The concept of community of practice in the context of a selected group of speakers of a Fala de Xálima

The purpose of this paper is to study the current sociolinguistic situation of the language community of Xálima through the prism of the theory of community of practice. We define the community of practice as an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavour of preserving and promoting their vernacular language. The empirical material will be a series of anthropological observations and comments on the semi-directed interviews, made in situ by the authors, in which we will analyse the efforts towards the orthographic standardization and their possible effects. We aim to demonstrate that the methodological principle of community of practice is applicable and suitable to shed new light over sociolinguistic minorized contexts, especially when conducting research in the field of the so-called third wave of sociolinguistics.

Similarities and contrasts in punctuation systems and in the use of commas in subordinate nouns and relative clauses in Spanish and Polish

The objective of the article is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to briefly compare the definitions of punctuation marks in Spanish and Polish, to justify their syntactic-logical function from a diachronic point of view, and to compare the graphic representations of punctuation marks in both languages. On the other hand, it attempts to compare, in more detail, the use of the comma in subordinate substantive clauses and in relative clauses in both languages, starting from the Spanish syntax and based on the corpus from literary works. The conclusion shows that, between both languages, there are more similarities when it comes to defining punctuation marks than when comparing the use of commas in specific syntactic structures.

Reduction of reading anxiety

The purpose of this paper is to sensitize teachers to the phenomenon referred to as reading anxiety and to suggest approaches to reading instruction that may reduce anxiety in high-reading-apprehensive language learners. The activities suggested in this paper are based on pedagogically sound approaches to reading instruction and are also appropriate for learners who do not experience reading anxiety.

Meismes, the morpheme of insistence in Middle French on the basis of Christine de Pizan’s works ‒ values and modes of use

The aim of the present article is to analyze the functioning of the meismes morpheme in Middle French, on the basis of Christine de Pizan’s works, above all the attempt to define and arrange the contexts of occurence of its particular paradigms in the language that demonstrates the features of a hybrid system. The analysis of occurences containing the meismes morpheme shows a co-existence of defensive constructions known in Ancient French altogether with the new, more numerous ones. The use of the meismes morpheme is characterized by a strong regularity and a consequence of applying analogical structures, which constitutes a piece of evidence that the system stabilizes, and even codifies itself.

L’Illustre philosophe by Sœur de La Chapelle (1663): Saint Catherine or Hypatia?

The paper focuses on one of the five tragedies that were dedicated in the 17th century to the character of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, martyred around 307. Some modern scholars dispute the existence of the saint and suggest that her legend was based on the life and murder of Hypatia, a Neoplatonist philosopher from Alexandria, who was massacred by Christians in 415. The author of the article proposes to demonstrate that in the tragedy L’Illustre philosophe the resemblance between these two martyrs – one pagan, the other Christian – becomes particularly flagrant. As a result, Soeur de La Chapelle’s work, while remaining an apology for the saint, also becomes a great plea for women’s access to education and participation in intellectual life.

“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.

The Italian writings of Edvige Toeplitz Mrozowska on Soviet Central Asia and the Bolshevik revolution

The aim of the paper is to answer the question about the attitude of Edvige Toeplitz Mrozowska to the Soviet revolution with which she entered in a direct contact during her travel to Tajikistan in 1929. In the period between 1930‒1933 she devoted two texts, important in her literary output, to the revolution and the reality of Soviet Central Asia. The first is an account of the expedition to the Pamir Mountains led by Mrozowska, and, apart from the geographical subject matter typical of such texts, it contains observations regarding socialist changes in the newly established Tajikistan, while the second one is not only a collection of sketches related to the analysis of revolutionary reality, but also a kind of project with historical and even historiosophical aspirations.

The aim of the article is to analyse the influence of occultism on the development of the Central European avant-garde, especially the Surrealism of the ‘30s and ‘40s. On the one hand, occultists affirm a retreat from the tyranny of reason, which for many avant-garde artists embodies the pettiness of human existence, stifled by the forces of family and public duties. On the other hand, they are an inexhaustible source of props, actions and rituals. Both aspects are extremely important for both Czech Artificialists (Toyen and Štyrský) and Surrealists (Teige, Nezval); however, they gain particular importance in the theories and practice of Romanian Surrealists – Victor Brauner, Gherasim Luca and, above all, Gellu Naum. The space in which these transformed entities with a new status enter consciousness are the eponymous „dangerous territory” that André Breton wrote about, and which become a metaphor (but is it only a metaphor?) of the alliance of the proto-language and the proto-image.

The Anabases of Saint-John Perse and Zbigniew Herbert

This article deals with the motif of “anabasis” in the poetry of Saint-John Perse and the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. The former, a poet and diplomat, gave this title to a poem written in the early 1920s, before he stepped onto the stage of international politics of the interwar period. It, in a way, anticipates his professional and existential choices. Herbert’s “Anabasis” appeared in 1983 in his collection of poems entitled Raport z oblężonego miasta [Report from a Besieged City]. Although two generations and vastly different geopolitical points of origin separate the authors of these poems, both writers left their “small homelands” (Guadeloupe, Lwów), to become witnesses to history filled with socio-political events in the face of which they could not remain neutral. Saint-John Perse began his own poetic “anabasis” in 1940, as an “exile” having escaped to the USA. Zbigniew Herbert published his “Anabasis” in a time when communist Poland would, once again (following the institution of Martial Law in 1981), would confirm his “internal exile.” Personal contexts aside, the “anabases” of Perse and Herbert represent a search for the “right word” which anticipates the script of existence or which is a meditation on exile, expressing through modern poetic means the desire to recover, or constantly (re)construct, their imaginative and spiritual homelands.

Non-standard Romance languages in the monograph Langues romanes non standard edited by Iwona Piechnik y Marta Wicherek

The aim of this article is to make some critical remarks on the monograph edited by Iwona Piechnik and Marta Wicherek, whose object of study are non-standard Romance languages. Moreover, the work highlights the importance of conducting this type of investigation in contemporary linguistic studies.

Georges Rodenbach – the most complete or the book by Joël Goffin Georges Rodenbach 100 articles. Parisian chronicler of the Belle Époque 1888–1898

The article concerns the work of Joël Goffin who selected, presented and annotated one hundred articles written by Georges Rodenbach from the years 1881–1898. As a Parisian columnist, the Belgian writer has showed an interest in modernity in its different registers, devoting his attention and his high-flying pen to literary, artistic, but also societal and scientific subjects.

The article discusses the main premises of Anna Swoboda’s monograph La Prose de Ken Bugul : entre le réel et le surnaturel. Swoboda assumes that the key to deciphering the characteristics of Ken Bugul’s prose is the interpenetration of the two dimensions present in the work of this contemporary Senegalese writer: the real and the supernatural. The book analyzes the fantastic, marvelous and uncanny elements that constitute the supernatural aspect of Bugul’s hybrid prose, as well as examines the fragmentation and multifaceted identity of the autofictional female protagonist (in the part devoted to the real elements). The eclectic methodology combines Western and African research on non-mimetic fiction with postcolonial and feminist theories.