Autotranslations

Author(s):  
Aarthi Vadde

The first chapter turns to Tagore, whose auto-translations stand as examples of degraded art both because translations fail to meet the criteria of aesthetic originality and because the critical consensus around Tagore’s English works is that they fail to transmit the beauty and flair of their Bengali originals. Rather than discount Tagore’s translations, I centralize them and examine how he turned unglamorous, second-order acts of literary production, such as compilation, translation, and editing, into modernist strategies for preserving linguistic difference and partial unintelligibility as a style of transnational contact across imperial lines of power. Through my close readings of Nationalism (1916) and The Home and the World (1919), I show how Tagore treated his Bengali originals not as hermetically-sealed, finished works of art, but rather as repositories of material. Their translation and rearrangement into English allowed him to mediate between utopian internationalisms that dreamed of perfect communication between nations and autarkic nationalisms that argued for the cultural self-sufficiency of the nation as a marker of its readiness for sovereignty. Against both these more absolutist positions of globalism and nationalism, Tagore’s auto-translations intervene with a model of national autonomy that precludes cultural organicism and a model of internationalism that makes imperfect communication a feature of globalized collectivity with which to grapple rather than an obstacle to overcome.

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Kelly James Clark

In Branden Thornhill-Miller and Peter Millican’s challenging and provocative essay, we hear a considerably longer, more scholarly and less melodic rendition of John Lennon’s catchy tune—without religion, or at least without first-order supernaturalisms (the kinds of religion we find in the world), there’d be significantly less intra-group violence. First-order supernaturalist beliefs, as defined by Thornhill-Miller and Peter Millican (hereafter M&M), are “beliefs that claim unique authority for some particular religious tradition in preference to all others” (3). According to M&M, first-order supernaturalist beliefs are exclusivist, dogmatic, empirically unsupported, and irrational. Moreover, again according to M&M, we have perfectly natural explanations of the causes that underlie such beliefs (they seem to conceive of such natural explanations as debunking explanations). They then make a case for second-order supernaturalism, “which maintains that the universe in general, and the religious sensitivities of humanity in particular, have been formed by supernatural powers working through natural processes” (3). Second-order supernaturalism is a kind of theism, more closely akin to deism than, say, Christianity or Buddhism. It is, as such, universal (according to contemporary psychology of religion), empirically supported (according to philosophy in the form of the Fine-Tuning Argument), and beneficial (and so justified pragmatically). With respect to its pragmatic value, second-order supernaturalism, according to M&M, gets the good(s) of religion (cooperation, trust, etc) without its bad(s) (conflict and violence). Second-order supernaturalism is thus rational (and possibly true) and inconducive to violence. In this paper, I will examine just one small but important part of M&M’s argument: the claim that (first-order) religion is a primary motivator of violence and that its elimination would eliminate or curtail a great deal of violence in the world. Imagine, they say, no religion, too.Janusz Salamon offers a friendly extension or clarification of M&M’s second-order theism, one that I think, with emendations, has promise. He argues that the core of first-order religions, the belief that Ultimate Reality is the Ultimate Good (agatheism), is rational (agreeing that their particular claims are not) and, if widely conceded and endorsed by adherents of first-order religions, would reduce conflict in the world.While I favor the virtue of intellectual humility endorsed in both papers, I will argue contra M&M that (a) belief in first-order religion is not a primary motivator of conflict and violence (and so eliminating first-order religion won’t reduce violence). Second, partly contra Salamon, who I think is half right (but not half wrong), I will argue that (b) the religious resources for compassion can and should come from within both the particular (often exclusivist) and the universal (agatheistic) aspects of religious beliefs. Finally, I will argue that (c) both are guilty, as I am, of the philosopher’s obsession with belief. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-77
Author(s):  
Akmal Marozikov ◽  

Ceramics is an area that has a long history of making clay bowls, bowls, plates,pitchers, bowls, bowls, bowls, pots, pans, toys, building materials and much more.Pottery developed in Central Asia in the XII-XIII centuries. Rishtan school, one of the oldest cities in the Ferghana Valley, is one of the largest centers of glazed ceramics inCentral Asia. Rishtan ceramics and miniatures are widely recognized among the peoples of the world and are considered one of the oldest cities in the Ferghana Valley. The article discusses the popularity of Rishtan masters, their products made in the national style,and works of art unique to any region


Hypatia ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky

Abstract In what sense do people doubt their understanding of reality when subject to gaslighting? I suggest that an answer to this question depends on the linguistic order at which a gaslighting exchange takes place. This marks a distinction between first-order and second-order gaslighting. The former occurs when there is disagreement over whether a shared concept applies to some aspect of the world, and where the use of words by a speaker is apt to cause hearers to doubt their interpretive abilities without doubting the accuracy of their concepts. The latter occurs when there is disagreement over which concept should be used in a context, and where the use of words by a speaker is apt to cause hearers to doubt their interpretive abilities in virtue of doubting the accuracy of their concepts. Many cases of second-order gaslighting are unintentional: its occurrence often depends on contingent environmental facts. I end the article by focusing on the distinctive epistemic injustices of second-order gaslighting: (1) metalinguistic deprivation, (2) conceptual obscuration, and (3) perspectival subversion. I show how each reliably has sequelae in terms of psychological and practical control.


