scholarly journals Memory, Place and Pain in W.G. Sebald's: The Emigrants

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-172
Author(s):  
Kobi (Yaaqov) Assoulin
Keyword(s):  
Do So ◽  
The Way ◽  

When we discuss the concept of place, we mostly do so geographically, or as a metaphor. That is, by representing what we think about by geographical notions. This paper avoids this literary tendency by discussing directly the role of actual place in W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants. Not only that, While still acknowledging melancholy's main role in the novel, and the way in which it is discussed in Freud and through Freud et al, the paper takes this melancholy to be a phenomenological spring board for explicating the centrality of place within The Emigrants's melancholy. In order to do this, the paper discusses the role of place within major phenomenological thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and the way their discussion dissolves the classical dichotomy of subject/object. However, as this dichotomy is dissolved, it becomes clearer as to the way places do not only belong to human-beings – simultaneously, humans belong to places. Through explicating this, we come to understand in The Emigrants what makes it such a tragic story. While the emigrants find their home to be rooted in places and memories of places, these places carry at the same time a mood of being-at-home and alongside that, a sense of ruins which haunt. Thus they become trapped between the conflicting urges of running toward and running from these memories. A dilemma that is finally solved only, in the novel, through death.

2018 ◽  

This book examines the role of the papacy and the crusade in the religious life of the late twelfth through late thirteenth centuries and beyond. Throughout the book, the contributors ask several important questions. Was Innocent III more theologian than lawyer-pope and how did his personal experience of earlier crusade campaigns inform his own vigorous promotion of the crusades? How did the outlook and policy of Honorius III differ from that of Innocent III in crucial areas including the promotion of multiple crusades (including the Fifth Crusade and the crusade of William of Montferrat) and how were both pope’s mindsets manifested in writings associated with them? What kind of men did Honorius III and Innocent III select to promote their plans for reform and crusade? How did the laity make their own mark on the crusade through participation in the peace movements which were so crucial to the stability in Europe essential for enabling crusaders to fulfill their vows abroad and through joining in the liturgical processions and prayers deemed essential for divine favor at home and abroad? Further essays explore the commemoration of crusade campaigns through the deliberate construction of physical and literary paths of remembrance. Yet while the enemy was often constructed in a deliberately polarizing fashion, did confessional differences really determine the way in which Latin crusaders and their descendants interacted with the Muslim world or did a more pragmatic position of ‘rough tolerance’ shape mundane activities including trade agreements and treaties?


DIALOGO ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-109
Author(s):  
Tudor-Cosmin Ciocan ◽  
Constantin Cucos ◽  
Maria Ciocan

The way in which the “traditional” system of education ends up deflecting people's attention from the things that make us, human beings, a whole, a species, and a unity, is constantly and ascendingly challenged and thought against. Currently, we need to find out what features of the former educational system, especially those institutionalized, maintained by the school and society, are highlighted here to be eliminated and what is their authentic value in the system. In the present approach, we will refer, as an example, to religious education. These characteristics that we intend to discuss here do not target a “radical” pedagogy but question the educational system in relation to the inclusion-exclusion binomial. The stereotype, bias, and pretentious choices strained by exclusivism through education actually dehumanize us and stress on features that do not honor us. Is it possible to ever lose them along with all their harmful social consequences?


Author(s):  
Iver B. Neumann

The diplomat is formed in certain socially specific ways, and is defined by the role they play within certain contexts in the field of international relations. Since it is human beings, and not organizations, who practice diplomacy, the diplomats’ social traits are relevant to their work. Historically, diplomats can be defined in terms of two key social traits (class and gender) and how their roles depend on two contexts (bureaucrat/information gatherer and private/public). Before the rise of the state in Europe, envoys were usually monks. With the rise of the state, the aristocracy took over the diplomatic missions. Nonaristocrats were later allowed to assume the role of diplomats, but they needed to be trained, both as gentlemen and as diplomats. From the eighteenth century onwards, wives usually accompanied diplomats stationed abroad, though by the end of the nineteenth century, a few women came to work as typists and carry out menial chores for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). As women became legal persons through performing such labor, they later became qualified to legally serve as diplomats. Meanwhile, in terms of context, the key context change for a diplomat is from “at home” (as in “my home country”) to “abroad.” Historically, work at home is the descendant of bureaucratic service at the MFA, and work abroad of the diplomatic service.


2020 ◽  
Vol 217 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars M. Koenig ◽  
Daniel F.R. Boehmer ◽  
Philipp Metzger ◽  
Max Schnurr ◽  
Stefan Endres ◽  
...  

An exacerbated and unbalanced immune response may account for the severity of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus 2, SARS-CoV-2. In this Viewpoint, we summarize recent evidence for the role of neutrophils in the pathogenesis of COVID-19 and propose CXCR2 inhibition as a promising treatment option to block neutrophil recruitment and activation.


Daedalus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 148 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-36
Author(s):  
David F. Levi ◽  
Dana Remus ◽  
Abigail Frisch

With the prospect of nonlawyers stepping in to do low-fee legal work, how should the legal profession conceive of its relationship to that work and ensure that nonlawyers bolster rather than undermine the value that lawyers add to society? Lawyers should reclaim their role as connectors in their communities: interstitial figures with the knowledge, skill, and trust to help resolve disputes, move beyond stalemates, dispel tensions, and otherwise bring people and resources together in productive solutions. They should do so, at least in part, through pro bono work for poor and low-income clients. It would be a mistake to stand in the way of innovative solutions to the justice gap. But it would also be a mistake, and a deep loss, if lawyers–particularly those who do not normally represent poor and low-income clients– turned their backs on the poor and low-income segments of our society.


