Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Alex Tissandier
Keyword(s):  
Positive Influence ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
As If

References to Leibniz’s philosophy appear constantly throughout Deleuze’s work. Despite often repeating the same themes, we find marked differences in tone, as if Deleuze is unable to arrive at a conclusive judgement. This book explores these various engagements and tries to account for these shifts in tone. Ultimately it will argue that focusing on Deleuze’s interpretation of Leibniz – both his appropriations and his criticisms – helps us to understand some key moments in Deleuze’s own philosophical development. A close reading, emphasising the particular context and terminology of Leibniz’s work, will open a narrow point of access into some of the most difficult areas of Deleuze’s philosophy. In the course of this reading, it will become clear that it is precisely Leibniz’s ambiguous status for Deleuze which makes an investigation into their relationship so fruitful: by not only explaining Leibniz’s positive influence, but also pinpointing the precise grounds for their eventual divergence, we hope to better articulate some of Deleuze’s own philosophical priorities....

scholarly journals An attempt at clarifying Maximus the Confesor’s remarks on (the fate of) sexual difference in Ambiguum 41

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-203
Author(s):  
Sotiris Mitralexis
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Maximus The Confessor ◽  
As If

Maximus the Confessor?s Ambiguum 41 contains some rather atypical observations concerning the distinction of sexes in the human person. There is a certain ambiguity as to whether the distinction of the sexes was intended by God and is ?by nature? (as found in Genesis and asserted by most Church Fathers) or a product of the Fall. Namely, Christ is described three times as ?shaking out of nature the distinctive characteristics of male and female?, ?driving out of nature the difference and division of male and female? and ?removing the difference between male and female?. Different readings of those passages engender important implications that can be drawn out from the Confessor?s thought, both eschatological implications and otherwise. The subject has been picked up by Cameron Partridge, Doru Costache and Karolina Kochanczyk-Boninska, among others, but is by no means settled, as they draw quite different conclusions. The noteworthy and far-reaching implications of Maximus? theological stance and problems are not the object of this paper. In a 2017 paper I attempted to demonstrate what Maximus exactly says in these peculiar and oft-commented passages through a close reading, in order to avoid a two-edged Maximian misunderstanding: to either draw overly radical implications from those passages, projecting decidedly non-Maximian visions on the historical Maximus, or none at all, as if those passages represented standard Patristic positions. Here, I am revisiting this argument, given that the interest in what the Confessor has to say on the subject seems to be increasing.

Revolutions of the Ordinary: Victorian Studies and the Turn to Ordinary Language

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Wright
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
As If

“To engage seriously with ordinary language philosophy,” Toril Moi tells us in the introduction to Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell, “is a little like undergoing psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein assumes that we don't begin doing philosophy just for the sake of it, but because something is making us feel confused, as if we had lost our way.” As Moi begins her project of explaining to an audience of literary critics the insights of ordinary-language philosophy, represented primarily by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell, and making a case for the value of their ideas for the practice we usually call close reading, this psychoanalytic metaphor makes a sudden turn to diagnosis, or to the initiation of a kind of therapeutic address that can feel coercive even in its charisma. You must recognize your sickness, Moi insists, before you can be receptive to the treatment. “Who wants to undergo philosophical therapy,” she goes on to ask, “if they feel that everything in their intellectual life is just fine as it is? Paradoxically, then, the best readers of the reputedly ‘conservative’ Wittgenstein might be those who genuinely feel the need for a change” (12). What kind of therapeutic project does Moi want to pursue in this book, which begins by distinguishing the best readers (the readiest patients) from those who think, conservatively, that everything is “just fine as it is”?

