Metaphor Of Palimpsest Research Articles

The Palimpsest of Welfarism: Enduring Layers of Paternalism in a New Zealand Industry Town

This paper explores the enduring impression made by industry and its representatives on the workforces, communities and locations in which it resides. This oral history study is based on a New Zealand single industry town developed in the post-World War II era and founded on the principles of industrial welfarism and paternalism. The study reveals that the employment relation practices of the town’s symbolic “founding father” have had an enduring effect on shared community identification long after the withdrawal of these practices, and the subsequent downsizing of the primary industry. Thus, the predominant memory was both shaped by principles of industrial paternalism and entwined with stories of recent events of downsizing and redundancy. Drawing on the metaphor of palimpsest, we consider how present accounts of downsizing and redundancy simultaneously overlay, dismantle and rewrite historical accounts of paternalistic interaction in the community. This paper highlights the enduring politics of industrial history, and the continued legacy of industrial strategies on the way in which we live, work and organise.

Landscape in space and landscape space (Anglo-American historiography)

The subject of this research is analysis of the problem of interaction between cultural landscape and space in the Anglo-American literature. Special attention is given to examination of concepts that interpret space as encompassing both, physical and symbolic components, which create the concepts of space as the network of relations. Particular interest of researchers towards determination of interconnection between the communities, their habitats and weakening of these interconnection in the process of globalization. Analyzing the problem of the “sense of place”, the author refers to the concept of design of space. Characteristics is given to different positions on the question of correlation of landscape and space. The authors highlight actively developing phenomenological approach towards studying cultural landscape. Since the metaphor of palimpsest is crucial in disclosure of the essence of landscape, consideration of space as a multilayered phenomenon that incorporates past and current functions, ideologies and physical contexts as an intertext, is demonstrated. The conclusion is made that one of the most promising trends is the understanding of landscape space as relational, when the landscape is viewed as a product of practice, trajectory and interconnection. Relational representations on the constantly changing world to a significant extent are formed by the actor-network theory, the “theory of becoming” or “new vitalism”, and hybrid geography. The actor-network theory is intended for overcoming the perceptions of world as comprised of discrete and limited objects, and suggest seeing the world comprised of networks. Each object or person can be interpreted as the cumulative result of network relations, and the sense of individuality and will is merely a relational effect.

Palimpsest Metaphor: Figures and Spaces of the Contemporary Project

What are the consequences of the use of the palimpsest metaphor on the construction of the contemporary project? The metaphor casts criticism on the modern project and opens to the long-term (longue durée). The investigation of territorial rationalities brings to the fore these temporal dimensions and the organizational structures of space. Understanding territorial rationalities is inescapable to define the basis of any exploration of the future of territorial, urban-rural configurations. The metaphor of the palimpsest alludes to the meeting/clash between different times, endless modifications and transformations. Until the use of the support is not so serious as to question its very existence, directions, dynamics and, at times, fortuitous encounters interweave on its shriveled skin; forms of power and violence are measured there, which, in turn, will generate new conflicts. “Unintentional monuments” are places where this intensity of pure overlapping disconnected intentions become monumental and the substance of a project, revealing, celebrating and exposing their landscapes, as episodes of collective human and environmental history. The palimpsest as a figure in the contemporary project is not only a criticism of the modern space, but the expression of a change of direction in the design activity, of its social role and of the theories intended to support it: Design space in the second degree.

The Autobiography of My Mother: Looking at the Past with Old Eyes.

The Autobiography of My Mother (Kincaid 1996) is Xuela’s story. Xuela as the narrator and protagonist of the novel ‘moves between the imaginary world of the text and the real world of Kincaid’s life’ (Edwards 116-17). The Palimpsest metaphor shows to be useful to represent the ‘palimpsesting of her identity’ that Xuela does in her autobiography because the final perception of Xuela’s identity implies a selection of experiences in which the visible surface makes it possible to perceive not only the young Xuela but that who never was and the life she did not allow herself to live.

