Act Of Naming Research Articles

The Polyhedral Victim and the Patchwork Abuser: A Comparative Study of Names and Naming in Vladimir Nabokov's <em>Lolita</em> (1955) and Maria Velho da Costa's <em>Myra</em> (2008)

In this article, I compare the function of names and the act of naming in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and Maria Velho da Costa's Myra (2008). I situate Nabokov's decision to write a narrative from the perspective of a male abuser and Velho da Costa's centring her novel on a female victim in the specific contexts in which these works were published. Whereas Lolita stands as a challenge to North American obscenity laws in the 1950s, Myra was written against the backdrop of a child abuse scandal, involving a state orphanage and powerful men from the Portuguese elite.

Mytho-logic anthropology and discursive games of Gods in time stream

Is the thought a gift or bloody hell of the person? Involving in a discourse of «another» is accompanied by forming of a field of own senses. Senses come, but they are not born by own «I». But «a science way» (connected with external language games) or a self-immersing way (connected with meditational practice’s), actually, eliminated our own «I». The way (as would tell the Buddha, Moisej or the Christ, and presently M. Heidegger or M. Moss) is a gift. Such gift allows to reconstruct own human nature and to open «passes» (ways) to different measurement of existence of the person. All transitions between measurements connected systems of signs (or languages). In particular, the system of signs allows to transfer the Messiah gift to historical space by means of a myth or mythical and poetic text. Actually, those who put myths or established names, always occupied exclusive position in a society. Interpreters of Ancient Greek mythology asserted that the main gift of gods is fire; however, main gift of gods was the word and a name (language).In «Being and time» of M. Heidegger language is the house of being. The main thought consists that being is structured as language. According to the modern version of J. Lacan, unconscious is structured as language, and unconscious acts as hidden (unconscious) presence of another (or Another as higher Father-god), so language is found out as universal unity, the universal topos, connecting mental and, probably, spiritual space. Not only unconscious, but also spiritual (and mental) it is structured as language. S. Freud and J. Lacan have found out only private forms of a certain universal principle in which specifies creativity of structuralists and poststructuralists: all actively existing (living) is structured as language or is functional in the field of signs and symbols (in the field of language). Leaning Gegel’s and Neohegelians creativity, it can be asserted that Spirit, generating the dialectic negation – a matter, does not disappear, it is not transformed, and continues process of naming, being in other measurement. But the spirit is structured as another in the creation-naming. The mono-spirit is not enough for a birth of the world, the act of naming means presence of another.In search of a nature bases of modern philosophy A. Badiou tried to find a way of realisation of patrimonial procedures in synchronous (adhered to the present) space of human thought and open the essence modern (postmodern) multiplane and polymorphic culture and thought. Proceeding from A. Badiou’s creativity it is possible to conclude, errors in act of naming is very cost much to mankind.

“[I]t is a word unsaid”

This study attempts to trace the aesthetic of the act of naming in Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself”. It tries, furthermore, to approach America as a geo-poetic concept and formation in the earlier American poetics of being. The literary geography of Whitman’s poetry might here be measured against the poeticity of the American con(text) or poetic dwelling, with all the nuances of the question of identity being implicated. The poet as a namer is the one who re-invents his linguistic-poetic gear to re-signify his existence in the act of renaming the second creation. Building on the Emersonian pseudo-philosophical premises, the poet Whitman thus sets himself the task of mapping out his Eden, or this terra incognita, by creating his textual geography and by Whitmanizing the American scene for that matter.

How Long? How Far?

One’s social identity is constituted in and through the act of naming. A name simultaneously interpellates the addressee and confines their resistance to the name’s religious, social, gender or racial oppression to the manoeuvring space warranted by that particular delimitation (e.g. gay, black, disabled). Since the 1960s rise of identity politics, several strategies have emerged in response to the closure of naming: the re-appropriation of injurious names; self-naming; and abject art, a form of public outrage at the increasingly invisible violence perpetuated by consumerist, class and gender interpellations – demands placed on the recessive realm of being which resides beyond naming. Taking its cue from abject art, this article queries the possibility of an epigenetic effect of naming. Epigenetics refers to the dynamic alterations in the way DNA information is transcribed from generation to generation, its chief claim being that cultural and social behaviour has a lasting effect on an organism’s biological make-up (Pembrey et al 2006). In pondering the trans-temporal performativity of naming in a realm made increasingly significant by organ transplantation – the realm of the intercorporeal – the article asks: can the long-forgotten effect of past naming practices (from Ish’s naming of animals to the subsumption of slave labour under the slave owner’s name) resurface in the inter-corpus, in the communal abject, in the khora – the mise en abyme of time, place and matter? (Derrida 1995)

