Lyrisk kompleksitet i antropocen. Ein formorientert, berekraftig litteraturdidaktikk

Med utgangspunkt i Inger Hagerups dikt «Kvelden lister seg på tå» utforskar artikkelen moglegheitene for ein berekraftig litteraturdidaktikk som legg vekt på kompleksitet og uhygge. Teoretisk lener artikkelen seg på omgrepet «det sublime» slik det blir definert av Immanuel Kant og utlagt av den økologiske tenkaren Timothy Morton. Vidare byggjer lesinga av diktet på teori om lyrikk som affektiv form og på dei hermeneutiske implikasjonane av Kristin Hallbergs ikonotekstomgrep. Desse tilnærmingane framhevar spennet mellom det trygge og det uhyggjelege i diktet, og artikkelen utforskar korleis lyrikk for born kan stimulere evna til å dvele ved kompleksitet og det uavklåra. Slik kan litteraturdidaktikken byggje opp under ein berekraftig, audmjuk veikskap overfor omverda.

RESENHA DE OBRA QUE ANALISA O PENSAMENTO DE IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804) NA EDUCAÇÃO

O presente resumo objetiva trazer apontamentos acerca da obra Sobre a Pedagogia (Über Pädagogik), do filósofo Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – e com tradução de Francisco Cock Fontanella –, registrando o pensamento do filósofo sobre educação, em um de seus trabalhos menos conhecidos.

The Shape of Motion

Cinematic motion has long been celebrated as an emblem of change and fluidity or claimed as the source of cinema’s impression of reality. But such general claims undermine the sheer variety of forms that motion can take onscreen—the sweep of a gesture, the rush of a camera movement, the slow transformations of a natural landscape. What might one learn about the moving image when one begins to account for the many ways that movements move? In The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, Jordan Schonig provides a new way of theorizing cinematic motion by examining cinema’s “motion forms”: structures, patterns, or shapes of movement unique to the moving image. From the wild and unpredictable motion of flickering leaves and swirling dust that captivated early spectators, to the pulsing abstractions that emerge from rapid lateral tracking shots, to the bleeding pixel-formations caused by the glitches of digital video compression, each motion form opens up the aesthetics of movement to film theoretical inquiry. By pairing close analyses of onscreen movement in narrative and experimental films with concepts from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, and Immanuel Kant, Schonig rethinks long-standing assumptions within film studies, such as indexical accounts of photographic images and analogies between the camera and the human eye. Arguing against the intuition that cinema reproduces the natural perception of motion, The Shape of Motion shows how cinema’s motion forms do not merely transpose the movements of the world in front of the camera; they transform them.

Divine Violence in the Book of Samuel

Much of the drama, theological paradox, and interpretive interest in the book of Samuel derives from instances of God’s violence in the story. The beginnings of Israel’s monarchy are interwoven with God’s violent rejection of the houses of Eli and of Saul, deaths connected to the Ark of the Covenant, and the outworking of divine retribution after David’s violent appropriation of Bathsheba as his wife. Divine Violence in the Book of Samuel explores these narratives of divine violence from ethical, literary, and political perspectives, in dialogue with the thought of Immanuel Kant, Martha Nussbaum, and Walter Benjamin. The book addresses such questions as: Is the God of Samuel a capricious God with a troubling dark side? Is punishment for sin the only justifiable violence in these narratives? Why does God continue to punish those already declared forgiven? What is the role of God’s emotions in acts of divine violence? In what political contexts might narratives of divine violence against God’s own kings and God’s own people have arisen? The result is a fresh commentary on the dynamics of transgression, punishment, and their upheavals in the book of Samuel. The book offers a sensitive portrayal of God’s literary characterisation, with a focus on divine emotion and its effects. By identifying possible political contexts in which the narratives arose, God’s violence is further illumined through its relation to human violence, northern and southern monarchic ideology, and Judah’s experience of the Babylonian exile.

Kant

This chapter’s argument is that for Immanuel Kant, empirical guilt requires determination of responsibility, where responsibility involves free agency. It argues that empirical guilt could only be justified for Kant in the final analysis if the agent is responsible and consequently guilty for his or her own “original sin” or radical evil (ontological guilt), where this responsibility and guilt imply an intelligible free deed, a position Kant defends in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. It is here that Kant can be seen to put forward a transcendental argument from (ontological) guilt to intelligible freedom. The chapter concludes by arguing that Kant, however, does not ultimately succeed in showing why guilt (empirical and ontological) is justified and that even though he can be seen to approach the idea of the subject as causa sui that later thinkers endorse, he does not embrace it fully.

Being Guilty

What can guilt, the painful sting of the bad conscience, tell us about who we are as human beings? This book seeks to answer this question through an examination of the views of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling, Arthur Schopenhauer, Paul Rée, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger on guilt, freedom, responsibility, and conscience. The concept of guilt has not received sufficient attention from scholars of the history of German philosophy. The book addresses this lacuna and shows how the philosophers’ arguments can be more deeply grasped once read in their historical context. A main claim of the book is that this history could be read as proceeding dialectically. Thus, in Kant, Schelling, and Schopenhauer, there are variations on the idea that guilt is justified because the human agent is a free cause of his or her own being—a causa sui—and thus responsible for his or her “ontological guilt.” In contrast, in Rée and Nietzsche, these ideas are rejected, and the conclusion is reached that guilt is not justified but is explainable psychologically. Finally, in Heidegger, we find a synthesis of sorts, where the idea of causa sui is rejected, but ontological guilt is retained and guilt is seen as possible, because for Heidegger, a condition of possibility of guilt is that we are ontologically guilty yet not causa sui. In the process of unfolding this trajectory, the various philosophers’ views on these and many other issues are examined in detail.

A Role for Religion?

The perspective of the preceding chapters has been humanistic but non-religious. This chapter is concerned with the possible role of religion in education. Endeavoring to steer between two kinds of fundamentalists—those who view particular scriptures as morally authoritative, and the “new atheists” who aim to abolish religion entirely—it argues that the crucial insight (stemming from Immanuel Kant) is to recognize the priority of morality. Once that is appreciated, secular humanists can ally with devotees of any religion, provided that the faithful have reached an ecumenical stage of religious progress. The educational consequences allow religion a role in the classroom, for comparative studies that promote dialogue among religions (and between religions and forms of secular humanism), and that appreciate both the contributions and the blemishes of the world’s major religions.