Calligraphy

Author(s):  
Amy McNair

Calligraphy is the art of writing characters with a brush and ink. Yet, the word “calligraphy,” from the Greek kalligraphía (beautiful writing), is something of a mistranslation of the Chinese term shufa (書法), which means “model writing,” or writing that is good enough to serve as a model. Calligraphy has no referent in nature, so all writing is modeled on that of another. Traditional calligraphers were less interested in mere beauty than in the ability of the gesture and the line to create images of aesthetic power and movement and in the paramount issue of upon whose writing they were modeling theirs. The precise moment Chinese characters were born is unknown, but a fully developed system was in use by c. 1200 bce, as seen on scripts on the incised oracle bones (jiaguwen甲骨文) and inscriptions cast into ritual bronze vessels (guwen古文) of the Shang dynasty. Over the next millennium, five major script types evolved. The archaic scripts gave way to the “large” seal script (zhuan篆) of the Zhou dynasty and the “small” seal script of the Qin. In Qin the clerical script (li隸) came into being and flourished during the succeeding Han, whereas by the end of the 2nd century the modern script types of regular (kai楷 or zhen真), running (xing行), and cursive (cao草) all had developed. Seal and clerical were relegated to decorative and monumental functions until they were revived as antiquarian modes in later times. Although mythic names are associated with the creation of each script type, there were no signed works of calligraphy until the Han dynasty. Since that time, when it began to be seen as expressive of its writer’s personality and character, calligraphy has been accorded the supreme position among the arts. Calligraphers could practice their art purely for their own pleasure or self-expression, or their work could be done for payment or in exchange for goods and services. Calligraphy had a rich tradition until the 20th century, and after China’s turmoil ended in the late 1970s, the amateur scene burgeoned again. In the late 20th century, Chinese calligraphy made a place for itself in the international art world, particularly through the incorporation of nonsense characters in multimedia installations. Critical texts that assessed famous calligraphers appeared in the 4th century, and histories of calligraphy have been written continually from the 5th century to the early 21st century. Japanese scholars have produced excellent research in the 20th and early 21st centuries, and researchers in the West have been writing on calligraphy history since the 1970s.

Art History ◽  
2021 ◽  

“China” here designates much but not all of China Proper or Inner China, terrain controlled during the Imperial era (221 bce to ce 1912) by historic dynastic states. Vast regions to the northeast, north, and west—Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet—are excluded even though they are now integral to the modern-day nation-state. Similarly, we slight areas of the south, for example the modern-day Lingnan and Yun-Gui macroregions, that only gradually were absorbed after the Bronze Age. In Chinese scholarship, “Bronze Age” (qingtong shidai青铜时代) serves as an alternate for the “Three Dynasties” (san dai三代) of traditional historiography: Xia (Hsia), Shang, and Zhou (Chou). Bracketing dates of c. 2000–221 bce are now widely used, the first an approximation, the latter firm. Bronze alloy, however, was just one ingredient of material cultures of the Three Dynasties. Other features include the appearance of states, social stratification, urbanization, warfare, and the appearance of iron (the Iron Age), in addition to achievements in literature, music, and philosophy during the latter centuries, a kind of “Classical Age.” Today, “arts” may encompass many forms of crafting materials for a variety of purposes and audiences. This bibliography specifically addresses architecture, bronze, jade, lacquer, and silk as well as music, pictorial representation, and writing. A term from the Bronze Age—“Six Arts” (or “skills,” liu yi六艺)—defined expertise for an elite male as ritual, music, archery, chariot driving, writing, and calculation. While the overlap between the ancient and modern categories is at best partial, these concepts do intersect in terms of makers and consumers and in social and religious purposes. The elite’s luxury lifestyle was sustained by the “arts.” Ritual required bronze vessels, and the requisite music was performed on instruments of bronze, stone, lacquer, etc. Chariots were outfitted with bronze; writing and picturing employed silk. This bibliography emphasizes Chinese archaeology, both as a discipline and as a realm of knowledge that have burgeoned since the late 20th century. Archaeology creates fresh evidence, which then becomes the stuff of excavation reports, investigative scholarship, exhibitions and museum displays, and reference works. Only some of this bounty can be cited here, and readers are directed to Oxford Bibliographies for Chinese Studies (e.g., Chinese Architecture, Calligraphy, Ceramics, Paleography, Ancient Chinese Religion) for further advice. This essay is limited to publications from 1980 and, when possible, favors English-language sources.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morgan Meis ◽  
J.M. Tyree

