First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The article concentrates on a key concept of the Fin de Siecle in Europe – namely, “dilettantism” and its connection with Czech Decadent literature. Dilettantism, as explained by Paul Bourget in his essay on Ernest Renan , is characterized by the individual’s refusal to forego any possible experience by adhering to a setmode of life. The “dilettante critic” originates in the idea of the “critic as artist” as developed by Oscar Wilde, who in turn is indebted to Pater’s conception (...) of the “aesthetic critic.” In dilettantism there are many pitfalls: the dilettante may be the perfect embodiment of the “Decadent” type with his Willenskrankheit, hypertrophied analysis, over-refinement, hyper-aestheticism, eclecticism, and sterility. Arnošt Procházka , for instance, applies the term “dilettante” to Andrea Sperelli , modelled on Huysmans’s Des Esseintes. The controversies over Dilettantism appear here as an expression of an exclusive concern with “life,” a concept that a cornerstone of philosophical debate of the period. (shrink)

This volume contains a selection of nine essays with an interdisciplinary perspective. They were originally presented at the Sixth International Conference on Word and Music Studies, which was held at Edinburgh University in June 2007 and was organized by the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The contributions to this volume focus on self-reference in various systematic, historical and intermedial ways. Self-reference - including, as a special case, metareference (the self-conscious reflection on music, literature and other (...) medial concerns) - is explored, among others, in instrumental music by Mozart, Mahler and Satie, in the structure and performance of (meta-)operas, in operatic adaptations of drama and filmic adaptations of opera, as well as in intermedial novelistic references to music. The essays cover a historical range from the 18th century to the present and are of interest to literary and opera scholars and students, musicologists as well as all readers generally interested in medial self-reference and intermediality studies. (shrink)

This is the first volume in any language that collects Hannah Arendt's remarkable series of essays and notes on literary figures and cultural questions.

A distinguished group of authors reflects on problems currently enlivening the space shared by philosophy and literary theory in a series of chapters that range in scope from Plato to postmodernism.

Introduction In "search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing, and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake," Umberto ...