The Biography of a Ritual Vessel: On Naming, and the Dialectics of Authenticity

This essay attempts to sketch a biography for jia 斝 , a type of ritual vessel once common during the Shang 商 (c. 1600-1046 BC) and Zhou 周 (c. 1046-249 BC) periods. While its name, in various written forms, survives, the knowledge of how it looked like was lost after the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC). The mismatch between the name and the artifact nonetheless became a fertile ground for conjectural and creative formulations of the idea of authenticity. The present essay identifies three key episodes in the “ life” of jia : the Song Dynasty cataloging of ancient artifacts, early 20th-century research on oracle bone script, and the mid-20th century debate on materialism and the hermeneutics of fiction. They correspond to moments of transformation and breakthrough in intellectual history, when scholars attempted to solve the puzzle presented by this vessel through innovative philological, iconographical, and literary methods. By investigating these episodes, this essay argues that, although the establishment of historic authenticity relies heavily on object-based evidence, the interpretation of the latter is conditioned by the act of naming and the narrative of provenance. More importantly, the very concept of authenticity is a regime constructed out of the relationship between persons, names, and artifacts, and is itself historicized through the ever-developing episteme.

Rich’s Essential Essays

Rich’s <i>Essential Essays</i>

Meaning and object in Freud's theory of language

Translations of summaryThis article sets out to challenge the interpretation of Freud's views on the origins of the meaning of language according to which meaning always originates from an act of naming. In Freud's terms, word‐presentations would originally denote object‐ or thing‐presentations and gain meaning through this reference. This interpretation claims that this view was already expressed in Freud's On Aphasia (1891) and influenced all his later theory of language. To oppose this claim, three conceptions proposed by Freud are discussed that strongly suggest the participation of language in the construction of the field of objects: a metapsychological hypothesis (the concepts of word‐, thing‐, and object‐presentation), the explanation of a psychopathological phenomenon (the genesis of a fetishistic object‐choice), and a concept concerning the foundations of the psychoanalytic method of dream interpretation (secondary elaboration). As a conclusion, it is argued that Freud's early views in On Aphasia (1891) can be alternatively understood such as to allow for a different view of language and its relationship with objects.

COLOUR TERMS AS COMPONENTS OF UKRAINIAN AND ENGLISH IDIOMS : AN ATTEMPT AT A CONTRASTIVE LINGUOCULTURAL ANALYSIS

The article offers a contrastive analysis of colour terms (CTs) as components of the phraseological units in English and Ukrainian. Among the perceptive variables considered that of colour is one in which we are physically capable of making a considerable numbers of distinctions, so the question how these are grouped into classes in any given language is of great importance. The notion of colour has many aspects, it also contains a fair amount of relevant information accumulated by the language bearer and rooted in the structure of colour concepts by which the language community operates (e.g., the symbolic meaning of colour, evaluative components, colour preferences, etc.). The lexical meaning of a CT – the unit of the language which names a certain domain of the colour spectrum – is the lingual interpretation of man’s knowledge and notions about a natural colour signal. In the contrastive aspect the denotative component of CTs is mainly, convergent, designating the shade, brightness and saturation of colour, however, their connotative components are frequently divergent and often dependent on the specific communicative load of a given CT as a constituent of the utterance. In Ukrainian CTs are adjectives, adverbs (not infrequently used with diminutive suffixes or with prefixes, sometimes in the prolonged forms) and verbs, while in English they are limited only to adjectives. CTs can be given a specific meaning in certain contexts. Whereas the primary coding of CTs must be understood as an act of naming (primary coding is a set of morphemes), a secondary coding is either a wilful act carried out by a person or it is suggested by the conventions of a society or culture. The connotative component includes different associative symbolic shades of meaning and contains some implicit information yielded by the imagined connections of phenomena of various nature on the basis of associations. The background knowledge of the phenomenon of colour is a rich source of occasional sense components of CTs. Keywords: colour terms, phraseological unit, Ukrainian, English, contrastive analysis, denotative meaning, connotative meaning, linguocultural studies.

