This article reconstructs the forgotten friendship between Georges Bataille and the Russian émigré poet and philosopher Boris Poplavsky. Comparing their solar metaphysics, I focus on conceptions of friendship, sacrifice and depersonalisation. First, I retrace Bataille’s relationship to early Surrealis and Russian circles in interwar Paris, with a focus on his friendship with Irina Odoevtseva. I then offer a novel reading of Poplavsky’s poetry through the lens of Bataille’s philosophy, analysing a recurring motif that I call ‘dark solarity’. Uncovering a hidden (...) intertextual dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I argue for Poplavsky’s lasting impact on Bataille’s anti-Icarian sun cult. Finally, my paper demonstrates how Poplavsky’s writings on solar sacrifice, excess and friendship left marks on Bataille’s vision of a solar community, embodied in the secret society Acéphale. The dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I finally suggest, is a missing piece in the entangled history of Russian and French philosophy, as well as an original contribution to discourses on friendship in twentieth-century continental thought. (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites (...) us to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

Bringing allegory into the light from the neglect into which it fell means focusing on the wondrous heights of the human spirit in its significance for culture. Contemporary philosophies and literary theories, which give pre-eminence to primary linguistics forms (symbol and metaphor), seem to favor just that which makes intelligible communication possible. But they fall short in accounting for the deepest subliminal founts that prompt the mind to exalt in beauty, virtue, transcending aspiration. The present, rich collection shows how (...) allegory, incorporating the soaring of the spirit, offers highlights for culture, with its fluctuations and transformation. This collective effort, rich in ideas and intuitions and covering a vast range of cultural manifestations, is a pioneering work, retrieving the vision of the exalted human spirit, bringing together literature, theatre, music and painting in a variety of revealing perspectives. The authors include: M. Kronegger, Ch. Raffini, J. Smith, J.B. Williamson, H. Ross, M.F. Wagner, F. Divorne, L. Oppenheim, D.K. Heckerl, N. Campi de Castro, P. Saurez Pascual, M. Alfaro Amieiro, H. Fletcher Thompson, R.J. Wilson III, and A. Stensaas. For specialists, students and workers in philosophy, comparative literature, aesthetic phenomenologists and historians of art. (shrink)

This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the problem of scale, with essays ranging in subject matter from literature to film, architecture, the plastic arts, philosophy, and scientific and political writing. Its contributors consider a variety of issues provoked by the sudden and pressing shifts in scale brought on by globalization and the era of the Anthropocene, including: the difficulties of defining the concept of scale; the challenges that shifts in scale pose to knowledge formation; the role of scale (...) in mediating individual subjectivity and agency; the barriers to understanding objects existing in scalar realms different from our own; the role of scale in mediating the relationship between humans and the environment; and the nature of power, authority, and democracy at different social scales. (shrink)

The third and purportedly final attempt to outline a personalism appropriate for a post-modern, post Marxist cultural phase, linked to but independent of Grant's (English, U. of Victoria, British Columbia) Literature and Personal Habits (1992) and Spirituality and the Meaning of Persons (1994). Concerned here with the idea of the person in relation to the politics of culture, he considers certain relationships between literature and religion to find clues about persons and human community. Annotation copyrighted by Book (...) News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

These essays showcase the value of the narrative arts in investigating complex conflicts of value in moral and political life, and explore the philosophical problem of moral dilemmas as expressed in ancient drama, classic and contemporary ...

