At the Limits of the Concept

It is often forgotten that the humanities—which are made up of history, philosophy, literary studies, philology, rhetoric, art history, musicology, and linguistics—are characterized not so much by their objects of study, which can change over time, as by their focus on reading, the reading of verbal texts, primarily, but also reading in the sense of decoding and recoding images, sounds, and movements. The disciplines that compose the humanities teach different kinds of reading practices. The products of these disciplines for the most part belong to the class of prose and poetic discourses. This is why they may often look similar or even the same, especially when they are cast in the same mode: narrative, argumentative, descriptive, or expressive as the case may be.

Download Full-text

Who Wouldn’t Want to Be a Person?

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190456368.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Caleb Smith

Keyword(s):

Law And Literature ◽

The State ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Individual Autonomy ◽

Change Over Time ◽

The Future ◽

Over Time

In an influential 2005 article, Julie Stone Peters analyzed the state of law and literature scholarship and offered her prognosis for the future of an “interdisciplinary illusion.” This chapter reviews trends in law and literature scholarship of the decade that followed. It observes the prominence of historical approaches that treat law and literature not as universals but as contingent fields and institutions whose relations change over time. It goes on to show how historicism has re-evaluated the key concept of personhood, seeking forms of agency and belonging that do not conform to liberal ideals of individual autonomy or contractual consent. A “postcritical” turn in interpretive scholarship and a rising interest in mixed, compromised forms of selfhood are considered in relation to the precarious conditions of legal and literary studies within the contemporary university.

Download Full-text

One Tribe, One Style? Paradigms in the Historiography of African Art

History in Africa ◽

10.2307/3171633 ◽

1984 ◽

Vol 11 ◽

pp. 163-193 ◽

Cited By ~ 46

Author(s):

Sidney Littlefield Kasfir

Keyword(s):

Art History ◽

Political History ◽

Academic Discipline ◽

National Character ◽

Thomas Kuhn ◽

African Art ◽

German Expressionism ◽

Change Over Time ◽

Over Time ◽

The Way

While the historiography of art as an academic discipline can hardly be construed as a science, it is nevertheless governed by certain dominant paradigms in both of the senses that Thomas Kuhn intended. First, at any point in time there is a constellation of beliefs, values, and techniques shared by the community of scholars who comprise the discipline known as art history. This can be further broken down, altered, and refined for the various sub-fields, but taken together, the separate facets constitute a “way of seeing” art history which differs substantially from the “way of seeing,” say, political history.Applying Kuhn's second and more rigorous sense, the historiography of art is dominated by certain paradigms which serve as exemplars or models of puzzle-solutions. While these change over time (it is no longer permissible to ascribe German expressionism to “national character,” for example), they are so powerful that they function as unquestioned assumptions when in force. Even more importantly, they are frequently invisible because they are rarely made explicit. In European art history, the dominant paradigms have coalesced into entities such as “The Baroque” or “Mannerism” which are largely ontological models used to simplify the otherwise intractable complexity of European art styles and movements.

Download Full-text

AWARENESS OF MATERIALITY IN TIME AND CONDITION. THOUGHTS ON THE RELATION BETWEEN ART HISTORY AND CONSERVATION

Protection of cultural heritage ◽

10.35784/odk.1074 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 123-138

Author(s):

Andreas Huth ◽

Katharine Stahlbuhk

Keyword(s):

Art History ◽

Historical Research ◽

Technical Knowledge ◽

Research Needs ◽

Research Projects ◽

Change Over Time ◽

History Of Art ◽

History Of ◽

Art And Architecture ◽

Over Time

Art historical research needs to consider the materiality of artefacts, but the character of the material and the state of preservation of any object change over time. Today’s restoration and conservation sciences provide the basis for present research in the field of history of art and architecture. Following this premises and with some examples from current research projects our contribution tries to show how much the contemporary academic Art History can benefit from the material and technical knowledge of conservators.

Download Full-text

Spiritual Exercises

The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190639631.013.4 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 74-104

Author(s):

Silvia Mostaccio

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Decision Making Process ◽

Spiritual Exercises ◽

Reading Practices ◽

Change Over Time ◽

Individual Consciousness ◽

Jesuit Missionaries ◽

Over Time

The Spiritual Exercises refer to both a particular practice and a text. It is a “book” that continues to be “made” by its practitioners. This contribution takes seriously the choice of Ignatius de Loyola: if the secrets of the “working” consciousness escape us, we can grasp the reading practices that are reflected in spiritual writings, as well as in pastoral actions in the missionary framework. The first part of this chapter presents the links between the Exercises and other sources regulating the life of the Society such as the Constitutions and the Directorium. Then follows a discussion about the development of the official discourses concerning the aims of the Exercises in the Imago primi saeculi. The chapter concludes with various examples of how the Jesuit missionaries, as well as laymen and -women, creatively appropriated the Exercises for their purpose. Thus, it is a long story in which the place of individual consciousness, actors in the decision-making process and the practice of obedience change over time.

Download Full-text