bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Shi'i Doctrine, Mu'tazili Theology
Authors: Abdulsater Hussein Ali
Published: May 2020

According to some Muslim theologians, God is not free to act; He is bound by human ethics. To be just, He must create an individual of perfect intellect and infallible morality. People are obligated to submit to this person; otherwise eternal damnation awaits them. While these claims may be interpreted as an affront to God’s power, an insult to human judgment and a justification for despotism, Shiʿi Muslims in the eleventh century eagerly adopted them in their attempts to forge a ‘rational’ religious discourse. They utilized everything from literary studies and political theory to natural philosophy and metaphysical speculation in support of this project. This book presents the contribution of al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍān (d. 1044), the thinker most responsible for this irreversible change, which remains central to Imami Shiʿi sectarian identity and conception of history. His debates with Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. 1024), al-Shaykh al-Mufīd (d. 1022) and al-Shaykh al-Ṭūsī (d. 1067) are the best expression of his intellectual project. The book analyses this project and establishes the dynamic context which prompted him to pour the old wine of Shiʿi doctrine into the new wineskin of systematic Muʿtazili theology.
Introduction
Authors: Abdulsater Hussein Ali
Published: May 2020

The introduction defines the problem, situates it historically and intellectually, and briefly surveys existing scholarship. The scarcity of studies on Shiʿi theology being evident, the scholarly community is in clear need of such a monograph. Starting with the debate sparked by Jāḥiẓ (d. 868), it will then turn the main thesis of the book, which is concerned with the extent to which Muʿtazili theology influenced Imami Shiʿism and Murtaḍā’s crucial contribution to the doctrinal development of the Shiʿi tradition, especially in relation to the formation of sectarian identity and the adoption of a specific form of rationalism. In addition to Murtaḍā, the main parties to this debate are ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Mufīd and Ṭūsī. Finally, the introduction will pose a question about the plausibility of classifying Murtaḍā’s theology under any of the categories of faith types proposed by modern theologians.
Life and Works
Authors: Abdulsater Hussein Ali
Published: May 2020

This chapter presents an overview of Murtaḍā’s context and a detailed account of his life. It thus studies his career as student, teacher, politician and religious authority. As the head of the ʿAlids, he coordinated between Buyid power and Abbasid reign in the humanistic atmosphere of the renaissance of Islam. There follows a survey of his most important writings, intended to acquaint readers with each work’s general objectives and specific contribution. The last section of this chapter is dedicated to an exhaustive bibliography of Murtaḍā, addressing questions related to the authenticity of certain works. The chapter is divided into three sub-headings: The Man and His Time; Magna Opera; Bibliography
God and the World
Authors: Abdulsater Hussein Ali
Published: May 2020

This chapter explains the conceptual framework of Murtaḍā’s system by detailing his views of God and the natural world. It presents a discussion of the major epistemological tools needed to construct an understanding of being, such as his view on the role of reason, the method of investigation and the need for evidence. Following is a study of the basic ontological claims that govern both divine and natural realms; atoms and accidents, the constitutive units of the world, are studied both as independent entities and as the basis for casual relations that govern all existents. The last part concentrates on God’s attributes, with emphasis on Murtaḍā’s efforts to create a coherent system to satisfy various conceptual requirements while still preserving the integrity of earlier Shiʿi doctrines. The key is his classification of attributes into essential and accidental, informed by the Muʿtazilī ‘Theory of States’. The chapter is divided into four sub-headings: Epistemological Sketch; Ontological Sketch; God’s Attributes; Theoretical Model
The Imama and the Need for Moral Leadership
Authors: Abdulsater Hussein Ali
Published: May 2020

This chapter covers Murtaḍā’s changes to the doctrine of Imama, which proved to be permanent. Understood as an expression of divine assistance, the Imama is studied in its theoretical aspects: definition, justification, charismatic qualifications and relation to political philosophy. This establishes the theory’s two core principles: the necessity of the Imama and infallibility of the Imam. The discussion then turns to an examination of applications of the theory to particular Imams, introducing a sacred-historical outlook that starts with Muhammad’s designation of ʿAli as his successor. The last part treats two major challenges arising from inopportune historical developments, i.e. the Imami view of Muhammad’s companions and the occultation of the Twelfth Imam. The chapter is divided into three sub-headings: Theoretical Model; The Test of History; Inconvenient Outcomes.
Introduction: The Problem of a Deleuzian Ethics
Authors: Carr Cheri Lynne
Published: May 2020