Wonder, Horror, Mystery is a dialogue between two friends, both notable arts critics, that takes the form of a series of letters about movies and religion. One of the friends, J.M. Tyree, is a film critic, creative writer, and agnostic, while the other, Morgan Meis, is a philosophy PhD, art critic, and practicing Catholic. The question of cinema is raised here in a spirit of friendly friction that binds the personal with the critical and the spiritual. What is film? What’s it for? What does it do? Why do we so intensely love or hate films that dare to broach the subjects of the divine and the diabolical? These questions stimulate further thoughts about life, meaning, philosophy, absurdity, friendship, tragedy, humor, death, and God. The letters focus on three filmmakers who challenged secular assumptions in the late 20th century and early 21st century through various modes of cinematic re-enchantment: Terrence Malick, Lars von Trier, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The book works backwards in time, giving intensive analysis to Malick’s To The Wonder (2012), Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), and Kieślowski’s Dekalog (1988), respectively, in each of the book’s three sections. Meis and Tyree discuss the filmmakers and films as well as related ideas about philosophy, theology, and film theory in an accessible but illuminating way. The discussion ranges from the shamelessly intellectual to the embarrassingly personal. Spoiler alert: No conclusions are reached either about God or the movies. Nonetheless, it is a fun ride.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1097184X2094325
Author(s):  
Dr. Carol Harrington

Coined in late 20th-century men’s movements, “toxic masculinity” spread to therapeutic and social policy settings in the early 21st century. Since 2013, feminists began attributing misogyny, homophobia, and men’s violence to toxic masculinity. Around the same time, feminism enjoyed renewed popularization. While some feminist scholars use the concept, it is often left under-defined. I argue that talk of toxic masculinity provides an intriguing window into gender politics in any given context. However, feminists should not adopt toxic masculinity as an analytical concept. I consider the term’s origins, history, and usage, arguing that it appears in individualizing discourses that have historically targeted marginalized men. Thus, accusations of toxic masculinity often work to maintain gender hierarchies and individualize responsibility for gender inequalities to certain bad men.


Author(s):  
Jane Chin Davidson

Since the late 20th century, performance has played a vital role in environmental activism, and the practice is often related to concepts of eco-art, eco-feminist art, land art, theatricality, and “performing landscapes.” With the advent of the Capitalocene discourse in the 21st century, performance has been useful for acknowledging indigenous forms of cultural knowledge and for focusing on the need to reintegrate nature and culture in addressing ecological crisis. The Capitalocene was distinguished from the Anthropocene by Donna Haraway who questions the figuration of the Anthropos as reflexive of a fossil-fuel-burning ethos that does not represent the whole of industrial humanity in the circuit of global capital. Jason W. Moore’s analysis for the Capitalocene illustrates the division between nature and society that is affirmed by the tenets of the Anthropocene. Scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer had dated the Anthropocene age to the industrial acceleration of the late-18th/mid-19th century but Moore points to the rise of capitalism in the 15th century when European colonization reduced indigenous peoples to naturales in their modernist definition of nature that became distinct from the new society. As material property, women were also precluded from this segment of industrial humanity. By the 20th century, the Euro-American system for progressive modernism in the arts was supported by the inscription of cultures that represented un-modern “primitivist” nature. The tribal and the modern became a postcolonial debate in art historical discourse. In the context of the Capitalocene, a different historiography of eco-art, eco-feminist art, and environmental performances can be conceived by acknowledging the work of artists such as Ana Mendieta and Kara Walker who have illustrated the segregation of people according to the nature/society divide. Informed by Judith Butler’s phenomenological analyses of performative acts, the aesthetic use of bodily-oriented expression (with its effects on the viewer’s body) provides a vocabulary for artists engaging in the subjects of the Capitalocene. In the development of performances in the global context, artists such as Wu Mali, Yin Xiuzhen, and Ursula Biemann have emphasized the relationship between bodies of humans and bodies of water through interactive works for the public, sited at the rivers and the shores of streams. They show how humans are not separate from nature, a concept that has long been conveyed by indigenous rituals that run deep in many cultures. While artists have been effective in acknowledging the continuing exploitations of the environment, their performances have also reflected the “self” of nature that humans are in the act of destroying.