Intense debates about who will lead the Muslims after the death of the Prophet Muḥammad (PBUH) occurred among the Aṣḥāb (companions of the Prophet Muhammad). A group of Aṣḥāb claimed that the caliphate was the right of Ḥaḍrat ʿAlī and his descendants. This movement, which emerged as political advocacy supporting Ḥaḍrat ʿAlī (d. 40/661) and his children, took on a sectarian identity called Shīʿa by time, was divided into groups, and then spread to different places in the Islamic World. One (...) of these groups is the Ismāʿīliyya which took its name from Ismāʿīl b. Ḏj̲aʿfar al-Ṣādiḳ (d. 138/755). Ismāʿīliyya had believed that the Umayyads and the ʿAbbāsids usurped the right of Ḥaḍrat ʿAlī and his descendants; therefore, they struggled against these dynasties secretly under the leadership of ʿUbayd Allāh al-Mahdī (d. 322/934) and by means of callers. After establishing their first state Fāṭimids in the North Africa with the Berbers, the Ismāʿīlīs carried out their activities openly and seized a region from Barqa to the Atlantic Ocean. The Fāṭimid State based on sectarianism aimed to follow the Shīʿa belief rather than controlling an area since its establishment. In this respect, the Fāṭimids, who differed from the ʿAbbāsid and Umayyad states, made great efforts to capture Egypt and Andalus by increasing their propagandas through callers (dāī) from the end of the third century. Because of this effort and successful policy of al-Muʿizz li-Din Allah the third, they conquered Egypt. The callers played a key role in the Egypt. As the Sunni-Maliki sect had taken root in Andalusia, Ismāʿīlīs could not achieve the same success, and a limited number of people embraced their doctrine. However, they managed to direct some famous intellectual and literary men to their side. Undoubtedly, one of the most important achievements was Ibn Hāniʾ al-Andalusi (d. 362/973). Ibn Hāniʾ, who had to leave Andalusia, as he was a Shiite, went to Maghrib and came under the patronage of the governors of Masila, which depended on Fāṭimid. His poems about governors spread his fame and made him known until al-Qayrawan, the capital of Fāṭimid. One of the methods used by many of the caliphs and amīrs (ruler) to consolidate their rule within the borders of the state and to spread their influence abroad since the Jahiliyya (pre-Islamic period) is that they included poets who praised themselves and the state policies, in other words, made their advertisements in the palace. Ibn Hāniʾ was one of the poets Caliph Muʿizz invited to his palace in al-Mansuriyya as soon as he heard of the poet’s fame. Ibn Hāniʾ came to the presence of Caliph in 350/962 and named as al-Mutanabbī of Maghreb as he became famous than poets such as Abu'l-Qasim al-Fazari and ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Iyadi. In time, Ibn Hāniʾ who became one of the sincerest friends of Muʿizz, used all his creative potential to defend the Caliph and deliver the views of Ismāʿīliyya in return for the value and generosity he received from the Caliph. Thus, the poet, who became the most powerful defender and propagandist of the Fāṭimids who pursued an expansionist policy in the East and the West, introduced an innovation to his style of praise contrary to his classical style. Accordingly, he gained great reputation thanks to his poems that praised the Fāṭimid Imāms, especially Muʿizz using expressions attributing him superhuman properties. Naturally, the successful politics followed by Muizz and the doctrine and terms of the Shiite-Ismāʿīliyya party, which the poet advocated, had a distinct reflection on his odes. Moreover, the issue of Ahl al-Bayt (the family of the Prophet Muḥammad) and injustices they suffered, affected the poet’s feelings deeply, and he did not hesitated to express these injustices in his poems without worrying about any danger. These odes reported to be the first written documents including information about the Fāṭimid creed and the traits, which Fāṭimid Imāms were supposed to have, are important resources for researchers. Fāṭimids believed that the imām was innocent, knew everything, and he would intercede his friends on Judgment Day. They even saw him as superhuman and attributed holiness and glory to him that would make him the spirit of God. Furthermore, they regarded that the imām was the reason of life. Similar themes were very common in Ibn Hāniʾ’s poetry. His poems went beyond the borders of the states in the North Africa, spread to a large region extending from Andalusia to Baghdad, and provided recognition of the doctrine of Ismāʿīliyya. This study consists of an introduction and two parts. The introduction part includes brief information about the history of the Shīʿa-Ismāʿīliyya and Ibn Hāniʾ’s life and poetry. The other parts discuss reflections of the Shīʿa-Ismāʿīliyya belief in the poet’s odes and analyses of these poems. Finally, poems having historical and political value related to Karbala, which has profound effects on Shiite literature, are analyzed. (shrink)

In Music in the Mirror, thirteen distinguished scholars explore the concept of music, music theory, and music literature as mirror images of one another?whether real or distorted. Encompassing the history of music and music theory and literature from the Middle Ages to the present, these essays, in their reconsideration of the relationships among music, theory, and literature, offer new approaches and articulate compelling visions for future research.

Folklore in Buddhist and Jaina Literatures. An account of the life of the common people as reflected in Pali, Prakrit and Apabhramsa works. Sures Chandra Banerji. Bibliotheca, Indo-Buddhica 37, Delhi 1987. xv, 120 pp. Rs 130.

