scholarly journals Post-secular Nature and the New Nature Writing

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 454-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander J. B. Hampton
Keyword(s):  
Nature Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Voice

With the turn of the twenty-first century, a group of writers began rehabilitating British nature writing and the voice of the individual interacting with it, producing what has become collectively known as the new nature writing. This examination considers how this literature represents a post-secular re-conceptualization of our relationship to nature. The new nature writing challenges a key element of the secular social imaginary, namely the subject-centered, immanence-bound, disenchanted representation of nature, which sets the self over and above nature, destabilizing existing dichotomies, and generating a multiplicity of hybridized possibilities that re-conceptualize our relationship to nature.

Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Century ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
The West ◽  
City Life ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
The Past ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Point Of Departure

What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers’ comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book’s point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.

Romantic Periodicals in the Twenty-First Century

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
British Romanticism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Periodical Studies ◽  
Digital Resources ◽  
Literary Periodicals ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Twenty First Century

While the twenty-first century has brought a wealth of new digital resources for researching late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century serials, the subfield of Romantic periodical studies has remained largely inchoate. This collection sets out to begin tackling this problem, offering a basic groundwork for a branch of periodical studies that is distinctive to the concerns, contexts and media of Britain’s Romantic age. Featuring eleven chapters by leading experts on the subject, it showcases the range of methodological, conceptual and literary-historical insights to be drawn from just one of the era’s landmark literary periodicals, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Drawing in particular on the trove of newly digitised content, specific essays model how careful analyses of the incisive and often inflammatory commentary, criticism and original literature from Blackwood’s first two decades (1817–37) might inform and expand many of the most vibrant contemporary discussions surrounding British Romanticism.

scholarly journals Robert Burns and the Re-making of National Memory in Contemporary Scotland

Authorship ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Dougal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Tourism Industry ◽  
First Century ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Selling Point ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Iconic Figure

Robert Burns, the eighteenth-century Scottish poet and song writer, continues to maintain a substantial cultural ‘afterlife’ in the twenty first century, both within Scotland and beyond. Achieving cult status in the nineteenth century, the power of Burns as a popular cultural icon remains undiminished. Where the appropriation of Burns as national icon in the nineteenth century was made manifest in statuary, commemorative objects, and painted portraits, the twenty-first century has been marked by the proliferation of the image of Burns in new forms and  technologies, with Burns as product and brand logo, museum and heritage attraction, and tourism industry selling point. This recent flourishing of interest and engagement raises questions about why and how an eighteenth-century poet continues to be the object of such extensive cultural elaboration at this time. In approaching this question, some fruitful lines of enquiry are being suggested in recent discussions that have looked at the nineteenth-century Burns as a ‘mobilizing agent in collective memory production’ (Rigney 2011, 81). One such appraisal points to how the construction of Burns in the nineteenth century as an iconic figure of Scottish cultural memory has the potential to ‘be resignified as necessary in subsequent chronological and geographical sites’ (Davis 2010, 14). It is this potential for the resignification of Burns as a symbolic site for the nation’s memory that this paper explores. In pointing to Burns’ representation in a variety of popular forms and in public discourse, the paper examines how a writer comes to be invested and reinvested as the voice and persona of the nation.

The Deposit of Monastic Faith: The Carolingians on the Essence of Monasticism

2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 74-86
Author(s):  
Renie Choy
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Classic Work ◽  
Precise Statement ◽  
Love Of Learning ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
External Form

We live in an age wary of admitting that any institution has an essence, and this has posed a dilemma for the study of monasticism. Until relatively recently, historians of monasticism zealously sought out its timeless and immutable inner qualities rather than its many varieties. While acknowledging the changes in external form and circumstances, Adolf von Harnack’s Monasticism: Its Ideals and History (1881), Dom Morin’s L’Idéal monastique (1912), James Hannay’s The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism (1903) and Herbert Workman’s The Evolution of the Monastic Ideal (1913) nevertheless pursued the stable qualities of monasticism which had survived the tides of time. Even in 1957 Jean Leclercq could still presume that monasticism had an ‘essence’, in a classic work translated into English under the title The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture. To our twenty-first-century ears, such a monolith of a title, suggestive of the existence of a metahistorical ‘monastic ideal’, seems out of date. This essay approaches the subject of monastic historiography via an examination of Carolingian reflection on the monastic past, arguing that the significance of the ninth-century monastic programme lies in its effort to distil the entire received monastic heritage into a coherent and precise statement about the fundamental purpose of the monastic life. So we ask the question: when Eigil described Boniface and Sturm as spending a day away in a ‘sweet discussion about the life and manners of monks’, what exactly did he think they were talking about?

