From aisling to chora: female allegories of the nation in contemporary Irish women's poetry

Contemporary Irish women poets use female tropes of Irish nationalism as a potent site for revising traditional conceptions of femininity, maternity, and cultural identity. Arguably, female tropes of aisling poetry inhabit the same cultural location that anchors the societal role of motherhood as theorised by Julia Kristeva. Kristeva's work highlights mothers' important function in regulating the drives and preparing children for entrance into the symbolic order of society, in relation to which mothers remain structurally liminal. The Platonic chora, an amorphous receptacle from which forms emerge, symbolises this position at the threshold. This essay shows that Irish women poets revise female allegories of the nation either by aligning them with women's lived experience, as Eavan Boland has done, or by re-evaluating them from within their liminality, through stylistic experimentation or irony, which the analysis of poems by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Rita Ann Higgins demonstrates.     

“知难”挑战下的阐释:章学诚解《诗》考论

章学诚一生治学处于"知难"的挑战下,而不被时人理解。在此心理事实基础上,针对考据学派、义理学派和辞章学派的解《诗》理论,他建构出以兴象和诗教解《诗》思想。包括重视《诗》的情感性和形象性;以《礼》约《诗》,设身处地的理解《诗》产生的时代语境。最终实现合考据、义理、辞章为一家的学术理想。章学诚的这种解《诗》思想以明道的角度,揭示了《诗》的本质特征和源流意义,贯彻了与之相始终的"六经皆史"的学术思想。     

Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī’s Contribution to Persian Poetic Modernity

In 1912, Ya?yā Dawlatābādī composed two poems, the form of which diverged greatly from the canonical rules of tradition. Both poems were based on syllabic meters. Critics and historians of modern Persian literature have given these poems little consideration, and discussed them merely from the point of view of metrics. When compared to the great modernist endeavors in the poetry of the time, these pieces were judged severely, or altogether disavowed. This paper aims to show that, beyond mere metrical audacity, Ya?yā Dawlatābādī’s syllabic poems were in fact innovative. As the article argues, they were born out of the same quest for fresh poetic forms that induced contemporaneous modernists to create new, individualized poetic patterns.     

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.     

Ata's Speech at the Royal Kava Ceremony Installation of Tu‘i Kanokupolu Tupou V on 30 July 2008: A Response to the Tongan Democracy Movement

His Majesty King George Tupou V, who reigned as the king of Tonga from 2008 to 2012, inherited near-absolute political power from his predecessors, yet two days before his coronation he announced that he would relinquish that power and granted amendments to the Tongan constitution, thereby making Tonga democratic. Innovative additions to the conventional speech made by the chief Ata at his taumafa kava installation ceremony as the 23rd Tu‘i Kanokupolu, on 30 July 2008 in Nuku‘alofa, suggest that the speech was composed by, or at the behest of, Tupou V himself to express his view of the contemporary ideology of his dynasty. The speech consists of 92 lines of traditionally styled Tongan poetry that rehearse the origins, history and achievements of the Tu‘i Kanokupolu dynasty, frequently employing pre-existing phraseology. Twenty-five anomalies of rhyme indicate that the speech was composed on the basis of a pre-existing composition and redacted to remind Tongans of particular aspects of the past and present character of the Tu‘i Kanokupolu dynasty.     

Reading back from Experimental Painting

ABSTRACT

My book, Experimental Painting (1970), was the product of a decade of coming to terms with the history of modern art and with contemporary manifestations of the avantgarde. While at Cambridge from 1960 to 1967, I published art criticism, initially in locally published magazines, and then went on to review art exhibitions both nationally and internationally. This led to being co-editor of Form, which produced further opportunities. The term ‘experimental’ that I adopted in 1970 was intended to suggest the paradigm of scientific discovery which suited some, if not all, of the artists I studied. This article considers concepts directly imported from contemporary scientific enquiry that seemed relevant to me at the time, notably those from experimental psychology, psychoanalysis and structural linguistics. I relate them to the character of intellectual life at Cambridge in a period which saw much debate about the relationship between Sciences and Humanities as ‘Two Cultures’.     

Heaney and education

Seamus Heaney inhabited the world of teacher education, as a student, and later as a lecturer, in 1960s Belfast. That world was infused by three ideas: learning as a journey, learning through play, and learning as construction. This article traces correspondences between these and thematic trends in Heaney’s work. It presents the case that Heaney’s writing reflects an informed understanding of children and of learning peculiar to the mind of a great teacher. Moreover, Heaney’s contribution to education is remarkable in that it transcends the school and the academy, and offers a creative vision in which poetry and learning are inextricably linked. As Heaney put it in Among Schoolchildren, the “walls of the world expand” as reader and writer, teacher and learner, poet and child “go beyond our normal cognitive bounds and sense a new element where we are not alien but liberated, more alive to ourselves, more drawn out, more educated”.     

Masculinity and political geographies in England,Ireland and North America

Historians have recently turned their attention to the place of masculinity in the politics of early-modern England. This essay widens that exploration to include the imperial settings of Ireland and North America. Drawing upon a range of English- and Irish-language sources – including political treatises, maps, state papers and court poetry – it contends that manhood, as a relational value between men, helped structure the form and character of politics in the metropole, the kingdom of Ireland and the American colonies. In all of those settings, the definition of acceptable male behaviour was different, the effect being that political action and theory in each place took on unique features. Consequently, the essay cautions against studying England and its colonies as distinct units of historical analysis and calls for further exploration of the particularities of colonial settings and their influence on the imperial centre. Moreover, the essay aims to demonstrate that masculinity, particularly contest over its proper expression, is an agent in historical change, in this case helping to shape political theory and practice as England developed into a multiple monarchy and budding imperial power in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.     

华喦及其两幅《昭君出塞图》考

从线条特征、拨言内容、字亦风格、钤印色泽诸多内容铲析,现存上海的两幅《昭君出塞图》一真一假。     

中国古典诗词中地理景观信息及其旅游地理意义分析

中国古典诗词作为中华民族优秀传统文化结晶,其中充满了大量的优美地理景观信息,这些地理景观大多成为现代旅游风景。本文对这些地理景观信息加以分析,提出其地域类型并探讨其旅游地理意义。