Writing to redundancy: approaches to spiritual journals and early modern spirituality

1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Webster
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Cultural Resources

ABSTRACTThe ‘puritan diary’ has received attention from historians and literary critics with little exchange between the approaches. Placing the diary in the context of experimental Calvinist personal discipline reveals that the form emerged independently of the literature of practical divinity. Considering the practice as a ‘technology of the self’ draws attention to the meanings of writing in a protestant context and encourages us to consider the cultural resources available to early modern protestants. Close reading of these texts suggests a greater degree of complexity than is often admitted and allows for a tension between different views of the salvific process. This tension between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ forms is helpful in understanding the religiosity of early modern protestants.

The Baroque and Philosophy

2018 ◽  
pp. 601-622
Author(s):  
Michael Moriarty
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Art And Architecture

Although the concept “baroque” is less obviously applicable to philosophy than to the visual arts and music, early modern philosophy can be shown to have connections with baroque culture. Baroque style and rhetoric are employed or denounced in philosophical controversies, to license or discredit a certain style of philosophizing. Philosophers engage with themes current in baroque literature (the mad world, the world as a stage, the quest for the self) and occasionally transform these into philosophical problems, especially of an epistemological kind (are the senses reliable? how far is our access to reality limited by our perspective?) Finally, the philosophies of Malebranche and Berkeley, with their radical challenges to so-called common sense, and their explanation of conventional understandings of the world as based on illusion, have something of the disturbing quality of baroque art and architecture.

scholarly journals “Industrious Revolution” Revisited: A Variety of Diligence Derived from a Long-Term Local History of Kuta in Kyô-Otagi, a Former County in Japan

Histories ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 108-121
Author(s):  
Satoshi Murayama ◽  
Hiroko Nakamura
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Industrial Production ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Local History ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Original Theory ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
History Of

Jan de Vries revised Akira Hayami’s original theory of the “Industrious Revolution” to make the idea more applicable to early modern commercialization in Europe, showcasing the development of the rural proletariat and especially the consumer revolution and women’s emancipation on the way toward an “Industrial Revolution.” However, Japanese villages followed a different path from the Western trajectory of the “Industrious Revolution,” which is recognized as the first step to industrialization. This article will explore how a different form of “industriousness” developed in Japan, covering medieval, early modern, and modern times. It will first describe why the communal village system was established in Japan and how this unique institution, the self-reliance system of a village, affected commercialization and industrialization and was sustained until modern times. Then, the local history of Kuta Village in Kyô-Otagi, a former county located close to Kyoto, is considered over the long term, from medieval through modern times. Kuta was not directly affected by the siting of new industrial production bases and the changes brought to villages located nearer to Kyoto. A variety of diligent interactions with living spaces is introduced to demonstrate that the industriousness of local women was characterized by conscience-driven perseverance.

scholarly journals Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen's Life Writing

Prose Studies ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-308
Author(s):  
Natasha Simonova
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Self

scholarly journals Ruin philosophy, poetic discourse and the collapse of meta-narratives in Aleksandr Kushner's poetry of the 1970s

Nordlit ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Schönle
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
The Face ◽  
Creative Forces ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Way

This article offers an analysis of the trope of ruin in the poetry of Aleksandr Kushner (born 1936), in particular through a close reading of two of his poems: “In a slippery graveyard, alone” and “Ruins”. The analysis of these poems is preceded by an overview of ruin philosophy from Burke and Diderot to Simmel and Benjamin, with particular emphasis on the way the trope of ruin contemplation stages a confrontation between the self and what transcends it (death, history, nature, etc.). This philosophical background serves as a heuristic tool to shed light on the poetry of Kushner. Through the trope of ruin, Kushner explores the legitimacy of poetic speech after the collapse of all meta-narratives. Kushner has no truck with Diderot's solipsism, nor with Hegel's bold narrative of progress, nor with Simmel's peaceful reconciliation with the creative forces of nature. Nor, really, does he intend to bear witness to history, the way Benjamin does in the faint anticipation of some miracle. Instead, Kushner posits the endurance of a community united not around a grand project, but around the idea of carrying on in the face of everything, muddling through despite the lack of hopes for a transformational future and making the most of fleeting moments of positivity that emerge out of the fundamental serendipity of history.

The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting

2000 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 180
Author(s):  
Yael Even ◽  
Victor I. Stoichita ◽  
Anne-Marie Glasheen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Insight Into

scholarly journals The Shape of Knowledge: Children and the Visual Culture of Literacy and Numeracy

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Daniel Eddy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
Instructional Literature

The ArgumentIn 1787 an anonymous student of the Perth Academy spent countless hours transforming his rough classroom notes into a beautifully inscribed notebook. Though this was an everyday practice for many Enlightenment students, extant notebooks of this nature are extremely rare and we know very little about how middle class children learned to inscribe and visualize knowledge on paper. This essay addresses this lacuna by using recently located student notebooks, drawings, and marginalia alongside textbooks and instructional literature to identify the graphic tools and skills that were taught to Scottish children in early modern classrooms. I show that, in addition to learning the facts of the curriculum, students participated in educational routines that enabled them to learn how to visually package knowledge into accessible figures and patterns of information, thereby making acts of inscription and visualization meaningful tools that benefitted both the self and society.

Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Arti Minocha
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Language Content

Abstract This paper looks at the formation of colonial print publics in Punjab, the gendered subjectivities that emerged in this new discursive space, and middle-class women’s deployment of print to articulate the self. This will be done through a close reading of one of the first novels in English, Cosmopolitan Hinduani, which was published in Lahore, Punjab, by a woman in 1902. The essay examines the narrator’s notion of a gendered cosmopolitanism and the subject position that it affords, her attempt at going beyond the fault lines of religion to articulate a liberal and modern political subject, while reworking the cosmopolitan/local binary. How does her insertion of herself as a gendered subject in the provincial, national, cosmopolitan imaginary reflect in the author’s choice of language and genre? My attempt will be to see the novel and its author as part of a literary culture in which she made certain choices about the form, language, content, and audience.

Breeched and Unbridled: Bifurcated Equestrian Garments for Women in Early Modern Europe

Costume ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-185
Author(s):  
Valerio Zanetti
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Affective Meaning ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Modern Europe

This article discusses the wearing of bifurcated equestrian garments for women in early modern Europe. Considering visual representations as well as documentary sources, the first section examines the fashion for red riding breeches between the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Worn for their comfort and functionality in the saddle, these garments were also invested with powerful symbolic and affective meaning. The second section provides new insights about female equestrian outfits in late seventeenth-century France. Through the close reading of two written accounts, the author sheds light on the use of breeches as undergarments in the saddle and discusses the appearance of a hybrid riding uniform that incorporated knee-length culottes. By presenting horsewomen who wore bifurcated garments in the pursuit of leisure rather than transgression, this study revises historical narratives that cast the breeched woman exclusively as a symbol of gender upheaval.

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