scholarly journals Towards Harmonizing the Mythic and The Modern in Erdrichs Tracks: A Magical Realist Perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol V (III) ◽  
pp. 91-98
Author(s):  
Mumtaz Ahmad ◽  
Asma Haseeb Qazi ◽  
Sahar Javaid

This article is an endeavor to provide an insight into Native American novelist Louise Erdrich's use of the magical-realist technique in an attempt to harmonize the mythic and modern conceptions of reality represented by the Native American and Euro American subjects, respectively. The article demonstrates that in an attempt to seek a way possible to intertwine the two cultures, to wed the Native and the European ideologies of the world into accommodative space and to strike out the all-pervasive differences between the two people inhabiting the same land, Erdrich delves into the structuring principles of each culture's conceptualizing and internalizing the reality and the faith in it, and presents them as simultaneous albeit contrary versions of the same events, suggesting the possibility of simultaneous and harmonious co-existence of the two views, each retaining its essential outlook and yet respecting and accommodating the other. Employing Bower and Paula Gunn Allen's theoretical postulations of magical realism as a particular discourse embedded in the mythic and cultural beliefs of the Native American subjects, the article explores the mythic and modern formulations of female identity in Native American magical-realist fiction Tracks.

Leonardo ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
François-Joseph Lapointe

Much has been said and written about the two-culture paradigm separating the world between artists and scientists. On one side of this debate are those who accept this cultural art/science divide. On the other side are those who reject it altogether to promote a better integration of artscience practices. In this paper, the author presents a network analysis of 40 papers submitted to the SEAD Network for Science, Engineering, Arts and Design and tests the hypothesis that the papers submitted by artists and scientists are disconnected in the corresponding graph, as predicted by the art/science separation. Rejecting this hypothesis will provide support for the alternative artscience integration.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 478
Author(s):  
Verónica Roldán

The present study on the religious experience of the Peruvian community in Rome belongs to the area of studies on immigration, multiculturalism, and religion in Italy. In this article, I analyze the devotion of the Peruvian community in Rome to “the Lord of Miracles”. This pious tradition, which venerates the image of Christ crucified—painted by an Angolan slave—began in 1651 in Lima, during the Viceroyalty of Peru. Today, the sacred image is venerated in countries all over the world that host Peruvian immigrant communities that have set up branches of the Confraternity of the Lord of Miracles. I examine, in particular, the cult of el Señor de los Milagros in Rome in terms of Peruvian popular religiosity and national identity experienced within a transnational context. This essay serves two purposes: The first is to analyze the significance that this religious experience acquires in a foreign environment while maintaining links with its country of origin and its cultural traditions in a multilocal environment. The second aim is to examine the integration of the Peruvian community into Italian society, beginning with religious practice, in this case Roman Catholicism. This kind of religiosity seems not only to favor the encounter between the two cultures but also to render Italian Roman Catholicism multicultural.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-152
Author(s):  
Jon Stewart

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel argues that the development of the religions of the world leads up to and culminates in Christianity, which is the one true religion. One key element which separates Christianity from the other religions, according to Hegel, concerns the issue of alienation. He argues that the previous religions all contain some form of alienation, which can be found in their conceptions of the divine. In this paper, I wish to examine Hegel’s view that Christianity alone overcomes religious alienation. What is it that makes Christianity so special in this regard? This is a particularly important issue given that the question of alienation is so central in the post-Hegelian thinkers such as Feuerbach, Bauer, and Marx, who all insist that, far from overcoming alienation, Christianity is guilty of causing it. I wish to argue that this issue provides new insight into the old criticism of Hegel as a thinker of abstraction.


Author(s):  
Jon Stewart

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel argues that the development of the religions of the world leads up to Christianity, which is the one true religion. One key element which separates Christianity from the other religions, for Hegel, concerns the issue of alienation. He claims that the previous religions all contain some form of alienation, which can be found in their conceptions of the divine. I wish to examine Hegel’s view that Christianity alone overcomes religious alienation. What is it that makes Christianity so special in this regard? This is a particularly important issue given that the question of alienation is so central in the post-Hegelian thinkers such as Feuerbach, Bauer, and Marx, who all insist that, far from overcoming alienation, Christianity is guilty of causing it. I argue that this issue provides new insight into the old criticism of Hegel as a thinker of abstraction.


Author(s):  
Kornélia Lazányi ◽  
Peter Holicza ◽  
Kseniia Baimakova

Culture is a scheme of knowledge shared by a relatively large number of people. Hence, it is a collection of explicit as well as implicit patterns of behaviour. It makes the members of the culture feel, think act and react in a certain, predefined way, hence makes their actions predictable. The literature on cultures, especially that of national cultures has focused on cultural differences and on understanding and measuring them for long decades, but in the 21st century the attention has shifted to leveraging benefits of multicultural environments and experiences. Hence, present paper—after providing a short insight into the basic approaches of national cultures—endeavours to analyse Russian and Hungarian culture. We aim to present the similarities and differences of the two cultures, along with tools and methods that are able to lessen these differences and harvest the benefits of them.


Author(s):  
Elisabeth Hein

The Ternus effect refers to an ambiguous apparent motion display in which two or three elements presented in succession and shifted horizontally by one position can be perceived as either a group of elements moving together or as one element jumping across the other(s). This chapter introduces the phenomenon and describes observations made by Pikler and Ternus in the beginning of the twentieth century. Next, reasons for continued interest in the Ternus effect are discussed and an overview of factors that influence it offered, including low-level image-based factors, for example luminance, as well as higher-level scene-based factors, for example perceptual grouping. The chapter ends with a discussion of theories regarding the mechanisms underlying the Ternus effect, providing insight into how the visual system is able to perceive coherent objects in the world despite discontinuities in the input (e.g., as a consequence of eye movements or object occlusion).


