bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The UDC’s Counter-securitising Practices
Authors: Han Saerom
Published: October 2024

Chapter 5 discusses the UDC, a key unemployed movement in Tunisia, in the context of its decreasing popularity from 2013 onwards and of the elites’ systematic association of the unemployed with terrorists. The chapter then elucidates how the UDC’s counter-narratives and subjectivities unsettled and undermined the elites’ securitising practices, while partly approving and reifying them. These findings complicate binary understandings of the unemployed struggle represented by the UDC in Tunisia as either successful, autonomous and revolutionary, or as failing, subordinated and non-revolutionary. The governmentality approach provides a more nuanced way of understanding the UDC’s resistance, in that it elucidates a mutually constitutive aspect of the relationship between the ruling elites and the unemployed.
Conclusion
Authors: Han Saerom
Published: October 2024

Conclusion summarises the previous chapters and explains what the Tunisian case adds to the debate on the democracy–security nexus in neoliberal times. It also discusses the crisis of democracy that Tunisia is reportedly experiencing with the emergence of President Kais Saied. The chapter argues that, to many Tunisians, the elected democratic institutions were not only insufficient for, but also against what they conceive of as real democracy. Beyond the question of whether Saied’s leadership is authoritarian or democratic, the chapter calls for attention to the wide gap and tensions between the political and economic system aspired to and demanded by the people, on the one hand, and the past decade’s actual democratisation process, on the other hand.
Christian Marriage, Medical Knowledge and the Attributes of the Person
Authors: Abillama Raja
Published: October 2024

Chapter 3 considers a Christian (Catholic) mode of making Christians and the secular positive law mutually available. The Christian figures in judicial discourse as a medicalised body and a subject of a (possibly pathological) desire, the ecclesiastical judiciaries exercising the function of extrapolating (translating) the statements of medical experts into an ecclesiastical decision. The Christian’s impulses, as structured through marriage and medical discourse, are the link between the Christian Lebanese subject of law and the state.
Conduct and Judgment between the Shariʿa and the Law
Authors: Abillama Raja
Published: October 2024

The Muslim (Chapter 4) is legally available in so far as he conducts himself appropriately (whether in accordance with the shariʿa or ‘common sense’), a conduct expected of the judiciaries as well. Harmony (or, at least, lack of conflict) between the shariʿa and the secular positive law is sought through that conduct in order to protect the shariʿa from the sanctions of the secular positive law. The Muslim’s conduct, cultivated in the family with the shariʿa as guide, is the link between the Muslim Lebanese subject and the state.
Epilogue
Authors: Abillama Raja
Published: October 2024

In the Epilogue, I revisit the relationship between law and the secular and suggest that the coexistence of Muslims and Christians in Lebanon is a sensibility (form of life) – a secular concept that is embedded in, but neither reducible nor identical to, Lebanese law in its current arrangement. I consider the limitations and paradoxes of the secularising critiques of the Lebanese legal arrangement and the benefits of an anthropological concept of ‘coexistence’. Coexistence is not – not just – a passive, peaceful living separately together, nor a cynically instrumental or pragmatic politics, but a problem and, therefore, the grounding of ‘the political’ – the secular organising principle of a politics of the religious through which ‘Christians’ and ‘Muslims’ (in the Lebanese case, but others, in other cases) are (re)composed, conjugated.
Sexual Violence, Sexual Transgression and the Law in Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice
Authors: Hurlock Kathleen Emily
Published: October 2024

Feminist criticism regarding Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799) often focuses on Mary, the protagonist, who refuses to marry her rapist. This paper expands on this focus by considering the protagonist’s mother, also named Mary, who had a consensually ambiguous, extramarital sexual relationship with a criminal. Through the parallels between mother and daughter, the novel underscores a double bind for the late eighteenth-century woman: an extramarital encounter must either be legal rape or a woman’s punishable transgression, with no room for grey areas. This essay argues that the novel underscores the limits of male-authored rape laws, which actively harm sexually transgressive women. The younger Mary’s resistance to her rapist offers a glimpse at what a woman-centric version of justice could be, in which there is recourse for rape survivors and room for women to enact their agency.
‘Thoughts that Breathe and Words that Burn’: Barbauld, Masturbation and the Novel
Authors: Ready Kathryn
Published: October 2024

Against a persistent image of Anna Letitia Barbauld as a paragon of feminine propriety, and, as some of her male contemporaries would have it, passionless and sexually frigid, William McCarthy has argued that her minor prose piece ‘Allegory on Sleep’ recognises young women’s inclinations towards autoerotic experiment, raising questions about the potential relevance of masturbation as a theme elsewhere in her writings. This essay offers evidence from Barbauld’s novel-criticism of a tacit, and sometimes not so tacit, response to the eighteenth-century discourse around masturbation and the novel. While Barbauld concedes some of the risks that particularly French romances and novels had run for readers as fuel for autoerotic fantasy, echoing concerns expressed by earlier anti-masturbation writers, she defends the English novel and affirms the social value of a properly curated course of novel-reading. Further, she seems to resist the idea that modernity and novel-reading had introduced any special new danger related to the masturbatory application of literature and can be seen playing with recognisably masturbatory tropes in her own writing.
‘Our Dire Transgression’: Mary Diana Dods in the Biblical Sense
Authors: Carman Colin
Published: October 2024

