The Epic of Gilgamesh

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-46
Author(s):  
Jon Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Mortality ◽  
Wild Man ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Human Condition

Chapter 1 gives a reading of the Mesopotamian The Epic of Gilgamesh. At the outset an account is provided of the historical context of the work in antiquity and its discovery and translation in the nineteenth century. An interpretation is given of the creation of the wild man Enkidu. Parallels are pointed out between this story and that of the Fall in Genesis. The nature of the Mesopotamian gods is also explored in the context of an interpretation of the episode featuring the goddess Ishtar. Angered by Gilgamesh’s rejection of her advances, Ishtar sends the Bull of Heaven to destroy Uruk. Gilgamesh and Enkidu manage to kill it, but only after it has caused much death and destruction. Enkidu insults Ishtar, and she in turn causes his death. Gilgamesh is deeply distraught by the death of his friend and goes in search of a solution to the problem of human mortality. He has many adventures and ultimately finds Utnapishtim, the Mesopotamian Noah, who survives the Flood and is made immortal. An account is given to the parallels of this episode and that of the Flood in Genesis. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh about a magic plant that can restore youth. Gilgamesh manages to find it, but he loses it right away to a snake. The story is interpreted as a statement of the finitude and limitations of the human condition.

The Seduction of Eve and the Exegetical Politics of Gender

1996 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reuven Kimelman
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Divine Command ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Human Condition

AbstractThis reading of the Eve and Adam story focuses on the consequential role of the woman and her linkage to the serpent. Her rapid switch from defender to transgressor of the divine command shows that the idea of disobeying God was not instigated exclusively by the serpent. Since the serpent does not get her to act out of character, he does not function outside of her, but provides a rationale for her to extend previous inklings. This function of the serpent is based on the differences between the original divine command and her rendering. It is supported by the reader's awareness that her Hebrew name Havva sounds like its cognates hivyah and hivvah which mean serpent and speech, respectively. The talking serpent becomes the inner Eve. Thus, the story is not one of humanity coming of age but a parable of the human condition. Our heroine is nothing less than Every(wo)man. Her representative status explains why the story features both woman and serpent, why the serpent talks specifically to woman, why of all the ancient epics of origins Genesis alone gives the creation of woman separate billing, and why Genesis underscores the commonality between man and woman. By highlighting the significance of the woman, this reading makes for the remarkable combination of authoritarian theology and egalitarian anthropology.

scholarly journals EDITORIAL

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-164
Author(s):  
JOHN BUTT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
The Human Condition

I clearly remember that when this journal was first devised there lay some niggling doubt behind my tremendous enthusiasm for this timely initiative. Wasn’t there something problematic about viewing the eighteenth century as a whole? Did I intuit some sort of fundamental divide, perhaps somewhere between the deaths of J. S. Bach and Handel, one that somehow cast this century into two irreconcilable worlds? The seventeenth century was perhaps enough of a mess for its disunity to become a historiographical topic in its own right, its separate threads providing at least some narrative potential, even if these could never convincingly be drawn into a single whole. And the nineteenth century was perhaps sufficiently punctuated with various revolutions and restorations, together with an overriding story of industrial progress, to fall into a coherent (if divisive) family of narratives. Even the twentieth century – that which surely saw the largest number of changes in the human condition and the exponential pluralizing of ‘legitimate’ musical traditions – seems to have a clear enough trajectory, much of the music at its end having a discernible genealogical connection with that of its beginning. So what was it that was worrying me about the eighteenth century?

“Men, Women, and Children Starving”: Archaeology of the Donner Family Camp

2010 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 627-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly J. Dixon ◽  
Shannon A. Novak ◽  
Gwen Robbins ◽  
Julie M. Schablitsky ◽  
G. Richard Scott ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
Human Tissue ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Animal Tissue ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Wild Game ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Lake Site ◽  
The Human Condition

In spring of 1846, the George and Jacob Donner families and some 80 traveling companions began their overland trek to California. When the party ascended the Sierra Nevada in late October, a snowstorm forced the group to bivouac. At this point, the train became separated into two contingents; the larger party camped near Donner Lake and the smaller group—including the Donner families—settled at Alder Creek. Though written accounts from the Lake site imply many resorted to cannibalism, no such records exist for Alder Creek. Here we present archaeological findings that support identification of the Alder Creek camp. We triangulate between historical context, archaeological traces of the camp, and osteological remains to examine the human condition amid the backdrops of starvation and cannibalism. A stepped analytical approach was developed to examine the site’s fragmentary bone assemblage (n= 16,204). Macroscopic and histological analyses indicate that the emigrants consumed domestic cattle and horse and procured wild game, including deer, rabbit, and rodent. Bladed tools were used to extensively process animal tissue. Moreover, bone was being reduced to small fragments; pot polish indicates these fragments were boiled to extract grease. It remains inconclusive, however, whether such processing, or the assemblage, includes human tissue.

