The Undercurrents of Penal Culture: Punishment of the Body in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada

2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Strange
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Family Courts ◽  
History Of

In the wake of Foucault's provocative philosophical contributions to the study of discipline and punishment, social and legal historians no longer narrate penal history as a straightforward tale of moral and political progress. In its place is a schematic picture of a large-scale retreat from the body to the prison as the prime site of punishment. Historiographical proclivities perpetuate that image: early modernists tend to concentrate on the Bloody Code and similar régimes of terror, whereas historians of the twentieth century specialize in studies of regulatory modes of punishment and “normalization.” These latter works include histories of reformatories, family courts, social workers, psychiatric experts—in short the institutions and agents that best instantiate the reorientation toward disciplining the soul and governing the self. Scholars who study corporal and capital punishment in the twentieth century would seem to have nothing to add, other than to remark that there were exceptions in the wider history of penal change.

The Missing Piece

Divine Bodies ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Candida R. Moss
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Scholarship ◽  
The Way

The resurrection of the body is a key place to think about who we are and which facets of ourselves are integral to ourselves. The introduction to this book places the resurrection of the body within the context of ancient anxieties about the self: What makes us who we are? It also reviews the history of scholarship on this question and traces the way that ideas about resurrection have been divorced from broader thinking about the self.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Maurice

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-153
Author(s):  
Finn Fordham
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Homosexual Orientation ◽  
The World ◽  
Resonant Term ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Edward Carpenter

As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body and the soul. Forster's exploration of the queer relationship between body and soul took place at a time when there was a battle over the nature of the soul, often defensive against materialism: concepts of identity and selfhood were undergoing radical contestations and the word 'soul' is a resonant term in modernist novels. How did emerging discourses, such as those of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others, about homosexual orientation relate to these contemporary discourses around the self? The chapter focuses on two passages about body and soul, whose textual genesis reveals problems of phrasing, as Forster’s unprecedented investigation of sexuality takes him to the edge of identity. It then examines how certain spaces, such as windows and thresholds, become symbolic zones of transgressive encounters between inner and outer, soul and body. It concludes by showing how Forster avoids drawing up any consistent ‘doctrine’ of body and soul. As a work of fiction in which different visions of the world come into conflict with each other, Maurice is a unique and vital witness of transforming discourses about homosexuality in the early twentieth century.

Social Workers in Capital Defense Practice

2020 ◽  
pp. 46-60
Author(s):  
Brian Kammer
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Social Worker ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Community Education ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Judicial Decision ◽  
Human Welfare ◽  
History Of ◽  
Death Sentencing

This chapter focuses on how social workers are uniquely suited to the essential task of crafting mitigating social histories for capital defendants that can penetrate the fog of misconceptions, disinformation, and demonization/dehumanization endemic to the capital punishment process. Rooted in traditions of antiracism and community education, welfare, and empowerment, whose fundamental aspirations have been to identify and remedy systemic impediments to human welfare and to encourage human mutuality, the 150-year history of American social work places it in natural opposition to capital punishment. Mitigating narratives created by social workers recover defendants’ humanity and empower judicial decision-makers to act mercifully. Decades of social worker participation in capital defense have seen a sharp decline in death sentencing.

scholarly journals O prvoj monografskoj obradi škrinje Svetog Šimuna u Zadru

Ars Adriatica ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 187
Author(s):  
Marijana Kovačević
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Date ◽  
The Third ◽  
Monographic Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
Very High ◽  
Do So

This paper paraphrases the first monographic study of the silver casket which was commissioned in the last quarter of the fourteenth century as a reliquary for the body of St Simeon in Zadar. The author of the monograph ‘The Silberschrein des S. Simeone in Zara’ is Alfréd Gotthold Meyer, an art historian from Berlin. The manuscript was written in German, translated into Hungarian and published in Budapest in 1894. Both the manuscript and the book are available only in a few copies in Croatia and this was one of the incentives for writing this article, apart from the need to introduce and evaluate one of the key works ever written on this important subject, and to do so in a more detailed manner than it had been done before. Meyer divided the material in five chapters. In the first chapter he deals with the traditions about the relic. The second chapter is a summary of the documents concerning the history of the silver casket. In the third chapter Meyer describes the reliefs on the casket and discusses their iconography, while in the fourth chapter he analyses them stylistically and attempts to reconstruct the original arrangement of particular reliefs. The final, fifth chapter is the most important part of this work, because it emphasizes comparisons between the Zadar casket and similar works in Italy and Dalmatia. The book has all the qualities of a scholarly text which is rather surprising for such an early date. Meyer pointed out a number of key notions about the supposedly different authors of particular reliefs, for example several master pieces of Italian painting and sculpture which may have inspired these authors, and he also noted the important seventeenth-century restoration on the casket. A. G. Meyer set very high scholarly standards with his work, which were rarely achieved in many subsequent publications on the casket, especially during the first half of the twentieth century.

Genius in France

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
History Of

This book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, the book examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. The book traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others. The book considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosophes such as Diderot. It then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology. The book shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and discusses the different ways major theorists—including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva—have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept. The book brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.

Self-Injuring Body Art

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-170
Author(s):  
Rosemarie Brucher
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Past Research ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Body Art ◽  
Self Injury ◽  
Art Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will ◽  
Artistic Self

AbstractArtistic self-injury, established as an art form since the late 1960s, polarizes the audience and still raises questions about the motivations behind such actions as well as about the narrative contexts in which they occur. While past research has focused on either specific performers or specific trajectories of violence in the contexts in which each artist was working, for instance, the Vietnam War (Kathy O’Dell), this article localizes artistic self-injury within the larger coherencies of the history of mind with respect to aesthetic theories. Questions of subjectivation and desubjectivation seem especially productive for such a discussion. Read against the backdrop of the aesthetics of the Kantian sublime as a strategy of self-empowerment that sets the independence of the will against the powerlessness of the body, the self-wounding act can also be understood with Georges Bataille as a purposeful desubjectivation, in which the artist strives for a radical disempowerment through pain. A consideration of selected artists sounds out the range between these two theoretical references.

Gentile, Giovanni (1875–1944)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Education ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Self ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Transcendental Arguments ◽  
Concrete Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Italian Philosophy

Best known as the self-styled philosopher of Fascism, Gentile, along with Benedetto Croce, was responsible for the ascendance of Hegelian idealism in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. His ‘actual’ idealism or ‘actualism’ was a radical attempt to integrate our consciousness of experience with its creation in the ‘pure act of thought’, thereby abolishing the distinction between theory and practice. He held an extreme subjectivist version of idealism, and rejected both empirical and transcendental arguments as forms of ‘realism’ that posited the existence of a reality outside thought. His thesis developed through a radicalization of Hegel’s critique of Kant that drew on the work of the nineteenth-century Neapolitan Hegelian Bertrando Spaventa. He argued that it represented both the natural conclusion of the whole tradition of Western philosophy, and had a basis in the concrete experience of each individual. He illustrated these arguments in detailed writings on the history of Italian philosophy and the philosophy of education respectively. He joined the Fascist Party in 1923 and thereafter placed his philosophy at the service of the regime. He contended that Fascism was best understood in terms of his reworking of the Hegelian idea of the ethical state, a view that occasionally proved useful for ideological purposes but which had little practical influence.

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