Archive for: Текстови објављени у часопису Култура на српском накнадно преведени на стране језике

Irony mocks truth in language by always implying at least two possible meanings: the literal and the figurative one. As such, irony as a figure of speech is conducive to the topics of Zadie Smith’s writing. The omniscient narrator of White Teeth tells the story of a transnational metropolis in an elaborate, ironic tone, verging on parody, in order to bring out the multifaceted and complex relational network that underlies the identities of the 20th century Londoners. The slippage and ambivalence inherent in verbal irony reflect Smith’s multiethnic setting, where no easy labels of identity apply, just as the meaning of an ironic utterance is not singular and is subject to multiple interpretations. The narrator of White Teeth conveys irony on the extradiegetic level with the function to expose how living in a multiethnic society leads to a deconstruction of the subject’s identity and his deeply-rooted, dogmatic truths about himself and the undying Other.

The main subject of this paper is the problem of love as shown in the Old French Arthurian romance called the Vulgata Cycle, especially its last part – La Mort le Roi Artus. This thirteenth century romance is the basis for all other Arthurian tales as it represents a summary of all themes associated with the legends of King Arthur and courtly literature, such as the forbidden love between Lancelot and Guinevere, the quest for the Graal and other adventures of the Knights of the Round Table. The main theme however, woven through each of the presented tales throughout the whole work, is love. Whether it’s the amor encompassed with the ideal of the chivalric code emphasizing its spiritual component or profane mortal love, this emotion is omnipresent in the plot. Based on the examples of many different forms of love, the paper will demonstrate the link between how the emotion of love and its manifestations were described in the romance and what the then leading philosophical theories had to say about amor and emotions. With this comparison an attempt will be made to find the connection between prevalences described in the romance and the philosophical truths.

My central premise is that approaching political literature as a grassroots expression of American democracy offers a crucial vantage point for a critical look at America’s erroneous conceptions of itself. Traceable to the ubiquitous culture of spin, questions about the level of citizens’ participation—or indeed, lack thereof—in the political process are really questions about the degree to which political apathy is rooted in and reflected by the culture in which we all participate.

The central claim in this paper is that literature is cognitively valuable as it offers specific cognitive benefits to the readers. This claim – which I call the intuitive attitude regarding cognitive dimension of literature – is defended against one very specific objection according to which literature offers knowledge already familiar to the reader, which makes it cognitively trivial. This objection – which I call argument from cognitive familiarity – is analyzed from the epistemic point of view, and not, as usually in literary aesthetics, from the aesthetic one. The analysis shows that there are significant cognitive benefits which are available even in those cases where we are already familiar with the knowledge that the work imparts.