scholarly journals From Muse to Material: The Defiance of Homeric Identity Through Creative Adaptation

Meliora ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Leidich
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Academic Discourse ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Greek Myth ◽  
The World ◽  
Philosophical Framework ◽  
Heroic Narrative

The hero crossing the wine-dark sea, a king kneeling at the foot of his son’s killer, a boy defending his homeland in his father’s absence. The world of epic Greek myth is an alluring and vast web of heroic narrative and moral dilemma. These iconic moments transcend history and cultural decay. They live in the literature, art, and philosophical framework of the contemporary human experience. Homeric myth is intrinsically embedded in our cultural landscape; it is the thread that runs through the most mundane storytelling and the most epic fantasy narrative. The narratives of the Iliad and The Odyssey have been institutionalized in the Western canon and prescribed as the essential foundation of academic discourse. Yet these same myths also include a daughter sacrificed by the hand of her father, a woman raped and held hostage by the greatest of the Greeks, and a girl whose beauty launched a thousand ships and killed even more men. There is room, though, in the oeuvre of Homeric myth, for an elevation of otherwise silenced voices. Through reimagining epic narratives such as the Iliad and The Odyssey, women authors transform exclusionary texts into stories that encompass the identities reflected in contemporary society. 

scholarly journals Rural Landscape as a Value of Cultural Heritage

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Wieruszewska
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
Rural Space ◽  
A Value ◽  
European Landscape Convention ◽  
The World

The Author – ethnologist and anthropologist of culture – defends the thesis that rural landscape is an important component of cultural heritage. Virtual “cyberspaces” as - sume the role of an alternative life environment. Physical space loses the basis for explaining the world and for shaping human experience. The degraded rural cultural landscape is the proof of erroneous conceptions and rural space gathers the effects of a deficit of sensibility to “long continuance”. In opposition to postmodernist assessments the Author objects to the attempts at destabilising culture. Culture is significant. The protection of rural landscape as a particularly sensitive and valuable quality has a sense. In the conclusion of her article the Author suggests that a more thorough humanistic reflection is needed to make it possible to optimally implement the recommendations of the European Landscape Convention.

scholarly journals The Metaphors of Quests, Labyrinths and the Dance of Kali in Christopher Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sathyabhama Daly
Keyword(s):  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Cultural Divide ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Choices ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Way

Ovid’s myth of the Cretan labyrinth, constructed by Daedalus to hide the Minotaur, the monster that is a result of Pasiphae’s lust, and Dante’s labyrinth of Hell, in The Inferno, are literary allusions that conjure images of imprisonment and moral dilemma. In this paper, I explore the metaphor of the labyrinth in The Year of Living Dangerously (YLD) and the way in which Koch integrates this metaphor with Christian, Hindu and Buddhist myths so as to engage with the cultural divide that continues to influence Christian and non-Christian worldviews. The labyrinth metaphor emerges through the imagery of the novel which focuses on caves, shadows, circuitous paths, entrapment, and moral choices. In the novel, the metaphor of the labyrinth is conveyed through the underworld imagery of Indonesian society and through the Wayang Bar, the citadel of the journalists trapped in a world of political intrigue and of good and evil. Metaphorically evoking the medieval concept of the world as a perilous maze, Koch uses the labyrinth as a way of imaging the search for the sacred in contemporary society.

scholarly journals The Feminine, The Poetic, And The Sacred In BPNichol's The Martyrology And Journal

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalya Androsova
Keyword(s):  
Human Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Poetic Practice ◽  
Mode Of Being ◽  
A Site

My goal is not to analyse the sacred – to analyse it is to kill it. The objective is only to explore different ways of approaching the sacred through looking deeply at the nature of poetic language. In our contemporary society, the sacred is the other. And so is the feminine. Our culture often rejects these modes of experience, but poetic practice gives them both a time and a space. My overall argument is that poetic practice creates an approach, a site and a possibility for the sacred to manifest itself phenomenologically by breaking through from the other realm into human experience. Poetic practice holds an intention, creates a direction, a dimension, a state that can approach the experience of the sacred and honour it, be open to it, invite it and allow the subject to suspend the habitual control and instead adopt a surrender mode. Thus, poetic practice itself becomes a sacred activity that teaches us about different kinds of knowledge, experience and insight and invites us to experience a different mode of being in the world, in language, with ourselves, and with each other. Instead of detachment and alienation that permeate our culture, instead of separation from and the resulting objectification of nature, poetic consciousness offers us a more primal mode of being that pre-modern man used to call sacred.

scholarly journals The Feminine, The Poetic, And The Sacred In BPNichol's The Martyrology And Journal

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalya Androsova
Keyword(s):  
Human Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Poetic Practice ◽  
Mode Of Being ◽  
A Site

