scholarly journals The Character of Rip van Winkle: Representation of Disappearing Cultural Identity

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
Magdalena Baga

Abstract ─ The purpose of this research is to explore how an ethnicity is represented in a story that has a historical setting and how this ethnic group was placed in American history. The short story of Washington Irving, "Rip Van Winkle", published in 1819, was very popular in America. This story was recycled in the form of stories for children, made into plays, etc. What Americans always remember about Rip Van Winkle character is his laziness. The story of "Rip Van Winkle" is traced through Stuart Hall's Representation theory. This theory states that representation can give meaning to an identity, and the New Historicism method is used to uncover that fictional stories are tied to the world that produced them. The result shows that Rip's character is a representation of Dutch ethnicity who felt losing their cultural identity. Rip's character in the story is a representation of Dutch New York ethnicity, and he was the main character in the story who was narrated as a lazy man. Thus, what always presents in America's memory is the lazy Dutch because of the representation of the character of Rip, but the other characters who were narrated less in the story are not remembered, even though they played a role in establishing America.

Author(s):  
Marjorie Levinson

Chapter 2 studies the relationship between historicism and Romanticism. It locates the two between Enlightenment materialism, on one side, and Marxian historical and dialectical materialism, on the other. In so doing, it isolates a paradox of materialism—namely, its production of the very concepts that undo it. These include the ideas of knowing as dissociated conceptual activity, and consciousness as absolute negativity. Romanticism and historicism, it is argued, represent solutions to a common problem—a claim defended through a reading of Wordsworth’s sonnet “The world is too much with us.” In considering how we position ourselves in relation to past literature, the chapter evaluates the choices between contemplation and empathy, knowledge and power, blame and defense. As such, it represents the first move in a self-critical turn on the new historicist method that had shaped the author’s—and part of the field’s—work in the previous decade.


2011 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 722-756
Author(s):  
Jon Adams ◽  
Edmund Ramsden

Nestled among E. M. Forster's careful studies of Edwardian social mores is a short story called “The Machine Stops.” Set many years in the future, it is a work of science fiction that imagines all humanity housed in giant high-density cities buried deep below a lifeless surface. With each citizen cocooned in an identical private chamber, all interaction is mediated through the workings of “the Machine,” a totalizing social system that controls every aspect of human life. Cultural variety has ceded to rigorous organization: everywhere is the same, everyone lives the same life. So hopelessly reliant is humanity upon the efficient operation of the Machine, that when the system begins to fail there is little the people can do, and so tightly ordered is the system that the failure spreads. At the story's conclusion, the collapse is total, and Forster's closing image offers a condemnation of the world they had built, and a hopeful glimpse of the world that might, in their absence, return: “The whole city was broken like a honeycomb. […] For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky” (2001: 123). In physically breaking apart the city, there is an extent to which Forster is literalizing the device of the broken society, but it is also the case that the infrastructure of the Machine is so inseparable from its social structure that the failure of one causes the failure of the other. The city has—in the vocabulary of present-day engineers—“failed badly.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 235-241
Author(s):  
Barbara Klonowska

This article reviews the recent monograph by Maxim Shadurski, The Nationality of Utopia. H. G. Wells, England, and the World State (New York: Routledge, 2020) in the context of utopian studies on the one hand, and the political ideas of the nation state vs. world state on the other.


Author(s):  
John L. Culliney ◽  
David Jones

Chapter 10 proceeds in light of our suggestion that sagely behavior is freely chosen, benign, yet powerful, and seeks cooperation in the world in ways that are positive, progressive, nurturing, and constructive in nature. This chapter, however, accounts for people who have been gifted with or have assiduously developed powers of rapport or charisma, achieving notable fractal congruence in the social, political, or economic life of institutions or communities but who have gone the other way. This phenomenon over a wide range of scale can elevate those who become destructive or aggrandizing to the ultimate detriment of society. Numerous followers can gravitate to the kind of socially-fractally-adept individual that we call an anti-sage. The chapter discusses examples of the antisage phenomenon in cults and terrorist organizations such as the People’s Temple and Aum Shinrykyo. In this narrative pertinent expressions of human selfness include: Protean self vs. fundamentalist self and parochial altruism. Also explored are politics and government, notably the administration of George W. Bush, creed-based religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, and aggrandizement in educational administration, such as that of John Sexton’s presidency of New York University.


2019 ◽  
pp. 86-102
Author(s):  
Susana Sueiro Seoane

This chapter analyzes Cultura Obrera (Labor Culture), published in New York City from 1911 to 1927. Pedro Esteve, the primary editor, gave expression to his ideas in this newspaper and while it represented Spanish firemen and marine workers, it reported on many other workers’ struggles in different parts of the world, for example, supporting and collecting funds for the Mexican revolutionary brothers Flores Magón. This newspaper, as all the anarchist press, was part of a transnational network and had a circulation not only in many parts of the United States but also in Latin American countries, including Argentina and Cuba, as well as on the other side of the Atlantic, in Spain and various European countries.


