Tragedy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan L. Feagin
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Tragic Hero ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Shakespearean Tragedy

Tragedy is primarily a type of drama, though non-dramatic poetry (‘lyric tragedy’) and some novels (for example, Moby Dick) have laid claim to the description. As a genre, it began in ancient Greece and forms a part of the western European tradition. Historically, it has carried prestige for playwrights and actors because it dealt with persons, generally men, of ‘high’ or noble birth, who, by virtue of their stature, represented the most profound sufferings and conflicts of humanity, both morally and metaphysically. The history of the genre is part of the history of how art and culture reflect views about class and gender. Tragic theory has concentrated primarily on how to define the genre. A persistent feature is the tragic hero, who begins by occupying a position of power or nobility, but comes to a catastrophic end through some action of his own. According to the Aristotelian tradition, the audience is supposed to experience pity and fear in response to the sufferings of the tragic hero, and perhaps pleasure from its cathartic effects. Hegel initiated a paradigm shift in tragic theory in proposing that tragic plots essentially involve conflicts of duty rather than suffering. Greek tragedy and Shakespearean tragedy provide two different exemplars of the genre. The tradition inspired by Greek tragedy emphasized a rigidly defined genre of dramatic poetry; French neoclassic tragedy is part of this tradition. Shakespearean tragedy, on the other hand, is written partly in prose, and includes comic elements and characters who are not nobly born. Lessing and Ibsen also resisted restraints imposed on the genre in terms of its representation of social class and gender in favour of drama that was more realistic and relevant to a bourgeois audience. Twentieth-century criticism has questioned the viability of the genre for modern times.

By Black Women’s Hands: Building Equitable Justice

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-77
Author(s):  
Livia Maria San’t AnnaE Sant’Anna Vaz
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
The Other ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Brazilian Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
System Data ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Social Vulnerabilities

The article evinces the need for the inclusion of Black women in the Brazilian justice system if equitable justice is to be achieved. The intersecting oppressions of race and gender to which Black women have been subjected down through the colonialist, slave-owning history of Brazil are still conditioning Black women’s access to spaces of power, notedly in the Brazilian justice system. Data are presented that illustrate the effects of institutional racism and sexism on justice officials, particularly how the dearth of Black women – the most vulnerabilized social category in Brazilian society – produces a single, white-centric, androcentric interpretation that ultimately makes the achievement of justice a white man’s privilege. From this perspective, Black women find themselves at a kind of intersectional crossroads that, on one hand, reinforces their social vulnerabilities while, on the other hand, it potentializes their ability to foster an epistemological, hermeneutic transformation inside the justice system, aimed at building a system that incorporates gender and race equity.

Polish History through the Eyes of Three Jewish Popular Historians

1998 ◽  
pp. 312-318
Author(s):  
Jerzy Tomaszewski
Keyword(s):  
Large Volume ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
History Of

This chapter provides a comparison of Howard Sachar's book The Course of Modern Jewish History, which was first published in 1958, with two other general works on Jewish history. One is a large volume entitled A History of the Jewish People, edited by Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, which was first published in Hebrew in 1969. The other is Robert M. Seltzer's Jewish People, Jewish Thought, which is more limited in size and scope and intended for a broad audience. The chapter considers only topics relating to Polish history, not those concerned with exclusively internal Jewish problems or the history of other nations. Nor will there be any general assessment of Sachar's book. Although Ben-Sasson's and Seltzer's works cover Jewish history from ancient to modern times, the story of the Jews in Poland is a relatively recent chapter in this history: it dates only from the creation of the Polish state in the tenth century. Both authors mention the early period of Polish history only briefly, beginning their real narratives of Polish Jewry with the detailed analysis of privileges granted to Jews by Polish kings in the thirteenth century.

FEMALE DEITIES IN BALINESE SOCIETY: LOCAL GENIOUS, INDIAN INFLUENCES, AND THEIR WORSHIP

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-61
Author(s):  
I Ketut Ardhana
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Political Aspect ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Female Deities ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One

