Eros and Thanatos in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Garloff
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Love Affair ◽  
The Road ◽  
Open Boundaries ◽  
Lower Social Class ◽  
Otto Weininger

This chapter considers a locale famously fraught with questions of sex, love, and identity: turn-of-the-century Vienna. Vienna was the birthplace of psychoanalysis and a center of the crisis of modern Jewish identity, especially after the election of an openly antisemitic mayor in 1895. While Sigmund Freud maintained a resonant silence about Jewish-Gentile attractions, several bedfellows of psychoanalysis explicitly thematize such attractions. In his highly influential philosophy of sexuality, Sex and Character (1903), Otto Weininger rejects love as a model for Jewish-Gentile rapprochement in favor of a radical Jewish self-transformation, or rather, self-annihilation. The chapter reads Arthur Schnitzler's novel The Road into the Open (1908), which draws an analogy between a Gentile's uneven friendship with a Jewish writer and his love affair with a woman from a lower social class, as a critique of Weininger's philosophical tract. Whereas Weininger can accept Jewish assimilation only as a form of suicidal striving, Schnitzler depicts assimilation as a mutual, quasi-erotic exchange across open boundaries. Against Freud's conspicuous silence about and Weininger's vehement rejection of Jewish-Gentile love, Schnitzler advances a vision of Jewish integration in which Eros has a place.

“The Road into the Open”: From Narrative Closure to the Endless Performance of Subjectivity in Mahler and Freud at the Turn of the Century

2011 ◽  
pp. 79-116
Author(s):  
John E. Toews
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Gustav Mahler ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
The Road ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Reflective Activity ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Subjectivity

This article studies selected works of Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud as enacting the history of subjectivity as a problematic narrative of the deconstruction and construction of identity. It views Mahler and Freud's cultural productions as historically parallel examples of a certain way of imagining human subjectivity as a reflective activity. It studies their ideas on identity as a form of assimilation, and looks at how their “works” took a turn towards subjectivity. The article shows that Freud, Mahler, and their modernist contemporaries did not opt to live in their songs and selves, but instead found a new way to imagine the relations among individuals.

‘Urfi marriage, an Egyptian Version of Cohabitation?

1970 ◽  
pp. 64-69
Author(s):  
Ikran Eum
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Young People ◽  
The State ◽  
Sexual Desires ◽  
Lower Social Class ◽  
State Pension

In Egypt, the term ‘urfi2 in relation to marriage means literally “customary” marriage, something that has always existed in Egypt but nowadays tends mostly to be secretly practiced among young people. Traditionally, according to Abaza,3 ‘urfi marriage took place not only for practical purposes (such as enabling widows to remarry while keeping the state pension of their deceased husbands), but also as a way of matchmaking across classes (since men from the upper classes use ‘urfi marriage as a way of marrying a second wife from a lower social class). In this way a man could satisfy his sexual desires while retaining his honor by preserving his marriage to the first wife and his position in the community to which he belonged, and keeping his second marriage secret.

Social class and envy among Chinese undergraduates: Victim justice sensitivity as a mediator

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (6) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
You-Juan Hong ◽  
Rong-Mao Lin ◽  
Rong Lian
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Negative Emotion ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Justice Sensitivity ◽  
Lower Social Class ◽  
Subjective Social Class ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Chinese Undergraduates

We examined the relationship between social class and envy, and the role of victim justice sensitivity in this relationship among a group of 1,405 Chinese undergraduates. The students completed measures of subjective social class, victim justice sensitivity, and dispositional envy. The results show that a lower social class was significantly and negatively related to envy and victim justice sensitivity, whereas victim justice sensitivity was significantly and positively related to envy. As predicted, a lower social class was very closely correlated with envy. In addition, individuals with a lower (vs. higher) social class had a greater tendency toward victim justice sensitivity, which, in turn, increased their envy. Overall, our results advance scholarly research on the psychology of social hierarchy by clarifying the relationship between social class and the negative emotion of envy.

