Search Results (62)

This article reconceptualizes Velimir Khlebnikov’s aesthetic temporality not as a lyrical motif but as an epistemic procedure through which poetic language tests the legibility of history. Treating his historico-mathematical “constants” and his avant-garde formal inventions as mutually implicative, it isolates a double regime: time as oscillatory recurrence (wave, cyclic return, numerical periodicity) and time as a higher-order extension in which duration is spatialized, traversable, and re-coordinatizable. Against linear models of influence, this study situates Khlebnikov within a thick interdiscursive atmosphere—folkloric chronotopes, Romantic time–space convertibility (Novalis), non-Euclidean geometry (Lobachevsky, Riemann), Minkowski–Einstein relativity, and the Russian vogue for “hyperspace” mediated by Morozov and Ouspensky (with Hinton as prototype)—and argues that these matrices are metabolized via poetico-fantastic transmutation rather than imported as explanatory doctrine. Close readings show how reverse temporality, historical inversion, palindromic and collage logics, and the super-narrative architecture of autonomous “planes” operationalize a hyperspatial present in which distant epochs collide without recourse to technological “time machines.” The article thereby reframes Khlebnikov’s project as a cognitive technology: an attempt to re-engineer the chronotope so that past and future become navigable coordinates inside an expanded textual now. In this model, number and word converge as homologous instruments for forecasting, montage, and speculative world-construction itself. Full article

This article addresses recent critiques of secularisation as a linear explanatory model for religious change in European societies, proposing that contemporary artistic creation is a fertile site for observing new interrelations between the secular and the religious. Focusing on João Madureira’s Missa de Pentecostes (2010), composed for the ensemble ‘Sete Lágrimas’ and part of a cultural project by the Roman Catholic community of ‘Capela do Rato’ (Lisbon), the study analyses how this work creatively reconfigures the traditional Mass form. By juxtaposing the Ordinary sections (e.g., Kyrie, Gloria) with the Proper sections (e.g., Introitus, Sequentia), which incorporate non-canonical Portuguese poetic texts, the composition creates a hybrid space in which ritual and artistic modes interact and mutually re-legitimise each other. Using a heterological interpretative framework inspired by Michel de Certeau, the article highlights the tensions and exchanges between ritual and aesthetic logics. The analysis draws on key theoretical concepts including Jean Rancière’s notions of consensus and dissensus, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ritual and habitus, Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of translation as hospitality, and Pierre Lévy’s concept of universalism without totality. The findings suggest that Madureira’s work enacts a process of poetic re-signification of religious memory, opening new possibilities for hybrid ritual–artistic practices. These practices transform ritual time-space into an interface that fosters plural and non-totalising forms of spiritual belonging. Full article

In his swan song A Tale of the Wind (1988), Joris Ivens undertakes the seemingly impossible task of capturing the invisible—the wind—on film. At the same time, the film looks back over the director’s own career, in a spirit that is at once self-reflective and youthful. Set mainly in China, it functions both as an allegory of the wind and as a search for a middle ground between realism and more poetic approaches to cinema. This article examines the film through the lenses of self-reflexivity, the cinematic portrayal of old age, and the relation between life and death. It first delves into Stanley Cavell’s ontological understanding of self-reflexivity, before examining how this self-reflexivity unfolds in A Tale of the Wind. In this regard, it analyses the relationship between technique and magic, the search for a “theory of cinema”, and the importance of imagination and childhood. Taking into consideration the Deleuzian correlation between face and landscape and the notion of “any space whatever”, the article concludes by analysing old age through its marks and gestures: wrinkles, laughter, waiting, and searching—elements that contribute decisively to the film’s self-reflexivity. Full article