One of the main issues that has been discussed in Indonesia regarding the democracy process in a modern world is about the feminism and gender issues. On the one hand, women are considered to play limited roles, whilst on the other hand, the men have always been considered to play a significant role. This can be traced back in the long process of the Balinese history not only in terms of political aspect, but also in the context of socio cultural aspects. It is important to look at what has happened in the Balinese societies, since Bali is known as a Hindu mozaic in Southeast Asia. The Balinese society has its own culture based on local culture that is strongly influenced by the Indian or Indic culture. The Balinese society is a patrilineal system, in which a man has a higher position, but in fact it was even Bali had a woman princess, who was of mixed Javanese and Balinese heritage, a wife of King Udayana of Bali between the 10th and 11th century. Both of them were considered as the Balinese kings at the same time. In the era of these two kings they were successful in integrating between Hinduism and Buddhism. Until now, the Balinese believe the soul of Mahendradatta as Durga. The main questions that will be addressed in this paper are firstly: how do the Balinese interpret the female deities? Secondly, how do they worship them? Thirdly, what is the meaning of this worship in terms of religious and cultural aspects in the modern and postmodern time? By discussing these issues, it is expected that we will have a better understanding on how the Balinese worship the female deities in the prehistoric, classical, and modern times in the context of a global or universal culture

scholarly journals East and West in Zakia Khairhoum's the End of My Dangerous Secret

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 73-82
Author(s):  
Youssef EL KAIDI
Keyword(s):  
Arab World ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Cultural Reality ◽  
History Of Literature

Literature is an arena for cross-cultural representation par excellence. It is in the literature that images produce an awareness of the Self and Other, and of the Here and the Elsewhere, however small that awareness maybe. The accounts of many canonical literary figures in the history of literature featured portrayals and descriptions of radically different people and customs, exotic lands, and far-off places where everything is outlandish and anomalous. Literary representation, therefore, plays a pivotal role in shaping perception, creating historical and textual monoliths, stereotypes, and essentialization about ethnic minorities, race, sexuality, and gender. This article investigates the politics of representation of the Self and the Other in Zakia Khairhoum’s novel The End of My Dangerous Secret (Nihayat Sirri L’khatir, 2008) from a postcolonial feminist’s point of view. I argue that Khairhoum does not only shatter the foundations of patriarchy in the Arab world but also undermines and subverts Western colonial discourse and its claim of supremacy. The novel foregrounds a different pattern of representation that has not yet been sufficiently investigated, which is the denigration of both the Self and the Other and the quest for a third cultural reality that is defined in terms of gender equality, justice, human rights and democracy.

scholarly journals The language of lace and embroidery from the court of Louis XIV through to contemporary haute couture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Catherine Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
French Society ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Visual Discourse ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Haute Couture ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Development Of Identity ◽  
And Gender

<p>The history of thread work is a story of practicality and functionality, but it is also a tale of power, fashion, virtuosity, decorum, art and culture. Thread work has played a role as a visual language in France for many centuries, continually evolving in its techniques and range of expressive and stylistic possibilities and thus in its significance as a communicative medium. In more recent times, thread work has come to be considered as a form of social and cultural discourse in its own right that is consequently referred to as ‘visual rhetoric’. Following this unique form of visual discourse through the history of fashion allows consideration of the development of identity and gender roles in French society as well as the interrelated narratives of the creative processes involved in the production of lace and embroidery. These reflections lead in turn to consideration of the ways processes of production and consumption were disrupted and transformed by major events, by sumptuary laws and political edicts. The language of thread work has been encoded and decoded by all socio-economic classes, and is underwritten by tensions between power and dependency, rich and poor, light and dark, public show and private domesticity. It has the capacity to express identities and to enhance communities. In more recent times the reconsideration of the value of thread work in the design concepts of haute couture has seen a revitalisation of the appreciation of this medium in an industry associated with luxury, exclusivity and creativity. The language of thread-work remains ambivalent and complex in France today, signifying an innocuous ‘feminine’ pastime on the one hand, and a valued professional skill and cultural heritage on the other.</p>

Islands, the Humanities and environmental conservation

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-110
Author(s):  
GARRY W. TROMPF
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Environmental Conservation ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Island Conservation ◽  
Historical Materials ◽  
The Social ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
And Gender

SUMMARYThis paper concerns itself with the contributions that the Humanities make to the understanding of islands and their bettered environmental conservation. Most distinctively, the Humanities comprise Literary Studies, Studies in Art and Culture (including Indigenous and Gender Studies) and Philosophy (with Aesthetics and the History of Ideas), but they also encompass Archaeology, History, Linguistics, Studies in Religion and, of late, Media and Communication Studies, even though members of this latter cluster frequently deploy methods from the social sciences. The goal here is to explore many of the implications such Human Studies and their sub-branches may have for island conservation, above all informed by the History of Ideas, in order to introduce the relevant key issues and inter-relationships and offer the most judicious illustrative materials. Variances in the reach and special attention of all these branches of knowledge are vast and intricate, while complex relativities apply both in the types of island situations and in expectations about what can or should be conserved. Since the mass of apposite discussions in the literature cannot possibly be summarized here, this article circumvents the difficulties by means of a special double-edged review. It ranges over the history of human consciousness of insular worlds, as reflected in mythic, legendary and historical materials, yet en route it uncovers how Humanities research can elucidate the human responses to islands through known time and shows how developing meaning-making has generally enhanced the appeal of sea-locked environments as worth conserving.

