Liberating Effects

Teen Spirit ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 89-109
Author(s):  
Paul Howe
Keyword(s):  
Modern Life ◽  
Social Rules ◽  
The Past ◽  
Harm To Others ◽  
Adolescent Society

This chapter focuses on the considerable liberating effects associated with the rise of adolescent traits and values. The brash and bold manner of the current age reflects a more general loosening of social rules that has come with substantial benefits as well as costs. If some constraints of the past served a useful purpose, others were unduly restrictive. The prevailing philosophy these days is that we should be free to do just as we please if it does no direct and evident harm to others. These must be acknowledged as one of the principal benefits of living in today's adolescent society. At the same time, there are areas of modern life where we can reasonably ask if these liberating effects have gone too far and whether our newfound freedoms might be put to better use if more closely harnessed to adult goals and sensibilities. The chapter considers both the upside and the downside of the expansion of personal freedoms that is one of the hallmark features of the adolescent society.

Coming of age in Milano: Ermanno Olmi from sponsored cinema to feature filmmaking

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-428
Author(s):  
Jim Carter
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Italian Cinema ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Cinema Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Michelangelo Antonioni ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Bernardo Bertolucci ◽  
Critical Process

This article argues that a full understanding of Ermanno Olmi’s feature films will require a deep engagement with the sponsored cinema he made as director of the Sezione Cinema Edisonvolta. It begins by spelling out some of the stakes and challenges of a ‘sponsored turn’ in Italian cinema studies, which during the past decade has inaugurated the long archival and critical process of revaluing the corporate roots of auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci and, to a certain extent, Ermanno Olmi. It then elaborates on the relation between Olmi’s sponsored cinema (1953–61) and feature filmmaking (1961–2014) by analysing two films that mark the director’s transition from the small to big screen: Michelino 1 a B (1956) and Il posto (1961). The central contention is that these films tell two different versions of the same coming-of-age story: a young boy from the provinces finds work in a downtown office building, where he must come to terms with the fact that he will remain there all his life. The distance between the two films is a measure of Olmi’s own coming-of-age as an intellectual: from a resolved promoter of the guiding role of business in modern life to a sceptical interrogator of white-collar mundanity. After a comparative reading that reveals general similarities of structure and specific scenes of quotation, the article concludes with some remarks about education, a concept through which Olmi’s feature films show themselves to be aware of – even commenting on – sponsored cinema.

China–India Myths in Xu Dishan’s ‘Goddess of Supreme Essence’

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-93
Author(s):  
Gal Gvili
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Ancient India ◽  
China And India ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter analyses the scholarship of prominent May Fourth writer Xu Dishan as gateway for understanding his fiction. A close examination of his engagement with Indian religions and mythology in his fiction constitutes a vision of a China–India literary horizon through a literary device termed as ‘transregional metonymy’: tropes that travelled between China and India through the cultural exchange of myths. The chapter elaborates on this literary device through a close reading of Xu Dishan’s ‘Goddess of Supreme Essence’ (1923). The reading shows how a shared China–India figurative domain emerges in the story to offer a new understanding of myths and how they function in modern life. It also suggests that instead of rewriting the past, myths can rewrite the present; instead of using myths to establish a national culture, literature can use myths to imagine a transregional horizon. Focusing on India to think about the nature of storytelling and the relationship between myth and reality, Xu Dishan undid the binary distinction between ancient India as a soul brother and colonial India as a cautionary tale.

scholarly journals African Ways of Knowing and Pedagogy Revisited

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Constantine Ngara
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
African Students ◽  
Indigenous Knowledges ◽  
The Past

Whereas African ways of knowing have previously been ‘misunderstood, misinterpreted, ridiculed and ignored’ in colonial discourses, this paper situates debate on their relevance in defining the African personhood and pedagogy of liberation and progress in Africa. The paper is designed to inform educators of African students on the nature of the African paradigm of knowing to understand the African psyche. Although modern people (especially the African elite) tend to invest little faith in developing indigenous knowledges, this paper amply demonstrates that traditional ways of knowing (spirituality centered wisdom) continue to be relevant in modern life even beyond the African boundaries. The insights informing the paper were gleaned from several studies conducted by this researcher (and others) exploring the African paradigm from Shona and Ndebele cultures’ conceptions of giftedness. The paper recommends revisiting African traditional ways of knowing to harmonize the past with the present and establish the true basis for pedagogy of liberation and progress in Africa.

scholarly journals Medication in the treatment of alcohol dependence

1996 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 249-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Chick
Keyword(s):  
Alcohol Dependence ◽  
Pharmacological Treatments ◽  
Harmful Drinking ◽  
Psychosocial Treatments ◽  
The Past ◽  
Harm To Others ◽  
New Evidence

Social, cultural, emotional and biological influences determine whether people drink to excess and whether they then experience harm or cause harm to others (Cook, 1994). Psychosocial treatments for alcohol dependence are only modestly successful, with most studies finding that at least 50% of patients return to harmful drinking in the following year. In the past decade there has been new evidence for the role of pharmacological treatments in reducing harm from drinking and in preventing relapse.

scholarly journals Steam Punks

2011 ◽  
Vol 133 (06) ◽  
pp. 32-37
Author(s):  
Jefrey Winters
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Induction Furnace ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Hydraulic Power ◽  
The Past ◽  
Computer Numerically Controlled ◽  
Compressed Earth Block ◽  
Minimum Number ◽  
Earth Block ◽  
Web Platform

This article discusses how some amateur engineers are working to design and build a set of tools that would enable self-reliant people to make everything they need. Marcin Jakubowski and his colleagues are among such people who are working for the past many years on the concept of open-source economy. The rationale for this concept is steeped in the language of empowerment. Using an open-source Web platform known as a wiki, Jakubowski worked with a far-flung network of collaborators over the Internet to identify the minimum number of technologies needed to produce a reasonable facsimile of modern life. Some of the items on the resulting list are the greatest hits of industrialism over the past 200 years: the steam engine, the combine, and the induction furnace. So far, the team has completed seven prototype machines: the tractor, a tiller, a hydraulic power unit, a computer numerically controlled plasma torch table, a drill press, a hole punch, and a compressed earth block press.

