Curiosity

2021 ◽  
pp. 25-54
Author(s):  
Robert Volpicelli
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Public Speech ◽  
The Us ◽  
Lecture Tour ◽  
The Way

Chapter 1 argues that the US lecture tour introduced Oscar Wilde to a form of curiosity entertainment that inspired him to continually modify his person for different regional audiences. Though Wilde’s 1882 tour has received much attention for the way it catalyzed the author’s celebrity, very little has been said regarding Wilde’s actual lecturing practices. This chapter therefore examines how the circuit connected Wilde to America’s increasingly commercialized forms of public speech. It does so by focusing on Wilde’s relationship to P. T. Barnum. While Barnum is best known as a circus magnate, he was also a popular speaker who specialized in self-improvement lecturing. Placing Wilde in this particular context, the chapter shows how newspapers readily associated Wilde not only with Barnum but also with his many curiosity attractions. However, its larger aim is to illustrate how Wilde incorporated a sense of Barnum’s overall rhetoric into his own lecturing. Throughout his tour, Wilde subtly adapted Barnum’s self-improvement into a means of self-manipulation, at times going so far as to alter his own class and racial identity in order to appeal to specific audiences.

Documentarian

2021 ◽  
pp. 108-133
Author(s):  
Robert Volpicelli
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
The State ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Many ◽  
Lecture Tour ◽  
The Way

Chapter 4 considers how the US lecture tour provided the expatriate author Gertrude Stein with a chance to reacquaint herself with her native country. The media blitz that accompanied Stein’s 1934–5 tour—she made regular stops for photo ops, book signings, and radio interviews—has prompted critics to examine the way Americans saw Stein as a 1930s celebrity. This chapter is more interested, though, in the way Stein saw America, examining in particular her role as a social documentarian during one of the lowest points in the Great Depression. It specifically analyzes the way she developed a public lecturing practice invested as much in documenting her audiences as it was in speaking to them. It then goes on to compare her lecture-tour memoir, Everybody’s Autobiography, to the state and regional guidebooks being produced at that time by the New Deal’s Work Progress Administration (WPA) to reveal how these two forms of 1930s documentary come together in their renewed belief in the American collective. Finally, the many points of overlap between Stein’s memoir and WPA documentaries become an occasion to question previous readings of the author’s late 1930s politics, which have typically portrayed Stein as a stalwart social conservative.

The Unassailable Self: Freud's Image Among Post-war American Intellectuals

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
External Force ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Human Being ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Way

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.

Refining Contrapuntal Pedagogy: Reflections on Teaching Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues” to First-Year Students

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Grogan
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
First Year ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Poetic Voice ◽  
Teaching Poetry ◽  
Approach To Teaching ◽  
The University ◽  
The Way

This article reports on and discusses the experience of a contrapuntal approach to teaching poetry, explored during 2016 and 2017 in a series of introductory poetry lectures in the English 1 course at the University of Johannesburg. Drawing together two poems—Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues”—in a week of teaching in each year provided an opportunity for a comparison that encouraged students’ observations on poetic voice, racial identity, transhistorical and transcultural human experience, trauma and empathy. It also provided an opportunity to reflect on teaching practice within the context of decoloniality and to acknowledge the need for ongoing change and review in relation to it. In describing the contrapuntal teaching and study of these poems, and the different methods employed in the respective years of teaching them, I tentatively suggest that canonical Western and contemporary postcolonial poems may reflect on each other in unique and transformative ways. I further posit that poets and poems that engage students may open the way into initially “less relevant” yet ultimately rewarding poems, while remaining important objects of study in themselves.

Spinoza’s Biblical Criticism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Divine Election ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Way

Chapter 1 homes in on Spinoza as a Bible critic. Based on existing historiography, it parses the main relevant historical contexts in which Spinoza came to articulate his analysis of the Bible: the Sephardi community of Amsterdam, freethinking philosophers, and the Reformed Church. It concludes with a detailed examination of the Tractatus theologico-politicus, Spinoza’s major work of biblical criticism. Along the way I highlight themes for which Spinoza appealed to the biblical texts themselves: the textual unity of the Bible, and the biblical concepts of prophecy, divine election, and religious laws. The focus is on the biblical arguments for these propositions, and the philological choices that Spinoza made that enabled him to appeal to those specific biblical texts. This first chapter lays the foundation for the remainder of the book, which examines issues of biblical philology and interpretation discussed among the Dutch Reformed contemporaries of Spinoza.

