Search results for "Original meaning"

Under Our Eye: Margaret Atwood's Variation on the Panopticon in "The Heart Goes Last"

2020

In her dystopian dark comedy The Heart Goes Last (2015), Margaret Atwood openly refers to Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon. The future world depicted in her novel is filled with violence and deprived of both human bonds and hope. Hence, being contained, monitored and — after Foucault — disciplined and punished appears to be the characters’ last resort. Surveillance tempts both sexes as it is politically correct and universal, and it does not privilege one group of people over the other. The article discusses the dystopian vision of the near future as created by Atwood in her 2015 novel, with direct references to the conception of the Panopticon, both in its original meaning propos…

Comfort, the acceptable face of luxury - an eighteenth-century cultural etymology

2014

The introduction of modern amenities into European homes has been extensively studied by sociologists and historians, who have stressed the rise in consumption during the Georgian period.1 Some objects, such as mirrors, stoves, or umbrellas, were made available by technical innovations; others, such as tea, sugar, or mahogany furniture, became accessible thanks to the expansion of global trade. Other amenities, such as carpets, curtains, or marble chimney-pieces, were no longer restricted to the aristocracy, as living standards rose.2 As the British nation became richer, the number of affluent households grew as did their capacity to spend more on material objects. This signaled a change in…

From Thinking to Raging: Reflexes of Indo-European *men- Polysemy in Homer

2020

This paper aims at investigating the semantic value of the verb μαίνομαι “to rage, to be furious” in Homeric Greek, in order to clarify the striking semantic relationship between the common ‘irrational’ meaning of the verb and the original ‘rational’ meaning of the Indo-European root *men- “to think”, to which the verb traces back. The corresponding words for μαίνομαι in other Indo-European languages (e.g. OInd. mányatē; Av. mainyeite; OIr. (do)moiniur; OCS mъnjo; Lit. miniu) can be translated as “to think”, thus showing an opposite meaning. From a textual analysis of all the occurrences of μαίνομαι in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the study aims at finding semantic traces of the original mean…

2013

Propositional content is often incomplete but comprehenders appear to adjust meaning and add unarticulated meaning constituents effortlessly. This happens at the propositional level (The baby drank the bottle) but also at the phrasal level (the wooden turtle). In two ERP experiments, combinatorial processing was investigated in container/content alternations and adjective-noun combination transforming an animate entity into a physical object. Experiment 1 revealed that container-for-content alternations (The baby drank the bottle) engendered a Late Positivity on the critical expression and on the subsequent segment, while content-for-container alternations (Chris put the beer on the table) …