Showing papers on "Lust published in 1985"

"On the Threshold of Woman's Era": Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory

Abstract: If the fifteenth century discovered America to the Old World, the nineteenth is discovering woman to herself.... Not the opportunity of discovering new worlds, but that of filling this old world with fairer and higher aims than the greed of gold and the lust of power, is hers. Through weary, wasting years men have destroyed, dashed in pieces, and overthrown, but to-day we stand on the threshold of woman's era, and woman's work is grandly constructive. In her hand are possibilities whose use or abuse must tell upon the political life of the nation, and send their influence for good or evil across the track of unborn ages. -FRANCES E. W. HARPER, "Woman's Political Future"

Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women

Abstract: SCHOLARS HAVE RECENTLY devoted much attention to the spirituality of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. In studying late medieval spirituality they have concentrated on the ideals of chastity and powerty-that is, on the renunciation, for religious reasons, of sex and family, money and property. It may be, however, that modern scholarship has focused so tenaciously on sex and money because sex and money are such crucial symbols and sources of power in our own culture. Whatever the motives, modern scholars have ignored a religious symbol that had tremendous force in the lives of medieval Christians. They have ignored the religious significance of food. Yet, when we look at what medieval people themselves wrote, we find that they often spoke of gluttony as the major form of lust, of fasting as the most painful renunciation, and of eating as the most basic and literal way of encountering God. Theologians and spiritual directors front the early church to the sixteenth century reminded penitents that sin had entered the world when Eve ate the forbidden fruit and that salvation comes when Christians eat their God in the ritual of the communion table.3 In the Europe of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, famine was on the increase again, after several centuries of agricultural growth and relative plenty. Vicious stories of food hoarding, of cannibalism, of infanticide, or of ill adolescents left to die when they could no longer do agricultural labor sometimes

Infernal Metamorphoses: An Interpretation of Dante's "Counterpass"

Abstract: This is an essay in the poetics of pain and punishment, in the symbology of sin. I do not have anything new to add, as might otherwise be expected, to scholarly accounts of the philosophical system which informs the horrific, orderly landscape of Dante's Inferno, and the machinery of suffering deployed within it-the progression downwards, that is, from sins of Incontinence to those of Violence and Fraud, from Lust to Treachery. Rather, I want to explore a way of describing the conceptual and metaphoric logic underlying Dante's mode of representing such suffering, a logic which must bridge the gap or muddle any easy distinctions between the theological and the poetical. My investigation starts from the realization that the pains of the damned are in truth their own living sins, but sins converted to torturing images by what Dante would persuade us is the allegorizing eye of eternal Justice. These pains become portions of a total metaphoric vision of human evil, one in which the damned souls' existence is doubly circumscribed,

Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid" and the "Judicio Solis in Conviviis Saturni" of Simon of Couvin

Abstract: The extensive medical knowledge Robert Henryson reveals in his Testament of Cresseid has been remarked on by several scholars, most recently by Saul Brody and Denton Fox.2 Perhaps not surprisingly, the sheer amount of detail the poem provides about the disease of leprosy and the daily lives of its victims has distracted us from the literary framework in which leprosy is inflicted on Cresseid: a council of planetary gods comprising a law court passes sentence on her for the crimes of lust, blasphemy, and infidelity. Much critical ingenuity has been expended on the rather ambiguous nature of these crimes and the reasons for the extreme severity of her punishment. Indeed, we can now distinguish three distinct critical attitudes toward her fate. That she is justly punished by the gods and her leprosy a fitting sentence is suggested in one of the first important studies of the poem, that of E. M. W. Tillyard, and by the Testament's most recent editor.3 Harold Tolliver, on the other hand, argues that the gods who punish the heroine themselves lack justice,4 while some critics of the middle road, such as Sydney Harth and A. C. Spearing, deny a Christian providence to the poem,5 or, like Tatyana Moran, feel that, if there is one, the gods acted too scrupulously.6 Most of this discussion has been based on evidence in the poem or on evidence from Henryson's model, the Troilus and Criseyde of Chaucer. Naturally, interpretations supported chiefly by the Troilus have obvious dangers, and Douglas Gray has wisely pointed out that "the relationship of the Testament to Troilus is not a straightforward one. It is partly a 'continuation'. . . [and] partly a companion poem to it."7 Nor can the fact be ignored that Chaucer's heroine provided the Scots poet only the model of infidelity in love, however much the tendencies to lust and blasphemy may have been hinted at in her character. How Henryson came to condemn his Cresseid to so savage a fate is then a question difficult to answer. In attempting to do so, I should like to sidestep what appears at present to be a minefield of critical interpretation8 by offering a simple and historical explanation. There is a

Museums and Their Enemies.

Abstract: The case against public art museums was made with very great force soon after they first became important establishments in the second half of the eighteenth century and particularly in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests. It was argued that museums destroyed the very purpose of the art which they had been called upon to house and to preserve. It was not just that a painting designed to move the devout to prayers might hang next to one designed to move the dissolute to lust. It was rather that each lost its true function once it had been moved from

A Reconstruction of Schlick’s Psycho-Sociological Ethics

Abstract: Since antiquity, ethics has been one of the most important disciplines of philosophy and is perhaps the oldest. Schlick’s ethics, as proposed in his book, Fragen der Ethik,1 breaks radically with this view. According to Schlick, ethics has firstly become a cognitive empirical discipline; it exists independently of philosophy. Secondly, ethics is founded on psychology and sociology and belongs to those disciplines. Thirdly, the ethical behavior of human beings is governed by positive and negative pleasure: Lust and Unlust. In German, Lust indicates a pleasant satisfaction, pleasant feelings and the like, including sexual pleasure. Here Lust will be translated by “pleasure”.

The barbarous scythian in “king lear”

Abstract: (1985). THE BARBAROUS SCYTHIAN IN “KING LEAR”. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 73-80.