Reading laïcité

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 330-339
Author(s):  
Leon Sachs
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
The Self ◽  
Transitional Space ◽  
Literary Reading ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
Cultural Experiences ◽  
Literary Experience ◽  
The Way

Beginning with the observation that in recent years laïcité has taken on connotations that its nineteenth-century republican proponents would not have foreseen, this article reflects on the way laïcité’s evolving meaning bears on questions of literary experience and literary education. It argues that there are important structural similarities between recent theories of laïcité and theories of literary reading, both of which rely on similar conceptions of intellectual and cultural space and the kinds of identity formation that occur there. The first half of the article builds on arguments by political philosophers Marcel Gauchet and Catherine Kintzler, who assert that aesthetic and cultural experiences enact the psychic phenomena of self-distancing inherent in laïcité. From there, the article goes on to suggest linkages between this view of laical distanciation and the process of individuation outlined in D. W. Winnicott’s concept of transitional space, an influential concept for reader-oriented critics seeking to explain literary experience as an act of ‘getting out of the self’.

The Well-Mannered Auditor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Deaville
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
The Way

The chapter explores the way English-language etiquette books from the nineteenth century prescribe accepted behavior for upwardly mobile members of the bourgeoisie. This advice extended to social events known today as “salons” that were conducted in the domestic drawing room or parlor, where guests would perform musical selections for the enjoyment of other guests. The audience for such informal music making was expected to listen attentively, in keeping with the (self-) disciplining of the bourgeois body that such regulations represented in the nineteenth century. Yet even as the modern world became noisier and aurally more confusing, so, too, did contemporary social events, which led authors to become stricter in their disciplining of the audience at these drawing room performances. Nevertheless, hosts and guests could not avoid the growing “crisis of attention” pervading this mode of entertainment, which would lead to the modern habit of inattentive listening.

scholarly journals Worn Shoes: Identity, Memory and Footwear

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Hockey ◽  
Rachel Dilley ◽  
Victoria Robinson ◽  
Alexandra Sherlock
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Personal Transformation ◽  
The Self ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The North ◽  
The Way

This article raises questions about the role of footwear within contemporary processes of identity formation and presents ongoing research into perceptions, experiences and memories of shoes among men and women in the North of England. In a series of linked theoretical discussions it argues that a focus on women, fashion and shoe consumption as a feature of a modern, western ‘project of the self’ obscures a more revealing line of inquiry where footwear can be used to explore the way men and women live out their identities as fluid, embodied processes. In a bid to deepen theoretical understanding of such processes, it takes account of historical and contemporary representations of shoes as a symbolically efficacious vehicle for personal transformation, asking how the idea and experience of transformation informs everyday and life course experiences of transition, as individuals put on and take off particular pairs of shoes. In so doing, the article addresses the methodological and analytic challenges of accessing experience that is both fluid and embodied.

David Brown's Divine Humanity

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-113
Author(s):  
Kathryn Tanner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Primary Indication ◽  
The World ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
The Way

The contributions of this fine book are many but I will concentrate on three, before turning to several more critical remarks.First, and most obviously, the book does the invaluable service of surveying developments in kenotic christology in the nineteenth century while situating them nicely in their different contexts of origin and with reference to lines of mutual influence: continental, Scottish and British trends are all canvassed rather masterfully. Some attention, in lesser detail, is also given to the way these christological trends are extended in the twentieth century to accounts of the Trinity and God's relation to the world generally: kenosis, the self-emptying or self-limiting action of God, in the incarnation, is now viewed as a primary indication of who God is and how God works, from creation to salvation.

scholarly journals Exporting ‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’: Robert Burns, Scottish Romantic Nationalism and Colonial Settler Identity

Romanticism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-89
Author(s):  
Sarah Sharp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
The Self ◽  
The South ◽  
Saturday Night ◽  
Cultural Baggage ◽  
The Way ◽  
At Home

A Scottish literary icon of the nineteenth century, Burns's ‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’ was a key component of the cultural baggage carried by emigrant Scots seeking a new life abroad. The myth of the thrifty, humble and pious Scottish cottager is a recurrent figure in Scottish colonial writing whether that cottage is situated in the South African veld or the Otago bush. This article examines the way in which Burns's cotter informed the myth of the self-sufficient Scottish peasant in the poetry of John Barr and Thomas Pringle. It will argue that, just as ‘The Cotter’ could be used to reinforce a particular set of ideas about Scottish identity at home, Scottish settlers used Burns's poem to respond to and cement new identities abroad.

scholarly journals En/countering the New Language of Exile in Uche Nduka's The Bremen Poems

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Obododimma Oha
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
European Context ◽  
Discourse Patterns ◽  
African Writers ◽  
Textual Politics ◽  
The Way

