Lucan's Legends of the Fall

Ramus ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew D. Walker

flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta mouebo.(Aen. 7.312)If I cannot bend the gods above, it is Acheron I shall move.So Juno claims, famously, expressing her determination to thwart the newlyforged alliance between Aeneas and the Italians, and setting in motion (through the agency of Allecto) the violence and passion that fuels the ‘Iliadic’ Aeneid—the ‘Energy of Hell’, as Philip Hardie calls it—energy necessary to sustain the momentum of a long narrative poem, a demonic ‘burst of power’ imitated by Vergil's successors—Lucan, Silius, and especially Statius, who opens the Thebaid with an embittered Oedipus summoning the dark forces of the underworld embodied in the Fury Tisiphone (Theb. 1.48ff.). Vergil's hexameter might also serve as a motto for Ramus to the degree that the journal has mounted a radical—and oedipal—critique over the last quarter century, assaulting the stuffy status quo in classical studies, finding a place ‘on the shelves of all the young and cool’, although those sons (and daughters), now a generation older, are themselves the new fathers, the new superi. Juno's claim so impressed Freud that he placed it on the title page of his magnum opus—The Interpretation of Dreams—anticipating psychoanalysis' assault on Western subjectivity and describing Freud's own exclusion from the academy, his circuitous ‘professional journey’. Years later Freud would maintain that the hexameter line provides a portrait of ‘repressed instinctual impulses’, suggesting that, long before the twentieth century, Vergil and his epic successors understood the project of psychoanalysis. ‘The poets and philosophers,’ Freud was fond of saying, ‘discovered the unconscious before I did.’

2002 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 330-339
Author(s):  
Keith Soothill

Somerset Maugham's writings had huge audiences in the first half of the twentieth century. In much of his work the focus is on people behaving badly. What effect did his work have on his readers? This article examines his short stories, of which approximately one-fifth of the major ones have murder as their theme. Focusing on the murders that Maugham ‘creates’, the claim is that Maugham is subversive, challenging some readily made assumptions. In Maugham's scheme of things, the criminal justice system is usually inappropriate, irrelevant or produces injustice, with ‘rough justice’ usually the best that is on offer. The resourceful can get away with murder. Murder is not the most serious crime for many. Instinct rather than rationality is the best judge. Maugham also emphasises the importance of fate, thus implying we are not in control of our destinies. The article argues that popular authors, such as Maugham, may have contributed much more than is generally recognised to the developing unease about the ‘status quo’ that ultimately led to the landslide victory of the Labour government in 1945.


Author(s):  
Richard G.T. Gipps ◽  
Michael Lacewing

This Handbook examines the contributions of philosophy to psychoanalysis and vice versa. It explores the most central concept of psychoanalysis—the unconscious—in relation to its defences, transference, conflict, free association, wish fulfilment, and symbolism. It also considers psychoanalysis in relation to its philosophical prehistory, the recognition and misrecognition afforded it within twentieth-century philosophy, its scientific strengths and weaknesses, its applications in aesthetics and politics, and its value and limitations with respect to ethics, religion, and social life. The book explains how psychoanalysis draws our attention to the reality of central aspects of the inner life and how philosophy assists psychoanalysis in knowing itself. This introduction elaborates on the phrase ‘know thyself’, the words inscribed at the Temple of Delphi, and illustrates the connection between matters philosophical and psychoanalytic in relation to the Delphic command by highlighting their mutual concern with truth and truthfulness.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-596
Author(s):  
Carlos S. Alvarado

There is a long history of discussions of mediumship as related to dissociation and the unconscious mind during the Nineteenth Century. After an overview of relevant ideas and observations from the mesmeric, hypnosis, and spiritualistic literatures, I focus on the writings of Jules Baillarger, Alfred Binet, Paul Blocq, Théodore Flournoy, Jules Héricourt, William James, Pierre Janet, Ambroise August Liébeault, Frederic W.H. Myers, Julian Ochorowicz, Charles Richet, Hippolyte Taine, Paul Tascher, and Edouard von Hartmann. While some of their ideas reduced mediumship solely to intra-psychic processes, others considered as well veridical phenomena. The speculations of these individuals, involving personation, and different memory states, were part of a general interest in the unconscious mind, and in automatisms, hysteria, and hypnosis during the period in question. Similar ideas continued into the Twentieth Century.


