The theatre of Bernard-Marie Koltès as a theatre of transgression

When we define specific theatrical forms, the work of Bernard-Marie Koltès transcends the boundaries between the forms. La nuit juste avant les forêts was a soliloquy or a quasi-monologue, Dans la solitude des champs de coton related to the form of the eighteenth-century philosophical dialogue, and Roberto Zucco provoked scandal due to the eponymous character of a serial murderer. All of Koltès’s texts, including the above, transgress the boundaries, either through their form or through the philosophy included in them. The violence that is inseparable from Koltès’s theatre is often devoid of any motivation, it is not grounded in any reasoning, it often acquires a mythical meaning, aggression becomes a desire, and evil becomes a source of fascination and something beautiful. The article is an attempt to demonstrate the unusual cooperation of form and content in Koltès’s theatre, while both of the elements balance between what is acknowledged, acceptable, and definable.

The costumbrista look of Jerónimo López Mozo on the COVID-19 pandemic

During 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic affected the entire world. One of the areas that suffered from the situation caused by the virus was culture, and especially the performing arts. To counteract the crisis, various solutions were sought that, on the one hand, would give continuity to theatrical art, and on the other, would maintain the relationship between the artists and the spectators. At the same time, the coronavirus became a subject of literary and theatrical creation, as in the case of five short pieces by Jerónimo López Mozo that have been studied in this article.

(Re)passing memory through laughter: The case of Alain Berenboom

Laughter, a term that at first sight seems incompatible with the Holocaust, has overcome some seemingly insurmountable barriers and has paradoxically become the essence of many literary and cinematographic works dealing with this painful subject. The aim of this article is to present the role of humor in the transmission of the memory of the Holocaust from selected novels by Belgian writer Alain Berenboom. By analyzing his works, we will show that laughter makes it possible to break with the horror experienced during the Shoah and to protect oneself from a real trauma. We will also highlight its role in demystifying and revealing the illusions of post-war society that can lead to its destruction.

Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée: The Beauvoir’s emancipation story

Simone de Beauvoir in her autobiography Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée describes her own way of getting to know herself, her abilities and limitations and her search for identity. Considering the past, she ruminates over how certain episodes from her life influenced her later choices, especially the writer’s sensitivity and personality. The autobiographical perspective allows Beauvoir to present evolution of young Simone’s behaviour and worldview, her dreams, traumas and obsessions. In this way the author sketches convincing portrait of a maturing woman, distinguished by brilliant intelligence, opposing traditional values of bourgeois environment, its morality and all authorities, a woman who could experience a kind of “conversion” and also fulfil her ideal of emancipation, and at the same time her idée fixe, which was to become a writer.

This article seeks to investigate the degree of influence that the works of William Faulkner have exerted over the output of novelist António Lobo Antunes, thus filling a critical gap and at the same time opening up new avenues for literary research in order to better assess the impact and importance of Lobo Antunes for Portuguese (in particular) and world literature (in general). The comparative approach takes into consideration the style and content of both writers and their approximations across some of their works.

This paper aims to explore Paul Celan’s writings in the Romanian language which have been preserved as manuscripts, and their significance to his very earliest poetry. Firstly, I will reconstruct the Bucharest episode in his life and work and then discuss the nature of the manuscripts that I examined in 2015. I will then recapitulate existing research on these texts. Discussing one of them, I will propose to update their meaning for this poetic work, especially in the context of Jacques Derrida’s Shibboleth for Paul Celan.

Motion encoding by Czech learners of Spanish: Influence of L1 Thinking-for-Speaking patterns in L2

This paper studies verbal encoding of motion events by Czech advanced learners of Spanish and Spanish native speakers. Since these languages differ in terms of Talmy’s (2000) typology of motion encoding, the study aims to assess to what extent the learners acquired the Thinking-for-Speaking patterns (Slobin 1996) of the L2. To this end, written narratives by natives and learners are examined and compared. The results show that the construction “path verb + manner complement”, a typical structure for verb-framed languages such as Spanish, is used significantly less often by the learners compared with the natives. The results also indicate that L1 interference happens when expressing boundary crossing situations in Spanish by the learners, since they tend to use a Manner of motion verb.

About the Romance languages and the different perspectives of their analysis reflected in the monograph written under the direction of Andrzej Zieliński Las fórmulas de saludo y de despedida en las lenguas románicas: sincronía, diacronía y aplicación a la enseñanza

The work mentions the current perspectives in the analysis of Romance languages, making a critical review of the monograph written under the direction of Andrzej Zieliński, whose object of study are the greeting and farewell formulas. In addition, the work highlights the importance of studying and preserving minority languages which, like the main Romance languages, are the result of the long training process called the Romance continuum.