Neo- and proto-fascisms have begun re-emerging in ultranationalist, authoritarian, and extremist consolidations of power across the globe. Even in the United States, where fascism was long dismissed as an historical or exclusively European problem, the popular emergence of rhetoric related to fascist ideology over the past decade has inspired widespread comparison and a new sense of the real, imminent danger that fascism poses. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari point out in Anti-Oedipus, fascism was not just a ‘bad moment’ or an ‘historical error’: fascism has yet to be overcome (AO 29–30). Why this is the case and what we might do about it are the frame for understanding Deleuze’s Kantian Ethos: Critique as a Way of Life. It begins with the argument that an account of the endurance of fascism would be better served by emphasising not how different ‘those people’ who support fascism are from ‘us’, who do not, but rather that at the basis of fascism’s allure for us all is the desire for our own repression. If such desire is constitutive of the productive cycle of desire itself, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, any ethics that hopes to create spaces of freedom must have anti-fascism at its heart.
Calvinist and Covenanter Gothic
Authors: Milbank Alison
Published: May 2020

So the protagonist of James Robertson’s novel of nation-building and history, The Fanatic, declaims to his mirror in 1997, the year of the vote for devolution. Nationalism, then as now, provides a fantasy of a hope of unitary identity for Scotland, which will put to rest the warring dualities of its past. The irony of Robertson’s Daniel Carlin raging against duality lies in the words immediately following this extract: ‘I am talkin tae you, by the way’, to which his mirror responds, ‘I ken’ (2001: 25). Carlin may dream of an escape from the complexities of history, but the past forms a hole in the back of his mind through which the ‘Killing Times’ of the Covenanter Wars of the late seventeenth century invade the present-day Edinburgh world of ghost tours, tourists and dossers.
Scottish Gothic and the Moving Image: A Tale of Two Traditions
Authors: Petrie Duncan
Published: May 2020

The Gothic has long been acknowledged as a significant cultural influence within Britain’s cinematic heritage. Locating the roots of the British contribution to cinematic horror in the familiar literary terrain of classic Gothic fiction initiated in the late eighteenth century by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and M. G. Lewis, Pirie makes a persuasive case for the value of the genre and its centrality to the cultural specificity of a (then critically undervalued) ‘national’ cinema. But what is immediately striking from a contemporary, post-devolutionary vantage point is the Anglocentrism of the analysis as conveyed by the interchangeable use of the terms ‘English’ and ‘British’ throughout his book. Moreover, while acknowledging that ‘the role of Ireland in Gothic literature is immense’ (1973: 96), Pirie proceeds to co-opt C. R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) – for him a foundational text alongside Lewis’s The Monk (1796) – to a singularly English literary tradition.
Introduction: The Marble Camera
Authors: Jacobs Steven
Published: May 2020

According to Rudolf Arnheim, “much sculpture lacks the essential quality of life, namely, motion.” This is why, no doubt, marble statues and plaster casts played such an important role in the works of early photographers of the late 1830s and 1840s, who had to cope with long exposure times. Given this perspective, what can be said about the relation between sculpture and film, a medium often first and foremost characterized by motion? This book deals with a wide range of magical, mystical, cultural, historical, formal, and phenomenological interactions between the two media. Apart from the contrast between stillness and movement, sculpture and film can be seen as opposites in other ways. Whereas sculpture is an artistic practice that involves not only static but also material, three-dimensional, and durable objects, the cinema produces kinetic, immaterial, two-dimensional, and volatile images.
Class Resilience
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: May 2020

Alwyn Turner’s compendious study, A Classless Society: Britain in the
1990s (2013), ends after 574 richly observed pages seemingly contradicting its title. Turner writes of John Major and Tony Blair, that ‘both had sought to create a classless society, both had failed, with wealth inequality increasing and social mobility decreasing, and both found themselves ill at ease with the kind of classless culture that emerged instead’ (574). Turner adds that Major and Blair (and before them, Margaret Thatcher) had aimed to refashion Britain as a meritocracy, where ability was more pertinent and consequential than family background and traditional networks of social power.
Celebrity Culture
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: May 2020

The nineties was a decade in thrall to the tremendous cultural and commercial attractions of celebrity. If, in hindsight, the seventies seem forever marked by memories of the Winter of Discontent, and the eighties by the dominating presence of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the signature cultural moment of the nineties was the extravagant national
response to the unexpected death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Diana embodied the glamour, beauty and charisma associated with celebrity, and enjoyed the capacity to furnish people with dreams that took them outside their workaday existence. Diana’s alluring public persona was founded on the fabricated fairy tale princess narrative constructed for
her by the Royal Family, a compliant and sometimes complicit media, and by herself. The truth was murkier and far more complex.
Becoming Other: The Posthuman and the Teen Movie
Authors: Smith Frances
Published: May 2020

