Animal Vision and Life Consciousness—‘Horse’ in D. H. Lawrence’s 1920s Short Stories

D. H. Lawrence is seeking for the consciousness of life throughout his lifelong creation; he resorts to animals that bear closer connections with nature mainly in the 1920s. Based on three short stories which mention ‘horse’ in the title, “The Horse-dealer’s daughter” (1922), “The Woman Who Rode Away” (1925) and “The Rocking-horse Winner” (1926), this essay illustrates how horses function as Lawrence’s pastoral ideal, pursuit for the primitive and shape of humanity. From the background that represents the past agricultural lifestyle to a life vehicle that carries the woman to freedom, and finally to a symbol with fantasy that mirrors crises in human relations, Lawrence’s deepening attention towards the ‘horse’ belabors his life pursuit of the primitive and balances between the binary oppositions of animality and humanity, finding for modern people a way out of distortions under industrialization and civilization.

In my back yard

In My Back Yard is a documentary film that explores the changing landscape of the Mount Dennis neighbourhood in Toronto. This change is represented by the 54-acre Kodak site that is being transformed into the second largest transportation hub in the Greater Toronto Area. The film employs a series of visual strategies and retells recent observations related to the impact of this massive infrastructure project on the people, the land and the urban wildlife. Local residents, politicians and community leader were consulted. Their interviews are combined with dioramas, archival photographs and time-lapse photography to express the multi-facetted list of community concerns. This support paper attempts to define and analyse these struggles within the context of Leo Marx’s 1964 work The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. This paper proposes that Marx’s concept of the “middle landscape” helps to define the current struggle in Mount Dennis.

In my back yard

In My Back Yard is a documentary film that explores the changing landscape of the Mount Dennis neighbourhood in Toronto. This change is represented by the 54-acre Kodak site that is being transformed into the second largest transportation hub in the Greater Toronto Area. The film employs a series of visual strategies and retells recent observations related to the impact of this massive infrastructure project on the people, the land and the urban wildlife. Local residents, politicians and community leader were consulted. Their interviews are combined with dioramas, archival photographs and time-lapse photography to express the multi-facetted list of community concerns. This support paper attempts to define and analyse these struggles within the context of Leo Marx’s 1964 work The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. This paper proposes that Marx’s concept of the “middle landscape” helps to define the current struggle in Mount Dennis.

The Empire of Our Religion

Amidst unfettered mobility, Jewish leaders like Isaac Mayer Wise and Isaac Leeser attempted not only an institutional overhaul of American Judaism, but also an ideological one. Jewish leaders engaged in popular geography and new forms of theological reflection, drawing on Jewish thought and the ideologies of American imperialism. They both critiqued the settings of American Jewish life, even advocating for agricultural colonies, but also developed a Jewish pastoral ideal. In this mode, they developed novel understandings of Jewish identity, Jewish institutions, and religious change. The internalized “Jewish heart” and the powerful “empire of our religion” both became widespread metaphors for explaining how and why Judaism would flourish anywhere. They were used by a broad swath of Jewish leaders, as was the concept of “progress,” although those allied with Wise’s Reform Judaism and with Leeser’s traditionalism soon developed competing understandings of how religious change should happen and of whether Judaism should be fully mobile or merely portable. In spite of these divides, they helped establish an underlying confidence that Judaism could and should prevail throughout the American continent through institutional development and individual identities.

Anglicanism and Methodism

This chapter examines the complex relationship between Anglicanism and Methodism. Revising the view that Methodism was an ever-separating movement, this chapter contends that the eighteenth-century Church of England was a varied body, with myriad challenges which it confronted through the maintenance of a pastoral ideal, lived out ‘on the ground’ by the parish clergy. The industrializing parish of Madeley, Shropshire (where the incumbent from 1760 to 1785 was the Revd John William Fletcher), is used as a case study. Together with Madeley, other examples of dutiful and evangelically minded clergy who utilized the experimental religion and religious irregularities often associated with Methodists or Dissenters, are surveyed. The chapter concludes that Fletcher and many evangelically minded Anglican-Methodist clergy found the Church of England sufficiently strong and flexible enough to do the work of the Church rigorously and creatively, and that Methodism could serve as a means of Anglican pastoral success.