The Other Classic: Hebrew Shapes British and American Literature and Culture

2017 ◽  
pp. 341-403
Author(s):  
James Engell
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Hebrew Scripture ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Shaping Power ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Classical Language

Hebrew, once regarded as a “classical language,” exerts enormous shaping power on British and American poetry, politics, and culture from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. It prompts the greatest innovations in post-Renaissance English verse, developments in aesthetics, including the sublime, fruitful arguments in politics, and vital strands of British and American thought that cannot be accounted for otherwise. This shaping power—related to but not the same as the influence of biblical translations regarded as literature—has received only sporadic attention. Hebrew as the other classic has not obtained its rightful place in studies of literature in English, nor in Anglo-American literate culture. This essay explores the other classic in: British and American colleges and universities; Puritan Hebraists; concepts of the sublime; the seminal criticism of Robert Lowth; the work of Dennis, Watts, Smart, Macpherson, Merrick, Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman, Longfellow, and Lazarus; in myths of national origin and identification; in Coleridge, De Quincey, Thoreau, Melville, Arnold, and J. L. Lowes; as well as in an appreciation of the stylistic and moral strengths of Hebrew Scripture. It explores why study of Hebrew declined. The essay challenges the exclusion of Hebrew, upon which all discussion of “classical languages” and their reception by the romantics has been based. The presence of Hebrew as the other classic enlarges and redefines the nature of classical influences on the romantic era.

Das tue ich nicht, weil es nicht Pflicht ist. Das Argument der Supererogation und sein Unanständigkeitsproblem

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-104
Author(s):  
Marie-Luise Raters
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Applied Ethics ◽  
Double Effect ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Anglo American

Most arguments of Applied Ethics (e.g.slippery slope argument, argument of double effect) are well analyzed. An exception is the argument 'I do not do this because it is not my duty'. It makes sense to call the argument the 'argument of supererogation' (ASE): Since J. Urmson's essay Saints and Heroes of 1958, those actions are called 'supererogations' which (despite of their moral value) are not supposed to be duties. The argument is widely used not only in Applied Ethics, but also in ordinary moral everyday life. Nevertheless, there is a need of investigation because it has an indecency-problem. The argument is convincing if an actor does not want to risk his life. It seems indecent, however, if an actor refuses a simple favor or a service of friendship with the 'argument of super-erogation', although they both constitute no duties. This paper reconstructs the 'argument of supererogation' as a syllogism. It analyzes its formal structure by benefitting from current Anglo-American literature on supererogation. The overall aim of this paper is to solve the problem of indecency.

What the Climber Saw: Strauss's Alpensinfonie and the Romantic Tradition of Nature Representation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
David Larkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Tone Poem ◽  
Peak Response ◽  
Landscape Features ◽  
Musical Compositions ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Relationship

Initially criticized for its naïve representation of landscape features, Strauss's Alpensinfonie (1915) has in recent years been reinterpreted by scholars as a deliberate challenge to metaphysics, a late outgrowth of the composer's fascination with Nietzsche. As a consequence, the relationship between Strauss's tone poem and earlier artworks remains underexplored. Strauss in fact relied heavily on long-established tropes of representing mountain scenes, and when this work is situated against a backdrop of similarly themed Romantic paintings, literature, travelogues and musical compositions, many points of resemblance emerge. In this article, I focus on how human responses to mountains are portrayed within artworks. Romantic-era reactions were by no means univocal: mountains elicited overtly religious exhalations, atheistic refutations of all supernatural connections, pantheistic nature-worship, and also artworks which engaged with nature purely in an immanent fashion. Strauss uses a range of strategies to distinguish the climber from the changing scenery he traverses. The ascent in the first half of Eine Alpensinfonie focuses on a virtuoso rendition of landscape in sound, interleaved with suggestions as to the emotional reactions of the protagonist. This immanent perspective on nature would accord well with Strauss's declared atheism. In the climber's response to the sublime experience of the peak, however, I argue that there are marked similarities to the pantheistic divinization of nature such as was espoused by the likes of Goethe, whom Strauss admired enormously. And while Strauss's was an avowedly godless perspective, I will argue in the final section of the article that he casts the climber's post-peak response to the sublime encounter in a parareligious light that again has romantic precedents. There are intimations of romantic transcendence in the latter part of the work, even if these evaporate as the tone poem, and the entire nineteenth-century German instrumental tradition it concludes, fades away into silence.

