scholarly journals Mapping Spaces, Identities, and Ideologies in The Parisian (2019)

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-117
Author(s):  
Fadwa Kamal Abdel Rahman

The Parisian (2019) is Isabella Hammad’s debut novel. It provides a dynamic spatial representation of a transitional era and a history that was unfolding and changing the face of the earth at the critical time between the two World Wars. Adopting the realistic tradition of nineteenth- century novelists, Isabella Hammad manages to provide a textual cartography of the places she dealt with in the Levantine and in France, mapping alongside the evolving sense of identity in the wake of drastic political, social, and cultural changes. By depicting those parallel worlds, the text dissects the Nabulsi society and reveals the heterogeneity that underlies its superficial homogeneity. It also introduces those spaces, specially Nablus, discursively bringing out their many facets through multifocalization. This paper aims at showing how the text underscores both the subjective experiential sense of place and the objective analytical and ideological sense of how place materializes the fabric of immanent relations of power. This is done through a geocritical approach that links together the literary representation with the lived spatial referent in ways that help readers understand a lot about the past and the present of this part of the world.

1981 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Baker

In the sense that myth is a reordering of various random elements into an intelligible, useful pattern, a structuring of the past in terms of present priorities, nineteenth-century Englishmen were inveterate myth-makers. As liberal and scientific thought shook the foundations of belief, the Victorians erected gothic spires as monuments to a medieval order of supposedly simple, strong faith. While their industrial masses languished, they extolled the virtues of self-made men. Confronted with foreign competitors and rebellious colonials, they instinctively asserted the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. In classic myth-making style, the Victorians set about “reorganizing traditional components in the face of new circumstances or, correlatively, in reorganizing new, imported components in the light of tradition.”Myth not only serves self-validating ends; it also provides a cohesive rationale, a fulcrum propelling people towards great achievements. If the Victorians were confident and self-congratulatory, they had cause to be: their material, intellectual, and political accomplishments were many. Not the least of their successes was in the sphere of sports and games, a subject often ignored by historians. Especially in the development of ball games—Association and Rugby football, cricket, lawn tennis, and golf—the Victorians modernized old games, created new ones, and exported them all to the four corners of the earth. Stereotyped as overly-serious folk, they in fact “taught the world to play.”Since sport, more than most forms of human activity, lends itself to myth-making, it is not surprising to find a myth emerging among the late-Victorians having to do with the origins of Rugby football. Like baseball's Doubleday myth, the tale of William Webb Ellis inspiring the distinctive game of rugby is a period piece, reflecting more of the era which gave it birth than of the event to which it referred.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 152-158
Author(s):  
Dr. Sheeba Himani Sharma

Since inception, human race has always witnessed pandemics, disasters and wars, but it is the resilient spirit that has brought us this far. With each passing devastation, we rebuild ourselves and stand even stronger than before. Although there are numerous factors that help to inculcate resilience within humans, Science and Technology have ever remained faithful and have suggested promising ways using which we could combat our ‘unseen enemy’ today and even in the past. Today, at this hour, when the world is overburdened by the chaos of COVID-19, people are looking up to Science and Technology for the ways they can offer to eradicate this disease from the face of the earth. As it is rightly said, “Necessity is the mother of invention”, it can be safely concluded that Science and Technology are boosted by resilience. The human race has found the best of its innovations while undergoing some very troubled times. The current crisis in front of us is the situation now where the world has been segregated and people have been isolated. But thanks to technology that is knitting us close together. On the other hand, Science is playing its part to help discover effective drugs, improve human immunity and all this is being done to ensure the smooth running of human civilization. This paper intends to bring into view the notable contributions of Science and Technology that are today being used and exploited extensively in light of this pandemic outbreak.


