The Limits of Text and Tradition: Theosophy, Translation, and Transnational Vedānta in the fin-de-siècle

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-228
Author(s):  
Nika Kuchuk
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ◽  
Fin De Siècle

Abstract Part of a larger project interrogating literal and discursive translation in late-colonial Vedāntic thought, this paper focuses on Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society and its key ideologue. Blavatsky grounded her articulation of Theosophical teachings in a mysterious source text, purportedly written in a sacerdotal language known as the Senzar. In presenting herself as its translator, Blavatsky deftly maneuvers between competing philosophies of language and knowledge paradigms, from philology to occultism. This allows her to simultaneously frame Theosophy as continuous with Vedāntic and Buddhist thought and as superseding them, thus effectively articulating a new—universal—teaching. Utilizing translation theory as an analytical and hermeneutical lens, this paper examines some of Blavatsky’s more notable discursive mechanics and their textual afterlives, tracing the tensions between authorship and authority, tradition and innovation, the particular and the universal. It is proposed that attending to such translational practices (or claims thereof) points to broader questions of meaning-making and commensurability implicated in any project of articulating a tradition across linguistic, cultural, temporal and geographical spaces—as well as its limits and challenges.

Paul Sérusier: Art and Theosophy

2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-213
Author(s):  
Nancy Davenport
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Original Design ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ◽  
The World ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
19Th Century France ◽  
The Universe

AbstractThe art of Paul Sérusier and that of his artist friends has been interpreted in this essay as having its roots in the Theosophical themes prevalent in an interdependent circle of authors and spiritualists in 18th and 19th century France. These mystical thinkers were less concerned with the writings and indomitable presence of the acknowledged leading light of Theosophy Helena Petrovna Blavatsky than with a more specifically French national yearning for its imagined Celtic and traditionally Roman Catholic roots, smothered, in their view, by secular and materialistic modern sensibilities. Theosophy, “the essence of all doctrines, the inmost truth of all religions” as defined by the doyenne of French Theosophy Maria, Countess of Caithness and Duchess of Medina-Pomar, led Sérusier to seek elemental truth for his art in a remote inland village in Brittany where he painted for many years, to a Benedictine monastery on the Danube where formerly Nazarene artist/monks had created a system of drawing and painting believed to be based on the original design of the universe, and to the widely read text Les Grands Initiés (1899) by the mystic writer, Edouard Schuré. Sérusier's broad-reaching search for the Theosophical roots of art was one aspect of the fin de siècle malaise that led the arts out of the world into dreams.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

Medical Humanism and Blackwood’s Magazine at the Fin de Siècle

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Coyer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Medical Humanism

If Blackwood’s helped to generate a recuperative medical humanism in the first half of the nineteenth century, what was its legacy? This ‘Coda’ turns to the fin de siècle to trace some key examples of a resurgence of the magazine’s mode of medical humanism at a time of perceived crisis for the medical profession, when many began ‘to worry that the transformation of medicine into a science, as well as the epistemological and technical successes of the new sciences, may have been bought at too great a price’....

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