Shelley and the revolution in taste: the body and the natural world

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

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THE REVOLUTION OF THE BODY

Buena Vista in the Club ◽

10.2307/j.ctv113122n.6 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 108-177

Keyword(s):

The Body ◽

The Revolution

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Empiricists

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Classics ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.8162 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Marquis Berrey

Keyword(s):

Medical Practice ◽

Analogical Reasoning ◽

Natural World ◽

The Body ◽

Experimental Medicine ◽

Personal Observation ◽

Historical Knowledge ◽

Practice Of Medicine

Empiricists were a self-identified medical sect of the Hellenistic and Imperial periods who shared a common experiential methodology about the purpose and practice of medicine. Denigrating unobservable causes and experimental medicine, they espoused a sceptical, passive approach to accumulated observations about the body and the natural world. Since few Empiricist texts survive, historical knowledge depends largely on the medical doxographies of later ancient physicians who were not Empiricists. Doxographies report that Empiricists practiced a controlled experiential medicine based on personal observation, written reports from previous physicians, and analogical reasoning from known to unfamiliar conditions. The importance of chance and memory to their medical practice along with a willingness to compare themselves to tradesmen of lesser status distinguished their philosophical medicine from other ancient medical sects.

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The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia: Observations on the Commentaries by Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg

Slavic Review ◽

10.2307/2498396 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 47 (3) ◽

pp. 512-517

Author(s):

Leopold h. Haimson

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Body Politic ◽

Social Identities ◽

The Body ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

The Revolution

Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg have greatly contributed by their respective commentaries to broadening the scope of the issues addressed in my discussion of “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia” (see Slavic Review [Spring 1988]: 1-20). They have also helped bring out the complexity of the processes involved, after the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917, in the shaping and reshaping of the representations that individuals and groups entertained of themselves, of one another, and of the body politic as a whole.

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Reimagining Our Relationship to the Dancing Body

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199949298.013.10 ◽

2017 ◽

pp. 178-194

Author(s):

Andrea Olsen

Keyword(s):

Intercultural Communication ◽

Visual Imagery ◽

Creative Thinking ◽

Subjective Experience ◽

Personal Narrative ◽

Daily Life ◽

Natural World ◽

The Body ◽

Multifaceted Approach ◽

Earth Systems

This chapter focuses on reimagining our relationship to the dancing body, inviting connection to self, others, and the natural world. Body systems and earth systems are seen as intricately interconnected, and dance as an essential way to experience this connection. Utilizing personal narrative, scientific research, experiential exercises, and visual imagery as modes of inquiry enables one to create the conditions for wellbeing through movement. The goal is to bind subjective experience with a scientific foundation through embodied scholarship. This multifaceted approach enhances the reader’s receptivity to discovery and discernment, encouraging agency in creative projects, intercultural communication, and daily life through dance. Attention is given to the science of perception, including tools for balancing the autonomic nervous system to support healing and creative thinking. Throughout, we foster positive responses to challenging social and environmental conditions through moving, dancing, performing, and writing—celebrating the intrinsic intelligence of the body.

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Conceptualising Food as Death: A Radical Environmentalist Politics of Food

Sociological Research Online ◽

10.5153/sro.2338 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 16 (2) ◽

pp. 77-87 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Julie Van Kemenade

Keyword(s):

Conflicts Of Interest ◽

Well Being ◽

Natural World ◽

The Body ◽

Human Food ◽

Food Practices ◽

Semiotic Approach ◽

Multiple Meanings ◽

Food Provision

Research into the politics of food cannot assume universal acceptance of what is meant by the term ‘food’ which has multiple meanings and significantly different associations. A semiotic approach demonstrates the meaning and value of this point.Food has variously been conceptualised as process and as commodity, nature or culture. None of these tropes are value neutral, but are associated with opposing priorities and conflicts of interest.Drawing from ecocentric and anthropocentric environmental philosophies, an alternative trope, that of food-as-death, can be developed, which challenges other, more dominant, tropes. Semiotics denies the notion that language ‘mirrors’ reality. Rather, language creates reality. Semiotics, then, can be useful in developing alternative realities.To conceptualise food as death is more than using death as a metaphor. Where food is prioritised as commodity, commercial/industrial food practices promote death: death of the body through malnutrition or over-consumption; death of communities through the power of transnationals and commercial interests; death of the natural world through the prioritisation of these human food provision systems. Food-as-death is a trope which privileges the destructive aspect of food over others such as pleasure, identity and nurturing.Power is invested in those whose trope gains the greatest acceptance. The challenge for environmentalism is to demonstrate the validity of food-as-death. The essential task therefore, is to demonstrate that food for humans can be organised in a way which affirms the well being of humans, communities and nature. This trope will be food-as-life.

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