Cultural Critique and the End of Genius

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The 1950S

This chapter describes the gradual discrediting of the notion of genius. In France in the 1950s, contemporaneously with the Minou Drouet affair, it became the object of a powerful cultural critique under the aegis of literary theory, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes—more or less simultaneously—portrayed it as an anachronistic legacy from the previous century, and denounced it as a one of the myths that lay at the heart of bourgeois ideology. Two of Barthes's texts in Mythologies (1957) specifically target genius—one devoted to Einstein's brain, and the other to Minou Drouet. Much the same goes for Sartre, whose autobiography, Les Mots, begun in 1953 (and finally published in 1964), targets genius and the child prodigy as central components of his farewell to literature.

Gewalt und Kommunikation

2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28
Author(s):  
Jens Bonnemann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Normal Case ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Philosophy Of Dialogue ◽  
The Individual

In ethics, when discussing problems of justice and a just social existence one question arises obviously: What is the normal case of the relation between I and you we start from? In moral philosophy, each position includes basic socio-anthropological convictions in that we understand the other, for example, primarily as competitor in the fight for essential resources or as a partner in communication. Thus, it is not the human being as isolated individual, or as specimen of the human species or socialised member of a historical society what needs to be understood. Instead, the individual in its relation to the other or others has been studied in phenomenology and the philosophy of dialogue of the twentieth century. In the following essay I focus on Martin Buber’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories of intersubjectivity which I use in order to explore the meaning of recognition and disrespect for an individual. They offer a valuable contribution to questions of practical philosophy and the socio-philosophical diagnosis of our time.

Alive Still

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Curtis
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Severe Form ◽  
The Other ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
Right Hand ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Village Voice

In 1942, at age twenty, after a vision-impaired and rebellious childhood in Richmond, Virginia, Nell Blaine decamped for New York. Operations had corrected her eyesight, and she was newly aware of modern art, so different from the literal style of her youthful drawings. In Manhattan, she met rising young artists and poets. Her life was hectic, with raucous parties in her loft, lovers of both sexes, and freelance design jobs, including a stint at the Village Voice. Initially drawn to the rigorous formalism of Piet Mondrian, she received critical praise for her jazzy abstractions. During the 1950s, she began to paint interiors and landscapes. By 1959, when the Whitney Museum purchased one of her paintings, her career was firmly established. That year, she contracted a severe form of polio on a trip to Greece; suddenly, she was a paraplegic. Undaunted, she taught herself to paint in oil with her left hand, reserving her right hand for watercolors. In her postpolio work, she achieved a freer style, expressive of the joy she found in flowers and landscapes. Living half the year in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the other half in New York, she took special delight in painting the views from her windows and from her country garden. Critics found her new style irresistible, and she had a loyal circle of collectors; still, she struggled to earn enough money to pay the aides who made her life possible. At her side for her final twenty-nine years was her lover, painter Carolyn Harris.

Informed Consent: Ezenwa–Ohaeto between Past and Future Uses of Pidgin

Matatu ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Zabus
Keyword(s):  
Informed Consent ◽  
First Language ◽  
West African ◽  
The Other ◽  
Wole Soyinka ◽  
The West ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The One

The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.

Physical Fitness in the 1950s and 18970s: Why Did One Fail and the Other Boom?

Quest ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia A. Eisenman ◽  
C. Robert Barnett
Keyword(s):  
Physical Fitness ◽  
The Other ◽  
The 1950S

Sozialismus und Zionismus

Aschkenas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-200
Author(s):  
Hans-Harald Müller
Keyword(s):  
Social Democracy ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Second World

Abstract Arnold Zweig and Walter A. Berendsohn, who were in correspondence with each other between 1909 and 1968, continuously sought to convert the other to their beliefs. Around 1910 Zweig wanted to convert Berendsohn to Zionism as coined by Buber, while his views changed after his exile in Palestine, when he tried to win Berendsohn over to communism. Berendsohn, for his part, wanted to convince Zweig of social democracy around 1910, but after traveling Palestine in the 1950s tried to convince Zweig of Zionism. Viewed retrospectively, both appear as idealistic German intellectuals whose eagerness to reform society in 1910 led them in very different directions due to their individual experiences especially in and after the Second World War.

The ‘Zen’ in the western monochrome

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 55-78
Author(s):  
Simon Morley
Keyword(s):  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Other ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The One ◽  
Contemporary Painting ◽  
The Impact

I look at the impact of Zen Buddhism on western painters during the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the monochrome in particular, in order to create a historical context for the consideration of transcultural dialogue in relation to contemporary painting. I argue that a consideration of Zen can offer a ‘middle way’ between conceptions of the monochrome (and art in general) often hobbled by models of interpretation that function within a binary opposition between ‘literalist/sensory’ on the one hand, and ‘intellectual/non-sensory’ readings on the other.

scholarly journals A MARXIST READING OF LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE (2017) BY CELESTE NG

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dwi Mayang Sagita ◽  
Delvi Wahyuni
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Surrogate Mother ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Species Being

This thesis is an analysis of a novel written by Celeste Ng entitled Little Fires Everywhere (2017). This analysis looks at the commodification and alienation that is experienced by women who involved in surrogacy and adoption. This analysis employes Marxist literary theory to explain the phenomena in the novel. The analysis focuses on two issues of commodification and alienation that are proposed by Karl Marx as seen through two female protagonists which are Mia Warren and Bebe Chow. This analysis also depends a lot on the narrator to determine which parts of the novel are used as the data. The result of the study shows that Mia Warren experienced commodification of the human body and four kinds of alienation such as alienation from the product of labor, alienation from the act of production, alienation from the species being, and alienation from other people bacause she becomes a surrogate mother. The other protagonist, Bebe Chow, also experienced four kinds of alienation because her child is adopted.

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