HOMER AND THE SUBLIME

Ramus ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 184-199
Author(s):  
James I. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
Ancient Astronomy

Was Homer sublime? The question is rarely asked today. Sublimity was once a staple of the ancient intellectual traditions, as Homer is perfectly suited to show. The present essay will take up the question of Homeric sublimity by examining four case studies drawn from ancient astronomy to literary criticism to Homer himself, who not only licensed but also inaugurated these later traditions. Longinus will lurk everywhere in the background, but part of the point of this essay is that Longinus, while broadly representative, is in fact a minority voice in the wider landscape of ancient thought, as is the purely literary critical perspective that he is usually assumed to represent. Just as sublimity transcends customary frameworks of experience by putting these radically into question, so does it challenge the ways in which we tend to carve up antiquity into domains and disciplines that are artificially removed from one another. Sublimity by its nature crosses over genres and discourses and brings out the underlying patterns of thought that they share. But now to our case studies, which will give us a clear entrée to the problem, and will supply us with criteria of what should or should not count as ‘sublime’, as we follow each case in turn.

Cybernetic-Existentialism in Performance Art

Leonardo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-254
Author(s):  
Steve Dixon
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Technological Performance

A theory of Cybernetic-Existentialism is proposed to offer a new critical perspective on technological performance art. Case studies of Wafaa Bilal, Stelarc and Steve Mann are used to demonstrate how core ideas and themes from both cybernetics and existentialism are increasingly converging in contemporary arts.

Being Soviet, Muslim, Modernist, and Fundamentalist in 1950s Central Asia

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-165
Author(s):  
Paolo Sartori ◽  
Bakhtiyar Babajanov
Keyword(s):  
Central Asia ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
October Revolution ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Soviet Rule ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
Transformative Process ◽  
Soviet Central Asia ◽  
Muslim Scholars

AbstractHow far, if at all, did the intellectual legacy of early 20th-century Muslim reformism inform the transformative process which Islam underwent in Soviet Central Asia, especially after WWII? Little has been done so far to analyze the output of Muslim scholars (ʿulamāʾ) operating under Soviet rule from the perspective of earlier Islamic intellectual traditions. The present essay addresses this problem and sheds light on manifestations of continuity among Islamic intellectual practices—mostly puritanical—from the period immediately before the October Revolution to the 1950s. Such a continuity, we argue, profoundly informed the activity of the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM) established in Tashkent in 1943 and, more specifically, the latter’s attack against manifestations of religiosity deemed “popular,” which were connected to the cult of saints. Thus, this essay posits that the juristic output of Soviet ʻulamā’ in Central Asia originates from and further develops an Islamic reformist thinking, which manifested itself in the region in the late 19th- and early 20th-century. By establishing such an intellectual genealogy, we seek in this article to revise a historiographical narrative which has hitherto tended to decouple scripturalist sensibilities from Islamic reformism and modernism.

scholarly journals The Hermeneutics of Transmission: Deciphering Discourses on Poetry and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800)

2011 ◽  
pp. 37-60
Author(s):  
Déborah Blocker
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Political History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
The Status ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Way

This article discusses how the constitution, circulation and institutionalization of discourses on poetry and the arts in early modern Europe could best be accounted for from a historical point of view. Pointing to various inconsistencies in the way historians of ideas have traditionally explained the rise of aesthetic discourses, the article examines the usefulness of the tools crafted by historians of the book for the development of such a project. Through an example, the drawbacks of interpretations based solely on serial bibliographies are also addressed, as the author argues for the importance of case studies, grounded in social, cultural and political history, through which various types of aesthetic practices may be made to appear. She also suggests that, to bypass the theoretical and practical deadlocks of traditional Begriffsgeschichte as far as the study of aesthetic practices is concerned, intellectual traditions and the actions that make them possible — that is “actions of transmission” — are to be promoted to the status of primary hermeneutic tools.

scholarly journals Writing World Literature: Approaches from the Maghreb

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1386-1395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Hiddleston
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Relative Status ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
National Borders

World Literature is a Notoriously Ambiguous Term. Since Goethe Began Referring to a Universal Weltliteratur IN 1827, the meaning of world literature has passed through many mutations, and, with the resurgence of interest in the term that followed David Damrosch's publication in 2003 of his provocative What Is World Literature?, it has generated a good deal of controversy. Although it appears to describe a type of literature or group of texts, world literature is more often used to designate a critical perspective. World literature is not so much a canon of works conceived to be globally or universally significant as an approach to literary criticism. What this critical approach entails, however, is often unclear and frequently freighted with cultural and sociopolitical assumptions that challenge the supposed openness of world literature. Most theorists agree that the notion of world literature invites exploration of the ways in which texts exceed national borders, but the relative status of national and international sociocultural frameworks remains highly contentious, as do critics' understandings of a text's “worldliness” and mode of circulation. As Franco Moretti famously asserts, world literature is “not an object, it's a problem”; it requires ongoing debate.

