An Invitation to the Table

Table Lands ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Kara K. Keeling ◽  
Scott T. Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Food Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Children’S Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Mind

Children’s literature is filled with foods to eat, reflecting the pleasure humans take in taste, which occurs as much in the mind as in the body. Food studies as a field has grown since the 1990s, crossing boundaries from the social sciences into the sciences. Within literary studies, work has shifted from seeing food as a literary trope to using material culture as an approach to what food signifies in a socio-historical context. Table Lands is a broad survey of food’s function in children’s texts, showing how comprehending the socio-cultural contexts of food reveals fundamental understandings of the child and children’s agency and enriches the interpretation of such texts. In roughly chronological order, it examines a variety of texts from historical to contemporary, non-canonical to classics—many from the Anglo American tradition but enriched by several books from multicultural traditions (Native American, Jewish American, African American, and immigrant Vietnamese)—and including a variety of genres, formats, and age-group audiences. These include realism (both historical and contemporary), fantasy, cookbooks, picture books, chapter books, young adult novels, and film.

Reference

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Satya P. Mohanty
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Free Play ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Epistemic Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Anglo American

Reference is one of the most important concepts in literary studies, routinely invoked in theoretical discussions since the rise of poststructuralism in the 1970s. Derrida and those who follow his general approach, in particular, take for granted the view that reference is a reductive notion since it limits the range of possible textual interpretations and the free play of language; it does this, they say, by privileging an element drawn from the social or historical context and making it the foundation on which interpretations are based. But this view of reference is both narrow and misleading, since a much richer conception of it can be drawn from such thinkers as the late-19th-century pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce as well as realist philosophers from the Anglo-American tradition who started writing in the second half of the 20th century. According to this conception, literary reference points not to a “thing,” or what Derrida calls a “sensible presence,” but rather to a complexly mediated object of knowledge, an object that is a part of an epistemic field that includes the written or oral text. Elaboration of this epistemic account of literary reference, illustrated through a comparison of two 19th-century realist novels from India where one comments on and corrects its predecessor, provides a more adequate theory than the simple and schematic view poststructuralists rely on. It shows how such a theory of reference can be a valuable, and even an essential, component of literary studies and can indicate how literary interpretation is related to other epistemic practices in human societies, including explanatory work done in the social and natural sciences.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora Goldschmidt ◽  
Barbara Graziosi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Specific Site ◽  
Entire Volume ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Significance ◽  
Classical Poetry ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Made In

The Introduction sheds light on the reception of classical poetry by focusing on the materiality of the poets’ bodies and their tombs. It outlines four sets of issues, or commonplaces, that govern the organization of the entire volume. The first concerns the opposition between literature and material culture, the life of the mind vs the apprehensions of the body—which fails to acknowledge that poetry emerges from and is attended to by the mortal body. The second concerns the religious significance of the tomb and its location in a mythical landscape which is shaped, in part, by poetry. The third investigates the literary graveyard as a place where poets’ bodies and poetic corpora are collected. Finally, the alleged ‘tomb of Virgil’ provides a specific site where the major claims made in this volume can be most easily be tested.

Birth of the body, birth of the mind, birth of the social

2018 ◽  
pp. 29-51
Author(s):  
Richard Morgan-Jones ◽  
Nuno Torres ◽  
Kevin Dixon
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind

Material Culture and Embodiment in American Religion

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Will

In recent years, the study of religion has undergone a useful materialization in the work of many scholars, who are not inclined to define it in terms of ideas, creeds, or doctrines alone, but want to understand what role sensation, emotion, objects, spaces, clothing, and food have played in religious practice. If the intellect and the will dominated the study of religion dedicated to theology and ethics, the materialization of religious studies has taken up the role of the body, expanding our understanding of it and dismantling our preconceptions, which were often notions inherited from religious traditions. As a result, the body has become a broad register or framework for gauging the social, aesthetic, and practical character of religion in everyday life. The interest in material culture as a primary feature of religion has unfolded in tandem with the new significance of the body and the broad materialization of religious studies.

