Introduction: Enter the Sexagon

Sexagon ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehammed Amadeus Mack
Keyword(s):  
Western Culture ◽  
Sensitive Questions ◽  
The West ◽  
As If

Among the sensitive questions involving Muslims living in the West, and in Europe most singularly, there is the position of Islam on homosexuality. In certain contexts, this question would be the sole and unique key to the possible “integration” of Muslims in Western culture. As if European cultures and values could be reduced to the acceptance or rejection of homosexuality....

scholarly journals Narrative Realism at the Interplay of Traditionality and Modernity in Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Woods and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Moustapha Ndour
Keyword(s):  
Western Culture ◽  
West African ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Effects ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
African Community ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
And Control

This paper articulates the interactions between a traditional and modern world as embodied by the colonizer and the colonized, focusing on Ousmane Sembène’s God’s Bits of Woods (1960) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between (1965). It argues that both narratives can be read as realist novels that counter the hegemonic power of the European empire. While Sembène engages in critiquing imperialism and its social and cultural effects in the West African community –Senegal, Mali and Niger – Ngugi concentrates on the internal problems of the Gikuyu as they respond to the contact with the Western culture. The essay claims that the sociopolitical agendas in these novels should be understood within the context of French and British colonial regimes concerned with finding a legitimizing basis and control in an era when social and political forces of the colonies were energetically asserting themselves.

MARKETING THE TESTAMENTS: CANONGATE AND THEIR POCKET-SIZED BIBLES

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-244
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Positive Potential ◽  
Publishing Firm ◽  
Investment Promotion ◽  
The Bible ◽  
King James Version ◽  
As If

AbstractRecently the Edinburgh-based publishing firm Canongate has brought out the Bible in the form of single books in the King James Version. Each of these volumes is introduced by a writer not necessarily associated with the Christian tradition, thus inviting the readers to approach them as literary works in their own right. For long the Bible came with commentaries written by prominent religious scholars, but now it looks as if it needed an introduction by novelists, pop artists, scientists including and even by some who are outside the Christian tradition to make the once familiar texts now widely neglected in the West come alive again. The purpose of this essay is to look at the following: the positive potential of this Pocket Canon; the role of the interpreter's personal voice within the process of discovering meaning in a narrative; the marketing of the Bible and appropriation of religious themes by secular marketeers; the re-iconization of the Bible though the King James Version; the colonial parallels in the investment, promotion and dissemination of the Bible; and the challenge of personal-voice criticism to biblical studies. Put at its simplest, can this disparate group of essayists rescue the Bible, which is fast losing its grip and importance in the West, and discover fresh significance in it?

Die globale Dichtung des Orlando Furioso

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-33
Author(s):  
Federico Italiano
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Hybrid Vehicle ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Ludovico Ariosto ◽  
Orlando Furioso ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
As If

AbstractThe epic poem of Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1516–1532), one of the most influential texts of Renaissance writing, shows not only a precise cognition of early modern cartographic knowledge, as Alexandre Doroszlaï has illustrated it in Ptolemée et l’hippogriffe (1998), but also performs a complex transmedial translation of cartographic depictions. The journeys around the globe of the Christian paladins Ruggiero and Astolfo narrated by Ariosto are, in fact, performative negotiations between literary and cartographic processes. Riding the Hippograph, the hybrid vehicle par excellence, Ruggiero and Astolfo fly over the Earth as if they were flying over a map. Their journeys do not merely transmedially translate the course to the West pursued by Early Modern Europe. Rather, by translating the map Ariosto performs a new geopoetics that turns away from the symbolic dominance of the East (or “Ent-Ostung”, as Peter Sloterdijk has usefully called it) and offers us one of the first poetic versions of modern globalization.

A study of attitudes toward Western culture among Saudi university students

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-56
Author(s):  
Anderson Hagler
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
University Students ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Science And Engineering ◽  
The West ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Saudi Students ◽  
Instrumental Motivation ◽  
Clear Majority

This paper analyzes the attitudes Saudi university students hold toward Western culture. Saudi participants completed an open-ended questionnaire about attitudes toward Western culture, consisting of five open-ended questions. This paper presents questionnaire responses from 210 university students in Saudi Arabia (male and female). This paper finds that most of these students are integratively motivated and therefore show a positive disposition toward Western culture. It also shows a correlation between instrumental motivation and students who study on science and engineering tracks. The study shows that a clear majority of students like some aspect of the West or Western culture. The study concludes that these Saudi students are predisposed to interact favorably with the West.

scholarly journals Cosmopolitan Sophistry: Grounding Politics in Disorder and Uncertainty

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 197-223
Author(s):  
Jon Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Chaos Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Ecology ◽  
The State ◽  
Legitimate Authority ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Death ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Moment ◽  
As If

