Meaningful Pasts

Meaningful Pasts
Author: Russell Johnston
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2024-01-31
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1487528752

In Meaningful Pasts, Russell Johnston and Michael Ripmeester explore two strands of identity-making among residents of the Niagara region in Ontario, Canada. First, they describe the region’s official narratives, most of which celebrate the achievements of white settlers with a mix of storytelling, rituals, and monuments. Despite their presence in local lore and landmarks, these official narratives did not resonate with the nearly one thousand residents who participated in five surveys conducted over eleven years. Instead, participants drew on contemporary people, places, and events. Second, the authors explore the emergence of Niagara’s wine industry as a heritage narrative. The book shares how the survey participants embraced the industry as a local identifier and indicates how the industry’s efforts have rekindled the residents’ interest in agriculture as a significant element of regional heritage and local identities. Revealing how the profiles of local narratives and commemorations become entwined with social, cultural, economic, and political power, Meaningful Pasts illuminates the fact that local narratives retain their relevance only if residents find them meaningful in their day-to-day lives.

A Meaningful Life

A Meaningful Life
Author: L.J. Davis
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2010-07-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1590173945

L.J. Davis’s 1971 novel, A Meaningful Life, is a blistering black comedy about the American quest for redemption through real estate and a gritty picture of New York City in collapse. Just out of college, Lowell Lake, the Western-born hero of Davis’s novel, heads to New York, where he plans to make it big as a writer. Instead he finds a job as a technical editor, at which he toils away while passion leaks out of his marriage to a nice Jewish girl. Then Lowell discovers a beautiful crumbling mansion in a crime-ridden section of Brooklyn, and against all advice, not to mention his wife’s will, sinks his every penny into buying it. He quits his job, moves in, and spends day and night on demolition and construction. At last he has a mission: he will dig up the lost history of his house; he will restore it to its past grandeur. He will make good on everything that’s gone wrong with his life, and he will even murder to do it.

Meaning and Representation in History

Meaning and Representation in History
Author: Jörn Rüsen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2006-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857455559

History has always been more than just the past. It involves a relationship between past and present, perceived, on the one hand, as a temporal chain of events and, on the other, symbolically as an interpretation that gives meaning to these events through varying cultural orientations, charging it with norms and values, hopes and fears. And it is memory that links the present to the past and therefore has to be seen as the most fundamental procedure of the human mind that constitutes history: memory and historical thinking are the door of the human mind to experience. At the same time, it transforms the past into a meaningful and sense bearing part of the present and beyond. It is these complex interrelationships that are the focus of the contributors to this volume, among them such distinguished scholars as Paul Ricoeur, Johan Galtung, Eberhard Lämmert, and James E. Young. Full of profound insights into human society pat and present it is a book that not only historians but also philosophers and social scientists should engage with.

Memory, Tradition, And Text

Memory, Tradition, And Text
Author: Alan K. Kirk
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2005
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004137602

Social and cultural memory theory examines the ways communities and individuals reconstruct and commemorate their pasts in light of shared experiences and current social realities. Drawing on the methods of this emerging field, this volume both introduces memory theory to biblical scholars and restores the category "memory" to a preeminent position in research on Christian origins. In the process, the volume challenges current approaches to research problems in Christian origins, such as the history of the Gospel traditions, the birth of early Christian literature, ritual and ethics, and the historical Jesus. The essays, taken in aggregate, outline a comprehensive research agenda for examining the beginnings of Christianity and its literature and also propose a fundamentally revised model for the phenomenology of early Christian oral tradition, assess the impact of memory theory upon historical Jesus research, establish connections between memory dynamics and the appearance of written Gospels, and assess the relationship of early Christian commemorative activities with the cultural memory of ancient Judaism. Contributors include April D. DeConick, Arthur J. Dewey, Philip F. Esler, Holly Hearon, Richard Horsley, Georgia Masters Keightley, Werner Kelber, Alan Kirk, Barry Schwartz, Tom Thatcher, and Antoinette Clark Wire. "Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org)."

