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Latest papers in the Humanities Journal

kathryn — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 04:16:56 +0000

The most recent issue of The International Journal of the Humanities includes:

My Sicilian Story: Pane e Zucchero (Bread and Sugar) by Sebastian Di Mauro.
White Prestige Ideology and its Effects on ELT Employment in Thailand by Phongsakorn Methitham.
Calligraphy Paintings in Malaysia: Clarification as an Art Tradition by Nor Azlin Hamidon, D’zul Haimi Md. Zain, Rahmah Bujang and Mariana Janeri.
Disclosure and Criticism in the Vietnam War Movie of the 1980s: An Interpretive Study of Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket by Rim Ktari.
A Cross-linguistic Study: Sex and Language Variation in Selected Nigerian Communities by Shirley Yul-Ifode.
Classical Reception Studies: Reconceptualizing the Study of the Classical Tradition by Maarten De Pourcq.
Language and Cultural Interconnectedness between Bruneian Malay and Sabah Malay Dialect: An Overview by Saidatul Nornis Mahali.
Empowering TESOL Teachers in Provincial Uruguay: The Power of Blended Learning by Magdalena De Stefani.
Queering and De-queering the Home: Private and Public Space in Contemporary Spanish Cinema by Adrián Gras-Velázquez.
Dramaturgical Techniques for Capturing Political Sensibility with Social Media: The Twitter Election Day Theatre and Poetry Project by Kerric Harvey.
A Visual Dialogue: What are the Inter Relational Dynamics of Grief? by Brian Sanstrom.
Comparative Struggles for Educational Equality in the US since the 1960s: The Case of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans by Guadalupe San Miguel Jr.
Attitudes of Special Education Teachers and School Psychologists: Individualized Education Plan (IEP’s) Developed using Traditional Assessments Versus IEP’s Developed using a Multiple Intelligence Assessment by Meshari Alhajri and Jerome M. Fischer.

Humanities Journal, Volume 9, Issue 4 now available

kathryn — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 04:14:43 +0000

The fourth issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of the Humanities has now been published.

Volume 9, Issue 4 contains:

Latest papers in the Humanities Journal

kathryn — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:43:58 +0000

The most recent issue of The International Journal of the Humanities includes:

Latest papers in the Humanities Journal

kathryn — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 01:42:35 +0000

The most recent issue of The International Journal of the Humanities includes:

Story Theory: Confessions of a Literary Darwinist

emily — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:09:20 +0000

From R. Salvador Reyes at Tottenville Review…

First confession. I didn’t start out this way: believing that art is a Godless domain, a tactically-consumed, evolutionarily-wrought siren to the mind—just another victim hunted by our massive, pulverizing desire to devour and catalog every pattern in the universe that presents itself to our perpetually-ravished brains. I didn’t believe any of those things. Not in the beginning.

In the beginning, I just wanted to write. Why should I care how humans had come to love literature and art? I didn’t care. Until I asked the question. How had humans come to love literature and art? People have been asking this for centuries, and they’ve put forth a plethora of fascinating answers. But during the last couple of decades, theorists have started examining the question through the lens of evolution—and it’s beginning to look like a new future for literary studies is taking shape. Two of the most eloquent and compelling arguments for art’s evolutionary roots are the recently published On the Origin of Stories (Harvard University Press), by Brian Boyd and The Art Instinct (Bloomsbury Press), by Denis Dutton. Both seem destined to become part of the foundation of the emerging field of Literary Darwinism—where literature is being examined from new viewpoints, like neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. More…

Humanities Journal, Volume 9, Issue 3 now available

kathryn — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 01:42:29 +0000

The third issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of the Humanities has now been published.

