scholarly journals Li Shangyin and the Art of Poetic Ambiguity

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-177
Author(s):  
Maja Lavrač
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
The Other ◽  
High Price ◽  
Secret Message ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Li Shangyin ◽  
The One ◽  
Unique Style

Li Shangyin (813–858), one of the most respected, mysterious, ambiguous and provocative of Chinese poets, lived during the late Tang period, when the glorious Tang dynasty was beginning to decline. It was a time of social riots, political division and painful general insecurity. Li Shangyin is famous as a highly original and committed poet who developed a unique style full of vague allusions and unusual images derived from the literary past (the traditional canon, myths and legends) as well as from nature and personal experience. The second important feature of his poetry is a mysteriousness which finally leads to ambiguity. Ambiguity plays an essential role in most of his renowned poems, and he uses it to superbly connect present and past, reality and fantasy, and history and mythology. Thus, ambiguity and obscurity, respectively, often engender different interpretations among Chinese critics. These interpretations reflect the poems’ imaginative qualities, hypotheses and contradictions. Since each interpretive direction emphasizes but a single aspect of the poet’s character, it is more fitting to understand his ambiguous poems in symbolic terms. Such understanding entails that the meaning of the poem is not limited to one interpretation; rather, the poem’s poetic landscape opens itself up to various interpretations.Li Shangyin is actually most popular for his melancholic love poetry that reveals his ambiguous attitude to love. In this poetry, love is shrouded in a secret message. On the one hand, we can sense his moral disapproval of a secret but hopeless love; on the other, we can sense his passion. This leads to a paradox: the pleasing temptations of an illicit romance also exact a high price. In these love poems Li investigates various aspects of the worlds of passion which stoke in him feelings of rapture, satisfaction, joy and hope as well as feelings of doubt, frustration, despair and even thoughts of death.

scholarly journals Li Shangyin and the Art of Poetic Ambiguity

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-177
Author(s):  
Maja Lavrač
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Tang Dynasty ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
The Other ◽  
High Price ◽  
Secret Message ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Li Shangyin ◽  
The One ◽  
Unique Style

Li Shangyin (813–858), one of the most respected, mysterious, ambiguous and provocative of Chinese poets, lived during the late Tang period, when the glorious Tang dynasty was beginning to decline. It was a time of social riots, political division and painful general insecurity. Li Shangyin is famous as a highly original and committed poet who developed a unique style full of vague allusions and unusual images derived from the literary past (the traditional canon, myths and legends) as well as from nature and personal experience. The second important feature of his poetry is a mysteriousness which finally leads to ambiguity. Ambiguity plays an essential role in most of his renowned poems, and he uses it to superbly connect present and past, reality and fantasy, and history and mythology. Thus, ambiguity and obscurity, respectively, often engender different interpretations among Chinese critics. These interpretations reflect the poems’ imaginative qualities, hypotheses and contradictions. Since each interpretive direction emphasizes but a single aspect of the poet’s character, it is more fitting to understand his ambiguous poems in symbolic terms. Such understanding entails that the meaning of the poem is not limited to one interpretation; rather, the poem’s poetic landscape opens itself up to various interpretations.Li Shangyin is actually most popular for his melancholic love poetry that reveals his ambiguous attitude to love. In this poetry, love is shrouded in a secret message. On the one hand, we can sense his moral disapproval of a secret but hopeless love; on the other, we can sense his passion. This leads to a paradox: the pleasing temptations of an illicit romance also exact a high price. In these love poems Li investigates various aspects of the worlds of passion which stoke in him feelings of rapture, satisfaction, joy and hope as well as feelings of doubt, frustration, despair and even thoughts of death.

Hagiographies Unbound

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alireza Doostdar
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Self Care ◽  
The Other ◽  
Scientific Models ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Mystical Tradition ◽  
Islamic Mysticism ◽  
The One

This chapter examines how the hagiographies of friends of God enable manifold readings that enable different forms of attachment to Islamic discourses of ethical self-care and spiritual wayfaring. On the one hand, these readings fully inhabit a mystically inclined Shiʻi tradition featuring proponents and detractors that are both powerful and influential. On the other hand, reading becomes an exercise in a kind of unspoken eclecticism that brings Islamic mysticism under the sign of a universal spirituality through the mediation of the imported sciences of metaphysics. The notion that the marvels of God's friends may be acquired through something other than pious discipline both depends on the Islamic mystical tradition and exceeds it. The chapter compares the search for technical formulas for securing pious self-certainty with other forms of metaphysical experimentation, namely, those that emphasize personal experience, empiricist methods, and scientific models.