Self-reflection plays a key role in healthy human adaptation. Self-reflection might involve different capacities which may be impaired to different degrees relatively independently of one another. Variation in abilities for different forms of self-reflection are commonly seen as key aspects of many adult mental disorders. Yet little has been written about whether there are different kinds of deficits in self-reflection found in mental illness, how those deficits should be distinguished from one another and how to characterize (...) the extent to which they are interrelated. We review clinical and experimental literature and suggest four different forms of deficits in self-reflection: sense of ownership of one’s own thoughts and actions, emotional awareness, distinction between fantasy and reality and the integration of a range of different views of oneself and others. We propose how these different impairments in self-reflection are linked with one another. (shrink)

This paper proposes a teaching alternative that can encourage the ethical reflective sensibility among students of social entrepreneurship. It does so by exploring the possibility of using religious parables as narratives that can be analysed from Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to provoke and encourage ethical discussions in social entrepreneurship courses. To illustrate this argument, the paper makes use of a parable from the New Testament as an example of a religious narrative that can be used to prompt discussions about social entrepreneurs’ ethical (...) dilemmas. The paper adds to the limited works that consider the teaching of ethics within social entrepreneurship education. It also advances studies that seek alternative strategies to teaching ethics in business contexts, making these strategies discernible for discussion within the broader business and management literature. (shrink)

Music may have a strong influence on literature. Many novels have reflected this by thematizing music in many different ways. However, this engagement can also adopt the form of an imitation or a formal presence that does not actually require the text to say anything about music. This paper aims to explore some aspects of musical imitation in literature that have not been analyzed in depth. Departing from the approach developed by Werner Wolf, I propose a distinction between (...) imitating and imitated elements that applies to any case of study. Furthermore, at the core of this article, I advocate for a fourth dimension that the imitation of music in literature may have and that should be added to word music, formal and structural analogies, and imaginary content analogies. I call this fourth category “graphic analogies.” It implies an imitation whose imitating element is the graphic, written aspect of the linguistic signifier. Finally, this leads to the idea that, in the case of the imitation of music in literature, there is not a necessary correlation between imitating and imitated elements. (shrink)

In recent years, multidisciplinary study has become all the rage in academic circles. Scholars have been going all out for interdisciplinarity, not only in research programs, but pedagogically in the classroom, and structurally in higher education curricula. Fewer and fewer cautionary voices are being heeded or even heard in this conversation. In this essay, I advocate a mediating position on this issue that has emerged from reflecting on my own professional work with interdisciplinary scholarship. That work includes research, scholarship, and (...) teaching in the fields of theology, religion and science, and religion and literature, as well as ten years of editorial experience with the American Journal of Theology and .. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas’s doubts about the ethical value of artistic beauty have been widely acknowledged by the vast majority of Levinas’s commentators. However, though it is true that in “Reality and Its Shadow” Levinas persistently rebukes artistic beauty for its nonethicality, it is undeniable that he at least upholds the value of artistic criticism and modern literature. In this article I intend to relate Levinas’s exploration of the possibility of spiritual–ethical teaching in literature to Immanuel Kant’s reflections on the (...) relation between the feeling of beauty, that of sublimity, and sensible feeling in his third Critique. This up-close comparative examination fosters understanding of Levinas’s religious and philosophical approach to the sublime elements in some literary works, especially those of Fyodor Dostoevsky. (shrink)

Imagining super rich women in the real and fictional world has long been a struggle. Those few depictions that do exist are scattered across time periods and literary genres, reflecting the legal restrictions that, at different points in time, would not allow women to accumulate assets independent of the patriarchal forces in their lives. The scarcity of extremely wealthy women in literature and film is confirmed by Forbes magazine’s list of the fifteen richest fictional characters that features forty different (...) fictional men and only nine women, with never more than two female characters nominated in a single year. This article explores the depiction of three exceptionally wealthy women: Cruella de Vil in The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) by Dodie Smith, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens, and the figure of the stepmother in various adaptations of “Cinderella.” I demonstrate how the protagonists’ wealth allows them to manipulate others and disconnect themselves from patriarchal and societal expectations. Further, I argue that these affluent antagonists are “rogued” by their respective narratives, highlighting their perceived anti-feminine and emasculating behaviour resulting in a mode of narration that greedily gazes at and shames their appearances and supposed unattractiveness. While this genealogy of rich rogues reiterates the narrow scope of imagining wealthy women on the page and on the screen, there are moments in the narratives that disrupt stereotypical depictions of these wealthy characters who defy the labels imposed on them. (shrink)