This essay shines light on the queer life of Mary Diana Dods, who published under a male nom de plume David Lyndsay and who, off the page, lived as a man ‘Walter Sholto Douglas’, a feat that still deserves further scrutiny by historians of transgender identity. It also calls attention to Dods’s interest in rewriting Biblical stories such as of Eden, Exodus and Christ before his crucifixion, queering these narratives in the process. It analyses two particular works published in the conservative Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, ‘The First Murder’ and ‘The Plague of Darkness’, both attesting to Dods’s preoccupation with desire and sexualised states of shame. It aims to explain what motivated Dods to revise these Biblical stories, asserting that Dods was fundamentally drawn to a vision of Eden as a fractious scene and place where cross-sex enjoyment is split into two halves, that is, hetero-paradise already lost, and a postlapsarian state of sinfulness marked by the first enactments of murder (Cain–Abel), polyphony (Babel), incest (Nephilim–humans, Noah–Ham) and homosexuality (Sodom).
George Sand, Indiana and the Transgressive Work of Idealism
Authors: Sha Richard C.
Published: October 2024

This essay examines how George Sand’s turn to idealism within her early novel Indiana transgresses transgression itself. Critics have long read Indiana as a transgressive novel whose target is marriage and traditional gender identities. Yet, these same critics have not paid sufficient attention to Sand’s coupling of transgression and idealism, understood here as a utopic promotion of a higher ideal and a heightening of certain characteristics like prettiness. The essay contends that utopia provides a vantage point so that the consequences of transgression are not assumed and can be more readily evaluated. Usually linked with material practice, transgression enables the work of social rules to become visible. Nonetheless, Sand recognises that this materialist view of transgression resists evaluation of its consequences since the concrete focus on rule-breaking along with its thrills neither addresses the resilience of the norm nor the gap between rule-breaking and meaningful change. In short, breaking the rules is hardly a guarantee of meaningful change, especially when it is by a single individual. When coupled with transgression, utopia further enables us to see the idealism within transgression: the fact that transgression is typically better at calculating benefits over costs, the change versus the meaning of that change.
Emily Brontë’s Shelleyan Poetics of Sexual Ambivalence
Authors: Davis Amanda Blake
Published: October 2024

This essay affirms Emily Brontë’s status as a late Romantic and reconsiders Brontë’s poetics of sexual transgression, alterity and gender ambiguity. Responsive to scholarship on the underappreciated influence of Percy Bysshe Shelley on Brontë’s poetic identity, and the influence of Epipsychidion and ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in particular, it explores how Brontë’s imaginative engagement with Shelley in unpublished verses and in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) builds upon Shelley’s poetic gender ambiguity. Contrary to Anne K. Mellor’s assertion that ‘Brontë’s works conform to a specifically masculine Romanticism’, which she had ‘absorbed from her enthusiastic reading of Percy Shelley’, the sexual ambiguity and ambivalence in Brontë’s poetry can be understood within the context of Romantic perversion explored by Richard C. Sha, where literary depictions of transgressive sexuality become loci of liberation, and where Romantic sexual difference ‘resists the near binary opposition between male and female’. Brontë forges a resistance to binary expressions of gender and sexuality, sharing Shelley’s affinity for non-binary pronouns and gender-fluid characteristics.
Primroses in the Porridge: Hareton Earnshaw’s Transgression against his Homosocial Family in Wuthering Heights
Authors: Lavoie Chantel
Published: October 2024

This essay argues that in choosing the younger Catherine and standing up to Heathcliff in her defense, Hareton Earnshaw transgresses the celibate misanthropy and misogyny at the homosocial home of Wuthering Heights formed by Heathcliff, Joseph and Hareton in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. It is a choice in favour of the fecundity promised by the marriage pending at the end of that novel. Hitherto a labourer, foul-mouthed and unkempt, Hareton, now learning to read, is coming into his birthright not only as presages the Heights, but as a husband who will participate in engendering births of other Earnshaws. Heathcliff, who permitted himself to live for years after the elder Catherine’s death, nourished by vengeance alone (and patriarchal vengeance at that, rooted in land ownership), is finally defeated by Hareton’s apparent disloyalty in choosing love.
The Artifice of Affect
Authors: Manning Nicholas
Published: October 2024

Is emotional truth a damaging literary and cultural ideal? The Artifice of Affect proposes that valuing affective authenticity risks creating a homogenized self, encouraged to comply only with accepted moral beliefs. Similarly, when emotional truth is made the primary value of literature, literary texts too often become agents of conformity. Nowhere is this risk explored more fully than in a range of post-war American realist texts from the Cold War to the twentieth century’s end. For the works of writers such as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Kathleen Collins, Paula Fox, Ralph Ellison, or Richard Yates, formulate trenchant critiques of true feeling’s aesthetic and social imperatives. The arguments at the heart of this book aim to re-frame emotional processes as visceral constructions, which should not be held to the standards of static ideals of accuracy, legitimacy, or veracity.
Introduction: Against True Feeling
Authors: Manning Nicholas
Published: October 2024