Many African writers have been very critical of Europe in their works, especially in relation to racism and the experience of colonization. Yet, with the conditions in African countries becoming unfriendly to the careers of these writers, many of them have had to seek refuge in Europe. The New European context of African writing (which means an entry into the space of the Other) raises a number of issues about literary style in the exilic/migrant text, especially with regard to the use of literature as a means of recreating the self and articulating the way the self experiences a new cultural space. To what extent does this entry into the space of the Other imply dialogism and transformation? The present paper discusses the stylistic and discourse patterns utilized by the Nigerian poet, Uche Nduka, who has been in self-exile in Germany, in his The Bremen Poems. It analyses the images that are enlisted in the textual politics of re/identification in the poems, especially in the articulation of Europe/Germany as a productive space. It analyses the images that are enlisted in the textual politics of re/identification in the poems, especially in the articulation of Europe/Germany as a productive space.

scholarly journals Disciplinary Power and the Role of the Subject at a Nineteenth-Century Danish Asylum

PhaenEx ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
BJØRN HAMRE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Psychiatric Practice ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Pastoral Power ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Way

This article reports on the ways in which psychiatric practice and power were constituted in a Danish asylum at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The point of departure will be a complaint by a former patient questioning the practice at the asylum in 1829. In an analysis of this narrative the study draws upon Foucauldian concepts like disciplinary power, confession, pastoral power and subjectivation. I will argue that the critique of the patient provides us with an example of the way that disciplinary power works in the case of an informal indictment of the methods and practice at an asylum. A key issue is whether the critique is not itself a part of the self-legitimation of disciplinary power.

The Puritans as Founders: The Quest for Identity in Early Whig Rhetoric*

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-194
Author(s):  
Dean C. Hammer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Whig Party ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
Political Drama ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
The Way

In looking at the politics of the opening decades of the nineteenth Century, scholarly attention has been drawn to the self-destruction of the Federalists, the ascendancy of the Jeffersonian Republicans, or the emergence of the Jacksonian Democrats. What gets lost in the way scholars view this political drama is the coalescence of an American Whig identity, forged in the decade of the 1820's. At least part of this inattention can be explained by scholarly appraisals of the Whig party as intellectually incoherent, politically cynical, and, ultimately, unsuccessful.The Whig position was, indeed, a curious one: the Whigs heralded the growth of the modern capitalist market that would unleash the forces of entrepreneurial individualism, yet they decried the loss of the precommercial values of deference, virtue, and hierarchical Community; they embraced the prosperity brought about by commerce, yet they feared the corruption of virtue that resulted from the pursuit of interest; and they looked forward to a capitalist economy while glancing back at an antidemocratic Federalism and Puritan moralism.

Poe and Tennyson

PMLA ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 418-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhard J. Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Self ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Idylls Of The King ◽  
The Way

Considering the way Poe and Tennyson admired each other's work, it is strange that the tonal and thematic convergence of two such major nineteenth-century writers has scarcely been sensed in Anglo-American (as contrasted to French) literary criticism. The quality that most obviously tempts the reader to link them, their extraordinary delight in sound for its own sake, became a comparable strategy in the service of an undogmatic philosophical idealism, the attempt of the spirit to escape the gross materiality and cloying passions of the world's body. The symbolic situations in Tennyson's early poetry and in Poe's stories and poems suggest the dream-shrouded entrapment of the poetic soul within the world's “deserted” (Tennyson) or “haunted” (Poe) houses. Even when Tennyson rejects, ambiguously enough, the self-entombments of Poe-like hyperesthetic souls, he hardly suppresses what Poe called his unequaled “etherisity” and “ideality.” Tennyson's resultant treatment of angelism (to apply to his protagonists Allen Tate's term for the hypertrophied state of Poe's heroes) and the concomitant evolution of a Poe-like Fatal Woman are most clearly evident in such Classical monologues as “Lucretius” and in the conception of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Idylls of the King.

Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Prevailing View ◽  
The Way

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry

Vérités et Mensonges

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-224
Author(s):  
Erik Gunderson
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Self ◽  
Faithful Representation ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Concrete Reality ◽  
Hermeneutic Process ◽  
The Way

This is a survey of some of the problems surrounding imperial panegyric. It includes discussions of both the theory and practice of imperial praise. The evidence is derived from readings of Cicero, Quintilian, Pliny, the Panegyrici Latini, Menander Rhetor, and Julian the Apostate. Of particular interest is insincere speech that would be appreciated as insincere. What sort of hermeneutic process is best suited to texts that are politically consequential and yet relatively disconnected from any obligation to offer a faithful representation of concrete reality? We first look at epideictic as a genre. The next topic is imperial praise and its situation “beyond belief” as well as the self-positioning of a political subject who delivers such praise. This leads to a meditation on the exculpatory fictions that these speakers might tell themselves about their act. A cynical philosophy of Caesarism, its arbitrariness, and its constructedness abets these fictions. Julian the Apostate receives the most attention: he wrote about Caesars, he delivered extant panegyrics, and he is also the man addressed by still another panegyric. And in the end we find ourselves to be in a position to appreciate the way that power feeds off of insincerity and grows stronger in its presence.

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