Literature is a complex and multifaceted expression of our humanity, one dimension of which is ethical content. This striking collection of new essays pursues a fuller and richer understanding of five of the central aspects of this ethical content. These aspects are: the question of character, its formation, and its role in moral discernment; poetic vision in the context of ethical understanding; literature's distinctive role in self-identity and self-understanding; patterns of moral growth and change that emerge from the (...) philosophical reading of literature; and the historical sources and genealogies of some of our most central contemporary conceptions of the ethical dimension of literature. The volume engages with literary work from Homer to J. M. Coetzee, Shakespeare to David Foster Wallace, and explores the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Levinas, and others. This rich collection presents some of the best new thinking about the ethical content that lies within literature, and it shows why our reflective absorption in literature is the humane--and humanizing--experience many of us have long taken it to be. (shrink)

This is a philosophical review of the exhibition dedicated to Literature – Art titled Mukhaputa (Cover page) held on occasion of the Manipal International Literature and Arts Platform 2017 in Manipal, India. The curatorial strategy of the exhibition explores the intersectional relationships between literature and visual arts at large. The context of this critical review is the recent past of modern literature journals in print that encouraged artists and illustrators to converse with literature and in (...) turn poets and authors to be artists in their own right. Through a reflection on the nature of new forms of art works submitted by various artists to the exhibition, the review situates new methods of interdisciplinary curating which is highly contingent and speculative. Curation, thus, demands a new reading in terms of its role in interdisciplinary creative practice. (shrink)

Though it reflects on the play of Paine's name and links it can establish, this essay is concerned with the role of fiction in the performativity of texts, both literary and nonliterary, and especially texts which, like Thomas Paine's Common Sense, affect to abjure any literariness for their political efficacy. The author reads Paine with Blanchot in elucidating the power of a certain fictionality, at work for instance in the performatives that found a democratic nation.

There is a rapidly growing public interest in nanotechnology such that people increasingly buy various books to inform themselves about nanotechnology. This paper tries to measure the public interest focus on nanotechnology and its relation to the public interest in other fields of knowledge by applying a new method. I combine formal network analysis of co-purchase book data with traditional content analysis. The method is successful in identifying the books that the public reads to be informed about nanotechnology, in distinguishing (...) between different kinds and classes of books and thereby between different interest foci and readerships and their relations. The results suggest that nanotechnology is for many the first intense contact with science and technology and that they read a great variety of different kinds of books. Rather than on general introductions to current research written by scientists or science journalists, readers focus on forecasting and visionary literature including business guides, written by software entrepreneurs and business consultants. Unlike expert readers, who connect nanotechnology to other fields of science and engineering, the broader public connects it to visions about dissolving the human/machine distinction. Although the distinction between non-fiction and science fiction is still important for readers, border-crossing authors increasingly blur it. (shrink)

The theme arises from the legal-academic movement "Law and Literature". This newly developed field should aim at two major goals, first, to investigate the meaning of law in a social context by questioning how the characters appearing in literary works understand and behave themselves to the law, and second, to find out a theoretical solution of the methodological question whether and to what extent the legal text can be interpreted objectively in comparison with the question how literary works should (...) be interpreted. The subject of justice and injustice has been covered not only in treatises of law and philosophy, but also in many works of literature: On the one hand, poets and writers have been outraged at the social conditions of their time. On the other hand, some of them have also contributed fundamental reflections on the idea of justice itself. (shrink)