This introduction outlines the book’s central argument that when we insist that emotions be true we are often in reality implying that they be limited, homogenised and made to comply with established moral beliefs. Similarly, when we erect emotional truth as a value in literature, whether of authors, characters or literary works, we risk making literature an agent of social and affective conformity. As evidenced in a range of American realist texts, true feeling is frequently a trap. To ask of emotions that they be true is to demand that they attune to an orthodox spectrum: that of the unified, normalised individual in an entrenched communal role, whose affective authenticity is at the service of defined ideological and socioeconomic ends. Furthermore, when we ask of emotions that they be expressible, understandable or balanced – terms which all depend on the implicit presence of a hierarchical truth – we are often employing a range of restrictive categories masquerading as positive ideals.
Inimitable Affect: On the Mimesis of Emotion
Authors: Manning Nicholas
Published: October 2024

Chapter 3 scrutinises claims that true feeling would somehow be ‘inimitable’: a transcendent essence or epiphanic experience not only beyond realist representation (as in Chapter 1) but perpetually resistant to imitation and mimesis as a whole, within either literature or the self. In the fiction of James Baldwin or Kathleen Collins, the nostalgia for an original emotionality at the basis of identity takes on particularly racialised tones, in the context of African American literatures, as a fantasy of a White emotional normality. In the work of John Cheever, Richard Ford and Richard Yates, such normalisation by way of the exclusion of ‘imitated’ feelings is articulated as a further mechanism of often unintentional societal control.
The Transparent City: Mansions, Montage and Commodity Architecture in The Kill and The Ladies’ Paradise
Authors: Moore Ben
Published: October 2024

The chapter examines Émile Zola’s Paris in The Kill (1872) and The Ladies’ Paradise (1883), focusing on the ways transparency relates to commodities in the mansions, boulevards and department store depicted in these novels. Although these novels seem to open up new vistas of absolute visibility, they also suppress or destroy parts of the city. As part of this process, architecture in Zola’s Paris becomes imbued with, even replaced by, the character of the commodity, supported by what Sergei Eisenstein calls the montage character of Zola’s writing. This architectural regime is shown to be predicated on the fantastical figure of an idealised and orientalised woman who takes on the character of the commodity.
Conclusion: The Invisible Architecture of New York
Authors: Moore Ben
Published: October 2024

This Conclusion extends the ideas and approaches presented in the book to another context, that of twentieth and twenty-first century New York. Through intersecting readings of Willa Cather’s ‘Behind the Singer Tower’ (1912), John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) and Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (2021), the chapter argues that each text draws our attention to a scene of architectural erasure, making them successors to the nineteenth-century novels of Gaskell, Dickens and Zola discussed in earlier chapters. The task of comprehending the connections between what is hidden and what is concealed in the city, and the transparency that mediates between them, is thus shown to retain its urgency beyond the period which the book has addressed.
Why “Common Judaism” Does Not Look Like Mediterranean Religion
Authors: Stowers Stanley
Published: October 2024

The contemporary cognitive and human sciences have shown that our common intuitive notions of human social formations are almost all misleading and distorting. “Common Judaism” is one of those notions. Ancient Judaism instead fits well into a theory of Mediterranean religion with three subkinds. Traditional conceptions of Judaism and common Judaism interpret Judean religion as almost wholly a matter of religious intellectualism and side line or ignore the religion of everyday social exchange and civic religion. But a critical reading of the literary sources, epigraphy, archaeology, and the cognitive sciences uncover a Jewish religion deeply entrenched in household, everyday, and civic religion.
Kinds of Myth, Meals and Power: Paul and the Corinthians
Authors: Stowers Stanley
Published: October 2024

J. Z. Smith inspires this chapter when he exposes the social multiplicity of Paul’s Corinthians by comparing them to the Atbalmin of Papua New Guinea. Instead of a cohesive community one sees social fractions attracted (and repelled) by Paul’s exotic foreign paideia and practices. Some attracted “elites” already inhabited practices and skills amenable to Paul’s freelance literate intellectual practices. Others selectively adapted certain things from Paul such as a myth of Christ as heir to a renowned ancient lineage from Abraham and incorporation through baptism, even of the dead. Paul’s frustrated discussion of the Lord’s Dinner attempts to elicit self-subjection to his freelance literate notions in light of many finding some attraction but who remained committed to the religion of everyday social exchange. Instead of understanding Paul’s utopian thought as a rebellion of alienation against locative religion, the utopian is better seen as an effect of Paul’s participation in a competitive field of freelance experts.
The Social Formations of Paul and His Romans: Synagogues, Churches and Occam’s Razor
Authors: Stowers Stanley
Published: October 2024

