Preliminary remarks on George Seferis' visual poetics

Abstract

This article makes some preliminary remarks on Seferis' photography, focusing mainly on its poetics as an act of seeing. The main intention is to highlight the direct relationship between Seferis' visual sensibility and his poetry. The article primarily discusses some technical features of Seferis' photography. It then examines his photography as a visual diary and draws attention to those cases where it is obvious that photographs hide behind specific poems. Finally, the article discusses the differences between photography and poetry regarding their relation to time. In this context, the poem 'M? τov τρóπo τov Γ.Σ.', which makes explicit reference to photography, is examined.     

Aquatic spaces and women's places: a comparative reading of George Eliot's The Millon the Floss and Alexandros Papadiamantis's H ϕóνıσσα

Abstract

This article will attempt a comparative reading of George Eliot' The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Alexandros Papadiamantis's H ?óν?σσα (1903), aiming to illustrate how both texts are preoccupied with the problem of inventing spaces for their deviant and superfluous female characters. Although enmeshed in the dominant ideologies of their time, such as the evolutionary pattern of life as a sign of progress, and women's marginalisation and domestication within this model, these novels simultaneously reject these ideologies. Interestingly, both Eliot's and Papadiamantis's problematic heroines are associated with water and experience a cathartic death by water. As a deus ex machina, the overflowing waters of the river in the first case, and the rising waves of the sea in the latter, provide a sanctuary, an intermediate space, where the two exiled heroines escape from traditional definitions of women as homeless containers or empty receptacles. George Eliot's Maggie and Papadiamantis's Frangoyannou discover an alternative geography in water, as the Darwinian aquatic space, a site of contestation, is reappropriated and transformed into a nursing space. This return to an intrauterine bliss, however, apart from its revolutionary potential, signifies also a return to essentialism and suggests the impossibility of ascribing any space to women except for that of endless metaphoricity. In the open-endedness of these two texts, women are floating signifiers, both promoting and transcending female archetypes.     

Change in Reputation as an Index of Genius and Eminence

Abstract

Many previous investigations have relied on entries in encyclopedias or similar sources (e.g., Who's Who) to quantify eminence and achievement. The premises in these earlier studies have been that eminence is a function of reputation and that reputation is accurately captured by encyclopedias and the like. In this article, the authors examine reputational changes from era to era. They expected that a comparison of encyclopedias from different eras would show significant changes, with some eminent persons having reputations (or at least biographical entries) that increase, some having reputations that decrease, and others having stable reputations. Can such change (or stability) be reliably assessed and predicted? To address these questions, encyclopedia entry length from 1911 was compared to encyclopedia entry length from 2002, using 1,004 individuals selected in a previous biographical study. Regression analysis indicates that biographical entries did in fact change significantly. The authors also explore implications for definitions of eminence and for the quantification of reputation.     

A Review of “Church,State, and Society: An Introduction to Catholic Social Doctrine”

Abstract

The Mandragola is a microcosm of Machiavelli's thought. As a comedy, every detail is under Machiavelli's control, and there are no losers: private vices yield public benefits. All Machiavelli's characters are not equal in either the choice worthiness of their goals or abilities. Who is the hero of this comedy? Machiavelli's clues prompts exploring his allusions to classical and patristic sources but, most importantly, to Livy. Parallels in The Mandragola and Livy connect Nicia with the Roman founder, Brutus. In his ambitious goal, freedom from conventional shame, and consequent triumph over misfortune, Nicia emerges as exemplifying Machiavellian virtue.     

The presence of Sikelianos in the poetry of George Seferis

Abstract

Echoes of Sike1ianos' poetry can be detected in many poets, but his presence in Seferis is particularly interesting in the light of the close personal relationship which developed between the two poets from the 1940s. The poetic dialogue starts with Seferis' Στρo?η (1931) and develops continuously until his last book of poems, Tρια Kρυ?? Φoιημα&tauα (1966). Seferis, attracted by Sikelianos' linguistic richness, recreates the older poet's words ingeniously in his search for a new poetics. I examine this dialogue chronologically to show that exploring the presence of Sikelianos in Seferis' poetry enhances the understanding of the younger poet and reveals that, however great the differences in matters of technique between the two poets, their attitudes to poetry and poetics are in the end closely related.     

George Sigerson: Charcot's translator*

Abstract

Senator George Sigerson (1836–1925), Dublin's first neurologist, was also a significant contributor to Anglo‐Irish literature. His medical career and literary accomplishments are outlined, the focus of the article being Sigerson's friendly relationship with Charcot (with whom he corresponded), and whose Leçons sur les maladies du système nerveux he translated.     

