Browsing by Subject "Intellectual history"
Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Continuity and change in the concept of freedom through three generations of the modern Arab Renaissance (Nahda)(2011-08) Bush, Stephen Andrew; Di-Capua, Yoav, 1970-; Ali, SamerThis thesis traces the development of the concept of freedom through three generations of the Modern Arab Renaissance (Nahda). The first chapter challenges the claim that the concept of freedom, in the sense of a political right, was absent from Arab thought prior to the French occupation of Egypt (1798-1801). ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti’s (1754-1825/6) chronicle of the occupation reveals that he possessed the concept of freedom despite the lack of an Arabic word to identify it. Therefore, when Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi (1801-73) translated the French term liberté into Arabic, through a semantic expansion of the word hurriyah, he was naming rather than introducing the concept. The second chapter turns to Syria and examines how Butrus al-Bustani’s (1819-83) advocacy of the freedom of conscience (hurriyat al-damir) as an individual right reflects the influence of his American missionary mentors. However, while the missionaries used this concept to defend their narrow sectarian interests, Bustani believed that the freedom of all citizens must be protected equally by a secular government. The third chapter follows two Syrian friends, Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935) and Farah Antun (1874-1922), who migrated to Egypt where their differing visions of reform brought them into conflict on the pages of their respective literary journals. While Antun argued that secularism provides the best guarantee of freedom, Rida contended that true freedom is only found in Islam. Despite this divide, they shared the same fundamental understanding of the value and meaning of freedom. This chapter shows that the concept of freedom is compatible with differing political ideologies while maintaining its core semantic field. Although there were some changes in how Arab intellectuals conceived of freedom during the nineteenth century, this study demonstrates that there was considerable continuity.Item Language, nature, and the politics of Varro’s De lingua Latina(2013-08) Lundy, Steven James; Riggsby, Andrew M.This dissertation is a historical analysis of Varro’s De Lingua Latina, a linguistic treatise composed in the 40s BCE during Rome’s transition from oligarchic Republican government to the monarchic settlement of the Augustan Principate. I advance a reading which restores contemporary political and intellectual context to the treatise, complementing and revising previous scholarship which has traditionally focused on the Greek philosophical pedigree of Varro’s work. As such, I explore Varro’s thematic emphasis on natura (‘Nature’) in his linguistic programme, which, as a term with wide-ranging intertextual functions, embodies its complex philosophical, political, and literary character. This five-chapter dissertation is subdivided between the surviving books on etymology (Chapters 1-3) and inflection (Chapters 4-5). In Chapter 1 (“Organisation and Meaning in Varro’s Etymologies”), I explore Varro’s etymologies in De Lingua Latina, Books 5-7, and explain how his programmatic emphasis on natural philosophy conveys his unique etymological authority. In Chapter 2 (“Grammatical Discourse in De Lingua Latina”), I consider Varro’s reception of grammatical techniques of etymological exegesis, elucidating his preference for philosophical readings of poetry and the social value of literary sophistication in the late Republic. Chapter 3 (“Ethnography and Identity in Varro’s Etymologies”) develops Varro’s etymological project as a kind of ethnography of the Roman people, which contextualises Varro’s philosophical intervention in the changing circumstances of his era. Chapters 4-5 are devoted to an analysis of Books 8-10, in which Varro describes his theory of morphological inflection (declinatio naturalis) as a platform for Latin linguistic standardisation. In Chapter 4 (“Declinatio and Linguistic Standardisation in the late Republic”), I survey the politics of linguistic standardisation in the late Republic. Mediating in a debate between Cicero and Caesar, I describe Varro’s nuanced revision of existing models of analogical inflection, and characterise his use of natura to explain linguistic standards. In Chapter 5 (“Linguistic Analogy and Natural Ratio in De Lingua Latina, Books 8-10”), I relate Varro’s linguistic innovations to contemporary shifts in cultural authority, and demonstrate how his transference of linguistic standardisation to philosophy entails a radical reorganisation of the existing political status quo.Item Literature as public sphere : gender and sexuality in Ottoman Turkish novels and journals(2008-08) Yildiz, Hülya; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-This study examines the mutually constitutive relationship between the print culture of the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the framework of social, cultural and political transformations in which that culture operated. This study crosses traditional disciplinary lines between literary studies and intellectual history by arguing for the modification of one of the central premises of modernization theory: the existence of an overtly masculine political public sphere standing in contrast to a supposedly nonpolitical feminine domestic and private sphere. By examining newspapers, magazines, journals, and novels, which reflected the emergence of communities of readers, I show that the print culture became central to the mediation and diffusion of themes in public discourse; and furthermore, I show that it diminished the separation between the public and private spheres as it penetrated into the domestic space and was used to insert issues from the private sphere into the public domain. Arguing that Ottoman intellectuals saw the novel as an instrument to disseminate their political, social, and cultural agendas, I examine Henüz On Yedi Yaşında (Only Seventeen Years Old; 1882) by Ahmet Mithat Efendi, focusing on how gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in early Turkish novels were imagined and represented. Based on my research in Ottoman and Turkish archives between 2004 and 2006, I show how women’s journals ensured the visibility of Ottoman women as writers in the public sphere. Women’s journals established a real intellectual community of women writers and readers who between them overtly introduced a feminist agenda into the public sphere. As part of my project of recovering the cultural work women's novels did within the political arena of nineteenth century Ottoman society, I also discuss the forgotten life and works Fatma Aliye Hanım, one of the first Ottoman woman novelists, analyzing two of her novels, Muhâdarât (1891-92) and Refet (1897). Finally, I explore the reasons why several Ottoman women writers were forgotten after the establishment of the Turkish Republic and why they are not included in the Turkish literary canon today.Item "Of order and liberty" : Catholic intellectuals in Argentina and Brazil(2015-05) Knoll, Travis K.; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, 1957-; Butler, MatthewThis project challenges the historical binary of a revolutionary versus a reactionary Church through a comparative case study of right-wing Christian Democrats in Brazil and Integralist/Nationalist intellectuals in Argentina. Intellectually, the project centers on Jacques Maritain and notable Latin American figures. Such figures include Brazilians Alceu Amoroso Lima and Dom Hélder Câmara, and Argentine leaders Julio Meinvielle and Leonardo Castellani. The study will argue that these figures' intellectual stands represented diverging paths for each country's conservative majority, but also shaped their respective hierarchies' reactions to key events in the Catholic and secular world: the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Second Vatican Council. While anti-Modernists, Brazilian intellectuals came to favor pluralist and democratic solutions of Social Democracy over and above the organic (and encompassing) visions espoused by Franco's Spain, and subsequently, the Argentine hierarchy. This study will analyze major Catholic newspapers and journals, including Criterio, Jauja , A Ordem, and O Diario de Belo Horioznte. These sources will give the reader a glimpse into the intellectual societies and forums in which these thinkers moved, and will more clearly display the distinction mentioned above. Surprisingly, conservative Brazilian papers maintained a vigorous anti-Communist stance, but came to see the government as an oppressing force prohibiting the legitimate social actions of the Catholic faithful. Argentine intellectuals took a much more ambivalent attitude toward democracy at best, and a more hostile one at worst. Julio Meinvielle and Leonardo Castellani from their journal Jauja directly challenged the Second Vatican Council, the liberal state, and the rights of left-wing dissidents. More generally, Argentine ties to Franco's Spain through the 1970s, as well as to conservative varieties of Peronism, as well as the loss of the unifying Gustavo Franceschi (editor of Criterio) in 1957, put the sizable democratic and reformist minority firmly outside the good graces of the hierarchy, paving the way for the Catholic purges in Argentina of the 1970s.