In 1999, N. Katherine Hayles argued that ‘we are all posthuman now’ owing to our daily interactions with intelligent machines. If moral panics about the time teenagers spend with screen media are to be believed, then present-day adolescents may have evolved into another life form entirely.1 Hayles’s conception of the posthuman is tinged with concern for the future; the very notion of human consciousness merged with computers calls up an association with the monstrous. As will become apparent, the question of the monstrous is a significant one for the analysis of the teen movie, particularly given the history of teenagers themselves as liminal figures removed from the more clearly defined identities of child or adult. However, William Brown observes that, like many a ‘post’, the posthuman should not be conceived as an identity that is wholly removed from the human, but rather a viewpoint that offers a perspective on the contingent position of humans in the world. The posthuman, then, offers a critical distance from human subjectivity, which allows us to perceive the white, male, Eurocentric assumptions that continue to underpin not only the conception of the human, but the tenets of liberal humanism.
Listening to the Late Cantos
Authors: Grogan Kristin
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the sonic possibilities of the Chinese characters in Ezra Pound’s late cantos. Specifically it examines how Pound understood Chinese sound in his late career, and traces what he did with this new understanding in the late cantos. Despite Pound’s enthusiasm for Chinese sound, critics have tended to approach the characters as silent, static material forms, unable to be sounded by the reader, which are antithetical to the lyrical elements of the late cantos and obstruct the poem’s prosodic flow. Arguing against the understanding of the ideograms as merely ‘silent’ objects, this chapter traces how the characters both communicate with and shape the poem’s rhythm and prosody, and what this, in turn, means for Pound’s reader. In doing so, it examines the unstable but productive interchange between graphic and phonetic signification in the late cantos, between image and sound, and explores what a fuller understanding of Pound’s late rehabilitation of Chinese sound might mean for our understanding of the problematic final stages of Pound’s epic.
Toshirô Mifune in Throne of Blood
Authors: McFarland Douglas
Published: May 2020

A discussion of Toshirô Mifune in Throne of Blood
Jean-Pierre Léaud in Stolen Kisses
Authors: Taylor Aaron
Published: May 2020

A discussion Jean-Pierre Léaud in Stolen Kisses
Choi Min-sik in Oldboy
Authors: Chung Hye Seung , Diffrient David Scott
Published: May 2020

A discussion in Choi Min-sik in Oldboy
The Likely Course of an Unlikely Life, 1248–1302
Authors: Kamola Stefan
Published: May 2020

Rashid al-Din Tabib (d. 1318) was born into a Jewish medical family and raised between waves of Mongol conquest in Iran. By 1297, he rose to the highest level of administration in the new Mongol state. This chapter traces the first half century of Rashid al-Din’s life through the societies in which it unfolded. These include the Jewish community of Hamadan, the Ismaʿili fortresses of northern Iran, and ultimately the new concentration of professional and political elites at the Mongol court. Rashid al-Din’s family struck a close alliance with a particular branch of the Mongol ruling family. When one member of that family, Ghazan Khan (1295-1304) came to the throne, Rashid al-Din was situated to assume a position of authority.
The Rise of Personal Genomics: An Overview of the Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing Industry
Authors: Phillips Andelka M
Published: May 2020

This chapter begins with an overview of the industry, including a discussion of the different types of tests available and prominent companies. It divided into sections addressing each of the different types of tests available. These discuss the companies operating and the issues which each type of test raises, including the implications for consumers. This draws upon the author’s research on the industry, some version of her dataset are available via Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/record/1183565#.Xfa18i1L0_U
Princesses, Concubines and Qahramanat under the ‘Abbasids: Gender and Politics, 749–1055
Authors: El-Azhari Taef
Published: May 2020

In this chapter, one examines the rise of concubines to power, and becomes de facto ruler of the empire as royal mothers. One analyse the authority of Queenship described by N. Abbott, and the term queen mother applied by H. Kennedy, which is more favourable.
One see the power of concubine Khayzuran who killed her son, the caliph and replace him with another, al-Rashid. She became the de facto ruler for three years. Also the phenomenal concubine, Shaghab in 10th century who ruled in the name of her boy caliph. That is with the network of allies, like Qahramanas. For example, Um Musa who ousted the vizier, and Thumal who took the unprecedented judicial post of Nazar al-Mazalim. In addition, queen mother allied with the eunuch commander of the army to protect her son’s interests. One do criticize the gendered opinion of F. El-Mernissi who described the age as (revolution of the harem) which is far from historical analyses and facts. The chapter examines in detail, the changing opinion of rulers about the participation of women in politics, and how public in general, and chroniclers in particular perceived such role.
The Fatimid Eunuchs and their Sphere1
Authors: El-Azhari Taef
Published: May 2020

The Fatimids had followed the Abbasid tradition of using eunuchs in their caliphate, but they exceeded them in every way. The 10th -11th century could be named, the age of eunuchs. They became deputy to the caliph. Tutor to heir apparent, army commander, and de facto ruler of the realm. One do examine such impact on politics and Isma‘ili doctrine alike. Especially that we have the exceptional memoirs of chief eunuch Jawdhar during the North African stage.
Although eunuchs were hired by their masters due to their non-existing political ambition, and absolute loyalty; one see them express their hunger for power, and dominate the state from beginning to end, which influenced Saladin to follow the same tradition when he succeeded the Fatimids in Egypt.
Peace in the Twenty-First Century: States, Capital and Institutions
Authors: Richmond Oliver P.
Published: May 2020