The original essays in this book address the influential writings of Peter A. French on the nature of responsibility, ethics, and moral practices. French’s contributions to a wide spectrum of philosophical discussions have made him a dominant figure in the fields of normative ethics, meta-ethics, applied ethics, as well as legal and political philosophy. Many of French’s deepest insights come from identifying and exploring the scope and nature of moral responsibility and human agency as they appear in actual events, real (...) social and cultural practices, as well as in literature and film. This immediacy renders French’s scholarship vital and accessible to a wide variety of audiences. The authors, recognized for their own contributions to the understanding of the nature of morality and moral practices offer new and unique positions while exploring, expanding and responding to those of French. The final chapter is written by French, in which he provides both new philosophical insight as well as some reflection on his own work and its influence. This book will appeal to philosophers, as well as advanced students and researchers in the humanities, social sciences, law, and political science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and ArtSusan FeaginDeeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art, by Jenefer Robinson; 516 pp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005, $35.00.Jenefer Robinson's lucid yet closely-argued book has four parts. The first part presents a theory of the emotions in general. The second part develops and defends the view that "some works of (...) class='Hi'>literature... need to be experienced emotionally if they are to be properly understood" (p. 3) and draws some implications for other arts. Part Three develops a new theory of expression, and Part Four examines the expression of emotion in and listeners' emotional responses to music. Robinson applies her theory of emotions and how they arise and are expressed in response to individual works of art throughout, and the extended discussions of Edith Wharton's The Reef and one of the intermezzi from Brahms's Opus 117 set are not to be missed.Robinson's use of psychological research to develop a philosophical theory of emotion is characteristic of an increasingly popular practice in the philosophy of mind. Her descriptions of this often highly technical literature are among the best with respect to accuracy and clarity. On most accounts, emotions are mental states; on Robinson's, they are mental processes. These processes are always initiated by "an automatic 'affective appraisal' [that] induces characteristic physiological and behavioral changes and is succeeded by... 'cognitive monitoring' of the situation" (p. 3). The appraisal is also referred to as a 'non-cognitive' appraisal, which may sound like an oxymoron. Robinson explains: these appraisals are non-cognitive "in the sense that they occur without any conscious deliberation or awareness, and that they do not involve any complex information processing" (p. 45; see also p. 59). Appraisals have a valence, positive or negative, sufficient to induce a characteristic pattern of physiological and (roughly, involuntary) behavioral responses, such as alterations in galvanic skin response and movements of facial muscles. These changes are succeeded by cognitive monitoring of the situation, resulting in conceptually more sophisticated assessments of one's initial response with respect to its suitability to the circumstances and in relation to one's beliefs. Thus, cognitive monitoring generates the more cognitively complex emotions, and here she is in agreement [End Page 420] with the "judgment theorists" (p. 90) that these emotions are individuated by cognitions. Robinson seeks a univocal account of emotions for humans and other sentient creatures, though with humans it is possible for a "complex cognition" to trigger the process that constitutes having an emotion and cognitive feedback may occur in general throughout the process in ways that are not possible for creatures lacking the relevant complex mental capacities (p. 93).The fact that complex cognitions can constitute the initial stage of an emotion makes it possible to respond emotionally to literature. As in emotional situations in real life, emotions are initiated by automatic affective appraisals that have to do with one's own wants and interests, calling our attention to something important in the novel, which may lay down its own memory system, linked with bodily feelings, which is then subject to cognitive appraisal and reappraisal. Cognitive reflection facilitates the understanding of narratives as well as characters, and with respect to the latter, she argues, deploys the same mental systems that are engaged in understanding people. Further, it is not merely the beliefs that one may acquire as a result of the process that is educational, but the process of emotional understanding itself (p. 155). Indeed, Robinson endorses the strong claim that for at least some novels, those that are part of the "Great Tradition" of nineteenth-century realistic British and American literature, it is necessary to experience them emotionally to understand them.Part Three exposits a theory of the expression of emotion simpliciter and then makes adjustments to it to build a theory of expression in art, taking advantage of Romantic theories of expression developed in the works of, for example, Collingwood. Reflection on ordinary expression allows an artist to clarify and articulate "what it is like to go through the emotion process," which may be revealed both in the... (shrink)

