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Parsifal (Daniel Mangrané and Carlos Serrano de Osma, 1951) is a little-known film that reflects in its production process some of the twists and turns that Spain and its film culture underwent during early Francoism, as the geopolitical priorities of the Allies in the Second World War evolved into strident Cold War anti-communism. We explore through original documents of the time, available in the censorship archives and film journals, the international ambitions of the film and the various competing agendas (political, cultural, stylistic) that it tried to adhere to. All this, at a time when Spanish cinema had been focusing on domestic priorities and was slowly readying itself to cross borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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An essay is presented on the zombie characterstics of the original work of Richard Wagner, an opera titled "Parsifal," focusing on its themes of passivity, acceptance, and Schopenhauerian hopelessness. It discusses several stage productions that highlighted the zombie characteristics of the Wagner's "Parsifal," as well as its post-apocalyptic connotations, exploring the horros of environmental devastation and immortality relating to the original opera.

La Première Continuation de Perceval contient, dans sa branche III, le curieux récit de la gué- rison de Caradoc par l'attrait du corps 'blanc et tendre' de son amie Guinier. Le dispositif thérapeutique mis en place afin de débarrasser Caradoc d'un reptile qui s'est enroulé autour de son bras associe de manière explicite la chair de la jeune fille à la douceur du lait, d'autant que c'est vers son sein qu'elle attire l'animal venimeux. Nous tenterons de comprendre la logique de cette scène peu étudiée, contrairement aux autres épisodes du 'Livre de Caradoc'. Notre lecture s'appuiera sur la version courte de la Continuation sans négliger pour autant les autres rédactions. Notre analyse cherche à montrer que ce récit contribue à établir une représentation très normative d'une relation amoureuse entièrement orientée vers la procréation. Tout en magnifiant le corps fécond de l'épouse, le 'Livre de Caradoc' affirme une maîrise masculine sur la reproduction humaine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

St. Aelred's Spiritual Friendship (dated between 1164 and 1167) serves as a framework through which we can read and better understand the interactions among knights on the Grail Quest. Ultimately, spiritual friendship proves not only an ennobling act in Malory, but also a necessary step in achieving the Grail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many people in organizations who have feelings of alienation; that is they feel they do not fit in, they get no meaning out of their work, they feel belittled or abused by their superiors or colleagues; they desire to break loose the masks they wear, or to find some sense of meaningfulness. In our paper, we demonstrate our assumption of alienation in the workplace by reviewing a collection of satirical and ironic organizational stories from police officers working at a county sheriff's department. Our argument is that if it seems that alienation might not be resolved through organizational change efforts and interventions, or might not be resolved through radical change of the economic conditions of modern industrial life, then alienation might be changed through the aggregation of individual projects from below. We discuss the possibility of resolving alienation at the workplace by using the legend of Percival as an analogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Richard Wagner spent 37 years developing and refining his final work,Parsifal, which he would not call an opera but, rather, a ‘Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage’. Critical response toParsifalhas historically taken up the work's ambiguous nature as a puzzle to be analyzed and solved, yet treating the opera as a Grail quest for some ultimate meaning reveals more about the seeker than the work and simultaneously errs by distancing the audience from participation in the ritual Wagner orchestrated.Parsifalis deeply psychological in the most radical sense of the word. A depth psychological approach finds the essential value of the work through a direct encounter with the dynamic symbols of the archetypal unconscious, which emerge through Wagner's images and music. Then, the light of understanding emanates from within the drama, from within the music, and from within the landscape and its characters as complex and dynamic autonomous beings – so that it becomes, in Nietzsche's description ofParsifal, ‘an event of the soul’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In John of Salisbury’s 1159 Policraticus, as in Patrick Colm Hogan’s cognitive and Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic literary criticism, bodily vulnerability anchors human perception of significance, and so emotional life, in the pursuit of one’s own flourishing—and that of one’s in-group’s success. But in both cognitive and psychoanalytic accounts, and in John, oral-aggressive predatory dispositions and value systems are subject to constant disruption by non-egocentric modes of registering significance. Read through Hogan and Kristeva, John’s combined emotion theory and political theory illuminate how Chrétien’s 1180s Perceval links the politics of predatory self-advancement to forms of psychic entrapment that only dispositional and political respect for sociality and pluralism might undo. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Perceval's sin in Chrétien's Li Contes del Graal may be better understood through an examination of the debate between Abelard and Bernard regarding unconscious sin, which sheds further light upon the theology that Chrétien himself develops through the narrative means open to him as a layman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the metaphors for abstraction by fragmentation and the disappearing quality that raises poetry. It mentions that the Orphic poet is not satisfied with nothingness and will try to redefine it, frequently in theological or ontological terms. It states that the kind of abstraction related to "Parzival" is one faithful to the subconscious, one that offends laws of the practical in preference of the intuitive.

