Signs of the Times

Prospects ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 187-197
Author(s):  
V. P. Bynack
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Rapid Succession ◽  
American Scholar ◽  
Linguistic Model ◽  
The World ◽  
The Times ◽  
Fredric Jameson

The topic “Criticism, Biography, and Popular Culture” raises issues that epitomize current intellectual possibilities and problems. As Emerson said of his own time in “The American Scholar,” this is a moment when “the old and the new stand side by side and admit of being compared; when the energies of men are being searched by fear and hope.… This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” If anyone's “energies” are being “searched by fear and hope” today, it's because we face a similar situation. The two preceding essays brought to bear in rapid succession two historically different models of how the world works. These models, which I will follow Fredric Jameson in calling the “organic” model of the nineteenth century and the “linguistic” model of the twentieth, imply two different versions of the character and status of language, two different versions of what literature is, two different versions of what the self is, and two different versions of what we could mean by saying that we use these things to study American “culture.”

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

scholarly journals Successful Against All Odds? – Margaret Fuller: The Self-Made Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Ad Americam ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 143-154
Author(s):  
Jolanta Szymkowska-Bartyzel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Social Determinants ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Age ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Cultural Model ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The Times ◽  
Work And Life

Margaret Fuller was an American philosopher, writer, journalist and one of the first gender theorists. The article examines Fuller’s work and life in the context of 19th century American culture and social determinants influencing women’s lives. From a very early age, Fuller perceived her role in society different from the role designed for her as a biological girl by the cultural model of the times she lived in. The article focuses on Fuller’s achievements in the context of the self-made man/woman concept.

David Brown's Divine Humanity

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-113
Author(s):  
Kathryn Tanner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Primary Indication ◽  
The World ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
The Way

The contributions of this fine book are many but I will concentrate on three, before turning to several more critical remarks.First, and most obviously, the book does the invaluable service of surveying developments in kenotic christology in the nineteenth century while situating them nicely in their different contexts of origin and with reference to lines of mutual influence: continental, Scottish and British trends are all canvassed rather masterfully. Some attention, in lesser detail, is also given to the way these christological trends are extended in the twentieth century to accounts of the Trinity and God's relation to the world generally: kenosis, the self-emptying or self-limiting action of God, in the incarnation, is now viewed as a primary indication of who God is and how God works, from creation to salvation.

The Picaro's Journey to the Confessional : The Changing Image of the Hero in the German Bildungsroman

PMLA ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 89 (5) ◽  
pp. 980-992 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H. Miles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Outer World ◽  
Fragmented Self ◽  
The World

From Goethe's Wilhelm Meister through Keller's Grüner Heinrich to Rilke's Malte, the hero of the German Bildungsroman develops from unselfconscious adventurer in the outer world to compulsive explorer of the world within. This transformation in the hero—from “picaro” to “confessor”—implies a change in the concept of Bildung: the “self” no longer accumulates, but must be re-collected. Wilhelm Meister's unreflective nature aligns him directly with the picaresque hero; essentially, he does not develop. In Keller's novel the hero develops precisely by narrating his picaresque past. Through his confessional notebooks, Rilke's hero, Malte, attempts to overcome the “sickness” of his fragmented self by recollecting his childhood. This transformation of the literary hero in the nineteenth century mirrors in turn the historical rise of alienated, self-conscious man. Beyond Maire the Bildungsroman can only move on to parody, to the anti-Bildungsromane of Kafka, Mann, and Grass, in which both types of hero are parodied.

scholarly journals Scheherazade in Istanbul: A study of the popular Turkish TV series Binbir Gece

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam Ghorbankarimi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Arabian Nights ◽  
Frame Story ◽  
World Today ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Reach

