Blindness and limits: Sophokles and the logic of myth

1980 ◽  
Vol 100 ◽  
pp. 22-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. G. A. Buxton
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Dramatic Technique ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Dramatic Voice ◽  
The Way

To generalize about Aischylos is difficult; to generalize about Euripides is almost impossible; but to generalize about Sophokles is both possible and potentially rewarding. With Sophokles—or, rather, with the Sophokles of the seven fully extant tragedies—we can sense a mood, a use of language, and a style of play-making (‘dramatic technique’) which are largely shared by all seven works. Of these characteristics it is surely the mood which contains the quintessence of Sophoklean tragedy. My aim in the first section of this paper will be to open the way to an appreciation of that mood by following up one of the most important motifs in Sophokles: blindness. In the second section the scope of the enquiry will be widened: I shall show that, in using the blindness motif, Sophokles was drawing on a theme which was fundamental to a large number of mythical narratives told by Greeks from the time of Homer to that of Pausanias, and beyond. In the final section we shall return to Sophokles, placing him this time not against the background of the whole Greek mythical tradition but rather within the specific context of the fifth century B.C., and attempting to overhear the individual dramatic ‘voice’ used by him as he explored the implications of blindness.

scholarly journals Beyond the Epic. Richard II and the Nature of the Tragic in Shakespeare

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 120-141
Author(s):  
Igor O. Shaytanov
Keyword(s):  
History Plays ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Metaphysical Tradition ◽  
Second Tetralogy ◽  
Dramatic Technique ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

The major disagreement on the nature of the epic is rooted in the opposition of two concepts — either the epic draws on the myth, or its optics is regulated by history. In Leonid Pinsky’s opinion the way leading from the epic past towards the individual and inward self was the way of Shakespeare’s heroes both in his tragedies and history plays. Richard II (1595, opening the second tetralogy) follows one of the two archetypes suggested by Hugh Grady in his article “Shakespeare's links to Machiavelli and Montaigne.” Richard is not essentially a machiavellian type, though occasionally called a weak, “deficient” tyrant by critics and a “landlord” (not a king) by John Gaunt in the play. Creating this character Shakespeare makes the first step towards Hamlet. The climax is reached in the scene of his dethronement, much more known for its political topicality than being scrutinized for the discovery a dethroned king is to make. Who is he now? A nonentity, or a new being? The mirror he asks to bring lies, he thinks, when he recognizes his own unchanged face in it. Several scenes in the play (the Queen and Bushy, Richard and his jailor) demonstrate how the lyrical experience, Shakespeare must have acquired in the two plague years (1592–1594), had changed his dramatic technique. In Richard II he gave a start to a new metaphysical tradition.

The Inbetweenness of Sympotic Elegy

2013 ◽  
Vol 133 ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Budelmann ◽  
Timothy Power
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Actual Performance ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
The Future ◽  
Generic Set ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article revisits the question of how elegy was performed at the symposion, and argues that, rather than being either musical or non-musical, elegy situates itself between speech and song. None of the passages in which elegy mentions song are clearly self-referential: they tend to be generic, set in the future, concerned with other performers and other compositions or altogether too slippery in their language to pin them down. Moreover, there are a number of elegiac pieces that appear designed to allow symposiasts to shift from song to speech or speech to song, thereby introducing a new mode of performance, and so are themselves transitional. These observations about the way elegiac texts position their own performance are complemented by considerations about their actual performance. Evidence both from ancient musicologists and from other tonal languages suggests that inbetween modes of delivery were common in Greek poetry and the metrical shape makes elegy a prime candidate. The final section of the article turns to the difficult term elegos in fifth-century drama. It argues that several of these passages draw on inbetweenness as one association of elegos and thus decreases the gap between elegos and surviving elegy. A coda points out that the elegiacs in Euripides' Andromache are a further example of elegy transitioning between two modes of performance.

