Curious Modernities: Early Twentieth-Century Balinese Textual Explorations

2007 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 723-758 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Creese
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The West ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Textual Representation ◽  
Dutch Colonial

The engagement of Balinese writers and intellectuals with the modern world began well before the final incorporation of the island into the Dutch colonial state in 1906–8. This essay analyzes three Balinese texts, each belonging to a different traditional Balinese literary genre, that were written around the beginning of the twentieth century. These texts, which deal with world events and geography, are Balinese reworkings of material from printed sources into indigenous forms of textual representation. They represent some of the earliest documented shifts toward modernity by indigenous Balinese writers and embody attempts to engage with modernity as a way of both understanding the West and coming to terms with new technologies. As examples of a localized translation of the foreign and the modern, they provide insights into how elite Balinese understandings of modernity were being constituted at the turn of the century.

Rebuilding the Chinese capital: Beijing in the early twentieth century

Urban History ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingzheng Shi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Municipal Government ◽  
Urban Infrastructure ◽  
Public Works ◽  
The West ◽  
Urban Affairs ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

ABSTRACTThis paper studies the evolution of urban form in both physical and social manifestations through an examination of the transformation of the Chinese capital from a planned imperial city into a modern metropolis in the early twentieth century. The newly created municipal government sought to modernize Beijing through public works to improve the old urban infrastructure. Consequently, city walls and gates were reconfigured; streets were paved, widened and expanded; and new rules of urban planning and zoning were introduced. Reflecting changes in political power relations, the modernist transformation in the urban built environment was evidently brought about by a combined force of Western influences and Chinese indigenous developments, especially by a shift in ideological allegiance from imperial authority to people's rights, by the state's increasing intervention in urban affairs, and by new technologies transmitted from the West.

‘Into Unknown Country’: Cinematicity and Intermedial Translation in Mansfield’s Fictional Journeys

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faye Harland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Cultural Perceptions ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Written Word

This chapter examines the intermedial qualities of Mansfield’s fiction as a form of translation, suggesting that her work draws upon the new technologies of rail travel and the cinema in order to explore changing perceptions of the modern world. Mansfield’s fiction is aligned with early twentieth century visual culture, adapting the visual effects of various new media into written word. The chapter also discusses the connection between translation and transposition, examining the liminal journeys undertaken by Mansfield’s characters in terms of exile, subjective vision, and cultural perceptions of time and space.

Firearms and Princely Power in Ethiopia in the Nineteenth Century

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Caulk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Leadership ◽  
Local Leaders

Several centuries after firearms had been introduced, they were still of little importance in Ethiopia, where cavalry continued to dominate warfare until the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they were much sought after by local leaders ambitious to secure their autonomy or to grasp supreme authority. The first of these warlords to make himself emperor, Tēwodros (1855–68), owed nothing to firearms. However, his successors, Yohannis IV (1872–89) and Minīlik (d. 1913), did. Both excelled in their mastery of the new technology and acquired large quantities of quick-firing weapons. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, possession of firearms — principally the breech loading rifle — had become a precondition for successfully contending for national leadership. Yet the wider revolution associated (as in Egypt) with the establishment of a European-style army did not follow. Nor was rearmament restricted to the following of the emperor. Despite the revival of imperial authority effected by Yohannis and Minīlik, rifles and even machine-guns were widely enough spread at the turn of the century to reinforce the fragmentation of power long characteristic of the Ethiopian state. Into the early twentieth century, it remained uncertain if the peculiar advantages of the capital in the import of arms would be made to serve centralization.

Arnold Mitchell (1863–1944): ‘Fecundity’ and ‘Versatility’ in an Early Twentieth-Century Architect

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 199-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Sherriff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Architectural Practice ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Younger Men

The architectural historian Roderick Gradidge, referring to the 1900s, wrote that ‘in architecture there have never been such opportunities for younger men as there were at the turn of the century’. Arnold Mitchell is an architect typical of those who took advantage of such opportunities, a man (women were yet to have the chance) who saw the economic and aesthetic potential for new architecture, both nationally and internationally. Understanding the nature of architectural practice should not be reliant solely upon knowledge of the stellar architects of any given period. It depends upon integrating others, one or two rungs down the ladder but who achieved success in their own sphere, into the corpus examined, in order to achieve a fuller understanding of the profession.

