Mark S. Massa
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199734122
- eISBN:
- 9780199866373
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199734122.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter introduces the law of unintended consequences for understanding Catholic changes since Vatican II. The law of unintended consequences simply refers to the insight that historical ...
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This chapter introduces the law of unintended consequences for understanding Catholic changes since Vatican II. The law of unintended consequences simply refers to the insight that historical actions, once undertaken, have consequences of their own, regardless of the actors who made them. This insight is especially important with regard to the Second Vatican Council, as recent debates centered on the intentions of the participants at the event in 1962–65. The chapter thus offers a distinctive point of view on what many refer to as the “Vatican II battles” over the meaning of that Council: it argues that Catholics first recognized historical change in the years after the Second Vatican Council. It was the growth of this historical consciousness within the Church that set off the battles within the Catholic community. The chapter thus sets up the narrative that follows.Less
This chapter introduces the law of unintended consequences for understanding Catholic changes since Vatican II. The law of unintended consequences simply refers to the insight that historical actions, once undertaken, have consequences of their own, regardless of the actors who made them. This insight is especially important with regard to the Second Vatican Council, as recent debates centered on the intentions of the participants at the event in 1962–65. The chapter thus offers a distinctive point of view on what many refer to as the “Vatican II battles” over the meaning of that Council: it argues that Catholics first recognized historical change in the years after the Second Vatican Council. It was the growth of this historical consciousness within the Church that set off the battles within the Catholic community. The chapter thus sets up the narrative that follows.
James I. Porter
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823282005
- eISBN:
- 9780823284795
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823282005.003.0009
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter studies the work of the German literary critic Erich Auerbach, who wrote in response to the historical upheaval of the mid-twentieth century as a form of historical engagement. In his ...
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This chapter studies the work of the German literary critic Erich Auerbach, who wrote in response to the historical upheaval of the mid-twentieth century as a form of historical engagement. In his work, Auerbach endeavors to portray the evolution of historical consciousness in the West and the discovery of the human and social worlds it yielded. He reflects on this evolution in relating the narrative of realism. In this account, realism is not a literary genre, but rather the evolving recognition of human consciousness of its own conditions, the growing awareness, that is, that reality and the real inhere in the sensuous, the mundane, and the human. At the center of this narrative, Auerbach places Judaism and its heritage rather than Christianity. For Auerbach, history and historical consciousness first appear in the Jewish biblical stories, which provide in turn the structure and the framework for all subsequent expressions of historical thought and experience.Less
This chapter studies the work of the German literary critic Erich Auerbach, who wrote in response to the historical upheaval of the mid-twentieth century as a form of historical engagement. In his work, Auerbach endeavors to portray the evolution of historical consciousness in the West and the discovery of the human and social worlds it yielded. He reflects on this evolution in relating the narrative of realism. In this account, realism is not a literary genre, but rather the evolving recognition of human consciousness of its own conditions, the growing awareness, that is, that reality and the real inhere in the sensuous, the mundane, and the human. At the center of this narrative, Auerbach places Judaism and its heritage rather than Christianity. For Auerbach, history and historical consciousness first appear in the Jewish biblical stories, which provide in turn the structure and the framework for all subsequent expressions of historical thought and experience.
Romila Thapar
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195637984
- eISBN:
- 9780199081912
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195637984.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Indian History
This book examines the link between time and history in the Indian context. It debunks the concept of time as cyclic in early India and subsequently the denial of history. The book indicates the ...
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This book examines the link between time and history in the Indian context. It debunks the concept of time as cyclic in early India and subsequently the denial of history. The book indicates the existence of linear time in Indian texts such as genealogies, biographies, and chronicles, where time-reckoning was recorded through generations, regnal years and eras. The volume suggests that cyclic time was used in cosmological contexts while linear time was used in historical contexts. It further argues that historical consciousness existed in early India.Less
This book examines the link between time and history in the Indian context. It debunks the concept of time as cyclic in early India and subsequently the denial of history. The book indicates the existence of linear time in Indian texts such as genealogies, biographies, and chronicles, where time-reckoning was recorded through generations, regnal years and eras. The volume suggests that cyclic time was used in cosmological contexts while linear time was used in historical contexts. It further argues that historical consciousness existed in early India.
