History, Mythology, and 20th Century Latin American Fiction

The history of the Americas from the colonial period is marked by a large influx of persons from Europe and Africa. Fiction in 20th Century Latin America is marked by ties to the Chronicles and the history of human melding in the Americas, with a natural flow of social and religious syncretism that shapes the unique literary aesthetics of its literatures as may be witnessed in representative authors of genuine merit from different regions of Latin America.

No One in Control? China's Battler Poetry

No literary genre is fully predictable or controllable – but some are more unpredictable and uncontrollable than others, and China's battler poetry is a case in point. In China, up to three hundred million people have left the countryside to flee from poverty and make their way into city life. Exposed to the extreme dynamic of global capitalism, these ‘battlers’ are the foot soldiers of China's economic rise but not invariably its beneficiaries. Many live and work under gruelling conditions and are deprived of basic civil rights, as second-class citizens in socio-economic and cultural terms. And… they write poetry. Not all of them by any means, but enough for a phenomenon called ‘battler poetry’ to enter the public eye. What is battler poetry, and what does it do? What happens when dominant logics of ideology, literary aesthetics and cultural expectations encounter the circumstances of battler life? The force field around this poetry is dizzyingly complex and rife with opportunities for disconnect and the unexpected, throwing into sharp relief the randomness that is part and parcel of cultural production.

LITERARY REALISM IN THE SHAPING OF SLOVAK CULTURE

Aim. The aim of the study is to clarify the internal complexity of the Slovak literary realist discourse and its diverse relations to the heterogeneous artistic, cultural and ideological discourses of the last third of the 19th century. Attention is focused on the appropriation and adaptation of stimuli from other social systems, as well as on the specific literary operations that modify literary realism as an artistic discourse constructing an intelligible world in a cultural sense. Methods. As a theoretical concept, realism is defined as a type of representation or representation technique associated with a set of textual conventions, complex referential and self-referential figures. As a literary-historical discourse and event situated in a particular moment of history, realism is governed by period-specific principles (operating in the mechanism of culture) of selection, evaluating and connecting the phenomena of reality. Only with this dichotomy the multiplicity of paradoxes, syncretism and heterogeneous character of Slovak literary realism can be captured. The theory of social systems (N. Luhmann) allows for a more complex view of realist literature as an autopoietic system in the context of modern society as a system of communications differentiated into a network of separate social subsystems interrelated by the medium of language. Finally, the theory of fictional worlds proposes selective and formative operations that explicate the construction of realist fictional world and the stratification of its functions (B. Fořt). Results. Among the configurational relations of Slovak literary realism, the concept of ideal realism is highlighted as a model of literary aesthetics that flexibly interacted with the discourse of national revival to provide an adequate expression of contemporary Slovak cultural and national interests. Two literary-aesthetic modifications of ideal realism (creative and voluntarist, originated by Svetozár Hurban Vajanský, and deterministic, represented in the prose works of Martin Kukučín) are analysed in detail in order to show the inner complexity of the literary-realist discourse and to manifest its semantic multidimensionality in the 1880s.

Addison as Critic and Critical Theorist

In the first half of the twentieth century Addison’s literary-critical and theoretical works were understood as early formulations of a literary aesthetics, as important theoretical statements on wit and imagination, as pioneering exercises in the analysis and sponsorship of vernacular literary texts, as influential popularizations of philosophical ideas. These writings have in recent decades, however, been less regularly a subject of attention. Indeed, in the 1980s and 1990s Addison’s essays in literary criticism and theory were often treated as though they were covert works of political ideology, as affirmations of ‘a hierarchic Chain of Seeing’. This essay takes Addison at his literary-critical word. It stresses the epistemological, rather than the sensational, elements in Addison’s critical theorizing. In particular, it argues that Addison the critic was fundamentally concerned with recognizably Aristotelian pleasures of mimesis. As readers we take a double mimetic pleasure, not only from our recognition of literature’s imitations of the natural world but also from our recognition of the contextual particulars—political, historical, literary, discursive—which inform writings of earlier times.

