AFTER MY OWN HEART: DOROTHY SAYERS' FEMINISM

Think ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (19) ◽  
pp. 23-33
Author(s):  
Susan Haack

Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night, published in 1936, explores still-topical questions about the relation of epistemological and ethical values, and about the place of women in the life of the mind. In her wry reflections on the radical differences between today's feminist philosophy and Sayers' no-nonsense observation that “women are more like men than anything else on earth,” Susan Haack draws both on this detective story and on Sayers' wonderfully brisk essay, ‘Are Women Human?’

Author(s):  
Nora Goldschmidt ◽  
Barbara Graziosi

The Introduction sheds light on the reception of classical poetry by focusing on the materiality of the poets’ bodies and their tombs. It outlines four sets of issues, or commonplaces, that govern the organization of the entire volume. The first concerns the opposition between literature and material culture, the life of the mind vs the apprehensions of the body—which fails to acknowledge that poetry emerges from and is attended to by the mortal body. The second concerns the religious significance of the tomb and its location in a mythical landscape which is shaped, in part, by poetry. The third investigates the literary graveyard as a place where poets’ bodies and poetic corpora are collected. Finally, the alleged ‘tomb of Virgil’ provides a specific site where the major claims made in this volume can be most easily be tested.


Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn

Miracles rarely appear in novels, yet Graham Greene includes several of them in The End of the Affair. Sarah Miles heals a boy suffering from appendicitis and a man with a disfigured cheek. Like a saint, she seems to heal or revive through her compassionate touch, as when she raises her lover, who may or may not have died in a bomb blast, by touching his hand. This chapter locates Sarah’s interventions amidst debates about miracles, beginning with David Hume’s sceptical rejection of inexplicable phenomena, through such mid-century books as C. S. Lewis’s Miracles and Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker. The inherent godlessness of novels, as Georg Lukacs puts the matter in Theory of the Novel, would seem to ban mystical content altogether from novelistic discourse. Yet this chapter argues for the revaluation of mystical content—the ordeals of the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory, for example—within the generic precincts of the novel.


Academe ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirley Brice Heath ◽  
Gerald Graff
Keyword(s):  

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Regine Lamboy

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] When Hannah Arendt encountered Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem she was struck by the fact that his most outstanding characteristic was his utter thoughtlessness. This raised the questins of whether there might be a connection between thinking and abstaining from evil doing, which she explored in her last book The Life of the Mind. If there is indeed such a connection, there may be a class of people who might be led to abstain from evil doing if they can be persuaded to engage in thinking. This dissertation examines Arendt's success in establishing such a connection. Overall, her project does not really succeed. Her overly formal analysis of thinking wavers between a highly abstract and obscure conceptualization of thinking and a more down to earth definition. Ultimately she winds up stripping thinking of all possible content. .


2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-124
Author(s):  
David Trippett

The icon of the machine in early-nineteenth-century Britain was subject to a number of contemporary critiques in which pedagogy and the life of the mind were implicated, but to what extent was education in music composition influenced by this? A number of journal articles appeared on the topic of music and phrenology, bolstered by the establishment of the London Phrenological Society (1823), and its sister organization, the British Phrenological Association (1838). They placed the creative imagination, music, and the “natural” life of the mind into a fraught discourse around music and materialism. The cost of a material mind was a perceived loss of contact with the “gifts of naturer … the dynamical nature of man … the mystic depths of man's soul” (Carlyle), but the concept of machine was also invested with magical potential to transform matter, to generate energy, and can be understood as a new ideal type of mechanism. These confliciting ideals and anxieties over mechanism, as paradigm and rallying cry, are here situated in the context of music pedagogy during the second quarter of the century, with particular reference to amateur musicians and the popular appeal of phrenological “exercise,” and of devices such as Johann Bernhard Logier's “chiroplast.”


1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Porter

SynopsisGoodwin Wharton (1653–1704) was a nobleman's son and a Whig MP who played no small part in English public life. His manuscript journal shows, however, that he also lived a bizarre secret life of the mind of a kind which, in later generations, would have led to his confinement as suffering from mental illness. Above all, through the offices of his medium and lover, Mary Parish, he entered into elaborate relations both with the fairy world and with God and His Angels. This paper examines our records of Wharton's consciousness


1966 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 1056 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles A. Barker ◽  
Perry Miller

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