scholarly journals Achilles Redivivus: "Pink Floyd: The Wall" as a Modern-Day "Iliad"

Oceánide ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 41-50
Author(s):  
Jorge Sacido-Romero ◽  
Luis Miguel Varela-Cabo
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Central Thesis ◽  
Binding Force ◽  
Dominant Theme ◽  
Pink Floyd ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
Historical Periods

This article elaborates on the structural, thematic and characterological similarities between Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd: The Wall and Homer’s Iliad, reading both works as epics that revolve around the hero’s wrath, its consequences and its resolution. The argument is organised around three central topics: loss as the cause of the heroes’ inaction and suffering inflicted by an inhumane power in the context of the war; law as the foundation of a social order that redresses the balance; love as the binding force of individual and collective harmony. After introducing the central thesis and objectives, the article redresses the balance concerning Achilles status as the example of virile might by highlighting its more human and humane dimension, the truly dominant theme of the Iliad an which comes closer to modern sensibility. Both the Iliad and Pink Floyd: The Wall feature two heroic figures that embark on a journey of self-discovery that not only entails the transformation of their subjective position inside society, but also the articulation of a set of values alternative to those that operate in their respective social formations. In developing this in the remaining sections, the article does not lose sight of the specificities of the different historical periods in which both narratives are embedded and respond to. The research carried out here takes Homer’s text more as a point of comparative reference for the film than as the object of creative reception.

Rethinking the nation: Intersections of race, desire, and love in Irene Sabatini’s The Boy Next Door

2019 ◽  
pp. 002198941985450
Author(s):  
Asante Lucy Mtenje
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Narrative Strategy ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Time Signals ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Interracial Relationship ◽  
Historical Periods

This article examines the interplay of race, desire, and love in Irene Sabatini’s novel The Boy Next Door by focusing on an interracial relationship that develops in a newly independent, yet still fraught, Zimbabwe. I argue that as a narrative strategy Sabatini uses two major historical periods in the history of independent Zimbabwe as the backdrop of a complicated and controversial relationship in order to offer critical commentary on the constructs of, and attitudes towards, interracial sexual unions in a country emerging from decades of systematic segregation where panics about sex and race were identified as social problems threatening the fundamental moral fibre and social order of colonial society. Drawing ideas from Dobrota Pucherova, the article highlights the way in which sexuality is used as a site to regulate and mark national belonging and further argues that Sabatini points to the apparent dissidence of such desires and relationships, and at the same time signals towards a racial utopia that can culminate from the realization of such desires.

The Social Order Yields to Functional Analysis

1958 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 158-160
Author(s):  
LAWRENCE SCHLESINGER
Keyword(s):  
Functional Analysis ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Social

Sex and the Social Order.

1946 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgene H. Seward
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
The Social

Terror salience and punishment: Does terror salience induce threat to social order?

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Fischer ◽  
Tobias Greitemeyer ◽  
Andreas Kastenmueller ◽  
Dieter Frey ◽  
Silvia Osswald
Keyword(s):  
Social Order

Journeys on Screen

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Formal Property ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
The Road ◽  
Formal Element ◽  
Contextual Element ◽  
Documentary Fiction ◽  
Self Discovery

This collection seeks to position the journey as a persistent presence across cinema, and fundamental to its position within modernity. It addresses the innovative appeal of journey narratives from pre-cinema to new media and through documentary, fiction, and the spaces between. Its examples traverse different regions and cultures, including a sub-section dedicated to Eastern Europe, to illuminate questions of belonging, diaspora, displacement, identity and memory. It considers how the journey is a formal element determining art cinema and popular genres such as sci-fi, romance and horror alike, with a special focus on rethinking the road movie. Through this variety, the collection investigates the journey as a motif for self-discovery and encounter, an emblem of artistic and social transformation, a cause of dynamism or stasis and as evidence of autonomy and progress (or their lack). The essays in it thus document epochal changes from urbanisation, migration and war to tourism and shopping, and all aim to address the diversity of cinematic journeys through developing methodological frameworks appropriate to an understanding of the journey as simultaneously a political question, contextual element and a formal property.

