Figures

2021 ◽  
pp. 106-137
Author(s):  
Elaine T. James
Keyword(s):  
Metaphorical Language ◽  
Human World ◽  
Central Tool ◽  
The Way

Chapter 4 considers a central tool of poets—the making of “figures.” It brings forward the ways in which imagery can privilege the visual and yet maintain complex, multisensory dimensions that draw the reader into a bodily encounter. It discusses metaphors and similes as types of comparison that can be both conventional and unstable, in that they invite the reader to draw conclusions about analogous qualities that cannot be fully disclosed. Metaphorical language for the deity is discussed. While some biblical poems explain their use of metaphors and symbols, many do not. When figures are symbolic, they remain open, relying on the reader to complete their significance. This analysis underscores the way in which poems are embedded in ancient contexts and simultaneously remain open to new contexts. Personification and anthropomorphism are presented as ecologically rich modes for negotiating the human being’s relationship to the more-than-human world. This chapter ends with a reading of Psalm 65.

Wild Mull

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Littlewood ◽  
Martin Jones
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Diverse Species ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Way

High above the mountaintops on the Isle of Mull, a huge bird is soaring. Its all-encompassing gaze records people in its Hebridean territory far below, but they are of no interest. The eagle is about its business: concentrating on the deer and fidgety hares out grazing in the morning sun, the urgent push of thermals beneath its wings, a threatening weather front way out at sea, and the restless chick back in its eyrie. This is Mull in its glory. This is what the excited, watching people have travelled so far to witness. They train their binoculars and admire, perhaps envy, the eagle with its vast freedom, knowing that such a self-willed being is part of another world – almost. This book guides the reader through that world. With superb illustrations and illuminating text, we are led to the wild side of Mull. Every facet of the island’s natural history is considered, its diverse species and many stories – past, present and future. Along the way we are reminded that wildness is not somehow separate from the human world but influenced, and shared, by nature and people together. Here is the tale of a precious and unique place, a seaborne landscape that displays an uncommon biodiversity and rare wildlife experiences, although today it also faces its greatest challenges. Most of all, this book is testimony to the power of wild places and the duty we have to learn from and protect them.

Signs and sentiment in British wildlife art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Welstead
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Affective Response ◽  
Level Of Abstraction ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Close Observation ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Visual Clues ◽  
The Way

Wildlife art does not receive the critical attention that it deserves. In this chapter, William Welstead considers how the images made after close observation in the field incorporate the signs and visual clues that enable us to identify the species, have some idea of what the individuals are doing and how they relate to the wider environment. These are all important factors in building an informed view of the non-human world and establishing how we feel about it. Wildlife artists tread a difficult path between serving science and catering for the affective response of viewers and between the representational and the abstract in depicting their subject matter. Welstead suggests that the way we recognise wildlife by its overall look or ‘jizz’ means that drawings and paintings can capture in a few lines and shapes the essence of the creature. This economical application of lines and colour therefore allows for at least some level of abstraction. The subject would merit further attention from ecocritics.

John Sayles

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Shumway
Keyword(s):  
Personal Style ◽  
John Sayles ◽  
Popular Films ◽  
Critical Realist ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Way

John Sayles is the very paradigm of the contemporary independent filmmaker. By raising much of the funding for his films himself, Sayles functions more independently than most directors, and he has used his freedom to write and produce films with a distinctive personal style and often clearly expressed political positions. From The Return of the Secaucus Seven to Sunshine State, his films have consistently expressed progressive political positions on issues including race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability. This book examines the defining characteristic of Sayles' cinema: its realism. Positing the filmmaker as a critical realist, the book explores Sayles' attention to narrative in critically acclaimed and popular films such as Matewan, Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, and Lone Star. The study also details the conditions under which Sayles' films have been produced, distributed, and exhibited, affecting the way in which these films have been understood and appreciated. In the process, the book presents Sayles as a teacher who tells historically accurate stories that invite audiences to consider the human world they all inhabit.

On Jesus, Pharaohs, and the Chosen People

1970 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Smylie
Keyword(s):  
Metaphorical Language ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
The Way

King assumed that exodus is an archetypal experience; it supplied him with the metaphorical language for interpreting the black experience in America—but always with agape informing his interpretation at every point along the way.

The Limits of Totalitarianism: God, State and Society in the GDR

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 25-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Fulbrook
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Exact Science ◽  
Atoms And Molecules ◽  
Political World ◽  
Level Of Abstraction ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Way

History is not an exact science. In describing and seeking to resurrect—or at least reconstruct—past societies, historians make use of concepts which bear a double freight of meaning. Unlike the elements, atoms and molecules of natural science, which—however much they are artefacts of the inquiring scientist's mind rather than natural ‘givens’ of the outside world—cannot answer back, the terms which historians use to describe the human world are themselves not only part of the way in which that past world was lived and experienced by the historical actors, but are also part of the way in which historians see, experience and act in their own social and political world. Historical concepts at any level of abstraction beyond the most basic and immediate empirical reference are also part of broader contemporary debates.