Conceptions of the State, Nation and politics, which are actually in play in ‘the West’, usually descend from totalitarian models which are primarily Platonic and monotheistic in origin. They aim for unity, harmony, wholeness, legitimate authority and the rejection of conflict, however much they claim to represent multiplicity. By expressing a vision of order, such models drive an idea of planning by prophecy as opposed to divination, as if the future was certain within limits and the trajectory was smooth. Chaos theory and evolutionary ecology shows us that this conception of both society and the future is inaccurate. I will argue that it is useful to look at the pre-socratic philosophers, in particular the so-called sophists Gorgias and Protagoras and Heraclitus with their sense of ongoing flux, the truth of the moment, and the necessary power of rhetoric in the leading forth of temporary functional consensus within the flux. This ongoing oscillation of conflict provides social movement and life rather than social death.

Settling Up

Worldview ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 35-36
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Cottle
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
Council House ◽  
As If ◽  
Settling Up

Beatrice Waters lives in the corner flat on the top floor of a council house in the Islington district of London. She spent four years of her life making the arrangements to rent a flat in this particular block of council houses. Four long years of speaking with this or that authority and arguing with her husband over whether they had made the right decision. At fifty, Henry Waters doubted he could survive still another move. He couldn't even remember all the places in which he had lived, as if immigrating from the West Indies to England wasn't significant enough. “Don't you think,” he would ask Beatrice, “there comes a time that people just settle down, no matter how good or bad a deal they've made for themselves? How long do you keep changing homes just to prove you're really getting somewhere in the world?’

Logic and Law in Russian and Western Culture

1998 ◽  
pp. 57-63
Author(s):  
Galina Sorina
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
The Social

The purpose of my paper is to compare those texts of Russian and Western thinkers where the relations between logic and law are discussed, and especially to show both the differences and the agreements of their understanding of this connection. Second, I would also like to show and contrast the place of logic and law in Russian and Western systems of education. Third, I propose to clarify some conclusions from my analysis of these relations for understanding the social life of a country and its culture. I believe that this is possible since the relations between logic and law, which are a special subject-matter, are only a part of a larger whole. There is no hard and fast line separating the place of these relationships from the whole of culture. The quality of this relationship is an indicator in some sense of the nature of culture and of its democracy. I would like to show with regard to the West that the classical logical culture determines the types of rationalities, argumentation patterns, and various kinds of political and juridical rhetorics. The consequences of the lack of logical culture in Russia will also be shown.

Safeguarding a «Civilization in Crisis»: La Revue Universelle's Conceptualization of Western Civilization and its Renewal,1920–1935

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Shurts
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Common Language ◽  
The West ◽  
Jacques Maritain ◽  
Conservative Revolution ◽  
Conservative Values

Safeguarding a <Civilization in Crisis>: La Revue Universelle's Conceptualization of Western Civilization and its Renewal, 1920-1935 This article contributes to a comparative study of the «Conservative Revolution» in Europe by exploring the French journal Revue Universelle in the 1920s and the early 1930s. Led by Henri Massis, Jacques Bainville and Jacques Maritain, the intellectuals contributing to the journal developed a unique cultural politics that evoked the decadence and decline of Western civilization under the forces of modernity, and called for the defence and renewal of this civilization through revitalised conservative values of Catholicism, authoritative leadership, elitism, and a return to the spiritual sources of Western culture. However, while the Revue Universelle team intentionally cultivated a pan-European scope for their journal and promoted its cultural politics as a common language for all European conservatives, their aim was compromised by their francocentric and germanophobic conceptualisation of the West and civilization.

scholarly journals V.—On some Physical Changes in the Earth's Crust

1889 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 165-171
Author(s):  
Charles Ricketts
Keyword(s):  
Earth’S Crust ◽  
The West ◽  
Red Sandstone ◽  
Maximum Thickness ◽  
The Government ◽  
Earth's Crust ◽  
Physical Changes ◽  
The Hill ◽  
As If

On the western flanks of the Malverns, the Upper Silurians are folded in several great anticlinals and synclinals, formed parallel to the axis of the Hill itself. To the west of Ledbury and again near Woolhope these contorted strata dip beneath the Old Red Sandstone, which, as computed by Phillips, has a maximum thickness of 8000 feet, that of the Upper Silurians being 2690 feet.The thickness of the strata of which the Longmynd is formed has been estimated by the Government Surveyors at not less than 26,000 feet, as exposed in their highly inclined edges; the beds dipping at an average inclination of 60° to the W.N.W. They thus appear as if they had been tilted by pressure against the more ancient rocks of the Caer Caradoc Range.

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