scholarly journals Sūrat Maryam (Q. 19): Comforting Muḥammad

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 60-85
Author(s):  
M.A.S. Abdel Haleem
Keyword(s):  
Structural Analysis ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Main Subject ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Continuous Text ◽  
Q 66 ◽  
The Way

Mary is a very important figure in the Qur'an, in which she is mentioned by name 34 times. In addition to passing references, such as in Q. 23:50 and Q. 66:12, two important Qur'anic pericopes are devoted to her: Q. 3:33–50 and Q. 19:16–36. Over and above this, Sura 19 is named after her. Much has been written about this sura, with recent scholarship giving particular attention to its structure. Identifying the structure within the sura is of course important, especially in view of the way the material is presented in the muṣḥaf, which sets out the entire sura in continuous text, without any divisions or paragraphs apart from the markers at the end of each verse. Structural analysis can be useful in terms of identifying main subject topics of a given sura, but there is a danger that overreliance on structural analysis can focus too heavily on form, thereby overlooking the message and purpose that runs throughout each sura. Form and literary analysis are important but only insofar as they indicate topics and meanings and show the purpose of the entire sura. In this article, I seek to undertake a structural analysis of Sūrat Maryam which identifies a different structure from those outlined by previous scholars. This structural analysis is based in, and led by, the study of the theme and purpose of this sura, which I maintain is to provide comfort and reassurance for the Prophet Muḥammad.

Los criterios de textualidad en la hermenéutica de Paul Ricoeur. Un análisis crítico

2008 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrián Bertorello
Keyword(s):  
Structural Analysis ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Paul Ricoeur ◽  
Material Base ◽  
The World ◽  
Paul Ricœur ◽  
Text Writing ◽  
The Way

RESUMENEl trabajo examina críticamente la afirmación central de la hermenéutica de Paul Ricoeur, a saber, que el soporte material de la escritura es el rasgo determinante para que una secuencia discursiva sea considerada como un texto. La escritura cancela las condiciones fácticas de la enunciación y crea, de este modo, un ámbito de sentido estable en el que se puede validar una concepción de la subjetividad que está implicada en las dos estrategias de lecturas (el análisis estructural y la apropiación), esto es, un sujeto pasivo que se constituye por la idealidad del significado. Asimismo, el trabajo intentará precisar una serie de ambigüedades en el uso que Ricoeur hace del «ser en el mundo» para sostener la referencialidad del discurso.PALABRAS CLAVETEXTO, ESCRITURA, REFERENCIA, SUBJETIVIDAD, MUNDOABSTRACTThis paper critically examines the main assertion of Paul Ricoeur´s hermeneutics, i.e., that the material base of writing is the determining feature to consider a discursive sequence as a text. Writing cancels the factual conditions of enunciation and creates, in this way, a background of stable meaning where it is possible to validate a conception of subjectivity implicated in the two reading strategies (the structural analysis and the appropriation), i.e., a passive subject constituted by the ideality of meaning. Likewise, this paper aims to clarify some ambiguities in the way Ricoeur uses the «beings in the world» to support the discourse referentiality.KEY WORDSTEXT, WRITING, REFERENCE, SUBJECTIVITY, WORLD

The Dilemma of Care: A Theory and Praxis of Citizenship-Based Care for China's Rural Migrant Youth

2016 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Yiu
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Opposite Effect ◽  
Institutional Context ◽  
State Policies ◽  
Migrant Students ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Rural Migrant ◽  
Migrant Youth ◽  
Children's Schooling ◽  
The Way

In this article, Lisa Yiu examines how migrant students attending public schools in Shanghai perceive teachers as uncaring and how the majority of teachers claim they are disempowered from caring. She contends that recent Shanghai reforms, which aim to “care” for migrant youth through inclusion into public schools, may be having the opposite effect, arguing that the nature of contact between educators and migrant youth is structured by conflicting state policies on citizenship, which constrain teachers from caring in the way migrant students desire. Yiu's findings problematize recent scholarship on migrant children's schooling which presumes that the dynamics of exclusion are primarily rooted in teacher prejudices. Importantly, this study advances caring theory by reconceptualizing care within the institutional context of the state's citizenship policies and contributes to a citizenship-based care praxis that is relevant to Chinese migrant youth who attend public schools.