Forms and Celestial Motion in Chaucer's Complaint of Mars

PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-295
Author(s):  
Kara Gaston
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Love Affair ◽  
Regular Motion ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Stable Forms ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

Recent discussions of form have argued that literary forms exist whether or not we pay attention to them. However, formalist criticism often begins with close reading. This essay uses medieval astronomy to consider the relation between form and perception. Chaucer's short poem The Complaint of Mars (c. 1385) presents a conjunction between the planets Mars and Venus as if it were a love affair. his celestial arrangement, wherein two planets seem to move toward each other before parting, reflects the way that celestial motion seems to an observer within a brief period of time. The arrangement disappears when integrated into a fuller account of the regular motion of the planets. Mars generates a similar excess in its literary language. Impressions of form that emerge in the process of reading dissolve against the background of larger, more stable forms when the poem is seen as a whole. These perceived, illusory forms reveal an interdependency between certain kinds of form and the time of reading.

Thebes Revisited: Theodicy and the Temporality of Evil

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Panteleimon Manoussakis
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
As If

AbstractThis essay gives a close reading of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex in light of Schelling's discussion of theodicy as teleology. The article raises the question of the connection between ethics and time, and it argues that ethical categories are really temporal ones, so much so that it would make little sense to posit a choice between good and evil as if there were two simultaneous options. Instead, the story of Oedipus shows us how Thebes is always to precede if one is to reach Colonus, that evil precedes and enables the good.

Wagner and the post-modern

1992 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Deathridge
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Full Page ◽  
As If

On 16 September 1989 a national British newspaper, The Independent, carried a full page advertisement placed by Technics for their latest ‘Hi-Fi Midi System for Music Lovers’, the CDX3. At the top of the page, Wagner's furrowed brow and glaring eyes, slightly askance, stared out as if insisting on, though not quite peremptorily demanding, a close reading of the text beneath. The text began as follows (comments in square brackets are mine):To hear what he [Wagner] intended a hi-fi system has to be perfectly composed.

scholarly journals ‘IT MEANS AS IF WE ARE EXCLUDED FROM THE GOOD FREEDOM’: THWARTED EXPECTATIONS OF INDEPENDENCE IN THE LUAPULA PROVINCE OF ZAMBIA, 1964–6

2006 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
GIACOMO MACOLA
Keyword(s):  
Systemic Approach ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Economic Cycle ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Independence Era ◽  
As If ◽  
Postcolonial Politics

Based on a close reading of new archival material, this article makes a case for the adoption of an empirical, ‘sub-systemic’ approach to the study of nationalist and postcolonial politics in Zambia. By exploring the notion of popular ‘expectations of independence’ to a much greater degree than did previous studies, the paper contends that the extent of the United National Independence Party's political hegemony in the immediate post-independence era has been grossly overrated – even in a traditional rural stronghold of the party and during a favourable economic cycle. In the second part of the paper, the diplomatic and ethnic manoeuvres of the ruler of the eastern Lunda kingdom of Kazembe are set against a background of increasing popular disillusionment with the performance of the independent government.

Meyerbeer and Mercadante? The reception of Meyerbeer in Italy

1993 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Wittmann
Keyword(s):  
Positive Influence ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
As If

‘First performed in 1840 and praised by Liszt for its orchestration and workman-ship, the score does not deny Meyerbeerian influence. The present recording, which sounds as if it has been taken from a live performance in the theatre, has a first-class cast and is altogether fascinating.’ The object of this encomium is La vestale by the Italian composer Saverio Mercadante (1795–1870), the first commercial recording of which was issued on CD in 1989. The quotation, taken from a leading record magazine, seems representative of the response that recordings of Mercadante's works can currently expect: scarcely a single review fails to mention Meyerbeer's positive influence on Mercadante. But how far is one in fact justified in linking these two composers?

scholarly journals Patriarchy Rejected: A Feminist Reading in Some Selected Poems by Adrienne Rich and Fatima Naoot

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Usama Raslan
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
Adrienne Rich ◽  
American Poet ◽  
The Common ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Poetic Vision ◽  
As If

