Here the arts play a vital role, cultivating powers of imagination that are essential to citizenship.This theory can be seen in many literary works. In Emily Bronte's Wuthering Height, the figure Heathcliff at the dying bed finding his original humanity hiding in the deepest part of his heart. Though he did his revenge to both families crudely, his unfair life experience draws the sympathy of the audience to his inside feeling. His rage and revenge are seen as the reimburse from an unjustified life. However, a wild life was eventually cultivated on his deathbed to back to his original soul so that the novel at the end brings a light of hope to people. The work practice the cultivating power to the audience which agrees with Nussbaum's theory of Cultivating Humanity.
The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Oter. In addition the orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.
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| http://www.lennarddavis.com/home.html |
"Frantz Fanon's relatively short life yielded two potent and influential statements of anti-colonial revolutionary thought, Black Skin, White Mask(1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), works which have made Fanon a prominent contributor to postcolonial studies." (http://english.emory.edu/Bahri/Fanon.html)
To overcome the binary system in which black is bad and white is good, Fanon argues that an entirely new world must come into being. This utopian desire, to be absolutely free of the past, requires total revolution, "absolute violence" (37). Violence purifies, destroying not only the category of white, but that of black too. According to Fanon, true revolution in Africa can only come from the peasants, or "fellaheen." Putting peasants at the vanguard of the revolution reveals the influence of the FLN, who based their operations in the countryside, on Fanon's thinking. Furthermore, this emphasis on the rural underclass highlights Fanon's disgust with the greed and politicking of the comprador bourgeoisie in new African nations. The brand of nationalism espoused by these classes, and even by the urban proletariat, is insufficient for total revolution because such classes benefit from the economic structures of imperialism. Fanon claims that non-agrarian revolutions end when urban classes consolidate their own power, without remaking the entire system. In his faith in the African peasantry as well as his emphasis on language, Fanon anticipates the work of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, who finds revolutionary artistic power among the peasants.
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| Modern Qindao |
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| An university building in Qindao with German style Learn more from here: http://www.echinacities.com/qingdao/city-life/exploring-old-qingdao-a-guide-to-the-area-s-main_1.html |
"Beauvoir's The Second Sex gave us the vocabulary for analyzing the social constructions of femininity and the structure for critiquing these constructions. From a phenomenological perspective this most famous line of The Second Sex pursues the first rule of phenomenology: suspend judgments, identify your assumptions, treat them as prejudices and put them aside; do not bring them back into play until and unless they have been validated by experience."
In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others. ~New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993.Anyone will have a other who think about him or her. The dialogue between people is not only oneself's thoughts in some culture and situation, but also the idea of the language reflects the point of view from others---- how others to see this oneself.
"He who represents the course of a human life, or a sequence of events extending over a prolonged period of time, and represents it from beginning to end, must prune and isolate arbitrary. Life has always long since begun, and it is always still going on. And the people whose story the author is telling experience much more than he can ever hope to tell. But the things that happen to a few individuals in the course of a few minutes, hours, possibly even days - these one can hope to report with reasonable completeness." (Auerbach in Mimesis)"The work is a strikingly successful combination of philology, stylistics, history of ideas and sociology, of meticulous learning and artistic taste, of historical imagination and awareness of our own age." (from A History of Modern Criticism 1970-1950, Volume 7, 1991)
"In English writing we seldom speak of tradition", "The past isn't dead, not even past".
A Room of One's Own"a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction"
"In the first place, to have a room of her own..was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble"
It is a story about a middle aged woman who has been from happiness to madness in her marriage, eventually gone to devastate. In 1960's, the society still restrains women to limit their living space. The main character Susan was happy with her husband and 4 kids in their family. However, they both start to doubt the real meaning of life. Since the husband has a affair, Susan changes from "it still under the control" to be irritable of her life. She starts to feel the emptiness and laking of freedom in her marriage. She wearies of the role of sustainer and comforter. The question of her decision of marriage is intelligent and fulfillment strikes her inner feeling. She finds out her identity through the self-discovery. Finally, she refuses to regress to the old self and to abdicate self-knowledge and self role, thus she remains the true to the authentic self. However, she choose to kill herself, which claims a means of resisting of crushing, culturally enforced image of woman and of posting a new politics of identity. The story denounces the devastating consequences of the restrictions to women in that era.
