Subtle Perspective Research Articles

A Comparative Exploration of Gender Representations in Persian Sufi Literature and Modern Literary Works

The research examines how gender is depicted in Sufi and modern Persian literature, exploring the complex factors that influence the representation of gender roles and identities throughout different historical periods. The study meticulously reviews these literary genres to identify the many perspectives on gender, acknowledging that each genre provides a distinct viewpoint through which societal values are conveyed. The investigation delves into not just literary aesthetics but also the cultural and historical conditions that have shaped the development of gender norms. This study examines how Sufi and modern Persian literature, which are deeply influenced by their specific time periods and cultural contexts, mirror and distort social perspectives on gender. Through the analysis of the progression of these depictions over time, the study sheds light on the profound transformation of gender norms and identities throughout the course of Iranian history. This inquiry enhances our comprehension of the complex relationship between literature, culture, and gender dynamics, providing significant insights into how literary works reflect and influence society's perspectives. The results of this study not only enhance academic discussions on Persian literature but also offer a subtle perspective to analyze the wider cultural weave of Iran.

The Primacy of Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World

The Primacy of Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World

Liquidity and attachment in the mobile hookup culture. A comparative study of contrasted interactional patterns in the main uses of Grindr and Tinder

ABSTRACTThis study compares the interactional practices for the main types of uses of the mobile dating applications Grindr and Tinder. The analysis shows that in both cases, a majority of users share a similar orientation towards a linguistic ideology regarding ordinary conversation as a social institution, as topic-based, as allowing individuals to share and update knowledge so as to enable rapport and intimacy. However, Grindr and Tinder users take almost opposite conversational stances regarding the organization of casual hookups as sexual, one-off encounters with strangers. While many gay Grindr users have to chat to organize quick sexual connections, they become wary of the way their electronic conversations might waylay them into more personal relationships and they try to prevent this by developing an interactional genre made of laconic, fact-checking and very short exchanges. On the other hand, many heterosexual users on Tinder are looking to achieve topically-rich chat conversations. Their interactional dilemma, then, is the achievement of such topically-rich conversation, but with complete strangers. The interaction-oriented comparison provides a more detailed and subtle perspective of the alleged ‘liquefaction’ of romantic relationships into a casual hookup culture through the use of location-aware mobile dating applications.

