scholarly journals Secolarizzazione, memoria e nuovi revivals: la difficile riscrittura del presente

ARCHALP ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 NS (Issue 2 Ns, July 2019) ◽  
pp. 43-50
Author(s):  
Carlo Olmo

The architectural project of re-use, in a context full of historical, cultural and environmental values ​​such as the Alpine one, must inevitably confront with the list of conceptualizations elaborated during the twentieth-century modernity. First of all we have to think about memory which is the main raw material of architecture and its history, a theme on which the culture of restoration has been built, and on which the rhetoric of re-use has been shaped in recent times, with the gradual addition of other contemporaneity values such as soil consumption, sustainability, zero growth. The theme of memory seems in some cases to negotiate the one of secularization, a term that often comes to coincide with modernity. The modernity that has standardized and flattened the Alpine territory, raising questions about the meaning of the “encounter”, its ability to question prejudices, beliefs, and consolidated rhetorics. The “encounter” that takes place in the moment in which the contemporary urban culture succeeds in crossing landscape and Alpine architecture issues, creating disorientation, reopening the eyes of the observer and rebooting history by questioning the present. The “rewriting of the existent” therefore raises issues that are difficult to make explicit, such as the recognition and critical knowledge that are the basis of design responsibility. This is accompanied by the threat caused by a prescriptive approach which, in light of the aspects of control and of technological and environmental management of the mountain context, can lead to the drift of the practice which must be avoided only through the assumption of risk linked to the design itself.

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-286
Author(s):  
Sam Edwards

This article examines how a post-1918 Edwardian commemorative aesthetic focused on the “English Garden” was deployed in the later twentieth century as a means to establish an “informal” Empire of memory. The result is an architectural irony and a landscape at odds with the moment that made it: the post-1945 cemeteries of the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) expanded the now defunct Empire’s commemorative possessions just as the actual deeds to land were surrendered. The one exception to this story of contemporaneous political withdrawal and commemorative appropriation nonetheless proves the broader point. For after the bloody imperial war fought in the South Atlantic in 1982 the Commission, at the behest of the British government, built its first and last post-1945 overseas war cemetery. And just as had been the case sixty years earlier, the form and style of this cemetery ensured it became the last outpost of an Edwardian Empire of memory.


BJHS Themes ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAHNAVI PHALKEY ◽  
TONG LAM

AbstractHow might one tell the histories of China and India – two countries that have come to be seen as twenty-first-century giants? How might one tell of how they look to the world and to each other? In this issue we juxtapose, connect and compare the two. Ours is an attempt at a historiography of twentieth-century modernity in China and India beyond the encouragement of Euro-American historiography. We seize this opportunity provided by the contemporary engagement and concern with the two countries to reinterpret the narratives of their twentieth-century transformation, which are far from settled at the moment. We bring historical knowledge to speak usefully to the excitement, anxiety and aspiration around science and technology in China and India. We bring the same to speak meaningfully to the cynicism, admonition and expectations that the world has of them. We use China and India as a method of exploring new historiographical questions of science. We are invested in extending the relevance of studying China and India to the world at large through connections, references and juxtaposition, and by raising questions that, on the one hand, expose the limits of the Euro-American experience and, on the other, open up the intellectual and historiographical space for narratives and theoretical frameworks that are not tied to geopolitical significance. This paper sets out these issues and introduces the papers of the collection.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Alys Moody

