A Survey of Structural Linguistics; A History of English; The Mode and Meaning of 'Beowulf'; 'Piers Plowman': Critical Approaches

This collection of essays examines the various ways in which the Homeric epics have been responded to, reworked, and rewritten by women writers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beginning in 1914 with the First World War, it charts this understudied strand of the history of Homeric reception over the subsequent century up to the present day, analysing the extraordinary responses to both the Odyssey and the Iliad by women from around the world. The backgrounds of these authors and the genres they employ—memoir, poetry, children’s literature, rap, novels—testify not only to the plasticity of Homeric epic, but also to the widening social classes to whom Homer appeals, and it is unsurprising to see the myriad ways in which women writers across the globe have played their part in the story of Homer’s afterlife. From surrealism to successive waves of feminism to creative futures, Homer’s footprint can be seen in a multitude of different literary and political movements, and the essays in this volume bring an array of critical approaches to bear on the work of authors ranging from H.D. and Simone Weil to Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, and Kate Tempest. Students and scholars of classics—as well as those in the fields of translation studies, comparative literature, and women’s writing—will find much to interest them, while the volume’s concluding reflections by Emily Wilson on her new translation of the Odyssey are an apt reminder to all of just how open a text can be, and of how great a difference can be made by a woman’s voice.

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Salvage

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875815001735 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 49 (4) ◽

pp. 845-859

Author(s):

EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Science Fiction ◽

Early Modern ◽

Human Body ◽

Insurance Law ◽

Future Possibility ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Personal Risk ◽

Critical Approaches ◽

History Of

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.

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The ‘Brazilian Connection’ in the History of American Linguistics

Historiographia Linguistica ◽

10.1075/hl.26.3.11alt ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 26 (3) ◽

pp. 355-382

Author(s):

Cristina Altman

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

The United States ◽

South American ◽

Columbia University ◽

Structural Linguistics ◽

History Of ◽

Roman Jakobson ◽

The 1950S ◽

The 1960S ◽

The One

Summary When mention is made of Brazil in connection with American linguistics, it usually amounts to a reference to the Linguistic Circle of New York, where Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (b.1908), who had come from Brazil where he had done ethnological work, met and exchanged ideas. This singular event has cast a shadow on other contacts between Brazil and American linguistics, of which, the one between Jakobson and the Brazilian linguist Joaquim Mattoso Câmara (1904–1970) was much more consequential, at least as far as the implementation of structural linguistics in Brazil and in South America generally during the 1950s and the 1960s is concerned. Mattoso Câmara came to the United States and spent most of his time in New York City (September 1943 till April 1944), where he got exposure to Praguean type structuralism, notably through Jakobson’s lectures he attended at Columbia University and at the École Libre of New York, which had been established by European refugees at the time. He also participated in the first meetings of the Linguistic Circle of New York in 1943 as one of its co-founders. Following his return to Rio de Janeiro, Mattoso Câmara proposed, in 1949, as his doctoral thesis a phonemic description of Brazilian Portuguese. The work was published a few years later, in 1953. His most influential work, Princípios de Lingüística Gerai, first published in 1954, had two more revised and updated editions (1958, 1967) and served to introduce several generations of Brazilian as well as other South American students to structural linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s.

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Introduction

Darjeeling Reconsidered ◽

10.1093/oso/9780199483556.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 1-24

Author(s):

Sara Shneiderman ◽

Townsend Middleton

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

South Asia ◽

Critical Approaches ◽

History Of ◽

Humanities And Social Sciences

This introduction establishes key frameworks for reconsidering Darjeeling’s past, present, and future. The book’s editors provide a succinct history of the region and an overview of its current circumstances—thereby establishing shared ground for the chapters that follow. Discussing Darjeeling’s status as a crossroads of Asia writ large, the introduction frames the region as a key site for the study of both South Asia and the postcolonial world, broadly conceived. These opening arguments challenge the prevalent yet problematic understandings of Darjeeling as the ‘queen of the hills’—a place somehow apart or above it all—instead calling for a timely rethinking of this often-romanticized region and its people through attention to the historical and contemporary complexities that constitute Darjeeling’s histories, politics, and environments. Highlighting each chapter’s contribution, the introduction launches the book’s project of reconsidering Darjeeling through critical approaches from across the humanities and social sciences.