scholarly journals The bastard verdict and its influence on jurors

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-35
Author(s):  
Lee J. Curley ◽  
Rory MacLean ◽  
Jennifer Murray ◽  
Phyllis Laybourn ◽  
David Brown
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Rational Choice ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Choice Models ◽  
The Other ◽  
European Convention ◽  
Guilty Verdict ◽  
Anglo American

The Scottish legal system is a unique jurisdiction, as jurors are able to give not proven verdicts in addition to the well-known Anglo-American verdicts (guilty and not guilty). The not proven verdict has never been legally defined, meaning that currently legal practitioners can only estimate why a not proven verdict has been given. The main aim of this study was to investigate if jurors violate the regularity principle, which is commonly incorporated in many rational choice models, by testing if the introduction of the not proven verdict has an impact on the outcomes given by jurors. In addition, this study aimed to test if the introduction of the not proven verdict has an impact upon how the not guilty verdict is perceived by jurors. In this study, 128 participants listened to two vignettes centred on homicide trials. Jurors could give one of two verdicts in one of the vignettes and one of three verdicts in the other vignette. The vignettes were counterbalanced in regard to how many verdicts could be given at the end of them. It was found that jurors in a three-verdict system were less likely to give a not guilty verdict in comparison to jurors in a two-verdict system, showing that jurors violate the regularity principle and that the not proven verdict may change how the not guilty verdict is perceived. The findings of this research have implications in relation to juror communication, article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights and juror rationality.

The Foundation of the Ottoman Foreign Ministry

1972 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 388-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carter V. Findley
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
History Of ◽  
Foreign Ministry ◽  
Economic Outlook

Analysis of the late unreformed state of those offices of the Sublime Porte out of which the Ottoman Foreign Ministry was to develop makes clear, as we have shown in an earlier article,1 that the possibilities for reform of the traditional bureaucracy were generally limited by two sets of determinants. One set, readily perceptible at what might be termed a macrohistorical level, consists of those largely exogenous forces which dominated the entire later history of the empire.2 In contrast, the other set derives from the legacy of the old bureaucracy itself. Determinants of this class can be identified only by close examination of that legacy, which in turn had been shaped by the nature of the traditional state, as well as by those patterns of social organization and economic outlook which over the centuries had characterized Ottoman society in general.

scholarly journals Introduction: What is a Thing

Konturen ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Nicholas Reynolds ◽  
Jeffrey S Librett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Everyday Objects ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Poetic Realism ◽  
Current Special Issue ◽  
Lost Object

As the modern world has seemed an increasingly material one, and so increasingly thingly, the very reality of things has often--and from many different perspectives--seemed to elude us. Questions about what things are, and how they mean, questions about how things are to be circumscribed (for example) in epistemological, ethical, aesthetic, and political terms, have arguably become--across the course of modernity (and beyond)--both increasingly pressing and increasingly vexed. -- In this extremely broad context, the contributions to the current Special Issue examine specific approaches to things from the later nineteenth century to today within the literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic discourses. The foci range from the descriptive representationalism of nineteenth century German poetic realism to the monumentalization of everyday objects in postcolonial fiction; from the poetics of the Dinggedicht in Rilkean modernism to the Anglo-American imagist doctrine of "no ideas but in things" and the disruptions of this doctrine in contemporary German and American poetry; from Husserl's call "to the things themselves" to the Derridian displacements of the Heideggerian "thing" and on to the most recent developments in "object-oriented metaphysics"; from the Freudian notion of the unconscious as comprising "representations-of-things" to the Lacanian rereading of the lost object as das Ding.

scholarly journals Kändisförfattarens varumärke i Finland

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (114) ◽  
pp. 143-158
Author(s):  
Tarja-Lisa Hypén
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Home Country ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
American Research ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The One ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

