sound so characteristic of the instrument as produced by the ‘traditional’ construction method consolidated by Spanish guitar builder Antonio de Torres. This uncomfortable position of having to sacrifice in one area in order to gain in another will be interrogated by investigating seven selected South African guitar builders. The manner in which they confront this challenge by adhering, to a greater or lesser degree, to two ‘poles’ of construction in line with international trends is highlighted. It is argued that this changing voice of the guitar is inherently part of wha...

El vituperio generaba identidad y señalaba a sujetos constitutivos de alteridad para el orador y su audiencia. En las Filípicas, Cicerón justificó la eliminación política de Marco Antonio situándolo junto a gentes infames, pervertidos, mujeres y bárbaros. Todos estos sujetos fueron descritos y relacionados con el léxico del campo semántico de la barbarie., Invective created identity and pointed at subjets constitutive of otherness from the point of view of the orator and his audience. Cicero stood up for the political murder of Antonius by placing him near to infamous people, degenerated individuals, women, and barbarians in the Philippics. All together were characterized and linked with the vocabulary of the barbarism semantic field.

The story of reliability is like the story of other technical and scientific disciplines. High and low points, good ideas and mistakes, sincere enthusiasm and fatigue, rigorous approaches and fads; we find these not only in art, culture and politics, but also in the world of engineering. It's always the same story, ever since the Tower of Babel: we are driven by ambition and pride. Many works of literature have lived for centuries and millennia: Homer, Dante Alighieri, Shakespeare and many others have spoken to us in a universal way. Their stories seem fresh and modem, because humankind is always the same, unable to understand and learn from errors. So we can always find similarities, for example between the Odyssey and the story of our field. Illusions, monsters, storms, errors and hope woven together.

To suggest his own biographical relationship to Ulysses Joyce has Stephen propose his expressive theory of the relationship between Shakespeare’s art and life. What makes Shakespeare a man of genius is that he encompassed in his vision “all in all in all of us” (U.213; IX.1049–50). Joyce recreates Shakespeare according to his own experience of him and thus becomes the father of his own artistic father and the artist whose imagination is so inclusive and vast that it contains the “all in all” of Shakespeare plus the very substantial addition — or, in current terminology, the supplement — of his own imagination. Like Joyce, Shakespeare used the details of everyday life for his subject: “All events brought grist to his mill” (U.204; IX.748). The major creative artist discovers in his actual experience the potential within his imagination: “He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible” (U.213; IX.1041–2).

The German Karl Bleibtreu (1859–1928), now largely forgotten, was an immensely prolific German writer, who published more than a hundred works ranging from epic and lyrical poems and plays to critical and scholarly writings. Joyce was interested in his book Die Losung der Shakespeare-Frage and incorporated the theory presented there, that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland, into the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses.