Explanations of “Christianity in Rome” and relations to Paul’s letter resemble Rube Goldberg contraptions with numerous unnecessary and non-working parts based largely on the mythology of Christianity beginning with a big bang. A major pillar of that myth crumbles upon critical inspection, namely, the myth about Nero executing multitudes of Christians in Rome in 64 CE. Synagogues, “the Church in Rome,” both never mentioned in the letters, are not necessary and not explanatory. But a field of freelance experts like Paul and households with individuals long interested in prophetic divinatory experts with an attraction to Paul’s message are explanatory and consist of social formations that we know existed.
Paul’s Four Discourses about Sin
Authors: Stowers Stanley
Published: October 2024

Interpreters have harmonized the various things that Paul writes about sin and read in assumptions from their own times by treating Paul as if he had one overall theory of sin. Situated historically, however, Paul worked with four distinct discourses about sin that already existed in his cultures. The letters interrelate these in particular ways without reducing them to one scheme of sin and salvation. The four are: the sinfulness of the non-Judean peoples; the degeneration of humanity; the time of the apex of sinfulness; the psychology of sin. Origen, Augustine and others united all of these into schemes of sin and salvation that drew from all parts of scripture and from contemporary philosophy. The West emphasized the psychology of sin. Thinkers in the ancient church correctly read Paul as saying that sin resulted from the fleshly passions and desires overcoming the mind. Augustine, Reformation and other later thinkers turned this on its head; sin came from a corrupted prideful mind.
The Political Economy of Industrial Policy
Authors: Toksöz Mina , Kutlay Mustafa , Hale William
Published: October 2024

This conceptual chapter reviews the theory and practice of industrial policy in the global political economy and starts with a brief analysis of the ‘rise’, ‘retreat’ and ‘return’ of industrial policies in late-industrialising economies, including Turkey. It then delineates key determinants of industrial policy in Turkey to assess the main factors that explain policy-makers’ half-committed policy implementation. The chapter argues against a dichotomic approach in “market vs state” led policies and underlines the central role of state capacity to steer market actors towards higher value-added production.
En-gendering Knowledge with the Oceanids in Prometheus Bound
Authors: Gilbert Mary H.
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores the dynamics of knowledge production and narrative authority in Prometheus Bound through the lens of contemporary philosophical work on epistemic injustice (Lorraine Code, Miranda Fricker, Gaile Pohlhaus) and epistemic resistance (Aida Hurtado, José Medina, Walter Mignolo). Building on the insight that Zeus’ sexual predation underscores his political tyranny, it argues that Io’s human and female positionality facilitates the chorus’ ultimate decision to reject their father’s epistemic authority and stand in solidarity with Prometheus and humanity, an act of courage that establishes female experience as an important source of democratic, even revolutionary knowledge.
Women’s Complaints about Violence at Athens: Zobia and Aristogeiton
Authors: McHardy Fiona
Published: October 2024

This chapter contributes to the literature on violence against women in classical Athens, by considering the case of Zobia, a metic woman who experienced violence at the hands of a man named Aristogeiton according to Demosthenes’ Against Aristogeiton (25.56-8). Inspired by consideration of women’s public vocalisation of their experiences of sexual violence and harassment through the ‘me too’ movement in recent years, the focus is on the way that Zobia uses public complaints regarding Aristogeiton’s violent behaviour. This study is informed by Alison Bailey’s (2018) exploration of anger and epistemic injustice and Karyn Freedman’s (2020) discussion of the epistemic significance of the #metoo movement. Zobia’s decision to speak out about the violence she has suffered places her at considerable risk of retaliation by a powerful man, and there is no evidence that speaking openly about offences against them yielded direct results for the women involved. Yet, Zobia’s ability to gain justice for herself at Athens was otherwise limited, and as Alison Bailey argues, employing a ‘knowing resistant anger’ can be a powerful tool for the marginalised to oppose epistemic injustices. By voicing her complaints openly as she does, Zobia’s story is able to influence the public perception of this man.
Signifying Dido: Constructs of Race and Gender in Augustan Rome
Authors: Haley Shelley P.
Published: October 2024

For too long white feminists have maintained the status quo of white supremacy and implicit support for anti-Blackness through the erasure of race as an analytical tool for interrogating the ancient societies of Greece and Rome. By applying the theoretical framework of critical race feminist theory to the works of Roman male authors such as Livy and Vergil I hope to correct this biased stance and open the door wider for a panoptic examination of ancient Roman cultural production and the society which engendered it. My main approach will be the application of racialized gender to the ancient texts. This will entail explanation of the concept as well as an explicit argument for a wider understanding of what race might have been in ancient Rome.
‘Feebly fighting back’: Stuprum in Eumolpus’s Pergamene Boy
Authors: Freas Debra
Published: October 2024

