Suchergebnisse

The development of English literature in the eighteenth century was strongly influenced by France and French writers. Lately there has been an attempt to belittle the French influences. It is true that in the past the Gallic influence has been exaggerated, but it really cannot be overlooked. Historically it is true to treat England and France as one country in respect to their literary activity between the middle of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Roughly, there were about 100 years, between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the execution of Louis XIV in 1793, during which there was a solid block of Franco-British or Anglo-French literary achievement. The Civil War in England gave the English political exiles in Paris a chance to acquire French taste, but this Entente Litteraire was ended when the French Revolution through Trafalgar and Waterloo caused a revulsion from the French example.

Similar to other fields, Middle East Studies are at a stage where scholars have begun to reexamine their efforts within the framework of the modern university and science in general, with regard to both research and teaching. It is being realized that for a long time these studies have been directed towards area specialization and self-perpetration while efforts at keeping up the communication with other fields of scholarship and, more important perhaps, with the disciplinary approaches and theories that are or ought to be applied in Near Eastern studies have been very much neglected. Communication of our field with other fields and with the various disciplines is invariable dependent on translation from translations of individual pieces of literature to 'translations' of the entire field and the range of problems related to it. Translators from one European language into another can rely on a vast amount of secondary data and a general knowledge of the overlapping cultural settings. Translators of Middle Eastern literary output have first to overcome a basic public ignorance about the area on, or, if not ignorance, then a view and presupposition that our field is still largely exotic. There is moreover little expectation on the side of non-specialists that the literary output of the Middle East can have any wider impact on or be of any importance for the various humanistic or social disciplines and comparative studies.

If Westerners harbored any doubts about the role of the Catholic Church in sustaining the Polish national spirit, the recent visit of Pope John Paul II to his native land surely laid them to rest. And yet the Church's historic partner in the enterprise of keeping Polish nationalism alive is still generally overlooked. That partner is Poland's national literature.Polish literature helped sustain the nation through centuries of oppression, and its role in the post-World War II epoch has been no less critical. From the Romantic classics of the nineteenth century to a (for Eastern Europe) remarkably free modern literature, Poland's authors and poets are its unsung heroes in the struggle to preserve an independent national culture.