The Wisdom of the Novel in Richard Rorty’s philosophy as an example of postmodern humanism

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 153-161
Author(s):  
Patryk Kaczmarek
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
The Novel

The article presents the reconstruction of the edifying subjectivity derived from Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism. The functions of Master Novels that fit the trend of liberal education and postmodern humanism have also been described. I argue in favor of a thesis that the recognition of the Wisdom of the Novel widely spread in culture can contribute to social change. The effect of this change may consist in a decrease in the amount of social exclusion of various groups and the existence of ideological radicalisms, which may contribute to the progression of solidarity among people.

Pendidikan Islam dan Humanitas

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-355
Author(s):  
Mohammad Liwa Irrubai
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Current Issue ◽  
Alternative Solution ◽  
Educational Objectives ◽  
Basic Issue ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Education Today ◽  
Human Problem

Today, the human problem in social life concerning education is growing more complex; many new ideas emerge as the level of human intellectuality grows. This paper will reveal the current issue of education in Indonesia and discuss ideas from the concept of liberal education. The basic issue of education criticized by liberal education is that education today focuses more on the needs of society than the educational objectives themselves. Education as a tool to transfer science, values, and agents of social change is seen as one alternative solution in the framework of improving people's lives. The education in which values are embodied is one of the efforts offered by genuine liberal education, aimed at giving us the habits, ideas and techniques necessary to continue our own education. Humans have the ability to learn continuously throughout life so that we can prepare ourselves to study and again as long as we are alive.

Buried Narratives: Exhuming the Mother's Story in Oliver Twist

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266
Author(s):  
Michelle L. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Maternal Inheritance ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Law ◽  
First Time ◽  
Critical Consideration

Initially, Oliver Twist (1839) might seem representative of the archetypal male social plot, following an orphan and finding him a place by discovering the father and settling the boy within his inheritance. But Agnes Fleming haunts this narrative, undoing its neat, linear transmission. This reconsideration of maternal inheritance and plot in the novel occurs against the backdrop of legal and social change. I extend the critical consideration of the novel's relationship to the New Poor Law by thinking about its reflection on the bastardy clauses. And here, of course, is where the mother enters. Under the bastardy clauses, the responsibility for economic maintenance of bastard children was, for the first time, legally assigned to the mother, relieving the father of any and all obligation. Oliver Twist manages to critique the bastardy clauses for their release of the father, while simultaneously embracing the placement of the mother at the head of the family line. Both Oliver and the novel thus suggest that it is the mother's story that matters, her name through which we find our own. And by containing both plots – that of the father and the mother – Oliver Twist reveals the violence implicit in traditional modes of inheritance in the novel and under the law.

The Shop-Girl Revolutionary in Henry James's The Princess Casamassima

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Mullin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Change ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Local Color ◽  
Literary Naturalism ◽  
Public House ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Marginal Characters

Abstract This essay argues that the complex political resonances of Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) can be further elucidated through closer critical attention to one of its more marginal characters, the shop-girl Millicent Henning. Ebullient, assertive, and, for many early reviewers, the novel's sole redeeming feature, Millicent supplies the novel with far more than local color. Instead, James seizes on a sexual persona already well established within literary naturalism and popular culture alike to explore a rival mode of insurrection to that more obviously offered elsewhere. While the modes of revolution contemplated by Hyacinth Robinson and his comrades in the Sun and Moon public house are revealed to be anachronistic and ineffectual, Millicent's canny manipulation of her sexuality supplies her with an alternative, effective, and unmistakably modern mode of transformation. The novel's portrait of ““revolutionary politics of a hole-and-corner sort”” is thus set against Millicent's brand of quotidian yet inexorable social change.

scholarly journals Rwandan Genocide Conflict Represented in the Novel “Led by Faith”

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (01) ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
Marisa Santi Dewi ◽  
Mundi Rahayu
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
World History ◽  
Conflict Theory ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Rwandan Genocide ◽  
Analysis Techniques ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

This study discusses the ethnic conflict in the Rwandan genocide in the novel Led by Faith: Rising from The Ashes of Rwandan Genocide written by Immaculée Ilibagiza. The novel is set in Rwanda, the country that was known as the place of the fastest killing in the world history, within 100 days killed more than 800.000 people. This novel is based on the author’s experience in surviving from the Rwandan genocide. Therefore, it is interesting to discuss how the author represented the genocide in the novel. This study applied conflict theory by Dahrendorf which focus on four aspect: Two aspects of society (conflict and consensus), power and authority, the groups involved in the conflict, and conflict and social change. The data are taken from the novel Led by Faith by using descriptive analysis techniques. The study reveals that the conflict between Hutu and Tutsi ethnics was represented as the power dynamics among the authorities. The conflict influenced the social change and social structure of the Rwandan society.

scholarly journals Repercussions of Stereotyping and Cultural Bigotry in John Updike’s 9/11 Fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-73
Author(s):  
Saleem Dhobi
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Cultural Integration ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Groups ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
The Us ◽  
American Society