Killing Politics Softly

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-73
Author(s):  
Paul Shields
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
Reception Study ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Russian State ◽  
New Hypothesis ◽  
Alternative Theories ◽  
The Way

Early propaganda studies in authoritarian countries argue that state media works to legitimize the regime through indoctrination and persuasion. However, recent scholarship shows that citizens in authoritarian countries—in states like China, Syria, Russia, and Kazakhstan—can be unconvinced by state propaganda. How, then, does the way in which citizens experience unconvincing propaganda shape their political beliefs? How might unpersuasive propaganda contribute to authoritarian stability? Given the lack of alternative theories of propaganda, this article proposes a new hypothesis based on a reception study that interviewed 24 Russian citizens from Krasnoiarsk Krai after they watched items from Russian state television. The article theorizes that unconvincing state propaganda in Russia can reinforce a preexisting cynical attitude toward politics—an attitude that makes the collective action necessary for bottom-up reform hard to contemplate, let alone organize in an authoritarian context.

Isolating, Placing and Contextualising the Hangover

The Hangover ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 9-32
Author(s):  
Jonathon Shears
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Tom Wolfe ◽  
Quantitative Studies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
The Way

This chapter identifies and isolates some of the prominent features of a hangover. It demonstrates the kind of physical phenomena that usually occupy quantitative studies of the hangover in the sciences before elaborating on the way these are linked to affect – often negative, although not exclusively – such as guilt, self-disgust and anxiety. It does this through contextualised, close literary analysis of hangover descriptions in the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe and Kingsley Amis. These readings demonstrate the way that hangover symptoms can both reveal and conceal larger socio-cultural concerns and how hangover consciousness is informed by the experience of transgressing social values. It also traces the etymology of the word hangover, reflecting on some of the vernacular used to describe hangovers in the early twentieth century, and introduces the Traditional-Punishment and Withdrawal-Relief responses that can disclose continuities between periods.

IV. Persae, Septem, Supplices

1986 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 14-22
Keyword(s):  
Major Part ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Divine Retribution ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

I make no apologies for devoting the major part of this survey to a discussion of the individual plays, and in consequence limiting the amount of space given to general topics of Aeschylean technique. So disparate are the individual dramas that to do otherwise incurs the risk of either reducing any comment that is made to valueless platitudes by preferring the commonplace to the distinctive, or creating the impression that the playwright’s works constitute but a single enormous play. Concentration upon the individual plays also serves to reflect the continuing emphasis that recent scholarship places upon this aspect of the poet’s work, and to underscore the fact – all too easily forgotten – that Aeschylus was a writer of dramas, not a pedlar of theatrical effects.Though the earliest extant tragedy, Persae is not an early play in terms of Aeschylus’ literary career; a simple, even ‘primitive’ play in its progression from prosperity to adversity and its emphatic clarity in depicting divine retribution following human pride, yet the successful conversion of historical fact into morally significant drama provides telling evidence of the playwright’s ability to control his material and exploit it for his own purposes that is not without importance for those plays founded on myth. Historical tragedy, however, presents its own peculiar difficulties: the need to balance retention of credibility by not straying too far from objective truth before an audience intimately involved in the events portrayed, with the equally potent need to emphasize, alter, distort, or repress those factors that run counter to the dramatic purpose of the play. In Persae we see this most graphically in the prominence given to Psytalleia as the counterpart to Salamis, the sparse attention to Darius’ own European campaigns, the implication of total Persian retreat immediately after Salamis, and the episode on the Strymon. No less important was the need to avoid converting the action into a celebration of Greek, or more specifically Athenian, victory - an inevitable factor (pace Kitto) in any depiction of Persian defeat, but by the same token one essentially inimical to the spirit of tragedy. That the playwright succeeded most commentators readily admit. Phrynichus had already shown the way in 476 B.c. by setting his own version of the war, Phoenissai, at the Persian capital of Susa, thus ensuring concentration on the Persian point of view.

May Yhwh Bless You and Keep You from Evil: The Rhetorical Argument of Ketef Hinnom Amulet I and the Form of the Prayers for Deliverance in the Psalms

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy D. Smoak
Keyword(s):  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Way

Abstract Most of the attention that the two silver amulets discovered at Ketef Hinnom Jerusalem have received in recent scholarship has centered upon their date and relationship to the biblical texts. This is due in part to the fact that both amulets preserve formulations of the biblical Priestly Blessing from Numbers 6:24–26. The new edition of the amulets published in 2004, however, provides impetus for new questions about the form of the incantations on the amulets and what the magical objects tell us about ancient Judahite apotropaic practices. In particular, the new edition provides a clearer picture of the content and form on both amulets. In turn, the new edition paves the way for a better understanding of how the incantations functioned as magical texts, which attempted to make an argument about their own efficacy as apotropaic objects. Despite this fact, few studies have devoted sufficient to the overall form and content preserved in the incantations. The following paper will describe the content and structure of the incantation on Amulet I and argue that the specific statement made therein provides a unique glimpse into the argument of magical texts in ancient Judah. Finally, the following paper will also briefly compare the content and structure of the incantation to several Psalms that petition Yhwh for protection against various ills. Such a comparison reveals that there may have been more fluidity between magical formulae and ancient Judahite prayer traditions than previously recognized.

