Exemplary Biography

Mnemosyne ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Murray

Abstract Moving away from the nineteenth century’s concern with Quellenforschung, serious study of Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta memorabilia in the twentieth century produced a variety of different approaches to this Tiberian text of exemplary tales. One of the most interesting projects in this regard was produced by T.F. Carney, who scrutinised a key exemplar, Gaius Marius, across the work. In constructing a ‘biography’ from the exempla themselves, Carney’s labour contributed much to Roman history generally, but also pioneered a novel methodology for reading Valerius Maximus—one that was taken up and imitated by later scholars. This methodology, however, is not without problems, particularly in relation to the way that Valerius has shaped, structured, and arranged his work at the level of chapter. By building upon Carney’s methodology, but also considering the context of the individual chapters themselves, I provide in this paper a case study of the way in which Valerius writes the life of Marcus Tullius Cicero—a figure unique in the Facta et dicta memorabilia in being both exemplar and a major source for the work. In doing so, this article elucidates the process of ‘exemplary biography’.

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Tze Ming Ng

AbstractThis article aims to apply the concept of 'glocalization' to the study of theology and culture. China is chosen as a case study, with particular focus on a Chinese theologians discussion of the interplay between Christianity and Chinese Culture in the early twentieth century China. Francis Wei was the first Chinese President of Huazhong University in Wuhan, 1929–1952, and he was appointed as the first Henry Luce Visiting Professor of World Christianity in 1945–46. Wei's conviction was that Christianity and Chinese culture could be complementary. He held that China needed Christianity for a better understanding of God's nature and the way human beings could communicate with God, while maintaining that Christianity needed China to move beyond western denominationalism. Moreover, Christianity could not become a universal religion without including China. This article argues that Wei's work is relevant to the contemporary discussion about interaction between globalization and localization, known as 'glocalization'.


2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gervase Phillips

The increased lethality of nineteenth-century “arms of precision” caused military formations to disperse in combat, transforming the ordinary soldier from a near automaton, drilled to deliver random fire under close supervision, into a moral agent who exercised a degree of choice about where, when, and how to fire his weapon. The emerging autonomy of the soldier became a central theme in contemporary tactical debates, which struggled to reconcile the desire for discipline with the individual initiative necessary on the battlefield. This tactical conundrum offers revealing insights about human aggression and mass violence. Its dark legacy was the propagation of military values into civilian society, thus paving the way for the political soldiers of the twentieth century.


2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-293
Author(s):  
John Young

AbstractWhile summits are well served in the literature on diplomacy, the focus tends to be on specific, high-profile occasions such as Munich and Yalta or on the broad experience of multilateral conferences. Such approaches may obscure the full range of summits that were taking place by the later twentieth century. By focusing on a four-year period in the experience of a particular leader, this article provides a case study of summitry, which might serve as the basis for comparisons with other countries and time periods. It draws out the frequency, type and geographical range of summits experienced by Edward Heath as British premier and, in doing so, also raises issues about how types of summits are defined, the relationship between bilateral and multilateral meetings and the way that summitry has evolved as a diplomatic practice. In particular it emerges that summits were frequent and ofen perfunctory affairs, sometimes held as a simple courtesy to leaders who were passing through London. In this sense the British experience may have been unusual, but it is also evident from the number of Heath's interlocutors and the multilateral conferences that he attended that summits had become an integral part of political life for world leaders in the jet age.


Author(s):  
Jim Isaak

While standards are issued by organizations, individuals do the actual work, with significant collaboration required to agree on a common standard. This article explores the role of individuals in standards setting as well as the way these individuals are connected to one another through trusting networks and common values. This issue is studied in the context of the IEEE POSIX set of standards, for which the author was actively involved for more than 15 years. This case study demonstrates that the goals and influence of individual participants are not just that of their respective employers but may follow the individual through changes of employment. It also highlights changes in the relative importance of individual and corporate influence in UNIX-related standardization over time. Better understanding of the interaction between individuals and organizations in the context of social capital and standardization can provide both a foundation for related research and more productive participation in these types of forums.