Beckett's famous claim that his writing seeks to ‘work on the nerves of the audience, not the intellect’ points to the centrality of affect in his work. But while his writing's affective quality is widely acknowledged by readers of his work, its refusal of intellect has made it difficult to take fully into account in scholarly work on Beckett. Taking Beckett's 1967 short prose text Ping as a case study, this essay is an attempt to take the affective qualities of Beckett's writing seriously and to consider the implications of his affectively dense writing for his texts’ relationship to history. I argue that Ping's affect emerges from the rhythms of its prose, producing a highly ‘speakable’ text in which affect precedes interpretation. In Ping, however, this affective rhythmic patterning is portrayed as mechanical, the product of the machinic ‘ping’ that punctuates the text and the text's own mechanical rhythms, demanding the active involvement of the reader. The essay concludes by arguing that Ping's mechanised affect is a specifically historical feeling. Arising from a specifically twentieth-century anxiety about technology's tendency to evacuate ‘natural’ emotion in favour of inhuman affect, it participates in a tradition of affectively resonant but curiously blank or indifferent performances of cyborg embodiment. Read in this historical light, Ping's implication of the reader in the production of its mechanised affect grants it, from our contemporary perspective, an archival quality. At the same time, it asks us to broaden the way in which we understand the Beckettian text's relationship to history, pointing to the existence of a more complex and recursive relationship between literature, its historical moment, and our contemporary moment of reading. Such a post-archival historicism sees texts as generated by but not bound to their historical moments of composition, and understands the moment of reception as an integral, if shifting, part of the text's history.


Author(s):  
A. V. Zaitseva

The article focuses on the libraries and the publishing and book trading organizations established by Moscow students in the early twentieth century. These organizations were founded to make the textbooks more available, cheaper and less deficient than they were at the moment. As the resource of the textbooks, libraries of compatriots’ associations were widespread. At the Moscow University students publishing commissions (parts of benefit societies) printed lecture notes and examination programs. Library, publishing, and trading activities were tightly bound in these societies. In the Moscow Technical School and the Moscow Women High Courses the libraries and publishing houses functioned independently of each other and of economical organizations of students. The students Library of textbooks at the Moscow Agricultural Institute was really unique, as it combined library service with book publishing for a while. Book trade was usually managed by publishers. Besides students organizations within educational institutes, there functioned a cooperative bookstore and a publishing house at the same time, common for all Moscow students. A dream, that never came true, was a Students House and united library collections of textbooks in it. In spite of many complications, the cooperation was successful, and due to it, access to the textbooks was facilitated for many students.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-2) ◽  
pp. 86-98
Author(s):  
Ivan Popov

The paper deals with the organization and decisions of the conference of the Minister-Presidents of German lands in Munich on June 6-7, 1947, which became the one and only meeting of the heads of the state governments of the western and eastern occupation zones before the division of Germany. The conference was the first experience of national positioning of the regional elite and clearly demonstrated that by the middle of 1947, not only between the allies, but also among German politicians, the incompatibility of perspectives of further constitutional development was existent and all the basic conditions for the division of Germany became ripe. Munich was the last significant demonstration of this disunity and the moment of the final turn towards the three-zone orientation of the West German elite.


APRIA Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
José Teunissen

In the last few years, it has often been said that the current fashion system is outdated, still operating by a twentieth-century model that celebrates the individualism of the 'star designer'. In I- D, Sarah Mower recently stated that for the last twenty years, fashion has been at a cocktail party and has completely lost any connection with the public and daily life. On the one hand, designers and big brands experience the enormous pressure to produce new collections at an ever higher pace, leaving less room for reflection, contemplation, and innovation. On the other hand, there is the continuous race to produce at even lower costs and implement more rapid life cycles, resulting in disastrous consequences for society and the environment.


Author(s):  
Wesley J. Wildman

Subordinate-deity models of ultimate reality affirm that God is Highest Being within an ultimate reality that is neither conceptually tractable nor religiously relevant. Subordinate-deity models ceded their dominance to agential-being models of ultimate reality by refusing to supply a comprehensive answer to the metaphysical problem of the One and the Many in the wake of the Axial-Age interest in that problem, but they have revived in the twentieth century due to post-colonial resistance to putatively comprehensive explanations. Subordinate-deity ultimacy models resist the Intentionality Attribution and Narrative Comprehensibility dimensions of anthropomorphism to some degree but continue to employ the Rational Practicality dimension of anthropomorphism, resulting in a strategy of judicious anthropomorphism. Variations, strengths, and weaknesses of the subordinate-deity class of ultimacy models are discussed.


