Книжка-1

Table of Contents: Issue 1, 2025 - Bulgarian, English

In 2025, the journal Literaturna missal (Literary thought) is going to publish an issue dedicated to the interdisciplinary topic "Sound and Text". The issue will include articles in English and Bulgarian. The complex interrelations between sound and text have a history as long as literature itself, dating back from the primary unstable form of oral poetry, through the secondary writing forms of oral poetry, up till today’s digital audio-visual forms (Paul Zumthor. Oral Poetry: An Introduction). Sound should be considered in the broadest possible sense, and in many literary and cultural forms it is practically inseparable from the text. The interconnected forms of sound and text are positioned in a broad intercultural context, as these forms develop from the verse of Antiquity to the present day. The research could focus on acoustic and textological issues of the Medieval Corpus and Early Modernity to the 20th century. It can adopt historical or theoretical approach. From the perspective of intermediality, the research could analyze the sound-text interaction in the historical avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes. The complex relations between the two are crucial also for many other realms of contemporary cultural studies (electronic audio literature, film, theatre, performance, popular music, video games, digital media, etc.). Their theoretical and historical configurations call for examination from various perspectives.

This article examines the relationship between sound and meaning, addressing the questions of the arbitrariness or (partial) motivation of their connection, as well as the related problem of the specific value of linguistic sound in poetic texts. The analytical section of the article comments upon three poetic texts: an episode from the third book of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (ca. AD 8), Ivan Vazov’s poem “Echoes” (1884), and Nadezhda Radulova’s poem “Echo” (2020). The article argues that these three texts share a common poetic strategy that functionalizes sound by combining the repetition of words or word fragments with a transformation of meaning. Thus, new meanings arise through the repetition of an already existing acoustic image.

The paper begins by criticizing, theoretically and practically, a view that may be termed “the picture−soundtrack dogma”: the view that the sound patterns of a text become expressive only on certain occasions. Then it turns to the analysis of dysphony of the grand style (essentially the substrate of the Homeric style) in [Pseudo?]Demetrius’ treatise “De elocutione” (Περὶ ἑρμενείας). The main argument is that dysphony is based on phonic density and also that it relates very closely to other levels of the text: metrical, syntactic, semantic etc.

The article traces the attitude to music in the Hellenistic Greek novels, namely the pastoral novels and tries to outline the significance of music and musical improvisation in the ancient world. It is shown against the backdrop of the representations of visual images. The text follows an excursus from there on and it is aimed at explaining the fate of music within the tradition of the aesthetics of the Enlightenment. With this purpose in mind, it considers the distinguishing between the varying signs and the divergent content of different arts as it is done in Winkelmann, Lessing and Herder. Visual art is privileged in the whole tradition of aesthetics. This is true mostly for aesthetics, which considers itself to be a philosophy of art and not a science of perceptive faculties and intuition. This tendency reaches its peak in Hegel’s “Aesthetics”.

The article focuses on the figure poems of Hellenism and on the figure notations of composers from the “Ars subtilior” movement. It discusses the modern experiments with the written word, created during Hellenism and then in the 14th-15th centuries, as they reveal the synthesis between the verbal, visual and auditory. Thereafter and against this tradition, the paper touches upon modern experiments from the 20th century in the works of Erik Satie and “Notations” by John Cage.

This study examines the shift in the prosecutorial strategy of Ernest Pinard in the cases against Gustave Flaubert (“Madame Bovary”) and Charles Baudelaire (“Les Fleurs du mal”), offering an interpretation that explores the ways in which legal professionals read literary works. Using examples such as the poet-detective Gabriel Syme, a character in G. K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday”, and the investigating monk William, a character in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”, the article investigates potential connections between poetry and law. These connections create legal spaces where both laughter and music become possible. Particular attention is given to the relationship between text and music within the framework of court proceedings (the so-called “courtroom acoustics”) as well as in the formation of judicial practice (understood as a harmonious performance).