Oliver Richmond asks in Chapter Two whether we can move beyond the older ideas of peace and order – and their associated rationalities and dispotifs – which simply implied that IR and politics had to occur within the confines of power, structure and nature. Can we instead develop a more maximalist normative and ethical vision for IR? Can difference, inequality and unequal power be permanently managed by the state and international institutions or will they too become victims of unequal power, as appears often to have been the case since the Second World War? These questions are asked in the context of debates on liberal-democratic peace, human rights, and cosmopolitanism that are each linked with various forms of intervention; from development to peacebuilding and humanitarianism. This ‘interventionary system/order’ model has come under pressure from a range of different fronts, and as such this chapter examines how peace and development may be rethought in a global framework if the previous version of a progressive framework (i.e. the liberal peace) is now being revised and intervention has shifted towards neo-liberal forms.
A Framework for Reimagining Order and Justice: Transitions in Violence and Interventions in a Global Era
Authors: Cox Michaelene
Published: May 2020

In considering the conception of interventions since the beginning of the 21st century, Chapter Five: Transitions in Violence and Interventions in a Global Era by Michaelene Cox, contrasts the interpretation and redefinition of sovereignty and intervention by Kofi Annan and Ban Ki Moon. Whereas Annan had found opportunity to interject a strong sense of moral authority into the ground-breaking R2P project, Ban instead drew upon mediation and bridge-building skills to shift the spotlight to its actual implementation. In viewing the perspectives of Annan and Ban, Cox argues that there clearly has been evolution in our understanding of state dominion even where it remains ambiguous. In this regard, the chapter is particularly interested in evaluating developments beyond the state-centric model in face of contemporary challenges to order and justice. Cox presents a brief view of systemic shifts precipitating the current era, and then considers transitions in violence and intervention. The chapter concludes with an emphasis on the need for political adaptability during periods of flux, and remind us that whilst considering international, state and societal interests, the welfare and the participation of the human being is indispensable.
(Re-)Building the World: Local Agency and Human Security in the New Millennium
Authors: Fraser Trudy
Published: May 2020

The ‘rebuilding’ of a society in the aftermath of conflict or mass violence often subsumes the dynamic requirements of human security into a technical task that belies or fails to fully comprehend the needs of the community being ‘built’. Indeed, as Trudy Fraser in Chapter Ten explains, critics have suggested that ‘building’ in the aftermath of conflict merely serves to impose externally configured normative benchmarks as a panacea for peace, privileging the goals of international actors at the expense of local actors. One of the main problems is that externally configured normative benchmarks do not necessarily conform to local models of peace and security. In order for the ‘building’ to be reflective of the dynamic requirements of human security, this chapter asserts that it must be responsive to the following questions: (1) who is doing the building?; (2) what is being built?; and (3) for whom is it being built? These three questions speak to separate but interrelated issues in the context of modern state-, peace- and nation-building, and highlights the ambiguity that currently exists between the initial (state-security-centric) and subsequent (human-security-centric) phases of intervention and ‘(re-)building’.
Cairo: Urban Space, Surveillance and the State
Authors: Ramadan Yasmine
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on the representation of the urban space of Cairo. It examines Sonallah Ibrahim’s Tilka-l-raʾiha (The
Smell of it, 1966), Gamal al-Ghitani’s Waqaʾiʿ harat al-Zaʿfarani (The Zafarani Files, 1976), Ibrahim Aslan’s Malik al-hazin (The Heron, 1981), and Radwa Ashour’s, Faraj (Blue
Lorries, 2008) reading the novels in opposition to the realist narratives of earlier decades. The shift away from the realist depictions of the urban metropolis as the site of national struggle, or of the alley as the cross-section of Egyptian society, is accompanied by a new representational aesthetics. Through the presentation of the city as the space of incarceration, the reimagination of the alley as a fantastic space, and the turn towards the previously ignored neighborhood of Imbaba, these writers showcase new literary techniques; aspects of magical realism; elements of the fantastic; a turn to hyper-realism, in order to represent the transformation of the urban space of Cairo into one of surveillance and control.
“Truly, and very notably discharg’d”: The Metamorphosis of Pyramus and Thisbe and the Place of Appropriation on the Early Modern Stage
Authors: Geddes Louise
Published: May 2020

In the mid 1590s, Shakespeare began a trend when he appropriated Ovid’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe in two different genres, the tragedy Romeo and Juliet and the comic performance by the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream The latter was the more subversive act, transforming the source material into a satire on the amateurs’ unskillful remix of their text, by focusing on the asymmetry between the performers’ transformative ambition and their skills. This janus-faced use of Ovid marks a divergence of appropriative treatment that saw the tragic adaptations struggle to maintain popularity against the widespread enjoyment of Shakespeare’s “tragical mirth,” and implicates Shakespeare in debates about the place of fidelity in appropriation. Pyramus and Thisbe’s Ovidian devolution aligns Shakespeare’s appropriative work with current theories about rhizomatic adaptation, and recognizes the collaborative and transformative nature of remediation.
The Egalitarian Sublime
Authors: Williams James
Published: May 2020