John Finnis
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199580095
- eISBN:
- 9780191729416
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199580095.003.0010
- Subject:
- Law, Philosophy of Law
The 1992 Gilson Lecture to the Mediaeval Studies Institute in Toronto, this chapter undertakes a substantial and wide-ranging critique of the theory of ‘historical’ (as opposed to ‘classical’) ...
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The 1992 Gilson Lecture to the Mediaeval Studies Institute in Toronto, this chapter undertakes a substantial and wide-ranging critique of the theory of ‘historical’ (as opposed to ‘classical’) consciousness elaborated in the later works of Bernard Lonergan and adopted by many theologians since the 1970s. The origins of the phrase, and its self-refuting deployment by Lonergan's predecessor in use of it are traced, and the ambiguities and inconsistencies in Lonergan's employment of it are shown in detail. Weaknesses in the Thomist tradition in relation to history are pointed out, and its neglect (and Lonergan's) of rationality norms is explored in relation to Hume's argument against miracles. The relevance of these problems to moral theology is the chapter's last major theme. Karl Rahner's theory of ‘changing human nature’ is challenged, and the form of coherent moral development traced with reference to marriage, usury, and religious freedom. The fall of Jerusalem and the dating of the Gospels is discussed.Less
The 1992 Gilson Lecture to the Mediaeval Studies Institute in Toronto, this chapter undertakes a substantial and wide-ranging critique of the theory of ‘historical’ (as opposed to ‘classical’) consciousness elaborated in the later works of Bernard Lonergan and adopted by many theologians since the 1970s. The origins of the phrase, and its self-refuting deployment by Lonergan's predecessor in use of it are traced, and the ambiguities and inconsistencies in Lonergan's employment of it are shown in detail. Weaknesses in the Thomist tradition in relation to history are pointed out, and its neglect (and Lonergan's) of rationality norms is explored in relation to Hume's argument against miracles. The relevance of these problems to moral theology is the chapter's last major theme. Karl Rahner's theory of ‘changing human nature’ is challenged, and the form of coherent moral development traced with reference to marriage, usury, and religious freedom. The fall of Jerusalem and the dating of the Gospels is discussed.
Steven Mullaney
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226547633
- eISBN:
- 9780226117096
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226117096.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
The crises of faith that traumatized Reformation Europe precipitated crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling and structures of belief underwent a lasting transformation; ...
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The crises of faith that traumatized Reformation Europe precipitated crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling and structures of belief underwent a lasting transformation; there was a reformation of social emotions—a necessary recalibration of community—as well as a Reformation of faith. It is an informing belief of this study that our most lasting and moving works of culture are what they are—lasting and moving—because they are so deeply rooted in the soil of their times, complexly engaged with what is at risk in the historical moment and unsettled in the collective identity. This is especially true of theater, one of the most social of the arts. As a public and performative art, theater provides public and performative cultures with a means of thinking about themselves, especially when other methods and media fail. This book argues that Elizabethan popular drama served as a form of embodied social and affective thought, challenging the first generation born into the Elizabethan Protestant Settlement—Shakespeare, Kyd, and Marlowe’s generation—to confront its fault lines and differences in social thinking, feeling, and belief. A lasting example of art at its most engaged, early modern Reformation drama was also a critical phenomenon in the way that theory, an etymologically related term for seeing, is critical: a far from harmonious and not always therapeutic way of thinking and feeling, by means of actual bodies on stage and in the audience, about the larger, traumatized social body.Less
The crises of faith that traumatized Reformation Europe precipitated crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling and structures of belief underwent a lasting transformation; there was a reformation of social emotions—a necessary recalibration of community—as well as a Reformation of faith. It is an informing belief of this study that our most lasting and moving works of culture are what they are—lasting and moving—because they are so deeply rooted in the soil of their times, complexly engaged with what is at risk in the historical moment and unsettled in the collective identity. This is especially true of theater, one of the most social of the arts. As a public and performative art, theater provides public and performative cultures with a means of thinking about themselves, especially when other methods and media fail. This book argues that Elizabethan popular drama served as a form of embodied social and affective thought, challenging the first generation born into the Elizabethan Protestant Settlement—Shakespeare, Kyd, and Marlowe’s generation—to confront its fault lines and differences in social thinking, feeling, and belief. A lasting example of art at its most engaged, early modern Reformation drama was also a critical phenomenon in the way that theory, an etymologically related term for seeing, is critical: a far from harmonious and not always therapeutic way of thinking and feeling, by means of actual bodies on stage and in the audience, about the larger, traumatized social body.
