Zweig and the Chinese Love-Letter Fever

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnhilt Johanna Hoefle
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Epistolary Fiction ◽  
Love Letter ◽  
The Prestige

In the 1920s and 1930s China was swept by a “love-letter fever,” a craze for real and fictional romantic letters (qingshu). One of this trend’s most important representatives was the notoriously frivolous writer Zhang Yiping (1902-1946). This chapter places Zhang’s retranslation of Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman of 1933 against the background of the young Chinese Republic’s ongoing struggles for modernity, when a multitude of theories on literature and its social functions were competing with each other. It also shows how Zhang used the prestige of a European writer in his feud with Lu Xun (1881-1936), one of China’s most influential writers. Taking the Chinese discourses as a starting point, a close reading of Letter from an Unknown Woman concludes the chapter. Beyond the framework of epistolary fiction and the love-letter genre the work reveals complex narrative strategies and literary dimensions which significantly complicate existing interpretations of Zweig’s most famous novella.

scholarly journals W czasie wiersza. "Posłańcy" Stanisława Grochowiaka

2021 ◽  
pp. 10-25
Author(s):  
Helena Hejman
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Problem Of Time ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Reading Experiment ◽  
The Relationship

This paper – presenting a close reading of Stanisław Grochowiak’s poem Posłańcy [The Messengers] – proposes reflections on the “time of the poem”. It deals with the issue of experiencing different temporalities while reading (when and where you are while experiencing written words; what is the relationship between the reader's "real" and "fictional" – immersed in the process of reading – lives), and proposes a depiction of pace moderations in the analyzed work – of its own, differential dynamics. The problem of time and velocity is the starting point for a hermeneutic interpretation, or rather hermeneutic exercises (inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style): a conceptual, anthropological and semiotic reading experiment carried out on Grochowiak's poem. This essay is an attempt to pave a few paths for understanding The Messengers and their messages. Following in the footsteps of the title characters (with the help of associations and seemingly trivial observations) becomes a cognitive and imaginative adventure, a revolve around an ineffable, dark mystery of the poem (perhaps of all poems and their messengers).

Intersectional Avant-Garde: Paul Leni’s Rebus-Film Series and the Confluence of Experimental Visual Styles

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-115
Author(s):  
Erica Tortolani
Keyword(s):  
Modern Art ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Film Series ◽  
Magazine Articles ◽  
The City

This chapter focuses on Leni’s eight-part short film series, Rebus-Film (1925-26), and the ways that it relates to various avant-garde art movements of the 1910s and 1920s. Using Rebus-Film Nr. 1 as a starting point, the essay analyses the series’ connections to contemporaneous artistic movements such as Cubism, Futurism, and Dada and to cinematic styles and genres of the time, including Soviet montage and the ‘City Symphony’ films. To supplement this analysis, the essay draws upon reviews, trade magazine articles, and other written records from the period. This chapter sheds light on the ways that critics and audiences received the films and regarded Leni’s use of experimental aesthetic styles. While it is debatable as to whether Leni considered himself a modern art practitioner, a close reading of these short films shows that they are in dialogue with the visual avant-garde. This chapter also discusses the ways that the series fits into, and extends, Leni’s German and American careers.

scholarly journals Towards the attainment of mindful bodily relations in music education

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-133
Author(s):  
Cecilia Ferm Almqvist
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Music Teacher ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Philosophical Thinking ◽  
Electric Guitar ◽  
Relational Experiences ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Upper Secondary ◽  
To Receive

Recent studies of female guitar students in upper secondary school ensemble education suggest that girls behave, and are encouraged to behave, in more immanent ways than boys. They seem to receive less encouragement to stretch their bodies and become full musical human beings. Instead they become the second musical sex. During the course of my work with the problem of how to create space for girls playing the electric guitar in educational settings, I have continually found myself wondering how to create educational spaces and relations in ways that let all pupils, independent of sex, realize ideas, transcend as musical bodies, and become what they already are. If teachers and pupils are interrelated bodies, teachers must be aware of how they use their bodies when it comes to creating space for all pupils to develop and stretch out their bodies. The actions of the music teacher, as a musical body, must be balanced in relation to the other musical bodies in the room, as well as to physical preconditions, goals, visions, and expectations of the students. In this article, I want to delve into the subject of bodily interaction, teachers’ responsibilities, and questions of intentional educational bodily relations. The aim is to share my close reading of Young’s philosophical thinking regarding gender structures and especially female comportment, motility, and spatiality, and develop a set of prerequisites for intentional bodily (music) educational relations. With a starting point in research-based inspiration and motivation for conducting the current philosophical investigation, I share my close reading of Young’s theories regarding female situated bodies. Continually I relate to excerpts from two interviews with female guitar students, exemplifying musical body-relational experiences. Finally I share and reflect upon a developed thinking about mindful bodily (music) educational relations.

