Volume 58, Issue 3

This article investigates the relation between Vasilii Rozanov’s myth of Egypt and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of carnival. It considers the first as an instance of religious art and the last as a case of transformation of religion into art. While Rozanov replaces Christian orthodox religion by a largely invented pseudo-Egyptian belief, which is grounded on a more or less free interpretation of reproductions of old artifacts from the Nile region, Bakhtin replaces in his book on Rabelais religion by an artistic project, which in the tradition of the concept of ‘Third Renaissance’ proclaims the development of a culture, which realizes human(ic) possibilities, rooted in antiquity but not (completely) carried out in them. Rozanovs aims at the integrative specialty of Russian culture, inherent to (his) neo-slavophile way of ‘serious’ thinking and thus excludes it from other cultures, whereas Bakhtin includes the possible coming culture into a European tradition, which renovates itself by perennially going back to its roots of laughter and ambivalence.

The article discusses biographical and literal similarities between Kharms and Kafka. Prominent in their work are devices of silent film, sign language, gesture, theatrical pose, slapstick and humor. Phobic refusings of familial subjections are pointed out among many sharing biographical aspects. Art of writing is recognized as concept of perfomativity that emphasizes mutual keywords: bachelorhood, prayer, gesture, birthing and starvation. Kafka’s „Odradek“ is exemplified and connected to Obėriu’s „Fifth dimension of meaning“ as „REAL“ art by using words as pure things or „perfect gifts“ in loss of use. Common „court commedies“ are reflected by different rituals of trial, law, violence, self-denial, pleas of guilty, guiltiness of guilt, subversion of discipline or rehabilitation and self-rehabilitation. This bears in mind deconstructive strategies about literature in close analogies to Butler, Agamben and Derrida.

This paper is dedicated to the concept of ambiguity and humor as an intercultural phenomenon. In the first section, we introduce different concepts of the term humor in literature from the perspective of literary and cultural studies, psychology and cognitive linguistics. We attempt to show that the concept of humor and ambiguity of an intercultural and interlingual perspective may belong to the most difficult areas of translation theory. At the same time, humor and polysemy are the key concepts of a semantically and pragmatically based theory of translation. In the second section, we will briefly deal with the phenomena of humor and ambiguity from the psycholinguistic and cognitive point of view and thereby we try to analyze the difference between visuality and textuality of Shakespeare’s tragedy “Romeo and Juliet” in film and on stage. The third section of this paper is devoted to the phenomenon of interculturality and the interlingual translation of pragmatic and cognitive-semantic categories on the example of polysemy, vagueness, irony, pun, word play and joke (and its various strategies and conversational implicatures in the literary text). It is assumed that initially the validity of the Relevance criterion (Sperber & Wilson 2005) and the validity of the principle of cooperation are in play, even in a text that is commonly considered as ‘meaningless’. We want to prove the example of James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake‘, demonstrating that even such a seemingly illegible or difficult text that has often been considered non transferable, in a certain pattern and its narrative potential of the storyline, in the dynamics and in the progression descends from and is determined by the VALIDITY of the criterion of relevance. In another part of this third section, we turn to the Elizabethan drama of Shakespeare and the novel Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, Ulysses by James Joyce as well as the unforgettable Novel by Jaroslav Hašek Brave Soldier Švejk, showing how wit and irony work and can be translated.

The research work on the imposition of martial law in Poland is aimed at pointing out the recurring and regulating measures preferred by certain players to (re)construct the past in order to influence the historical discourse. This shall be achieved by means of selected German and Polish press articles, interviews on radio and television, statements given by Jaruzelski and reports issued by the IPN (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej), which make an assessment of December 13 1981. The work shall also unveil the narrative structures typically followed in the telling of the events as well as find out what ideological meaning they imply, what type of explanation they lead to and, finally, how far they support their argument with regard to the question of whether this was a morally right or excusable decision. The methodology used throughout this work shall involve concepts of cultural semiotics, discourse analysis and such literary aproaches, which understand history and the telling of it as a fiction-creating process.

The following article deals with the linguistic situation in Belarus and the Belarusian dialects. It emphasizes on the local dialect of the Hrodna region. The conditions under which German words came into the Hrodna dialect language are described. The analysis made by us concerns the following questions: what phonological processes German words are subject to and how strongly they are phonetically adapted to the system of loan-language and the Belarusian dialect.