Conventional Worldview Research Articles

The Artistic vs the Useful Opposition in Nataliia Kobrynska’s Prose Texts

Some of Nataliia Kobrynska’s prose texts refer to the modernist motif of beauty that opposes materialistic and pragmatic world. The symbolic language of “The Hebrew Child” relies on the beautiful vs the useful opposition, given that this text is about the uselessness of beauty rather than about Hinda’s greed. In this mostly realistic sketch, the influence of aestheticism (the self-sufficiency of beauty) and decadence (the fragility of beauty) is sufficiently tangible. In “Liebesahnung,” Kobrynska in a specific way experiments with the unconscious work of memory and desire. The picture here is a trigger both for actualizing Denys’ monomania, obsession with the pictured girl, and for launching of his memory mechanism. Protagonist’s hallucinatory visions are structured according to the matrix of artwork – since Denys imagines his dream as an artwork, it remains distant. In contrast to male narratives with similar plots, the object of aesthetic appropriation in Kobrynska’s text is not a real woman but a portrait that has no real prototype. The real and the imaginary are clearly separated: the protagonist’s obsession with the beautiful woman in the painting is in fact an aesthetic experience, and an attempt to extrapolate the male phantasm to a real experience remains fruitless. In “The Creature”, the principle of reality is manifested through the concept of an honest and morally consistent job for the protagonist. On the contrary, blacksmith’s art is an exception, some kind of anomaly. Within the conventional attitudes, this anomaly works as an escape from reality; it is immoral in all senses – not only as a result of blacksmith’s alcoholic inspiration, but also as his refusal to remain within socially appropriate roles and norms. Accordingly, the process of creation is treated here as a rebellion and a break with a conventional worldview. To sum up, Kobrynska is extremely sensitive to fin de siècle aesthetic searches; on the stylistic level, realist, symbolist, impressionist, aestheticist, and even decadent elements are entwined in her prose texts.

Historical roots and the evolving science of forest management under a systemic perspective

In recent history, both a growing awareness of how scientific and societal uncertainty impacts management decisions and of the intrinsic value of nature have suggested new approaches to forest management, with a growing debate in forest science over the need for a paradigmatic shift from the classic conventional world view, based on determinism, predictability, and output-oriented management, towards a world view that has roots in complex adaptive systems theory and is consistent with a nature-based ethic. A conceptual framework under this context is provided by systemic silviculture. In this discussion, we analyze how this approach can be linked to three fundamental moments of the history of forestry and forest science: the Dauerwald theory, Gurnaud’s control method, and the origins of environmental ethics. Relationships with the recent history of forest management science and current research perspectives are also highlighted.

A Sociological Perspective of Honour Killing in India

Human minds have always been captured by traditionally dominant civilizations to think and act within cultural boundaries. Although the world is progressing, society is reverting to a more conventional worldview. It has stifled reasonable thought while encouraging violent behaviours, all of which constitute a breach of humanity. The International Forum, as well as Islamic law, has always been supportive of others' rights, particularly women's rights, which are protected by laws, conventions, and treaties. Few societies have been unaware of women's dignity. The subject of honour killing in India is addressed in this study paper. The historical technique of research was employed in this study as part of qualitative research methodology. The information is gathered from reliable sources such as the literature and prior studies. Women are susceptible to violence not only in India, but also around the world, as a result of poor governance, a lack of execution of suitable laws, and societal and cultural hurdles. People's attachment to traditional and cultural norms has resulted in a rise in violence against women. Honor killings are on the rise as a result of ignorance. Despite the fact that women in India are empowered, their status is not fully functional. The findings point to the need for stringent legislation to prevent honour killings. To remove ignorance from society, societal awareness is critical. Women should be given the tools they need to take such matters seriously and fight for their rights.