scholarly journals The Evantropian Project: Revitalising Critical Approaches to Young Adult Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-193
Author(s):  
Robert Gadowski
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Critical Power ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
The Third ◽  
Average Reader ◽  
Critical Approaches

Anna Bugajska’s recent book Engineering Youth: The Evantropian Project in Young Adult Dystopias (2019) is an important and thought-provoking inquiry into the field of young adult literary criticism. While for the average reader, young adult narratives may be associated with juvenile tales created with an intent to provide escapist entertainment, a true connoisseur of youth literature is well aware of an immense didactic potential of this genre. Bugajska certainly belongs to the latter category as she diligently engages with young adult dystopias to highlight the immense critical power of these texts. In the following review article, the author of the paper is going to offer a brief commentary on the critical perspective that Bugajska employs to explore the notion of evantropia. The first section of this review discusses Bugajska’s volume as a part of utopian intellectual tradition, the second section postulates that ideas presented in Engineering Youth enrich literary criticism in the field of speculative fiction and children’s and young adult literature, the third section briefly discusses the layout of the volume and the content of each chapter, the fourth section presents an overview of selected core ideas that Bugajska presents in her work and in the last section the author of the paper offers his final thoughts on Engineering Youth.

scholarly journals The And of Modernism: On New Periodizations

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 446-468
Author(s):  
Niall Gildea ◽  
David Wylot
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
Present Understanding

The study of literary modernism is in the ascendant in the academy. From alternate modernisms, to neomodernisms, to metamodernism and global modernisms, modernism scholarship has evolved through a configuration of modernism into a cross-cultural and inter-generational aesthetic practice. This article critically examines the periodizing logic implicit in this new modernism scholarship, specifically as it pertains to the study of what is loosely called ‘neomodernism’, which we suggest presents a notable development in literary history for accounts of contemporary fiction and postmodern culture. We are principally interested in a recent trend we observe in modernism literary criticism concerning the futurization of the object (literary modernism), and of critical work thereupon. This work, which specifically addresses developments in contemporary Western Anglophone literature, seeks to extend the project of modernism (sometimes called its ‘promise’) into the present, understanding it as the principal agency in literary distinction and merit. We examine this criticism through a series of case studies, and discern three interconnecting strands in neomodernist criticism – three ways of futurizing modernism, and of self-futurizing modernism criticism.

Homer in the Gutter

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James I. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Western World ◽  
The West

In antiquity Homer may have been the most revered of poets, and the foundation of all literary criticism and philology; but he was also the most maligned and interfered with of ancient poets. He spawned entire traditions of literary critique, parody, subversion, and revision that kept his image alive down through the centuries and well into modernity. Homer lived on, in other words, both in the gutter and at the top tier of the literary and cultural canons of the West. Examples from Heraclitus to d’Aubignac will lay out the case for this puzzling bipolar reception, which throws a troubling light on what it means to be a canonical poet of the western world. Two case studies will then reinforce the consistency of these patterns of reception over the course of the tradition: Dio’s ‘Trojan Oration’ (Discourse 11) and Butler’s Authoress of the Odyssey.

Cellphilms in Public Scholarship

2019 ◽  
pp. 417-442
Author(s):  
Katie MacEntee ◽  
Casey Burkholder ◽  
Joshua Schwab-Cartas
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Mobile Technology ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Public Scholarship ◽  
Visual Methodology

Digital media offer new platforms for engagement and dissemination for public scholarship. Cellphilm method (cellphone + film production) is a participatory visual methodology that builds on the increasing ubiquity of cellphones and other mobile technology across the globe, and the uptake of cellphone video-making as a form of socially engaged visual practice. In this chapter the authors trace the development of cellphilm method in research. They present case studies of cellphilm research in Hong Kong, Mexico, and South Africa in order to provide concrete examples of cellphilm research in practice and nuance the methodological implications of integrating cellphones and visual media production into public scholarship. The chapter concludes by offering directions for future research on cellphilms as a public scholarship method and providing a critical perspective on the integration of cellphones in research for public scholarship.

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