Cheryl B. Welch
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198781318
- eISBN:
- 9780191695414
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198781318.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This chapter situates Tocqueville among a set of problems and writers in post-revolutionary France in order to give the reader a sense of both the idiosyncrasy of Tocqueville's project in his own ...
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This chapter situates Tocqueville among a set of problems and writers in post-revolutionary France in order to give the reader a sense of both the idiosyncrasy of Tocqueville's project in his own environment and its political relevance. As a theorist and a writer with a cause, Tocqueville aimed to write books that would inspire leaders to direct French political culture along new paths. However, his solitary manner of argument disregarded what is considered the norm of his own time. The chapter places him in the changing patterns of his time: the search for a social science that would save the French from the results of their disastrous experiments in revolutionary politics, the rise of historical consciousness, and the widespread desire to understand a spiritualized version of human reason.Less
This chapter situates Tocqueville among a set of problems and writers in post-revolutionary France in order to give the reader a sense of both the idiosyncrasy of Tocqueville's project in his own environment and its political relevance. As a theorist and a writer with a cause, Tocqueville aimed to write books that would inspire leaders to direct French political culture along new paths. However, his solitary manner of argument disregarded what is considered the norm of his own time. The chapter places him in the changing patterns of his time: the search for a social science that would save the French from the results of their disastrous experiments in revolutionary politics, the rise of historical consciousness, and the widespread desire to understand a spiritualized version of human reason.
Yoav Di Capua
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520257320
- eISBN:
- 9780520944817
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520257320.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
This chapter examines the multiple ways in which authoritarian pluralism shaped the historiographical marketplace. It argues that while authoritarian pluralism allowed previously marginalized groups ...
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This chapter examines the multiple ways in which authoritarian pluralism shaped the historiographical marketplace. It argues that while authoritarian pluralism allowed previously marginalized groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood to write and publish history, the government monopoly on state records curtailed the ability to ascertain the veracity of historical interpretations. The lack of historical records undermined the value of historical truthfulness and severely damaged the capacity to maintain textual hierarchy. Furthermore, given the state's continuous disregard for other values—such as accessibility, transparency, and public accountability—the professional authority of academic historians, whose agenda of modern research was highly dependent on the maintenance of such values, declined sharply. Consequently, greater sections of the historiographical field became methodologically poor, culturally provincial, and philosophically speculative. Since the 1987 conference on historiography, the various aspects of this process have come to be known as the crisis of historical consciousness.Less
This chapter examines the multiple ways in which authoritarian pluralism shaped the historiographical marketplace. It argues that while authoritarian pluralism allowed previously marginalized groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood to write and publish history, the government monopoly on state records curtailed the ability to ascertain the veracity of historical interpretations. The lack of historical records undermined the value of historical truthfulness and severely damaged the capacity to maintain textual hierarchy. Furthermore, given the state's continuous disregard for other values—such as accessibility, transparency, and public accountability—the professional authority of academic historians, whose agenda of modern research was highly dependent on the maintenance of such values, declined sharply. Consequently, greater sections of the historiographical field became methodologically poor, culturally provincial, and philosophically speculative. Since the 1987 conference on historiography, the various aspects of this process have come to be known as the crisis of historical consciousness.
Lesley Sharp
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520229501
- eISBN:
- 9780520935884
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520229501.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, African Cultural Anthropology
Youth and identity politics figure prominently in this study of personal and collective memory in Madagascar. A deeply nuanced ethnography of historical consciousness, it challenges many ...
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Youth and identity politics figure prominently in this study of personal and collective memory in Madagascar. A deeply nuanced ethnography of historical consciousness, it challenges many cross-cultural investigations of youth, for its key actors are not adults but schoolchildren. This book refutes dominant assumptions that African children are the helpless victims of postcolonial crises, incapable of organized, sustained collective thought or action. It insists instead on the political agency of Malagasy youth who, as they decipher their current predicament, offer potent, historicized critiques of colonial violence, nationalist resistance, foreign mass media, and schoolyard survival. The book asserts that autobiography and national history are inextricably linked and therefore must be read in tandem, a process that exposes how political consciousness is forged in the classroom, within the home, and on the street in Madagascar.Less
Youth and identity politics figure prominently in this study of personal and collective memory in Madagascar. A deeply nuanced ethnography of historical consciousness, it challenges many cross-cultural investigations of youth, for its key actors are not adults but schoolchildren. This book refutes dominant assumptions that African children are the helpless victims of postcolonial crises, incapable of organized, sustained collective thought or action. It insists instead on the political agency of Malagasy youth who, as they decipher their current predicament, offer potent, historicized critiques of colonial violence, nationalist resistance, foreign mass media, and schoolyard survival. The book asserts that autobiography and national history are inextricably linked and therefore must be read in tandem, a process that exposes how political consciousness is forged in the classroom, within the home, and on the street in Madagascar.