In his Lohengrin, Wagner contrasts the medieval piety of Wolfram's Parzival with the tragedy of doubt, which ends without reconciliation. The conflict between faith and doubt essentially forms the spiritual substance of Wagner's Lohengrin, from the first conception to the completed score, although in the earliest prose draft--the Prosaentwutf (Prose-sketch) of 1845--a variety of political and historical motives unfold around the main idea. These, however, become increasingly relegated to the background in successive compositional stages of the work. The final score, completed in 1847, accentuates the psychological aspect of the drama through the expressive power of the music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The predominant opinion in contemporary science is that Richard Wagner began formulating his doctrine of regeneration in the 1860s, with a subsequent elaboration in the so-called regeneration writings, creating a sort of theoretical platform for working on Parsifal, a festival play for the consecration of the stage. Wagner's written legacy, however, shows that he had been thinking about regeneration ever since the 1840s, as well as that he used the term in a broad range of meanings – especially considering that he used that word of the French origin as the synonym for the German word Wiedergeburt. This paper focuses on three instances where he referred to regeneration in the fifth decade of the 19th century: a letter from 1843, a text "How do republican aspirations stand in relation to the monarchy?", and a paper Art and Revolution. In 1843, Wagner had only vague ideas about regeneration in art; five years later, while the city of Dresden was eagerly awaiting the revolutionary wave from France, it was the rebirth of human society that he had in mind; after the collapse of the revolution, realizing his limitations and dispelling illusions about its success, he established a correlation – never to be dismissed – between regeneration and art; i.e. he fancied that the regeneration of the being of a nation's members could be achieved by exposing them to the effects of a special, true art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a poetic reading of Trevrizent's lie and his later retraction of it from a poetological perspective. In many forms, Trevrizent presents a reflection of the narrator on the intradiegetic level, the semantics of ableiten, a German word with which he explains the motivation for his lie about angels that has preoccupied many Parzival scholars and how it is poetologically significant. Trevrizent, a character belonging to German literature, relates the circumstances of the Grail to his nephew. Trevrizents' withdrawal, one of German's conflict, can be a angelological and a narratological two fundamentally different approaches to interpretation.

