Auerbach,Madness, and the East

ABSTRACT

Erich Auerbach’s lack of interest in engaging with non-Western contexts and literatures has often led critics to identify varying degrees of Eurocentric bias in his work. This perception of bias obfuscates the depths of Auerbach’s thought regarding the non-European, who does have a central place in Auerbach’s overall vision, not only of philology and Western literature, but also of humanism and historical progress generally. This articles accounts for the centrality of the non-European in Auerbach’s notion of realism.     

A Single Thread of Meaning: Esperanza Ortega's Hilo solo

Scholarship on Marie de France's Lai de Lanval has long held Guinevere's accusation of homosexuality against Lanval to have been motivated by hurt feelings: it is made, in the words of one commentator, "in the fury of a woman scorned." This article suggests that subtler motives may have been apparent to the text's earliest audiences. By the twelfth century, sodomy was increasingly categorized by ecclesiastical legislation as a kind of treason. Accordingly, it is likely that Guinevere's charge is meant to counter Lanval's insinuation that, in attempting to seduce him, she has tried to lure him into an act of treason as well.     

¿Hacia una literatura de compromiso? Cohesión social desde el individuo en La muerte de Kurt Cobain de Care Santos

Socially committed writing in contemporary Spanish narrative scene sometimes eliminates the possibilities of depicting individual realities. Care Santos's novel La muerte de Kurt Cobain (1997) develops the case of a unique young girl who goes through a life-changing experience during a summer when she has to overcome personal issues in order to form her persona. The novel is half crime-fiction since there is a mystery to solve and half bildungsroman due to the formation of the personality of the female lead character. Coming of age by becoming a human being, a friend, a sister, and a woman is the main focus of this text, which rejects generalizations regarding youth as a reckless period of life and embraces adulthood as a natural process of growth. Young Spanish girls represented in Santos's work are portrayed through the protagonist who contributes to build a human and cohesive society that stems from the level of commitment of the individual.     

Dwelling Brothers,Oozing Oil,and Descending Dew: Reading Psalm 133 Through the Lens of Yehudite Social Memory

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the ways in which Psalm 133 contributes to and is shaped by social memory in Yehud. By reading this psalm as a voice within a larger discourse of cultural memories, the images of brothers dwell-ing together, flowing oil, and dew can be understood to fit within a standard narrative structure according to which the Yehudite community fashioned its stories, highlighting a sense of continuity between Israel’s perceived golden age and its anticipated utopian future. In this paper, I argue that through the collective reliving of shared memories, the community was able to virtually participate in the glorious existence that it perceived to be due to it as YHWH’s chosen people, contributing to a sense of collective identity.     

Hallucinations and Pathological Visual Perceptions in Maupassant's Fantastical Short Stories- A Neurological Approach

Maupassant excelled as a realist writer of the nineteenth century, with fantastical short stories being an outstanding example of his literary genius. We have analysed four of his fantastical stories from a neurological point of view. In “Le Horla,” his masterpiece, we have found nightmares, sleep paralysis, a hemianopic pattern of loss and recovery of vision, and palinopsia. In “Qui sait” and in “La main” there is also an illusory movement of the objects in the visual field, although in a dreamlike complex pattern. In “Lui,” autoscopy and hypnagogic hallucinations emerge as fantastical key elements.

The writer suffered from severe migraine and neurosyphilis involving the optic nerve, which led to his death by general paralysis of the insane (GPI). Visual loss and visual hallucinations affected the author in his last years, before a delirant state confined him to a nursing home. Our original hypothesis, which stated that he could have translated his sensorial experiences coming from this source to his works, had to be revised by analyzing some of his earliest works, notably “Le Docteur Héraclius Gloss” and “La main d’écorché” (1875). We found hallucinatory symptoms, adopting the form of autoscopy and other elaborated visual misperceptions, in stories written at age 25, when Maupassant was allegedly healthy. Therefore, we hypothesize that they may be related to his hypersensitive disposition, assuming that no pathology is necessary to experience such vivid experiences. In addition, Maupassant's abuse of drugs, as illustrated in “Rêves,” could have provided an additional element to outline his painstaking visual depictions. All these factors, in addition to his up-to-date neurological knowledge and attendance at Charcot's lectures at “La Salpêtrière,” armed the author for repetitive and enriched hallucinatory experiences, which were transferred relentlessly into his works from the beginning of his career.     

