Showing papers on "Theme (narrative) published in 1978"

The Theme of the Pentateuch

Abstract: This popular textbook regards the Pentateuch as a literary whole, with a single theme that binds it together. The overarching theme is the partial fulfilment of the promises to the patriarchs. Though the method of the book is holistic, the origin and growth of the theme is also explored using the methods of traditional source analysis. An important chapter explores the theological function of the Pentateuch both in the community for which the Pentateuch was first composed and in our own time. For this second, enlarged edition, the author has written an Epilogue reassessing the theme of the Pentateuch from a more current postmodern perspective.

Systematic reconnaissance mapping and registration of slope movements

Abstract: The General Report consists of three parts. In part 1 the directions and purposes achieved with landslie mapping works so far published are briefly reviewed. In part 2 the papers contributed to Theme 1 of the Symposium are summarized.

The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature

Abstract: The Wound and the Bow collects seven wonderful essays on the delicate theme of the relation between art and suffering by the legendary literary and social critic, Edmund Wilson (1885-1972). This welcome re-issue - one of several for this title - testifies to the value publishers put on it and to a reluctance among them ever to let it stay out of print for very long. The subjects Wilson treats - Dickens and Kipling, Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway, Joyce and Sophocles, and perhaps most surprising, Jacques Casanova - reveal the range and dexterity of his interests, his historical grasp, his learning, and his intellectual curiosity. Wilson's essays did not give rise to a new body of literary theory nor to a new school of literary criticism. Rather, he animated or reanimated the reputations of the artists he treated and furthered the quest for the sources of their literary artistry and craftsmanship.

The Cloud of unknowing, and other works

Abstract: Although the exact identity of this text's author remains obscure, he was probably an English country parson of the late 14th century. The main theme of this book is that god cannot be reached by human intellect but only by a love that can pierce the cloud of unknowing.

Conceptual thinking about the individual in international law

Abstract: I Have thought it appropriate, in a lecture that bears the name of Henry Sidgwick, to choose a theme that focuses on individual rights and on questions of reform and change, with which he was, of course, so much associated.

Marxism and the new middle classes: French critiques

Abstract: An entire history of political sociology could be written on the theme of the "new middle classes." Whether in the guise of the "managerial revolution," "white collar," the "new working class," or the "new petite bourgeoisie," the emergence of intermediate strata in advanced industrial societies has been rediscovered more often than the wheel. Moreover, nowhere does the ideological. commitment of whatever variety found in political sociology appear more tiansparently than in consideration of this problem. Examples abound. German Social Democratic sociologists used the appearance of the new mittelstanden (with their alleged political moderation) as the sociological justification for their Revisionism. Later, and primarily in America, the "managerial revolution" was used by intellectuals of many political persuasions for their own purposes, from liberal economic fundamentalists (Schumpeter, James Burnham) who saw new bureaucratic strata as decisive threats to the integrity of capitalism, to liberal pluralists (Kaysen et al.) who saw the same groups as bringing the private corporation to a new stage of socially responsible soulfulness. Then, in the America of the 1950s and 60s, in what C.Wright Mills called the "Great American Celebration," pluralist political scientists saw the burgeoning new middle classes as a new, moderate political center between polarized elites and workers and, as such, the key to American capitalism's permanent stability (S. M. Lipset's Political Man is one key source here). This analysis was exported in toto to England in the 1950s by "revisionist" British intellectuals to justify the strategic changes which they were urging upon the British Labor Party.

The Great Feud: Scriptural History and Strife in Beowulf

Abstract: Dorothy Whitelock describes family and national feuds in Beowulf as “sub-plots” to the monster fights. But the theme of feud history is more complex than that. There are the Scandinavian fights, some of them perceived and all relevant within the heroic world of the story, and the Great Feud of sacred history, associated in its beginnings with the monster fights in Denmark and in its end with the dragon fight in Geatland. This cosmic feud, introduced in the “scripturizing” passages of the poem, is not perceived within the world of the story. By distinguishing between the kind of knowledge available in that world and the kind available to his audience, the poet foregrounds the theme of the Great Feud and aligns the noble pagans of the poem with God, thereby “redeeming” the cultural identity of an audience for whom the Scandinavian matter of Beowulf is ancestral lore.

