Chinese Gretchen in Russian Literature: on the Genesis and Attribution of M. Shkapskaya’s Poetry Book Tsa-Tsa-Tsa

This article examines in detail Maria Shkapskayas poetry book Tsa-Tsa- Tsa (1923) and its handwritten genesis. It explains the role and significance of ancient Chinese poetry for this literary piece of work. The problem is to attribute the texts that make up the book and find out their translated or stylized basis. The general thesis is that all the poetic texts of the book are translations: the names of Tao-Yuan-Ming, Du Fu, and Bo-Juyi indicated by Shkapskaya in the manuscripts are reported. One of the texts in the book is attributed as the Sixth Poem from the Shi ju gu shi ( Nineteen Ancient Poems ). The removal of the names of Chinese authors (not only in the book published in 1923 but also in the manuscript of 1921) and the alignment of the thematic word series silk, crane, thousand, spring that organize the book into a single text indicate a tendency to blur the border of the own-alien text (even though the book was treated by the author as translation from the Chinese, in autobiographies and correspondence). This trend leads to the appearance of a central artistic image of the book (it is a feature of M. Shkapskayas poetic books). It is the image of a lonely, longing woman. The mention of the spinning wheel connects this image with the popular (especially in Western European literature) image of Gretchen. This way the poetry book Tsa-Tsa-Tsa goes beyond the narrowly translated work and reveals some features of chronologically later literary trends (such as postmodernism and metapoesis).

Buffoonery in the Speech of the Character and the Issue of Historical Form in the Novel The Winter of Our Discontent by J. Steinbeck

The intention is to explain some aspects of hybridization of language consciousness in this literary work. The aim of the study is to clarify the issue of a word in the novel, which was updated by M.M. Bakhtin. The general thesis is that the tendency to hybridization explains the juxtaposition of serious and funny within the characters utterance: the border between prosaic reality and the characters own world is found precisely when he turns to jokes. The speech of the character indicates a tendency to aestheticize the household environment. This trend leads to a high-intensity hybridization of everyday words and Holy Scripture . The novel The Winter of Our Discontent is more than a didactic literary work and reveals some features of the picaresque novel, but the necessary feature of the picaresque novel is the first-person narrative. Instead of this form of narration the character and the narrators points of view are brought closer together in the novel by J. Steinbeck. The literary work with the features of the picaresque novel remains multidimensional and does not reduce only to one of the existing novel forms, and typologically is rather anti-picaresque. The characters buffoonery gives him the right to detachment, due to which the skewed nature of other characters in the novel is overcome. The language hybridization in this work plays a key role in understanding of the novel.

Grounding the Open Future

In this chapter, Patrick Todd considers how presentists can argue that the future is open, holding fixed that they maintain that the past is not. He argues that any such presentist argument is doomed to failure, if it proceeds by appeal to a general thesis about truth (such as that “truth supervenes on being”). Thus, he contends, presentist open futurists should not argue for the open future from an intuition about truth in general, but from an intuition about the future in particular. The result, however, is that presentist open futurists cannot make their case by appeal to anything like a metaphysically neutral starting point. Nevertheless, due to certain asymmetries between facts about the past and facts about the future, a presentist open future view remains substantially theoretically motivated.

“Good translating is very hard work”

Upon immigrating to New Zealand in 1937, Austrian-born philosopher of science Karl Raimund Popper lived and worked in the English-speaking world, where he published his major works in English. Life events forced him to engage in various forms of self-translation around the same time that he began earnestly working on translating Presocratic philosophical fragments into English. While he rejected language wholesale as an object of philosophical reflection, translation became an exception, a privileged occasion for philosophical reflection on language. This article reads Popper’s thoughts on translation in the context of previously unpublished correspondence between Popper and potential translators of Conjectures and Refutations (1963, third edition 1968) from English to German. The article thereby mediates the tension between Popper’s outspokenly perfectionistic demands on potential translators and his general thesis that scientific or philosophical language need only be as precise as the problem at hand requires.

BIBLE QUOTES AND IMAGES IN THE POETRY OF MARIA SHKAPSKAYA

This article is the first to examine in detail the complete corpus of Biblical quotations in the poetry of Maria Shkapskaya, including unpublished handwritten texts. The article uses the material in books Mater dolorosa (1921), Chas vecherniy (1913—1917) (The Evening Hour (1913—1917), 1922), Baraban Strogogo Gospodina (The Drum of the Strict Master, 1922), Krov’-ruda (Blood-ore, 1922), Zemnye remyosla (The Earthly Crafts, 1925) and the poem “Yav’” (“Reality,” 1923), as well as texts from the notebooks of 1903—1907, 1913—1920 and Vcherashnee, a project of a book of poems (Yesterday, 1916) with a preface by Z. Gippius. The intention is to explain the role and significance of the biblical corpus of texts for the author's poetry. The task is to consider in chronological order all the poems by Maria Shkapskaya that are somehow related to the texts of the Holy Scripture, while clarifying the author’s basic principles of working with these texts. The thematic inversions characteristic of Shkapskaya’s poetry are revealed. The general thesis states that the nature of Shkapskaya’s appeal to the texts of Holy Scripture has changed over the years, and her attitude to them has consistently shifted from neutral-calm to a tense one that requires dialogue. Growing increasingly more conflicted and questioning over time, Shkapskaya’s quoting of biblical texts assumes the nature of a personal experience, which clearly indicates the author’s reflections in this direction and a deeply religious understanding of the surrounding reality and poetic creativity as such.