The End of Art and the Non-End of Religion: Hegel on Aesthetics and Religion

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
David Lê
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Per Se ◽  
End Of Art ◽  
Role Of Religion

Abstract While Hegel’s infamous “end of art” thesis states that art is “for us, a thing of the past” he insists that philosophy and, to a degree that is often underestimated by contemporary readers, religion endure within the structure of modern life. In this paper I aim to demonstrate how by focusing on Hegel’s claim that religion meets no end, we can come to a better understanding of how and why he thinks art does end. This will lead us away from common, but false, picture of Hegel as being indifferent (or even hostile) to art’s sensuous mode of intelligibility. Inasmuch as religion remains both necessarily sensuous and a component of social life that realizes freedom and divinity within modernity, the “problem” with art cannot be its sensuousness per se. What art ultimately finds itself unable to do, and what religion can do, is find a way to reconcile the destabilizing force of individual, subjective freedom with a jointly-held representation of who and what we are and what we value most, what Hegel calls “divinity” (das Göttliche). By countenancing the vital role of religion in Hegel’s thought, we can therefore better understand one of his most famous, and least understood philosophical claims.

scholarly journals Empathy and Community in the Age of Refugees: Petzold’s Radical Translation of Seghers’ Transit

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 118
Author(s):  
Margarete J. Landwehr
Keyword(s):  
Rapid Change ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Refugees ◽  
Similar Vein ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Globalized World

Petzold’s film constitutes a radical translation of Seghers’ novel by transforming her tale of political refugees in Vichy France into an existential allegory depicting the fluidity of identities and relationships in a globalized world. The transitory existence of Petzold’s war refugee serves as an extreme example of the instability of modern life, which allows spectators to identify and empathize with migrants’ unpredictable journeys. Moreover, the director conveys the universality of his protagonist’s story by portraying him as an Everyman bereft of distinctive personality traits, by intermingling the past (Seghers’ plot) with the present (contemporary settings), and by situating his experiences in non-descript, liminal “non-places.” Both thematically and aesthetically, narrative is portrayed as establishing a community in an unstable contemporary world. Like the anti-hero of many modern Bildungsromane, Petzold’s protagonist fails to develop a stable identity and enduring friendships that anchor him in a community, but he creates his own family of listeners through his storytelling. In a similar vein, the film’s voice-over/narrator that bridges the fictional world with that of the audience underscores the film’s (and the novel’s) central theme: in a world of rapid change and mobility, the individual who may not be able to establish a stable identity or relationships, can create, as a narrator, a community of empathic listeners.

The Clay Figurines of Acambaro, Guanajuato, Mexico

1953 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 388-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles C. Di Peso
Keyword(s):  
Life Forms ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Private Collection

For the past eight years, stories have appeared concerning a vast collection of animal and human figurines of great antiquity, gathered in the vicinity of Acambaro in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. Senor Waldemar Julsrud possesses some 32,000 of these artifacts in his private collection. These ceramic figures consist of such forms as Brontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Stegosaurus, Trachodon, Dimetrodon and other Mesozoic reptilian life-forms. Also included in the collection are a number of modern life-forms such as cow, horse, hippopotamus, elephant, rabbit, and dog. Even more fabulous is the number of miniature Egyptian sarcophagi found in the collection.

Acheron's rainbow: Free associations on 75 years of exploration geo-electromagnetics

Geophysics ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 70 (6) ◽  
pp. 25ND-31ND ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan C. Tripp
Keyword(s):  
Electrical Conductivity ◽  
Dielectric Permittivity ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
The Past

Geophysics has proved to be an effective means of prospecting for the raw materials necessary for modern life. Electromagnetic techniques are the methods of choice when buried treasure has an anomalous electrical conductivity or dielectric permittivity. In the past 75 years, SEG has provided a forum for the usually rational exchange of ideas in electromagnetic prospecting as well as a bazaar for goods and services.

scholarly journals Brześć – the city of an eastern borderlands, architecture of the 2nd Republic of Poland

1970 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 96-101
Author(s):  
Krystyna Paprzyca
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Object A ◽  
The Past ◽  
Life Styles ◽  
The City

The borderland, often called „ land lost” are becoming the places we often return to in our memories, the need of rediscovering them arises. The past might be described in a different way: through pictures of different life styles, architecture, people, tradition. It is natural they create longing and sorrow caused often by the lack of acceptance of modern life styles. Because borderland towns are located abroad, their architecture, tradition, culture, literature are our cultural heritage and we shall not forget it. The phenomenon of the lack of bond of people and places observed today, makes “places with no soul”. Steering and controlling people, people’s needs, emotions, make a person an object. A man loses oneself, loses one’s soul. Many places are being ruled by a moment, similarity, rush and loneliness There are no history, past in them, there is only the present moment and they are characterized by the similarity. We cannot interpret them and we have no bonds with them.

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