We assess the organizational culture in the finance industry in relation to the global financial crisis and consider the potential of cultural change to improve the financial sector. To avoid biases, we build on the person–organization fit literature and develop a novel, indirect method for assessing organizational culture that revolves around relationships between employees’ personal traits and their career success in the industry or organization under study. We analyze personal values concerning the pursuit of private gain versus (...) personal values concerning caring for others and consider whether employees that value self-enhancement more and self-transcendence less enjoy more career success relative to their peers when working in finance than when working in other industries. Results do not reveal any sort of cross-industry differences that would implicate the finance industry’s culture in the financial crisis. Instead, we find the opposite, namely that strong self-enhancement values and weak self-transcendence values go together with less career success in the finance industry compared to other industries. Hence, if anything, the culture in the finance industry does not seem to resonate well with professionals that seek to pursue personal gain at the expense of clients’ welfare. Implication is that cultural change has little potential to improve the financial system. Meanwhile, the method for assessing organizational culture indirectly by analyzing relationships between employees’ traits and their career outcomes has wider applicability, particularly when relying on scores or measures obtained directly from the people concerned is likely to render biased evidence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Self-Culture in Emerson’s Schellingian Solution to FateNicholas L. Guardiano (bio)Professor of English literature, President of Yale University, and Commissioner of Major League Baseball, Angelo Bartlett Giamatti (1938–1989), delighted in saying that Emerson “is as sweet as barbed wire.”1 Giamatti understood the full range of Emerson’s thought, which spans the highs and lows of the human condition. Writings such as “Experience,” “Illusions,” “The Tragic,” and “Fate” demonstrate the (...) transcending of Emerson’s transcendentalism beyond any soft Romanticism or naïve idealism. They consistently assert the reality of antagonistic forces pervading human experience and nature. “The Tragic” opens with the lines: “He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the House of Pain. As the salt sea covers more than two thirds of the surface of the globe, so sorrow encroaches in man on felicity” (CW 10:334).2 “Fate” similarly insists: “We cannot trifle with this reality [of fate], this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts” (CW 6:11; my emphasis). Emerson was made intimately aware of the House of Pain by his own personal hardships. To name only a few, there was the death of his first wife Ellen at age 19 from tuberculosis, a rheumatic eye disease that left Emerson nearly blind for months, the terrible loss of his five-year old son Waldo to scarlet fever, the untimely deaths of his two brothers Charles and Edward in their 20s, a fire that partially destroyed the Emerson family home, and the inexorable mental decline into aphasia afflicting Emerson in his final years. Emerson further bore sympathetic witness to the hardships of his friends, family, and community. In addition, he lived through the national crisis of the American Civil War, and was a committed abolitionist willing to face head on the real evils of slavery. These experiences and others were a discipline in the tragic [End Page 28] constitution of the world. Furthermore, they provided hints on how to make one’s way through it.3In this essay, I aim to do some justice to Emerson’s mature transcendentalism by examining his metaphysical-ethical co-principles of fate and freedom, or necessity and power. These co-principles are the central topic of the essay “Fate,” which appeared as the opening chapter of the book The Conduct of Life (1860). There, Emerson somewhat paradoxically admits both principles as opposing forces, and attempts to show their compatibility using a Schellingian dialectic. After presenting Emerson’s understanding of fate and an interpretation of his metaphysical solution to it, I follow up on the primary ethical concern that opens the essay and book, namely “How shall I live?” (CW 6:1). To that end, I attempt to flesh out the ethical character of a life that embraces fate in terms of an Emersonian project of self-culture. My methodological approach throughout evolves progressively from the interpretation to the expansion of Emerson’s ideas. Its first section examines his philosophy as an offshoot of the world-historical line of thought extending from Plato to the Neoplatonists, Eriugena, Spinoza, Goethe, and Schelling, among others. Later philosophers, scientists, and artists who took inspiration from Emerson’s transcendentalism, including Charles Peirce, the Hudson River School painters, Wallace Stevens, and Loren Eiseley, follow the same intellectual trajectory.4 Further taking up the torch, my second section creatively amplifies Emerson’s insights for an ethics of self-culture, and in this way argues for the truth of his Schellingian form of freedom.I. The Problem and Its SolutionFor Emerson, fate is real. It consists in the “immovable limitations” and necessary “laws of the world” (CW 6:2). These limits or laws occur in the conduct of life not so much as theoretical abstractions or remote chains of efficient [End Page 29] causality but as impositions on our will, both from within and without. On the one hand, we are confronted by the rough and tumble of nature, the outside environment in which we live. Serious in Emerson’s nineteenth century and remaining so today are... (shrink)

