scholarly journals The Sublime as a Response to Terror: A Study of Empiricism and Transcendence in Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s “El monte de las ánimas”

Author(s):  
Megan DeVirgilis

This paper studies the relationship between 18th century Enlightenment philosophy and 19th century Romantic expression by relating the Burkean and Kantian conceptualizations of the sublime to Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s leyenda, “El monte de las ánimas.” Although Burke opts for an empirical approach while Kant takes a transcendental approach, both theories highlight the contradictory philosophical platform of the Enlightenment: individual>society. The shift in focus from the social to the individual is evidenced in 19th century literary production through Bécquer’s treatment of the relationship between the subject and the empirical and metaphysical worlds. In this paper, this relationship is studied through the representations of objects and sounds that are all used to inspire one sensation: terror. These representations convey the menacing aspects of nature, break the boundaries of time and space, and juxtapose reality and unreality. In this way, the analysis suggests that the narrative and descriptive techniques used to represent the terror experienced by the characters aim to inspire a similar effect on the reader, while also indicating that the philosophy of the Enlightenment provides the theoretical underpinnings for Romantic expression in the 19th century.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Selina Monjau

Interspecies intercourse between humans and simians has been the subject of numerous texts by various authors of Western literature since the 19th century. From Gustave Flaubert to Ian McEwan to Peter Høeg – analyzing nine texts overall, the author addresses an extraordinary and thus far mostly disregarded motif's cultural and literary historical backgrounds. In the process, she does not only examine the relationship between humans and simians and the way it changed over time, but also elaborates on the topical relevance for Animal, Gender, Queer and Women's Studies, as well as for the social discourse with regard to race and ethnicity.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-140
Author(s):  
Constantin Vadimovich Troianowski

This article investigates the process of designing of the new social estate in imperial Russia - odnodvortsy of the western provinces. This social category was designed specifically for those petty szlachta who did not possess documents to prove their noble ancestry and status. The author analyses deliberations on the subject that took place in the Committee for the Western Provinces. The author focuses on the argument between senior imperial officials and the Grodno governor Mikhail Muraviev on the issue of registering petty szlachta in fiscal rolls. Muraviev argued against setting up a special fiscal-administrative category for petty szlachta suggesting that its members should join the already existing unprivileged categories of peasants and burgers. Because this proposal ran against the established fiscal practices, the Committee opted for creating a distinct social estate for petty szlachta. The existing social estate paradigm in Russia pre-assigned the location of the new soslovie in the imperial social hierarchy. Western odnodvortsy were to be included into a broad legal status category of the free inhabitants. Despite similarity of the name, the new estate was not modeled on the odnodvortsy of the Russian provinces because they retained from the past certain privileges (e.g. the right to possess serfs) that did not correspond to the 19th century attributes of unprivileged social estates.


Author(s):  
Doron Swade

The principles on which all modern computing machines are based were enunciated more than a hundred years ago by a Cambridge mathematician named Charles Babbage.’ So declared Vivian Bowden—in charge of sales of the Ferranti Mark I computer— in 1953.1 This chapter is about historical origins. It identifies core ideas in Turing’s work on computing, embodied in the realisation of the modern computer. These ideas are traced back to their emergence in the 19th century where they are explicit in the work of Babbage and Ada Lovelace. Mechanical process, algorithms, computation as systematic method, and the relationship between halting and solvability are part of an unexpected congruence between the pre-history of electronic computing and the modern age. The chapter concludes with a consideration of whether Turing was aware of these origins and, if so, the extent—if any—to which he may have been influenced by them. Computing is widely seen as a gift of the modern age. The huge growth in computing coincided with, and was fuelled by, developments in electronics, a phenomenon decidedly of our own times. Alan Turing’s earliest work on automatic computation coincided with the dawn of the electronic age, the late 1930s, and his name is an inseparable part of the narrative of the pioneering era of automatic computing that unfolded. Identifying computing with the electronic age has had the effect of eradicating pre-history. It is as though the modern era with its rampant achievements stands alone and separate from the computational devices and aids that pre-date it. In the 18th century lex continui in natura proclaimed that nature had no discontinuities, and we tend to view historical causation in the same way. Discontinuities in history are uncomfortable: they offend against gradualism, or at least against the idea of the irreducible interconnectedness of events. The central assertion of this chapter is that core ideas evidenced in modern computing, ideas with which Turing is closely associated, emerged explicitly in the 19th century, a hundred years earlier than is commonly credited.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey S. Librett

