scholarly journals Barriers to the Self

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Wall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Young Women ◽  
The Self ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
Common Thread ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Perception Of Self ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This article explores Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1967) and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation (1994) through the effects that depression has on the creation and perception of self in young women. Depression is explored in terms of the barriers it erects around young women’s attempts to conceptualise selfhood as it forms in adolescence. This article particularly focuses on the problem of productivity in both texts as protagonists Esther Greenwood and Elizabeth Wurtzel appear to view productivity, particularly academic and literary, as the means through which they will create and establish a coherent self. This fetishised productivity is halted by their depressions, illustrating a further tension between the wider capitalist society which demands productivity and the destabilising nature of depression. Whilst Esther and Elizabeth have different experiences, due to the periods of composition, both characters and texts have striking similarities which suggest that there is a common thread which unites the experiences of female depression in the late twentieth century.

Exploring the Self Through Algorithmic Composition

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 89-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Alsop
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Computer Technology ◽  
The Self ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Algorithmic Composition ◽  
Computer Algorithms ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Computer Based ◽  
Musical Interests ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The author discusses his views on musical composition in the late twentieth century, focusing on the influence that communication and computer technology have had over his pursuit. He goes on to describe his use of computer-based algorithmic composition and how this particular approach enhances and refines his understanding of his own musical self-expression. He describes four computer algorithms, used in recent compositions and improvisations, that reflect his particular musical interests.

Rorty, Richard McKay (1931–2007)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Voparil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Early Exposure ◽  
Traditional Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Best known for his lively and provocative advocacy of pragmatism, Rorty was a wide-ranging and iconoclastic philosopher, whose influential, frequently decried work helped define some of the key intellectual debates of the late twentieth century. His broad training in the history of ideas, early exposure to pragmatism, and self-taught fluency in analytic philosophy combined in his landmark book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), to yield a profound anti-Cartesian and anti-Kantian critique of the foundationalist and representationalist assumptions of modern epistemology and metaphysics. Drawing insight and inspiration from novel juxtapositions and associations of thinkers – Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey; Quine, Sellars, and Davidson; Freud, Sartre, and Gadamer – Rorty set the terms of his decades-long project: what he called in Mirror the negative, "therapeutic" work of historicizing the purportedly timeless problems of traditional philosophy to highlight how they resulted from the adoption of contingent vocabularies, and the positive, "edifying" (1979) effort to think through what it would mean to move beyond "the entire cultural tradition which made truth…a central virtue" (1982, 35). In his most original work, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), and across four volumes of philosophical papers and a collection of popular essays, Rorty elaborated the implications of this broader cultural and intellectual shift for our understanding of language, the self, community, politics, ethics, justice, and religion. Increasingly identifying with the pragmatist tradition, he engaged with leading philosophers around questions of truth, knowledge, justification, and relativism. Yet, the moral core of his project centered on asserting "the priority of democracy to philosophy" (1991a) and reorienting philosophical reflection away from the problems of philosophers and toward a political liberalism dedicated to the reduction of human cruelty and suffering.

Friend and foe: Wei Te-Sheng on Taiwanese emotions towards Japanese colonization and the Japanese perspectives of Ryotaro Shiba and Yoshinori Kobayashi

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-188
Author(s):  
Tets Kimura ◽  
Shih-Ying Lin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Taiwanese Identity ◽  
Collective Emotions ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In Warriors of the Rainbow, Wei Te-Sheng sharply distinguished between heroes and villains in the 1930 Musha incident – the Taiwanese heroes fight against the Japanese villains. This contrasts with Kano, where Wei presents the romantic Orient of Japanese colonization through baseball games. Although his films are not always historically accurate in details, they realistically represent Taiwanese collective emotions towards Japanese colonization. Preferencing Japanese colonization over Chinese administration is not unusual in today’s Taiwan and thus not original to Wei. Taiwan’s Japanese colonial past was previously acknowledged by two well-known Japanese writers, Ryotaro Shiba and Yoshinori Kobayashi, in the late twentieth century when Taiwan newly asserted its freedom of expression. This article will analyse the role played by Japan in establishing the creation and projection of a unique Taiwanese identity in the field of popular culture by employing a ‘point of view’ framework from narratology.

scholarly journals 'A Hostile Environment': Failure of Composition in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn.

