Maja Lunde: între apocalips și speranță

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 65-70
Author(s):  
Rodica Grigore

Born in 1975, the Norwegian Maja Lunde, widely known as a gifted children’s writer, surprised the literary world by her first novel, The History of Bees (2015), an ambitious dystopian book meant to put into question some of the greatest challenges our contemporary world has to face: the climatic changes and the threatening idea of a future and hypothetic disappearance of bees. Even if some critics considered her writing dangerously close to non-fiction or an expression of the so called “cli-fi” (“climate fiction”), Lunde proves to be a convincing author, perfectly capable of expressing deep fears of our contemporary Western society, but also able to offer her readers a symbolic solution to many of the major problems of the present. These preoccupations are also to be found in her second novel, The End of the Ocean (2017), where Maja Lunde perfectly succeeds in dealing with some another stringent nowadays issues, namely desertification and water shortages.

Author(s):  
Lindsay Kaplan

In focusing on a medieval theological discourse of figural slavery, this book demonstrates the racist force of the construction of inferior identities for Jews, Muslims, and Africans. Although these groups occupy complexly different positions in contemporary Western society, the medieval linkages between them nevertheless help us understand the recent rise in nationalism and white supremacism both in the United States and Europe. White supremacists and the alt-right have expressly drawn on medieval tropes and phrases to fabricate a notion of originary medieval Christian whiteness that they aspire to recreate in the contemporary moment. While no apparent rationale organizes white supremacists’ animus against blacks, Muslims, and Jews, the history of the ideology of white supremacy can be traced back to medieval Western Europe, when the concept of Christian superiority, often coded as white, opposed itself to an imagined infidel inferiority that correlated Jews, Muslims, and Africans.


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Quartier

Liturgical music at Roman-Catholic funerals has a very diverse character in contemporary Western society, especially in a strongly secularized country like the Netherlands. The spectrum covers the favorite music of the deceased as well as traditional chants. But how is it possible that people still frequently opt for the Requiem, even outside the classical liturgical context? In this article, we explore the concepts of experience and meaning with regard to the Requiemmass. Which kind of experience belongs to this type of liturgical chant? And which meaning is ascribed to it? Using the resonance-theory of Hartmut Rosa, we distinguish a liturgical horizontal dimension (shared experience) and a vertical dimension (religious meaning). Diagonal resonance refers to the liturgical elements of singing. By referring to striking examples from the history of Christian worship, we show that experience and meaning of liturgical chant always depended on its context. It changed; meaning differed from experience and covered it again. For contemporary liturgical practice it would therefore be too simple to only speak about an experiential dimension of the Requiem and no longer about its meaning. The aim must be to combine a personalized meaning with the tradition of ecclesial liturgy.


Author(s):  
Begüm Tuğlu

Feminist authors have long been trying to alter the patriarchal structure of the Western society through different aspects. One of these aspects, if not the strongest, is the struggle to overcome centuries long dominance of male authors who have created a masculine history, culture and literature. As recent works of women authors reveal, the strongest possibility of actually achieving an equalitarian society lies beneath the chance of rewriting the history of Western literature. Since the history of Western literature relies on dichotomies that are reminiscences of modernity, the solution to overcome the inequality between the two sexes seems to be to rewrite the primary sources that have influenced the cultural heritage of literature itself. The most dominant dichotomies that shape this literary heritage are represented through the bonds between the concepts of women/man and nature/culture. As one of the most influential epics that depict these dichotomies, Homer's Odysseus reveals how poetry strengthens the authority of the male voice. In order to define the ideal "man", Homer uses a wide scope of animal imagery while forming the identities of male characters. Margaret Atwood, on the other hand, is not contended with Homer's poem in that it never narrates the story from the side of women. As a revisionist mythmaker, Atwood takes the famous story of Odysseus, yet this time presents it from the perspective of Penelope, simultaneously playing on the animal imagery. Within this frame, I intend to explore in this paper how the animal imagery in Homer's most renowned Odysseus functions as a reinforcing tool in the creation of masculine identities and how Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad defies this formation of identities with the aim of narrating the story from the unheard side, that of the women who are eminently present yet never heard.


1996 ◽  
Vol 36 (312) ◽  
pp. 300-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Pustogarov

In the history of humankind, no matter how far back we look into the past, peaceful relations between people and nations have always been the ideal, and yet this history abounds in wars and bloodshed. The documentary evidence, oral tradition and the mute testimony of archaeological sites tell an incontrovertible tale of man's cruelty and violence against his fellow man. Nevertheless, manifestations of compassion, mercy and mutual aid have a no less ancient record. Peace and war, goodneighbourly attitudes and aggression, brutality and humanity exist side by side in the contemporary world as well.


Labyrinth ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-105
Author(s):  
Gianluca Chiadini

The reception of the notions of trace, arkhé, and document in the work of Alain Nadaud This paper intends to point out the philosophical features in the novels of the French writer Alain Nadaud and their links with the philosophical theory concerning the concepts of trace, arkhé and document elaborated by Jacques Derrida in the second half of the XX century. This subject, related to the contemporary socio-historical concept of post-truth, reveals the originality and the up-to-date tendency in the novels of Alain Nadaud. This paper uncovers new important aspects of his work by proposing a solid philosophical interpretation of its main theoretical principles. In particular, it uncovers the philosophical reasons at the origin of his writing, which is based on the historical research method. Furthermore, it reveals the sense of dystopia of his novels and relates it with the most recent socio-philosophical analysis of contemporary western society.


Author(s):  
Kenneth McK. Norrie

This book explores the development of Scottish child protection law from its earliest days in the poor law, tracing the changing assumptions that underlay child protection processes, and the radical shift of emphasis from private (charitable) endeavour to public (local authority) duty. This book looks at the developing legal processes for removing children from abusive or neglectful environments, explores how child offenders and child victims came to be dealt with in the same processes, and examines the reasons why Scots law has managed to continue to cleave its own procedural path in the contemporary world. It explores both processes and outcomes, explaining how the juvenile court evolved into the children’s hearing, and it examines the substantive continuities between the various orders that could be made over children. The regulation of boarding out and fostering of children is compared with the regulation of institutional care, and the evolution of aftercare provisions is explained. The book also offers an analysis of the (dubious) legal basis for the Imperial practice of sending troubled children to the colonies, as part of a deliberate policy of spreading British “stock” across the world. The final chapter traces the origins and statutory control of the practice of adoption of children, from its days as an informal arrangement through its early manifestation as a minor action changing status to its present position as the most radical order that a court of law can make.


2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (6) ◽  
pp. 1244-1253 ◽  
Author(s):  
T Honkola ◽  
O Vesakoski ◽  
K Korhonen ◽  
J Lehtinen ◽  
K Syrjänen ◽  
...  

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Brown ◽  
Dawn Penney

This article draws on material associated with a solo sailing circumnavigation, undertaken by 16 year old Jessica Watson in 2009–2010, to discuss how her voyage provided a focal point for debates relating to voluntary risk-taking conducted within the sport and leisure context. Specifically, we illustrate how public and media commentaries on her voyage reflect discourses of risk being infused and conflated with discourses of responsibility, youth and gender. Our analysis brings to the fore the contested, moral and political nature of risk discourses in contemporary western society. Public reaction to Watson’s voyage indicates that descriptions of western society as risk-averse fail to capture the situated and dynamic perceptions of risk.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document