Review articles/Besprekingsartikels

Abstract

Swiss missionary Henri Alexandre Junod has been widely recognised for his extensive entomological, botanical, linguistic and anthropological contributions regarding southern Africa. However, shortly after publishing his most acclaimed work, The Life of a South African Tribe, Junod wrote a little-studied novel, Zidji: étude de m?urs sud-africaines, in which he endeavoured to give a detailed portrayal of South African Society. Interestingly, he chose fiction as the best vehicle for conveying what he saw as the 'truth' of the situation. As the only novel written by Junod this is a unique piece of writing in relation to his other work and its study shows that it is essential to an understanding of Junod. In Zidji he attempts to give a complete picture of South African society at the beginning of the twentieth century by recounting a black convert's experiences of what Junod considered to be the three main influences acting upon black society of the time, that is, tribal life (paganism), the mission station (Christianity) and white society (civilisation). By considering his depiction of South Africa, in particular his presentation of 'civilisation', further light is shed on his sentiments and perspective of the missionary encounter, social change and race relations in South Africa.     

WHITHER “WHAT IF” HISTORY?

Richard Evans's new book, Altered Pasts, offers a perceptive but flawed critique of the field of counterfactual history. The author provides a useful historical survey of the field's recent rise to prominence and intelligently analyzes its respective strengths and weaknesses. His overall assessment of the field is quite skeptical, however. Evans cites many reasons for his skepticism, but his overall critique can be summarized in three words: plausibility, politicization, and popularity. Evans faults works of counterfactual history for their frequently implausible narratives, their promotion of political agendas, and their distressing degree of popularity. In advancing his critique, Evans makes many valid observations that call attention to important deficiencies in the field. But his view is a partial one that neglects countervailing evidence and never penetrates to the heart of why the field has left the margins for the mainstream. Evans's study provides a useful introduction to an understudied topic, but further research—ideally of a less partisan nature—is required for us to better understand counterfactual history's increasing appeal.     

THINKING HISTORICALLY WHEN THE MARGINS BECOME THE CENTER: INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AS HISTORICAL CRITIQUE IN MARTIN JAY'S ESSAYS FROM THE EDGE

This review of Martin Jay's recent published collection of essays examines his ongoing rethinking, supplementation, and revision of central themes—the negative and positive dialectics of historical totalization, the varieties and uses of conceptions of experience, the nature of visual cultures and scopic regimes, and the ambiguities of truth‐construction in the public realm—that have been the focus of his major works since the 1970s. It argues that his more recent work indicates a gradual shift toward an affirmation of the kinds of paratactic and deconstructive thinking of Adorno and Derrida as models for producing appropriate forms of historical consciousness and historical critique in the present, and it raises the question of how the issues of historical truth‐telling, consensual collective identity, ethical action, and the cultural role of the critical intellectual are reformulated in this process.     

Cultivating the cosmos: spaceflight thought in Imperial Germany

Space historians have predominantly identified Weimar Germany (1919–1933) as the starting period of German debates over the possibility of spaceflight. However, spaceflight and the utopian potential of outer space were already topics of popular discussion in the late nineteenth century, when calls by German astronomers for speculative restraint were challenged in popular science accounts and fantasy literature. Mass-produced fiction in the first decade of the twentieth century increasingly depicted spaceflight as a technological vision, imagining the spaceship as the successor to the airship. While exploring the historical processes behind this ascent of plausibility of futuristic design, the article shows how popular science media gave public voice to both established and new professional elites and fostered interprofessional exchange. In the 1900s spaceflight developed into a popular theme and boundaries between fiction and popular science blurred.     

从《曹风·蜉蝣》说开来——浅论《诗经》中的生死观

《曹风·蜉蝣》是一首通篇感叹人生短暂的诗歌,《诗经》中其它作品如《唐风·蟋蟀》和《小雅·頍弁》也表达过类似情感。从《诗经》反映的社会生活来看,当时的人们承受着战争,饥馑,徭役,被剥削,遭遗弃,生离死别,亡国失家等苦难,但是《诗经》中触及生与死的主题,抒发人生短暂的悲叹的作品相对较少。这一现象缘于诗经时代人们重视"生",着眼于现实生活的快乐和满足的生死观,这种生死观表现出强烈的生命意识。     

The Impact of the First World War and the Polish-Soviet War on the ‘Culture of Suffering’ in Post-1914 Polish Fiction

ABSTRACT

Using Jeffrey C. Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma, this article focuses on the three major types of narratives of suffering which appeared in Polish fiction, after Poland regained political independence in 1918, outside the strong myth-creating narrative of the Polish Legions’ role in the war for independence. It argues that Polish post-1918 fiction developed these three major paths in the face of suffering inflicted on Polish lands, during WWI and Polish-Soviet War. These paths were to: 1) continue the narrative of Polish suffering within the framework of heroic, and selfless, sacrifice for Poland that has been well established since Romanticism; 2) present suffering as the universal fate of humanity outside the notion of national identity, due to the monstrosity of modern bureaucratic systems wherein human beings are treated as objects; and 3) present suffering as the result of modern warfare, but told outside of “patriotic phraseology” – thus suggesting a growing need as to finding a solution to national conflicts outside narrowly defined identities.     

略论魏晋玄学的“自觉”前奏

学术与道德自觉一方面使汉魏士人渐趋性灵自觉，另一方面也使他们复归于道家传统，并现实化为自身的玄思理路和放达的朝朝暮暮。     

Surviving the Holocaust: Emil Utitz’s ‘As-If Technique’

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to present the work of Emil Utitz, the Czech-German Jewish philosopher and psychologist, who was also a survivor of Theresienstadt. The power of the imagination and its intensification by the daily reality of the concentration camp was central to Utitz’s conception of life, which reveals the influence of the then popular ideas of Hans Vaihinger, and especially his theory of the importance of the human ability to act as though something was true. More specifically, the article reconstructs and contextualizes Utitz’s thought along two axes: the Kantian philosophical tradition, and Viktor Frankl’s and Hans Günther Adler’s conceptions of the Holocaust experience.     

Priestley and Kant on materialism

ABSTRACT

Kant maintains in the Critique of Pure Reason that both materialism and spiritualism cannot explain our existence. This paper argues that Kant’s relation to (psychological) materialism is more complex than this rejection suggests and is usually thought, and it evaluates this relation in a new and more positive light. The paper shows that Priestley anticipates some of Kant’s arguments against rationalist psychology, and that Kant’s rejection of materialism does not commit him to an immaterialist metaphysics of the soul. These arguments involve a discussion of the problem of the unity of consciousness and of notions such as simplicity and identity.     

Alice Munro’s Narrative Historicism: “Too Much Happiness”

Alice Munro’s “Too Much Happiness” relates the final years of its subject Sophia Kovalevsky (1850–1891), a nineteenth-century Russian mathematician, writer, and subsequent feminist icon. Munro’s narrative here does not always fit with her earlier fictional practice. By examining Munro’s earlier work, and glancing at a later sequence of narratives with regard to her uses of historical matters, this discussion outlines the generic implications of “Too Much Happiness” and their effect upon our estimation of the remainder of Munro’s fiction.