Introduction

Author(s):  
Ian Finseth

Contra conventional wisdom, this introductory chapter proposes that the Civil War dead were understood in relation to four epistemic predicaments that shaped not only an American but a broadly Western modernity in the late nineteenth century: (1) a growing sense of the eᶊentially mediated character of all experience and a loᶊ of faith in the coherence of the individual subject; (2) the increasing dominance of the image in political and social relations and in shaping how Americans knew the world; (3) an erosion of traditional and nationalist views regarding the meaning of historical change and of the present’s relationship to the past; and (4) a newly secular emphasis on complexity, contingency, and chance in the workings of the world. These social and intellectual dilemmas provide an organizational scheme for the book, which is structured around four cultural archives: eyewitneᶊ accounts, visual art, histories of the war, and narrative fiction.

Author(s):  
Brenda Hollweg ◽  
Igor Krstić

In this introductory chapter readers are made familiar with the expanding research field of essayistic filmmaking in world cinema-contexts around the globe. Brenda Hollweg and Igor Krstíc argue that the essay film is a privileged political and ethical tool by means of which filmmakers around the world approach historically specific and locally, geographically concrete issues against larger global issues and universal concerns. The chapter also includes a genealogical overview of important moments in the development of essay filmmaking, particularly during the 1920s and 1960s, and provides readers with short abstracts on the individual chapters and their specific transnationally inflected case studies on essay film practitioners from around the world.


Author(s):  
Lila Caimari

This introductory chapter begins with the author's account of the origins of the present volume, which can be traced back to her interest in a late nineteenth-century set of concepts, images, and metaphors that grew up around the figure of the modern criminal. It then discusses the population growth in Buenos Aires, which jumped from about 1.5 to 2.5 million in the two decades between the world wars and the corresponding urban expansion. This sets the stage for a description of the book's purpose, namely to explore the many dimensions of porteño life in the early decades of the twentieth century: its vital network of neighborhood associations, its literacy campaigns, its grassroots politics, its many reformist projects, and so forth.


Author(s):  
Iryna Herz

The purpose of the article is to identify the essence of dance as a means of assimilating the sociocultural experience of the individual. The methodology of the research is based on interdisciplinary and systematicity characterizing the culturological knowledge. The scientific novelty of the results obtained is to formulate the problem of dance in the cultural dimension and in finding out the essence of dance as a means of assimilating socio-cultural experience due to the socio-cultural orientation laid down, which contribute to the full comprehension of the world of culture. Conclusions. Correlation with the eternal foundations of the world and with the most modern innovations makes dance a kind of model of cultural processes. Being a non-verbal system, the language of art performs an indirect function, however, dance - non-national, universal in its linguistic characteristics - does not need translation and therefore is capable of performing a unifying function. The educational and therapeutic possibilities of dance are important in the process of including the individual in the system of social relations; dance is an effective means of overcoming human disunity, acting as a standard of deep orientation towards the surrounding people, and develops the harmony of social understanding deeply rooted in a person.


1973 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 132-135
Author(s):  
Valerie Chalidze

“Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own”— this can be considered the basic philosophical principle of social relations just because it asserts the right of everyone to leave the territory of any state and therefore to escape the jurisdiction of any state. Although conditions in the world must change substantially for this principle to be always practicable, the import of its proclamation is the recognition that state sovereignty over the individual can be limited in the future.


Arthur Szyk ◽  
2004 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Joseph P. Ansell

This introductory chapter briefly describes the life and work of the artist, Arthur Szyk. It discusses his numerous and diverse works and places special emphasis on those works which contain topical commentary on contemporary political and social issues. Though it would seem difficult to reconcile these greatly disparate elements in one artist's work, the chapter argues that the concentrated political activity of the World War II years was not an aberration — however important — in Szyk's career. It was an integral part of an artistic life dedicated to serving humanity through his talents. To understand the interconnection of all aspects of his work, and to understand the man who was equally adept at rendering an entire world within a few square inches of exquisite beauty and savagely attacking a political enemy through caricature, the chapter argues that one must look beneath the decorated surface of the page to the meaning of the individual work and to its historical context.


Author(s):  
Lyudmila Myasnikova ◽  
◽  
Elena Shlegel ◽  

The problem of the balance between society and personality, awareness of ‘individuality’, ‘personality’, as well as ‘publicity’ (publicness) are ranked among the central philosophical issues. There are many interpretations of them. And these matters remain critical in today’s ‘individualised’ society. Based on a philosophic-anthropological approach, and using comparative-historical methods, the authors trace the cultural-historical transformation of the subsistence of an individual in society from Antiquity to the present. An individual is characterised via such conceptions as ‘social type’, ‘individuality’, ‘personality’. The author’s interpretation of these concepts does not always coincide with the generally accepted one. In particular, the individual is often understood as an ‘ensemble of social relations’, i.e. as synonymous with the social. Furthermore, the authors define the term ‘social type’ as an expression of the societal, the term ‘individuality’ as a holograph or verge of the world, the absolute, mankind, whereas the term ‘personality’ is understood as an individuality rendered ‘in-being-with-others’. The main developmental trend in the relationship between the individual and society is the long cultural-historical transition from an individuality ‘outside the world’ to an individuality ‘in the world’. The authors justify the idea that an individualised society is not a society of individuals. Furthermore, the transformation of the conventional conception of publicness is revealed, the ephemerality of publicness in contemporary society in general, and particularly in virtual space, is highlighted. Publicness is substituted with cocktail parties, ‘cloakroom communities’, and shindigs. The article deals with the construction of virtual identity in the social media of the younger generation. At the end of the article, the authors conclude that in the contemporary world of multiple identities, a person has to look for life values, once again facing the problem of choice and a new understanding of freedom.


