scholarly journals A Literary Piece as a Sociological Work: The Concept of Modernity in Karel Čapek’s "War With the Newts"

Adeptus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karel Hlaváček

A literary Piece as a Sociological Work: The Concept of Modernity in Karel Čapek’s War With the NewtsIn this text, I interpret Karel Čapek’s novel War With the Newts (1936) as a sociological work and analyze the concept of the modern age that it presents. First, I show in what sense Čapek’s work was sociological. Following Theodor Adorno, I suggest that the difference between literature and sociology is not of a fundamental but of a historical and analytical nature, and that what defines sociology is not method, empiricism, or explicitly defined concepts, but the insightful notion of social totality. In Čapek, I analyze a social totality that I find in his concept of the modern age. Such an analysis provides insight into the self-destructive power of modern society. I suggest that Čapek’s portrayal of modernity still applies today and that we can recognize the same patterns he presented in the world around us. Utwór literacki jako dzieło socjologiczne. Koncepcja nowoczesności w Inwazji jaszczurów Karela ČapkaW artykule analizuję powieść Karela Čapka Inwazja jaszczurów (1936) jako pracę socjologiczną, skupiając się na zaprezentowanej w niej koncepcji nowoczesności. W pierwszej części tekstu pokazuję, w jakim sensie można uznać pracę Čapka za socjologiczną. Podążając śladami Theodora W. Adorna, uważam, że różnica między literaturą a socjologią nie jest fundamentalna, a jedynie historyczna i analityczna, oraz że wyróżnikiem socjologii nie są metoda, empiryzm czy jednoznacznie zdefiniowane koncepcje, lecz dające głęboki wgląd pojęcie całości społecznej. W drugiej części tekstu analizuję zidentyfikowane przeze mnie u Čapka pojęcie całości społecznej, jakie stanowi jego koncepcja nowoczesności. Analiza ta pozwala uzyskać wgląd w autodestrukcyjną moc nowoczesnego społeczeństwa. Staram się dowieść, że przedstawiona przez tego autora wizja nowoczesności jest wciąż aktualna, a opisane przez niego wzory możemy zaobserwować w otaczającym nas świecie.

Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-14
Author(s):  
Robert Gnuse

Psalm 104 is a majestic hymn to creation, a dynamic corollary to the more formal presentation of the creation of the world in Genesis 1. Reflection upon some of the passages provides us with insight into the biblical author’s appreciation for nature, an attitude that needs to inspire us in this age of ecological crisis. Though the biblical text is unaware of such an ecological crisis; nonetheless, passages shine forth that can speak to us in our modern age of global warming and environmental collapse.


2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-29
Author(s):  
Tomy Kallarackal

The Value Added Tax was first introduced in France in 1954. It was the resultant effort of France and members of the European Economic Community (E.E.C) during the 1950s aimed at the simplification of commodity taxes. Currently more than 130 nations in the world have adopted the VAT system. In the last decade alone over 50 nations have introduced VAT. This includes implementation in China and most recently the addition of Australia to the list of VAT nations. The world over, VAT is payable on both goods and services as they constitute a part of the national GDR Excise duty and sales taxes are merged into the singularity of VAT. No tax is levied on exports with full input tax credit made available. The scheme of taxation adopted by most nations is very simple. The seller of goods and the service provider charge tax on sales, avail input tax credit and pay the difference as VAT to the goVernment treasury. The compliance system in VAT nations is also very simple. There is very less interface between the tax collector and the tax payer. However there are provisions for heavy penalization of VAT defaulters. VAT is administered nationally and is also levied on imports.  


Author(s):  
Carey K. Morewedge ◽  
Daniella M. Kupor

Intuitions, attitudes, images, mind-wandering, dreams, and religious messages are just a few of the many kinds of uncontrolled thoughts that intrude on consciousness spontaneously without a clear reason. Logic suggests that people might thus interpret spontaneous thoughts as meaningless and be uninfluenced by them. By contrast, our survey of this literature indicates that the lack of an obvious external source or motive leads people to attribute considerable meaning and importance to spontaneous thoughts. Spontaneous thoughts are perceived to provide meaningful insight into the self, others, and the world. As a result of these metacognitive appraisals, spontaneous thoughts substantially affect the beliefs, attitudes, decisions, and behavior of the thinker. We present illustrative examples of the metacognitive appraisals by which people attribute meaning to spontaneous secular and religious thoughts, and the influence of these thoughts on judgment and decision-making, attitude formation and change, dream interpretation, and prayer discernment.


2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Byrne

This essay concerns the question of whether it is possible to have an account of what judges ought to do when they decide cases if one accepts Stanley Fish’s thesis that man is a socially constructed creature, who can only see the world around him in terms of the practice that he is involved in. It puts forward the view that such a position is defensible, provided that one makes different metaphysical commitments to the ones made by Fish. It is argued that Fish is best understood as a metaphysical idealist. The essay seeks to demonstrate that Martin Heidegger’s conception of the self and interpretation are similar to those of Fish, but that, when understood as involving a commitment to metaphysical realism, Heidegger’s philosophy can hold the possibility of strong legal theory open in a way that Fish’s cannot. Michael S. Moore’s natural law position is used in order to articulate what such a position might be. Moore’s example of what a judge ought to do if called upon to define ‘death’ as a concept is used to illustrate the difference between Fish and Heidegger when it comes to metaphysics and strong legal theory, despite their similarities when it comes to an account of interpretation and of the self.


