The Presence of the Sign in Goethe's Faust

PMLA ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 98 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil M. Flax

Recent studies in the early history of semiotics allow us to trace an open concern with the problem of language in Goethe's Faust. The protagonist appears as a quest hero in search of a revelatory sign, whether verbal or pictorial, that will release him from the world of mediating representations. The folly of the quest is consistently satirized from the viewpoint of Romantic aesthetics and its theory of the symbol. For the Romantics, the aesthetic symbol is a sign that paradoxically effects a revelation by affirming its own semiotic nature. But in elevating semiotic phenomena to the status of epiphanies, Goethean symbolism in Faust confronts the same impasses that beset the hero as he seeks to escape the rule of signs. The recurring quandaries arise when the Romantic text responds to the initial challenge of semiotics by attempting to reconcile semiotics and theology.

Author(s):  
Alexandra Wilson

La bohème is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world. But how did it come to be so adored? Drawing on an extremely broad range of sources, Alexandra Wilson traces the opera’s rise to global fame. Although the work has been subjected to many hostile critiques, it swiftly achieved popular success through stage performances, recordings, and filmed versions. Wilson demonstrates how La bohème acquired even greater cultural influence as its music and dramatic themes began to be incorporated into pop songs, film soundtracks, musicals, and more. In this cultural history of Puccini’s opera, Wilson offers a fresh reading of a familiar work. La bohème was strikingly modern for the 1890s, she argues, in its approach to musical and dramatic realism and in flouting many of the conventions of the Italian operatic tradition. Considering the work within the context of the aesthetic, social, and political debates of its time, Wilson explores Puccini’s treatment of themes including gender, poverty, and nostalgia. She pays particular attention to La bohème’s representation of Paris, arguing that the opera was not only influenced by romantic mythologies surrounding the city but also helped shape them. Wilson concludes with a consideration of the many and varied approaches directors have taken to the staging of Puccini’s opera, including some that have reinvented the opera for a new age. This book is essential reading for anyone who has seen La bohème and wants to know more about its music, drama, and cultural contexts.


A brief review of the major advances since 1979 in Silurian and Devonian palaeobotany is followed by a preliminary report on a Gedinnian assemblage from the Welsh Borderland. This is dominated by rhyniopsids and includes several species of Cooksonia and Salopella . Spores have been isolated from a number of taxa. The assemblage is used to illustrate the problems of recognition and classification of early vascular plants. Parallel sedimentological and palaeogeographical studies permit speculation on the ecology and life histories of the plants that colonized the Old Red Continent. It is concluded that the lack of well preserved and independently dated assemblages from elsewhere in the world (an exception being the Baragwanathia flora of Australia) prevents the detection of any provincialism in the late Silurian and early Devonian and makes generalizations on the early history of vascular plants premature.


FIKROTUNA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
ABD WARITS

In the history of women's life, the woman has never cracked from the wild cry of helplessness. Woman always become victim of men’s egoism, marginalized, hurt, unfettered, fooled and never appreciated the presence and role. This situation troubles many intellectual Muslims who have perspective that Islam teaches equality, equality for all human beings in the world. The difference in skin color, race, tribe and nation, as well as gender does not cause them to get the status of the different rights and obligations. The potential and the right to life of every human being and the obligation to serve the Lord Almighty is the same. Indeed, all human beings, as caliph in the world, have the same obligation, namely to prosperity of life in the world. No one is allowed to act arbitrarily, destroying, or hurt among others. They are required to live side by side, united, and harmonious, help each other and respect each other. However, that "demand" never becomes a reality. The differences among human identities become a barrier and the cause of divisions. For them, those who are outside environment, different identities are "others" who rightly do not need them "know". The difference of identity has become a reason to allow "hurt" each other. Several intellectual Muslims who recognize the wrong (discrimination against women), and then they attempt to formulate a movement for women's liberation. All the efforts have been done on the basis of awareness that arbitrary action by any person can never be justified. They also realize, that the backwardness of women are "stumbling block" that will lead to the resignation of a civilization. However, this struggle found a lot of challenges; including the consideration of "insubordination" to conquer the power of men, despite it had done by using many strategies. Starting from the writing of scientific book and countless fiction themed women has been published in order to give awareness of equality between men and women. This paper seeks to reexamine the process of the empowerment struggle to give a brand new concept, so that the struggle of women empowerment is not as insubordination and curiosity process in an attempt to conquer the male. Through approach of literature review and observations on the relationship between men and women, the writer finally concluded that the movement of Islamic feminism is not a movement to seize the power of men, but an attempt to liberate women from oppression so that they get the rights of their social role, giving freedom for women to pursue a career as wide as possible like a man, without forgetting a main duty as a mother: to conceive, give birth and breastfeed their children.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Peck ◽  
Stephen M. Rowland

ABSTRACT Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807–1894) was a British scientific illustrator and sculptor who illustrated many British exploration reports in the 1830s and 1840s. In the early 1850s, Hawkins was commissioned to create life-size, concrete sculptures of Iguanodon, ichthyosaurs, and other extinct animals for a permanent exhibition in south London. They were the first large sculptures of extinct vertebrates ever made, and they are still on view today. Inspired by his success in England, Hawkins launched a lecture tour and working trip to North America in 1868. Soon after his arrival, he was commissioned to “undertake the resuscitation of a group of animals of the former periods of the American continent” for public display in New York City. Had it been built, this would have been the first paleontological museum in the world. As part of this ambitious project, with the assistance of the American paleontologist Joseph Leidy, Hawkins cast the bones of a recently discovered Hadrosaurus specimen and used them to construct the first articulated dinosaur skeleton ever put on display in a museum. It was unveiled at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in November 1868. Hawkins worked tirelessly on New York’s proposed “Paleozoic Museum” for two years, until his funding was cut by William “Boss” Tweed, the corrupt leader of the Tammany Hall political machine, who grew hostile to the project and abolished the Central Park Commission that had made it possible. When Hawkins defiantly continued to work, without funding, Tweed dispatched a gang of thugs to break into his studio and smash all of the sculptures and molds. Although Hawkins would create several copies of his articulated Hadrosaurus skeleton for other institutions, the prospect of building a grand museum of paleontology in America was forever destroyed by Tweed’s actions.


