The Modern Cyclops

Cyclops ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 305-376
Author(s):  
Mercedes Aguirre ◽  
Richard Buxton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
The Past ◽  
Abstract Expressionist ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Modern Artists

The period from the eighteenth century till today has witnessed the most innovative explorations of Cyclopean myths since antiquity. Indeed, in visual art, reimaginings of the Cyclopes have arguably been more innovative over the past two-and-a-half centuries than at any time in the past, including antiquity. So far as literary retellings are concerned, the case for the parity of the modern with the ancient—let alone the case for the superiority of the modern—is more difficult to sustain. Nevertheless, some major modern writers have magnificently reappropriated the figure of the Cyclops, and the variety of modern literary takes on these myths is startling. Showing how all this is so is the project of this final chapter. Earlier literary examples include Raspe (on Baron Munchausen), Vico, and Victor Hugo (treated in particular detail); their contemporaries in visual art include James Barry, Flaxman, the Romantics Füssli and Böcklin, and the Symbolists Moreau and Redon. Closer to today, modern artists such as Paolozzi, Oppenheim, and the Abstract Expressionist Baziotes receive attention. In literature, a range of significant figures is discussed, not least Joyce and Ellison. Also covered are developments in cinema, where, even if it can be hard to claim aesthetic quality for many of the screen Cyclopes who appear, their role in forming popular consciousness can hardly be doubted.

Medea Overlived: The Future of Catastrophe

2020 ◽  
pp. 174-198
Author(s):  
Juliette Cherbuliez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Isabelle Stengers

The final chapter turns to the particular nature of a Medean tragedy—that is, the tragedy of what Isabelle Stengers has called the “challenge” of a mother who kills her children but does not perish and is therefore without issue or, paradoxically, finality. This idea of tragedy in the neoclassical age is taken up through this temporal lens, by considering primarily Racine’s last play Athalie (1690). Through the idea of “lastness,” the chapter considers how tragedy demands a peculiar reading of time, of history, of our place in time, and of our relationship to a temporality out of our control. It considers the changing concept of “catastrophe,” originally a theatrical term that originally meant the final steps of a tragedy’s resolution, but shifted, in the eighteenth century, to designate an unpredictable cataclysm. Both within its verse and in its reception Athalie is the drama of a shift in temporalities, from one in which we lived history as an unfolding of events in the past, present, and future; to one in which the future’s devastations are always a surprise.

Holism, Chinese Medicine and Systems Ideologies: Rewriting the Past to Imagine the Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker Scheid
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Us ◽  
Shared Objective ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.

Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Half

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

Denouement: World Politics, Systemic Leadership, and Climate Change

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Thompson ◽  
Leila Zakhirova
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
World Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Climate Fluctuations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Agrarian Economy ◽  
Historical Processes

In this final chapter, we conclude by recapitulating our argument and evidence. One goal of this work has been to improve our understanding of the patterns underlying the evolution of world politics over the past one thousand years. How did we get to where we are now? Where and when did the “modern” world begin? How did we shift from a primarily agrarian economy to a primarily industrial one? How did these changes shape world politics? A related goal was to examine more closely the factors that led to the most serious attempts by states to break free of agrarian constraints. We developed an interactive model of the factors that we thought were most likely to be significant. Finally, a third goal was to examine the linkages between the systemic leadership that emerged from these historical processes and the global warming crisis of the twenty-first century. Climate change means that the traditional energy platforms for system leadership—coal, petroleum, and natural gas—have become counterproductive. The ultimate irony is that we thought that the harnessing of carbon fuels made us invulnerable to climate fluctuations, while the exact opposite turns out to be true. The more carbon fuels are consumed, the greater the damage done to the atmosphere. In many respects, the competition for systemic leadership generated this problem. Yet it is unclear whether systemic leadership will be up to the task of resolving it.

Searching for Political Parties in the Past

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Common

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.