George Thomson and the Dialectics of Hellenism

Abstract

When I think of G. Thomson one question which immediately springs to mind is: why was he, and why is he still, so popular in Greece, a country he visited only four or five times? Was it his scholarly work, his Marxist beliefs or his emphasis on the continuity of Greek culture that bestowed on him respect and acclaim among Greeks? It seems to me that it was a combination of all these three factors which resulted in the fact that Thomson is one of the few classical scholars whose major studies have been translated into Greek and enjoyed wide publicity. He is now considered in Greece not only an exception among classicists but an exception among those who have studied the historical development of Greek culture and vehemently stressed its continuity. Despite the fact that his views were largely ignored during the debate of the 1960s and early 70s concerning the question of continuity, and which centred around Byzantium, Thomson's views on the subject must seriously be taken into account.     

Days of those made like me: retrospective pleasure,sexual knowledge,and C. P. Cavafy's homobiographics

Abstract

This article begins with a comparison between the anonymous Roman d'un inverti (1894/5) and Cavafy's poem ‘Να με?νει’, and then proceeds to read Cavafy's private notes and key erotic poems in the context of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses about non-normative sexuality. During that period, and in a discursive domain dominated by sexological case studies, the deviant sexual life story was published in order to titillate, check, control and medicalize. In Cavafy's texts we see, instead, a network of homosexual life stories proposed as a platform for the conceptualization of novel sexual, aesthetic and social technologies, as well as a new ethics of contact.     

Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer and George Finlay

Abstract

The collection of Finlay Papers in the British School at Athens though throwing invaluable light on the character of George Finlay and on conditions in the Greece and western Europe of his day, are by no means complete in their coverage. The diaries cover only certain years; the Letter Book records mainly family and business correspondence; the actual copies of surviving letters both to and from Finlay—apart from Finlay to Leake or Leicester Warren—seem to owe their preservation to chance rather than policy. Yet Finlay was no less interested in the history of Trebizond than in Greek topography or in numismatics, and a stray survival among his papers seems to indicate that he had closer relations with Fallmerayer than is suggested by the almost total omission of any reference to him in the works on the Fragmentist (as Fallmerayer called himself). The editor of Fallmerayer's collected works, his best friend G. M. Thomas (the ‘carissimus Thomas’ of the Tagebücher), does mention the generosity of Fallmerayer's attitude towards Finlay's work on Trebizond, but that is about all.     

Cropsey on Plato and the Unity of Philosophy

Abstract

Cropsey's book, Plato's World, contains his longest and most sustained reflections on a set of Platonic dialogues, but it is not the first work he published on Plato or the last he intended to write. His last collection of essays, On Humanity's Intensive Introspection, shows that in his writings on Plato Cropsey was attempting to answer a broader question: What is philosophy?     

Organicism,womanhood and domesticity in Anne LaBastille's Woodswoman saga

Anne LaBastille's Woodswoman saga presents an ecological approach to organicism that aims to recuperate the notion of nature and the wilderness as live organisms in perpetual, cyclical transition. LaBastille's conception of nature as an animate entity to which the self is intimately connected unleashes her discursive advocacy for a necessary reversion to a communion with natural rhythms. Her hermitage represents a voluntary conversion into the laws of nature, a conversion which results in the identification of the self as a self-in-place, and in the redefinition of the categories of domesticity, privacy and territoriality from an ecofeminist perspective. Such redefinitions lead to an implosion of the notion of femininity itself: as LaBastille negotiates between the categories of womanhood, the wilderness, and private and public domains in accordance to organicist principles, she opens a new discursive space that acknowledges women's need for a territory of their own where they too can become independent selves-in-relation.     

OCCUPATION AND ETHNICITY IN FIVE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CITIES: A COLLABORATIVE INQUIRY

Abstract

Literary critics and historians often interpret authors and authors' works as more or less significant, but are reluctant to quantify those works. The interdisciplinary field of creativity studies, however, poses methods of quantifying the eminence of an author's works. This study uses four measures from that field (anthology entries, scholarly citations, entries in books of quotations, and auction sale records) and one measure from the fields of computational linguistics and data mining (ngrams using millions of books digitized by Google) to assess the eminence of John Milton's thirty-one prose works1. For the purpose of this study, Milton's short “A Letter to a Friend Concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth” (1659) was not included in the quantitative analysis out of concern with possible conflations and confusions with letters in Milton's Familiar Letters. and their relation to his greater achievement in epic poetry. These measures indicate the singular eminence of Areopagitica, Milton's 1644 tract on the liberty of unlicensed printing.     

Guerrilla healthcare innovation: creative resilience in Zimbabwe’s chimurenga, 1971–1980

Abstract

Drawing from the last five years of chimurenga, Zimbabwe’s war of self-liberation from the early 1960s to 1980s, this paper shows that the most important aspect of technology and innovation in Africa is not the technology and innovation itself, but the African spirit of creative resilience born of the specificities of struggles its people have endured. By creative resilience is meant a phenomenon whereby, even where death is the outcome, and where the situation is insurmountable, people do not just surrender to fate, but die fighting. As a site of creative resilience, chimurenga is the ultimate site of creative labor and a vast laboratory, not simply a destination for incoming technologies, or a 'user' space but generative of its own insurgent and counter-insurgent innovations. Focusing on the communal war effort involving guerrillas and ordinary Africans in the rear bases of Mozambique and Zambia and on the front inside Zimbabwe, the paper makes its argument through a focus on healthcare innovation.     