2021 ◽  
pp. 107-136
Author(s):  
James C. Nicholson

Chapter Five discusses the origins of the International Race and the British contestants' transatlantic voyage to America. August Belmont II, chairman of the powerful Jockey Club in New York, convinced Benjamin Irish, the farmer and caterer of relatively modest means who owned Epsom Derby winner Papyrus, to agree to a match race against a to-be-determined American horse. Kentucky Derby champion Zev was the likeliest choice. Admiral Cary T. Grayson, friend and physician to former president Woodrow Wilson, owned the other leading American candidate, My Own. But Hildreth and Sinclair manipulated the selection process. Newspaper coverage of the procedural gamesmanship helped to hype the event. Sportswriters' profiles of the men associated with the English horse -- including jockey Steve Donoghue, who had risen from a rough industrial town to become the most famous rider in the world, and a modest second-generation Newmarket trainer named Basil Jarvis -- spread the ballyhoo nationwide.


Author(s):  
Pranshi Jain

Traditional knowledge is the knowledge base of a particular society or a community which has been generated from one generation to the other over a period of time through the process of learning and sharing. It takes several generations to refine or improve the knowledge base with expertise which they gained through experiences. Ultimately, it becomes the integral part of cultural identity of their community. The art of carpet weaving is one of the traditional knowledges which has represented the continuity of the age- old Indian heritage and also the socio-cultural tradition of weaving communities and thus has given Indian carpets a renowned place in the world. The magnificence of Indian carpet weaving and the intricate patterns that have emerged from it have substantially increased India’s carpet exports and placed it prominently on the international carpet map and thus has made it the largest exporter of handmade carpets in the world. Handloom sector being one of the major sectors which helps the country in maintaining the GDP at present is suffering from high competition to power looms due to the very nature of handmade sector being unorganized and dispersed. Therefore, this paper would give the review of carpet tradition in India, its evolution, its present scenario and thus addressing the need to safeguard the knowledge/ skill related with the craft as it is on the verge of losing its identity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 102-106
Author(s):  
Sergey Borisov ◽  

The article is a philosophical essay based on Maria Tillmanns’ book Why We Are in Need of Tails (Iguana Books, 2019). In an allegorical form the essay presents many current philosophical issues such as understanding, companionship, communication, attitude towards the Other, and the continuity of cultural tradition.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-86
Author(s):  
Liliana Danciu

The unprecedented experience of Gavrilescu, the main character in the La Țigănci short story, continues to arise  various interpretations, proving the viability of this eliadesc writing. For some literary critics, he is the anti-hero by definition, which lives what Eliade understands by "level break", but without understanding anything of it. The ordinary man, with a banal existence, routinely in the profane becomes the Chosen One uselessly claimed by sacred, for ignorance prevents him from seeing beyond the Illusion. In the hut of the gypsies, he crosses a rite of passage, from life to death, proof being the shrouded curtain that will wrap his naked body, the terrible thirst for unpopularity, and the surprising encounter with the always young Hildegard, the beloved of his youth.In this article, I try to reveal another dimension of this eliadesc short story, linked to the name of the main character, which, in my opinion, refers to the name of the archangel Gabriel, the "pair" of the other, Michael. As it is known, the name of the archangel Michael is directly related to the Romanian legionary movement in the inter-warperiod, a nationalistic, violent and criminal political-ideological movement that has successfully manipulated local religious and cultural elements to gain followers and become strong. Up to a point, the Romanian legionary movement stood under the sign of both archangels, synthesizing both the intellectual and the political dimensions.In time, the two directions have broken apart, and the legion has remained exclusively under the warlike sign of the warrior archangel. The Romanian intellectuals, who originally sympathized with the nationalist ideals of the legionary movement, distanced themselves from it and remained under the soteriological mark of Archangel Gabriel. This is, in my opinion, the message hidden by Eliade in this unusual short story. Also, using allegory and symbol, the Romanian author turns out to be a man of vision and prophesies the future of Romania, which has been culturally and historically marked, in time, by Germany. The present does not contradict Eliade, because Germany is the engine of the European Union, of which Romania wants to be part.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-212
Author(s):  
Nathan D. Frank

Abstract Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu pave the way, in Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative (2016), to think of space in narrative as well as narrative in space. I steer their approach through nonhuman space by examining a narrative traversal of “the mesh,” which is Timothy Morton’s spatial metaphor for human and nonhuman interconnection. “A narrative traversal of the mesh” indicates two distinct aspects of narrative motion, which can be thought of as the motion that occurs within a narrative’s fictional spaces (internal), and as the movement of a narrative through the non-fictional spaces of the mesh (external). A narrative’s internal and external motions suggest that a narrative text is itself an enmeshed pocket of nonhuman space that emulates the meshiness of the space that envelops it. The outcome of each “narrative traversal” is that the text purports to become the mesh, but this outcome registers on two scales – that of the storyworld containing a fictional mesh (the internal scale), and that of the actual, non-fictional mesh containing the storyworld (the external scale). Remarkably, each type of traversal relies on and influences the other, so that the tandem dynamism that obtains between them emerges as my object of inquiry more so than either of them individually. Since a narrative’s spatial situation is precisely that of one nonhuman space within the larger mesh, my reading of Lucy Corin’s short story, “Eyes of Dogs,” engages ultimately with the scalar discrepancy between text and world and concludes that narrative may serve as an extramental shelter from correlationism.


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