Matthew Arnold and the Institutional Imagination of Liberalism

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-375
Author(s):  
Sebastian Lecourt
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
Main Claim ◽  
Great Books ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
The World ◽  
Class Divisions ◽  
Literary Canons

I first took up Matthew Arnold's essays as a dissertation writer circa 2008. Although I had not read much of Arnold's prose beyond the commonly anthologized pieces (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “The Study of Poetry,” bits of Culture and Anarchy), he was a figure very much out of favor, and I brought to the table a strong preconception of his polemic. Arnold, I had learned, was a kind of cultural nationalist trying to fight class divisions within Britain by prescribing a narrow canon of books that could shore up a common language for his compatriots. His main claim was that there was a singular tradition of great books called “culture” that embodied “the best that is known and thought in the world.” Everyone in Britain needed to keep reading these books if the nation were to retain a shared identity and not fall into chaos. Furthermore, as I understood it, Arnold thought that to experience culture you needed to remain “disinterested” and “aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’” (5:252). Arnold was a Victorian Mortimer Adler who sought to defend the authority of traditional literary canons as well as a Victorian Wimsatt-and-Beardsley who upheld disinterested close reading against hyperpolitical Theory.

Flow

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell Ohriner
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
Music Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Voice Flow ◽  
Computational Music Analysis

Originating in dance parties in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, hip hop and rap music have become a dominant style of popular music in the United States and a force for activism all over the world. So, too, has scholarship on this music grown, yet much of this scholarship, employing methods drawn from sociology and literature, leaves unaddressed the expressive musical choices made by hip-hop artists. This book addresses flow, the rhythm of the rapping voice. Flow presents theoretical and analytical challenges not encountered elsewhere. It is rhythmic as other music is rhythmic. But it is also rhythmic as speech and poetry are rhythmic. Key concepts related to rhythm, such as meter, periodicity, patterning, and accent, are treated independently in scholarship of music, poetry, and speech. This book reconciles those approaches, theorizing flow by integrating the methods of computational music analysis and humanistic close reading. Through the analysis of large collections of verses, it addresses questions in the theories of rhythm, meter, and groove in the unique ecology of rap music. Specifically, the work of Eminem clarifies how flow relates to text, the work of Black Thought clarifies how flow relates to other instrumental streams, and the work of Talib Kweli clarifies how flow relates to rap’s persistent meter. Although the focus throughout is rap music, the methods introduced are appropriate for other genres mix voices and more rigid metric frameworks and further extends the valuable work on hip hop from other perspectives in recent years.

Appropriating Hobbes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Boucher
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
Main Claim ◽  
The World ◽  
Michael Oakeshott ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

The aim of this book is not to trace the changing fortunes of the interpretation of one of the most sophisticated and famous political philosophers who ever lived, but to glimpse here and there his place in different contexts, and how his interpreters see their own images reflected in him, or how they define themselves in contrast to him. The main claim is that there is no Hobbes independent of the interpretations that arise from his appropriation in these various contexts and which serve to present him to the world. There is no one perfect context that enables us to get at what Hobbes ‘really meant’, despite the numerous claims to the contrary. He is almost indistinguishable from the context in which he is read. This contention is justified with reference to hermeneutics, and particularly the theories of Gadamer, Koselleck, and Ricoeur, contending that through a process of ‘distanciation’ Hobbes’s writings have been appropriated and commandeered to do service in divergent contexts such as philosophical idealism; debates over the philosophical versus historical understanding of texts; and in ideological disputations, and emblematic characterizations of him by various disciplines such as law, politics, and international relations. The book illustrates the capacity of a text to take on the colouration of its surroundings by exploring and explicating the importance of contexts in reading and understanding how and why particular interpretations of Hobbes have emerged, such as those of Carl Schmitt and Michael Oakeshott, or the international jurists of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

“The Chalk Wall Falls to the Foam”: Reimagining Littoral Space in the Poetry of the Dover Cliffs

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-224
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus
Keyword(s):  
Material Composition ◽  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
Geological History ◽  
Marine Microorganisms ◽  
Human History ◽  
New Model ◽  
British Identity ◽  
The World ◽  
British Coast

