‘Soft, Wild and Free’: A magical realist fairytale

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-98
Author(s):  
Ifigeneia Liangi
Keyword(s):  
Magical Realism ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Words And Images

‘Soft, Wild and Free’ is a magical realist fairytale about a creature that was soft and wild. It is also a magical realist fairytale about the courage of a guerilla princess who freed this creature from its foundations. With my research on magical realism, fairytales and the combination of the two, I am looking into fictional narratives that have the potential for the creation of spaces which are magical and critical. These fictional narratives exist in words and images that are constructed with a sensitivity to ideas of place and a place’s spirit and character. Through the writing I bring together elements from magical realist literature and the classic magical fairytale, into a hybrid style, which then translates into drawings that I make physically and digitally. Clay, wood, card models, as well as sketches, orthographic drawings and paintings of buildings weave into a series of drawings whose scope is to suggest a version of architecture with a critical and poetic stance to the world. These drawings propose buildings as characters and characters as places that talk about the past and the present while imagining a poetic and critical future. In my work there are three types of processes, which are based on translations; two intersemiotic and one interlingual. The two intersemiotic translations are from writing to drawings and models and from drawings to writing; the interlingual translation is from modern Greek to English. These processes become spatial acts, as they allow for a perpetual generation of fictional and factual stories in words and images. My research is rooted in an inherent understanding of architecture through a literature that is critical and magical, an existential potion for our allegedly normal and normative world, which is really a wondrous, magical realist dream.

The New Islamic State

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farhad Khosrokhavar
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
The West ◽  
Patriarchal Family ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation

The creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS) changed the nature of jihadism worldwide. For a few years (2014–2017) it exemplified the destructive capacity of jihadism and created a new utopia aimed at restoring the past greatness and glory of the former caliphate. It also attracted tens of thousands of young wannabe combatants of faith (mujahids, those who make jihad) toward Syria and Iraq from more than 100 countries. Its utopia was dual: not only re-creating the caliphate that would spread Islam all over the world but also creating a cohesive, imagined community (the neo-umma) that would restore patriarchal family and put an end to the crisis of modern society through an inflexible interpretation of shari‘a (Islamic laws and commandments). To achieve these goals, ISIS diversified its approach. It focused, in the West, on the rancor of the Muslim migrants’ sons and daughters, on exoticism, and on an imaginary dream world and, in the Middle East, on tribes and the Sunni/Shi‘a divide, particularly in the Iraqi and Syrian societies.

Studying Palestinian-Israeli Relations at the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (VTNA)

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-40
Author(s):  
Deborah L. Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Television News ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
P 16 ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Words And Images

For the Past Five Decades, media texts, broadcast over television air waves, have created a shared identity among viewing audiences. John B. Thompson notes that if culture is understood as “the ways in which meaningful expressions of various kinds are produced, constructed and received by individuals”, then mass media can be understood as central to the creation and maintenance of culture (pp. 122-23). The words and images that construct a media culture are the very building blocks of collective identity. As Michael Schudson observes, “news is part of the background through which and with which people think” (p. 16).

scholarly journals Alternative international currencies

2012 ◽  
Vol 57 (194) ◽  
pp. 31-39
Author(s):  
Vladimirovna Rozhentsova
Keyword(s):  
International Monetary System ◽  
International Currency ◽  
The Past ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
International Currencies ◽  
The World ◽  
Circulation Mechanism ◽  
The Creation

The modern international monetary system has a number of flaws and therefore needs cardinal change. Hence, economists from all over the world are suggesting alternative international currencies that would make the international monetary system more efficient. However, it is essential when approaching the creation of a new international currency to analyze and take into account the experience of all the past international currencies. Therefore this paper begins with an exploration of the drawbacks of each of the past and present international currencies. Drawing on this analysis a justification will be made for the necessity of introducing a new international currency, pointing to the requirements it should meet. Further on, this paper proposes an alternative theoretically possible variant of the international currency, with a fixed value relative to a commodity basket. An abstract example is used to demonstrate its composition and circulation mechanism.

Poetosphere and mythopoetics of the estate in A.A. Blok’s dramatic poem “Song of Fate”

2020 ◽  
pp. 186-205
Author(s):  
Ekaterina V. Kuznetsova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Russian Literature ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
White House ◽  
Modern City ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Xix Century ◽  
The Hill ◽  
As If

As it noted by the researchers, the “Song of fate” accumulates painful thoughts of A.A. Blok about the fate of Russia and about his personal fate associat ed with the past, present and future of the Motherland. In addition to the ideological problems raised in it, the poem is interesting in an attempt to escape from the specifics of historical and national-cultural realities through their symbolization, combining the plans of life and being. The white house with a garden on the hill, in which the action of the play begins and the return to which is implied at the end, incorporates the most important features of Russia as a cultural, natural and spiritual space. The world of the estate is opposed by the space of the modern city and the big world of Russian open spaces. However, the estate for Blok is Russia the same. Therefore, Elena, the keeper of the estate, and Faina, the personalization of the world element, are two parts of one whole, as if the projection of an ideal Russia. The plot of the “Song of fate”, accord ing to D.M. Magomedova, I.S. Prikhodko, etc., is an artistic realization of the Gnostic myth of the captive Sophia, the Soul of the world. The imposition of the Gnostic myth in the “Song of fate” on the entire existing in Russian literature of the XIX century poetosphere of the estate leads to the creation of the author’s myth about Russia, the transformation of poetosphere in the mythopoetics.

