Quest For Redemption Research Articles

Symbolism and Psychological Depth in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Its Influence on Modern Literature

This paper delves into the intricate layers of symbolism and psychological depth in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s seminal work, Crime and Punishment. By unraveling the complex psyche of the protagonist, Raskolnikov, the study explores the novel’s exploration of existential dilemmas, moral ambiguity, and the quest for redemption. The analysis further extends to the symbolic elements embedded within the narrative, such as the pervasive use of crosses, blood imagery, and the urban landscape of St. Petersburg, which collectively enhance the novel’s exploration of human suffering and alienation. Additionally, the paper examines the profound influence of Dostoevsky’s themes and narrative techniques on modern literature, tracing echoes of Raskolnikov’s psychological turmoil in characters and narratives of subsequent literary movements, including existentialism and modernism. Through a detailed investigation of these elements, the study aims to underscore the enduring relevance of Crime and Punishment in the contemporary literary landscape and its pivotal role in shaping the trajectory of modern literature.

(F)ailing mothers and the quest for redemption: a sociological study of postnatal depression recovery blogs

(F)ailing mothers and the quest for redemption: a sociological study of postnatal depression recovery blogs

Redemption in the South African West: Violence, Colonialism and Oppression in Five Fingers for Marseilles (2018)

ABSTRACT In the South African Sesotho-language Western Five Fingers for Marseilles (2018), Tau flees his hometown of Marseilles in the aftermath of a violent incident. Returning after apartheid ended, Tau finds his hometown in ruins at the hands of some of the very individuals—his childhood friends—who were supposed to protect it. Tau seeks to save Marseilles from those who corrupt it and seeks redemption for himself and the town in the process. In this article, we demonstrate that the film borrows genre conventions and iconography from the Western to tell its story of redemption, and in telling this story the film invokes a general disillusionment with contemporary South African politics. Tau’s quest for redemption is as much political as his self-forgiveness is personal, and this redemption is made possible through an atonement for the past to halt the intergenerational violence that characterises South Africa and Marseilles in the post-apartheid era. Marseilles can only be a life-sustaining, generative community in the absence of the violence of colonialism and corruption.

Working on Ourselves: Jobseeking as a Quest for Redemption

Working on Ourselves: Jobseeking as a Quest for Redemption

The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works by Rares G. Piloiu

Reviewed by: The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works by Rares G. Piloiu Carl Niekerk Rares G. Piloiu, The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2018. 338 pp. Rares G. Piloiu's The Quest for Redemption offers a comprehensive study of Joseph Roth's fictional works, including a review of scholarship and some interesting side glances at Roth's journalism. The author argues for the centrality of Jewish thinking in Roth's work—in the form of a turn to tradition and a spiritual, at times mystical experience of authenticity and moral certainty lost in the modern, overly rational world. A central text for Piloiu is Roth's essay "Juden auf Wanderschaft" (1927), a text documenting Roth's confrontation with the primitive conditions under which many Jews lived in Eastern Europe and their remarkable spiritual resilience. Piloiu is interested in the notion of "redemption," understood, following Hasidic thinking, as an everyday, historical experience (43) that is at the same time mystical, religious, social, and also moral and individual (46–47). Faced with the unappealing alternatives of the bourgeoisie's assimilationist rationalism and an "emerging nationalism," Roth in his work promotes a notion of "redemption" that allows for "a more meaningful identification of the individual with the community and tradition" (51). The notion is admittedly vague, but Piloiu does make the convincing point that a similar turn to Jewish tradition can be found in texts by Rosenzweig, Buber, and, somewhat more distantly, Kafka, Freud, Benjamin, and Bloch, albeit in very different forms and shapes—nuances that sometimes get lost in his argument. How, for instance, does Austria exemplify the "order of redemption" (221) understood in a Hasidic sense? To me one of the key questions this study raises, but only implicitly, is how the model of redemption is linked to other images Roth invents to describe humankind's metaphysical homelessness—is there indeed one model underlying all of Roth's writings, or does his work rather offer a series of narratives, figures, and images all meant to illustrate the human condition but from a variety of perspectives? Is it indeed the case that modernity, rationalism, and secularization, in a world focused on the individual [End Page 99] but not the collective, are always and by necessity tied to each other? Or do Roth's fictional worlds, at times, also allude to modes of being modern that do respect diversity? Without a doubt, Piloiu's approach works well for certain texts. This goes for Hiob (1930), which is indeed a meditation on a man who, lured by the promises of modern society, leaves his homeland with his family, faces a series of major trials to eventually return to find peace and a spiritual home. Roth's Tarabas (1934) too can be read as the story of a protagonist who abandons a history of violence and undergoes a long process of redemption to eventually embrace tradition. But doesn't the same text also show how an investment in tradition and religion can lead to violence? It is the uncovering of a painting of the Virgin Mary that triggers the violence at the core of the text when the Jewish innkeeper in whose inn it is discovered is accused of having desecrated it, leading to what Piloiu describes as a "moment of collective psychosis" (158). The limits of the concept of "redemption" are particularly clear when one looks at the novel Radetzkymarsch (1932), of which Piloiu offers a reading I do not find very convincing (205–37). It is precisely the focus on "tradition" and the way the past is constructed (the story of the Hero of Solferino) and ideologically (ab)used in the service of empire that keeps the representatives of the second and third generations of the Trott a family from finding anything like authenticity or developing a moral outlook on life. Cannot Carl Joseph's heartbreaking love affair with Frau Slama be understood as an argument for a more modern attitude toward sexuality? Carl Joseph at the end of the novel indeed does act morally—he is killed seeking to provide his men with drinking...

