Classical Modern Research Articles

A Bridge Connecting Classical Physics and Modern Physics

In classical physics, time and space are absolute and independent, so time and space can be treated separately. However, in modern physics, time and space are relative and dependent: time and space must be treated together. In 4-d s-t frames, we treat time and space independently, then add a constraint to link them together. In teaching, there is a big gap between classical and modern physics. We hope that we are able to find a frame connecting them to make learning simpler. 3-d s-t frame is the best candidate to serve this purpose: time and space are able to be treated dependently by defining the unit of time as T and the unit of space as λ in this frame. Furthermore, the ratio, λ/T, is the velocity, c, of the medium. This paper shows the equivalence between a 4-d s-t frame and a 3-d s-t frame by properly converting coordinates of two frames.

The Progressive Constructions in the Work of Architects of the Classical Modernism, Slovakia 1919-1939

The influence of approaching functionalism on the traditional structures of the interwar architecture, reflected through the life and work of the German circuit architects Franz Wimmer and Andreas Szőnyi.

Mirjam Pressler: Many, Many Peepholes

Mirjam Pressler:Many, Many Peepholes Carolin Farbmacher (bio) In describing our need for books, Mirjam Pressler has often been quoted as saying, Without books, the world remains narrowed; the possibilities for what is imaginable and thus also do-able, are limited. We need many books, many, many different books. Many little peepholes in the wall that stands between us and the ofttimes inexplicable world. ... And naturally they should not be only the ones that everyone wants to look through. That would be an irresponsible reduction of our perspectives of the world. (Pressler in Gelberg, Werkstattbuch 71) As an author and a translator, Pressler herself has created many such peepholes of highest literary quality that expand perspective and worldview. What’s more, with her kind of peepholes she stands up for the rights of the weak and disadvantaged, for religious tolerance, and against fascism, both in the past and the present. Pressler is a champion for intercultural understanding through literature. With her nomination for the shortlist of the Hans Christian Andersen Award, we have someone who excellently fulfills the IBBY mission of promoting intercultural understanding through children’s books. A Roundabout Path to Literature Pressler has described her path to literature as an accidental one. She was born in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1940, as the illegitimate child of a Jewish mother. The girl grew up in the care of non-Jewish foster parents who belonged to the lower social class, as well as in an orphanage, thus able to survive the Holocaust. Pressler grew up in intellectually narrow confines, often experiencing corporal punishment and a sense of ostracism and insecurity. Although reading was considered a waste of time, it became a secret sanctuary in her childhood. Later, Pressler studied painting and languages in Frankfurt am Main and Munich; she also spent one year living in a kibbutz in Israel. Upon returning to her native country, she married and had three daughters, whom, after her divorce, she raised alone. One of the variety of jobs she took was running her own jeans shop. When the landlord cancelled her shop’s rental contract, she decided, at the age of thirty-nine, to supplement her income from a part-time office job by writing her first young adult novel. Within the next two years, she had published five further novels. Pressler’s career as a translator began in 1983, in an equally unusual manner. On a whim after a party, she decided to translate a book from Dutch, even though she did not know the language. Hence, she could only complete the project with a dictionary and a grammar book. Since then, she has written over fifty books for children and young adults—including picture books, early readers—as well as books for adults, and she has also translated more than two hundred other works. Her anti-authoritarian novels have become part of the modern classics of German children’s and young adult literature. Often the themes and plots of her books are connected in some way with her own biography, making the stories “taste of real-life experience,” as her publisher, Hans-Joachim Gelberg has put it (Budeus-Budde: Wenn Geschichten nach Erlebtem schmecken 5). In many other countries, it is also possible to look through her peepholes: Her debut novel, Bitterschokolade [Bitter Chocolate], for example, has been translated into eighteen other languages. Mirjam Pressler is not only a tireless writer but [End Page 26] she also spends many days of the year on the road, giving author readings and meeting with her young readers. In her home city of Landshut, near Munich, she is the patron of the Landshut Youth Book Prize, which is awarded annually by the local young adult reading club. Giving a Voice to the Weak At the center of Mirjam Pressler’s books is the topic of childhood and adolescence. In her works, she does not describe a protective, idyllic picture-book world of growing up. Her books deal with the difficult side of living—with damaged childhoods, with children and young people who suffer and long only for a little happiness. Her protagonists include, for example, the overweight Eva in Bitterschokolade; the handicapped Thomas, who like his...

