Parrots and Starlings

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher GoGwilt ◽  
Melanie D. Holm
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Word Classification ◽  
History Of ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
Human Animal

This chapter introduces the sense in which “mocking birds” applies to a range of birds that mimic and introduces the different kinds of “technologies” (avian, human, interspecies, poetic, mechanic, etc.) variously addressed by the volume’s contributors. Taking the pairing of parrot and starling as paradigmatic across a range of different philological traditions, the introduction surveys some of the foundational theoretical and methodological problems for the human sciences presented by the topic of bird mimicry. The parrot, global sign of a long history of human-animal mimicry, appears everywhere across different linguistic and literary traditions, a familiar and exotic trope that is something of a touchstone for postcolonial studies. The starling adds to that familiar and exotic trope a complication of classification, cultural difference, and bio-diversity (including all the various mynah birds also called starlings). The foundational problems of bird and word classification posed by parrot and starling extend to the range of scientific, poetic, linguistic, and post-human issues discussed by the volume as a whole, whether addressing this bird, that bird, or even no bird at all.

Reframing Vernacular Culture on Arabic Fault Lines: Bamba, Senghor, and Sembene's Translingual Legacies in French West Africa

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette Damayanti Lienau
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
West African ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Vernacular Culture ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
History Of ◽  
African Context ◽  
Sub Saharan

This PMLA cluster invites us to rethink questions of language, script, and literary traditions in a long-historical framework. Several other essays here address the inter-imperial dynamics accompanying the rise of Arabic from a localized dialect to a transregional language with a religious valence. My contribution considers the legacy of the Arabic language in the twentieth-century sub-Saharan West African context, in its contact with Senegalese vernaculars and with French as an imperial challenger. It further explores the broader implications of retracing the longue durée history of Arabic-script vernaculars for comparative work in postcolonial studies.

Between History and Nature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anik Waldow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Scientific Models ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Hermeneutic Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Way

From within the philosophy of history and history of science alike, attention has been paid to Herder’s naturalist commitment and especially to the way in which his interest in medicine, anatomy, and biology facilitates philosophically significant notions of force, organism, and life. As such, Herder’s contribution is taken to be part of a wider eighteenth-century effort to move beyond Newtonian mechanism and the scientific models to which it gives rise. In this scholarship, Herder’s hermeneutic philosophy—as it grows out of his engagement with poetry, drama, and both literary translation and literary documentation projects—has received less attention. Taking as its point of departure Herder’s early work, this chapter proposes that, in his work on literature, Herder formulates an anthropologically sensitive approach to the human sciences that has still not received the attention it deserves.

The National and the Universal

2020 ◽  
pp. 368-386
Author(s):  
Sarah Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Johann Gottfried Herder ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Respective Treatment ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.

The Subaltern Critique of Dominant Historiography and a Case for Retrieving a Historiography of Dalit Literary Traditions in India

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Vandana
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
The Third World

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. The basic questions that I have tried to look into through this study include: Why is it problematic to retrieve literary history in India? Why is it essential to have an alternative literary historiography of Dalit literature? How does Dalit subalternity differ from colonial subalternity? How the Dalit voice is disintegrated from within because of the prevalence of graded inequality? What constitutes the politics of history writing and canon formation in the third world countries like India where retrieving subaltern literary trends remain a problematic discourse?

Arabesques, Unicorns, and Invisible Masters: The Art Historian’s Gaze as Symptomatic Action?

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-232
Author(s):  
Eva-Maria Troelenberg
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Islamic Art ◽  
Methodological Development ◽  
World War ◽  
Taxonomic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Methods ◽  
Second World

This essay takes two seminal texts of mid-twentieth-century Islamic art history as case studies for the methodological development of the scholarly gaze in the aftermath of the Second World War. Ernst Kühnel’s Die Arabeske (Wiesbaden, 1949) testifies to the continuity of a taxonomic history of styles, rooted in phenomenologist Sachforschung and apparently adaptable to shifting ideological paradigms. Richard Ettinghausen’s The Unicorn (Washington, 1950) stands for a neo-humanist approach. Its negotiation of aesthetic and cultural difference clearly is to be considered against the background of the experience of exile, but also of the rising tide of democratic humanism characteristic for postwar American humanities. Both examples together offer a comparative perspective on the agencies of art historical methods and their ideological and epistemological promises and pitfalls in dealing with aesthetic difference. Consequently, this essay also seeks to contribute exemplary insights into the immediate prehistory of the so-called “Global Turn” in art history. 


Form and History in Modern Arabic Poetics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huda Fakhreddine
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Fundamental Forces ◽  
Modern Arabic

Modern Arabic poetic forms developed in conversation with the rich Arabic poetic tradition, on one hand, and the Western literary traditions, primarily English and French, on the other. In light of the drastic social and political changes that swept the Arab world in the first half of the 20th century, Western influences often appear in the scholarship on the period to be more prevalent and operative in the rise of the modernist movement. Nevertheless, one of the fundamental forces that drove the movement from its early phases is its urgent preoccupation with the Arabic poetic heritage and its investment in forging a new relationship with the literary past. The history of poetic forms in the first half of the 20th century reveals much about the dynamics between margin and center, old and new, commitment and escapism, autochthonous and outside imperatives. Arabic poetry in the 20th century reflects the political and social upheavals in Arab life. The poetic forms which emerged between the late 1940s and early 1960s presented themselves as aesthetically and ideologically revolutionary. The modernist poets were committed to a project of change in the poem and beyond. Developments from the qas̩īdah of the late 19th century to the prose poem of the 1960s and the notion of writing (kitābah) after that suggest an increased loosening or abandoning of formal restrictions. However, the contending poetic proposals, from the most formal to the most experimental, all continue to coexist in the Arabic poetic landscape in the 21st century. The tensions and negotiations between them are what often lead to the most creative poetic breakthroughs.

scholarly journals Dyskursywnie o dyskursie

2006 ◽  
pp. 89-96
Author(s):  
Ewa Sławkowa
Keyword(s):  
Modern Human ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
History Of ◽  
Discourse Studies ◽  
Political Speeches ◽  
Characteristic Evolution ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

The article presents a lexical and semantic study of the discourse, one of the most widespread terms of modern human sciences. We begin with etymology, and then demonstrate various stages of the development of the meaning of the term in the history of Polish. The lexem “discourse”, well established in the linguistic tradition of Polish, has undergone a characteristic evolution: first, a borrowing from Latin (discurere – “go in diverse directions”), it then became popular in the 16th through 18th centuries as a rhetorically marked Polish (particularly with the view of political speeches and sermons) to signal a kind of discussion and logical exposition of argumentation. Recent contemporary Polish gives this term a slightly archaic and bookish sense. At the same time, however, “discourse” has become a strictly scientific, scholarly term which carved for itself a special discipline of research (discourse studies). In the 1960s and 1970s the work of such linguists as Emile Benveniste or Roman Jakobsen helped to shape the meaning of discourse as a process of speaking, an interactive and dialogic communicative behaviour which sees language as conditioned by diverse social practices and/or ideologies (e.g. historical, scholarly, or feminist discourse).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document