The Decline of Calvinism: An Approach to Its Study

1972 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 306-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Walker Howe
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Western World ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
British Colonies

One of the major themes in the intellectual history of the Western world has been the rise and fall of Calvinism. A militant and crusading ideology during the Reformation era, Calvinism was nevertheless showing signs of losing its expansive force by the time of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the Restoration of the English monarchy (1660). Before much longer, the inner conviction of Calvinist adherents as well as their determination to impose their beliefs upon others somehow faltered. Despite periodic ‘revivals’ such as the Great Awakening of the 1740s in the British colonies, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were, for the most part, a time of gradual weakening for the Calvinist impulse. This weakening was by no means uniform; it occurred at different rates among different groups of people. (Indeed, even in the mid-twentieth century, a virtually undiluted Calvinism remains a powerful force in at least one part of the world: Afrikaans-speaking South Africa.)

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
William Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Caribbean Region ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Historical Past

V.S. Naipaul is one of the most internationally acclaimed twentieth-century writers from the Caribbean region. Yet it is usually assumed that he was neither much influenced by the Caribbean literary and intellectual tradition, nor very influential upon it. This chapter argues that these assumptions are wrong. It situates Naipaul’s life and work within the political, social, and intellectual history of the twentieth-century Caribbean. Naipaul’s work formed part of a larger historical debate about the sociology of slavery in the Caribbean, the specificity of Caribbean colonial experience, and the influence of that historical past on Caribbean life, culture, and politics after independence. The chapter closes with a reading of Naipaul’s late, retrospective book about Trinidad, A Way in the World.

Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Reading Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Art For Art's Sake ◽  
Aesthetic Structure

How did “reading for the message,” a mark of shame among literary critics, yet in many ways an ordinary reading practice, become so marginalized? The origins of this methodological commitment ultimately are intertwined with the birth of literary studies itself . The influential aestheticist notion of “art for art’s sake” has several implications crucial for understanding the intellectual history of literary criticism in the twentieth century: most important was the belief that to “extract” an idea from a text was to dismiss its aesthetic structure. This impulse culminated in the New Critical contention that to paraphrase a text was a “heresy.” Yet this dominant tradition has always co-existed with practical interpretation that was much less formalist in emphasis. A return to the world of American literary criticism in 1947, when Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn was published, shows this clearly: many now-forgotten critics were already practicing a form of criticism that emphasized literary content, and often overly rejecting Brooks’s insistence that reading for the content or meaning of a poem betrayed its aesthetic nature.

South Africa and the International Community

1966 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Dale
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Western World ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Boer War ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Ever since the discovery there of gold and diamonds in the last half of the nineteenth century, South Africa has engaged the rapt attention of the Western world. The saga of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, perhaps the last of the “gentlemen's wars,” and now the refurbished accounts of the gallant defense of Rorke's Drift in the AngloZulu War of 1879 have been fascinating material for both novelists and film scriptwriters. In addition, the history of South Africa is replete with titanic figures who rank with, or perhaps even above, those from the rest of the continent: the aggressive architect of empire, Cecil J. Rhodes; the redoubtable Zulu warrior, Chaka; the dour, stern-willed President of the South African Republic, “Oom” (Uncle) Paul Kruger; the world-renowned statesman and philosopher, Field Marshal Jan C. Smuts; the founding father of Indian independence, Mohandas K. Gandhi; the compassionate and courageous writer, Alan S. Paton; and the dignified, modest Zulu Nobel Laureate, Albert J. Luthuli. By any standard, South Africa and its leaders of all races have made far-reaching and impressive contributions to the continent, the British Empire, and the world at large.

scholarly journals Kabbalah in Sweden

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 88-97
Author(s):  
Thomas Karlsson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Age ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Unique Manner ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Symbolic World

