Redefining a Sense of Home

24 Aug


by Jennifer McLennan, Simon Fraser University

download Redefining my sense of Home

After the birth of my first son, family and friends kept asking me, “so when are you going to buy a house?” “When are you going to buy a house?” “When are you going to buy a house?” This persistent question left me with the feeling that raising him in an apartment was somehow depriving him of a great childhood. It preyed upon my fears of not being able to recreate my childhood home. It gnawed at my anxiety that I didn’t know anyone who had successfully raised their children in an apartment. Probably my little innocent baby was going to become a psychopath, or a serial killer or much worse, a telemarketer.

Marais district, Paris ©Yanidel (click image for website)

Unbeknownst to me at the time of the birth of my son, this myth of the house with a backyard as being a prerequisite for raising children is largely a North American idea–most of continental Europe lives in apartments. They seem to be doing just fine. Growing up, I fully bought the myth. I assumed that I would automatically be able to buy my dream house before I was thirty. When I turned thirty-five, I panicked. I have two children. We are living in a two bedroom apartment. Where is my backyard? My extra bathroom? My extra space in which to put stuff I no longer want or need? So I did what any good graduate student would do and I took myself to the library in order to find out what was wrong with my life. What I wanted when I started my research on home was a nice tidy answer, a blueprint, a guide. I wanted to be able to follow a method or a system–what I uncovered was a muddle. Home is fraught with tensions–it is a place of refuge, but also a source of confinement.  A place to escape from and a place to run back to.  There are many unknowns as to what makes a “good” home. It is the intersection of many concepts: memory, identity, belonging, location, and time. I started diving into my own memories of home. I am very sensorially aware and most of my dominant memories are grounded in sensory experiences. The following is an excerpt from a longer piece of my sense memories of home. Continue reading →

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Calderon’s Painter, Gadamer’s Spectator: Extending the Realm of the Play

7 Aug

By Janis E. Carpenter, Reed College

Download: Calderon and Gadamer.[1]

Monument to Calderon de la Barca, Madrid

Of the several ways in which Pedro Calderon de la Barca portrays painting in The Painter of his Dishonour,[2] one of the most intriguing is his depiction of Don Juan Roca’s failed attempt to paint a portrait of his wife, Seraphine.[3] Don Juan’s failure sets the keystone in the arch of this 17th century Spanish honor play by suggesting the nature of his relationship to the woman he eventually will murder.  Still Calderon intensifies the scene further through his design of its context and structure, specifically in his use of illusory allusions, comic critique, dramatic irony, and metatheatrical role-play.[4] These extensions seem to exemplify the kind of theatrical strategies Hans-Georg Gadamer envisioned in developing his particular concept of a work of art as a work of “play” that engages and absorbs the spectator in an interactive experience.[5] In this sense, the ideas of the 20th century German philosopher help explain how the realm of a 17th century Spanish play opens toward spectators and readers beyond the time and place of its origin.

The failed-painter scene[6] resides in one of several “honor” plays written by the prolific Calderon.[7] As an honor play, The Painter of his Dishonour centers on a husband who kills his wife and her alleged lover.[8] Some modern scholars find fertile ground in the play for a study of 17th century Spanish culture:  its social codes, gender roles, artistic theory, artistic practice, and theater.[9] They have noted the manner in which the extensive ambiguity and linguistic subtlety of the operatic horror story highlight the tensions within a society struggling with its traditional code of honor.  One Hispanicist calls the play “an audacious dramatic experiment . . . located in the frontier area that lies between comedy and tragedy.”[10] Others have recognized its vivid depiction of the female lead and the multiple ways in which it makes painting a literal and metaphorical subject.[11]

Equally compelling, however, is the way this play as a whole, and the failed-painter scene in particular, resonate beyond its place in the history of Spanish culture, meriting more than the attention one ordinarily might give to artifacts of long-gone cultures and amounting to far more than a quaint scene in a twisted play about social strangleholds in a dead world.  In this scene in particular, Calderon has tapped a vein of truth and uncertainty that extends beneath and beyond the specific time, place, and culture of its origin.  The source of this broader power resides both in the nature of the situation Calderon creates and in the particular techniques by which he absorbs his audience in that situation. Continue reading →

The Scientist in the Modern Novel: The Work of Rebecca Goldstein

16 Jul

by Oscar Firschein, Stanford University MLA 2000

download pdf file of this essay.

