scholarly journals A socio-cultural history of the machine metaphor

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Glebkin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Blow Up ◽  
Conceptual Metaphor ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
The Middle Ages

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-up, a scene of affection, after enlarging the negatives, transforms into a scene of an attempted or an actual murder. It seems a good image to characterize the change of the initial view of conceptual metaphor from a more precise perspective. The conceptual metaphor theory emerged with the claim that primary metaphors, such as Categories Are Containers, More Is Up, Affection Is Warmth, and even Time Is Money, were determined by the fundamental constants of our perceptual experience; hence, they could not change or evolve, and had no history. Later, however, plenty of studies have provided strong evidence that such metaphors, being much more complicated structures, essentially rest on the cultural-historical ground. The article can be considered as a step in this direction. It addresses the machine metaphor as a cultural-historical phenomenon examining its development from Antiquity to Early Modernity. The author reveals that conceptual machine metaphor appears in the Middle Ages, long before Newton and the Industrial Revolution, in the wake of the transformation of basic elements of the cultural model from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

A Cultural History of Memory in the Middle Ages

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Social Fields ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Middle Ages

This volume covers the vast field of memory, commemoration and the art of memory in the Middle Ages. Memory was not only a religious, social and historical phenomenon but also a driving factor in cultural life and in the production of art. It played an important role in medieval intellectual, visual and material culture, touching on almost all spheres of personal and social life. Yet the perception of memory did not remain static. The period covered by this volume, 500-1450, was one of enormous change in the way memory was understood, expressed, and valued. The authors of the essays trace the changes in the understanding of memory in its diverse forms and social fields, analysing everyday life as well as politics, philosophy and theology. As can be demonstrated, functions and perceptions evolved over the medieval millennium and laid the foundations for the modern understanding of individual and social memory.

Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
History Of Rhetoric ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Medieval Rhetoric ◽  
Social Contracts ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Aristotelian Rhetoric ◽  
The Middle Ages

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring in what has largely been a blank space between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle’s rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.

scholarly journals The Monobloc Chair: Democratising the Practice of Sitting

Res Mobilis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Carsten Kullmann
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Middle Ages

This article examines the cultural history of chairs to understand the many meanings the Monobloc can acquire. The history of chairs is traced from post nomadic culture through the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment period and the French Revolution. Subsequently, I will examine the Monobloc from a Cultural Studies perspective and demonstrate how its unique characteristics allow multiple meanings, which are always dependent on context and discourse. Thus, the Monobloc becomes an utterly democratic symbol of popular culture that can be appropriated for any use.

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