Hellenisms

Hellenisms
Author: Katerina Zacharia
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2016-12-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351931067

This volume casts a fresh look at the multifaceted expressions of diachronic Hellenisms. A distinguished group of historians, classicists, anthropologists, ethnographers, cultural studies, and comparative literature scholars contribute essays exploring the variegated mantles of Greek ethnicity, and the legacy of Greek culture for the ancient and modern Greeks in the homeland and the diaspora, as well as for the ancient Romans and the modern Europeans. Given the scarcity of books on diachronic Hellenism in the English-speaking world, the publication of this volume represents nothing less than a breakthrough. The book provides a valuable forum to reflect on Hellenism, and is certain to generate further academic interest in the topic. The specific contribution of this volume lies in the fact that it problematizes the fluidity of Hellenism and offers a much-needed public dialogue between disparate viewpoints, in the process making a case for the existence and viability of such a polyphony. The chapters in this volume offer a reorientation of the study of Hellenism away from a binary perception to approaches giving priority to fluidity, hybridity, and multi-vocality. The volume also deals with issues of recycling tradition, cultural category, and perceptions of ethnicity. Topics explored range from European Philhellenism to Hellenic Hellenism, from the Athens 2004 Olympics to Greek cinema, from a psychoanalytical engagement with anthropological material to a subtle ethnographic analysis of Greek-American women's material culture. The readership envisaged is both academic and non-specialist; with this aim in mind, all quotations from ancient and modern sources in foreign languages have been translated into English.

A Writer's Guide to Fiction

A Writer's Guide to Fiction
Author: Elizabeth Lyon
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2004-06-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780399528583

The second book in the Writer's Compass series from professional writing instructor Elizabeth Lyon offers both aspiring and established authors the fundamentals of writing and selling a great novel or short story. In addition to the basics of characterization, plot, pacing, and theme, A Writer's Guide to Fiction also features a plan for revising fiction, a guide to marketing, samples of cover and query letters, and methods of honing the writing craft.

Thinking Through Tourism

Thinking Through Tourism
Author: Julie Scott
Publisher: Berg
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1847885306

Summarising current debates and offering new approaches for this expanding field of study, Thinking Through Tourism will appeal to students across a range of disciplines.

Time Binds

Time Binds
Author: Elizabeth Freeman
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2010-11-29
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0822348047

By foregrounding bodily pleasure in the experience of time and its representation in queer literature, film, video, and art, Elizabeth Freeman challenges queer theorys recent emphasis on loss and trauma.

Meaningful Work

Meaningful Work
Author: Andrea Veltman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190618191

This book examines the importance of work in human well-being, addressing several related philosophical questions about work and arguing on the whole that meaningful work is central in human flourishing. Work impacts flourishing not only in developing and exercising human capabilities but also in instilling and reflecting virtues such as honor, pride, dignity, self-discipline and self-respect. Work also attaches to a sense of purposefulness and personal identity, and meaningful work can promote both personal autonomy and a sense of personal satisfaction that issues from making oneself useful. Further still, work bears a formative influence on character and intelligence and provides a primary avenue for exercising complex skills and garnering esteem and recognition from others. The author defends a pluralistic account of meaningful work, arguing that work can be meaningful in virtue of developing capabilities, supporting virtues, providing a purpose, or integrating elements of a worker's life. In light of the impact of meaningful work on living well, the author argues that well-ordered societies provide opportunities for meaningful work, that individuals would be well advised to pursue these opportunities, and that the philosophical view of value pluralism, which casts work as having no special significance in an individual's life, is false. The book also addresses oppressive work that undermines human flourishing, examining potential solutions to mitigate the impact of bad work on those who perform it. Finally, a guiding argument of the book is that promoting meaningful work is a matter of ethics, more so than a matter of politics. Prioritizing people over profit, treating workers with respect, respecting the intelligence of working people, and creating opportunities for people to contribute developed skills are basic ethical principles for employing organizations and for communities at large.