The Life of Words

Author(s):  
David-Antoine Williams

For centuries, investigations into the origins of words were entwined with investigations into the origins of humanity and the cosmos. With the development of modern etymological practice in the nineteenth century, however, many cherished etymologies were shown to be impossible, and the very idea of original ‘true meaning’ asserted in the etymology of ‘etymology’ declared a fallacy. Structural linguistics later held that the relationship between sound and meaning in language was ‘arbitrary’, or ‘unmotivated’, a truth that has survived with small modification until today. On the other hand, the relationship between sound and meaning has been a prime motivator of poems, at all times throughout history. The Life of Words studies a selection of poets inhabiting our ‘Age of the Arbitrary’, whose auditory-semantic sensibilities have additionally been motivated by a historical sense of the language, troubled as it may be by claims and counterclaims of ‘fallacy’ or ‘true meaning’. Arguing that etymology activates peculiar kinds of epistemology in the modern poem, the book pays extended attention to poems by G. M. Hopkins, Anne Waldman, Ciaran Carson, and Anne Carson, and to the collected works of Seamus Heaney, R. F. Langley, J. H. Prynne, Geoffrey Hill, and Paul Muldoon.

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 13-20
Author(s):  
Andrey Kurtenkov

It is related leg problems to the realization of the necessity of doing a detailed analysis of the phenotype correlations between body weight and exterior measurements. As a result of the study, lower coefficients have been obtained of the correlation between the girth of the tarso metatarsus on one hand, and the body weight and the girth behind the wings, on the other hand (respectively 0.563 and 0.608), compared with the one between the body weight and the girth behind the wings (0.898). It is advisable in the selection of ostriches to take into consideration the necessity of a higher phenotypic correlation between the girth of the tarso metatarsus on the one hand, and the body weight and the girth behind the wings on the other hand, with a view to preventing leg problems.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-293
Author(s):  
Guilherme Bernardes

Paul Muldoon (1951 ”“ ) é um poeta norte-irlandês de origem católica nascido em Portdown, condado de Armagh. Integrou junto a Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley e Ciaran Carson, dentre outros, o chamado Belfast Group, organizado por Philip Hobsbaum. Publicou seu primeiro livro, New Weather, em 1973. Desde então, já publicou mais doze coletâneas de poemas, sendo a mais recente Frolic and Detour, em 2019. Além disso, já publicou literatura infantil, libretos de ópera, coletâneas de letras de música e peças de teatro. Já foi premiado com o T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry por The Annals of Chile (1994) e o Pulitzer Prize for Poetry por Moy Sand and Gravel (2002). Mudou-se para os Estados Unidos em 1987, onde foi professor do curso de escrita criativa na Universidade de Princeton até 2017 e foi, até 2016, editor de poesia da revista The New Yorker. As traduções a seguir integram o apêndice da dissertação “Uma Camisa de Força para Houdini: Paul Muldoon, Forma Fixa e Tradução”, defendida em fevereiro de 2020 na UFPR.


2020 ◽  
pp. 56-99
Author(s):  
David-Antoine Williams

This chapter begins by noting with Saussure that the rupture structural linguistics makes between sound image and referent would appear to make etymology theoretically vacant. How one might continue to ‘believe’ in the truth of etymologies in the face of this occupies the rest of the discussion, beginning with the problems and possibilities of phenomenological ‘unveiling’ (Martin Heidegger, Anne Carson, Jan Zwicky, and Anne Waldman are discussed) and deconstructive etymological word play (Jean Paulhan, Nancy Streuver, Derek Attridge, Paula Blank). Play, or work, with etymology then frames a comparative reading of poems by G. M. Hopkins and Ciaran Carson, which explores questions of poetic assertion, belief, and irony. After sketching a taxonomy of etymological tropes in modern poetry, the chapter concludes by following the etymological development and redeployment of central metapoetic metaphors, which imagine the work of poetry as that of maker, weaver, singer, and ploughman.


Author(s):  
Laurie McManus

This brief epilogue addresses the relationship—historical and present—between the exclusivity of the priestly performing persona and the development and perpetuation of canonical compositions. The author suggests that the two reinforce each other; Clara Schumann’s status as a priestess was informed by her selection of certain repertoire, but at the same time her “restrained” performance of the pieces helped mark them as serious works worthy of preservation. Jumping to today’s world of performance, the author analyzes the rhetoric in a New York Times article by Anthony Tommasini comparing two young pianists. The juxtaposition of these sources suggests that some nineteenth-century values of priestly performance, such as “seriousness” and “modesty,” still inform music criticism today.


