Racine and The Problem of Suicide

PMLA ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 441-454
Author(s):  
Marion Monaco

The Suicides of Racine, and of the seventeenth-century French theatre in general, have been studied in terms of the technical requirements pertaining to staging which developed from Greco-Roman theory and practice. This is a logical approach which cannot be dismissed, especially since in the seventeenth century the theory of bienséance was expanded to include the ethical proprieties. Nevertheless such a technical approach cannot provide full insight into Racine's intent. An adequate understanding of Racine's use of suicides is possible only when we analyze the particular suicides of the various plays in terms of the inner construction of Racine's tragedies and in terms of the interaction in Racine's thought of Greco-Roman and Christian factors.

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Varun R. Kshettry ◽  
Stefan A. Mindea ◽  
H. Hunt Batjer

✓Cranial injuries were among the earliest neurosurgical problems faced by ancient physicians and surgeons. In this review, the authors trace the development of neurosurgical theory and practice for the treatment of cranial injuries beginning from the earliest ancient evidence available to the collapse of the Greco–Roman civilizations. The earliest neurosurgical procedure was trephination, which modern scientists believe was used to treat skull fractures in some civilizations. The Egyptian papyri of Edwin Smith provide a thorough description of 27 head injuries with astute observations of clinical signs and symptoms, but little information on the treatment of these injuries. Hippocrates offered the first classification of skull fractures and discussion of which types required trephining, in addition to refining this technique. Hippocrates was also the first to understand the basis of increased intracranial pressure. After Hippocrates, the physicians of the Alexandrian school provided further insight into the clinical evaluation of patients with head trauma, including the rudiments of a Glasgow Coma Scale. Finally, Galen of Pergamon, a physician to fallen gladiators, substantially contributed to the understanding of the neuroanatomy and physiology. He also described his own classification system for skull fractures and further refined the surgical technique of trephination. From the study of these important ancient figures, it is clearly evident that the knowledge and experience gained from the management of cranial injuries has laid the foundation not only for how these injuries are managed today, but also for the development of the field of neurosurgery.


2021 ◽  
Vol 168 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin C. Olsen ◽  
Will H. Ryan ◽  
Ellen T. Kosman ◽  
Jose A. Moscoso ◽  
Don R. Levitan ◽  
...  

AbstractMany benthic marine invertebrates resemble plants in being modular and either sessile or sedentary, and by relying on an external vector to disperse their gametes. These shared features, along with recent evidence of inbreeding in these taxa, suggest that theory and practice bearing on the evolutionary costs and benefits of inbreeding for plants could advance our understanding of the ecology and evolution of invertebrate animals. We describe how the theory for the evolution of inbreeding and outbreeding could apply to benthic invertebrates, identify and compare techniques used to quantify inbreeding in plants and animals, translate relevant botanical concepts and empirical patterns to their zoological equivalents, and articulate predictions for how inbreeding might be associated with major axes of variation in sessile and sedentary marine invertebrates. The theory of inbreeding and outbreeding provides critical insight into major patterns of life-history variation in plants and holds similar promise as a complementary perspective on the evolution of reproductive traits, lifespan, ecological strategies, and dispersal in marine invertebrates. Extending what we have learned from plants to marine invertebrates promises to broaden the general study of mating systems.


2021 ◽  

Greco-Roman archaeology is an indispensable source of scholarship for biblical scholars. Those who work in a largely textual discipline benefit from conversation with archaeologists to situate literary data within its historical material contexts. Greco-Roman archaeology can also provide insight into the economic, social, political, and religious lives of persons in the ancient world, including marginalized persons whose lives are often obscured by elite literary material. Lastly, Greco-Roman archaeology and biblical studies have intertwined histories and entanglements with colonialism, and comparative work helps to uncover those legacies, especially where they are still operative in the present. While biblical scholars might long for evidence that directly connects to specific individuals in the earliest Christ communities (and thus to the texts of the New Testament), archaeological evidence most often provides evidence for context and not positivist truth claims. Biblical scholars looking, for example, for a particular building where Paul might have slept or where the first Christ communities may have met will be disappointed by the archaeological evidence. Though this evidence is rich and diverse and specific, it does not tell us about the particular individuals biblical scholars so often seek. In other words, the questions biblical scholars ask of Greco-Roman archaeology are often unanswerable. A better use of Greco-Roman archaeology is to guide biblical scholars in asking better questions and learning about the social, economic, and material context from which texts and communities emerge.


PMLA ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 67 (7) ◽  
pp. 1035-1053
Author(s):  
P. Albert Duhamel

Recent scholarship has tended to overstress Milton's adherence to Ramism and to overlook his significant deviations in both theory and practice. The distrust of the human thought processes in theoretical or practical deliberation and the faith in the immediate intuitive perception of logical relations, which is the ultra-spiritual epistemology implied throughout the Ramistic logics, were much more in keeping with the enthusiasm of the radical sects of the seventeenth century than with the rationalism of Milton. Milton was an independent thinker in logical matters as elsewhere and the balance of scholarly evaluation is in need of some readjustment.