1980 ◽  
Vol 162 (3) ◽  
pp. 18-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxine Greene

Informed and active engagements with works of art make new experimential openings visible as they turn attention to the concreteness of the world. The ordinary and the taken-for-granted must be bracketed out if a poem or a painting or a musical piece is to be achieved. Viewed within the brackets and from an unfamiliar vantage point, reality may become questionable, in need of interpretation, perhaps in need of repair. If learners are provided opportunities for understanding their part in realizing illusioned worlds, they may come to confront their contributions to the construction of their social realities. Teachers who create situations that permit this to happen will be opening up their classrooms, not only to a new sense of the totality, but to a consciousness of what might be, what is not yet. And this, in turn, may provide a ground for common action, for desired change.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rami Gabriel

The cultural project is a therapeutic melding of emotion, symbols, and knowledge. In this paper, I describe how spiritual emotions engendered through encounters in imaginative culture enable fixation of metaphysical beliefs. Evolved affective systems are domesticated through the social practices of imaginative culture so as to adapt people to live in culturally defined cooperative groups. Conditioning, as well as tertiary-level cognitive capacities such as symbols and language are enlisted to bond groups through the imaginative formats of myth and participatory ritual. These cultural materializations can be shared by communities both synchronically and diachronically in works of art. Art is thus a form of self-knowledge that equips us with a motivated understanding of ourselves in the world. In the sacred state produced through the arts and in religious acts, the sense of meaning becomes noetically distinct because affect infuses the experience of immanence, and one's memory of it, with salience. The quality imbued thereby makes humans attentive to subtle signs and broad “truths.” Saturated by emotions and the experience of alterity in the immanent encounter of imaginative culture, information made salient in the sacred experience can become the basis for belief fixation. Using examples drawn from mimetic arts and arts of immanence, I put forward a theory about how sensible affective knowledge is mediated through affective systems, direct perception, and the imagination.


Author(s):  
M.B. Rarenko ◽  

The article considers the story by Henry James (1843 – 1916) «The Turn of the Screw» (1898 – first edition, 1908 – second edition) in connection with the emergence of a new type of narrator in the writer's late prose. The worldview and creative method of H. James are formed under the influence of the philosophy of pragmatism, which became widespread at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries thanks to the works of the writer's elder brother, the philosopher William James (1842 – 1910). The core of pragmatism is the pluralistic concept of William James based on the assumption that knowledge can be realized from very limited, incomplete, and inadequate «points of view» and this leads to the statement that the absolute truth is essentially unknowable. The epistemological statements of William James's theory is that the content of knowledge is entirely determined by the installation of consciousness, and the content of the truth in this case depends on the goals and experience of the human, i.e. the central starting point is the consciousness of the person. Henry James not only creates works of art, but also sets out in detail the principles of his work both on the pages of fiction works of small and large prose, putting them in the mouths of their characters – representatives of the world of art, and in the prefaces to his works of fiction, as well as in critical works.


Author(s):  
Dobrawa Lisak-Gębala

This article constitutes an attempt at organising the non-conservative tendencies in Polish essays published in the 21st century, which apply to themes, the lowering of the tone, and forms of writing. One major stream is travel writing, which focuses not on the Mediterranean legacy, but on the ‘second world’: long-disadvantaged provincial areas. Many essayists abandon the traditional topic of books and works of art, and turn to ‘reading’ the animal world, the plant world, and the world of ordinary objects. The essay has also become a tool for introducing polarisation between that which is mainstream and that which is marginal and concerns minorities. The fact of choosing a non-traditional topic often entails a non-canonical cognitive attitude, which translates into experiments within the area of the form of expression. The author of this article argues that all those innovations can be accommodated by the flexible convention of the essay as a genre which, in principle, is supposed to constitute an artistic cognitive experiment.


Author(s):  
Tatyana S. Zlotnikova ◽  

The article actualizes the concept of «Soviet man» as a socio-cultural and philosophical-anthropological phenomenon. Based on a broad empirical material, the author substantiates the idea of the project «Soviet man» as a generalized artistic image, a set of social and moral characteristics, visual and verbal matrices. The integration of the cultural project with the world tradition (in particular, the ancient one) is established, and the artistic-aesthetic and socio-political aspects of works of art as cultural practices are substantiated. It is concluded that the considered concept incorporates human experience, which is in demand due to its diversity, tendentiousness, structural certainty, strangeness and recognizability.


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