In Petronius’ Satyrica, Eumolpus tells Encolpius the story of the Pergamene Boy, which recounts his seduction of and sexual relationship with a former pupil, the son of a Roman quaestor. The Pergamene Boy has been recognized to parody Plato’s Symposium, and this chapter shows that the narrator Eumolpus strategically presents the events of the story through the literary and cultural lens of Athenian pederasty in order to trivialise and suppress the victimisation of the boy and his family in a Roman legal and social context. This tale is so successful, in fact, that scholarly assessments largely fail to acknowledge that when Eumolpus seduces and has sex with a Roman boy, he is committing stuprum, a legal charge covering unsanctioned sexual relations with Roman boys, women, widows, and girls. I argue that, by privileging Athenian pederastic norms and ignoring Roman sexual mores, Eumolpus’ Pergamene Boy meets the conditions for contributory injustice as defined by Kristie Dotson. By applying the concept of contributory injustice to a literary narrative from ancient Rome, the chapter shows how narration raises epistemological issues related to authority, reliability, and privilege that are particularly relevant for the legal and cultural recognition of sexual violence.
Olive Schreiner, Race and Black South Africa: #RhodesMustFall and a ‘Prophetic Vision of the Future’
Authors: Remmington Janet
Published: October 2024

While Schreiner’s anti-imperial, anti-war, anti-capitalist, and pro-women’s rights campaigning are well known, there is arguably less documented or interrogated around her linkages to Black South African representatives and causes. This chapter reviews Schreiner’s mid-to-late life views, networks, associations, and advocacy in relation to race, and explores how she was assessed and claimed by Black South Africans – and others – advocating for rights. The chapter opens with a focus on her changing, ultimately oppositional, relationship with archimperialist Cecil John Rhodes (1853–1902) and resonances between Schreiner’s anti-Rhodes advocacy and decolonial activism in the present (most particularly the #RhodesMustFall movement). The chapter then analyses Schreiner’s energetic post-South-African-War involvement in Black causes, such as the African franchise, campaigning against the 1913 Natives Land Act, and her contribution to the 1911 Universal Races Congress. Drawing from a range of sources, including letters, newspapers, and published writings, this chapter offers an assessment of Schreiner in relation to race and to the complex politics of black South African activism in the face of white settler colonialism and Unionism. While registering complexities, this chapter explores ways in which Schreiner was evoked, applauded, and assessed by Black South Africans at a critical historical juncture for Black rights and representation.
The Reception of Olive Schreiner’s Work and Thought in the Dutch Press
Authors: Drwal Małgorzata
Published: October 2024

This chapter explores how Olive Schreiner’s work was received in the Dutch press between the 1890s and the 1930s. During this period, the press landscape in the Netherlands reflected the ‘pillarisation’ of Dutch society – a vertical pattern of social organisation in which political and confessional divides structured all spheres of social life, bisecting or superseding other divisions such as class.
Judging by the number of records in the press archives (Delpher.nl) alone, Olive Schreiner was a recognisable figure in the Netherlands, with references to and discussion of her work and opinions in periodicals representing the range of confessional and ideological pillars in Dutch society. The chapter is based on analysis of material including book reviews and announcements, readers’ letters, reprinted excerpts from Schreiner’s works, as well as references to her as a writer and progressive intellectual. These are used to illuminate the complexities of divisions among Dutch society into pillars in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The chapter assesses Schreiner’s impact on the Dutch public and explain how the contexts in which her writing and thought were referred to influenced their interpretation, with associated implications for the public image of Schreiner.
Ashes and Diamonds
Authors: McArthur Colin , Murray Jonathan
Published: October 2024

Building on a description of the immediate post-war political situation in Poland, this essay reveals and celebrates the complex response of director Andrzej Wajda to that situation in his film Ashes and Diamonds (1958). This essay is concerned with both socio-historical and formal analysis and, where possible, locating the former within the latter.
Politicising Scottish Film Culture
Authors: McArthur Colin , Murray Jonathan
Published: October 2024

A polemical piece deploring the lack of political analysis of Scottish film culture, its fragmented quality and the lack of dialogue among its constituent parts. The essay commends the model of ideological analysis proposed by the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma.
Breaking the Signs: Scotch Myths as Cultural Struggle
Authors: McArthur Colin , Murray Jonathan
Published: October 2024

Taking the Grigors’ exhibition Scotch Myths (1981) as a jumping off point, the essay brings the emergent discipline of semiotics to bear on a wide range of Scottish artefacts (postcards, shortbread tins, paintings, films etc.) to reveal the recurrent discourses, primarily Tartanry and Kailyard, within which they have been constructed. It then proposes alternative, often deconstructive, discourses which challenge the dominant ones.
National Identities
Authors: McArthur Colin , Murray Jonathan
Published: October 2024

This essay explores cinematic and televisual representations of World War Two and responds to the regressive conception of British national identity that was widely mobilised round the South Atlantic War of 1982.
TV Commercials: Moving Statues and Old Movies
Authors: McArthur Colin , Murray Jonathan
Published: October 2024