Author(s):  
Marlou Schrover

This chapter discusses social exclusion in European migration from a gendered and historical perspective. It discusses how from this perspective the idea of a crisis in migration was repeatedly constructed. Gender is used in this chapter in a dual way: attention is paid to differences between men and women in (refugee) migration, and to differences between men and women as advocates and claim makers for migrant rights. There is a dilemma—recognized mostly for recent decades—that on the one hand refugee women can be used to generate empathy, and thus support. On the other hand, emphasis on women as victims forces them into a victimhood role and leaves them without agency. This dilemma played itself out throughout the twentieth century. It led to saving the victims, but not to solving the problem. It fortified rather than weakened the idea of a crisis.


Foods ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 766
Author(s):  
Magdalena Skotnicka ◽  
Kaja Karwowska ◽  
Filip Kłobukowski ◽  
Aleksandra Borkowska ◽  
Magdalena Pieszko

All over the world, a large proportion of the population consume insects as part of their diet. In Western countries, however, the consumption of insects is perceived as a negative phenomenon. The consumption of insects worldwide can be considered in two ways: on the one hand, as a source of protein in countries affected by hunger, while, on the other, as an alternative protein in highly-developed regions, in response to the need for implementing policies of sustainable development. This review focused on both the regulations concerning the production and marketing of insects in Europe and the characteristics of edible insects that are most likely to establish a presence on the European market. The paper indicates numerous advantages of the consumption of insects, not only as a valuable source of protein but also as a raw material rich in valuable fatty acids, vitamins, and mineral salts. Attention was paid to the functional properties of proteins derived from insects, and to the possibility for using them in the production of functional food. The study also addresses the hazards which undoubtedly contribute to the mistrust and lowered acceptance of European consumers and points to the potential gaps in the knowledge concerning the breeding conditions, raw material processing and health safety. This set of analyzed data allows us to look optimistically at the possibilities for the development of edible insect-based foods, particularly in Europe.


1998 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 565-565
Author(s):  
G. Cayrel de Strobel ◽  
R. Cayrel ◽  
Y. Lebreton

After having studied in great detail the observational HR diagram (log Teff, Mbol) composed by 40 main sequence stars of the Hyades (Perryman et al.,1997, A&A., in press), we have tried to apply the same method to the observational main sequences of the three next nearest open clusters: Coma Berenices, the Pleiades, and Praesepe. This method consists in comparing the observational main sequence of the clusters with a grid of theoretical ZAMSs. The stars composing the observational main sequences had to have reliable absolute bolometric magnitudes, coming all from individual Hipparcos parallaxes, precise bolometric corrections, effective temperatures and metal abundances from high resolution detailed spectroscopic analyses. If we assume, following the work by Fernandez et al. (1996, A&A,311,127), that the mixing-lenth parameter is solar, the position of a theoretical ZAMS, in the (log Teff, Mbol) plane, computed with given input physics, only depends on two free parameters: the He content Y by mass, and the metallicity Z by mass. If effective temperature and metallicity of the constituting stars of the 4 clusters are previously known by means of detailed analyses, one can deduce their helium abundances by means of an appropriate grid of theoretical ZAMS’s. The comparison between the empirical (log Teff, Mbol) main sequence of the Hyades and the computed ZAMS corresponding to the observed metallicity Z of the Hyades (Z= 0.0240 ± 0.0085) gives a He abundance for the Hyades, Y= 0.26 ± 0.02. Our interpretation, concerning the observational position of the main sequence of the three nearest clusters after the Hyades, is still under way and appears to be greatly more difficult than for the Hyades. For the moment we can say that: ‒ The 15 dwarfs analysed in detailed in Coma have a solar metallicity: [Fe/H] = -0.05 ± 0.06. However, their observational main sequence fit better with the Hyades ZAMS. ‒ The mean metallicity of 13 Pleiades dwarfs analysed in detail is solar. A metal deficient and He normal ZAMS would fit better. But, a warning for absorption in the Pleiades has to be recalled. ‒ The upper main sequence of Praesepe, (the more distant cluster: 180 pc) composed by 11 stars, analysed in detail, is the one which has the best fit with the Hyades ZAMS. The deduced ‘turnoff age’ of the cluster is slightly higher than that of the Hyades: 0.8 Gyr instead of 0.63 Gyr.


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