Kindness in memorable university teachers

The article presents some insights derived from research on ‘good teaching practices’ in the context of the School of Humanities, Mar del Plata State University, Argentina. He professor in charge of the ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ course has been signaled as ‘memorable’ by her advanced students, and thus become part of the investigation. In her classes, the relationship with the students entails peculiar ethical dimensions, and hospitality is one of the categories involved in her didactic proposal. Much data has been gathered through ethnographic reports of classwork, interviews, surveys and analysis of reference materials, which aims at throwing light into good teaching at university, as part of the investigation conducted by the Research Team on Education and Cultural Studies (GIEEC) in this University.Fil: Porta Vazquez, Luis Gabriel. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Flores, Graciela Nelida. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata; Argentin

Stage directions: Shakespeare's use of the map

This study argues that sixteenth-century map culture is a source for Shakespeare's plays, and that his use of the map, as cartographic language and as stage property, is a factor in understanding Shakespeare's representation of power. Maps empower their users and their makers, at the expense of those who are mapped those who live on the land represented. However, the stage counters the map's effectiveness as a tool of power. In Shakespeare's plays, characters using the map to achieve power fail, partly because of their inability to read maps and use them properly, and partly because the map and the stage's relationship with the space they represent is different. Land is staged refusing to yield to the map's attempts to break it down, and those living on the land are staged resisting their inclusion or exclusion from it. Plays and issues discussed include the mis-use of the map in The Second Tetralogy, the weaknesses of cartography and stage-mapping in Richard III and King Lear, the presence of death on the map in relation to Antony and Cleopatra, and mapping body-space in Cymbeline

Insurgent Remains: Afterlives of the American Revolution, 1770-1820

Insurgent Remains disturbs the identification of the American Revolution with U.S. national beginnings by tracing it through its literary aftereffects in the period with which it is identified, 1770-1820. While the American Revolution is thought to have concluded with the Treaty of Paris (1783) and the “birth of the United States, Insurgent Remains reads texts produced in the decades following the peace for delineations of ongoing Revolutionary experiences characterized by loss and constraint that demand creative, collective responses without guarantee. In chapters organized around the re-use and re-circulation of “old” forms and formats—allegory, anthology, tragedy, and petition—I propose that the liminal affective states in the texts I examine are sites of insurgent potential in their own right whose politics are inscrutable when the Revolution is conceived as an oppositional conflict of sides whose descriptive vocabulary reduces to a binary formula (American/British, Loyalist/Patriot). Instead, they become legible as “remains”: pending works of grief, yearning, need, and love that offer vibrant possibilities for collective action and ethical commitment obscured by teleologies of national consolidation. Eschewing preconceived identitarian and partisan markers through which Revolutionary history has conventionally been organized, my approach stresses the roles of literary forms in mediating traumatic experiences of Revolutionary history that may otherwise elude representation. I argue that the itineraries along which these forms travel open up new ways of thinking about the cultural politics of the period and the politics of revolution itself. This project thus seeks to enrich our understanding of the Revolutionary period by expanding the narrow field in which politics seem to operate, attending to modes of historical experience debarred from political consideration by traditional Revolutionary histories bound to binary narratives of conflict and progress

The toucan in early modern French culture (1526-1650)

This is a thesis about the life of a strange little bird in early modern European culture. Bright and colourful in feather yet bizarre in physical form, bearing a seemingly impossible bill, the Toucan inspired wonder in many a traveller to the New World. Transcribed into text, it soon appeared in books of several genres, in the drawings of artists and, as a material sample, in the cabinets de curiosités of collectors and dignitaries. The sheer breadth of source material available indicates the cultural significance of the Toucan; our discussion sets out to assess the bird's impact on early modern thought and culture. To fully understand the shape and nature of the bird's influence -- or what I refer to as its several 'lives' in European culture -- we develop an analytical framework based on the methodological cores of semiosis and agency. Our analysis shows how the 'lives' of the Toucan disrupted and reshaped a number of cultural frames, both in discursive formations and in cultural practices. These disruptions, in turn, transformed some major European cultural frames of reference regarding scientific and artistic mimesis and their didactic as well as theological stakes: idolatry, eschatology, deformity and hybridity, ingenuity and craft are all in play in these. The thesis is organised into three principal chapters, each one following the Toucan in a distinct area of early modern culture -- that is, natural-historical writing, confessional discourses and material cultures of collecting and making. Reading familiar material in the new lights of semiosis and agency and drawing several new conclusions, the discussion also broaches little-known texts and reaches the borders between languages and genres. By focusing on European interactions with a challenging New World creature, this thesis tells a story of broader European re-imaginings of the natural world in a time of social and cultural transformation