Das palimpsestische Selbst. Zur Genese, Struktur, Darstellung und Vermittlung von personaler Identität nach Sören Kierkegaard

Abstract This article examines the subjective structure and genesis of personal identity in (some of) Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings. Based on a structural analysis of self-awareness (here, in particular, the category of existential becoming, the social embeddedness of the individual and the irreducible fact of mediation of personal identity), the main thesis is that, according to Kierkegaard, personal identity can best be described as a constant interweaving of hypertextual and intertextual layers. Accordingly, the central metaphor of palimpsest is used in order to account for the self-relation as an overwriting process, realized by a constant self-reinterpretation of the individual. The article focuses on certain structural, existential, hermeneutic, and semiotic key aspects of such an interpretation.

Palimpsest and heterotopia, metaphors of the Circular Economy

Words like palimpsest or heterotopia do not belong to the working vocabulary of materials or engineering sciences: they are used in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). A palimpsest is a manuscript written on an older document, the text of which has been erased. Heterotopia is a young word forged by Michel Foucault in 1967 to describe a closed space, the boundaries of which mark a discontinuity in terms of behavior: a jail or a monastery are thus a heterotopia. The Circular Economy (CE) is an essential concept in the framework of the ecological transition, pulled by a series of converging economic, ecological and political drivers. It is usually described as the adoption of a circular model of production to replace the “linear model”, but also as the new buzzword to describe material efficiency, the 3-R rule, the zero-waste ideal, the concepts of lean or frugal design or their reformulation by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, as a societal challenge and an ethical necessity. Materials producers claim that they have been practicing the Circular Economy since long before the expression was ever invented, thus à la Monsieur Jourdain, etc. The point of this paper is to describe the Circular Economy as a palimpsest and as a heterotopia and to use the metaphors, if indeed they are only metaphors, to highlight some of the less obvious features of the CE. A palimpsest is a parchment or a papyrus, which is used several times to support a series of consecutive texts. Secondary raw materials are like a palimpsest, because there are retrieved from a previous life and used again in a second life: a new artefact made from that material is like a new text written on/with this material – a metaphor also used, mutatis mutandis, in expressions like 3-D printing or laser scribing. Some interesting features of the CE pointed out by the metaphor: a the palimpsest can be used several times, like a material can be recycled several times; the concept of the palimpsest posits that the parchment is somehow more important than the text that is written on it, therefore a material is more important than the goods that are made of it; the palimpsest was used before the invention of paper and, similarly, the Circular Economy was the standard model before mass production of cheap consumer goods imposed the so-called “linear model”; a palimpsest keeps a fragmented memory of the past, in the same way as recycled material maintains a link to its past lives, through its composition in tramp elements. Examples of heterotopia are a prison or a cemetery. The Circular Economy defines a space where a particular material/element exists in its various avatars, impersonations and reincarnations and this may tentatively be worked out as a heterotopia. This is a more complex endeavor than discussing the palimpsest metaphor, but a potentially more fruitful one. Foucault has provided criteria defining heterotopia which can help us explore the analogy: particularly the point that such a space is either a space of illusion or a space of perfection. This analysis is original because it hybridizes materials and SSH concepts and thus fits with the exploration of the frontier between materials and society that SAM conferences are concerned about.

“Our Future Is Already in Jeopardy”

Duress results from the internalization of violence. Through the narratives of two Central African Republic student refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this article presents the multiple layers of violence they experience. After introducing violence, the article turns to its different layers by making use of the palimpsest metaphor. Three layers of violence interrelate and overlap: the first relates to chronic crisis in the Central African Republic; the second layer deals with the context of the urban jungle (Kinshasa); and the third layer is linked to the humanitarian agencies that fail to provide for urban refugees. The experience of these three layers adds up to duress. Duress colors the students’ agency and the decisions they make along their life paths.

Constructing urban cultural landscapes & living in the palimpsests: a case of Moscow city (Russia) distant residential areas

A metaphor of palimpsest is used to describe the multivocal cultural landscapes since the 1970s. Interventions into new cultural / humanistic geography, semiotics and the theory of regional geography help to regard each layer of the palimpsest as a constructed context, centered by dominant representation of a place. Real-and-imagined landscapes are regarded as palimpsests lived through everyday practices seen as processes of (re)construction of new layers. Trying to unite those “constructing’ and “living’ perspectives is a challenging task for urban cultural agenda. A series of mobile quest games was made by the author for Moscow Agency for Area Development through Culture in order to construct new tourist sights outside city centre. This project is discussed as a case of constructing new geographical contexts (palimpsest’ layers) and the lived experience rediscovering the distant residential areas, traditionally regarded as standardized “non-places’, as becoming rich in symbolic capital.