Originally written for a volume of essays celebrating and applying the critical method of Roland Barthes, this essay brings the idea of ‘intertextuality’ to bear on a range of TV commercials, demonstrating that they are constructed more from other aspects of (popular) culture than from the ‘real’ world.
Tele-history: The Dragon Has Two Tongues
Authors: McArthur Colin , Murray Jonathan
Published: October 2024

This essay celebrates a Harlech TV series about Welsh history on account of its multiple departures (two presenters with different views of Welsh history; extensive foregrounding of political issues) from the norms of TV programmes about history. The Harlech series is compared favourably with those norms. The latter are critiqued as embodying the bourgeois conception of history via such recurrent tropes as the centrality of the individual, the uniqueness of historical events, and a commitment to linear conceptions and representations, televisual or otherwise, of history.
The Rises and Falls of the Edinburgh International Film Festival
Authors: McArthur Colin , Murray Jonathan
Published: October 2024

Tracing the Festival’s trajectory from its founding in 1947, this essay argues that the EIFF was at its best at those moments (the late 1940s; the early 1970s) when it was committed to a clear politics of film culture. The essay offers detailed accounts of the films shown and the critical documentation produced in both periods and the distinctive conception of cinema underlying them.
Transatlantic Scots, Their Interlocutors and the Scottish Discursive Unconscious
Authors: McArthur Colin , Murray Jonathan
Published: October 2024

Returning to the concept of the Scottish Discursive Unconscious (an idea first developed in two earlier essays also included in this volume), this later work explores the extent to which that phenomenon suffuses the utterances of those Scots (and more particularly, their descendants) who have emigrated to the United States and Canada. The essay outlines a series of research proposals for understanding how this phenomenon came about.
Author’s Afterword
Authors: McArthur Colin
Published: October 2024

In this volume afterword, the author emphasises and reflects on the multiple institutional contexts for, and influences on, his evolving critical practice during the six-decade-long period that the volume surveys. He notes that several of the volume’s essays deal directly with institutional histories and questions; that a significant part of his working life was spent primarily within or in relation to three institutions (the British Film Institute, the Council for National Academic Awards and Tribune, the socialist weekly); and that much of his wider published oeuvre was rehearsed in or around those institutions. The author also emphasises and reflects on connections between his specifically Scottish writings and two further institutions, the Edinburgh International Film Festival and the journal Cencrastus. The author also argues that his evolving critical methodology, as curated and illustrated by the volume, was influenced initially by American New Criticism and the journals Cahiers du Cinéma and Movie before shifting, under the influence of Marxist cultural theory, to what he today terms Marxist formalist, displaying as it does equal interest in ideology and discourse on one hand and close formal analysis of texts on the other.
Non-theatrical exhibition and the emergence of an art film audience
Authors: David Jackson Andrew
Published: October 2024

This chapter investigates three exhibition spaces that directly fuelled the emergence of art houses and cinephilia: the European cultural centres, university film clubs and small private cinemas called ‘cinematheques’ or ‘videotheques.’ All three spaces offered participants a cinematic means of overcoming the dictatorship’s cultural blockade. All were formed in opposition to the culture of mainstream theatrical exhibition. They exhibited European art films when screening opportunities for movies outside the mainstream were limited. Chapter 2 investigates the institutional identities of European cultural centres, film clubs, and videotheques, focusing on the motivations and desires of audiences, the type of domestic and international films consumed and the exhibition practices that emerged. All three spaces served as entry points for many of the same people who were influential in exhibition, production, distribution, and film creation in Korea. These people did not emerge from within the chedogwŏn or established channels of a cinematic system that was seen as bereft of ideas and inextricably linked with the corruption of the dictatorship. These exhibition sites cultivated a small but committed fanbase dedicated to European art and other non-mainstream film for whom cinema meant more than entertainment; it offered a new meaning to their cultural consumption.
The theatrical exhibition of art film and Korean cinephilia, 1987–95
Authors: David Jackson Andrew
Published: October 2024

Chapter 3 examines the establishment of theatres dedicated to art films in post-dictatorship era Seoul. It offers a historical snapshot of the cinematic culture that emerged in response to the military dictatorship’s 30-year cultural blockade. This immediate post-dictatorship period (1988-1995) was key to the growth of art film consumption in Korea. Regulatory changes, shifts in the geopolitical atmosphere, and the cut-throat economic atmosphere of a cinematic market open to direct distribution by Hollywood majors helped create a niche for European film exhibition. Theatres experimented with programming strategies to draw audiences. The Core Art Hall successfully created an institutional identity through its programming, use of space, and film-related events and activities. Most strategies were adopted from videotheques, film clubs, and cultural centres, and exhibitors and fans alike were motivated by the anti-dictatorship movement's dynamism. This chapter interrogates the specific character of a Korean cinephilia that prioritised the sociality, ritualistic and symbolic associations of cinematic experiences over film texts. This cinephilia was led by women both as consumers and producers of film culture. This chapter examines the female domination of art film exhibition and consumption and the important women who emerged into the industry from this cinematic culture.
The Sacrifice , the Dongsung Cinematheque, film media and the shaping of a new audience, 1995–6
Authors: David Jackson Andrew
Published: October 2024

