Agnieszka Kocik

Bacchus/Master Merry-face: the malicious power of an “antiquaille”

Charles De Coster is a master in drawing on legends, including those he forges himself. In a creative and uncanny language, underpinned by the medieval coloration, he becomes a remarkable image- maker. In the tale Les Frères de la Bonne Trogne [The Brotherhood of the Cheerful Countenance], the writer appropriates a tradition that comes from far away, to endow it with the Belgian colourful characteres of yesteryear. To recount the advent of Bacchus, the emblematic figure of the wine civilization, an antique motif is accompanied by a local mythology: among beer lovers, in some part of Flanders, during the time of the Good Duke... The god of drunkenness, absent from the title of  decosterian fiction, is astutely baptized “Monsieur de la Bonne Trogne” [Master Merry-face] by the men of Uccle who establish in his honour a jolly brotherhood. Based on this scenario, the paper examines how the representation of Bacchus responds to a conglomerate of mythical elements (more or less allusive), to which is added a strong sense of  somewhereness.

The growth of anti-mathematics sentiment at the beginning of the 19th century

At the threshold of the nineteenth century, the collapse of the salons, the new gestalten of education, a new role of literature and the occurrence of the pre-romantic sensibility resulted in a remarkable increase of the yawning gap between the scientific communities and literary men. A prejudice against mathematics gave a new lease of life to the reintroduced belief that pursuing mathematics corrupts hearts and cools human imagination.

The aim of the present paper is to restore the epistemic and ideological background that allows one to understand the terms of the debate and to identify opposing ideas. With this end in view, the paper focuses on the cultural and philosophical opinions of François-René de Chateaubriand whose The Genius of Christianity (1802) extremely polarizes the attitudes of supporters and opponents towards mathematical thinking and abilities.

In the XIXth century, a legendary aura surrounded the mastership of Dutch artisans. In 1878 Henry Havard published his history of Delft faience, Histoire de la faïence de Delft, considered to be first rigorous elaboration on this matter. Havard carefully studies an ambiguous beginning of the ceramic industry in city of Delft. He attributes the establishing initiative to Herman Pietersz, who was a local plateelbacker, that is an earthenware manufacturer. Almost twenty years later Eugène Demolder published his Quatuor (1897), a set of four fictional tales. In one of them, titled La Fortune de Pieter de Delft, Demolder makes a fictional hero – Pieter de Delft – the founding father of Delft pottery. The hero is plateelschilder, a painter of pottery, who one Sunday, inspired by snow, “in the bliss of mind and aroma of savoury victuals,” full of Schiedam’s jenever creates the fancy artwork. After introduction, the paper suggests reviewing the tale La Fortune de Pieter de Delft using the alchemical key in order to describe the type of perception that the hero is equipped with: “imaginal vision” (regard imaginal, Paolo Mottana).
 

Raj wschodni, raj zachodni: ogród George Sand (Laura, albo Podróż do wnętrza kryształu – próba odczytania)
Artykuł jest próbą interpretacji wizji ogrodu w powieści Laura, albo Podróż do wnętrza kryształu w świetle baśni Tysiąca i jednej nocy, hipotekstów Biblii i Eposu o Gilgameszu, estetyki miniatury perskiej oraz bachelardowskiej wyobraźni materialnej. Refleksja koncentruje się wokół symbolicznego wymiaru raju mineralnego obecnego w wizji zaproponowanej przez George Sand. Wizja ta wynika z antymaterialistycznych postulatów romantycznych, a jednocześnie zdaje się szczególnym wyrazem zainteresowań przyrodniczych i orientalistycznych epoki oraz samej autorki Laury.

“A Burial at Paris” by Gustave Flaubert (Sentimental Education, 1869)

The paper focuses on the passage on the burial of the banker Dambreuse in chapter IV of the third part of Sentimental Education (L’Éducation sentimentale, 1869) where there is a portrayal of the path from the final illness to the agony and, above all, to the tomb of a rich Parisian. The funerary scenography that Gustave Flaubert sets in this scene radicalises the break with the intimate code of death. It deprives the deceased of the role of protagonist of the drama to make room for the public management of death: the gestures and parades that regulate the ritual, beyond the collective and spiritual investment in death.

Epistemology and a new rationality in the early nineteenth century in France: the concept of point de vue

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how spatial experience is reformulated into the experience of the mental ‘horizon’, which reveals the process of conceptualization of point de vue (point of view). The review of French dictionaries and discourses from the early 19th century shows the ambiguity and semantic haziness of the term point de vue. It also shows the evolution of the metaphorical use of the term: from spatial experience (the sensory perception of space and location) to a cognitive category (the mental processing). The point de vue becomes in this way a heuristic element introducing an ‘intellectual view’.