Tragic form and feeling in theIliad

1982 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. B. Rutherford
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
The Way

These hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out, and figured with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.Henry James,The Bostonians, ch. xxxixThis paper is intended to contribute to the study of both Homer and Greek tragedy, and more particularly to the study of the influence of the epic upon the later poets. The current revival of interest among English scholars in the poetic qualities of the Homeric poems must be welcomed by all who care for the continuing survival and propagation of classical literature. The renewed emphasis on the validity of literary criticism as applied to presumably oral texts may encourage a more positive appreciation of the subtlety of Homeric narrative techniques, and of the coherent plan which unifies each poem. The aim of this paper is to focus attention on a number of elements in Greek tragedy which are already present in Homer, and especially on the way in which these poets exploit the theme of knowledge—knowledge of one's future, knowledge of one's circumstances, knowledge of oneself. Recent scholarship on tragedy has paid much more attention to literary criticism in general and to poetic irony in particular: these insights can also illuminate the epic. Conversely, the renewed interest in Homer's structural and thematic complexity should also enrich the study of the tragedians, his true heirs.

Brechts braver Schweyk

PMLA ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert Knust
Keyword(s):  
Human Existence ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Structural Pattern ◽  
Typical Representative ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Way

A close literary analysis of the text shows that Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg is an artful antimorality play with parodistic parallels to Everyman and Faust. The confrontation and interrelation of the “big” and the “small” provide a thematic and structural pattern on both the political and the social levels of the play. Love, faith, and work of the “little” are exploited by the “big.” Scattered revolution and traditional virtues prove useless in an attempt to fight and survive a totalitarian system. Schweyk is caught between a “big” enemy and a “big” friend. As a typical representative of the “little man” he is pitted against Hitler, whose plans he sabotages by a devious method of opportunism mixed with opposition; as an individual he is also contrasted with the fat glutton Baloun, whom he tries to help. In both respects he is “virtuous.” However, the juxtaposition of Schweyk in the icy Russian steppes and Baloun in the cozy “Keich” inn marks two contradictory, yet interrelated extremes of human existence. Brecht subtly points the way out of these undesirable paradoxes. Only if the “little” resolve their differences will they truly cease to be “little.” Schweyk's virtues and Brecht's “Schweykian philosophy” are dictated by circumstances; they are not meant to be of permanent value.

Dostoevskii and the Book of Job: The Struggle to Find Faith

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Rampton
Keyword(s):  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

The book of Job is essential for understanding Dostoevskii’s art, because of the similarity of the questions the authors engage with and the way their texts are constructed. However, ambiguities in the book of Job itself as well as disagreements about the presentation of faith and doubt in Dostoevskii’s fiction have made the discussion of precisely how the book of Job influenced Dostoevskii remarkably wide-ranging. In this article I argue for complementing the literary analysis of Dostoevskii’s novels with the insights of recent criticism of the book of Job. According to this reading, Job does not provide Dostoevskii with a cognitive answer to the question of why the innocent suffer or explain the existence of evil in the world, but rather acts as a confirmation that faith is a process in which doubt plays a crucial and ongoing role.

scholarly journals Ritual ukopa na nekropoli Velike Mrdakovice

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-63
Author(s):  
Toni Brajković
Keyword(s):  
Ceramic Material ◽  
Representative Sample ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Main Subject ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Material Evidence ◽  
Archaeological Excavations ◽  
Written Sources ◽  
Grave Goods ◽  
The Way

Continually used for burials between the 8th-7th centuries BC and early 3rd century AD, the necropolis at Velika Mrdakovica in the vicinity of Zaton (near Šibenik) is one of the best researched sites of this type in Liburnia. Some 130 incineration burials – mostly Roman – were discovered during the 1969 – 1974 archaeological campaigns, while recent excavations yielded 15 more. This exceptionally large number of Roman-period graves dated to the period between the 1st century AD and, roughly, early 3rd century AD is a representative sample that can help us reconstruct, or at least attempt to reconstruct, what has always been uppermost in experts’ mind – the burial ritual. As we lack written sources that would serve as first-hand testimony about the details of one of the most important and most sacred rituals in the lives of the Liburni – the burial ritual – we will try to reconstruct it with the help of material evidence: the grave goods and the way they were used for the purpose. Some issues arising from the interpretation of – mostly – luxurious ceramic material have been discussed in scientific papers and professional articles since the 1970s, only offhandedly dealing with the main subject of this paper. Based on the observations from earlier and – particularly – recent archaeological excavations, we will try to discuss in some detail the theses about certain elements of the burial ritual, while also giving a detailed description of the funeral process carried out by the Liburni of Velika Mrdakovica.

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