Social Class and Wellbeing among Staff and Students in Higher Education Settings: Mapping the Problem and Exploring Underlying Mechanisms

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isla Dougall ◽  
Mario Weick ◽  
Milica Vasiljevic
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Staff Members ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
High Social Class ◽  
Lower Social Class ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
The Relationship

Within Higher Education (HE), lower social class staff and students often experience poorer wellbeing than their higher social class counterparts. Previous research conducted outside educational contexts has linked social class differences in wellbeing with differences in the extent to which low and high social class individuals feel respected (i.e., status), in control (i.e., autonomy), and connected with others (i.e., inclusion). However, to our knowledge, there has been no research that has investigated these factors within HE settings. Furthermore, inclusion, status and autonomy are correlated, yet little is known about how these factors contribute to wellbeing simultaneously, and independently, of one another. To fill these gaps, we report the results of two studies; firstly with HE students (Study 1; N = 305), and secondly with HE staff (Study 2; N = 261). Consistently across studies, reports of poor wellbeing were relatively common and more than twice as prevalent amongst lower social class staff and students compared to higher social class staff and students. Inclusion, status and autonomy each made a unique contribution and accounted for the relationship between social class and wellbeing (fully amongst students, and partially amongst staff members). These relationships held across various operationalisations of social class and when examining a range of facets of wellbeing. Social class along with inclusion, status and autonomy explained a substantial 40% of the variance in wellbeing. The present research contributes to the literature exploring how social class intersects with social factors to impact the wellbeing of staff and students within HE.

The Chronology of Apollinaire's Alcools

PMLA ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 67 (7) ◽  
pp. 907-923
Author(s):  
LeRoy C. Breunig
Keyword(s):  
Direct Current ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle

Guillaume Apollinaire's poetry fills the twenty-year interregnum between the end of Symbolism as an organized movement and the birth of Surrealism. The earliest selections in Alcools were composed the year of Mallarmé's death in 1898, and Calligrammes appeared only a few months before Breton and Soupault began their collaboration on Les Champs magnétiques in 1919. The work of perhaps no other poet in France at the turn of the century flows in such a direct current between the two dominant schools of the last seventy-five years. Obviously our appreciation of this period would gain considerably could we but view the poems of Apollinaire in the order in which he created them, proceeding with him from the mellifluous, fin de siècle delicacy of his first published piece, Clair de lune, to the discordant lines of Victoire:On veut de nouveaux sons de nouveaux sons de nouveaux sonsOn veut des consonnes sans voyellesDes consonnes qui pètent sourdement Imitez le son de la toupieLaissez pétiller un son nasal et continuFaites claquer votre langueServez-vous du bruit sourd de celui qui mange sans civilitéLe raclement aspiré du crachement ferait aussi une belle consonne

Society and the Observer

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-102
Author(s):  
Alex Belsey ◽  
Alex Belsey
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Journal Writing ◽  
British Society ◽  
Social Involvement ◽  
Social Differences ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Lower Social Class

This chapter analyses how, in his wartime journal-writing, Keith Vaughan articulated the social differences and exclusions that he believed were preventing him from fully participating in British society. In his accounts of failing to connect with those around him, he romanticized his failures and dramatized his distance from others, thereby justifying his exclusion and ultimately ascribing himself the powerful (if lonely) role of observer – a position from which he could assert superiority over his fellow C.O.s and men of lower social class whilst representing them in his sketches, paintings, and bathing pictures. The first section of this chapter considers how Vaughan used the early volumes of his journal to record his difficulties in making contact with his fellow man and reinforce them through self-dramatization. The second section explores the strategies employed by Vaughan to emphasize his difference from other individuals and groups, particularly around his homosexuality and artistic inclinations, and therefore justify and maintain his distance from them. The third section argues that Vaughan constructed an empowering role that made use of his remove from male society: that of the observer, enabling him to laud his own powers of perception whilst evading the problems of social involvement and possible surveillance.

Raza latina: immigration and decadence at the fin de siècle

2018 ◽  
pp. 29-56
Author(s):  
Michela Coletta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Progressive Degeneration ◽  
Sociological Literature ◽  
The Impact

This chapter explores the ways in which the incorporation of the notion of ‘Latinity’ was affected by changing representations of European civilisation. Through an analysis of the discourses that were created in the popular press, the key argument here is that shifting perceptions of the European immigrant deeply affected the debate on the Latin race: rather than being taken at face value, the possible implications of belonging to the cultural and political sphere of the Latin countries of Europe were long debated. More specifically, the chapter explores the idea of national degeneration in relation to responses to and perceptions of ‘Latin’ immigration at the turn of the century. The significant waves of immigration from Southern Europe fuelled discussions over the impact of a notion such as that of Latinity, which was becoming identified with ideas of progressive degeneration in the contemporary sociological literature. The civilising power of the immigrant was increasingly ambivalent as he was identified with a decadent civilisation whose values seemed to clash with nineteenth-century liberal ideals. So, contrary to the widely shared assumption that ‘Latin America’ was a uniform notion, this discussion shows the complex debates about Latinity and Anglo-Saxonness in each of the three national contexts.

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