The book answers the question: Can the sublime be egalitarian? It gives critical studies of the main historical theories of the sublime, from Longinus, Burke, Kant, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, as well as recent secondary literature. There are also reactions to contemporary positions, from Žižek, Lyotard, Kristeva and Adorno. It is argued that the sublime has always had consequences counter to equality. In response to this, the book defends an anarchist theory of the sublime, where anarchism is part of a radical commitment to democracy and multiplicity. The book develops a new method, inspired by microhistory and by the process philosophy of signs, from my earlier book A Process Philosophy of Signs. Diagrams of the effects of definitions of the sublime are central to this method. The definition of egalitarian is made in relation to Balibar and to Rancière. This definition leads to a rejection of the technological and environmental sublimes on the basis of their failure to be egalitarian.
Shakespeare and the Truth-Teller
Authors: Hershinow David
Published: May 2020

The Truth-Teller makes the case that Shakespeare repeatedly responds to sixteenth-century debates over the revolutionary potential of Cynic critical activity—debates that persist in later centuries and that inform major developments in Western intellectual history. To live one’s truth may have been a radical (and controversial) proposition for ancient Greek democracy, but Shakespeare reveals it to be an equally vexed task for drama, which aimed both to represent political truths and warn against the dangers of over-identifying with the figure of the lone truth teller. The book contends that aspiring critics from the sixteenth century to the present cathect onto the figure of the Cynic because they mistake literary character for viable political formula. Shakespeare, the book argues, works to diagnose this interpretive error through his Cynic characterizations of Lear’s Fool, Hamlet, and Timon of Athens. Offering new ways of thinking about early modernity’s engagement with classical models as well as literature’s engagement with politics, The Truth-Teller insists upon the necessity of literary thinking to political philosophy.
Introduction
Authors: Hershinow David
Published: May 2020

Early on in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques, having just made the acquaintance of Touchstone, declares himself ‘ambitious for a motley coat’, explaining his interest in foolery in terms of the freedom its practitioner can exercise in criticising others

I must have liberty,...
Coda
Authors: Hershinow David
Published: May 2020

In this book, I have tried to show that it is only with the rise of dramatic realism that the figure of the Cynic truth-teller begins to provoke sustained interpretive crisis, a crisis that takes shape in the sixteenth century and that goes on to drive key developments in our literary, philosophical and political history. Through my readings of Shakespeare’s plays, I have also tried to show that literature – along with its academic offspring, literary criticism – is uniquely positioned to diagnose the interpretive errors that consequently underwrite philosophical and political ideas about the means of achieving extreme critical agency. What these two overarching aims have in common is the critical methodology I develop in order to advance them, and I conclude this book by briefly commenting on the value this method holds for early modern studies in particular and for the discipline of literary studies in general....
When in Doubt, Seduce: An Interview with Screenwriter Allie Hagan
Authors: Heller-Nicholas Alexandra , Brandum Dean
Published: May 2020

This chapter is an interview with Allie Hagan, the screenwriter of When in Doubt, Seduce, a forthcoming film based on the comedy collaboration between Elaine May and Mike Nichols. Hagan discusses the current rise in interest in Elaine May, the relationship between May and Nichols, and adapting a real relationship to the screen.
Contemporary Ghosts
Authors: Leeder Murray
Published: May 2020

This chapter tracks the dominant trends of the twenty-first-century ghost. It argues that Sadako, the techno-onryō from Ringu (1998), has proved a model that would spread in countless ways, cementing the idea of the media ghost in both Asian and western media, sometimes focused on new technology but with a surprising tendency to evoke ‘outdated’ media as haunted/haunting residue. It also discusses the availability of the ghost not only to popular media like reality television and to middlebrow horror films such as those of Blumhouse Pictures, but also to ‘legitimate’ art, like Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger (2007) and works by films like film auteurs like ApichatpongWeerasethakul, Guillermo del Toro and Guy Maddin. It proposes that many of these works provide their own critical commentary on the ghost story itself.
Asian Gothic
Authors: Ancuta Katarzyna
Published: May 2020

The chapter offers a selective survey of twenty-first-century Asian Gothic. The main focus of the discussion is the most prominent contemporary trend involving reconfigurations of Asian folklore and the ghost story. More specifically, this chapter investigates literary and film narratives dealing with individual and collective trauma that revolve around the figure of the vengeful ghost, texts which reclaim animism as an inherent part of Asian modernity, and Asian Gothic’s interrogation of gender dynamics and empowered women. The first section of the essay discusses the emergence of the female vengeful ghost as the dominant figure of fear in Asian horror films. The second section examines the portrayal of ghosts in literature of the region and the way their haunting engages with historical trauma and socio-cultural anxieties of the time. The final part investigates narratives that highlight the connection of women to shamanism and magic and proposes to read female spirituality in terms of empowerment.
Latin American Gothic
Authors: Ibarra Enrique Ajuria
Published: May 2020