Abstract Where beaches and harbors have frequently been taken to signify openness and intermingling, a different coastal setting, the cliffs of Dover, overtly bespeaks opposition and closure. Demarcating the British coast at its closest point to continental Europe, the cliffs often stand for Britain’s supposedly elemental insularity. However, the chalk composing the cliffs makes them, in their own way, as malleable and permeable as a beach. I argue that poems by Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden, and Daljit Nagra contest the cliffs’ association with an exclusive Britishness by focusing on their material composition. In these poems, the cliffs’ chalk—formed by fossilized marine microorganisms at a time when what would become Britain was at the bottom of a prehistoric sea—attests to Britain’s geohistorical contingency. Arnold, Auden, and Nagra use this chalk geology to develop a new model of British identity as contingent, permeable, and linked with the wider world. In these poems, that is, Dover’s cliffs collapse oppositions rather than enforcing them: they blur the lines between Britain and the world, past and present, organic and inorganic, human history and geological history. The literature of the Dover cliffs thus highlights the revisionary potential of this distinctive kind of littoral space.

scholarly journals RECOGNIZING THE IMPORTANCE AND STRUGGLES OF WOMEN: AN ECOFEMINIST READING OF ANITA DESAI’S NOVELS: FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN AND WHERE SHALL WE GO THIS SUMMER?

2017 ◽  
pp. 289-297
Author(s):  
Anjali Parmar ◽  
Ami Upadhyay
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Anita Desai ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Equal Share ◽  
Research Article ◽  
Living Things ◽  
The World

This research article glances in a few words at the concept of ecofeminism and the interconnectedness of woman and nature and their struggle. Earth belongs to all creatures on this planet so human has to share equally with them. All living things on earth have equal share on each and everything on this planet between them, But for the game called survival, human is destroying other things for their own benefits only. Since humanity is inseparable from nature, it is necessary to live in harmony to save the human race as well as the world from the damage and destructions which that demands the need of co existence. It is not only a movement but philosophies. Anita Desai is deeply fascinated by ecofeminism perception and through her novels she is trying to lead her readers to believe that nature and woman are resolving tools to the universal problems arising in today’s scenario. Through the close reading of Desai’s novel, I have explored the concept of ecofeminism. The present paper tries to reveal the features of ecofeminism through the portrayal of characters- Nanda Kaul and Sita in the Fire on The Mountain and Where shall We go This Summer? Respectively.

scholarly journals Intricate Coalescence of Nature and Philosophy in Coelho’s world: Ruminations from The Alchemist

2020 ◽  
pp. 72-79
Author(s):  
L. Monica Lilly
Keyword(s):  
Common Language ◽  
Human Species ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
Human Psyche ◽  
Egyptian Desert ◽  
The Universe

 In The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho projects Santiago communicating with Nature which he refers to as the common language of the world. A study of The Alchemist will reveal how Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a bounty treasure explores the wisdom of life. His quest for the treasure buried near the Pyramids propels him to enter an unchartered territory from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert. This paper aims to explore the ecological reflections mired with concepts of slants in philosophy. Ecology on one hand is considered as a branch of science but, despite providing erudition on the subject it is understood that it provides sagacity to understand the universe better. This paper rightly discusses the amalgamation of nature and literature. It is indeed a manifestation of the recurrently believed ideologies that connect human psyche and platitudes of the cosmos. The logos that interrelates the existing connection between the non human and the human species require an exceptional mastery. This paper will analyze and depict the emotions connected with nature from the spectacle of the Protagonist Santiago in The Alchemist.

scholarly journals 明中葉知識體系建構的多元取向：從李夢陽〈刻《戰國策》序〉談起

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (31) ◽  
pp. 171-190
Author(s):  
王昌偉 王昌偉
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Song Dynasty ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Good Case ◽  
Warring States ◽  
The Song Dynasty ◽  
The World ◽  
The Ideal

<p>嘉靖2年（1523），巡按河南的王溱（生卒年不詳）打算刊刻《戰國策》，為此特別請文學復古運動的領導者李夢陽（1473-1530）作序。通過對序文及李夢陽相關著作的細讀，本文旨在說明，從表面看來，李夢陽似乎是以衛道之士的口吻，通過作序的方式批判《戰國策》為畔經離道之書，事實上這篇序文實含有多重視角。要理解李夢陽這篇序文的學術思想史意義，我們必須把它放置在明中葉以還「雜學」或諸子學興起的背景下考慮。跟宋代以來的理學家強調士人學術應該統一在宏大和具普遍意義的「道」之下的傾向不同，明中葉以後的思想家對世界的理解，則是以多元和分別為基礎，強調萬物的分殊和差異。本文將說明，李夢陽序《戰國策》的多重視角，正反映了明代中葉知識界重視多元性和差異性多於普遍性的特點。</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><p>Li Meng-yang (1473-1530), a leader of mid-Ming literary archaist movement, was invited in 1523 by the inspector of Henan Wang Zhen to write a preface for a reprint of the Intrigues of the Warring States that the latter intended to publish. Through a close reading of the preface and Li&rsquo;s other works, this paper argues that while Li seems to have, on the surface, taken a moral high round and castigated the Intrigues for deviating from the orthodox teachings of the Classics, he preface actually encourages the readers to approach the text from multiple perspectives. We have to situate the preface in the context of the rise of &ldquo;miscellaneous learnings&rdquo; and the &ldquo;learnings of the masters&rdquo; in the mid-Ming period in order to appreciate its significance in intellectual history. Departing from the ways the Neo-Confucians since the Song dynasty envisioned literati learning to be a focused pursuit of a grand and universal Way, intellectuals from the mid-Ming onwards began with an assumption of multiplicity and diversity and emphasized disparities among all things. The multiple perspectives that Li Meng-yang exhibits in his preface to the Intrigues is a good case for showing that mid-Ming intellectuals were more inclined to see the world as complex and diverse, rather than to pursue the ideal of universality.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

