There are episodes in Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead that seemingly contradict its realistic genre when ordinary soldiers experience moments of mystical awareness and knowledge about everything and everyone. Admittedly, these moments are fleeting. Yet, studying these flashes of insight inevitably leads to the conclusion that the young author of mere 25 years packed a lot more in...
The presented studies may help to view and analyse the mystical not only as a conceptual category, but also from a functional and semantic perspective, providing the opportunity to distinguish certain verbal characteristics of literary artistic texts as non-fiction sacred sources originated from different epochs of human cultural development. This study aims at disclosing cultural and...
Written at a time when the nature of place was reimagined, John Lyly’s Endymion draws upon Neoplatonic theories of desire to present space as a domain continually reshaped by contemplative thought. In his commentary on Plato’s Symposium , Marsilio Ficino argues that desire can traverse the cosmos in an ecstatic flight toward the Beautiful and the Good, bringing the contemplative soul closer to...