The Uses and Abuses of Constructive Trusts: The Experience of England and Wales

1997 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 437-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Harpum
Keyword(s):  
England And Wales ◽  
Central Thesis ◽  
Amorphous Nature ◽  
Fiduciary Obligations ◽  
English Law ◽  
Law Commission

This paper, which was first given on 19 October 1996 at a seminar on constructive trusts organised by the Universities of Edinburgh and Strathclyde with the Scottish Law Commission, examines the role that constructive trusts play in English law. It explains the amorphous nature of such trusts, how they are rooted in concepts of equity and conscience, and how they are often imposed in accordance with equity's traditional grounds for intervention. The central thesis of the paper is that a constructive trust, when imposed, will cause the trustee to become subject to one or more fiduciary obligations or incidents. One situation in which this is not the case— where a constructive trust is employed to impose an encumbrance on a transferee of property—is criticised. There is also a critique of the recourse to equitable maxims as a reason for the imposition of constructive trusts. The paper concludes with some reflections on the likely path of development of constructive trusts in English law and whether they ought to be more widely received into Scots law.

Through the Lens of the Adam Narrative: A Re-consideration of Sūrat al-Baqara

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.O. Klar
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Dominant Theme ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
A Chain

The thesis of a single pillar or axis around which the longer Medinan suras are structured has been highly influential in the field of sura unity, and scholarship on the structure and coherence of Sūrat al-Baqara has tended to work towards charting the progress of a dominant theme throughout the textual blocks that make up the sura. In order to achieve this, scholars have divided the sura into discrete blocks; many have posited a chain of lexical and thematic links from one block to the next; some have concentrated solely on the hinges and borders between these suggested textual blocks. The present article argues that such methods, while often in themselves illuminating, are by their very nature reductive. As such they can result in the oversight of important elements of the sura. From a starting point of the Adam pericope provided in Q. 2:30–9, this study will focus on the recurrence of a number of its lexical items throughout Sūrat al-Baqara. By methodically tracing the passage of repeated, loosely Fall-related, vocabulary, it will attempt to widen the contextual lens through which the sura's textual blocks are viewed, and establish a broader perspective on its coherence. Via a discussion of the themes of ‘gardens’, ‘parable’, ‘prostration’, ‘covenant’, ‘wrongdoing’ and finally ‘blindness’, this article will posit ‘garments’, not as a structural pillar, but as a pivot around which many of the repeated lexical items of the sura rotate.

George Hoggart Toulmin: politics and geology

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-481
Author(s):  
ROY PORTER
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Great Distance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Christian View ◽  
The Social ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
History Of

The physician George Hoggart Toulmin (1754–1817) propounded his theory of the Earth in a number of works beginning with The antiquity and duration of the world (1780) and ending with his The eternity of the universe (1789). It bore many resemblances to James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth" (1788) in stressing the uniformity of Nature, the gradual destruction and recreation of the continents and the unfathomable age of the Earth. In Toulmin's view, the progress of the proper theory of the Earth and of political advancement were inseparable from each other. For he analysed the commonly accepted geological ideas of his day (which postulated that the Earth had been created at no great distance of time by God; that God had intervened in Earth history on occasions like the Deluge to punish man; and that all Nature had been fabricated by God to serve man) and argued they were symptomatic of a society trapped in ignorance and superstition, and held down by priestcraft and political tyranny. In this respect he shared the outlook of the more radical figures of the French Enlightenment such as Helvétius and the Baron d'Holbach. He believed that the advance of freedom and knowledge would bring about improved understanding of the history and nature of the Earth, as a consequence of which Man would better understand the terms of his own existence, and learn to live in peace, harmony and civilization. Yet Toulmin's hopes were tempered by his naturalistic view of the history of the Earth and of Man. For Time destroyed everything — continents and civilizations. The fundamental law of things was cyclicality not progress. This latent political conservatism and pessimism became explicit in Toulmin's volume of verse, Illustration of affection, published posthumously in 1819. In those poems he signalled his disapproval of the French Revolution and of Napoleonic imperialism. He now argued that all was for the best in the social order, and he abandoned his own earlier atheistic religious radicalism, now subscribing to a more Christian view of God. Toulmin's earlier geological views had run into considerable opposition from orthodox religious elements. They were largely ignored by the geological community in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, but were revived and reprinted by lower class radicals such as Richard Carlile. This paper is to be published in the American journal, The Journal for the History of Ideas in 1978 (in press).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document