Teaching the Ethics/Technology Interface

1987 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-66
Author(s):  
Albert R. Jonsen
Keyword(s):  
Electronic System ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Face ◽  
Old World ◽  
New Words ◽  
The Face ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

The problem that I will discuss in this essay is marvellously illustrated in the title given to me by the editors. The word “interface” is itself part of the jargon of technology, the technospeak needed by those who develop, use, and discuss functions, things, and relationships that had not existed previously in the human world. They must make up new words to describe new realities (and, unfortunately, allow new and ugly words to obscure old ones). An “interface” presumably describes the way in which one electronic system contacts another so that the first energizes the second. In the old world of human experience, an “interface” is impossible. The face of one human being is visible to another; two faces, smiling or frowning at each other, communicate. The mind behind one face can interpret the movements of another. Never does one human face interpenetrate or merge with another.

‘Buried in the flesh’: Home, Embodiment and Interanimality in John Burnside’s Work

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-90
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Nature Poetry ◽  
Living World ◽  
Human World ◽  
Poetic Work ◽  
The Way

The chapter discusses the role and significance of concepts such as home, dwelling, language and the question of embodied Being in relation to John Burnside’s writing. Developed through the thinking of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty specifically, and phenomenological thinking more generally, but with reference to other modes of critical apprehension, the discussion expands the examinations of the idea of dwelling and the place of human animals within the living world (as part of an attempt to decentre the human), which constitute predominant themes in Burnside’s work, complicating the notion of ‘nature poetry’. The analysis focuses on the relation between human selfhood and the non-human world, Mitsein, or Being-with other animals, and the question of naming things. In this respect, this chapter provides not only a particular way of reading Burnside’s poetry, but also a more detailed investigation of the way in which the concept of dwelling relates to certain aspects of place, understood as a dynamic nexus of relationships, as well as the concept of the creaturely. It argues that these themes, together with the problem of language dominate Burnside’s poetic work.

More-than-human economies of writing

2021 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2110608
Author(s):  
Emma Waight
Keyword(s):  
Doctoral Students ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Human World ◽  
Writing Practice ◽  
The Way

In this article, and based on the theme of economies of writing, I explore writing as a more-than-human or posthuman practice. In particular, I consider the way in which academics curate writing places and spaces and the role of matter (things, natures and technologies) in these assemblages of writing by drawing on a Baradian take on posthumanism. The article utilises empirical data from a qualitative, photovoice study with doctoral students. The aim of the article is to encourage reflection on the way we, as academics, experience and teach writing practice in a more-than-human world, and how these experiences relate to productivity and wellbeing.

scholarly journals Analogiese taal by Bultmann in die lig van die kennissosiologie1

2000 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gert Malan
Keyword(s):  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Metaphorical Language ◽  
The Way

A reflection on Bultmann's use of analogical language in thelight of the sociology of knowledge. Bultmann's approach to analogical language, or as he put it, mythological language, was to demythologise it. Reaction to his demythologising program was largely negative, as it seemed radical to many. This study shows that Bultmann's approach to analogical language does not differ much from the way the concept "analogical language" is used within the sociology of knowledge. It seems that disciplines which had previously been practised in isolation from each other, developed their own terminology. The result is that essentially the same issueswere referred to by different names, and that the same terms could be used todenote different issues. In this article the question whether analogical/mythological/symbolical/metaphorical language is treated in much the same way by thetwo different approaches is answered positively.

scholarly journals The Poet’s “Caressive Sight:” Denise Levertov’s Transactions with Nature

Text Matters ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 145-152
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Poks
Keyword(s):  
Nature Poetry ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Holistic Perception ◽  
Human World ◽  
A Site ◽  
Sense Of Wonder ◽  
The Way ◽  
Denise Levertov

The scientific consciousness which broke with the holistic perception of life is credited with "unweaving the rainbow," or disenchanting the world. No longer perceived as sacred, the non-human world of plants and animals became a site of struggle for domination and mastery in implementing humankind's supposedly divine mandate to subdue the earth. The nature poetry of Denise Levertov is an attempt to reverse this trend, reaffirm the sense of wonder inherent in the world around us, and reclaim some "holy presence" for the modern sensibility. Her exploratory poetics witnesses to a sense of relationship existing between all creatures, both human and non-human. This article traces Levertov's "transactions with nature" and her evolving spirituality, inscribing her poetry within the space of alternative—or romantic—modernity, one that dismantles the separation paradigm. My intention throughout was to trace the way to a religiously defined faith of a person raised in the modernist climate of suspicion, but keenly attentive to spiritual implications of beauty and open to the epiphanies of everyday.

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