Chapter 1. History, Deconstruction, and Working through the Past

2019 ◽  
pp. 32-60
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
Working Through

Searching for Political Parties in the Past

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Common

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.

The Obligation to Choose

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Past ◽  
Light Quanta ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wave Particle Duality ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Chapter 1 explores Woolf’s writings up to the end of 1925 in relation to scientific ideas on wave-particle duality, providing the ‘retrospect of Woolf’s earlier novels’ which Michael Whitworth has suggested shows that she was working ‘in anticipation of the physicists’. The chapter as a whole challenges this idea of anticipation, showing that Woolf was actually working in parallel with physicists, philosophers, and artists in the early twentieth century, all of whom were starting to question dualistic models and instead beginning to develop complementary ones. A retrospect on wave-particle duality is also provided, making reference to Max Planck’s work on quanta and Albert Einstein’s development of light quanta. This chapter pays close attention to Woolf’s writing of light and her use of conjunctions, suggesting that Woolf was increasingly looking to write ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. Among other texts, it considers Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, and ‘Sketch of the Past’.

‘Higher then to her no bookes doe reach’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Vandrei
Keyword(s):  
Early Stage ◽  
Deep Understanding ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
James I ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Past ◽  
Classical World ◽  
Material Evidence ◽  
Do So

This chapter and the following both draw the reader into seventeenth-century understandings of the past, and of Boudica in particular, and makes clear that in a time before disciplines, writers of ‘history’ were erudite commentators, immersed in political thought, the classical world, and contemporary ideas, as well as in drama, poetry, and the law. Chapter 1 shows the subtleties of Boudica’s place in history at this early stage by giving sustained attention to the work of Edmund Bolton (1574/5–c.1634), the first person to analyse the written and material evidence for Boudica’s deeds, and the last to do so in depth before the later nineteenth century. Bolton’s distaste for contemporary philosophy and his loyalty to James I were highly influential in determining the way the antiquary approached Boudica and her rebellion; but equally important was Bolton’s deep understanding of historical method and the strictures this placed on his interpretive latitude.

Die Zukunft der Vergangenheit Richard Oelze (1900 – 1980) and Post-war Reflection

2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-155
Author(s):  
Eleanor F. Moseman
Keyword(s):  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
Critical View ◽  
Repressed Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Visual Expression ◽  
Post War ◽  
Regime Analysis

Abstract The Surrealist artist Richard Oelze’s postwar enterprise was one of inner reflection and personal questioning linked to the broader project of coming to terms with the past. The essay takes a critical view of his artworks and his automatist Wortskizzen to assess the manner and extent to which Oelze utilizes his artistic practice as a mode of working through his, and Germany’s, complicity with the Nazi regime. Analysis of the Wortskizzen exposes how verbal probing informs Oelze’s visual expression of inner turmoil, while implied gaps and voids in paintings and drawings puncture space as well as time, illuminating memory and blending the past with the present. Oelze’s serious play with word and image in turn invites his viewers to release repressed memories through reflective contemplation.

Chapter 1. The Home Economy

1989 ◽  
Vol 127 ◽  
pp. 7-25
Keyword(s):  
Exchange Rate ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
Balance Of Payments ◽  
Medium Term ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Regional Pattern ◽  
Economic Cycles ◽  
The Past ◽  
Alternative Scenarios

On this occasion we have adopted a rather different format for this chapter from the customary one. Part One begins with an analysis of some of the most important developments of the past few years, with notes on the deterioration in the balance of payments, on the fall in the savings ratio and on the acceleration of inflation. Next we discuss some of the problems associated with economic forecasting. We analyse the errors made last year and compare them with the error margins normally associated with short-term forecasts of this kind. We look at the behaviour of the economy at the corresponding stage of previous economic cycles. And we consider the best way of forecasting GDP when there are discrepancies between the measures of its growth in the past. Our central forecasts for 1989 and 1990 are described briefly in the text of Part Two, and more fully set out in the usual tables. We end in Part Three with a discussion of alternative scenarios for the medium term, with particular reference to their implications for interest rates and the exchange rate. An appendix describes the regional pattern of unemployment and the way it has changed since the early 1980s.

Explorations in America

2021 ◽  
pp. 20-56
Author(s):  
Alex Alonso
Keyword(s):  
Northern Irish ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Working Through ◽  
The Usa

Chapter 1 examines the text that marked Muldoon’s arrival in the USA, the long and often puzzling Madoc: A Mystery (1990). A vast American epic of travel, Madoc’s book-length title poem is by far Muldoon’s most daringly avant-garde work to date, and this chapter draws on archival sources to explore the Joycean influence or ‘Wakean experiments’ that underlie its formal quirks, mythic framework, and peculiar language. Madoc is not only a bridge between Muldoon’s Irish and American phases, but a means of working through his transition between those places and phases, with the poet simultaneously taking stock of his Northern Irish roots and exploring the frontier of his new place of writing.

Tracing the Trace: Photography, the Index, and the Limits of Representation

Shadow Sites ◽  
2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kitty Hauser
Keyword(s):  
Photographic Plate ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Print History ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Past ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
The World ◽  
The Hours

Photography, as is well known, is the image-making technology which specializes in the freezing of time.1 What kind of historiography, then, might photography be said to embody? How can photography, with its ineluctable connection to the present moment, hope to say anything at all about the past—about either the broad processes of history or even the events of the hours and minutes immediately preceding the second in which the photograph is taken? What kinds of knowledge of the past does photography allow, and what does it disallow? How can photography, that most superficial of media, hope to become a vehicle for the archaeological imagination, with its love of immanent depths? If photographic technology is uniquely equipped to record (visually) the present moment, it is also characterized—famously—by its thorough and indiscriminate recording of surface detail. What it lacks in temporal depth it makes up for in this meticulous rendering of appearances; any surface marked by the effects of action or time can be faithfully recorded by this technology which itself produces the marked surfaces of photographic plate, film, or print. History and the passing of time is available to photography only in the form of its traces, the more-or-less legible marks and remnants it has left behind at any one moment in the world. And it is precisely photography’s own nature as a chemical trace (until digitization, at least) that enables it accurately to reproduce these marks and signs of history. As discussed in Chapter 1, since the nineteenth century (at least) historical sciences such as palaeontology, geology, and archaeology have based themselves upon the reading of such signs of the past in the present, and this broad epistemological model could be extended to include military reconnaissance, forensic science, and art connoisseurship. Photography, fixing these signs in an image, has had—unsurprisingly, perhaps—an important part to play in the historical development of these disciplines. Photography meets the archaeological imagination as soon as photographic images are scanned for historical information in these disciplines and practices. In a sense, however, photography cannot help but represent the world archaeologically, since it cannot help but record its objects and landscapes in a temporal context, the traces of the past scattered across their surfaces. Ruskin enthused over this quality of the new medium.

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