scholarly journals Doonstruck Diaries of Victorian Memsahibs: Between the Journal and Jhampaun in Mussoorie and Landour

2021 ◽  
pp. 191-210
Author(s):  
Arup K. Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Literary Imagination ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Doon Valley ◽  
Terra Nullius ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
The Aesthetic

Established as colonial hill stations in Indian's Doon Valley, in the 1820s, Mussoorie and Landour emerged in Victorian literary imagination with the journals of Emily Eden, Fanny Parks, and the Wallace-Dunlop sisters. This paper argues that the Doon's female imperial architextures invented new prospects of grafting Anglo-Saxon aesthetics on the Himalayan terra nullius, diminishing, miniaturizing, and depopulating aspects of the hazardous, the alien, and the local. A thread of archetypes —jhampauns (Himalayan loco-armchairs) and Himalayan vistas— link the aesthetic arcs in the journals of Eden, Parks, and the Wallace-Dunlops. Although the architexture was ostensibly apolitical, it imbued the Doon's representational spaces with a reproducible English character, rendering its terra incognita into terra familiaris in imperial psyche, while carving a distinct imperial subjectivity for Memsahibs.

scholarly journals Theorising Things, Building Worlds: Why the New Materialisms Deserve Literary Imagination

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-134
Author(s):  
Babette B. Tischleder
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
Unified Approach ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
Nonhuman Agency

AbstractThe New Materialisms constitute a rich field of critical inquiry that does not represent a unified approach; yet there is a general tendency to theorise objects by highlighting their agency, independence, and withdrawnness from human actors. Jane Bennett speaks of “thing power” in order to invoke the activities of “nonsubjects,” and she suggests to marginalise questions of human subjectivity and focus instead on the trajectories and propensities of material entities themselves. This essay takes issue with Bennett’s and other New Materialist thought, and it also offers a critical engagement with Bruno Latour’s notion of nonhuman agency. In his recent work, Latour has been concerned with the question of how we can tell our “common geostory.” Taking up his literary example (by Mark Twain) and adding one of my own (by William Faulkner), this essay argues that our understanding of the powers of rivers and other nonhuman agents remains rather limited if we attend primarily to the mechanics of storytelling in the way Latour does. Rather, it is the aesthetic and experiential registers of literary worlding that offer alternative venues for imagining nonhuman beings and our interactions with them in the era of the Anthropocene.

scholarly journals As beautiful inside, as it is outside: On the connection between beauty and morality in the Old English corpus

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 205-221
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier Minaya Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Complete Analysis ◽  
Sensory Level ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
Cognitive Component ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Do So

This paper aims to look into the link between the experience of beauty at a sensory level and its connection with more cognitive considerations in Anglo-Saxon England. To do so, I have carried out a complete analysis of the usage of the Old English adjective fæger, one of the main descriptors of beauty in the linguistic variety. Using the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, I have created a concordance and a database containing all its attested forms, which I have analysed following diverse sociolinguistic criteria. This analysis has proven that the evaluation of beauty as rendered by Old English fæger had a strong cognitive component, mainly related to the moral and spiritual virtues of the aesthetic object and often visually represented by an abundance of light. According to this analysis, the experience of beauty in Anglo-Saxon England constitutes a rare experience that in most cases, goes beyond the sensory and the purely physical.   El propósito de este artículo es investigar la conexión entre la experiencia de la belleza a un nivel sensorial y su conexión con aspectos más cognitivos en la Inglaterra anglosajona. Para ello, he llevado a cabo un análisis completo del uso del adjetivo fægerperteneciente al inglés antiguo, uno de los principales descriptores de belleza en la variedad lingüística. Usando el Dictionary of Old English Corpus, he creado una concordancia y una base de datos con sus distintas atestaciones, las cuales he analizado siguiendo diversos criterios sociolingüísticos. Este análisis ha demostrado que la evaluación de la belleza tal y como es descrita por fæger tenía un fuerte componente cognitivo, principalmente relacionado con las virtudes morales y espirituales del objeto que a menudo son representadas visualmente con una abundancia de luz. De acuerdo con este análisis, la experiencia de la belleza en la Inglaterra anglosajona constituía una experiencia poco frecuente que en la mayoría de casos traspasaba las barreras de lo sensorial y lo puramente físico.