2013 ◽  
pp. 140-149
Author(s):  
Mariya Yarkina

In the process of studying the transformation and inversion of symbols, it becomes clear that the analytic context of socio-cultural axiology, which permits the identification of mechanisms for the formation of values ​​with the help of symbols, is of particular importance for the understanding of the symbol. Since the symbol is the sphere of the functioning of the unconscious, suggestive-emotional influence on a person, he is able to embody those values ​​and achievements that have not yet become the subject of logical and rational knowledge. From the standpoint of history, the swastika is the most ancient and widespread of all graphic symbols. Traditionally, the swastika has a "light" semantic load. The use of this symbol by the Nazis made it the most recognizable element of the twentieth century. with a reputation directly opposite to its ancient meaning. "The Big Soviet Encyclopedia" directly says about the inversion of the symbol: "Hitler and the German fascists made a swastikas with their emblem. Since then, it has become a symbol


2021 ◽  
pp. 86-114
Author(s):  
Julie Golia

This chapter examines the advice column “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise,” which ran in the Chicago Defender, one of the most successful black newspapers in the United States. In the early twentieth century, black publishers recognized the many ways that mainstream newspapers reinforced the racial status quo in America and failed to address the needs of African American readers. They also sought to offer more feature content to women readers. “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise” was one of the country’s most widely read black advice columns. Columnist Princess Mysteria, a vaudeville mentalist, embraced the Defender’s mission of racial “uplift” and advocacy. But her counsel also reflected a unique sensitivity to the dual prejudices that her female readers faced as African Americans and as women. The columnist offered a worldview very different from that of white columnists, one that doled out assertive, even feminist advice.


Tempo ◽  
1953 ◽  
pp. 34-38
Author(s):  
Colin Mason

At the end of last November, Pittsburgh, on the initiative of Roy Harris, resident composer of the Pennsylvania College for Women, organized an ambitious First International Contemporary Music Festival. It was an attempt to give a survey of music written in the last quarter-century, and although lasting only one week, boldly challenged comparison with the American-sponsored Festival of Twentieth-century Masterpieces held in Paris throughout last May. It says much for all concerned that the Pittsburgh festival emerged from the comparison with much credit.


1982 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 424-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Burguiére

In a letter addressed to the medievalist Ferdinand Lot and dated June 1941, Charles Seignobos, hereditary enemy of the Annales, declared, “I have the impression that, for approximately the last quarter-century, the effort to think about historical method, which was vigorous in the 1880s and especially so in the 1890s, has reached a stalemate,” and noted that, as a sign of the times, “the Revue de Synthese Historique … has changed its name.” Seignobos, then only a year before his death, was writing a book on “the principles of the historical method.” His letter alluded to American and German output (“a mediocre American, Barnes, published a fat book in 1925 in which he summarized a large number of works….”), but made no mention of Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, or of the Annales, then in its twelfth year. To choose to ignore the Annales while discoursing on historical method is of course unjust and absurd. But aside from this omission, Charles Seignobos's remarks are not without pertinence. It is true that France at the turn of the last century and particularly during the first decade of the twentieth century, had been the center of a passionate and fascinating debate on the nature of historical knowledge, on the legitimacy of its pretensions to be a science, and so forth, and that by the 1940s this debate had ceased.


Author(s):  
Federico Leoni

Psychoanalysis and phenomenological psychopathology mark the beginning of twentieth-century psychiatry. They are two grand experiments against nineteenth-century neurological-criminological alienistics. Psychopathological experiences are not meaningless disfunctions, they both state. But psychoanalysis and phenomenology immediately part ways. Freud’s psychoanalysis reconstructs psychiatry around the idea of the unconscious, phenomenological psychiatry around the idea of consciousness. Psychoanalysis believes in causes, and the first unconscious cause is what Freud called drive, with its adventures and misadventures. Husserl’s phenomenology believes in the transcendental, and what we call psychopathological experiences are nothing other than the fading, the displacement, the fragmentations of the constitutive power of the transcendental.


2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-136
Author(s):  
Boman Desai

During the late twentieth century, the veracity of a particular aspect of Johannes Brahms's boyhood came under challenge. Had he played the piano in Hamburg's dockside bars as many of his biographers had recorded, or had he not? The two sides of the story were debated in the spring 2001 issue of 19th-Century Music. Jan Swafford, Brahms's definitive biographer in English, provided the case for the status quo, citing all the known instances of times when Brahms himself had mentioned the story to friends and biographers. Styra Avins, a translator of many of Brahms's heretofore untranslated letters into English, provided evidence to the contrary by saying all the friends and biographers were mistaken. Swafford's inventory of sources is complete, but there remained more to be said. In "The Boy Brahms" I have attempted to show how Avins's evidence is strictly circumstantial and speculative. At this remove from the incidents in question it can be nothing more. I have attempted to refute the conclusions she has drawn from the young Brahms's handwriting, the testimony of neighbors, and the laws governing attendance in the bars, among other things. I have also attempted to show inconsistencies in Avins's arguments that throw into question her thesis and support the veracity of the original story.


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