All Boundaries Are Lost: Travel, Fragmentation and Interconnection in Virginia Woolf

Author(s):  
Sam Wiseman

Woolf’s childhood was characterised by contrasts between urban and rural, movement and belonging, past and future, domesticity and the outdoor landscape. These influences are evident in her work’s balance between nostalgic reflection and an acceptance of the inexorable transience of human existence and sensation. Woolf is interested in the ways in which new developments in travel and technology can defamiliarise us, and reveal interconnections with other beings. Her attentiveness to the sedimentary layering of the past within rural landscapes is applied to her reimagining of the urban environment; Woolf inverts urban-rural associations, and portrays the metropolitan world as a site within which both fragmentation and interconnection are made explicit. That sense of interconnection also extends to nonhuman animals in Between the Acts (1941). Ultimately, this portrayal of a world in which all experience and activity is part of a ‘work of art’ underlies the theme of unity in Woolf’s final novel; but that theme nonetheless remains balanced by the novel’s exploration of dispersal and fragmentation.

Author(s):  
Sam Wiseman

This book examines a renewed focus upon rural landscapes, culture and traditions among English interwar modernist writers, specifically D.H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, Mary Butts and Virginia Woolf. All of these figures have a profound sense of attachment to place, but an equally powerful desire to engage with the upheavals of interwar modernity and to participate in contemporary literary experimentation. This dialectic between tradition and change is analogous to a literal geographical shuttling between rural and metropolitan environments, and all four writers display imagery and literary techniques which reflect those experiences. The first chapter emphasises ambivalence in the work of Lawrence, and argues that this is inextricably bound up with his intimate, empathic understanding of place. Chapter Two argues that Powys has a similarly ambivalent relationship with modernity, but defuses this through a fantastical, nostalgic lens; he develops a sense of the landscape as layered, expressing a kind of temporal cosmopolitanism. Chapter Three notes a vexed relationship with modernity and place in the work of Butts; like Powys she attempts to resolve this through a re-enchantment of place, promoting a cosmopolitan reimagining of rural England. Finally, Chapter Four posits Woolf as a figure able to manage tensions between urban and rural, modern and traditional, reflected in the development of an ‘urban pastoral’ form. In all four writers there is evidence that modernism’s expansion of perspectives can be fruitfully extended to those of place and nonhuman animals; the central stress in the conclusion is on the need to incorporate such perspectives.


2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-60
Author(s):  
Davide Sparti

Obwohl jede menschliche Handlung mit einem gewissen Grad an Improvisation erfolgt, gibt es kulturelle Praktiken, bei denen Improvisation eine überwiegende Rolle spielt. Um das Risiko zu vermeiden, einen zu breiten Begriff von Improvisation zu übernehmen, konzentriere ich mich im vorliegenden Beitrag auf den Jazz. Meine zentrale Frage lautet, wie Improvisation verstanden werden muss. Mein Vorgehen ist folgendes: Ich beginne mit einem Vergleich von Improvisation und Komposition, damit die Spezifizität der Improvisation erklärt werden kann. Danach wende ich mich dem Thema der Originalität als Merkmal der Improvisation zu. Zum Schluss führe ich den Begriff affordance ein, um die kollektive und zirkuläre Logik eines Solos zu analysieren. Paradigmatisch wird der Jazzmusiker mit dem Engel der Geschichte verglichen, der nur auf das Vergangene blickt, während er der Zukunft den Rücken zugekehrt hat, und lediglich ihr zugetrieben wird. Weder kann der Improvisierende das Material der Vergangenheit vernachlässigen noch seine genuine Tätigkeit, das Improvisieren in der Gegenwart und für die Zukunft, aufgeben: Er visiert die Zukunft trotz ihrer Unvorhersehbarkeit über die Vermittlung der Vergangenheit an.<br><br>While improvised behavior is so much a part of human existence as to be one of its fundamental realities, in order to avoid the risk of defining the act of improvising too broadly, my focus here will be upon one of the activities most explicitly centered around improvisation – that is, upon jazz. My contribution, as Wittgenstein would say, has a »grammatical« design to it: it proposes to clarify the significance of the term »improvisation.« The task of clarifying the cases in which one may legitimately speak of improvisation consists first of all in reflecting upon the conditions that make the practice possible. This does not consist of calling forth mysterious, esoteric processes that take place in the unconscious, or in the minds of musicians, but rather in paying attention to the criteria that are satisfied when one ascribes to an act the concept of improvisation. In the second part of my contribution, I reflect upon the logic that governs the construction of an improvised performance. As I argue, in playing upon that which has already emerged in the music, in discovering the future as they go on (as a consequence of what they do), jazz players call to mind the angel in the famous painting by Klee that Walter Benjamin analyzed in his Theses on the History of Philosophy: while pulled towards the future, its eyes are turned back towards the past.