Hope

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Stratton-Lake
Keyword(s):  
Moral Theory ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Central Place ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Ernst Bloch ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
Theological Virtues ◽  
The One

In Christian theology ‘hope’ has a central role as one of the three theological virtues. As theology has gradually become separated from moral theory, the inclusion of ‘hope’ within a theory of ethics has become rare. Hope can be either intentional or dispositional. The former is a specific hope for something, whereas the latter is a state of character. Kant gave a central place to intentional hopes in his moral theory with his doctrine of the postulates. Hope also played an essential role in the moral and political writings of Ernst Bloch and Gabriel Marcel. Bloch regarded hope as concerned with a longing for utopia, whereas Marcel regarded hope as a disposition to rise above situations which tempt one to despair. In each of these writers the Christian connection between hope, on the one hand, and faith and love, on the other, remained, although Kant and Bloch did not oppose these categories to reason, but sought to ‘subsume’ them under it.

Richard of St. Victor: An Early Scottish Theologian?

1958 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-52
Author(s):  
G. S. M. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Human Heart ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Song Of Songs ◽  
The Other ◽  
Proper Place ◽  
Peter Abelard ◽  
The Will ◽  
Reason And Faith ◽  
The One

The twelfth century witnessed a memorable conflict between rationalism and authority, in the persons of Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux. It is, of course, erroneous to exaggerate these two extremes; by the one, reason was ultimately accepted as the servant of personal faith, and by the other, authority was founded on a basis of mystical devotion. None the less it remains true that both, in different directions, were guilty of the same dangerous tendency, that of abstracting one element from the wholeness of human personality, and of confining religion to the sphere of that one element; Abelard was too exclusively concerned with matters of the intellect, while Bernard directed an almost equally exclusive attention to the will; and the factor neglected and suppressed by both, which breaks through in Bernard's Sermons on the Song of Songs, and overwhelms Abelard in his affair with Heloise—the factor of emotion, of personal experience, of the deep springs of affection in the human heart—it was this forgotten factor which another school of theologians had the distinction of restoring to its proper place. The great Victorines took a saner and more balanced view of human nature. They studied man in his totality, and were willing to derive or at least expound their doctrine on the level of practical experience. They occupied a mediating position from which, with exaggerating either, they could give due weight to the claims of both reason and faith.

scholarly journals Tennessee Williams’ Awareness of Feminist Issues in A Streetcar Named Desire —From Readers to Ideal Readers

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 106
Author(s):  
Yan HUANG
Keyword(s):  
Reader Response ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Tennessee Williams ◽  
Deep Sympathy ◽  
Streetcar Named Desire ◽  
The One ◽  
A Streetcar Named Desire ◽  
Reader Response Criticism ◽  
The Ideal

On the one side, as a male, Tennessee Williams showed a strong awareness on feminist issues because of his special personal experience, which can be proved by his many plays portraying women. On the other side, he expressed admiration to the muscular beauty of men. A Streetcar Named Desire can be seen as a play to display the conflict in Williams’ mind and to demonstrate his deep sympathy to women. By constructing the confrontation between hero and heroine, Tennessee succeeded guiding readers to the ideal readers to share what in his mind. In this thesis, the author will use the theory of Reader-Response Criticism to explore Tennessee’s awareness on feminist issues, and display how he converted the real readers to the ideal ones step by step.

scholarly journals Hypothetical Art and Art Education: The Educational Role of the Method of Hypothetical Artwork Modelling

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-72
Author(s):  
Jurij Selan
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Educational Practice ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
The Other ◽  
Theoretical Issue ◽  
Educational Role ◽  
Theoretical Construction ◽  
The One

A hypothetical artwork is an artwork that exists only as a fictional creation of an art theorist. The explicatory powers of such hypothetical artworks are mainly used by an art theorist to reflect on an art theoretical issue under consideration. Such an artwork has an intriguing and paradoxical nature. On the one hand, it is only fictitious, but, on the other hand, it tries to function as a real token, persuading the reader to trust it as if it were a real artwork. Even though this kind of argumentation can be deceiving, as it presents a statement of real art on the basis of fiction, it has some important explicatory abilities that can be put to good usein the art educational process. In this case, the construction of the hypothetical artwork is handled as the construction of a theoretical model. The author calls such theoretical construction the method of hypothetical artwork modelling, and its result the hypothetical artwork model. Such a hypothetical artwork model can be usefully employed when one wishesto encourage the student to become fictionally involved in the process of creation of an artwork, thus giving him or her more personal experience of problems that accompany the process of creating a real artwork. When such hypothetical experience is gained, the student can more efficiently learn about the considered art issue. In the paper, the authordemonstrates how the explicatory powers of the method of hypothetical artwork modelling can be put into educational practice regarding an issue taken from colour theory (i.e., the primary colours fallacy). 

scholarly journals Lockdown e “Chiesa in uscita”. Un caso di studio in Italia: la fraternità “AGBP”

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (13) ◽  
pp. 131-142
Author(s):  
Daniela Turco
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Social Bonds ◽  
The Other ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
On Line ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One

The impetuosity of the Sars-Covid 2 infection has been remarkable, quickly upsetting the habits of individuals in every seat of the planet. We can observe, on the one hand, the individuals, lost and called to redefine every area of their daily lives. On the other, the institutions that, seizing this loss, have been called to play their essential role of creating and strengthening social bonds. The Catholic Church has promoted respect for the norms, without renouncing a “religious offer” which seems to have responded to an effective demand for accompaniment with a lot of possibility to chose on line liturgical celebrations, with a multiplicity of forms and possibilities of access. Among the various options possible, it was decided to focus attention on a specific case: the case of the fraternity “Amici di Gesù Buon Pastore” (AGBP), which has experienced a significant increase in its followers in the days of lockdown. In particular, we will ask ourselves what so many spiritual-followers have been looking for and if (and how) this interest, born during the quarantine period, can transform the new forms of religious belonging into a context where the historical religions seem to be unattractive if compared to the many alternatives of spirituality present on the “market”.

