bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Setting the Scene: The World of a Late Medieval Middling Scholar
Authors: Hirschler Konrad
Published: May 2020

This chapter writes the social history of a scholar of late Mamluk Damascus who was a highly prolific writer, but never part of the social elite of his city. It moves away from the unhelpful term ‘religious scholar’ and considers in detail how such a middling scholar was able to sustain a sprawling family by a range of economic activities. That his books were hardly copied and hardly circulated was to a large extent linked to the fact that he was the last dinosaur of a mode of scholarship that was on the verge of disappearing, post-canonical hadith scholarship.
Monumentalising the Past
Authors: Hirschler Konrad
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Library of Damascus was the oldest continuously surviving book collection of the city when the modern Public Library was founded in 1878. It discusses the practicalities of building up such a library from scratch in late Mamluk Damascus and shows to what extent post-canonical hadith scholarship dominated this book collection. As this line of scholarship was on its way out Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī had to take enormous strides to revive books that needed oral transmission from an authorized teacher. He finally endowed this library - accompanied by a ritualistic binge reading of the books – to create a monument to one part of Syrian book culture that was about to vanish. He placed this monument into one of the most meaningful places to commemorate a way of writerly culture that had been closely tied to his family and quarter.
Rural Experiences: The Western Desert
Authors: Colburn Henry P.
Published: May 2020

This chapter is concerned with the Dakhla and Kharga Oases in the Western Desert. This was an obscure region, considered by the Egyptians to be outside of Egypt proper. Population there was limited, especially after the Old Kingdom when the artesian wells dried up. This picture changes dramatically under Achaemenid rule. Several temples were established or expanded in the oasis. One of these, the Hibis Temple is the earliest example of the ‘pan-Egyptian’ temples that characterized the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. New towns were built along with these temples, and these towns were supplied with water by means of qanats, an irrigation technology that originated in Iran. The resurgence of the oasis, then, served an imperial purpose, namely to link this important strategic location more closely to centers of imperial power in the Nile valley. But, as the Demotic ostraca from Ain Manawir indicate, this act also created a thriving local economy with ties to the Mediterranean and the production of cash crops, notably castor oil, for export. Once again, the empire’s impact in the oases produced varied consequences.
Coinage and the Egyptian Economy
Authors: Colburn Henry P.
Published: May 2020

A major consequence of the integration of Egypt into the Achameneid Empire was its newfound need for silver in order to make tribute payments. This was achieved by selling grain and other products to the Greeks. As a result Egypt acquired large quantities of Athenian tetradrachms, which became so prominent that by the end of the fifth century it appeared as a unit of account in Demotic and Aramaic documents, and was even imitated by the Egyptians. Indeed, the tetradrachm was so prevalent that during the Second Persian Period imitations of it were even issued in the names of the satraps Sabaces and Mazaces, and of Artaxerxes III himself. In this respect Achaemenid rule played an important yet indirect role in setting Egypt on the road to monetization.
Scotland: Local Leaders, Local Communities
Authors: Holtschneider Hannah
Published: May 2020

Focusing on the specifics of the Scottish context, the analysis centres on the work of Salis Daiches in relation to the discussion about the relationship between London and the provinces. The Chief Rabbi’s authority was not so tangible in this northernmost nation and the need to keep alive his hegemony in all halakhic matters was a prominent concern in Hertz’s dealings with Daiches and Jewish religious leaders in Glasgow. Daiches was the best educated rabbi in Scotland at the time, was trusted by the Chief Rabbi, which, alongside his public profile as a representative of Jews and Judaism to non-Jewish society, placed him in a prominent position in the Scottish Jewish communities. The chapter argues that Daiches’s ambition for leadership in Scotland was useful to the Chief Rabbi whose authority was upheld through Daiches, while it resulted in tension with Jewish leaders in Glasgow. Daiches’s own clashes with the Chief Rabbi meant that his career did not flourish the way in which he had hoped. Daiches died in Edinburgh in 1945, broken by the murder of his fellow Jews in Europe, and the impossibility of the synthesis of Jewish and secular culture he had championed all his life.
Traces and Spaces: Jews and/in the City of Edinburgh
Authors: Holtschneider Hannah
Published: May 2020

This chapter relates the discussions of the previous three chapters to the present-day geography of the city of Edinburgh. Memories of early- to mid-twentieth century Jewish life in the Scottish capital form the basis for the exploration of the urban geography of Jewish Edinburgh. The memoirs of David Daiches, the second son of Salis Daiches and prominent literary scholar, take centre stage in this journey into the city’s Jewish past and its markers in the present cityscape. Additional evidence is drawn from published memoirs such as Howard Denton’s The Happy Land, anecdotal articles from the community newspaper The Edinburgh Jewish Star, and observations during the recently piloted walking tours ‘Jewish Edinburgh on Foot’. Thus the city of Edinburgh emerges as a space filled with traces of Jewish life, actively recalled by residents and increasingly physically marked in the landscape as landmarks and related stories are narrated and re-narrated.
Erasing
Authors: Cooper Sarah
Published: May 2020

