scholarly journals 'The Shadow of One’s Own Head' or The Spectacle of Creativity

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 685
Author(s):  
Susanne Valerie Granzer

When acting, the actor/actress experiences a complex regime of signs in his/her body, mind, mood and gender. These signs are both disturbing and promising. On the one hand, the act of creativity makes a wound obvious which has been incarnated within man. It tells him/her that he/she is not the sole actor of his/her actions. On the other hand, precisely this way acting on stage becomes an event. The act of this event reveals a way of be-coming in which one acts while at the same time being passive, in which the actor/actress is both agent and patient of his/her own performance. This complex artistic experience catapults actors/actresses into an open passage, into an in-between where they are liberated from the illusion of being the sole actors of their performances. One might even say that by this turn an actor/actress experiences a change, an “anthropological mutation” (Agamben). Or, to have it differently: the artist suffers a kind of “death of the subject”.It is remarkable that this loss of the predominance of subjectivity is a crucial aspect of acting which may affect the audience in a particularly intensive way. Why? Perhaps because it updates an extremely intimate connection between audience and actors/actresses which vicariously reflects the in-between of life and death. A passage by which life presents itself as itself? Life – by its plane of immanence?

Author(s):  
Margaret J. M. Ezell

John Bunyan’s writings have traditionally invited critical readings focusing on gender issues. With the scholarly recovery of the writings of radical sectarian women during the 1650s and 1660s and renewed study of libertine sexuality in the Restoration, our understanding of Bunyan’s representation of gender hierarchy and gender roles in his writings has become more complex. On the one hand, as a minister, he insisted on conformity to a biblically based gender hierarchy, and in works like The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680) he condemned the fashionable display of sexuality. On the other hand, Bunyan conceptualized the nature of the human relationship with God as requiring men to perform feminine roles and women to take on masculine traits.


Author(s):  
Niek Van Wettere

Abstract This paper examines the productivity of the subject complement slot in a set of French and Dutch (semi-)copular micro-constructions. The presumed counterpart of productivity, conventionalization in the form of high token frequency, will also be taken into account in the analysis of the productivity complex. On the one hand, it will be shown that prototypical copulas generally have a higher productivity than semi-copulas, although there are some semi-copulas that can rival the productivity of prototypical copulas. On the other hand, it will be demonstrated that high token frequency is in general detrimental to productivity, on the level of the entire subject complement slot and on the level of the different semantic classes. However, the shape of the frequency distribution also seems to play a role: multiple highly frequent types are in my data more detrimental to productivity than one extremely frequent type, although the semantic connectedness of the types in the distribution might also be an explanatory factor.


Traditio ◽  
1948 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 161-185
Author(s):  
Kurt Lewent

Cerveri was decidedly no poetical genius, and often enough he follows the trodden paths of troubadour poetry. However, there is no denying that again and again he tries to escape that poetical routine. In many cases these attempts result in odd and eccentric compositions, where the unusual is reached at the cost of good taste and poetical values. On the other hand, it must be admitted that Cerveri's efforts in this respect were not always futile. His is, e.g. an amusing satire upon bad women. One of his love songs, characteristically called libel by the MS (Sg), assumes the form of a complaint submitted to the king as the supreme earthly judge, in which the defendant is the lady whose charms torture the lover and have made him a prisoner. This poem combines the traditional praise of the beloved and a flattery addressed to the king. Its slightly humoristic tone is also found in a song entitled lo vers del vassayll leyal. Here Cerveri, basing himself on a certain legend connected with St. Mark, gives the king advice in his love affair. Again the poet kills two birds with one stone, flattering the sovereign and pointing, for obvious purposes, to his own poverty. The latter is the only topic of a remarkably personal poem in which the author complains bitterly that, while many of his playmates have become rich in later years, the only wealth he himself did amass were the chans gays and sonetz agradans which he composed for other people to enjoy. Cerveri even tries to renew the traditional genre of the chanson de la mal mariée by adding motifs of—presumably—his own invention. This tendency towards a more independent way of thinking and greater originality in its poetical presentation could not be better illustrated than by the two poems which the MS calls Lo vers de la terra de Preste Johan and Pistola The one puts the poet's moral argumentation against the background of the medieval legend of Prester John, the other, which forms the subject of the present study, sets its teachings in a still more solemn framework, the liturgy of the Mass.


1987 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-257
Author(s):  
Robert Iljic

The sentences of the type above mentioned are characterized, on the one hand, by the cooccurrence of bă with an intransitive verb, on the other hand, by the classifier ge following bă and introducing a noun relative to a unique referent. This type of sentence, quoted by most major contemporary Chinese grammars, and to be traced in baihuà texts, doesn't seem, nowadays, to pertain any longer to a universally accepted standard. This paper demonstrates that in these sentences, as in all bă constructions, bă actually marks a patient (even if the latter may be the subject-of an intransitive verb); besides, given its position before bă, a certain agentivity is always conferred to a noun in topic position, even if this agentivity, taken to its far end, boils down to the only desire of having been able to do something to prevent a given event (a point in case: the death of a father); finally, the function of ge before a proper noun or a noun semantically determined as unique, which can be found in some other sentences, isn't to count, that is, to indicate a quantity. but to emphasize the qualitative value of the noun (the father insofar as he is a father), the effect being to underline the value (price) that the speaker attaches to a given person or thing, hence the modal connotation ascribed to such sentences.