scholarly journals “[I]t is a word unsaid”

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (126) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Amer Rasool Mahdi
Keyword(s):  
Terra Incognita ◽  
Literary Geography ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The One

This study attempts to trace the aesthetic of the act of naming in Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself”. It tries, furthermore, to approach America as a geo-poetic concept and formation in the earlier American poetics of being. The literary geography of Whitman’s poetry might here be measured against the poeticity of the American con(text) or poetic dwelling, with all the nuances of the question of identity being implicated. The poet as a namer is the one who re-invents his linguistic-poetic gear to re-signify his existence in the act of renaming the second creation. Building on the Emersonian pseudo-philosophical premises, the poet Whitman thus sets himself the task of mapping out his Eden, or this terra incognita, by creating his textual geography and by Whitmanizing the American scene for that matter. 

The aesthetic of radicalism: the relationship between punk and the patriotic nationalist movement of the Basque country

Popular Music ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Lahusen
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Basque Country ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Peculiar Phenomenon

Our time has come Tio/ I'm Basque and I'm proud/ That's enough Tio, say it loud/I'm Basque and I'm proud! (Negu Gorriak, 1989)The relationship between popular music and social movements does not in itself constitute an exceptional phenomenon. However, Basque Radical Rock (as Basque punk has come to be called) has emerged as a peculiar phenomenon of the history of political mobilisation in Euskadi (the Basque name for Basque country). This peculiarity is due to the fusion of an eminently anti-establishment music of anglo-saxon origin with a nationalist patriotic movement. The ‘alliance’ between these two such diverse spheres is the theme of this article. Such an alliance is of interest because it reveals how the discursive and organisational linkages which formed Basque radical rock defined a common struggle shared by punks and nationalist activists.

A Decolonizing Medieval Studies?

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-63
Author(s):  
Helen Young
Keyword(s):  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Legal Doctrine ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
High Court ◽  
Indigenous Law ◽  
Terra Nullius ◽  
Decolonizing Methodologies ◽  
Indigenous Land Rights ◽  
Indigenous Land

Abstract This article considers how medievalism, particularly in its academic form of medieval studies, might contribute to decolonization through exploration of how the Western “cultural archive” (Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies) draws on the teleological temporality embedded in the idea of the “medieval” to rationalize “white possessive logics” (Moreton-Robinson, White Possessive). It explores medievalisms in legal, mainstream, and academic contexts that focus on Indigenous land rights and law in the Australian settler-colonial state. It examines the High Court of Australia’s ruling in Mabo and Others v. Queensland (2) (1992), a landmark case that challenged the legal doctrine of terra nullius, on which claims to British sovereignty were founded, and on comparisons of Anglo-Saxon and Indigenous law in the post-Mabo era.

Subtle Scripture for an Invisible Church

1998 ◽  
pp. 158-165
Author(s):  
Sandra L. Shapshay
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Functional Role ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
The Third ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
Poetic Justice ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Invisible

I argue for an interpretation of Kant's aesthetics whereby the experience of the beautiful plays the same functional role in the invisible church of natural religion as Scripture does for the visible churches of ecclesiastical religions. Thus, I contend, the links that Kant himself implies between the aesthetic and the moral (in the third Critique and the Religion) are much stronger than generally portrayed by commentators. Indeed, for Kant, experience of the beautiful may be necessary in order to found what Kant views as the final end of morality — the ethical community — since human moral psychology requires embodiments of moral ideas. Finally, I seek to modify Martha Nussbaums' argument in Poetic Justice (1995) for the increased use of the literary imagination as a means for improving public moral reasoning in this country, with the Kantian insight that aesthetic autonomy is the key to any aesthetic-moral link.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document