2019 ◽  
pp. 98-100
Author(s):  
Д. М. Кудайбердиева

Аннотация. В данной статье рассматривается проблема восприятия городской среды студентами из города и сельской местности. Обозначены определения терминов «среда», «пространственная среда», «городская среда». Проведено экспериментальное сравнительное исследование особенностей восприятия города Бишкек городскими и сельскими студентами в количестве 50 человек. Статья содержит результаты проведенного анализа исследования. Выявлены различия и сходства в восприятии города Бишкек у студентов двух групп. В контексте восприятия города изучена неудовлетворенность прошлым и настоящим временем, трудности языкового барьера у студентов из сельской местности. Также было выявлено, что актуальной для студентов обеих групп является потребность в социальных контактах, общении, включенности в социум. Полученные результаты будут иметь пользу в проведении воспитательной работы со студентами из сельской местности, в оказании поддержки им в период адаптации с учетом особенностей восприятия города студентами. Ключевые слова. среда, городская среда, восприятие пространства, городские студенты, сельские студенты, восприятие города Бишкек, неудовлетворенность прошлым и настоящим, языковой барьер, учеба в городе, сходства и различия в восприятии города. Аннотация. Бул макалада шаардык жана айылдан келген студенттердин шаардык чөйрөнү кабыл алуу көйгөйү каралган. «Чөйрө», «мейкиндик чөйрө», «шаардык чөйрө» терминдеринин түшүнүктөрү келтирилген. 50 адамдан турган шаардык жана айылдык студенттердин Бишкек шаарын кабыл алуу өзгөчөлүктөрүнө эксперименталдык салыштырма изилдөө жүргүзүлгөн. Макалада изилдөөнүн анализ жыйынтыктары камтылган. Эки студенттик топторунун Бишкек шаарын кабыл алуусунун айырмачылыктары жана окшоштуктары белгиленген. Шаарды кабыл алуу контекстинде өткөн жана учур чактарга канагаттанбоо, тил барьеринин кыйынчылыктары изилденди. Ошондой эле студенттердин эки тобуна актуалдуу болуп социалдык катнаштарга, баарлашууга, коомго кошулуу муктаждыгы белгиленүүдө. Алынган жыйынтыктар студенттердин шаарды кабыл алуу өзгөчөлүктөрүнө эске алып, айылдан келген студенттерге адаптация убагында колдоо көрсөтүү максатында тарбиялык иштерди жүргүзүүдө жардам берет. Түйүндүү сөздөр. Чөйрө, шаардык чөйрө, мейкиндикти кабыл алуу, шаардык студенттер, айылдык студенттер, Бишкек шаарын кабыл алуу, өткөн жана учур чакка канагаттанбоо, тил барьери, шаарда окуу, шаарды кабыл алуусунун айырмачылыктары жана окшоштуктары. Annotation. This article addresses the problem of perception of the urban environment by students from the city and countryside. The definitions of the terms “environment”, “spatial environment”, and “urban environment” are indicated. An experimental comparative study of the characteristics of the perception of the city of Bishkek by urban and rural students in the amount of 50 people was conducted. The article contains the results of the analysis of the study. The differences and similarities in the perception of the city of Bishkek among students of the two groups are revealed. In the context of the perception of the city, dissatisfaction with the past and the present has been studied, and the difficulties of the language barrier among students from rural areas. It was also revealed that the need for social contacts, communication, inclusion in society is relevant for students of both groups. The results will have the benefit of conducting educational work with students from rural areas, in providing support to them during the adaptation period, taking into account the peculiarities of the perception of the city by students. Кeywords. Environment, urban environment, space perception, urban students, rural students, perception of the city of Bishkek, dissatisfaction with the past and the present, language barrier, studying in the city, similarities and differences in the perception of the city.