(Anamnesis) Revolting Bodies: “Le Forgeron” and the Poetry of the Past

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert St. Clair
Keyword(s):  
Victor Hugo ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Louis Xvi

weChapter 4 takes up the question of poetry and engagement at its most explicit and complex in Rimbaud, focusing on a long, historical epic entitled “Le Forgeron.” We read this poem, which recreates and re-imagines a confrontation between the People in revolt and Louis XVI in the summer of 1792, as Rimbaud’s attempt to add a revolutionary supplement to the counter-epics modeled by Victor Hugo in Châtiments. Chapter 4 shows how Rimbaud’s “Forgeron” challenges us to examine the ways in which a poem might seek “to enjamb” the caesura between poiesis and praxis by including and complicating revolutionary (counter)history into its folds in order to implicate itself in the political struggles of its time.

The theater of memory: Direct speech in Palestinian oral history

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-648
Author(s):  
Kobi Peled
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Main Thing ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
Do So

A striking feature of Palestinian oral history projects is the extensive use that interviewees make of direct speech to communicate their memories—especially those born before the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. They do so irrespective of whether or not they participated in or actually heard the dialogues they wish to convey. This article seeks to characterize and explain this phenomenon. In the interviews conducted by the author—an Arabic-speaking Jew—as well as in other projects, this mode of speech is marked by ease of transition from character to character and between different points in time. It clearly gives pleasure to those engaged in the act of remembering, and it grades readily into a theatrical performance in which tone of speech and the quality of the acting become the main thing. This form of discourse sprang up from the soil of a rural oral culture and still flourishes as a prop for supporting memory, a vessel for collecting and disseminating stories, and a technique for expressing identification with significant figures from the past.

The Convent of Santa Clara, the Elite and Social Change in Eighteenth Century Querétaro

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELLEN GUNNARSDÓTTIR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

This article focuses on the changes that occurred within Querétaro's elite from the late Habsburg to the high Bourbon period in colonial Mexico from the perspective of its relationship to the convent of Santa Clara. It explores how creole elite families of landed background with firm roots in the early seventeenth century, tied together through marriage, entrepreneurship and membership in Santa Clara were slowly pushed out of the city's economic and administrative circles by a new Bourbon elite which broke with the social strategies of the past by not sheltering its daughters in the city's most opulent convent.

Hajj Transportation of Netherlands East Indies, 1910-1940

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-147
Author(s):  
Erlita Tantri
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Poor Condition ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
Netherlands East Indies ◽  
State Authority ◽  
Historical Phenomenon

This article is about Hajj transportation of Netherland Indies in during the years of 1910-1940. The focus of this article is the mechanism of the Hajj transportation and its significance since eighteenth century. It is based on that historical phmomenon, that this paper will examine the hajj transportation in the past related to regulation and problem and why it was important to control hajj ship transportation by using archives and authorities' report as main sources and other secondary sources. Historically, since eighteenth century, even until today, going to hajj or pilgrimage was very interesting and attractive for native Muslim in Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia), especially for gaining religious requirement, social pride and Islamic ideas. The phenomenon can be seen from the increase and the stable number of the pilgrims from Indonesia which had attracted much interest from many parts of stake holders such as from Hijaz (Arabian government). In relation to that, it is worth noting that ship was an important transport to convey pilgrim from and to Indonesia and thus, business of hajj transportation become a field of contention between state authority and private ship businesses. It is based on that historical phenomenon, that this paper will examine the hajj transportation in the past related to regulation and problems and why it was important to control hajj ship transportation by using archives and authorities report as main sources and other secondary sources. Hajj transportation was a profitable business (even until today) that increased competition among British, Malay, Arabic, and Dutch shipping companies. Completion and regulation from ships and authority did not give better services for native pilgrims besides poor condition, discomfort and suffering of pilgrimage. However, hajj transportation had to be controlled, especially to restrain problems of moekimans and movement ideas from Hijaz.

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