Colloquium: New Philologies (E-Journal)
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(Un)doing nationalism through metaphorical scenario: a case of modern China/Taiwan
No full textIdeals of femininities and masculinities (to a lesser extent) are often used to mobilise citizens in testing socio-political times. Familial roles such as mother and wife are prime targets for politicians crafting ideals of nationalism. Comparing the political rhetoric of two of the most prominent female politicians in Chinese/Taiwanese modern history, Mme. Chiang Kai Shek (Mme. CKS, 1989–2003) and Annette Lu (b. 1944), I argue that ideal familial roles have always intersected with politics during social transitions. Moreover, in the developing China/Taiwan contexts, these ideals parallel changes from feudalistic to modern society, and from authoritarian to democratic rule. By looking into the argumentative strategies and familial metaphors, I offer a comprehensive view on how gender, nation, and family values have been articulated in times of transition in Taiwan in the 20th century
The Multiple Modality System in Southern Scotland: Levels of Acceptability of Double and Triple Modals in the 21st century Scottish Borders region
Get PDFThis paper mainly aims to describe and analyse the current syntactic and semantic system of Multiple Modality spoken and written in the Scottish Borders region. The task of the questionnaire survey is to get further details as regards this dialectal reality in which hundreds of combinations are possible. In total, 231 informants participated in this field dialectal enquiry from 2010 to 2013. The data analysed in this paper stem from the 2011 survey that mainly took place in Kelso and Jedburgh. 73 informants completed the structured-type questionnaire at this time. How many combinatorial possibilities are allowed in this part of Scotland? What are the possible positions of modal expressions in these combinations? What types of semantic interpretations can these combinations generate in the Borders? What is (un)grammatically possible in the varieties of Scottish English spoken in the region? In contrast to the American South, where a number of projects (both theoretical and field studies-based) have been undertaken since the 1970s, there are, at this point only very few answers to these questions regarding the Scottish Borders region. It is time to reactivate the knowledge in this research field in order to obtain a general syntactic overview of these modal sequences which were born in Northern Europe
Conceptual Metaphors in Donald Trump’s Political Speeches: Framing his Topics and (Self-)Constructing his Persona
Get PDFThis study investigates the use of conceptual metaphors by Donald Trump in three important political speeches on his way to the US presidency: the acceptance speech of his candidacy, the victory speech on election night, and his inaugural address as president of the US. The consistent analysis of all the metaphors in the speeches shows that Trump relies almost exclusively on conventional conceptual metaphors that are expressed by conventionalised metaphorical expressions. Nevertheless, a range of metaphors appears as constitutive to his framing of political topics, such as immigration and the economy. In addition, Trump metaphorically constructs his political persona as that of a repairman, builder, healer, and warrior, among others
Srbohrvaški asimetrični deseterec v slovenskih prevodih
Get PDFSlovene translations of serbocroatian folk songs, written in scr. deseterac metrum, began in 1831 with the translation of Hasanaginica; this and all the following translations were made in trochaic decasyllable. I compard the rhythm of six Slovene and one German translation with scr. corpus of seven folk songs by the following rhythmic parameters: accentuation of syllabic positions, non-metric accents, borders between phonetic words, verse endings, caesura after the 4th syllable and zeugma after the 3rd and 9th syllable
Competitive Nationalism vs. Cooperative Nationalism: Re-reading Rabindranath Tagore in Times of War
Get PDFThe proposed paper intends to discuss Rabindranath Tagore\u27s idea of Nationalism and why he is the man the world should look up to for guidance at a time of violence and war threatening to destroy humanity. The proposed paper also intends to identify the loopholes in the traditional theories of Nationalism and to understand the logic behind Tagore\u27s rejection of the same in favour of a more inclusive and humanistic approach to nationalism. Tagore\u27s well-known debate with Mahatma Gandhi on the subject of nationalism will also be touched upon in order to highlight the uniqueness of his thoughts.