The focus of this chapter is on mental images that spectators are prompted to build and then to erase, either by conjuring a disappearance within them or by dismantling them fully as part of the activity of imagining. This iconoclastic mental activity is the corollary of the onscreen relation to the image in the work of the two contrasting directors discussed in this final chapter. The reshaping of the previous chapter necessitated adding something to the onscreen image. The work of erasure explored in this current chapter involves both subtracting something from the mental image that has been formed on the basis of verbal instruction and destroying it in its entirety: the former process is one traced as a recurrent element of Guy Debord’s first film Howls for Sade (1952). The latter process is one traced through a series of late films by Marguerite Duras, from The Lorry (1977) and The Ship Night (1979) to two shorts, Negative Hands (1979) and Caesarea (1979). Negative Hands also prompts instances of what Elaine Scarry terms ‘re-picturing’, which involves the forming and re-forming of mental images even as this too, in Duras’s case, serves an ultimate process of annihilation.
Postscript
Authors: Cooper Sarah
Published: May 2020

The brief postscript cites Derek Jarman’s writings in his book Chroma in order to stress that no two people’s mental images will be the same and encourages readers to broaden the scope of the discussion still further by extending guided imagining into as yet uncharted territory.
Conclusion: Broadening Out
Authors: Cooper Sarah
Published: May 2020

The conclusion journeys back across the different processes explored in the preceding chapters in order to stress continuities in the procedures that prompt mental image composition in spite of the very different films from different geo-political contexts and eras that have informed this study. It also asks how the fruits of this research might relate to an even broader range of filmic examples. The argument throughout the book emphasises that no one process is attached solely to the examples discussed in any given chapter and indicates how a number of processes sometimes coalesce when viewing an individual work. To take this argument further, the conclusion suggests that these processes, especially the opening account of layering, are portable and relevant to moments of mainstream narrative cinema as well as further examples from art house cinema and documentary. When characters tell stories in the diegetic space without their words giving way to images that illustrate what they are narrating, when a voice-over is evocative and diverges from what is seen on screen, or when a soundtrack speaks louder than words, there is an opening for the image-making capacity of the imagination that has been the book’s focus throughout.
Introduction
Authors: Mullen Mary L.
Published: May 2020

The introduction offers a new understanding of the politics of institutions and a new transnational account of British realism. The introduction suggests that nineteenth-century British realist novels express the tensions between shared institutional time and unruly anachronisms. In realist novels, especially realist novels in colonial settings, representing how characters inhabit institutions means encountering alternative temporalities and envisioning otherwise possibilities. This introduction makes the case for the importance of nineteenth-century Irish realist novels not only because they exemplify the temporal and political contradictions that define realism but also because their prevalent anachronisms insist that institutional time is not neutral or merely disciplinary: it structures empire.
Charles Dickens’s Reactionary Reform
Authors: Mullen Mary L.
Published: May 2020

This chapter demonstrates how Charles Dickens’s novels embrace ‘reactionary reform’: a vision of the future that is actually a return to an anachronistic past. Reactionary reform restores origins that institutions erase in their drive towards futurity, whether those origins are Sissy Jupe’s life with her father in Hard Times, Esther Summerson’s parentage in Bleak House or the humble home that Pip mistakenly disavows in Great Expectations. Reactivating origins allows a different stance towards institutions: instead of settling down and accepting their established rhythms, characters inhabit institutions, dwelling temporarily in them without acceding to their terms. But Dickens’s vision of reform does not extend to everyone. He reinforces settler colonialism by representing particular groups of people as outside of history and futurity altogether. Validating anachronisms and criticising them in turn, Dickens imagines progressive change that rejects modern institutionalism but, in the process, shores up the racialised abstractions upon which settler colonial institutions depend.
Coda: Inhabiting Institutions
Authors: Mullen Mary L.
Published: May 2020

The coda clarifies the political stakes of this book’s argument. Reflecting on the gap between people’s lived experiences of the university and public defenses of it, it argues that nineteenth-century realist novels provide strategies for inhabiting the twenty-first century university. We, too, can find political inspiration in anachronisms. The coda shows that postcolonial and queer theory’s untimely presence in the academy resist the impulse to define the future as merely an extension of the present.
Affective Functions of Fiction
Authors: Moss-Wellington Wyatt
Published: May 2020

This chapter covers the use of emotion in fiction: the way we use stories to signal affective aptitude or emotional intelligence, to regulate moods and shift undesirable affect, to stimulate emotional contagions, to replace mystification with causal emotional attributions, to both inspire and deflate fears, and to share that which upsets us with imagined others.
Ethics and Conclusions
Authors: Moss-Wellington Wyatt
Published: May 2020

