Self-Portrait

2017 ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
Gian Maria Annovi

Pasolini’s less well-studied paintings and drawings, particularly his self-portraits, are the subject of chapter Four. I provide new critical and theoretical perspectives on his visual work and follow its development in parallel with Pasolini’s other creative endeavors, interpreting them as one way of delineating an public authorial performance. I analyze Pasolini’s drawing as wounded self-portrait, that is the graphic manifestation of a torn self-image, produced by the violent clash with society. In Chapter Four, I also look at Pasolini’s relationship to abstract art, focusing on the parallels between his cinema and his experimentation with materials and forms in painting. Challenging the common notion of Pasolini’s hatred for modern art, I argue that in his portraits and self-portraits, he actually used abstraction to deform or disfigure the self, as a result of the pressure of history and society. Finally, in this chapter I consider some of Pasolini’s photographic portraits as a part of his authorial self-fashioning, and as a necessary component of his multimedia practice and his authorial performance during the last phase of his career.

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibrahim A. Odugbemi

A number of scholarly and critical arguments have explored the poetics of nonfiction, otherwise called life writing, as a sub-genre of prose literature. Against the common expectation of a detailed concentration on facts about the subject (the self or the other) which has made nonfiction to be seen in some quarters as a concern of history, such critical arguments have shown that this genre has its peculiar, predominant pattern and structure, which make it arguably a concern of the literary enterprise. A part of such argu­ments theoretically postulates that nonfiction is a meta-history, based on its identification of some textual and contextual properties and patterns of narra­tion which transform the life account of the self or other into a meta-historical (and not historical) expression, and therefore makes such writing a concern of literature. In extension of this argument, this paper examines Toyin Falola's memoir, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, as a genre of life writing and, especially, a form of autobiography, by showing how the setting, Ibadan, in its cultural and social formations, is depicted as having contributed to the self-awareness, self-image and identity of the subject, and how this reflection makes the nar­rative a meta-historical expression.


2013 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-279
Author(s):  
Anna Engelking

This article concerns the anthropological inquiry about collective identity of contemporary Belarusian kolkhozniks. The author had conducted her field research (1993-2011) in both west and east Belarus. Source materials consist of about seven hundred conversations with individuals overwhelmingly more than sixty years of age. By analyzing and interpreting their narrative, the author traced the implicit values, norms, rules, basic semiotic dichotomies, and distinctive attributes in search of an unbiased insight into the content, structure, and building process of collective identity of the subjects under study. She concludes that the dichotomies, constitutive for collective identity of kolkhozniks—“peasant” versus “lord,” “peasant” versus “Jew,” and “Christian” versus “Jew”—result in the self-definition of muzhik-kolkhoznik as a simple, hard-working man “from here” belonging to a “Christian nation.” Neither the nation nor motherland, state nor language, belongs to the principal values of this group, which are “working the land” and “faith in God.” As a result of the petrifaction of the old model of the serfdom manor by the Soviet kolkhoz system, in a Belarusian village we presently encounter one of the last European residuals of premodern mentality and social identity. The image of Belarusian kolkhozniks’ collective identity has little to do with the popular category of Homo sovieticus and with the common stereotype of the kolkhoz. The human subject of the author’s anthropological reflection shows up as a person dealing amazingly well with extremely difficult living conditions and the modern, vivid personification of the archaic Homo religiosus.


Author(s):  
Yumiko Inukai

James contends that the rejection of conjunctive relations in experience leads Hume to the empirically groundless notion of discrete elements of experience, which James takes as the critical point that differentiates his empiricism from Hume’s. In this chapter, I argue that James is not right about this: Hume not only allows but employs experienced conjunctive relations in his explanations for the generation of our naturally held beliefs about the self and the world. There are indeed striking similarities between their accounts: they both use the relations of resemblance, temporal continuity, constancy, coherence, and regularity, and the self. Also, objects are constructed out of basic elements in their systems—pure experience and perceptions, respectively. Although collapsing the inner and outer worlds of the subject and object into one world (of pure experience for James and of perceptions for Hume) may seem unintuitive, this is exactly what allows them to preserve our ordinary sense of our experiences of objects.