scholarly journals FROM COMMENTED READING TO READING WITH A COMMENTARY: A NEW PARADIGM OF DEVELOPING THE INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNIQUE (PAPER 3)

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-596
Author(s):  
E. S. Romanicheva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Research Question ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Maximum Effect ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Main Body ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Group Project ◽  
Classical Text ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Instructional Technique

Abstract. The Introduction to the paper raises a research question, why a classical text needs another commentary if the addressee of the commentary is a school-age reader. The question becomes a starting point in the discourse on how text commenting is used in school practice today and what new types of commentaries appear in the school lesson. Materials and methods. Search for an answer to the question raised employs methods of comparison and collation of sources to clarify the dissimilarity between the technique of commented reading and that of reading with commentaries, and establish a conceptual difference. The main body of the paper contains a description of the research results. An analysis of the experience of E.S. Abelyuk (a teacher and methodologist from Moscow) presented in methodological publications allowed the conclusion that the possibilities of using the technique of readers’ commenting in today’s school have significantly grown: it can be a research project, either a group project or an individual one; while the methodology developed by E.S. Abelyuk that, essentially, appears to be both research work and project-oriented work, could be used by teachers to support learners’ research and projects. The hypothesis put forward is tested by the analysis of practices pursued by M.A. Pavlova (a teacher from Moscow). She proposes readers’ commentary as a form of final work. According to her task, learners have to write a commentary on the poetic essay ‘L.N.Tolstoy’ (little known to contemporary readers) by V.V. Nabokov. It is noteworthy that while writing their commentaries, learners should demonstrate their abilities to use the Internet resources. Teacher’s assistance to learners in mastering the practices is also a contemporary tutorial objective. The final part of the paper presents a commentary on ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’’ written by A.I. Knyazhitsky, a methodologist from Moscow. He commented on the story by addressing the literary investigation of ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ and some other documents. In his commentary, the methodologist assumed that considering other texts via commentary creates a context where the studied fiction is read to the maximum effect, and it is up to the learner who reads it to choose the depth of ‘plunging’ into the text. Having created the commentary on the story, A.I. Knyazhitsky splendidly accomplished the most challenging tutorial objective: to describe the technique that combines the commentary of a text and its close reading and fills it with substance. The paper demonstrates this on a specific fragment of the story. The conclusion states that commentary is one of the best known and most effective instructional techniques to teach reading and understanding of a literary text, but the content of the commentary on texts and the commented texts themselves can and should vary. Commentary as an instructional technique should be considerably enriched, in particular, based on an analysis of teachers’ best practices and their further testing and technification. Keywords: instructional technique, commented reading, close reading, reading with a commentary, types of commentaries.

Post-World War II Group Psychology and the Limits of Leadership: Bion, Lacan and the Leaderless Goup

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-339
Author(s):  
Max Maher
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Logical Time ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
British Military ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Neoliberal Economics ◽  
Contemporary Work ◽  
Post War

This article attempts to reveal something different about the afterlife of a number of innovations made in British psychiatry during World War II – in particular around the notion of leadership – by reading them in a much broader context which includes Jacques Lacan's article ‘Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty’ (1945). Within such a broader trajectory, considerations of leaders and leaderlessness, which pressed towards democracy and egalitarianism, intersect (paradoxically) with other currents, equally radical, which envision a totalizing reduction of individuals to a technocratic mass. The article's starting point is Jacques Lacan's high praise of British military psychiatry – in particular of W.H. Bion, John Rickman and John Rawlings Rees, consulting psychiatrist to the army during the war. It then weighs Lacan's description of their achievements against a historical account of where such experiments led in the post-war context, and the social functions envisaged for them, that differed from those Lacan hoped they could perform. It concludes with a comparison of Lacan's article ‘Logical Time’, his first published after reading Bion and Rickman, to the contemporary work of Friedrich von Hayek, the early theorist of neoliberal economics, to illustrate the profound ambiguity which exists within the political implications of psychoanalytic theories of groups.

scholarly journals Judicial diversity, the woman judge and fairy tale endings

Legal Studies ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Rackley
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Rational Thought ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Woman Judge