Teaching Tact

Tact ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 59-96
Author(s):  
David Russell
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
Theory Of Education ◽  
The World

This chapter shows that, for while it is true that Matthew Arnold focused on “the question of cultural values and intellectual and aesthetic standards,” the chapter suggests that it was precisely this focus that enabled Arnold to develop, against the grain of public discourse, an egalitarian ethic and a theory of education founded in the practice of tact. Arnold's writings propose, not a prescriptive content (of specific objects, rules, values, canonical goods), but a tactful mode of relation. It is a handling of experience, which is “adequate,” in Arnold's term, both to relieving the strain of, and finding new—egalitarian and creative—possibilities for, aesthetic freedom in modern social life. This effect of tact Arnold calls “deliverance,” and a “help out of our present difficulties.” It is a relation, a formal movement of making contact with the world, rather than an appropriation of the knowledge that would master it.

Functional Assessment of Persons with Motor Limitations

2014 ◽  
pp. 43-74
Author(s):  
Kaliopi Lappas
Keyword(s):  
Functional Assessment ◽  
World Health ◽  
International Classification Of Functioning ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Reference Guide ◽  
The World ◽  
Examination Methods ◽  
Health Organization ◽  
And Function

In this chapter a referral is made to the most known examination methods and tools for evaluating persons with motor limitations. Since there are many methods and tools, standardized or not, describing each of them by the area of evaluation and forming a quick reference guide seem to be helpful. Furthermore referrals are made to some special evaluation forms regarding special conditions, like stoke, which appear to have multiple problems influencing function. Finally, in the last section of this chapter a referral is made to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health scale (ICF), which has been developed the past few years by the World Health Organization (WHO), in an effort to have and apply a universal way of assessing people with disabilities. This scale aims to give to all the health professional and researchers a “common language” when “measuring” disability and function.

Functional Assessment of Persons With Motor Limitations

2019 ◽  
pp. 896-933
Author(s):  
Kaliopi Lappas
Keyword(s):  
Functional Assessment ◽  
World Health ◽  
International Classification Of Functioning ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Reference Guide ◽  
The World ◽  
Examination Methods ◽  
Health Organization ◽  
And Function

In this chapter a referral is made to the most known examination methods and tools for evaluating persons with motor limitations. Since there are many methods and tools, standardized or not, describing each of them by the area of evaluation and forming a quick reference guide seem to be helpful. Furthermore referrals are made to some special evaluation forms regarding special conditions, like stoke, which appear to have multiple problems influencing function. Finally, in the last section of this chapter a referral is made to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health scale (ICF), which has been developed the past few years by the World Health Organization (WHO), in an effort to have and apply a universal way of assessing people with disabilities. This scale aims to give to all the health professional and researchers a “common language” when “measuring” disability and function.

Gavel

2018 ◽  
pp. 214-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
James EK Parker
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
World Today ◽  
The World ◽  
Contemporary Work

The gavel is one of the most widely recognized objects of law around the world today. Images of it are everywhere. Gavels feature in some of the most prominent institutions of international law as well as in many courts and legislatures internationally. Even in jurisdictions where the gavel doesn’t appear in conventional legal settings it can still be found at auctions, conferences, and meetings, and will be doing important juridical work. It is not, however, well understood. Drawing on contemporary work in sound studies and jurisprudence, and via a close reading of a film by Italian artist Diego Tonus, this chapter provides a critical evaluation of the gavel’s material, symbolic, and sonic lives. It suggests that the gavel is right at the centre of the global juridical imaginary, and that this serves as a reminder that sound matters in law in ways that are not yet adequately explored.

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