FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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Vessels of Passage: Reading the Ritual of the Late-Medieval Ship of Fools
Get PDFMy paper explores the late-medieval image of the ship of fools. The metaphor originates in the fifteenth-century carnivals of Europe and was depicted in Sebastian Brant’s 1494 compilation, Das Narrenschiff. The paper explores the underlying dynamic of the imagery and its origins in carnivalesque rituals as well as how the motif was exploited by Brant, becoming a literary force at the turn of the sixteenth century
Wilderness, the West and the Myth of the Frontier in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild
Get PDFThis article investigates the representation of wilderness in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, specifically with regards to the myth of the American frontier. By using the myth of the frontier as a structure through which to read the film, we discover that the film proves William Cronon’s thesis that the idea of wilderness as an anti-human place is merely a human construct
Trees of Birth: rituals and the emergence of sacred space in Dutch Vinex-areas
Get PDFIn this article, I aim to explore the role of rituals in the emergence of a “sacred” space in a newly built suburban area in the Netherlands. This so-called birth forest serves as a case study to show how nature functions as a platform for ritual practice in this neighbourhood
The “Natural” Is a Sham: The Baroque and Its Contemporary Avatars
Get PDFThis article discusses three aesthetics which go against the understanding of “the natural” as the default setting of life and being: baroque, punk and camp celebrate the artificiality and made-upness of man-made worlds. Reflecting on autobiographical encounters with these styles, and using a Lacanian frame of analysis, the author discusses what makes these styles appealing to some and horrific to others, and what they effectuate in the lives of their aficionados
Nostalgia\u27s Violence
Get PDFThis essay considers some of the ways in which nostalgia figures in contemporary social theory as well as addresses the post/modern character of nostalgia. It does so with the aim of exploring the question of colonial and imperial violence at the heart of nostalgia
Ritual Art: Political, Social and Religious Subversion in the Dramatic Works of William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley
Get PDFThe ritual plays of William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley question the dominant political, social, and religious values of their time, contravening traditional ideas of ritual as a conservative social force. This study analyses Yeats’s Celtic Mysteries rituals and Crowley’s Rites of Eleusis according to changing scholarly theories of ritual
Enthronement Rituals of the Princes of Rus’ (twelfth-thirteenth centuries)
Get PDFThis article examines the translation, transformation, and innovation of ceremonies of inauguration from the principality of Kiev to the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal’ and the city of Novgorod in the early Russian period (twelfth-thirteenth centuries). The ritual embellishment of inauguration ceremonies suggests a renewed contact between early Rus’ and Byzantium
‘Numinous’ and ‘Negatively Numinous’ in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Get PDFThis paper seeks to explore the representation of both the numinous and negatively numinous presence in a late nineteenth century Gothic novel which occupies the complicated borderland between the supposed binary oppositions of the sacred and sacrilegious, holy and profane, of good and evil: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)
The New Creatures of Difference: A Look at the Concept of Repetition Within Dissipative Systems Theory
Get PDFRepetition is a major theme in contemporary thought, aligned more with difference and monstrosity than similarity and banality. This paper examines the logic of repetition through its deployment as a critique of the Western philosophical tradition’s understanding of time as temporal succession and examines the development of new concepts of repetition in dissipative systems theory and evolutionary thinking
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Aspects of Interdisciplinary Knowledge Transfer from a Translation Studies Perspective
Get PDFThis article sets out to investigate points of contact and pathways of interdisciplinary knowledge diffusion from a translation studies point of view. For this purpose, notions of innovation, memes, aspects of idea transmission, sociological network theories, and diffusion of knowledge in networks are discussed against the backdrop of network studies theories from the discipline of sociology