scholarly journals Identity and the theme of belonging in Seamus Heaney's Selected Poems

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (45) ◽  
pp. 547-560
Author(s):  
Shaymaa Saleem Yousif

Abstract       The heritage and history of the ancestors and the country are important parts of the history and culture of peoples. It is the vessel which their faith, traditions, authentic values, language, ideas, and way of life derived from. It also shapes their personality by   culture, national identity, and creates the bridge of communication between generations. The identity and the sense of belonging can be traced in the early poems of Seamus Heaney: Digging (1966), Gravities (1966), Traditions (1972) and Anahorish (1972). Many critics consider this as only self-revelation or as a result of feeling guilty for leaving his family, land, and career. This study aims at proving that in spite of the fact that Heaney had left his place of birth and his parent’s tradition for choosing to be a writer, he presented poems that carry out the continuity of searching for the past and roots. The study concludes with that the sense of belonging has appeared through Heaneys early poems, reflecting his desire to plant the spirit of devotion to family, tradition, and Ireland.   

Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-243
Author(s):  
Tim Heysse

How should we look back on the history and the origins of our ethical outlook and our way of life? We know that in the past, strange and appalling ethical views and practices have enjoyed widespread and sincere support. Yet we do not regard our contemporary outlook – to the extent that we do, at the present, have a common outlook – as one option among many. However bemused we may feel in ethical matters, at least on some issues we claim to have reasons that are good (enough). If we do not object to the use of the predicate ‘true’ in ethics, we may say that we are confronted with the (ethical) truth of an outlook. Or, to echo a provocative expression of David Wiggins, we claim that ‘there is nothing else to think’.


Author(s):  
Halima Kadirova ◽  

This scientific article highlights the place and role of the Karakalpak ethnic culture in the development and preservation of the identity of the people. The authors analyze the culture and life of the modern Karakalpak family, which inherits to the next generation the traditional way of life associated with national holidays and traditions, dastans performed by Karakalpak bakhshi (singers), legends and legends of the past, told by the older generation. The article argues that social changes in the global space contribute to the emergence of certain changes in the content of cultural identity, language, art, spiritual categories, which are elements of the basis of the national identity of each nation and various ethno-regional units, which further strengthens the study of this issue under the influence of the process of globalization.


Author(s):  
Ziad Fahed

The post-war period in Lebanon brought to the open all sensitive subjects that have marked the history of Lebanon: how to avoid falling into such a crisis? How not repeating such war? How can the Lebanese society eradicate the reasons that may lead to any other war? The Lebanese crisis had challenged the Church inviting her to move from being a passive witness to an active participant in the peaceful struggle for the liberation of the Lebanese society and help the country to complete its incorrect reading of history. Can the Maronite Patriarchate have a positive role in this regard? Can the Maronite Patriarchate bring about the purifi cation of the memory in a multiconfessional country? In this paper, and after defi ning the meaning of the purifi cation of memory in the Lebanese context, we will consider the important challenges that must precede any serious and defi nitive solution to the crisis in Lebanon and how can the Lebanese Church contribute in the development of a national identity and in the building of a new state free from any kind of domination. The purpose of this paper is not to justify what has happened in the past 34 years, i.e. since the beginning of the Lebanese war, but to contribute in searching for a sustainable peace.


2020 ◽  
pp. 217-248
Author(s):  
Roma Bončkutė

SOURCES OF SIMONAS DAUKANTAS’S BUDĄ SENOWĘS-LËTUWIÛ KALNIENÛ ĨR ƵÁMAJTIÛ (1845) The article investigates Simonas Daukantas’s (1793–1864) BUDĄ Senowęs-Lëtuwiû Kalnienû ĩr Ƶámajtiû (The Character of the Lithuanian Highlanders and Samogitians of the Old Times, 1845; hereafter Bd) with regards to genre, origin of the title, and the dominant German sources of the work. It claims that Daukantas conceived Bd because he understood that the future of Lithuania is closely related to its past. A single, united version of Lithuanian history, accepted by the whole nation, was necessary for the development of Lithuanian national identity and collective feeling. The history, which up until then had not been published in Lithuanian, could have helped to create the contours of a new society by presenting the paradigmatic events of the past. The collective awareness of the difference between the present and the past (and future) should have given the Lithuanian community an incentive to move forward. Daukantas wrote Bd quickly, between 1842 and May 28, 1844, because he drew on his previous work ISTORYJE ƵEMAYTYSZKA (History of the Lithuanian Lowlands, ~1831–1834; IƵ). Based on the findings of previous researchers of Daukantas’s works, after studying the dominant sources of Bd and examining their nature, this article comes to the conclusion that the work has features of both cultural history and regional historiography. The graphically highlighted form of the word “BUDĄ” used in the work’s title should be considered the author’s code. Daukantas, influenced by the newest culturological research and comparative linguistics of the 18th–19th centuries, propagated that Lithuanians originate from India and, like many others, found evidence of this in the Lithuanian language and culture. He considered the Budini (Greek Βουδίνοι), who are associated with the followers of Buddha, to be Lithuanian ancestors. He found proof of this claim in the language and chose the word “būdas” (character), which evokes aforementioned associations, to express the idea of the work.


2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.


