Pedagogy around graffiti

In this article graffiti is perceived as the art of living with images operated by young artists. The author draws attention to the fact that this art does not only have a negative perception of character, and thus also a social perception (reception). There is explained what the polarization effect of two neighboring generations of graffiti artists in the social space is - open and hidden, in which a presented group of artists tries to manifest their position and presence. Is it worth talking about graffiti in pedagogy in social sciences? The author analyzes it (graffiti) which may not penetrate the structures of life of the young generation, their school, and out-of-school environments, and what does not become the source of rebellion and also a way for establishing a new type of social and educational relationship.

“Give: Charity and the Art of Living Generously” by Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow

Review ofMagnus MacFarlane-Barrow, Give: Charity and the Art of Living Generously (London: William Collins, 2020), pp. 256, ISBN‎ 978-0008360016. £16.99

The Great Stoic Revival

Why is Stoicism the new Zen of the West now? In part, the need for finding calm is ever pressing. In the tech world, work weeks can be manic, the lead-up to new funding rounds even tougher, and the pressure to design products that are both user-friendly and examples of smart engineering leads to stress and burnout. Stoicism offers lifehacks for detoxing from anxiety and stress. For the alt-right, it has the additional badge of being a philosophy of “dead white men.” The Covid-19 pandemic added a new layer of anxiety as people faced stresses from social isolation, job losses, massive death, and basic fear. The pandemic made clear that people need ways of preparing themselves, emotionally and psychologically, for worst-case scenarios. Individuals are hungry for ways of dialing down anxiety and tempering despair. Stoicism is an uncanny mix of a philosophy of empowerment and a philosophy of accepting what lies beyond full human control with equanimity. The book distills lessons for modern resilience with concrete meditation guides for the art of living well.

D. H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places. A Modernist Revaluation of Temporality

The article deals with the literary modes of constructing temporality in D. H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places (1932), a travel book written in 1927 and published posthumously. Typically for the first decades of the twentieth century, the work reflects the writer’s anxieties about war force, scientific discoveries and cultural exhaustion in a series of interrelated essays on the remnants of ancient Etruria and the powerful memory of Etruscan civilization. In this article, Etruscan Places is read like a subjective re-creation of a lost civilization; it is interpreted as the writing of an imaginary philosophy attributed to an ancient people and modelled on Lawrence’s personal engagement with the renewal of life potentialities. Patterning his book on the past-present opposition, the author recuperates the Etruscan past within the mythical framework of modernist coherence. The repeated movements between the lost Etruscan world and the writer’s mostly disappointing contemporary age reveal the possibility of establishing continuities not only on an anthropological plane, but also on a philosophical-aesthetic one. The Etruscans’ narrative of death brings to light an art of living; the historical perspective blends with existential and artistic considerations. Lawrence’s exploratory technique is based on similitudes and antitheses, being literarily rendered by a cross-cultural discourse that combines the factual with the fictional, and the epic with the lyric. The British author’s style puts forward repetition as a modernist rhetorical achievement that indirectly questions the validity of literary tradition. Furthermore, the explicit intertextuality of the book completes the writer’s modernist perspective, authenticating the cultural substance of the temporal links that Lawrence seeks to uncover.