Non-Olympian Gods and Persuasive Speech in the Aeneid

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-214
Author(s):  
David M. Pollio
Keyword(s):  
Human Behaviour ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Persuasive Speech

Throughout Vergil’s Aeneid, non-Olympian gods, acting on behalf of Olympian gods, attempt to persuade mortals to undertake various destructive actions. Apart from Juturna (Book 12), non-Olympian gods such as Iris (Book 5), Somnus (Book 5), and Allecto (Book 7) are unable to persuade their audience with words alone and resort to their irresistible divine appearance or abilities to achieve their ends. Although these speeches rarely attract critical attention in their own right, we can be certain that Vergil complicates these episodes to convey information not only about the nature of the non-Olympian gods (and their relationship to mortals) but also about the character of the resisting mortals. In particular, I will demonstrate that Juturna is able to persuade the Rutulians to break the truce with the Trojans in Book 12 because she—both as a recent mortal and sister of Turnus—understands human behaviour, whereas the other non-Olympians fail precisely because their speeches do not reflect a true understanding of their audience’s humanity.

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.”

scholarly journals Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet Edward II

2003 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boldizsár Fejérvári
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
The Real ◽  
Edward Ii

It is a common fashion in literary criticism, or 'Lit Crit,' to treat reality, human behaviour, communication, and everything else as though they were 'texts to be read.' This paper proposes to go the other way: it interprets literature (or, more precisely, one literary text, Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) as a part of reality in which several other layers of the real combine, such as linguistics, science, or other literary texts, most notably Hamlet. While Edward II is not generally considered a direct source for Stoppard's play, this paper shows how, in the wider perspective of 'interreality,' Marlowe's tragedy might interact with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. At the same time it is proved that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, contrary to the critical conception of many, is not a parasitic work 'feeding off' Elizabethan playwrights, but a play that enters a symbiotic relationship with its host (as defined by Hillis Miller).

Maîtresse: Direction without Domination

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-104
Author(s):  
Edward Lamberti
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
The Other ◽  
French Language ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Sense Of Identity

This chapter looks at Barbet Schroeder’s French-language film Maîtresse (1975), a film about sadomasochism that is also a love story. Schroeder films this potentially sensational subject matter in a matter-of-fact way, his camera calmly – though never coldly – observing the actions of the dominatrix (Bulle Ogier), her clients and her lover (Gérard Depardieu). The calmness of the visual style in this film speaks to what I am reading as a Levinasian openness to the idiosyncrasies of human behaviour, a calmness that performs an ethical acceptance of the Other. The chapter also explores Schroeder’s views on the power of the director and how he does all he can to refuse that power, and relates this to questions of directorial identity. It argues that Schroeder’s lack of an overt directorial identity is a part of what makes him a Levinasian director; in sacrificing his own sense of identity, he allows himself to be open, in a Levinasian way, to the Otherness of his filmic subjects.

The need for recognition of practical animal welfare as a profession.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Rebecca Sommerville
Keyword(s):  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Systemic Change ◽  
Wild Animal ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
The Other ◽  
Work Experiences ◽  
Scientific Theories

Abstract This introductory chapter describes the contents of the other chapters in this book, including the scientific theories and principles that underpin human behaviour and systemic change to enhance companion, farm, working and wild animal welfare, and the realities in practice, based on the work experiences of animal welfare practitioners in different sectors.

A typology of suicide

1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Giddens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Psychological Theory ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
The Other ◽  
Psychological Phenomenon ◽  
Objective Investigation

Objective investigation into suicide as a social and psychological phenomenon dates back to the opening of the nineteenth century (1). Few other areas of human behaviour, in fact, can have attracted the same measure of continuous interest on the part of students in several disciplines. H. Rost'sBibliographie des Selbstmords, published in 1927, lists well over 3,000 items (2). Today the total must be something over 5,000 (3). The reader surveying this voluminous literature, however, is impressed by several notablelacunae: 1) most of this literature is descriptive rather than explanatory; the great bulk of it consists of surveys of the distribution of suicide, or of clinical descriptions of individual cases (4); 2) there is a marked degree of disciplinary “compartmentalisation”. It has been evident for many years that both sociology and psychology have complementary contributions to make to the explanation of suicide (5); but theory and research into suicide in these two disciplines has tended to proceed separately with little more than a token acknowledgement of the potential relevance of one to the other (6). The object of this paper is to establish a schematic typology upon which a bridge between sociological and psychological theory might be built.

scholarly journals “Dead letters! … Dead Men?”: The Rhetoric of the Office in Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener”

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
GRAHAM THOMPSON
Keyword(s):  
Good Deal ◽  
The Other ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Market Place ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener ◽  
The One ◽  
Critical Discourses ◽  
The Relationship

Although a good deal of recent critical attention to Melville's writing has followed the lead of Robert K. Martin in addressing the issue of sexuality, the predominant themes in discussions of “Bartleby” remain changes in the nature of the workplace in antebellum America and transformations in capitalism. But, if one of the abiding mysteries of the story is the failure of the lawyer–narrator to sever his relationship with his young scrivener once Bartleby embarks upon his policy of preferring not to, it is a mystery that makes sense within both of these critical discourses. On the one hand, the longevity of the relationship dramatizes a tension implicit in Michael Gilmore's suggestion that the lawyer–narrator straddles the old and the new economic orders of the American market-place. Although he may employ his scriveners “as a species of productive property and little else”, his attachment to his employees is overwhelmingly paternalistic and protective. On the other hand, James Creech suggests that Pierre (published the year before “Bartleby”) is a novel preoccupied with the closeting of homosexual identity within the values of an American middleclass family, while Gregory Woods describes Melville as the nearest thing in the prose world of the American Renaissance to the Good Gay Poet Whitman. In this critical context the longevity of the relationship suggests that the lawyer–narrator's desire to know Bartleby, to protect him, to tolerate him, to be close to him, to have him for his own, and then to retell the story of their relationship, needs to be considered in relation to sexual desire.