Voice

Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker describes a spate of current essays by men disgraced by #MeToo, essays that speak of what these men have lost personally and professionally and their quest for redemption, as bearing “the gravitational pull of male power . . . exerting itself, turning our attention back to the place where it has been trained to linger: the hero’s journey of

Dreaming as a critical discourse of national belonging: China Dream, American Dream and world dream

AbstractThis article explores the normative politics of national belonging through an analysis of the ‘China Dream’ and the ‘American Dream’. It traces how politicians and public intellectuals employ such slogans to highlight how national dreams emerge in times of crisis and involve a combination of aspirations and anxieties. It compares parallel rhetorical strategies – ‘patriotic worrying’ in China and the American Jeremiad in the US – to examine how belonging to these two nations involves a nostalgic longing for the past as a model for the future. Debates about the meaning of these national dreams highlight the tension between freedom and equality in the US, between the individual and the collective in China, and between longing for the true nation, and belonging in the actual nation for both countries. It concludes that while this quest for redemption through past models limits opportunities for critical discourse in China, the American Dream still contains much ‘promise’. The China Dream and the American Dream thus are, at the same time, 1) familiar expressions of nationalism and national belonging, and 2) ongoing self/Other coherence‐producing performances that help us to question received notions of nationalism and national belonging.

Society as the mode of redemption: the individual in Georg Simmel's early sociological writings

Margarete Susman, a close friend of Georg Simmel, once described his spiritual life in terms of a philosophical quest for redemption,1 culture constituting for him – in life no less than thought – ...

The Korean Adam: Yi Hyoseok and Walt Whitman

Yi Hyoseok (1907-1942) was one of the major Korean writers of his time, producing over two hundred works of poetry and prose. His popularity continues to this day: his works, which are included in almost every Korean best-twenty list of the last fifty years, are present in all authoritative anthologies and are taught as part of the governmentdesigned high school curriculum.1 Yi took his literary cues from the West more proactively than many of his contemporaries. He was especially influenced by the Miltonian trope of the loss of paradise and the Whitmanian version of redemption. It is in this context that I want to examine how these influences manifest themselves in Yi Hyoseok's literary consciousness, focusing in particular on how Walt Whitman's literary persona in Leaves of Grass appears in and shapes one of Yi's major pieces of short fiction.In 1910, Korea became a colony of the Japanese Empire, thereby losing its independence. However, at the same time, Korea, as a colonial subject, began to be flooded by the same forces of modernity that had been rapidly transforming Japan since the beginning of the Meiji Restoration (1868). One of these imports was the formation of a modern Korean literature following on the heels of similar developments in Japan. By the mid-to-late 1930s, when Yi Hyoseok was at his most prolific, Korean literature written according to Western literary conventions was only in its third decade.Yi's brand of literary modernism took on an eclectic flair that even to this day is difficult for critics to pin down. His use of a variety of themes, including a pronounced lyricism, a powerful-even graphic- sexuality, an urbane cosmopolitanism, and a unique, verse-like prose style seemed to baffle later critics in their attempts to categorize him as both a writer and a person. In an 1937 essay titled My School Days published in Yosung [Women] magazine, Yi talks about some of his literary influences. In addition to mentioning specific writers (including Shelly, Yeats, and Whitman), he gives two other pieces of information that provide insight into his literary world. First, Yi describes himself as being initially attracted to poetry, a strong influence on his burgeoning literary self-awareness. Second, Yi describes absorbing both romantic and realistic literature, going even further to suggest that these two things can and, in fact, must co-exist in art. For Yi:Literature grew out of a dialectic process between poetry and prose, and art was founded in the nexus where reality and dreams meet. Even when the apex of realism is reached, perhaps unknowingly the dream world is therein incorporated and this is not only essential to humanity but also may be the essence of art.2It is clear, then, that Yi took inspiration for some of his prose from poetry. The most obvious examples of such poetic influence are the many references one can find in his work to Milton's Paradise Lost. Yi had written his graduation thesis on John Milton and subsequently made extensive use of the Miltonic archetype of the loss of paradise and the quest for redemption in his two completed full-length novels, Hwabun [Pollen, 1938] and Byeokgong Muhan [Endless Blue Sky, 1940]. His use of the loss (and recovery) of paradise motif is subversive of Milton in both the Blakean sense (the earth-and not heaven-is figured as paradise) and the Whitmanian sense-the Adamic protagonist seeks to recover/create a new paradise he has never known, having committed no original sin and suffered no loss.3According to one source, Yi first came into contact with Whitman while in high school. Yi attended the best high school in Seoul, one that prepared students for entrance to the Imperial University. Here he immersed himself in a comprehensive poetry reader published in Japan, which included, in addition to Whitman, Heine and Goethe.4 Later, as a student of the English Literature Department of Gyeongseong Imperial University, he no doubt came into further contact with Whitman's work in the course of his studies. …