Marxist Materialism and Critical Race Theory: A Comparative Analysis of Media and Cultural Influence on the Formation of Stereotypes and Proliferation of Police Brutality against Black Men

Using Marxist and Critical Race Theory frameworks to call codified culture into question, this essay explores how diverse modes of expression are crushed by the restraint of the individual and through a lack of variance that prohibits progress for Black males in American society. This essay critiques the capitalist structure that insists on the illusion of uniformity when it clearly benefits and operates from emphasizing difference. The article compares the impact of a consumerist frame of reference on career, residence, and material possessions; media technologies’ published messages and images that contribute to negative stereotypes; and the formation of style as an act of naming or resisting with regard to the proliferation of questionable and brutal treatment of Black males by law enforcement agents, in particular, and society, in general.

Socioonomastika - lze ji vymezit jako samostatnou disciplínu?

This study is focused on scholarship on proper names within a sociolinguistic framework. The main aim of this study is to clarify the term socio-onomastics and its meaning and usage with regards to toponomastics. Special attention is paid to the genesis of socio-onomastics and to the relations between sociolinguistics, onomastics and socio-onomastics. The influence of social aspects on the act of naming and on the entire existence of names is also taken into consideration when discussing the use of socio-onomastics. The text discusses views and attitudes towards the topic presented in linguistic literature. The socio-onomastic aspects are predominantly studied in scholarship on personal names, e.g. name creation and choice. In the case of place names, they are studied more rarely and the research pays attention mostly to the usage of place names in communication. Available toponomastic and anthroponomastic works using the term socio-onomastics in their description have been analyzed, as well as theoretical onomastic literature, producing several findings of differences in the usage of this term. The main topics of socio-antroponomastic literature are anthroponymy of various social groups, social aspects of name choice, social aspects of the development of naming systems, popularity of names, nicknames, hypocorisms and slang naming. The socio-toponomastic works mainly deal with the toponymy of various social groups, toponymic competence (knowledge and usage of toponyms), non-standardized toponyms, slang toponyms, social-based toponyms (commemorative toponyms), social-based renaming, and the linguistic landscape.

Naming and nurturing reality from a heart renewed by grace

This contribution investigates the unbearable tension between the homiletical act of naming reality (with the promise of exposing, challenging and/or triggering creative forces in it) on the one hand, and neglecting this same reality on the other hand, thereby causing it to return to an ignored, unchallenged and degenerated state. The author focuses on tension fields that are generated when preachers embark on the activity of naming realities in their proximate contexts and how they position, withdraw or distance themselves in a certain way when problematic elements (for instance the glaring and seemingly unbridgeable inequality in the situation of Dalits) are opened up by the act of naming. By means of a theological reflection on the renewal of the heart by God’s act of grace in Christ, the author attempts to identify key markers for a homiletic theory that will be able to link the act of naming reality with the act of nurturing (rather than neglecting) this named reality.

Cry, the beloved country’s isiZulu translation: speech act of naming

The aim of this paper was to examine the role of translation in social development. One aspect of culture that had not previously received much attention is the speech act of naming. In this article, this aspect was addressed in the translation between the Zulu and English cultures as used by CLS Nyembezi [1957 (1997)] in Lafa Elihle Kakhulu, a translation of Alan Paton's [1948 (2005)] Cry, the Beloved Country. The theoretical frameworks that informed this paper are Toury's (1995) descriptive translation studies that draws from Even-Zohar's (1980) polysystem theory and Bourdieu's (1984) sociological theory of translation in order to analyse the role of power in development and social change. The research was exploratory-descriptive-interpretive in nature. The study examined selected dialogues that appear in Book One between the protagonist, Rev. Stephen Khumalo, and several other characters who belong to different age groups, social status and power. The aim was to determine if Nyembezi's translation was acceptable to his target readership, i.e. Zulu-speakers, at the time of translation and beyond. It was found that Nyembezi used strategies of cultural substitution, omission and addition in an effort to make his text appealing to his target social and cultural audience.

Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of a National Literature

Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of a National Literature

‘THE TIME OF NO ROOM’: TOWARDS A THEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF CONTEMPORARY ATTEMPTS AT EARTH MANAGEMENT

This essay offers a theological critique of contemporary attempts to economically price the earth. It does so by drawing an analogy between pricing and the biblical act of ‘naming.’ In particular, this essay considers two forms of naming found in scripture: 1) the human person’s task of naming the animals, as described in Gen. 2:19; and 2) the work of ‘name-taking’ via census (here I focus especially on the Lukan account’s reference to the Roman imperial census).The rationality underlying each of these forms of naming is examined leading to the conclusion that the act of naming in Genesis is shaped by the desire to serve that which is named, while the act of naming in Luke is shaped by the desire to press that which is named into service. The essay concludes by arguing that the dominant regime of pricing and earth management bears a strong resemblance to the dominative logic that characterizes the Roman imperial census. doi: 10.7833/111-1-11

‘THE TIME OF NO ROOM’: TOWARDS A THEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF CONTEMPORARY ATTEMPTS AT EARTH MANAGEMENT

This essay offers a theological critique of contemporary attempts to economically price the earth. It does so by drawing an analogy between pricing and the biblical act of ‘naming.’ In particular, this essay considers two forms of naming found in scripture: 1) the human person’s task of naming the animals, as described in Gen. 2:19; and 2) the work of ‘name-taking’ via census (here I focus especially on the Lukan account’s reference to the Roman imperial census).The rationality underlying each of these forms of naming is examined leading to the conclusion that the act of naming in Genesis is shaped by the desire to serve that which is named, while the act of naming in Luke is shaped by the desire to press that which is named into service. The essay concludes by arguing that the dominant regime of pricing and earth management bears a strong resemblance to the dominative logic that characterizes the Roman imperial census. doi: 10.7833/111-1-11

The Sacrament of Language

The Sacrament of Language

Being in the place world: toward a Māori “geographical self”

The concept of place is central to geography, and is also seminal to the thinking of Indigenous peoples, including the Māori of Aotearoa/New Zealand. However, few geographical studies of Indigenous peoples have used conceptions of place that depart from Western modes of representation. This article explores how the phenomenological concept of the “geographical self” can illuminate Māori thought about self, body, landscape, and place. It uses an approach known as kaupapa Māori, which while based in European epistemology enables us to identify relevant aspects of the Māori knowledge system and weave them into academic theories and methodologies. Three dimensions of Māori knowledge (genealogy as a way of knowing things, understandings of time, and the importance of the spoken word rather than visual representation) are used to demonstrate how Māori identify themselves, conceptualize the body as an arbiter of interaction with the environment, and create landscape through place naming. It is argued that for Māori the world is represented, indeed created, in speech and the act of naming, including the naming of places, which impresses ancestors and deities into the landscape in such a way that a place and its knowledge cannot be separated.

Mathematics and Mysticism, Name Worshipping, Then and Now

The author's purpose is to put together three different mystical approaches to mathematics which are located in different contexts and periods of recent times but can be compared and may enrich one another: (1) the name-worshipping movement in the Russia of the beginning of the twentieth century, which gave birth to the famous Moscow School of Mathematics; (2) the deep mystical approach to mathematics of the important French philosopher Simone Weil; and (3) the recent autobiographical thoughts of the very important French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. All three instances give a central role to the act of naming, and the author suggests further theological and mathematical investigations of the naming process.

What's in a Name?-Consequences of Naming Non-Human Animals.

Simple summaryHistory teaches us that the act of naming can have various consequences for that which is named. Thus, applying labels as well as both specific and generic names to non-human animals can have consequences for our relationships to them, as various examples show. The issues of whether and how we should name other animals should therefore be given careful consideration.The act of naming is among the most basic actions of language. Indeed, it is naming something that enables us to communicate about it in specific terms, whether the object named is human or non-human, animate or inanimate. However, naming is not as uncomplicated as we may usually think and names have consequences for the way we think about animals (human and non-human), peoples, species, places, things etc. Through a blend of history, philosophy and representational theory—and using examples from, among other things, the Bible, Martin Luther, colonialism/imperialism and contemporary ways of keeping and regarding non-human animals—this paper attempts to trace the importance of (both specific and generic) naming to our relationships with the non-human. It explores this topic from the naming of the animals in Genesis to the names given and used by scientists, keepers of companion animals, media etc. in our societies today, and asks the question of what the consequences of naming non-human animals are for us, for the beings named and for the power relations between our species and the non-human species and individuals we name.

O páthos da distância e da diferença

This paper analyzes and seeks to understand Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Platonic eros. Several problems of philosophical interest seem to arise from it in the contemporary scenario, among which the focus on difference and on critical confrontation of the ontology of presence as the source of reification, which represents the way we relate to the world. This philosophical project aims to reach its goals through the theory of linguistic nomination, by claiming the existence of the paradoxical image of union in the link between the act of naming and Platonic eros. Such paradox is only effective if it deals with distance and difference.