scholarly journals Alejo Carpentier, The Harp and the Shadow: Literature, History and Fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
Rodica Grigore

Not entirely a historical text, The Harp and the Shadow, the last novel published by Alejo Carpentier, takes as its pretext certain historical data in order to offer the readers a specific view of the protagonist, Christopher Columbus. Considered by some the great discoverer of the New World or highly regarded as “The Admiral of the Seas” and despised by many others as an adventurer and a liar, Columbus is also the author of some disturbing writings that still put critics and literary historians in discomfort. This is the novel’s point of departure, together with the intent of Pope Pius IX to initiate the canonization of Columbus, an idea regarded by the great majority of his contemporaries as a complete blasphemy. At the aesthetic level, comparable up to a certain point to the conception of Jorge Luis Borges, Carpentier’s form of understanding and practicing literature is always, in a more or less obvious way, reliant on Cervantes himself. But it is not limited to Don Quixote: in The Harp and the Shadow, the Cuban author builds an endless network of intertextual associations connecting his own creation to The Works of Persiles and Segismunda, the last work by Cervantes.

Author(s):  
Marcelo NEDER CERQUEIRA

Upon leaving his post as director of the Mariano Moreno National Library in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges appointed a clerk to package and identify the ownership of the works in his personal collection, with a number of them remaining in the institution and classified as an official donation made by the writer. This text examines the works belonging to the personal collection and listed in the Borges, libros y lecturas [Borges, books, and readings] catalogue. The complete process for identifying all of the books took place almost 40 years later, by means of the research behind the publication of Borges, libros y lecturas in 2010. The following text focuses on the care Borges took in framing his work and with his author’s legacy, even including countless jokes and enigmas meticulously woven into his biographical fiction. We depart from the idea that it would not be absurd to suppose that the collection donated by the author to the library does not so much constitute an act that was purely casual, contingent, and spontaneous, but rather a conscious move strangely planned by the author and in which he was invested. The inclusion of Latin American authors in Modernism and Romanticism and their appropriations of culturalist epistemological innovations by means of their Catholicism are examined by means of the aesthetic-expressive method, in which we outline paths to clinical observation with the observer’s participation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Stauffer

In the fall of 1874, in the midst a particularly severe round of Church-state conflict, Mexico's archbishop, Pelagio Antonio Labastida y Dávalos, introduced a novel weapon in the Catholic Church's struggle against liberal anticlericalism. He had sought and obtained a special dispensation from Pope Pius IX for all Mexicans to participate in a “spiritual pilgrimage,” a month-long exercise of mental travel, prayer, and contemplation that would figuratively transport the faithful out of Mexico's anticlerical milieu and into the purified air of Jerusalem, Rome, and other Old World holy sites, where they would pray for divine intercession on behalf of the embattled Church. The practice had been inaugurated a year earlier by lay Catholics in Bologna, as a response to the prohibition of mass pilgrimages in the flesh in the former Papal States. Labastida y Dávalos felt that spiritual pilgrimage could be especially effective in Mexico, where the anticlerical government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada had embarked on a radical program of secularization. In fact, the recently codified Laws of Reform had likewise prohibited acts of public religiosity in Mexico, attempting thus to suppress the myriad local processions and mass pilgrimages that helped to define Mexican Catholicism.


1884 ◽  
Vol s6-IX (227) ◽  
pp. 353-353
Author(s):  
Edmund Waterton
Keyword(s):  
Pius Ix ◽  

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 178-196
Author(s):  
Miranda Stanyon

Like other spaces of the Enlightenment, the sublime was what Michel de Certeau might have called “a practiced place.” Its rhetorical commonplaces, philosophical terrains, and associated physical environments were cultivated, shaped, and framed by human action and habit. But can the sublime—epiphanic, quasi-spiritual, unmasterable, extraordinary—ever really become a habit? Is it possible, even natural, to become habituated to sublimity? Taking as its point of departure the Aristotelian claim that “habit is a second nature,” this article explores the counterintuitive relationship between habit and the sublime. It focuses not on that eighteenth-century “cultivar,” the natural sublime, but on sonic sublimity, exploring on one hand overwhelming sounds, and on the other a conceptualization of sound itself as a sublime phenomenon stretching beyond audibility to fill all space. As this exploration shows, both the sublime and habit were seen as capable of creating a second nature, and prominent writers connected habit, practice, or repetition to the sublime. Equally, however, there are points of friction between the aesthetic of the sublime and philosophies of habit, especially in the idea that habit dulls or removes sensation. This is a prominent idea in Félix Ravaisson's landmark De l'habitude (1838), a text currently enjoying renewed attention, and one that apparently stems from Enlightenment attempts to explain sensation, consciousness, and freedom. Similar concerns inform the eighteenth-century sublime, yet the logic behind the sublime is at odds with the dulling of sensation. The article closes by touching on the reemergence of “second nature” in contemporary art oriented toward the sublime, and on the revisions of Enlightenment nature this involves.


