Howard Hawks’s Red River

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Day
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Red River ◽  
Epic Tradition ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The Sacrifice

As the film that introduced a new psychological complexity to the genre while establishing John Wayne as a serious actor rather than merely a star, Howard Hawks’s 1948 Red River is often considered the first Golden Age Western. After brief discussion of its literary roots and the circumstances surrounding its production, release, and reception, this chapter connects this film to the broader epic tradition before turning to specific parallels with the three canonical Greco-Roman epics, first, arguing that much like Homer’s Iliad, Red River positions Wayne’s Tom Dunson as an Achilles figure – a man consumed by deadly rage provoked by a slight to his honor. Next, expanding on Gerald Mast’s identification of the film as an Odyssey, this chapter shows that in both works, a morally ambiguous hero embarks upon a quest to preserve his home, and in both, the father-son relationship is central, along with related issues of succession, status, authority, and identity. Finally, Red River’s kinship with Virgil’s Aeneid is discussed: both highlight the painful sacrifices inherent in the heroic work of nation-building – difficulties symbolized in both cases by the sacrifice of women and the hero’s compromised humanity – emphasizing the cost of empire even while promoting its glories.

Cowboy Classics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Day
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Red River ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Core Beliefs ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
Western Film ◽  
High Noon

In the American cultural imagination, the Wild West is a mythic-historical place where our nation’s values and ideologies were formed. The heroes of this dangerous world, most familiar to us through film, are men of violence who fight the bad guys as they build the foundations of civilization out of wilderness, forging notions of justice, manhood, and honor in the process. In the Greco-Roman societies that are America’s cultural ancestors, epics provided similar narratives: like Western film, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid focus on the mythic-historical past and its warriors, men who helped shape the ideological frameworks of their respective civilizations. At the same time, the best works from both genres are far from simplistic, but instead, call the assumptions underlying society’s core beliefs and value systems into question even as they promote them. Cowboy Classics examines the connections between these seemingly disparate yet closely related genres by first establishing the broad generic parallels and then providing deeper analysis through case-studies of five critically acclaimed Golden Age Westerns: Howard Hawks’s Red River, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, George Stevens’s Shane, and John Ford’s The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the end, this important comparison allows the American Western to serve as a lens through which to better understand the more remote works of antiquity, while identifying epic patterns in film provides the distance that allows us to see Westerns, in whose ideological undercurrents we are more directly implicated, in a more objective light.

scholarly journals Altruism in behavioural, motivational and evolutionary sense

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bojana Radovanovic
Keyword(s):  
Reproductive Success ◽  
Social Norm ◽  
Moral Principle ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
Altruistic Motivation ◽  
Evolutionary Theories ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Material Benefits ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The Sacrifice

This paper discusses the relations between three forms of altruism: behavioural, evolutionary and motivational. Altruism in a behavioural sense is an act that benefits another person. It can range from volunteering to a charity and helping a neighbour, to giving money to a non-profit organisation or donating blood. People often dedicate their material and nonmaterial resources for the benefit of others to gain psychological, social and material benefits for themselves. Thus, their altruistic acts are driven by egoistic motivation. Also, the final goal of an altruistic act may be the increase in the welfare of a group or adherence to a certain moral principle or a social norm. However, at least sometimes, the welfare of others is the ultimate goal of our actions, when our altruistic acts are performed from altruistic motivation. In evolutionary sense, altruism means the sacrifice of reproductive success for the benefit of other organisms. According to evolutionary theories, behaviour which promotes the reproductive success of the receiver at the cost of the actor is favoured by natural selection, because it is either beneficial for the altruist in the long run, or for his genes, or for the group he belongs to. However, altruism among people emerges as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behaviours. Not only do we benefit the members of our own group, but we are capable of transcending our tribalistic instincts and putting the benefit of strangers at our own personal expense as our ultimate goal.

Democracy, Elections, and Constitutionalism in Africa

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cross Section ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Design Systems ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Opposition Parties

This book is the outcome of the sixth Stellenbosch Annual Seminar on Constitutionalism in Africa (SASCA). The theme of the seminar was ‘Democracy, elections and Constitutionalism in Africa.’ The participants examined how the fledgling foundations of African constitutionalism could sail through the stormy seas of authoritarian revival and prevent the democratic recession spiralling into a depression. They examined a number of intricate issues concerning the role of elections in fostering democracy and constitutionalism. Some of the issues looked at included how we could design systems that will ensure that elections on the continent are genuinely competitive and reflect a real contest between competing approaches to nation-building and not a contest between perceived enemies? Or again, how we could reduce the cost of losing an election and encourage incumbents and opposition parties to accept defeat and continue to play by the rules of the democratic game? Whilst there are no easy and obvious answers to the numerous questions that arise, they nevertheless are important and urgent issues that need to be seriously interrogated. This is because, even if constitutionalism and democracy may not be working well today in Africa, there is no better alternative. The chapters in this book have been written by attendees from the seminar and cover a cross section of the continent’s regions and legal traditions.