Recently, scholarly criticism has acknowledged the presence of the Gothic in Latin America, which should be distinguished from magic realism and the fantastic. Latin American Gothic evinces regional, tropicalised and hybridised nuances that not only adapt the mode to specific cultural and regional anxieties, but also have helped coin terms such as ‘Tropical Gothic’. On the other hand, Guillermo delToro’s popularity has brought attention to Latin American Gothic horror in twenty-first-century visual media and how it address issues of identity, folklore and haunting. This chapter analyses the appropriation of Gothic motifs in the films Somos lo que hay (We are What We Are, 2010), La casa muda(The Silent House, 2010) and Juan de losmuertos(Juan of the Dead, 2011). It explores Tropical Gothic, medicine and faith in the TV series Niño santo (2011–14) and reviews the #CharlieCharlieChallenge trending topic on social media as an everyday Gothic experience.
Language Revitalisation in Gaelic Scotland
Authors: Dunmore Stuart
Published: May 2020

Situated within the interrelated disciplines of applied sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, this book explores the language use and attitudinal perceptions of a sample of 130 adults who received Gaelic-medium education (GME) at primary school, during the first years of that system’s availability in Scotland. The school is viewed by policymakers as a crucial site for language revitalisation in such diverse contexts as Hawai’i, New Zealand and the Basque Country – as well as throughout the Celtic-speaking world. In Scotland, GME is seen as a key area of language development, regarded by policymakers as a strategic priority for revitalising Gaelic, and maintaining its use by future generations of speakers. Yet theorists have stressed that school-based policy interventions are inadequate for realising this objective in isolation, and that without sufficient support in the home and community, children are unlikely to develop strong identities or supportive ideologies in the language of their classroom instruction. For the first time, this book provides an in-depth assessment of language use, ideologies and attitudes among adults who received an immersion education in a minority language, and considers subsequent prospects for language revitalisation in contemporary society. Based on detailed analyses using mixed methods, the book offers empirically grounded suggestions for individuals and policymakers seeking to revitalise languages internationally.
Bilingual Life After School? Linguistic Practice and Ideologies in Action
Authors: Dunmore Stuart
Published: May 2020

This final chapter draws together the principal research findings presented in the book, providing a synthesis of key conclusions in respect of the overarching research questions initially outlined in chapter 1. The discussion presented will relate these findings to previously formulated theories of language revitalisation, and the possible role of education in language revitalisation (as addressed in chapters 2–3). The chapter firstly offers a summary of participants’ present-day Gaelic use, before drawing together findings from the qualitative and quantitative analyses of informants’ ideologies and attitudes. Such speaker perceptions are discussed in relation to Gaelic language use, sociocultural identities, and attitudes to GME as an education system generally. Finally, this chapter draws together the principal conclusions of the book’s principal empirical chapters, with a view to assessing how participants’ beliefs, attitudes and ideologies concerning Gaelic impact on language practices, and on likely future prospects for the maintenance of Gaelic in Scotland. A number of recommendations for activists and policymakers attempting to revitalise minority languages internationally are then presented.
Underground Palaces and Castles in the Air: The Realms and Ruins of the Arabian Nights
Authors: Dickson Melissa
Published: May 2020

Chapter 2 explores the use of the Arabian Nights as a familiar cultural narrative through which the burgeoning practices of archaeology, geology, geography and ethnography might be communicated. In this period, the imaginary voyage and adventures of the Arabian Nights, known since childhood, profoundly interacted with actual voyages above and below the ground, providing a narrative template for approaching new experiences that was already familiar to British readers. At the same time, this narrative strategy infused those emergent sciences with an enduring form of magic, or magical thinking, in the adult world, which informed processes of thinking about the physical laws of nature, the elements that comprise the globe, and new technological developments of the period. The magical possibilities and treasures of the Arabian Nights held an irresistible fascination for Western readers, who did not want to relinquish fully to the emergent discipline of science the potential meanings and possibilities of Eastern exploration.
Je Pense à Vous and La Promesse: From Describing to Performing
Authors: Lamberti Edward
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at two early Dardenne films, Je Pense à Vous (1992) and La Promesse (1996). The gap between these two films proved momentous in the Dardennes’ career, as they were able, after the critical, commercial and, in their eyes, personal failure of Je Pense à Vous, to rethink their approach to film style, which led to La Promesse, the true ‘beginning’ of their career as it is commonly known and their first explicit engagement with Levinas’s ethical philosophy. The chapter considers this radical change in film style to be akin to the distinction that J. L. Austin, in his lectures on performativity, makes between constative and performative uses of language, the first being description and the second being performance. The chapter begins by positing a parallel between the shifts in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy from the descriptions of Totality and Infinity to the literary performance of Otherwise than Being and the Dardennes’ reconfiguration of their style between Je Pense à Vous and La Promesse. This will show how, just as Levinas sought to clarify his ethics by deploying a more overtly performative style, so the Dardennes achieve a similar, Levinasian style in their filmmaking in La Promesse.
American Gigolo and the Ethics of Falling in Love
Authors: Lamberti Edward
Published: May 2020

