Search Results (400)

Medieval liturgical exegesis presents a striking interpretative paradox: Advent, the opening season of the liturgical year, falls within the autumn–winter period and yet is frequently understood as a tempus renovationis, a time of renewal analogous to spring. This study argues that such an association is not merely a poetic metaphor, but the result of a liturgical and theological reconfiguration of time grounded in the adventus Domini. Focusing especially on the liturgical commentaries of Prepositinus of Cremona and related exegetical traditions, the article examines how the symbolic code of spring, widely attested in medieval cultural and poetic sources, is assumed and transformed within the liturgical sphere. It then considers chant as one of the principal media through which this renewed temporal condition becomes perceptible in ecclesial practice. Particular attention is given to the introit Ad te levavi, read as the sung threshold of the liturgical year, in which prophetic promise, ecclesial response, renewed breath, and ascensional movement converge. The analysis is finally extended to manuscript culture, where enlarged initials, figural programs, and the notated shaping of the incipit contribute to the visual and aural articulation of the same theological logic. The study concludes that the “spring” of Advent is best understood not as a merely seasonal analogy, but as a coordinated symbolic and liturgical phenomenon articulated across exegesis, chant, and manuscript mediation. Full article

This study examines the theological structure of Tengrism, understood here as a heuristic term for the broader Tengri-centered early Turkic belief system, its historical transformation, and its continuity in post-Islamic Turkic culture and folklore from an interdisciplinary perspective. Although the continuity of pre-Islamic Turkic beliefs in later Turkish folk culture has been noted in previous scholarship, the specific mechanisms through which Tengri-centered concepts survived as implicit theological structures within lived religion, folk belief, and Alevi-Bektashi ritual–poetic traditions have not been sufficiently systematized. The research argues that Tengrism should not be understood merely as an archaic remnant of belief but as a comprehensive theological paradigm shaping cosmology, political legitimacy, ethical order, and the perception of sacredness in early Turkic societies. In this context, epic and mythological texts such as the Orkhon Inscriptions, the Epic of Oghuz Khan, the Book of Dede Korkut, and the Epic of Manas constitute the primary textual sources of the study. The research is based on a qualitative design and employs phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches. The phenomenological perspective seeks to understand the theological principles of Tengrism and the perception of sacredness within their own cultural and symbolic universe, while hermeneutic analysis interprets the continuity of symbolic and mythological elements preserved in folkloric narratives. The findings indicate that the Tengri-centered and cosmologically structured character of early Turkic religiosity did not disappear after the adoption of Islam; rather, it persisted through folkloric narratives, popular beliefs, ritual practices, and the Alevi-Bektashi tradition. These findings demonstrate that Tengrism continues to function as a dynamic theological paradigm within Turkish cultural memory and popular religiosity. Full article

This article examines selected instances of Canaanite poetic parallelism preserved in two Late Bronze Age texts outside the Levant: the Hittite Elkunirša and the Egyptian pLeiden I 343 + 345. Through comparative analysis, it traces within these parallel structures features characteristic of Canaanite poetic convention, including distinctive epic formulae, fixed word pairs, graded numerical patterns, and expanded construct expressions. Their analysis not only clarifies difficult philological passages but also recovers early poetic forms, thereby expanding the limited pre-biblical corpus. Full article

From the period of the Anatolian Seljuks onward, Iranian culture and civilization exerted a strong influence over Anatolia. As a result of this interaction, Persian gradually became the region’s administrative and literary language; it was spoken in major cities, taught as a subject in madrasahs, preferred in official correspondence, and played a central role in the production of literary works. The Anatolian Seljuk sultans and amirs of Anatolia, who possessed a profound mastery of Persian, supported this cultural exchange by patronizing Iranian poets, scholars, and intellectuals. The effort to preserve and promote Iranian culture, the Persian language, and its poetic tradition continued under the Ottomans as well. During this era, numerous poets and writers from Iran came to Istanbul, and the imperial courts became literary centers where Iranian artists gathered. In fact, those who arrived from Iran were often expected to possess poetic talent. Among the Ottoman rulers who encouraged Persian poetry were Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, Sultan Selim I, and Sultan Murad III—each of whom composed Persian divans (collected poems). Poets who flourished during both the Anatolian Seljuk and Ottoman periods composed Persian poetry to demonstrate their literary mastery and to prove that they knew Persian as proficiently as Iranian poets. Those with only a few Persian poems interspersed them within their Turkish divans, whereas those who produced many compiled them into independent divans. This study aims to identify the Persian divans written in Anatolia during the Anatolian Seljuk and Ottoman periods and to present detailed information about these works. By systematically classifying the Persian divans of these eras, this study serves as a fundamental bibliographic reference for researchers. Full article