2012 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES ROBSON

The reception of Aristophanes has gained extraordinary momentum as a topic of academic interest in the last few years. Contributions range from Gonda Van Steen's ground-breaking Venom in Verse. Aristophanes in Modern Greece to Hall and Wrigley's Aristophanes in Performance 421 BC–AD 2007, which contains contributions from a wide range of scholars and writers, a number of whom have had experience of staging Aristophanes' plays as live theatre. In Found in Translation, J. Michael Walton has also made strides towards marrying the theory of translation to the practice of translating Aristophanes (something I have myself also sought to do in print). And with the history of Aristophanic translation, adaptation, and staging being rapidly pieced together (in the English-speaking world at least, where Hall, Steggle, Halliwell, Sowerby, Walsh, and Walton, for example, have all made their own contributions), much of the groundwork has been laid for a study such as is attempted in this article. Here I aim to take a broad look across a range of translations in order to see how one particular text type within Aristophanic drama has been approached by translators, namely Aristophanes' lyric passages. The aim of this study will be to give both an insight into the numerous considerations that translators take into account when translating Aristophanic lyric and an impression of the range of end products that have emerged over the last two hundred years.


2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-62
Author(s):  
Belma Hadžiomerović ◽  
Emir Kurtić ◽  
Maja Arslanagić Kalajdžić

This study aims to improve the understanding of perceived managerial decency by developing an initial set of items for its measurement scale. Based on the social exchange theory and driven by the strong need for instilling more decency and civility in managerial discourse, this study makes a comprehensive overview of the scope and domain of perceived managerial decency and extracts the potential decency dimensions. After conducting a literature review, 50 collected interview responses on typical examples of managerial decency, as perceived by employees, served as a basis for further analysis. Using the content analysis tools, we generated a set of initial items and dimensions of decency. Those were further refined by 21 experts (5 from academia and 16 from the target audience) using the means of qualitative and quantitative assessment. as a result, we define the perceived managerial decency construct and outline its six potential dimensions: (1) respectful interactions, (2) treatment with good manners, (3) employee development, (4) mutual trust, (5) decent feedback, and (6) providing insight into a bigger picture, as well as generate a set of 75 valid items that reflect the decency construct. We further discuss the research implications for theory and practice.


2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (103) ◽  
pp. 108-137
Author(s):  
Carsten Sestoft

Romanens status i det 17. århundredes Frankrig The hesitations of a genre: The status of the novel in seventeenth-century FranceIn answering the question: What was the novel in seventeenth-century France? – this article provides insight into some important points of the early history of the genre. The contradiction between its non-existence in official (Aristotelian) poetics and its existence as a popular commodity on the book market was, in the course of the seventeenth century, reconciled in the emergent category of belles lettres as a plurality of genres mainly defined by their public of honnêtes gens, while attempts at legitimizing the novel as belonging to such Aristotelian genres as epic or history generally failed; and at the end of the century a number of convergences – between epic and novel, between the designations roman and nouvelle, and between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of the novel – seem to point to the fact that the social existence of the genre had been strengthened, even if it was the English novel of the eighteenth century that could be said to reap the profits of this stronger position. Using historical semantics and cultural sociology to study the status of the novel in seventeenth-century France thus leads to a clearer understanding of the specificity of the novel as a literary and cultural genre.


Perichoresis ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-75
Author(s):  
Matthew S. Harding

ABSTRACT Throughout the bulk of the Reformed Tradition’s history within both Europe and the United States, most scholars have dismissed pastor and theologian Moïse Amyraut as a seventeenth century French heretic whose actions and theology led to the demise of the Huguenots in France. However, upon further introspection into Amyraut’s claims as being closer to Calvin (soteriologically) than his Genevan successors, one finds uncanny parallels in the scriptural commentaries and biblical insight into the expiation of Christ between Calvin and Amyraut. By comparing key scriptural passages concerning the atonement, this article demonstrates that Reformed theologian Moïse Amyraut in fact propagated a universal atonement theory which parallels Calvin’s, both men ascribing to biblical faithfulness, a (humanistic) theological method, and similar hermeneutic. As such, both Calvin and Amyraut scripturally contend that God desires and provided the means for the salvation of the whole world. Further, the article demonstrates that Calvin’s successor, Theodore de Beza, could not in fact make the same claims as Amyraut, this article demonstrating that Beza went beyond Calvin’s scriptural approach to Christ’s expiation. Therefore, this article supports a more centrist approach from within and outside the Reformed tradition by demonstrating that Calvin and Amyraut concentrically held to God’s gracious provision in Christ for the saving of the whole world, for those who would believe in Christ for salvation.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrich G. Schroeter

It is generally accepted in both theory and practice of arbitration that there are two basic forms of arbitration, ad hoc and institutional. This long established dichotomy has rarely been questioned, and it has mostly worked well in international arbitration practice.The present contribution investigates the traditional distinction between ad hoc and institutional arbitration in more detail by looking at "borderline cases", i.e. constellations that cannot easily be allocated to one of these two categories. Four groups of borderline cases are discussed: (1) UNCITRAL arbitrations, in particular those administered by arbitral institutions; (2) cases in which the parties have chosen institutional rules, but not the issuing institution (and vice versa), (3) the modification of institutional rules by the parties and the identification of a possible "mandatory" core of institutional rules, and (4) "mix and match" (or "hybrid") arbitrations combining one arbitral institution's rules with the case's administration by a different arbitral institution. By identifying the factors that were decisive for these borderline cases being regarded as institutional or ad hoc, the article is trying to gain insight into the core characteristics underlying each arbitration category. Drawing on these insights, it develops and explains a novel definition of "institutional arbitration".


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