One Thousand and One Nights is a composite, transnational work, consisting of popular stories originally transmitted orally within its embedded cultures and developed over several centuries. Ever since its translation into European languages in the nineteenth century, or perhaps even before, it has been adapted and appropriated into different forms and mediums and thus has reached different corners of the world. This project was inspired by the level of popularity of One Thousand and One Nights, often known as The Arabian Nights, in the world today. Although only a relatively small number of people might have read all the tales, we can safely assume that most people do have an idea of what the Nights are, whilst some could even name one or two films, series or cartoons that they think are based on the Nights. Indeed, only a very limited number of stories included in editions of the Nights have been adapted into films or TV series. There are two main characteristics of the Nights that help identify adaptations and adoptions in popular culture: embedded storytelling using a frame tale, and the ‘feminist’, emancipating heroine Scheherazade. The popular Turkish TV series Binbir Gece (One Thousand and One Nights) (2006–09), which this article focuses on, not only makes use of these two popular features; it also offers a fresh and contemporary adaptation of the frame story of Shah Shahriyar and Scheherazade and elements from many other tales from the Nights, such as the emphasis on the importance of education for women, or the evil of cunning women. After analysing the degree of adaptation of the frame story in this series, this article sheds light on its global reach, reception and popularity.

The genius of Michael Faraday

1992 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-323
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
The Self ◽  
Margaret Thatcher ◽  
Royal Institution ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Electrical Engineers ◽  
Michael Faraday

Geoffrey Cantor, Michael Faraday. Sandeminian and scientist. A study o f science and religion in the nineteenth century . Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991. Pp. xi + 359. ISBN 0-333-55077-3. John Meurig Thomas, Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution. The genius of man and place . Bristol, Philadelphia and London: Adam Hilger, 1991. Pp. xii + 234. ISBN 0-7503-0145-7. The correspondence of Michael Faraday. Volume 1 , 1811-1831, edited by Frank A.J.L. James. London: Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1991. Pp. xlix + 673. ISBN 0-86341-248-3. ‘Very ordinary background, father ran a smithy, son had virtually no education ... didn’t go to university ... But extraordinary - brilliant. The Good Lord’s no respecter of backgrounds, never has been, He plants genius the world over and it’s up to us to find it’.1 Spoken neither by a scientist nor by a historian, these were the words by which Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher elevated Faraday to the status of personal hero in 1987. Behind the rhetoric stood the conviction of 1980s Thatcherism, idealizing as it did the cult of the self-made, and challenging the very survival of those weighty institutions of education and science, most notably the universities, which had apparently played no part in the life and work of such great individuals as Michael Faraday and their entrepreneurial counterparts of the Thatcher years.

Fictio Audaciae: Beyond the Self-Preservation of the Enlightenment [Enment]

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 107-128
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Main Issue ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Fredric Jameson

The article is devoted to tracing out the operations of the Enlightenment’s self-preservation mechanism in the realm of imagination and to a search for ways to problematize that mechanism. The Enlightenment blocks imagination by subordinating it to self-preservation, which cloaks the utopian impulse. This cloaking is found in both science fiction and extro-science fiction (Quentin Meillassoux’s term). Extroscience fiction reveals the limits of self-preservation and self-restraint placed on the Enlightenment: an agreement to a rational despotism of knowledge liberated from nature (and from its laws). What remains outside the area accessible to the enlightened imagination may be referred to as “non-Kantian worlds of the third type.” Access to these worlds is closed, as the main issue for the enlightened imagination remains the infernological question of return and narration. This limitation predetermines the instrumentalization of the non-Kantian worlds of the third type, which become the means of supporting life and knowledge. Fictio Audaciae is a regime of imagination that has not been produced by the Enlightenment, but from which the Enlightenment derives its energy, while struggling always to keep it under control. However, the mechanism of self-preservation is vanquished by a utopian anarchism in which the imagination gains access to the nonKantian worlds of the third type by means of the “terror of obliteration.” According to Fredric Jameson, the terror of obliteration circumvents self-preservation. Nature understood as rebellion and reason that has abandoned the pursuit of self-preservation converge in the Gordin Brothers’ world of “noncorrelation” in which the key role belongs to anarchic technology rather than to the “magic of the Enlightenment.” The Gordin Brothers’ utopian Anarchy Land is neither science fiction nor extro-scientific fiction, but a techno-fiction in which the laws of nature are not even contingent but have been declared never to have existed This non-existence is explained by the principle of noncorrelation (nature as a set of laws does not exist, laws and the world are not correlated). Based on the principle of noncorrelation and guided by the utopian impulse (Fictio Audaciae), the Gordin Brothers not only postulate the existence of non-Kantian worlds of the third type, but also offer a utopian description of them.