2014 ◽  
Vol 107 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-446
Author(s):  
Ayelet Even-Ezra

In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul writes: It is doubtless not profitable for me to boast. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord: I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago—whether in the body I do not know, or whether out of the body I do not know, God knows—such a one was caught up to the third heaven. And I know such a man—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—how he was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. Of such a one I will boast; yet of myself I will not boast, except in my infirmities. (2 Cor 12:1–5 nkiv) This brief and enigmatic account is caught between multiple dialectics of power and infirmity, pride and humility, unveiling and secrecy. At this point in his letter Paul is turning to a new source of power in order to establish his authority against the crowd of boasting false apostles who populate the previous paragraphs. He wishes to divulge his intimate, occult knowledge of God, but at the same time keep his position as antihero that is prevalent throughout the epistle. These dialectics are enhanced by a sophisticated play of first and third person. The third person denotes the subject who experienced rapture fourteen years ago, while the first person denotes the narrator in the present. Only after several verses does the reader realize that these two are in fact the same person. This alienation allows Paul the intricate play of boasting, for “of such a one I will boast, yet of myself I will not boast.”


2021 ◽  

Speech science has a history of over 120 years. In addition to the self-image of the discipline, this book focuses on everything that makes the subject so attractive: With its vital research and teaching subject, speaking and people talking to each other, it is both application-oriented and up-to-date. This explains the continuing high level of interest among students, research partners, and practical professional fields in education, art, media, counseling, therapy, and prevention. With study locations in Halle, Jena and Marburg, Speech Science is represented throughout Germany. As an interdisciplinary research and working subject with links to linguistics, medicine, pedagogy, psychology, politics and sociology, among others, there are also diverse collaborations in research, teaching and practice. This volume offers surprising insights into the diversity of speech science – from its history to the present to an outlook on what will be possible in the future. Susanne Voigt-Zimmermann holds a degree in speech science. After scientific, speech-educational, and clinical-therapeutic activities at the universities of Jena, Heidelberg, and Magdeburg, she has been a professor of speech science at the Department of Speech Science and Phonetics at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg since 2017.


2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-105
Author(s):  
Necmettin Kızılkaya

The legal rules of each legal system reflect their own nature and primary characteristics in both quantity and quality. Since they comprise the main structure of the system, the study of these rules, therefore, gives an idea about the mechanism of the system as a whole. An investigation of the principles behind these legal rules, which represent dominant features of several rules is a further step and gives an opportunity to understand the common points of the particular cases. These principles have different essences and historical backgrounds in every legal surrounding. The settled principles of Islamic law (al-qawā‘id al-fiqhiyyah) which reflect the general characteristics of rules, were used in legal corpuses from the early ages and developed at a later stage as an independent subgenre in Islamic law. Not only the four Sunni schools of law, but also Shi‘i jurists have made a considerable contribution to the development of the literature in the course of time. In the Muslim world, there are several academic works on the subject such as critical editions, theoretical studies of the genre, and the investigations and applications of certain qawā‘id in legal corpuses. Nevertheless, this significant subject of Islamic law has so far found little attention among the Western academia. This paper, aims to make a small contribution to this significant component of Islamic law. It is concentrating on al-qawā‘id alfiqhiyyah, not al-qawā‘id al-usūliyyah (hermeneutic principles). After dealing with the concept of qawā‘id and its importance in Islamic law, the paper presents a historical overview of the development of qawā‘id literature in four Sunni schools of law. The evolution of the genre is examined in three periods: the formative period second/eighth–fourth/tenth centuries), the self-contained compilation period (fourth/tenth–tenth/sixteenth centuries), and the post-compilation period (tenth/sixteenth– thirteenth/nineteenth centuries).The paper concludes with a list of traditional and modern qawā‘id works.


