The Enchanter's Spell: J.R.R. Tolkien's Mythopoetic Response to Modernism

J.R.R. Tolkien was not only an author of fantasy but also a philologist who theorized about myth. Theorists have employed various methods of analyzing myth, and this thesis integrates several analyses, including Tolkien’s. I address the roles of doctrine, ritual, cross-cultural patterns, mythic expressions in literature, the literary effect of myth, evolution of language and consciousness, and individual invention over inheritance and diffusion. Beyond Tolkien’s English and Catholic background, I argue for eclectic influence on Tolkien, including resonance with Buddhism. Tolkien views mythopoeia, literary mythmaking, in terms of sub-creation, human invention in the image of God as creator. Key mythopoetic tools include eucatastrophe, the happy ending’s sudden turn to poignant joy, and enchantment, the realization of imagined wonder, which is epitomized by the character of Tom Bombadil and contrasted with modernist techno-magic seeking to alter and dominate the world. I conclude by interpreting Tolkien’s mythmaking as a form of mysticism.

O conflito das fronteiras: Metafísica, Negatividade e o Extremo Oriente

The conflict of borderlines unfolds itself as a natural path in history of human thought. It becomes clear only through an explicit cultural clash, which conveys distinct conceptual formatting. Thinking this conflict might enlighten the bindings responsible for development of contemporary way of thought. This thesis intent to analyse, in a first moment, the history of thought as Metaphysics, presenting a diagnostic towards the way through which the West impinges its categorical logic. Thereafter, presents the tradition of Negativity, showing a thinking beyond Classic Ontology through a Henology and a Meontology in Neoplatonism and Medieval Mysticism. At the end, exposes the Far Eastern thought as possibility of contemporary reception of Negativity and escape from the Westernizer formatting of contemporary philosophy

El discernimiento de espíritus en las periferias cristianas: gozo, pactos y poderosos entre aborígenes evangélicos del Chaco Argentino

El discernimiento de espíritus ha sido a lo largo de la historia del cristianismo un mecanismo fundamental para el control del acceso al carisma. Su desarrollo ha estado profundamente ligado a los cambios en la estructura social de las iglesias. Por ello buscamos aportar nuevas miradas sobre este dispositivo, analizándolo en el contexto de las periferias cristianas. Específicamente centraremos nuestro análisis en las iglesias evangélicas aborígenes mocoví del suroeste de la provincia del Chaco en Argentina. Nos aproximaremos a estas cuestiones a partir del análisis a la estructura social de estas iglesias, sus concepciones sobre los vínculos con las potencias no-humanas, la gestión de salud y enfermedad y la experiencia del culto.

The Re-Enchantment of Surrealism: Remedios Varo’s Visionary Artists

The visionary prowess of the artist was established, in both the visual and verbal arts, by the Symbolists in Fin de siècle France. This article asserts a continuity between the avowed spiritual dimension of their work and the visionary power of surrealist art asserted—despite strong resistance from the centre—by a group of renegade surrealists in the 1920s and beyond. To do so, it explores the artists that Spanish-born Mexican painter Remedios Varo (1908 – 1963) depicts in her work, demonstrating how they might be better understood when analysed in relation to Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff’s (1866?-1949) esoteric aesthetics. In doing so, it reveals a neglected, postsecular trajectory in the history of surrealism.

Al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī’s Kitāb Ithbāt al-‘Ilal

A paper read at the 1960 annual meeting of the American Oriental Society held in New Haven, Connecticut, and updated in July 2016.

Adapting Victorian Gypsies for the Screen: Ethnicity, Otherness and (In)visibility in Neo-Victorian Popular Film

This paper aims at analysing the presence of gypsy characters in two neo-Victorian popular films, namely Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman (2010) and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011). The cultural construction of nineteenth-century gypsies, those “Others within Europe” (Boyarin 433) whose presence in Victorian fiction was peripheral, spectral and at times invisible (Nord 3-4), is simultaneously exploited and contested by these two neo-Victorian screen narratives to raise issues of otherness and invisibility on the screen. Setting off from the premise that screen texts, just like print texts, can also be participant in the neo-Victorian project of reimagining the underside of Victorian culture for contemporary audiences (Whelehan 273), this paper traces how the adaptation of Victorian gypsies for the screen, true to the palimpsestuous potential inherent to the process of adaptation (Hutcheon 6) and sharing the double drive between past and present which characterises the neo-Victorian genre (Arias and Pulham xiii; Shiller 539), hybridises our cultural memory of the Victorian Age on the screen while concurrently raises concerns over the persistent liminal status of gypsies in contemporary European culture. In particular, this paper illustrates how the tropes prototypically associated to gypsies (namely their nomadic lifestyle, mysticism, alienated existence or their perceived association to criminality) which can be traced back to Victorian culture are deployed on the neo-Victorian popular screen (with varyingly succesful outcomes) to comment on their (in)visibility in the European popular imagination.

