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Change and contradiction in literary periods

  • Le 18 Novembre 1971 IIIe Sujet Courants Littéraires Époques Littéraires Séance du Matin Présidée par Roland Mortier Séance de L'Après-Midi Présidée par Jacques Voisine
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Literatur

  1. Cf. Second Thoughts on Literary Periods. In: Literature as System, Princeton, 1971, pp. 420–469.

  2. Change. In: The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, New York and London, 1967, II, p. 79.

  3. Croce: Epoche cronologiche e epoche storiche. In: La storia come pensiero e come azione, 6th ed. Bari, 1954, p. 308.

  4. Cf. Literature as System, p. 447.

  5. Cit. by Janson, H. W.: Criteria of Periodization in the History of European Art. New Literary History, I (1970), p. 118.

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  6. Gombrich, E. H.: A Comment on H. W. Janson's Article. New Literary History, I (1970), p. 124.

  7. Styles et histoire du style. In: Littérature Hongroise. Littérature Européenne, ed. István Sőtér and Ottó Süpek, Budapest, 1964, p. 25.

  8. Cf. Braudel, F.: La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II, 2e éd. Paris, 1966.

  9. Critique de la raison dialectique. Paris, 1960, pp. 63–64, n. 2.

  10. Sartre, p. 24: „nous apprimes à tourner le pluralisme (ce conceptde droite) contre l'idéalisme optimiste et moniste de nos professeurs, au nom d'une pensée de gauche qui s'ignorait encore.”

  11. Sartre, „nous apprimes à tourner le pluralisme (ce conceptde droite) contre l'idéalisme optimiste et moniste de nos professeurs, au nom d'une pensée de gauche qui s'ignorait encore.”, p. 15.

  12. Sartre, „nous apprimes à tourner le pluralisme (ce conceptde droite) contre l'idéalisme optimiste et moniste de nos professeurs, au nom d'une pensée de gauche qui s'ignorait encore.”, p. 37.

  13. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, ed. T. Litt, Stuttgart, 1961, p. 478.

  14. J. Ferrater Mora: El ser y la muerte. In: Obras selectas, Madrid, 1967, Vol. II, pp. 344–346.

  15. Let me refer here to the idea of “literary zone” as a method for the articulation in literary history of supranational objects of study. There are great difficulties involved. The notion of zone is originally spatial (in geography, in geometry). It may also refer to supranational culture groups-like the Slavic nations, or the Scandinavian. However, it is profoundly characteristic of Europe and its diversity that certain nations, particularly in Central Europe-Rumania, Hungary, or even Czechoslovakia-, do not belong clearly to one group or may even be viewed as participating in more than one zone. In such cases, the issue should be settled historically-or perhaps not be settled at all. At any rate, it seems evident that zones of this type do not coincide withliterary zones at all, that is, with those configurations, embracing international styles, movements, and the such, which are supposed to be of use to literary history in the first place. If we are to write a European history of the Baroque, what profit will be derived from the use of culture zones such as the Slavic or the Germanic? Endre Angyal has shown that Baroque styles in Hungary owed much to an aristocratic culture of which the center was Poland, to the Serbo-Croatian humanists of the seventeenth century, and to a “symbiose hungaro-slave réalisée sur la terre de Hongrie à l'âge baroque”-cf. Littérature Hongroise. Littérature Européenne, pp. 189–190. And of course the French impact on Hungarian culture was not negligible during the Middle Ages. The close connection existing between English literature and Italian literature from the days of Chaucer to those of Joyce supersedes any notion of culture zone in Western Europe, unless the zone is to be so large as to make it indispensable to view it as a changing, evolving, historicalensemble articulé, marked by peculiar nation-to-nation tensions and contacts—of the kind that we encounter also when we view the role of regions or provinces within a single nation or state. The internal structure of the Iberian peninsula is triadic: it is based on a historical series of relationships and tensions between the Castilian, the Portuguese and the Catalan components. The culture zone, in its broadest outline, may have persisted over a number of centuries, but the articulation of the whole has changed. The dialectics of part and whole, or of part and part, must be traced historically along a trajectory of change.

  16. Dimensions de la conscience historique, 2e éd. Paris, 1964, p. 112.

  17. Danto, A.: Analytical Philosophy of History. Cambridge, Eng., 1965, p. 159.

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Guillén, C. Change and contradiction in literary periods. Neohelicon 1, 210–223 (1973). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02039247

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