Portraits of the Nigerian Soldier in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty and Festus Iyayi’s Heroes

An essential feature of Nigerian literatures is their capacity to exploit history and social experience to bring to light the human condition in society without compromising literary aesthetics. Thus, Nigerian novels often appear to be more educative than entertaining by their ability to illuminate social realities far more effectively than historical or sociological texts. This is evident in the representations of soldiers in Nigerian novels which are highly influenced by historical and social circumstances. This paper carries out a comparative and descriptive analysis of portrayals of Nigerian soldiers in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty and Festus Iyayi’s Heroes from a new historical perspective. Most studies on the military in Nigerian novels often focus on their actions in war situations and their disruptive and undemocratic activities in politics. However, these studies frequently explore the military as a group with little attention to the texts as expositions on character types in the Nigerian military. This study therefore contributes to criticism on the nexus between literary representation, history, and society. It further highlights historical and social contexts of military explorations in Nigerian novels and their impacts on the perception of the Nigerian soldier in society. These are aimed at showing that depictions of the military in Nigerian novels go beyond their capacities for disruptions and destructions in society; they represent artistic probing of the nature and character of persons in the Nigerian military.

Flowers in Classical Malay Literature: A Study of Aesthetics

Flowers are among God's amazing creations in the mortal world. There are a variety of flowers in the Malay world, such as the hibiscus, various types of jasmine and the lotus. These flowers are recorded in old Malay texts. Therefore, this paper examines flowers in traditional or classical Malay literature as elements employed, mentioned or used metaphorically for a specific purpose, which clearly shows the wisdom of the Malays of old. The methodology employed for this study was library research as well as textual analysis to analyse relevant data. A conceptual framework related to literary aesthetics was used as the basis of the study. The study finds that in Malay texts, flowers are used for both their figurative and literal meanings. This study is important in demonstrating the ingenuity of the Malays.

PSYCHOANALYTIC MANNER AND ITS RELATION TO THE LITERATURE

This research continues the methodological discussion between psychoanalytically-oriented therapists and their colleagues, who understand the point, the process and the influence of psychotherapy through a CBT-oriented lens. The central point of research is the question of connections between psychoanalysis and literature, or even, of psychoanalysis itself as a kind of literature. The key features of a psychoanalysts mode of thinking is to be found in the plane of aesthetics. It is proposed, that, unlike a CB-therapist, who mainly goes by the rational principles of cognition, a psychoanalyst is prone to experience the reality of psychotherapy in terms of literary aesthetics, and their attempts to verbalize their understanding of the patient is based on a literary perspective. There exists certain similarity between a writers work, as he tries to embody an imaginary character onto a page, and an analysts work, as he tries to incorporate his analytic intuition into a psychodynamic hypothesis and create a psychological portrait of the patient. Thus, the article is focused on the empirical exploration of therapeutic texts, made by therapists based on viewing an unstructured first-session interview, executed by therapists with different levels of psychotherapeutic education, experience and predisposition to psychoanalytic thinking. (For measuring said predisposition an adaptation of the Comparative Psychotherapy Process Scale(CPPS) has been carried out, its inner coherence and diagnostic validity have been established. The results of simultaneous independent criterion-based analysis of the produced texts by literary experts and psychoanalytic supervisors have shown, that the literary aesthetic is an a priory feature of the descriptions of psychoanalysts, and the more so, the higher the analysts therapeutic quality. This does not so much concern the artistic value of the descriptions, but the artistic taste: the ability to distinguish kitsch and artistic form, and the ability to integrate them into new gestalts on basis of sensual harmony. Thus, the evidence supports the claim, that artistic taste is a fundamental feature of a psychoanalysts therapeutic cognition. It is particularly the aesthetic ability of the analyst, which allows for the specific non-goal-oriented approach to his therapeutic influence, which gives room to the development of the true Self according to Winnicott, and further separates the therapeutic process from the goal-oriented therapeutic learning. Thus it is concluded, that the analytic process from the position of aesthetics may fall under the risk of devolving into forms of kitsch practices.

A Literary Aesthetics of War Crime

In order to develop a literary aesthetics of war crime, I examine the phenomenon of moral immunity in military memoir. Using three paradigmatic examples of memoirs of unjust wars characterised by the routine perpetration of war crimes, I argue that moral immunity is achieved by means of three literary devices: literary irresponsibility, ethical peerage, and moral economy. I then employ the proposed literary aesthetics of war crime to provide an answer to the perennial question of the relationship between literature and morality as well as to two specific instantiations of this question, the value interaction debate in literary aesthetics and the ethics of reading in literary theory. My conclusion is that the literary aesthetics of war crime demonstrates both that there is a systematic relationship between aesthetic value and moral value and that there is no systematic relationship between literary ambiguity and moral uncertainty.