Ein Garten-Brunn : gewässert durch die Ströhme der göttlichen Lustbarkeit ... oder, ein rechtes Diarium und ausführlich Tag-Verzeichnus alles desjenigen, was sich mit dieser theuren Autorin, in ihrem hohen Beruffe vom Jahre 1670 her zugetragen ... /

Theil 3 has t.p. variation: Das Durch die Ströhme der Göttlichen Lustbarkeit gewässerten Garten-Brunnens ...

Variaciones de la utopía tecnológica contemporánea: tecno-racionalidades, tecno-culturas y tecno-mística

In this article the author argues that a technological utopia underlies present society so that it is necessary to change the way communication has been understood until now. To think of technology as something unavoidable and constitutive of subjectivity in contemporary world means to understand new ways of thinking, doing and transcending; that is, new life forms as metaphors for theory building on communication, the juvenilization of contemporary culture, and (post)modern mysticism.

Lo sviluppo del movimento sabbatiano in Italia. Binyamin ben El'azar Coen Vitale da Reggio e il suo 'Et ha-zamir (עת הזמיר, Il tempo del canto)

La mia tesi si concentra sullo sviluppo del movimento sabbatiano in Italia tra il XVII e il XVIII secolo, una fase tarda del Sabbatianesimo. Il tentativo è quello di descrivere questo post-sabbatianesimo e i suoi rappresentanti attraverso lo studio di figure come quelle di Binyamin ben El‘azar Coen Vitale da Reggio (1651-1730), un rabbino piemontese identificato da Gershom Scholem - il padre degli studi sabbatiani - come un modello nel panorama sabbatiano italiano. Dopo una contestualizzazione storica e culturale che compara il mondo cristiano e quello ebraico dell'epoca, e il misticismo ebraico italiano con quello originario di Safed in Galilea, ho analizzato la produzione letteraria di Binyamin Coen. Mi sono concentrata sui suoi testi a stampa, traducendo integralmente e analizzando la versione a stampa di‘Et ha-zamir, "Il tempo del canto", una raccolta di poesie cabalistiche (piyyutim), composta da poesie per i giorni della settimana e per le festività principali. la prim a edizione a stampa del "Tempo del canto" risale al 1707, e fu stampata a Venezia. Il testo era utilizzato nel contesto delle confraternite cabalistiche dei ghetti italiani, e spicca per l'uso molto particolare della metrica legata alla cabbala. ‘Et ha-zamir è infatti perfettamente inserito in un'epoca che vide una vasta diffusione della mistica ebraica.

Iberian and Latin American Music Scholarship on the Ascent: Reflections from the United States

In the early twentieth century, musicology was established as an academic discipline in the United States. Nonetheless, with the exception of Iberian medieval and Renaissance repertories, U.S. scholars largely overlooked the music of the Spanish- and Portuguese- speaking world. Why should this have been the case, especially in light of Spain’s strong historical presence in the United States? This autobiographical essay examines this question by tracing the career of an individual musicologist, the Hispanist musicologist Carol A. Hess. Evaluated here are disciplinary shifts in U.S. musicology —methodological, philosophical, and ideological— over the past thirty years. These transformations have combined to make this repertory a viable field of study today. Musicologists in the United States can now make their careers by specializing in Iberian and Latin American music, as well as the music of the Hispanic diaspora. They research topics ranging from the avant-garde composer Llorenç Barber to the rapper Nach Scratch or the popular bandleader Xavier Cugat and his U.S. audiences of the 1940s, while others also pursue the time-tested areas of medieval and Renaissance music. Iberian and Latin American music is regularly offered in postsecondary institutions while instructors now have a variety of textbooks and other pedagogical resources from which to choose. All add up to a disciplinary freedom that would have been unthinkable only a few decades ago.