This chapter ties up the social narratology of Part II by looking at some of the uses of narrative in generating ethical conclusions. It covers gossip, the “playing through” of responses to ethical dilemmas, and some of the basic “how to live” questions embedded in a majority of stories. It concludes with suggestions for future research based on this work.
Afterword
Authors: Moss-Wellington Wyatt
Published: May 2020

A brief postscript covers the current ethical and political implications of narrative humanism; it seeks to situate the theory in present global politics, and show how narrative humanism might guide us through some contemporary problems, in particular our responses the rise of the alt-right. It concludes with some suggestions for further research in these areas.
After Life – Expressions of Mourning in Elizabeth von Arnim and Katherine Mansfield
Authors: Römhild Juliane
Published: May 2020

Like many women, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim lost members of their immediate family in the Great War, and both writers worked through their loss in writing. Although their work is stylistically and thematically different, the expressions of grief in their work shares certain characteristics with other (post-)war writing. This article examines the literary responses to personal to loss in von Arnim’s novels Christine and In the Mountains, as well as Mansfield’s New Zealand stories and “The Fly” with the help of their private diaries and letters.
Tracing Garden Networks: Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim
Authors: Scott Bonnie Kime
Published: May 2020

Investigating the connections between Mansfield and von Arnim, as well as ways that they differed in the style, enables us to appreciate a diverse set of creative attachments that early 20th century women writers made to the natural world. As Mansfield’s older cousin, von Arnim offered an example of a successful woman writer with her novel, Elizabeth in her German Garden. This essay finds an international set of gardens in the experience and writing of both authors, as well as sensitivity to gender, class and national attitudes reflected in garden settings. While Mansfield’s style was decidedly more modernist in its imagery and psychology, both authors constructed floral catalogues and used garden settings in characterisation, often to humorous effect. The two join other women writers of their era in their love of gardens, using references to flowers, and offerings of them, both to network and to express their regard for one another.
Writing Toward a New World: Awakenings in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ and Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April
Authors: O’Connor Noreen
Published: May 2020

Noreen O’Connor argues that Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ and her cousin Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April each present a specifically female narrative of awakening to consciousness of the alienated nature of bourgeois marriage; however, the texts also open up the possibility for women to reinvent and restructure their lives. The essay compares each text’s narration style, discussing the ways in which Mansfield’s third-person limited narration reveals the main character Bertha’s struggle to bring a new desire into language, even as it captures the great difficulties that acting on such an awakening presents in the modernist era. Von Arnim’s use of free indirect discourse narration echoes that of Mansfield’s, revealing the flawed bourgeois social conventions that constrain women from acting upon their desires. However, the narrative also emphasises the shared nature of the multiple women characters’ experiences, and quickly pushes past the isolated alienation that Mansfield’s story addresses. The Enchanted April, further, in the shape of a double quest narrative, moves beyond the scene of awakening to offer a vision for women of individual self-determination as well as strategies for imagining and building a supportive, peaceful, post-World War One community based upon mutual understanding, respect, and pacifist ideals of universal love.
‘Ces femmes avec ces fleurs!’: Flowers, Gender and Relationships in the Work of Elizabeth von Arnim and Katherine Mansfield
Authors: Jakubowicz Karina
Published: May 2020

This article considers Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim's shared love of flowers. It  demonstrates how this particular passion affected their work and personal relationships. It also suggests that the symbolism of these plants became, for both women, a way of communicating emotional, rebellious or sexual sentiments in a way that was seemingly conventional and feminine.
Katherine Mansfield’s Many Forms
Authors: Ryan Derek
Published: May 2020

Review essay appraising recent critical scholarship and one novel in the field of Katherine Mansfield studies.
Aristotle on the Matter of Form
Authors: Trott Adriel M.
Published: May 2020

This book argues that nature even in generation in Aristotle should be understood on an emergent model that sees a unity in the four causes. The model of artifice divides form from matter, where material only appears as already informed because it is itself natural, but functions in artifice as the stuff for form. Natural generation, and thus nature, appears to follow this model insofar as form in the figure of semen appears to impose itself on matter as menses, making form the superior and positive power that is the contrary to matter, which lacks and seeks after form. This book affirms the internal source of movement view by arguing that form in generation is working in and through matter and that matter has a character of its own, suggesting the Möbius strip as a model for the relationship. Semen does the work of form through the material that makes it semen; semen’s matter has its own power to contribute to form, not reducible to its relationship to form. The book presents arguments against the existence of species form and prime matter in Aristotle and canvasses ancient Greek depictions of the feminine in order to situate the specifics of Aristotle’s account of material in the composition and working of semen and menses in generation and sex differentiation. It concludes by canvassing the places Aristotle uses the analogy to craft to show how they work in specific contexts.
Introduction: Aristotle and the History of Sex
Authors: Trott Adriel M.
Published: May 2020