John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Day
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Civic Identity ◽  
John Ford ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Self Knowledge

Standing at the end of a long line of John Ford Westerns and at the twilight of the genre’s Golden Age, 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a self-reflective work, as much about the Western genre as a product of it. Thus, while this film, like other Westerns examined in this book, demonstrates important connections to Homer’s epics, it finds its most pervasive parallels with the post-Homeric tradition. As in Virgil’s Aeneid, John Wayne’s Tom Doniphan sacrifices his personal desires in the interest of national progress, exhibiting a Western version of Aeneas’ pietas, while Liberty Valance fills the role of Turnus, demonstrating Achillean traits, but in a negative light. Yet the film also has a close kinship with Greek tragedy: in particular, through its preoccupation with generational tensions along with issues of knowledge and identity intertwined with themes of murder, marriage, and reputation, it recalls Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, with James Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard functioning as a decidedly un-epic Oedipus figure forced to confront his own failures. Like both Virgil and Sophocles before him, Ford offers a complex commentary on nation-building, simultaneously sentimental and critical, holding America’s glorious civic identity up for scrutiny and encouraging self-knowledge over blind mythologizing.

George Stevens’s Shane

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Day
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
Masculine Identity ◽  
Epic Tradition ◽  
Male Honor

Though a staple of the Western canon, George Stevens’s 1953 Shane has been criticized for its self-conscious mythologizing. Perhaps because of this mythic framing, Shane’s connections to the epic tradition are pervasive. This chapter begins by examining the overlapping concern in both with the guest-host relationship, constructions of male honor, and property rights as they relate to masculine identity. Turning next to the Iliad, this chapter expands on Carl Rubino’s examination of Shane as an Achilles figure by looking at the complicated psychological identification between hero, companion, and enemy present in both works. Next, Shane is connected to Homer’s Odyssey in its focus on a hero torn between lust for action and longing for home, its concern with a boy’s coming-of-age, and its anxiety about women’s sexual integrity. Finally, this chapter examines Shane’s close kinship with Virgil’s Aeneid through their focus on nation-building, with each including a significant acknowledgement of the antagonist’s perspective, in effect calling the justice of the hero’s cause into question, along with related notions of divine impetus and Manifest Destiny.

Pax and the ‘Ara Pacis’

1960 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 44-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Weinstock
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Classical Archaeology ◽  
Greek Art ◽  
Ara Pacis ◽  
The Sacrifice ◽  
As If

We call a monument Ara Pacis without any support from ancient tradition. It was Friedrich von Duhn who first so called it in 1879 and he justified it in the briefest fashion. He considered three sacrificial slabs and three processional slabs. He did not produce any analysis but based his case on the fact that some of those reliefs were discovered in the grounds of the Palazzo Fiano, that is on the Campus Martius, and that the Ara Pacis was built on the Campus Martius. That was all. Nevertheless, his conjecture was enthusiastically received: it was the golden age of classical archaeology, when numberless monuments were assigned to great Greek artists and great historical events and thus the foundations were laid for a more critical and sceptical study of Greek art. This scepticism destroyed many identifications but it never reached the Ara Pacis, and that I believe for special reasons. There was great excitement in the years after 1873 when Carl Humann discovered the great altar of Pergamum ; excavations began in 1878 with sensational results. Friedrich von Duhn made his ‘discovery’ in the following year and it concerned another great altar, but this time in Rome. He was clearly spellbound and so were his contemporaries. They did not ask for proof. In that atmosphere such credulity was natural. Yet however much the altar has been studied during the last eighty years the question has never been asked why it should be the Ara Pacis. My answer is that it is not. My first task, however, is to reconsider the evidence about Pax and I shall do this as if our altar did not exist. I shall return to it in the second part of my paper and end with the interpretation of a specimen relief, the sacrifice of Aeneas which seems to me the most revealing of the reliefs.

scholarly journals An Insight Regarding Economic Growth and Monetary Policy in Romania

2015 ◽  
Vol 62 (s1) ◽  
pp. 85-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Mera ◽  
Monica Pop Silaghi
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Monetary Policy ◽  
Interest Rate ◽  
Sacrifice Ratio ◽  
National Bank ◽  
Potential Gdp ◽  
The Interest Rate ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Sacrifice

Abstract This study introduces some aspects regarding the link between monetary policy and economic growth, through a rule well known in the literature which is named Taylor’s rule and through the concept of sacrifice ratio which encompasses the impact of the cost of disinflation on the economic growth of a country. In this paper, we rely on estimates of the growth of potential GDP of the National Bank of Romania for the period 2003-2006 while for the period 2007-2012 we rely on the estimates reported by the International Monetary Fund. Thus, we carry a deterministic exercise for computing the interest rate on the period 2003-2012 as depicted from the Taylor’s rule and we compare it with the effective monetary policy interest rate used by the National Bank of Romania. In the same time, we calculate the sacrifice ratio for the period 1997-2013 so as to be able to form an opinion regarding the cost of disinflation and its comparison with the typical estimates for larger time spans and for other countries.

