The Oxford Handbook to the Second Sophistic

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Second Sophistic ◽  
Dio Chrysostom ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Classical Traditions

The study of the Second Sophistic is a relative newcomer to the Anglophone field of classics, and much of what characterizes it temporally and culturally remains a matter of legitimate contestation. This Handbook offers a diversity of scholarly voices that attempt to define the state of this developing field. Included are chapters that offer practical guidance on the wide range of valuable textual materials that survive, many of which are useful or even core to inquiries of particularly current interest (e.g., gender studies, cultural history of the body, sociology of literary culture, history of education and intellectualism, history of religion, political theory, history of medicine, cultural linguistics, intersection of the classical traditions and early Christianity). The Handbook contains chapters devoted to the work of the most significant intellectuals of the period, such as Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, Lucian, Apuleius, the novelists, the Philostrati, and Aelius Aristides. In addition to its content and bibliographical guidance, this volume helps to situate the textual remains within the period and its society, to describe and circumscribe the literary matter and the literary culture and societal context. Throughout it tries to keep the contextual demands in mind. In its scope and its pluralism of voices, this Handbook thus represents a new approach to the Second Sophistic, one that attempts to integrate Greek literature of the Roman period into the wider world of early imperial Greek, Latin, Jewish, and Christian cultural production, and one that keeps a sharp focus on situating these texts within their socio-cultural context.

Ivanova, E., ed. (2018). The biography in cultural history: Collected papers. Moscow: Ruteniya

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 270-275
Author(s):  
L. V. Egorova
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Theoretical Interpretation ◽  
Criminal Proceedings ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Case Files

A review of the collective monograph by researchers of the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the RAS into the origins and evolution of the biography as a genre. The first section of the book discusses composing a writer’s biography with the examples of Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson, the myth and the truth in Camões’ biography, as well as the specific features of this genre in the Latin American tradition. The second section of the monograph covers the history of the genre in Russia. Here, the authors discuss a wide range of problems, from the historical and cultural context of Simeon Polotsky’s biography to attempts of the genre’s theoretical interpretation. Also considered is P. Furman’s project, a series of biographies adapted for children’s reading. The third section focuses on documents at the source of poets’ biographies, criminal proceedings of the Decembrists, and case files of our contemporaries who fell victim of the Stalin terror.

Presentation

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Redacción CEIICH
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
History Of

<p class="p1">The third number of <span class="s1"><strong>INTER</strong></span><span class="s2"><strong>disciplina </strong></span>underscores this generic reference of <em>Bodies </em>as an approach to a key issue in the understanding of social reality from a humanistic perspective, and to understand, from the social point of view, the contributions of the research in philosophy of the body, cultural history of the anatomy, as well as the approximations queer, feminist theories and the psychoanalytical, and literary studies.</p>

Dancing Women

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Usha Iyer
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The Body ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material History ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Hindi Cinema

Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia’s most popular cultural forms—cinema and dance—historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the “women’s question” via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the “choreomusicking body” and “dance musicalization,” aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic “techno-spectacles,” Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.

The Art of Love Poetry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Gray
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
Meaning And Function ◽  
Comprehensive History

Love begets poetry; poetry begets love. These two propositions have seemed evident to thinkers and poets across the Western literary tradition. Plato writes that “anyone that love touches instantly becomes a poet.” And even today, when poetry has largely disappeared from the mainstream of popular culture, it retains its romantic associations. But why should this be so—what are the connections between poetry and erotic love that lead us to associate them so strongly with one another? An examination of different theories of both love and poetry across the centuries reveals that the connection between them is not merely an accident of cultural history—the result of our having grown up hearing, or hearing about, love poetry—but something more intrinsic. Even as definitions of them have changed, the two phenomena have consistently been described in parallel terms. Love is characterized by paradox. Above all, it is both necessarily public, because interpersonal, and intensely private; hence it both requires expression and resists it. In poetry, especially lyric poetry, which features its own characteristic paradoxes and silences, love finds a natural outlet. This study considers both the theories and the love poems themselves, bringing together a wide range of examples from different eras in order to examine the major structures that love and poetry share. It does not aim to be a comprehensive history of Western love poetry, but an investigation into the meaning and function of recurrent tropes, forms, and images employed by poets to express and describe erotic love.

scholarly journals Milliyet Çocuk and the Making of Children's Literary Culture in Turkey in the 1970s

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-75
Author(s):  
Deniz Arzuk
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Majority Group

This article is based on a systematic content analysis of Milliyet Çocuk, a children's magazine published by a left-leaning publishing house in the politically polarised context of Turkey in the late 1970s. It outlines the socio-political and cultural context, defines Milliyet Çocuk's position in the structure of the publishing field and questions how a non-majority group made space for themselves in a nation's children's literature. The archival material used in this article has been collected for the course New Perspectives in Cultural History, taught by Prof. Cengiz Kırlı. My research is funded by the Swedish Institute.

