In this article I analyse and interpret three passages from Dante’s Paradise containing more or less explicit allusions to the myth of the Argonauts, which Dante knew from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. All three are intertextual and occur at key points in the Canticle of Light, performing a meta-poetic function. They pertain to the essence and objectives of Dante’s poetry and its pioneering character, both in terms of subject-matter and means of expression, particularly for the depiction of the visions of Paradise. Dante makes use of the metaphor of sailing the seas, which had been a topos of literary creativity since ancient times, and compares his own poetic exploit (The Divine Comedy) with the quest for the Golden Fleece conducted by Jason. Yet at the same time Dante distances his own work from the feat accomplished by the captain of the Argonauts.

The pandemic is symbolic of an apparent absolute evil that afflicts human materialism in its essence, as seen in the fundamental masterpiece of Italian literature, Dante’s poem. In it, pestilence becomes a symbol of fraud and is associated with the perverse, falsifying and destructive use of intellect for the will of oppressing the others and an uncontrollable greed of wealth and power. In the Divine Comedy appears the symbolic vision of a terrible epidemic, affecting the deep infernal areas and associating itself with the wrong arrogant use of alchemical science (Inf. XXIX–XXX). We are in the presence of a real ideological and technical-scientific perversion which, instead of offering help to our world, only causes continuous diseases for our body and spirit.

This article focuses on Yitzhak Katzenelson – a pedagogue, playwright and poet from Łódź – and his work on the epic poem The Song of the Murdered Jewish People written in Vittel and published in Paris in 1945. The Vittel internment camp for foreigners served as the first destination for Polish Jews with travel documents from Latin American countries, obtained primarily in the Warsaw ghetto in the so-called ‘Hotel Polski Affair’. Their final destination was Auschwitz, where they perished on arrival in May 1944.

The main aim of the following article is to present the ways in which Letícia Wierzchowski, herself a descendent of “poloneses” (Poles), undertakes the (de)construction of an ethnic stereotype around Polish immigrants. First of all, we present some factors that participated in the definition of the pejorative ethnic stereotype. Next, based on her novel Uma ponte para Terebin (“A bridge to Terebin”) the author´s commitment for the sentiment of cultural belonging is discussed. It is implied that, in addition to manifesting them on personal plan, the writer mentions problems related to the existence of her ethnic group, subscribing herself into a long cultural and historical discussion. The question to which the following analysis tries to present possible answers is whether the author deconstructs the stereotype, perpetuates it, or tries to create a new meaning to replace it.

Marguerite Duras’s The Sea Wall is considered a novel with a traditional narrative. However, the struc- ture of the book, which refers to the writer’s childhood, turns out to be more complex. Considering the description of the literary characters, their behaviour, the way they express themselves, especially the dialogue form (the use of specific stylistic devices, i.e. diverse variations of reported speech), as well as the places where the action takes place and the time-space relations distort the model of a re- alistic novel. An insightful analysis of The Sea Wall allows us to understand Duras’ predilection for ‘experimentation’ in terms of writing technique, which makes the novel - through a specific vision of reality – an extremely interesting melange of real and symbolic elements, highlighting the importance of the unconscious, i.e. instincts, obsessions, hidden desires, phantasms. These elements, modifying the novel structure, allow for a poetic reading of the prose text.

Defined by his childhood in Missembourg, a family property with a paradise garden, Paul Willems, a Belgian French-speaking writer, a literary « wizard » and « magician » remains inherently attached to this land from which he does not want to separate. Next to the declaration of love, garden, reflections, water and time, just to mention the most recurring, the union and the separation are the concepts that haunt the Willems’ imagination. This article focuses on different forms of the motif of separation found/ identified in the theater plays of Paul Willems. After introducing the notion of separation and its different meanings, the study discusses its diverse configurations: original, diegetic (spatial and temporal), social, linguistic, sentimental, internal and final (death).

Hélène Gaudy’s story, Un monde sans rivage, was based on the authentic events of 1897. It is about the Swedish Andree’s balloon expedition to the North Pole, which ended in a catastrophe. The travelers’ remains were accidentally decanted in 1930 along with other items, including photos. Gaudy, taking historical facts as a starting point, translating visual into discursive ones, writes a story of an intriguing,
heterogeneous form, which is the subject of analysis. The analytical key becomes the adjective “strange”, used by Andrée himself, which thus describes this journey. The presented analysis, with the help of the concept of strangeness, attempts to understand the essence of Andrée’s expedition in terms of human experience of the world and otherness, of crossing the limits of the possible.

The novel of Garréta refers to the figure of cyborg, creature emerging in collective imaginary due to unprecedented development of science. Hybrid, created from combination of men with highly developed technology, forces to define modern forms of existence and other forms of social relations. This new ontological status of human beings abolishes previously known borders, traditional divisions and the way of thinking based on binary polarities. Characters from the novel of Garréta live in an urban agglomeration where it is difficult to distinguish physical spaces from illusory artificial reality. The most striking is the indeterminacy on language’s level – in the text, there are not any grammatical determinants attributes to male or female subject; the entire text of the novel does not contain a grammatical clue to identify the character’s gender. In this way, cyborg shows as modern incarnation of the ancient myth of androgyne.

In this paper an analysis of the poetic use of the imperfect tense in El Jarama by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio is proposed basing on the concept of narrative grounding. The claim made in the paper is that in El Jarama the imperfect is used in a manner that breaks down the narrative foreground-background distinction. As a consequence, the arrangement of the events into a meaningful story line is nullified, which affects the way the narrative is experienced and interpreted.

The aim of this article is to present some interesting issues related to the category of grammatical gender based on the book of Marta Pawłowska, titled: La categoría de género: naturaleza, percepción, tradición gramatical. We want to draw attention to some unknown aspects related to the formation of genera in different languages, as well as their development over the centuries. This article is critical, which is why there are also polemical comments.

The main objective of this review is to make some critical comments on the book entitled “Entonaciones del español. Acentos dialectales y acentos extranjeros” edited by Francisco José Cantero Serenay Dolors Font-Rotchés. The book presents and describes in detail a theme that has been little studied and little treated in the bibliography dedicated to the Spanish phonetics. It is the question of the dialectal accent and the foreign accent, two aspects of the Spanish intonation less described. Furthermore, this text pretend to highlights the importance of this type of research not only to develop scientific knowledge on the subject but also, and above all, to offer concrete tools for the teaching of foreign languages.