Such is Beauty. Its variety is infinite, its possibility is endless. In normal life all may have it and have it yet again. The world is full of it; and yet today the mass of human beings are choked away from it, and their lives distorted and made ugly. This is not only wrong, it is silly.
...especially those who are weary of the eternal struggle along the color line, who are afraid to fight and to whom the money of philanthropists and the alluring publicity are subtle and deadly bribes.
http://www.howard.edu/library/reference/guides/hurston/
- The Negro's universal mimicry is not so much a thing in itself as an evidence of something that permeates his entire sel. And that thing is drama.
- The will to adorn is the second most notable characteristic in Negro expresssion. Perhaps his idea of ornament does not attempt to meet conventional standards, but it satisfies the soul of its creator.
- Asymmetry is a definite feature of Negro art... but the sculpture and carvings are full of this beauty and lack of symmetry.
- Imitation----The Negro, the world over, is famous as a mimic.
- Mimicry is an art in itself.
by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, during lectures he gave between 1907 and 1911 at the University of Geneva. His views revolutionized the study of language and inaugurated modern linguistics. The theory also profoundly influenced other disciplines, especially anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism. The central tenet of structuralism is that the phenomena of human life, whether language or media, are not intelligible except through their network of relationships, making the sign and the system (or structure) in which the sign is embedded primary concepts. As such, a sign -- for instance, a word -- gets its meaning only in relation to or in contrast with other signs in a system of signs.
In general, the signifier and the signified are the components of the sign, itself formed by the associative link between the signifier and signified. Even with these two components, however, signs can exist only in opposition to other signs. That is, signs are created by their value relationships with other signs. The contrasts that form between signs of the same nature in a network of relationships is how signs derive their meaning.
The "Uncanny"---- is undoubtedlly related to what is frightening----to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general.
'uncanny'='unfamiliar'
The term 'repression' beyond its legitimate meaning. It would be more correct to take into account a psychological distinction which can be detected here, and to say that the animistic beliefs of civilized people are in a state of having been (to a greater or lesser extent) surmounted [rather than repressed]. Our conclusion could then be stated thus: an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.Fetishism
Fetish is recognized by its adherents as an abnormality, it is seldom felt by them as the symptom of an ailment accompanied by suffering.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is the wild man, the self-proclaimed anti-Christ, of Western thought. A brilliant polemicist, he champions energy over reason and art over science while contmptuous of the quiet, "timid" virtues of domesticity, democracy, and peace. He is absolutely central to modern and postmodern attempts to rethink the Western tradtion's most fundamental assumptions.What do human beings really know about themselves? Are they even capable of perceiving themselves in their entirety just once, stretched out as in an illuminated glass case? Does nature not reman silent about almost everything, even about our bodies, banishing and enclosing us within a proud, illusory consciousness, far away from the twists and turns of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream and the complicated trembling of the nerve-fibres? Nature has thrown away the key...
In the views described here we already have all the constituent elements of a profound and pessimistic way of looking at the world and thus, at the same time, of the doctrine of the Mysteries taught by tragedy: the fundamental recognition that everything which exists is a unity; the view that individuation is the primal source of all evil; and art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation can be broken a premonition of unity restored.
Although remembered now for his elegantly argued critical essays, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) began his career as a poet, winning early recognition as a student at the Rugby School where his father, Thomas Arnold, had earned national acclaim as a strict and innovative headmaster. Arnold also studied at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1844, after completing his undergraduate degree at Oxford, he returned to Rugby as a teacher of classics. |
| Karl Marx |
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluationof the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity -- and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)
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| Engels |
"Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no his tory, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking." (Karl Marx, The German Ideology)
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| Raymond Williams |
'The base' is the real social existence of man. 'The base' is the real relations of production sorresponding to a stage of development of the material productive forces. 'The base' is a mode of production at a particular stage of its development."
"productive forces" is to give just brief reminders, the most important thing a worker ever produces is himself, himself in the fact of that kind of labour, of the broader historical emphasis of men producing themselves, themselves and their history.
Hegemony: governing class, ruling class.
