PTE Journals (University of Pécs)
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Identity in The House on Mango Street, Beloved, and in The Woman Warrior: Names and Naming
Full text linkIt becomes apparent at first reading that in any of the three works to be examined, naming (i.e. the naming of characters by the authors, the characters’ addressing themselves and each other individually or in community, the names identifying them when they are spoken to by members of the white majority) has much relevance in the shaping of identity. In ethnic literatures, where personal and communal identity as well as identity in the larger context of society are a matter of life and death, names do matter for both writer and reader, and deserve attention
"The Present of Things Future" in Fiction
Full text linkWe cannot speak meaningfully of the future without taking into consideration the past and the present. Of those scholars or thinkers who have discoursed on the relation of the past to the present to the future, few have done so as cogently or as memorably as Saint Augustine in Chapter XI of his Confessions. There, he ponders over the question, “What is time?” concluding:
What then is time? I know what it is if no one asks me what it is; but if I want to explain it to someone who has asked me, I find that I do not know. Nevertheless, I can confidently assert that I know this: that ifnothing passed away there would be no past time, and if nothing were coming there would be no future time, and if nothing were now there would be no present time. (XI: 14, 267)
Whose Immortality Is It Anyway? The Hungarian Translations of Shakespeare\u27s Sonnet 18
Full text linkText and translation mutually function as one another’s context both in terms of style and cultural history. None of Shakespeare’s sonnets is easy to translate, but Sonnet 18 would seem to be especially difficult to render. The turns of its intellectual-emotional structure, the dramatic changes of its poetic message, the verse music of its rhyme scheme, the referential ambiguities of the sonnet, the relationship between sense and sound, metre and rhythm, the intricacies of imagery and the daringly innovative treatment of tradition present and represent complexities that test the translator, try the adventurer, and challenge the challenger
The Irish Contribution to British Drama in the Eighteenth Century
Full text linkIt is widely accepted that with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne of England in 1660, English drama underwent a new and historically important phase of development. For the first time, actresses appeared on the English stage, now modelled on the French tennis-court style, and painted scenery in perspective laid the basis for a more realistic portrayal of life. In these new theatrical conditions, whereby the proscenium stage slowly developed into the nineteenth-century pictureframe style, tragedy received the kiss of death, comedy the kiss of life. This is not to say that tragedies were not written after 1660. On the contrary, tragedy as an art form had such a high cultural profile that its continued existence was guaranteed up to the end of the nineteenth century. Thus the five-act tragedy in blank verse, with a setting in remote times and places, carried on the Shakespearean tradition right up to Alfred Lord Tennyson. But Restoration tragedy is lifeless and artificial in contrast to the liveliness and sheer zest of Restoration comedy. Even the best ofthe Restoration tragedies, by Dryden, Congreve or Southerne, make dull reading today, and as the eighteenth century advanced the only spark of originality in tragedy came when the domestic, prose tragedy was introduced, in plays such as Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731) and Moore’s The Gamester (1753), plays which had as their main purpose the teaching of some lesson to the youth of the day. These domestic tragedies were to pave the way for French and German drama of ordinary life, and eventually for the social dramas of Henrik Ibsen. But in the meantime English tragedy in its mainstream form remained remote and artificial, having little or nothing to do with real life. Comedy, on the other hand, which is always more closely related to realism, rapidly developed as a witty and daring reflection of the manners and morals of an aristocratic society. The comedies of Dryden, Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve were heavily indebted to the French theatre, especially to the theatre of Moliere, but they managed to transport this form to London with such success that a new genre was invented: the English comedy of manners (cf. Muir)
From Beckett to Havel: Absurdist Playwrights of Western and Central Europe Compared
Full text linkThe creator of the term of the absurd drama, Martin Esslin (who was born in Budapest, Hungary) published his book The Theatre of the Absurd in 1961. The term he used to characterize a trend in then contemporary drama soon became popular and mis-used. Esslin felt it important to draw attention to the sense in which he had intended to use the term. In the preface to the 1968 edition of his book, he stressed that the term of the Theatre of the Absurd was only a working hypothesis, a concept to give basis for the comparative analysis. “How could that have led to the assumption that Beckett and Ionesco should behave towards each other as members of the same club or party? Or that Pinter subscribed to the same views on politics or law as Genet? Only by profound misunderstanding” (Esslin, Theatre 12)
Gender-Related Reading, Writing, and Charlotte Bronte: : Does a Woman Reader Make a Difference?
Full text linkIn the past two decades feminist critics have demonstrated that gender leaves its traces in literary texts. They argue that gender determines everything, including value systems and language structures; as Elizabeth Abel said, “sexuality and textuality both depend on difference” (173). The introduction of gender—which is biological sex in the world of culture—into the field of literary studies works as a new phase in feminist criticism, claiming that all reading and writing, by men as well as by women, is marked by gender. By the time gender studies enter literary studies as critical discourse it is one more way of talking about books, authors and readers. This paper attempts to reveal how reading and writing relate to gender while focusing on female writers in general, and on Charlotte Bronte and her female audience in particular
The Origins of Broadcast Education in the U.S.
Full text linkSome ten years after the licensing of the first commercial radio station in the U.S.—Pittsburgh’s KDKA in 1920—radio courses began to appear in the curricula of what were then called speech departments, the forerunners of today’s communication departments. As outgrowths of existing courses in public speaking and drama, radio courses addressed such topics as announcing, diction, microphone techniques, directing, scriptwriting, singing, and acting. According to a survey conducted by the Federal Office of Education, some two dozen colleges or universities offered some version of a basic “radio speaking” course in 1933 (Koon 6-9). By the end ofthe decade, in many institutions the basic radio course had spun off separate classes in production, speech, writing, and other special topics, and several universities had begun to offer degrees in broadcasting (McReynolds 44-45)
Folk Music: : Property of the Peasantry?
Full text linkThere is a prevalence among people to look upon folk music as something quaint, pastoral and ancient, as though God when creating the world had equipped each nation with three hundred or so folk songs and commanded its people to care for them as best they could. Folk music is looked upon by one part of the community as inviolable and sacred, by another as irrelevant and out-of-date. Neither attitude does any good to the musical oral tradition