I examine the relation between anxiety and the COVID-19 pandemic.  For context, I begin by sketching the rise of anxiety as a theme from the 19th century to the post-World War II era, as a mood of the individual in a world without absolutes.  Then, I characterize the current moment as the age of the anxiety of the global contagion.  Next, I examine the most general effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the individual ego, as simultaneous radical separation from and connection with others.  I proceed to juxtapose this situation with Freud’s anxiety theory, which likewise involves simultaneous separation and connection.  The social ego today thus appears, from a Freudian perspective, as in an exacerbated anxiety-state.  I claim that this exacerbation helps us understand more clearly Freud’s anxiety theory, and vice versa.  I then consider where this anxiety takes place, and so I examine the Freudian “site” of anxiety—the ego. This examination clarifies two aspects of Freud’s ego-theory: both the sense in which the Freudian ego is (post)modern, and the sense in which Freud’s linkage of anxiety with the ego is not occasional, but constitutive.  That is, the ego is the site of anxiety, in that anxiety characterizes the ego as such, because the ego is a (post) modern liminal structure.  I suggest in conclusion that the affirmation and acceptance of anxiety as a fundamental experience of the ego, and of the psyche more generally, constitutes an ethical imperative for psychoanalysis in general, and especially in the contemporary age of the global contagion.


2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-132
Author(s):  
Rosa Ricci

The theory of affections has seen a renewed conceptual interest both in the role played in the formulation of power structures in modernity, which remains important in understanding the present form of Nation State, and in the possibility to formulate a new interpretation of the social relationship useful to surpass the classical psychological lectures. We aim here to reconsider an affect which in contemporary language is tinged with theological nuances: the affect of fides. We can translate the word using the modern terms of trust and belief, but also loyalty. The choice of this particular affect is due to the centrality that, in our view, it occupies in modern contract theories, and to its ability to reflect, with its multiple conceptual stratification, different perspectives and political proposals. In order to clarify the terms of this discussion, we will henceforth use the term fides, alongside with different meanings which overlap within it, to illustrate two different and divergent proposals that have emerged during the seventeenth century. We consider, in particular, the thought of Spinoza opposed to the social contract theories by Hobbes in order to understand the modern theoretical break with previous political concepts; in particular, we will briefly analyze the different conceptions of Societas civilis that emerge from this division. The background of these considerations is the analysis of modern philosophy‘s use of the theory of affections. The XVII century witnessed the rise of social contract theory. It draws on the concept of the individual, conceived as isolated from others, located in the original state of nature (pre-social), unable to develop its rational part. It is therefore a victim of its own passions, but even more so those of others. The dominant sentiments emerging in Hobbes‘ Leviathan are therefore those of awe and fear. They derive from the constant uncertainty of one‘s power and strength; the uncertainty of being able to maintain everyone‘s domination over others and thus to suffer in turn the others‘ power. From the necessity to control these emotions in a rational way emerges the contractual proposal to transfer the power to an authority (singular or plural) whom all subjects must obey. Philosophical movements such as neostoicism and philosophical works such as Les passions de l‘ame by Descartes, testify in their „rationalist“ proposal the need to keep a constant control over the passions. They open the way for the famous dialectics of reason and passion, a central theme throughout the Enlightenment. This need to dominate the passions arouses from the complex Cartesian metaphysical theory and from its conception of the individual always split between body and soul, reason and instinct. These two models are the ones which have prevailed; this conception of individual and society and this approach to the passions still dominate common sense when we talk about human affections. The paper follows an itinerary across three authors of the modern age. At first we try to delineate the theory of affection by Descartes, and the birth of the dichotomy of body and soul through the focus of two of the most important works by Descartes: Méditations métaphysiques and Traité sur les passions de l‘âme. Then, by analyzing the works of Hobbes (Leviathan), and Spinoza (Ethic and Political treatise) we will describe in which terms the subject carrying his affective baggage interacts in a political space.


Author(s):  
Tatyana S. Sadova ◽  
◽  
Elena V. Golovchenko

The article examines the features of the functioning of the structure of duty “povinen + infinitive” on examples of its use in the “Military Regulations” of 1716. In the function of expressing obligation and directiveness, the construction "povinen + infinitive”, according to a number of studies, was borrowed from the Polish language, through the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages, at the beginning of the 18th century. Despite the rare use due to high competition with the primordially Russian formulas of the same semantic field, it is consistently used in the texts of the directive orientation of the 18th century, performing certain pragmatic tasks, one of which is the expression of the personal responsibility of the subject of “povinnost” in the military hierarchy having a lower status a modal action object. It is assumed that the extremely rare use of the formula “povinen + infinitive” can be explained by the significant influence of the original semantics of the ‘personal responsibility’ lexeme “povinen”, which depends on the deep content of the wordroot -vin- in Russian, which does not quite coincide with the strictly deontic meaning of ‘obliged, compelled’ contained in the borrowed formula. As a result, by the beginning of the 19th century in business texts the formula “povinen + infinitive” was displaced from use by other modal structures of this functional-semantic field.