Volume 9, Issue 3 contains:

A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain

emily — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 20:11:30 +0000

From Samuel McNerney at Scientific American…

Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17^th century when he claimed that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible… the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” In the proceeding centuries, the notion of the disembodied mind flourished. From it, western thought developed two basic ideas: reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied and reason is transcendent and universal. However, as George Lakoff and Rafeal Núñez explain:

Cognitive science calls this entire philosophical worldview into serious question on empirical grounds… [the mind] arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experiences. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment… Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanism of neural binding. More…

What Is ‘Non-Western’ Philosophy?

emily — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 19:53:30 +0000

From Justin Erik Halldór Smith…

Part One, I.
I used to get very upset at the suggestion that there might be such a thing as ‘non-Western philosophy’. Some years ago a German anthropologist friend told me she had heard, out on Broughton Island in Arctic Canada, Inuit elders using their free time, in the dim light of slowly burning seal blubber, to engage in leisurely dialogue about the nature of space and time. That’s different, I insisted, because they were only addressing the issue (I supposed) within the comfortable mythological confines of their culture, rather than asking what space and time look like when you strip away your culture’s contingent myths, which are, as Spinoza would say, satisfying only to the imagination, and then see what is left over. I had an even stronger complaint about what had come to be called ‘African philosophy’, ‘Native American philosophy’, and so on. These, I thought, were more the product of an unfortunate misunderstanding brought about by the politics of identity, which supposed that every identity group –and often what counts as an identity group, I noted, is only slapped together in hasty response to the classificatory schemes of the West: as if there could have been anything like a unified tradition across the African or North American continent prior to the period of colonial expansion– must come up with its own version of whatever it is that the West is thought to do well. I felt horribly discouraged when, on more than one occasion, while working the ‘philosophy table’ at my university’s open house, I would meet adult Cree and Mohawks thinking of returning to school who, as they explained, might want to study ‘your’ (i.e., my) philosophy someday, but didn’t feel any particular urgency to do so, since “we’ve got philosophers of our own.” More…

Wordsworth’s Prelude, Poetic Autobiography, and Narrative Constructions of the Self

emily — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:39:56 +0000

Humans are inveterate storytellers. We make incessant and insistent narrative sense of the world around us and of our place in it—so much so that some scholars have suggested “homo narrans” as a more appropriate identifying description for our species than “homo sapiens”.1 Indeed, a long-standing tradition holds that our very self-identities have an essentially narrative shape: that who each of us is is determined by the stories of our lives, and that in some sense we create our selves by crafting those stories. In this essay, I focus on an especially compelling case of narrative self-construction: Wordsworth’s Prelude. I argue that we do need rich, substantive selves of the sort delivered by narratives like The Prelude, both in order to evaluate our past actions and to guide future ones. However, the very feature which makes Wordsworth’s poem so rhetorically powerful as an autobiography—his invocation of a robust teleological structure, which is imposed on him from infancy by Nature—also prevents us from embracing it as a model for our own self-understanding, because it conflicts sharply with modern views about ontology. Contemporary advocates of a narrative conception of the self, such as Jerome Bruner, Alasdair MacIntyre and Marya Schectman, drop The Prelude’s objectionable ontological assumptions. But rather than placing the narrative conception of self on a firm metaphysical foundation, this actually intensifies the threat of fictionalism: the risk that the selves we fashion through stories are mere self-deluding illusions. I conclude by gesturing toward the characters within stories as an alternative literary model which avoids many of these problems. More…

The Brontë sisters are always our contemporaries

emily — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 19:37:34 +0000

From Philip Hensher at The Telegraph…

As Ezra Pound said, literature is news that stays news. The great classics mutate to fit our preoccupations, revealing aspects of themselves that previous generations never suspected. Writers long dead come in and out of favour; reputations rise and fall. Who would have thought, in 1815, that the novelist now read and adored across the world would be, not Sir Walter Scott, but Jane Austen? And who, among the first readers of those astonishing books Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, would even begin to recognise the versions of them that 21st-century readers hold dear?

The Brontës have transformed themselves over a century and a half, even if the ongoing fascination perhaps says more about us than it does about them. A tiny teenage manuscript of Charlotte’s is about to be sold, its value estimated at between £200,000 and £300,000, which is as good a measure of enthusiasm as any. And the release of new film versions of her and her sister Emily’s best-known books – Cary Fukanaga’s Jane Eyre and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights – offers an opportunity to think about how we have remade these books in our own image. More…