Author(s):  
Anton Franks

As ways of making meaning in drama strongly resemble the ways that meanings are made in everyday social life, forms of drama learn from everyday life and, at a societal level, people in everyday life learn from drama. Through history, from the emergence of drama in Western culture, the learning that results at a societal level from the interactions of everyday social life and drama have been noted by scholars. In contemporary culture, electronic and digitized forms of mediation and communication have diversified its content and massively expanded its audiences. Although there are reciprocal relations between everyday life and drama, aspects of everyday life are selected and shaped into the various cultural forms of drama. Processes of selection and shaping crystallize significant aspects of everyday social relations, allowing audiences of and participants in drama to learn and to reflect critically on particular facets of social life. In the 20th century, psychological theories of learning have been developed, taking note of the sociocultural relationships between drama, play, and learning. Learning in and through drama is seen as being socially organized, whole person learning that mobilizes and integrates the bodies and minds of learners. Making signs and meanings through various forms of drama, it is interactive, experiential learning that is semiotically mediated via physical activity. Alongside the various forms of drama that circulate in wider culture, sociocultural theories of learning have also influenced drama pedagogies in schools. In the later part of the 20th century and into the 21st century, drama practices have diversified and been applied as a means of learning in a range of community- and theater-based contexts outside of schooling. Practices in drama education and applied drama and theater, particularly since the late 20th century and into the early 21st century, have been increasingly supported by research employing a range of methods, qualitative, quantitative, and experimental.


2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 47-60
Author(s):  
Thuy Trung Luu

In the history of Vietnamese drama, Saigon was one of the places absorbing Western drama from the early time. Although drama in Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City didn’t develop in a smooth and straight way, it was a continuous and unbroken process. This process brought in strong development of drama in Ho Chi Minh city in two decades of the late 20th century and the early 21st century. However, in recent years, drama in Ho Chi Minh City seems to proceed slowly, which reflects some irrational aspects from drama script, performance art to performance operation. Therefore, it’s high time to review the whole history of drama in Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City to collect experiences for the steady development of drama in this City in the future.


Letonica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liene Markus-Narvila

Keywords: folksongs, subdialects, Lejaskurzeme, phonetics, morphology It has been a long time since linguists have spoken about the levelling of subdialects in Latvia, for instance, linguist Jānis Endzelīns already in the middle of the 20th century, when he spoke about the language of the district of Vidzeme said these significant words: “As elsewhere also in Latvia the standard language exterminates subdialects and partly has already exterminated them. There are many areas where it is hard to find a person who speaks only in subdialect.” Therefore, it is important to identify the most important sources of the acquisition of subdialects, which would be useful to all who are interested in subdialectic studies. One of these sources is Latvian folksongs, which vividly preserve the most prominent phonetic and morphological features. The phonetical and morphological features of the subdialects of Lejaskurzeme have been identified in both folksong materials and in later linguistic sources—in the descriptions of Anna Ābele “Par Rucavas izloksni” (On the Rucava Sub-Dialect (1927)), “Rucavas izloksne” (The Rucava Sub-Dialect (1928)), “Gramzdas draudzes izloksne” (The Sub-Dialect of Gramzda Parish (1929)) and also in the description of Emma Valtere “Pērkones izloksne” (The Pērkone Sub-Dialect (1938)) as well as in late 20th century and early 21st century linguistic sources, which allow a comparison between characteristic subdialectical peculiarities and to track their changes over the years. This article analyses the most prominent peculiarities of the subdialects of Lejaskurzeme both in folksongs and in subdialectal sources: in phonetics and morphology. The analysis of the folksongs shows that the treasures of our language are still living; moreover, especially the sources of folklore, including folksongs, are still an actual source of studying subdialects, which, if we use correctly, can reveal grammatical, phonetical, and morphological peculiarities.


2006 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER TOWNSEND

By the late 20th century, the plight of millions of older people in many developed countries was regarded as serious and was acknowledged to require concerted cross-national remedial action. Sociologists and social gerontologists only then were beginning to put together explanations rooted in the evolution of social policy and its corresponding institutions. One thesis that attracted support was that the dependency of the aged had been ‘structured’ by long-term economic and social policies. During the final decades of the 20th century, older people were perceived and treated, according to accumulating research evidence, as more dependent than they really were or needed to be. This had been fostered by the emerging institutions of retirement, income maintenance, and residential and domiciliary care. This development had been the responsibility primarily of the State, which tried to deliver welfare but also to accommodate the market. Forms of discrimination against older people had become, or continued to be, as deep as forms of discrimination against women and ethnic minorities. Such ‘institutionalised ageism’ had to be countered. Hopes were invested in anti-discriminatory policies that reflected good reciprocal relationships between the generations in many families and the rights of individuals of any age to human dignity and opportunities to practise their skills. The globalisation of the market and affiliation to neo-liberal policies, together with the simultaneous passage of various instruments of human rights, have changed the nature of the problem, and therefore the debate, during the early 21st century. This paper argues that the release and implementation during and after the Second World War of collective liberal egalitarian values, expressed in many countries in international statements on human rights, as will be shown, had a big impact on the design of public services, including those for older people. If the claims for the elderly in the welfare states of 50 years ago were exaggerated, as we can now safely conclude, the claims for older people today are even more exaggerated – at a time of heightened emphasis on individual rights and individual market powers. The various problems of ‘structured’ dependency persist, and seem set to grow in many parts of the world. Human rights offer a framework of rigorous analysis and anti-discriminatory work. Success depends on good operational measurement, and the incorporation of international and national institutions and policies that reflect those rights.


Author(s):  
Maryana Dolynska

There are official and traditional names of places upon the territory of the town or the city. They have existed from the ancient times till contemporary days. The official ones have been given by the executive body, and the traditional names are describing the place by nearby locations, buildings or natural objects. Toponyms are divided into different classes and subclasses. Horonyms describe nonlinear structures (territories) and were used to call any places on the town’s area, except for streets or squares. Horonyms do not provide the information about the official administrative division of the contemporary time but were putting traditional names in use.In order to answer the question - how long this class of the city’s names lasted, one has to base on retrospective comparison of the pre-statistical source. The contemporary vocabulary of Lviv’s dialect (“Leksykon lvivskyy povazhno i na zhart”) have fixed 65 horonyms of Lviv’s area, which currentlyare being used by city dwellers. That was the basement of analysis by the retrospective method. This data was compared with such sources: late 19 c.-early 20 c. guidebooks and middle 19 c. maps with their accompaniment notes.The administrative units’ division of Lviv’s territory was applied in this article because during the long 19 century Lviv was a part of Austro-Hungary Empire. That’s why 4 groups of horonyms were excluded: 1. the names of the former city’s villages that are currently preserved as the city’s horonyms because those villages were absorbed into the city only during 20th century. (Today names of those former villages do not reflect the administrative units’ division); 2. village Sygnivka, which was founded only in the 20th years of 19thcentury on the area of the former suburb Halytskie of Lviv’s early modern period; 3. the names of villages, which surrounded town’s area, but were not under the rule of the town hall; 4. all names of objects, which were upon the area of these villages.So after the exclusion, we have 48 names (horonyms). The analysis showed that one name came into being in the late 20th century and eight other ones during its first half. Fifteen horonyms, as well, as their names were founded during the 19th century. So, that leaves us with twenty-four names, which were established during the earlier period and are being used now in the city. We need to continue research on a retrospective comparison of the named recorded in the early modern serial sources.


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