scholarly journals AN OTTOMAN ARAB MAN OF LETTERS AND THE MEANINGS OF EMPIRE, c. 1860

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 89-114
Author(s):  
Andrew Arsan

AbstractThis paper returns to one of the germinal texts of nineteenth-century Arab political thought, Butrus al-Bustani's Nafir Suriyya (‘The Clarion of Syria’). A series of broadsides published between September 1860 and April 1861, these reflected on the confessional violence that had rent apart Mount Lebanon and Damascus in mid-1860. As scholars have suggested, Bustani – now regarded as one of the pre-eminent thinkers of the nineteenth-century Arab nahda, or ‘awakening’ – here offered a new vision of Syrian patriotism, which formed part of a longer reflection on political subjectivity, faith, and civilisation. But, this paper argues, these texts can also be read as reflections on the changing workings of empire: on the imperial ruler's duties and attributes and his subjects’ obligations and rights; on the relationship between state and population and capital and province; on imperial administrative reform; and on the dangers foreign intervention posed to Ottoman sovereignty. Drawing on the languages of Ottoman reform and ethical statecraft, as well as on imperial comparisons, Bustani argued against the autonomy some counselled for Mount Lebanon and for wholesale integration with the Ottoman state. These texts offer grounds for methodological reflection and for writing Ottoman Arab thought into broader histories of imperial political thought.

1979 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-554
Author(s):  
George Feaver

There is something intrepidly parochial in Patricia Hughes's account of Mill's views. Her very opening statement, with its new vision of society, its “emerging social forces,” its principals “trapped by traditional influences,” sets the tone for the enterprise which follows—an historical melodrama with J. S. Mill, the patron saint of contemporary liberalism, reborn in Canada without his aspergillum, an affable enough character, a sort of Bruno Gerussi of the political thought set, his do-gooder's heart generally in the right place but his head usually muddled: an admirably earnest figure, even, who some how always misses the point but, up to now, has gotten away with it. Our aspiring script-writer intends to set things right, to show how we can redo the storyline (which may require substituting another nineteenth century great in the leading role), so as to combine passion and theory in a really radical vision of a fully liberated society.


1997 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roxanne L. Euben

The steadily increasing appeal of Islamic fundamentalist ideas has often been characterized as a premodern, antimodern or, more recently, as a postmodern phenomenon. To explore the relationship of Islamist political thought to modernity, and the usefulness of the terminology of “modernity” to situate and understand it, this article explores two comparisons. The first is a comparison across time, and involves the juxtaposition of a prominent nineteenth century Islamic “modernist” and the critique of modernity by an influential twentieth century Islamic fundamentalist thinker. The second is a comparison across cultures, and involves the juxtaposition of this Islamic fundamentalist critique and many Western theorists similarly critical of “the modern condition.” These comparisons suggest that Islamic fundamentalist political thought is part of a transcultural and multivocal reassessment of the value and definition of “modernity.” Such reassessments should be understood in terms of a dialectical relationship to “modernity,” one that entails not the negation of modernity but an attempt to simultaneously abolish, transcend, preserve and transform it.


Author(s):  
Alexander Dumov

The paper presents a review of modern philosophical and methodological literature on exploring complexity. The research featured the effect of metaphor in the cognitive processes, research communication, and transmission of complex ideas. The author developed a classification of metaphors in the context of exploring complexity. The approach is based on the identification of a certain ontological and epistemic content of the metaphor. The contextual role of the metaphor in cognition processes depends on these aspects of its content. The author analyzed the groups of metaphors associated with such topics of exploring complexity as self-organization, ecology, and dialogue. The metaphors proved important in developing a complex vision of the relationship between the cognizer and the world. The study also examined the axiological aspects of the metaphors, as well as the connection between the metaphor and the new vision of rationality, typical of the philosophical reflection of complexity. The metaphor proved to have a heuristic, communicative, and organizational potential in conditions of methodological uncertainty. The context of philosophical and theoretical-methodological reflection of complexity makes it possible to study the metaphor in order to identify the existing models of exploring complexity and their cognitive stylistics.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.


Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
Alex Broadhead

In 2009, Damian Walford Davies called for a counterfactual turn in Romantic studies, a move reflective of a wider growth of critical interest in the relationship between Romanticism and counterfactual historiography. In contrast to these more recent developments, the lives of the Romantics have provided a consistent source of speculation for authors of popular alternate history since the nineteenth century. Yet the aims of alternate history as a genre differ markedly from those of its more scholarly cousin, counterfactual historiography. How, then, might such works fit in to the proposed counterfactual turn? This article makes a case for the critical as well as the creative value of alternate histories featuring the Romantics. By exploring how these narratives differ from works of counterfactual historiography, it seeks to explain why the Romantics continue to inspire authors of alternate history and to illuminate the forking paths that Davies's counterfactual turn might take.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.


Author(s):  
Hubert J. M Hermans

In the field of tension between globalization and localization, a set of new phenomena is emerging showing that society is not simply a social environment of self and identity but works in their deepest regions: self-radicalization, self-government, self-cure, self-nationalization, self-internationalization, and even self-marriage. The consequence is that the self is faced with an unprecedented density of self-parts, called I-positions in this theory. In the field of tension between boundary-crossing developments in the world and the search for an identity in a local niche, a self emerges that is characterized by a great variety of contradicting and heterogeneous I-positions and by large and unexpected jumps between different positions as the result of rapid and unexpected changes in the world. The chapter argues that such developments require a new vision of the relationship between self and society.


Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung

The conclusion of this book calls attention to the relationship between comprehending realist fiction and Aristotle’s claim that mimetic representation provides a form of aesthetic pleasure distinct from our response to what is represented. It also argues that, by demonstrating how much nineteenth-century novelists depend on the knowledge and abilities that readers bring to a text, cognitive research on reading helps us revisit long-standing theoretical assumptions in literary studies. Because the felt experience of reading is so distinct from the mental acts underlying it, knowing more about the basic architecture of reading can help literary critics refine their claims about what novels can and cannot do to their readers.


Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson

Ritchie Robertson situates Lessing’s text within debates over the proper depiction of extreme suffering in art, focusing on Goethe’s essay on the Laocoon group (1798), as well as other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works on the representation of pain. The issue of suffering in art was of utmost significance to Goethe’s ideology of the classical, Robertson explains; more than that, the themes introduced in Lessing’s essay—above all, its concerns with how suffering can be depicted in words and images—proved pivotal within Goethe’s prescriptions about the relationship between idealism and individuality (or ‘the characteristic’) in art. As part of a larger campaign against what he called ‘naturalism’ in art, Goethe argued that the ancients did not share the false notion that art must imitate nature. For Goethe, responding to Lessing, the power of the Laocoon group lay precisely in its depiction of bodily suffering as something not just beautiful, but also anmutig (‘sensuously pleasing’).


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