Reading and Interpreting Variants inCome and Go,Va-et-vientandKommen und Gehen

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-86
Author(s):  
Pascale Sardin
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
French Translation ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Famous Paper ◽  
Textual Variants ◽  
Insight Into

This paper focuses on textual variants in Come and Go, Va-et-vient and Kommen und Gehen and considers these variants as thresholds (Genette, 1997) into these works. This paper aims to show how Beckett's self-translating process, which was prolonged and complicated in the case of his plays when he directed them himself, produces a number of possible textual confusions, but also how these complications constitute insight into the Beckettian text. Indeed variants and rewritings point to moments in the writing and rewriting process when Beckett met ‘resistant vitalities’ mentioned by George Steiner in After Babel (1975). To illustrate this, I study Beckett's first ‘dramaticule’, Come and Go, by examining its pre-texts, the French translation, and Beckett's production notebooks for Kommen und Gehen. In these texts, I explore the motifs of death and ocular anxiety, as studied by Freud in his famous paper on ‘The Uncanny.’ I show how the Freudian uncanny actually reveals the parodic archaism of Beckett's drama, as a parallel is drawn between the structure of Beckett's play and Greek tragedy. Beckett's sometimes ‘messy’ rewritings in Come and Go, Va-et-vient and Kommen und Gehen served the performing intuitive perception in us of death, an issue explored here through the trope of femininity. Furthermore, comparing Beckett's Come and Go and Va-et-vient makes it easier to see Beckett progressing towards what Deleuze called a ‘theatre of metamorphoses and permutations’ in Difference and Repetition – a monograph published in France the very year Come and Go was first produced (1966).

The Bayesian Controversy in Statistical Inference

1967 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. A. Barnard
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Inference ◽  
Occupational Group ◽  
Major Advance ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Bayes’S Theorem ◽  
Famous Paper ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Bayes's Theorem ◽  
Insight Into

When I was invited to read this paper I felt not only honoured but particularly pleased to be given the opportunity to set forth for your criticism the views I have come to hold concerning the complex of problems centred round the use of Bayes's theorem. For what body of people has for longer been engaged in the application of the mathematical doctrine of probabilities to the affairs of life? And so, what body could be better fitted to judge the merits and the faults of any attempt to clarify the principles of the subject? It is no accident that the original publication of Bayes's famous paper was brought about by the author of the Northampton Life Table; and in the modern period, in dealing with the criticisms of Bayes's postulate stemming from Boole, the credit for a major advance is shared between Sir Harold Jeffreys and Mr Wilfred Perks, independent originators of the theory of invariant prior distributions. And, to anticipate a point I shall develop in more detail later on, it appears to me that the experience of actuaries in the formation of categories as, for instance, by occupational group, as abstainers or non-abstainers, and so on, can be highly relevant to the effective use of Bayes's theorem in many wider contexts; and an examination of the principles underlying the formation of categories should improve our insight into problems of statistical inference in general.

A History of Ambiguity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Expressive Power ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
German Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The Many ◽  
Insight Into

Ever since it was first published in 1930, William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity has been perceived as a milestone in literary criticism—far from being an impediment to communication, ambiguity now seemed an index of poetic richness and expressive power. Little, however, has been written on the broader trajectory of Western thought about ambiguity before Empson; as a result, the nature of his innovation has been poorly understood. This book remedies this omission. Starting with classical grammar and rhetoric, and moving on to moral theology, law, biblical exegesis, German philosophy, and literary criticism, the book explores the many ways in which readers and theorists posited, denied, conceptualised, and argued over the existence of multiple meanings in texts between antiquity and the twentieth century. This process took on a variety of interconnected forms, from the Renaissance delight in the ‘elegance’ of ambiguities in Horace, through the extraordinary Catholic claim that Scripture could contain multiple literal—and not just allegorical—senses, to the theory of dramatic irony developed in the nineteenth century, a theory intertwined with discoveries of the double meanings in Greek tragedy. Such narratives are not merely of antiquarian interest: rather, they provide an insight into the foundations of modern criticism, revealing deep resonances between acts of interpretation in disparate eras and contexts. The book lays bare the long tradition of efforts to liberate language, and even a poet's intention, from the strictures of a single meaning.

Pragmatism and Anscombe on the First Person

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Heal
Keyword(s):  
First Person ◽  
Famous Paper ◽  
Insight Into

Anscombe’s famous paper on the first person makes claims which may seem bewildering or absurd, that we have ‘unmediated conceptions’ of some of our states and actions, that these conceptions are ‘subjectless’, and also, very controversially, that ‘I’ does not refer. Anscombe would not have identified herself as a pragmatist. But we can gain insight into and sympathy with some of these claims (even if we do not end up fully endorsing all of them) by seeing that they arise from her asking central pragmatist questions about ‘I’, that is how we use the word and why using it that way is important for us. Her answer centres on what she calls ‘self-consciousness’, that is, our ability to speak for ourselves, to say how things are with us, or what we are doing without checking to make sure that it is really ourselves we are speaking about.

1. Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-18
Author(s):  
David Abram
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Metabolic Processes ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Species Dynamics ◽  
Insight Into

Reflecting on species dynamics within the planetary biosphere, this chapter suggests that new insight into the uncanny navigational feats of migratory animals may be gleaned by recognizing the broad Earth not as a passive background upon which these movements occur, but as a dynamic, agential player in these migrations. The long-distance movements of various animals can readily be understood as metabolic processes within the body of the living planet, not unlike the rhythmic systole and diastole of a heartbeat.

