213 research outputs found

    Signifying Europe

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    Signifying Europe provides a systematic overview of the wide range of symbols used to represent Europe and Europeanness, both by the political elite and the broader public. Through a critical interpretation of the meanings of the various symbols—and their often contradictory or ambiguous dimensions—Johan Fornäs uncovers illuminating insights into how Europe currently identifies itself and is identified by others outside its borders. While the focus is on the European Union’s symbols, those symbols are also interpreted in relation to other symbols of Europe. Offering insight into the cultural dimensions of European unification, this volume will appeal to students, scholars and politicians interested in European policy issues, cultural studies and postnational cultural identity

    Luigi Russolo: The Work and Influence of a Visionary - The Birth of Noise-Music

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    My senior project focuses on the work and legacy of Luigi Russolo. Italian Futurism was one of the most influential artistic movements of the twentieth century, and Russolo contributed to that to a large extent. He was the co-author of the Futurist Painters\u27 Manifesto, but soon he abandoned painting to pursue his true passion: In 1913 he published The Art of Noises, a manifesto that changed music forever. In my project I analyzed Futurist paintings and their respective manifestos. Music of the Futurist Noise-Machines, and their respective manifestos. And I assess Russolo\u27s influence on composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, Edgar Varese, and John Cage

    Seculum, an epic trilogy in verse by Peter Dale Scott : the poem as structure for a new dawn

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    This dissertation reads the three books of Canadian-American poet and scholar Peter Dale Scott’s epic poem Seculum. Scott identifies as a practising Buddhist with a strong interest in Catholic theology and his poetry explores key ideas associated with both systems of belief. I argue that Scott formally employs the number three in diverse ways within the trilogy and that this formula (as in the poetic tercet form) constructs a poesis that is structured on the ruins of a type of Dantean Hell. Similarly, that this repetition gradually replaces the characteristics of Hell – such as darkness and feelings of despair and faithlessness – with a Purgatorian stillness and quietude, and then, a Paradisiacal mood of acceptance, harmony and clear thinking. In its gradual ‘presencing’ of hope, redemption and peace, Seculum’s poetic structure is acoustically tuned to its past (by way of quotation, evocation and influence) and religiously engaged with the present. In its complex evolution out of a psychological darkness to a spiritual lightness it excavates, empties out and builds an artifice from which the poet and reader can participate in the genesis of a new dawn. I maintain that Seculum is an epic poem in keeping with examples of quest poetry from Homer through to the twenty-first century. As a formula for completing the mission – to re-imagine the world as a better place – Seculum explores dichotomous relationships between religious and secular ideas related to selfhood and progressive ecology. In Seculum Scott’s poetic consciousness matures in its understanding of a balance between individual desires and communal responsibilities and his theological position, as explored in the trilogy, can best be understood – after Thomas Merton and in the context of recent eco-critical thinking by Jonathan Bate, Stuart Cooke and Kate Rigby – as a kind of “sacramental ecology”. Seculum moves beyond the horror of terror, as epitomised in the first volume, Coming to Jakarta, to a place of dwelling on earth that in the third volume recognises the sacredness of earth and the value of eco-critical living. The success of the narrative arc in Seculum relies heavily upon the employment of poetic and philosophic guides who include Wordsworth, Eliot and Pound and, to varying degrees, Heidegger and Hölderlin. The sense of an eco-critical livelihood in Seculum becomes, then, a prototype of an idyll, giving contemporary presence to the past with a view to discovering future providence. In Seculum this is developed by a coalescing of poetic and cultural memory from different literary epochs, beginning with classical antiquity. In the manner Book 3 of the trilogy achieves a synthetic resolution of the thesis posed in Book 1 and the anti-thesis that follows in Book 2, Seculum emerges as a built “structure” in which can be housed a new dawn of possibility

    Using Chaos in Articulating the Relationship of God and Creation in God\u27s Creative Activity

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    Out of dialogue with Old Testament studies and the sciences, there has been a rise in recent years in the use of chaos language by theologians in their articulation of a theology of creation. There has been little uniformity in how the word is used among the fields, or even within some fields—especially by biblical scholars doing ancient Near East comparative studies. Under the umbrella of this popular terminology, some ideas have found refuge whose theological implications warrant evaluation. Within this dissertation the range of ideas that fall under chaos within the physical sciences, Old Testament studies, and theology is identified and evaluated. However, the more focused evaluation is on the appropriateness of the choice to apply the term to particular circumstances, whether that is entropy or unpredictability in science or the tohu wabohu and tehom of Genesis 1:2 in biblical studies. Choosing the term chaos as a label reflects an interpretation of the data and shapes subsequent thinking and speaking about the data. As much as reflect the world (the facts), it construes a world/worldview in which scholars work in their fields. The implications of the ideas that have been developed under chaos are evaluated herein, but it is the initial application of the term to the data that is the root issue which receives the greater focus. After critiquing the current uses of chaos in the physical sciences, in interpretations of Genesis 1 by scholars such as Jon D. Levenson, and in the creation theologies of contemporary theologians like Catherine Keller, an alternative grammar of creatio ex nihilo and God\u27s relationship to creation is proposed. This framework builds upon the pneumatology of Lyle Dabney—in which he develops the language of possibility and the Spirit operating trans –creation—by developing the idea of the Word operating transcarnate to creation. It is within this framework that it is suggested that chaos be used as a label for circumstances where any part of creation expresses itself discordantly with God and neighbor, both with whom God makes possible for it to participate in loving community

    Memory, Time and Identity in the Novels of William Faulkner and Marcel Proust.

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    This dissertation is a comparative study of first person narrative in Marcel Proust\u27s A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), and selected novels of William Faulkner, primarily those in which the character of Quentin Compson appears: The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! This comparison is based upon the assumption that the attempts to represent the patterns of thought, memory, or consciousness in these novels is symptomatic of many twentieth-century novels, which dramatize an anxiety about the possibility of a solid ground for knowledge of the world or of the self. The language of these novels displays the instability or incoherence of human knowledge of self and world, thus destabilizing the notion of the individual as a coherent, self-knowing entity. Subjectivity is portrayed as the weaving of relations between signifiers. This implies a conception of being which is not that of a positive, substantial entity, but of relation. In chapter two, the role of language in the formation of memory, and the relationship between narrative and time is examined in Proust. In chapter three, the narrative structure of Faulkner\u27s novels is examined from the perspective of Suassurian linguistics and through Continental criticism of Proust. In chapter four, the role of the proper name in the formation of a sense of social hierarchies is seen as central to the narrating hero\u27s formation of a sense of self and other, and is one aspect of the role of sign systems in the formation of memories and personal identities. The role of art and representation in the formation of self-awareness leads to a consideration of the mises en abyme, or textual mirrors, in the novels, in chapter five. Finally, the question of identity and its expression in language gives rise to a consideration of the problems of reading and interpretation. These problems are also raised by the narratives under consideration. The activities of reading, interpretation, and literary studies are best understood, not as the pursuit of meaning, but as the production of meaning through the ongoing activity of recontextualization

    the Mirror BRAIN - MIND

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    The biological Brain createst the mental Mind. Today our collective Mind becomes so fascinated by its source, the Brain, that all sciences incorporate neuro models in their concepts to increase global brainpower with technology. The most significant discovery is probably technology. We learn how the Brain creates consciousness and how the Brain generates momentaneous Time. Discover how at each moment in Time, our body runs the whole program of Evolution. What we know about the Brain is phantasy from the Mind
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