The Quest for Redemption: Penitent Demons Leading Christians to Salvation in Medieval Christian Exempla Literature

The Quest for Redemption: Penitent Demons Leading Christians to Salvation in Medieval Christian Exempla Literature

Modernist Humanism and the Men of 1914: Joyce, Lewis, Pound, and Eliot by Stephen Sicari (review)

Reviewed by: Modernist Humanism and the Men of 1914: Joyce, Lewis, Pound, and Eliot by Stephen Sicari Janine Utell (bio) Modernist Humanism and the Men of 1914: Joyce, Lewis, Pound, and Eliot, by Stephen Sicari. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011. xiv + 224 pp. $59.95. One of the most controversial moments in Joyce studies emerged from Hans Walter Gabler’s decision to define, once and for all, the word known to all men. The debate enlivened the pages of this journal and elsewhere, and I am sure most readers know the passages of Ulysses in question.1 Gabler’s introduction, in “Scylla and Charybdis,” of the purported answer from Stephen Dedalus—”Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men” (U 9.429–30)—both solved the question and raised further issues. How are we to take this? Is it ironic? Does it provide a proleptic moment of connection with Bloom, who will assert in “Cyclops” that “[f]orce, hatred, history, all that. . . . everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life. . . . Love. . . . I mean the opposite of hatred” (U 12.1481–85). Of course, Bloom’s humane statement is immediately denigrated by the barflies, but some readers have taken the Citizen’s assessment—”A new apostle to the gentiles. . . . Universal love” (U 12.1489)—quite literally as a credo for the book. Love, universal love, humanistic love, transcendent love, ethical love, agape, eros: Gabler gave a number of critics (myself included) a license to love love.2 Stephen Sicari’s book Modernist Humanism and the Men of 1914: Joyce, Lewis, Pound, and Eliot makes a case for the primacy of love in Joyce’s work and others. In his reading of Joyce, he focuses on Ulysses, arguing that its humanistic vision takes the place of a radical skepticism that was originally part of the modernist project. Ulysses is the earliest work examined by Sicari here; after a chapter on Joyce’s 1922 novel, he moves on to Wyndham Lewis’s The Revenge for Love, Ezra Pound’s late cantos, and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.3 As he writes in the conclusion to his study, titled “Modernist Humanism: A Love Story,” “Each in his own way discovered love, or agape, as the permanent and constant ideal capable of grounding a sense of human being and of value” (198). The years of Blast contained a call to reject, even destroy, institutions and the authoritative forms of knowledge and discourse they supported. Once those forms were emptied out, however, the authors discussed here sought something new, even redemptive, to fill that space.4 What they found was a humanism that was not modernist but actually hearkened back to the early modern period: a rejection of rationality, order, and the strictures placed on experience by reified [End Page 769] forms of knowledge, all in the service of reclaiming the nobility of the individual from the indignity of modernity with its ideologies, bureaucratic dehumanization, and mechanization of everyday life. Sicari claims for each writer a humanism reminiscent of the intellectual and spiritual stance of early modern thinkers like Erasmus, Dante, and François Rabelais, rooted not in an Enlightenment tradition but rather a Christian one, characterized by faith, love, and the quest for redemption. Sicari’s modernist humanism has four qualities, exemplified by the chosen writers: a move to situate the body as something sacred and worthy, a belief in the power of love, a rejection of mastery in favor of humility, and an acceptance of the transcendent and the ways it allows us to push against the limits of language and time. For readers of Joyce, the implications of Sicari’s argument are that Leopold Bloom is conceived of as a Christ-like figure and Ulysses as a text putting forth an incarnational vision of love and redemption. In his earlier book, Joyce’s Modernist Allegory: “Ulysses” and the History of the Novel, Sicari reads the trajectory of Ulysses as moving from the naturalism of the early Bloom episodes to a more figurative, allegorical, allusive style that opens a path to something more visionary: “The Bloom of the...

