107 research outputs found

    Sunt superis sua iura. Ovid, the law, and the Augustan discourse

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    My thesis investigates how Ovid’s treatment of juridical language and content fits into the socio-cultural landscape of Augustan Rome. Moving beyond the legacy of his early career in the forum, Ovid resorts to the legal to express a wider engagement with divine and political justice – an aspect of consistency and evolution throughout the poet’s corpus. In the Amores, the Ars Amatoria and the Heroides, Ovid revisits the elegiac code to formulate an extended recusatio that plays with the ‘micro-semantics’ of the legal to bring to the fore the gaps in the narrative of Augustus’ legislation. Through a selection of legally-inflected case studies, I demonstrate that the Metamorphoses shares the same approach to ius as his elegiac poetry, though developed through a more in-depth exploration of power dynamics, as arbitrary divine jurisdiction in the mythological universe of the poem mirrors the ‘state of exception’ of the Princeps iudex. In the Fasti, Augustus’ appropriation of legal calendar time highlights the convergence of the Princeps’ and the poet’s fictional procedures: myth and traditional legacies are deceptively ‘recodified’ through Ovid’s ‘mythologising’ ius in a similar fashion to Augustus’ reimagining Rome’s constitutional system through fictio iuris, as both the poet and the Princeps adapt the notion of justice to their respective agendas. In his elegy Ovid engages with the tension created by Augustus’ new role as lawgiver, an approach that evolves when taking the Metamorphoses’ history of the universe into account, to then show a further change through the prism of the Fasti, as the same power dynamics are matched with the Princeps’ narrative of control. The ‘micro-semantics’ of ius are thus reconciled with the macro-semantics of Ovid’s reflections on the nature of justice, becoming the playing field for the poet’s deceptive narrative devices to mirror the fictional nature of Augustus’ regime.“I would also like to thank the Classical Association for funding my stay at the Fondation Hardt in July 2022.”--Acknowledgement

    Our Mythical Hope

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    Classical Antiquity is a particularly important field in terms of “Hope studies” [
]. For centuries, the ancient tradition, and classical mythology in particular, has been a common reference point for whole hosts of creators of culture, across many parts of the world, and with the new media and globalization only increasing its impact. Thus, in our research at this stage, we have decided to study how the authors of literary and audiovisual texts for youth make use of the ancient myths to support their young protagonists (and readers or viewers) in crucial moments of their existence, on their road into adulthood, and in those dark hours when it seems that life is about to shatter and fade away. However, if Hope is summoned in time, the crisis can be overcome and the protagonist grows stronger, with a powerful uplifting message for the public. [
] Owing to this, we get a chance to remain true to our ideas, to keep faith in our dreams, and, when the decisive moment comes, to choose not hatred but love, not darkness but light. Katarzyna Marciniak, University of Warsaw, From the introductory chapte

    Play Among Books

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    How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

    Tokyo Olympics: when athletes are faced with the impossible

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    The global pandemic, with the social distancing measures and lockdowns, disrupted many aspects of life, including sport. This chapter demonstrates how the pandemic affected athletes participating in Tokyo Olympics

    Olympic and Paralympic Analysis 2020: Mega events, media, and the politics of sport

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    Is there space on the podium for us all?

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    People with intellectual disabilities (ID) have cognitive deficits which impact on their daily lives, requiring them to receive additional support. Having ID also means that an individual’s ability to compete in sports at an elite level is impaired resulting in potential eligibility to the Paralympics, rather than the Olympics, in a class called “Intellectual Impairment”. First entering into the Paralympic in 1992, athletes with ID competed separately, but by Atlanta, 1996 the events were integrated and 54 ID athletes competed alongside everybody else. This rose to 244 ID athletes in Sydney, 2000. However, in a disastrous episode at this event the ID Spanish basketball team, cheated and fielded athletes who did not have ID. There was an investigation and it was found that there was purposeful misrepresentation, but also that the systems in place to check eligibility were not strong enough to prevent such occurrences. The whole impairment group of ID was then suspended from competing in the Paralympics and for the next twelve years elite athletes with ID lost out on Paralympic opportunities

    The soft power of the Olympics in the age of Covid 19

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    The Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics Games was a Sport Mega Event (SME) like no other. The tensions evident in holding the world’s largest sporting event in one of the world’s most densely populated cities in the age of Covid raises pointed questions with respect to the values of hosting SME’s. Jules Boykoff’s NOlympians ably demonstrates historical and contemporary opposition to Olympic hosting. Nonetheless, the benefits of hosting SME’s - promoted by the International Olympic Committee and other governing bodies in sport - are often considered in terms of the perceived soft power benefits that accrue to the hosts. Soft power - the power of attraction and trust in relations amongst different polities, is a much debated term, but one that has proved remarkably durable since it was first coined by scholar Joseph Nye Jr in the early 1990s. Supposed soft power benefits have been typically measured in terms of visitor numbers to a city, hotel beds filled, cultural exchange events, and tickets sold to the games themselves, alongside increased GDP – a harder power measure. Covid corrupted these criteria. The impact on the athletes and administrators was huge – medals were ultimately won and lost on the basis of what the impact a year’s delay meant to athletic performance. Similarly, the impact on the hosts affords an opportunity to reappraise a soft power typography for hosting SMEs away from previous attempts to classify soft power success in terms of physical footfall – tickets sales et al. The soft power impact of Tokyo 2020 needs to be considered in its own right

