scholarly journals D. H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places. A Modernist Revaluation of Temporality

Author(s):  
Camelia Anghel

The article deals with the literary modes of constructing temporality in D. H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places (1932), a travel book written in 1927 and published posthumously. Typically for the first decades of the twentieth century, the work reflects the writer’s anxieties about war force, scientific discoveries and cultural exhaustion in a series of interrelated essays on the remnants of ancient Etruria and the powerful memory of Etruscan civilization. In this article, Etruscan Places is read like a subjective re-creation of a lost civilization; it is interpreted as the writing of an imaginary philosophy attributed to an ancient people and modelled on Lawrence’s personal engagement with the renewal of life potentialities. Patterning his book on the past-present opposition, the author recuperates the Etruscan past within the mythical framework of modernist coherence. The repeated movements between the lost Etruscan world and the writer’s mostly disappointing contemporary age reveal the possibility of establishing continuities not only on an anthropological plane, but also on a philosophical-aesthetic one. The Etruscans’ narrative of death brings to light an art of living; the historical perspective blends with existential and artistic considerations. Lawrence’s exploratory technique is based on similitudes and antitheses, being literarily rendered by a cross-cultural discourse that combines the factual with the fictional, and the epic with the lyric. The British author’s style puts forward repetition as a modernist rhetorical achievement that indirectly questions the validity of literary tradition. Furthermore, the explicit intertextuality of the book completes the writer’s modernist perspective, authenticating the cultural substance of the temporal links that Lawrence seeks to uncover.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalpana B ◽  

Subramania Bharathi is probably the greatest poet in the History of Tamil literature. Many books and articles have been written both in English and Tamil praising his works and criticizing him for the past hundred years. His works have been taken up for research, to analyze Nationalism, language, politics, literature, translation, philosophy, feminism and religion. This book entitled “Bharathi’s concept of women liberation: Legacy and novelty” analyzes his feminist thoughts and the lives of women during his period. The author of this book Dr. B. Kalpana carefully analyzes about Bharathi’s works, his period, tradition, his innovative and modern thoughts that paved the way to the future generation. In this book, Dr. B. Kalpana points out, how Bharathi overcame tradition, and became a revolutionary poet of the twentieth century. Bharathi’s feminist ideology is carefully analyzed in this book from the historical perspective.


2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 797-832 ◽  
Author(s):  
DEEPAK NAYYAR

This paper situates the economic performance of independent India in historical perspective to evaluate the past and reflect on the future. It shows that the turning point in economic growth was circa 1951 in the long twentieth century and circa 1980 in India since independence. Thus, it is not possible to attribute the turnaround in India's performance to economic liberalization beginning 1991. During the period 1950–1980, economic growth in India was respectable, for it was a radical departure from the past and no worse than the performance of most countries. During the period 1980–2005, economic growth in India was impressive, indeed much better than in most countries. The real failure in both these periods was India's inability to transform this growth into well-being for all its people. And India's unfinished journey in development cannot be complete as long as poverty, deprivation and exclusion persist. Even so, with correctives, it should be possible to reach the destination.


Author(s):  
Bruce A. Kimball

While envisioning liberal education for the twenty-first century, we must not forget that our visions are shaped and conditioned by historical context, or tradition. Indeed, the very fact that we discuss something called "liberal education" demonstrates the influence of tradition. The general precept is well known, but the nature of this particular tradition is often misconstrued, due not only to neglect but also to genuine intentions to rescue or correct the tradition. To be sure, this particular tradition is long and complex, and it is doubtful that anyone can claim to understand fully the current situation of liberal education in light of its tradition, particularly in this era of postmodern interpretivism and deconstruction. This brief essay will therefore make two, more modest claims. First, I hope to demonstrate that, contrary to the conventional perception, the tradition of liberal education is not uniform and continuous but full of variety, discontinuity, and innovation. It has been and is a conflicted tradition. Second, I wish to argue conversely that innovative proposals made for liberal education at the end of the twentieth century often belong to the tradition, although this heritage is generally not recognized by either the proponents or their opponents. These two points, I suggest, indicate the richness and complexity of the tradition and its value, as well as its influence, for those seeking to envision what the next century of liberal education may and should hold. This is not to say that the tradition is boundless, that liberal education is all things for all situations, or that it is without blemishes or addictions, even cancerous growths. But liberal education is what we have and what we are, after centuries of trying to get it right, and we can no more wipe the slate clean and start entirely afresh here than we can in any other human endeavor. We can certainly try to change and improve in the coming century, but change and improvement imply understanding of and comparison with the past.


CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz

Multisensory and cross-modal perception have been recognised as crucial for shaping modernist epistemology, aesthetics, and art. Illustrative examples of how it might be possible to test equivalences (or mutual translatability) between different sensual modalities can be found in theoretical pronouncements on the arts and in artistic production of both the avant-garde and high modernism. While encouraging multisensory, cross-modal, and multimodal artistic experiments, twentieth-century artists set forth a new language of sensory integration. This article addresses the problem of the literary representation of multisensory and cross-modal experience as a particular challenge for translation, which is not only a linguistic and cross-cultural operation but also cross-sensual, involving the gap between different culture-specific perceptual realities. The problem of sensory perception remains a vast underexplored terrain of modernist translation history and theory, and yet it is one with potentially far-reaching ramifications for both a cultural anthropology of translation and modernism's sensory anthropology. The framework of this study is informed by Douglas Robinson's somatics of translation and Clive Scott's perceptive phenomenology of translation, which help to put forth the notion of sensory equivalence as a pragmatic correspondence between the source and target texts, appealing to a range of somato-sensory (audial, visual, haptic, gestural, articulatory kinaesthetic, proprioceptive) modalities of reader response.


What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-297
Author(s):  
Tom Walker

Allusions to other texts abound in John McGahern's fiction. His works repeatedly, though diffidently, refer to literary tradition. Yet the nature of such allusiveness is still unclear. This article focuses on how allusion in The Pornographer (1979) is depicted as an intellectual and social practice, embodying particular attitudes towards the function of texts and the knowledge they represent. Moreover, the critique of the practice of allusion that the novel undertakes is shown to have broader significance in terms of McGahern's whole oeuvre and its evolving attempts to salvage something of present value from the literature of the past.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.


Author(s):  
VICTOR BURLACHUK

At the end of the twentieth century, questions of a secondary nature suddenly became topical: what do we remember and who owns the memory? Memory as one of the mental characteristics of an individual’s activity is complemented by the concept of collective memory, which requires a different method of analysis than the activity of a separate individual. In the 1970s, a situation arose that gave rise to the so-called "historical politics" or "memory politics." If philosophical studies of memory problems of the 30’s and 40’s of the twentieth century were focused mainly on the peculiarities of perception of the past in the individual and collective consciousness and did not go beyond scientific discussions, then half a century later the situation has changed dramatically. The problem of memory has found its political sound: historians and sociologists, politicians and representatives of the media have entered the discourse on memory. Modern society, including all social, ethnic and family groups, has undergone a profound change in the traditional attitude towards the past, which has been associated with changes in the structure of government. In connection with the discrediting of the Soviet Union, the rapid decline of the Communist Party and its ideology, there was a collapse of Marxism, which provided for a certain model of time and history. The end of the revolutionary idea, a powerful vector that indicated the direction of historical time into the future, inevitably led to a rapid change in perception of the past. Three models of the future, which, according to Pierre Nora, defined the face of the past (the future as a restoration of the past, the future as progress and the future as a revolution) that existed until recently, have now lost their relevance. Today, absolute uncertainty hangs over the future. The inability to predict the future poses certain challenges to the present. The end of any teleology of history imposes on the present a debt of memory. Features of the life of memory, the specifics of its state and functioning directly affect the state of identity, both personal and collective. Distortion of memory, its incorrect work, and its ideological manipulation can give rise to an identity crisis. The memorial phenomenon is a certain political resource in a situation of severe socio-political breaks and changes. In the conditions of the economic crisis and in the absence of a real and clear program for future development, the state often seeks to turn memory into the main element of national consolidation.


Author(s):  
Seva Gunitsky

Over the past century, democracy spread around the world in turbulent bursts of change, sweeping across national borders in dramatic cascades of revolution and reform. This book offers a new global-oriented explanation for this wavelike spread and retreat—not only of democracy but also of its twentieth-century rivals, fascism, and communism. The book argues that waves of regime change are driven by the aftermath of cataclysmic disruptions to the international system. These hegemonic shocks, marked by the sudden rise and fall of great powers, have been essential and often-neglected drivers of domestic transformations. Though rare and fleeting, they not only repeatedly alter the global hierarchy of powerful states but also create unique and powerful opportunities for sweeping national reforms—by triggering military impositions, swiftly changing the incentives of domestic actors, or transforming the basis of political legitimacy itself. As a result, the evolution of modern regimes cannot be fully understood without examining the consequences of clashes between great powers, which repeatedly—and often unsuccessfully—sought to cajole, inspire, and intimidate other states into joining their camps.


Author(s):  
James Tweedie

This chapter introduces the concept of the “archaeomodern” and its connection to the aging of the quintessential modern medium of film. It sketches the historical and cultural background of the archaeomodern turn in the late twentieth century, including the development of an obsession with the past in the heritage industry and the rise of postmodernism. It then discusses two phenomena from the 1980s and 1990s—a mannerist or baroque revival, and the development of media archaeology—that complicate the habitual association between tradition and the past or modernity and the future. The introduction suggests that archaeomodern cinema was characterized by the return to failed or abandoned modern experiments and other relics from the modern past.


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