The Crisis (Musical Staves)

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-86
Author(s):  
Martin Eisner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Final Section ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Innovative Idea ◽  
Consolation Of Philosophy ◽  
Musical Accompaniment ◽  
De Vulgari Eloquentia

This chapter begins with the musical stages that accompany Dante’s ballata in an early twentieth-century English translation. Although the music is a modern fabrication, it calls attention to the distinctive form of the ballata which Dante considers defective in the De vulgari eloquentia because it requires the kind of musical accompaniment these staves provide. This chapter examines how this formal defect also encodes a thematic problem of relying on Beatrice’s greeting. This chapter shows how Dante deals with this crisis through the praise style expressed in the self-sufficient (not defective) form of the canzone Donne ch’avete intelletto. While the canzone’s significance has been widely recognized, this chapter shows how Dante’s expression of this new idea of love by plotting these different poetic forms draws on the two books he read after Beatrice’s death, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and Cicero’s De amicitia. The final section discusses how several later readers transformed and even erased Dante’s innovative idea of love.

Mock Mockers: Cynicism, Suffering, Irish Modernism

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-194
Author(s):  
Ronan McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
Irish Modernism

Cynicism styles itself as the answer to the mental suffering produced by disillusionment, disappointment, and despair. It seeks to avoid them by exposing to ridicule naive idealism or treacherous hope. Modern cynics avoid the vulnerability produced by high ideals, just as their ancient counterparts eschewed dependence on all but the most essential of material needs. The philosophical tradition of the Cynics begins with the Ancients, including Diogenes and Lucian, but has found contemporary valence in the work of cultural theorists such as Peter Sloterdijk. This article uses theories of cynicism to analyze postcolonial disappointment in Irish modernism. It argues that in the “ambi-colonial” conditions of early-twentieth-century Ireland, the metropolitan surety of and suaveness of a cynical attitude is available but precarious. We therefore find a recursive cynicism that often turns upon itself, finding the self-distancing and critical sure-footedness of modern, urbane cynicism a stance that itself should be treated with cynical scepticism. The essay detects this recursive cynicism in a number of literary works of post-independence Ireland, concluding with an extended consideration of W. B. Yeats’s great poem of civilizational precarity, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”

Cicero: On Fate

1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.W. Sharples
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Free Will ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Issue ◽  
Latin Culture ◽  
Consolation Of Philosophy

Cicero and Boethius did more than anyone else to transmit the insights of Greek philosophy to the Latin culture of Western Europe, which has played so influential a part in our civilisation to this day. Cicero's treatise On Fate (De Fato), though surviving only in a fragmentary and mutilated state, records contributions to the discussion of a central philosophical issue, that of free will and determinism, which are comparable in importance to those of twentieth-century philosophers and indeed sometimes anticipate them. Study of the treatise has been hindered by the lack of a combined Latin text and English translation based on a clear understanding of the arguments; this edition is intended to meet this need. The last book of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (Philosophiae Consolationis) is linked with Cicero's treatise by its theme, the relation of divine foreknowledge to human freedom. The book presents Latin text with facing-page English translation, introduction and commentary.

Maurice

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-153
Author(s):  
Finn Fordham
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Homosexual Orientation ◽  
The World ◽  
Resonant Term ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Edward Carpenter

As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body and the soul. Forster's exploration of the queer relationship between body and soul took place at a time when there was a battle over the nature of the soul, often defensive against materialism: concepts of identity and selfhood were undergoing radical contestations and the word 'soul' is a resonant term in modernist novels. How did emerging discourses, such as those of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others, about homosexual orientation relate to these contemporary discourses around the self? The chapter focuses on two passages about body and soul, whose textual genesis reveals problems of phrasing, as Forster’s unprecedented investigation of sexuality takes him to the edge of identity. It then examines how certain spaces, such as windows and thresholds, become symbolic zones of transgressive encounters between inner and outer, soul and body. It concludes by showing how Forster avoids drawing up any consistent ‘doctrine’ of body and soul. As a work of fiction in which different visions of the world come into conflict with each other, Maurice is a unique and vital witness of transforming discourses about homosexuality in the early twentieth century.

scholarly journals Still Afraid of Legal Pluralism? Encountering Santi Romano

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 539-558
Author(s):  
Roger Cotterrell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Legal Pluralism ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sociolegal Studies

The second edition of Santi Romano’s book, The Legal Order, now appearing in its first English translation (2017), is a pioneer text of legal pluralism. Its interest lies in its extreme radicalism and in the fact that, although it is written by a lawyer, its argument has many important political implications and addresses core conceptual issues in contemporary sociolegal studies of legal pluralism. The social and political context of Romano’s book in early twentieth-century Italy is far from being solely of historical interest. Issues that surrounded his juristic thinking in its time resonate with important political and social issues of today.