1996 ◽  
Vol 12 (45) ◽  
pp. 3-5
Author(s):  
Simon Trussler

Acting style is arguably the most elusive of the theatre's always ephemeral traces – not least because each generation, while proclaiming its own actors to be more ‘natural’ than their predecessors, has tended in its criticism, as in actors' memoirs, to take style as a ‘given’. Anecdotage and plot synopsis have accordingly taken precedence over analysis of how performers actually worked and appeared on stage – let alone prepared their performances. Here, Simon Trussler introduces a project being launched at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is Reader in Drama, to utilize the immense storage capacity of the CD-ROM both to record the evidence, verbal and pictorial, that has come down to us from the past, and to assess its relevance to present approaches to acting and to the playing of the classical repertoire. Specifically, the project aims to explore the ways in which the national identity – the quality of ‘Englishness’ – has been both reflected in and influenced by the ways in which it has been rendered on stage. In the succeeding article, Nesta Jones outlines the history and development of the English acting tradition, and some of the issues its consideration raises in relation to the Goldsmiths project. Simon Trussler was one of the founding editors of the original Theatre Quarterly in 1971, and has been co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly since its inception. The most recent of his many books on theatre and drama, The Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre, was runner-up for the 1994 George Freedley Award of the Theatre Libraries Association, being cited as ‘an outstanding contribution to the literature of the theatre’.


Author(s):  
Iveta Ķestere ◽  
◽  
Baiba Kaļķe ◽  

In order to understand how the concept of national identity, currently included in national legislation and curricula, has been formed, our research focuses on the recent history of national identity formation in the absence of the nation-state “frame”, i.e. in Latvian diaspora on both sides of the Iron Curtain – in Western exile and in Soviet Latvia. The question of our study is: how was national identity represented and taught to next generations in the national community that had lost the protection of its state? As primers reveal a pattern of national identity practice, eight primers published in Western exile and six primers used in Soviet Latvian schools between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s were taken as research sources. In primers, national identity is represented through the following components: land and nation state iconography, traditions, common history, national language and literature. The past reverberating with cultural heritage became the cornerstone of learning national identity by the Latvian diaspora. The shared, idealised past contrasted the Soviet present and, thus, turned into an instrument of hidden resistance. The model of national identity presented moral codes too, and, teaching them, national communities did not only fulfill their supporting function, but also took on the functions of “normalization” and control. Furthermore, national identity united generations and people’s lives in the present, creating memory-based relationships and memory-based communities.


Author(s):  
Eugeniy Kazakov ◽  
Darya Kutovaia

The article presents the entire human history in its phylogeny and ontogenesis as a desire for personification, i.e. to find one’s generic and individual Self. If one gains one’s Self, it means that one truly exists. But that is impossible without gaining one’s freedom. The reflection over the process of self-identification is as old as the human history. However, the moment one gains one’s face, one loses it. The problem of self-identification is particularly relevant nowadays. There is every reason to talk about the growing crisis of identity in modern man. Globalization deprives people of some markers that previously identified them. People seldom identify themselves with the place of birth. Man plunges into the global impersonal flow of information, thus losing both connection with a certain historical past and a sense of belonging to the family or kin. The loss of cultural and national identity is a marker of the growing social infantilism where freedom is more important than responsibility: "I want" means more than "I must", the present presides over the past and the future, and "mine" is more important than everything else.


Author(s):  
Natalia V. Gorinova

Introduction. The work is devoted to the study of the theatrical and dramatic work of O. Ulyashev. It reveals the originality of his dramatic handwriting and some aspects of the movement of national culture in the 1990s. Materials and Methods. The material of the study was the plays by O. Ulyashev. The method of study is comparative. Results and Discussion. O. Ulyashev’s plays are an important milestone in the history of the development of the Komi Theater. His plays, like many other ones of the turn of the XX–XXI centuries, are inherent in the desire for renewal. The artistic originality of his texts, however, determines the actualization of folklore material. The writer’s worldview is close to the high artistic, aesthetic and moral and philosophical potential of oral folk art. It is folklore origins that contribute to his creative quest and the development of his creative aspirations. O. Ulyashev’s works, like many other works of Komi literature of the late XX century about the historical past of the Zyryans, serve to increase and strengthen national identity. Conclusion. The work of the writer O. Ulyashev played an important role in the development of theatrical and dramatic art of the Komi Republic. His plays largely update the Komi drama, saturating it with folklore material, romanticizing the past of the Zyryans.


1982 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 567-590
Author(s):  
Frances Lannon

The inseparability of national identity and Catholicism in modern Spain has never been more pugnaciously and confidently affirmed than in the provocative hyperbole of Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. ‘Spain, evangeliser of half the globe; Spain, hammer of heretics, light of Trent, sword of Rome, cradle of Saint Ignatius . . .; that is our greatness and our unity: we have no other’. This uncompromising statement undoubtedly owes some of its stridency to the age of the author when he wrote it—he was twenty-five—and something to his abiding convictions and temperament. But one does not have to search very assiduously this most famous defence of catholic orthodoxy as the source of Spanish grandeur in order to realise that Menéndez y Pelayo’s fervour and language are both sharpened by nostalgia. Volumes six and seven of his history of Spanish heterodoxy which trace the history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitute one long lament for lost catholic unity, lost cultural homogeneity and, lost with them, an irretrievable simplicity and clarity of national self-definition. When he wrote his eloquent and audacious lament in the early 1880s he was well aware that the uniformity of religious belief which he had unhesitatingly discerned beneath minor, and usually imported, heterodoxy in earlier Spanish history already belonged irrecuperably to the past. Moreover, he found himself as many lesser followers were also to do in the uncomfortably Canute-like position of opposing the uncontrollable while asserting an ideal which had to be articulated as a series of negative and necessarily unsatisfactory defensive reactions.


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