Interkulturelle Metaphern Überlegungen zu ihrer Theoretisierung am Beispiel des Palimpsests

Abstract Cultural theory is full of metaphors. In intercultural German studies (›interkulturelle Germanistik‹), metaphors play an equally significant role in the treatment of cultural concepts. It may seem surprising, though, that their use has not been analyzed from an intercultural perspective yet. This article discusses the potential of metaphors for intercultural thinking, and describes how different theories (Bernhard Waldenfels, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, Anil Bhatti and others) make use of them in their treatment of culture and identity. In particular, focus is given on the intercultural potentials provided by the palimpsest metaphor, which presents culture in its plurality, cross-border complexity and ambivalence.

New Trends in Native American Studies: The Road Back to Sweetgrass and the Palimpsest Approach to Native Fiction

This article reflects on recent developments in the broad category of Native American Studies, as it offers a particular proposal of analysis for contemporary Native literature which is based on the palimpsest metaphor. The text first revises the dialogue of Native Studies with the Turn to Ethics, emphasizing the primary ceremonial—or transformative—motivation of Native writing, and with Trauma Studies, offering a re-mapping of the paradigm by theorizing Native American grief and its political implications when expressed in literature. It then covers several recently articulated developments of Native storytelling: the dialogues between storytelling and theories; the concept of tribalography; and the recent turn to theory in Native studies. Arguing that the future of Native American Studies will necessarily have to reach for some level of balance between difference and relation, it reflects on contemporary Native identity, best illustrated by Gerald Vizenor’s concepts of the postindian and transmotion. The author then connects all these developments to the palimpsest metaphor, arguing that its emphasis on difference and relation, which come from the simultaneous view of the palimpsestic and the palimpestuous ways of understanding the metaphor, offers a useful way to interpret contemporary Native American literatures and identity, for it conveniently addresses the double reference to survival and the threat of disintegration that Native writing is largely based on. The article then analyses Linda LeGarde Grover’s The Road Back to Sweetgrass (2014) from the palimpsestic/palimpestuous perspective, examining the textual efforts to rescue hidden or written-upon meanings, and asserting the way in which those recovered voices are brought to the surface and are simultaneously acknowledged as part of a larger whole, as engaging in dialogic relation to a series of other voices with which they coexist in tension and contradiction. The double motivation of this reading—that of recovering, digging, denouncing, and of vindicating belonging, equality, and our common humanity—is key to the understanding of Native literature as a form of activism.

Narrating palimpsestic spaces

The term ‘palimpsest’ refers to medieval manuscripts that have been multiply erased and inscribed with the overlapping texts of successive scribes. More recently and amongst academics, the term has become a metaphor for describing the city, including both the physical urban form as well as memories and experiences of everyday urban life. The palimpsest offers a way of thinking not only about urban transformation, where new and repurposed structures exist alongside the old, but also changes in how the city is experienced, or how life stories are written upon and rewrite existing spaces. This paper focuses on the latter. Though the palimpsest metaphor has been used to describe material transformations of the urban, the question that this paper raises is: how can the notion of the palimpsest inform methodological approaches to researching how the city is lived and seen? Collaborative, digital storytelling that combines images, narration, and sound can provide a method that emphasises the polyvocality and multi-temporality that the term palimpsest implies. A palimpsestic approach to digital storytelling, as a visual and narrative method, gestures at places as open to future readings and inscriptions. This is relevant to all cities, but perhaps most obviously in cities where historical narratives, memories of violence, and questions over the future political direction of the country in which the city is located are all highly contested. To illustrate these points, this paper draws upon research conducted with young people in Beirut, Lebanon as part of a wider study about how youth experience citizenship and belonging in divided societies.