The Introduction considers how Aristotle’s normative view of form and matter, associated with male and female, makes for a metaphysics of gender that construes the male as what has meaning and definition and the female as what is in need of such definition. The one- and two-sex models in the history of thinking of sexual difference are explained to show how Aristotle seems to fit in both and neither by construing matter as what is not form on the one-sex model but also considering form and matter separate and distinct causes. This framing points to the problem that matter has posed to the history of philosophy—matter is posited to fill a role that it seems only capable of fulfilling by having no power of its own—and offers the Möbius strip as a model for thinking matter’s relation to form.
Feminist Critics of Aristotle’s Biology and Metaphysics
Authors: Trott Adriel M.
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at the many issues that feminist critics have raised both to accuse Aristotle of misogyny and to defend Aristotle’s conception of the female, matter, and the feminine. This chapter thus lays out the questions that set up the book: To what extent is Aristotle’s biology offering a positive role for the female and for matter in generation? To what extent does Aristotle’s biology influence the rest of his corpus? To what extent is Aristotle’s metaphysics normative, privileging form—and thus male—over matter—and thus female? To what extent is artifice the proper model of generation for Aristotle? The chapter thus looks at feminists who say Aristotle’s biology is sexist, those who say it is not, and thus who find the problem more fundamentally rooted in Aristotle’s metaphysics.
Aristotle on Material
Authors: Trott Adriel M.
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues against the existence of prime matter in Aristotle’s metaphysics and biological works by analysing the key passages supporters of the prime matter view draw on to make their case. Aristotle’s case for change from a substratum, his rejection of matter as substance viewed as a substratum, his account of elemental change are shown not to require prime matter, but rather to point to the power that matter has on its own. Aristotle views matter as multiple and the multiple sense of matter forecloses the possibility of prime matter. The chapter concludes by considering how separate form and matter in generation can be construed through Aristotle’s account of the soul’s relation to body and his account of different ways of being acted upon to further the case for matter’s independent power and intimacy with form in natural generation and in natural substance.
The Feminine and the Elemental in Greek Myth, Medicine and Early Philosophy
Authors: Trott Adriel M.
Published: May 2020

This chapter offers historical background and context of ancient Greek conceptions of the female, the feminine, and matter, including the elemental in Greek myth, medical texts and the Pre-Socratic philosophers. The chapter examines the role of female divinities in reproduction and the gods said to be born of Zeus and thus without a female goddess or mortal woman in Greek myth to show the anxiety in Greek myth over female fecundity coupled with the recognition that reproduction without women was impossible. Depictions of Pandora as the beginning of a separate race of women point to Greek understandings of woman as a belly in both productive and consumptive ways. The chapter further considers how Pre-Socratics thematize the elemental to think about the association of moisture with the female in medical treatises and Aristotle. The last part examines the Hippocratics views of elemental forces in the body and their effect on women for whom their excess can become a problem as well as the focus on the belly as the source of power in the body.
Semen, Menses, Blood: Material in Generation
Authors: Trott Adriel M.
Published: May 2020

This chapter presents the central argument of the book: the material capacities of semen contribute to its capacity to animate menses. The chapter considers how semen’s material produces formal capacities by comparing semen to blood: blood is hot through dependence on something external to it, while semen’s heat is internal to it. This internal power is what makes it formal power. The case is made for how matter can have power without being teleological. The particulars of how semen causes by comparison to the positions of pansomatism and preformationism, which Aristotle rejects, are laid out and the central aspects of the material composition of semen are considered with a focus on the role of vital heat. Vital heat is a source of fostering life beyond the generation of animals, in stomachs, earth and sun, which points to a further sense of its materiality.
Shakespeare in Japan: Disability and a Pedagogy of Disorientation
Authors: Hobgood Allison P.
Published: May 2020

This essay describes what happened in the author’s Shakespeare classroom at Tokyo International University in the wake of a deadly stabbing attack at a residential care center for people with disabilities in nearby Sagamihara. Allison Hobgood discovers that the importance of Shakespeare in processing and responding to the Sagamihara attack was, paradoxically, his relative non-importance to her students, as compared with Shakespeare’s elevated status among U.S. undergraduates. Her model of a “feminist disability pedagogy of disorientation” decentralizes stoic analysis and mastery in favor of “immersive, deeply affective, real-time experiential learning.” By juxtaposing irreverent adaptations and selected close readings from Macbeth with frank discussions of cultural attitudes toward disability, Hobgood and her students carved out a space for Shakespeare to speak to their disorienting present, fashioning in their responses to Shakespeare a framework for more just thought and action.
Global Performance and Local Reception: Teaching Hamlet and More in Singapore
Authors: Jones Emily Griffiths
Published: May 2020