Metaphors of Inscription: Discipline, Plasticity and the Rhetoric of Choice

1998 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pippa Brush
Keyword(s):  
Cosmetic Surgery ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Recent Theory ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Standards ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Economic Constraints

The metaphor of inscription on the body and the constitution of the body through those inscriptions have been widely used in recent attempts to theorize the body. Michel Foucault calls the body the ‘inscribed surface of events’ (Foucault, 1984: 83) and Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ‘female (or male) body can no longer be regarded as a fixed, concrete substance, a pre-cultural given. It has a determinate form only by being socially inscribed’ (Grosz, 1987: 2). The body becomes plastic, inscribed with gender and cultural standards. While Foucault assumes the existence of a pre-inscriptive body, many theorists reject that idea and argue that ‘there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings’ (Butler, 1990: 8). The constitution of the body rests in its inscription; the body becomes the text which is written upon it and from which it is indistinguishable. Starting from Catherine Belsey's suggestion that to ‘give the metaphor literal significance … is to … isolate it for contemplation’ (Belsey, 1988: 100), I discuss this metaphor of inscription, using cosmetic surgery as one literal example. While some theorists reject the pre-inscriptive body, the popular discourses advocating changing one's body assume unproblematically the existence of a body prior to these ‘elective’ procedures and reinforce the mind/body dualism which recent theory has sought so insistently to reject. I examine how popular discourses of body modification enforce a disciplinary regime (in Foucault's sense) and impose degrees of both literal and figurative inscription. Juxtaposing these two perspectives, I explore how both discourses efface the materiality of the body and the social contexts within which bodies are experienced and constructed. While the rhetoric surrounding cosmetic surgery denies the physical process and the economic constraints, so theories of the body which stress the body's plasticity also deny the materiality of that process and the cultural and social contexts within which the body is always placed.

scholarly journals Lesbianism as Another Alternative for the Other: A Punishment or an Escape? The Saudi Novel "al-Akharun/The Others" as a Sample

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-55
Author(s):  
Hanan Bishara
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Body ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
Anna Karenina ◽  
Madame Bovary ◽  
Saudi Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
Lady Chatterley's Lover ◽  
New Phenomena

World Literature has witnessed the appearance of many novels that focus on the physical experiences of the “body” and deal with sexual themes. In their historical context, these novels represent a protest against the social moral values and search for alternatives. Among these novels are Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Anna Karenina, and Madame Bovary. In Arabic literature, the Egyptian writer Ihsan Abd al-Qudous laid the foundation for this type of novel.  Literature has developed through breaking the barrier of taboos and adopting different forms. One of the controversial issues, whose red lines literature has crossed, is the issue of sex, which exists in every human relationship between males and females. The Arabic novel has addressed sexual taboos and dealt with them as an adventure still in its initial stages despite numerous significant contributions that have appeared in the 20th century.   Recently, Saudi Arabian women writers have broken various taboos and dealt with the problems that they confront as women in the Kingdom by employing the themes of sex, the body, and other taboo issues. Some critics accused these writers of trying to draw attention to themselves by exploiting these subjects to increase their readership. In fact, these novelists have exposed new phenomena in conservative Saudi society and broken the stereotypical image of conservative Saudi women. This study deals with Saba al-Herz’ novel al-Akharun/The Others as a sample of these novels.

scholarly journals Sociological theorizing as meaning making: the case of ecological modernization theory

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Philippe Sapinski
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Mirror Image ◽  
The Body ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Ecological Modernization ◽  
Business Elite ◽  
The Social