Nation-building, a Nun and a Bionic Boy

2018 ◽  
pp. 69-91
Author(s):  
Edna Lim
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Political Context ◽  
National Cinema

This chapter initiates the book’s study of the post-studio 1970s as an important turning point that marks the transition from the pre-national cinema of the golden age to the post-national one today. It explores the socio-political context of post-independent Singapore, such as the state’s efforts at nation-building, the global focus of its policies and the arrival of television, which resulted in a changing audience and the development of a different cinema that was also internationally oriented. Like the country within which it operates, this is a cinema in transition and the films perform a Singapore that is either absent or foreign.

IV. TheAeneid

1998 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 53-101
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Formal Model ◽  
De Rerum Natura ◽  
Epic Tradition ◽  
Philosophical Account ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Literary Genealogy ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Roman Epic

At the heart of theAeneidthe hero descends to the world of the dead and in its innermost recess is reunited with his father. Anchises, Aeneas’s link to his destroyed Trojan past, reveals to his son the future of his race in the form of a procession of the souls of Roman heroes as yet unborn. In this place where time past, present, and future is held together, theAeneidalso comes to a heightened consciousness of its own literary genealogy, as literary memory is overlaid on family and racial memory. The whole of the Underworld episode is modelled on Odysseus’ visit to the land of the dead inOdyssey11: Aeneas’ meeting with his father reworks Odysseus’ meeting with his mother Anticleia (Od.11.152–224), which is immediately followed by the Catalogue of Heroines (Od.11.225–332), the formal model for Virgil’s very masculine Parade of Heroes. But the tears and words with which Anchises greets his son (6.684–9) allude to the Roman epic of Ennius and specifically to the scene at the opening of theAnnalsin which Ennius established his own place within the epic tradition, by narrating a dream in which the phantom of Homer explained to the sleeping poet how, through a Pythagorean metempsychosis, the true soul of Homer was reincarnated in the breast of Ennius himself. In restaging this scene of succession in the dreamlike setting of the Underworld Virgil hints at his own relationship to the dead epic poets to whose company he seeks admittance. The encounter of Aeneas and Anchises occurs within a set-piece of Homeric imitation; Anchises’ running commentary on the Parade of Heroes functions as a summary of the matter of Ennius’ historical epic, which it ‘completes’ by extending the story to Augustus’ achievement of world-empire and restoration of a Golden Age (6.791–800). Ennian historical epic is thus framed in a Homeric mythological episode; in the first part of his speech (6.724–51) Anchises encapsulates another branch of the hexameter tradition, with a philosophico-theological account of the nature of the world and of the soul that is indebted both to Anticleia’s explanation to Odysseus of what happens to humans after death (Od.11.216–24) and to the Ennian Homer’s more philosophical account of these matters, but couched in markedly Lucretian language: a miniature didactic ‘de rerum natura’ to set beside the miniatureAnnalsthat is to follow.

scholarly journals The Battle of Marathon

1881 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 380-395
Author(s):  
W. Watkiss Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Military History ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Western Coast ◽  
Ground Plan ◽  
The World ◽  
Full Compensation ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The Sacrifice

Military history proper must begin with the battle of Marathon; it is the first battle of which history preserves for us even a moderately detailed account in respect of the relative numbers and equipments of the contending armies, the precise situation and local peculiarities of the conflict, the positions of the armies before the battle, the circumstances of the actual collision, and the decisiveness of the result. There are uncertainties as to the maps which should illustrate the far later battles of Pharsalus and Philippi, that determined the fate of the empire of the world, but we have a perfectly satisfactory ground-plan, from the country as it still exists, of the first great collision of Hellenic and Asiatic power on the western coast of the Aegean. Herodotus, to whom we are chiefly indebted for an account of it, was not a contemporary, having been born about six years later, 484 B.C. His account, no doubt, is meagre where information would be most valuable, and he is anything but a skilful military critic, and, like many others of the most successful historians, he neglects details that might be dry to make room for others not rigidly authenticated that are pointed and picturesque. Still, even so he supplies us with many circumstances which he might value simply for the sake of sparkle, but that enable us by comparison with other stray notices to divine some very critical facts about the battle, which he himself either did not fully know, or, not duly appreciating, failed to set down. If after study of all subsidiary information duly compared and combined it seems possible to recover a very fairly authentic account of the battle, it will be no doubt at the cost of some reduction of what is most marvellous in the account of Herodotus; but the story will still be sufficiently romantic, no moderate remainder of marvel will be left, and there is full compensation for the sacrifice in certified credibility and historical instruction.

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