A micro-commission from Signal Film & Media, Barrow-in-Furness, initiated a two-year dialogue between artist/filmmaker Laurence Campbell and ecological artist David Haley. They started with the question, ‘How did such a small stream serve the development of such a large industrial town?’ Their eco-poetic, video/sonic exploration became a freshwater odyssey, discovering the blood of extinction (chalybeate-polluted water) through arterial tributaries, from deep time to 19th-century extraction to today. Their inquiry was informed by the Cumbria Archives, a local environmental conservationist, a poet and opera singer and passersby. The emergent art form revealed a complex set of ecological narratives. The project continues to raise questions about our relationships with the Nature–Climate–Culture Emergency, and the nuclear, defence, mining and water industries. Full article

Nicolás Guillén Landrián (1938–2003) is often described as one of the most formally daring documentary filmmakers to emerge from Cuba’s Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), yet decades of institutional censorship, including imprisonment, forced psychiatric treatment, and the quiet burial of his films in archives, pushed him into a kind of official nonexistence. His work resurfaced unexpectedly during a 2003 screening in Havana, an event that seemed to reveal just how much had been missing from the historical record. This article examines the systematic relationship between the revolutionary Cuban censorship apparatus and the aesthetic strategies Guillén Landrián developed, from his early ICAIC shorts to his final exile film, Inside Downtown (2001). Drawing on archival materials, published interviews, critical theory (Foucault, Agamben, Bourdieu, Scott, de Certeau), and close readings of key films such as Coffea Arábiga (1968), Desde La Habana ¡1969! Recordar (1969–1971), and Taller de Línea y 18 (1971), we argue that censorship did not simply constrain his filmmaking but shaped it in ways that opened unexpected formal paths. We describe these strategies as a “poetics of obliqueness”—a mode of working that embeds critique within intermedial collage, uneasy juxtapositions, ellipsis, allegory, and double coding. These tactics exploited the gap between the apparatus’s strict monitoring of explicit ideological statements and its difficulty policing ambiguous or formally inventive gestures. Although grounded in the Cuban case, this framework speaks to broader questions about how artists under authoritarian conditions convert pressure into a generative constraint, revealing how creativity can survive, and sometimes mutate, under sustained surveillance. Full article

Though working-class literatures poorly fit within the theoretical purview of contemporary literary studies, the absence of scholarship in the Canadian context is particularly acute. Neoliberal readings thrive at the expense of labour-focused readings, with the possible result of insulating against the desired change such readings wish to bring into being. Because Chris Pannell’s poetry is so focused on work, its representations and spiritual qualities amidst a particular post-industrial location (Hamilton, Ontario), it makes for poetry well suited my goal: to create an ambidextrous reading method. In this article, I summarize the work done to date in Canadian literary studies on both labour and neoliberalism. Due to the relatively thin literature in CanLit available over the past few decades, I bring in Lukács and some American literary scholars (Jameson, Christopher and Whitson, Clarke) to round out what a working-class literature might be theorized as, and read as, in Canada while also keeping in view how critiques of neoliberalism are inadequate to the task of serving the working-class. To recalibrate Canadian literary studies, I bring forward Marx’s ideas concerning surplus value and alienation as they pertain to the production of poetry. While acknowledging the contributions of critiques of neoliberalism in Canadian literature, I critique those readings as rooted in Marx. Full article

In his poem The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare uses ekphrasis—the virtuosic description of a piece of art such as a painting, tapestry, or tableau—to critique the Roman ideal of female virtue. After her husband’s description of her beauty incites Tarquin to rape her, Lucrece processes her wrong and positions herself heroically by identifying herself with the figure of Hecuba in a painting of the fall of Troy. She then commits suicide, and her body becomes a vehicle of political renewal, prompting Roman men to revolt against the Tarquins and found the Roman Republic. Shakespeare’s wronged Roman women imitate Lucrece, ekphrastically orienting themselves to destruction in hopes of effecting political change. Tracing Lucrece-inspired moments of ekphrasis across multiple plays reveals how Shakespeare is in conversation with ancient literary techniques, critiques of Stoicism, and the moral concerns about Lucrece’s suicide raised in the Christian tradition. I argue that Shakespeare’s deliberate omission of ekphrasis from the story of the Stoic Portia highlights her suicide as unnecessary and reveals the self-destructive power of the Roman ideal of female virtue. While we may be tempted to think of ekphrasis as purely decorative, in these ekphrastic moments, poetics, philosophy, and political action are intertwined. Full article

