scholarly journals Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘On Raised Beach’: ‘Geopoetics’ in a Time of Catastrophic Crisis’

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Richard H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Deep Ecology ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Hugh Macdiarmid ◽  
Immediate Experience ◽  
Literary Renaissance

The poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) was the major driving force behind the twentieth-century Scottish literary renaissance and was also a passionate Scottish nationalist. His poem ‘On a Raised Beach’ (1934) has been understood in theological and philosophical terms as a metaphysical exploration, albeit one grounded in an immediate experience of nature that took place on Shetland. In this paper, MacDiarmid’s epic is placed in the context of the present environmental crisis and the ongoing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘On a Raised Beach’ can now be re-located within the hermeneutical tradition of ‘Geopoetics’, a Scottish genre that is articulated and asserted by the poet Kenneth White (1938–). Whilst, however, White draws upon the highly contested and polyvalent concept of ‘shamanism’ in elaborating his standpoint, we shall argue that it is also appropriate to look for affinities between this dynamic poem and the ethos and mysticism of ‘deep ecology’, a perspective that invokes the equally contested mythology of ‘Gaia’.

Realignment and Beyond

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell J. Dalton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Electoral Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Process ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Societal Changes

Affluent democracies have experienced tremendous socio-economic changes since the mid- twentieth century, which has reshaped public opinion, party programs, and electoral choices. This chapter first summarizes the societal changes that have been a driving force behind the political changes described in this study. One pattern involves the longstanding economic issues of contemporary democracies, and shifting social positions on these issues. In addition, an evolving cultural cleavage and its ties to broader attitudes toward social change have altered citizen policy preferences. In most affluent democracies, the parties’ responses to these changing citizen demands have produced a realignment to represent both economic and cultural positions. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for the working of electoral systems and the democratic process more broadly.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lincoln Center

The Conclusion briefly examines the current state of the New York City Ballet under the auspices of industrial billionaire David H. Koch at Lincoln Center. In so doing, it to introduces a series of questions, warranting still more exploration, about the rapid and profound evolution of the structure, funding, and role of the arts in America through the course of the twentieth century. It revisits the historiographical problem that drives Making Ballet American: the narrative that George Balanchine was the sole creative genius who finally created an “American” ballet. In contrast to that hagiography, the Conclusion reiterates the book’s major contribution: illuminating the historical construction of our received idea of American neoclassical ballet within a specific set of social, political, and cultural circumstances. The Conclusion stresses that the history of American neoclassicism must be seen as a complex narrative involving several authors and discourses and crossing national and disciplinary borders: a history in which Balanchine was not the driving force, but rather the outcome.

Death and Society in Twentieth Century America

1988 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Fulton ◽  
Greg Owen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Time Span ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
The Media ◽  
Immediate Experience ◽  
Twentieth Century America ◽  
Two Age Groups

American attitudes and responses toward death have changed markedly during the twentieth century. This transformation is illustrated through an examination of two age groups: those born prior to the advent of the atomic bomb, and those born into the nuclear age. Each cohort contended with very different patterns of environment and socio-historical experiences, and had differential life expectancies as well. Images of death have changed significantly over this time-span, partially because of the pervasive influence of television and the overall growth in the importance of media. Death's presence in the media is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere; it is at once illusively fantastical and frighteningly real. Today's youth face the threat of a sudden anonymous death that is counterpoised against a more immediate experience with death that often is either distorted or denied. It is within this context that America's youth express their fears and frustrations in music, drugs, violence, and vicarious death experiences. The research agenda should include investigation of such phenomena as the rising interest in spirituality and the increase in suicide among adolescents as possible symptoms of despair in an impersonal and threatened world.

Lu, Xun (1881–1936)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flora Xiaofang Shao
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
New Culture Movement ◽  
New Literature

Lu Xun, a pre-eminent man of letters in twentieth-century China, is widely regarded as the father of modern Chinese literature. Writing during China’s tumultuous transition from a dynastic empire into modern nation-state, Lu Xun was one of the leading practitioners of the nationalist ‘New Literature’ as well as a driving force behind the iconoclastic New Culture Movement and other intellectual reforms. His works have been celebrated for their trenchant critique of the cultural malaise of Chinese society. His inimitable style of acute self-reflexivity, combined with dark sarcasm, set an example for later writers who were similarly engaged in literature as a form of social critique.

Irish Literary Revival

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Hu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Irish Literature ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
Irish Literary Revival ◽  
Literary Renaissance

The Irish Literary Revival — also known as the ‘Irish Literary Renaissance’ or ‘The Celtic Twilight’ — describes a movement of increased literary and intellectual engagement in Ireland starting in the 1890s and occurring into the early twentieth century. As a literary movement, the Irish Literary Revival was deeply engaged in a renewed interest in Ireland’s Gaelic heritage as well as the growth of Irish nationalism during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Irish Literary Revival was only a part — though a significant one — of a more general national movement called the ‘Gaelic Revival’, which engaged in Irish heritage on the intellectual, athletic, linguistic, and political levels. For instance, the Literary Revival coincided with the formation of the Gaelic League in 1893, which sought to revive interest in Irish language and culture more broadly. The Irish Literary Revival is also sometimes referred to as the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival because it revitalized Irish literature not through the Irish language, but in English. In addition, many of its leading members were part of the Anglo-Irish Protestant class. As a movement, the Irish Literary Revival is difficult to encapsulate, partly because of the range and reach of its various members, and also because the work that emerged from it was often experimental and widely diverse in focus, style, and genre.