The Curious History of the Minerva Reefs: Tracing the Origin of Tongan and Fijian Claims Over the Minerva Reefs

ABSTRACT

This article explores the historical events relating to the competing claims over the Minerva Reefs by Tonga and Fiji. Tonga’s sovereign claim over the Minerva Reefs was prompted by a private group’s laying claim to a 'Republic of Minerva' in 1972. At that time, Fiji, as well as the South Pacific Forum, recognized Tonga as the only possible owner of the Minerva Reefs, but did not explicitly recognize Tonga's claimed sovereign title. Such a position reflected the legal uncertainty in relation to Tonga's claim in 1972. The establishment of the 200?nm Exclusive Economic Zone legal regime in the late 1970s gave rise to Fiji's claim to the Minerva Reefs, whereas subsequent developments in international law have significantly reduced the legal uncertainty in relation to Tonga's claim.     

Is Francesco Patrizi’s L’Amorosa Filosofia a heterodox reading of the Symposium?

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on L’Amorosa Filosofia, perhaps the most compelling response to Ficino’s De Amore produced in the sixteenth century, as it is centered on the notion of love as philautia, based upon a naturalistic and psychological interpretation. The learned lady Tarquinia Molza, the most important interlocutor of Francesco Patrizi, affirms that love, from its beginnings in the inner self to its end, when reaching the divine, cannot but be a phenomenon that engages the sense of touch, showing a naturalistic attitude toward the body and an interest in the mediation between matter and spirit. Contrary to popular notions of self-love as selfish and callous, an honest man must necessarily love himself first in order to love others. In The Praise of Folly, Erasmus also tackles the concept, making Folly praise Philautia as a fundamental means for happiness. More relevant to Patrizi’s work, in Mario Equicola’s De Natura de Amore, there is a long digression on the virtues of self-love.     

The house gun: White writing,white fears and black justice (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

One way of understanding the Pistorius case is through the powerful writings of white South African authors such as Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer's anticipatory post‐apartheid novel, The house gun, in which she imagined a scenario similar to the one played out in the Pistorius trial where white fears and black justice met in the courtroom. South Africa is not unique. The mobilization of white peoples' fear of black or brown ‘intruders’ has infected other divided nations, like the United States and Israel. Here the social and architectural construction of ‘white’ settler or settler‐like special enclosures fortified by the legal right to self‐defence with private weapons has reproduced a colonial ‘paranoid ethos’ and a dangerous denial of the violence that is nested like a coiled rattlesnake from within their own segregated and hypervigilant enclosures.     

Self and space,resistance and discipline: a Foucauldian reading of George Orwell's 1984

The novel 1984, George Orwell's nightmarish vision of totalitarianism published after the Second World War, remains relevant in the twenty‐first century. Orwell's concerns regarding the abuse of power, the denial of self, and the eradication of both past and future continue to resonate in contemporary discussions of politics and society. Geographers, however, have directed minimal attention to the spatiality embedded within 1984. Accordingly, in this paper I examine the theoretical implications of space, resistance and discipline as manifest in the novel. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Michel Foucault, I detail how the spatial and temporal control of everyday activities serves to discipline spaces within a totalitarian society. Moreover, I suggest that 1984 illustrates how the production of knowledge through the act of writing may forge spaces of resistance within disciplined spaces. This paper contributes, therefore, in two areas, these being resistance geographies and fictive geographies.     

Thinking with Excerpts: John Locke (1632–1704) and his Notebooks

In his “Méthode nouvelle,” an anonymous article in the Bibliothèque universelle of 1686, John Locke described his way of collecting excerpts in notebooks and retrieving relevant entries. The well-known practice of entering textual passages in commonplace books sits uneasily with Locke's criticism of received opinion and authority. Is it possible that he used any of these notes to think with? I suggest that the conditions for this were provided by Locke's interactions with some of his notes, including those which recorded observations, testimonies and experiments. As well as labelling excerpts and other notes with topical Titles, Locke sometimes added precise bibliographical citations, transferred material across notebooks, interpolated his own signed reflections and queries, and (eventually) dated entries.     

The Tragedy of Politics: Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare uses the story of the two lovers to dramatize the tragedy of politics. The excessive love of self that characterizes the two serves as a metaphor for the larger story of Rome's descent into tyranny. Unless love of country, that is, love of one's fellow-citizens, tempers self-love, a state loses its capacity to sustain even that degree of freedom that belongs to kingly rule. But Shakespeare also depicts the love of Antony and Cleopatra for each other as something noble; there is something worthy of our love that is higher than freedom. The tragedy of politics lies in the opposition of these two loves.