1974 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 360-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Starobinski

SYSNOPSISAt the beginning of the 19th century France had many experts on the ‘moral treatment of insanity’. Very few of them, however, applied their experience and theories to the role of language in the development of behaviour from childhood on, in the pathogenesis of mental disorders, and in psychotherapy. To Dr. Louis Cerise, one of the founders of the Annales Médico-Psychologiques, belongs the great distinction of formulating a theory which tried to take account of the necessary contribution of language to individual development. In his book Des Fonctions et des Maladies Nerveuses (1842), he put forward a view of the relationship between the individual and society. His concept of ‘the goal of activity’ still merits our attention.


MIGRAINE (‘sick headache’) is a common malady, primarily comprising a characteristic visual disturbance (shimmering or scintillating zigzag ‘scotoma’) associated with headache and nausea. The condition is considered to be of very ancient origin, albeit the extreme vagueness of many of the claims for early accounts cited as indicative of migraine. By the 18th century, however, there appear descriptions connoting certain symptoms which undeniably can be construed as migraine, although it was not really until the 19th century that the disease received really serious scientific or medical analysis. The present century, particularly the past twenty-five years, has witnessed considerable research into migraine, and an impressive body of literature, which grows daily, exists on the subject (1). The primary purpose of the present paper is to draw attention to a historically important but overlooked original contribution to the study of migraine made over a century ago by Sir George B. Airy (1801-1892; F.R.S. 1836; P.R.S. 1871; R. S. Copley, and Royal, Medallist) as several of his observations have subsequently become well established clinical entities in the large array of symptoms now recognized as pathognomonic, or variants, of migraine.


Gesnerus ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 52 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 247-263
Author(s):  
Cay-Rüdiger Prüll

The rise of scientific medicine in the 19th century had its origins mainly in Rudolf Virchows localistic cellular pathology. As a consequence the organism as a complex system was kept in the background. In recognition of this prob-lem, concepts of pathology, emerging in 20th century, tried in vain to establish organismic theories of illness. Pathology remained deeply indebted to Virchows work. Deficits appeared even in 19th century, when treatment of patients was mainly focussed on practicability of cure, ignoring the social background. Therefore, it is not possible to speak about progress of pathology in general, for diagnostics depends also on individual mentality, the subject, and the situation of the time.


2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 227
Author(s):  
Luz del Rocío Bermúdez H.

Escasa y mal documentada, la migración francesa en Chiapas durante el siglo XIX puede encontrar una veta de investigación? en los casos de Borduin y Dugelay, padre e hijo, en la ciudad de San Cristóbal de Las Casas. El primero, conocido como «francés», aunque procedente del Bajo Canadá, se convirtió desde 1839 en figura central local, entre otros aspectos, por su apreciada profesión en medio de continuos brotes epidémicos. Más de cuatro décadas después, en pleno auge de la influencia francesa en México, Diego Dugelay gozó por su parte el privilegio doble del origen de su padre y el poder social, político y económico, heredados de su madre. Además del testimonio individual ambas trayectorias, alguna vez contrastantes y complementarias, muestran también ciertos mecanismos, aspiraciones y paradojas ocurridas en Chiapas durante su primera apertura hacia los «hermanos de allende los mares». ABSTRACT Scarcely and poorly documented, the French migration in Chiapas during the 19th century may find a vein of research[*] in the cases of Borduin and Dugelay, father and son, in the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. The first, known as “French” although in reality originating from francophone Canada, converted after 1839 into a central local figure, among other aspects, due to his esteemed profession amidst continuous epidemic outbreaks. More than four decades later, in the boom of French influence in Mexico, Diego Dugelay for his part enjoyed the double privilege of his father’s origin and the social, political and economic power inherited from his mother. In addition to the individual testimony, both trajectories, at times contrasting and others complementary, also demonstrate certain mechanisms, aspirations and paradoxes occurred in Chiapas during its first opening toward the “overseas brothers.”


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