scholarly journals Educating the Other

Aspasia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-56
Author(s):  
Nicoleta Roman

This article explores the role of foreign governesses in the early nineteenth century in the province of Wallachia, a principality in the southeastern part of present-day Romania and a peripheral territory at the intersection of the Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires. It focuses on the professional integration of governesses into Romanian society, exploring their complementary routes of activity, both in private educational networks for the elite and in the emerging educational institutions for girls. Their cultural identities as transnational teachers sometimes collided with local perceptions and employers’ ambitions, and the study sheds light on the different categories of governesses and how they succeeded in keeping up with a certain model for governesses that prevailed in this period.

Author(s):  
Sarah Collins

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.


2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (108) ◽  
pp. 92-111
Author(s):  
Hans Lauge Hansen

Utopian and Dystopian Representations of Europe in Antonio Muñoz Molina:How does a modern European society like the Spanish one reflect upon the experience of having dead bodies of illegal immigrants washed up on the nice clean beaches prepared for English, German and Danish tourists? How do such experiences affect the dominant national discourse, which identifies itself with the EU as a global centre of modernity? How do these experiences affect the Spanish citizen’s understanding of the character of this modernity? And what kind of narratives does it take to bridge the gap between the image of the democratic, open and human-rights oriented European Community created by official discourse and these traumatizing experiences? Taking its point of departure in two books written by one of Spain’s greatest novelists, Antonio Muñoz Molina, the article aims to investigate the role of literature as an actor in the creation and negotiation of cultural identities. The hypothesis is that literary discourse has got the unique capacity to offer the reader the image of him- or herself as another and to present the other as a self through its aesthetic strategy, thereby contributing to the reader’s appropriation of textual experiences as his or her own. In this process, the different aspects of reality, the dark and brighter sides of European history and the rise of modern, globalized society become mediated and dialogized.


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.


Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins

The introduction sets the scene by exploring the role of Edinburgh as a centre for the development and propagation of pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories. It gives essential background on natural history in the Scottish capital in early nineteenth century and the history of evolutionary thought and outlines the aims and objectives of the book. In addition, it explores some of the historiographical issues raised by earlier historians of science who have discussed the role of Edinburgh in the development of evolutionary thought in Great Britain.


Author(s):  
Jason W. Smith

This chapter examines the origins of navigational science in the American maritime culture of the early nineteenth century, in marine societies, and in the U.S. Navy, linking the institutionalization of naval science to the broader expansion of American maritime commerce and the evolving role of science in the federal government more broadly. The chapter argues that naval scientists, surveyors, and cartographers saw their work as bringing empirical rationality to a watery wilderness, imposing cartographic order over nature and an appropriation of space in the interests of American maritime commerce. In the process, they aimed to replace folkloric and experiential navigational understandings deeply held by the American seafaring community with a growing embrace of science institutionalized in the federal government and in the American navy specifically.


Author(s):  
Michelle McCann

This chapter examines the function, status and qualifications of the men that served in the role of county coroner in Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century. This remains an under-researched area when compared to other local government figures of authority. The history of the office exposes tensions within a politically polarised society and the need for changes in legislation. A combination of factors initially undermined the social standing and reputation of coroners. An examination of the legislation on coroners that the administration subsequently introduced suggests that the authority of the office in early-nineteenth-century Ireland was not strictly jurisprudential, but political and confessional by nature. By analysing the personal background, work experience, social standing, political alliances and religious patronage of coroner William Charles Waddell (1798-1878), the paper charts the wider social and political narrative that allowed this eminently respectable Presbyterian figure to secure the role of coroner of County Monaghan.


Author(s):  
Frederick C. Beiser

Chapter 3 is a study of Strauß’s early intellectual context. It examines his early faith, his educational institutions (the Blaubeuren school and Tübinger Stift), his early devotion to mysticism and romanticism, his conversion to Hegel’s philosophy, his stint as an apprentice pastor in the village of Klein-Ingersheim, and his trip to Berlin to learn the master’s philosophy directly from its source. The chapter also discusses the influence of Kant, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Boehme on the young Strauß, and attempts to reconstruct the major philosophical problem facing Strauß: the conflict between reason and faith in the early nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Anders Lundgren

The reception of Mendeleev’s periodic system in Sweden was not a dramatic episode. The system was accepted almost without discussion, but at the same time with no exclamation marks or any other outbursts of enthusiasm. There are but a few weak short-lived critical remarks. That was all. I will argue that the acceptance of the system had no overwhelming effect on chemical practice in Sweden. At most, it strengthened its characteristics. It is actually possible to argue that chemistry in Sweden was more essential for the periodic system than the other way around. My results might therefore suggest that we perhaps have to reevaluate the role of Mendeleev’s system in the history of chemistry. Chemistry in Sweden at the end of the nineteenth century can be characterized as a classifying science, with chemists very skilled in analysis, and as mainly an atheoretical science, which treated theories at most only as hypothesis—the slogan of many chemists being “facts persist, theories vanish.” Thanks to these characteristics, by the end of the nineteenth century, chemistry in Sweden had developed into, it must be said, a rather boring chemistry. This is obviously not to say that it is boring to study such a chemistry. Rather, it gives us an example of how everyday science, a part of science too often neglected but a part that constitutes the bulk of all science done, is carried out. One purpose of this study is to see how a theory, considered to be important in the history of chemistry, influenced everyday science. One might ask what happened when a daring chemistry met a boring chemistry. What happened when a theory, which had been created by a chemist who has been described as “not a laboratory chemist,” met an atheoretical experimental science of hard laboratory work and, as was said, the establishment of facts? Furthermore, could we learn something about the role of the periodic system per se from the study of such a meeting? Mendeleev’s system has often been considered important for teaching, and his attempts to write a textbook are often taken as the initial step in the chain of thoughts that led to the periodic system.


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