Organicism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arun Kumar Pokhrel
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Willa Cather ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Louis Zukofsky ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Lewis Mumford

Modernist organicism emphasizes the interrelationship between the natural world and society, and links sociocultural changes with nature, biology, and aesthetic forms in imagining the human being—and society—as organic structures. Modernist organicist aesthetics follow the modernist organic principle of art, "form follows function." Crucial to the theory of modernist organicism are theories of biology and life such as those of Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Herbert Spencer. Importantly, modernist organicist aesthetics emphasizes a sense of place or region and ecological consciousness (e.g., the Garden City movement in Britain in the early 20th century and the cultural or anthropological turn of the 1930s). A list of modernist organicists might include D. H. Lawrence, and later Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, Richard Llewellyn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Lewis Mumford, Willa Cather, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky, to name only a few. These artists viewed nature as a living force and showed the interdependence between nature and human beings.

The Invention of Altruism

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Dixon
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religion Of Humanity ◽  
British Culture

‘Altruism’ was coined by the French sociologist Auguste Comte in the early 1850s as a theoretical term in his ‘cerebral theory’ and as the central ideal of his atheistic ‘Religion of Humanity’. This book traces this new language of ‘altruism’ as it spread through British culture between the 1850s and the 1900s, and in doing so provides a portrait of Victorian moral thought. Drawing attention to the importance of Comtean positivism in setting the agenda for debates about science and religion, this volume challenges received ideas about both Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as moral philosophers. Darwin saw sympathy and love, not only selfishness and competition, throughout the natural world. Spencer was the instigator of an Anti-Aggression League and an advocate of greater altruism in Britain’s dealings with the ‘lower races’. The book also sheds light on the rise of popular socialism in the 1880s, on the creation of the idealist ‘altruist’ in novels of the 1890s, and on the individualistic philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, and G. E. Moore—authors considered by some to be representative of fin de siècle ‘egomania’. This wide-ranging study in the history of ideas is relevant to contemporary debates about altruism, evolution, religion, and ethics.

scholarly journals Writing Nature with Darwin, Darwinism and Jung

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Rowland
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
Major Significance ◽  
Mother Goddess ◽  
Literary Darwinism ◽  
Definition Of

Charles Darwin and C. G. Jung were revolutionary thinkers about the role of human beings in the natural world. While Darwin’s Origins of Species (1859) sought to remove both God and “man” from the centre of the understanding of nature, C. G. Jung, one generation later, aimed to remove the ego from the central definition of human nature. Although both theorists have been explored for their conceptual ideas, neither has been seriously considered as writers, and in particular as writers of nature and human nature. This paper shows how similar these authors are in treating the unknowable in the psyche and history as of major significance. In particular, both writers require the resources of ancient myth, especially of nature as an Earth Mother goddess in order to represent the inconceivable. The paper also looks at the new critical practice of “literary Darwinism,” which, while viable in its own terms, suffers from being neither “literary,” nor “Darwinian.”

The Measure of Greatness

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Nature ◽  
Complex Trajectory ◽  
The Many ◽  
Human Excellence ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

Magnanimity is a virtue that has led many lives. Foregrounded early on by Plato as the philosophical virtue par excellence, it became one of the crown jewels in Aristotle’s account of human excellence and was accorded an equally salient place by other ancient thinkers. One of the most distinctive elements of the ancient tradition to filter into the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, it sparked important intellectual engagements there and went on to carve deep tracks through several later philosophies that inherited from this tradition. Under changing names, under reworked forms, it continued to breathe in the thought of Descartes and Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, and their successors. Its many lives have been joined by important continuities. Yet they have also been fragmented by discontinuities—discontinuities reflecting larger shifts in ethical perspectives and competing answers to questions about the nature of the good life, the moral nature of human beings, and their relationship to the social and natural world they inhabit. They have also been punctuated by moments of controversy in which the greatness of this vision of human greatness has itself been called into doubt. This volume provides a window to the complex trajectory of a virtue whose glitter has at times been as heady as it has been divisive. By exploring the many lives it has lived, we will be in a better position to decide whether and why this is a virtue we might still want to make central to our own ethical lives.

Gertrude Stein's Identity:

2006 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
John Bell
Keyword(s):  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Federal Theatre Project ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Thornton Wilder ◽  
Theatre Production ◽  
Puppet Theatre ◽  
Federal Theatre

Donald Vestal's 1930s puppet theatre production of a Gertrude Stein play, Identity, or I Am I Because My Little Dog Knows Me, marked a confluence of Midwest modernism, the resources of the Federal Theatre Project, the development of American puppet theatre as a modernist art form, and the coincidental presence of Stein, Vestal, Thornton Wilder, Bil Baird, and other artists of 1930s Chicago.