Author(s):  
П. В. Капустин ◽  
А. И. Гаврилов

Состояние проблемы. Проблематика городской среды заявила о себе в 1960-е годы как протест против модернистских методов урбанизма и других видов проектирования. Средовое движение не случайно тогда именовали «антипрофессиональным» - оно было направлено против устоявшихся и недейственных методов работы с городом - от исследования до управления. За прошедшие десятилетия в рамках самого средового движения и его идейных наследников наработано немало методов и приемов работы, однако они до сих не подвергались анализу как пребывающая в исторической динамике целостная совокупность инструментария, альтернативного традиционному градостроительству. Результаты. Рассмотрены особенности и проблемы анализа методологического «арсенала» средового движения и урбанистики. Методы работы с городской средой впервые структурированы по типам знания. Показана близость методов исследовательского и проектного подходов в отношении городской среды. Выводы. В ближайшее время можно ожидать появления новых синтетических знаний и частных методологий, связанных как с обострением средовой проблематики, с расширением круга средовых акторов, так и с процессом профессионализации урбанистики. Statement of the problem. The urban environment paradigm emerged in the 1960s as a protest against the modernist methods of urbanism and other types of design. It was no coincidence that the environmental movement was back then called "anti-professional" as it was directed against the established and ineffective methods of working with the city, i. e., from research to management. Over the past decades, within the framework of the environmental movement and its ideological heirs, a lot of methods and have been developed. However, they have not yet been analyzed as an integral set of tools in the historical dynamics which is an alternative to traditional urban planning. Results. The features and problems of the analysis of the methodological “arsenal” of environmental movement and urban studies are considered. The methods of working with the urban environment are first structured according to the types of knowledge. The proximity of research and design approaches in the case when the urban environment is dealt with is shown. Conclusions. In the nearest future, we can expect new synthetic knowledge and particular methodologies related to both the exacerbation of environmental problems to emerge as well as the expansion of the circle of environmental actors and the process of professionalization of urbanstics.


Author(s):  
John Carman ◽  
Patricia Carman

What is—or makes a place—a ‘historic battlefield’? From one perspective the answer is a simple one—it is a place where large numbers of people came together in an organized manner to fight one another at some point in the past. But from another perspective it is far more difficult to identify. Quite why any such location is a place of battle—rather than any other kind of event—and why it is especially historic is more difficult to identify. This book sets out an answer to the question of what a historic battlefield is in the modern imagination, drawing upon examples from prehistory to the twentieth century. Considering battlefields through a series of different lenses, treating battles as events in the past and battlefields as places in the present, the book exposes the complexity of the concept of historic battlefield and how it forms part of a Western understanding of the world. Taking its lead from new developments in battlefield study—especially archaeological approaches—the book establishes a link to and a means by which these new approaches can contribute to more radical thinking about war and conflict, especially to Critical Military and Critical Security Studies. The book goes beyond the study of battles as separate and unique events to consider what they mean to us and why we need them to have particular characteristics. It will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, and students of modern war in all its forms.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (8) ◽  
pp. 4137
Author(s):  
Jan Frohlich ◽  
George N. Chaldakov ◽  
Manlio Vinciguerra

Studies over the past 30 years have revealed that adipose tissue is the major endocrine and paracrine organ of the human body. Arguably, adiopobiology has taken its reasonable place in studying obesity and related cardiometabolic diseases (CMDs), including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which is viewed herein as a neurometabolic disorder. The pathogenesis and therapy of these diseases are multiplex at basic, clinical and translational levels. Our present goal is to describe new developments in cardiometabolic and neurometabolic adipobiology. Accordingly, we focus on adipose- and/or skeletal muscle-derived signaling proteins (adipsin, adiponectin, nerve growth factor, brain-derived neuroptrophic factor, neurotrophin-3, irisin, sirtuins, Klotho, neprilysin, follistatin-like protein-1, meteorin-like (metrnl), as well as growth differentiation factor 11) as examples of metabotrophic factors (MTFs) implicated in the pathogenesis and therapy of obesity and related CMDs. We argue that these pathologies are MTF-deficient diseases. In 1993 the “vascular hypothesis of AD” was published and in the present review we propose the “vasculometabolic hypothesis of AD.” We discuss how MTFs could bridge CMDs and neurodegenerative diseases, such as AD. Greater insights on how to manage the MTF network would provide benefits to the quality of human life.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Sujit Sivasundaram