Purpose: It has been argued in literature that culture has significant influence on the education implementation. While it is undeniable that education quality is the most important in the education implementation, many attempt to ensure quality assurance at all levels of education. Hence this Study investigates the culture approach in Quality assurance in Elementary School. Design: A Qualitative approach was applied in this study. Using explorative research with a naturalistic phenomenon exposure in Elementary school in Bangkalan city, (...) Madura Island, East Java Province, Indonesia. Data collection using in depth interview while data analysis using descriptive with deductive methods. Findings: Teachers showed a strategic approach with an integrated culture in quality assurance as the students’ good grade is the focus of the teaching. Support system in developing a more cultural, independent, self-reliant approach in teaching to achieve good quality in education is needed. Teachers perceive themselves doing well in their job, however teachers need close guidance and support when undertaking quality assurance assessment. (shrink)

We assess the organizational culture in the finance industry in relation to the global financial crisis and consider the potential of cultural change to improve the financial sector. To avoid biases, we build on the person–organization fit literature and develop a novel, indirect method for assessing organizational culture that revolves around relationships between employees’ personal traits and their career success in the industry or organization under study. We analyze personal values concerning the pursuit of private gain versus (...) personal values concerning caring for others and consider whether employees that value self-enhancement more and self-transcendence less enjoy more career success relative to their peers when working in finance than when working in other industries. Results do not reveal any sort of cross-industry differences that would implicate the finance industry’s culture in the financial crisis. Instead, we find the opposite, namely that strong self-enhancement values and weak self-transcendence values go together with less career success in the finance industry compared to other industries. Hence, if anything, the culture in the finance industry does not seem to resonate well with professionals that seek to pursue personal gain at the expense of clients’ welfare. Implication is that cultural change has little potential to improve the financial system. Meanwhile, the method for assessing organizational culture indirectly by analyzing relationships between employees’ traits and their career outcomes has wider applicability, particularly when relying on scores or measures obtained directly from the people concerned is likely to render biased evidence. (shrink)

To take into account the growing importance of this extraterritoriality paradigm reassessing the idea of territory in literature, culture and languages, this book offers an interdisciplinary and plurilingual journey through four centuries, four continents and a dozen languages.

The lectures on classical philology that Friedrich Nietzsche delivered in Basel between 1869 and 1879 constitute an extraordinarily promising new field of study that has opened up in recent years to Nietzsche scholars. In this article I intend to offer a novel reconstruction of Greek culture as it emerges from Nietzsche's Lectures on the History of Greek Literature. In a pioneering manner with respect to his time, Nietzsche identifies the dimension of orality, of the spoken word, as the (...) salient character of Greek culture, and he sets it against contemporary culture and education, which are based on writing and learning from books. My purpose is to show how Nietzsche's cultural critique acts, taking its cue from an ancient and obsolete culture to highlight the weaknesses and contradictions of his contemporary culture. (shrink)

In recent years, few areas of research have advanced as rapidly as cognitive science, the study of the human mind and brain. A fundamentally interdisciplinary field, cognitive science has both inspired and been advanced by work in the arts and humanities. In _Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies: Literature, Language, and Aesthetics,_ Frederick Luis Aldama and Patrick Colm Hogan, two of the most prominent experts on the intersection of mind, brain, and culture, engage each other in a lively dialog (...) that sets out the foundations of a cognitive neuroscientific approach to literature. Despite their shared premises, Aldama and Hogan differ—sometimes sharply—on key issues; their discussion therefore presents the reader not with a single doctrine, but with options for consideration—an appropriate result in this dynamic field. With clarity and learning, Aldama and Hogan consider five central topics at the intersection of literature and cognitive science. They begin with the fundamental question of the nature of the self. From here, they turn to language, communication, and thought before moving on to the central issue of the structure and operation of narrative. The book concludes with thought-provoking explorations of aesthetics and politics. Illustrating their arguments with work that ranges from graphic fiction and popular cinema to William Faulkner and Bertolt Brecht, Aldama and Hogan leave the reader with a clear sense of what cognitive cultural studies have already achieved and the significant promise the discipline holds for the future. (shrink)

