Yeats,Wittgenstein and the ladder of linguistic inversion

This paper will consider the philosophy of language by Ludwig Wittgenstein in relation to the later modernist poetry of W. B. Yeats in Last Poems (1939). Accordingly, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953) are used to understand the limits of language in conveying the facts of existence and the necessity for the inversion of previously held truths to navigate the altering nature of reality through time. W. B. Yeats’s final volume of poetry, Last Poems (1939), is shown to parallel the philosophical ideas of Wittgenstein, thus demonstrating the subversive nature of Yeats’s last written poetry as an interrogation of his own constructed truths of the past. Both philosopher and poet are shown to coalesce in the deconstruction of linguistic representations of the world through the “form of life” that is the game of language in order to question limiting worldviews.     

The Artist as Nation-Builder: William Butler Yeats and Chaim Nachman Bialik

Abstract. The poets William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934) were among the builders of their respective Irish and Jewish national cultures. Their lives and careers were in limited ways remarkably alike and throw light on the dynamics of cultural nationalism. Each emerged in an historical watershed, leading to the establishment of an Irish state in 1921 and a Jewish state in 1948. Though their circumstances, styles, receptions and fates differed, each represented a profound moral vision in an age of declining faith, expressed his people's sense of victimisation and exposed their weaknesses as he saw them. Each saw his culture as being humanist and universal, not narrowly nationalistic. Each identified with his nation for reasons that were in part intensely and disturbingly personal. Each found a poetic voice in a rich heritage of ethnic myth, legend and symbol but was conscious of tension between the need for self-expression and national demands. It is argued that the creative powers of both Yeats and Bialik were set free by the national movements of which they were a part, and that the national struggle for self-determination was, in effect, mirrored on the private scale by the poet striving for artistic freedom and originality.     

Algeria's Veiled Drama

Books reviewed in this article:
Luis Martinez, La guerre civile en Algérie
William B. Quandt, Between ballots and bullets: Algeria's transition from authoritarianism
Michael Willis, The Islamist challenge in Algeria: a political history     

张謇与近代戏剧文化

20世纪初,张謇在南通创办伶工学社、更俗剧场、梅欧阁、《公园日报》,对中国传统戏剧进行了包括剧场建设、人才培养、表演艺术等方面一系列的革新,对于戏剧改革,他的主张与思想都付诸于创办戏剧事业的行动中,并在内容与形式上呈现了他对戏剧艺术的独到见解。