When Emily Griffiths Jones taught a Shakespeare seminar in Singapore through MIT’s Global Shakespeares project, she found. In this context, normative Western patterns of interpretation are challenged, along with their assumptions of a “supposedly universalizing psychological realm.” The comparative deployment of digitally archived multicultural performances led students to engage with Shakespeare’s works in a way that “transcend[s] the myth of monolithic textual authority.” Through interpreting, comparing, and responding creatively to global Shakespeares (including making their own short films), students used Shakespearean performance to address social issues relevant to them, from immigration to LGBTQ rights.
“Intelligently organized resistance”: Shakespeare in the Diasporic Politics of John E. Bruce
Authors: Hall Kim F.
Published: May 2020

In 1916 the black journalist and organizer John Edward Bruce outlined an approach for the study of Shakespeare aimed at racial uplift. This chapter situates Bruce’s inaugural address to “The Friends of Shakespeare,” a black organization for the study and performance of Shakespeare, in the wider U.S. context of migration, the rise of white nationalism, and pan-Africanist thought. An autodidact, Bruce advocated for a collaborative approach to studying Shakespeare’s works in their historical context and alongside works by black authors. Comparing Bruce’s collectivist and historicist strategies for using Shakespeare as a vehicle for racial uplift, with radical pedagogies described more recently by Joyce E. King and others, Hall argues that the study of Shakespeare, then as now, can equip students for “intelligently organized resistance.”
Shakespearean Tragedy, Ethics, and Social Justice
Authors: Metzger Mary Janell
Published: May 2020

How can the study of literary form shape students’ understanding of ethics, justice, and community? This chapter describes a course that yokes Shakespearean tragedies to ethical philosophy from Aristotle to Patricia J. Williams. Through these pairings, students compare the benefits of cognitive and affective learning, consider questions of epistemic injustice, reasoning, and belief in historical moments of epistemological crisis, and question the roles of individuals and collectivities in precipitating tragic outcomes. Detailing her approach to teaching Othello alongside Williams’ “The Obliging Shell,” the author illustrates the importance of historicizing the construction of whiteness in order to illuminate the effects of systematized injustice.
Teaching Environmental Justice and Early Modern Texts: Collaboration and Connected Classrooms
Authors: Laroche Rebecca , Munroe Jennifer
Published: May 2020

Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe offer innovative approaches to teaching the embodied and collective history of human impact on the planet through early modern texts and contemporary ecofeminist theory. Combining Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” (a way to understand environmental destruction over long periods of time) with an ecofeminist approach that “interrogates mutual forms of subjugation,” the authors stress how humans inhabit collective environments with other human and nonhuman entities. Their intersectional teaching strategy reflects this attitude by elevating collaborative scholarship, forging links between distinct classroom communities, and empowering students to historicize environmental problems, from water quality to wildfires. Students collaborate across geographic and institutional differences, and with scholarly efforts like the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective, to develop a heightened sense of both place and global interconnectedness.
Literary Justice: The Participatory Ethics of Early Modern Possible Worlds
Authors: Sarkar Debapriya
Published: May 2020

Where early modern writers traffic in imaginative inventions, they often do so with the aim of effecting positive change. In this chapter, Debapriya Sarkar puts pressure on the ethical relation between literature’s celebration of possible worlds and the pedagogical value of such imagined realms for the reader—and, by extension, for the student of early modern literature and culture. She shows how we might tap into the ubiquitous presence of imaginary worlds in early modern literature; these “golden” worlds of the imagination simultaneously practice and theorize ways of knowing and being in the actual world. What Sarkar calls “participatory readerly ethics” reveals “the radical potential of poiesis” to help us transform what is into what might be.
Shakespeare, Service Learning, and the Embattled Humanities
Authors: Eklund Hillary
Published: May 2020