This paper finds its origin in a debate between Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and Octavio Paz (1914-1998) on what is central to the idea of eroticism. Bataille posits that violence and transgression are fundamental to eroticism, and without prohibition, eroticism would cease to exist. Paz, however, views violence and transgression as merely intersecting with, rather than being intrinsic to, eroticism. Paz places focus on imagination, and transforms eroticism from a transgressive, to a ritualistic act. Eroticism thus functions as an intermediary, turning (...) animal sexuality into ceremony and rite. In this paper, I argue that Paz and Bataille are not fundamentally at odds in their conceptualisation of eroticism. Instead, Paz redefines the locus of eroticism by subverting its unsettling aspects. His conception of eroticism gives precedence to the imagination, which in itself is an act of violation. Imagination transgresses normal life, but this transgression – the violation of the habitual world – also introduces a glimpse of the numinous that Paz associates with belongingness. The paper further explores eroticism, as this is perceived today, and argues that it ultimately eliminates the threshold marked by transgression. The rise of the contemporary pornographic society is marked by a loss of imagination and transcendence, which ultimately reduces the subject into a mere automaton that demands instant gratification. (shrink)

Introduction In "search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing, and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake," Umberto ...

This book explores the postcolonial discourse and decolonization processes in modern Kazakhstan and beyond. It pays particular attention to such areas as national and religious identity, language, literature, and historical narratives. Despite the fact that the post-colonial theory initially emerged in other regions of the world, it has increasingly been applied in the scholarship on Central Asia. Exploring recent debates on post-coloniality in Kazakhstan, this book is an attempt to bring together two bodies of scholarly literature: scholarship on (...) culture and society in post-Soviet Central Asia and research on post-colonial theory. This volume will be of interest to scholars of Eurasian studies as well as researchers and students of post-colonialism in various contexts beyond Eurasia. (shrink)

Preface -- I. WELCOME TO THE WAR -- Introduction -- The war of the worldviews -- Who will be God? -- II. WORLDVIEWS IN PHILOSOPHY -- Introduction -- Thomas Aquinas -- The first battle front -- René Descartes -- John Locke -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- Karl Marx -- Ralph Waldo Emerson -- The second battle front -- Jeremy Bentham -- Charles Darwin -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- John Dewey -- Jean-Paul Sartre -- III. WORLDVIEWS IN LITERATURE -- Introduction -- The (...) third battle front -- William Shakespeare -- Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Mark Twain -- Ernest Hemingway & John Steinbeck -- IV. WORLDVIEWS IN CULTURE -- Pandora's machine -- Glossary -- List of images. (shrink)

These essays showcase the value of the narrative arts in investigating complex conflicts of value in moral and political life, and explore the philosophical problem of moral dilemmas as expressed in ancient drama, classic and contemporary novels, television, film, and popular fiction. From Aeschylus to Deadwood, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Harry Potter, the authors show how the narrative arts provide some of our most valuable instruments for complex and sensitive moral inquiry.

Scandals involving celebrities’ moral transgressions are common in both Western and Eastern cultures. Existing literature, however, has been primarily based on Western cultures. We examine differences between South Korea and the United States in consumers’ support for celebrities engaged in moral transgressions and for the brands they endorse. Across six studies, we find that Korean consumers show lower support for celebrities who engaged in moral transgressions. This effect occurs because Korean consumers have a stronger belief that an individual’s competence (...) and morality are interconnected. Thus, Korean consumers are less likely to separate their judgments of celebrities’ morality and competence in professional performance, thereby lowering support for the celebrities. Building on the proposed mechanism, we identify the moderating role of transgression relevance. When a moral transgression is relevant to the domain of the celebrity’s professional competence, the difference in celebrity support between the two countries is attenuated. This difference extends to the support for a brand endorsed by the celebrity transgressor when the brand retains the celebrity endorser, but not when the brand dismisses the endorser. (shrink)

We developed this study to examine the issue of parental refusal of treatment, looking at the issue through a cultural competence lens. Recent cases in Canada where courts have declined applications by clinicians for court orders to overrule parental refusal of treatment highlight the dispute in this area. This study analyses the 16 cases of a larger group of 24 cases that were selected by a literature review where cultural or religious beliefs or ethnic identity was described as important (...) reasons behind the refusal. The most significant finding was that nearly all of the cases cited unacceptable side effects as the main reason for declining treatment. We then analysed the detail of the cases and concluded that in the first instance a skilled clinical approach to develop an agreed management plan is by far the best approach. In the event that agreement cannot be reached we recommend engaging a mediator to help the clinician and parents/child to find an agreeable way forward. We argue that the option of se... (shrink)