Miranda Wilcox and John D. Young (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- June 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199348138
- eISBN:
- 9780199376735
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199348138.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
At the eve of the bicentennial anniversary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, fifteen scholars explore the relationship between Mormon historical consciousness and the belief in a ...
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At the eve of the bicentennial anniversary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, fifteen scholars explore the relationship between Mormon historical consciousness and the belief in a universal Christian apostasy. Latter-day Saints have a paradoxical relationship to the past; even as they invest their own history with sacred meaning—as the restoration of ancient truths and the fulfillment of biblical prophecies—they repudiate the eighteen centuries preceding the founding of their church as apostate distortions of the truth. Since the advent of Mormonism, Latter-day Saints have told narratives about the origin of their church using the paradigm of apostasy and restoration. Constructing a boundary between apostasy and restoration has generated a powerful and enduring binary of categorization in Mormonism that has profoundly impacted their self-perception and relations with others. Standing Apart explores how the idea of apostasy has functioned as a category to mark, define, and set apart “the other” in the development of Mormon historical consciousness and in the construction of Mormon narrative identity. The contributors trace the development of and changes in LDS narratives of apostasy within the context of Mormon history and American Protestant historiography. They offer suggestions for and predictions about ways that these narratives might be reformulated to engage with the past in generous and charitable conversation, recognizing mutual concerns stemming from shared divine inheritance and humanity while offering new models of interfaith relations, as the LDS church and Mormon culture respond to challenges and opportunities in the twenty-first century.Less
At the eve of the bicentennial anniversary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, fifteen scholars explore the relationship between Mormon historical consciousness and the belief in a universal Christian apostasy. Latter-day Saints have a paradoxical relationship to the past; even as they invest their own history with sacred meaning—as the restoration of ancient truths and the fulfillment of biblical prophecies—they repudiate the eighteen centuries preceding the founding of their church as apostate distortions of the truth. Since the advent of Mormonism, Latter-day Saints have told narratives about the origin of their church using the paradigm of apostasy and restoration. Constructing a boundary between apostasy and restoration has generated a powerful and enduring binary of categorization in Mormonism that has profoundly impacted their self-perception and relations with others. Standing Apart explores how the idea of apostasy has functioned as a category to mark, define, and set apart “the other” in the development of Mormon historical consciousness and in the construction of Mormon narrative identity. The contributors trace the development of and changes in LDS narratives of apostasy within the context of Mormon history and American Protestant historiography. They offer suggestions for and predictions about ways that these narratives might be reformulated to engage with the past in generous and charitable conversation, recognizing mutual concerns stemming from shared divine inheritance and humanity while offering new models of interfaith relations, as the LDS church and Mormon culture respond to challenges and opportunities in the twenty-first century.
Kevin Myers
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719084805
- eISBN:
- 9781781708774
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719084805.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, Social History
The third chapter, spanning the period 1981-2000, traces the ways in which newly available historical identities came to be applied in public. Municipal multiculturalism developed educational and ...