What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and invention of the Canon by Ankhi Mukherjee (review)

Reviewed by: What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and invention of the Canon by Ankhi Mukherjee Urmila Seshagiri What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and invention of the Canon. Ankhi Mukherjee. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. 296. $24.95 (paper). What is a classic? Taking her lead from Augustin Sainte-Beuve, T. S. Eliot, and J. M. Coetzee, Ankhi Mukherjee offers an eloquent case for the question’s continuing relevance to literature, literary criticism, and, above all, to the language arts of the postcolony. What Is a Classic? Post-colonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon brings fresh energy to the longstanding study of imperial cultural authority, attending to both the ideological imposition of that authority and the split literary consciousness of postcolonial writing produced in its wake. The canon, Mukherjee argues, is “an achieved anxiety, an imagined unity, an inclusive stance on the diverse literary genres produced within the tradition of literature in English” (216). Rising above the twinned optics of skepticism and condescension towards the concept of a Western canon, this study casts an unwavering gaze on the canon-bred aspirations of postcolonial writers such as Orhan Pamuk, V. S. Naipaul, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Across the British Empire’s spatiotemporal conjunctions and disjunctions, Mukherjee declares, the canonized literary classic emerges as “a thing of splendid and defensive isolation as well as a textuality mutilated by time over iteration and critical intervention” (214). Mutilation, iteration, and intervention are the historical acts and forces through which Mukherjee’s study establishes that “the invention of modern classics is sustained by a dynamic and variable conversation between the past and present of English studies” (8). What Is a Classic? locates such conversations in the works of a truly impressive range of artists, including the nineteenth-century “Eurasian” poet Henry Derozio, the Nobel laureates Naipaul and Derek Walcott, the contemporary filmmaker Vishal Bharadwaj, and the Hamara Shakespeare project in India. These and numerous other artists are bound together by a struggle over whether, as Salman Rushdie once put it, “It is perhaps one of the more pleasant freedoms of the literary migrant to be able to choose his parents” (20–21). Pleasant freedom or torturous exile? History has not exhausted this question, and Mukherjee reminds us that twentieth-century postcolonial literature’s filiative crises continue to exert definitive power over the “formation of an alternative canon for a postcolonial, global age” in the twenty-first century. Mukherjee’s rigorously researched and passionately argued study is a welcome corrective to misguidedly democratic visions of imperial modernity’s cultural transactions. The move to globalize postcolonial literature can dilute national literary traditions born of violent centuries of colonization, but Mukherjee, attentive to the canon reformations inaugurated by Franco Moretti, David Damrosch, and Wai Chee Dimock, upholds vital, nuanced distinctions between the postcolonial and the global. World literature, she summarizes crisply, “is not so much a canon of texts as it is a mode of circulation” (31), and the term postcolonial “does not … amount to [End Page 255] rooted and antagonistic reprisals of colonial power/knowledge” (220). Her standard-bearers for her keywords—“classic” and “canon”—are, surprisingly and daringly, Harold Bloom and John Guillory. Testing a dazzling array of primary postcolonial texts against Bloom’s oft-derided valuation of difficulty and Guillory’s vision of the canon as an aristocracy, Mukherjee illuminates a historical-ideological reality that critics engaged in the act of “worlding” twentieth-century literature often resist: the unrelenting psychological grip of the Western literary canon in the British Empire’s former colonies. To illustrate how the albatross weight of Western literature—Ovid, Virgil, Shakespeare, Defoe, Dickens, the Brontës, Conrad—hangs around the necks of non-Western writers, What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon returns to postcolonial methodologies that have been occluded by a decade dominated by theories of cosmopolitan, global, and planetary literature. Relying on the now decades-old work of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Abdul JanMohamed, and Frantz Fanon (as well as Patrick Brantlinger, Henry Louis Gates, Mary Louise Pratt, Benita Parry, Jahan Ramazani, and Terry Eagleton), Mukherjee reminds us why center-periphery models of nationhood, culture, and...