Hierarchical switching in a multi-dimensional task space is not induced by specific task cues

2001 ◽  
Vol 209 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Kleinsorge ◽  
Herbert Heuer ◽  
Volker Schmidtke
Keyword(s):  
Specific Task ◽  
Task Space ◽  
Basic Pattern ◽  
Task Representation ◽  
Switching Mechanism ◽  
Factorial Combination ◽  
Individual Task ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

Summary. When participants have to shift between four tasks that result from a factorial combination of the task dimensions judgment (numerical vs. spatial) and mapping (compatible vs. incompatible), a characteristic profile of shift costs can be observed that is suggestive of a hierarchical switching mechanism that operates upon a dimensionally ordered task representation, with judgment on the top and the response on the bottom of the task hierarchy ( Kleinsorge & Heuer, 1999 ). This switching mechanism results in unintentional shifts on lower levels of the task hierarchy whenever a shift on a higher level has to be performed, leading to non-shift costs on the lower levels. We investigated whether this profile depends on the way in which the individual task dimensions are cued. When the cues for the task dimensions were exchanged, the basic pattern of shift costs was replicated with only minor modifications. This indicates that the postulated hierarchical switching mechanism operates independently of the specifics of task cueing.

Reverence, Revision and Creaturely Life: Whitehead’s Political Theology of Enjoyment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatrice Marovich
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Free Society ◽  
Actual Entity ◽  
Symbolic Code ◽  
Strategic Motivation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

‘The art of free society’, A.N. Whitehead declares in his essay on symbolism, is fundamentally dual. It consists of both ‘maintenance of the symbolic code’ and a ‘fearlessness of [its] revision’. This tension, on the surface paradoxical, is what Whitehead believes will prevent social decay, anarchy, or ‘the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows’. Bearing in mind Whitehead’s own thoughts on the nature of symbolism, this chapter argues that the figure of the creature has been underappreciated in his work as a symbol. It endeavors to examine and contextualize the symbolic potency of creatureliness in Whitehead’s work, with particular attention directed toward the way the creature helps him to both maintain and revise an older symbolic code. In Process and Reality, ‘creature’ serves as Whitehead’s alternate name for the ‘individual fact’ or the ‘actual entity’—including (perhaps scandalously, for his more orthodox readers) the figure of God. What was Whitehead’s strategic motivation for deploying this superfluous title for an already-named category? In this chapter, it is suggested that his motivation was primarily poetic (Whitehead held the British romantic tradition in some reverence) and so, in this sense, always and already aware of its rich symbolic potency.

Attention Sustainability Impact on Social Status in the Class

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46
Author(s):  
Stanislava Varadinova
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Communication Skills ◽  
School Dropout ◽  
Learning Material ◽  
Early School ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way ◽  
Positive Environment

The attention sustainability and its impact of social status in the class are current issues concerning the field of education are the reasons for delay in assimilating the learning material and early school dropout. Behind both of those problems stand psychological causes such as low attention sustainability, poor communication skills and lack of positive environment. The presented article aims to prove that sustainability of attention directly influences the social status of students in the class, and hence their overall development and the way they feel in the group. Making efforts to increase students’ attention sustainability could lead to an increase in the social status of the student and hence the creation of a favorable and positive environment for the overall development of the individual.

Christograms as Signs of Authority in the Late Roman Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Courtly Culture ◽  
Diachronic Change ◽  
Late Roman

The first section tests the main interpretations of Lactantius’ passage on Constantine’s victorious sign in 312 against existing graphic evidence from the 310s and early 320s, and consequently supports the interpretation of Lactantius’ description as a rhetorical device invented or modified by the Christian narrator. The next two sections support the argument that the perception of the chi-rho as Constantine’s triumphant sign became entrenched in courtly culture and public mentalities from the mid-320s onwards, and trace the diachronic change of the chi-rho from its paramount importance as an imperial sign of authority under the Constantinian dynasty to its hierarchic usage alongside the tau-rho and cross in the Theodosian period. The final section presents a contextualized discussion of the encolpion of Empress Maria and mosaics from several early baptisteries, illustrating the paradigmatic importance the chi-rho and tau-rho for early Christian graphicacy around the turn of the fifth century.