Shamanism and the social nature of cumulative culture

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Nielsen ◽  
Ronald Fischer ◽  
Yoshihisa Kashima
Keyword(s):  
Human Behaviour ◽  
The Other ◽  
Evolution Theory ◽  
Cumulative Culture ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cognitive Motivations

AbstractOur species-unique capacity for cumulative culture relies on a complex interplay between social and cognitive motivations. Attempting to understand much of human behaviour will be incomplete if one of these motivations is the focus at the expense of the other. Anchored in gene-culture co-evolution theory, we stake a claim for the importance of social drivers in determining why shamans exist.

scholarly journals Adjective complementation patterns and judgement: Aligning lexical-grammatical and discourse-semantic approaches in appraisal research

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hang Su ◽  
Susan Hunston
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Personality Traits ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
The Other ◽  
Appraisal System ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
The One ◽  
National Corpus

Abstract This study takes a lexical-grammatical approach to exploring the evaluation of human behaviour and/or character. It uses adjective complementation patterns as the starting point to examine the lexical-grammatical resources at risk in the appraisal system of judgement, aiming to explore the extent to which we can arrive at the same categorization of the resources realizing judgement if a formal or lexical-grammatical approach, rather than a discourse-semantic one, is taken. Using a corpus compiled of texts categorized as ‘Biography’ in the British National Corpus, the study, on the one hand, shows that most of the items identified can be very satisfactorily classified in terms posited in the judgement system, suggesting that the nomenclature from that model is useful. On the other hand, a considerable number of items have also been identified which construe attitudes towards emotional types of personality traits, leading to the proposal of a potentially useful new judgement category and further an adjusted system of judgement. The heuristic potential of aligning the lexical-grammatical and discourse-semantic approaches to appraisal is further discussed.

The Performance of Feminism in The Taming of the Shrew

1994 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 214-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Loftus Ranald
Keyword(s):  
Physical Violence ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
The Other ◽  
Marriage Ceremony ◽  
Cycle Plays ◽  
Stock Character ◽  
Husband And Wife

Performance is ideology! This is particularly true of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, one of his two comedies concerning the behaviour of husband and wife after the marriage ceremony—the other being The Comedy of Errors. Here he makes use of what may well be the longest-running English female stock character, the recalcitrant wife, who goes back to Mrs Noah, the disobedient woman of the mediaeval religious cycle plays. But at the same time he adapts the technique of classical farce to observation of human behaviour, by taking an impossible premise (that a wife can be tamed) and extending it logically to the utmost limits of absurdity. He also combines the Mrs Noah figure with the Judy puppet and the clever woman of the Interludes who outwits her husband, but with one distinctive omission: the physical violence commonly assumed essential to shrew-taming. I believe that here Shakespeare has forged a new dramatic mode by humanizing the intellectuality of rhetorically based classical farce and psychologizing the knockabout physicality of its Plautine offshoot.

scholarly journals Wyzwanie etnometodologii i nauka o normach

Etyka ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 231-247
Author(s):  
Jacek Kurczewski
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Deep Structure ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Individual Behaviour ◽  
Concrete Situation ◽  
The Continuum ◽  
Traditional Sociology

By levelling its criticism it traditional sociology ethnomethodology focuses directly or indirectly on the role of norms in description and explanation of human behaviour. Although sociologists respond to this criticism the way in which they accommodate it is rather superficial. That is why this article is written in the form of a dialogue. One protagonist quotes selected tenets of ethnomethodology, phrasing them as he would be apt to in the programmatic phase of the development of that discipline, while the other offers corrections and undertakes to analyse and evaluate the views that he hears. In the course of their discussion it becomes clear that, according to ethnomethodology, norms out of context have no bearing on behaviour which is always occasioned by particular circumstances hic et nunc. Yet, it would not be true to say that remembrance of norms never affects decisions responsible for individual behaviour, any more than it would be to say that ethnomethodology can dispense with objective language as allegedly incompatible with the very nature of social life. Additionally, the dichotomy ‘indexical versus objective language’ distorts the continuum of the contextuality of expressions beyond recognition. Thus we are left with the old problem, familiar to both practitioners and theorists of normative disciplines, the problem of interpretation, its ramifications are neglected by ethnometodologists. Application of a concrete norm to a concrete situation presupposes an interpretation of the situation, and in this sense, it is true that knowledge of norms is not sufficient for a description of the behaviour by a man who follows them. But a norm can play a role in the interpretation of a situation too. Besides, in their attempt to get rid of surface norms, ethnomethodologists create latent or interpretative norms whose ontological status is rather doubtful. Though they are reconstructed they need not be Identified with deep-structure norms which in fact have influence on human behaviour. In case when the two might conflict the ethnometodologists would be hard put to know what to say. But without precluding any answer to this query, it must be stressed that the interpretative procedures, as they have been reconstructed from ethnomethodological analyses, are vague and underdeveloped which is probably due to this vagueness of criteria with which ethnomethodology defines the object of its interests.

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