'Well!' thought Alice to herself. After such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down-stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home!' --Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland As the Odyssey's Circe turns from treacherous witch to helpful advisor and takes it upon herself to warn Odysseus against, first, the Sirens, and, second, the twin dangers that are Scylla and Charybdis, she curiously does not immediately proceed to discuss the latter pair. In her preamble, Circe begins by claiming that Odysseus's path is a matter of choice: one leads to the Clashing Rocks or Planctae, the other to Scylla and Charybdis (Od. 12.56-8). It quickly emerges, however, that Odysseus does not, in fact, have a choice: the Planctae, which spare not even the doves carrying ambrosia to Zeus, have only once been successfully crossed, and even so, only thanks to Hera's direct intervention (Od. 12.69-72). How formidable these rocks are can be glimpsed in the fact that the Planctae are known only by a name the gods have given them. In only one other instance does the Odyssey refer to this divine taxonomy--what scholars have called the "language of the gods"; it is when Hermes introduces the molu plant to Odysseus and discusses what makes it unique: (1) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (2) (And the gods call it "molu"; for mortal men / It is hard to dig up; the gods, however, are capable of everything, Od. 10.305-6). Like steering a ship through the treacherous Planctae, to find and dig up the molu is a simple matter for the gods; for mortals, the same task is not so easy. It is implicit in Odysseus's subsequent questions to Circe about how best to tackle Scylla that he does not for a moment consider the Planctae to be a real alternative. (3) Odysseus thus gives up beforehand on a trajectory that is doomed to failure as it leaves no room for him, as a mortal, as a hero without the direct divine protection enjoyed by the likes of Jason, to exercise his famed resourcefulness. There is a strong suggestion here that the Clashing Rocks may belong to a heroic past that cannot be revisited by Odysseus. Circe's introduction is thus significant, for it frames the hero's encounter with Scylla and her counterpart as, unlike the Planctae, a challenge that is not beyond remedy--provided he follows her advice to steer clear of Charybdis and thus stay closer to Scylla. And not only did Odysseus follow the advice, so have most commentators. The pair has been the object of many fruitful studies, but common to these treatments is a stress on Scylla, often to the neglect of Charybdis. Both monsters are, scholars agree, female, engulfing mouths, but Homer's own tendency to humanize Scylla while leaving Charybdis as landscape rather than fully gendered creature has slanted the traditional reading, favoring an interpretive close-up of Scylla. (4) Scholarly discourse, at its most fleshed-out, interprets the whirlpool as an extreme example of the anthropophagous, one of the Odyssey's main structuring themes, and largely leaves it at that. Yet, equally central to the description of Charybdis as a voracious mouth is the tall fig tree perched atop the lower crag that lies in the middle of the vortex. I argue in this paper that a close analysis of Charybdis, and of her unique combination of whirlpool, rock, and fig tree is essential for making sense, first, of the pair of which she is part, and, second, of the role that these two interconnected monsters play in shaping Odysseus as a distinctive kind of epic hero. (5) I suggest that Charybdis's importance lies not merely in being a danger of greater magnitude than Scylla, but in embodying a new type of monster. Charybdis is the threatening (although not absolutely fatal) landscape that Greek navigators must contend with in the real world, the world Odysseus seeks to return to. Scylla, by contrast, represents the old, perhaps even obsolete, model of the nightmarish monster, the kind encountered in the Theogony s catalogue of monsters, and the kind that Odysseus leaves behind, as he left behind Polyphemus in his shattered Golden Age. …

Two chapters, "Scylla and Charybdis" and "Penelope," in James Joyce's Ulysses are crucial to an understanding of the novel as a whole. "Scylla and Charybdis" stands midway in the novel, the ninth of eighteen chapters, and is designed to serve as a kind of exegesis of the writer's methods and intentions. An analysis of that chapter helps to explain the meaning of the controversial final chapter, "Penelope," and to clarify its thematic and stylistic relation to the text as a whole. Ulysses is the story of a quest, actually of many quests that all coalesce into a single goal: the search for value in a modern world that is somehow diminished and constructed in comparison with the Homeric world where mortals strode the universe in company with gods and goddesses. How, in this dwarfed setting, can men and women redefine heroism in secular humanistic terms relevant to twentieth-century life? Almost by definition a quest narrative culminates in the attainment of the goal or in the potential for its attainment; Joyce's Ulysses affirms this possibility in "Penelope."

Joyce's fascination for Shakespeare and his use of his work fuse in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses. In that section the Shakespearean parallels, allusions, echoes, and references are ordered into a pattern rich in detail, rare in texture, and weighted with symbolic complexity. Elucidation of the meaning of "Scylla and Charybdis," in relation to the work as a whole, has been the subject of several studies. This essay does not attempt to work that extremely fertile ground. It is simply concerned with the structure of the episode and in particular with a structural pattern which has so far escaped notice.

When we think of a character for Joyce's aesthetics, we usually think of Stephen Daedalus, not Leopold Bloom. Stephen's neat aesthetic theories in A Portrait and in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses overlap in many ways with Joyce's own. Stephen also resembles the young Joyce, of course-a thin tall lad with spectacles and rotting teeth-and his thought usually comes to us in a literary mask. For these reasons, he seems the logical one to comment on the "linguistic screens" and the "textual anonymity" that we have come to think of