This chapter investigates the events of 1995-1996, a pivotal year-long period in the transformation of South Korean cinematic culture. Four essential elements contributed to the rapid expansion of South Korean cinephilia. ‘TheSacrifice Incident’ in which Tarkovsky’s movie sold tens of thousands of tickets at screenings in Seoul, outselling Hollywood blockbusters. The story behind this incident provides an important historical insight into tensions within mid-1990s South Korean cinema. This industry was undergoing transformation but was still dominated by powerful vested interests intent on resisting significant change. The rapid expansion of print media dedicated to film helped nurture the nascent art houses and expand cinephilia nationwide. The most prominent art house, the Dongsung Cinematheque, began its year-long experiment in film exhibition, education and audience engagement. The establishment of the Pusan International Film Festival and the festival ‘fever’ that erupted in its wake catalysed cinephilia. The chapter demonstrates the interconnections between the success of The Sacrifice, the Dongsung Cinematheque, film media, academia, film festivals and the intensification of cinephilia in mid-to-late 1990s South Korea.
Narratives, Power and Resistance: Gezi as a Counter-narrative
Authors: Uğur-Çinar Meral
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on the role patriarchal narratives play in politics and how such patriarchal stories are countered in protests and to what end. It starts by discussing the role patriarchal narratives play in legitimizing political authority, and different forms of rule, such as neopatrimonialism. It brings together theories of feminism and those of the state. The chapter then turns to the dialogical nature of patriarchal narratives and focuses on how Gezi protesters engaged with the AKP’s patriarchal narratives to subvert it and to open new possibilities of alternative notions of Turkish citizenship that are inclusive, nonhierarchical, and nonpaternalistic. Using the Gezi protests in Turkey as a case in point, this chapter shows how the protesters engaged with and subverted the patriarchal narratives in order to problematize the very foundations on which state-citizen relations were built in Turkey under the AKP rule. The conclusion of the chapter regarding the potentials of nonpatriarchal narratives also provides a good segue into the following chapter.
Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation
Authors: Greer Erin Elizabeth
Published: October 2024

The ideal of 'conversation' recurs in modern thought as a symbol and practice deemed central to ethics, democratic politics and thinking itself. Interweaving readings of fiction and philosophy in a 'conversational' style inspired by Stanley Cavell, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation clarifies this lofty yet vague ideal, while developing a revitalizing model for interdisciplinary literary studies. It argues that conversation is key to exemplary responses to sceptical doubt in ordinary language and political philosophys – where scepticism is understood to threaten ethics and democratic politics – and in works of British fiction spanning from Jane Austen through Ali Smith. It shows that for these writers, conversation can shift attention from metaphysical doubts regarding our capacity to know 'reality' and other people, to ethical, democratic and aesthetic action. The book moreover proposes – and models – 'conversational criticism' as a framework linking literary studies to external political and ethical commitments, while remaining responsive to aesthetic form.
Performative Conversation and Acknowledgement: Meredith, Austin and Cavell
Authors: Greer Erin Elizabeth
Published: October 2024

This chapter focuses on the tension between Cavell's picture of conversational acknowledgement and conventions – legal, social and literary – that underwrite language use. Acknowledgement is Cavell's term for the appropriate response to the alleged problem of 'other minds,' and he represents conversation as a central site in which acknowledgement unfolds as 'articulate responsiveness' to the other, an alternative to striving to overcome otherness and achieve perfect knowledge. The chapter demonstrates that George Meredith's The Egoist shares an understanding of the importance of such conversational acknowledgement, while also questioning how conversations can live up to this ideal in situations of stark inequality. The novel spotlights this problem through exploring speech performativity, anticipating J.L. Austin's path-breaking account of the tendency of language to act rather than merely report or communicate. The chapter argues that Meredith's novel recasts the ethics of intimate conversation in light of potentially repressive powers of speech, while simultaneously suggesting that literature can influence the interpretive lenses that give conversations their specific performative forces.
Conversation and Common Sense: Woolf, Russell and Kant
Authors: Greer Erin Elizabeth
Published: October 2024

This chapter demonstrates that conversation is an aesthetic, worldmaking practice in Virginia Woolf's fiction. It focuses on Woolf's 'play-poem,' The Waves, arguing that this text develops and formally enacts an implicit philosophy of conversation as a source of common ground, which offers respite from sceptical doubt. This philosophy is encapsulated in a repeated scene of dinner conversation in which six characters look together at a flower on the table, proposing that as they make conversation, they 'make one thing seen by many eyes simultaneously.' Reading this assertion as a retort to Bertrand Russell's sceptical assertion that 'There is absolutely nothing which is seen by two minds simultaneously,' the chapter builds on Ann Banfield's study of Woolf's relationship to Cambridge philosophy by claiming that these scenes, and the text as a whole, sketch an idiosyncratic, aesthetic response to problems associated with scepticism. Woolf suggests that a Kantian sensus communis can be generated (rather than consulted and imputed) in conversation, and that this 'common sense' reassures characters of the common world and possibilities of community. The unique soliloquy form of The Waves enacts this implicit philosophy of conversation and prefigures links between conversation, aesthetic judgement and political worldmaking pursued in subsequent chapters.
Public Conversation and Judgement: Rushdie and Arendt
Authors: Greer Erin Elizabeth
Published: October 2024