Sex and Evolution in Willa Cather'sO Pioneers!andThe Song of the Lark

Prospects ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 565-591
Author(s):  
Bert Bender
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Willa Cather ◽  
Thorstein Veblen ◽  
Professor's House ◽  
Song Of The Lark

Studies of Willa Cather refer to Charles Darwin so rarely that one might conclude she hardly knew of him. But at least one recent interpreter has begun to discuss the Darwinian shadow in her work, describing the “Darwinist cartography” in her novelThe Professor's House(1925) and noting the “striking parallels between Cather's mapping of America and that undertaken by her near contemporary, Thorstein Veblen.”

Image in the Making

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Thomson-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
Digital Tools ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Video Installation ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Fundamental Distinction ◽  
Net Art ◽  
Do So

Human beings have always made images, and to do so they have developed and refined an enormous range of artistic tools and materials. With the development of digital technology, the ways of making images—whether they are still or moving, 2D or 3D—have evolved at an unprecedented rate. At every stage of image making, artists now face a choice between using analog and using digital tools. Yet a digital image need not look digital; and likewise, a handmade image or traditional photograph need not look analog. If we do not see the artist’s choice between the analog and the digital, what difference can this choice make for our appreciation of images in the digital age? Image in the Making answers this question by accounting for the fundamental distinction between the analog and the digital; by explicating the technological realization of this distinction in image-making practice; and by exploring the creative possibilities that are distinctive of the digital. The case is made for a new kind of appreciation in the digital age. In appreciating the images involved in every digital art form—from digital video installation to net art to digital cinema—there is a basic truth that we cannot ignore: the nature and technology of the digital expands both what an image can be as an image and what an image can be for us.

scholarly journals As palavras e os bichos: sobre o lugar do homem no jogo das representações científicas | The words and the beasts: on the place of man in the game of scientific representations

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Milla Benicio
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Scientific Representations ◽  
Complex Transformation ◽  
The Creation

RESUMO O principal objetivo deste artigo é traçar o itinerário científico e filosófico que permitiu à modernidade a criação de um novo campo de visibilidade dentro da ciência, enfraqueceu o antigo pressuposto da centralidade do homem em relação aos demais seres e levou a uma complexa transformação nas relações do homem com o mundo natural. Nosso foco será, portanto, a grande reorganização epistemológica e cultural do Ocidente, cujas quebras de paradigmas revolucionaram não apenas as noções ligadas à natureza, mas, principalmente, ao papel do homem nesse cenário.Palavras-chave: Reorganização Epistemológica; Homem; Mundo Natural.      ABSTRACT This article aims to draw the scientific and philosophical route which allowed to modernity the creation of a new field of visibility within science. This field weakened the old assumption of the centrality of human beings in relation to other and led to a complex transformation in human relationships with the natural world. Our focus will therefore be the major epistemological reorganization of the Western, whose breaking paradigms revolutionized not only the concepts related to the nature, but, mainly, to the role of the man in this scenario.Keywords: Epistemological Reorganization; Man; Natural World.

Dynamic Form

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cara L. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Mina Loy ◽  
Spatial Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modernist Studies ◽  
Verbal Category

This book traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, the book examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as the book states, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment. As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, the book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. It thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.

The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Students ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Magical Realism ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Post Secondary ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Many ◽  
Hogarth Press

With thirty-nine original chapters from internationally prominent scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf is designed for post-secondary students, scholars, and common readers. Feminist to the core, each chapter offers an overview that is at once fresh and thoroughly grounded in prior scholarship. Six parts focus on Woolf’s life, her texts, her experiments, her as a professional, her contexts, and her afterlife. Opening chapters on Woolf’s life address the powerful influences of family, friends, and home. Part II on her works moves chronologically, emphasizing Woolf’s practice of writing essays and reviews alongside her fiction. Chapters on Woolf’s experimentalism pay special attention to the literariness of Woolf’s writing, with opportunity to trace its distinctive watermark while ‘Professions of Writing’, invites readers to consider how Woolf worked in cultural fields including and extending beyond the Hogarth Press and the Times Literary Supplement. Part V on ‘Contexts’ moves beyond writing to depict her engagement with the natural world as well as the political, artistic, and popular culture of her time. The final part, ‘Afterlives’, demonstrates the many ways Woolf’s reputation continues to grow. Of particular note, chapters explore three distinct Woolfian traditions in fiction: the novel of manners, magical realism, and the feminist novel.

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