Resurrection, Dualism, and Legal Personhood: Bodily Presence in Ben Jonson

This chapter argues that Ben Jonson’s Volpone charts a massive cultural shift in which, within a rising capitalist order, a fully dualist understanding of resurrection is transformed into a legal personhood that allows the individual’s will to survive past the limit of death. Volpone represents the elegiac death knell for the specific form of counter-secularization that the rest of the book charts in which materialist and monist ideas of resurrection are celebrated for their critical power. However, Jonson’s own corpus of work is bifurcated between Volpone and his poetry, and most especially his poetry of praise and memorialization. In Jonson’s poetry he imagines that the separation of soul and body creates a gap in the symbolic fabric of the world, and he wants his poetry to fill this gap and he imagines his poems as an ersatz body. Jonson’s fantasy about poetry’s ability to make people present as textual bodies is similar to modern fantasies about the special incantatory power of “code” whether genetic code or computer-based code as a kind of language that does not represent but that enacts presence in the world.

BI-TEXTS IN THE CONTEXT OF NATIONAL-RUSSIAN BILINGUAL EDUCATION

This study analyses the problems associated with bilingual teaching mathematics in national-Russian schools of the Russian Federation. In particular, problems associated with the Russian and Yakut language interference and the mixing of language codes that negatively affect the acquisition of subject knowledge are indicated. Based on the analysis of the speech corpus of bilingual students, the paper revealed the need for the purposeful development of mathematical speech in a primary school. The role of the principle of relying on the native language of schoolchildren in the conditions of bilingual teaching mathematics is determined and the inadmissibility of mixing language codes is justified. The main characteristics of the basic communicative qualities of mathematical speech and the criteria for assessing their level of formation are given. A system of mathematical problems has been developed and presented in the form of parallel textual bodies in two languages (bi-texts) with an indication of the basic communicative qualities of mathematical speech, the development of which they are aimed at. This paper is useful for familiarizing with the potential of bi-texts in a bilingual learning environment. The work shows the process of developing special mathematical problems presented in the form of bi-texts; the presented experience can be applied in the training of other subjects in the conditions of national-Russian bilingualism

The body in brief

This chapter continues to develop a picture of Vitruvian expertise by interrogating the implications of Vitruvius’s repeated characterization of his text as a complete body marked by brevitas. The corpus hominis bene figurati in book 3 (so-called Vitruvian man) is reconsidered for its relevance to the corpus of De architectura as a text. The body and its parts remain powerful metaphors for composition: a body is complete and well ordered, and provides a “lifelike” mimesis of what it represents. Despite ancient and some modern claims to the contrary, textual bodies never embrace the comprehensive wholes with which they are associated and, in the Roman period, are rarely politically disinterested. Textual bodies are often emphatically reductive and, as such, mediate various wholes and universals through synopsis and other forms of “definition.” Such a bodily metaphor is especially appropriate for Vitruvius’s “expert” text. Examples from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero’s letters, and the so-called universal historians show that the textual “body” (also often described as “brief”) involved specific, ideological value before Vitruvius. His claims to have ordered the synoptic body of architecture properly suggest an analogous ideological function. Physical bodies are “compositions” of nature, so the author’s claims to have put a textual body in good order mimic nature’s sense of what is appropriate. This is another quality particular to experts. Such expertise has implications well beyond the proprietary fields on which they lay claim. By cordoning off the true totality of architecture from the reader, the guiding corpus metaphor of De architectura is basically restrictive.

The Garb of Being

This collection of essays explores how the body became a touchstone for late antique practice and the religious imagination. When we read the stories and testimonies of late ancient Christians, what different types of bodies stand before us in such stories and what do they tell us? How do we understand the range of bodily experiences—solitary and social, private and public—that clothed ancient Christians? How might such experiences and the body as garb itself serve as a productive metaphor by which to explore this attention to matters of gender, religious identity, class, and ethnicity? The essays in this book explore these and related questions through stories from the eastern Christian world of antiquity: monks and martyrs, families and congregations, and textual bodies from antiquity subject to modern interpretations.