George Sigerson: Charcot's translator*

Abstract

Senator George Sigerson (1836–1925), Dublin's first neurologist, was also a significant contributor to Anglo‐Irish literature. His medical career and literary accomplishments are outlined, the focus of the article being Sigerson's friendly relationship with Charcot (with whom he corresponded), and whose Leçons sur les maladies du système nerveux he translated.     

Creating a socialist canon for children: Lea Goldberg dictates a revolutionary dualism in labor movement children's literature in the 1940s and 1950s

Lea Goldberg served as a key literary taste-maker in the labor movement children's literature for a period of about 25 years, from the mid-1930s until the end of the 1950s. This essay focuses on the peak of her activities in this field, a period beginning in 1943 and ending around 1960. These were the years of her uncompromising struggle to establish a children's literary canon through Sifriyat Po'alim, the publishing house of Hashomer Hatza'ir and Hakibbutz Ha'artzi federation. The essay explores the strategies employed by Goldberg in her pursuit of a meaningful balance between two contrasting labor movement approaches towards the revolutionary role of children's literature: the “political” approach, which recruited children's literature in order to promote revolutionary kibbutz values; and the “poetic” modernist approach, which defined literature itself as revolutionary. By maintaining a dialectic tension between the two models of a revolutionary “literary beautiful,” Goldberg led a quiet revolution in the hegemonic labor movement children's literature of her time.     

The astrolabe: Its uses and derivatives

Despite the technical means available for its diffusion, the information explosion is such that a diminishing proportion of geographical literature achieves the circulation that it deserves. The problem is illustrated by reference to a single country — Finland. In the case of such a country, even assuming familiarity with its languages, access to significant publication often proves impossible save on its home ground. Examples of three types of geographical literature are reviewed — 1) literature from the past which merits wider acquaintance because of its enduring value; 2) literature from the present which, on the score of methodology or theory independently of content, deserves attention, but which — not appearing in internationally familiar outlets — is unlikely to gain recognition; 3) similar literature directly relevant to the geography of Finland in the publications of cognate disciplines. The rate of change in the geographical scene and the volume of publication generated make it increasingly difficult for the would‐be specialist in even a relatively narrow field to keep up‐to‐date and to speed the circulation of information.     

Max Pulver’s Himmelpfortgasse: Fictionalizing the 1920s Cocaine Craze in German-Speaking Europe

Abstract

In the years following the end of the First World War, cocaine achieved unprecedented popularity in Europe, a development reflected in the number of novels dealing with cocaine use by writers from across the Continent. One such is Max Pulver’s Himmelpfortgasse, first published in 1927, which tells of a Munich-based intellectual torn between his respectable bourgeois existence and his cocaine-fuelled passion for a young Viennese painter. After a brief interlude in Berlin, the protagonist follows his new love to Vienna, but their relationship soon deteriorates. The plot of the novel is unremarkable, but its depiction of three separate cocaine-using cliques, each based in a different city and each with a distinct social position and political orientation, vividly illustrates the extent to which recreational use of cocaine spread across geographical, socio-economic, and ideological divides in the period in question. Moreover, the narrator’s essayistic reflections on the function, effects, and social practice of cocaine use allow for productive cross-reading with contemporary toxicological sources. Pulver’s novel also occupies a curious position in literary history. As well as being one of several European cocaine novels of the inter-war period, it shows substantial thematic and stylistic links to the treatment of cocaine in the writings of Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn dating to the previous decade. Himmelpfortgasse’s Expressionist elements add to its distinctiveness, but have probably also contributed to the novel’s relative lack of commercial and critical success.     

重大事件对城市空间结构的影响:研究进展与管理对策

在全球化竞争日益激烈的背景下,举办重大事件已成为许多城市进行重新定位或推动城市跨越式发展的一种途径。重大事件为综合运用结构主义、制度主义等多种方法研究城市空间结构的演化与重构提供了一个难得的契机,但国内外学术界关于重大事件对举办城市空间结构影响的专门研究还比较缺乏,特别是对于事件背景下城市空间要素怎样发生演变以及城市如何借助事件契机对空间结构进行优化的研究还很薄弱。本文通过梳理国内外有关重大事件对举办城市空间结构影响的文献,初步厘清了重大事件对举办城市空间结构的影响因素及作用方式,进而为事件举办城市提出了指导性的战略管理框架,并指出了现有研究存在的不足与未来发展方向。