The Sovereign Logic of Jack London’s Sea Stories

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hank Scotch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
The Self ◽  
New World Order ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Spatial Differences ◽  
The Difference

Jack London’s maritime writing often interrogates the difference between the savage space of the “outside” sea and the relative domesticity of land’s civilized interior, as well as the ways in which this spatial distinction supports the sovereignty of space, society, and the self. But instead of maintaining these spatial differences, London’s work is all about exposing their increasing indistinction in the early twentieth century and the effects such a spatial destabilization had on sovereignty itself. This interrogation of the new world order and its effects on previous forms of sovereignty, the chapter argues, is what makes London’s contribution to American maritime writing (especially The Sea-Wolf and The Cruise of the Snark) so important. London’s sea stories not only acknowledge the world’s new “nomos” but the effects this order has on political and personal forms of autonomy and coherence.

EUGENICS AND PRAGMATISM: F. C. S. SCHILLER'S PHILOSOPHICAL POLITICS

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 661-687 ◽  
Author(s):  
ADMIR SKODO
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Formal Logic ◽  
The Self ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
Psychical Research ◽  
Broad Scope ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Eugenics Movement ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
British Philosopher

The British philosopher F. C. S. Schiller (1864–1937) was a leading pragmatist in the early twentieth century. His critiques of formal logic and his attempts to construct a humanist logic, derived from an anti-foundationalist humanism, are recognized as lasting philosophical achievements. But scholars have failed to consider that Schiller was passionately committed to the British eugenics movement. This essay explores the relationship between Schiller's pragmatism and his eugenicism. It argues that Schiller represents the broad scope of pragmatism in the early twentieth century through his involvements not only with eugenics, but also with psychical research as well. Underneath Schiller's various undertakings lies a common theme: the self, conceived in voluntaristic, historicist, and concrete terms. By tracing the trajectory of this theme in Schiller's thought, this essay demonstrates that Schiller's eugenicism was confined to the presuppositions of his pragmatist logic, which steered Schiller's eugenicism toward a distinctively nondeterministic and non-social-Darwinist kind.

‘What is a Beautiful Body?’

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 192-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murat C. Yıldız
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
Young Men ◽  
The Self ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Sports Clubs ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article examines the emergence and spread of the ‘sportsman’ genre of Ottoman photography in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Istanbul. The ‘sportsman photograph’ depicted young men posing shirtless or wearing tight-fitting athletic attire, flexing their muscles and exhibiting their bodies. These images were embedded in a wider set of athletic and leisure activities and constituted novel social and photographic practices. By tracing the deployment of ‘sportsman’ photographs in sports clubs and the press, I argue that they cemented homosocial bonds, normalized and popularized new notions of masculinity, confessionalized the male body and reconfigured the ways in which Ottoman Muslims, Christians and Jews performed and conveyed their commitment to middle-class notions of masculinity and the self.

SELF, SPENCER AND SWARAJ: NATIONALIST THOUGHT AND CRITIQUES OF LIBERALISM, 1890–1920

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
SHRUTI KAPILA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Language ◽  
Self In Relation ◽  
Liberal Nationalism ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Individual Self

In giving a historically specific account of the self in early twentieth-century India, this article poses questions about the historiography of nationalist thought within which the concept of the self has generally been embedded. It focuses on the ethical questions that moored nationalist thought and practice, and were premised on particular understandings of the self. The reappraisal of religion and the self in relation to contemporary evolutionary sociology is examined through the writings of a diverse set of radical nationalist intellectuals, notably Shyamji Krishnavarma, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Har Dayal, and this discussion contextualizes Mohandas Gandhi. Over three related sites of public propaganda, philosophical reinterpretation and individual self-reinvention, the essay charts a concern with the ethical as a form of critique of liberalism and liberal nationalism. While evolutionism and liberalism often had a mutually reinforcing relationship, the Indian critique of liberalism was concerned with the formation of a new moral language for a politics of the self.

BURGLARY INSURANCE AND THE CULTURE OF FEAR IN BRITAIN, c. 1889–1939

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 1039-1064 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELOISE MOSS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Marketing Strategy ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Insurance Sector ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Culture Of Fear ◽  
State And Market ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Market Discourse

ABSTRACTThis article explores the representations of burglary and burglars created by the burglary insurance sector in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Two lines of argument are developed: first, that the marketing strategy of the burglary insurance sector exacerbated existing fears about the nature and prevalence of burglary in a calculated bid to attract custom; and secondly, that the depictions of crime and criminal used in marketing this form of insurance were subsequently revised in the contracts issued to customers as part of the industry's commercial transactions, thereby securing against supposed ‘negligence’ by homeowners as well as malicious attempts to defraud insurers. As the self-styled commercial ‘protection’ against burglary, burglary insurance became an ordinary household investment. Its prosperity therefore enables us to identify certain ideas about crime and criminal then current. Crucially, this research highlights the intersection of media, state, and market discourse about crime in weaving a specific version of burglary into the very fabric of everyday life, uniting three domains that historians of crime have traditionally treated separately.

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