AbstractThe Pacific has often been invisible in global histories written in the UK. Yet it has consistently been a site for contemplating the past and the future, even among Britons cast on its shores. In this lecture, I reconsider a critical moment of globalisation and empire, the ‘age of revolutions’ at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, by journeying with European voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. The lecture will point to what this age meant for Pacific islanders, in social, political and cultural terms. It works with a definition of the Pacific's age of revolutions as a surge of indigeneity met by a counter-revolutionary imperialism. What was involved in undertaking a European voyage changed in this era, even as one important expedition was interrupted by news from revolutionary Europe. Yet more fundamentally vocabularies and practices of monarchy were consolidated by islanders across the Pacific. This was followed by the outworkings of counter-revolutionary imperialism through agreements of alliance and alleged cessation. Such an argument allows me, for instance, to place the 1806 wreck of the Port-au-Prince within the Pacific's age of revolutions. This was an English ship used to raid French and Spanish targets in the Pacific, but which was stripped of its guns, iron, gunpowder and carronades by Tongans. To chart the trajectory from revolution and islander agency on to violence and empire is to appreciate the unsettled paths that gave rise to our modern world. This view foregrounds people who inhabited and travelled through the earth's oceanic frontiers. It is a global history from a specific place in the oceanic south, on the opposite side of the planet to Europe.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvie Loufouma Mbouaka ◽  
Michelle Gamble ◽  
Christina Wurst ◽  
Heidi Yoko Jäger ◽  
Frank Maixner ◽  
...  

AbstractAlthough malaria is one of the oldest and most widely distributed diseases affecting humans, identifying and characterizing its presence in ancient human remains continue to challenge researchers. We attempted to establish a reliable approach to detecting malaria in human skeletons using multiple avenues of analysis: macroscopic observations, rapid diagnostic tests, and shotgun-capture sequencing techniques, to identify pathological changes, Plasmodium antigens, and Plasmodium DNA, respectively. Bone and tooth samples from ten individuals who displayed skeletal lesions associated with anaemia, from a site in southern Egypt (third to sixth centuries AD), were selected. Plasmodium antigens were detected in five of the ten bone samples, and traces of Plasmodium aDNA were detected in six of the twenty bone and tooth samples. There was relatively good synchronicity between the biomolecular findings, despite not being able to authenticate the results. This study highlights the complexity and limitations in the conclusive identification of the Plasmodium parasite in ancient human skeletons. Limitations regarding antigen and aDNA preservation and the importance of sample selection are at the forefront of the search for malaria in the past. We confirm that, currently, palaeopathological changes such as cribra orbitalia are not enough to be certain of the presence of malaria. While biomolecular methods are likely the best chance for conclusive identification, we were unable to obtain results which correspond to the current authentication criteria of biomolecules. This study represents an important contribution in the refinement of biomolecular techniques used; also, it raises new insight regarding the consistency of combining several approaches in the identification of malaria in past populations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136248062110078
Author(s):  
Katja Franko

The Southern Mediterranean border has in the past decade become one of the most deeply contested political spaces in Europe and has been described as a site of the border spectacle. Drawing on textual and visual analysis of Twitter messages by two of the most prominent actors in the field, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, and the humanitarian and medical NGO Médecins Sans Frontières, the article examines the split nature of the Mediterranean border which is, among others, visible in radically different narratives about migrants’ journeys, border deaths and living conditions. The findings challenge previous scholarship about convergence of humanitarianism and policing. The two actors are waging a fierce media battle for moral authority, where they use widely diverging strategies of claiming authority, each of which carries a particular set of ethical dilemmas.


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110335
Author(s):  
Tingting Hu ◽  
Tianru Guan

Through an in-depth analysis of gender representation in the box office record-breaking Chinese movie Wolf Warrior II, this study interrogates how the male body is used as a site for the projection of Chinese national power. Furthermore, it illustrates a revival of patriotic pride in China through a contemporary reading of cross-genre action-military films. Developing Shuqin Cui’s notion of “woman-as-nation,” which understands on-screen female victimization in Chinese films as signifying the past suffering of the nation, this study proposes the new concept of “man-as-nation” to explain how the masculine virtues of male protagonists in Chinese films signify the nation’s rejuvenation and strength. Framing male virtue into the paradigms of wu (武), as martial valor, and wen (文), as cultural attainment, this article argues that masculinity has come to symbolize China’s enhanced comprehensive power and to embody its ideological orientation in both global and domestic domains.


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