Translations by James Christian Brown
Points de vue de l'histoire nationale grecque et roumaine sur la question des Phanariotes' , in P... more Points de vue de l'histoire nationale grecque et roumaine sur la question des Phanariotes' , in Paschalis Kitromilides and Anna Tabaki (eds.), Relations gréco-romaines. Interculturalité et identité nationale (Athenes: 2004, 189-94); Christina Ion, 'The Present Creates the Past: The "Phanariots" in the Romanian Text Books during the Second Half of the 19th Century' , Revue d'
This book contains twelve engaging philosophical lectures, most of them given during Romania’s Co... more This book contains twelve engaging philosophical lectures, most of them given during Romania’s Communist regime. They were written by Alexandru Dragomir, a former student of Heidegger who never published anything in his lifetime. The lectures deal with a diverse range of topics, such as the function of the question, self-deception in the past, the present, and the future, and banalities with a metaphysical dimension. The book includes a phenomenological discussion of the topic of nation and examines what happens when the human race loses its sense of measure. It also addresses the true role of the intellect in contrast with the dominance of scientific abstraction in today’s technical world. Among the thinkers discussed are Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Nietzsche.
Alexandru Dragomir was born in 1916 in Romania. After studying law and philosophy at the University of Bucharest (1933–1939), he left Romania to study for a doctorate in philosophy in Freiburg, Germany, under Martin Heidegger. He stayed in Freiburg for two years (1941–1943), but before defending his dissertation he was called back to Romania for military service and sent to the front. After 1948, historical circumstances forced him to become a clandestine philosopher: he was known only within a very limited circle, and even his friends did not know whether or not he was giving concrete expression to his philosophical preoccupations in a written work. He died in 2002 without ever publishing anything. It was only after his death that the “Dragomir notebooks” came to light.
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 2016
Papers by James Christian Brown
In contrast to their English predecessors, who had compiled their collections largely from printe... more In contrast to their English predecessors, who had compiled their collections largely from printed texts and manuscripts, the Scottish ballad collectors of the early nineteenth derived their material principally from oral tradition. The introductory material and commentary in their published collections makes it clear that value of the ballads for them lay above all in their antiquity. From this perspective, oral tradition was initially approached with ambivalence: on the one hand, it had ensured the durability of ballads which would otherwise be lost, while on the other, it involved a process of change which had eroded the integrity of the supposed original texts leaving only transient variants. By the 1820s, a more positive view of oral tradition was being expressed, but still within a basically devolutionary paradigm. The twentieth century appreciation of oral tradition as a creative and evolutionary process was still in the future. The folkloric text, circulating in oral tradition through space and time, is characterized both by durability and by transience. On the one hand, there is the durability of genre and type; on the other, the transience of the individual variant, the unique performance experienced through the evanescent medium of sound, which, as Walter Ong observes, "exists only when it is going out of existence" (32). This paper will look at some of the ways in which early nineteenth-century Scottish collectors and editors of one traditional genre, the popular narrative songs that were by this time coming to be identified in literary circles as "ballads" (Gerould 250-2)-in particular Walter Scott, Robert Jamieson and William Motherwell-approached the durable and transient aspects of the texts that so fascinated them. To what time does an orally transmitted text belong? That of its original creation, or that in which the particular version under discussion was recorded in performance? In an article first published in 1935, John Spiers claimed the Scottish ballads for the eighteenth century on the grounds that "a poem and the language it is in are one and the same", and the language of the ballads, as we know them from published collections, is largely that of the eighteenth century (236). And in the 1990s, the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature decided after some discussion to move their sample selection of "Popular Ballads" from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, the period in which the printed texts took shape, rather than that of the conjectured origins of the genre (Brown, Placed 116-18). To the eighteenth century itself, however, or at least to those eighteenth-century Britons whose encounter with ballads was primarily through expensive printed anthologies rather than through oral tradition or popular printed broadsides, things looked different: what was interesting then about ballads was that they were old. From A Collection of Old Ballads (1723-25), whose editor sought to "enter upon the Praises of Ballads, and shew their Antiquity" (qtd. in Kersey 41), through Thomas Percy"s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), where the ballads were attributed to "our ancient English bards and minstrels, an order of men, who were once greatly respected by our ancestors, and contributed to soften the roughness of a martial and unlettered people by their songs and by their music" (Percy I: xiii)-thus, it has been argued, offering a legitimating genealogy for English literature, and at the same time affirming a role for the author as a natural part of an imagined feudal world in contrast to the insecurities of the eighteenth-century literary marketplace (Stewart 113-4)-, to Ancient Songs: From the Time of King
In contrast to their English predecessors, who had compiled their collections largely from printe... more In contrast to their English predecessors, who had compiled their collections largely from printed texts and manuscripts, the Scottish ballad collectors of the early nineteenth derived their material principally from oral tradition. The introductory material and commentary in their published collections makes it clear that value of the ballads for them lay above all in their antiquity. From this perspective, oral tradition was initially approached with ambivalence: on the one hand, it had ensured the durability of ballads which would otherwise be lost, while on the other, it involved a process of change which had eroded the integrity of the supposed original texts leaving only transient variants. By the 1820s, a more positive view of oral tradition was being expressed, but still within a basically devolutionary paradigm. The twentieth century appreciation of oral tradition as a creative and evolutionary process was still in the future.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016 (“Dis/Continuities: Toruń Studies in Language, Literature and Culture”, Ed. Miroslawa Buchholz). pp. 133-142 (ISBN 978-3-631-66888-7)
Mostly Protestant, and coming from a culture influenced by Evangelicalism, British travellers in ... more Mostly Protestant, and coming from a culture influenced by Evangelicalism, British travellers in the first half of the nineteenth century often express their disquiet at aspects of religion and morality in the Danubian Principalities, in particular, The paper looks at some of the points of difference that prove particularly disturbing for the travellers and attempts to set them in the context of typical British attitudes in the period.
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Translations by James Christian Brown
Alexandru Dragomir was born in 1916 in Romania. After studying law and philosophy at the University of Bucharest (1933–1939), he left Romania to study for a doctorate in philosophy in Freiburg, Germany, under Martin Heidegger. He stayed in Freiburg for two years (1941–1943), but before defending his dissertation he was called back to Romania for military service and sent to the front. After 1948, historical circumstances forced him to become a clandestine philosopher: he was known only within a very limited circle, and even his friends did not know whether or not he was giving concrete expression to his philosophical preoccupations in a written work. He died in 2002 without ever publishing anything. It was only after his death that the “Dragomir notebooks” came to light.
Papers by James Christian Brown
Alexandru Dragomir was born in 1916 in Romania. After studying law and philosophy at the University of Bucharest (1933–1939), he left Romania to study for a doctorate in philosophy in Freiburg, Germany, under Martin Heidegger. He stayed in Freiburg for two years (1941–1943), but before defending his dissertation he was called back to Romania for military service and sent to the front. After 1948, historical circumstances forced him to become a clandestine philosopher: he was known only within a very limited circle, and even his friends did not know whether or not he was giving concrete expression to his philosophical preoccupations in a written work. He died in 2002 without ever publishing anything. It was only after his death that the “Dragomir notebooks” came to light.