Suchergebnisse

This study is, to a large extent, influenced by the Marxist doctrine on the relationship between literature and society. It has been assumed by the marxist literary theorists that literature as the upper level of society is determined by the lower level namely the economic. Meanwhile, it is also suggested that literature is a part of social-realism suggesting that literary writer must describe the reality within society and then make socialistic propaganda. This study, by concentrating on this contadictory statementnconcerning literature, sees that arcadia theory may be applicable in order to explain the relationship beetween literature and society. The theory assumes that a writer of a certain class, aristocracy for instance, must adapt his way of struggling against a certain condition to his own social background. In this way, it has been found that Amir Hamzah who was of the aristocratic family must fight against his own society by the use of 'hidden' propaganda rather than a straight forward or bottom-up approach.

This thematic issue is not simply about political appropriations of Rome and its empire in later times (e. g. Byzantium as a New Rome, the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, the US as the final goal of the translatio imperii from the East to the West, etc.). Instead, it is dedicated to the role specific paradigmatic patterns related to the Roman Empire played in political imaginaries and literature. The initiative for this collection of papers originated in the research project "Empire and Transformation of Genre in Roman Literature", funded by the Slovenian Research Agency (J6-2585). A live conference on the topic was planned for 2021 but had to be called off for obvious reasons. In spite of this, the virtual exchange of ideas between the contributors amounted to forming an ad hoc research group that is supposed to come together again, in person, at a forthcoming international event.

Japanese writer and Nobel laureate Kenzaburô Ôe delivered the first in a series of lectures established at the Center for Japanese Studies to honor political theorist Masao Maruyama. In his Maruyama Lecture, "The Language of Masao Maruyama," he focuses on the problem of political responsibility in the modern world, taking Maruyama's major work as his point of departure. In a second (unrelated) lecture, "From the Beginning to the Present, and Facing the End: The Case of One Japanese Writer," Kenzaburô Ôe offers an account of his own development as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction.