"Bobok" y "Pedro Páramo", dos narraciones sobre muertos

El presente estudio realiza un análisis comparativo entre la novela del mexicano Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (1955), y un cuento del escritor ruso Dostoievski que trata también el tema del Más allá, titulado Bobok (1873). Paralelamente, se trabaja con la posibilidad de que el relato ruso hubiese podido ser una más de las fuentes literarias de la novela mexicana, y se trata de determinar las posibles conexiones -directas o indirectas- entre las dos obras. Ambas son puestas en común por su género literario, y a partir de ahí se estudian los elementos constitutivos que tienen en común, sus afinidades y divergencias más llamativas.

Paul Karl Feyerabend Las proyecciones de la proliferación teórica en la relación ciencia-metafísica

La doctrina de la Proliferación teórica de Paul Karl Feyerabend ha sido interpretada por sus especialistas como un intento de salvaguardar el ideal del progreso científico. Aunque tales estudios hacen justicia, en parte, a la intencionalidad de nuestro filósofo no explicitan la crítica fundamental que implica para Feyerabend el pluralismo teórico. La proliferación teórica constituye en sí misma una reductio ad absurdum de los distintos intentos del positivismo lógico y del racionalismo crítico por definir la ciencia a expensas de lo metafísico. Este artículo presenta la proliferación teórica como una reivindicación del papel positivo que ocupa la metafísica en el quehacer científico. Se consigna la defensa que hace Feyerabend de la metafísica en cuanto que ésta constituye la posibilidad de superar el conservadurismo conceptual, aumentar de contenido empírico de la ciencia y recuperar el valor descriptivo de las teorías científicas.

The Reception of Byzantium in European Culture since 1500

Studies on the reception of the classical tradition are an indispensable part of classical studies. Understanding the importance of ancient civilization means also studying how it was used subsequently. This kind of approach is still relatively rare in the field of Byzantine Studies. This volume, which is the result of the range of interests in (mostly) non-English-speaking research communities, takes an important step to filling this gap by investigating the place and dimensions of ‘Byzantium after Byzantium’.
This collection of essays uses the idea of ‘reception-theory’ and expands it to show how European societies after Byzantium have responded to both the reality, and the idea of Byzantine Civilisation. The authors discuss various forms of Byzantine influence in the post-Byzantine world from architecture to literature to music to the place of Byzantium in modern political debates (e.g. in Russia). The intentional focus of the present volume is on those aspects of Byzantine reception less well-known to English-reading audiences, which accounts for the inclusion of Bulgarian, Czech, Polish and Russian perspectives. As a result this book shows that although so-called 'Byzantinism' is a pan-European phenomenon, it is made manifest in local/national versions.
The volume brings together specialists from various countries, mainly Byzantinists, whose works focus not only on Byzantine Studies (that is history, literature and culture of the Byzantine Empire), but also on the influence of Byzantine culture on the world after the Fall of Constantinople.

"From Indomania to Indophobia":Thomas De Quincey's Providential Orientalism

Thomas De Quincey’s terrifying oriental nightmares, reported to sensational acclaim in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), have become a touchstone of romantic imperialism in recent studies of the literature of the period (Leask 1991; Barrell 1992 et al). De Quincey’s collocation of “all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions” in the hypnagogic hallucinations that characterized what he called “the pains of opium” seems to anticipate neatly Said’s theory of orientalism, whereby the orient was supplied by the west with “a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere,” the attitudinal basis as he argues for the continuing march of imperialism from the late eighteenth century. Yet, as Thomas Trautmann (1997) has pointed out, orientalist scholarship based in India and led by the influential Asiatic Society of Bengal in the late eighteenth century was extremely enthusiastic about Indian classical antiquity. The early orientalist scholarship posited ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious links between Europe and India, while recognizing the greater antiquity of Indian civilization. This favourable attitude (which Trautmann calls “Indomania”) was overtaken in the nineteenth century by disavowal of that scholarship and repugnance (which he calls “Indophobia”), influenced by utilitarian and evangelical attitudes to colonialism. De Quincey’s lifespan covers this crucial period of change. My paper examines his evangelical upbringing and interest in biblical and orientalist scholarship to suggest his anxious investment in these modes of thinking. I will suggest that the bizarre orientalist fusions of his dreams can be better understood in the context of changing attitudes to the imperialism during the period. An examination of his work provides a far more dynamic understanding of the processes of orientalism than the binary model suggested by Said. The transformation implied from imperial scholarship to governance, I will suggest, is not irrelevant to a world which continues to pull apart on various grounds of race and ethnicity, and reflects on our own role in the academy today.

Relaunching Titanic: Memory and Marketing in the New Belfast

Relaunching Titanic critically considers the invocation of Titanic heritage in Belfast in contributing to a new ‘post-conflict’ understanding of the city. The authors address how the memory of Titanic is being and should be represented in the place of its origin, from where it was launched into the collective consciousness and unconscious of western civilization.

Relaunching Titanic examines the issues in the context of international debates on the tension between place marketing of cities and other alternative portrayals of memory and meaning in places. Key questions include the extent to which the goals of economic development are congruous with the ‘contemplative city’ and especially the need for mature and creative reflection in the ‘post-conflict’ city, whether development interests have taken precedence over the need for a deeper appreciation of a more nuanced Titanic legacy in the city of Belfast, and what Belfast shares with other places in considering the sacred and profane in memory construction.

While Relaunching Titanic focuses on the conflicted history of Belfast and the Titanic, it will have lessons for planners and scholars of city branding, tourism, and urban re-imaging.

Fleuve glauque : les départements de la Seine, banlieue des romans « Spécial Police » de Frédéric Dard

This paper studies the representation of suburbs as a place of anguish in the “Special Police” novels (Fleuve Noir publisher, Paris) by Frédéric Dard. This anxiety, it is argued, is what lends this collection of 25 novels some of their essential qualities, their unhealthy climate and absolute darkness. Dard’s suburbs fit into the traditions of realism; but the atmosphere, characters and plots owe to the American hardboiled school and like in film noir, space is stylized and dramatized, and often used to express a judgment of moral nature. Spatial representations in these novels are part of a critique of civilization and constitute a comment on the social modernization and public intervention in the development of the French territory in the postwar period. The novels written by Frédéric Dard from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s offer a profoundly original representation of suburban angst and what was not yet known at the time as the suburban malaise. Avoiding clichés and excessively connoted referential spaces, Dard anchor these noir novels he called “novels of the night” in landscapes that are both biographical and intertextual. The West Suburbs of Paris and what was
to become the Yvelines department are at the centre of Dard’s novelistic geography, turning into a mythical and deadly space in which is negotiated an acculturation in France of the evil and ruined world described in American noir.

History of several mistakes: on differences between Lev Gumilev and Eurasians

This article challenges prevalent views about Gumilev’s relation to classic Eurasianism. On the basis of previously unavailable correspondence and interviews, it is argued that Lev Gumilev had substantial degree of affinity with the original Eurasian movement understood as a scholarly tradition. This was manifested both in his personal contacts with some of its key members, and in his scholarly work on the nomad history, which remained Eurasian in its spirit. However, the most significant departure from Eurasianism, under-appreciated by most scholars, was his theory of ethnogenesis, which attempted to establish a new naturalistic paradigm for study of history.