The short mantra known as Gāyatrī or Sāvitrī (Ṛgveda III 62.10) is one of the most frequently recited texts of mankind. Over the course of time it has not only been personified as the “Mother of the Vedas,” but has even come to be venerated as a goddess. The present study reveals for the first time how the mantra gained prominence as a religious…[Read more]

Der berühmten Kaṭha-Upaniṣad wurde oft Inkohärenz und Widersprüchlichkeit unterstellt: Das vedische Feuerritual, das in ihr erwähnt wird, ließ sich in den Augen der meisten Interpreten nicht mit der Erkenntnislehre und den Yoga-Praktiken, die den Großteil des Textes ausmachen, vereinbaren. Die Master-Arbeit versucht zu ergründen, wie ein derart…[Read more]

London Bridge is down * QRt by PRURITUS MIGRANS * CC: BY-NC-SA

In this paper, presented at the 2022 H-Net Teaching Conference, I describe how I teach undergraduate students about disability in music through what I call disclosure-oriented pedagogy. This practice involves demonstrating cross-historical comparisons between my lived experiences of disability and the representations of disability in 19th-century…[Read more]

It is May 2020. I am watching Kae Tempest perform Hold Your Own online. Tempest’s vocal performances are always rich in meaningful detail; from the rising semi-sung sound that embodies all the dreams and potentials of a fallible humanity to the throaty fall that
edges and softens our collapse into foolishness and self-defeat. Slipping between s…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Reseño aquí el capítulo “In the Wilderness of Forms: Ideas and Things in Thomas Browne’s Cabinets of Curiosity”, de Claire Preston, publicado en el libro de estudios mediáticos retrofuturistas ‘The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print’ (ed. Neil Rhodes y Jonathan Sawday, 2000). Los sabios y est…[Read more]

This study focuses on the Philippine artist Ricarte Puruganan’s reckoning with the ideas of “country,” “God,” and “the sublime.” It does so through a hermeneutic reading of the artist’s works as a cultural text. In order to fill the gaps in the historiographic record and to enrich the material on the artist that was already available, the…[Read more]

A series of sketches written in 1924 during an ocean crossing from New York to Tilbury, “Passage to England” was published only in 1998 by the Thomas Wolfe Society and is hardly Wolfe’s most popular or most accomplished work. Nonetheless I always felt that Passage to England had something unique and idiosyncratic and that despite a certain a…[Read more]

A series of sketches written in 1924 during an ocean crossing from New York to Tilbury, “Passage to England” was published only in 1998 by the Thomas Wolfe Society and is hardly Wolfe’s most popular or most accomplished work. Nonetheless I always felt that Passage to England had something unique and idiosyncratic and that despite a certain a…[Read more]

No creo que haya mejor ocasión que este homenaje alcalaíno al maestro Alberto Blecua para vencer las reticencias y dudas del neófito que, en palabras de Márquez Villanueva, ha de pisar por vez primera los “senderos de alto riesgo” por los que camina el Libro de buen amor. Por motivo de mi admiración y reconocimiento al homenajeado, voy a dejarme…[Read more]

This digital book is a companion to Of Sunken Islands and Pestilence: Restoring the Voice of Edward Taylor Fletcher to Nineteenth-Century Canadian Literature. It is intended as an aid to readers, in particular students and scholars, who wish to know more about Fletcher’s works. The ideas that drove Fletcher’s creative works are on display here,…[Read more]

This digital book is a companion to Of Sunken Islands and Pestilence: Restoring the Voice of Edward Taylor Fletcher to Nineteenth-Century Canadian Literature. It is intended as an aid to readers, in particular students and scholars, who wish to know more about Fletcher’s works. The ideas that drove Fletcher’s creative works are on display here,…[Read more]

In this article, I examine two recent memoirs of Zen students that speak openly about the aberrant behavior of their teachers. These memoirs are Natalie Goldberg’s The Great Failure (2004) and Shozan Jack Haubner’s Single White Monk (2017). Both of these authors consider the scandals surrounding their teachers as an opportunity for spiritual gro…[Read more]

Persian literature used to be visibly worldly when Persian was a lingua franca in a vast space from Balkan to China. With the British colonialism in the India and the rise of nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Persian lost its status and became more national in various contexts. In Iran it only got worsened with sanctions,…[Read more]

This is a particular work focusing on an aspect of the Catholic Church in Europe, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, concerning the rise of democracy during the so-called Modernist Crisis. I view the Modernist phenomenon as an historical lens through which to understand the politics, often characterized by artful and dishonest…[Read more]

En este artículo sobre teoría narrativa evolucionista releemos y comentamos algunos textos y nociones clave de la teoría de Charles Darwin, en el ‘Origen de las Especies’ y ‘El Origen del Hombre’, a la luz de la sociobiología cognitiva con…[Read more]

The concept of Bahujan literature is based on the sum total of the literary contribution of a writer. Hence, it also has place for Dwij writers with an unflinching commitment to the cause of the deprived communities. As we have been arguing in the columns of FORWARD Press, the concept of Bahujan literature is a huge umbrella, under which Dalit,…[Read more]

कोविड महामारी से निपटने के लिए विज्ञान की भूमिका को सर्वोपरि बताया गया। लेकिन विज्ञान के नाम पर अनेक ऐसी चीजें भी हुईं, जिसने इस विभिषिका को निर्मित करने तथा इसे और भयावह बनाने में योगदान किया। इस दौरन सांख्यिकी के आंकड़ों को विज्ञान बनाकर प्रचारित किया गया तथा दुनिया के अधिकांश हिस्से को लॉकडाउन में धकेल दिया गया। ऐसे में सवाल यह…[Read more]

Pramod Ranjan wirft einen Blick aus Indien auf die Coronakrise und das wissenschaftliche Verständnis von der Welt, das oft erwähnt, aber meist ignoriert wird, sowie die Frage, wem das nutzt.

Die übertriebene Angst vor Covid-19 hat die menschliche Zivilisation und Kultur in Gefahr gebracht. Die Richtung, in die sich die Menschheit bewegte, br…[Read more]