The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid

Abstract: "Epyllion" is the term coined by modern scholars for a relatively short poem on a mythological theme otherwise appropriate to longer epic. One of its recurrent characteristics is "ekphrasis", the telling of one myth encapsulated within the context of another, and the two thematically or symbolically linked to offer subtle comparison and contrast. The most persistent modes of "ekphrasis" are narrative by a character form, or the description of myth depicted on a work of art used in the context of the "outer" myth. The phenomenon has its origins in Homeric epic (the shield of Achilles) but was refined in the Hellenistic period by Callimachus and Theocritus, and taken up by the neoterics (Catullus 64). Its methods were absorbed back into long epic and form a dominant characteristic of Ovid's interweaving of myths in the "Metamorphoses". This book was originally published in 1931, and presents a chronological account of "epyllion" in English.

The mysteries of identity : a theme in modern literature

Abstract: OF THE MOST FASHIONABLE LITERARY TERMS these days is persona which is the Latin word for the mask that actors used to wear in the Greek and Roman theater. The currency of the term suggests that the identity of the author and his characters, and the distinction between them, has become a problem. When critics call characters in poems and plays and novels personae, they may mean one of two different things. They may mean that the characters are masks through which the author speaks, or they may mean that the characters have nothing to do with the author but are the masks or types necessary in order that the action may be played out. With both meanings of the word persona, the critics are saying that literature is or ought to be impersonal. Like most technical terminology the word persona is a weapon in a campaign in this case a campaign against the autobiographical or confessional style of much nineteenth-century literature. It is in nineteenth-century literature that the issue first arises between a personal and an impersonal literature, that it becomes a problem to distinguish between the author and his characters. To understand the twentieth-century reaction, we have therefore to understand why nineteenth-century literature became so personal. A good working explanation is provided, I think, by the Chicago philosopher George Herbert Mead, in his Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. According to Mead, the ro© Regularly at the University of Virginia, ROBERT LANGBAUM is visiting professor of English this year at Columbia University. His latest book is The Gayety of Vision: A Study of Isak Dinesen's Art. The present article derives from a paper he read at the Conference in the Study of Twentieth-Century Literature at Michigan State University in May, 1964.

The Romantic Prison: The French Tradition

Abstract: "Prison haunts our civilization," writes Victor Brombert. "Object of fear, it is also a subject of poetic reverie." Focusing on French literature of the Romantic era, the author probes the manifold significance of imprisonment as symbol and metaphor of the human condition. His thematic exploration draws on a constellation of writers ranging from the Platonic and Christian traditions to the Existentialist generation. Professor Brombert points out that nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature endowed the prison image with unusual prestige, and he examines the historical and social reasons. After considering the influence of Pascal and of the myth of the Bastille, he closely analyzes the work of Borel, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Nerval, Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Sartre, with excursions into texts by Byron, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Solzhenitsyn, Sade, and others. His approach reflects a concern with the interaction of literature, historiography, and popular myth. This imaginative treatment deepens our understanding of Romanticism and its favored themes. It offers fresh thoughts as well about modern man's dialectical tensions between oppression and inner freedom, fate and revolt, and the awareness of the finite and the longing for infinity. A wide-ranging conclusion speculates about the future of the prison theme in a world that has been threatened by extermination camps.Originally published in 1978.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Variations on a theme of Kronecker

Abstract: In 1857, Kronecker [10] showed that if θ1,…, θn are the roots of the polynomial P(z)= zn |cn-1+ … + cn, where c1, …, cn are integers with cn≠0, and if |θ1| ≤ 1, …, |θ1| ≤1, then θ1, …, θn are roots of unity. The proof is short and ingenious: Consider the polynomials Pm(z) whose roots are The condition on the size of the roots and the fact that the ci are integers implies that there can only be a finite number of different Pm . Thus two distinct powers of each root must coincide and this means that each root is a root of unity.

Political conventions as legitimation ritual

Abstract: The major parties faced special problems in 1976 which they attempted to overcome in part through the ritual forms of their national conventions. The Democrats played upon the theme of unity, the Republicans upon the theme of conflict, as each sought legitimation of the party and its chosen leader.