Content“As I look around I see the crumbling ruins of a proud civilization… and yet I shall not commit the grievous sin of losing faith in Man” (Tagore 1941) was the unequivocal utterance of a man whose strong faith in the ideals of humanism never quivered, even in the face of an all-sweeping storm of modernism that came along with an extremely powerful philosophy of nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century. It is a well-established practice in the Indian subcontinent to assimilate Tagore into their brand of postcolonialism where his staunch critique of the discourse of nationalism is often rendered as his oppositional attitude towards the European models of nationalism which arose out of the divisive principles of the European Enlightenment. The obvious danger of such reductionist reading of Tagore lies in the fact that this kind of crippled understanding of Tagore’s critique of nationalism leads to the construction of narrow ideological walls which is the hallmark of the traditional discourse of nationalism, against which Tagore protested in many of his creative and critical writings including Nationalism (1917). A serious problem with the intellectuals who have worked on Tagore’s idea of nationalism so far is that they have treated his idea of nationalism as a monolith whereas the truth is his idea of nationalism was always in a state of flux and it did not remain where it was when he had started writing on/reacting to the discourse of nationalism. Having said that, one cannot unaccept the fact that there runs a common strain in all that he wrote on nationalism, and a clear understanding of that common strain is most important in order to effectively understand his otherwise baffling concept of nationalism. Several theories of nationalism have come into being over decades across the globe to analyse the history of nationalism, the rise of the nation-state as a result of man’s collective will to call something their own and the interrelation between man and the nation. During the Enlightenment era, an intellectual, as well as cultural, void was created in the minds of the younger generation who unconditionally submitted their faith to the philosophy of Enlightenment which resulted in the breakdown of older social orders causing psychological crisis among the members of the younger generation. This deep psychological crisis, Elie Kedourie believes, had made this generation desperate to look for an alternative space which could provide a sense of stability to them. They finally found the much needed “stability” in a “coherent and stable community” of the “nation” (Kedourie 1960). Ernest Gellner links the rise of nation and the feeling of nationalism to the rise of industrial society. He believes that the ulterior motive behind the formation of the nation-state was to create a nation of citizen-workers. Control over state apparatuses through which to express power is what Karl Deutsch claims to be the criterion by which nationalism transforms itself into “nations”. Anderson, in Imagined Communities, defines “nation” as “an imagined political community that is both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson 1983). In a postcolonial response to Anderson, Partha Chatterjee dismisses the theory of “imagined community” by stating that the theory had originated in the West and can be applied to the western nation-states only as it fails to explain the reality of the “inner domain” of the Asian and the African people which is the basis of anticolonial nationalism. Several other theories have been originated to extend the scope of nationalism, especially following the infamous incident of 9/11, but one thing remains constant in all these apparently contesting theories of nationalism, i.e. the attempt to uphold national identity as something different from the identity of “other”. Tagore’s objection to this entire discourse of nationalism lies in the attempt to try to project a nation as distinct from all other nations, which is, according to him, the root-cause of violence and war in all ages. Tagore was one of those very few public intellectuals who sought an alternative to the available model of nationalism which would be completely free of “any Enlightenment concept of freedom” and would uphold a “distinctively civilizational concept of nationalism embedded in the tolerance encoded in various traditional ways of life in a highly diverse plural society” (Nandy 1994). A close reading of Tagore’s three political novels – Ghare Baire (The Home and the World), Gora (Gora) and Char Adhyay (Four Chapters) – enables the reader to clearly get the quintessential point of Tagore’s unique brand of nationalism which is independent of the influences of the western theories and which shifts the focus completely from competitive nationalism to cooperative nationalism. His famous debate with Mahatma Gandhi on the subject of nationalism bears a clear witness to this. Like a true humanist, in his last public speech – “Crisis in Civilization” – Tagore proudly declares: “A day will come when unvanquished Man will… win back his lost human heritage” (Tagore 1941). We all are waiting for that day to come
Resisting Nationalism: Postnational Visions in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day
Get PDFI aim to investigate how Pynchon’s Against the Day depicts a postnational vision that questions the metanarrative of “nation-ness” (Pöhlmann, 7). My discussion is informed by Sascha Pöhlmann’s enlightening study of postnationalism in Pynchon’s fiction. Here, the postnational is anything that “works towards dismantling the hegemony of nation-ness as a metanarrative” (8). Nonetheless, although Pöhlmann brilliantly analyzes Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, he dedicates few pages to discuss Against the Day. Drawing and building upon Pöhlmann’s theoretical study of postnationalism, I endeavor to show how Pynchon’s alternative worlds in Against the Day manifest the potential of other “modes of being” (McHale, 10) which instantiate a trans/post-national insight, resisting the rooted hegemony of “nation-ness” in our life worlds.
