Bacon, Francis (1909–1992)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fionna Barber
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Emotional Appeal ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Human Condition

British painter Francis Bacon was one of the most important figures of international post-war modernism. During the 1940s and 1950s, he developed a characteristic painting format used throughout his career, generally featuring an isolated figure within an armature or stage-like setting. Bacon’s work is renowned for its raw emotional appeal, and also its ability to convey an existential sense of the human condition. Bacon’s painting developed sporadically until Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) attracted considerable critical attention. During the 1950s, a series of variations on Diego Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (c. 1650) supported the development of Bacon’s international reputation, consolidated by a major retrospective at the Tate in 1962. In 1970, however, on the eve of his major retrospective exhibition at Grand Palais, Paris, his former lover George Dyer died of an overdose, a tragedy Bacon later commemorated in a group of triptychs. After this event he withdrew considerably from Soho Bohemia, in which he had played such a leading role during the previous two decades.

From the Golden to the Dark Decade, From Reforms to Isms and Ologies

1980 ◽  
Vol 15 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 457-470
Author(s):  
John Pinder
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
Demand Management ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Applied Social Science ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Welfare State

THE 1950s WERE A WONDERFUL DECADE FOR APPLIED SOCIAL science: for the belief that reason addressed to economic and social problems can improve the human condition. Compare the 1950s with the 1930s and ask how much of the improvement was due to Keynes and Beveridge. It is inevitable that a generation of debunkers should follow whose answer would be ‘not much’. But that would have seemed a strange conclusion in the 1950s; and the view of the 1950s was surely right. We had full employment in place of 10 per cent unemployment in the 1920s and nearly 15 per cent in the 1930s; and after the first years of post-war reconstruction, it was reasonable to attribute this to Keynesian demand management. We had a safety net through which relatively few fell into poverty; and this was Beveridge's social security and the welfare state.

Il potere dei giudici e la latitanza della politica

2012 ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Melis Guido
Keyword(s):  
Old Regime ◽  
High Court ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War

The power of judges and the default of politics. Since 1861 the High Court of Magistrates has been part of the top level of the Italian state. It was the task of the Court to turn into jurisprudence the great bourgeois laws, when Italy was still rural and old regime. However the judges held power: internally, as the High Court ruled judicial careers; and externally, because judges protected their privileges. Fascism restricted the liberty of judges, but at the same time allowed them to retain their power of control of careers. In the post-war Republic, the judges discovered the newborn Constitution only in the 1950s and started to defend it. In more recent times, the judges have taken a leading role in the three "emergencies": against terrorism, mafia, and corruption. In all three of these situations they have acted as proxies, given the lack of accountability of politicians.

scholarly journals récit de circonstance à la pensée humaniste : la condition humaine en temps de guerre dans l’œuvre de Vercors

2021 ◽  
pp. 661-679
Author(s):  
María de los Ángeles Hernández Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nous Proposons ◽  
World War ◽  
French Writer ◽  
Post War ◽  
Siglo Xx ◽  
Second World ◽  
Seconde Guerre Mondiale ◽  
The Human Condition

