scholarly journals "Beautiful External Life to Watch and Ponder": Katherine Mansfield Confronting the Material

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ivy McDaniels
Keyword(s):  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Material World ◽  
Harmonious Development ◽  
Keen Interest ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Journal Entries

<p>Throughout her famously short, disrupted career, Katherine Mansfield chased the idea of "warm, eager living life,"attempting to translate this vivid experience of being in the world into fiction. This passage, written in late 1922, shows the author focusing on her fascination with vivid, personal interaction with the material world. Mansfield convinces herself that the pursuit of "warm, eager living life" and the experience of submerging herself in it - "to be rooted in life" - is what she must strive for once she regains her health. Unfortunately, Mansfield's health declined steadily after this passage was written, and she died at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau on the 9th of January, 1923. In addition to various personal possessions, Mansfield left behind a host of written material: personal letters, journal entries and jottings, drafts of stories and poems, and published volumes, which document her attempts at submerging herself in a vividly experienced life. Her stories full of characters self-consciously attempting to anchor their vague and variable identities in the material world, graphic sensory detail, and ambiguous imagery register Mansfield's determination to describe exquisite, sensible life. Throughout the writing, she displays a keen interest in and fixation on the material world. Mansfield's colonial childhood, her preference for luxury, her feelings of disunity and dividedness, and the fleetingness of her life made more poignant by various levels and types of consumption inform her piercing awareness of the material world. Critical attention to the materiality of Mansfield's writing highlights that this writer, so determined to be "rooted in life," documents everywhere the frail but persistent efforts of characters to find substance in the ephemeral and attach changeable selves to things.</p>

scholarly journals "Beautiful External Life to Watch and Ponder": Katherine Mansfield Confronting the Material

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ivy McDaniels
Keyword(s):  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Material World ◽  
Harmonious Development ◽  
Keen Interest ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Journal Entries

<p>Throughout her famously short, disrupted career, Katherine Mansfield chased the idea of "warm, eager living life,"attempting to translate this vivid experience of being in the world into fiction. This passage, written in late 1922, shows the author focusing on her fascination with vivid, personal interaction with the material world. Mansfield convinces herself that the pursuit of "warm, eager living life" and the experience of submerging herself in it - "to be rooted in life" - is what she must strive for once she regains her health. Unfortunately, Mansfield's health declined steadily after this passage was written, and she died at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau on the 9th of January, 1923. In addition to various personal possessions, Mansfield left behind a host of written material: personal letters, journal entries and jottings, drafts of stories and poems, and published volumes, which document her attempts at submerging herself in a vividly experienced life. Her stories full of characters self-consciously attempting to anchor their vague and variable identities in the material world, graphic sensory detail, and ambiguous imagery register Mansfield's determination to describe exquisite, sensible life. Throughout the writing, she displays a keen interest in and fixation on the material world. Mansfield's colonial childhood, her preference for luxury, her feelings of disunity and dividedness, and the fleetingness of her life made more poignant by various levels and types of consumption inform her piercing awareness of the material world. Critical attention to the materiality of Mansfield's writing highlights that this writer, so determined to be "rooted in life," documents everywhere the frail but persistent efforts of characters to find substance in the ephemeral and attach changeable selves to things.</p>

Comparing Comparisons: Political Implications of Different Notions of Difference

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Glenn Odom
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
Location Point

With the rise of the American world literature movement, questions surrounding the politics of comparative practice have become an object of critical attention. Taking China, Japan and the West as examples, the substantially different ideas of what comparison ought to do – as exhibited in comparative literary and cultural studies in each location – point to three distinct notions of the possible interactions between a given nation and the rest of the world. These contrasting ideas can be used to reread political debates over concrete juridical matters, thereby highlighting possible resolutions. This work follows the calls of Ming Xie and David Damrosch for a contextualization of different comparative practices around the globe.

Sandra Ramos Revisited

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 32-54
Author(s):  
Silvia Spitta
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Graphic Arts ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The World ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Political Choices ◽  
The Rich

Sandra Ramos (b. 1969) is one of the few artists to reflect critically on both sides of the Cuban di-lemma, fully embodying the etymological origins of the word in ancient Greek: di-, meaning twice, and lemma, denoting a form of argument involving a choice between equally unfavorable alternatives. Throughout her works she shines a light on the dilemmas faced by Cubans whether in Cuba or the United States, underlining the bad personal and political choices people face in both countries. During the hard 1990s, while still in Havana, the artist focused on the traumatic one-way journey into exile by thousands, as well as the experience of profound abandonment experienced by those who were left behind on the island. Today she lives in Miami and operates a studio there as well as one in Havana. Her initial disorientation in the USA has morphed into an acerbic representation and critique of the current administration and a deep concern with the environmental collapse we face. A buffoonlike Trumpito has joined el Bobo de Abela and Liborio in her gallery of comic characters derived from the rich Cuban graphic arts tradition where she was formed. While Cuba is now represented as a rotten cake with menacing flies hovering over it ready to pounce, a bombastic Trumpito marches across the world stage, trampling everything underfoot, a dollar sign for a face.

scholarly journals Beyond Entanglement: (Socio-) Materiality and Organization Studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 263178772095444
Author(s):  
François Cooren
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Theory ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Material World ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The World

Although we have to welcome the renewed interest in socio-materiality in organization studies, I claim that we are yet to understand what taking matter seriously really means. The mistake we especially need to stop making consists of automatically associating matter to something that can be touched or seen, that is, something tangible or visible, an association that irremediably leads us to recreate a dissociation between the world of human affairs and the so-called material world. To address this issue, I mobilize a communication-centered perspective to elaborate that (1) materiality is a property of all (organizational) phenomena and that (2) studying these phenomena implies a focus on processes of materialization, that is, ways by which various beings come to appear and make themselves present throughout space and time. In the paper I conceptualize the contours of these materialization processes and discuss the implications of this perspective on materiality for organizational theory and research.