On Kavikarṇapūra

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rembert Lutjeharms
Keyword(s):  
The Way

Chapter 1 gives an overview of Kavikarṇapūra’s life and his works, and places both in the context of the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition. Very little is known about Kavikarṇapūra’s life. He says little about himself in his works, nor do the hagiographies of Caitanya, as he was a child when Caitanya passed away. Nevertheless, beginning with his contemporary Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja, Caitanya Vaiṣṇavas have recorded stories about Kavikarṇapūra, especially his encounters with Caitanya. This chapter considers these images of Kavikarṇapūra as well as the reception of his works to gain an understanding of his position in the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition. This chapter does not aim to recover a ‘historical’ Kavikarṇapūra, but to examine the way the tradition viewed Kavikarṇapūra, his works, and his position in the Vaiṣṇava community of his time. The chapter also examines Kavikarṇapūra’s views of his contemporary Vaiṣṇava communities, to understand how he saw himself in this tradition.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rembert Lutjeharms
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Poetry And Poetics ◽  
Sanskrit Poetics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sanskrit Poetry ◽  
The Way

This chapter introduces the main themes of the book—Kavikarṇapūra, theology, Sanskrit poetry, and Sanskrit poetics—and provides an overview of each chapter. It briefly highlights the importance of the practice of poetry for the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition, places Kavikarṇapūra in the (political) history of sixteenth‐century Bengal and Orissa as well as sketches his place in the early developments of the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition (a topic more fully explored in Chapter 1). The chapter also reflects more generally on the nature of both his poetry and poetics, and highlights the way Kavikarṇapūra has so far been studied in modern scholarship.

‘the barbarous wastes’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oli Hazzard
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
The Us

Chapter 1 describes Ashbery’s relationship with W. H. Auden in a new way, attending as much to the substantial, productive antagonisms between the two poets as to developing important continuities outlined by earlier critics. It positions The Vermont Notebook—an underrated volume in Ashbery’s oeuvre—as the critical point in Ashbery’s response to his mentor. The chapter argues that The Vermont Notebook serves as a trenchant critique of the turn towards conservatism in Auden’s poetry and cultural outlook after his move to the US in 1939. Through his homage to and appropriation of techniques from The Orators, Ashbery attempts to bring the innovative and versatile early Auden out from the shadow of his later self.

scholarly journals Trauma and Sacrifice in Divided Communities: The Sacralisation of the Victims of Terrorism in Spain

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 104
Author(s):  
Eliana Alemán ◽  
José Pérez-Agote
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Traumatic Events ◽  
The State ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Institutional Discourse ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
The Us ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Public Demonstrations ◽  
The Way

This work aims to show that the sacrificial status of the victims of acts of terrorism, such as the 2004 Madrid train bombings (“11-M”) and ETA (Basque Homeland and Liberty) attacks in Spain, is determined by how it is interpreted by the communities affected and the manner in which it is ritually elaborated a posteriori by society and institutionalised by the state. We also explore the way in which the sacralisation of the victim is used in socially and politically divided societies to establish the limits of the pure and the impure in defining the “Us”, which is a subject of dispute. To demonstrate this, we first describe two traumatic events of particular social and political significance (the case of Miguel Ángel Blanco and the 2004 Madrid train bombings). Secondly, we analyse different manifestations of the institutional discourse regarding victims in Spain, examining their representation in legislation, in public demonstrations by associations of victims of terrorism and in commemorative “performances” staged in Spain. We conclude that in societies such as Spain’s, where there exists a polarisation of the definition of the “Us”, the success of cultural and institutional performances oriented towards reparation of the terrorist trauma is precarious. Consequently, the validity of the post-sacrificial narrative centring on the sacred value of human life is ephemeral and thus fails to displace sacrificial narratives in which particularist definitions of the sacred Us predominate.

Russia's Baltic pipeline nearly ready but risks remain

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Content Type ◽  
Bilateral Agreement ◽  
The Us ◽  
Nord Stream ◽  
The Way

Significance Despite this, Biden indicated no change in the US position after a bilateral agreement with Germany effectively paved the way to completing the pipeline. Technically, Nord Stream 2 could begin partially operating in October. Impacts The recent spike in European gas prices to levels unseen since 2008 reinforces the case for Nord Stream 2's speedy completion. EU energy diversification, with a focus on renewables, poses long-term questions about the viability of both the Nord Stream pipelines. From October, Hungary will switch to Gazprom gas supplied via Serbia and Austria instead of through Ukrainian pipelines.

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