1995 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-99
Author(s):  
Sebastián Sanz ◽  
Dirk Platvoet

On several occasions, shrimps belonging to a new species of the genus Typhlatya were collected in a cave in the province of Castellón, Spain. This is the first record of the genus in the Iberian Peninsula. The species is described and the validity, distribution, and zoogeography of the genus, as well as the status of the genus Spelaeocaris, are discussed. Former models for the evolution of the genus Typhlatya and its genus group are reviewed, as well as the system of inner classification of the Atyidae and its biogeographical meaning. For the age and evolution of the genus we developed a new model based on vicariance principles that involves further evolution of each species after the disruption of the ancestral range. This allows new estimations for the age of the genus. Accordingly, we suppose that other proposals, such as recent dispersal through the sea, should be disregarded for this genus. The evolutionary development of this species is discussed in the context of the geological history of the area and the world distribution of the genus, the genus group, and the family.


The Royal Society was not the first scientific society, or organized academy for the promotion of science, to be founded, since it was preceded by the original Accademia del Cimento, which took its rise in 1657, but lived only ten years. The Royal Society is, then, the oldest corporate body of its kind to have enjoyed continuous existence until today. In a like way the Philosophical Transactions was not the earliest scientific periodical to come forth, since the first number of the Journal des Sçavans appeared, on 5 January 1665, two months before the first number of the Transactions . The Journal , however, while much concerned with scientific matters, including scientific books, dealt with the world of learning in general, including literary, legal and theological matters. Its pronouncements often led to stormy controversy, it had a troubled history and finally ceased to appear in 1790. The Transactions , except for a short break when it was replaced by Hooke’s Philosophical Collections , and for an interruption of three years that followed the landing of William of Orange and the flight of James II, has been published continuously from the issue of the first number dated 6 March 1664/5, the present year thus being the three hundredth anniversary of its beginning. Conspicuously connected with the first appearance of the Philosophical Transactions was Henry Oldenburg, a character very much to the fore in the early history of the Society.


Author(s):  
Carol Percy

This chapter describes assignments used to teach the History of the English Language (HEL) and its contemporary counterpart the English Language in the World. In both of these courses, linguistic concepts can be linked to literary analysis, which helps students learn how to analyze code-switching and/or style-shifting in the context of a literary argument. For discovering and interpreting issues about the status and use of English around the world, students have a number of options. For example, after reading specific articles about slang generally and analyzing examples chosen in class, some students choose to write a final essay on slang or jargon used within online newspapers or films that represent different World Englishes (e.g., in Nigerian “Nollywood” films). Thus, World Englishes become realer for students rather than exotic abstractions or curious variants of English or American English.


2001 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa M. Wilcox

“It seems to me, now,” reflected Troy Perry, four years after founding a successful new Protestant denomination, “that it must have been a matter of timing, and I think that it was fate, too! God chose me for my mission at a time when He knew the world would respond, once the need was made clear.” While the question of divine ordination is a bit outside the scholar's jurisdiction, the question of timing is a crucial one for historical inquiry, and Perry's remarks show an insightful awareness that the success of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC) was due in large part to timing. As with any successful religious group, however, the seeds of the UFMCC germinated, sprouted, and grew as a result of a multitude of interconnected factors, including both external back-ground factors in American society at large and internal factors within the UFMCC itself. This article relates the history and early growth of the UFMCC to this constellation of factors in order to gain a clearer understanding of both the denomination itself and the social changes of which it was an integral part.


2010 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Joel Cracraft

The Australian avifauna is one of the most biologically important in the world. For its size, it has the highest diversity and endemism of any continent. Importantly, as a key piece of Gondwana, it was at a crossroads for the early history of modern birds (Neornithes). Indeed, it has phylogenetically deep lineages of palaeognaths, galliforms, anseriforms, caprimulgiforms, parrots, and songbirds. Moreover, patterns of endemism and diversity are well-marked and provide a natural laboratory for the study of speciation and diversification. All of this is why studies of the systematics and taxonomy of Australian birds are so important, for without a clear understanding of the taxonomic limits of taxa and their relationships we cannot hope to make progress toward answering critical evolutionary questions. Nor can we provide the systematic framework for comparative studies in the organismal sciences, especially behaviour, ecology, and conservation biology.


Author(s):  
Jan von Brevern

This article examines a particular problem in the early history of photographic land surveying: the unwavering desire to use photography to capture accurate topographical information for map-making, even in light of practical difficulties. It considers how both the practical survey work and the status of photography changed when, instead of the landscape itself, photographs were measured. Photography’s promise to simplify strenuous fieldwork was almost as old as photography itself—but in practice, it took decades of experimenting until the process was feasible.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document