Author(s):  
Sarah Jane Boss

The nineteenth century saw an upsurge in Marian devotion and Mariological enquiry in Western Europe. Of particular note is the Bull of Pope Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus (1854), which defines the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception as an article of Catholic faith. Developments of this kind may be seen partly as an example of the Catholic Church’s reaction against increasing secularization. However, methodologically, Marian theology was part of the tendency towards a more historical approach to theology, with greater emphasis on the participation of the ordinary faithful in the articulation of doctrine. Attention is drawn to the importance of the tradition in which Mary is identified with the Old Testament figure of Wisdom, and the relevance of this for the understanding of Mary’s pre-election as the Mother of God, immaculately conceived. Finally, there is discussion of some of the nineteenth century’s most prominent Mariological thinkers, such as Newman and Scheeben.


2007 ◽  
Vol 82 (12) ◽  
pp. 1535-1540 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. I. Sirven ◽  
J. F. Drazkowski ◽  
K. H. Noe

Author(s):  
Thomas Marschler

In the second half of the eighteenth century, under the influence of the Enlightenment, Catholic theology had increasingly turned away from its scholastic tradition. A renewal of Thomist thought started in the first decades of the nineteenth century, especially from Italy. Its original concern was to overcome the modern philosophies that were perceived as endangering faith. From the middle of the century, the movement spread to other parts of Europe, gaining support of the Church’s magisterium under Pope Pius IX. In the wake of the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) written by his successor Leo XIII, neo-scholasticism made its final breakthrough in Catholic academic life. Subsequently, numerous Thomist-oriented textbooks were published and Thomist academies were founded throughout Europe. The critical edition of the works of Aquinas (Editio Leonia) marked the beginning of a period of intense historical research on medieval theology and philosophy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-84
Author(s):  
Michael W. Homer

In 1852 King Victor Emmanuel’s ministers proposed legislation to recognize civil marriages in the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont). This proposal was opposed by Pope Pius IX and other Catholic apologists who argued that it would result in undermining the official status of the Catholic Church and one of the church’s sacraments. Even worse it would mean that Jewish and Protestant marriages would be recognized. This legislation coincided with Mormon missionaries proselytizing in Torino and the public announcement that the church practiced polygamy. Catholic opponents of this legislation argued that even Mormon polygamous marriages would be recognized if the legislation passed. During fierce debates that took place Catholic apologists also claimed that Mormons formed alliances with other Protestant “sects” to push through the civil marriage litigation. The specter of Mormon plural marriages in a civil marriage system continued to be mentioned until civil marriages were finally recognized in 1865.


2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 345-358
Author(s):  
Mariam Kartashyan

The attempts of Pope Pius IX to restrict the ecclesiastical rights of the Armenian Catholics with his bull Reversurus (1867) led to the Armenian schism in 1871. A factor which was decisive for the development of the relationship between the Armenian Catholic Church and the Ottoman empire, under whose rule the Church existed, was the influence of other powers. This article analyses the background of this relationship and its significance for the Armenian schism. For this purpose, first, the ecclesiastical rights of the Armenian Catholic Church during the period before the publication of Reversurus and their relation to the internal policy of the Ottoman empire are outlined. Second, the influence of the domestic and foreign policy of the Ottoman state on its relationship with its Armenian Catholic subjects is elucidated. In this way, it is shown that the historical background of the Armenian Catholic Church and the internal political circumstances of the Ottoman empire were intertwined and shaped the relationship between the Armenian Catholics and the Ottoman state. Despite this, relations between the Ottoman empire, the Holy See and other European empires came to exercise a predominant influence, leading by the end of the 1870s to the Armenian Catholic Church's enforced acquiescence in ecclesiastical change.


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