Proust: identity,time and the postmodern condition

The self as the identification of the self with itself is a product of the dynamic transformation of European culture beginning in the Renaissance. The self, or absolute ego, was an outgrowth of the consciously rationalist spirit. However, modernity's Faustian drive was conscious paradoxically without being self conscious of itself or its cultural creations. Modernism deconstructed the values and assumptions of modernity. A casualty was the problematization of the self that had been banished and/or erased by formalism, structuralism and deconstruction.

The modernist self erases the absolute ego reconstructing it with a rich, complex, narrative idea of a self‐conscious relational self encompassing memory, repression, autobiography and history.

This paper explores the modernist conception of self in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Proust demolishes the absolute ego in favor of the paradoxical self which knows itself only in relation to otherness actualized in persons and culture in the sacred time of existence.     

Resilient Social Actors in the Transition from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Age on Cyprus

Journal of World Prehistory - Our understanding of the earliest Iron Age on Cyprus has long remained somewhat obscure. This is the result of both a relative lack of material evidence and the fact...     

Rethinking Middle Bronze Age Communities on Cyprus: “Egalitarian” and Isolated or Complex and Interconnected?

Current views of Cyprus during the Middle Bronze Age (or Middle Cypriot period) depict an island largely isolated from the wider eastern Mediterranean world and comprised largely if not exclusively of “egalitarian,” agropastoral communities. In this respect, its economy stands at odds with those of polities in other, nearby regions such as the Levant, or Crete in the Aegean. The publication of new excavations and new readings of legacy data necessitate modification of earlier views about Cyprus’s political economy during the Middle Bronze Age, prompting this review. We discuss at some length the island’s settlement and mortuary records, materials related to internal production, external exchange and connectivities, and the earliest of the much discussed but still enigmatic fortifications. We suggest that Middle Bronze Age communities are likely to have been significantly more complex, mobile, and interconnected than once envisaged and that the changes that mark the closing years of this period and the transition to the internationalism of Late Bronze Age Cyprus represent the culmination of an evolving series of internal developments and external interactions.

     

On the typology of the texts that appear on migration‐era bracteates

Historiographically, the main tradition of interpreting the Old Germanic bracteates has been that developed by Karl Hauck in the late 1960s. Much contested by critics, Hauck's bracteate iconology has also influenced the way the runic legends that appear on the golden amulets are understood in much continental scholarship. This paper presents an alternative interpretation of such testimonies of early Nordic language based on a less‐ambitious approach to the decoration and associated epigraphy of the controversial migration‐period finds, grounding its analysis in a more explicitly theorized linguistic and semiotic hermeneutics.