This chapter provides an evolving model for uniting educational practices often believed to be quite remote: service learning and literary analysis. Although one mode ostensibly attends to utility while the other dwells in academic abstraction, pursuing both in tandem reveals more shared interpretive practices than one might expect. Hillary Eklund argues that “when we free ourselves from the burden of proving the relevance of Shakespeare,” and instead create frameworks that collate classroom and community learning, we “heighten both the intellectual and civic stakes of our teaching.” Key to this model is a process that compares “problem-solving frameworks” as a way to foreground metacognition and self-reflection.
Teaching Shakespeare Inside Out: Creating a Dialogue Between Traditional and Incarcerated Students
Authors: Yeo Jayme M.
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the possibilities for teaching Shakespeare within and outside of the criminal justice system by putting these communities of learners into substantive dialogue. In contrast to many “prison Shakespeare” programs, a social-justice oriented approach prioritizes learning over “therapy” and promotes dialogue and collaboration among inside and outside populations. While this approach can yield positive results like “increased activism and decreased stereotyping,” its difficulties can be profitable too, as students learn to make the most of “the uncomfortable dissonances that occur when diverse populations interact.” This, argues Jayme M. Yeo, is where Shakespeare faculty can best transmit their skills to students, “for multivalence and conflict accurately describe the work of literary interpretation itself.”
From Pansophia to Public Humanities: Connecting Past and Present Through Community-Based Learning
Authors: Boster Tania
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes a course that explores the public humanities by combining service learning with historical documentary analysis. Students pair with community partners working to address a range of pressing local, national, and global issues. Through analysis of public and historical records, they develop broad strategies for understanding and contextualizing “competing views of social justice, radicalism, patronage, network analyses, structure and agency, and the practical application of the liberal arts.” They then deploy similar strategies in analyzing digitally archived primary sources on seventeenth-century polymath Samuel Hartlib and his pan-European circle of scholars. Comparing the circle’s utopian ideals of pansophia—universal wisdom—with its more severe proposals for reform amidst the turbulent contexts of war and social change, students historicize these discrepancies and gain critical purchase on contemporary approaches to solving similar social problems.
An Afterword About Self/Communal Care
Authors: Thompson Ayanna
Published: May 2020

It is interesting to note that the terms “Shakespeare” and “social justice” are neither assumed to be synonymous nor necessarily “relevant” to each other. I find this particularly ironic because as a black, female Shakespeare scholar, I have come to think of Shakespeare as my great secret weapon. I frequently wield him in the service of dialogues about equality, justice, and progress as a hidden dagger that slices to the heart of the matter. As a graduate student, I specifically chose not to specialize in African-American literature and culture because I thought (naively and mistakenly) that I would not get a large enough set of interlocutors; many who are resistant to pedagogies/scholarship of justice simply opt not to engage with (i.e. ignore all together) African-American literature, culture, and scholarship. Shakespeare, on the other hand, has been so thoroughly adopted as both the epitome of high culture and as quintessentially American (regardless of the pesky fact of his birth in Stratford-upon-Avon) that many come to his works on the page, the stage, and in the classroom with their defenses down. They are more open and available to complex social issues when they encounter them in Shakespeare’s works. My students regularly comment that they come to my classes to study Shakespeare but leave having learned so much more about our contemporary world. I know that many of you will have heard similar comments....
Projecting Reality
Authors: Shaw Dan
Published: May 2020

Following Andre Bazín, Cavell saw Film as the most realistic of the visual arts. But, unlike Bazín, he never made the prescriptive claim that filmmaking would hence be better served by making more realistic films. He attributed the singular power of the Hollywood mythmakers to inspire their audiences to the credibility this most realistic of media lent to their flights of fancy. Realism was a good making characteristic in Cavell’s writings, and I will show how it fulfills its promise in Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning tale of addiction to the drug of war, The Hurt Locker.
Cavell on Nietzsche: The Ascetic Ideal, Eternal Recurrence, and “Higher Self”
Authors: Shaw Dan
Published: May 2020

Cavell saw Friedrich Nietzsche as a fellow devotee of Emerson, and adherent to the notion of self-overcoming. He admired several aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, including the notions of Eternal Recurrence, striving for the “Higher Self” and the Three Metamorphoses of the Human Spirit from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He refers to the conjunction of Emerson and Nietzsche in numerous works, as talismans for some of his deepest insights into film. An interpretation of Jane Campion’s Ada in The Piano depicts this notion of a Higher Self faithfully,as a resolute and self-willed pioneer woman in mid-nineteenth century New Zealand.
Plato
Authors: Del Lucchese Filippo
Published: May 2020

Grounded on the reading of Timeus, book X of The Laws, and book V of The Republic, this chapter analyses the process of invention of idealism, which consists first and foremost in the subordination of the material principle of the atomists to a higher divine principle. Through this process, Plato is able to shape the idea of a hierarchy of perfection in the universe which, as on a scale, relies but also distinguishes superior and inferior things. Monstrosity thus becomes the feature of the lower parts of the universe, the material and necessary parts, recalcitrant to their ordering by the superior and divine ones. This chpapter’s thesis is that, in Plato, the threatening character of monstrosity becomes a dangerous threat for the order and harmony of the universe. Monstrosity is the inferior other of divinity. Plato also reinforces Socrates’s teleology and opposes the realm of ideal truth to that of aimless, rumbling and chaotic causality that monstrously characterises the lower reality.
A Community of Sense
Authors: Bryant Jan
Published: May 2020

