scholarly journals Tabularity: Poetic Structure in Shelley, Agamben, Badiou, and Husserl

CounterText ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Watkin

The recent history of the intense relationship between philosophy and poetry has concentrated on the poiesis of poetic language. Poiesis is the truth-revealing nature of poetic materiality and linguistic singularity. The ‘truth’ it reveals is that truth itself, as expressed by philosophy, is under erasure in a manner that cannot be expressed philosophically, and so must instead be performed poetically. At the same time, however, what has been neglected is the manner by which material poiesis, for example lineation, is located within a wider poetic structure. If a poem disrupts what Badiou calls dianoia, at the local or linear level, it constructs meanings at the ‘global’ level in the form of its structure. So that while poems may be gifted with truth-revealing poiesis, they are also dominated by truth-developing structures. So far a philosophical interaction with these structures is lacking. This article will consider the philosophical nature of a poem's structure as a means of generating local and global poetic meanings through a development of what will be called poetry's tabularity. Using Shelley's ‘Ode to the West Wind’, it will consider the work of Agamben, Badiou, and Husserl in relation to how meaning is generated across the poetic, two-dimensional, or tabular field.

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-358
Author(s):  
WEN-CHIN OUYANG

I begin my exploration of ‘Ali Mubarak (1823/4–1893) and the discourses on modernization ‘performed’ in his only attempt at fiction, ‘Alam al-Din (The Sign of Religion, 1882), with a quote from Guy Davenport because it elegantly sums up a key theoretical principle underpinning any discussion of cultural transformation and, more particularly, of modernization. Locating ‘Ali Mubarak and his only fictional work at the juncture of the transformation from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘modern’ in the recent history of Arab culture and of Arabic narrative, I find Davenport's pronouncement tantalizingly appropriate. He not only places the stakes of history and geography in one another, but simultaneously opens up the imagination to the combined forces of time and space that stand behind these two distinct yet related disciplines.


1969 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric J. Sharpe

To the student of the recent history of theological ideas in the West, it sometimes seems as though, of all the ‘new’ subjects that have been intro duced into theological discussion during the last hundred or so years, only two have proved to be of permanent significance. One is, of course, biblical criticism, and the other, the subject which in my University is still called ‘comparative religion’—the (as far as possible) dispassionate study of the religions of the world as phenomena in their own right.


2021 ◽  
pp. 75-108
Author(s):  
Anna von der Goltz

This chapter engages with several major themes that have long animated research on the West German 1960s: protesters’ family backgrounds and wartime childhoods; the meaning of the Nazi past to their activism; and intergenerational relations. Like their student peers on the Left, centre-right activists had been raised in a post-genocidal society. Given that, how did they view and engage with Germany’s recent history of mass violence? The chapter highlights the centrality of anti-totalitarianism to their thinking. It also shows that, inspired by the so-called ‘‘45ers’ and nudged by social scientists who routinely portrayed student protest as a symptom of generational conflict, they began to think of themselves as a distinct generational community in the 1960s.


1970 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
J. B. Ward-Perkins

Nobody who has worked in the field of late Republican and early Imperial Rome can fail to be aware how remarkably little archaeological evidence we have of any specifically Roman presence in the provinces of which Rome was in political and military control during the last century of the Republic. In the east, where she was faced with a civilization older and richer than her own, this is intelligible enough. But for the student of the spread of Roman institutions and ideas in the west the gap is embarrassing. In Roman Britain we have no difficulty whatever in identifying the Gallic precedents for the settlement that followed the Roman conquest. But what lay behind the Caesarian and Augustan settlement in Gaul itself? In terms of the recent history of the area it would be reasonable to expect that in the south, at any rate, it should have been rooted in local Republican Roman practice; and yet there is remarkably little evidence of any such roots in the surviving remains. Much the same is true of Spain and Africa. Why is this? Is it that the impact of the early Imperial settlement was so strong that it swept away all trace of what had gone before? Or is it simply that the Republican Roman presence in these territories was not of a character to leave any substantial mark on the archaeological record?


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleonora Fanari

In the last two decades conflicts due to biodiversity conservation projects have been rising all over the world. This is due to the interest at the global level towards environmental protection, which is often implemented at the expense of communities living within and around important biodiversity spots. The study analyses the violent process of relocation and displacement from the protected areas of India with the purpose of documenting the illegal relocation of indigenous communities and forest dwellers from the protected forest areas. It examines the specific laws and regulations that legalize their relocation from their ancestral land in contravention of legal recognition of the community’s forest rights under the Forest Rights Act (FRA). The article concludes how these conflicts are the results of no recognition of tenure rights, and mirrors the contradictions embedded in the environmental protection policies not only in India but at the global level as well.


Author(s):  
Roman Sympos1

Abstract In “Ode to the West Wind” Percy Shelley represents the instability of the archive and the tenuousness of literary transmission through allusions, via Dante’s Divine Comedy and Virgil’s Aeneid, to a formative period in the history of the book: the period from roughly the first century BCE to the fourth century CE when the classical volumen or scroll was giving way to the codex of cut and sewn pages or “leaves.” By registering the poet’s own anxieties over the survival of his poetry and the perils of fragmentary dissemination through the image of “leaves dead” by which his two great precursors imagined the afterlives of departed souls, Shelley’s prophetic ode speaks to our own anxieties over the possibility of archival displacement and dispersion in a digital age while reaching back two millennia to the re-establishment of state religion, transformations in writing practices, and the founding myth of the Cumaen Sybil in Augustan Rome.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 929
Author(s):  
Ping Lin

The presupposition of meaning determines that the history of translation in China and the West is actually a history of transformation of meaning. Under the impact of deconstructionism and postmodernism, however, meaning changes from fixed to indeterminate, and the author and his subjectivity as the incarnation of reason and humanism are no longer deemed as valid. The “death of the author” fundamentally deconstructs the “inspiration theory” of the origin of poetry. With the questioning of the author's original intention and the inherent characteristics of poetic language make the translation of poetry eventually lead to a path of rewriting.


1963 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 141-152
Author(s):  
Robert H. G. Lee

A leading figure in the field of modern Chinese philosophy, Fung Yu-lan (Feng Yu-lan) has lived and worked amidst the intellectual and political tensions which have characterised the recent history of his country. His major work, Chung-kuo Che-hsueh Shih (History of Chinese Philosophy), was published in the 1930s, and is known in the West through the monumental translation into English prepared by Professor Derk Bodde of the University of Pennsylvania. Fung's technical philosophical theories were defined and articulated in his wartime writings during the 1940s. Like many of the leading Chinese intellectuals, he has now embraced Marxism-Leninism, the new orthodoxy which provides the doctrinal creed for contemporary China even as Confucianism did for the scholar-officials of the imperial period.


2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Ahearn ◽  
Mary Mussey ◽  
Catherine Johnson ◽  
Amy Krohn ◽  
Timothy Juergens ◽  
...  

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