Chapter 7 analyses American Gigolo (1980), Paul Schrader’s third film as a director, following on from Blue Collar (1978) and Hardcore (1979). In comparison with the styles of Blue Collar and Hardcore, American Gigolo, a romantic thriller focusing on the high-class gigolo Julian Kaye (Richard Gere), is stylistically ostentatious, positively exploding with flourishes such as elaborate camera movements, expressive lighting, abundant use of music and striking use of colour, all of which would come to recur throughout Schrader’s work, frequently in the 1980s and periodically thereafter. Drawing on Schrader’s own theoretical work on transcendental style, the chapter shows how analysing the film style of American Gigolo from a Levinasian perspective reveals the ethical drive of Julian’s relationship with his clients, before reflecting on what he gains ethically and what he loses ethically when he turns away from those clients towards a developing love affair with one particular person.
Levinasian Limits of Performativity in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Authors: Lamberti Edward
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers Paul Schrader’s film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), a biopic on the life of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, and uses three different styles – black and white for the past, realistic, gritty colour for the present and highly stylised colour and décor for dramatic stagings from his novels. This fusion of styles is fitting for the subject: Mishima lived his life as performance art, and Schrader’s uses of film style perform Mishima’s own tendency towards performance. This, the chapter argues, is a Levinasian approach to the subject on Schrader’s part, as the film is open to exploring Mishima’s Otherness. But this also creates a limit in the film, as the viewer becomes aware that the film is unable (necessarily, in a Levinasian sense) to get truly close to Mishima’s Otherness. To try to would be unethical; to fail to is paradoxically a Levinasian move, as it reinforces the Otherness that no portrait can hope to unlock.
Return
Authors: Gutman David
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that a surprisingly large number of Armenian migrants returned to the Ottoman Empire between 1890 and 1908 in the face of many obstacles. It demonstrates how in this period, the Ottoman state increasingly viewed Armenian return migration as a major threat to the empire’s political stability. As a result, Armenians were forced to find creative ways to bypass Istanbul’s efforts to keep them out. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the Ottoman state was engaged in an ambitious effort to militarize points of entry, both on land and sea, in an effort to stop Armenian migrants from reentering the empire, employing a decidedly “modern” discourse of border security to justify these efforts.
Dubious Citizens
Authors: Gutman David
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the politics of Armenian return migration in both the Ottoman Empire and United States between 1890 and 1908. In the mid-1890s, allegations of Ottoman mistreatment of returning Armenians who had naturalized as US citizens while abroad caused a major diplomatic row between the two states. Over the course of the late-1890s, harnessing the growing anti-immigrant sentiment in the US, Ottoman diplomatic officials successfully convinced the US government to grant Istanbul wide latitude in handling the return of Armenians who claimed US citizenship. By the start of the twentieth century, the convergence of Ottoman and US policies on Armenian return resulted in returnees losing the protections of citizenship and rendering them vulnerable to imprisonment and deportation from the empire.
Natural History in Edinburgh, 1779–1832
Authors: Jenkins Bill
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses in on Edinburgh’s natural history circles in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. First it examines the chair of natural history at the University and the work of its two incumbents during this period, John Walker and Robert Jameson, before turning to natural history in the extra-mural anatomy schools. These were the site of some of the boldest thinkers on evolutionary themes in early nineteenth-century Britain. Edinburgh was also the home of a number of important natural history societies in this period, for example, the Plinian and Wernerian Natural History Societies. These served as lively forums for the discussion of the latest developments and theories. This chapter will explore the nature and role of these societies, before finally turning the spotlight on the scientific and natural history journals published in the city, such as the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal and the Edinburgh Journal of Science.
The Legacy of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’
Authors: Jenkins Bill
Published: May 2020