In this article, we develop an approach for the moral assessment of research and development networks on the basis of the reflective equilibrium approach proposed by Rawls and Daniels. The reflective equilibrium approach aims at coherence between moral judgments, principles, and background theories. We use this approach because it takes seriously the moral judgments of the actors involved in R & D, whereas it also leaves room for critical reflection about these judgments. It is shown that two norms, namely (...) reflective learning and openness and inclusiveness, which are used in the literature on policy and technological networks, contribute to achieving a justified overlapping consensus. We apply the approach to a case study about the development of an innovative sewage treatment technology and show how in this case the two norms are or could be instrumental in achieving a justified overlapping consensus on relevant moral issues. (shrink)

This study aims to examine the philosophical life values of the Manggarai people in Western Flores, which are reflected in the proverbs of the Manggarai language (Go'et). Go'et is an oral literature that contains the values that govern the life of the Manggarai people. This study uses a qualitative descriptive approach design involving semantics theory to interpret the meaning of Go'et. The data in this study were obtained by conducting in-depth interviews with one of the Manggarai community leaders with (...) the initials AW (52) and secondary data available on the Manggarai Nuca Lale website. The data obtained were then validated using the Indonesian-Mangarai dictionary to find samples that fit this study. Nine data are relevant to the scope of this study based on the results of data collection that have been done. From the data found, the researcher concluded that there are three central values in go'et which contain advice and instructions for living a life under the norms that apply to the Manggarai community, such as unity, Manners and Wisdom, and passion and hard work. These findings are consistent with the fact that the Manggarai people uphold the values of unity, cooperation, and harmony among community members. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wittgenstein’s Reflection in Lewis Carroll’s Looking-GlassLeila S. MayAccording to one tradition in the theory of fiction, there is a kind of fantasy whose function is to invite the reader to "acknowledge the possibility of a different reality."1 In this essay I want to ask whether Lewis Carroll's Alice books fit into this category; that is, I want to explore the possibility that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through (...) the Looking-Glass are not the pure nonsense that many readers take them to be. In considering the Alice books as fantasy offering a view of a "different reality" I do not deny that there are in these stories some mimetic elements alongside the fantastic—representations of things going on somewhere, somehow, in Victorian society—in which case the "different reality" presented will not be so terribly different as to be unrecognizable. For example, the Mad Tea Party in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is not only an act of fantasy but also an act of mimesis. It certainly imitates the real tea parties often held throughout Victorian England—if caricature is a form of imitation—but it may also mime those mock tea parties held in English asylums whose goal was to model sane-like behavior to the inmates.2 An analogous question can be asked about Carroll's books in general: In addition to the component of fantasy, are they mimetic of Victorian culture itself, or merely of the Victorian conception of madness? Michel Foucault has argued that, while the very idea of la folie is an historical construct, the dialectical relationship between reason and unreason, with each pole parasitic on the other, is a structural constant. Carroll's Alice books produce images that are discharged in the confused nineteenth-century landscape where these two opposites meet. In that respect, his books are not so different from many of the more standard novels written in mid-century England. In this essay I [End Page 79] will explore features of this landscape, using a theoretical framework that has been synthesized from a number of related claims in the work of the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In addition to my long-range aim of urging further study of Wittgenstein's work by literary critics, one of my specific goals is to show that the application of Wittgensteinian methods to the works of Lewis Carroll reveals something about the hidden logic of Carroll's stories, and conversely that this procedure tests some of Wittgenstein's intuitions concerning language. Yet another goal is to suggest that the structure of the discourse of domesticity as reflected in many mid-nineteenth-century novels is curiously similar to the structure of discourse in Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land—that the language-games played at these sites are at the same time functional and dysfunctional in much the same way. That may seem like a lot to attempt in a few pages,... but to paraphrase Humpty-Dumpty, when I ask words to do that much extra work, I pay them overtime.In 1965 the philosopher George Pitcher published an essay, "Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll," in which he sought to demonstrate "the remarkable extent and depth of affinity between these two great writers with respect to nonsense." In addition, he showed that "the very same confusions with which Wittgenstein charged philosophers were deliberately employed by Carroll for comic effect," and that many of the examples that Wittgenstein used to illustrate his points "resemble, in varying degrees, examples that are found in the works of Carroll."3 While I agree with Pitcher's observation that the examples of nonsense that Wittgenstein offers are very similar to a primary strain of nonsense that runs through the Alice books, in the first section I intend to go beyond that observation and to apply some of Wittgenstein's tools to Carroll's work and show that Wittgenstein's work can be used to reveal features of literary narrative that might otherwise be obscured, and in the second section, to apply these tools to the works of fiction this side of the Looking-Glass.IWittgenstein says that a language is a "language-game." He... (shrink)