The chapter opens with a distinction between political activism and artmaking by suggesting that activism tends to push the political as subject matter, while art has moved away this century from representing ‘the political’, returning to a concern for materials and their affects. However, such a crude distinction fails to account for nuances within practices, and thus the example of the Cuban artist, Tania Brugera, who uses political tools as material for her work, complicates the claim. Is it possible to define something as nebulous as an art community today? As with the contested space of aesthetics, Rancière argues that communities offer similar breaches that open and close, in this case between identities. There will be agreement in certain places and times on what constitutes an art community, but this is contingent upon an ongoing process of dissensus and transformation, subjectivation and disidentification. The chapter closes with an introduction to what became a global economic imperative from the 1970s, neo-liberalism, and it suggests that what is at stake for artists is a battle to define one’s practice against the contemporary figure of a complicit artist-entrepreneur. [185]
Encounter One: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino
Authors: Bryant Jan
Published: May 2020

Through the letters of Pasolini and Calvino, this chapter delves into the different political paths that they each took. While Pasolini wrote of his disappointment with his age and politics, Calvino by this stage has withdrawn from political life to become part of the French structuralist group, Oulip. In recognition of the voids that open up between text and world, the group’s investigations into the structures of language systems aligns with what has been called ‘the linguistic turn’ in late 20th century European philosophy. Pasolini considers that such a move is a deflection from directly approaching the inequalities of class. In return, Calvino censures Pasolini for making films because they are so far from slow reading and reflection. [118]
Encounter Three: Art and the Socialist State
Authors: Bryant Jan
Published: May 2020

This chapter traces the tactics used by the art Slovenian collective, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), specifically the art section, Irwin and the music group, Laibach, to criticise the socialist state of Yugoslavia. The chapter offers a brief overview of the political climate at the time leading up to and during the Yugoslavian wars (1980s and ‘90s). Closely analysed is NSK’s use of ambiguity and parody to hold a mirror up to authoritarianism and Irwin’s appropriation of early Russian avant-garde motifs to criticise socialist-realism and the State’s ‘misuse’ of art. As protection against retaliation by the state, NSK never prescribed their intentions, so audiences and viewers needed to bring their own context and perspective to events. Once Slovenia left the Yugoslavian Federation to enter into free-market capitalism, NSKs tactics seemed far less potent, flowing neatly into a 1980s western art context (a moment in history) that embraced ambivalence and indeterminacy. As an approach that hides a work’s political intent, allowing its viewers to have their own political views affirmed, it is argued that such a tactic fails to shake the political aesthetic. [181]
Frances Barrett – A Politics to Come
Authors: Bryant Jan
Published: May 2020

The Curator is a performance by Frances Barrett in response to a question posed by Liquid Architecture, an arts organisation for artists working with sound, “What does a feminist methodology sound like?” Two curators are asked to fully care for the artist including feeding, toileting, boarding and entertaining over a 24-hour period. The implications arising from Curator around care, hospitality, feminism, curatorial responsibilities, tolerance, and gender are considered. It also includes philosophical questions on immanence, and forms of ethics. There is an analysis of scenes from Certain Women (2017) a film directed by Kelly Reichardt that touches on similar themes. [100]
Claire Denis – The Intruder
Authors: Bryant Jan
Published: May 2020

An extended essay on Claire Denis’ L’Intrus acts as a companion piece to the chapter on Frances Barrett. Dealing with similar themes of care, hospitality, and feminism, it expands on an aspect that sat at the edges of Curator, the questioning of received ontological boundaries or defining categories. Denis covers both formerly and conceptually a taxonomy of borders, which are both physical and psychological. Her source material, Jean Luc Nancy’s essay about his heart transplant, is considered in relation to the way Denis produces a moving image work from a philosophical text, with particular concern for her treatment of narrative to produce bodily sensation. The ‘Other’ or figure of the stranger is pitted against the disintegrating power of patriarchy referenced in Denis’ casting of the actor, Michel Subor, who appears in L’Intrus and Beau Travail (1999) as well as Jean Luc Godard’s Petite Soldat (1955). [145]
The Politics of Painting: Cliché, Fashion, Mimesis
Authors: Bryant Jan
Published: May 2020

How might painting be understood in the 21st century? Working from the supposition that the painter confronts an over-loaded pictorial regime each time she begins to paint, this chapter considers three forces relevant to the contemporary context: (1) cliché and terror, concepts developed by Jean Paulhan in his text, Le Fleur de Tarbes; (2) the painterly defined in contradistinction to digital; and (3) the fashionable in its capacity to baffle the viewer as to whether a work ruptures or leaves undisturbed the prevailing apparatus or dispositif. Recent paintings by Angela Brennan are used to discuss how the political aesthetic operates in works that have no direct political claim but are nonetheless disruptive of certain existing notions, particularly around judgement. It critically asks through the immanent tradition of Deleuze, Nietzsche and Spinoza, on what criteria and on whose authority does one form judgements. This section includes Brennan’s interest in Piero della Francesca. [151]
Still Deep in the Bones of the Bourgeoisie: Introduction
Authors: Bryant Jan
Published: May 2020

