Archetype Architecture And The Writer

"Altogether, the work is a delight, offering an unusual, provocative view on the disparate texts, with the added pleasure of lucid graceful prose." --Journal of Modern Literature Bettina Knapp probes the nature, meaning, and use of the architectural metaphors and archetypes that pervade all literature.

What is architecture? How is it made? How is it judged? These fundamental questions have intrigued architects for centuries. While the questions are philosophical, the answers have important ramifications for architectural practice. In Search of Elegance provides answers to these complex questions and, in so doing, develops a new theory for the practice of architecture and urban design.

Dedicated to the renowned Safavid historian Roger Savory, this book brings together a collection of studies on the Safavid state of Iran (1501-1722) from the perspectives of political, social, literary, and artistic history. Savory, a doyen of Safavid studies in the 1960s and 1970s, was responsible for expanding and popularizing the study of Iran in the 16th and 17th century. To celebrate this legacy, well-established scholars of medieval and early modern Iran have contributed specific studies reflecting an array of research interests and specializations, which include critical re-examinations of issues of gender, literature, art and architecture, cultural and linguistic currents, illustrated historical chronicles, and courtly and administrative practices under the Safavid dynasty. This unique compilation is indicative of a growing interest in Iran and Iranian studies in both the academic and public spheres, and as such contains a number of new perspectives which will serve to supplement and re-interpret the existing corpus of Safavid scholarly literature to date. It will be an important text for scholars of world history and Middle East studies, as well as to historians in general.

A historical study of Vitruvius's De architectura, showing that his purpose in writing "the whole body of architecture" was shaped by the imperial Roman project of world domination. Vitruvius's De architectura is the only major work on architecture to survive from classical antiquity, and until the eighteenth century it was the text to which all other architectural treatises referred. While European classicists have focused on the factual truth of the text itself, English-speaking architects and architectural theorists have viewed it as a timeless source of valuable metaphors. Departing from both perspectives, Indra Kagis McEwen examines the work's meaning and significance in its own time. Vitruvius dedicated De architectura to his patron Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, whose rise to power inspired its composition near the end of the first century B.C. McEwen argues that the imperial project of world dominion shaped Vitruvius's purpose in writing what he calls "the whole body of architecture." Specifically, Vitruvius's aim was to present his discipline as the means for making the emperor's body congruent with the imagined body of the world he would rule. Each of the book's four chapters treats a different Vitruvian "body." Chapter 1, "The Angelic Body," deals with the book as a book, in terms of contemporary events and thought, particularly Stoicism and Stoic theories of language. Chapter 2, "The Herculean Body," addresses the book's and its author's relation to Augustus, whose double Vitruvius means the architect to be. Chapter 3, "The Body Beautiful," discusses the relation of proportion and geometry to architectural beauty and the role of beauty in forging the new world order. Finally, Chapter 4, "The Body of the King," explores the nature and unprecedented extent of Augustan building programs. Included is an examination of the famous statue of Augustus from Prima Porta, sculpted soon after the appearance of De architectura.

When J. Henry Shorthouse (1834-1903) published John Inglesant in 1881, he contributed a unique synthesis of Anglo-Catholic sensibilities to the enduring legacy of the Oxford Movement. Although his "philosophical romance" has been acclaimed "the greatest Anglo-Catholic novel in English literature" and "the one English novel that speaks immediately to human intuition without regard to the reader's own faith or philosophy", his most enduring contributions are the "religion of John Inglesant", an Anglo-Catholic synthesis of obedience and freedom, faith and reason, and the sacramental vision of "the myth of Little Gidding". Afflicted with a lifelong stammer, "the author of John Inglesant" proved himself a master of cadenced rhythms and "enspiritualised" prose in quest of "the great musical novel". Delineating parallels between sixteenth-century and Victorian England, Shorthouse integrated Quietism with Platonism into a religious aesthetic, a sacramental vision of "the Divine Principle of the Platonic Christ". Studied chronologically, Shorthouse's transition from Quaker to "Broad Church Sacramentalist" provides informing comparison with T. S. Eliot's conversion from Unitarian to Anglo-Catholic, as his myth of Little Gidding informs the historical imagination of Eliot's Christian poetry and dramas. The religious and developmental nature of the work of both artists affords analogies with C. G. Jung's psychology of Individuation.

The Agent in the Margin: Nayantara Sahgal’s Gandhian Fiction is a comprehensive study of the literary works of Nayantara Sahgal, daughter of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit—the first woman president of the United Nations General Assembly—and niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Clara A.B. Joseph introduces Mahatma Gandhi’s political and philosophical to literary analysis and utilizes non-structuralist aspects of Louis Althusser’s theories of ideology to trace how characters marginalized by gender, class, race, and language in Sahgal’s work assume agency, challenging poststructuralist theories of cultural and ideological determinism. She considers how gender complicates autobiography and how the roles of daughter, virgin, wife, widow, and alien serve (often ironically) to highlight human dignity.

This groundbreaking collection brings the range and diversity of post-Jungian thought into the realm of contemporary literary and cultural criticism. These essays explore, expand, critique, and apply post-Jungian critical theory as they revisit and reread Jung's own writings from numerous perspectives. No longer treated as a source of clear, unequivocal, authoritative pronouncement, Jung's writings are themselves subjected to critical, deconstructive readings, and several of the essays confront head-on Jung's evident racism, antifeminism, anti-Semitism, and political conservatism. While not downplaying such charges, the contributors outline an alternative, post-Jungian theory responsive to contemporary feminist, postcolonial, and poststructural concerns. The result is not just a critical reinterpretation but, more important, a regeneration of Jungian thought.

This book introduces students, practitioners, and laypeople to a comfortable approach to learning landscape architectural design free of design jargon and derived from their existing knowledge. A step-by-step process has readers consider their knowledge of language as metaphorically related to basic design and landscape design. Through information delivery and questioning processes, readers build on what they already know, their tacit understanding of language as applied to problem solving and storytelling. Everyone is a storyteller. Taken one step at a time through a three-tiered analogy of language, basic design, and landscape design, readers learn the makeup and role of such design features as points, lines, planes, volumes and sequential volumetric spaces that make up their worlds. With that, in a sense, new world view, and numerous questions and examples, readers begin to see that they in fact daily read the environments in which they live, work, play, raise families, and grow old. Once they realize how they read their surroundings they are helped to recognize that they can build narratives into their surroundings. At that point the existence of authored landscape narratives finds readers understanding a design process that relies on the designer-as-author, landscape-as-text, and participant, user-as-reader. That process has the reader write a first- or second-person narrative, visually interpret the written narrative into a storyboard, and turn the storyboard into a final design, the physical makeup of which is read by those who participate in it.