Myths in crisis? Marina Carr’s revision of feminine myths in contemporary Irish Theatre

The theatre of Marina Carr evokes Sophocles’ Electra in The Mai (1994), through female characters that pursue a mythical ending. It turns to classical modernity in Marble (2009), when women are unable to coexist with normative models, Trojan territories turn into unknown dreamlands, lasting and immaculate existences, that go beyond earthly life, are pursued, and the protagonists echo Greek heroines. Through a revision of the mythological content of her plays, the question of the crisis or persistence of myths in contemporary Irish society and culture can be addressed successfully: Irish and Greek female myths survive in the plays of Carr, and this technique highlights the relevance of mythology in today’s Irish theatre as a strategy to question the role of women in society. On the other hand, this use of myth continues revealing the inability of modern materialist society to substitute the epic life of the individual.Keywords: Myth, theatre, Marina Carr, Greek, Irish, female.

Rereading the Past, Reshaping the Present

This article uses Rudolph T. Ware III's original and compelling book, The Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa, as a window through which to reflect on the contribution of West African clerisy of the classical Quran tradition to Islamic thought and the social transformative aims of their teachings and epistemologies. It focuses on the ways in which the West African clerisy of the historical period covered by Ware framed philosophical resistance strategies, based on their embodied knowledge of the Quran, to combat hegemonic forces of enslavement. In this way, they were able to reconstitute a sense of emancipatory noble citizenship. In the process, the essay shows how Ware's study challenges both the perceived notion, reiterated in many studies of the classical Quran school, that this classic institution, once catering equally to both men and women, is a purveyor of a passive, Thomistic education, and the Hegelian dismissal of Africa South of the Sahara as a place of no philosophy and, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, of no history. The discussion also draws attention to the philosophical distinctiveness of the classical Quran school tradition and modernist puritanical Wahhabi Salafism sweeping through West Muslim African societies.

DIALÉTICA NEGATIVA E MATERIALISMO DIALÉTICO: DA SUBJETIVIDADE DECOMPOSTA À OBJETIVIDADE PERVERTIDA

RESUMO O trabalho apresenta uma discussão polêmica, complexa e enigmática para a teoria do conhecimento: a elaboração da dialética negativa na concepção da teoria crítica frankfurtiana – sobretudo, adorniana – na interface com a dialética materialista, do marxismo. Do estudo emerge uma proposta de reestruturação do universo objetivo no sentido de indicar elementos subjetivos – por intermédio da teoria psicanalítica – como possibilidade de superação do estado da alienação ampla: intelectual, política, cultural e humana. Trata de confrontar aspectos metodológicos, teóricos e subjetivos em âmbito social amparado por uma perspectiva crítica. As contribuições, para além dos embates entre o idealismo clássico e o materialismo moderno, atravessam, entre outras, as perspectivas heideggeriana, hegeliana, kantiana, freudiana, marxiana e adorniana, visando apresentar fundamentos epistemológicos e teóricos que embasam a teoria crítica ao tempo que identifica diferenças e convergências entre o materialismo sócio-histórico dialético e a dialética negativa; componentes relevantes para compreender a incursão desta teoria no âmbito das diversas áreas do conhecimento.

In Search of a Non-Eurocentric Understanding of Modernization: Turkey as a Case of ‘Multiple Modernities’

This article uses the Turkish case of modernity to critically examine different understandings of modernization put forward by competing schools of thought, namely the ‘classical modernization theory’, the ‘neo-modernization theory’ and the ‘multiple modernities paradigm’. In the context of modernization studies, Turkey has long held a special place as numerous scholars have studied this country in an attempt to validate the ‘convergence thesis’ – namely the idea that once a non-western society launches a secularization and/or an industrialization programme, its political regime and socio-economic life would eventually resemble its western counterparts. Firstly, the three theories are comparatively analysed by discussing how they perceive the concept of modernity and its interaction with religion, economic development and democratization. Then, the theories are reviewed in light of the Turkish experience. It is argued that the Turkish modernity can be best comprehended through the lens of the multiple modernities paradigm that challenges the Eurocentric assumption of classical modernization and neo-modernization theories based on the convergence thesis.