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-53
Author(s):  
Peter Lachmann

Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester in 1905 and – like his fictional alter ago Lewis Eliot – determined from an early age to be remembered. The essays in this issue, some 60 years after he first wrote about ‘The Two Cultures’, give testimony that in this respect he has been successful. There is still merit in his essential contentions that there are graduates in the humanities who remain out of touch with scientific developments – and science graduates who don’t read novels. But the world has changed: the computer revolution and the World Wide Web have permitted far broader access to each of the two cultures. While the split between the humanities and the sciences may have grown less, another fissure has become prominent: the sharp divide between those I call the true children of the European enlightenment and those who reject these values, the ‘fideists’. This argument began at Christ’s College, Cambridge.


Author(s):  
Sunaj Hadžija ◽  
Jahja Fehratović ◽  
Kimeta Hamidović

Imperialism emerged in the late 19th century. Europe's supremacy in various areas of life which led to the view that Europe is above other parts of the world that are uncivilized and culturally fell behind, and that needed to be civilized. This attitude lead to negative phenomena such as racism - contesting the rights of other races and colonialism - conquering territories inhabitated by people of other cultures. The world seen from an imperialist perspective was most often the one colonized by Europe, postcolonial research has critized the way in which European colonial powers (especially England and France) created values of subordinate cultures and established relations between center and margins. However, the notion of discursive domination is spread quickly to all relations between colonizers and colonized, which is why this second group includes all gender and ethic groups that did not have cultural independece, but were marginalized and subjected to institutional repression. As different cultural minorities began to form resistance to agressive political, gender, and racial domination, postcolonialism also represents a disagreement with the passivity towards cultural supremacy which is symbolized in empires that no longer even existed. The novel A Passage to India represents Forster's interests in Indian culture, which was colonized by Great Britain. A Passage to India is an exploration of the spiritual and cultural contrast of the two cultures of East and West.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatiana S. Akhromeeva ◽  
Georgy G. Malinetsky ◽  
Sergey A. Posashkov

The article considers the interaction of science and art, as well as the development of Science Art from the standpoint of the theory of self-organization and the theory of humanitarian-technological revolution. The world is at the point of bifurcation defining the future. The choice of the further trajectory will be largely determined by what is happening in the emotional and intuitive spaces. This, in turn, depends on the deve­lopment of art, science, philosophy. The article discus­ses alternative futures and the role of culture in them.Charles Snow wrote about a gap between the two cultures — natural science, answering the question “How?” and looking into the future, and humanities, answering the question “What?” and often reflec­ting on the past.The growing gap between the two cultures prevents the civilization from relying to the necessary extent on scientific knowledge and leads to its devaluation. The authors show the importance of the “exchange of metaphors” between science and art, allowing to build bridges over the gap of two cultures. Another way to connect these two spaces is the development of interdisciplinary approaches, in particular, the theory of self-organization, or synergetics. In the 1970s, synergetics was conceived as a language that allowed humanitarians, specialists in natural sciences and mathe­maticians to discuss, formulate and pose common problems, while remaining, nevertheless, in the space of science. Now the central interdisciplinary problem is the study of not only the rational (as du­ring the last three centuries), but also the emotional and intuitive space of human and society.Currently, there are two forecasts materializing — the one of D. Bell, on the transition from the industrial phase of development to the post-industrial, from the world of technology to the world of people, and the one of N.A. Berdyaev, on the transition from the Se­cond Antiquity to the Second Middle Ages. The article shows how this will change the culture itself and its place in society.


1884 ◽  
Vol 30 (130) ◽  
pp. 223-233
Author(s):  
H. Hayes Newington

In none of the more practical aspects of insanity, with the exception perhaps of that of pathology, does the alienist stand at so much disadvantage with the other members of the medical profession as in the matter of prognosis. In diagnosis we have, as a rule, an easy task, though now and then cases arise in which it requires much thought to come to a determination whether some unhappy event is due to insanity or to crime. Again, in treatment we fairly hold our own, taking into consideration the complex nature of the organs and functions that are affected, coupled with the impossibility of direct examination and treatment of them. But in prognosis we are distinctly less sure of our footing, and it is unfortunate that this uncertainty is accompanied by a most pressing demand for accurate forecasts from the relatives of those who are placed under our charge. This pressure, no doubt, arises in chief from the necessity in nearly every case for modifying, either temporarily or for good, those circumstances, domestic, official, and pecuniary, from which the patient has been removed; but there is this further difficulty, that while in cases of general disease, other than insanity, the friends have some sort of knowledge and opinion of their own as to the probable result, gained from insight into similar cases, in insanity such clinical experience is denied them by the necessity for withdrawing patients from the observation of the public. They are thus almost entirely without guides of their own, and in consequence they come to lean more heavily on the doctor. The strain and responsibility for error thus cast on us would be intolerable were there only the two eventualities of absolute recovery and absolute loss of mind; but, fortunately, there are many stages to fill up the huge gap between these two extremes, stages of partial recovery which allow of the restoration of the patient to various degrees of liberty and usefulness in the world. It is not too much to say that the problem of the future of the patient has to be faced never less often, generally more frequently, than that of treatment.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document