The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History

Mali, Joseph

doi:10.1017/cbo9781139198882

Cited by 47 publications

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References 121 publications

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“…Michelet shared La Villemarqué's view that "the true national history of a people" was to be found in myth and popular poetry, and that the stories found therein were even more important than facts because they were true to the character of the people who created them (Crossley 1993, 194). Michelet, as an early translator of Giambattista Vico's Scienza Nuova (The New Science) (1725), would have been familiar with the latter's emphasis on the "people" as opposed to great men, as well as primitive man's predisposition to poetry (Berlin 1976, 42, 93;Mali 2012;Rushworth 2017). Michelet had even planned to write an "Encyclopédie des chants populaires" (Encyclopedia of Popular Song), modeled on Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), around 1828 (Bénichou 1970, 51).…”

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The poetry of Celtic places

Williams

2019

Nineteenth-Century Contexts

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The place of Celts and Celticity in the French imagination shifts radically during the course of the nineteenth century. 1 It is widely accepted that Ernest Renan's essay "La poésie des races celtiques" (Poetry of the Celtic Races) of 1854 is key in this development.Renan is often referred to as the point of departure in any investigation of the dominant images that we have of Brittanyindeed of Celticnesstoday. Along with Matthew Arnold's On Celtic Literature (1867), which is indebted to Renan's text, "La poésie des races celtiques" occupies a key position in the development of Celtic Studies as an academic discipline, and has colored views of Celtic lands and people ever since. The discourse inaugurated by Renan and Arnold has been described as a "Celticism," modeled on Edward Said's "Orientalism" (Mc Cormack 1985, 220; Kiberd 1996, 6), and Arnold's work in embellishing and interpreting Renan has been described as "arguably the most influential piece ever written in the field of Celtic studies" (Chapman 1992, 25).However, it is notable that, despite the mention of "race" in the title of Renan's essay, the discussion of poetry contained within seems to be just as much about place, as a passage near the opening demonstrates:"Le sommet des arbres se dépouille et se tord; la bruyère étend au loin sa teinte uniforme; le granit perce à chaque pas un sol trop maigre pour le revêtir; une mer presque toujours sombre forme à l'horizon un cercle d'éternels gémissements" (The treetops lay themselves bare and writhe; the heather extends its unchanging hue into the distance; at every step granite breaks through a topsoil too thin to clothe it; at the horizon an almost-always somber sea forms a circle of eternal sighs) (1928, 375-376). 2 In what is ostensibly a study of literature, we find a landscape conjured up by a vocabulary of human suffering called on to express a psychological state. 3 The present article explores descriptions of Celtic places that foreground the question of poetry and poeticness, with a focus on travel writing about two Celtic places, Brittany and Wales, by Jules Michelet (1798-1874), the foremost historian of his generation in what was a golden age of French history. Michelet's Breton pages are well known, since the notes in his travel journal for August 1831 were reworked to form the Breton section of his Tableau de la France (1833), before being taken up again in La Mer (1861), to be finally published posthumously as part of his Journal ([1828-1848] 1959). 4 His Welsh pages, on the other hand, have been overlooked, but repay close attention, not least

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confidence: 99%

The poetry of Celtic places

Williams

2019

Nineteenth-Century Contexts

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Odysseus’ (Memory) Scar: Geoffrey Hartman’s and Erich Auerbach’s Readings of Homer Through the Holocaust

Goldwyn

2022

Homer, Humanism, Holocaust

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Toward a dataist future: tracing Scandinavian posthumanism in Real Humans

Larsen

2021

AI & Soc

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Artificial intelligence is likely to undermine the anthropocentrism of humanism, the master narrative that undergirds the modern world. Humanity will need a new story to structure our beliefs and cooperation around. As different regions explore posthumanist alternatives through fiction, they bring with them distinct traditions of thought. The Swedish TV series Real Humans (2012–2014) and its British remake, Humans (2015–2018), dramatize the challenge of freeing oneself from cultural presumptions. When negotiating personhood with humanoid robots, the Swedish protagonist family presupposes a social-democratic ethos, which is a trace of Scandinavian humanism that carries into the family’s posthumanist beliefs. Using Heideggerian and related perspectives, I analyze these series to make a case for a dataist ontology with potential to re-enchant the modern world and bring forth a new epoch of being. Such a master narrative of algorithmic universality could be facilitated by a new level of interconnectedness made possible by AI. This ontology fulfills the requirements of Robbins and Horta (Introduction, Cosmopolitanisms. New York University Press, New York, pp 1–17, 2017) who call for a cosmopolitanism of inclusivity with room for overlapping conceptions to remedy our present era’s international dysfunction. The Swedish and British TV series suggest that even if humanity’s uniting around a dataist master narrative were to be driven by intercultural competition, the decisive choice might be out of human hands. Paradoxically, such disempowering in terms of agency is portrayed as necessary for human re-enchantment.

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The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History

Cited by 47 publications

References 121 publications

The poetry of Celtic places

The poetry of Celtic places

Odysseus’ (Memory) Scar: Geoffrey Hartman’s and Erich Auerbach’s Readings of Homer Through the Holocaust

Toward a dataist future: tracing Scandinavian posthumanism in Real Humans

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