The Movement of History in Our Mutual Friend

PMLA ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 89 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-495
Author(s):  
William J. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Past History ◽  
Sexual Relationship ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Main Protagonist ◽  
Central Characters ◽  
Mutual Friend

Dickens' Our Mutual Friend is an existential novel dealing with the struggles of the central characters to place, in Sartrean terms, existence before essence. This theme of self-definition involves characters singularly preoccupied with analyzing the deadness of past history and with rejecting the impositions of the past upon the present and the future. Boffin's historical reading and Lizzie Hexam's visions in the symbolic fire both reveal the necessity of change if there is to be an existential future. The main protagonist, Eugene Wrayburn, faced with the Shakespearean-Sartrean decision of whether or not to be in his sexual relationship with Lizzie, chooses to reject the pornographic cliches of Victorian sexuality and establish an existence for himself outside of the atrophied “Society” of the novel. Because of these decisions by the central characters to reject the dead history of the past, Our Mutual Friend is an optimistic statement of Dickens' belief in the power of the individual to regenerate a dead world.

scholarly journals Hybrid Encounters in Reconciliation Ecology

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 238-250
Author(s):  
Jeremy Kidwell
Keyword(s):  
Past History ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Environmental Sciences ◽  
Reconciliation Ecology ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human And Nature ◽  
Viable Model ◽  
Strategy I

Over the past century, environmental scientists have developed a range of conservation approaches. Each of these, from management to restoration has embedded within it certain dualisms which create exclusive spaces or agencies for “human” and “nature.” I begin with a critique of these binaries as they occur in philosopher, Florence R. Kluckhohn’s influential model and in more recent narratives about the “Anthropocene,” and then turn to examine some of the novel features of “reconciliation ecology” as it has recently been deployed in the environmental sciences. Though this model is beginning to see wider use by scientists, it has not yet been explored within a religious framework. Taking up Miroslav Volf’s suggestion that reconciliation involves a “double strategy” I highlight ways that reconciliation can (1) provide a viable model for promoting an “embrace” of the other and (2) better integrate the past history of negative human biotic impacts.

scholarly journals Psychoanalytical Theory of Child Development by D. Winnicott

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-81
Author(s):  
Vladimir V. Starovoitov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Past History ◽  
Transitional Object ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The article deals with the psychodynamic theory of the development of the individual in his personal relationships created by the English psychoanalyst and psychiatrist D. Winnicott. Winnicott created a special model of the intersubjective approach in clinical psychoanalysis. According to this approach, the studied subject, considered in the context of its culture, is largely determined by the past history of its development. Winnicott believed that a third area, the cultural experience of mankind, should be added to the other two areas explored in psychoanalytic theory: the inner psychic reality of the individual and the real world and the people living in it. His studies of childhood, in which he studied the relationship of the infant with the mother, the phenomenon of the transitional object, the role and influence of play in therapeutic work, etc., are particularly well known. According to the author of the article, Winnicott's study of the earliest experiences of the infant, due to the primary connection “mother-baby”, gave rise to the ideas that have become key to understanding these deepest levels of mental life.

scholarly journals Memristive Perceptron for Combinational Logic Classification

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lidan Wang ◽  
Meitao Duan ◽  
Shukai Duan
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
Synaptic Weight ◽  
Past History ◽  
Input Current ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Combinational Logic ◽  
Matlab Simulation ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

The resistance of the memristor depends upon the past history of the input current or voltage; so it can function as synapse in neural networks. In this paper, a novel perceptron combined with the memristor is proposed to implement the combinational logic classification. The relationship between the memristive conductance change and the synapse weight update is deduced, and the memristive perceptron model and its synaptic weight update rule are explored. The feasibility of the novel memristive perceptron for implementing the combinational logic classification (NAND, NOR, XOR, and NXOR) is confirmed by MATLAB simulation.

Camus's Absurd and the World of Melville's Confidence-Man

PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer
Keyword(s):  
Careful Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Ugly Duckling ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”

"A Dismal Swamp": Darwin, Design, and Evolution in Our Mutual Friend

1994 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard W. Fulweiler
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Dismal Swamp ◽  
Human World ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend, published just six years after Darwin's The Origin of Species, is structured on a Darwinian pattern. As its title hints, the novel is an account of the mutual-though hidden-relations of its characters, a fictional world of individuals seeking their own advantage, a "dismal swamp" of "crawling, creeping, fluttering, and buzzing creatures." The relationship between the two works is quite direct in light of the large number of reviews on science, evolution, and The Origin from 1859 through the early 1860s in Dicken's magazine, All the Year Round. Given the laissez-faire origin of the Origin, Dicken's use of it in a book directed against laissez-faire economics is ironic. Important Darwinian themes in the novel are predation, mutual relationships, chance, and, especially, inheritance, a central issue in both Victorian fiction and in The Origin of Species. The novel asks whether predatory self-seeking or generosity should be the desired inheritance for human beings. The victory of generosity is symbolized by a dying child's "willing" his inheritance of a toy Noah's Ark, "all the Creation," to another child. Our Mutual Friend is saturated with the motifs of Darwinian biology, therefore, to display their inadequacy. Although Dickens made use of the explanatory powers of natural selection and remained sympathetic to science, the novel transcends and opposes its Darwinian structure in order to project a teleological and designed evolution in the human world toward a moral community of responsible men and women.