This paper focuses on the early Qing monk-painter Hongren 弘仁, systematically exploring the pathways through which the Chan Buddhist “emptiness contemplation” is manifested in his landscape paintings. As a representative monk-painter, Hongren produced works that profoundly embody the Chan contemplation of emptiness, yielding a singular style defined by austere coldness, minimalist simplicity, and profound quietude. Transcending conventional stylistic descriptions in art history and essentialist philosophical deductions, this study adopts a comprehensive empirical approach that integrates poetry, calligraphy, painting, and seals (shi-shu-hua-yin 诗书画印). By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective of philosophy, religion, and art history, this study argues that Hongren’s landscapes are not merely subjective emotional expressions or aesthetic pursuits; rather, they constitute a visual extension and a spiritual externalization of his emptiness contemplation. Through a multi-layered analysis of his form, brushwork, composition, and artistic conception, combined with the mutual corroboration of poetic inscriptions on paintings and textual inscriptions on seals, this paper reveals how the Chan philosophy of “emptiness contemplation” is reflected within his artistic language. While Hongren’s style is the cumulative result of various factors such as the Ming-Qing dynasty transition, his personal life, the inheritance of painting techniques, and the regional culture of Mount Huang, this paper specifically takes Chan thought as its analytical starting point, focusing on its unique expression in his work. Hongren’s path of “Painting-Chan” (hua chan 画禅) not only infused early Qing painting with a sublime spiritual power but also provides a vital religious exegesis of the deep-seated Chinese tradition of “Technique Ascending to the Dao” (ji jin yu dao 技进于道). Full article

In recent years, Chinese animation has increasingly embraced traditional cultural elements, with Chan (Zen) Buddhism emerging as a rich source of philosophical and aesthetic inspiration. Existing research on the manifestation of Chan aesthetics in Chinese animation has explored the topic from diverse perspectives, yet analyses from a systematic semiotic perspective remain limited. Most symbolic studies reduce Chan elements to isolated visual signs with one-to-one meaning correspondences, neglecting the synergistic operation of narrative, visual, and auditory symbols in animation as an integrated system. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ theory of myth, this study employs a qualitative semiotic analysis to examine how Chan aesthetics are reconstructed and naturalised in Chinese animated works across different periods and genres. The analysis demonstrates that core Chan concepts are reconfigured into secularised audiovisual symbol systems. These systems translate abstract philosophy into tangible aesthetic forms and narrative structures, with meaning generated through the interplay of denotation, connotation, and myth. Furthermore, the representation of Chan aesthetics evolves across eras. Early animation relies on minimalist ink-wash visuals and implicit narrative; contemporary commercial animated film employs causal storytelling to embed Chan values in modern contexts; and Ye Youtian ‘poetic animation’ emphasises personal spiritual expression through non-linear imagery. Full article

Approaching the tension between critical thinking and religious conviction in a modern secular context, this study explores Paul Ricoeur’s theological hermeneutics as a potential metaphoric language for doing contemporary theology. Utilizing Ricoeur’s hermeneutic method of the “long route”—a patient detour through text, symbol, and narrative that refuses the direct existential decoding of myth—the research qualitatively analyzes his interdisciplinary insights across biblical interpretation, revelation, and narrative theory. The analysis reveals that Ricoeur’s integration of philosophical and biblical hermeneutics facilitates what he calls a “second naïveté”: a post-critical posture in which religious symbols can be inhabited again only after, and through, the labour of critique, never before or around it. Such a posture addresses the specifically modern difficulty of making Christian faith argumentatively responsible to contemporary readers, believers and reflective non-believers alike. Key findings highlight the poetic dimension of theological language—its capacity to disclose rather than merely describe—as essential for reconfiguring reality and for redefining revelation as an event that takes place between the “world of the text” (the possible world projected by a biblical text read as discourse) and the “world of the reader.” This reorientation does not dismiss dogmatic-theological formulation; it holds the systematic–speculative and the poetic–hermeneutic together rather than letting either collapse into the other. The study concludes that doing theology through metaphor—specifically through the dialectic between “being” and “being-as” of God—opens a generative hermeneutic perspective for articulating the divine in a post-critical age, where the category “post-critical” designates not a repudiation of critique but the reflective stance that remains possible only on the far side of it. Rather than providing a unified theological system, this perspective preserves the tensions—between philosophy and theology, critique and conviction, metaphor and its ontological reach—that Ricoeur deliberately leaves unresolved. Full article