SIR WILLIAM WILDE, ONE OF IRELAND'S GREATEST EYE AND EAR SURGEONS AND FATHER OF OSCAR WILDE, ON EYESTRAIN AS A CAUSE OF VISUAL IMPAIRMENT

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 68 (5) ◽  
pp. 664-664
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
Visual Impairment ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
The Other ◽  
High Price ◽  
School Of Medicine ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Continuous Application ◽  
William Wilde ◽  
The One ◽  
Low Wages

Sir William Wilde (1815-1876) is remembered today, if at all, as the father of Oscar Wilde. Largely forgotten is that he was not only a distinguished archeologist and statistician but also the dominant figure in otology and ophthalmology of the Dublin School of Medicine, which was at its peak during his lifetime.1 Like most of his ophthalmologic contemporaries he believed that eyestrain led to visual impairment. He wrote2: In these days of forced education on the one hand, when unhappy children are compelled, both by parents and teachers, to pore over books, often of very small type, for hours and hours together, with the head bent, the shoulders stooped, the abdomen compressed, and the legs often dangling in the air, in crowded, badly illuminated, and illventilated apartments;— when young ladies in the upper circles, and those girls in the middle ranks who are preparing to be governesses and teachers, are obliged to "practice" and read music for five and six hours a day;—when young gentlemen are induced, either by threats or emulation, to read for eight and ten hours a day, and in addition several hours of the night, under the glare of a strong gas light, in order to uphold the character of a school or master at the risk—often at the expense of sight and life—when on the other hand, unfortunate tradesmen are compelled by low wages, the high price of provisions, and scarcity of work, to support their almost starving families by working in dark, damp cellars and garrets for fourteen or sixteen hours a day;—and when poor seamstresses and milliners are necessitated by the fashionable luxuries of the upper classes to work for no less than eighteen hours out of the twenty-four;—and when we add to this the various factories and private trades which require the continuous application of the eye to minute objects, we wonder not that near-sightedness and impaired or altered vision should be now so common amongst us.

‘Complete rubbish but a real page-turner’ Chukovsky and detective stories

2020 ◽  
pp. 169-186
Author(s):  
P. A. Moiseev
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Regular Reader ◽  
The One

K. Chukovsky was one of Russia’s first scholars of detective fiction. Yet his literary criticism on this particular topic has never been researched. Nor has it come to light that his attitude to the genre was ambivalent. On the one hand, he knew it very well, was a regular reader of detective stories and made a number of valuable observations about the works of Conan Doyle (whose writing he contrasted with the cheap sensationalist books about Nat Pinkerton, stressing the quality of logic in Conan Doyle’s stories) and Wilkie Collins. On the other hand, he often made very critical and ironic remarks about the genre, confessing that he failed to comprehend the reason for its popularity. The article suggests the grounds for Chukovsky’s attitude: he argued that literature was linked to ‘the most important personal experience’ (in the words of the writer N. Oleynikov), with entertaining literature automatically dismissed as an outsider to real art.

Ironic Representation, Authorial Voice, and Meaning in Qohelet

2004 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Sharp
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fictional Character ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
Human Choice ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
The One ◽  
Authorial Voice

AbstractThe book of Qohelet presents a literarily noteworthy double voicing and differing perspectives by means of the sage "Qohelet" and the Epilogist. Interpreters have responded with redactional schemas, on the one hand, and with literary defenses of the rhetorical unity of the book, on the other. Aligned with literary studies that discern a rhetorical purpose underlying the fictional character of the sage, the present essay argues for a governing metanarratological irony mediated by the construction of the persona of "Qohelet." Building on appraisals of key functions of irony by Kierkegaard, Booth, and Hutcheon, this study analyzes ways in which ironic representation and authorial voice work rhetorically in the book of Qohelet. Clues to the pervasive irony informing the representation of the persona of "Qohelet" can be discerned in the unreliability of "Qohelet's" voice, in the hyperbole that shades over into caricature regarding "Qohelet's" claims about himself, and in the epistemologically illegitimate way in which "Qohelet" grounds his global skepticism in his avowedly unique and un(con)testable personal experience. Intertextual allusions to the Garden of Eden story are mustered in support of the position that the book's ironic perspective inscribes in the body of "Qohelet" and in the corpus of the text the catastrophic effects of the human choice to privilege the sapiential quest over halakhic obedience. Implications of the present analysis press a challenge to postmodernist hermeneutical strategies that fail to address adequately the issue of the competent decoding of authorial intention in ironic texts.

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