scholarly journals Historical silences and the enduring power of counter storytelling

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Miles
2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 887-905 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Purser ◽  
Tina Cockburn ◽  
Cassandra Cross ◽  
Helene Jacmon

Author(s):  
Anne Lounsbery

This book shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called “the provinces”—a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. The book looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature's representation of the nation's space. The book brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, the book argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficult questions about the symbolic geography of the nation as a whole. This constant awareness of a far-off European model helps explain why the provinces, in all their supposed drabness and predictability, are a topic of such fascination for Russian writers—why these anonymous places are in effect so important and meaningful, notwithstanding the culture's nearly unremitting emphasis on their nullity and meaninglessness.


Author(s):  
David Jenkins ◽  

For the poet, prophet, and politician, as for the lover, the king, and the anthropologist, the human is the measure of all things. Philosophers and psychologists define us as a perceiving consciousness, an object determined by the environment, a subject not only capable of heroic individualism but also of esoteric understanding. For some, our measure is beyond things and our true worth lies not only in the here and now but rather in our freedom to transcend the bounds of self and prevail beyond the limits of temporality. For the artist, whose creative consciousness aims to redeem the human image from the constraints of brute anonymity, the questions about our status must be asked if not finally answered. The article considers the role that the classical world view plays in the process of artistic redemption. It looks at the Judeo-Christian and Classical legacies and their interpretations. Nineteenth-century Russian literature and religious philosophy are then analysed. The article winds up with a reading of select poems by Osip Mandelstam as special attention is paid to the ethical stance of the poet when confronted with the dictates of totalitarian power.


World Affairs ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004382002110538
Author(s):  
Brendan Szendro

In recent years, hate groups have increasingly attracted public attention while at the same time escaping the purview of scholars. Although overt prejudiced attitudes have lost public support in recent decades, hate group and hate-group activity has remained relatively consistent. What, then, explains the enduring power of hate? I argue that hate groups have arisen in reaction to the loss of social capital, particularly in regard to rural and exurban communities. Using county-level suicide rates as a proxy for the loss of social capital, I test this theory using data from the lower 48 states from 2010 to 2019. I find that each 5.38 percent increase in suicide rates is associated with 1 additional hate group forming. These findings highlight the importance of examining quality-of-life in understanding far-right activity, and challenge previous findings with regard to rurality and hate.


2020 ◽  
pp. 322-330
Author(s):  
Allison Margaret Bigelow

This chapter reviews the major methodological and theoretical approaches used in Mining Language, at once concluding the book and gesturing toward future research directions in the fields of history of colonial science and technology and Indigenous Studies. Specifically, it reflects on the relationship between history and literary studies within these intersecting fields. By reflecting on what colonial archives say and do not say, the conclusion argues for the importance of research ethics and methods that confront, acknowledge, and respond to historical silences.


Author(s):  
Adam Lee

At the close of Pater’s career, then, one can summarize the broad strokes of his Platonism. He calls it a tendency and a temper; but it is really a critical acuity for negotiating or reconciling the paradox of opposites one sees on a daily basis, such as the many and the one, or the finite in the infinite, the recognition of form in matter, which in the right balance is beauty. Calling it a tendency emphasizes its enduring power in a person’s personality. It is taking seriously the importance of love in Platonism that opens Pater’s teaching up to charges of a peculiar or idiosyncratic form of the philosophy. Platonically, his aestheticism is the desire to possess beauty, and begins with the very things around us, possessing a high degree of form, becoming rarer and rarer, more select, as one learns to identify better instances of it and his taste advances. Because he is a lover and philosopher at once, he progresses up the Platonic ladder with enthusiasm for visible ideas and knowledge of Dialectic, which relies on scepticism, or a suspension of judgement, which is both a suspension of belief and disbelief. Because he becomes ...


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