scholarly journals Ambivalence of patriotism: the ideas of nation and homeland in the publicism of Clive Staples Lewis

Author(s):  
Iryna Voloshyn

This article makes an attempt of scholarly reflection on the meaning of the concepts of patriotism, nationalism and homeland. Those are the core categories in the publicism of the famous British writer, religious philosopher and public intellectual of 20th century Clive Staples Lewis. The research is based on the analysis of the works and essays of C. S. Lewis, the studies of Ukrainian and the Western scholars, philosophers and publicists (journalists). It demonstrates the communicative potential of Lewis’s texts and examines the theory of «ambivalent patrio tism» in the context of general philosophical and publicistic discourse. C. S. Le wis categorizes patriotism by the degree of its «sanctification » and therefore identifies four stages of patriotic feelings. This article thoroughly analyzes these stages and along with studying other works of the writer interpolates them in the general discourse of patriotism and nationalism, outlines a comprehensive overview of the Lewis’ ideology. At the same time, by studying not only the publicistic articles of C. S. Lewis (in the traditional interpretation of this genre), but also his other works, the author argues the hypothesis the publicism is not necessarily limited by a specific type of the materials. The key features of this genre can be as well identified in other literary texts, such as fiction, novels, poems, treatises and so on. This research also focuses on the ideological and notional aspects of the texts based on the core principles of the theory of «conceptual publicism». Keywords: patriotism, nationalism, national and extra-national identity, publicism, religious conscience.

Author(s):  
Andrew Logie

In current day South Korea pseudohistory pertaining to early Korea and northern East Asia has reached epidemic proportions. Its advocates argue the early state of Chosŏn to have been an expansive empire centered on mainland geographical Manchuria. Through rationalizing interpretations of the traditional Hwan’ung- Tan’gun myth, they project back the supposed antiquity and pristine nature of this charter empire to the archaeological Hongshan Culture of the Neolithic straddling Inner Mongolia and Liaoning provinces of China. Despite these blatant spatial and temporal exaggerations, all but specialists of early Korea typically remain hesitant to explicitly label this conceptualization as “pseudohistory.” This is because advocates of ancient empire cast themselves as rationalist scholars and claim to have evidential arguments drawn from multiple textual sources and archaeology. They further wield an emotive polemic defaming the domestic academic establishment as being composed of national traitors bent only on maintaining a “colonial view of history.” The canon of counterevidence relied on by empire advocates is the accumulated product of 20th century revisionist and pseudo historiography, but to willing believers and non-experts, it can easily appear convincing and overwhelming. Combined with a postcolonial nationalist framing and situated against the ongoing historiography dispute with China, their conceptualization of a grand antiquity has gained bipartisan political influence with concrete ramifications for professional scholarship. This paper seeks to introduce and debunk the core, seemingly evidential, canon of arguments put forward by purveyors of Korean pseudohistory and to expose their polemics, situating the phenomenon in a broader diagnostic context of global pseudohistory and archaeology.


Our understanding of Anglophone modernism has been transformed by recent critical interest in translation. The central place of translation in the circulation of aesthetic and political ideas in the early twentieth century has been underlined, for example, as well as translation’s place in the creative and poetic dynamics of key modernist texts. This volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies offers a timely assessment of Mansfield’s place in such exchanges. As a reviewer, she developed a specific interest in literatures in translation, as well as showing a keen awareness of the translator’s presence in the text. Throughout her life, Mansfield engaged with new literary texts through translation, either translating proficiently herself, or working alongside a co-translator to explore the semantic and stylistic challenges of partially known languages. The metaphorical resonances of translating, transition and marginality also remain key features of her writing throughout her life. Meanwhile, her enduring popularity abroad is ensured by translations of her works, all of which reveal sociological and even ideological agendas of their own, an inevitable reflection of individual translators’ readings of her works, and the literary traditions of the new country and language of reception. The contributions to this volume refine and extend our appreciation of her specifically trans-linguistic and trans-literary lives. They illuminate the specific and more general influences of translation on Mansfield’s evolving technique and, jointly, they reveal the importance of translation on her literary language, as well as for her own particular brand of modernism.