Francis Bacon (editor’s note: see also IEP entry) in his essay Idols of the Mind warns the scientist of the dangers of relying on information picked up in the marketplace or by tradition.  Instead, the scientist should rely on information gained by empirical methods.  Thus, the scientist committed to rationalism should behave differently than the rest of the population which functions using non-empiric information.  One would think that the contrast between the type of rationality pursued by the scientist compared to the unprovable faith of the lay world would offer interesting material for treatment in the novel, but this is not the case. The activities and beliefs of the scientist are seldom treated in the modern novel.

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The endlessly fascinating question…

12 Jul

What are universities for? Or, to be more precise, what are they good for? In the British magazine Standpoint, an articulate answer by Nigel Biggar in which, toward the end, talking about the humanities, he writes:

©Thomas Hawk

To ask a scholar of history, literature or theology to explain what he does matters is one thing. To ask that he demonstrate its usefulness is quite another. “Usefulness” connotes a shrunken, materialistic, utilitarian understanding of human goods — an understanding that is sunk deep into Anglo-Saxon mentality. In contemporary colloquial English, when we talk about “goods” we’re referring to washing machines, sofas, cars and plasma TVs. Until the modern era, however, the word “goods” encompassed the likes of beauty, justice, friendship and communion with God — meanings that now survive among us only in university departments of moral theology and (to the extent that they follow Aristotle rather than Bentham or J. S. Mill) moral philosophy. Compared to this rich, colourful and dignifying vision of human flourishing, our modern utilitarian view is pinched, anaemic and degrading. This secularised Protestant view is embedded in the fate of other words in the English language. Take, for example, otium, the Latin noun that the medievals used to refer positively to the freedom to reflect and admire: this has come down to us as the disdainful adjective “otiose” — meaning “unemployed,” “idle”, “sterile”. And the medieval word for the basic university course in the liberal rational and public arts of thinking, writing and persuading — trivium — has reached us as “trivial”….

Canadian Afghan School Project in Kandahar.

In modern, hard-nosed, utilitarian Anglo-Saxon cultures, it is quite difficult to get a hearing for the serious worth of anything that can’t be measured. This is not quite as true in other Western countries. In Ireland, at least since the late 19th century, national identity defined itself over and against the ruthless, materialistic utilitarianism of the globalising British empire….One of the extraordinary, concrete public expressions of this Irish resistance to Anglo-Saxon materialism is that to this day in Ireland, if you can get yourself registered as an “artist”, then you pay no income tax. (Which might go some way towards explaining why every second person I met when I was teaching at Trinity College Dublin seemed to be writing and publishing poetry.) Ireland, then, furnishes some hope that, even in this day and age, a national society can publicly recognise human and social goods that are beyond measurement.

So while it is difficult in a heavily utilitarian culture such as ours to make a case for academic activity that doesn’t matter much economically, it nevertheless belongs to the moral vocation of university “professors” (in the broad sense of any professional academic) in the arts and humanities to do just that.

Continue reading the full article.

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An Analysis of the Message of the Negro Spirituals…

7 Jul

…Within the Context of Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope

by Carolyn Matthews, Dominican University.

From the website: Sweet Chariot (click on image)

Presented at the 2010 Graduate Liberal Studies Symposium, Reed College, Portland Oregon, 26 June

Editor’s Note: this essay contains the lyrics to several spirituals, and a downloadable (.wav) recording of Ms. Matthews singing the spiritual.