This article offers a theoretically nuanced and empirically grounded investigation into the paradoxical afterlife of classical versification within the poetic practices of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde. Challenging the persistent historiographic narrative that equates avant-garde poetics with an unequivocal rupture from tradition, the study demonstrates that canonical metrical forms—most notably iambic tetrameter—continued to operate as structurally productive, albeit critically reconfigured, elements within experimental verse. Drawing on a broad corpus encompassing poetic manifestos, verse texts, and prose writings by Vladimir Maiakovskii, Ilia Sel’vinskii, Semen Kirsanov, and Nikolai Aseev, the authors combine close formal analysis with quantitative prosodic modeling, including linguistic and speech models derived from Kolmogorov–Taranovsky verse theory. The article argues that avant-garde poets did not simply negate inherited metrics but subjected them to a process of internal recomposition, shifting attention from meter as a fixed scheme to rhythm as a dynamic, semantically charged construct. While rhythmic innovation is shown to be consciously engineered in verse, the analysis of verse-like fragments in prose reveals persistent, unconscious attachments to “classical” rhythmic patterns, particularly the Pushkinian alternating rhythm. This tension between declarative rejection and latent continuity illuminates the avant-garde’s distinctive mode of negotiating tradition: not abolishing it, but instrumentalizing it within a broader project of total artistic reorganization. The study thus reframes avant-garde prosody as a site where innovation and inheritance coexist in a state of productive contradiction, reshaping our understanding of modernist poetic technique. Full article

Perhaps the most well-known figure from among the Arabized Christians of al-Andalus, the theologian and scholar Ḥafṣ Ibn Albar of Cordoba (fl. late ninth/early tenth century CE) has attracted considerable scholarly attention. The work that has drawn the most attention, extant in its entirety, is Ibn Albar’s translation into the classical Arabic meter of rajaz of Jerome’s Latin Psalter, rendered from the Hebrew. Most scholars have focused on this text as a lens into Arabization and Islamization among Iberian Christians and the impact of acculturation on Christian doctrine. However, the relationship between poetic form and liturgical practice in Ibn Albar’s translation has received less attention. In the present article, I explore this relationship. I offer a close reading of Kitāb al-Zabūr in dialogue with its Vorlagen, the Old Hispanic liturgy, and Qurʾānic recitation. I argue that Ibn Albar’s translation exploits and amplifies the characteristic orality of its sources and communicates the Psalms principally as liturgical practice, ad intra and ad extra. I conclude that Ibn Albar’s Psalter reinforces Latin Christian tradition while also transcending it. Full article

While Abū Nuwās is most often celebrated for his irreverent exaltation of wine and homoerotic desire, his hunting poems (tardiyyāt) reveal a lyrical mode of interspecies perception and affective entanglement. Drawing on thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Donna Haraway, and Giorgio Agamben, I consider how Abū Nuwās develops an ecological and relational poetics that decenters human centrality and enacts a shared field of perception. The poet’s work offers a proto-phenomenological account of embodiment, relational ethics, and aesthetic attention that anticipates contemporary philosophical concerns with nonhuman agency, multi-species intersubjectivity, and an ethics of perception. Full article

Paul Celan’s speech the “Meridian” addresses the fundamental question of how poetry can be possible in a world “after Auschwitz.” In contrast to the Platonic aesthetic system and classical art traditions, Celan draws upon Büchner’s concept of “Hostility to Art.” Amid the paradox of “the impossibility of writing” and “the loneliest loneliness,” Celan embraces the mission of “struggling with the German language,” speaking through a wounded mouth to reclaim a lost home for art. He employs a “grayer language” that distrusts beauty and turns toward truth, approaching a “meridian” of language in a way both “art-less” and “art-free.” On this “meridian,” Celan engages in a secret dialogue of poetry and thought with Others such as Mallarmé, Adorno, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, seeking to return to a realm that is at once uncanny and oriented toward the human. Full article