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Ethical Adjacency in Piers Plowman

The Arts of Disruption ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198860242.003.0004 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 75-113

Author(s):

Nicolette Zeeman

Keyword(s):

Middle English ◽

Literary History ◽

Piers Plowman ◽

Intellectual Work ◽

Intellectual Tradition ◽

Nature And Grace ◽

History Of ◽

Body And Soul ◽

The Relationship ◽

Special Relevance

The chapter argues that the intellectual tradition that underlies medieval personification debate is Aristotelian and medieval logical teaching on ‘opposites’, the relationship by which opposed terms illuminate each other—available in Aristotle’s elementary logical works. This teaching has a special relevance to personification debate, where the heuristic drive is dramatized in speakers that represent opposed positions and phenomena, each of which is explored in the process of debate itself. This suggests why personification debate provides for over a thousand years one of the main tools with which allegory unpacks its structuring terms and reflects on its conflictual work. Aristotle’s teaching on opposites also enables us to query some aspects of the literary history of medieval debate literature; it suggests that a critical concern about resolution in debate, or its lack, fails to see where the real intellectual work of debate occurs. It also suggests that the critical distinction between supposedly open ‘horizontal’ debates and closed ‘vertical’ debates may be misguided. In fact, Aristotle’s subcategory of the ‘relative’ opposition (master and slave, artisan and tool) often involves a hierarchy. The chapter uses these materials to argue that personification debate can be formally unresolved and ‘vertical’, and yet also challenging and seriously investigative. This is illustrated with analyses of some debates, several hierarchical: ‘four daughters of God’, body and soul, Nature and Grace (Deguileville) and the Middle English Pearl.

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What Is Charity? William Langland’s Answers with Some Diachronic Questions

Religions ◽

10.3390/rel10080458 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 10 (8) ◽

pp. 458

Author(s):

David Aers

Keyword(s):

Fourteenth Century ◽

Piers Plowman ◽

Late Medieval ◽

The Reformation ◽

History Of ◽

The Subject ◽

Medieval Christianity ◽

Ethics And Politics

Charity turns out to be the virtue which is both the root and the fruit of salvation in Langland’s Piers Plowman, a late fourteenth-century poem, the greatest theological poem in English. It takes time, suffering and error upon error for Wille, the central protagonist in Piers Plowman, to grasp Charity. Wille is both a figure of the poet and a power of the soul, voluntas, the subject of charity. Langland’s poem offers a profound and beautiful exploration of Charity and the impediments to Charity, one in which individual and collective life is inextricably bound together. This exploration is characteristic of late medieval Christianity. As such it is also an illuminating work in helping one identify and understand what happened to this virtue in the Reformation. Only through diachronic studies which engage seriously with medieval writing and culture can we hope to develop an adequate grasp of the outcomes of the Reformation in theology, ethics and politics, and, I should add, the remakings of what we understand by “person” in these outcomes. Although this essay concentrates on one long and extremely complex medieval work, it actually belongs to a diachronic inquiry. This will only be explicit in some observations on Calvin when I consider Langland’s treatment of Christ’s crucifixion and in some concluding suggestions about the history of this virtue.

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Introduction

Religion and the Arts ◽

10.1163/107992609x12524941449804 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 403-409

Author(s):

Daniela Merolla

Keyword(s):

Visual Arts ◽

Visual Representations ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Human Beings ◽

Creation Myths ◽

History Of Art ◽

The World ◽

Critical Approaches ◽

History Of

AbstractSculptures, paintings, drawings, performances, and films have often refashioned narratives of the origins of the cosmos and of human beings. The essays collected in Creation Myths and the Visual Arts investigate the interplay between image and narrative and offer critical approaches from literary studies, the history of art, archaeology, and anthropology on the interpretation and categorization of verbal and visual representations of “creation myths” from all over the world.

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Martin Scorsese

Cinema and Media Studies ◽

10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0320 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Marc Raymond

Keyword(s):

Writing Centers ◽

Martin Scorsese ◽

American Cinema ◽

The Past ◽

New Hollywood ◽

Time Period ◽

Critical Approaches ◽

History Of ◽

To Come

Martin Scorsese’s name has come to symbolize many broad ideas over the past few decades, to the point where he is no longer merely a filmmaker, but rather a cultural touchstone. He is associated with a particular religion (Catholicism), ethnicity (Italian), genre (gangsters), and time period (New Hollywood), while also being the foremost cinephile in American cinema, influencing whole generations in his wake. Consequently, the amount of writing on Scorsese is quite vast, and this bibliography will try to represent that variety while pointing readers to the best of this work. It is thus organized with a focus on Scorsese’s own scholarly contributions, interviews, career overviews, anthologies, major films, documentaries, and influence. There is a temptation to try to divide the work thematically, since so much of the writing centers around either religion, ethnicity, or masculinity, but doing so would risk perpetuating this overemphasis in the scholarship while also not representing the best writing on this important auteur. Thus, while certainly the work on Italian-Catholicism and masculinity will be frequent within the citations to come, they will not predominate among the selections taken as a whole. This bibliography also attempts to give some of the history of Scorsese scholarship itself, focusing on scholarly touchstones that tended to define particular historical moments and how Scorsese has been useful to particular critical approaches and/or arguments.

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