L’écriture au second degré et sa valeur communicationnelle dans le discours poétique

Writing in the second degree and its communicational value in poetic discourse. The article takes a look at some poetic strategies pertaining to writing “in the second degree”, and their more general implications, mostly from a communicational perspective. The cognitive metaphor of palimpsest covers various forms of rewriting and absorption of discursive otherness. Against this theoretical background, the dialogic-communicative framework is deemed highly adequate for the comparative analysis as a whole and acquires renewed importance in the context of contemporary productions, where ironic double-voicedness, reported discourse, polyphony and intertextuality have become the very texture of poetic discourse. A new reading contract is established by the specificity of postmodern intertextuality, due to its inherent ambivalence towards previous texts. By drawing on examples from the Romanian poets Radu Andriescu, Mircea Cărtărescu and Alexandru Mușina, I argue that the differential re-enunciation of already codified texts and discourses relies, for its illocutionary and communicational impact, on the deliberate vacillation between pastiche and parody.

Persistencia de la India en Octavio Paz

Este ensayo revisa la presencia de la India en la literatura del poeta Octavio Paz, usando para ello la metáfora del palimpsesto, de capas de sentido y de experiencia sobrepuestas. Para esto se revisa la estancia del poeta en la India como parte de una cierta “educación sentimental”, a partir de obras como Ladera este, El mono gramático y Vislumbres de la India.

O źródłach pamięci miasta w nowoczesności

The analysis of urban experience of modernity developed simultaneously with the analysis of collective memory. Urban space is related with a palimpsest metaphor, which includes urban memory in the history of memory understood as a history of the media. In recent years the relationship between memory and a city is analyzed on the examples featuring multiculturalism and migration movements of the cities of the Central Europe, e.g. in the Vienna monograph ca. 1900 Das Gedächtnis der Städte (The Memory of the City) by Moritz Csaky. On the other hand, the media paradigm is used by Christine Boyer, who analyses visual manifestations of city memory in her book The City of Collective Memory. Juxtaposition of the two mutually complementing scientific attitudes invokes a need to postulate a deeper analysis of the role of popular culture and visuality in shaping the memory of cities, as well as conducting further studies on cross-country and transnational “cultural tangles”.

Big Girls Do Cry: Femininity and "Toughness" in the Kerrigan-Harding Affair

connection to healing. One production appears to be Western-style naturalism and the other avantgarde-the meaning of which is unclear. plight of ethnic Koreans has been very much in the Japanese media lately as a political and social concern. If these productions are attempts at healing, who is being healed? Do they seek to politicize the situation? Do they educate Japanese audiences? Only one of these productions has been shown in both Japan and Korea. Playwright Hirata's suggestion, as you translate it, that The Korean language is not fit for literature is disturbing when taken out of context. Does he mean the audience's warm, if subdued reaction to the production is somehow inadequate because the play was performed in Korean? I don't know. Richard Schechner suggests there are four functions for performance: Education, Pleasure, and Ritual, as well as Healing. To focus simply on one of them with regard to Japanese performance (or any other culture's performance, for that matter) is limited. Through the palimpsest metaphor, I was able to examine a range of performance venues available to the Tokyo theatregoer. Since there are about 80 theatre companies active at any time in metropolitan Tokyo, there is much to be added to my short list. However, the wide variety of performances illustrated by my report cannot be analyzed simply through the metaphor of ancient healing rituals. A broader approach was needed, so I employed one.

Theatrical Palimpsest: Tokyo 1992

Richard Schechner once described Asian cultures as palimpsests-literally, tablets or parchments reused after previous writing has been erased. Since old writing is always partially visible under the new, a palimpsest exists as layers of past and present. The palimpsest metaphor applies to Japan not only historically, but culturally. Women in kimonos walk down the street next to salarymen in Italian suits. People often marry in Shinto ceremonies (though Western-style chapel weddings are becoming popular) and are buried after a solemn Buddhist funeral. Tokyo hosts a full range of theatre styles: shingeki, derived from Western-style realism; shin'pa, historical plays that borrow from both realism and kabuki; the unique performing style of Takarazuka, which combines French revue, American musical theatre, Nihon buyo, and high melodrama with noh and kabuki. Underground and experimental work shares advertising space with more established theatres in the famous Pia Guide.