The music had its origin on shores distant from the land where its people eventually came to dwell for generations. They were stripped physically and metaphorically of their native trappings. Those who survived what came to be called the “Middle Passage,” would have to build community among people from disparate tribes. Although the languages were different and the religious customs varied, it was the music and the inherent sense of community that would be reinforced and would help to keep the hope of freedom forever alive.

Work songs, sorrow songs, laments, moans and chants; the musical genre that has come to be known as the Negro Spiritual emanated from the folk song of the enslaved African. Once thought to be simple expressions of Christian faith from an illiterate people, objective scholarship over the years has come to understand the Spiritual as more than that. Although composed and formed on the shores of the New World, the music has definite African roots. Wyatt Tee Walker writes, “Wherever the Africans and their progeny touched New World shores, no matter what the condition of their existence, they maintained their musical identity.  The rhythm forms and musical idioms were kept alive through the desperate need of the Africans for humanness, which the slave system forcibly stripped from them” (Walker 48, 29). The American slave system was brutal, oppressive and dehumanizing. Although many freedoms were lost the enslaved African retained the freedom to think and thereby was able to develop a longing for freedom and liberation from bondage, providing the foundation from which they would hope for and look forward to a better day. This message, as communicated in selected Spirituals, is analyzed in the context of Jürgen Moltmann’s concept of hope. Continue reading →

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How Natural Images Convey Modernist Concepts in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front

3 Jul

by Kelley Skumautz, Mount St. Mary’s College, Los Angeles

Download this file: Kelley Skumautz

This paper was presented at the GLS Symposium, June 26 2010, at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front nature was used as an important conveyer of Modernist ideas. In the literary eras before the Modernists, nature had been portrayed by green landscapes, tall trees, placid water, and the like, in order to set a mood or tone. Though Woolf and Remarque appreciated and even used these idylls in their writing, they also understood something more about nature: that humans are Homo sapiens – mammals with superior cognitive functioning — and as such are affected by basic biology, and most of all by intelligence and emotion. Human evolution had drawn people toward cities and mechanized lives and away from direct contact with the environment, and by the early twentieth century writers took it upon themselves to remind us that nature is a place from which we all came and to which we will all eventually return. Specifically, Woolf and Remarque questioned the notion of nice, neat, civilized lives in favor of depicting life as more engrained in the earthly world. Woolf used a heightened awareness of the natural environment to define her characters and to show the fragmentation of the human spirit, and Remarque used nature to demonstrate the innocence and the alienation felt by the soldiers of a Lost Generation.

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Drinking This Champagne Water: Walks With Rousseau and Muir in Nature

20 Jun

by Michael JS Cox, Simon Fraser University

(An edited version of this essay appears in Confluence, vol. 15 no.2, spring 2010)

Download this essay as a pdf file: Drinking This Champagne Water

Thomas Hill, Great Canyon of the Sierras - Yosemite, 1871

These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God’s beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be. Drinking this champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing the living air, and every movement of limbs is pleasure…(John Muir, Nature Writings 228)

Sixty years separate Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s death (1778) from John Muir’s birth (1838). Muir is not considered a philosopher, and Rousseau is not considered an environmentalist, but each man had an abiding passion for the solace occasioned by long walks in nature, and saw in Nature[1] an expression of God. Each loved the mountains, whether hiking or appreciating them from a distance, and each shared a love of flowers, and of moving water, and each saw himself reflected in the cold, still waters of alpine lakes. This paper addresses the parallels between these men, and the divergences and convergences, which until now have not been sufficiently explored.

In those papers I have read on Muir, references to Rousseau are scant. Several works compare Henry David Thoreau with Rousseau, most of them examining their social philosophies,[2] but as Joseph Lane (2006) notes, “the lines of intellectual transmission from Rousseau to Thoreau and his successors…are, at best, indirect.”

Indirect, but not indistinct. If I were to list several founders of contemporary environmental philosophy—which I am aware would be contentious—there is good reason to include Jean-Jacques Rousseau.[3]

Continue reading →

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