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The third chapter, spanning the period 1981-2000, traces the ways in which newly available historical identities came to be applied in public. Municipal multiculturalism developed educational and cultural policies designed to promote multi-ethnic and pluralistic cities. Ethnic difference in the present was explained by the invention of ethnic pasts and experiences that were tacitly assumed to be the basis of enduring historical identities. The resulting ethnic minority histories, which were initially championed by municipal multicultural policy and later recruited to combat social exclusion, may have effectively challenged the dominant national narrative but they also entailed their own silences and simplicities. It is argued that acrimonious debates, around what constituted ‘indigenous culture’ or ‘authentic history’, demonstrated how the historical sensibility promoted by earlier scholar activists was disappearing. In the practice of cultural difference, and in the associated elevation of ethnic histories as the source of strong identities, history was becoming a celebration of those differences and identities partly imposed by a racist society.Less
The third chapter, spanning the period 1981-2000, traces the ways in which newly available historical identities came to be applied in public. Municipal multiculturalism developed educational and cultural policies designed to promote multi-ethnic and pluralistic cities. Ethnic difference in the present was explained by the invention of ethnic pasts and experiences that were tacitly assumed to be the basis of enduring historical identities. The resulting ethnic minority histories, which were initially championed by municipal multicultural policy and later recruited to combat social exclusion, may have effectively challenged the dominant national narrative but they also entailed their own silences and simplicities. It is argued that acrimonious debates, around what constituted ‘indigenous culture’ or ‘authentic history’, demonstrated how the historical sensibility promoted by earlier scholar activists was disappearing. In the practice of cultural difference, and in the associated elevation of ethnic histories as the source of strong identities, history was becoming a celebration of those differences and identities partly imposed by a racist society.
Hermann Kappelhoff
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231170727
- eISBN:
- 9780231539319
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231170727.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Against the backdrop of the Second World War and the ubiquitous instrumentalization of cinema in propaganda battles, the aesthetic potential of cinema is radically reconceptualized. By examining ...
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Against the backdrop of the Second World War and the ubiquitous instrumentalization of cinema in propaganda battles, the aesthetic potential of cinema is radically reconceptualized. By examining Kracauer's theories and Visconti's history films, it is made clear that this reconceptualization primarily emphasizes a different idea of the spectator, who is no longer addressed as a mass subject, but as an individual, while the cinema seeks to provide this new spectator with the means to question the position of his or her subjectivity in history and society. In Kracauer the consciousness of a catastrophic history is manifest in the figure of the reading subject of history who, in all the powerlessness of a real individual existence, regains a space of reflection in the cinema. Here, viewers see themselves enclosed in a social reality that has lost sight of active social struggle. With a similar social diagnosis, Visconti's films open up the cinema as a space in which the sensibility of a past time is understood as a lost possibility of history.Less
Against the backdrop of the Second World War and the ubiquitous instrumentalization of cinema in propaganda battles, the aesthetic potential of cinema is radically reconceptualized. By examining Kracauer's theories and Visconti's history films, it is made clear that this reconceptualization primarily emphasizes a different idea of the spectator, who is no longer addressed as a mass subject, but as an individual, while the cinema seeks to provide this new spectator with the means to question the position of his or her subjectivity in history and society. In Kracauer the consciousness of a catastrophic history is manifest in the figure of the reading subject of history who, in all the powerlessness of a real individual existence, regains a space of reflection in the cinema. Here, viewers see themselves enclosed in a social reality that has lost sight of active social struggle. With a similar social diagnosis, Visconti's films open up the cinema as a space in which the sensibility of a past time is understood as a lost possibility of history.
Qi Wang
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748692330
- eISBN:
- 9781474406390
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748692330.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book provides a historically informed examination of independent moving image works made between 1990 and 2010 in China. Showcasing an evolving personal mode of narrating memory, documenting ...
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This book provides a historically informed examination of independent moving image works made between 1990 and 2010 in China. Showcasing an evolving personal mode of narrating memory, documenting reality, and inscribing subjectivity in over sixteen selected works that range from narrative film and documentary to experimental video and digital media (including a multimedia avant-garde play), this book presents a provocative portrait of the independent filmmakers as a peculiarly pained yet active group of historical subjects of the transitional, postsocialist era. Through a connected investigation of cultural and cinematic concepts including historical consciousness, personal memory, narrative, performance, subjectivity, spatiality, and the body, Wang weaves a critical narrative of the formation of a unique postsocialist cultural consciousness that enables independent cinema and media to become a highly significant and effective conduit for historical thinking in contemporary China. Covering filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, Meng Jinghui, Wang Bing, Wang Guangli, Duan Jinchuan, Cui Zi'en, Shi Tou, and Tang Danhong, this book is essential reading for all students and scholars in Chinese film and culture.Less
This book provides a historically informed examination of independent moving image works made between 1990 and 2010 in China. Showcasing an evolving personal mode of narrating memory, documenting reality, and inscribing subjectivity in over sixteen selected works that range from narrative film and documentary to experimental video and digital media (including a multimedia avant-garde play), this book presents a provocative portrait of the independent filmmakers as a peculiarly pained yet active group of historical subjects of the transitional, postsocialist era. Through a connected investigation of cultural and cinematic concepts including historical consciousness, personal memory, narrative, performance, subjectivity, spatiality, and the body, Wang weaves a critical narrative of the formation of a unique postsocialist cultural consciousness that enables independent cinema and media to become a highly significant and effective conduit for historical thinking in contemporary China. Covering filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, Meng Jinghui, Wang Bing, Wang Guangli, Duan Jinchuan, Cui Zi'en, Shi Tou, and Tang Danhong, this book is essential reading for all students and scholars in Chinese film and culture.
