scholarly journals The case of W.B. Yeats: Mind, Nation and Literary Landscape

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemarie Rowley
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Loss Of Contact ◽  
The Mind

The emergence of the nation states was one of the fruits of Romanticism, and each reborn country needed to rediscover its identity: in Ireland, identity was very much tied to the landscape and what remained of the Irish language, place-names playing a special role in the evocation of national desires.   A study of these key texts of Yeats’ shows how his dedication to the life of the mind   mirrored the loss of contact with the natural world.  This is true of its landscapes and its mythological figures.  I hope to show that in an early poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus” that in developing an antithetical self, Yeats was at significant times not only opposed to Nature intellectually and spiritually, but also emotionally. The privileging of the life of the mind over the animal self has played in his own life and in his influence what may have been a costly division.    La aparición de los estados nación  fue uno de los frutos del Romanticismo, y cada país que renacía necesitaba redescubrir su identidad. En Irlanda, la identidad estaba muy ligada al paisaje y a lo que quedaba de la lengua irlandesa, por ello los topónimos desempeñaron un papel especial en la evocación de deseos nacionales.   Un análisis de estos textos clave de Yeats muestra cómo su dedicación a la vida de la mente reflejaba la pérdida de contacto con el mundo natural. Esto es cierto en el caso de los paisajes y las figuras mitológicas. Espero mostrar que en uno de sus primeros poemas “La canción de Aengus el Errante” al desarrollar un ser antitético, en momentos significativos Yeats estaba no sólo opuesto a la Naturaleza intelectual y espiritualmente, sino también emocionalmente. Privilegiar la vida de la mente sobre el ser animal ha jugado en su propia vida y en su influencia lo que podría haber sido una división costosa.  

scholarly journals Exercising Musical Minds: Phrenology and Music Pedagogy in London circa 1830

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-124
Author(s):  
David Trippett
Keyword(s):  
Music Pedagogy ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Creative Imagination ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Appeal ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Dynamical Nature ◽  
Loss Of Contact ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Cost

The icon of the machine in early-nineteenth-century Britain was subject to a number of contemporary critiques in which pedagogy and the life of the mind were implicated, but to what extent was education in music composition influenced by this? A number of journal articles appeared on the topic of music and phrenology, bolstered by the establishment of the London Phrenological Society (1823), and its sister organization, the British Phrenological Association (1838). They placed the creative imagination, music, and the “natural” life of the mind into a fraught discourse around music and materialism. The cost of a material mind was a perceived loss of contact with the “gifts of naturer … the dynamical nature of man … the mystic depths of man's soul” (Carlyle), but the concept of machine was also invested with magical potential to transform matter, to generate energy, and can be understood as a new ideal type of mechanism. These confliciting ideals and anxieties over mechanism, as paradigm and rallying cry, are here situated in the context of music pedagogy during the second quarter of the century, with particular reference to amateur musicians and the popular appeal of phrenological “exercise,” and of devices such as Johann Bernhard Logier's “chiroplast.”

The Life of Cognition and the Cognition of Life (Kant)

Forms of Life ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 77-122
Author(s):  
Andreas Gailus
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Symbolic Life ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Sensus Communis

This chapter examines the conceptualization of life as formative form around 1800. Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment is the first book in the German tradition to articulate the new dynamic notion of life as a convergence of mind and nature. For Kant, aesthetic experience is important because it involves an intensification of the life of the mind (including the social dimension of mind as sensus communis) and enables us to develop a regulative notion of organic life. Kant's claim is that to understand the peculiar organization of natural beings, we must view them as products of an intrinsic formative activity, and hence as in some way analogous to the mind's power of cognitive and perceptual synthesis, which we experience most vividly in our encounter with beauty. Aesthetic experience allows us to grasp the nature of human, or symbolic, life and its place within the natural world.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Strachan Donnelley
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Fly Fishing ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Essential Unity ◽  
The Mind