Danxia Burns a Buddha

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory P. A. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Art Collecting ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Photographic Reproduction ◽  
Art Canon ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Modern Artists

Chapter 3 focuses on a medieval painting in the Zen art canon—Yintuoluo’s painting of Danxia Tianran (738/39-824), a Chinese monk said to have burned a wood statue of the Buddha—and situates it within its modern surround, particularly in relation to Zen iconoclasm, a prominent trope in postwar Zen cultural production including Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and other countercultural works. The chapter suggests how premodern representations of the Danxia tale circulated in the modern world through art collecting, photographic reproduction, translations of hagiography into modern Japanese and English for lay and non-practicing readers, and “reverse orientalist” critique of Western views of Buddhism. It notes too the tale’s representation by modern artists in Japan, including Yamamoto Shunkyo and Okamoto Ippei. Whatever the representation of Danxia burning the Buddha meant in preceding centuries, in the early twentieth century, it responded to new prospects, ambitions, and conflicts, as much geo-political as personal.

The Old Rhetoric

2019 ◽  
pp. 27-68
Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophical Analysis ◽  
Persuasive Communication ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
The West ◽  
The Third ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Persuasive Speech

This chapter discusses the Old Rhetoric, sketching the long persistence in the West—from Aristotle to the early twentieth century—of a ‘single meaning model’ of language, one that takes ambiguity for granted as an obstacle to persuasive speech and clear philosophical analysis. In Aristotle's works are the seeds of three closely related traditions of Western thought on ambiguity: the logicosemantic, the rhetorical, and the hermeneutic. The first seeks to eliminate ambiguity from philosophy because it hinders a clear analysis of the world. The second seeks to eliminate ambiguity from speech because it hinders the clear and persuasive communication of argument. The third, an extension of the second, seeks to resolve textual ambiguity because it hinders the reader's ability to grasp the writer's intention. The chapter then considers Aristotle's two types of verbal ambiguity: homonym and amphiboly. The solution to both—whether their presence in a discussion is accidental or deliberate—is what Aristotle calls diairesis or distinction, that is, the explicit clarification of the different meanings involved.

Old Testament Realism in the Writings of Erich Auerbach

2018 ◽  
pp. 187-224
Author(s):  
James I. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
The West ◽  
The Real ◽  
Historical Thought

This chapter studies the work of the German literary critic Erich Auerbach, who wrote in response to the historical upheaval of the mid-twentieth century as a form of historical engagement. In his work, Auerbach endeavors to portray the evolution of historical consciousness in the West and the discovery of the human and social worlds it yielded. He reflects on this evolution in relating the narrative of realism. In this account, realism is not a literary genre, but rather the evolving recognition of human consciousness of its own conditions, the growing awareness, that is, that reality and the real inhere in the sensuous, the mundane, and the human. At the center of this narrative, Auerbach places Judaism and its heritage rather than Christianity. For Auerbach, history and historical consciousness first appear in the Jewish biblical stories, which provide in turn the structure and the framework for all subsequent expressions of historical thought and experience.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 171-176
Author(s):  
Tyler Carrington
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Online Dating ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Contemporary World

The epilogue, which opens by tracing the legacy of Frieda Kliem’s Berlin throughout the rest of the twentieth century, insists that we cannot understand this famous twilight of “old” Germany and its transition into “new” Germany unless we take seriously the tensions surrounding love, intimacy, and dating that play out in Love at Last Sight. It further contends that the modern world—epitomized by the modern metropolis—not only exacerbated some of the long-standing and inherent risks of love, but also created a whole new set of dilemmas with which men and women throughout Germany, Europe, and the United States continue to grapple as they pursue love using similarly radical methods and technologies (most notably, online dating). The story of the Berliners who negotiated these same tensions at the turn of the century, the epilogue concludes, is thus eminently relevant to and instructive for our own contemporary world.

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