Tragicomic Transpositions: The Influence of Spanish Prose Romance on the Development of Early Modern English Tragicomedy

The critical origin story for early modern English stage tragicomedy has frequently centered around Italian playwright and theorist Giambattista Guarini, who offered a tragicomic model in his play Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd) and in his treatises on the genre. While Guarini’s impact on playwrights such as John Fletcher is undeniable, tragicomic critics have generally ignored the pervasive influence of Miguel de Cervantes’ work on seventeenth-century English playwrights. This project is the first sustained study of the influence of Cervantean prose romance on the development of early modern English tragicomedy. By looking at English tragicomedies with Spanish sources – particularly Cervantes’ Novelas ejemplares (1613) – I propose a genealogy for the genre that deviates from the traditional understanding of English tragicomedy as derived from Italian drama. I argue that, in many of their solo and collaborative transpositions of Cervantean material, John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont, William Shakespeare, Philip Massinger, and John Webster crafted a form of stage tragicomedy different from earlier pastoral iterations of the genre, of which Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess (1609) is the prime example. After the theatrical failure of this Guarinian-inspired play, Fletcher and his frequent collaborators turned their attention to Cervantes and began transposing the Spanish author’s novellas into a form of tragicomedy characterized by more cosmopolitan settings and interactions, an interest in cross-cultural exchange (both formally and thematically), a remarkable generic flexibility, and an investment in a distinct form of audience engagement. Stage tragicomedies transposed from Cervantean material also attempted to teach theatergoers how to become savvy interpreters and consumers of dramatized events and, in the world beyond the theater, of cultural production and political spectacle

The Intervention of Philology

This book examines the interplay of history, textuality, dramaturgy, and politics in the school dramas of Daniel Casper von Lohenstein (1635–1683). The plays are based on well-known episodes from classical Roman history and were staged in Breslau by students at two all-male humanistic gymnasia. Organized exclusively around stories of such female protagonists as Agrippina, Cleopatra, Epicharis, and Sophonisbe, these productions required that the young actors dress as women to play roles that routinely involved scenes of political intrigue, incest, seduction, torture, and threatened infanticide. In print these plays were accompanied by massive annotational apparatuses that delineate the contours of the learned universe of eastern central Europe in exacting detail. Newman's study sheds light on the ideological complexity of gender, politics, and learned culture in the early modern period as it emerges from these intriguing and often bizarre plays

The Petty Scots novel

CHAPTER I - Introduction. CHAPTER II - The Cottagers of Glenburnie, 1808. Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton CHAPTER III - Marriage, 1818; The Inheritance 1824; Destiny, 1831. Susan Ferrier. CHAPTER IV - Some Passages in the Life of Adam Blair, Minister of the Gospel at Cross Meikle. 1822. The History of Matthew Wald - 1824. John Gibson Lockhart. CHAPTER V - The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - 1824. The Brownie of Bodsbeck - 1818. James Hogg. CHAPTER VI - The Ayrshire Legatees (Oct. 1820 - Mar. 1821). The Annals of the Parish 1821. The Provost 1822. Sir Andrew Wylie of that Ilk 1822. The Entail; or the Lairds of Grippy 1823. Ringan Gilhaize 1823. The Last of the Lairds 1826. John Galt. CHAPTER VII - Mansie Mauch - Tailor in Dalkeith. David Macbeth Moir CHAPTER VIII - Conclusion. Bibliograph