ContentIn 1996, Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny assessed, rather optimistically, the condition of “belonging to a nation” (32) as a state of “cultural recovery” which could potentially bring about “acceptance, even celebration of difference.” They observed that “Being national is the condition of our times.” Nevertheless, with the rise of the nationalist movements in the U.S., and elsewhere, in recent years, many racial, ethnic, and social groups have been the target of intolerance. Such a condition calls, ipso facto, for a rethinking of the notions of nation and community. In today’s world, nation-states and politics are not anymore the only sites of sovereign power. Indeed, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued that “the concept of national sovereignty is losing its effectiveness” (307). As the “State functions and constitutional elements” effectively undergo change, a “system of transnational command” assimilates the government and politics.
Several significant factors have played a role in highlighting the (un)making narratives of (trans/post)nationalism in the U.S. Fiction has always been influential in the representation of protest and dissent against hegemonic structures of socio-political power, impacting our quotidian “lived spaces,” to speak like Henri Lefebvre. In this respect, Thomas Pynchon has been very salient in creating the so-called alternative worlds which challenge the dominance of nation-state and undermine the legitimacy of nationalism as the single form of ordering our life worlds. Pynchon\u27s alternative worlds reflect upon the spatiality of our lives in the way it constructs national identities and boundaries and is used to exert social power and surveillance over “a political body of governable people” (Pöhlmann, 177). A hegemonic narrative, nation-state has made it very difficult to imagine other (im)possible worlds, in the sense of “way of life, life-experience” (McHale, 79), for almost as long as the last 200 years In light of this brief introduction, my paper aims at investigating how Pynchon’s Against the Day depicts a postnational vision that questions the metanarrative of “nation-ness” (Pöhlmann, 7), which refers to the concept of nation as distinguished from nationality. My discussion is informed by Sascha Pöhlmann’s enlightening study of postnationalism in Pynchon’s fiction, which takes issue with those scholars, such as Paul Giles, who favor a transnational attitude in American studies, dismissing a postnational perspective. Here, the postnational is anything that “works towards dismantling the hegemony of nation-ness as a metanarrative” (8). Nonetheless, although Pöhlmann brilliantly analyzes Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon at great length, he dedicates few pages to discuss the topic in Against the Day. An “interstice” (361) between the two other novels, he observes that Against the Day is “nothing like Mason &; Dixon or Gravity’s Rainbow in many respects.” At the same time, however, the novel evinces similar “postnational traits” and “constitutes another part of Pynchon’s postnational imagination.” Drawing and building upon Pöhlmann’s theoretical study of postnationalism, I endeavor to show how Pynchon’s alternative worlds in Against the Day manifest the potential of other “modes of being” (McHale, 10) which instantiate a trans/post-national insight, resisting the rooted hegemony of “nation-ness” in our life worlds For example, in the novel Darby explains that, during the sieges of Paris, some of the balloonists came to realize “how much the modern State depended for its survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege” (19). Pöhlmann argues that the elevated viewpoint of these balloonists allowed them to broaden their “framework of thought” (362) by way of observing the big picture of “politics and society that could not remain within the accepted national categories.” In effect, with the end of the sieges, the balloonists were set free “of the political delusions” and decided to fly “far above fortress walls and national boundaries” (20). Realizing the problematic nature of “nation-ness,” they seek to feed “the hungry” and shelter “the sick and persecuted,” irrespective of nationalities or boundaries. On the cusp of a war that is nationalized, they are trying to develop a transnational attitude in the hope of peace in the world. Their good will, however, is fiercely antagonized “because it violates the dictates of national politics and identity” (Pöhlmann, 363). Moving from a trans/post-national point of view, this, and other similar scenarios in the novel, can be analyzed in suggesting how the alternative worlds of Against the Day demonstrate an imagination which calls into question the dominant sovereignty of “nation-ness” and national identity by way of setting in motion other ways of epistemological thinking and organizing our world
Zur Sichtbarkeit von erbrachten Leistungen: Die Darstellung von Wissenstransfer in den Geistes-, Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften
Get PDFIdentity and Contemporary Fashion
Get PDFFashion, defined as a cultural phenomenon provides one of the most ready means through which individuals can make powerful visual statement about their identity. This thesis seeks to explore the issue of multiculturalism with special attention to work of contemporary fashion designers, starting from Karl Lagerfeld and controversial example of two confronted ideas of freedom, Arabic-inspired dress. Fashion plays a vital role in construction and expression of identity. Multiculturalism can be defined as a dialogue between cultures which results in acknowledgement of certain ethic and national groups. It is a political compromise to maintain cultural identity. However, culture is in a changing position. The transition starts from the point where culture was trying to extend humanity values to the point that defines culture as an instrument of political differentiation