Informal reckonings: conflict resolution in mediation, restorative justice, and reparations

Part 1: Formal and Informal Justice: What is 'Formal' Justice? The Critique of 'Formal' Justice. The Reparational Turn: Emerging Visions of 'Informal' Justice. The Informal/Formal Justice Complex. Justice: The Grand Illusion? Part 2: Resolving Conflict in a Changing World: Understanding Transformations in the Juridical Field. Neoliberalism and Governmentality. Communicative and Instrumental Forms of Informal Justice. Changing Historical Contexts and Changing Justice Practices. The Quest for Redemption (Perpetrators and Victims) Part 3: Mediation as 'Informal Justice': What is Mediation? Its Origins and Position in the Juridical Field. Mediation Within the Field of Civil Conflict. The Strengths and Weaknesses of Mediated Settlements. Splits in Mediation Practice: The Fragmentation of the Mediation Field (e.g. Evaluative, Facilitative and Transformative Mediation). The Prospects for Mediation in the Informal/Formal Justice Complex Part 4: Restorative Justice as 'Informal' Justice: What is Restorative Justice? Its Origins, Intersections With Mediation and Position in the Juridical Field. Restoration Within the Field of Criminal Conflict. The Strengths and Weaknesses of Restoration. Splits in the Practice of Restoration: 'Communitarian' and 'Governmentalist' Restoration. The Prospects for Restorative Justice in the Informal/Formal Justice Complex Part 5: Reparations As Informal Justice: What Are Reparations? Their Origins, Intersections with Mediation and Restorative Justice and Position Within the Juridical Field. Reparations Within the Fields of National and International Conflict. The Strengths and Weaknesses of Reparations. Splits in the Field of Reparations: Reparations for Justice and Reparations for Certainty. The Prospects for Reparations in the Informal/Formal Justice Complex Part 6: Conclusions. Summary of Noted Tensions and Contradictions in the Juridical Field (Pertaining to Mediation, Restorative Justice and Reparations). Reconfiguring the Informal/Formal Complex. Towards 'Transformative Justice'

From Nation State to World Empire: Franz Rosenzweig's Redemptive Imperialism

At first glance, there seems to be no reason to question widely-held view that Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption denies politics a positive role in humanity's quest for redemption. For it is well known that Star presents Jewish people as a religious community which anticipates redemptive unification of world humanity before only by grounding its existence in a realm wholly beyond political vicissitudes of world history. Indeed, according to Rosenzweig, state acting in history cannot realize perfect community of all with God which Jew feels he already possesses in circuit of every year,2 and hence, the true eternity of eternal people must always be alien and enraging to state and to history of world.3 The proleptic eternity of Jewish existence gives lie to worldly and all-tooworldly sham eternity of historical moments of nations, moments expressed in destiny of their states.4 Contemporary commentators on Rosenzweig's writings have found in this contrast between state's violent, unsuccessful attempts to conquer history, and Jewish people's peaceful anticipation of redemption from a standpoint outside history, evidence for Rosenzweig's rejection of politics as a realm in which central problems of human existence can be addressed, and for his corresponding turn towards religion. What makes this turn all more profound, they point out, is how consumed Rosenzweig was by political affairs both before First

Saxophones and Smothered Rage: Bob Kaufman, Jazz and the Quest for Redemption

Jack Kerouac once mused that Bob Kaufman's life was "written on mirrors with smoke" (Clay n.p.). While much of that smoke emanated from Kaufman's own mouth, his biography has also been somewhat haphazardly pieced together from various legends, hearsay, fading memories and book jacket blurbs. One need only trace the relatively spare (but growing) literary critical treatment of Kaufman and how his accounts of his ancestry have changed to recognize how tenuous the Bob Kaufman narrative is. 1 There has been a burgeoning critical attention to Kaufman in recent years coinciding with the reevaluative projects surrounding the Beat Generation, Black Arts Movement and the African-American left.

Christian religion under the conditions of modernity: Aspects of the nineteenth-century quest for redemption

Christian religion under the conditions of modernity: Aspects of the nineteenth-century quest for redemption

McGovern at Wheaton: A quest for redemption

This article employs Kenneth Burke's notion of interlocked moments to examine the speech, “Sources of Our Strength,” delivered by Senator George S. McGovern on October 11, 1972, at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. A clear rhetoric of change emerges, indicating a quest for redemption as the preeminent motive inherent in McGovern's discourse.