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Culture as Nature: Landscape Metaphors and Access to the World of Learning

Alice Jenkins

in Space and the 'March of Mind': Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain 1815-1850

This chapter discusses the landscape metaphors that were very frequently used to regulate and describe access to knowledge. By imaging knowledge as a series of outdoor spaces, subject to a greater or ... More

This chapter discusses the landscape metaphors that were very frequently used to regulate and describe access to knowledge. By imaging knowledge as a series of outdoor spaces, subject to a greater or lesser degree of human intervention, and accessible to a greater or lesser range of human characters, these metaphors of gardens, wildernesses, pastoral, and picturesque landscapes staged debates about who should be able to learn what in early 19th-century Britain as a tussle between nature and culture. The chapter asks how spatial rhetorics were mobilized to manage access to knowledge in the face of strong pressures at once to enlarge and to control popular engagement in education. Using evidence from both popular and elite texts, it explores the political implications of the particular kinds of spatial metaphor most widely deployed, focusing especially on arguments and anxieties about individualism, conquest, and exploration.Less

A Tripartite Taxonomy of Visual Metaphor in Graphic Illness Narratives

Elisabeth El Refaie

in Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives

This chapter uses the analysis of 35 graphic illness narratives to identify the various forms that visual metaphor may take in this genre. A novel tripartite classification system that distinguishes ... More

This chapter uses the analysis of 35 graphic illness narratives to identify the various forms that visual metaphor may take in this genre. A novel tripartite classification system that distinguishes between pictorial, spatial, and stylistic metaphors is proposed. Pictorial metaphors, which use images of concrete animate or inanimate objects to stand for something else, have received a lot of scholarly attention in recent years, but this study offers the first systematic description of the other two types of visual metaphor. Spatial metaphors exploit the relative size, arrangement, and orientation of elements on the page to convey more abstract meanings, whereas in the case of stylistic metaphors, features such as color, shape, level of detail, and quality of line are used to indicate an abstract concept or a nonvisual sense perception. These three categories can be further subdivided, and in many instances several distinct types of metaphor are used in combination.Less

Cultural Choices

Julian Johnson

in Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Values

This final and sixth chapter is about the division of culture by the spatial metaphors of high and low forms of cultural criticism. This includes the differences of aesthetic criteria and different ... More

This final and sixth chapter is about the division of culture by the spatial metaphors of high and low forms of cultural criticism. This includes the differences of aesthetic criteria and different music for the sociology of music. The dissimilarities in music arise not because they are made differently, but because they exhibite different properties and characteristics. Today's musical culture reflects a diversity that seems to mark a perfect union of self-determination. Music, despite its apparently subjective nature, is rooted in the same social objectivity. That this statement seems odd today is perhaps a sign of the degree to which, in cultural matters, the educational system confirms rather than questions the relativism of everyday life.Less

Introduction: Is Russia a Center or a Periphery?

Edith W. Clowes

in Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity

This introductory chapter considers the links between spatial discourse and national identity in post-Soviet Russia. Since the early 1990s powerfully opposing views about what it means to be ... More

This introductory chapter considers the links between spatial discourse and national identity in post-Soviet Russia. Since the early 1990s powerfully opposing views about what it means to be “Russian” have taken shape. Some focus nostalgically on reinstating Moscow as the imperial center, while others apply “eccentric” ideas of margin, periphery, and border to rethink the meaning of Moscow and to move away from the old tsarist and Stalinist paradigms and their homogenizing, russifying cultural values. In the Soviet era official identity relied on images of time, but post-Soviet public discourse has since preferred the alliance of Russianness with concepts of geographical and geopolitical space. The chapter shows how these spatial metaphors have shifted from previous Soviet hopes and anxieties and at the same time positions the post-Soviet moment among other “post” events—postmodernism and postcolonialism.Less

Histories of Modern Selfhood

John D. Caputo

in On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self

The fourth chapter discusses existing models for writing the history of forms of identity, in particular the work of Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, Peter and Christa Bürger and Jerrold Seigel. The ... More

The fourth chapter discusses existing models for writing the history of forms of identity, in particular the work of Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, Peter and Christa Bürger and Jerrold Seigel. The limits of their positions are discussed, but at the same time they all contribute to the project of a defamiliarizing history of forms of modern identity. Foucault's works is shown to be useful for the attention it gives to the practices through which identities are fashioned. Charles Taylor insists on the shared nature of these practices, and the ethical impulses which underpin them. He also points out that the practices underpinning modern identity have evolved historically and don't fit together to form a unified package. Peter and Christa Bürger remind us that male and female identities cannot be considered in isolation from each other, while Jerrold Seigel draws attention to the importance of giving an account of identity that includes what it feels like to live that identity from the inside. The chapter closes by showing how the prereflexive awareness to which Seigel's argument appeals must be radically rethought for it is inseparable from an involvement in the world that connects it to history and shared social practices.Less

Pyramids and Prisms: Reading Foucault in 3-D

in Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History

This chapter applies the spatial argument to Foucault's own works. Foucault's repeated use of spatial metaphors is not just symptomatic of his rhetorical inclinations. Rather, his reliance on spatial ... More

This chapter applies the spatial argument to Foucault's own works. Foucault's repeated use of spatial metaphors is not just symptomatic of his rhetorical inclinations. Rather, his reliance on spatial terms enters into the very arguments themselves. The tables, triangles, and quadrilaterals that intersperse his archaeological studies, the “capillary” action of power relations in his genealogies, and even the subjectivizing “spaces” of his later problematizations serve not merely to illustrate but to further their respective arguments. The chapter discusses how these spatial images are ingredient in the working of the argument itself, like the imaginative models of a scientific theory. The chapter underscores the spatialization of reason at work in Foucault's texts. But his spatialized reasoning does not merely juxtapose, it compares and contrasts. Because Sartre's theory of history is in large part indebted to the concept of dialectical reason, it is appropriate to ask what some of the effects of such an attack on the dialectic might be.Less

Illusory Empire: Viktor Pelevin’s Parody of Neo-Eurasianism

Edith W. Clowes

in Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity

This chapter focuses on the themes crucial to Viktor Pelevin's Chapaev and the Void, the deconstruction of the Soviet mass psyche and the search for identity. Set partly in a Moscow mental hospital, ... More

This chapter focuses on the themes crucial to Viktor Pelevin's Chapaev and the Void, the deconstruction of the Soviet mass psyche and the search for identity. Set partly in a Moscow mental hospital, Pelevin's Chapaev parody lends itself to a psychoanalytic challenge to the repressive neo-Eurasianist view of human nature. Here the focus is on the constructions of self of the four inmates in the psychiatric hospital story, each of whom is viewed as an allegorical component in something we can call the “national-imperial psyche.” Contemporary neo-Eurasianism with its national-imperial idea is an ideological straw man that receives wonderful philosophical and psychological satirical treatment in this novel. Chapaev also features a series of zany philosophical dialogues variously about consciousness, ethics, and metaphysics—and always about identity. Thus the post-Soviet tendency to link identity to spatial-geographical metaphor becomes here the object of a fundamental philosophical challenge.Less