Gender Regimes in Western Societies from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (03) ◽  
pp. 391-399
Author(s):  
Didier Lett
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Relative Success ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Regimes ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One

The concept of gender has become such an important subject in international historiography over the last two decades that it might appear odd to devote an entire dossier of the Annales to the topic. However, the relative success of this field of research may also conceal ambiguities in both the intellectual project underlying the term as well as its reception in the social sciences. For certain authors, undertaking a history of gender has meant writing a history of women. Though this form of history now enjoys proper recognition, it is still depreciated in two ways: on the one hand, it is qualified as a militant—and therefore unscholarly—history; and, on the other, it is criticized according to some vague argument claiming that no matter how it is labeled—“gender” or “women”—the inquiry is already dated. Without a doubt, the now canonical expression “history of women and gender” has generated real confusion among those scholars who are not particularly engaged with the field.1

scholarly journals Caesura of History: Performing Greek Tragedy after Brecht

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 241
Author(s):  
Matthias Dreyer
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
A Site ◽  
Established Order ◽  
The Way

Taking into account the intertwining of the theory of tragedy on the one hand and theatrical work on ancient tragic texts on the other, the paper explores the way in which tragedy poses the question of history. This is especially the case in conceptions of tragedy as an interruption in a continuum. Hölderlin’s idea of caesura, its reflection in Benjamin’s understanding of tragedy as a revision of myth are in the center of a critical dramaturgy of this kind. By analysing Brecht’s work on Antigone as well as the stagings of critical theatre makers that came after Brecht (Einar Schleef, Dimiter Gotscheff), the paper shows the consequences of the concept ‘tragedy as caesura‘ on the level of the aesthetics of the theatre, unclosing in a radical way the temporality of the tragic process. From this point of view, tragedy is understood as a site of encounter with the persisting powers of the past; as reflexive rupture in the transition between times, that undermines the established order, but without, however, arriving at a new one. Although in the history of theatre and thought tragedy has been too often associated with the universal and timeless, how is it possible to think of historicity in a way negating submission under the universal without losing the genre of tragedy itself?

The Two Faces of Janus

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-32
Author(s):  
Yael Tamir
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Common Perception ◽  
Information And Technology

This chapter argues that nationalism is a deceptive ideology; one of its faces looks to the past, the other looks to the future. It discusses the negative descriptions of nationalism that emphasize its backward-looking face. The chapter also explains how nationalism tried to revive (or invent) an image of a magnificent past. It examines the history of nationalism, and one of its most fascinating features, modernizing powers. Despite the common perception of nationalism as identified with primordial, tribal feelings, the chapter asserts that true power of nationalism in modern times is grounded in its ability to promote processes of modernization and industrialization that go hand in hand with the universalization of education, information, and technology. Ultimately, the chapter portrays nationalism as an expression of a populist state of mind. It further presents the most interesting definition of populism.

Tragedy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan L. Feagin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Shakespearean Tragedy

Tragedy began in ancient Greece as a type of drama and has become an important part of the literary and critical tradition in Europe and the United States. Nondramatic poetry (‘lyric tragedy’) and some novels (for example, Moby Dick) have laid claim to being tragedies, or at least to being tragic, explicated as a type of plot or as a way of seeing the world. In general, concepts of tragedy reflect the ways humans think about and try to manage some of the most important features of human life – family, moral duty, suffering, and the noble heights and barbaric depths of human experience – in an unpredictable or intractable world. Greek and Shakespearean tragedy provide two different exemplars of tragedy as a dramatic genre. The tradition inspired by the former typically emphasizes more formal constraints; French neoclassic tragedy is part of this tradition. Shakespearean tragedy, in contrast, is written partly in prose and includes comic scenes and characters who are not nobly born. Lessing and Ibsen also favoured drama that was more realistic and relevant to a bourgeois audience. Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ has been the centre of much debate in the twentieth-century over the viability of the genre for modern times. The philosophy of tragedy also has two exemplars: Aristotle and G. W. F. Hegel. In the Aristotelian tradition, protagonists bring suffering as an unforeseen consequence of their actions. Hegel proposes that tragic plots essentially involve a protagonist’s struggle with conflicting duties rather than with unintended or unforeseen consequences. A persistent though not universal feature is a protagonist who comes to a catastrophic end, bringing others down in the process. In general, philosophies of tragedy have attempted to define the genre and elucidate how it depicts human action in relation to reason, morality and emotion. In what follows, I provide a glimpse of the state of the genre for a particular time or place, and then describe the main theories about its potential and purposes.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document