This article analyzes Updike’s 9/11 novel, Terrorist to explore the implications of stereotyping and cultural bigotry in US society in the aftermath. The novelist demonstrates the problematic in the cultural integration of minorities particularly Muslims and Jews as represented by Ahmad and Jack Levy. The primary motto of the article is to analyze the novel from the perspective of the protagonists Ahmad and Jack who suffer the cultural and social exclusion in American society. Ahmad is the victim of cultural bigotry and Jack Levy faces discriminatory practices at school. The isolation and marginalization of Ahmad and Jack respectively imply the ethnic crevices prevalent in the US society. The author demonstrates that the dominant cultural groups: European and African Americans do not accept the religious minorities: Muslims and Jews. Consequently, Muslims who are overtly the targets of cultural hatred and marginalization in the aftermath of the 9/11 as portrayed in the novel become hostile toward the Western culture. The efforts for integration of religious minorities are cosmetic as exemplified in the cases of Ahmad and Jack in the text. The writer makes a balance in representing both dominant and Muslim cultures to demonstrate the problems pertaining to ethnic groups at their failure in accommodating differences. The cultural separation and hatred prevalent in US society become obstacles even for those like Jack who seek to integrate. The paper eventually demonstrates the possibility of integration of religious minorities when both mainstream Americans and people of religious minorities conform to accepting the differences.

FROM ELIZABETH GASKELL’S MARY BARTON TO HER NORTH AND SOUTH:PROGRESS OR DECLINE FOR WOMEN?

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pearl L. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Conflicts ◽  
Social Purpose ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mature Work ◽  
North And South

ASSESSMENTS OF ELIZABETH GASKELL’S two novels of social purpose typically conclude that North and South, published in 1855, is a more mature work stylistically and ideologically than Mary Barton, published in 1848. North and South is said to integrate the narrative modes of romance and realism more effectively than Mary Barton (Felber 63, Horsman 284), and to provide a more complicated narrative structure (Schor, Scheherezade 122–23), a more complex depiction of social conflicts (Easson 59 and 93) and a more satisfactory resolution of them (Duthie 84, Kestner 170). North and South is also said to deal with “more complex intellectual issues” (Craik 31). And the novel’s heroine, Margaret Hale, has been seen as Gaskell’s most mature creation — a woman who grows in self-awareness as she adapts to an alien environment (Kestner 164–166) and, unlike Mary Barton, becomes an active mediator of class conflicts (Stoneman 120), the central consciousness that brings together “the lessons of social change and romance” (Schor, Scheherezade 127).1 The reconciliation of these conflicts she inspires through her influence over both mill owner and worker has been praised as a more effective and credible narrative resolution to the social problems depicted in the novel than the reconciliation between mill owner and worker in Mary Barton (David 36).

Altruism and the Monks of Thelema

Walter Besant ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 151-170
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Education ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Francois Rabelais ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
Mass Democracy

The central concerns of Besant’s philanthropic novels of the 1880s were anticipated in 1878’s The Monks of Thelema: An Invention, his first sustained foray into social commentary. Although largely neglected by scholars, the novel is an intriguing satire that is rich with contemporary insights. In addressing the dilemmas of philanthropic activism, Besant mocks the naïve idealism associated with Oxford thinkers and undergraduates while finding positive value in their reformist schemes of liberal education for the emerging mass democracy. With the French humanist François Rabelais supplying a model for progressive liberal humanism, amid the satire Besant’s fiction develops a positive ideal of association and moral perfectibility that foreshadows his later, more celebrated work in philanthropy and social reform.

‘Twenty girls in my attic’: Spatial and Spiritual Conversion in L. T. Meade’s A Princess of the Gutter

2020 ◽  
pp. 154-172
Author(s):  
Lisa C. Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Religious Philosophy ◽  
Settlement Movement ◽  
Spiritual Conversion ◽  
East End

This chapter examines L.T. Meade’s A Princess of the Gutter (1895). This novel integrates generic conventions of romance and realism in order to engage in contemporary debates about the settlement movement for its juvenile audience. In its representation of the protagonist’s experience living and working in various forms of settlement housing in London’s East End, the novel explores the degree to which a commitment to religious philosophy was necessary to effect meaningful social change.

Is Law Unbounded? Property Rights and Control of Social Groupings

2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (02) ◽  
pp. 517-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amnon Lehavi
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Suggested Model ◽  
Legal Rules ◽  
And Control ◽  
Practical Feasibility

This review essay follows up on a suggested model for resolving problems of neighborhood externalities and exclusionary associational patterns in metropolitan areas. The model is based on a property rights regime of “alienable entitlements,” as articulated by Lee Anne Fennell in The Unbounded Home (2009). The essay frames this model as promoting a groundbreaking approach to the fundamental quandary over the role of law as a tool for broad‐based social change and asks if legal rules can fully absorb the multiple types of societal effects that influence the nature of contemporary homeownership. It assesses the normative desirability and practical feasibility of controlling social exclusion through property rights.

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