This chapter makes explicit the political stakes of the foregoing analysis of conversation as a collaborative, aesthetic and ethical project, arguing that Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses provides resources toward formulating an original vision of democratic exchange as conversation. Through its satirical depictions of British public life and a subaltern counterpublic, the novel simultaneously rebukes the liberal idealization of rational, disinterested public discourse, identity politics and radical fixations on disrupting public norms. This threefold rebuke culminates in a riot, which the chapter reads alongside Hannah Arendt's theorization of the public realm and her late invocation of Kantian aesthetics as a model for political judgement. The chapter develops an account of public life as generated and sustained in conversation, arguing that The Satanic Verses helps connect Arendt's separate work on political speech and judgement, while also helping correct for her flawed considerations of racism and inequality. The chapter concludes with a reappraisal of the political stakes of magical realism, proposing that the hybrid form of Rushdie's novel transforms the practice of reading into an analogue for the conversational mode of political judgement Arendt argues is essential to democratic politics.
The curious geographies of Arizona Bill
Authors: Scheie Timothy
Published: October 2024

A close reading of two films from Joë Hamman’s “Arizona Bill” cycle (1912-1914) exposes a discordance between the Camargue region’s distinct landscape and the western narrative’s setting. In this “transitional” period, between the earliest years of cinema and the integration of the classical narrative film style, the narrative continuity of a fiction film could remain unstable; it is not always clear whether the action in the films is unfolding in contemporary (1913) France or on the American frontier decades earlier. However, this ambiguity, considered primitive by later standards, is also permissive, and may be considered a positive asset of this mode of cinema. The appeal of these films arguably lies not in a convincing or decisive representation of either America or France, but in the surplus attraction the indeterminacy allows.
East meets west(ern)
Authors: Scheie Timothy
Published: October 2024

The Dziga Vertov Group’s Wind from the East (Le Vent d’est) is a radical experiment that could be called an anti-Western and an anti-cinema. The Western genre, in both its Hollywood and Italian iterations, is positioned in this film as the foremost emblem of an irredeemable mode of cinematic representation: the insidious image juste (“just” or “correct” image) whose apparently transparent meaning begs a systematic critique. However, the enunciation of the pilloried genre is also identified as French, specifically as a cinematic response to the events of May 1968 issued by figures who participated them (Jean-Luc Godard and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, among others). This chapter submits that the western genre not only acts as the target of the critique but, through its dissonance in a French mode, also adds dimension to the film’s didactic estrangement of existing cinematic practices. When has a French western ever held a recognized claim to the image juste?
Plutarch and Punishment: Slavery and Toxic Masculinity in Aulus Gellius 1.26
Authors: Husby Tristan K.
Published: October 2024

Tristan Husby uses a story from Aulus Gellius about Plutarch beating a slave while claiming that he does not feel any anger to examine the utility of the concept of ‘toxic masculinity’ for discussions of ancient masculinity. Pointing out that the modern definition puts anger at the centre of the concept, but that expressing anger in the ancient world is coded as a loss of control and thus not masculine, Husby proposes that adding the dimensions of freedom and class status to the definition will make toxic masculinity a more useful concept to apply to the ancient world.
Manliness as Motive for Action: A Discussion of (Toxic) Masculinity in the Antigone and the Lysistrata
Authors: Morassi Davide
Published: October 2024

Davide Morassi assesses how the ideal of masculinity was perceived in relation to its power as a motive for action and comments upon the influence of this paradigm on the actions of Athenian men. He discusses how masculinity was represented in two examples of Attic theatre from the second half of the fifth century: Sophocles’ Antigone and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. Morassi highlights how the ideal masculinity shaped not only the self-representation of Athenian (and Greek) men, but was also recognised as a reason for behaviours which were excessive and thus frowned on.
Toxic Masculinity as a Lens for Middle Byzantium: The Case of Nikephoros II Phokas
Authors: Masterson Mark
Published: October 2024

Mark Masterson consider the manifold discourse around the tenth-century emperor, Nikephoros II Phokas. In terms of toxic practices harming the self, Nikephoros was an ascetic who believed in denying himself sex and limiting food. He also cultivated a masculine circle that excluded women at court, and oversaw a brutal expansion of territory by military means. Masterson uses the modern notion of toxic masculinity to shed light on the life of the Emperor and Byzantine perspectives on him. While the Byzantine evidence shows a partially favourable picture of male homosociality, there is also what can be called toxic masculinity lodged in the durable structures of the medieval empire, structures which have current analogues.