Vilém Flusser, Mark Poster, and Nancy Ann Roth
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816670222
- eISBN:
- 9781452947228
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816670222.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter reflects on thinking and writing about writing, an exercise it calls “superscript.” It suggests that all writing is “right”: it is a gesture of setting up and ordering written signs. And ...
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This chapter reflects on thinking and writing about writing, an exercise it calls “superscript.” It suggests that all writing is “right”: it is a gesture of setting up and ordering written signs. And written signs are, directly or indirectly, signs for ideas. So writing is a gesture that aligns and arranges ideas. And written signs are the quotation marks of right thinking. All writing is orderly, and there is something mechanical about this ordering. One can leave writing, this ordering of signs, to machines. That is, grammar machines, artificial intelligences that take care of this order on their own and fundamentally perform not only a grammatical but also a thinking function. The chapter then discusses two kinds of thinking, namely, mythical thinking and logical thinking. It also describes writing consciousness as historical consciousness and how writing, as an ordering of written signs into rows, can be mechanized and automated. Finally, it contends that all history can be confidently left to automated machines.Less
This chapter reflects on thinking and writing about writing, an exercise it calls “superscript.” It suggests that all writing is “right”: it is a gesture of setting up and ordering written signs. And written signs are, directly or indirectly, signs for ideas. So writing is a gesture that aligns and arranges ideas. And written signs are the quotation marks of right thinking. All writing is orderly, and there is something mechanical about this ordering. One can leave writing, this ordering of signs, to machines. That is, grammar machines, artificial intelligences that take care of this order on their own and fundamentally perform not only a grammatical but also a thinking function. The chapter then discusses two kinds of thinking, namely, mythical thinking and logical thinking. It also describes writing consciousness as historical consciousness and how writing, as an ordering of written signs into rows, can be mechanized and automated. Finally, it contends that all history can be confidently left to automated machines.
Kevin Myers
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719084805
- eISBN:
- 9781781708774
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719084805.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Social History
The emergence of multicultural Britain was one of the most profound transformations of 20th century society. This book provides both a description and an analysis of that change. It argues that ...
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The emergence of multicultural Britain was one of the most profound transformations of 20th century society. This book provides both a description and an analysis of that change. It argues that immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and Ireland, despite deep and historic connections to Britain, were widely represented as ‘alien others’ and understood to threaten an exclusive national culture that was guaranteed by history. This was a highly selective version of the national past but it encouraged the idea that post-war immigrants had created a new ‘race problem’ that required management and intervention. The science and practice of race relations was one influential response. Despite some serious shortcomings that are examined in detail, race relations work helped to provide a space and a language in which immigrant groups responded to their rejection from the national community. In supplementary schools, language classes, in the rise of Black Studies and in a wide variety of cultural and educational projects immigrant groups explored their histories. Historical education was central to all these activities. History, and memory, helped to define the ethnic identities of multicultural Britain and provided the resources with which it became possible to imagine and discuss a future postcolonial Britain. Yet, as these narratives were mainstreamed, and as they became a central element in the municipal multiculturalism of the 1980s, they also became increasingly instrumental and descriptive. Celebratory stories of ethnic heritage, characterised by conceptual confusion and divorced from any adequate understanding of historical processes, began to replace the more critical narratives, and the historical consciousness, once championed by scholar activists.Less
The emergence of multicultural Britain was one of the most profound transformations of 20th century society. This book provides both a description and an analysis of that change. It argues that immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and Ireland, despite deep and historic connections to Britain, were widely represented as ‘alien others’ and understood to threaten an exclusive national culture that was guaranteed by history. This was a highly selective version of the national past but it encouraged the idea that post-war immigrants had created a new ‘race problem’ that required management and intervention. The science and practice of race relations was one influential response. Despite some serious shortcomings that are examined in detail, race relations work helped to provide a space and a language in which immigrant groups responded to their rejection from the national community. In supplementary schools, language classes, in the rise of Black Studies and in a wide variety of cultural and educational projects immigrant groups explored their histories. Historical education was central to all these activities. History, and memory, helped to define the ethnic identities of multicultural Britain and provided the resources with which it became possible to imagine and discuss a future postcolonial Britain. Yet, as these narratives were mainstreamed, and as they became a central element in the municipal multiculturalism of the 1980s, they also became increasingly instrumental and descriptive. Celebratory stories of ethnic heritage, characterised by conceptual confusion and divorced from any adequate understanding of historical processes, began to replace the more critical narratives, and the historical consciousness, once championed by scholar activists.