My goal is not to analyse the sacred – to analyse it is to kill it. The objective is only to explore different ways of approaching the sacred through looking deeply at the nature of poetic language. In our contemporary society, the sacred is the other. And so is the feminine. Our culture often rejects these modes of experience, but poetic practice gives them both a time and a space. My overall argument is that poetic practice creates an approach, a site and a possibility for the sacred to manifest itself phenomenologically by breaking through from the other realm into human experience. Poetic practice holds an intention, creates a direction, a dimension, a state that can approach the experience of the sacred and honour it, be open to it, invite it and allow the subject to suspend the habitual control and instead adopt a surrender mode. Thus, poetic practice itself becomes a sacred activity that teaches us about different kinds of knowledge, experience and insight and invites us to experience a different mode of being in the world, in language, with ourselves, and with each other. Instead of detachment and alienation that permeate our culture, instead of separation from and the resulting objectification of nature, poetic consciousness offers us a more primal mode of being that pre-modern man used to call sacred.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Performing States-Of-In-Between: Dogs, Parrots, and Other Humans in Recent Austrian Performances

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-310
Author(s):  
Sabine Wilke
Keyword(s):  
Fine Arts ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Dramatic Effect ◽  
The Past ◽  
Violent Content ◽  
The World ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Recent Developments

Every late spring since 1951, the Wiener Festwochen bring performers from around the world to Vienna for an opportunity to share recent developments in performance styles and present them to a Viennese public that seems to be increasingly open to experimentation. These festival weeks solidify a specific form of Viennese self-understanding and self-representation as a culture that is rooted in performance. This essay seeks to link two recent Austrian performances—one of them was part of the Wiener Festwochen in 2016, the other was staged in downtown Linz during the past few years—to this Austrian and specifically Viennese culture of performance by reading them as contemporary articulations of a tradition of radical performance art that can be traced back to the Viennese Actionism of the sixties and later feminist articulations in the seventies and eighties. They play on the dramatic effect of these actions, specifically their joy in cruelty, chaos, and orgiastic intoxication, by staging regressions and thus making visible what has been dammed up and repressed in contemporary society.1 Just as their historical models, these two performances merge the performing and the fine arts and they highlight provocative, controversial, and, at times, violent content. But they do it in an interspecies context that adds an entire layer of complexity to the project of societal and cultural critique.

Words in the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerusha Tanner Lamptey
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Marginal Groups ◽  
Rosemary Radford Ruether ◽  
The World ◽  
Divine Words

Using the analogy of the two Divine Words, this chapter begins by exploring pressing debates in contemporary Islamic feminist and Muslima theological engagement with the Qur’an, debates that arise out of the underlying problematic of the Word in the world. The chapter, then, explores Christian perspectives on Jesus Christ from Rosemary Radford Ruether, Jacquelyn Grant, Kwok Pui-lan, and Ada María Isasi-Díaz. These theologians discuss topics ranging from the language and symbols invoked to describe Jesus to the value assigned to particular human markings of Jesus (inclusive of but not limited to Jesus’s maleness) to the affiliations of Jesus with power and marginal groups. The chapter concludes by returning to Muslima theology and constructively proposing an approach to the Qur’an that embraces hybridity, human experience, and a preference for the marginalized.

The Remembered Anthropologist: Engaging with the Insights of M. N. Srinivas

2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-240
Author(s):  
Nita Mathur
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Village Studies ◽  
Specific Sense

The plethora of M. N. Srinivas’s articles and books covering a wide range of subjects from village studies to nation building, from dominant caste in Rampura village to nature and character of caste in independent India, and from prospects of sociological research in Gujarat to practicing social anthropology in India have largely influenced the understanding of society and culture for well over five decades. Additionally, he meticulously wrote itineraries, memoirs and personal notes that provide a glimpse of his inner being, influences, ideologies, thought all of which have inspired a large number of and social anthropologists and sociologists across the world. It is then only befitting to explore the major concerns in the life and intellectual thought of one whose pioneering contributions have been the milestones in the fields of social anthropology and sociology in a specific sense and of social sciences in India in a general sense. This article centres around/brings to light the academic concerns that Srinivas grappled with the new avenues of thought and insights that developed consequently, and the extent of his rendition their relevance in framing/understanding contemporary society and culture in India.

Interpreting the Inter-Christian Relationship and Dialogue with Monotheistic Religions in the Document For the Life of the World

2021 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 408-417
Author(s):  
Nicu Dumitraşcu
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship

In this article I briefly examine chapter 6 of the document For the Life of the World issued by the Ecumenical Patriarchate concerning “ecumenical relations and relations with the other faiths.” In the first part, I discuss the relationship between the Orthodox Church and other Christian denominations, and in the second, the dialogue with Judaism and Islam. The document has an optimistic, inspiring, and hopeful tone, but it will simply remain an idealistic statement without a major echo inside of the Christian world and contemporary society.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document