This study explores the perspectives of monolingual English-speaking parents whose children are enrolled in elementary (Grades 1–5) French immersion (FI) in New Brunswick, Canada, where FI students learn mathematics in French. Using poetic inquiry within a feminist postmodern framework, we analyzed interview data from three parents to examine how they conceptualize the relationship between language and mathematics, and how these conceptualizations shape the ways they support their children’s mathematics learning. The resulting research poems reveal tensions in participants’ views of mathematics and language. For example, mathematics was at times positioned as detachable from language, although language was simultaneously described as a potential barrier to mathematical success. In turn, parental involvement was characterized by support toward monitoring linguistic markers, relearning pedagogical methods, and rehearsing procedures. By centring parents’ perspectives, this study contributes to research on multilingual mathematics education by illustrating how parental conceptualizations may play a role in shaping mathematics practices across home and school spaces. Methodologically, the study suggests that research poetry has analytic potential for surfacing tensions in parental sense-making that may remain overlooked in more conventional qualitative analyses. This study points to a need for resources and communication practices that support dialogue between schools and families about the relationship between language and mathematics in FI contexts. Full article

This article explores Mihail Aslan’s volume of poetry Late Geometries, Rejected through the prism of an in-depth psychoanalytic reading. The text highlights how the poetic work constitutes an expression of deep psychic processes, centered around the concepts of early trauma, narcissistic deficit, and failure of the primordial environment. Through theories by authors such as Winnicott, Anzieu, Green, and Kristeva, the article reveals how Aslan’s creation functions as a transitional space, in which a complex dialectic takes place between Eros and Thanatos, between the constitution of the self and its waste. Writing thus becomes an act of psychic survival, a way to metabolize the traumatic experience and to reconstruct an inner geometry, albeit “late” and “rejected”. Full article

This article explores how Herta Müller and Paul Bailey transform the apparatus of state bordering, i.e., passports, permits and catechisms, into metaphors for an interior struggle between flight and belonging. In The Passport, The Land of Green Plums and Bailey’s Kitty & Virgil, emigration is portrayed not as departure alone but as a prolonged contest between the body that moves and the spirit that lingers. Those who cross borders geographically remain anchored, often painfully, in the mental and moral landscapes of the home they leave behind. The paper examines how documents, bodies, and languages become shifting frontier zones where identity is repeatedly issued and withdrawn, shaped by the pressures of memory, exile, and biopolitical control. Müller’s vision, written from within Romania’s history, and Bailey’s, refracted through an English consciousness yet partly set in Romania, converge in a poetics of witness that treats exile as both wound and testimony. Ultimately, these works suggest that identity survives in the liminal space between motion and remembrance where thought halts at its own threshold, memory traces its faint watermark, and the self bears its unspoken credential. Full article

This study proposes an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered multimodal system designed to enhance the appreciation of traditional poetry, using Japanese haiku as the primary application domain. At the core of the system is an intelligent data analysis pipeline that extracts key emotional features from poetic texts. A fine-tuned Japanese BERT model is employed to compute three affective indices—valence, energy, and dynamism—which form a quantitative emotional representation of each haiku. These features guide a generative AI workflow: ChatGPT constructs structured image prompts based on the extracted affective cues and contextual information, and these prompts are used by DALL·E to synthesize stylistically consistent watercolor illustrations. Simultaneously, background music is automatically selected from an open-source collection by matching each poem’s affective vector with that of instrumental tracks, producing a coherent multimodal (text, image, sound) experience. A series of validation experiments demonstrated the reliability and stability of the extracted emotional features, as well as their effectiveness in supporting consistent cross-modal alignment. These results indicate that poetic emotion can be represented within a low-dimensional affective space and used as a bridge across linguistic and artistic modalities. The proposed framework illustrates a novel integration of affective computing and natural language processing (NLP) within cultural computing. Because the underlying emotional representation is linguistically agnostic, the system holds strong potential for cross-cultural extensions, including applications to Chinese classical poetry and other forms of traditional literature. Full article

This essay introduces an experiential process through which student actors can explore any Shakespearean play. Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints technique serves as the foundation for a creative process informed by devising exercises and physical composition. In this essay, I demonstrate how this physically based dramaturgical process enables students to pay particular attention to the foundational elements that uniquely shape the story, such as time, space, sound, architecture, and gesture. This process gives student actors the agency to create material inspired by Shakespeare yet infused with their own imagination and curiosity. It allows students to wake up Shakespeare’s text in unexpected ways, embrace collaboration, and embody the richly detailed expression of Shakespeare’s poetic language. This essay aims to be a resource for educators and directors alike who are interested in a collaborative process that can either be integrated into rehearsals or serve as a foundation for classroom-based discussions. As such, this process can be mapped onto any classical or contemporary play, even though this essay features Shakespeare as the foundation for exploration. Full article

