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This article examines Magorovy labutí písně (‘Magor’s swan songs’), a collection of poems by political prisoner Ivan M. Jirous, and an important example of Czech prison poetry from the second half of the 20th century. It was during his imprisonment in Litoměřice, Ostrov, and Valdice (1981–1985) that Jirous wrote the poems, which were smuggled out as motáky (clandestine notes written on rolls of paper) by his friend and fellow prisoner Jiří Gruntorád. The article first characterises the situation of Jirous and the Czech underground during the 1970s and 1980s. It then proceeds to analyse how Magorovy labutí písně represents a form of literary creation whose aesthetic specificity arises from the situation of extreme hardship — the ‘state of emergency’ — in which it was written. This specificity can be found in the authentic and even documentary aspect in which the poems reflect the time and place of the prison, as well as the broader, timeless, and more spatially expansive awareness of life that the poems express. What is essential here is not the contingent aspects of the writing, the fleeting influence of inspiration, but more broadly the conscious use of specific means and methods of poetic composition. It is thus a form of literary expression that confronts the characteristic aspects of prison time and spatial confinement by consciously exceeding the limits of the walls, reaching out into the diverse and varying temporal planes and shifting reality of the surrounding world — an experience that is only intensified by its juxtaposition to the daily life of the prisoner from which these dimensions have been brutally stripped. This context-based interpretive analysis demonstrates, in conclusion, that the prison poetry in question here aims to define the effects of confinement and the prison environment by means of a complex gesture, one that is unified by a range of interrelated poetic devices: aural (sound and metre), figural, metaphorical, compositional, stylistic, etc. Prison poetry thus facilitates the survival of its creators and fellow (not only political) prisoners — referred to colloquially as ‘muklové’ (an acronym for muži určení k likvidaci, or ‘men destined for liquidation’) — not only in the physical sense, but above all spiritually, as integral, unbroken personalities.

Reading is a highly complex cognitive process. From a neurobiological point of view, it involves at least six linguistic sub-competences including orthographic, semantic, syntactic, phonetic and prosodic competence. Each of these skills is required of the reader to extract different types of information from the text, ranging from the perceptual and the syntactic to the lexical and pragmasemantic one. Based on the main results of cognitive-oriented research on text and reading, this paper illustrates how prosodic competence, combined with formal coherence patterns, can be considered and employed as a reading strategy, enabling the reader to progressively grasp the meanings of a text. In the first part particular attention will be paid to the description of the syntax-prosody interface as well as of its function as a means of encoding of information structure in German. With regard to the teaching of German as a foreign language, the second part of the paper will present a method to train intonational reading. This approach aims to raise foreign language readers’ awareness of prosodic features of written texts and to introduce them to melodic patterns which can be encountered while reading. Such a practical training may prove to be advantageous, as the most typical and apparently “uncorrectable” errors committed by foreign language learners when speaking and reading German texts are almost always related to the domains of phonology and prosody.

In this paper we tackle the issue of the role of narrative language in the constitution of human subjectivity. There are at least two different approaches to this issue. The first one is consistent with the view that language has a unique constitutive role in cognition. According to this account, human subjectivity is a by-product of the advent of language. We will refer to it as linguistic idealism and will argue that, in spite of its popularity in the philosophy and social sciences, this view is completely unfounded. We will defend a second approach, which acknowledges the relevant role of language in human subjectivity but interprets this role in the light of a relation of coevolution between language and cognition. We will suggest that this relation is asimmetric and the priority is given to the cognitive foundations of human sense of the self. The influence of language on human subjectivity is then analyzed in terms of a retroactive effect. We will argue that the relation of coevolution between language and cognition provides an interpretative tool that allows us to account for human subjectivity in accordance with darwinian naturalism.

From Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages, two basic factor shaped Ravenna’s ability to influence a much more extensive space than its natural hinterland. The first was its establishment as an imperial residence the second was its location within the northern Adriatic basin, which had since Antiquity been a crossroads for peoples, trade and cultures. Just on the basis of the support it received from the imperial power, its episcopate was elevated to one of the most important sees of Italy. By means of the large international harbour of Classe, from the 5th to the 7th centuries the city imported products from around the entire Mediterranean. With the arrival of the Byzantine government, the ties between the port of Classe and the other Mediterranean export centres shifted by moving from West to East. Moreover, the relationship with Constantinople reaffirmed the political and ecclesiastical importance of Ravenna. As long as these ties remained strong, Ravenna retained a vital contact to the other maritime Mediterranean trade centres. The twilight of Byzantine rule did not cause the decline of the city, but rather a progressive turn of its ruling class toward the political scenario of the medieval West. By virtue of being the management centre of the patrimonium beati Apollinaris, the city remained wealthy and influential well beyond the 9th century. This was due both to the economic power of its archbishops and to their alliance with the Ottonians and then later with the Salian and Swabian emperors. The trajectories of the political centrality of Ravenna from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages were, therefore, deeply influenced by the dynamic of successive empires, which, in one form or another, were all connected or attempted to reconnect to the memory of its Roman past.

Βιβλιοκρισία του: T. C. LOUNGHIS, Byzantium in the Eastern Mediterranean: Safeguarding East Roman Identity (407 – 1204), Nicosia 2010 (Cyprus Research Centre. Texts and Studies in the History of Cyprus, LXIII), pp. IX-XXXIV, 1-220, ISBN: 978-9963-0-8118-9.