Qi Wang
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748692330
- eISBN:
- 9781474406390
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748692330.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The introduction opens the book with two highly symbolic anecdotes of cinematic imagination, respectively provided by filmmakers Cheng Qingsong and Wang Guangli who share a desire to rewrite the ...
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The introduction opens the book with two highly symbolic anecdotes of cinematic imagination, respectively provided by filmmakers Cheng Qingsong and Wang Guangli who share a desire to rewrite the socialist past and understand postsocialism on a personal scale. The introduction then introduces the concept of the Forsaken Generation and explicates its peculiar historical consciousness as embodied in a much more personal and critical approach to history when compared with their older siblings found in the “educated youth” or the Fifth Generation. The Introduction concludes with an explication of the methodology used and a chapter outline.Less
The introduction opens the book with two highly symbolic anecdotes of cinematic imagination, respectively provided by filmmakers Cheng Qingsong and Wang Guangli who share a desire to rewrite the socialist past and understand postsocialism on a personal scale. The introduction then introduces the concept of the Forsaken Generation and explicates its peculiar historical consciousness as embodied in a much more personal and critical approach to history when compared with their older siblings found in the “educated youth” or the Fifth Generation. The Introduction concludes with an explication of the methodology used and a chapter outline.
Joseph Luzzi
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300123555
- eISBN:
- 9780300151787
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300123555.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter focuses on Nietzsche's contention that the thirst for historical knowledge engenders a confusing surplus of images and ideas that tempers the immediacy of experience and produces an ...
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This chapter focuses on Nietzsche's contention that the thirst for historical knowledge engenders a confusing surplus of images and ideas that tempers the immediacy of experience and produces an ironic detachment from the present in the weakened or “impotent” modern personality. In the current historicist critical climate, it is difficult not to appreciate the prophetic qualities of his text. By reducing critical awareness to historical self-consciousness, however, Nietzsche perhaps overstates his case. As David Perkins writes, the aim of literary history is “not merely to reconstruct and understand the past” but “to explain how and why a work acquired its form and themes and, thus, to help readers orient themselves.”Less
This chapter focuses on Nietzsche's contention that the thirst for historical knowledge engenders a confusing surplus of images and ideas that tempers the immediacy of experience and produces an ironic detachment from the present in the weakened or “impotent” modern personality. In the current historicist critical climate, it is difficult not to appreciate the prophetic qualities of his text. By reducing critical awareness to historical self-consciousness, however, Nietzsche perhaps overstates his case. As David Perkins writes, the aim of literary history is “not merely to reconstruct and understand the past” but “to explain how and why a work acquired its form and themes and, thus, to help readers orient themselves.”
Tracie Church Guzzio
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617030048
- eISBN:
- 9781617030055
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617030048.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This chapter describes how Wideman’s dialogue with recorded or popular history illustrates his aesthetic effectively. Through the imagination, he can fill the gaps and silences of African American ...
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This chapter describes how Wideman’s dialogue with recorded or popular history illustrates his aesthetic effectively. Through the imagination, he can fill the gaps and silences of African American life in the historical consciousness, and in doing so, celebrates the unknown men and women who survived and kept a tradition alive in the wake of slavery, racism, and oppression. Reaching back into the past allows Wideman to confront the site of trauma and the “original sin” of America—slavery. Wideman seeks to question, deconstruct, and displace those histories of the hegemonic culture by revising them or overlapping them within his own fictions, autobiographies, and re-imaginings of the past. He buries the recorded history in his writing as historians have often buried the stories of African Americans in the official chronicles.Less
This chapter describes how Wideman’s dialogue with recorded or popular history illustrates his aesthetic effectively. Through the imagination, he can fill the gaps and silences of African American life in the historical consciousness, and in doing so, celebrates the unknown men and women who survived and kept a tradition alive in the wake of slavery, racism, and oppression. Reaching back into the past allows Wideman to confront the site of trauma and the “original sin” of America—slavery. Wideman seeks to question, deconstruct, and displace those histories of the hegemonic culture by revising them or overlapping them within his own fictions, autobiographies, and re-imaginings of the past. He buries the recorded history in his writing as historians have often buried the stories of African Americans in the official chronicles.