Another look at the universal grammar hypothesis: Commentary on Evans 2014

Another look at the universal grammar hypothesis: Commentary on Evans 2014 Adele E. Goldberg It is important to recognize that The language myth (TLM) is not a research monograph, but is instead aimed at a popular audience, and therefore it should be judged in this light. Popular books necessarily oversimplify certain issues, on pain of not being very popular, yet TLM does satisfy its intended purpose: it demonstrates, in a clear and engaging way, that the existence of a universal grammar, involving structure or syntactic knowledge that is unique to language and not learned, is quite far from established fact (see also e.g. Ambridge et al. 2014, Christiansen & Chater 2008, Elman et al. 1996, Evans & Levinson 2009, Everett 2012, Goldberg 2013, 2016, Hurford 2012, Newmeyer 2016, Sampson 2005, Tomasello 1995). The position that TLM counters is no straw man, as the following easy-to-find quotes make clear (boldface added): Two facts about language learning are indisputable. First, only a human baby, but not her pet kitten, can learn a language. It is clear, then, that there must be some element in our biology that accounts for this unique ability. Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (UG), an innate form of knowledge specific to language, is a concrete theory of what this ability is. (Yang 2004:451) Generative linguistic theory stands on the hypothesis that grammar cannot be acquired solely on the basis of an analysis of the input, but depends, in addition, on innate structure within the learner to guide the process of acquisition. (Lidz et al. 2003:295) the most controversial claim of Noam Chomsky’s is that Language is also an instinct. Many parts of Language are built in, or innate. Much of Language is an ability hard-wired into our brains by our genes … . There are very good reasons to believe … that a human faculty for Language (perhaps in the form of a ‘Language organ’ in the brain) is innate. We call this facility Universal Grammar (or UG). (Carnie 2013:19) [End Page 200] Many of the familiar arguments in favor of a universal grammar are addressed and countered in TLM, and the book weaves together discussions drawn from research in linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and anthropology. Evans agrees that human language is distinct from animal communication in many ways, even while he draws certain parallels between them (Ch. 2). While it follows from this generally agreed-upon conclusion that humans’ general capacity for language is in some way unique to our species, it simply does not follow that any knowledge or structure that is specific to language need be ‘innate’ (cf. Adger 2015:77 and the first quote above). Instead, a combination of prerequisites for language may be required, prerequisites that need not themselves be specific to language and that may interact with one another and the environment in complicated ways (Ch. 4). This more subtle perspective concerning how phenotypes relate to genotypes has much evidence in its favor and is, in fact, uncontroversial within biology generally (see Blumberg 2005 for a popular overview). E addresses the issue of whether there exists evidence of provable (i.e. falsifiable) language universals in Ch. 3. He briefly surveys a range of work on absolute and implicational (i.e. ‘if a language has X, then it has Y’) universals, and covers topics ranging from phonology to syntax in clear and jargon-free prose. He concludes that falsifiable language universals are relatively rare and are typically explicable in terms of the functional pressures of communication as well as domain-general constraints (see also Newmeyer 2016). Ch. 4 focuses on language acquisition, emphasizing the role of statistics in the input, as well as the functions of constructions that are learned. This chapter also reviews some important evidence that human ‘cultural-intelligence’ serves as a key and uniquely human prerequisite for language (see also Ch. 8; and for relevant data, see Herrmann et al. 2007, Tomasello 2009). Ch. 5 discusses the neural underpinnings of language, emphasizing arguments against a modular linguistic system. Here it may be worth pointing out that even if there do exist areas in the typically developed adult brain that are devoted to language (as argued in Fedorenko et...

The Social Dominance Paradox

Dominant individuals report high levels of self-sufficiency, self-esteem, and authoritarianism. The lay stereotype suggests that such individuals ignore information from others, preferring to make their own choices. However, the nonhuman animal literature presents a conflicting view, suggesting that dominant individuals are avid social learners, whereas subordinates focus on learning from private experience. Whether dominant humans are best characterized by the lay stereotype or the animal view is currently unknown. Here, we present a "social dominance paradox": using self-report scales and computerized tasks, we demonstrate that socially dominant people explicitly value independence, but, paradoxically, in a complex decision-making task, they show an enhanced reliance (relative to subordinate individuals) on social learning. More specifically, socially dominant people employed a strategy of copying other agents when the agents' responses had a history of being correct. However, in humans, two subtypes of dominance have been identified: aggressive and social. Aggressively dominant individuals, who are as likely to "get their own way" as socially dominant individuals but who do so through the use of aggressive or Machiavellian tactics, did not use social information, even when it was beneficial to do so. This paper presents the first study of dominance and social learning in humans and challenges the lay stereotype in which all dominant individuals ignore others' views. The more subtle perspective we offer could have important implications for decision making in both the boardroom and the classroom.

Symbolic Chiasm in Arvo Pärt’s Passio (1982)

Passio, is Arvo Pärt’s first large scale vocal-instrumental work in the tintinnabuli style and remains today one of his most significant compositions. In this setting of the Passion text according to St. John, Pärt codifies procedures of tintinnabuli that will remain his principle means of musical communication for years to come while implying a very important perspective of Johannine theology. His compositional design utilizes both small-scale and large-scale chiastic constructions and gives prominence to John’s observance in Chapter 18, verse 4, that Christ knows all that will occur in the events leading to his crucifixion. Seen in this light, the Passion narrative unfolds according to a pre-ordained plan; it is this subtle perspective of the Gospel that Arvo Pärt reveals musically in his Passio. This paper approaches a musical analysis of Passio in relation to John’s perspective that Christ knew all that was to follow. It illustrates that virtually every note is linked in some way to Pärt’s musical pilgrimage to the cross. With a microscopic lens, the analysis connects Pärt’s use of melody, texture, inversion and tintinnabuli to a poignant marriage of music and the biblical text. And on a macroscopic level, it is shown that musical events unfold over time to reveal the inevitability of the crucifixion. It is revealed that within the work’s tonal centres, large-scale textural procedures, pedal points and the music of the Exordium and Conclusio the path to the cross is present from beginning to end. In this way, the listener is taken through the narrative only to realize afterward that the Gospel’s outcome was present from beginning to end.

