The Moral Legacy of Les Mille et une nuits: Where the Post-Colonial East Opens Its Portals onto the West in Late Twentieth-Century Literature

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-83
Author(s):  
Jennifer Forrest
2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astrid Erll

This article proposes to extend the prevalent short-term and presentist frameworks of research on transcultural memory and to consider its dynamics across long-term relational mnemohistories. After more than two and a half millennia, “Homer” and the Homeric epics still resonate in memory cultures across the world. But they are often erroneously cast as “European heritage” or “foundations of the West.” This is the result of what I call a tenacious “Homeric genea-logic.” Highlighting three moments in the relational mnemohistory of Homer, this article shows, first, that already during their emergence in the archaic age, the Homeric epics were relational objects; second, how during the Middle Ages Homer could arrive in Petrarch’s Italy only as a product of relational remembering between the Roman and the Byzantine empires; and third, how twentieth-century literature (Joyce, Walcott) developed conscious modes of mnemonic relationality connecting diverse cultural memories. Relationality thus emerges as a key term for a reflexive memory culture today, a tool to overcome exclusive memory logics (“Homer as the heritage of Europe”) while enabling the articulation of meaningful long-term transcultural memories (“Homer as relational heritage in Europe”).


2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-108
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Roudinesco

The concept of ‘perversion’ is introduced, with all its resonances from the vocabulary of psychopathology and more generally in critical philosophy, in juxtaposition to the philosophy and values of the Enlightenment, following Adorno and Horkheimer's evaluation in the light of the monstrosities of twentieth-century history. The author considers recent perverse developments in the culture of late twentieth-century science, in particular cognitivism, in their relation to the psychoanalytic tradition and the vision of humanity found in these competing traditions. The paper finally considers three modern test-domains: contradictory responses to prostitution; pornographic therapy; the borderlands between the animal, the robot and the human.


2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-272
Author(s):  
Brian Bennett

AbstractFor over a millennium, the myth of Saints Cyril and Methodius has played a vital role in European Christianity. In the late twentieth century, both John Paul II and Aleksii II appealed to the saints but, in doing so, projected different 'maps' of the continent. For the pope, who imagined a Christian Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, the saints were bridge-builders and exemplars of ecumenism. For the patriarch, the Cyrillomethodian heritage identified Russia as an Orthodoxbelieving, Cyrillic-writing nation distinct from the West. Thus, while John Paul used the myth to amalgamate, Aleksii used it to differentiate.


What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history


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