2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-72
Author(s):  
Håkan Larsson

Håkan Larsson: Sport and gender This article concerns bodily materialisation as it occurs in youth sport. It is based on interviews with teenagers 16 to 19 years of age doing track and field athletics. The purpose of the article is to elucidate how the notion of a “natural body“ can be seen as a cultural effect of sports practice and sports discourse. On the one hand, the body is materialised as a performing body, and on the other as a beautiful body. The “performing body“ is a single-sexed biological entity. The “beautiful body“ is a double-sexed and distinctly heterosexually appealing body. As these bodies collide in teenager track and field, the female body materialises as a problematic body, a body that is at the same time the subject of the girl’s personality. The male body materialises as an unproblematic body, a body that is the object of the boy’s personality. However, the body as “(a problematic) subject“ or as “(an unproblematic) object“ is not in itself a gendered body. Rather, these are positions on a cultural grid of power-knowledge relations. A girl might position herself in a male discourse, and a boy might position himself in a female discourse, but in doing so, they seem to have to pay a certain price in order not to be seen as queer.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naupal Naupal

Abu Zayd believes that understanding the Qur'an is not limited to explanations or comments. It involves an interpretation process for capturing the significance (maghza) from the literal text. Interpretation also requires a presupposition that the Qur'an itself does not produce literal absolutes and certainty. The presupposition needs an interpretation that illustrates the possibility of accepting the diversity of Qur'anic interpretations in the times. By using Abu Zayd's hermeneutics, the Qur'an is an icon of Islam and at the same time a representation of Arab culture itself which is not necessarily literally absolute, but is open to interpretation. Hans Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic circle that inspired Hermeneutics of Abu Zayd emphasized that in understanding and applying the meanings of the text, the subject played a role in the text rather than the other way around. This study aims to open opportunities that the Qur'an on the one hand is an objective thing seen from the content of its truth, that is seen from its universal message, but on the other hand it is subjective, because it is bound by the interpretation of the text. This research is also intended to avoid the sacredness of the ordination of a single interpretation of the Qur'an which has resulted in the emergence of fundamentalism which has recently become so prevalent in global Islamic societies, not least in Indonesia.


Author(s):  
Lars Albinus

The purpose of the article is to show how the negative dialectics of Adorno gets involved with a concept of myth that is questionable in several respects. First of all, Adorno tries to combine, but rather conflates, two understandings of myth. On the one hand, the concept of myth is defined as the ancient Greek mythos, in which the subject of man is projected on to nature; on the other hand, myth is defined as the backfire of enlightenment, in which self-reflection becomes the blind spot of instrumental reason. Along these lines of argument, Adorno’s interpretation of Homer, which, at any rate, is highly inspiring, attempts to demonstrate that Odysseus is already enlightened in that he keeps the myth at bay in order to gain his self. The point is, as a matter of dialectic necessity, that he just ends up in myth once again, albeit in the second sense, namely by being a victim of his own self-denial. A question that seems to remain unanswered, though, is how the two kinds of myth are related. Further, Adorno draws on a problematic distinction between myth and literature in order to claim that Homer separates himself from the realm of myth. By adopting Adorno’s own game of interpretation, however, it is possible to regard myth as such, including the Homeric one, as being contingently open-ended rather than just a matter of dialectic determination.


2005 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rein Bos

Of whom does the prophet say this? A single question and a multifaceted answerTheologians seeking to preach Old Testament texts meaningful way in Christian congregations face a great challenge. On the one hand, very little has been written in homiletical textbooks about hermeneutical problems facing those who wish to read the Old Testament from the perspective of Christ’s life and death. On the other hand, advances in biblical criticism seemed to have made any such attempt problematic to begin with. In this article, the author attempts to provide a practical-theological contribution to this hermeneutical challenge by reconsidering the heuristic value of mediaeval fourfold interpretation of scriptural passages. By focussing on the servant song of deutero-Isaiah (53) in light of its reinterpretation in Acts 8, this paper aims to provide some suggestions on how Christological interpretation of the Old Testament can be done in a way that takes the original context seriously and is able to read the text from a Christian perspective without the one reading infringing on the other.


2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-288
Author(s):  
Stefan Keine ◽  
Trupti Nisar ◽  
Rajesh Bhatt

We describe and analyze the previously undocumented verbal agreement system of Kutchi (Indo-Aryan). We argue that Kutchi instantiates a novel type of split ergativity. First, it exhibits an aspect split in that agreement in non-perfective clauses behaves on a par with agreement in intransitive perfective clauses, in stark contrast to transitive perfective clauses. A striking property of Kutchi is that these asymmetries manifest themselves in the richness of agreement. In the former configurations, the verb agrees with the subject for person, number and gender. In the latter, on the other hand, agreement is systematically defective and reliable fails to cross-references certain φ-features. In addition to this aspect split, Kutchi displays a person split: While the verb normally agrees with the subject, it surprisingly fails to do so in transitive perfective clauses with a 1st person subject. Instead, it is the object that triggers agreement in these configurations, likewise in a defective manner. We will argue that these agreement asymmetries are syntactic in nature rather than morphological. Our analysis builds on, and extends, previous work by Laka (2006) and Coon (2010).


Poligrafi ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 107-127
Author(s):  
Victoria Dos Santos

This article aims to explore the affinities between contemporary Paganism and the posthuman project in how they approach the non-human natural world. On the one hand, posthumanism explores new ways of considering the notion of humans and how they are linked with the non-human world. On the other hand, Neopaganism expands this reflection to the spiritual domain through its animistic relational sensibility. Both perspectives challenge the modern paradigm where nature and humans are opposed and mutually disconnected. They instead propose a relational ontology that welcomes the “different other.” This integrated relationship between humans and the “other than human” can be understood through the semiotic Chora, a notion belonging to Julia Kristeva that addresses how the subject is not symbolically separated from the world in which it is contained.


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