Literature, Volume 4, Issue 1 (March 2024) – 4 articles

It is well studied that some Pythagorean principles lied at the foundations of the Late Antique Neoplatonic School. The main reason for that conclusion to be drawn is the two biographies of the Samian sage written by the Neoplatonic philosophers Porphyry of Tyre and Iamblichus of Chalcis. Accordingly, the archetypical image of Pythagoras became a major ideal for which every pagan philosopher aimed in Late Antiquity. Henceforth, masters and their disciple circles comprised a micro-society which can reasonably be analyzed as a whole. Suffice it to say that they were small and cohesive charismatic communities whose isolation from the outside world aroused a living harmony from which emerged long-standing emotional bonds. Consequently, the Pythagorically rooted κοινός βίος (Iambl. Vit. Pyth. 6.29: τὸ λεγόμενον κοινοβίους) can easily be ascertained in the biographical literature around the philosophical schools from Plotinus to Damascius (cf. Porph. Vit. Plot. 18.6-14; Procl. In Resp. passim). It is a way of life in common which was also known at the old Athenian Academy (according to Plato’s only explicit reference to Pythagoras (Resp. 600a-b: Πυθαγόρειον τρόπον τοῦ βίου) and has sometimes been defined even as “coenobitic”, in analogy with other contemporary phenomena. But from our point of view, it can be better understood through an analysis of the concept of συνουσία—that is, the meetings of philosophers with their companions (ἑταῖροι) in a specific place which turned into a sort of spiritual household. With this contribution, we aim at focusing on the redefinition of the Neoplatonic συνουσίαι as a legacy of the Platonic notion of συνουσία, stemming from Pythagorean κοινόβιοι. To sum up, we will revise this issue and the state of the art, with the redefinition of Late Antique συνουσία as a terminus technicus in the biographic literature around the Neoplatonic Schools, aiming at opening new paths for the understanding of the Pythagorean–Platonic heritage in Late Antiquity. Full article

Respecting life and protecting life are the core values of Chinese culture. As the greatest poet nurtured by Chinese culture, Du Fu showed a distinct consciousness of life in his poems. With the passage of time and the changes in his physical body, Du Fu became sensitively aware of the existence of life. Government service was the main way to realize the value of life for scholars of Tang, and this way was frustrated by reality for a long time, particularly for the poet Du Fu, who faced the crisis of settling his life. Although Du Fu wanted to find a place to settle his life in the other dimensions of the human world, in the real and imaginary drunken world and the natural world, he could not overcome the frustration concerning the relationship between the ruler and the minister, and he often felt the pain of nowhere to settle his life and the insignificance of life when its meaning becomes absent. Full article

In a Christmas 2017 interview with the British magazine Fortean Times, the celebrated Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro described ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘the original Cinderella’, and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ as ‘a horror story’, before affirming that ‘horror and the fairy tale walk hand in hand’ (del Toro 2017, p [...] Full article

At the beginning of his Creole opus The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable refers to Louisiana as “A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay”. This anti-pastoral view of Louisiana as an ecosystem of horrific nature and the very human melancholy it breeds is one that has persisted in popular American culture to the present day. However, the literature of Louisiana itself is marked by its creativity in blending elements of folktales, fairy tales, and local color. This paper proposes to examine the transhuman, or the transcendence of the natural by means of supernatural transformation, in folk horror tales of Louisiana. As the locus where the fairy tale meets the burgeoning Southern Gothic, these tales revolve around a reworking of what Vladimir Propp refers to as transfiguration, the physical and metaphysical alteration of the human into something beyond the human. The focus of this paper will be on three recurring figures in Louisiana folk horror: yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil. Drawing upon works including Alcée Fortier’s collection of Creole folktales Louisiana Folktales (1895), Dr. Alfred Mercier’s “1878”, and various newspaper tales of voodoo ceremonies from the ante- and post-bellum periods, this article brings together theorizations about the fairy tale from Vladimir Propp and Jack Zipes and historiological approaches to the Southern Gothic genre to demonstrate that Louisiana, in its multilingual literary traditions, serves as a nexus where both genres blend uncannily together to create tales that are both geographically specific and yet exist outside of the historical time of non-fantastic fiction. Each of these figures, yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil, challenges the expectations of what limits the human. Thus, this paper seeks to examine what will be termed the “Louisiana gothic”, a particular blend of fairy-tale timelessness, local color, and the transfiguration of the human. Ultimately, the Louisiana gothic, as expressed in French, English, and Creole, tends toward a view of society in decay, mobilizing these elements of horror and of fairy tales to comment on a society that, after the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Civil War, was seen as falling into inevitable decline. This commentary on societal decay, expressed through elements of folk horror, sets apart Louisiana gothic as a distinct subgenre that challenges conventions about the structures and functions of the fairy tale. Full article