THE BRAND OF THE CELEBRITY AUTHOR IN FINLAND | In the 21st century, the celebrity author has begun to interest researchers not only as a marketing phenomenon, but also as the literary institution’s own phenomenon. In my article, I explore the relationship of the celebrity author to the so-called acclaimed authors of modern times. In Anglo-American research, the celebrity author and the bestselling author are distinguished as separate author types, but in the case of Finnish Jari Tervo, these types combine. For almost 20 years, Jari Tervo has been amongboth the most sold and the most visible celebrity authors in his home country. I examine how the publicity and brand of the Finnish celebrity author are formed. I consider how the brand affects the author’s works on the one hand, and the reception of the works on the other. I point out the limiting effects of the brand, but I also examine how, in combining the high and the low, it affords mobility in the literary fields while it also offers an opportunity to influence society.

scholarly journals Wzniosłe i cielesne pożywienie w sztuce jedzenia i nie-jedzenia

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Robert Dobrowolski
Keyword(s):  
Modern Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Sensual Pleasure ◽  
The One

Wzniosłe i cielesne pożywienie w sztuce jedzenia i nie-jedzeniaPrzenikające współczesną sztukę rozmaite, często przeciwstawne, strategie estetyczne manifestują się w  kulinarnym artyzmie nowoczesnej kuchni, a  także w  zmieniających się pod jej wpływem postawach i  zwyczajach żywieniowych. Z  jednej strony — abiektualizacyjny porządek dadaistycznej dezynwoltury, perwersyjna obrona przed całkowitym nihilizmem, w  perwersyjny sposób dekonstruuje estetykę jedzenia w  kuchni fusion; z  drugiej — zupełnie odmienna i  szczególnie zaskakująca w  wypadku sztuki jedzenia, charakterystyczna dla kuchni molekularnej, estetyka wzniosłości, zbliżająca się niekiedy do anorektycznej awersji wobec ciała, ale też nigdy nieporzucająca perspektywy smaku i  związanej z  nią zmysłowej przyjemności. The sublime and carnal food in the art of eating and not eatingVarious aesthetic strategies present in modern art, often contradictory, are not only manifested in culinary art of modern cuisine, but also in changing dietary attitudes and habits. On the one hand — abject order of dadaistic unceremoniousness, defense against complete nihilism, perversely deconstructs the food aesthetics in fusion cuisine; on the other hand — completely surprising in the context of food art, characteristic of molecular cuisine, aesthetics of sublime acquires sometimes anorectic aversion to the body, but never abandons the taste and connected with it sensual pleasure.

scholarly journals The Law of Obligations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lobban
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Tort Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
Public Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
American Law ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Unifying Principles

The Anglo-American law of obligations was profoundly reshaped in the two centuries after 1800, driven by social and economic changes, and changes in legal institutions and doctrines. In contract law, nineteenth-century jurists increasingly sought to put the rules of law into a coherent rational framework (inspired by continental models resting on will theory), though they soon found that this theory could not explain many contractual doctrines. In tort law, jurists were also divided over whether unifying principles underlying tort could be uncovered, with formalist efforts to find such principles being challenged by Realists who argued that tort was in effect ‘public law in disguise’. The quest for underlying principles was also pursued by scholars of unjust enrichment, first in the United States and subsequently in England; though as in the other areas of obligations, by the end of the twentieth century, there was no consensus on whether this was possible.

Democracy

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Norton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Left And Right ◽  
Anglo American

This chapter examines how the Muslim question is tied to the question of democracy. In his book Voyous (translated as Rogues), Jacques Derrida referred to the United States and Islam as the enemies of democracy. In particular, he called Islam “the other of democracy.” Only Islam, Derrida insisted, refuses democracy. Derrida was not the only scholar to have made that claim. His account echoes Samuel Huntington. John Rawls thought Islam so alien that he was obliged to treat it separately. There are countless scholars, left and right, Anglo-American and Continental, who have insisted that Islam is the other of democracy. The chapter suggests that political philosophy in the Muslim (but not simply Muslim) tradition offers visions of democracy, cosmopolitanism, immigration, and integration that are remarkably familiar.

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