The Paradox of Transgressing Sexual Identities: Mapping the Micropolitics of Sexuality/Subjectivity in Ang Lee's Films

From a perspective of multiculturalism, this paper aims to analyze Ang Lee’s Wedding Banquet and Brokeback Mountain by elaborating on the issues of sex/gender/identity in the hope of exploring the process and problematics of cultural formations in the era of globalization characterized by multiculturalism. Based on Judith Buthler’s deconstructive/postmodernist view of sex/gender/identity, the first part of this essay evaluates simultaneously both the positive and negative aspects of these two films; whereas Deleuze’s literary aesthetics of minor literature offers me a subtle perspective on Ang Lee’s extraordinary achievement in creating a minoritarian artistic work that exposes the complexity of human psyche/desire, which constitutes the second part of this essay. In addition, both parts intend to reexamine, from a perspective of multiculturalism, how Ang Lee’s special micropolitics/aesthetics enables him to rewrite successfully Annie Proulx’s short story for the screen so as to create a globally popular American love story that not only distinguishes him from the mediocre Hollywood commercial romance film makers but also simultaneously brings him fame and profit.

Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (review)

Reviewed by: Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory Tareq Y. Ismael (bio) Ahmad H. Sa’diLila Abu Lughod, eds.Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. 356 pp. ISBN: 978-0-231-13579-5, $75.00. Published in 2007, just antedating the sixtieth anniversary of the Israeli state, this book is a timely and wide-ranging collection of essays concerning the Palestinian catastrophe—Nakba—and subsequent questions of Palestinian identity and existence. The mass-expulsion and the uprooting of 600,000 Palestinians (80 percent) in 1948 left a nation in exile, in continuous statelessness and refugee squalor. Hence, the rules that came to govern the lives of the Palestinian refugees are necessarily different from those of formal state citizens, and equally different are the tools necessary to record the modern history of the Palestinian people. In this book’s treatment of the Palestinian refugees, it juxtaposes the standard (Israeli) narrative of the cataclysmic events of 1948—afterwards the “Western” narrative—with the oral and recorded histories of the Palestinian Diaspora, and hence a direct contrast to the Israeli history of the victors. Ever since the violent beginnings of Israel in 1948, outlets of western media have propagated the Israeli standard narrative of a “return from exile, after millennia, with people with memory of suffering redeemed in . . . their own modern nation-state” (286). This projection of a mythical past onto a contemporary state project, wherein the name of the Palestinians—let alone their tragedy—is expunged from the history, has become the standard narrative that western peoples have internalized as established fact. Hence, over five decades, Israel and its supporters have rejected any moral/ legal culpability for the Palestinian Nakba, weaving this historical blackhole into the national myth of the Israeli state. The displaced Palestinian nation has been, comparably speaking, unable to present a counter-narrative to the Israeli national myth, since much of Palestinian history was contained in the realm of oral memory. Until recent developments in ethno-history and the oral tradition disciplines that depend on such memories, Palestinian oral history has been reflexively dismissed as unreliable when weighed against the presumptive strength [End Page 751] of standard scholarship, particularly where embodied in pro-Israeli sectors in academia and think-tank advocacy. For the last fifty years or so, there has been a spatter of Palestinian voices within the historical/academic mainstream (e.g., the late Edward Said), but it has had little impact upon the intellectual and moral centers of the western world—particularly when, as Ben Gurion put it, the formation of the Israeli state was “Western Civilization’s gesture of repentance for the Holocaust” (298), a sentiment that now describes the western (especially American) orientation towards Israel and its inconvenient Palestinian victims. Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu Lughod’s Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory is “neither a collection of personal reflections and testimonials nor is it a history proper; . . . it is a sustained examination of . . . the Palestinian social and cultural memory” (6–7) whose foundation is the resilient recording of the events before and after Nakba. The Nakba is the historical watershed in Palestinian collective memory, similar to, and no less morally severe, than the Jewish Diaspora. While the Nakba, for the Palestinians, marks the abrupt dispossession of national life and uprooting from national place, much like the Jewish Diaspora, it ushered in subsequent suffering for the Palestinian people, such as the 1967 war, the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the destruction of Palestinian life and property in refugee camps, the massacres in Sabra and Shatillah, and more recently the Israeli economic blockade of 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. The avowed goal of the book, according to the editors, is “to examine this painful site—Nakba—of memory in light of the larger comparative literature on memory, history and trauma” (4). A discerning reader of this book will notice its subtle perspective on the inseparability of memory, self, place, and identity, which is certainly true for the Palestinian people. As Paul Connerton observes, memory, as a process of recollection, calls back unique events, not as isolated episodes, but as parts of a...

