Literature

Far from new, correlative and comparative conceptualizations of Jewish and queer studies go back to one of queer theory’s first, and most influential, accounts: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990). This article revisits Sedgwick’s comparison between the gay and the Jewess’s acts of coming out to delicately destabilize her dichotomized differentiation of them. Unconditionally endorsing her condemnation of homophobia, I nevertheless shift my lens to center Esther’s, rather than gay men’s, narrated experience at the heart of the article. Closely and carefully examining Esther’s utterances and performances throughout the entire Book of Esther to trace a multifaceted understanding of her fictionalized figure, I conflate Sedgwick’s narration of Esther with more elaborate examinations of Esther’s literary construction. Capturing Esther’s fluid textuality, I contest the very assumption that one’s coming out as queer—within cultural as well as sexuality discourses—indicates her intention to define and/or confine herself along strict, systematic, and/or static taxonomies.

Letters by the Secretary of the Exiled Duke :
Hungarian Mikes in Rodosto (Turkey) at the “court” of Duke Rákóczi II
The sunrise of premodern literary movements i.e. the secular approach (after the Baroque), and the “belles-lettres of sensibility” (as the Sentimentalism is lately called by the specialists in the field) — all these requires from the authors of the fictions to analyse more and more deeply the human soul. It was not provided enough space for it in the static genres as the epos, classicist drama, even the spiritual writing e.g. of Theresa of Avila. Therefore it was necessary the new, dynamic genres were to be unfolded. Those were more “fitting” for depiction of the psychological processes. Hence the rebirth of “Confessions” as a literary genre, rooted in the heritage of Augustine, must be taken for a significative example. The mostly fitting genre for this new task was the literary letter as well. It was fairly reflected in the 18th century history of Hungarian literature when the exiled Duke Franz Rákóczi II wrote his “Confessions” and his secretary, Kelemen Mikes his thirty-year flow of literary letters. Duke Rákóczi, after he headed the resurrection against the Habsburg Empire for independence of Hungarian Kingdom in 1705-1711, went to exile to France then Turkey, with his narrow court, including his secretary Mikes, who was of origin from Transylvania. The exiled Duke wrote his “Confessions” to the Lord, contributing much for renewing the Hungarian literary language, and investigating his psyche while describing events, those outraged his country and himself. His secretary Mikes wrote a long series of letters to his imagined aunt; although some researchers lately came to the opinion that she was a really living person. Parallel to the Confessions by the Duke, the Letters by Mikes described: the story and circumstances of the exile; behavior of the Turkish “Porte” as it used the exiled Hungarians for tools of the power in diplomatic games; last but not least, depicted the processes of changes those were to be suffered by the a human souls in the exile, while becoming from establishment of a country to tolerated “guests” of the Turkish Sultan. This flow of letters was a great contribution to the Hungarian Sentimentalism, in the following aspects:  literary letters often expressed unfolding and evolving of the love (e.g. the love-games in the French novel “Les Liaisons dangereuses” i.e. “The Dangerous Relations” by Choderlos de Laclos), these letters from exile expressed not less but more human emotions, as even love, humour, joy as well, not only sadness although being in exile; renewed language and literary tools when the Romanticism was already at the corner; on a special way: Mikes was of Transylvanian origin, a son of particular part of territories inhabited by Hungarians, thus his language, meaning, style and spirit are very specific, as reflected in his writings. This thirty-year flow of letters made a great impact on the Hungarian literature; Mikes was cited, was addressed, became subjects of poems and fiction, his topics appeared in reminiscences and motives, during the last two centuries up to recent days.

Durante el siglo XVII se desarrolló una compleja cultura en la Nueva España, donde Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y Eusebio Kino expresan su interés por los fenómenos celestes, signados por la constelación de Pegaso.

Si potrebbe dire che la letteratura sia la creazione di dimensioni nelle quali agiscono diverse teorie della mente, e nel caso della letteratura contemporanea spesso scrivere è istallare direttamente il lettore nello spazio nel quale si dispiega una teoria della mente.

The Book of Revelations describes the Holy City, a New Jerusalem with transparent glassy streets and pearly walls – a city so heavenly that, “The nations will walk by its light” (Revelation 22.24). All nations, the poor, outcasts, all races, all human forms, will dwell forever within the Light of the Lord. In The City of God Saint Augustine developed this Heavenly City as an idealized polis, as an eternal haven of joy above and beyond the material world of the dying Roman Empire. “An eternal haven of joy”, a “light for all human forms” signals the emotional dimension of the utopian promise for the oppressed, the noncountable, the marginalized, the different, the singular. Today, after the catastrophic failure of the communist projects at the end of the last century and the global domination of liberal democracy, perhaps more than ever we miss this emotional side of the utopian faith. Perhaps this is the reason for the recent theological revival and the unusual upturn in interest in political theology.
The utopian side of political theology today calls us to reexamine and rethink what it means to be a human self and what selves might be together. How are contemporary politics, art and culture contaminated by different forms of the sacred? How is dominant liberal discourse and the myth of modernity as a pure secular form of politics interiorized and maintained? How does the discourse of ‘crisis’ connect to submissions of the oppressed and production of the sense of a ‘damaged future’? Does any emancipatory project require what Simon Critchley calls both a counterfactual faith and utopian faith in radical social imagination as a performative alternative to biocapitalism?

Outi Paloposki and Kaisa Koskinen: ‘Reprocessing texts. The fine line between retranslating and revising.’ Across Languages and Cultures 11(1), 2010, 29–49.

Retranslations are a frequent object of study in Translation Studies. They can be used as data for a number of research problems, or retranslation can be studied as a phenomenon of its own. There are no large-scale surveys on retranslation, however, let alone surveys that would be coupled with in-depth case studies; no doubt due to the laboriousness and complexity of such task. Our own interest in the issue started from a small-scale project testing the so-called Retranslation Hypothesis, but gradually our research expanded to focus on the phenomenon as a whole. We have addressed three main areas: the extent and proportion of retranslation in Finland (including lists and timelines of retranslated literature); the motives for and reception of retranslations (publishers, readers); and finally, what happens to a text when it is retranslated (textual analysis). For this purpose, we have compiled three different sets of data in Finnish translated literature. These sets consist of synchronic data (retranslations and their reviews from the year 2000), diachronic data (retranslations of classics lists compiled in 1999 and 1887) and case studies (works by e. g. Victor Hugo, Nikolai Gogol, Astrid Lindgren and Juan Valera translated into Finnish). This paper presents an overview of the results of our own study, argues for a need for a comprehensive treatment of retranslation as a phenomenon, and discusses the implications of textual analysis to the understanding of what retranslation is. of The cases presented include Hugo's Les Miserables, Gogol’s Dead souls and Lagerlöf's Gösta Berling.

Contiene las notas introductorias del libro "Crónicas de la Montaña". El mismo pretende hacer un acercamiento al periodismo del escritor utuadeño Francisco Ramos Sánchez. Libro que los interesados en su lectura lo pueden conseguir en CreateSpace.com y Amazon.com