    Astronomy and Literature | Canon and Stylometrics

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    This eighth issue of Interfaces contains two thematic clusters: the first cluster, entitled The Astronomical Imagination in Literature through the Ages, is edited by Dale Kedwards; the second cluster, entitled Medieval Authorship and Canonicity in the Digital Age, is edited by Jeroen De Gussem and Jeroen Deploige

    Three chapters in the history of femicide

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    This dissertation describes the genesis of the idea of femicide in a period of English and American Letters, the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, in which patriarchal values and constructions were entering a crisis which resulted in the revision of the idea of gender—in a way, that was the period in which the concept of gender was coded. In the first chapter, I look at the way the term femicide was first given currency in the English language in 1827 through Robert Macnish’s The Confessions of an Unexecuted Femicide, a fiction disguised as a true story, and how it spawned a short-lived literary sub-genre. In the second chapter, I examine Poe’s reworking of the femicide story, and to the ways in which he has drawn attention to its Gothic roots. Finally, in the third chapter, I offer a reading of Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,’ in which I argue that Godwin’s “sentimentalised” portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, and by extension of the female intellectual, constitutes an implicit refutation of her ideas, and therefore can be profitably compared to the portraits Poe’s femicide narrators make of Morella and Ligeia in the tales named after them.Esta dissertação descreve a gĂ©nese da ideia de femicĂ­dio durante um perĂ­odo nas letras Anglo-saxĂłnicas, entre a Ășltima dĂ©cada do sĂ©c. XVIII e meados do sĂ©culo seguinte, em que os valores e elaboraçÔes ideolĂłgicas patriarcais entravam numa crise que conduziria a uma revisĂŁo da ideia de gĂ©nero (de certo modo, poder-se-ia mesmo dizer que Ă© nesse perĂ­odo que o conceito de gĂ©nero começa a ser codificado). No primeiro capĂ­tulo, descrevo como o termo femicĂ­dio ganhou pela primeira vez projecção na lĂ­ngua inglesa depois da publicação, em 1827, de The Confessions of an Unexecuted Femicide de Robert Macnish, uma ficção apresentada ostensivamente como relato verĂ­dico que deu origem a um efĂ©mero sub-gĂ©nero de ficção, a que chamo “histĂłria de femicĂ­dio.” No segundo capĂ­tulo examino a reinterpretação da histĂłria de femicĂ­dio por Edgar Allan Poe, e sobre o modo como este autor pĂŽs em evidĂȘncia as suas raĂ­zes gĂłticas. Finalmente, no terceiro capĂ­tulo, apresento uma leitura de Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ em que argumento que o retrato “sentimentalizado” que Godwin aĂ­ faz de Mary Wollstonecraft, e por extensĂŁo da mulher intelectual, porquanto constitui uma refutação implĂ­cita das ideias dessa autora, ganha em ser comparado com os retratos que os narradores femicĂ­das de Poe fazem das suas esposas em “Morella” e “Ligeia.

    Justified: The Pragmaticization of American Evangelicalism from Jonathan Edwards to the Social Gospel

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    This dissertation tracks the epistemological precursors, what I call the “pragmatic attitudes,” of William James’s pragmatism as they appear in liberal evangelical culture from the time of Jonathan Edwards to the postbellum Social Gospel movement. I examine what I take to be three major epistemological underpinnings of this tradition of evangelical theology – the privileging of direct experience, the practical identification of essence and praxis, and the emergent belief in God’s pervasive affection toward Creation – and their role in the shaping of a distinctively pragmatic ethos in American evangelical culture. By juxtaposing two different traditions – one putatively “secular” and one “sacred” – I offer an interdisciplinary bridge between American religion and philosophy while challenging assumptions that American history can be divided along secular or sacred lines. I begin with Jonathan Edwards’s “latent pragmatisms,” certain epistemological attitudes toward religious conversion and the nature of God that lead Edwards to justify these ideas on logics fundamental to modern pragmatism, namely the integration of the “separate” faculties feeling and volition and the justification of religious experiences by their practical effects. The second chapter explores the antebellum revivalist Charles G. Finney and his interpretation of these Edwardsean pragmatic attitudes, making the case that Finney and the evangelical culture he represents merit a place in our understanding of the history of American pragmatism. Chapter three looks directly at the theology of William James’s father, Henry James Sr, and the extent to which its decidedly Swedenborgian influence reflected the pragmatic attitudes I outline in the first two chapters. The fourth and final chapter deals with the transatlantic Social Gospel movement, a self-consciously pragmatic evangelical reform movement whose theology and literature most visibly brought the realms of the sacred and the secular together for the common goal of bettering the condition of people here and now. The epilogue broadly addresses the implications of the sacred/secular binary in American culture.PHDEnglish Language & LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155035/1/lazbell_1.pd
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