An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise by Ross Chambers

la vision de près et de loin, la multifocalité qui en reposant sur un partage de la lumière donne une vision floue à chaque foyer mais précise sur une plus grande plage de distance, ou encore le zoom, cet objectif à focale variable qui permet des effets d’éloignement et de rapprochement. Le regard du lecteur, sa distance par rapport au temps et à l’espace ainsi que sa position idéologique, agit comme vecteur de l’appréhension du texte équivalent au procès pictural. En fin de compte, ces essais captivants qui adoptent chacun un angle de vue différent démontrent que ce serait une erreur de choisir entre la lecture de près qui ne serait que celle du détail et la lecture de loin que celle de la généralité; il ne s’agit pas de les opposer, “chacune articule les deux, dans un sens, dans un ordre, dans une mesure différente” (83). Fairfield University (CT) Marie-Agnès Sourieau Chambers, Ross. An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8232-6584-8. Pp. xiii + 187. $35. In this excellent book, Chambers traces Baudelaire’s evolution, following the calamitous and disillusioning events of 1848–51 and the advent of the Second Empire, from a fetishizing aesthetic that counters ugliness, beautifies the ordinary, and acts as a negentropic element through the power of form, to a“poetics of the antipoetic”(23), a poetics accommodating and incorporating the disorder of the street and the world, a poetics of noise. For his demonstration, Chambers focuses on a number of poems drawn mainly from “Tableaux parisiens” and Le spleen de Paris. “Je n’ai pas oublié,” for example, shows not only Baudelaire’s formal mastery but also seeds of his dissatisfaction with fetishizing art and its illusionism.“Paysage” and “Le soleil” point to the abandoning of idealizing poetry. “Le cygne,” “Les sept vieillards,” “À une passante” evoke the life and crowdedness of cities, express the corrosive powers of time, and institute a dynamics of disalienating beauty.“Perte d’auréole,” in which the poet abandons his aura and effaces himself, and “Le mauvais vitrier,” which lays out the stages of Baudelaire’s aesthetic transformation, develop a noise-friendly poetics. Chambers’s readings are rich, precise, persuasive, and so are his remarks on such matters as allegory, the tension between supernaturalism and irony in Baudelaire, the poet’s attitude toward sculpture, or rhyme and its mediation of difference. Most interesting, perhaps, is Chambers’s discussion of the Petits poèmes en prose, which he views as having invented, inadvertently, a new genre: the urban diary. An Atmospherics of the City illuminates the very nature of modern art, an art that assimilates non-art or anti-art, and it draws a memorable portrait of an exemplarily modern Baudelaire. Modern and maybe postmodern, as Chambers emphasizes the perplexing undecidabilities in the poet’s work, his denial of human progress, and his belief that, ultimately, humans cannot know the truth, his move toward a “lowercase practice of the poetic” 256 FRENCH REVIEW 90.2 Reviews 257 (135), his refusal of totalization and completion. Chambers’s text constitutes a splendid achievement. University of Pennsylvania Gerald Prince Chouiten, Lynda. Isabelle Eberhardt and North Africa: A Carnivalesque Mirage. Lanham: Lexington, 2015. ISBN 978-0-7391-8592-6. Pp. 217. $85. At first glance, the life of Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904) seems to exemplify the subversive potential of nomadism and hybridity. The Swiss-born child of Russian and Armenian parents, Eberhardt traveled to Algeria, converted to Islam, wore men’s clothing, and married an Arab. But read closely, her diaries, letters, and fiction present a somewhat different figure. In her study of Eberhardt’s life and works, Chouiten argues that rather than subvert Orientalist understandings of race and gender, Eberhardt leveraged unconventional strategies—cross-dressing and religious conversion—to occupy a position of power from which to espouse a conventional worldview that supported the colonial project. While biographies of Eberhardt have tended to focus on her diaries and letters, Chouiten pays particular attention to her fiction as a way of plotting the author’s...

Emergence and the Forms of Metabolism

AbstractEarlier this year, Michael Weinstock published a seminal book, The Architecture of Emergence: The Evolution of Form in Nature and Civilisation, which challenges established cultural and architectural histories. The conventional worldview is expanded by placing human development alongside ecological development: the history of cultural evolution and the production of cities are set in the context of processes and forms of the natural world. As well as providing a far‐reaching thesis, Weinstock's book gives lucid and accessible explanations of the complex systems of the physical world. In this abridged extract from Chapter 5, Weinstock explains the dynamics of individual and collective metabolisms from which intelligence and social and spatial orders emerge. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Time for change? An exploration of complexity in health-care practice

In everything that health-care professionals do, in every evidence-based procedure or service they deliver, they are practitioners of a particular philosophy. However implicitly, they embrace a particular view of the world and a preference for some types of knowledge to make sense of the world from that perspective. In this article, the basis for the conventional world view held by health-care professionals is explored. Its basis in science is set out and compared to the development of two other traditions: naturalistic (giving rise to the principles of qualitative research) and complex (based on the non-linear dynamics of complex systems). At stake, in this challenge to the conventional explanatory model in health care, is the way in which three different types of knowledge have become recognized as relevant and acceptable. The conventional world view, and by extension the explanatory model inhealth care, is now challenged at its very core by the emergence of our understanding of chaos, complexity and complex adaptive systems. The nature of complexity and its relevance to professional practice is explored.