2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Chowrimootoo

AbstractThrough investigating the production and reception ofDeath in Venice(1973), this essay considers the ways Britten and his audiences responded to the fraught discourse surrounding opera in the twentieth century. If the genre as a whole often threatened to fall on the wrong side of contemporaneous aesthetic oppositions – between abstraction and immediacy, the intellectual and the visceral, the high and the low – early critics of this particular work tended to translate its visual spectacles and musical rhetoric into more rarefied terms. Taking my cue from elements of contradiction and ambivalence in this sublimating criticism, I will examine how Britten's opera resists the very suppressions it promotes. I will suggest that, in simultaneously staging and confounding oppositions at the heart of contemporary operatic discourse,Death in Veniceoffers a powerful case study of the way composers, directors, critics and audiences responded to and overcame the terminal illness with which opera had been diagnosed in the middle third of the twentieth century.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 471-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kylie Cheng

Objectives The objective of this study was to discuss jinn possession in Muslim culture, and the importance of understanding cultural differences in mental health. Conclusion It is important to understand cultural and religious differences in psychiatry, as it affects the way patients perceive and attribute symptoms. It also helps clinicians to reach an accurate diagnosis and provide appropriate treatments. Beliefs about jinn possession should not automatically be regarded as delusional. In alleged cases of jinn possession, clinicians should consider all the biopsychosocial, cultural and spiritual factors that are unique to the individual. Further research is still needed in this area.


Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Nash

Scrutinizing the literature of a modern religious movement this article argues that postcolonial theory can effectively be brought to the analysis of religions and religious writing. The case study focuses on the way in which colonialism impacted the Bahai faith in a specific and formative way, causing its leadership to present aspects of the faith’s development by employing the codes of Western Orientalism. Drawing on nineteenth and early twentieth-century European orientalist texts composed either about their own faith, or the Islamic society out of which it grew, the article demonstrates how these led Bahais “themselves [to]… adopt [..] an essentially Orientalist vision of their own community and of Iranian society”. Edward Said’s Orientalism throws light on an enduring situation in which mutual othering has crossed from culture and religion into politics, however since the late 1990s critics have demonstrated that Orientalism can function in more varied ways than Said allowed. Finally, the possibility is discussed as to whether there can be such a thing as a postcolonial Bahai scholar.


Author(s):  
Hanna Looks ◽  
Jannik Fangmann ◽  
Jörg Thomaschewski ◽  
María-José Escalona ◽  
Eva-Maria Schön

AbstractContext: Twenty years after the publication of the agile manifesto, agility is becoming more and more popular in different contexts. Agile values are changing the way people work together and influence people’s mindset as well as the culture of organizations. Many organizations have understood that continuous improvement is based on measurement.Objective: The objective of this paper is to present how agility can be measured at the team level. For this reason, we will introduce our questionnaire for measuring agility, which is based on the agile values of the manifesto.Method: We developed a questionnaire comprising 36 items that measure the current state of a team’s agility in six dimensions (communicative, change-affine, iterative, self-organized, product-driven and improvement-oriented). This questionnaire has been evaluated with respect to several expert reviews and in a case study.Results: The questionnaire provides a method for measuring the current state of agility, which takes the individual context of the team into account. Furthermore, our research shows, that this technique enables the user to uncover dysfunctionalities in a team.Conclusion: Practitioners and organizations can use our questionnaire to optimize collaboration within their teams in terms of agility. In particular, the value delivery of an organization can be increased by optimizing collaboration at the team level. The development of this questionnaire is a continuous learning process with the aim to develop a standardized questionnaire for measuring agility.


2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-442
Author(s):  
Yoon Sun Yang

Abstract This article examines how a major twentieth-century Korean writer, Kim Tongin, adopted the language of Western medical science to produce the effect of literary interiority as an iteration of the individual in his novella “Oh, the Frail-Hearted!” (1919–20). My reading of the story unravels the ways in which this work draws several equations between the practice of medical science and that of literature. The main character’s diary and letter are treated as his medical records; a well-known man of letters acts as his doctor by identifying his symptoms through the “medical” gaze; readers are invited to read his “mind” the way doctors examine those of their patients; his illness gives his interiority an identifiable form; and his extramarital affair is not only a love story but also a trigger of his mental illness. The medical gaze allows him to explore his sexuality beyond the traditional conjugal norm—whether via a heterosexual love affair or homoeroticism. His pursuit of individuality is, however, bounded by the “colonial” gaze, under which he appears as an accomplice of the collective debilitation of the colony through a moralistic prism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 175-181
Author(s):  
Christopher Terepin

Recordings made in the early part of the twentieth century suggest a great deal of historical diversity in musicians’ attitudes to ensemble performance. The ensemble style of the Czech (formerly Bohemian) String Quartet, traces of which were captured on record in the 1920s, offers an intriguing example of an approach to “togetherness” that is strikingly unlike that of our own time. Drawing on their recording of the Lento movement of Dvorak’s famous String Quartet in F Op.96, this case study investigates aspects of the Czech Quartet’s unusual ensemble playing, and in particular the way they combine expressive asynchrony with coordinated, large-scale shaping strategies. By situating these practices in aesthetic and theoretical context, this chapter shows how the evidence of early recordings might contribute valuable nuance to our understanding of the conventions of (good) ensemble performance.


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