In this paper, I propose a novel way to consider sociological theorizing. I argue that the structural analysis method first developed by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss provides a powerful tool to deconstruct and critique sociological theories. I propose that this method can be used to redefine certain theories not as sets of proposals from which testable hypotheses are to be derived, but rather as different versions of foundational narratives of Western society. Viewed in this way, sociological theorizing contributes to construct the Western cosmology – the body of tales and narratives that explain the creation of the social world, its relationship with nature, and its future direction.As a case in point, I argue that the narrative of ecological modernization can thus be analyzed and deconstructed using the same tools Lévi-Strauss uses to make sense of native American cosmologies. Doing so, I find that the narrative of ecological modernization developed as a mirror image of older tales of modernization, closely associated with the myth of progress – according to which Western society emerged from a state of nature in which no rational division of labour and no private property existed. This inversion transforms the myth of creation at the heart of the modern Western cosmology into a utopian narrative that finds considerable political traction with a certain part of the business elite and associated organic intellectuals, interested in maintaining existing relations of production and power.

Hamann, Johann Georg (1730–88)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Beiser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Friedrich Schlegel ◽  
Sturm Und Drang ◽  
German Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Mind

Hamann was one of the most important critics of the German Enlightenment or Aufklärung. He attacked the Aufklärung chiefly because it gave reason undue authority over faith. It misunderstood faith, which consists in an immediate personal experience, inaccessible to reason. The main fallacy of the Aufklärung was hypostasis, the reification of ideas, the artificial abstraction of reason from its social and historical context. Hamann stressed the social and historical dimension of reason, that it must be embodied in society, history and language. He also emphasized the pivotal role of language in the development of reason. The instrument and criterion of reason was language, whose only sanction was tradition and use. Hamann was a sharp critic of Kant, whose philosophy exemplified all the sins of the Aufklärung. Hamann attacked the critical philosophy for its purification of reason from experience, language and tradition. He also strongly objected to all its dualisms, which seemed arbitrary and artificial. The task of philosophy was to unify all the various functions of the mind, seeing reason, will and feeling as an indivisible whole. Although he was original and unorthodox, Hamann’s critique of reason should be placed within the tradition of Protestant nominalism. Hamann saw himself as a defender of Luther, whose reputation was on the wane in late eighteenth-century Germany. Hamann was also a founder of the Sturm und Drang, the late eighteenth-century literary movement which celebrated personal freedom and revolt. His aesthetics defended creative genius and the metaphysical powers of art. It marked a sharp break with the rationalism of the classical tradition and the empiricism of late eighteenth-century aesthetics. Hamann was a seminal influence upon Herder, Goethe, Jacobi, Friedrich Schlegel and Kierkegaard.

Summary

2015 ◽  
pp. 137-138
Author(s):  
Emily Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Body ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Approaches

This chapter summarises the study of Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (2002). Talk to Her is a film that reflects the social and historical context of Spain and demonstrates many of Almodóvar's auteur characteristics. Its award-winning screenplay defies traditional conventions in genre and narrative structure whilst still creating something that is aesthetically pleasing and accessible to view. The interpretations cited in this book are not the only interpretations. This is a film which becomes richer through discussion and analysis and by approaching it from different critical approaches such as: auteur, genre, narrative, gender, and psychoanalytic film theory. Indeed, the film leaves the viewer with many interesting questions to consider. Ultimately, it is important to look at the film within the body of Almodóvar's work, particularly through exploring his depictions of rape.

Sustainable practice: The future mode of temporality in fashion

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 377-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harah Chon
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Sustainable Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Meaning Creation ◽  
Sociocultural Development ◽  
Nature Of Time ◽  
The Relationship

Fashion is indicative of time and, serving as the interpretive and representational forms of a society, is measured against the cyclical rhythms of trend diffusion and style adoption. This article examines the function of time within the framework of historical research, reviewing the construction and translation of contemporary fashion. The temporality of material objects is further probed by an analysis of the sociocultural development of current sustainable practices to grasp the affective nature of time and its relationship to the fashion system. With an overview of emerging sustainable design practices, the relationship between time and meaning creation is critically examined, analysed and discussed. The social production of design and its utilization of the body-as-space are presented in relation to the social construction of time, explicated as part of a subjective, embodied experience. This article presents a new modality of time in how it is articulated, imitated, reproduced and reinterpreted through material culture and future sustainable practices.

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