Creating the Past: Schelling’s Ages of the World

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Welchman ◽  
Judith Norman
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Viewing Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hegelian Dialectic ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Creation ◽  
To Receive

AbstractF.W.J. Schelling’s Ages of the World has just begun to receive the critical attention it deserves as a contribution to the philosophy of history. Its most significant philosophical move is to pose the question of the origin of the past itself, asking what “caused” the past. Schelling treats the past not as a past present (something that used to be a ’now’ but no longer is) — but rather as an eternal past, a different dimension of time altogether, and one that was never a present ’now’. For Schelling, the past functions as the transcendental ground of the present, the true ’a priori’. Schelling’s account of the creation of this past takes the form of a theogeny: in order to exist, God needed to separate the past from the present. By grounding the creation of the past in a free decision of God, Schelling tries to conceptualize temporality so as to preserve the sort of radical contingency and authentic freedom that he considers essential features of history. In so doing, he opens up a way of viewing time that avoids the pitfalls of the Hegelian dialectic and anticipates some of the 20th century developments in phenomenology.

Promiscuity, Polygyny, and the Power of Revenge: The Past and Future of Burmese Buddhist Law in Myanmar

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa CROUCH
Keyword(s):  
Potential Application ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Family Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

AbstractMyanmar is the only Buddhism-majority country in the world that has developed and maintained a system of family law for Buddhists enforced by the courts. This article considers the construction of Burmese Buddhist law by lawyers, judges, and legislators, and the changes made through legislative intervention in 2015. It begins by addressing the creation and contestation of Burmese Buddhist law to demonstrate that it has largely been defined by men and by its perceived opposites, Hinduism and Islam. Three aspects of Burmese Buddhist law that affect women are then examined more closely. First, Burmese Buddhist law carries no penalties for men who commit adultery, although women may risk divorce and the loss of her property. Second, a man can take more than one wife under Burmese Buddhist law; a woman cannot. Third, restrictions on Buddhist women who marry non-Buddhist men operate to ensure the primacy of Burmese Buddhist law over the potential application of Islamic law. This article deconstructs the popular claim that women are better off under Burmese Buddhist law than under Hindu law or Islamic law by showing how Burmese Buddhist law has been preoccupied with regulating the position of women. The 2015 laws build on this history of Burmese Buddhist law, creating new problems, but also potentially operating as a new source of revenge.

scholarly journals Plots and Motives about the Creation of the Earth and Man in the Mythology of the Altaians

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-62
Author(s):  
N. R. Oinotkinova
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Folk Tradition ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Close Contacts

The paper analyzes the plots and motives of Altai myths about the creation of the earth and man with the use of comparative material from the folklore of peoples with which the Altai people had close contacts in the past, in particular from Russian and Buryat-Mongolian folklore. The motives characteristic of these versions are considered: diving behind the earth; creation of the earth; the creation of man; the dog protects the human body; desecration of the human body; spilled elixir of immortality; lost heaven; the overthrow of the devil from heaven; competition of deities for primacy in the rule of the world. In the Altai folk tradition, two versions of the myth of the creation of the world and man are distinguished: the first is dualistic (pagan) and the second is “Buddhist”. In the dualistic version of the myth, the main characters are two deities – Ulgen and Erlik. In the plot of the “Buddhist” version of the myth, unlike the dualistic one, 4 deity brothers participate in the act of creation: Yuch-Kurbustan (Three Kurbustan) and Erlik. This story is joined by a Buddhist legend about how bodhisattvas competed in order for the victor to become the ruler of the world.

scholarly journals Reviewing the global economy: the UN and Bretton Woods systems

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rod Oram
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Hybrid System ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Bretton Woods ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation

Humankind has been searching for millennia for ways to govern itself at large scale and over great distances. Overwhelmingly, the dominant solution had been the creation of empires, defined as multi-ethnic or multinational states with political and/or military dominion over populations who are culturally and ethnically distinct from the ruling imperial ethnic group and its culture. In the modern Westphalian era of the past several centuries, a hybrid system of governance around the world emerged, comprising the nation state (in Europe and the Americas) and international empires (across Africa, Asia and Oceania).

Fragmenting Hominins and the Presencing of Early Palaeolithic Social Worlds

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Chapman ◽  
Bisserka Gaydarska
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Cognitive Evolution ◽  
David Bohm ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Distributed Elements

This chapter introduces the fragmentation premise — the idea that the deliberate breakage of a complete object and the re-use of the resultant fragments as new and separate objects ‘after the break’ was a common practice in the past. It also summarizes the main implications of the fragmentation premise for the study of enchained social relations and of the creation and development of personhood in the past. Enchained relations connect the distributed elements of a person's social identity using material culture. These concepts of fragmentation, enchainment and fractality are used to think through some of the earliest remains of objects in the world. Following the philosopher David Bohm, the discussion supports the co-evolution of fragmentation in both consciousness and in objects, and compares Bohm's three-stage ideas to Mithen's model of cognitive evolution and Donald's model of external symbolic storage.

scholarly journals The Legal Classification of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-248
Author(s):  
Péter Bálint Király
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Digital Assets ◽  
Legal Classification

Cryptocurrencies are digital assets desig ned to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets. In the past few years there is a growing number of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, etc. In my paper and presentation I would like to present the difficulties of the legal classification of cryptocurrencies. Countries all over the world have different solutions to this question. It is not written in stone whether cryptocurrencies should be considered a currency, a commodity, or an investment. In my study I examine each of these possibilities.

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