Gender and the Process of Moral Development in the Thought of Paul Evdokimov

2005 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher P. Klofft
Keyword(s):  
Moral Development ◽  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

[In the writings of Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov (1901–1970), Western theology can find new resources regarding the relationship between gender and moral development. The author presents Evdokimov's unique theological anthropology in the context of both the complicated question of gender, as well as the effects that gender has on the way women and men act. While the goal of the Christian life for both is the transformation of the individual through asceticism, the role each plays in the salvation of the world differs markedly.]

Sexist Humor in Facebook Profiles: Perceptions of Humor Targeting Women and Men

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Strain ◽  
Donald Saucier ◽  
Amanda Martens
Keyword(s):  
Gender Norms ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Women's Equality ◽  
Sexist Humor ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Society Research ◽  
The Way

AbstractDespite advances in women’s equality, and perhaps as a result of it, sexist humor is prevalent in society. Research on this topic has lacked realism in the way the humor is conveyed to participants, and has not examined perceptions of both men and women who use sexist humor. We embedded jokes in printed Facebook profiles to present sexist humor to participants. We manipulated the gender of the individual in the profile (man or woman), and the type of joke presented (anti-men, anti-women, neutral) in a 2×3 between-groups design. We found that both men and women rated anti-women jokes as more sexist than neutral humor, and women also rated anti-men jokes as sexist. We also found that men who displayed anti-women humor were perceived less positively than men displaying anti-men humor, or women displaying either type of humor. These findings suggest that there may be different gender norms in place for joke tellers regarding who is an acceptable target of sexist humor.

scholarly journals Theorising the deaf body: using Lefebvre and Bourdieu to understand deaf spatial experience

2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402110036
Author(s):  
Dai O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Deaf Children ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Work Practices ◽  
Spatial Experience ◽  
Individual Basis ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

In the field of Deaf Geographies, one neglected area is that of the individual deaf body and how individual deaf bodies can produce deaf space in isolation from one another. Much of the work published in the field talks about collectively or socially produced deaf spaces through interaction between two or more deaf people. However, with deaf children increasingly being educated in mainstream schools with individual provisions, and the old social networks and institutions of deaf communities coming under threat by the closure of deaf clubs and changing work practices, more research on the way in which individuals can produce their own deaf spaces and navigate those spaces is needed. In this paper, I outline two possible theoretical approaches, that of Lefebvre’s productive gestures to produce social space, and Bourdieu’s habitus, capital and hexis. I suggest that these theories can be productively utilised to better understand the individual basis of the production of deaf spaces.

Enforcing charitable trusts: a study on the English necessary interest rule

Legal Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Hui Jing
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Insufficient Attention ◽  
Charitable Trust ◽  
Conceptual Nature ◽  
The Way

Abstract In England, Parliament introduced the ‘necessary interest rule’ through the enactment of section 115 of the Charities Act 2011 (England and Wales), allowing ‘any person interested’ in a charitable trust to initiate charity proceedings against defaulting trustees in their administration of charitable assets. Nevertheless, insufficient attention has been paid to this rule despite it being initially enacted in 1853. Parliament has refrained from clearly defining the rule, and the courts have long been grappling with its meaning in determining whether a person is eligible to sue. This paper studies the necessary interest rule by exploring the way in which the courts have interpreted it and the uncertainties surrounding its operation. It is shown that, in the context of charitable trusts, the concern of securing the due administration and execution of the trust lies at the heart of the rule. The final section of this paper discusses the significant theoretical implications of the necessary interest rule. It considers the beneficiary-enforcer debate concerning the conceptual nature of express trusts and highlights the insights that analysis of the rule can provide into this debate.

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