Author(s):  
Nasar Meer

The purpose of this chapter is to locate the discussion about Muslims in Scotland in relation to questions of national identity and multicultural citizenship. While the former has certainly been a prominent feature of public and policy debate, the latter has largely been overshadowed by constitutional questions raised by devolution and the referenda on independence. This means that, while we have undoubtedly progressed since MacEwen (1980) characterised the treatment of ‘race-relations’ in Scotland as a matter either of ‘ignorance or apathy’, the issue of where ethnic, racial and religious minorities rest in the contemporary landscape remains unsettled. One of the core arguments of this chapter is that these issues are all interrelated, and that the present and future status of Muslims in Scotland is tied up with wider debates about the ‘national question’. Hitherto, however, study of national identity in Scotland has often (though not always) been discussed in relation to the national identities of England, Wales and Britain as a whole.


2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 33-54
Author(s):  
Daniel A. Bell

Confucianism has made a comeback in mainland China over the last two decades or so. Politically minded Confucian revivalists see Confucianism as the core of national identity that differs from ‘‘foreign’’ traditions such as liberalism and they argue for replacing Marxism with Confucianism as the core ideology of the one-party state. But is the ancient tradition of Confucianism compatible with the modern tradition of nationalism? And is it possible to defend a morally appealing form of ‘‘Confucian nationalism’’? This essay argues that both questions can be answered affirmatively.


Author(s):  
Valeria Sobol

This book shows that Gothic elements in Russian literature frequently expressed deep-set anxieties about the Russian imperial and national identity. The book argues that the persistent Gothic tropes in the literature of the Russian Empire enact deep historical and cultural tensions arising from Russia's idiosyncratic imperial experience. It brings together theories of empire and colonialism with close readings of canonical and less-studied literary texts as the book explores how Gothic horror arises from the threatening ambiguity of Russia's own past and present, producing the effect Sobol terms “the imperial uncanny.” Focusing on two spaces of “the imperial uncanny” — the Baltic “North”/Finland and the Ukrainian “South” — the book reconstructs a powerful discursive tradition that reveals the mechanisms of the Russian imperial imagination that are still at work today.


2018 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 46-66
Author(s):  
Jaime Omar Salinas Zabalaga

This article discusses the film Vuelve Sebastiana (1953) by Jorge Ruiz, focusing on its ideological and aesthetic aspects. The analysis establishes connections between the idea of “nation” in the context of cultural transformation prompted by the economic and social policies of the National Revolution of 1952 and the way the Chipaya community is represented. The central argument is that "Vuelve Sebastiana" can be read not only in relation to the new national identity but as an expression of a new national imaginary regarding the indigenous communities of the Altiplano. The author proposes that "Vuelve Sebastiana" represents the nation through the temporal and spatial cartographies of a modern nation-building project, making visible some of its tensions and contradictions and allowing us to explore the imaginary that has redefined the relationship between the State and the indigenous communities of the Altiplano throughout the  second half of the 20th century.


2021 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-79
Author(s):  
Dmitry N. Zamyatin ◽  
◽  