Reception History and Beyond: Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 357-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Beal
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Cultural Turn

After highlighting the substantial gains made by the reception historical approach, this article proceeds to point out some of its inherent limitations, particularly when applied to biblical texts. In attending to the material-aesthetic dimensions of biblical texts, media, and ideas of the Bible, especially in dialogue with anthropological, material-historical, and media-historical approaches, these limitations become acute and call for a harder cultural turn than is possible from a strictly reception-historical approach. This article proposes to move beyond reception history to cultural history, from research into how biblical texts and the Bible itself are received to how they are culturally produced as discursive objects. Such a move would involve a double turn in the focus of biblical scholarship and interpretation: from hermeneutical reception to cultural production, and from interpreting scripture via culture to interpreting culture, especially religious culture, via its productions of scripture. As such, it would bring biblical research into fuller and more significant dialogue with other fields of comparative scriptural studies, religious studies, and the academic humanities and social sciences in general.

Language Learning

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Paugh
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Development ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
First Language ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Wide Range

The study of language learning is central to understanding how children learn to communicate and become competent members of their communities and social worlds. It is basic to the study of what it means to be human. As such, the body of research on this topic spans multiple disciplines including linguistics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, human development, education, applied linguistics, speech-language pathology, and neuroscience. It entails studies of the acquisition of first and second (third, etc.) languages in monolingual and bi/multilingual contexts, and both typical and atypical language development. Theories and methods used to study this phenomenon vary across academic disciplines. Linguistic and psychological approaches to first-language acquisition have focused more heavily on cognitive processes and development, while research from anthropological and sociolinguistic perspectives tends to examine learning language in its social and cultural context. These differing orientations are reflected in the terms used to refer to the process, for example, language acquisition or language development in linguistic and psychological approaches and language socialization in anthropological approaches. Much research on first-language acquisition has been carried out on English-speaking North American and European populations, but recent years have witnessed increasing analysis of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural data. Studies range in focus, examining theoretical claims or the acquisition of particular linguistic features such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. Researchers investigate the influences on language learning and seek to illuminate the relations of language to human development, cognitive processes, and/or culture. Normally developing children worldwide evidence a high degree of similarity in early language learning; thus it has been possible to summarize general developmental sequences. One of the most fundamental points of rigorous debate concerns the degree of influence played by innate genetic predispositions or mechanisms of language (“nature”) versus the role of the social environment and language(s) children are exposed to (“nurture”). Spurred by this and other debates, the field has exploded since the 1960s. The literature is extensive and multidisciplinary, with each area often very specialized. This bibliography covers a wide range of perspectives, including research that falls on all points of the nature-nurture continuum, but focuses primarily on early childhood and confines itself to reviews, primary case studies, and foundational publications on child language learning in each tradition. The article was compiled with research assistance from Divya Ganesan at James Madison University.

The Hurt(ful) Body

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Art History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Dialectical Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theatre Studies

This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. It has a sustained focus on visual sources, textual material and documents about actual events rather than well-known thinkers or ‘masterpieces’ of art history, and a preference for cases and historical contexts over systematic theory-building. The hurt(ful) body brings under discussion visual and performative representations of embodied pain, using an insistently dialectical approach that takes into account the perspective of the hurt body itself, the power and afflictions of its beholder and, finally, the routinising and redeeming of hurt within institutional contexts. The volume’s two-fold approach of the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ both from the perspective of the victim and the beholder (as well as their combined creation of a gaze), is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies, and confronting them to the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings, and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience. This will be done through three rubrics: the early modern performing body, beholder or audience responses, and the operations of institutional power. Because of its interdisciplinary approach of the history of pain and the hurt(ful) body, the book will be of interest for Lecturers and students from different fields, like the history of ideas, the history of the body, urban history, theatre studies, literary studies, art history, emotion studies and performance studies

How Nauchnaia Fantastika Was Made: The Debates about the Genre of Science Fiction from NEP to High Stalinism

Slavic Review ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Soviet Science ◽  
Literary Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Science Fiction

Based on a detailed analysis of published and unpublished sources, Matthias Schwartz reconstructs the making of Soviet science fiction in the cultural context of Soviet literary politics. Beginning in the 1920s, nauchnaia fantastika (scientific fantasy) became one of the most popular forms of light fiction, though literary critics and activists tended to dismiss it because of its origins in popular adventure, its ties to the so-called Pinkerton literature, and its ambiguous relationship to scientific inventions and social progress. Schwartz's analysis shows that even during high Stalinism, socialist realism's norms were far from being firmly established, but in the case of nauchnaia fantastika had to be constantly negotiated and reconstituted as fragile compromises involving different interest groups (literary politicians, writers, publishers, readers). A cultural history of Soviet science fiction also contributes to a better understanding of what people actually wanted to read and sheds new light on the question of how popular literature adapts to political changes and social destabilizations.

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