This study examines al-Mufaḍḍaliyyāt anthology as a foundational corpus wherein pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabic poetry emerged not only as a cultural artifact but as a generative locus for theological reflection. Through a close reading of selected poems and nuanced engagement with the figurative language specifically metaphor, personification, and symbolic narrative, the research situates poetry as a mode of epistemic inquiry that articulates religious meaning alongside Qurʾānic revelation. Drawing on ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s theory of semantic structure and metaphor, in dialogue with Paul Ricoeur’s conception of metaphor as imaginative cognition, the study proposes that poetic discourse operates as a site of “imaginative theology”, i.e., a space wherein the abstract is rendered sensorially legible and metaphysical concepts are dramatized in affective and embodied terms. The analysis reveals how key Qurʾānic themes including divine will, mortality, ethical restraint are anticipated, echoed, and reconfigured through poetic imagery. Thus, al-Mufaḍḍaliyyāt is not merely a literary corpus vis-à-vis Islamic scripture but also functions as an active interlocutor in the formation of early Islamic moral and theological imagination. This interdisciplinary inquiry contributes to broader discussions on the interpenetration of poetics and theology as well as on the cognitive capacities of literature to shape religious consciousness. Full article

This article identifies different forms of poetic transport—understood in the sense of metaphor, transition, transfer, crossing and translation—in Hölderlin’s poem “Patmos”. There are several motifs scattered throughout the poem that semantically express a transition using highly metaphorical language: motifs reflecting on the mediation between the divine and the human, signalling the hybridization of Greek and Christian religion, and indicating transfer from ancient to modern thought. Initially, this article examines the metaphorical quality of language in contrast to its analytical capacity and proposes that the former—by seeking forms of transitions—enables mediation between the associative-affective reading of the text and the critical-analytic method of the scientific view. Hölderlin reflects on this fundamental issue as a result of his spatial transition to Regensburg. The article will further show that various forms of transfer sustain the entire poem: motifs ranging from an epochal transfer to the transition from a topographical space into the text, the superimposition of different figures and the transformation of the biblical narrative, as well as the crossing between the different layers of the draft and the poet’s task of a creative translation of various forms of encountering the world, all describe issues central to Patmos. Full article

Vajrayāna teaching places the guru outside space and time, while simultaneously manifest in the teacher’s physical body. Those who regard Danzanravjaa primarily as a Buddhist teacher even today have his poems as a potent source of his teaching and consequently as a catalyst for their own spiritual development. But what can we hear across two centuries, and how can we actively listen to his religious teaching through his singular, aphoristic, and complex poetics? And to what extent can we understand today his nomadic perspective on Buddhist teaching in order better to understand the particular nature of Mongolian Buddhism? This paper will examine Danzanravjaa’s poetry in both Mongolian and Tibetan through the intertwining outer, inner, and secret levels of Tibeto-Mongolian Vajrayāna Buddhism, listening to how his poetic language and down-to-earth themes might have spoken to his contemporaries, as well as how they might speak to us today. In doing so, it presents Danzanravjaa’s poetry in a different light—not in terms of nineteenth century literature but as actionable spiritual wisdom from a teacher who, like any other, presents his own direct apprehension of Buddha nature in a challenging, personal style. Full article

“Know that in place of a heart I carry a tongue,” writes the unnamed poetic speaker of Mexican poet Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead. This documentary poetic text alternates between the voices of Central American immigrants journeying north and a subtle yet bold revision of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’s A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, with some words from the Friar’s 1552 text replaced by other words that reflect the realities of twenty-first century immigrants traveling north. Interspersed with de la Casas’s texts are persona poems in which we are invited to listen to the ghosts of immigrants who have suffered tragic deaths. This essay explores the ways that, crossing borders between time and space while drawing strength from his Christian faith, Rodrigo resists the erasure of Indigenous peoples, honors their journeys, and invites readers into solidarity. Full article