The present paper offers a comparative feminist reading of the American poet Adrienne Rich and the Egyptian poet Fatima Naoot. It aims at analyzing both Rich’s and Naoot’s poetry in terms of feminist criticism demonstrated particularly in Beauvoir and Millett’s theory of patriarchy. The collections from which the poems under study are selected are Rich’s The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984 (2002), and Naoot’s A Bottle of Glue (2007). The selected poems are Rich’s “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”, “An Unsaid Word”, and “Power”, and Naoot’s “The Cock’s Crest”, “A Goose”, and “Isis”. The analysis of these poems motivates one to infer three essential points regarding the poetic achievement of both poets. First, patriarchy is a male programming engineered by the male to subdue and decentralize the female by treating the latter as if she were a sexed being, or rather the inessential other. Second, this inferior position of woman motivates Rich and Naoot to incorporate Beauvoir and Millett’s theory of patriarchy into their verse. In order to achieve this objective, both poets set up a poetic vision in terms of which they portray how patriarch marginalizes and subordinates woman. Lastly, the close reading to the selected pieces denotes that they rotate around the systematized oppression of women. Such is the common theme of Rich and Naoot’s verse.

scholarly journals Pendidikan kewarganegaraan sebagai wahana untuk meningkatkan kesadaran hidup yang lebih baik bagi sesama

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-37
Author(s):  
Juliati Juliati ◽  
Wawan Hermawan ◽  
Mohamad Firman
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Citizenship Education ◽  
General Public ◽  
Positive Influence ◽  
Alternative Solution ◽  
Internet Media ◽  
Increasing Knowledge ◽  
As If

Era globalisasi seolah-olah satu negara dengan negara lain ibarat sebuah  kampung, karena setiap saat kita dapat memantau setiap  perkembangannya salah satunya  melalui  berbagai  media  internet (pengaruh positifnya) bertambahnya pengetahuan, tetapi ada pula  pengaruh  negatifnya  bagi  remaja dan  masyarakat  umumnya sepertinya  sekarang  ini  telah  dihadapkan  kepada krisis jati diri bangsa. Pada saat ini  sekarang  sikap dari  kebiasaan warga negara  sudah  tergantikan  dengan individualistis, materialistis, bahkan munculnya berbagai  macam  kekerasan  telah  tumbuh di sekeliling  kita.  Solusinya tiada lain untuk di Indonesia pendidikan kewarganegaraan harus disosialisasikan dan dibelajarkan kepada masyarakat.-----------------------------------------------------The era of globalization as if one country with another country is like a village, because every time we can monitor each development, one of them is through various internet media (positive influence), increasing knowledge, but there are also negative influences for teenagers and the general public to the crisis of national identity. Now, the attitude of citizens' habits has been replaced by individualistic, materialistic, even the emergence of various kinds of violence that have grown around us. The alternative solution in Indonesia, citizenship education must be socialized and taught to the community.

scholarly journals Exceptions as Rules of the Game for Young Adults: A Close Reading of Sonya Sones’ What My Mother Doesn’t Know

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (01) ◽  
pp. 25-32
Author(s):  
Hari Adhikari
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
Rules Of The Game ◽  
As If

Adolescents often surprise adults with their exceptional behaviors. Overwhelmed by their struggles for separating from parents, understanding the changes in the body, facing peer pressures, learning to socialize, finding a partner, and discovering one’s position in the society, young adults act in “abnormal” ways. At times they even appear as if they have mad-like obsessions for exceptions. This paper digs out the major concerns of young adults and the strategies to deal with this demography implicitly proposed in Sonya Sones’ novel What My Mother Doesn’t Know. By using Julia Kristeva’s formulations of the notions of “adolescence” and “abjection,” the paper argues that the primary cause of conflicts between adults and young adults is the latter’s “syndrome of ideality” and the adults’ failure to understand them. Empathy from both sides is the key to mutual understanding during their struggles for self-discovery.

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