This article examines the role of sound in literary texts, focusing on how silent reading recreates sonic effects. The research discusses the question of whether sound-meaning links are inherent or conventional, ranging from Plato’s, Saussure’s, Peirce’s, and Jakobson’s points of view on the matter. In particular, sound symbolism and Jakobson’s poetic function highlight how phonetic literary tools can shape aesthetics in writing. An empirical analysis of selected Josip Stritar’s 19th-century novels reveals the author’s frequent use of onomatopoeia, alliteration, and rhythm to create evocative prose. In fact, though often associated with poetry, sound-based elements also enrich narrative texts in prose, suggesting specific atmospheres and emotional depth. These writing features showcase the complexity and importance of sound in literature.

An introductory look at the interdisciplinary field that, in line with global trends, can be called music and literature studies, or word and music studies, gives the possibility to present some important achievements of this field in Slovenian scientific and artistic literature. This article analyses the interaction of sounds, music, and literature in four twentieth-century Slovenian narrative texts, written respectively by Ivan Cankar, Milan Pugelj, Ciril Kosmač, and Rudi Šeligo. The focus is not on the sonority of the prose itself (assonance, alliteration, rhythm, rhyme, and onomatopoeia), but on the effects of musical modernity on narrative forms from early modernism to the present, and therefore, on the ways in which music modernized or shaped their narrative discourse.

“Shipwreck with a Witness: Music and Fascism in Thomas Bernhard’s “The Loser”” is an attempt to think the multifaceted relations between music as an art and practice, and fascism as a desire as well as a political, existential, aesthetic, etc. condition and phantasm. These relations are explored through a close reading of Thomas Bernhard’s novel “The Loser” which is a fictional account of a doomed friendship between Bernhard‘s unnamed narrator, a fictionalised version of Glenn Gould, the infamous piano virtuoso, and Wertheimer – a caricature of the equally infamous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is through them that Bernhard addresses the problems of madness, desire for eternity and totality, the hatred of diversity and the Other, etc. By unpacking the dense logic and meaning of the above through ideas by Deleuze, Brassier, André Michels, etc., the text addresses the crucial figure of witnessing a transcendental trauma (fascism) qua event. Finally, the article engages with the theoretical and practical (ethical) importance of examining not just the relation between fascism and music but also the problem of the return of fascism within contemporary culture.

The article will attempt to explore George Saunders' novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” from a Lacanian perspective, focusing on the relationship between the voice, trauma, and the various forms (neologisms, euphemisms, and ellipses) under which the half-told [mi-dit] appears in the work of the American author. The article’s main goal will be to demonstrate that Saunders' book is constructed as a polyphonic (in the Bakhtinian sense) collage of voices, which continuously evoke the empty core of their subjectivity. As the novel occasionally blurs the boundary between fact and fiction, the text will also examine how Saunders treats history as a fictional (or phantasmic) field of disagreements, coordinated around the half-told truth of some (traumatic) event.

The paper aims to analyse the dimensions of silence in “The Name of the Wind” in order to highlight the various roles that music plays in the examined work. The subversive strategies that the novel employs in regard to the genre expectations of fantasy literature are of particular interest. Deposition is seen as a conceptual move that draws on the dynamic between the magical, the scientific and the musical within the framework of the fictional world.

The aim of this research paper is to unravel some unknown sound features of the language of the disciples of St. Cyril and St. Methodius by analyzing the rhythmic structure of four Old Bulgarian canons in 12-syllable verses. Each of the verses in these works follows one of the variants of the dodecasyllable used in the three Byzantine iambic canons by St. John of Damascus, which are briefly presented in the article. The restriction of the line to exactly 12 syllables makes it possible to clarify: a) whether the vocals ъ and ь (jers) in a weak position began to disappear as early as the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century; b) whether jers positioned before [j] were syllabic; and c) whether Old Bulgarian hymnographers used contracted endings of the adjectives.

This study examines several incantations against the disease known as “nezhit”, focusing on the pronunciation of sacred words as a primary method of healing the sick. The connection between these incantations and prayers against this disease, found mainly in various medieval books of both liturgical and apocryphal nature, is also explored.