Romantic poetry is known to have engendered a potent discursive space in 19th-century Europe, wherein national aspirations, personal tragedies, and mythic narratives coalesced. This study examines the recurring images of the “galloping horse” and the “self-sacrificing cavalryman” in 19th-century Romantic poetry in the context of a common poetic myth shaped around the themes of national identity, spiritual transcendence, and historical destiny. The present study focuses on Adam Mickiewicz’s “Faris” and Nikoloz Baratashvili’s “Merani”, employing a comparative literary and philosophical approach to analyze these two works. This study reveals that “Faris” presents a messianic call around the ideal of freedom of the Polish nation, while “Merani” is structured as an individual tragedy and inner journey. Both poems are positioned within a broader poetic paradigm that can be called the “Faris” Cycle, and they can be compared thematically and imaginatively with the works of Goethe, Petőfi, Sully Prudhomme, and Vazha-Pshavela. This study explores the aesthetic and intellectual dimensions of intercultural interaction by analyzing the poetic transitions between the two poles of the Romantic paradigm: collective hope and individual melancholy, action, and inner intuition. By tracing the interplay between national poetics and universal archetypes, this manuscript investigates how such interaction facilitates the symbolic transformation of historical traumas. Full article

In the wake of post-truth politics, neo-oral media, and epistemic fragmentation, qualitative researchers face intensified pressure to justify the legitimacy of our methods. This essay explores the idea that writing itself can be a form of research—not merely an act of representation, but an epistemic, institutional, and affective method. Structured in two voices—one stylized and poetic, the other scholarly and conceptual—the piece moves through five acts to examine writing as a form of border-crossing. It argues that voice-rich, situated writing is not indulgent; it is a way of thinking, navigating complexity, and holding space for uncertainty. Drawing on traditions of performative autoethnography, collective biography, data feminism, and more-than-human inquiry, the essay considers how writing can generate insight, foster civic resonance, and resist epistemic conformity. A heuristic table offers readers practical entry points for approaching writing as method. This essay is for those moments when something in the sentence feels off, but we write it anyway. It asks what becomes possible when we write not to comply, but to inquire. Full article

Traditional Japanese architecture is known for its open, ambiguous spatial boundaries (“kyokai”), which integrate nature and dwelling through Zen/Shinto philosophies. Yet modern urban housing, driven by high-density minimalism, flattens spatial hierarchies and erodes these rich boundary concepts. This study aims to explore how Japanese architect Yoshiji Takehara reinterprets traditional spatial principles to reconstruct the interior–exterior relationships in modern housing through a mixed-methods approach—including a literature review, case studies, and semi-structured interviews—verifying the hypothesis that he achieves the modern translation of traditional “kyokai” through strategies of boundary expansion and ambiguity. Analyzing 78 independent residential projects by Takehara and incorporating his interview texts, the research employs spatial typology and statistical methods to quantify the characteristics of boundary configurations, such as building contour morphology, opening orientations, and transitional space types, to reveal the internal logic of his design strategies. This study identifies two core strategies through which Takehara redefines spatial boundaries: firstly, clustered building layouts, multi-directional openings, and visual connections between courtyards and private functional spaces extend interface areas, enhancing interactions between nature and daily life; secondly, in-between spaces like corridors and doma (earthen-floored transitional zones), double-layered fixtures, and floor-level variations blur physical and psychological boundaries, creating multilayered permeability. Case studies demonstrate that his designs not only inherit traditional elements such as indented plans and semi-outdoor buffers but also revitalize the essence of “dwelling” through contemporary expressions, achieving dynamic visual experiences and poetic inhabitation within limited sites via complex boundary configurations and fluid thresholds. This research provides reusable boundary design strategies for high-density urban housing, such as multi-directional openings and buffer space typologies, and fills a research gap in the systematic translation of traditional “kyokai” theory into modern architecture, offering new insights for reconstructing the natural connection in residential spaces. Full article