Horizons ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 172-194
Author(s):  
Christopher Pramuk

In March 1943, having narrowly escaped Europe three years earlier, Abraham Joshua Heschel published “The Meaning of This War,” his first essay in an American publication. The essay shows, quite remarkably, his full command of literary English. It also shows, as biographer Edward Kaplan remarks, that Heschel “had found his militant voice.” “Emblazoned over the gates of the world in which we live,” the essay begins, “is the escutcheon of the demons. The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. There have never been so much guilt and distress, agony and terror. At no time has the earth been so soaked with blood.” Heschel's extraordinary life's witness, his whole body of work, traverses precisely this anthropological and theological knife's edge: The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. Where is God? Or better, Who is God? in relation to the rapacious misuse and idolatrous distortion of human freedom? Or simply, Is God?


2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 437-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Dallmayr

The question raised by the article is: can democracy be religious and, if so, how? Can religious faith be reconciled with modern democratic political institutions? The article takes its departure from the biblical admonition to believers to be ‘the salt of the earth’ — a phrase that militates against both world dominion and world denial. In its long history, Islam (like Christianity) has been sorely tempted by the lure of worldly power and domination. Nor is this temptation entirely a matter of the past (witness the rise of the Christian right and of ‘political Islam’ in our time). Focusing on contemporary Iran, the article makes a constitutional proposal which would strengthen the democratic character of the Iranian Republic without canceling religious faith. If adopted, the proposal would reinvigorate the ‘salt’ of Muslim faith thus enabling believers to live up to the Qur‘anic summons for freedom, justice and service in the world.


Author(s):  
Tanjana S. Zlotnikova ◽  

The article raises the question of foreseeing moral and intellectual, aesthetic and political collisions that could occur after the expected changes at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. The philosophical and anthropological paradigm of the pre-revolutionary era is defined through metaphors and concepts that attracted the attention of Russian philosophers, representatives of the sphere of artistic creativity: «expectation» (of changes, new people and phenomena) and «fear» (of changes, the unknown). For the analysis, we selected the judgments of prominent philosophers who discovered existential issues and related existential problems of the transition era for their contemporaries: V. Solovyov, V. Rozanov and N. Berdyaev. In V. Solovyov, the problem of waiting is related to the loneliness of a person in the face of global discord. Attention is drawn to the concept of «symptom of the end», to the concepts of crisis and disaster. Loneliness is experienced by the intellectual in anticipation of changes, possibly destructive, so the expectation as a context of loneliness turns into horror. V. Rozanov emphasized the tendency to distance himself from the world, Europe, contemporaries and classics in Russia. In Rozanov's philosophical and journalistic works, the future is not discussed at all because it is impossible to construct it; the past, which might have been the refuge of ideas about the harmony and dignity of life, causes the philosopher's attitude is sometimes even more negative than the present. On the example of the great creators – A. Chekhov, V. Meyerhold, V. Komissarzhevskaya and other contemporaries of N. Berdyaev, the psychoemotional tension from the coming crisis, the horror in anticipation of the coming future is shown. Berdyaev organically raises the question of the border between longing and other conditions (boredom, horror, a sense of emptiness), and the border is existential.


1987 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Knight

Historians generally grumble at the liberties taken with letters and papers by editors and biographers in the past, while reviewers may complain at the professorial pomposities which interfere with the reader's interaction with the text. Certainly, reading is not a mere matter of information retrieval or of source-mining, but a meeting of minds, and any over-zealous editing which makes this more difficult will have failed. Editors, whether of journals or of documents, are midwives of ideas—self-effacingly bringing an author's meaning and style into the world. What reviewers praise is the unobtrusive, and what they damn is ‘a manner at once slapdash and intrusive’, making allowances perhaps for an ‘introduction which is as admirable as his footnotes are useless’. When in the 1960s new technology brought us a flood of facsimile reprints of scientific works, some avoided these problems by appearing naked and unashamed: but for a text on phrenology, or for Goethe's Theory of Colours, a fig leaf or two of commentary is really necessary to help the innocent reader to interact with the book. Facsimiles of nineteenth-century editions of Wilkins' papers, of some Newton correspondence, or of Henry More's poetry are even more problematic; the reader should know that these editors' assumptions cannot be taken for granted, and that their introductions are themselves historical documents. The exact reproduction of misprints and misbindings (giving pages out of order and misnumbered) is of dubious assistance to the modern reader.