scholarly journals The times and spaces of transplantation: queercrip histories as futurities

2021 ◽  
pp. medhum-2021-012199
Author(s):  
Donna McCormack
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Multiple Selves ◽  
Environmental Disasters ◽  
The Past ◽  
Loss Of Self ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Times

With a focus on Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu, this article explores how transplantation is part of the ongoing transformation of being in a body that is of the world. That is, it examines how we may require other ways of thinking bodies as constituted by histories, spaces and times that may be ignored in the biomedical arena. The Tiger Flu, I argue, calls for an intra- and inter-connected way of thinking how we treat bodies, and thereby ways of working with bodies affected by environmental disasters (both acute and ongoing capitalist and colonial projects), multiple selves and time as more than linear. I turn to queercrip as a way of defying a curative imaginary that dominates transplantation and in so doing examine the colonial, capitalist violence of present day living. I move through Eve Hayward’s and Karen Barad’s work to examine how the cut of transplantation is a transformation, as integral to the ongoing experience of having a body in the world and yet potentially unique in its force of bringing inter- and intra-relatedness to the fore of one’s existence. Rather than sick or cured, I argue that transplantation is a transformation that captures our bodily changes, how the environment constitutes the self, how parts may feel integral to the self or easily disposed of, how viscera may tie us to others, and how the future may only be forged through a re-turn to the past (of the donor and a pre-transplant self). Transplantation is not about loss of self or gaining of an other, but rather about rendering apparent our multispecies, multiworld ties, and thus how we are bound by the histories we forge and the futures we re-member.

Class, Community, and Arab Historiography in the Early Nineteenth Century—The Dawn of a New Era

1984 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Philipp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Era ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
The World ◽  
Traditional Patterns ◽  
Arab Historiography

The aim of the present essay is to explore some of the relations between the socioeconomic and political transformation which occurred in Syria during the eighteenth century and the development of a new view of the world and the self as it came to be expressed in the writings of several Arab historians at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Of particular interest in this context is the question of whether and when a clear departure from traditional patterns of society and thought can be discerned.

The Poetics and Practice of Iranian Nostalgia in Exile

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-302
Author(s):  
Hamid Naficy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Third World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
The World ◽  
Fredric Jameson

In this article, I will focus on the poetics and practice of nostalgia in exilic popular culture, drawing primarily on examples from some 10 years of Iranian television programs and music videos produced in Los Angeles. Nostalgia, a feature of exile, has in recent years become a “cultural practice” and a “mode of representation” (K. Stewart 227, 238) as postmodernity, neocolonialism, communism, totalitarianism, imperialism, and transnational capital have displaced peoples and cultures the world over. Fredric Jameson tells us that this fragmentation and deterritorialization forces us to experience time differently; that is, we experience the present as a loss or, as Baudrillard would have it, as a phenomenon that has no origin or reality, a “hyperreality” (2). For the exiles who have emigrated from Third World countries, life in the United States, especially in the quintessentially postmodern city of Los Angeles, is doubly unreal, and it is because of this double loss—of origin and of reality—that nostalgia becomes a major cultural and representational practice among the exiles. In addition, nostalgia for one’s homeland has a fundamentally interpsychic source expressed in the trope of an eternal desire for return—a return that is structurally unrealizable.

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