The Grail Castle in Chretien's Le Conte du Graal has long been an object of scholarly enquiry, in part because it contradicts the poem's otherwise normative Arthurian landscape by disappearing and reappearing arbitrarily. This article argues that the Grail Castle's fantastic nature is a result of its function as a mnemonic device, demonstrating that the Castle is a phantasm that represents Perceval's identity. Perceval accesses and explores this phantasm, filling the Castle's empty chambers with memories regarding his family. This interpretation suggests that Perceval's quest for personal and ancestral memory subordinates his quest for the Holy Grail in Chrétien's poem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kafka's last novel, Das Schloss, borrows structural and thematic elements from the medieval grail quest, especially the first extant grail narrative, Chrétien's incomplete Perceval. In Kafka, however, the symbolic object worthy of the quester's efforts (the grail) is absent. The land surveyor's refusal to be motivated by any object other than 'getting to the Castle' is his successful resistance to the oppressive force of authority in the village. Kafka's Das Schloss is a deliberately 'stalled' or 'failed' version of Perceval, which offers its reader a glimpse of what Benjamin describes as a vision of redemption 'on the inner linings' of nothing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilising the first scene of Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal, this paper explores the problematic nature of applying modern psychological theory to medieval literature, and proposes how medieval literature itself may actually provide a useful, and relatively untapped, source for understanding contemporaneous concepts of cognitive and perceptual development. Specifically, it demonstrates how the oddly childlike characteristics of Chrétien’s Perceval, in this often-named Bildungsroman, can be interpreted as mirroring particular schemes of development imagined by Classical and Medieval thinkers such as Aristotle, Augustine and Boethius. The level of influence and popularity enjoyed by the Conte, and indeed by Chrétien’s other works, implies that any scheme of development which can be demonstrated as central to Chrétien’s narrative(s) may have been more widely authoritative. As such, medieval literature may offer the medieval scholar acres of unploughed territory from which to glean a more complete understanding of psychoanalysis in the Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the possibility of using Erich Neumann's schema of the feminine archetype found in his work, The Great Mother, as a means to compare the feminine characters in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. Six female figures from Parzival are analyzed and plotted on Neumann's schema: Herzeloyde, Ampflise, Belacane, Sigune, Cundrie, and Cundwiramurs. Each of these characters displays some characteristic of the Great Mother. Rather than occupying a discreet point on the schema, all of these characters describe a position which moves and thus describes a line on the schema. When considered together these figures describe all the features of the Great Mother. Using this technique it is possible to compare female characters with each other in a very objective way. If this technique were used with several works, one would have an objective method of comparing various female characters from different works with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Letras (0326-3363) is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica Argentina and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article explores the demonstrations of the components of Oedipal and Perceval myths as well as Grail stories in current mythology in North America such as in films. It examines the similarity of the myths to the stories behind the films "Pulp Fiction" and "The Sixth Sense." It is noted that the two films do not show unique allusions to the stories of Perceval and Oedipus as well as the structural opposition between them.

The article presents an overview of the legacy of the three act opera called "Parsifal," which was created by composer Richard Wagner and was based on a poem about the Arthurian nobleman Percival and his quest for the Holy Grail. A discussion of several ways in which Percival and the Holy grail appeared in medieval stories is presented. the plot of "Parsifal" is discussed and examined. Several themes which are apparent in "Parsifal" are discussed. Criticisms of "Parsifal" which were offered by several authors in the late 19th and early 20th century are explored.

The article offers information on life and religious practices of Perceval and his mother in England. It highlights the book "Conte du Graal," which narrates Perceval's upbringing without community or religious involvement. It states that Perceval's and his mother separated their lives from the most important source of grace and hope for salvation. It notes that their separation from the society indicates doubt about the good of humanity and the possibility of reconciliation with others. It explores the previous spiritual experience of Perceval and his mother, to demonstrate that a deep uncertainty about God's presence in the world undelies their solitary life in the Waste Forest.

The place, name, and image of the father lie at the heart of the Conte du Graal's many enigmas. The romance locates knowledge of the father in an inaccessible space ailleurs (elsewhere). As such, the topos of ailleurs provides both unity and structure to the tensions between word and image, knowledge of self and selfishness, or past and future that inhabit the romance. The article proposes an interpretation in which the need to heal the Fisher King coincides with recovery of the father whose existence is revealed to the hero at the outset of his adventures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on how the performance of Arthurian scholar Valerie Lagorio as the Grail-bearer in a Metropolitan Opera production of "Parsifal" influenced her life and career. Lagorio became a searcher of the Grail through scholarship and formed her own Grail community of scholars of mysticism, thereby turning her analysis of the Grail as the spiritual underpinnings of the quest. Lagorio spent the last years of her life caring for the sick and volunteering in a hospice when she retired from scholarship and teaching. Lagorio's scholarship and life committed to the Grail taught and offered a model of the Grail carrier.

The article focuses on lithographs created by the artist Odilon Redon, especially the prints titled "Parsifal" and "Druidess." The similarities between the lithographs are discussed, and it is suggested that Redon manufactured one print by using the image of the other on the same lithograph plate. The characters in the art are discussed and Redon's artistic process is explored as a representation that making art is a process involving multiple steps and attempts.