This article examines the history of Kabbalah in Sweden. The reader is presented with an overall view to Kabbalah in Sweden: first, the Johannes Bureus and the Nordic Kabbalah, Kabbalah after Bureus, Kabbalistic literature, and last, Kabbalah in Sweden today. When the Kabbalah reached Sweden it was mainly the non-Jewish Kabbalah that gained influence, even if its Jewish roots were acknowledged. Johannes Bureus unites, in a similar fashion as do the Christian Kabbalists in continental Europe, Christian motifs with the symbolic world of the Kabbalah. Bureus, however, adds runes, ancient Norse gods and Gothic ideas in his own unique manner. The Kabbalah invites speculation and the search for correspondences which has caused the Kabbalah in Sweden to be united with a number of other traditions. Bureus combined the Kabbalah with runes and Gothicism; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we can find the Kabbalah in Freemasonry and Esoteric societies, while the Kabbalah in the twentieth century and onwards has been associated with New Age, Parapsychology and Indian Mysticism. Apart from Bureus, most Kabbalists in Sweden have followed the trends that flourished in the rest of the world. Bureus was the first to create a specifically Swedish interpretation of the Kabbalah.

Artefacts of Writing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
English Language ◽  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Philosophical Analysis ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
History Of

Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds. This book argues that they pose as much of a challenge to the way states conceptualize language, culture, and community. Drawing on a wealth of evidence, from Victorian scholarly disputes over the identity of the English language to the constitutional debates about its future in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and from quarrels over the idea of culture within the League of Nations to UNESCO’s ongoing struggle to articulate a viable concept of diversity, it brings together a large group of legacy writers, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Rabindranath Tagore, putting them in dialogue with each other and with the policymakers who shaped the formation of modern states and the history of internationalist thought from the 1860s to the 1940s. The second part of the book reflects on the continuing evolution of these dialogues, showing how a varied array of more contemporary writers from Amit Chaudhuri, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, to Antjie Krog, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Es’kia Mphahlele cast new light on a range of questions that have preoccupied UNESCO since 1945. At once a novel contribution to institutional and intellectual history and an innovative exercise in literary and philosophical analysis, Artefacts of Writing affords a unique perspective on literature’s place at the centre of some of the most fraught, often lethal public controversies that defined the long-twentieth century and that continue to haunt us today.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

scholarly journals Should 1974 be considered a watershed year in the economic history of the world?

1980 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-49
Author(s):  
G. Jan Hupkes
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Market Mechanism ◽  
Oil Consumption ◽  
Payments System ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Oil Crisis ◽  
Economic Future

The early 1970s marked a turning point in mankind's economic fortunes and the author takes 1974 as an 'artificial' vantage point from which to look back, but also forward. Several forces led to the shocks of the seventies: the breaking down in the discipline of the international payments system, rising inflation, the oil crisis, the West's loss of strategic military initiative to the East. The author outlines what ought to be done to improve the economic outlook for the 1980s: The international payments system must be placed on a more stable and disciplined footing, inflation must be controlled by balancing of national budgets, the energy crisis must be contained by reduction of oil consumption via the price mechanism. In South Africa the economic watershed year was 1976; two years later than that of the world economy in general. Since then a policy of strict financial discipline has led to a record surplus in balance of payments, which together with new emphasis on the importance of the free market mechanism and increasing energy self-sufficiency, promises a better economic future for South Africa than for many other countries.Die vroee 1970s was 'n keerpunt in die mensdom se ekonomiese lotgevalle en die skrywer neem 1974 as 'n 'kunsmatige' uitsigpunt vanwaar hy terug kyk, maar ook vorentoe. Verskeie magte het gelei tot die skokke van die sewentigs: die aftakeling van die dissipline van die internasionale betalingstelsel, stygende inflasie, die oliiekrisis, en die Weste se afstand van strategiese militere inisiatief aan die Ooste. Die skrywer dui aan wat gedoen moet word om die ekonomiese vooruitsigte vir die 1980s te verbeter: Die internasionale betalingstelsel moet op 'n meer stabiele en gedissiplineerde grondslag geplaas word, inflasie moet deur die balansering van nasionale begrotings beheer word, die energiekrisis moet via die prysmeganisme deur verminderde olieverbrulk beteuel word. In Suid-Afrika was die ekonomiese waterskeidingsjaar 1976; twee jaar later as die van die wereld-ekonomie in die algemeen. Sedertdien het 'n beleid van streng finansiele dissipline gelei tot 'n rekord surplus op die betalingsbalans, wat saam met nuwe klem op die belangrikheid van die vrye markmeganisme en toenemende energie-selfvoorsiening, 'n bater ekonomiese toekoms vir Suid-Afrika as vir baie ander lande beloof.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document