International Dictatorship or International Democracy. A Discussion of Albert Camus’ 1946 Considerations

AbstractIn the seriesNeither Victims Nor Executioners(1946) the Franco-Algerian writer Albert Camus argued for the need of a relative utopia that would allow man, who refused the logic of murder and violence, to revolt against their historical condition. To this end Camus stressed the importance of fighting for a new democratic world order that would have reversed the condition of international dictatorship immanent in the interdependent world of the 20th century. In the series of essays another reading is possible; an attempt to find a new political way after the end of the classic modern world - a system founded on the supremacy of European nation-States - and to consider such an attempt as an interesting standpoint to face current transnational challenges.

Reading one's symptoms.

> My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness — and the healthiest way of being ill — is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. — Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (Penguin Modern Classics eBook), p. 9. An invisible

Notes towards a 'social aesthetic': Guest editors' introduction to the special section.

There is an emerging 'aesthetic turn' within sociology which currently lacks clear focus. This paper reviews the different issues feeding into this interest and contributes to its development. Previous renderings of this relationship have set the aesthetic up against sociology, as an emphasis which 'troubles' conventional understandings of sociality and offers no ready way of reconciling the aesthetic with the social. Reflecting on the contributions of recent social theorists, from figures including Bourdieu, Born, Rancière, Deleuze, and Martin, we argue instead for the value of a social aesthetic which critiques instrumentalist and reductive understandings of the social itself. In explicating what form this might take, the latter parts of the paper take issue with classical modernist conceptions of the aesthetic which continue to dominate popular and sociological understandings of the aesthetic, and uses the motif of 'walking' to show how the aesthetic can be rendered in terms of 'the mundane search' and how this search spans everyday experience and cultural re-production. We offer a provisional definition of social aesthetics as the embedded and embodied process of meaning making which, by acknowledging the physical/corporeal boundaries and qualities of the inhabited world, also allows imagination to travel across other spaces and times. It is hoped that this approach can be a useful platform for further inquiry.

Cardiac surgery 2014 reviewed.

For the year 2014, more than 17,000 published references can be found in Pubmed when entering the search term "cardiac surgery". The last year has been characterized by a vivid discussion in the fields where classic cardiac surgery and modern interventional techniques overlap. Specifically, there have been important contributions in the field of coronary revascularization with either percutaneous coronary intervention or bypass surgery as well as in the fields of interventional valve therapy. Here, the US core valve trial with the first demonstration of a survival advantage at 1 year with transcatheter valves compared to surgical aortic valve replacement or the 5-year outcome of the SYNTAX trial with significant advantages for bypass surgery has been the landmark. However, in addition to these most visible publications, there have been several highly relevant and interesting contributions. This review article will summarize the most pertinent publications in the fields of coronary revascularization, surgical treatment of valve disease, heart failure (i.e., transplantation and ventricular assist devices) and aortic surgery. This condensed summary will provide the reader with "solid ground" for up-to-date decision-making in cardiac surgery.

A Study on Congruence between Classical Nyaya Sutras and Modern Theories of Knowledge

Knowledge is an asset that can make or break organizations. Its importance has been duly asserted in the Western management thought as well as in the Indian classical philosophical thought. The present study takes a hermeneutical approach by reviewing the Western literature related to knowledge and then trying to find congruence with the Indian philosophy of Nyaya Sutras. Nyaya is a branch of Indian philosophical thought; these thoughts were written in the form of verses called the sutras. We draw from the modern knowledge management literature and compare and contrast it with selected verses of Nyaya Sutras. We find a high level of similarity between the two and discuss offerings from Nyaya Sutras that can be adopted by the modern knowledge management domain. The key aspects of our work have been consolidated in a conceptual model for knowledge management which will provide useful insights to modern management practices.

Helen King. The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence. (History of Medicine in Context.) xii + 274 pp., illus., bibl., index. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. £70 (cloth).

Helen King. <i>The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence</i>. (History of Medicine in Context.) xii + 274 pp., illus., bibl., index. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. £70 (cloth).

