The Abbasid Construction of the Jahiliyya: Cultural Authority in the Making

1996 ◽  
pp. 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rina Drory
Keyword(s):  
2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 155-167
Author(s):  
Penny Brown

This paper considers the merit of manga versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha which employ the impressionistic techniques of the Japanese comic format to create new, dynamic texts. Such multimodal texts demand different verbal and visual skills to decode the synergy between word and image and elements like the page layout, the size and shape of images and speech balloons and the style of lettering. Far from debasing the cultural authority of the originals by blurring the boundaries between high and popular culture, these versions can be seen as an act of salvage of the original texts from the perceived difficulties of challenging language and content, reinvigorating them with a vibrant immediacy. By making demands on the imagination and intellect in exciting ways, they may also salvage the act of reading itself by encouraging a young or reluctant readership, as well as the already enthusiastic, to explore new ways of engaging with a text.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cliff Mak

This piece explores the multitude of animal figures in Joyce, especially with regards to his engagement with the classical moral mode of the beast fable. Drawing from a number of texts throughout Joyce's corpus – from his early essays on Dante and Defoe to the fables in Finnegans Wake – I show how a young Joyce's poetics of boredom (as derived from Giordano Bruno) informs his later work through the figure of the animal. Granting his animal figures a certain amount of agency, Joyce uses them to subvert the didacticism of fables, the colonial instrumentalization associated with this didacticism, and even the cultural authority of modernism itself, his own work included.


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-268
Author(s):  
Leo Mellor

This article traces the complex and potent role of classical mythology in the poet George Barker's work of the 1930s. Noting Geoffrey Grigson's rage about ‘narcissism’ when reviewing Barker in 1935 it shows why this barb was more perceptive and apposite – in acknowledging an obsession with both a figure and an overtly classical precedent – than the acclamation given to Barker at the time, from T. S. Eliot among others. Central to the article is an exploration of Barker's heterodox version of a common modernist urge: encountering and reworking of fractured myths. For the radical and ever-present notions of uncertainty with which classical tales and Gods are treated in Barker's work is also revelatory of the autodidactic process – incomplete, unstable, and without class-annotated cultural authority – by which he gained such knowledge. The article thus situates Barker within a cultural matrix, and draws renewed attention to the pluralities of poetry within 1930s Britain.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Henderson

Comic dramas, attested as early as the later sixth century bce in Sicily and from ca. 486 bce in Attica, reflect familiarity with Hesiodic poetry from the time our actual documentation begins in the 470s for Sicily and 430s for Attica and into the mid-fourth century bce. Comic poets engaged with Hesiodic poetry at the level of specific allusion or echo and (more frequently) with Hesiodic stories, thought, themes, ideas, and style, now common cultural currency. They also engaged with the poet and his poetic persona, whether bracketed with Homer as a great cultural authority, distinguished as the anti-Homer in subjects or style, or showcased as an emblematic persona of poet and (didactic) sage. Aristophanes, for one, adopted elements of the Hesiodic persona in fashioning his own.


Prospects ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 471-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamilton Cravens

In post-Darwinian times, Americans have usually thought of the national population as divided into many distinct races and ethnic groups. The notions and definitions they have used for a race and an ethnic group have varied from one age to another. Although Americans have not needed the resources of science to believe that some races and ethnic groups are superior to others, in these times science has become a powerful symbol of cultural authority. For the racist, the assistance of science has often been useful. In this essay, it is important to distinguish between the scientific discourse on race and ethnicity whose participants do not necessarily assume that groups differ in value, and that of scientific racism, whose participants might or might not be scientists, but who have consistently assumed that science proves the existence of permanent group differences and legitimates the assertion that some groups are inherently superior to others. Here we shall discuss the latter.


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