In this paper, I consider Alain Locke’s critical pragmatism to see how he might address the problem of racist literature, particularly, the use of stereotypes. For my purposes here, it will be assumed that stereotypes are sustained by evil and malicious intentions, whether consciously acknowledged or not. Two issues arise when considering Locke’s critical pragmatism. First, Locke denies the objective status of morality—objective in the sense that moral absolutes exist “out there” and can be classified rightly or wrongly. Thus, (...) claiming that stereotypes are “evil” must have a different connotation for Locke than one might assume. The second issue is that it has been argued that Locke creates and uses stereotypes himself. The paper will progress as follows: I first address Locke’s use of stereotypes, contending that Locke does not in fact use stereotypes. He has a notion of collective identity or representation that he uses as a heuristic to counteract racist uses of stereotypes. While similar to a stereotype, collective identity is qualitatively different. Next, I discuss Locke’s understanding of cultural pluralism as the tool with which Locke is able to address racist stereotypes, on the one hand, and defend his use of collective identity on the other. I conclude that though Locke’s account is useful it lacks the moral weight, which I would like, to condemn stereotypes as fully wrong. (shrink)

The culture of ‘culture’ in National Health Service policy implementationThe widespread reference to ‘culture’ in UK NHS policy and organisational literature suggests that culture has, in itself, become a cultural phenomenon. This article draws on anthropological thought to explore this trend, and finds it stems from the way that the term ‘culture’ has become analytically empty. Lack of rigour in the way that culture is conceptualised allows it to be used both to suggest (...) an evolved consensus among the workforce, and to validate the imposition of values and beliefs by management. Such manipulation of ‘culture’ is evident in recent NHS policy demanding cultural change to ensure a flexible, empowered and self‐regulating workforce — the type of workforce not only valued by health services, but pivotal to a post‐Fordist economy. The findings from an ethnographic study are drawn upon to consider the relationship between nurses’ cultural practices, corporate culture shaped by NHS policy, and the requirements of the economic domain. It is suggested that a commitment to post‐Fordist priorities of flexibility, empowerment and self‐regulation is not necessarily matched by any shift in the traditional location of power. The article concludes that greater analytical rigour is necessary to challenge the way in which ‘culture’ is manipulated by policy makers. (shrink)

While there are interesting connections between literature and evil, there is as of yet no systematic collection of models of evil to study literature. This is problematic, since literature is among other things an evaluative discourse and the most basic evaluative category is the polarity of good versus evil. In addition, evil shows important affinities with basic narratological principles. To initiate a discussion of models of evil for the analysis of literature, this article organizes a dozen (...) models of evil into four groups. The first consists of a core model which coincides with basic narratological elements in character analysis and narrative tension. The second group contains two pre-modern models of evil, defilement and moral-natural evil. The third group takes its cue from personality theory and proposes the five-factor model of personality and an enriched “dark triad,” and, to balance description against narration, a model which categorizes kinds of murder. The last group organizes six models around the thematic opposition between nature and society, an opposition which forms the backbone of Western philosophy and narrative. To test their validity, the models are applied to a series of literary examples/characters, above all Grendel, Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” and Carol Oates’ short story “Heat.”. (shrink)

