The Word's Dispersion: Two Letters and a Parchment in Browning's Poetry

1990 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 95-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph A. Dupras

Scientific and hermeneutic studies, which held the attention of Robert Browning7's contemporaries who were sensitive to Christology, made Scripture and the “book of nature” seem even more inscrutable. A prominent theme in many Browning poems, “How very hard it is to be / A Christian” (Easter-Day, lines 1–2), pertains not only to behavior but also to the influence of spoken, written, or printed discourse on historical and canonical matters. In Karshish's epistle to Abib, Cleon's letter to Protus, and multiple analyses of a parchment concerning St. John's death, Christianity appears not just a religious and cultural phenomenon, but a changing philological and interpretive one affected by “the ineptitude of the time, / And the penman's prejudice” (Christmas-Eve 871–72). For Victorians and later readers, anxious about being on the brink of a post-Christian age and therefore inclined to idealize their ancestors' religious confidence, Browning's portraits of Christianity's first century are a chance to review inherited discursive practices. He represents Christianity's vocal and textual foundations to accentuate “hermeneutics, … how poets find authority and means to communicate in written language and how readers derive meaning from poetic texts … or an event qua text.” (Peterson 363). Browning is less troubled by “higher” or “lower” critics, attuned to the perils of logocentrism, than by nervous religious and literary disciples who understand his poetics no better than they adapt to the altered theological climate.

Author(s):  
Ada Alexandrovna Bernatskaya

The purpose of the article is to outline the specifics of the discourse of information psychological war on the material of fiction.As a result of consistent interpretation of the key concepts as the basis of the linguo-philosophical aspect of the study, it is concluded that information psychological war as a socio-and linguo-cultural phenomenon responds to all the features and categories of discourse. The object of this research consists in the implementation of the information psychological war subtype, the dominant attribute of which is the material / object of study (a combination of aesthetic function with a number of social ones) and the content heterogeneity of the text as a condition for the potential realization of any discourses in it. The author raises an is sue about the scientific and ethical pro and contra of the research of fiction from the information psychological war perspective. The conclusion is made about the necessity of introducing the factor of “degree” of confrontation / struggle and, accordingly, the study of the fiction for the individual symptoms / features of information psychological war.The conditions and criteria for their establishment in specific practices are formulated.The article presents the targets of information psychological war in the discursive practices studied earlier by the author.In conclusion, the criteria for the selection of fiction texts in the aspect of information psychological war and the criteria for distinguishing information psychological war symptoms from social criticism are summarized.


2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hudis

AbstractThe global economic-financial downturn has given new impetus to a re-examination of Rosa Luxemburg’s writings on capitalist accumulation and economic crisis, which pinpointed the central contradiction of capitalism in its drive for global expansion. In this article I critically engage Luxemburg’s theory of capital accumulation and crisis by evaluating it in comparison with the central categories of Volumes One and Two of Marx’sCapitalon the one hand, and the quest for an alternative to capitalism in the twenty-first century on the other. I argue that Marx’s procedure in Volume Two ofCapital, in which he abstracts from realization crises and foreign trade in order to discern the “law of motion” of capital freed from secondary and tertiary considerations, captures the internal dynamic of capitalist development and crises far better than its Keynesian and neo-Keynesian alternatives.


2009 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Elena Abramov-van Rijk

One difficulty in understanding the poetic texts of Trecento madrigals is that the language they use is often that of allegories and symbols, which requires a key for deciphering their true meaning. It is widely accepted, based on the interpretation of birds as heraldic symbols, that the madrigal Aquil'altera (Proud eagle) by Jacopo da Bologna was written either for a wedding or for a coronation ceremony. In this essay, however, I show that Aquila's content and literary style echo ideas and images that were circulating in the literature of the time, and especially in bestiaries and bestiary-inspired Italian poetry. Since these sources were well known to every educated person of the time, we may assume that its symbolic content, which is actually a praise of the human intellect, would have been understood by listeners and readers. This madrigal in turn provides a stimulus for tracing its ideas in other musical compositions of the Trecento, the madrigals Musica son by Francesco Landini and Se premio di virtù by Bartolino da Padova. These compositions are examined in the context of a specific cultural phenomenon in Italy of this period, namely, tenzoni, or correspondence in poetic forms – a practice that was the natural domain of the phenomenon we know as intertextuality.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-128
Author(s):  
Yoke Lian Lau ◽  
Chek Kim Loi ◽  
Mohd Nor Azan bin Abdullah

Broca's aphasia is a type of aphasia named after the French surgeon Broca. Broca's aphasic patients experienced difficulty in speaking, but they could understand both spoken and written language. There were three essential patients in the historical development of the study of Broca's aphasia. Louis Victor Leborgne (1809–1861) was also known as Monsieur Leborgne or 'Tan' as he could only utter the syllable 'Tan' throughout his 21 years of illness. The second patient was called Lazare Lelong. His language ability was slightly better than Leborgne. He could utter simple syllables, such as oui (yes), non (no), and this (trois or three). The third patient was Gage, a railway company worker. Broca studied similar cases in the following years and planned a brain function localization theory.


2005 ◽  
Vol 79 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 79-90
Author(s):  
John P. Homiak

Drawing increasingly upon digital technologies and the internet to assert a sense of community even as they cultivate an austere biblical persona, adherents of Rastafari can be thought of as simultaneously modern and antique. Their claim to antiquity is grounded in a collectively professed African-Ethiopian identity that has not only resisted the ravages of enslavement, colonialism, and European cultural domination but is seen to transcend local differences of culture and language. Theirs is a way of life organized around theocratic principles that begin with a recognition of the divine in all peoples and as the basis of all human agency. Rastafari assert the universal relevance of these principles to the conditions of modernity even as they persistently claim social justice on behalf of all peoples of African descent exploited by colonialism and the prevailing global capitalist-imperialist system. Based on these general themes, the Rastafari movement has come to represent a large-scale cultural phenomenon that has long since burst the chains of its colonial containment in Jamaica. From the late 1960s onward it has spread throughout the Caribbean and the Central and South American rimland to the major metropoles of North America and Europe as well as to many sites on the African continent.