The story of the woman judge as one of exclusion and isolation plagued with allegations of bias is well documented. Interestingly, despite significant differences in time and place, a common theme unites these tales: the woman judge is a dangerous outsider, a threat to the aesthetic norm. The judicial climate, at least in most of the common law world, is somewhat chilly: reactions to her presence on the bench vary from the largely indifferent to the downright hostile. Why is this? After all, most people, perhaps acknowledging the political and democratic gains underlying calls for a more representative judiciary, would wish to encourage – or at least not discourage – judicial diversity.Taking the stories of the woman judge as its starting point, this paper contends that underlying these tales is an image of the judge that is as much intuitive as it is reasoned; that our understanding of the judge and judging is as much derived from the imagination as from what is conventionally considered as rational thought. Thus, the paper deploys the narrative strategies of fairy tales in an attempt to disrupt the imaginative hold of familiar yet particular images that infuse and distort current discourses on adjudication. It suggests that despite the Department for Constitutional Affairs’ ongoing quest to increase diversity within the judiciary, current initiatives do not confront fully these instinctive images. As a result, their narrative of inclusiveness and difference fails. In response, the paper appeals to the imagination as a route toward engendering new conceptions on the judge and judging, the possibility of truly diverse judiciaries and, perhaps, a fairy tale ending to the woman judge’s story.

scholarly journals Kormányzástan a Laozi-ben

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2018/2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Endre Ladjánszky
Keyword(s):  
Heterogeneous System ◽  
Chinese Philosophy ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Technical Aspects ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Classical Chinese ◽  
Textual Cohesion

The power-technical aspects and the methods of governance of Laozi’s workare the less widely discussed topics of sinological literature on classical Chinese philosophy. The tension caused by the duality in the paradoxes in connection with the textual cohesion problems in the Daodejing’s reading isthe starting point for our analysis. An inherent way to resolve the tension wasmade possible by an original text-critical distinction, in which we can examinethe divergent and convergent aspects of the shengren-teaching that constitutesthe Daoist concept of governance. With the help of an analytical techniquebased on a close reading of the texts, in addition to the systematic discussionof the chapter relevance, Laozi’s first man, the sage shengren can be recognized and portrayed in four different roles: as a wise hermit, as a kind ofrulers’ helper, as a ruler who becomes a shengren and as a shengren whobecomes a ruler. These descriptions make it easier for us to understand thecomplex-heterogeneous system of the Daodejing’s governance.

Reading Lu Xun’s Early Essays in Relation to Marxism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viren Murthy
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
The World ◽  
Marxist Approach ◽  
Marxist Tradition

Lu Xun was claimed and canonized as a Marxist by the Chinese Communist Party, while Japanese and Western critics frequently read his work as a critique of modernity. Whereas the latter approach tends to trace the continuity in his writings, the Marxist approach largely brackets his earlier work. This chapter attempts to bring Marxist theory in dialogue with Lu Xun’s work in a different way, by focusing on his early writings and reading them in relation to various theorists. Through a close reading of two of Lu Xun’s early essays, “On the Destruction of Malevolent Voices” and “Imbalanced Cultural Development,” this chapter examines debates within the Marxist tradition, especially about issues related to global capitalism and the possibilities of a socialist future in countries on the periphery of the world-system. In this way, Lu Xun and Marxist theory can illuminate one another.

The Unbroken Messiah: A Johannine Feature and its Social Functions

1995 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-441
Author(s):  
Bruce W. Longenecker
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Fourth Gospel ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Narrative Approaches ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Biblical Study ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
The University

Two areas of biblical study identified as ‘growth points’ are the sociological and narrative approaches to early Christianity and its literature. Although these two approaches may be the offspring of different departments within the university, they are intricately related: narratives relate to a social context to the extent that they reinforce or subvert socio-perspectives. This project explores the interface of the two, examining one aspect of the narrative of the Fourth Gospel and considering ways in which it might have functioned within the social context of Johannine Christianity. While some literary critics draw high walls around a text to contain the ‘text world’ and keep it from outside contamination, others work on the basis that narratives are often referential, pointing to other narratives and building their own storyline in relation to them in some fashion. The latter approach is the one taken here, as certain points in the Johannine storyline are considered in relation to two important stories within early Christian tradition and within Judaism. The starting-point for this investigation is the feeding miracle in John 6.

Beckett, Bilingualism and the Bible

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 353-366
Author(s):  
Iain Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Biblical Intertextuality ◽  
Critical Discourses ◽  
French Texts

The starting point for this article is a critical consensus that biblical references are more prevalent in Beckett's English than his French writing. Through a close reading of as well as existing critical discourses on the Bible's status for Beckett, I argue that there may be more scope for a detailed attention to biblical intertextuality in Beckett's French texts than has previously been allowed.

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