Los dos conflictos mundiales que protagonizan la primera mitad del siglo XX provocan un movimiento de renovación humanista en busca de nuevos valores para el hombre contemporáneo. Entre las muchas propuestas que surgen, la de la obra y el pensamiento del escritor francés Vercors, especialmente marcado por la Segunda Guerra mundial. En este artículo, trataremos de identificar y analizar las particularidades del nacimiento de la propuesta vercoriana en el contexto francés de la guerra y de la inmediata posguerra. Las primeras obras de ficción del autor se construyen a partir de un diálogo directo con la realidad contemporánea, escritos de los que surgen diferentes interrogantes sobre la condición humana a los que Vercors tratará de responder en sus ensayos de corte ético-filosófico. Para ello, proponemos un estudio detallado de algunas de estas producciones con el fin de crear un espacio de convergencia entre las identidades ética y estética que caracterizan las primeras publicaciones del autor. The two World Wars brought a trend of humanist revival in search of new values for con-temporary man. Among others, the Second World War particularly left its mark on the work and thought of the French writer Vercors. In this article, we will try to identify and analyse the particularities of the birth of Vercors’ works in the French context of the war and post-war periods. Based on contemporary realities, his first fictions raised questions about the human condition, which Vercors tried to answer in his ethical-philosophical es-says. We propose a detailed study of some of these texts in order to create a space of con-vergence between the ethical and aesthetic identities that characterise the author’s early publications. Les deux conflits mondiaux de la première moitié du XXe siècle provoquent un renouveau de la pensée humaniste contemporaine. Parmi les nombreuses propositions qui surgissent, l'œuvre et la pensée de l'écrivain français Vercors, particulièrement marqué par la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Dans cet article, nous tenterons d'identifier et d'analyser les particularités de la naissance de la proposition vercorienne dans le contexte français de la guerre et de l'immédiat après-guerre. Les premières œuvres de fiction de l'auteur sont construites sur la base d'un dialogue direct avec la réalité contemporaine, des écrits d'où émergent différentes questions sur la condition humaine, auxquelles Vercors tentera de répondre dans ses essais éthico-philosophiques. Nous proposons une étude détaillée de certaines de ces productions afin de créer un espace de convergence entre les identités éthiques et esthétiques qui caractérisent les premières publications de l'auteur.

Global Beckett

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rónán McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
Production History ◽  
Waiting For Godot ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
The Human Condition

Beckett, arguably the most important playwright of the twentieth century, has achieved an international reputation that goes well beyond his achievement as a writer. There is in effect a ‘Beckett brand’, a marketable image of the man and his works. The abstraction of his theatre work, its lack of definite geographical or specific referents, has led to a tenacious discourse of universalism. His global fame developed from the first production ofWaiting for Godot, seen as the epitome of modernist experiment, delivering a profound image of the human condition free of historical specificity and thus available to any number of different interpretive schemes. The production history of Beckett’s work in recent times, however, has shown that it is at its most effective in its trans-historical capacity, represented most tellingly in instances such as the productions ofGodotin Sarajevo or New Orleans. Beckett is ‘glocal’ rather than global.

Sophocles’ Ajax: A Matter of Judgment

Antichthon ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 18-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary M. Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Code Of Conduct ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Emotional Appeal ◽  
The Human Condition

Ajax is unmatched among the works of Sophocles in its barren, cruel atmosphere and its repulsive view of society. The dominant mood is hatred; sometimes it simply breaks out; but always it is there in language and action. Ajax’ curious emotional appeal to us was noted by earlier critics. ‘Odysseus is the wise man, Odysseus adopts the correct attitude, but it is to Ajax that the heart goes out.’ More recently, Kitto and Knox have modified the conception of an Ajax deserving of our pity. His suffering is largely self-inflicted, and is admirable solely because he labours so fiercely to purge his reputation of the damage caused by his wrongdoing. ‘Ajax had little Wisdom in the handling of his life, and his lack of Wisdom destroyed him, but nevertheless Ajax was magnificent.’ This view typifies the conventional opinion. Knox finds the essential issue to be the inadequacy of the old morality (τούς μέν φίλους εΰ ποιεϊν, τούς δ’ έχϑρούς κακῶς — to help your friends, harm your enemies). Its disadvantages are illustrated in Ajax’ blind retaliation at whatever cost. Knox builds a superb case from the scene where Ajax awakens to the fluctuation of human relationships in his famous soliloquy about the inroads of time (646 ff.). The instinctive resilience and self-control of Odysseus make him the triumphant figure. Indeed, the emergence of these qualities softens and harmonizes a discordant presentation of the hybris-ate motif. ‘The nature of man’s life in time, its instability, is recognized by all three parties, Ajax, Odysseus, the Atridae. The only code of conduct proper to such a vision of the human condition is that of Odysseus, a tolerant and tragic humility.’

An Adolescent Girl Experiments with Sexuality: Rain (Christine Jeffs, 2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Adolescent Girl ◽  
Emotional Problems ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Core ◽  
Parental Neglect ◽  
The Human Condition

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.

Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Killer Whale ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
The Human Condition

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.

Dreams of a Black Commons on Turtle Island

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Wild Mushrooms ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty ◽  
Black Land ◽  
The Human Condition

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.  

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