The article explores the possibilities of literary studies as a hermeneutics of the social by focusing on intermediations of literary and social studies in the present and in the early days of the DVjs, i.e. in the 1920s. It first investigates, how sociology interrogates itself by reading detective stories (Kracauer, Boltanski). As a testing ground for the productivity of the proposed orientation the article then takes a closer look at German crime fiction of the interwar years (Perutz, Jacques) and demonstrates (...) how these novels problematize the workings of a social imaginary in the »time of monsters«. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Citizenship and Culture in Early Modern EuropePeter N. MillerCharlotte Wells, Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), xviii, 198p.Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), xviii, 449p.Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago and London: University of (...) Chicago Press, 1994), xxiv, 483p.Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680–1775 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), xv, 395p.Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), xiii, 217p.Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), viii, 270p.Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), xiii, 338p.E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s “Fable”: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xii, 284p.The pre-modern political world was broken and remade in the two centuries that separate Montaigne from Jefferson. The long agony of the mixed constitution that began in the civil wars which raged in Iberia, France, the Low Countries, and England and seemed settled by the widespread adoption of the maxims of reason of state, revived at the end of the period, with revolution in Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Geneva, and, more famously, [End Page 725] British North America and France. The problem, classically, turned on the location of sovereignty, or supreme authority, in political systems designed to balance and diffuse rather than concentrate power. When budget deficits and fratricidal culture wars raised the cry of “necessity”—with the knowledge, of course, that necessity knew no law—estates and kings across Europe found themselves at daggers drawn. The claim that the ruler, who naturally was wholly committed to the common good, had therefore the ability to take emergency action was used both by those accustomed to rule and those newly attained to it by force. The pursuit of an “interest” that was identified with the nation’s effectively marginalized discussions of right and law while still serving an essentially constitutional, justificatory role in political debate. But if unchecked authority was necessary in order to meet the challenge of a world characterized by change and chance and thus had to reside somewhere, was there anything that made its exercise by one body more appropriate than another? This was the question that lay behind the late eighteenth-century repudiation of the reason of state “solution” to the problem of the mixed constitution. The answer, which clearly underpinned the establishment in fact of what had first been theorized already a century earlier, was that only consent could legitimate the exercise of sovereignty in time of necessity.1Representation, in one form or another, was the acknowledged solution to the problem formulated by Hobbes: “the name of Tyranny, signifieth nothing more, nor less, than the name of Sovereignty, be it in one, or many men, saving that they that use the former word are understood to be angry with them they call Tyrants.” But representation also acknowledged the reality behind the charged category of “citizenship”: most people in most places could not be said to live the life of the active citizen celebrated in Roman republican literature. Hence Hobbes’s attack on recourse to classical exempla in general, and the Libertas of Lucca in particular. The idea of civis as law-abiding subject was as radical a redrawing of the terms of debate as the identification of human nature with unsociability. Insofar as politics, classically, justified itself as the means for individual self-perfection, the practice of the ancient citizen could be conceived of as the practice of that best life speculated upon by philosophers. For the represented citizen, however, politics necessarily occupied a more subsidiary position. What, then, defined the best life to which he could aspire?There is no simple answer to this question, and the early modern ambivalence has persisted into our own time... (shrink)

Department of Philosophy and Religions, Faculty of Arts, University of Benin, Benin City. Nigeria.

In nursing literature, Heideggerian hermeneutics, as expounded in Being and Time, is taken well near unanimously to be an invitation to explore tradition and culture. Understanding, we are told in the name of Heidegger, is to be found in the realm of common meanings and shared practices. This interpretation of what Heidegger is about in Being and Time is neither unchallengeable nor unchallenged. While a number of scholars can be found to agree with it, there are many others (...) who see it as an utter misreading of Heidegger. In their judgement, it is an interpretation diametrically opposed to what Heidegger sets forth in his treatise. For researchers interested in invoking Heidegger or following a Heideggerian approach, this is a frustrating impasse. The only valid starting point for resolving it, this article suggests, is a close reading of what Heidegger actually says in the pages of Being and Time. (shrink)

Aesthetics originated in ancient India as a descriptive account of the drama which was meant for both entertainment and education of the mass. If the drama was a mass medium, aesthetics — its account — represented the mass culture. Philosophical thinking, rigorous ethical practices and the dramatic art had a common aim — experience of the Reality as a whole. The difference was that while the first two were accessible to only a few elite or intellectuals, the third one (...) was meant for all. The mass was experiencing the representation of Reality in the drama by a dehghtful emotional response. The sensibihty necessary for such response was technically called "like-heartedness" which was also a necessary qualification for a healthy social life. (shrink)

An analysis of the treatment of time in literature and its relationship to science and philosophy. Since the consciousness of time seems to the author to have greatly increased in contemporary culture, he refers primarily to such twentieth-century authors as Proust, Joyce and Mann.--A. R.