Early China ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 113-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Rakita Goldin

This article discusses the several previously unknown Confucian texts discovered in 1993 in a Warring States tomb at Guodian, near Jingmen, Hubei Province. I believe that these works should be understood as doctrinal material deriving from a single tradition of Confucianism and datable to around 300 B.C. Of the surviving literature from the same period, they are closer to the Xunzi than to any other text, and anticipate several characteristic themes in Xunzi's philosophy. These are: the notion of human nature (xing 性),and the controversy over whether the source of morality is internar or “external”; the role of learning (xue 學)and habitual practice (xi 習) in moral development; the content and origin of ritual (li 禮), by which human beings accord with the Way; the conception of the ruler as the mind (xin 心) of the state; and the psychological utility of music (yue 樂) in inculcating proper values.It is especially important for scholars to take note of these connections with Xunzi, in view of the emerging trend to associate the Guodian manuscripts with Zisi, the famous grandson of Confucius, whom Xunzi bitterly criticized.


1989 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-67

We have come to the human dimension in this discussion. It would, therefore, be useful for us to consider two different ways of approaching this. One is talking about people at arm's length, in the way we have been doing most of the day; to a certain extent we have had to do so, as social scientists or even as humanists. I am going to try the other approach, namely, to talk about a few individuals to see if there is anything there that might help us in understanding the nationality question. My subject is literature and language. First, I will cover literature as an instrument, as something of interest to social scientists; and then I will discuss certain important individuals. As far as the nationality question is concerned, the individual does matter, although, it seems, the Party places that aspect at the bottom of its list of nationality concerns deemed important.


1982 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 29-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Creer ◽  
E. Sturt ◽  
T. Wykes

Many patients depend on the care and support provided by relatives and friends as much as or more than on the help of services. In order to investigate this role and the burden that it might entail, interviews were sought with those who actually played a practical caring role. Members of the research team asked people in the series and staff whether (a) the patient shared a household with someone, or planned to do so in the near future if living in a residential unit; or (b) the patient regularly visited the relative; or (c) someone regularly helped with tasks such as laundry, washing up or cooking. There were 79 such helpers, all but two of whom turned out to be relatives. One exception was a landlady who had for years provided a very disabled patient with extensive motherly support. The other was a friend who visited the patient every evening in hospital. He used to visit her every day when she was living at home, and helped her round the house when she could not manage. For convenience the term ‘relative’ is used to include these two.


Author(s):  
Orlando Coutinho ◽  
◽  

The way in which an unknown virus has moved from a local to a global case, taking on a pandemic outline, has caused significant changes in the lives of all human beings. Firstly, for that reason, it is unknown, then because behind the ignorance comes mistrust and fear. Nowadays, these ingredients are - in the political-social space - substance for the biggest factors of action and decision of the actors of the power. Have we been in a war context, as some have said? Was confinement, global and so prolonged, really necessary? Was decreeing a state of emergency essential? Were the exception measures proportional? And are they reversible? This article aims, in the way of the ideas of several authors that thinking about the political philosophical role of health contexts, of exception state, and of political control of the State, in face of public health issues and not only, understand the “state of the art” in the way of governing western democracies, in the firstly, but flying over other geographies and systems as the virus has assumed global contours. And, by means of the concrete measures, politically adopted, by the different political actors, what real impacts they had on the life and the institutions working, and on the psychology of the persons individually or socially considered.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Nadira Brioua

Islam has been growing quickly in the world, yet it is a predominately misunderstood religion. Othering Islam through media propaganda and western writings, and mis associating it with some assumptions are still rampant. Thus, the researcher attempts at showing these assumptions stereotypical prejudgments of Islam and Muslims that are commonly associated with Western assumptions resulted in Islamophobia and exploring the role of counter-discourses in contemporary Black-American Fiction by analyzing Umm Zakiyyah’s If I Should Speak and showing to what extents the novel has an important role in correcting assumptions and narrating the Islamic facts. Thus, this article highlights Umm Zakiyyah’s narrative of Islam’s truth within its historical sources the Qur’an and the Sunnah. The paper analyses Umm Zakiyyah’s reconsideration of Islam’s truth, by focusing on the meaning of Islam and being a Muslim. To do so, this qualitative and non-empirical research is conducted in a descriptive-theoretical analysis, using the selected novel as a primary source and library and online critical materials, such as books and journal articles, as secondary references. Based on the analysis, it is found that Umm Zakiyyah narrates Islam and Muslims to counter the West’s negative view on Islam. Furthermore, based on the story, the power of Muslim self-identification within the historical transparent knowledge based on the Quran’s perspectives leads to the conversion of Tamika Douglass, proving that Islam can be perceived positively by non-Muslims; in this case, it is represented within its subjectivity. It is found that the novel can be a tool of Islamic da’wah [call for the faith]. Hence, the Muslim writers and novelists should write to solve the challenges facing Muslims and the Ummah by Islamizing English fiction.


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