Reflections on the cosmic serpent

AbstractThe author takes Jeremy Narby's1 recent publication as a source of reflection on the nature of healing, consciousness and awareness and how knowledge of these can be acquired. As a molecular biologist, the author was confronted with many challenges to his conventional world view when exploring (initially with some scepticism) Narby's research and experiences of working with the Ashaninca people of the Peruvian Amazon. What follows is a personal reflection on how knowledge and awareness can change when we have to face up to new possibilities which shatter our established way of looking at things. Copyright © 2002 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

Apart from Freud: Notes for a Rational Psychoanalysis

JONATHAN COHEN: Apart from Freud: Notes for Rational Psychoanalysis. City Light Books, San Francisco, CA, 2001, 239 pp., $18.95, ISBN: 0-87286-378-6. A without Freud, or indeed, Apart from Freud, the provocative title of Jonathan Cohen's book on the hidden politics of psychoanalytic theory, will strike many readers as paradoxical or even absurd. How can there be that excludes the theoretical ideas of its founder? Yet, I believe Cohen makes strong case for his proposition. The author argues that he is unwilling to create yet another new school with its new terminology and that it would be better to proceed with revised form of psychoanalysis, holding on to its two most important, and in the author's eyes, most valid beliefs, the importance of early experiences and the unconscious. He suggests that we simply consider Freudianism as special case of psychoanalysis (p. ix). Cohen thinks Freud's initial intuitive insights were usually correct, but that he tended to modify (and distort) them to fit his conservative sociopolitical views, based on the burgeoning capitalist system of the time and on the philosophers who extolled it. He also regards many psychoanalytic revisionist attempts, such as hermeneutic or narrative theories, as not having addressed what he views from his liberal perspective as Freud's basic moral flaw. Jonathan Cohen, practicing psychoanalyst of over 25 years, who, judging from the book has in-depth knowledge of such fields as philosophy, linguistics, sociobiology, and political science, draws on these diverse fields to demonstrate Freud's theoretical fallacies. In addition, he uses very close reading of Freud's ideas and an equally close examination of the progression (or regression) of these ideas through time. The book is rare in-depth philosophical analysis of Freud's entire work. Apart from Freud is composed in circular, rather than linear fashion, with themes that reappear repeatedly in new configurations. An abstract thus presents considerable challenge to this reviewer! Cohen's most profound criticisms revolve around Freud's instinct theories, and their development from postulation of libido and self-preservation instincts-the latter of which Cohen views as potential source of moral propensities-to replacement of the self-preservation instinct by the aggressive instinct, arriving at Freud's well-known dual instinct of 1920 (p. 96). Before that, aggression had merely been defined as a response to threats to the self (p. 96). In Cohen's eyes this move, rather than the much discussed relinquishing of the seduction theory was watershed that removed from any sociopolitical reality eliminating social reasons for aggression. An even more dramatic move in the same direction was Freud's later years' invention of death instinct. Cohen attributes the shift in Freud's thinking to the horrors of World War I. Either there was something terribly flawed [about social institutions] or ... humans were perverse beasts who could not be effectively civilized under the best of circumstances (p. 98). Freud started to consistently choose the second alternative in his theorizing. Another aspect of his pessimistic vision is Freud's basic premise, shared with Hume and other philosophers of the liberal market economy, that the propensities of human nature and the needs of civilized society are in direct opposition, necessitating the inevitable repression and suppression of instinctual desires and leading to neurosis if this conflict between instincts and society was not successfully negotiated. Children, according to Freud would only become acceptable members of their society by being vigorously socialized into their parents' conventional world view, thus perpetuating the status quo. Freud's dark view of human nature, thinks Cohen, thus demands, by implication, oppressive authority to keep order in society. …

Jesus' kingdom parables as metaphorical stories: A challenge to a conventional worldview

Jesus' parables are to be read as metaphorical stories. Parable as metaphor demands that the parable remains open-ended and polyvalent, with the reader always involved in a participatory role. This article aims at showing that Jesus' kingdom parables are of a diaphoric, nature challenging the conventional worldview. It focuses on the parable 'A Man Had Two Sons' (Lk 15:11-22). This parable is interpreted from the Lucan perspective. It shows how the mytheme of the 'two-sons stories' is used as a tensive symbol in order to establish the Lucan notion of the all-inclusiveness of God's kingdom.