The Dialectic of Deodorization

Art Scents ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 87-97
Author(s):  
Larry Shiner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Western History ◽  
Sense Of Smell ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Turn ◽  
Natural Tendency

Chapter 5 begins by recalling the central role that incense and perfumes once played in religion, medicine, and social relations throughout Western history, from ancient Egypt through the eighteenth century. The second part of the chapter looks at the “dialectic of deodorization” over the past two centuries, involving the narrowing of the uses of incense and the gradual discrediting of the medical uses of both incense and perfume, in part through the great sanitary campaigns to rid cities of the stench of human excrement and various noxious industries, leaving incense to mostly religious and perfumes to mostly aesthetic uses. The chapter concludes that this historical turn may have exacerbated our natural tendency to be unaware of smells and have encouraged intellectuals to view the sense of smell as of little importance, despite evidence of a certain “reodorization” from the mid-twentieth century on.

What Was Neo-Classicism?

1969 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
James William Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Vast Range ◽  
Century Literature ◽  
Selection Of

There seems to be no doubt about it: the century-old truisms about the literature variously called “Augustan” and “Neo-Classical” are in the process of dissolution. Premises induced by J. S. Mill and Matthew Arnold, explored by Oliver Elton, dogmatized by G. E. B. Saintsbury, and summarized by Leslie Stephen now appear inadequate to more recent scholars, whose research and rereading of Neo-Classical texts run counter to the general testimony as well as the specific judgments of their grandfathers. For the past few decades at least, published commentary has increasingly indicated the need to overhaul received ideas about those writers identified with the revival of classicism in England following the Restoration of Charles II and continuing throughout the eighteenth century.The deficiencies in Victorian and Edwardian assumptions about Neo-Classicism revealed by latter-day findings are several, some of them due to false criteria of taste, morality, and literary excellence. But chiefly the research of the present age has disclosed a vast range of literature simply ignored — or, perhaps, suppressed — by earlier critics. Based as they were on a limited, prejudged selection of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, the premises inherited from Victorian criticism have naturally failed to account for the discoveries of twentieth-century scholars.The resulting disparity between limited assumptions and expanded information has called into question the very possibility of formulating any critical schema that accurately describes the characteristics of English literature between 1660 and 1800. The relativistic — not to say atomistic — inclinations of contemporary scholarship enforce the view that indeed no schema is possible.

Material Visions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacy C. Kozakavich
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Temporal Changes ◽  
Intentional Communities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Building Community ◽  
Vinyl Records

Artifacts made, bought, and used within past intentional communities demand careful interpretation. They may reaffirm or challenge our long-held ideas about a group, and as mute witnesses to the past can invite conflicting views among scholars and community descendants. This chapter spans the volume's widest temporal range, from eighteenth-century ceramics and food remains left by Pennsylvania's Ephrata Cloister to twentieth-century vinyl records listened to by members of California's Chosen Family. Examples from the Shakers, Harmonists, and Moravians demonstrate the importance of building community-specific contexts of interpretation that are sensitive to differences between individual groups as well as temporal changes within long-lived communities.

The Riddle of Me’iri’s Recent Popularity

2020 ◽  
pp. 394-401
Author(s):  
Haym Soloveitchik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Past

This chapter examines the recent popularity of R. Menaḥem ha Me'iri of Perpignan. It is commonly thought that the works of R. Menaḥem ha Me'iri were first published in the twentieth century. This is correct if one is referring to the series of Me'iri publications that Avraham Sofer produced from the huge, six-volume manuscript in the Parma Palatina Library, and which contains the Bet ha-Beḥirah on most of the tractates of the Talmud. However, a glance at any bibliography will immediately reveal that the Bet ha-Beḥirah on many tractates was already published in the eighteenth century. Some parts of it were printed in the eighteenth century, a few more in the nineteenth; but they were swiftly forgotten. In fact, the revival of his work did not begin in the 1930s: initially Sofer's publications had little impact. Only in the latter half of the twentieth century did they become popular, and various scholars moved quickly to put out the Bet ha-Beḥirah on other tractates of the Talmud and to publish new editions of the works that Sofer had already published, and these editions have been repeatedly reprinted. Why the centuries-long indifference and why the revival of the past sixty years? The chapter answers these questions.

Strata of the Soul: The Queer Archaeologies of Vernon Lee and Oscar Wilde

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angie Blumberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
The Self ◽  
Queer Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Vernon Lee ◽  
Sexual Transgression

This essay explores Vernon Lee's ‘Amour Dure’ and ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’, as well as Oscar Wilde's ‘The Sphinx’, ‘The Truth of Masks’, and ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ to uncover how writers at the turn of the twentieth century represented encounters with material artefacts of the past to facilitate the expression of queer identity and experience. While Lee's stories address derelict material remains to expose neglected individual histories, illustrating unconventional relationships through temporal collision, Wilde's ‘The Sphinx’ adopts the exoticism of ancient Egypt to more explicitly discuss sexual transgression. Furthermore, through ‘The Truth of Masks’ and ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, Wilde can be seen to employ archaeological experience to envision queer desire. In their appropriation of the mysteries of the buried past to suggest non-normative desires buried within the self, these late-Victorian works constitute a precursor to major concepts generally associated with the twentieth century, including Freud's analogy between archaeology and psychoanalysis, and the rise of queer archaeology in the late 1980s.

The Pasts of a Pāḷaiyakārar: The Ethnohistory of a South Indian Little King

1982 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 655-683 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas B. Dirks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sovereign Authority

This article examines a text containing the late eighteenth-century family history of a line of South Indian “little kings,” or pāḷaiyakārars. The text provides the basis for a discussion of the Maṟavar caste of the Tirunelvēli region in southern Tamil Nāṭu and the notions held by this and other related groups concerning royal appropriateness and sovereign authority, political and social relations, and kingly privileges and gifts. Further, the text is seen as a cultural form of “history” that has an integrity of its own. Indeed, a structural analysis of the text reveals that the text can not be separated into “fanciful” and “historical” sections, and that underlying assumptions about the past are revealed by the form as well as the content of the text. The results of this analysis are seen to have significance not only for understanding how the past is viewed from within, but also for how it must be analyzed from outside the cultural context. Thus, ethnohistory is asserted to be not simply one agenda for “history” but a way of setting the actual agenda of “history.”

scholarly journals The Journey towards “No Man's Land”: Interpreting the China-Korea Borderland within Imperial and Colonial Contexts

2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 1035-1058 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nianshen Song
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Geographic Information ◽  
Legal Knowledge ◽  
Tumen River ◽  
Origin And Evolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
No Man's Land

In the early twentieth century, the sovereignty of a territory north of the China-Korea Tumen River border was under severe dispute between China, Korea, and Japan. Based on a Jesuit memoir and map of Korea published in eighteenth-century Europe, a Japanese colonial bureaucrat and international law expert, Shinoda Jisaku, asserted that a vast region north of the China-Korea border should be regarded as a “no man's land.” Employing Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and European materials, this article traces the origin and evolution of such a definition. It demonstrates that the Jesuit map and description were based on false geographic information, which the Korean court deliberately provided to a Manchu official in 1713 in order to safeguard its interests. During prolonged intercommunication between diverse areas of the globe during the past three centuries, spatial and legal knowledge has been produced, reproduced, and transformed within imperial and colonial contexts.

scholarly journals WINCKELMANN’S APOLLO AND THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF RACE

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (59) ◽  
pp. 6-35
Author(s):  
Lasse Hodne
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
White Male ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Male Body ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Different Types

The taste for classical art that induced museums in the West to acquire masterpieces from ancient Greece and Rome for their collections was stimulated largely by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. In the past decade, a number of articles have claimed that Winckelmann’s glorification of marble statues representing the white, male body promotes notions of white supremacy. The present article challenges this view by examining theories prevalent in the eighteenth century (especially climate theory) that affected Winckelmann’s views on race. Through an examination of different types of classicism, the article also seeks to demonstrate that Winckelmann’s aesthetics were opposed to the eclectic use of ancient models typical of the fascist regimes of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Albert Camus, Metaphysical Revolt, Gnosticism and Modern Cinema

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-70
Author(s):  
Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Western History ◽  
Important Place ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

Abstract In The Rebel (1951) Albert Camus assigns ancient Gnosticism an important place in the history of human revolt. In his interpretation, Gnostics incarnate the spirit of proud rebellion and protest against a God deemed responsible for human suffering and death. For Camus these are the roots of metaphysical rebellion in Western history that, beginning in the eighteenth century, culminated in the fascist and socialist utopian experiments in the twentieth century. After assessing Camus’s view of Gnosticism, this article claims that modern cinema shows the impact of The Rebel on the way several recent films conceive of their rebellious protagonists. The controlled character of the revolts they promote shows that modern cinema follows Gnosticism in their analysis both the modern sentiments of alienation in contemporary society and the ways to break free in order to attain a life worthy of its name.

scholarly journals Crazy about Catherine: Representations of Catherine the Great in Contemporary Russian Cinema (Temptations of Power and Legitimation of the Present)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Prikazchikova
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
National Pride ◽  
The Past ◽  
Emotional Culture ◽  
Russian Cinema ◽  
Female Audience

This article discusses the reasons for the increased interest in the figure of Catherine II in Russian cinema of the 2010s. These films recreate the principles of gynecocracy in the period of Catherine’s reign. The analysis of TV series Catherine (2014–2016) and The Great (2015) aims to answer the question about the ideological and psychological meaning of such ‘retrohistory’ and its connection with the political concerns of the present. This study also considers these series within the cinematographic tradition of the twentieth century and the context provided by the memoirs of the eighteenth century. The conclusion is made that contemporary Russian historical cinema has lost its escapist function as well as its interest in depicting the emotional culture of the Catherinian era. Cinematic representations of the past are thus characterized by the following features: use of the past to legitimize the present; aesthetic empathy; ‘Russification’ of the German princess as a source of Russian national pride; gender self- presentation and projection of certain psychological complexes on the representation of Catherine in order to enhance the film’s appeal to the female audience. Keywords: Catherine the Great, Russian cinema, gynecocracy, retrohistory, legitimation of the present, aesthetic empathy, gender self-presentation

The “Historical Turn” in the Social Sciences

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert S. Klein
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
Professional Societies ◽  
Historical Turn ◽  
The Social

The first professional societies in the United States, from the 1880s to the 1910s, understood history to be closely associated with the other social sciences. Even in the mid-twentieth century, history was still grouped with the other social sciences, along with economics, sociology, political science, and anthropology. But in the past few decades, history and anthropology in the United States (though not necessarily in other countries) have moved away from the social sciences to ally themselves with the humanities—paradoxically, just when the other social sciences are becoming more committed to historical research.

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