The ‘gift of being disgusted’ is a challenge first raised by Walter Benjamin in the 1920s, insisting that each era has a responsibility to critically contest the inequalities of its time. This chapter looks at two 21st century art events, the 56th La Biennale di Venezia (2015), which had global politics as its core theme, and the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014) that attracted artist boycotts as protest to successive Australian Governments’ treatment of asylum seekers. Venice and Sydney are examples of large publicly-funded art events that instrumentalise politics as spectacle. However, the experience of Sydney also revealed the chasm that often exists between a patron class and artists working on the ground. [113]
Housekeeping and the Fiction of Subjectivity in Eva Trout
Authors: Kelaita Jasmin
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines how Bowen’s final novel, Eva Trout, amplifies the issue of the domestic and the ‘things’ that build subjective containment and betray non-normative, unstable and difficult narrative subjects, by claiming that Eva Trout is such a subject: difficult and utterly indeterminate. In order to draw on the value-laden potency of ‘home’ for women in fiction the chapter calls upon Bowen’s contemporary, one who might be described as the quintessential author of homelessness, Jean Rhys. Rhys’s novel Good Morning, Midnight (1939) to show how the issue of domestic space becomes paramount to the workings of narrative for women writers and their female protagonists. Unlike Rhys’s protagonist Sasha Jensen, who does not attempt to make any specific space her home but rather moves between rented rooms in a hope for nominal protection, Eva Trout repeatedly attempts to make herself in relation to domestic spaces. Eva is unable to establish a stable domestic existence in accordance with conventional gender expectations. The way that women make homes and, in very material and embodied ways, occupy space is significant in Bowen’s fiction, where objects, ephemera and domestic stability are crucial to the development of character and narrative.
The Scottish Mental Health Tribunal
Authors: Auchie Derek , Carmichael Alisa
Published: May 2020

This unique text provides an authoritative and practical commentary on the practice and procedure of the new Mental Health Tribunal for Scotland. A full review of the Mental Health Tribunal for Scotland (Practice and Procedure) (No 2) Rules 2005 is conducted, as well as a detailed examination of the relevant provisions of the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003.
The authors, both Legal Members of the Tribunal, draw upon their own experiences in convening Tribunal hearings, as well as the experiences of other members, making this text an invaluable practical tool for anyone involved at any level of the Tribunal process.
Ginsenoside Re Attenuates High Glucose-Induced RF/6A Injury via Regulating PI3K/AKT Inhibited HIF-1α/VEGF Signaling Pathway
Authors: Xie Weijie , Zhou Ping , Qu Muwen , Dai Ziru , Zhang Xuelian , Zhang Chenyang , Dong Xi , Sun Guibo , Sun Xiaobo
Published: May 2020

Hyperglycaemia-induced retinal microvascular endothelial cell apoptosis is a critical and principle event in diabetic retinopathy (DR), which involves a series of complex processes such as mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress. Ginsenoside Re (Re), a key ingredients of ginseng, is considered to have various pharmacologic functions, such as antioxidative, inhibition of inflammation and anti-apoptotic properties. However, the effects of Re in DR and the related mechanisms of endothelial cell injury induced by high glucose (HG) exposure remain unclear. The present study was designed to investigate and evaluate the ability of Re to ameliorate HG-induced retinal endothelial RF/6A cell injury and the potential mechanisms involved in the hypoxia-inducible factor-1-alpha (HIF-1α)/vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) signaling regulated by phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)/AKT pathway. Our results showed that preincubation with Re exerted cytoprotective effects by reversing the HG-induced decrease in RF/6A cell viability, downregulation of apoptosis rate and inhibition of oxidative-related enzymes, thereby reducing the excess intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) and HG-triggered RF/6A cell injury. In addition, Western blot analysis results showed ginsenoside Re significantly increased HIF-1α expression in the cytoplasm but decreased its expression in the nucleus, suggesting that it reduced the translocation of HIF-1α from the cytoplasm to the nucleus, and downregulated VEGF level. Moreover, this effect is involved in the activation of the PI3K/Akt pathway. LY294002, a PI3K inhibitor, was used to block the Akt pathway. Afterwards, the effects of Re on the regulation of apoptotic related proteins, VEGF and HIF-1α nuclear transcription was partially reversed. These findings suggested the exerting protective effects of ginsenoside Re were associated with regulating of PI3K/AKT and HIF-1α/VEGF signaling pathway, which indicates that ginsenoside Re may ameliorates HG-induced retinal angiogenesis and suggests the potential for the development of Re as a therapeutic for DR.