‘Mystic and a little utopistic’

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-362
Author(s):  
Daniel Panka

The Mézga Family is an animated television series that ran for three seasons in Hungary between 1970 and 1980 (produced between 1968 and 1978). In the first season, the twentieth-century Hungarian family establishes contact with their descendant from the thirtieth century who sends them futuristic gadgets whose use results in various adventures. In the second season, the family’s youngest member goes out on missions to other planets in a spaceship built by himself. In the third season, the family goes on vacation during which several calamities befall them. The irony directed at facile utopian desires allowed the series to subtly express deeper-penetrating concerns but simultaneously remain light-hearted. This article introduces the term ‘cynical utopia’ to explain how the season generates multi-layered meanings and critical commentary. By using the conventions of utopia, sf and fairy tales, the series could discuss social and even political issues in a period when state control over media content was strict in Hungary and the production of a clearly dystopian work on national television would have been unimaginable.

1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. McMillan

Most historians of modern France would agree that the quarrel between clericals and anticlericals was one of the most significant political issues in French politics between 1870 and 1914, especially in the period before the passing of the law which separated Church and State in 1905. The charges brought against the Catholic Church by the anticlericals were many, but until recently few students of nineteenth-century France have commented on the fact that one of their most serious allegations was that the Church oppressed women. Perhaps the most celebrated formulation of this theory came from the pen of the historian Michelet who, in a virulent polemic entitled Priests, women and the family, bitterly attacked the powers which priests were reputed to exercise over the female mind through the institution of the confessional, to the great detriment of marital life and family unity.


Terminus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3 (56)) ◽  
pp. 251-284
Author(s):  
Rozalia Sasor

Notes on Francesc Eiximenis’ Book of Angels Francesc Eiximenis, a Catalan Franciscan and writer who lived in the 14th century, is not very well known today outside the narrow circle of Catalan researchers of the Middle Ages, even though he was a very popular author at the time and was eagerly translated into other languages. He was most enthusiastic about using his native language, i.e. Catalan, in which he wrote treatises on the truths of faith, theological questions, and social and political issues. The purpose of this study is to introduce Eiximenis and to present a Polish translation of an excerpt from the first book of his angelological treatise entitled Llibre dels angels (Book of Angels). Rozalia Sasor’s translation, together with an initial critical commentary on the text, is the first contemporary edition of this part of the treatise. The paper, which is at the same time an introduction to the translation, is divided into four sections. In the first one, Sasor briefly discusses the state of knowledge about Francesc Eiximeni in Poland; in the second one, she presents his biography with a special emphasis on the time of his studies and his theological and philosophical interests, and in the third she characterises the Llibre del angels and the circumstances surrounding the creation of the work. It is worth noting at this point that the aforementioned characteristics focus on the properties of the language of the original, which contributed to the success of Llibre dels angels among readers; it also takes up the previously undiscussed problem of the sources of the treatise. The paper ends with a comment on the Polish translation, in which Sasor explains how she prepared the source text for translation as there is no contemporary critical edition of the first three books of Llibre dels angels; she also discusses the translation strategy she adopted. The whole publication is completed by a translation of selected excerpts from the first part of Llibre dels angels, i.e. chapters 1–7, 9, 14, and 16–17, with critical commentary.


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

This chapter analyses the earliest of the New Zealand coming-of-age feature films, an adaptation of Ian Cross’s novel The God Boy, to demonstrate how it addresses the destructive impact on a child of the puritanical value-system that had dominated Pākehā (white) society through much of the twentieth century, being particularly strong during the interwar years, and the decade immediately following World War II. The discussion explores how dysfunction within the family and repressive religious beliefs eventuate in pressures that cause Jimmy, the protagonist, to act out transgressively, and then to turn inwards to seek refuge in the form of self-containment that makes him a prototype of the Man Alone figure that is ubiquitous in New Zealand fiction.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pranam Dhar