Obituary notices of fellows deceased

1877 ◽  
Vol 25 (171-178) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Past History ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
Accurate Observation

George Poulett Scrope. It is scarcely possible at the present day to realize the conditions of that intellectual “reign of terror” which prevailed at the commencement of the present century, as the consequence of the unreasoning prejudice and wild alarm excited by the early progress of geological inquiry. At that period, every attempt to explain the past history of the earth by a reference to the causes still in operation upon it was met, not by argument, but by charges of atheism against its propounder; and thus Hutton’s masterly fragment of a ‘Theory of the Earth,’ Playfair’s persuasive‘ Illustrations,’ and Hall’s records of accurate observation and ingenious experiment had come to be inscribed m a social Index Expurgatorius ,and for a while, indeed, might have seemed to be consigned to total oblivion. Equally injurious suspicions were aroused against the geologist who dared to make allusion to the important part which igneous forces have undoubtedly played in the formation of certain rocks; for the authority of Werner had acquired an almost sacred cha­racter; and “ Vulcanists ” and “ Huttonians ” were equally objects of aversion and contempt. To two men who have very recently—and within a few months of one another—passed away from our midst, science is indebted for boldly en­countering and successfully overcoming this storm of prejudice. Hutton and his friends lived a generation too soon ; and thus it was reserved tor Lyell and Scrope to carry out the task which the great Scotch philosopher had failed to accomplish, namely, the removal of geology from the domain of speculation to that of inductive science.

The Diaspora of the Novel

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis
Keyword(s):  
Uneven Development ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type

Reflection on the history of the novel usually begins with consideration of the social, political, and economic transformations within society that favored the “rise” of a new type of narrative. This remains true even with the numerous and important studies appearing during the past ten years, which relate the novel to an everbroadening spectrum of ideological issues—gender, class, race, and, most recently, nationalism. Yet a history of the genre might reflect not just on the novel’s national, but also its transnational, trajectory, its spread across the globe, away from its original points of emergence. Such a history would take into account the expansion of western markets—the growing exportation of goods and ideas, as well as of social, political, and cultural forms from the West—that promoted the novel’s importation by nonwestern societies. Furthermore, it could lead one to examine the very interesting inverse relationship between two kinds of migration, both of which are tied to the First World’s uneven “development” of the Third. In a world system that draws out natural resources in exchange for technologically mediated goods, the emigration of laborers and intellectuals from peripheral societies to the centers of power of the West and the immigration of a western literary genre into these same societies must be viewed as related phenomena.

Re-membering Syria’s Traumatic Past: Gender, Poetics, and Loss in Manhal al-Sarrāj’s As a River Should

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 202-227
Author(s):  
Linda Istanbulli
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Abstract In a system where the state maintains a monopoly over historical interpretation, aesthetic investigations of denied traumatic memory become a space where the past is confronted, articulated, and deemed usable both for understanding the present and imagining the future. This article focuses on Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr (As a river should) by Manhal al-Sarrāj, one of the first Syrian novels to openly break the silence on the “1982 Hama massacre.” Engaging the politics and poetics of trauma remembrance, al-Sarrāj places the traumatic history of the city of Hama within a longer tradition of loss and nostalgia, most notably the poetic genre of rithāʾ (elegy) and the subgenre of rithāʾ al-mudun (city elegy). In doing so, Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr functions as a literary counter-site to official histories of the events of 1982, where threatened memory can be preserved. By investigating the intricate relationship between armed conflict and gender, the novel mourns Hama’s loss while condemning the violence that engendered it. The novel also makes new historical interpretations possible by reproducing the intricate relationship between mourning, violence, and gender, dislocating the binary lines around which official narratives of armed conflicts are typically constructed.

scholarly journals Tingkat Kesiapan Kali Pepe untuk Dikembangakan sebagai Kawasan Wisata Berbasis Sungai di Kota Surakarta

Arsitektura ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Nurul Widowati ◽  
Winny Astuti ◽  
Murtanti Jani Rahayu
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Past History ◽  
River Flooding ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Past ◽  
Institutional Infrastructure ◽  
Strategic Location ◽  
Readiness Level ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government

<div><p><em>Surakarta is a city that has the potential of the river. But in the process, these rivers suffered environmental degradation as a function instead of the banks into slums and squatter, and functions of rivers that serve as places of waste disposal. Government’s city of Surakarta has done various setup area of the river. One of the targeted structuring Pepe-River is often known by the name Kali Pepe. Kali Pepe is the river which has the most strategic location because it divides the centre of city and the river has a past history of Surakarta. Kali Pepe is the witness of history where culture and trade activities in the rapidly growing city of Surakarta in the past with the ecological function and physical function as transportation trade.Setuping Kali Pepe, according to the Mayor of Surakarta, is directed to serve as recreation/tourism area. Since the Surakarta Mayor initiated the year 2015 that Kali Pepe as a tourist area. The initiated moves the government and society in order to more actively participate in developing the area into a tourist area. This research would like to know how the readiness level of the Kali Pepe area to be developed as a tourist area-based streams. The components of preparedness were seen from aspect of attractions or natural tourist attraction, artificial attractions, acessesiblity, institutional, infrastructure supporting tourism, and the behavior of the flooding of the river. This research is quantitative research in methods of scoring analysis. The result of this research has shown that Kali Pepe less readiness to be developed as a tourist area-based stream. Aspects of accessibility and infrastructure supporting tourism were an aspect which has a readiness. But for this aspect of the attraction, institutional and river flooding behavior is still in the stage of less readiness.</em></p><p> </p><p><strong><em>Keywords:</em></strong><em> readiness, tourist areas, river tours</em></p></div>

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