The Telltale Teeth: Psychodontia to Sociodontia

PMLA ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore Ziolkowski
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Dental Health ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Social Health ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Psychic State

The prevalence of dentists in recent novels by Grass, Bellow, Updike, Pynchon, and Vonnegut suggests a shift in cultural attitudes toward teeth. Teeth have conventionally represented potency, beauty, or pain. The first attribute is most common in myth, folklore, and psychoanalysis. The topos of beautiful teeth, familiar in literature from the Old Testament to Poe, was inverted parodistically by fin-de-siècle writers like Mann and Benn. The attribute of pain assumed particular significance for Dostoevsky, H. C. Andersen, and Mann—heirs of the romantic association of disease and art—as a clue to the psychic state of the individual. Following the revival of the organismic theory of society, decaying teeth were seen to provide a more general symbol: in the novels of Koestler and Greene dental health consistently reflects social health. Hence the dentist enters contemporary fiction as psychic healer and social analyst.

Anarchist Terrorism in Fin-de-Siècle France and its Borderlands

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivien Bouhey
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
International Scale ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Propaganda By The Deed

In contrast to traditional historiography, which insists on the absence of organization within the anarchist movement and on the individual character of propaganda by the deed, this chapter situates anarchist attacks in the context of a more structured movement that operated on a local, regional, national, and international scale. This movement was not, however, identical to the “Black International,” the fantasy of a small group giving orders to disciplined operatives that was dreamt up at the time by, among others, police informants and journalists. The chapter shows how, although some attacks were indeed individual and spontaneous, others were carefully prepared by local, regional, national, and cross-border networks whose members benefited from active solidarity within the movement and together managed to terrorize the Third Republic.

Performing Identities in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Encounter with the Other Between Politics, Tourism, Migration and Culture in the Late Victorian Context

Pólemos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-354
Author(s):  
Sidia Fiorato
Keyword(s):  
Western Culture ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Political ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Political Stance ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Narrative Control ◽  
The Individual

Abstract Bram Stoker’s Dracula presents an investigation of identity from multiple perspectives: the political stance of the Victorian fin de siècle intersects with questions of identity and their liminal articulation through narrative control. The count becomes a “thick” synecdoche for the East and his arrival to England symbolises a reverse political and cultural colonisation that leads to a new image of the individual, revealing the innermost recesses of Western culture.

Advocacy in history and culture

2019 ◽  
pp. 33-40
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Maderthaner ◽  
Wolfgang Grisold
Keyword(s):  
Medical School ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Individual

We might well conceive of fin-de-siècle and interwar Vienna as providing the background for a paradigmatic project of Late Enlightenment: a ‘powerhouse of modernity’, as Charles Schorske once called it. The emergence of a widely renowned medical school was, in a variety of ways, characteristic for that project. Brilliant in diagnosis, nihilistic in therapy, the school searched for methods that we would nowadays categorize by the term advocacy. This chapter analyses two different yet closely interrelated concepts that are both, in their respective ways, aimed at the emancipation of the individual: Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and Julius Tandler’s social reconfiguration of a whole urban body.

scholarly journals Generation related self-identity of Lesia Ukrainka (Based on her epistolary heritage)

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (46) ◽  
pp. 101-108
Author(s):  
Tetiana Virchenko ◽  
Roman Koz
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Present Generation ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
History Of Literature

The need to talk about the generation related self-identity of those writers who lived at the change of the century became more acute, because “fin de siècle” is the period of modernization of literature. The objective of the research is both historic-literary and purely theoretical. If in the first area we have to find out the individual identity of Lesia Ukrainka with a certain literary generation, and in the second area one should answer the question of whether the self-identification of the writeress with a certain literary generation can become the cornerstone for writing the history of literature. The process of working with the contents of letters was carried out with the help of systematic interpretation and hermeneutic reading. The main result of the research is the possibility to state that Lesia Ukrainka respected the experience of the representatives of the previous generation, but she desired to be appreciated by critics as part of the present generation gives reason to think that the writeress still identified herself as the representative of modernism.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

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