Cooper and The American Dream

PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-94
Author(s):  
Frank M. Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Social Order ◽  
American Dream ◽  
James Fenimore Cooper ◽  
Formal Theory ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Human Condition

Chroniclers of the American Dream have made progressively clear in recent years that the “dialogue” or “dialectic” it produced was the distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century American letters. An important consequence of the valuable studies carried out in particular by Marius Bewley, A. N. Kaul, R. W. B. Lewis, and Henry Nash Smith has been the rehabilitation of James Fenimore Cooper as an early and exemplary participant in this debate. According to Lewis, he is, as the creator of the “fictional Adamic hero unambiguously treated,” a partisan of the party of Hope in its skirmishes with the parties of Memory and Irony. In the more properly internalized drama presented by the others, he is the theater for a struggle between what Smith sees as his commitment to the “principle of social order” and his attraction to the “anarchic freedom” projected in Leatherstocking; what Bewley sees as Europe and America taken as value clusters similar to those later placed in dramatic opposition by Henry James; and what Kaul sees as “the history and the myth of American civilization,” acceptance and repudiation of ties with the corrupt European past. But this revised conception of Cooper's significance is in the process of passing into stereotype before it is validated. What remains to be done, what I propose to do, is to examine closely the texture of his habitual discourse. By isolating and relating those minute flourishes and recurring expressions which betray a writer's stance in its complexity, I hope to bring more clearly into focus the conflict between Cooper's formal theory, the conscious thesis of universal depravity which was the structuring principle in his religious and political philosophy (his acceptance of Europe as an abiding reminder of the human condition) and the half or barely articulated antithesis of meliorism (his rejection of Europe as the inevitable condition)— a conflict which did not so much end in an outright victory for either view as subside in a faltering synthesis.

scholarly journals Aesthetics of Modernist Literature: a Style Analysis of Three Texts from T. S. Eliot, S. Beckett and V. Woolf´s Writings as Sample

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Nasr-edine OUAHANI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonlinear Structures ◽  
Style Analysis ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
The Human Condition

This paper explores analytical and stylistic tools in the discourse of modernist literature as epitomized in three canonical works of three influential modernist literary figures: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. The paper shows how, upon meditation on the lived reality of Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, modernist literature writers resort to fragmented language, mythical usages, and nonlinear structures to respond to the much ravaging and grotesque events witnessed by the world in general and Europe in particular in this epoch. Reflecting the compartmentalized and Balkanized reality of the world through its dazzling stylistic and figurative innovations, modernist literature sought to shock audiences, to lead bare the inconsistency of the human condition. This goes in parallel with an emerging philosophy that turned conventions upside down in different domains: ethics and morals, religion, history, economy, politics, aesthetics, arts, and language among others.  

ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
David Schmidtz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Old Field ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Human Condition

AbstractOur modern observation-based approaches to the study of the human condition were shaped by the Scottish Enlightenment. Political Economy emerged as a discipline of its own in the nineteenth century, then fragmented further around the dawn of the twentieth century. Today, we see Political Economy’s pieces being reassembled and reunited with their philosophical roots. This issue pauses to reflect on the history of this new but also old field of study.

Compassion and Peregrinatio

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Joshua Hordern
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Healthcare Professionals ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter begins to describe the response to Chapter 1’s diagnosis. The core of a social theory which will provide therapy is introduced, namely, peregrinatio, the wayfaring and pilgrim experience of life. Peregrinatio is explained and deployed to show how it reframes healthcare encounters, illuminating the nature of compassion, its civic context, and its everyday practice and fostering six attitudes which conduce to compassion: (i) interest in the human life-course; (ii) patience with plurality of perspective; (iii) curiosity in human encounter and companionship; (iv) humility in conversation; (v) recognition of the proper value of healthcare; and (vi) perseverance in preserving the communal nature of human life amidst suffering. The benefits of such a framing of the human condition for three aspects of healing are considered: (i) the healing of the affections; (ii) the healing encounter with God amidst suffering; and (iii) the healing role of healthcare professionals. Objections to peregrinatio are considered and addressed.

scholarly journals Constructing and Complicating Physical Wholeness

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-72
Author(s):  
Ryan Sweet
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
New Models ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Human Condition

AbstractThis chapter explores the construction of the concept of physical wholeness and the way in which fears of physical loss were perpetuated. The chapter addresses nineteenth-century contexts such as changing understandings of the human condition, new models of work, and changes in legislation. It considers these factors alongside analyses of literary texts that stimulated anxiety regarding the neurological impact of body loss, including Frederick Marryat’s Jacob Faithful (1834) and Silas Weir Mitchell’s “The Case of George Dedlow” (1866). The chapter ends by investigating how the burgeoning prosthesis market reinforced preferences for physical normalcy in advertisements as it exploited them for capitalist ends.

scholarly journals “os dentes afiados da vida preferem a carne na mais tenra infância ”: etnocartografar com olhos de besta

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (36) ◽  
pp. 01-28
Author(s):  
Marcos Ribeiro de Melo ◽  
Michele De freitas faria de Vasconcelos ◽  
Edson Augusto de Souza neto
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Main Character ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Ways Of Life ◽  
The Human Condition

in this article, we experience the exercise of a screen ethnocartography in agency with the film Beasts of the southern wild (2012) by the director Benh Zeitlin. We tested a film experimentation that led to a renewed writing (our) ways of life. We bet on cinema and childhood as possibilities for creating cracks and a stutter of language for the creation of new worlds and ways of living. In cinema images less as a representation, and more as art that proposes incompleteness, fissure, a hole in appearances. In childhood as an exercise of differentiation and resistance to dominant narratives in a given context. In childhood as a limiting experience of/in language, tirelessly exposing the human condition in front of the world. Thus, accompanying the main character of the plot, little Hushpuppy — a six-year-old resident of the “Charles Doucet Island”, experienced as “the Bathtub” —, we are shaken by the forms of life there, considered bestial and not recognized by city humans. Hushpuppy, his father and friends resist attempts to destroy their existence by the forms of the state that try to domesticate them, imbued with the logic that primitives must come to civilization, just as children must become adults. 

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