Electronic Inspirations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Iverson
Keyword(s):  
Information Theory ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Magnetic Tape ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Laboratory Culture ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Sine Tone ◽  
Cultural Healing

Cold War electronic music—made with sine tone and white-noise generators, filters, and magnetic tape—was the driving force behind the evolution of both electronic and acoustic music in the second half of the twentieth century. Electronic music blossomed at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR [West German Radio]) in Cologne in the 1950s, when technologies were plentiful and the need for cultural healing was great. Building an electronic studio, West Germany confronted the decimation of the “Zero Hour” and began to rebuild its cultural prowess. The studio’s greatest asset was its laboratory culture, where composers worked under a paradigm of invisible collaboration with technicians, scientists, performers, intellectuals, and the machines themselves. Composers and their invisible collaborators repurposed military machinery in studio spaces that were formerly fascist broadcasting propaganda centers. Composers of Cold War electronic music reappropriated information theory and experimental phonetics, creating aesthetic applications from military discourses. In performing such reclamations, electronic music optimistically signaled cultural growth and progress, even as it also sonified technophobic anxieties. Electronic music—a synthesis of technological, scientific, and aesthetic discourses—was the ultimate Cold War innovation, and its impacts reverberate today.

RATIONAL DISSENT, ENLIGHTENMENT, AND ABOLITION OF THE BRITISH SLAVE TRADE

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 741-772 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANTHONY PAGE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Wide Range

ABSTRACTFollowing British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the origins and nature of popular abolitionism have been much debated among historians. Traditionally, religion was seen as the driving force, with an emphasis on the role of Quakers and evangelicals, whilst in the twentieth century social historians began to stress the importance of economic and social change. This article revises both interpretations by helping to recover and analyse the abolitionism of enlightened Rational Dissenters. Legal inequality and their ‘rational piety’ encouraged heterodox Dissenters to become active in a wide range of reformist causes. Owing to evangelical dominance in the nineteenth century, however, the role of Rational Dissenters was marginalized in histories of abolitionism. Recovering Rational Dissenting abolitionism underlines the importance of religion in the campaign against the slave trade. Since Rational Dissent was to a large extent a religion of the commercial classes, this article also sheds light on the hotly debated relationship between capitalism and abolition.

How Russia's Bureaucracy hindered its Economic Development

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 438-453
Author(s):  
Chaim Shinar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
The State ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Russian History ◽  
The Real ◽  
State Bureaucracy ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
The Right

At least as far back as the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, Russia's state bureaucracy has been widely considered to be top-heavy, corrupt, inefficient and tyrannical. By the early twentieth century the real driving force of Russian history and society was neither the constitutional façade erected by the autocracy to stifle the revolution nor the subsequent Bolshevik seizure of power, but rather the growth of the state bureaucracy. Similarly, in the course of the twentieth century, analysts on both the left and the right came to view hyper-bureaucratic growth unchecked by democratic constraint as the major problem of Soviet society. Attempts to reduce bureaucratic interference in the economy of post-Soviet Russia have not resulted in positive change.

What Happened to Evil?

Evil ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 358-382
Author(s):  
Susan Neiman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Analytic Tradition ◽  
The Problem Of Evil

This chapter explores the reasons why the problem of evil was ignored in twentieth-century mainstream philosophy. It first examines the belief that the problem of evil is a religious problem and argues to the contrary that while the problem of evil is one of the major impulses behind the development of religion, religion is not the source of the problem of evil. It then argues that the problem of evil is the driving force behind most of modern philosophy. Special focus is given to nineteenth-century philosophy, which was often largely ignored in the analytic tradition precisely because it was so focused not only on understanding but also solving the problem of evil. While sometimes expressed in secular form as a claim about progress in history, the problem of evil plays a central role in the work of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche, each of whose work is briefly explored with reference to that role.

Theodore M. Hesburgh, Theologian: Revisiting Land O’Lakes Fifty Years Later

2017 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 930-959 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward P. Hahnenberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Academic Freedom ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Catholic Theology ◽  
Catholic University ◽  
Catholic Universities ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Status ◽  
The University

Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC, was the driving force behind the 1967 Land O’Lakes Statement—a watershed document that affirmed both the distinctive identity of Catholic universities and the “true autonomy and academic freedom” they needed to excel. This article explores the prominent role of theology in the Land O’Lakes Statement by means of an examination of Hesburgh’s specifically theological commitments. Attending first to the status of Catholic theology in the early twentieth century, the article considers Hesburgh’s neo-Scholastic formation, his early work on the theology of the laity, and the evolution of his thinking as president of the University of Notre Dame. It concludes that the category of mediation, present in Hesburgh’s earliest work, would come to ground the dialogical role he thought theology had to play to ensure the nature and mission of the contemporary Catholic university.

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