Subversion and Transcendence in the Latin American Modern Travel Novel (1928-1976)

The focus of this dissertation is the role that travel plays in Latin American novels that stem from 1928 to 1976, specifically, Macunaíma, Los pasos perdidos, El reino de este mundo, and Mascaró, el cazador americano. Departing from the fact that this period of time in history was marked by political and cultural change and upheaval, different aspects and interpretations of travel as manifested in the novels of the corpus are explored as a means of subversion and transcendence to hegemonic discourses. Travel is viewed as a means of disruption, particularly of limits and borders, be they geographical, political, and cultural. The idea of a heightened sense of potentiality inherent in travel is also explored as part of the subversive and transcendent nature of travel. The beginning of the work delves into alternative spaces that are created by voyage. These spaces are described as differential spaces using Lefebvre’s definition of the term. Following a discussion of space, myth in travel is explained as an open system that resists particular power structures. Travel’s role in disseminating myths is also studied. Subsequently, the function of the Trickster as a mythological figure and as a peripatetic storyteller is analyzed. The final aspect considered in this study is the creation and the use of alternative semiotic systems that exist inside and outside of travel that subvert and transcend authoritative discourses of power

Golding’s Metaphysics: William Golding’s Novels in the Light of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy

Esta tese analiza as preocupacións metafísicas do novelista británico William Golding a través do prisma da filosofía de Arthur Schopenhauer, coa cal ten importantes puntos en común: o asombro metafísico que leva á procura da esencia do mundo, as preocupacións morais e un suposto pesimismo que vai contra toda esperanza utópica. Após ofrecer una visión panorámica do tratamento que esas preocupacións teñen recibido pola crítica, e da teoría metafísica de Schopenhauer, a tese examina os aspectos das novelas de Golding que coinciden con esta. En primeiro lugar analízanse as clases de coñecemento — racional e non racional — de que os seus personaxes dispón, e a súa capacidade para atinxir unha comprensión metafísico do mundo. A seguir examínase o tratamento que Golding dá ás descricións do mundo fornecidas pola ciencia, a arte e a relixión. Esta última pon o foco na esencia do mundo, a miúdo conceptualizándoa como unha vontade todopoderosa e amoral. Como a vontade esencial é un impulso que non pode ser satisfeito e no cal ten as súas raíces o carácter innato e inmutable de cada un dos individuos, para Golding a vida humana caracterízase pola agresión mutua e a dor. A pesar de ofrecer varias maneiras de evitar o sufrimento — a contemplación estética, o altruísmo compasivo, a morte e a represión moral e física — Golding suxire que, coa excepción da morte, estas só poden mitigar a dor, nunca pórlle fin; de aí o seu pesimismo e o rexeitamento de toda solución utópica. Todos estes aspectos das súas novelas coinciden coa filosofía de Schopenhauer. Porén, Golding introduce pouco a pouco unha serie de elementos que difiren da visión do mundo a que Schopenhauer deu expresión filosófica: a primeira mudanza prodúcese cando as novelas de Golding afirman que o carácter moral das persoas, lonxe de depender dunha vontade inmutable que excede o individuo, veñen determinados pola libre escolla individual; despois Golding cuestiona a posibilidade de coñecer a esencia do mundo; finalmente, Golding abre a porta á posibilidade de que as decisións libres dos individuos dean lugar a unha comunidade utópica non gobernada pola competición e a represión. Aparte destes elementos, as súas novelas conteñen outro que non está incluído no modelo de Schopenhauer: a divindade. O estudo das novelas de Golding acaba explorando o lugar que a divindade ocupa nelas, e que pode resumirse afirmando que a caracterización das deidades de que fala o autor coincide nos seus trazos esenciais coa caracterización da vontade esencial, e que, por tanto, a única función desas deidades nas novelas é dar testemuño das crenzas relixiosas de Golding e de moitos dos seus personaxes