Poem as Field, Canon as Crystal: Geoffrey Hill’s Historical Semantics

This article aims to demonstrate that the transition from the mainstream narrative to the interactional history of concepts promises tangible benefits for scholars of social time in general and temporal comparisons in particular. It is shown that the traditionally close alignment of narration with the production of historical consciousness at various levels hinders the study of time as a semantic variable perpetually contested, amended and upheld across society. Alternatively, the references to time made in public settings, allowing for more or less instant reactions (turn-taking) as well as expression of dissenting opinions (stance-taking), offer a much more representative palette of temporal semantics and pragmatics in a given sociopolitical environment. In a particularly intriguing case, the essentially deliberative venue where contestation is supported by both institutional arrangements and political reasons (British House of Commons) is put to test under circumstances commonly known as ‘the post-war consensus’ – the unspoken convention directing opposing political parties to suspend stance-taking regarding the past actions of the government during WWII, its immediate aftermath and its future prospects. As a reliable indicator of this arrangement, the contestation of temporal comparisons between relevant pasts and futures is tested in oppositions reflecting party allegiances (Conservatives vs. Labour vs. Liberals) and executive functions (government vs. opposition) between 1946 and 1952. It is shown that, notwithstanding the prevalence of non-contested statements aimed at preserving interactional coherence and pragmatic functionality of the setting, the moderately active contestation of the adversary’s temporal comparisons in the House of Commons at that time helped all parties, albeit to a different degree, to shape their own political and institutional roles as well as to delegitimize their respective adversaries.

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Genrens tøven

K&K - Kultur og Klasse ◽

10.7146/kok.v35i103.22300 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 35 (103) ◽

pp. 108-137

Author(s):

Carsten Sestoft

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

The Novel ◽

Book Market ◽

English Novel ◽

The Social ◽

The Status ◽

Historical Semantics ◽

History Of ◽

Insight Into ◽

Or History

Romanens status i det 17. århundredes Frankrig The hesitations of a genre: The status of the novel in seventeenth-century FranceIn answering the question: What was the novel in seventeenth-century France? – this article provides insight into some important points of the early history of the genre. The contradiction between its non-existence in official (Aristotelian) poetics and its existence as a popular commodity on the book market was, in the course of the seventeenth century, reconciled in the emergent category of belles lettres as a plurality of genres mainly defined by their public of honnêtes gens, while attempts at legitimizing the novel as belonging to such Aristotelian genres as epic or history generally failed; and at the end of the century a number of convergences – between epic and novel, between the designations roman and nouvelle, and between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of the novel – seem to point to the fact that the social existence of the genre had been strengthened, even if it was the English novel of the eighteenth century that could be said to reap the profits of this stronger position. Using historical semantics and cultural sociology to study the status of the novel in seventeenth-century France thus leads to a clearer understanding of the specificity of the novel as a literary and cultural genre.

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al_o dv kie_en maht an dirre figuren: Formen und Funktionen astronomischer Diagramme in der sogenannten ‚Mainauer Naturlehre‘

Das Mittelalter ◽

10.1515/mial-2017-0018 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 22 (2) ◽

pp. 294-313

Author(s):

Dorothee Lindemann

Keyword(s):

Special Kind ◽

Strong Relationship ◽

Middle High German ◽

Technical Literature ◽

Historical Semantics

AbstractThe present study adverts to a newly found manuscript and reclassifies the diagrams of the ‘Mainauer Naturlehre’ in the context of the Latin tradition. Thus, a deficit of research concerning the astronomic technical literature in Middle High German can be closed. The Basle vernacular manuscript that is discussed here shows a very strong relationship between the text and its diagrams, which is examined as a special kind of diagrammatical act, whose intratextual function lies primarily in the realm of historical semantics: the diagram generates a notion of scientific specialization in vernacular. In contrast to this, the York manuscript confronts text and diagram in a contrapunctual way and supplements the vernacular text with an appendix of Latin diagrams. This relation between German prose and Latin diagrammatic tradition might well be a reflection of a pragmatic background.

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Value-semantic Dominants of the Philosophical Congress (COVID-19 Era Amendments)

Вопросы философии ◽

10.21146/0042-8744-2020-12-24-28 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 24-28

Author(s):

Pavel A. Olkhov ◽

◽

Elena N. Motovnikova ◽

Keyword(s):

Self Organization ◽

Stable Form ◽

Scientific Conference ◽

The Public ◽

Philosophical Education ◽

Substantive Content ◽

Special Value ◽

Historical Semantics ◽

Social Hermeneutics ◽

Philosophical Community

The article is a revised version of a report prepared and read at the international scientific conference “What is a community? Social hermeneutics, power and media” (Belgorod, 2019). Changes’ took place that significantly clarify the very idea of the congress, its substantive content and historical relevance during the preparation for the publication of the following report materials within a few months (!). Communication as a living sense-forming beginning of the congress has been tested by the idea of social distance as some completely stable form of self-organization of the philosophical community. The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the emergence of new conditions for its possibility: the personal turned out to be in some involuntary, “digital” identity with the public. It was impossible not to take these changes into account in the final edition of the text of the report, which included some additional semantic accents and historical information. The presented material specifies the historical semantics of the idea of a philosophical congress, its substantive content and relevance. The article substantiates the understanding of the congress as a special, value-rich form of cognitive activism. The ethical and communicative meanings of the international philosophical congress are as a special or formative dialogic constellation of professional community, which does not require renouncing the individuality of each of the participants. It is thus important to suggest the moral prospects of the next VII Russian Philosophical Congress in probably an intensive connection with the renewal of value-epistemological attitudes and traditional technologies of philosophical education as an indispensable condition for the moral health of a philosophizing people.

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Historical Semantics and Historical Lexicography

Lexicology, Semantics and Lexicography - Current Issues in Linguistic Theory ◽

10.1075/cilt.194.07kay ◽

2000 ◽

pp. 53 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Christian J. Kay

Keyword(s):

Historical Semantics

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Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung” Part I

Traditio ◽

10.1017/s0362152900017220 ◽

1944 ◽

Vol 2 ◽

pp. 409-464 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Leo Spitzer

Keyword(s):

Historical Development ◽

Medieval Art ◽

Semantic Field ◽

Face To Face ◽

German Word ◽

Historical Semantics ◽

The Many

In the following study I propose to reconstruct the many-layered Occidental background for a German word: the concept of world harmony which underlies the word Stimmung. This task implies a survey of the whole semantic “field”, as it was developed in different epochs and literatures: the concept and the words expressing it had to be brought face to face, and in the words, in turn, the semantic kernel and the emotional connotations with their variations and fluctuations in time had to be considered. A “Stimmungsgeschichte” of the word Stimmung was necessary. I hope that this historical development will spontaneously, if gradually, emerge from the mosaic of texts to which I wished my running text to be subordinated: the consistency of the texture of verbal and conceptual associations and motifs through the centuries seems to me to be herewith established. “Avez-vous un texte?” was the insistent question which the famous positivist Fustel de Coulanges was wont to address to his pupils when they made a historical statement. The student in historical semantics must ask: “Have you many texts?”, for only with a great number of them is one enabled to visualize their ever-recurrent pattern. I realize that the medieval art of tapestry (which Péguy has revived in literature), with its possibility of showing a constant motif along with the labyrinth of interwoven ramifications, would be a more adequate medium of treatment than is the necessarily linear run of the words of language. And, in any case, I shall be obliged, in the notes, to anticipate or recapitulate the events which cannot be treated at their historical place.

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