In this book, Bonnie Lander Johnson explores early modern ideas of chastity, demonstrating how crucial early Stuart thinking on chastity was to political, medical, theological and moral debates, and that it was also a virtue that governed the construction of different literary genres. Drawing on a range of materials, from prose to theatre, theological controversy to legal trials, and court ceremonies - including royal birthing rituals - Lander Johnson unearths previously unrecognised opinions about chastity. She reveals that early Stuart theatrical (...) and court ceremonies were part of the same political debate as prose pamphlets and religious sermons. The volume also offers new readings of Milton's Comus, Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Henrietta Maria's queenship and John Ford's plays. It will appeal to scholars of early modern literature, theatre, political, medical and cultural history, and gender studies. (shrink)

Australia is currently experiencing a prolonged period of water scarcity that is challenging a diverse range of water-dependent activities ranging from household gardening to horticultural production to the viability of riverine ecosystems. The political and ecological importance of water in Australia is not, however, only a recent phenomenon. For the majority of Australia’s settled history, water politics, economics, culture and engineering have reflected and embodied a dynamic relationship between Australian hydrology and Australian society. This essay examines that relationship by (...) first reviewing the work of the Australian historical geographer, Emeritus Professor J. M. Powell. For 40 years Powell has been writing about the process of natural resource appraisal and management in Australia and he has been Australia’s leading authority on the role of water in that process for most of that time. The essay then argues for an extension of Powell’s work by applying the insights provided by the scholars Karl Wittfogel, Donald Worster and Eric Swyngedouw. Their work, it is argued, suggests the possibility of a more nuanced understanding of water in Australia than that currently offered by the majority of the Australian literature, and ultimately provides some tools for thinking ourselves out of the current water crisis. (shrink)

The remarks which follow arise from the daily and simultaneous consulting of two literatures and, in a larger sense, of two cultures, Portuguese and Brazilian, both expressed in the same language, Portuguese. They also arise from an attempt to describe and define by categories which are “internal” to literature the differences which exist between the two bodies of writing under discussion. But they are equally inspired by a desire to isolate in the corpus of the texts which conventionally constitute (...) a national literature those thematic and stylistic recurrences which may serve as starting points for an attempt at formalization. (shrink)

The article examines the developments that made the legend of an Asian migration into Europe part of mainstream historiography during the eighteenth century. It was believed that the Norse god Odin was in fact a historical person, who had migrated from Asia to with the north of Europe with his tribe. The significance of this legend to how medieval poetry was received and debated in England has received little attention. The study falls into three sections. The first will trace the (...) significance of the Odin migration legend in discovering Germanic cultural origins. The second section examines the impact of the legend on philological studies, primarily in establishing a new category: the Gothic (i.e. Teutonic/germanic) poetic tradition. The final section will focus on the debate between two of the most important eighteenth-century pioneers of vernacular poetic tradition: Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton. Their discussion over whether the Asian foundation of Germanic (and thereby English) tradition had paved the way for later Arabian influences is instructive, as it shows how Eastern “others” were negotiated in the discovery of cultural and national roots. (shrink)

The current study explores the contribution of cultural mediators to the dissemination of Russian literature in Greece between 1893 and 1917. More precisely, it examines the case of F. M. Dostoevsky’s reception during this time frame, which can be considered as the period of the writer’s introduction and beginning of his establishment among the Greek readership. The focus is on two types of mediators with a significant influence on the fortune of Dostoevsky and other Russian writers in Greece. The (...) two main groups investigated more closely are Russian-speaking mediators and Western-oriented mediators. The study aims to discuss some of the following questions: What are the main characteristics of the groups in question? What are the differences between their roles? How did their critical and translational engagement affect Dostoevsky’s reception? It should be noted that the current study presents part of the results of the author’s ongoing doctoral research project on the Greek reception of F. M. Dostoevsky. (shrink)

This book analyses the use of the crucial concept of 'taste' in the works of five major seventeenth-century French authors, Méré, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Boileau. It combines close readings of important texts with a thoroughgoing political analysis of seventeenth-century French society in terms of class and gender. Dr Moriarty shows that far from being timeless and universal, the term 'taste' is culture-specific, shifting according to the needs of a writer and his social group. The notion (...) of 'taste' not only helped to shape a new dominant culture, but also registered the conflicts within that culture between a view of taste that presupposted the values of 'polite society' as an exclusive (though not necessarily aristocratic) group, and a view that stressed the value of the classical-humanist tradition as a source of standards ratified by a broader public. this study sheds light not only on the central concept, but also on the individual authors discussed and on the norms of French classical literature in general. (shrink)