Zakat is an important form of religiously mandated charity under Islam. It is the third pillar of Islam. The giving of Zakat is important for Muslims, as this leads to purification of their wealth from all sins. This paper examines the role of Zakat as an instrument of social justice and poverty eradication in society. Each Muslim calculates his or her own Zakat individually. Generally, this involves the payment each year of two and a half percent of one's capital, after the needs of the family have been met. One can donate additional amount as an act of voluntary charity but Zakat is fundamental to every Muslim. Zakat is the Islamic contribution to social justice: those who have to give charity share the benefit of their prosperity to those who have fallen short. This is the Islamic approach to remove greed and envy and to purify one's soul based on good intentions. This is the institution of Zakat in Islam. The institution of Zakat serves to eradicate poverty in the community and uphold the light of Islam. Allah says “whatever is paid as Zakat for the sake of Allah shall be rewarded in manifolds”.


Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.


Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.


Author(s):  
Antonio Girolami ◽  
Diana Noemi Garcia de Paoletti ◽  
Marcelo Leonardo Nenkies ◽  
Silvia Ferrari ◽  
Hugo Guglielmone

Background: Investigation of rare bleeding disorders in Latin-America. Objective: The report of a new case of FX deficiency due to a compound heterozygosis. Methods: Accepted clotting procedures were used. Sequencing of DNA was carried out by means of Applied Biosystems Instruments. Results: A compound heterozygote due to the association of a new mutation (Gla72Asp) with an already known mutation (Gly154Arg) of the FX gene is reported. The proposita is a 38 year old female who had a moderate bleeding tendency (menorrhagia, epistaxis, easy bruising). The proposita has never received substitution therapy but in the occasion of a uterine biopsy. The mother was asymptomatic but was a heterozygote for the new mutation. The father was asymptomatic but had deserted the family and could not be investigated. After this abandonment the mother of the proposita re-married with an asymptomatic man and she gave birth to a son who was asymptomatic but was also heterozygous for the new mutation (Gla72Asp). As a consequence it has to be assumed that the first husband of the mother of the proposita was heterozygous for the known mutation (Gly154Arg). Conclusion: This is the third case of a new mutation in the FX gene reported, during the past few years, in Argentina.


Author(s):  
Emily E. LB. Twarog

In 1973, housewives in California launched what would be the last meat boycott of the twentieth century. And, like its predecessors, the 1973 boycott gained national momentum albeit with little political traction now that Peterson had left public life for a job in the private sector as the consumer advisor to the Giant grocery store chain. And in some quarters of the labor movement, activists drew very clear links between the family economy and the stagnation plaguing workers’ wages. The 1973 boycott led to the founding of the National Consumers Congress, a national organization intended to unite consumer organizers. While it was a short-lived organization, it demonstrates the momentum that consumer activism was building. This chapter also reflects on the lost coordinating opportunity between housewives organizing around consumer issues and the women’s movement in the 1970s.


Author(s):  
Barbara Kellerman

The chapter focuses on how leadership was taught in the distant and recent past. The first section is on five of the greatest leadership teachers ever—Lao-tzu, Confucius, Plato, Plutarch, and Machiavelli—who shared a deep belief in the idea that leadership could be taught and left legacies that included timeless and transcendent literary masterworks. The second section explores how leadership went from being conceived of as a practice reserved only for a select few to one that could be exercised by the many. The ideas of the Enlightenment changed our conception of leadership. Since then, the leadership literature has urged people without power and authority, that is, followers, to understand that they too could be agents of change. The third section turns to leadership and management in business. It was precisely the twentieth-century failure of business schools to make management a profession that gave rise to the twenty-first-century leadership industry.


Author(s):  
Francesca Martelli
Keyword(s):  

Between the third and first centuries BCE, a tomb near the Via Appia not only served as a funerary monument for the Scipiones but was also believed to have once contained the statue of a man from outside the family: Quintus Ennius. This chapter considers how Ennius’ poetry and portrait contributed to the circulation of political prestige. Linking the story of his statue to a later image of the poet in Varro’s De poetis, it argues that Varro’s collection of author portraits and the practice of erecting busts of authors in libraries are best seen as a form of entombment—situating the poet’s imago alongside those of his literary forebears in a space that recognizes their identity as a group, much like the tomb of the Scipiones, or, indeed, any Roman atrium that collects the imagines of a family’s ancestors.


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