Author(s):  
Vlad Strukov

In the final chapter, I am concerned with the confirmation of the subject as a transcendent category in the moment of self-recognition whereby the finite identity is rejected in favour of the infinite Self. Zel’dovich’s The Target employs the sublime as a drama of subject-formation—both as a story of emergence and obliteration—whereby the limits of the self are conceived as a movement away from the self into the topography of solitary subjectivity confronted with open-ended being. The subject becomes an excess of discourse itself, that is, it centres on self-preservation which ensures infinity in stasis. The subject enters the divine state of amnesia after cataclysmic disruptions: the subject is no longer a tyrannous architect of the fallen world but a pre-eminent observer of the unfolding universe. I am particularly interested in the cinematic materiality of the sublime and the immateriality of subjectivity existing outside the temporal framework of history. I centre on issues of scale and amplification as matters of cultural vibration in a post-apocalyptic world. I conclude by demonstrating how Zel’dovich’s The Target with focuses on transient spaces and the epiphany of the universal monad. Thus, this chapter summates the key points presented in the book.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Thomas Michael Malone

<p>The purpose of this thesis is to challenge the common notion that the internet has had a detrimental impact on the music industry, and on musicians’ ability to generate a viable income while still producing good music. Note, that the following arguments do not automatically extend to the effect that the web has had on books, patents, films, journalism or any other medium. The reason for this is because these different disciplines have individual characteristics that make them respond differently to the same socio-economic pressures. However, on the same token, it does not necessarily follow that the conclusions reached here are inapplicable to other activities: perhaps what is true for music in the following pages is also true for e.g. photography. Furthermore, I am not advocating for a free-for-all internet where behemoths like Google, Amazon and Facebook get to do whatever they wish. Although I am intrigued by such matters, the constraints of both time and space allow me only the possibility to focus on the subject that I am most familiar and passionate about. Furthermore, because I am painting a broad picture which encompasses many intellectual disciplines, many of which I am not an expert in, this work is to be considered more on the consistency of the overall argument rather than the minutia of its individual parts.</p>


2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (32) ◽  
pp. 133-146
Author(s):  
Helena Kardashova

This paper seeks to formalize the structures of everyday discourse. The search for factors ensuring the unity and autonomy of everyday discourse is based on the assumption that the integrity of the discourse as such is guaranteed by the instance of discursive subject. The article deals with the common notion of collective subject/common subject popular in lingua-cultural approach in the Russian discourse analysis. The article on the material of the Russian National Corpus analysed the statements containing an identifier “common / ordinary man”, specified the values in this model, and reconstructed the paradigm of conceptual meanings significant to the speaker as the subject of ordinary discourse. Two aspects of the concept are considered: one model focuses on semantic structures of a subject positioned as a member of a community; another model is related to the subject projecting one in opposition to the other. The author of this article argues that the constitutive force of each discursive practice lies in its provision of subject positions. While the everyday discourse makes available to take up both positions for subjects, the discourse analysis reveals the synergistic nature of everyday communication.


Dialogue ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Amy Mullin

Nietzsche writes about the common temptation to take the capacity for consciousness as constituting the “kernel of man; what is abiding, eternal, ultimate, and most original in him. One takes consciousness for a determinate magnitude. One denies it growth and intermittences. One takes it for the ‘unity of the organism’.” The very description of the nature of this unified organism is indicative of reasons one might wish to believe in it. It is “abiding” and “eternal.” Nothing in the world poses a threat to its existence or survival. This temptation and Hegel's complicated response to it are the subject of this essay. In particular I will investigate the accuracy of Adorno's claims that Hegel is untrue to his own insights into the dialectical nature of the self, and that Hegel's self-betrayal is due to the the fact that “like Kant and the entire philosophical tradition including Plato, Hegel is a partisan of unity.”


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