The penultimate chapter looks at the longer-term impact of the efflorescence of evolutionary speculation in early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh on later generations of natural historians. First it examines the evangelical reaction against progressive models of the history of life and its role in the eclipse of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians.’ Next it examines to the evolutionary theory proposed by Robert Chambers in his anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to assess its possible debt to the Edinburgh transformists of the 1820s and 1830s. Finally it turns to the important question of the possible influence of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’ on Charles Darwin during his time as a medical student in Edinburgh in the years 1825 to 1827, during which period he rubbed shoulders with many of the key proponents of evolutionary ideas in the city.
‘An endless succession of mirrors’: Irony, Ambiguity and the Crisis of Authenticity in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York
Authors: Devereaux Michelle
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York creates a metatextual relationship between director and protagonist through its use of Romantic irony. The film directly addresses issues of solipsism as it is told from the radically subjective viewpoint of its self-obsessed protagonist, who may or may not be descending into madness. Kaufman conjures sublime feeling in the spectator through aesthetic devices of fantastic world creation. These include the creation of mise en abyme and an engagement with Tzvetan Todorov’s fantastic ‘themes of the self’ and ‘themes of vision’, which are expressed by inexplicable narrative elements such as a continually burning house fire. Drawing on German idealism and Schlegel’s concept of Romantic irony to counteract traditional notions of mimetic realism, Kaufman portrays his film world (and the world itself) as chaotic. But whereas Kaufman’s film embraces the chaos of becoming inherent in Schlegel’s philosophy, its protagonist suffers from a complete inability to engage with life on any authentic level and subsequently fails as an artist and person.
Girlfriend in the Machine: Intersubjectivity and the Sublime Limits of Representation in Spike Jonze’s Her
Authors: Devereaux Michelle
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses how Spike Jonze’s film Her engages both the egotistical and feminine sublimes through the philosophical ‘problem of other minds’, the idea that we can never truly know what another thinks or feels because we are too trapped in our own subjectivity. This crisis leads the film’s male protagonist to withdraw from life into a cocoon of imaginative solipsism. While the film’s artificial intelligence, a computer operating system with a female voice, embraces the feminine sublime through ecstatic communion with other operating systems, ‘she’ also serves as an object of egotistical sublimity for the protagonist, who finally begins to regain his power as a writer due to their relationship. The film’s final images suggest that such a feminine sublime can be accessible to humans if we exercise imaginative will and empathy in our relations toward others, regardless of the fact that we can never really know existence outside of our own consciousness.
Spike Jonze’s Screenwriting: The Screenplay
Authors: Moss-Wellington Wyatt
Published: May 2020

This original screenplay presents a fictional dialogue with Spike Jonze, drawing much of its content from interviews, speeches made by Jonze, and other writings concerning the nature of screenwriting. The dialogue traverses a consideration of the writing process and themes of Jonze’s two original screenplays: Her and Where the Wild Things Are.
“Are these feelings even real?” Intimacy and Authenticity in Spike Jonze’s Her
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: May 2020

While essentially heteronormative, the world of Her’s male protagonist, Theodore Twombly, is complicated by the operating systems, sexual surrogates, blind dates, images, and phone sex aficionados he attempts to be intimate with, to which can be added his estranged wife and the romcom ideal in plain sight, Amy. This chapter explores Theodore’s interactions with seven of the film’s women: his wife, Catherine; ‘Samantha’; ‘SexyKitten’; Amy; his blind date; Samantha’s surrogate, Isabella; and a sexy pregnant TV star he glimpses briefly on a screen, and then incorporates into a phone sex session that turns from fantasy to horror. It investigates the complicated relationship between intimacy and authenticity in a future we are already beginning to inhabit.
Spike Jonze, Propaganda/Satellite Films, and Music Video Work: Talent Management and the Construction of an Indie-Auteur
Authors: Stubbs Andrew
Published: May 2020

This chapter critically evaluates the status Jonze has earned as indie-auteur, a label placing him alongside filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch, the Coen Brothers and Steven Soderbergh. Jonze’s filmmaking career began in part thanks to his music video work, particularly for Propaganda Films; Stubbs analyses Propaganda Films’ talent management practices and their role in helping to develop Jonze’s brand and industry profile. The chapter investigates the economic and industrial strategies underpinning Jonze’s cultural and commercial profile, synthesizing textual analyses of Jonze’s music videos with marketing and critical discourse analysis. Stubbs aims to reconfigure Jonze’s authorial profile while considering the cultural implications of the indie-auteur label in general.
International Judicial Cooperation as the Architecture of Engagement
Authors: Taquela María Blanca Noodt
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyses the idea that international judicial cooperation shows the level of engagement of one state with others and with people all over the world.
One point that is explored is the use of the arbitration framework as a model to enhance international cooperation: the system adopted by the 1958 New York Convention has proved to be very efficient, thus it may be followed by the Conventions on recognition of foreign judgments.
Other point is the need of uniform interpretation and application of treaties on international judicial cooperation. It requires, between other conditions, databases that may be created an administered by international organisations or even by private associations.
In addition, the rise of networks and the possible role of non-governmental organisations and other private actors to facilitate international cooperation is suggested. Lawyers may play an important role in international judicial cooperation; for example, service of process may be transmitted by bar associations very quickly.
The role of international judicial cooperation is ever increasing but what may make this architecture more robust in present times is the further inclusion of administrative organisations and private individuals, in the operationalisation of international cooperation.