Oblicza ezoteryzmu

Esoterism belongs to those phenomena present for a long time in culture which caused and still cause certain interest, as well different kinds of reservations and raise certain questions. The main issue is however made here by the fact that it had taken and still takes various forms and it is being perceived and presented differently by both - its followers and its academic researchers. In these remarks I will recall several exatmples of that. Although none of those researchers aren’t willing to marginalize and trivialize the issue they do differ in the judgment of its cultural impact. I’m willing in that matter to share the general thesis by saying that it had played and still does an alternative role to the socially dominant forms of culture.

Disagreement and Deep Agnosticism

One defense of the “steadfast” position in cases of peer disagreement appeals to the idea that it's rational for you to remain deeply agnostic about relevant propositions concerning your peer's judgment, that is, to assign no credence value at all to such propositions. Thus, according to this view, since you need not assign any value to the proposition that your peer's judgment is likely to be correct, you need not conciliate, since you can remain deeply agnostic on the question of how the likelihood of your peer's judgment bears on the likelihood of your own. This paper argues that the case for deep agnosticism as a response to peer disagreement fails. Deep agnosticism (as a general thesis) implies that it is sometimes permissible to withhold judgment about whether there is a non-zero chance of a proposition's being true. However, in cases of disagreement where deep agnosticism is supposed to support the steadfast position, such withholding isn't rational. This is because of constraints placed on rational credence by objective probability or chance, which ensure that rational credence adequately reflects strength of evidence.

Beyond the Moral Domain: The Normative Sense Among the Chinese

In this paper we report a study on how different types of normatively relevant transgressions are evaluated by Chinese participants. We hypothesized that, given the continuing influences of Confucian worldview on contemporary Chinese societies, the Chinese will not make a distinction between moral (daode) and conventional norms of cultured behavior (wenming). Our results indicate that Chinese participants expressed a strong normative conviction not only towards harmful and unfair actions, usually subsumed under the moral domain in Western literature, but also towards violations of what would be widely accepted as conventional (or cultural) norms. Similarly, Chinese participants expressed a strong normative conviction towards violations of the traditional Chinese value of family reverence (xiao), thus further supporting our general thesis. Moreover, results indicate that, overall, explicit consi­derations of wenming (unculturedness) emerged as the best predictor of a normative conviction response among the Chinese. Though considerations of harm and fairness also emerged as significant predictors of normative conviction response. The results are discussed in the light of recent debates about the moral/conventional distinction and the scope of morality.

The Embodied Self and the Paradox of Subjectivity

While it seems obvious that the embodied self is both a subject of experience and an object in the world, it is not clear how, or even whether, both of these senses of self can refer to the same self. According to Husserl, the relation between these two senses of self is beset by the “paradox of human subjectivity.” Following Husserl’s lead, scholars have attempted to resolve the paradox of subjectivity. This paper categorizes the different formulations of the paradox according to the dimension each pertains to and considers the prospects of each proposed resolution. It will be shown that, contrary to the claims of the respective authors, their attempted resolutions do not really resolve the paradox, but instead rephrase it or push it to the next dimension. This suggests that there is something deeper at work than a mere misunderstanding. This paper does not aim to resolve the paradox but instead initiates a new approach to it. Instead of seeing the paradox as a misapprehension that needs to be removed, I dig deeper to reveal its roots in ordinary consciousness. Investigating the proposed resolutions will reveal the fundamental role of the natural attitude, and I will argue that already the general thesis of the natural attitude makes the decisive cut that leads to what Sartre calls a “fissure” in pre-reflective self-awareness. The phenomenological reduction deepens the cut into what Husserl calls the “split of the self,” which in turn engenders the paradox of subjectivity. The paradox’s roots in the structure of ordinary consciousness not only constitute a reason for its persistence, but also suggest a new way to further investigate the embodied self.

Introduction

The Introduction offers an overview of the book’s contents as well as a statement of the book’s general thesis: representations of plague in Latin epic play critical roles in diagnosing and rehabilitating a civic body wracked by discordia. They do so partly by staging a conflict between the concerns of the individual and the interests of the collective res publica. Lucretius, Ovid, and Vergil innovate within the tradition of plague writing by introducing new symptoms and social effects of contagious disease, and by emphasizing the expurgating properties of plague. Such properties allow these poets to weigh the possibility of an entirely new order against the likelihood that any civic body will bear traces of old pathologies.