An Analysis of the Syro-Hexapla of Job and Its Relationship to Other Ancient Sources

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-241
Author(s):  
John D. Meade
Keyword(s):  
Textual Variants ◽  
Insight Into

The Syro-Hexapla is a valuable witness to the text of Origen’s Hexapla. This article describes the marginal material in the Syro-Hexapla of Job under the following headings: (1) hexaplaric notes, (2) longer scholia (from patristic works), (3) textual variants and other versions, (4) Greek words, and (5) exegetical notes / glosses. By examining all of the materials within the manuscript more insight into its history and provenance was made possible. According to the evidence, Syro-Hexapla Job probably originated in or around Alexandria and was probably translated from the Tetrapla or a text that preserved four Greek versions of Job along with other marginal material.

scholarly journals BECOMING THE POSTHUMAN: THE DESTABILISATION OF THE SUBJECT IN THOMAS GLAVINIC’S NIGHT WORK

2021 ◽  
pp. 223
Author(s):  
Branka B. Ognjanović
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
The State ◽  
Night Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Insight Into

The paper provides an insight into the destabilisation of the subject and the emergence of the posthuman condition in the novel Night Work (Die Arbeit der Nacht, 2006) by Austrian writer Thomas Glavinic. The first part briefly discusses previous analyses of the novel and the definitions of posthumanism as an umbrella term for a heterogeneous theory dedicated to the questions of what follows after the re-consideration of the humanist ideals and after decentring the human. The posthuman is interpreted as non-fixed, in the state of constant reconstruction as opposed to the humanist subject’s fixedness and integrity. The analysis examines the ‘uncanny’ setting of the novel and the power of survival in the face of death, which becomes the protagonist’s point of demise and divergence from consciousness and rationality. The urban environment devoid of all organic life replaces the Other applied traditionally to other humans. The Sleeper as the nightly doppelgänger and the filming of the environment further add to the transgression of the boundaries between material and immaterial, the living and the non-living, the real and the dreamlike/artificial, and ultimately determine the protagonist’s posthuman existence in the state of ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’.

Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Fate of Tragedy

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Billings
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Greek Society ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
First Time ◽  
Historical Necessity ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter focuses on Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). The Phenomenology treats tragedy both as a model for historical processes in ancient Greek society, and, for the first time, as a literary genre in its own right, with a particular historical place and cultural role within the Athenian polis. In both contexts, tragedy is the process through which loss becomes constructive, furthering the development of consciousness in and beyond antiquity. Yet Greek tragedy is also importantly limited for Hegel: both its content and its form have been rendered irrevocably past by the very historical transformations it represents. Hegel's theory of tragedy encompasses moments of both loss and gain, and the power of his appropriation in the Phenomenology results from the tension between the insight into historical necessity that tragedy offers on one hand and the emotion of sorrow that it brings with it on the other.

Ancient Greek Tragedy as Performance: the Literature–Performance Problematic

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Mario Frendo
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Performance Criticism ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
A Performance

In this article Mario Frendo engages with the idea of ancient Greek tragedy as a performance phenomenon, questioning critiques that approach it exclusively via literary–dramatic methodologies. Based on the premise that ancient Greek tragedy developed within the predominantly oral context of fifth-century BCE Greece, he draws on Hans-Thies Lehmann's study of tragedy and its relation to dramatic theatre, where it is argued that the genre is essentially ‘predramatic’. Considered as such, ancient Greek tragedy cannot be fully investigated using dramatic theories developed since early modernity. In view of this, Walter J. Ong's caution with respect to the rational processes produced by generations of literate culture will be acknowledged and alternative critiques sought, including performance criticism and performance-oriented frameworks such as orality, via which Frendo traces possible critical trajectories that would allow contemporary scholarship to deal with ancient tragedy as a performance rather than literary phenomenon. Reference will be made to Aristotle's use of the term ‘poetry’, and how performance criticism may provide new insight into how the Poetics deals with one of the earliest performance phenomena in the West. Mario Frendo is lecturer of theatre and performance and Head of the Department of Theatre Studies at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta, where he is director of CaP, a research group focusing on links between culture and performance. His research interests include musicality in theatre, ancient tragedy, and relations between philosophical thought and performance.

The Orchestra as Acting Area in Greek Tragedy

Ramus ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Ley ◽  
Michael Ewans
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Close Relation ◽  
Central Problem ◽  
Classical Drama ◽  
Considerable Experience

For some years past there has been a welcome change of emphasis towards the consideration of staging in books published on Greek tragedy; and yet with that change also a curious failure to be explicit about the central problem connected with all stagecraft, namely that of the acting-area. In this study two scholars with considerable experience of teaching classical drama in performance consider this problem of the acting-area in close relation to major scenes from two Greek tragedies, and suggest some general conclusions. The article must stand to some extent as a critique of the succession of books that has followed the apparently pioneering study of Oliver Taplin, none of which has made any substantial or sustained attempt to indicate where actors might have acted in the performance of Greek tragedy, though most, if not all, have been prepared to discard the concept of a raised ‘stage’ behind the orchestra. Hippolytus (428 BC) is the earliest of the surviving plays of Euripides to involve three speaking actors in one scene. Both Alcestis (438 BC and Medea (431 BC almost certainly require three actors to be performed with any fluency, but surprisingly present their action largely through dialogue and confrontation — surprisingly, perhaps, because at least since 458 BC and the performance of the Oresteia it is clear that three actors were available to any playwright.

Calibration problems in hydrogen luminosities

1966 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 322-330
Author(s):  
A. Beer
Keyword(s):  
Galactic Structure ◽  
B Stars ◽  
Insight Into

The investigations which I should like to summarize in this paper concern recent photo-electric luminosity determinations of O and B stars. Their final aim has been the derivation of new stellar distances, and some insight into certain patterns of galactic structure.

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