How words make the world: language materialities and the circulation of the Sakha algys

Multilingua ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenanne Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Spoken Language ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
World Language ◽  
Material World ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article investigates contemporary uses of the Sakha language algys (blessing poems) and reveals the “old” and “new” types of language materiality present in this genre of ritual poetry. Focusing primarily on one example of algys shared online in 2018, I discuss how performing algys has always involved close interconnection between language and the material world and present the changing contexts and forms of algys transmission that highlight both fixity and fluidity in the way speakers conceive of language and materiality. Despite the new mobilities and technologies that build upon the previously established written textual forms of this poetry—and contribute to its continued circulation and transmission—certain elements of traditional algys remains salient for speakers, reinforced by ideologies or ontologies of language that foreground the power of the (spoken) word. This is connected to the production of qualia and the invocation of chronotopes. Thus, while textual forms further enable processes of citationality as they are circulated online; the written words alone do not constitute an algys. Rather, here the importance of embodied, spoken language materiality is at the fore.

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.”

On the Nomenclature of the Vinegar Eelworm

1927 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. G. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Keen Interest ◽  
Naked Eye ◽  
The World

This eelworm, only just visible to the naked eye, and quite common in vinegar in all parts of the world, has long been known to zoologists, and indeed was an object of keen interest and discussion to the naturalists of the seventeenth century. Petrus Borellus [3], for instance, enthusiastic over the recent adoption of the microscope for researches in natural history, published in 1656 his “Observationum Microcospicarum Centuria,” in which he leads off with a note “De Vermibus aceti.” In the twelfth edition of the “Systema Naturae” (1767), Linnaeus included a species redivivum in that final genus of the Regnum Animale so appropriately named Chaos. This species of animal he says, “Habitat in Aceto & Glutine Bibliopegorum.”.

scholarly journals Psychology in an Indeterminate World

2021 ◽  
pp. 174569162095800
Author(s):  
Ludger van Dijk
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Ecological Perspective ◽  
Ecological Approach ◽  
Material World ◽  
Psychological Science ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
The World ◽  
Indeterminate World ◽  
Over Time

By sharing their world, humans and other animals sustain each other. Their world gets determined over time as generations of animals act in it. Current approaches to psychological science, by contrast, start from the assumption that the world is already determined before an animal’s activity. These approaches seem more concerned with uncertainty about the world than with the practical indeterminacies of the world humans and nonhuman animals experience. As human activity is making life increasingly hard for other animals, this preoccupation becomes difficult to accept. This article introduces an ecological approach to psychology to develop a view that centralizes the indeterminacies of a shared world. Specifically, it develops an open-ended notion of “affordances,” the possibilities for action offered by the environment. Affordances are processes in which (a) the material world invites individual animals to participate, while (b) participation concurrently continues the material world in a particular way. From this point of view, species codetermine the world together. Several empirical and methodological implications of this view on affordances are explored. The article ends with an explanation of how an ecological perspective brings responsibility for the shared world to the heart of psychological science.

To Make a Choice You Should Know The Option Physiological and Psychological Contribution of the Female Component in National Security and Intelligence

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-51
Author(s):  
Sabrina Magris
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The World ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Female Component ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Ways Of Being

The paper addresses the importance of the role of women in Intelligence and National Security with the specific purpose to highlight the quality of female contribution in all different domains. The world is changing and in this change, Intelligence risks being left behind as never before. An epic evolution and change are underway that will upset ways of being and ways of thinking. All this not suddenly and all this without realizing it if not after the fact. The world is changing, women “are gain the upper hand” taking over also numerically and it is not realized that a change must happen in the field of Intelligence with a space left to women, not because they are women but because of their abilities. In all domains, from strategic to an operational one. Blindness to change that many Agencies are having. And those who are making changes often do so because they are obliged by the rules but not by evaluating the concrete capability of individuals. Two factors risk being explosive if no action is taken. The paper highlights the physiological and psychological contribution of the female component in the National Security and Intelligence work, and why diversity is scientifically important to successfully conduct operational and strategic tasks. It also describes the existing lack of models, how to enlarge the interest of young girls to join the Intelligence Community, and a look into the near future regarding the training and the recruitment processes with specific regards to women.

The Clinton Administration and Africa: A View from Gaborone, Botswana

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-69
Author(s):  
Larry A. Swatuk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Clinton Administration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Bill Clinton ◽  
Crisis Response ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Material World ◽  
Existing Problems ◽  
The World

With fanfare befitting the arrival of a god of the Western material world, U.S. President Bill Clinton toured Southern Africa imparting “words of wisdom” along the way. His aim, we were told, was to see that the United States becomes Africa’s “true partner.” The reason being, according to Clinton, “[a]s Africa grows strong, America grows stronger ... Yes, Africa needs the world, but more than ever it is equally true that the world needs Africa.” To this end, the United States would pursue a mix of political and economic policies that included the African Crisis Response Initiative and the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, both designed to foster “stability” and “prosperity” on the continent. Lofty goals, to be sure, but ends whose means are badly in need of interrogation. This article does just that: To wit, does Clinton, on behalf of U.S. policymakers, mean what he says? If so, in naming “peace” and “prosperity,” can he make them? Put differently, does the Clinton administration have the power to introduce order where there was chaos? Or will it only compound existing problems and visit new ones upon those who had few to begin with?

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document