NEOPHILOLOGUS最新文献

Abstract

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Pepe Carvalho detective novels comprise a seminal series, spanning eighteen novels from 1972 to 2004, that consolidated the novela negra as a popular, denunciatory genre in Spain. While much has been written about the early entries in the series, the latter novels, namely El hombre de mi vida (2000), Milenio I: Rumbo a Kabul, and Milenio II: En las antípodas (2004), have not received similar attention. Critics like Colmeiro, Balibrea, and Nichols have accurately read these novels as a denunciation of the most evident negative consequences of globalization at the turn of the new millennium, principally gentrification, displacement, and the exploitation of both labor and natural resources. Here, I expand this analysis to consider another of the deleterious effects of free-market rationality: The increasing personal alienation that has come to characterize modern neoliberal societies, a phenomenon recently analyzed by political philosophers like Brown (2015) and May (2012), and psychologists such as Verhaeghe (2014). I argue that, as the Carvalho character evolves throughout the series and neoliberalism achieves cultural hegemony, the depiction of the solitary protagonist in the final three novels denounces the growing isolation of the individual in a transnational society. This is reflected in the trope of the voyage, Carvalho’s nostalgic melancholia, and the progressively alienated condition of the marginalized detective as his relationships with others, tenuous in the best circumstances, begin to fully disintegrate.

The essay identifies the Grammar/Glossary of the homilist Ælfric as the source for the continuous Old English gloss to the prose version of Abbo of St Germain’s Bella Parisiacae urbis Book III, which occurs in two manuscripts. The borrowings are very frequent, amounting to more than 250 in an edited text of just 90 lines. Analysis shows Ælfrician Old English matching sometimes Abbo’s main text, sometimes Abbo’s original Latin glosses. The essay argues that the Abbo gloss was executed by the scribes of the similar glossing to Aldhelm’s prose De virginitate in Brussels, RL 1650, those same scribes who wrote the Antwerp-London Glossaries. A conclusion contextualizes the Abbo glossing within the curriculum of a monastic school.

In this paper I offer a reading of Virginia Woolf’s story “A Haunted House” from the perspectives of hauntology and heterotopic spatiality. I argue that, initiating with this story, spectrality prevails in Virginia Woolf’s writing and haunts her literary corpus. By examining the mystical element rhythmic practice brings to the story, and by linking it to thencept of haunting and spectrality, I discuss the use of haunting and spectres to question modernity’s connection to the past. I emphasize that Woolf questions the relation of modernity to the past, which does not necessarily mean that the past has always negative connotations for her, but rather that she distrusts modernity and suspects that it might betray her. By focusing on the quintessential role of the house, I claim that the house transforms into a heterotopic place where boundaries between spaces and times blur and the past, the present, and the future merge, as a result of which the house becomes a space of encounter, which is a way of resisting the rigid conceptualizations of spatio-temporality.

Based on a study contrasting the spellings of the Ormulum’s (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1) Hand C with those of Orm, this article proposes that final < tt > did not necessarily indicate a short preceding vowel in the hypothesized spelling system which Orm sought to reform, and that the Ormulum’s double accent marks might serve to prophylactically counteract a spelling habit present in Orm’s house of doubling final < t > following an etymological long vowel. It argues thus against previous explanations which tend to construe the double accents as redundant markers of vowel length. Further evidence is adduced to suppose that the unexpected doubling of final < t > could have been a post-Conquest orthographical tendency arising from the intermixture of English and (Anglo-)French spelling systems.

Marriage and the relationship between husband and wife in medieval literature have often been analyzed from many different points of view. However, there is an aspect which remains unexplored and this is the analysis from a discursive perspective of the conversation between the knight and his lady before he departs in search of adventures, war or whatever other reason. This study aims to verify if there is any kind of coincidence or similarity in the arguments used by the lady in different texts, when she tries to stop her husband from leaving. Therefore, in the present study conversations concerning the departing of a knight from his lady shall be analyzed in Icelandic, German, French, Catalan and Spanish chivalric texts of the Middle Ages, taking into account the consequences of the knight’s departure for the lady, for the knight and for the marriage bond itself. A detailed analysis of the lady’s arguments intending to keep the knight by her side seems to lead to a hypothesis concerning the existence of similar arguments across literary texts in different languages.

In 1964, Sudamericana Publishing House printed in Buenos Aires the second edition of the Spanish version of the novel Ferdydurke (1937) by Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. Apparently, it was identical to the first publication in Spanish (by Argos Publishing House, Buenos Aires, 1947); however, the text had been extensively revised according to Ernesto Sabato’s indications. Furthermore, a new prologue written by Sabato substituted the previous initials materials. This article documents and explains how this revision, the new prologue, the decision to publish in Sudamericana, and the publicity given to the book were conscious decisions either by Gombrowicz or by Sabato in search of editorial success. Their final goal was to place the novel and its author in a visible and privileged place in the Argentine and Spanish-speaking literary system. The study also focuses on the textual differences between Ferdydurke’s first and second Spanish editions: it tries to explain how and why specific changes were made and the implications of these changes.

The ruined-city motif in the Old English poem The Wanderer (lines 73–87) has long been read as a reflex of traditional Germanic diction, and as a symbol of material transience. In line with more recent biblical readings of the poem, this paper identifies a number of analogues and possible sources for both the excidio urbis image and other images of transience, in the biblical Book of Ezekiel. Among these correspondences between The Wanderer and the prophetic biblical narrative are references to scavenging animals, traditionally read as Germanic ‘beasts of battle’ when encountered in the Old English elegies. Reading this passage alongside Gregory the Great’s Homilies on Ezekiel further illuminates how the poem’s structure and changing use of tense corresponds with contemporary thought on the revelatory processes of prophecy. It is here proposed that the Old English poet has chosen to use images and devices which resonate with both biblical and traditional vernacular poetic diction.