Author(s):  
Christian W. McMillen

There will be more pandemics. A pandemic might come from an old, familiar foe such as influenza or might emerge from a new source—a zoonosis that makes its way into humans, perhaps. The epilogue asks how the world will confront pandemics in the future. It is likely that patterns established long ago will re-emerge. But how will new challenges, like climate change, affect future pandemics and our ability to respond? Will lessons learned from the past help with plans for the future? One thing is clear: in the face of a serious pandemic much of the developing world’s public health infrastructure will be woefully overburdened. This must be addressed.


1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Vicinus

How and when did society first recognize women's homoerotic bonds? Were these romantic friendships fully accepted, or were they seen as problematic? Did the women involved see themselves as lesbians? These and other questions have been raised over the past twenty years by historians of lesbian sexuality. When Lillian Faderman in her pioneering survey of European and American lesbians declared the nineteenth century as the golden age of unproblematic romantic friendships, historians quickly responded with evidence to the contrary. Much of this debate has been focused on whether or not women could be considered “lesbian” before they claimed (or had forced on them) a publicly acknowledged identity. But the modern lesbian did not appear one day fully formed in the case studies of the fin-de-siècle sexologists; rather she was already a recognizable, if shadowy, subject for gossip among the sophisticated by at least the 1840s and 1850s. By examining closely a single divorce trial, I hope to show that literary and legal elites acknowledged lesbian sexuality in a variety of complex ways. Their uneasy disapproval encompassed both a self-conscious silence in the face of evidence and a desire to control information, lest it corrupt the innocent. Yet who can define the line between the ignorant and the informed? The very public discussion of the Codrington divorce, and most especially the role of the feminist, Emily Faithfull, in alienating Helen Codrington's affections from her husband, demonstrate the recognition of female homosexual behavior.


1941 ◽  
Vol 1 (S1) ◽  
pp. 86-95
Author(s):  
R. M. Havens

During the past decade the rapid spread of governmental activities into new fields and their extension within the fields that had previously been entered have increased the attention always given to the question of the legitimate sphere of activity for the Federal Government. There has been a widespread assumption that throughout the nineteenth century with only insignificant exceptions this country followed a policy of laissez-faire. From this assumption many people have proceeded to argue that in the past decade the American people have suddenly turned from the tradition which made this the greatest industrial nation of the world and have adopted a course which leads away from the “American way of life.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 409-449
Author(s):  
Zeinab Azarbadegan

Abstract This article examines a copy of Farhād Mīrzā’s Jām-i Jam (the World-Revealing Goblet) published in 1856 in Tehran and kept at Columbia University Library offsite storage. It demonstrates the dual importance of this book in geographic knowledge production and as part of the library of Saʿīd Nafīsī, one of the most prominent Iranian scholars of Persian literature. Methodologically, the paper offers various ways to study a single lithograph to decipher larger historical processes in histories of education, translation, and print. First, it analyzes the paratext to expose scholarly and political networks in order to examine the genealogy of geographic knowledge production in mid-nineteenth century Qajar Iran. Second, it studies the content and translation practices employed by Farhād Mīrzā to offer novel strategies for analyzing dissemination and reception of new ways of production and categorization of geographic knowledge as well as methods utilized in composition of pedagogical geography books. Finally, it discusses how cataloging practices affect current scholarship and lead to rendering certain texts “hidden.” It therefore illustrates how the study of Farhād Mīrzā’s Jām-i Jam, a book aspiring to reveal the world, can expose much about scholarly practices not only in the past but also the present.


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