Reality and Imagination, the Potrait of Solitude, Suffering, Desperation and Exclusion, through the Existential Conscoiusnees in the Man’s Character

Federigo Tozzi is a Classical Modern Italian writer of the Italian Literature in the early XXth century. The novel analyzed, The Clocks, is written by him and the central character is Bernardo Lotti a man who lives alone in his existence surrounded by clocks that are hanged on the walls around the house. The existential melancholy, ineptitude and loss, painful conception of the character’s life are the demonstration of the XXth century’s crisis in Europe and Italy. The writer tries to be evident with the modern myth of the impossibility of life between consciousness and the reality. The objects in this novel are vitalized and life was given to them. The character is seen through the mechanism of glance and the metaphoric use of the reality, an objective description by the writer and subjective interpretation of the consciousness from Bernardo. In the horizontal plane we have a slow trend and in the vertical plane a fast style, concentrated, with ellipsis of verbs.

Reality and Imagination, the Potrait of Solitude, Suffering, Desperation and Exclusion, through the Existential Conscoiusnees in the Man’s Character

Federigo Tozzi is a Classical Modern Italian writer of the Italian Literature in the early XXth century. The novel analyzed, The Clocks, is written by him and the central character is Bernardo Lotti a man who lives alone in his existence surrounded by clocks that are hanged on the walls around the house. The existential melancholy, ineptitude and loss, painful conception of the character’s life are the demonstration of the XXth century’s crisis in Europe and Italy. The writer tries to be evident with the modern myth of the impossibility of life between consciousness and the reality. The objects in this novel are vitalized and life was given to them. The character is seen through the mechanism of glance and the metaphoric use of the reality, an objective description by the writer and subjective interpretation of the consciousness from Bernardo. In the horizontal plane we have a slow trend and in the vertical plane a fast style, concentrated, with ellipsis of verbs.

Modernists at odds: reconsidering Joyce and Lawrence

Modernism's most contentious rivals, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, are traditionally seen as opposites. This is the first book to explore the resonances between the two writers, revealing that their lives, works, and careers have striking similarities. For starters, they shared the same literary agent, published in the same literary magazines, fought similar legal battles against censorship, and were both pirated by Samuel Roth. The parallels run deeper. This volume revels in two writers who share classic modernist paradoxes: both are at once syncretists and shatterers, bourgeois cosmopolitans, prudish libertines, displaced nostalgists, and rebels against their native lands. These essays consider mutual themes such as gender, class, nature, and religion, highlighting the many intersections among the issues that concerned both Joyce and Lawrence. Modernists at Odds is a long overdue extended comparison of two of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century.

Second world war as a trigger for transcultural changes among Sámi people in Finland

ABSTRACTThe article analyses the consequences of the Lapland War (1944–45) and the reconstruction period (1945–52) for the Sámi society in Finnish Lapland, and provides some comparisons to the situation in Norway. Re­constructing the devastated Lapland meant powerful and rapid changes that ranged from novelties of material culture to increasing Finnish ideals, from a transition in the way of life to an assimilation process. The war was a trigger to an accelerated development in which otherwise long-term processes happened in a very short time frame in the post-war period. The post-war development was characterized by economic, political and cultural processes that integrated Sámiland to Finland and the Finnish nation. These processes can be interpreted as a classic modernization process, even “finnicization”, in which the traditional Sámi culture was forced to switch over to the modern large-scale society. In addition to problematic changes, however, the consequences of the war are also considered to have created new possibilities for the Sámi to influence the majority society both as individuals and as ethno-political actors. This was reflected in Sámi ethnopolitical activism, which started in Finland only after WWII. Also, the role of the majority education system had two-fold consequences: strong assimilation features, but also helping to build the educated Sámi “radical” generation that challenged the prevalent Sámi politics in the 1960s.

Christianity and Secular Reason: Classical Themes and Modern Developments. Edited by JeffreyBloechl. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012, $40.00.

Christianity and Secular Reason: Classical Themes and Modern Developments. Edited by JeffreyBloechl. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012, $40.00.

The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence

The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence