Cultural Bases for Understanding Literature

PMLA ◽  
1953 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-23
Author(s):  
Margaret Mead
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Farm Laborer ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
A Chain

Among the variety of contributions which modern anthropological research might be able to offer to members of this Association, I plan to stress only one, that which anthropological studies of whole cultures can make to those whose task it is to cherish and cultivate the arts, and especially literature, in the contemporary world. Just because we, the anthropologists, specialize in primitive, usually quite small, societies and take as our focus communities of a few hundred people with an oral tradition which can be no more elaborate than the memories of those few, we are able to include within our study many aspects of human experience which the scholar dealing with a period or trend within a complex high civilization accepts on authority or takes for granted. Yet, to the extent that the scholar who works with the eighteenth century in England must so take for granted the economic arrangements of agriculture or the methods of child care in the nursery, he or she is cut off from watching the intimate interplay between the way a farm laborer is paid or a child rebuked and the images of sophisticated literature, within which these experiences of the poor or immature may be represented by a chain of transmuted images or an explicit counterpoint which cuts them off from the developed consciousness of the small literate elite who inherited and cultivated the literary tradition of the past. Short of time, and very often short of materials, historians have only recently thought it worth while to consider the “short and simple annals of the poor” or the life of children who were neither the subjects of later literary elaboration by a Samuel Butler or a Proust, nor had even the dubious claims of a Daisy Ashford.

Fyodor Fyodorovich Martens (1845–1909) a humanist of modern times

1996 ◽  
Vol 36 (312) ◽  
pp. 300-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Pustogarov
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Record ◽  
Peace And War ◽  
The Ideal

In the history of humankind, no matter how far back we look into the past, peaceful relations between people and nations have always been the ideal, and yet this history abounds in wars and bloodshed. The documentary evidence, oral tradition and the mute testimony of archaeological sites tell an incontrovertible tale of man's cruelty and violence against his fellow man. Nevertheless, manifestations of compassion, mercy and mutual aid have a no less ancient record. Peace and war, goodneighbourly attitudes and aggression, brutality and humanity exist side by side in the contemporary world as well.

John Weaver and the Origins of English Pantomime: A Neoclassical Theory and Practice for Uniting Dance and Theatre

2001 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Neoclassical Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rare Combination ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

Theatre historians have long acknowledged John Weaver as the father of English pantomime. In 1985, however, the foremost Weaver scholar, Richard Ralph, noted that no one had systematically studied Weaver's pantomime descriptions, printed in The Loves of Mars and Venus, nor had classical influences upon Weaver been sufficiently investigated.1 Scholarship in the past fifteen years has not filled these gaps; thus, this article begins an examination of these two areas of Weaver's work. They are especially significant because the pantomime descriptions and classical influences reveal that Weaver was a scholar-artist, a rare combination in his era, whose theories and practices deepened the interplay among the arts in early eighteenth-century England.2

Antiquities and Political Prestige in the Early Modern Era

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Country House ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

Television programmes about archaeology, the Asterix series on many children’s bookshelves, Celtic-flavoured holidays in Ireland, the megalomaniacal classical style in the business buildings erected since the late 1980s—all these tell us about the enduring popularity of the past in people’s minds. The intellectual ‘other side of the coin’ are the departments of archaeology, museums of archaeology, and heritage departments operating all over the world. This interest in the past is certainly not new. Whereas the latter—the museums, university and heritage departments—only appeared in the urban landscape less than two hundred years ago, by then several generations of intellectuals with knowledge in the arts had been aware of the existence of an ancient past. A Doric folly on the bank of the river overlooked by the cathedral in the pretty city of Durham was built in 1830 by a Polish count and the eighteenth-century estate of La Alameda de Osuna on the outskirts of Madrid, with its Greek-inspired temple of love with a statue of Bacchus (substituting the original Venus statue that had been taken by the Napoleonic troops on their withdrawal to France)—are only two examples of my own personal daily encounter with the past I have had at diVerent periods in my life. Yet, a different type of past is also familiar to me, a past that is more related to the nation’s past. In La Alameda de Osuna estate, in addition to its many classical features, there is an eighteenth-century copy of a medieval hermit’s chapel, and a country house which used to have displayed automatons in traditional dress. In the seventeenth century a beautiful Gothic-style font cover was made for Durham cathedral illustrating a continuity with a medieval past. Many other examples could be added. All of them illustrate an obsession with the past which on the one hand has lasted at least several centuries. On the other, however, they also appear to indicate an initial quasi-fixation with the classical period, which gradually became counter-balanced by an appeal to each country’s past. This reveals a continuous transformation in time and space in the discourse of the past.

Lord Mansfield’s Voices

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Steedman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Material Object ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Chief Justice ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines the emotions experienced in archives by historians and other scholars. It discusses the way in which different disciplinary formations inculcate and teach emotional responses to things, including things found in archives. Voice—language—is treated as a thing—a material object—around which emotion is articulated; other, past emotional responses inhere in it. The case study is Lord Chief Justice William Mansfield (1705–93), who, in many of the cases he adjudicated, wrote his own notes as a kind of a play script, transcribing the evidence of plaintiffs and defendants so that they appear to speak directly out of the past; a long-lost courtroom echoes with the clamorous, insistent voices of poor and middling-sort people. The chapter describes the effect of these voices on the researcher, whose listening is dictated by the accreted stories of the poor that have circulated since the end of the eighteenth century.

High-Resolution, Low-Voltage SEM of Cell Wall Regeneration of Yeast Shizosaccharomyces Pombe Protoplasts

1988 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 208-211
Author(s):  
M. Osumi ◽  
N. Yamada ◽  
T. Nagatani
Keyword(s):  
Electron Microscope ◽  
Scanning Electron Microscope ◽  
Low Voltage ◽  
Cell Wall Regeneration ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Probe Size ◽  
Beam Damage ◽  
Biological Field ◽  
Scanning Electron

Even though many early workers had suggested the use of lower voltages to increase topographic contrast and to reduce specimen charging and beam damage, we did not usually operate in the conventional scanning electron microscope at low voltage because of the poor resolution, especially of bioligical specimens. However, the development of the “in-lens” field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM) has led to marked inprovement in resolution, especially in the range of 1-5 kV, within the past year. The probe size has been cumulated to be 0.7nm in diameter at 30kV and about 3nm at 1kV. We have been trying to develop techniques to use this in-lens FESEM at low voltage (LVSEM) for direct observation of totally uncoated biological specimens and have developed the LVSEM method for the biological field.

Holism, Chinese Medicine and Systems Ideologies: Rewriting the Past to Imagine the Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker Scheid
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Us ◽  
Shared Objective ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.

The Pornographer and McGahern's Allusive Practice

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-297
Author(s):  
Tom Walker
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Present Value ◽  
The Past

Allusions to other texts abound in John McGahern's fiction. His works repeatedly, though diffidently, refer to literary tradition. Yet the nature of such allusiveness is still unclear. This article focuses on how allusion in The Pornographer (1979) is depicted as an intellectual and social practice, embodying particular attitudes towards the function of texts and the knowledge they represent. Moreover, the critique of the practice of allusion that the novel undertakes is shown to have broader significance in terms of McGahern's whole oeuvre and its evolving attempts to salvage something of present value from the literature of the past.

Reframing the Sciences of the Long Eighteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Giuliano Pancaldi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Past Half

Here I survey a sample of the essays and reviews on the sciences of the long eighteenth century published in this journal since it was founded in 1969. The connecting thread is some historiographic reflections on the role that disciplines—in both the sciences we study and the fields we practice—have played in the development of the history of science over the past half century. I argue that, as far as disciplines are concerned, we now find ourselves a bit closer to a situation described in our studies of the long eighteenth century than we were fifty years ago. This should both favor our understanding of that period and, hopefully, make the historical studies that explore it more relevant to present-day developments and science policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled “Looking Backward, Looking Forward: HSNS at 50,” edited by Erika Lorraine Milam.

Zygmunt Krasiński wobec sztuk pięknych / Zygmunt Krasiński and the Fine Arts

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Płaszczewska
Keyword(s):  
Fine Arts ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Individual Sensitivity ◽  
What Works ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
A Current ◽  
Aesthetic Preferences

Summary This is an attempt at examining Zygmunt Krasiński’s opinions and preferences with regard to the fine arts, a theme many critics believed to be missing from his writings. While putting things right, this article looks at the issues involved in his artistic choices, for example, what works or artists attracted his attention, in general, and to the point of him actually drawing on them in his own work or provoking him to some response (critical, approving, emotional, etc.). Furthermore, the article tries to explore the reasons and circumstances which may account for Krasiński’s interest in a given painting, print, or sculpture. It may have been the work’s theme as in the case of his ekphrasis of Ary Scheffer’s Dante and Virgil Encountering the Shades of Francesca and Paolo Di Rimini, where literary tradition provided the impulse, or the mode of its execution, or the personal ties with its author, or, finally, some other factors, like a current vogue or simply Krasiński’s individual sensitivity. The ultimate aim of all these inquiries is to outline Krasiński’s relationship with the arts (beaux arts) in the context of the aesthetic preferences of the epoch.

Theodore W. Schultz. The Economics of Being Poor. Oxford: Blackwell. 1993. ix+340 pp.+ Index. Hardbound. £ 40.00.

1995 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-85
Author(s):  
Mir Annice Mahmood
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
Policy Formulation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Logical Sequence ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
Economic Journals ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Demand For Children

Improving the material conditions of the poor has been the main focus of economic policy formulation for the past fifty years or so. Thus, in this connection, a vast body of literature has been published which deals with such issues as identifying the poor and suggesting remedies to alleviate their lot. The book by Theodore W. Schultz deals specifically with the economics of the poor. The book is primarily a collection of articles the author wrote over a fortyyear period (1950-1990), and these have been published previously in a number of leading economic journals. The articles have been grouped under three headings: "Most People Are Poor"; "Investing in Skills and Knowledge"; and "Effects of Human Capital". The articles basically deal with the concept of human capital. There is a logical sequence to the articles that make up this book; the poor are identified and steps are then suggested to improve their standing. Issues such as women's economic emancipation and the demand for children are highlighted in the collection of articles dealing with these two subjects. By investing in themselves through education, the poor raise their level of skills, and thus their level of wages/salaries, allowing them to enjoy higher standards of living.

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