The subject of the study is the Christian discourse of the English TV series «Robin of Sherwood» (1984–1986). As a methodological basis for the scientific work, a philosophical-hermeneutic approach is used, presented, in particular, in the works of W. Dilthey, H.-G. Gadamer and M.M. Bakhtin. The most important structure of understanding is the principle of the «hermeneutic circle», which assumes that the text as a whole is understood through each of its parts, and the part through the whole. In addition, (...) understanding arises in the process of «dialogical cognition», a dialogue between the author, as well as the text as a subject, and the reader (viewer). The content of the series «Robin of Sherwood» is analyzed in the specific historical conditions of the 1980s. This is a period of growing social and cultural protest caused in Europe and the United States by the policy of neoconservatism and the reduction of social guarantees. Many phenomena previously classified as counterculture are becoming fashionable and becoming mainstream, including the legacy of paganism, pre-Christian mysticism and mythology. The article shows that the creators of the series intended to present Robin Hood not only as a leader of social or national resistance, but also as a defender of the ancient pagan religion against the new, Christian. An analysis is given of episodes from the first two seasons of the film, which trace criticism of the Christian church as an institution, as well as specific monks and clergy. In the third season, the critical pathos towards the church practically disappears. However, the author comes to the conclusion that it is the first two seasons that demonstrate the development of the moral consciousness of the characters from pagan to Christian, and Christian discourse is present in the film text, perhaps contrary to the original intention of its creators. There is also a reception of the Christian discourse of the series in the Russian and, more broadly, Russian-language literary Internet space, which is reflected in discussions on relevant literary and historical forums, as well as in works of fan literature. (shrink)

The contribution offers some pedagogical reflections dedicated to the theme of tenderness in education through the exploration of a repertoire of excellent picture books published in the field of children’s publishing. The poetic investigation of the suggestions from the bibliographic corpus highlights ethical, aesthetic and pedagogical aspects of bodily imagery and experiences, linked to the sensitive, ethical and emotional dimension of education. The reflection interweaves perspectives from the pedagogy of the body with the interdisciplinary study of children’s literature (...) and proposes a pedagogical reflection, with didactic and formative repercussions, on the iconographic and narrative representations of the postures of care, play and the educational relationship. (shrink)

In the late 1920s – early 1930s, the Russian poet and novelist Konstantin Vaginov (1899–1934) wrote four novels which reproduce various discourses pertainingto the Russian humanities (philosophy, psychology, linguistics, study of literature) of that time. Trying to go back to the source of the corresponding theories and “hidden” quotations by identifying their authors allows us to include Vaginov’s prose in the general intellectual context of his epoch. Analysing Vaginov’s prose in the light of the history of ideas enables us (...) to understand how a number of philological and philosophical trends were interpreted by particular groups of Soviet intellectuals (for instance, writers and poets who were Vaginov’s contemporaries). Besides, it allows us to propose a new interpretation of Vaginov’s novels and their evolution which corresponds to his perception of humanities around him: their many tendencies and peculiarities become unacceptable for the writer in the 1930s. (shrink)