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Place Of Death ◽  
Hostile Environment ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Law ◽  
Ecstatic Experience ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This essay examines the effects of incompleteness in Anna Mendelssohn’s poetry, when incompleteness constitutes a requirement to take the thought of the poem further, beyond and outside itself, especially in its refusal to be reconciled with reality as it exists. Taking composition to mean the integration of the materials of a poem into a whole, the argument seeks to show that Mendelssohn’s poems are not-whole, and do not construct a world, but on the contrary carry through an unappeasable criticism of the reality she lived, which is that of late twentieth-century Britain. Her work is in unremitting rebellion against language that covers over and permits misogyny, racism, class oppression, hatred of art, insipid living. She writes from a situation in which not-speaking is imposed, in which the speech organs themselves have been damaged and closed up. This condition carries a removal of the self from life, into a place of death. Another, contrary death, however, takes place in her poetry: that of the self that passes through a disintegration, which Mendelssohn places at the heart of ecstatic experience of life. She excoriates those who want to remove the extreme aliveness of lyrical language from life and poetry. The law is what gives permission to that suppression: her poetry repeatedly moves against the actions of the law as it deadens life and language. Mendelssohn’s poetry is an account, implacable and without resentment, of a life lived inside and against personal and historical suffering.

“The Most Important Biblical Discovery of Our Time”: William Henry Green and the Demise of Ussher's Chronology

2000 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald L. Numbers
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Human History ◽  
Saturday Evening ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Evangelical Protestants ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Princeton Theological Seminary ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In 1650 the distinguished church historian Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland announced his meticulously calculated time of the Creation: early Saturday evening, 22 October 4004 B.C.E., a date immortalized in the margins of countless Bibles for nearly three centuries. Among evangelical Protestants who believed in the inerrancy of Scripture this date came to mark the beginning of human history. For some believers it remained a landmark until the late twentieth century; others abandoned it as early as the 1860s. Among American evangelicals no one played a more important role in discrediting Ussher's chronology than William Henry Green, an Old Testament scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary. One of Green's Princeton colleagues called his demonstration of Ussher's fallacy “the most important biblical discovery of our time.” In some ways it was, although its full impact did not come until the second half of the twentieth century.

Taylor, Charles (1931–)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Calhoun
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Science Ethics ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
Historical Reconstructions ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Among the most influential of late twentieth-century philosophers, Taylor has written on human agency, identity and the self; language; the limits of epistemology; interpretation and explanation in social science; ethics; and democratic politics. His work is distinctive because of his innovative treatments of long-standing philosophical problems, especially those deriving from applications of Enlightenment epistemology to theories of language, the self and political action, and his unusually thorough integration of ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophical concerns and approaches. Taylor’s work is shaped by the view that adequate understanding of philosophical arguments requires an appreciation of their origins, changing contexts and transformed meanings. Thus it often takes the form of historical reconstructions that seek to identify the paths by which particular theories and languages of understanding or evaluation have been developed. This reflects both Taylor’s sustained engagement with Hegel’s philosophy and his resistance to epistemological dichotomies such as ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ in favour of a notion of ‘epistemic gain’ influenced by H.G. Gadamer.

Fundamentalism: Not Just a Cautionary Tale

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-151
Author(s):  
Edith M. Humphrey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Ad Hominem ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The One ◽  
Conservative Christians ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
The Church

Paradox attends the Biblical thread concerning foundations and the one true foundation, Christ—the unique divine cornerstone foundation is also a means of scandal to those who reject him. In this essay, Humphrey traces the history of the term “fundamentalism” from its Scriptural and Patristic reference to the person of Jesus Christ and/or the tradition of the Church, through the self-ascription of Protestant scholars of various denominations seeking an inclusive Christian minimalism, and into the pejorative use against sectarian evangelical Christians and political terrorists in the late twentieth century. In the end, the pejorative use of the term is too broad to offer us anything but a caricature, and “fundamentalism,” whatever it means, is more vilified than carefully explained or answered. She concludes by arguing that this term cannot reasonably be used against tradition-driven, maximalist Catholic or Orthodox Christians, and she suggests that its deployment signals a need for less conservative Christians to confront the issues raised by “fundamentalists” rather than resort to ad hominem attacks.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

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