Titurel, Wolfram von Eschenbach's second narrative poem, contains a pre-history of Sigune and Schionatulander, the ill-fated couple who are presented several times in Parzival without a full explanation of how they met their fate. But the expectation that Titurel will provide a straightforward account of the lovers' past is confounded: its transmission is fragmentary and it frustrates attempts to read it as a contiguous linear narrative. This article proposes a new analysis of these 'difficulties' by focusing on the treatment of time and space. It begins by illustrating the importance of the two categories in the Sigune passages of Parzival before examining how their role in creating narrative cohesion is exploited in the later work. Two conclusions about Titurel are reached. First, the coordinates of the action in time and space are clearest when the lovers are together and happy, more uncertain when they are apart. Second, the references to locations in time and space blur the boundaries between the world of the text, the worlds of other texts, and the real world, with implications for how we read the work and the message it bears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes 'charismatic representation' as the category that makes the three figures of the title comparable. It argues that each of the works creates exemplarity in the main characters by projecting their strength, desirability and destinies into the supernatural, at least to the point where a contest with the supernatural is an option, which ends inevitably in higher reconciliation. After defining 'charismatic representation,' it focuses on the elements that best illustrate that mode and that best invite comparison of the three works: the fantastic, the rise of the hero, and defiance of the gods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the character and values of Acheflour in the tale "Sir Perceval of Galles," which highlights the challenge which the tale poses to the values and philosophy of the androcentric society. Difference in the portrayal of Acheflour in the German and French versions of the tale; Relationship of Acheflour to her son, Perceval; Role and power of women in the tale.

This essay examines the holy grail myth from the perspective of a medieval scholar of working class origin. Presentation of the idea of Perceval as a "smart kid"; Construction of a critique of education and its effects on instilling class values; Parallels between the quest for knightly fame and achieving an education; Need to find a way to link the good and the real of both working class and middle-class worlds into education.

Analyzes the text of the Middle English romance 'Sir Perceval of Galles.' Period wherein it was composed; Speculations on a passage concerning three knights of the Round Table; Information on Perceval's cousins.

The article focuses on the last of four continuations added to French poet Chrétien de Troyes's unfinished book on romance "Perceval." This continuation has been the subject, over the years, of the almost universal opprobrium of scholars. The literary quality of the text has been condemned and it is true that the style of the work is made unnecessarily heavy by a somewhat excessive pursuit of rich rhyme, a fault it has in common with many texts of the period. The continuation contains numerous episodes which feature heroes other than the legendary character Perceval, whether on their own, together, or with Perceval himself. The presence of the legendary character Gauvain comes as no surprise, since he features prominently in most sections of the Perceval cycle. The links with the prose "Lancelot," were noticed long ago, as was the fact that a number of episodes in the continuation are markedly similar to episodes in that cycle. Other three continuations to Troyes's work are also commented in the article.

The article presents a paradigmatic reading of the interrupted discourse which constitutes the text of medieval literary work "Perceval," by French author Chrétien de Troyes. The text was discussed in light of the perspective by French philosopher Jacques Lacan that any discourse can be interpreted according to either a syntagmatic or a paradigmatic reading strategy. The author focused on one line extracted from the episode of the character Perceval's adventure at the Beaurepaire castle.

The article reports on a music history conference held on October 23-25, 2009 in Hamburg, Germany on the subject of the character Siegfried in composer Richard Wagner's opera cycle "Ring des Nibelungen." Topics discussed focused on the conceptual and symbolic relations between Siegfried and the Greek mythological figure of Heracles, as well as the legendary Arthurian character of Perceval. Presentations were given by musicologists including Mischa Meier, Nikolaus Henkel, and Martin Geck.

The article presents the author's view regarding the elimination of admission history and physicals, instead using of the electronic patient record in admitting a patient in Canadian hospital. He presents the Wolfram of Eschenbach's epic poem from 13th century that describes the travel and trials of the medieval legend of the knight Parzival. Moreover, he believes on the therapeutic effect of asking questions that express compassion to a suffering patient.