2014 ◽  
pp. 60-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Connolly

After presenting a critique of both negative and positive freedom this essay pursues the relation between creativity and freedom, drawing upon Foucault, Deleuze and Nietzsche to do so.  Once you have understood Nietzsche’s reading of a culturally infused nest of drives in a self, the task becomes easier.  A drive is not merely a force pushing forward; it is also a simple mode of perception and intention that pushes forward and enters into creative relations with other drives when activated by an event.  You can also understand more sharply how the Foucauldian tactics of the self work.  We can now carry this insight into the Deleuzian territory of micropolitics and collective action by reviewing his work on flashbacks and “the powers of the false.” If a flashback in film pulls us back to a bifurcation point where two paths were possible and one was taken, the powers of the false refer to the subliminal role the path not taken can play in the formation of creative action.  As you pursue these themes you see that neither old, organic notions of belonging to the world nor do negative notions of detachment as such do the work needed.  Deleuze’s notion of freedom carries us to the idea of cultivating “belief” in a world of periodic punctuations.  The latter are essential to creativity and incompatible with organic belonging.  They are also indispensable supports of a positive politics today.


2014 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Szostak

YouTube is a massively popular video streaming website. It has become so ingrained in daily consciousness that it is almost difficult to conceive of a time in which it did not exist. YouTube’s slogan is “Broadcast Yourself.” It connotes a sense of freedom to be whoever you want to be and communicate this conceptualization of the self with the world. Vlogs, or video blogs, share the same function as a traditional diary except there is no assumption of privacy since the videos are uploaded publicly. Both men and women participate in the production of these videos. However, the experience of male and female YouTubers is quite different. The following paper will explore whether YouTube operates as a public sphere in light of the gender divide that appears to have formed on the site. The four objectives of the paper are as follows: to define the concept of the public sphere, to determine the factors that have contributed to a gender divide on YouTube by analyzing the gendered use of the medium, to examine the reception of the controversial “Girls on YouTube” video by female vloggers, and to evaluate whether YouTube operates as a public sphere in light of the findings of the preceding sections. Ultimately, this paper will give greater insight into whether new media offers the possibility for women's voices to be heard or if it is simply a remediation of older patriarchal technology.


Author(s):  
Candy Gunther Brown

This chapter canvasses the various meanings of modernity and secularization, and develops a partial typology of Protestant reactions to these key themes of the twentieth century. Through the author’s expertise in global charismatic and divine healing movements, and shifting interpretations of sacred texts and religious practice, the chapter notes six categories of Protestant responses, which are to: (1) reinterpret the Bible in light of modern scholarship; (2) reaffirm the Bible’s authoritative status; (3) recontextualize the Bible in light of modern society and culture; (4) reinterpret medical materialism through the prism of biblical supernaturalism; (5) reassess the Bible’s compatibility with a plurality of spiritual healing resources; and (6) reappropriate modern technologies for traditional biblical ends. The chapter notes the challenges to the standard secularization theory, and to the self-definition of Protestant dissenting movements, as they move around the world. It illustrates these points with particular reference to the rise of African indigenous charismatic dissenting practice, starting with key figures such as William Wadé Harris.


2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc A.W. Damen ◽  
Jos M.A.F. Sanders ◽  
Karen van Dam

Long live learning: the effect of positive learning experience on low educated workers’ self-efficacy Long live learning: the effect of positive learning experience on low educated workers’ self-efficacy For both public authorities, businesses and employees ‘life-long learning’ remains increasingly important to maintain their competitive position in relation to other players on the world market and labor market respectively. Life-long learning, however, is not self-evident for everyone. Lower educated workers, for instance, participate less in training than their higher educated colleagues and the difference between these groups is gradually increasing. Goal of this longitudinal study was to measure the effects of training participation and learning experience on the self-efficacy of lower educated employees with regard to learning. Lower educated workers of three different organizations (N = 359) filled out a questionnaire on three moments with an interval of half a year. Training participation alone appeared to have no effect on self-efficacy, but a positive learning experience was positively correlated with an increase in self-efficacy with regard to learning. These results are in line with Bandura’s Social Learning Theory. This demonstrates the importance of a low key training which is aimed at gaining of a positive learning experience among lower educated workers in order to increase self-efficacy and trigger life-long learning.


Evil ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 252-257
Author(s):  
Eleonore Stump

Dante is a superb Thomist; and, in his Divine Comedy, he puts flesh on Aquinas’s sophisticated philosophical and theological views by means of an allegory with novelistic elements. In the Inferno, Dante the traveler exemplifies the way in which to do well what the sinner in hell did horribly. The punishment of the sinner shows the ugliness of a particular evil, and the actions of Dante the traveler show something powerfully good that is the alternative, the near neighbor, of the evil. By this twinned means, the nature of the seven deadly sins is vividly exposed, and true goodness and love, opposed to all the seven deadly sins, is illuminated and poignantly depicted. Furthermore, Dante is not only a superb Thomist and an insightful philosopher in his own right, but he incarnates the philosophy in narrative; and that makes all the difference in the world to his ability to give us insight into evil.


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