The Ideal of Sincerity

Abstract: The notion of sincerity has not much perplexed contemporary philosophers. It is introduced casually into the discussion of a number of issues, and even appears, suitably refined, in the statement of certain celebrated philosophical theories,' but in its own right it rarely receives more than an uncurious glance. Perhaps philosophers think its nature is already clear and well-understood. If so, they are mistaken. The concept of sincerity is peculiarly elusive and very imperfectly characterised in what little has been written about it. This will be the dominant theme of the first half of my paper (Parts I-III), in which I shall examine two accounts of sinceritythe common view which treats sincerity as closely akin to truthfulness,2 and the view of sincerity as singlemindedness recently expounded by Stuart Hampshire.3 Both views, I argue, are vulnerable to rather similar objections: first, neither is sufficiently general to accommodate all our uses of the notion, and secondly, even in those contexts where each fits most happily, certain aspects of the concept of sincerity are left completely unexplained. In the remainder of the paper (Parts IV-VI) I shall develop an alternative account of sincerity which escapes the foregoing objections and which hopefully can contribute something to our understanding of the notion.

LeWitt in Progress

Abstract: Consider the following three documents: The first is an article entitled "Sol LeWitt-The Look of Thought," by the critic Donald Kuspit. The second is a book-length essay called Progress in Art by the artist and writer Suzi Gablik. The third is the critic Lucy Lippard's contribution to the catalogue for the LeWitt retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Taken together these essays put forward a set of claims, addressed initially to the work of a specific artist, but extended to the larger context of abstract art in general, or at least to the abstract art of LeWitt's generation. What these claims amount to is a declaration of the mission and achievement of this abstraction. It is, they collectively assert, to serve as triumphant illustration of the powers of human reason. And, we might ask, what else could Conceptual Art be? Kuspit signals this grand theme with the title of his essay. "The Look of Thought" is what stares back at us from the modular structures, the openwork lattices, the serial progressions of LeWitt's sculputure. Thought, in Kuspit's terms, is deductive, inferential, axiomatic. It is a process of finding within the manifold of experience a central, organizing principle; it is the activity of a transcendental ego. "In LeWitt," Kuspit writes, "there is no optical induction; there is only deduction by rules, which have an axiomatic validity however much the work created by their execution has a tentative, inconsequential look." And, he continues, "rationalistic, deterministic abstract art links up with a larger Western tradition, apparent in both classical antiquity and the Renaissance, viz., the

Reflections on Martin Diamond's “Ethics and Politics: The American Way”

Abstract: There can be no question but that the theme which is addressed by Martin Diamond in his article, "Ethics and Politics: The American Way"' is an area of considerable intellectual confusion. Politics, it is generally believed, should of course be "ethical" but ethics, or morality-they are distinguished or considered synonomous at the convenience of the writer-dare not be political. There cannot, or more precisely "ought" not be a legislative or governmental concern with the morality of the citizenry. It is properly a concern of government only when it is forced to police itself. The view is amply expressed in the commonplace-and dominant-opinion, "you can't legislate morality." To the extent that both "right" and "left" share a radical individualist or "libertarian" view they are in agreement with this commonplace. This should not be taken as a sign that the individualism found in liberal democracy is amoral. It is, in fact, intensely "moralistic," even in its most anarchistic, or perhaps especially in its most anarchistic form, since the struggle for individual liberty, or for self-realization must be understood ultimately as a struggle for the

Aldous Huxley : the critical heritage

Abstract: This set comprises forty volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first sixty-eight volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

The Eclipse Dragon on an Arabic Frontispiece-Miniature

Abstract: A lunar emblem framed by a pair of entwined dragons is repeated twice on the double frontispiece-miniatures of the Arabic Pseudo-Galen manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationale, MS arabe 2964, in Paris. Bishr Fares who discovered the manuscript argued for a relationship between the subject matter of these frontispiece-miniatures and the content of the text of the manuscript which dealt with the effects and treatment of snakebite. The present paper intends to demonstrate the astrological meaning of the theme of the Paris Pseudo-Galen frontispiece-miniatures which gains significance from the juxtaposition of the entwined dragons and the lunar emblem. The motif of the entwined dragons in these miniatures is here explained as a reference to the pseudoplanetary nodes of the moon's orbit, the Arabic al-Djawzahr, which were regarded as the Head and Tail of a giant Dragon. The astronomical importance of the jawzahr lay in its role in effecting solar and lunar eclipses which were attributed to the occurrence of a conjunction of the sun or moon in or near the lunar nodes. It is unlikely that the artist of the Paris Pseudo-Galen miniatures attempted to establish a connection between the eclipse phenomenon and the content of the manuscript. However, the correspondence between the date of the completion of the manuscript and the occurrence of a solar eclipse on January 28, A.D. 1199, would appear to indicate the astrological significance of the eclipse for the completion of the work.