Literary texts can be considered as the most attractive research material for analyzing the key features of both the semiotics of the city as a whole and the semiotics of individual cities, to which many works of art are devoted. The urban space of Modernity as a result of the processes of powerful semiotization can be considered as both textual and intertextual. The intertextuality of Modern urban spaces presupposes sets of “floating” topological signifiers corresponding to similar sets of “floating” topological signs. In the traditional semiotics of the city, the existence of two realities is assumed — the “real” reality and the “semiotic” reality, between which clear logical correspondences and/or relations can be observed and analyzed. The appearance of non-classical/post-classical urban narratives focused on the problems of dis-communication at the beginning of the 20th century became one of the important signs of the primary formation of the post-city and post-urbanism phenomena. The post-city is not a text and can not be regarded as a text; at the same time, it can generate separate texts that are not related to each other in any way. Post-urban texts, which are the communicative results of specific co-spatialities, remain local “flashes” that do not form a single text or meta-text (super-text). Hetero-textuality is a phenomenon of post-urban reality, which is characterized by the coexistence, as a rule, of texts that do not correlate with each other, relating to certain stable urban loci. Trans-semiotics in general context is understood as the study of any texts that involve the creation of sign-symbolic breaks or “gaps” with any other potentially possible correlating texts in the process of signification. Trans-semiotics of post-cities are studies of (literary) texts that involve the creation of sign-symbolic breaks or “gaps” with any other potentially possible correlating texts related to a particular urban locus in the process of signifying any urban loci. The post-city heterostructuality can be considered as the co-spatiality of mutually exclusive texts corresponding to “non-seeing” post-city loci. Post-urban trans-semiotics in the course of their development form a kind of “dark zones” that reject or neutralize any attempt at any semiotic interpretation.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 680-685
Author(s):  
Viacheslav Krylov

This article analyses the evolution of literary reflections among the representatives of the 19th-early 20th-century trends and schools where ideas on national literature distinctness were formed. The study specifies both an invariant of the notions of national literature identity and individual variations that did not find further development in literary self-awareness. The essays of the 1870-80s suggest that there was formed an image of the original literature opposed to European literature. A new impetus to the problem of national identity in literature was attached to the era of the Silver Age; however, the analysis of the literary review, historical and literary discourses of the turn of the century leads to the conclusion that it was in this era that the ideology of literary centrism was further strengthened, and the exclusive status of Russian literature in culture received detailed reflection.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-19
Author(s):  
Lykke Guanio-Uluru

Abstract How can student-teachers learn efficient ways to encourage sustainability thinking in their pupils and fulfil the competence aims on sustainability outlined in national subject curriculums as a response to UNESCO’s programme on Education for Sustainable Development, ESD? The core hypothesis of this project was that tailored literature circles, focused on the ecocritical aspects of literary texts, would make student-teachers aware of how they can use literature as a process to reflect on sustainability. This would enable them to incorporate sustainability thinking into their own teaching practices. The project’s tailoring of the standard literature circle roles (Daniels 1994, 2002, 2006) involved the design of reading roles that highlighted ecocritical and generic aspects of the studied texts and the application of an analytical matrix developed by literary scholars researching the representation of nature in children’s and young adult literature. This article presents the results of a small-scale study testing the ecocritical literature circles approach and its impact on student-teachers’ conception of their own ability to meet the competence aims on sustainability in their teaching. The intervention included lectures on ecocriticism and on the posthuman debate prior to the literature circles and student feedback through pre- and post-circle questionnaires. It was implemented in the teacher-training classroom, working with dystopian science fiction texts for young adults. These texts present the reader with visions of the future. The study showed that the ecocritical literature circles, and in particular the ecocritical reading roles, were considered useful by the participating student-teachers. The participants also reported a significant increase in confidence relative to their own ability to discuss sustainability issues with their pupils.


2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew F. Roche

AbstractLucy Allais argues that we can better understand Kant's transcendental idealism by taking seriously the analogy of appearances to secondary qualities that Kant offers in the Prolegomena. A proper appreciation of this analogy, Allais claims, yields a reading of transcendental idealism according to which all properties that can appear to us in experience are mind-dependent relational properties that inhere in mind-independent objects. In section 1 of my paper, I articulate Allais's position and its benefits, not least of which is its elegant explanation of how the features of objects that appear to us are transcendentally ideal while still being ‘empirically’ real. In section 2, I contend that there are elements of Allais's account that are problematic, yet also inessential, to what I view to be the core contribution of her analysis. These elements are the views that the properties that appear to human beings are not really distinct from properties that things have ‘in themselves’ and that Kant embraced a relational account of perception. In section 3, I return to the core of Allais's reading and argue that, despite its multiple virtues, it cannot make sense of key features of Kant's idealism.


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