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 203
Author(s):  
Belén Piqueras

The relation between subject and object in contemporary societies is a key concern of much postmodernist literature, authors often denouncing the superfluous pervasiveness of material culture in our lives and our absurd dependence on the artificial systems of meaning that we project on the world of things.The antihumanism that is commonly identified with postmodern culture finds a congenial formulation in Postructuralist theories, which consider meaning not as an absolute concept, but always arising of a web of signs that interrelate; the key issue is that for most Postructuralist thinkers –among them Jean Baudrillard and his definition of the ‘hyperreal’– these codes on which culture is founded always precede the individual subject, annihilating all prospects of human agency.Postmodern authors like Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo or William Gibson foster the debate on the nature of those underlying structures, and offer manifold portraits of these frail, commodified, and antihuman subjectivities that are very often the product of progress


Paragraph ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-78
Author(s):  
Roberto Barbanti

Listening to the landscape means hearing the world differently, this article contends. Since its theorization in the pictorial figuration of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, landscape has been conceived as a spatial extent delimited by the gaze of a spectator. In the late 1960s a more complex and sensitive approach to landscape, including reflection on its sound and acoustic aspects, began to emerge. Despite this new focus, a certain oculo-centrism still persists. The ecosophical approach — which complicates and goes beyond the antitheses of subject/object, ethics/aesthetics, nature culture — that is put forward here promotes a new aesthetic dimension focused on listening. Based on the notions of presence, holism and non-separation, this approach makes it possible to combine the individual and the collective imagination with social relations and natural processes.


2018 ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Юлія Юріївна Бродецька

The article deals with the ontological aspects of the consolidation of social being. As a fundamental reproduction mechanism, there is a phenomenon of meaning. The meaning produces, transmits the practice of connectivity and the unity of co-existence both at the individual and social levels. It is a connection, involvement that continues in the nature, quality, stability of human relations with the outside world. This connection gives the status of reality, the truth of human existence. In its ontological significance, reality as materiality, conformity, is only in experience. Thereby it is revealed that the social and individual being reality is in the space of experience that a human acquires in social interaction. «Significance of experience» forms a connection with reality, which acts as an ontological basis of meaning and grows out of its metaphysical nature. Thus, it fills the meaning itself, makes a true, real human being. The meaning connects, transforms and gives perspective to social relations. It is noted that the basis of meaning is its ontological characteristic, that is, a phenomenon arising from the real life relationships of an individual with the outside world. The nature of the meaning, which is an integral, consolidating, is determined by its transcendence. The meaning is always in the objective world. In other words, human does not choose and does not invent meaning, on the contrary, by selfrealization, it forms its connection with the world – its life meaning. Therefore, human existence requires direction to someone (something) other than herself. This metaphysical connection of being and meaning ensures the connection of human co-existence. So the true life meaning is always outside the human self, and therefore requires unity with other people. This logic reveals the phenomenon of comprehension as an integral being element, its symbolic component. Because of this, the main task of human is to go beyond the limits of their own selfishness, to feel their connection with the surrounding world. In this perspective, the meaning phenomenon is revealed in the space of sacral transformation, the personality birth. The more human overcomes the power of selfishness in themselves, the more he reveals the uniqueness of the surrounding world, the more he improves, realizes himself, acquires understanding of his own personality. In other words, self-realization itself does not foresee a direction. When in the human creativity field there is no orientation towards another human, when he «creatеs» for himself, a human must be prepared to be disappointed. Such «creativity» is empty, unclaimed, since it is devoid of its main content – love, that is, meaning. In other words, self-realization in itself should not and can not be the goal of human life. It is the result of the life meaning realization that is achieved only in the harmonious human connection with the outside world, only in productive relations with others. Therefore, self-realization is only a side effect of the man’s release beyond his own self. Consequently, meaningful life is not concentrated on its own «I», but is connected internally and externally with the lives of others. Moreover, this life is not only connected but it is also integral, since the nature of human relationship with the surrounding reality is a projection of the attitude towards himself. Thus, the analysis of the consolidation mechanisms of human existence, of its integrity, harmony, must focus in the space of the meaning problem. In other words, it is a matter of gaining a real individual experience of unity with the world. It is precisely this perspective of studying problems of integration of social and individual order that allows you to offer tools and ways to solve the issue.


Interiority ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Pimlott

Interiority pertains to the individual’s inner life, rich and set in opposition to the pressures of the world. This interiority has been allied with notions of the exclusive space or refuge of the interior. As a realm of privacy and subjectivity, of projections and receptions, the interior has come to be considered as a realm that, although profoundly affected by infiltrations of the world without, is ‘responsive’ to the individual at its centre. As such, it is a realm of illusions. However, there is another order of interior, a condition of interior, wherein spaces, settlements and territories are ideological realms of constructed narratives and imagery within which the individual subject is given illusory impressions of freedom. Interiority’s turn toward the imagination suggests that freedoms can be found despite these determinations. Public interiors have the obligation to realise this, and exemplars have offered places for gathering and interaction, promoted freedoms of movement, association and action, and advocated consciousness of the self and others.


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