2009 ◽  
Vol 102 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-352
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bagger

In the introduction to Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience, Maurice Bloch makes some forthright admissions about the methodological and theoretical pitfalls threatening a project of the scope he undertakes in this slim, provocative volume. He acknowledges, for instance, the temptation, when arguing for what he describes as a “quasi-universal” religious structure, to present “a tendentious selection of examples, and make this structure appear to be present everywhere.”1 In the face of this danger, independent readers, who “choose to continue the exercise by trying to see whether what is proposed here stands up to the test of the other cases they know” become the most important critical constraint.2 In what follows I test Bloch's theory of rebounding violence against the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish theologian.


2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (S13) ◽  
pp. 179-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Van de Putte ◽  
Michel Oris ◽  
Muriel Neven ◽  
Koen Matthijs

This article examines social heterogamy as an indicator of “societal openness”, by which is meant the extent to which social origin, as defined by the social position of one's parents, is used as the main criterion for selection of a marriage partner. We focus on two topics. The role first of migration and then of occupational identity in this selection of a partner according to social origin. And in order to evaluate the true social and economic context in which spouses lived, we do not use a nationwide sample but rather choose to examine marriage certificates from eleven cities and villages in Belgium, both Flemish and Walloon, during the nineteenth century. By observing different patterns of homogamy according to social origin we show in this article that partner selection was affected by the relationship between migration, occupational identity and class structure. It seems difficult to interpret all these divergent patterns in terms of modernization. In our opinion the historical context creates a complicated set of conditions reflected in differences in the type and strength of migration and in the sectoral composition and evolution of the local economy. The whole exerts an influence over partner selection.


Author(s):  
Katarzyna Seroka

The presented selection of correspondence constitutes an interesting source concerning the relationship between publishers and authors within the area of Poland and partitioned Polish lands in the 19th century. This shows how complicated this relationship was and how a publishing office worked, including the issues of selection of paper, fonts or covers. On the other hand, it reveals formal difficulties related to issuing and printing books (among others, censorship, customs frontiers and currencies). The selection of letters dates back to 1870-1871. The presented correspondence is a part of handwritten legacy of J.I. Kraszewski, which can be currently found in the Jagiellonian Library.


Author(s):  
Penny Edgell Becker

This article explores the relationship between gender ideology and popular culture in one particular time and place—a Catholic family magazine called the Ave Maria during the latter part of the nineteenth Century. This case study yields an interpretive sociological account of how women were portrayed in this magazine, an account that sheds light on our understanding of the construction and negotiation of religious ideologies. When I speak of “ideology,” I refer to highly articulated and explicit meaning Systems that construct and regulate patterns of conduct. “Official ideologies” are endorsed and promoted by organizational officials and/or community elites.A systematic examination of Ave Maria from 1865 to 1889 reveals that two-thirds of the articles reproduce some version of the official ideology of the True Catholic Woman. On the other hand, about one-third of the articles produce what I call “alternative interpretations”—“alternative” because they are critical of the limits that the official versions placed on women's character, activity, or autonomy.


1992 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-181
Author(s):  
James R. Lehning

The article focuses on the relationship between social and economic structure and household structure, on the one hand, and household structure and demographic behavior on the other. The analysis provides some insight into the factors that determined household structure and demographic behavior in the two nineteenth-century villages in the Loire district in France-one village agricultural and the other with a protoindustrial sector. Labor needs imposed on the household by the economy helped to determine the structure of that household, and, especially by way of nuptiality, such considerations could also affect reproduction. Nevertheless, it would be pressing the evidence much too far to suggest that only household structure determined demographic behavior.


2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 598-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Pickering

The relationship between nationalism and the land, observes Philip Bull in his recent study of the Irish land question, “formed a nexus which was so strong that the one issue became effectively a metaphor for the other.” Any student of nineteenth-century Irish politics can appreciate the force of this eloquent conclusion. Nevertheless, the preoccupation with the land by contemporaries and historians alike has relegated an important strand of economic nationalism devoted to manufacturing industry to a footnote in Irish history. The fate of manufacturing industry in the aftermath of the Union of 1800 is the subject of controversy among scholars suggesting, at the very least, substantial regional and sectoral variations. Contemporaries, however, were in little doubt that Irish manufacturing industry was suffering from terminal decline, a perception that had formed a regular reprise in public comment throughout the previous century. As John O’Connell wrote in 1849 “the question of Irish manufacturing has been, for more than a century and a half, one of the chief grounds of bitterness and bickerings” between Ireland and England.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document