Este artigo, por sua natureza teórica, trabalha com noções tais como infâncias, crianças, multidão e experiência, no intuito de pensar uma educação cujas práticas educativas possibilitem o exercício da infância. O artigo refaz um caminho no qual a infância e a criança são percebidas "em sua dimensão singular", de modo a recuperar, no fim do percurso, o caráter plural que as noções de criança e infância encerram. O referencial teórico parte de Deleuze, Guattari, Agamben, entre outros autores, e busca colocar a infância numa temporalidade múltipla, em detrimento da temporalidade fundada em visões da história e da psicologia, que privilegiam etapas e sucessões cronológicas. Ao afirmarmos a infância como atravessada pela experiência, pela inventividade e pelo desarazoamento, propomos pensar uma educação na direção da multidão.This article, in its theoretical nature, discusses notions such as childhood, children, multitude and experience, in order to consider a kind of early childhood education in which educational routine enables the practice of childhood to happen. The article rebuilds a path on which childhood and children are perceived according to a single particular notion. Towards the ending of the analysis, the plural character involved in the notions of child and childhood is considered.The theoretical framework for the analysis was based on the propositions of Deleuze, Guattari and Agamben, among others. Their views place childhood in a multiple temporality rather than in a single temporality which is determined by historical and psychological perspectives both based on chronological and succession levels. By stating that childhood is crossed by experiences, inventiveness and unreasonableness, our proposal is about thinking of a different kind of education, which leans towards the multitude.

Nelle gemme magiche appaiono diverse iconografie di divinità o personaggi armati. Queste includono l’anguipede della testa di gallo, Salomone e altri. La presenza di una iconografia con significato militare si spiega con l’uso apotropaico di questi amuleti, che servono a difendersi contro i demoni e le malattie.

The expression oikoi stratiōtikoi, used in Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus as opposed to oikoi politikoi, designates all those families who were bound to military service. They, in the tenth century, were listed in various enlistment registers that were periodically updated, among which one was kept in Constantinople. There is solid evidence to argue that such an administrative practice originated in the eighth century, coinciding with a significant transformation in the enrolment of soldiers and their maintenance. A conscription procedure was devised in the age of the Isaurians, which, although it is not known whether it was on a voluntary or compulsory basis, entailed the entry in the military records (in Constantinople and the provinces) of every person in charge (oikodespotēs) of the family that had assumed the military burden. This implied in later periods a strong uncertainty in the relationship between service and its performance because registration rested on an ambiguous vocabulary. The ambiguity, in fact, was rooted in the polysemy of the concept of oikos, family unit, home and patrimony at the same time. While such a notion allowed the recruitment in thematic armies to function flexibly through the wide network of the family's cognate and agnatic structure, precisely because the oikos was also a set of economic interests, it exposed the landed patrimony of military families to splitting and erosion. This ambiguity ended with Constantine VII's famous law of 949, which regulated the property regime of the stratiōtikoi oikoi, a regime that, as the same provision explicitly states in several points, already existed previously throughout the empire. The law provided a precise economic quantification of the assets needed for each 'military family' to perform the service. Historiography has generally interpreted Constantine VII's measure as an act breaking with the previous tradition, since military service appears in it much more markedly connoted as a patrimonial burden, rather than as a personal one. However, this 'oppositional' interpretation does not seem adequate for understanding the concept of oikos stratiōtikos, which from the outset must have implied a profound interrelationship between the personality of the service and its patrimonial basis, since the one did not exist without the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of German as a Foreign Language is the property of German as a Foreign Language and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Using a particular speech style or speaking a language variety such as a multi-ethnolect implies a continuous 'act of identity', i.e. a way of self-positioning through which speakers develop and consolidate a sense of belonging to a group. Starting with this assumption, this paper depicts the close correlations between linguistic variables and definition of macro-sociological categories for multilingual speakers. We will firstly focus on the main peculiarities of a new way of speaking emerging in multiethnic urban Germany (often referred to as 'Kiezdeutsch'), which combines features of a youth language with those of a contact language; then we will examine the major functions of sociolinguistic variation in social meaning construction as well as in the process of shaping one's own linguistic and cultural identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading is a highly complex cognitive process. From a neurobiological point of view, it involves at least six linguistic sub-competences including orthographic, semantic, syntactic, phonetic and prosodic competence. Each of these skills is required of the reader to extract different types of information from the text, ranging from the perceptual and the syntactic to the lexical and pragmasemantic one. Based on the main results of cognitive-oriented research on text and reading, this paper illustrates how prosodic competence, combined with formal coherence patterns, can be considered and employed as a reading strategy, enabling the reader to progressively grasp the meanings of a text. In the first part particular attention will be paid to the description of the syntax-prosody interface as well as of its function as a means of encoding of information structure in German. With regard to the teaching of German as a foreign language, the second part of the paper will present a method to train intonational reading. This approach aims to raise foreign language readers' awareness of prosodic features of written texts and to introduce them to melodic patterns which can be encountered while reading. Such a practical training may prove to be advantageous, as the most typical and apparently "uncorrectable" errors committed by foreign language learners when speaking and reading German texts are almost always related to the domains of phonology and prosody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of German as a Foreign Language is the property of German as a Foreign Language and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)