Introduction

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jed Z. Buchwald ◽  
Mordechai Feingold
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Church History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
Fluid Media ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Natural Philosophers

This introductory chapter discusses Isaac Newton’s immersion in ancient prophecies, Church history, and alchemy. These investigations raise several questions: what links his interest in such matters to his investigations in optics, mechanics, and mathematics? Was Newton in his alchemical laboratory the same Newton who analyzed the passage of light through a prism and who measured the behavior of bodies falling through fluid media? What did the Newton who interpreted the Book of Revelation have to do with the man who wrote the Principia Mathematica? And how does the Newton who pored over ancient texts square with the author of the Opticks? The Newton that is the subject of this book differs in striking ways from any scientist of the twenty-first century. But he differed as well from his contemporary natural philosophers, theologians, and chronologers. The book investigates the origin of this difference and then uses it to produce a new understanding of Newton’s worldview and its historical context.

Language, Religion, Nation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Abstract Entities ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
Collective Phenomenon ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual

This chapter traces the popular usage of “genius” in the nineteenth century. If genius no longer has the self-evidence that was attributed to it in the eighteenth century, this is due in part to the profligacy with which the word had come to be used. While the term is widely invoked—in fact, ever more widely so—it is rarely the subject of sustained theoretical scrutiny of the type established by aesthetics and philosophy in the previous century. The genius celebrated in this popular usage was, more often than not, a collective phenomenon linking success or supremacy with the individual character of institutional or abstract entities in a way that combined genius as ingenium with genius as the form of superlative excellence.

Ventriloquism

2020 ◽  
pp. 223-270
Author(s):  
Natalie Pollard
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Waste Products ◽  
Plan B ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Limited Edition ◽  
The Voice

Tracking fugitive dynamics into the twenty-first century, this chapter probes Paul Muldoon’s exploration of metamorphosing poetic and corporeal forms. It focuses on the ventriloquizing of artworks, artists, and nonhuman agents (animals, plants, bodies, objects, waste products). It offers particular attention to: a) Muldoon’s limited edition pamphlets and literary-artistic collaborations containing photographs, drawings, and paintings. One example is Plan B, the cover of which shows a statue of Apollo wrapped in polythene. The poems within depose the colonizing order Apollo’s torso represents, engaging in refractions of aesthetic and literary inheritance. b) the voice of human and nonhuman bodies, especially Muldoon’s mythological preoccupation with half-animal forms, degenerating waste products, and digesting/gustatory metaphors for the lyric work. Each destabilizes fixed and perfected forms, often in favour of organic mutability and resonance.

scholarly journals The Humanities as Contradiction: Against the New Enclosures

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Christopher Breu
Keyword(s):  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
Dialectical Tension ◽  
Level Of Knowledge ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Twenty First Century

This essay begins by surveying our current moment in the humanities, diagnosing the language of crisis that frames much of the discourse about them. It argues that the crisis is a manufactured economic one not a symbolic one. The problems with many recent proposals—such as the new aestheticism, surface reading, and postcritique—is that they attempt to solve an economic crisis on the level of symbolic capital. They try to save the humanities by redisciplining them and making them mirror various forms amateur inquiry. I describe these approaches as the new enclosures, attempts at returning the humanities to disciplinarity with the hopes that administrative and neoliberal forces will find what we do more palatable. Instead of attempting to appease such forces by being pliant and apolitical, we need a new workerist militancy (daring to be “bad workers” from the point of view of neoliberal managerial rhetorics) to combat the economic crisis produced by neoliberalism. Meanwhile, on the level of knowledge production, the humanities need to resist the demand to shrink the scope of their inquiry to the disciplinary. The humanities, at their best, have been interdisciplinary. They have foregrounded both the subject of the human and all the complex forces that shape, limit, and exist in relationship and contradiction with the human. The essay concludes by arguing that the humanities, to resist neoliberal symbolic logics, need to embrace both a critical humanism, and the crucial challenges to this humanism that go by the name of antihumanism and posthumanism. It is only by putting these three discourses in negative dialectical tension with each other that we can begin to imagine a reinvigorated humanities that can address the challenges of the twenty-first century.

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