As I am.
As I am.
All or not at all.

― James Joyce, Ulysses

                                   
                                                    Doutzen Kroes Photographed by Jan Welters

"MUST READING" before the New Semester

Dear Students,

During the semester you are exposed to a list of readings and assignments. But while you are trying to figure out the hidden secrets, messages and lessons out of the text, you may face the truth that you have to do a more complex reading in order to analyze the literal work.

The most common insipiratons are definitely driven from Roman and Greek classics.
Here is a list of readings that I recommend (for freshman and sophomores) you to read before the new semester:

1. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus
- Oedipus is important for the theory on the Oedipus Complex.
- Antigone is important for civil disobedience, gender and familial ties.

2. The Odyssey, by Homer
- Odysseus’s journey back to Ithaka, all about "human motivation"

3. Metamorphoses by Ovid
- best-known myths and legends of ancient Greece and Rome (including Icarus)
- influenced writers and artists throughout the centuries from Shakespeare and Titian to Picasso and Ted Hughes.

4. Theogony by Hesiod
- first Greek mythical cosmogony

“Art is how we decorate space, Music is how we decorate time” - Jean-Michel Basquiat

via GIPHY

sculpture "little dancer" by Edgar Degas

Living in Diaspora

N 
Nilüfer Bharucha points out in her work Imagined Worlds: Salman Rushdie as a Writer of the Indian Diaspora, “[l]iving in diaspora means living in forced or voluntary exile and living in exile usually leads to severe identity confusion and problems of identification with an alienation from the old and new cultures and homelands” (70). "Alienaton", "Exile", "Migration","Otherness" are not only recurring themes and key words constructing the fundamentals of Diaspora Literature, but are also considered as leitmotifs in many other literal works.

For those who are interested in Diaspora Literature, this essay may well be a nice introduction, titled "Metaphors of Diaspora: English Literature at the Turn of the Century" by Fernando Galvan:
http://www.sdas.edus.si/Elope/PDF/ElopeVol5Galvan.pdf

                                      Yang Hae-gue "Diaspora" at Haus der Kunst in Munich 2013
                                                          https://hausderkunst.de/en/exhibitions/der-ffentlichkeit-von-den-freunden-haus-der-kunst-haegue-yang

la passion et l'art

'I put my heart and soul into my work, and I have lost my mind in the process' - Vincent van Gogh

   

The Dialogic Imagination

“T he word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder with it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object. A word forms a concept of its own object in a dialogic way” (279). 
                                  - Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin

For Bakhtin, texts do not exist ‘in themselves,’ but only in their relations to other texts. Poetry, for example, is traditionally monologic, due to the fact that the poet “endured in the process of creation, in the finished work language is an obedient organ, fully adequate to the author’s intention” (Bakhtin, 286). Monologism therefore encloses the created world and pretends to be the ultimate world. However every piece of art remains to inclose another piece of art may it an allusion or a text, a phrase, a clip of newspaper, photography or a word. Be aware of the dialogue while reading !


those who wish to include this theory in their MA studies can watch Slavic literary scholar Michael Holquist for a lecture entitled “On a Footnote in Bakhtin.”

Please use your free time to re-read novels with a different point of view!!!

Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland', for example, is not an adult book in the usual sense,but still an excellent novel for further analysis.  Here are some inspiring articles and a book:

Alice’s Vacillation between Childhood and Adolescence in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
https://kau.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:409791/FULLTEXT01.pdf

The Tripartite role of the Psyche in Alice in Wonderland:
http://www.diva-portal.se/smash/get/diva2:974381/FULLTEXT01.pdf

From Carroll‘s to HBO‘s Alice: gender, sexuality and nonconforming subjectivities:
http://www.bibliotecadigital.ufmg.br/dspace/bitstream/handle/1843/ECAP-9J2P9E/diana__lislie._from_carroll_s_to_hbo_s_alice1.pdf?sequence=1

Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy:
https://cdn.mashreghnews.ir/old/files/fa/news/1392/9/25/459415_804.pdf

The Three Oddest Words

W

hen I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,

                          I destroy it.

                          When I pronounce the word Nothing,
                          I make something no nonbeing can hold. 

                          - Wislawa Szymborska

La poesía tal vez se realza cantando cosas humildes.
M. Cervantes

Beyond the Canon to the Margins

I

t is a problematic condition that due to the academic curriculum university students are introduced to literature that is highly considered as the Canon.

Please be curious and always step out of the European and American tradition of the classics and approach the works of the margins.

You will find a reflection of tradition and heritage under the umbrella term of cultural memory when you seek literal works of minorities.

La poésie est pour nous 🌹

To Ist-Bilgi ELT

Dear Students,

I have announced your final grades including those who took the MakeUp Exam.
Please check them during the day.
best
gh

Respect poetry. Writers have died for it.

Ariel. P.