This book is written with the knowledge that serious cancer will foreshorten the author’s life. It is an expression of a life of exploring ideas and nature. And it is an affirmation of the essential unity of human beings and a natural order that is valuable and good. Following Alfred North Whitehead, this order can be called “nature alive.” The author has been shaped by an impulse to explore the life of the mind and the recognition of his own fundamental ignorance. The writing and contents of the book are shaped by two themes. One, “living waters,” centres on the direct experience with the nonhuman world, particularly fly-fishing, and is a metaphor for the fact that the natural world is fluid and dynamic, not completed and static. The second theme is “magic mountains,” which refers to the influence that important philosophical thinkers have had on the author’s thinking and self-identity. Each chapter in the book is designed to reveal the development of this tradition of questions and ideas and to invite readers to carry that dialogue further in their own lives and minds.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora Goldschmidt ◽  
Barbara Graziosi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Specific Site ◽  
Entire Volume ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Significance ◽  
Classical Poetry ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Made In

The Introduction sheds light on the reception of classical poetry by focusing on the materiality of the poets’ bodies and their tombs. It outlines four sets of issues, or commonplaces, that govern the organization of the entire volume. The first concerns the opposition between literature and material culture, the life of the mind vs the apprehensions of the body—which fails to acknowledge that poetry emerges from and is attended to by the mortal body. The second concerns the religious significance of the tomb and its location in a mythical landscape which is shaped, in part, by poetry. The third investigates the literary graveyard as a place where poets’ bodies and poetic corpora are collected. Finally, the alleged ‘tomb of Virgil’ provides a specific site where the major claims made in this volume can be most easily be tested.

Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind

Academe ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirley Brice Heath ◽  
Gerald Graff
Keyword(s):  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

Nature and the Sublime

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
John Clare ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Mind

An account of Edmund Burke’s central ideas about the Sublime and the Beautiful shows how the emphasis Burke gave to terror helped to shape the Gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. Focusing on examples from the poetry of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Charlotte Smith, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and John Clare, the remainder of this essay explores the ways in which Romantic poets both thought about and attempted to represent those elements of the sublime that were instigated by their encounters with the natural world. What emerges as defining about these interactions between the mind and world is how imaginative impulses towards a sense of the sublime often led to a renewed sense of the material world and the very contingencies of existence they sought to transcend. Even Wordsworth’s more reverential response to the natural world as sacrosanct recognises the ‘awe’ of the sublime can be as much consoling as it is disturbing. These disturbing aspects of natural process and the sublime are self-consciously explored in the poetry of Shelley, who subjects notions of transcendence and idealism to sceptical scrutiny. With varying degrees of emphases, the poetry of Byron, Smith, and Clare elide distinctions between nature and culture to acknowledge a sublime more explicitly shaped by temporal and material processes. Finally, a key episode in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is read as exemplifying the many difficulties and complexities of the Romantic imagination’s encounter with, and its attempts, to represent transcendence and the sublime.

The real banality of evil

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Regine Lamboy
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
The Real ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Adolf Eichmann ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The University

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] When Hannah Arendt encountered Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem she was struck by the fact that his most outstanding characteristic was his utter thoughtlessness. This raised the questins of whether there might be a connection between thinking and abstaining from evil doing, which she explored in her last book The Life of the Mind. If there is indeed such a connection, there may be a class of people who might be led to abstain from evil doing if they can be persuaded to engage in thinking. This dissertation examines Arendt's success in establishing such a connection. Overall, her project does not really succeed. Her overly formal analysis of thinking wavers between a highly abstract and obscure conceptualization of thinking and a more down to earth definition. Ultimately she winds up stripping thinking of all possible content. .

The diary of a madman, seventeenth-century style: Goodwin Wharton, MP and communer with the fairy world

1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Porter
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

SynopsisGoodwin Wharton (1653–1704) was a nobleman's son and a Whig MP who played no small part in English public life. His manuscript journal shows, however, that he also lived a bizarre secret life of the mind of a kind which, in later generations, would have led to his confinement as suffering from mental illness. Above all, through the offices of his medium and lover, Mary Parish, he entered into elaborate relations both with the fairy world and with God and His Angels. This paper examines our records of Wharton's consciousness

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