Politics and International Investment

Political risk has been a major concern of international business scholars up to the 1970s, yet this line of research has become rather quiet in recent years. Maybe, businesses found the world rather predictable between “Iran 1979” and “Indonesia 1997”. Yet, the end of the cold war has not eliminated political risk. Recently research has taken a more subtle perspective, incorporating as political risk small changes in local institutions that may affect investors' profitability.

Does Education have Independent Power? Bernstein and the question of relative autonomy

In this article, I focus on some of the ways Basil Bernstein's positions can help us understand the question of the relative autonomy of the school and of the 'class belongingness' of its cultural dynamics. In the process, I show how this differentiation of various social fields of power and of the complex ways in which class relations work within them enables a considerably more subtle perspective on 'who controls what' and on what that 'what' actually is. I also argue that we cannot fully answer the question of whether schools can 'create a new social order' unless we unpack the relations of outside to inside, of what constitutes the inside, and especially of what the specific power relations are both within what Bernstein calls 'the symbolic field' and between it and 'the field of production' and the 'field of the state'. Of particular importance here is the notion of the 'pedagogic device', Bernstein's apparatus for demonstrating the specific cultural configuration that enables us to uncover 'why things stay the same' and how they might be different. For Bernstein, the issue became not only explaining change, but also explaining what he saw as the remarkable stability and similarity of education among different political economies. I use as an example the pedagogic device in one specific nation and demonstrate how we can employ it to more rigorously focus our attention on the possible effects education itself has.

Linguistic perspective in short news stories

Textual perspective is the introduction of a subjective viewpoint that restricts the validity of the presented information to a particular person in the discourse. Strong perspective is accomplished through quotation and focalization, that is, presentation of narrative material through a character's discourse or consciousness. Subtle perspective that introduces an implicit viewpoint, is accomplished by a variety of linguistic features such as tense shifts and marked choices of referring expressions. The effect of the two kinds of perspective on readers' appreciation of news texts and stories was tested in two experiments. In Experiment 1, news text and story versions with subtle and strong perspective were presented along with neutralized versions. Focalization made news text versions unacceptable, but was unproblematic in story versions. Text versions with focalization were judged as more subjective, more suspenseful, and livelier than versions without perspective. The failure of subtle perspective alone to show reliable effects in this experiment may have been due to the presence of the unacceptable focalized versions. Those versions were excluded from Experiment 2, where versions with subtle perspective were compared to neutralized versions. This restricted comparison yielded a positive effect of subtle perspective on acceptability and affective judgments.

‘STRANGE AND SUBTLE PERSPECTIVE …’: Van Gogh, The Hague School and the Dutch Landscape Tradition

‘STRANGE AND SUBTLE PERSPECTIVE …’: Van Gogh, The Hague School and the Dutch Landscape Tradition