2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (40) ◽  
pp. 163-176
Author(s):  
Carlos Eduardo Gomes Siqueira ◽  
Teresa Roberts ◽  
Fernanda Lucchese

This paper describes the health profile of Brazilian mothers in Massachusetts according to data collected through Massachusetts Standard Certificate of Live Births (1989 revision) filed with the Massachusetts Registry of Vital Records and Statistics during 1999 and 2009. To our knowledge this is the first time that such information is reviewed with a focus on Brazilian immigrants. The findings of this article suggests that Brazilian mothers who gave birth in Massachusetts between 1999 and 2009 fared better than all mothers in Massachusetts in most obstetric health indicators considered.


1968 ◽  
Vol 72 (695) ◽  
pp. 911-914
Author(s):  
R. Stanton-Jones

The introduction to a book called “An Anthology of Partly Baked Ideas” states that it was compiled to provide an opportunity for the publication of ideas either half or partly baked, which might not otherwise be suitable for publication in established learned journals. However, the Royal Aeronautical Society's decision to solicit articles on aeronautical achievement in the latter half of the twenty-first century is a direct invitation from a learned society to expound on, what at best, can only be some very partly baked ideas. The author of this admirable anthology, I. J. Good, has defined partly baked ideas (PBIs) in some detail in the opening chapters where he gives a clear indication that reputable scientists and engineers should at very least endeavour to incubate their proposals to the point where the degree of “bakedness” should be greater than 0·5, i.e. better than half-baked.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 342-352
Author(s):  
Leah E. Wilson

This article examines Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie as portraying the need for a postpornographic trans* feminism that contests homonormative queer and feminist responses to LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual) individuals in neoliberal French and Francophone societies during the rise of far-right anti-gender movements. Interrogating Preciado’s autotheory text, which questions what gendered performance entails in the pharmacopornographic era, allows for a consideration of the author’s bodily subjectivity and how he represents material-discursive practices to theorise his techno-identity. The article argues that Preciado highlights his sexual and gendered performance to assert a trans* identity that rebels against classification. Unveiling the multiplicity of gendered and sexual experiences that counter Western hegemonic binary categorisations, Preciado shows readers that through his material representation, he controls his own subjectivity to centre possibility with postpornographic feminist performance, expanding what it means to be a feminist subject in the twenty-first century.


2015 ◽  
pp. 35-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Gibson

Gruomota: the influence of politics and nationalism on the development of written Latgalian in the long nineteenth century (1772–1918)Latgale, the southeast region of Latvia, has a distinct ethnoregional identity largely due to the wide- spread use of the Latgalian language/dialect. The status of Latgalian as a language/dialect is highly politicised in Latvia today, yet this is not only a twenty-first century phenomenon. Since its inception as a written language in the mid-eighteenth century, the development of written Latgalian has been strongly influenced by politics and nationalism. This is an exploratory paper, which traces the impact of politics and nationalism on the development of written Latgalian throughout the long nineteenth century, a period in which the region was administered by three political regimes (Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russian Empire, First Republic of Latvia). Transnational perspectives are used to contextualise the development of written Latgalian with the development of other written languages in the vicinity (Belarusian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Samogitian), and to open up the field for further comparative studies on the development of non-national written languages/dialect. Latgale is a borderland region often neglected in mainstream Latvian scholarship, and by extension, even more so outside Latvia. This paper hopes to go some way to rectifying this. Gramota: wpływ polityki i nacjonalizmu na rozwój łatgalskiego języka literackiego w długim wieku XIX (1772–1918)Łatgalię, południowo-wschodni region Łotwy, cechuje odrębna tożsamość etniczno-regionalna, przede wszystkim z racji powszechnego na tym terenie używania języka/dialektu łatgalskiego. Status łatgalskiego jako języka/dialektu stanowi w dzisiejszej Litwie w dużej mierze kwestię o wymiarze politycznym, aczkolwiek nie jest to zjawisko, które pojawiło się dopiero w XX stuleciu. Łatgalski już od czasu swych narodzin jako język literacki w połowie XVIII wieku pozostawał pod silną presją polityki oraz nacjonalizmów. Niniejszy artykuł ma na celu prześledzenie oddziaływania polityki i nacjonalizmu na kształtowanie się literackiej odmiany języka łatgalskiego w ciągu „długiego wieku XIX” – okresu, w którym region ten podlegał administracji rządowej sprawowanej przez trzy systemy polityczne (Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów, Imperium Rosyjskie, Pierwsza Republika Litewska). Spojrzenie na omawiane zagadnienie z perspektywy ponadnarodowej pozwala stworzyć kontekst rozwoju łatgalskiego języka literackiego w odniesieniu do innych języków literackich formujących się w bliskim jego sąsiedztwie (białoruskiego, łotewskiego, litewskiego i semigalskiego), jak też otworzyć pole dla kolejnych studiów porównawczych nad kształtowaniem się nienarodowych języków/dialektów literackich. Łatgalia stanowi region pograniczny, zwykle zaniedbywany przez główny nurt nauki łotewskiej, a tym bardziej w dociekaniach naukowych poza granicami Łotwy. Niniejszy artykuł ma za zadanie choć w pewnej mierze stan ten naprawić.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document