Vilém Flusser, Mark Poster, and Nancy Ann Roth
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816670222
- eISBN:
- 9781452947228
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816670222.003.0021
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter reflects on the status of writing in the face of the informatic revolution that is giving rise to more effective codes and asks whether historical consciousness has been surpassed by ...
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This chapter reflects on the status of writing in the face of the informatic revolution that is giving rise to more effective codes and asks whether historical consciousness has been surpassed by something new that is still beyond our conceptual powers. The level of consciousness that prevailed before history is articulated in terms of pictures, the historical in terms of the alphabet, and the new in terms of digital media. Abysses open between them. Each alphabetic attempt to bridge the abyss in the direction of the digital will fail because it will carry its own linear, goal-oriented structure into the digital, covering the digital up. There are people who write because they think it still makes sense, and there are people who no longer write but go back to kindergarten. And then there are people who write despite knowing that it makes no sense. This chapter is actually directed at the first two but dedicated to the third.Less
This chapter reflects on the status of writing in the face of the informatic revolution that is giving rise to more effective codes and asks whether historical consciousness has been surpassed by something new that is still beyond our conceptual powers. The level of consciousness that prevailed before history is articulated in terms of pictures, the historical in terms of the alphabet, and the new in terms of digital media. Abysses open between them. Each alphabetic attempt to bridge the abyss in the direction of the digital will fail because it will carry its own linear, goal-oriented structure into the digital, covering the digital up. There are people who write because they think it still makes sense, and there are people who no longer write but go back to kindergarten. And then there are people who write despite knowing that it makes no sense. This chapter is actually directed at the first two but dedicated to the third.
Evgeny Dobrenko
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748634453
- eISBN:
- 9780748653607
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748634453.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines the three film adaptations of Maxim Gorky's novel Mother. It compares the directorial styles of film directors Vsevolod Pudovkin, Mark Donskoi and Gleb Panfilov, and their ...
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This chapter examines the three film adaptations of Maxim Gorky's novel Mother. It compares the directorial styles of film directors Vsevolod Pudovkin, Mark Donskoi and Gleb Panfilov, and their adherence to Gorky's plot. The chapter suggests that through these three Mother films one can study the history of Soviet culture and Soviet historical consciousness, and explains how Mother attracted recurring interest as a novel and in its life in the theatre and in the cinema.Less
This chapter examines the three film adaptations of Maxim Gorky's novel Mother. It compares the directorial styles of film directors Vsevolod Pudovkin, Mark Donskoi and Gleb Panfilov, and their adherence to Gorky's plot. The chapter suggests that through these three Mother films one can study the history of Soviet culture and Soviet historical consciousness, and explains how Mother attracted recurring interest as a novel and in its life in the theatre and in the cinema.
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804758390
- eISBN:
- 9780804787482
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804758390.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter introduces the topics of the book, noting the rise of geography in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a conceptual matrix for understanding culture and society. The ...
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This chapter introduces the topics of the book, noting the rise of geography in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a conceptual matrix for understanding culture and society. The discussion claims that during this period, European society developed a pronounced historical consciousness. The historicization of human existence lies at the heart of modernity. The discussion argues that the moment European society came to deem historicity to be a fundamental mode of being in the world, it also realized that to be in the world necessarily meant to inhabit the earth and that geographic space is important for human existence.Less
This chapter introduces the topics of the book, noting the rise of geography in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a conceptual matrix for understanding culture and society. The discussion claims that during this period, European society developed a pronounced historical consciousness. The historicization of human existence lies at the heart of modernity. The discussion argues that the moment European society came to deem historicity to be a fundamental mode of being in the world, it also realized that to be in the world necessarily meant to inhabit the earth and that geographic space is important for human existence.
