bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“Emerson” The Essay
Authors: Gann Kyle
Published: January 2018

Ives’s essay on Emerson is less a description of that writer than an apologia for Ives’s compositional method, which is intentionally disunified and based on the discontinuous way in which humans perceive reality. The idea that Ives was a Transcendentalist himself (like Emerson) is difficult to maintain given the other, more conventional religious influences evident in Ives’s thinking. But there is a strong parallel between the way Emerson left the church at age 29, and Ives left the music world at page 27, both because they could no longer carry on the conventions of those worlds in good conscience.
Hawthorne and The Celestial Railroad
Authors: Gann Kyle
Published: January 2018

Ives based his “Hawthorne” movement on various stiroes of Hawthorne’s, and one novel – The House of the Seven Gables – that he names, though with only a few hints of what musical passages link to what stories. Two other Ives pieces, the subsequent “The Celestial Railroad” (based on an eponymous Hawthorne story, a satire of John Bunyan’s Pilgrims’ Progress) and the scherzo of the Fourth Symphony, share material with the “Hawthorne” movement, and the parallels say much about the Concord Sonata’s philosophical underpinnings.
Epilogue
Authors: Gann Kyle
Published: January 2018

During my last trip to Yale’s Sterling Library to reseach this book, I spent my fnal evening there sitting on the College Green, on a park bench a few yards away from the Central Church on the Green, keeping an eye out for the ghost of a Yale student who had played organ at that church in the years 1894–1898. Te Yale students and New Haveners who strolled by probably imagined that I was an old Yalie there for my reunion and reminiscing about the old days. Imagining that Charlie’s ghost could hear me, I said to him, “All that music was born when you were, wasn’t it? I mean, it’s great that you had that father and that musical upbringing, but ten million people could have had the same father and same upbringing and not done what you did, not been born with their brain wired for that vision. Tat music needed to get into the world, and you didn’t make it wait long, though the world kept it from getting heard a lot longer than you did.” And as I fnished my cigar and walked away, I heard in my head the stern octave B, followed by A and A♯, that begins that incredible ...
Prologue
Authors: Cooper Brittney C.
Published: January 2018

Beyond Respectability employs an Anna Julia Cooperian approach to reading and interrogating the theoretical work and lived experiences of Black women intellectuals. To understand this methodological approach, one needs to first become acquainted with two of Cooper’s cardinal commitments. They include: 1) a commitment to seeing the Black female body as a form of possibility and not a burden, and 2) a commitment to centering the Black female body as a means to cathect Black social thought. In Voice, Cooper places the Black female body and all that it knows squarely in the center of the text’s methodology. She fundamentally believed that we cannot divorce Black women’s bodies from the theory they produce. The author recognizes these forms as an embodied discourse, which predominates in Cooper’s work. Embodied discourse refers to a form of Black female textual activism wherein race women assertively demand the inclusion of their bodies and, in particular, working class bodies and Black female bodies by placing them in the texts they write and speak. By pointing to all the ways Black women’s bodies emerge in formal and informal autobiographical accounts, archival materials, and advocacy work, this work disrupts the smooth function of the culture of dissemblance and the politics of respectability as the paradigmatic frames through which to engage Black women’s ideas and their politics.
Queering Jane Crow
Authors: Cooper Brittney C.
Published: January 2018

Pauli Murray was one of the young activists that Mary Church Terrell mentored. In the 1940s, Murray enrolled at Howard University Law School and went on to graduate as the only woman and top student in her class. In the 1930s, the convergence of several important Black male intellectuals at Howard University, including Abram Harris, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, had cemented a new formal model of the academically trained Black male public intellectual. When Murray enrolled in the 1940s, she experienced great sexism from these Black male intellectuals. She termed their treatment of her, “Jane Crow.” While she went on to have a storied career as a legal expert, Episcopal priest, poet, and writer, all of which place her firmly in the tradition of the race woman, her identity as both a woman and queer person in the 1940s and 1950s collided with the Howard model of public intellectual work. This chapter brings together Murray’s time and training at Howard, her archives, and an examination of her two autobiographies to suggest that her concept of Jane Crow grew out of the collision of race-based sexual politics and limited ideas among Black men about who could provide intellectual leadership for Black people. Moreover, Jane Crow exposed the heterosexist proclivities of Black public leadership traditions, and offers a framework for thinking about how Black women negotiated gender and sexual politics even as they devoted their lives to theorizing new strategies for racial uplift.
The Problems and Possibilities of the Negro Woman Intellectual
Authors: Cooper Brittney C.
Published: January 2018

This chapter returns to the question of what it means to be a Black woman intellectual by interrogating the claims in an article in Ebony Magazine in 1966 called “Problems of the Negro Woman Intellectual.” Given the ferment of racial crises in the 1960s, this chapter argues that much like the transitional period of the 1890s, the transition from Civil Rights to Black Power was marked by a tension over the roles that Black women would play, not only as political activists, but as intellectual leaders. Thus Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual erased a long and significant history of Black women’s intellectual labor in order to sustain his narrative of racial crisis. What really seems to be in crisis are the terms of Black masculinity. Cooper reads Toni Cade Bambara’s book of essays The Black Woman as a critical corrective to Cruse’s assertions because The Black Woman presses the case for Black women’s centrality as thought leaders and public intellectuals in racial justice struggles, and Bambara and her comrades approach the same political moment as an opportunity for creativity around the articulation of new modes of what she terms “Blackhood” rather than embracing the narrative of crisis. This chapter makes clear that the struggle to be known and to have the range of Black women’s experiences properly articulated in the public sphere is a recurring struggle for Black women thinkers. At the same time, these women engage in a range of creative practices to make Black women’s lives legible in public discourse.
The Politics of Abstraction
Authors: Crawford Margo Natalie
Published: January 2018

The second chapter shows that the Black Arts Movement called upon abstraction as the movement hailed blackness. Crawford argues that the black abstract art of the 21st century is a direct continuation of the Black Arts Movement working of abstraction for its blackest possibilities. The paintings of the Afri-COBRA collective are as central to this chapter as the 21st century sculpture of Barbara Chase-Riboud and the 21st century paintings of Kerry James Marshall. This chapter argues that we have failed to see the connections between strategic essentialism and what Crawford names “strategic abstraction.”
Backing into the Culture
Authors: Kincaid Paul
Published: January 2018

This chapter recounts how Banks began to get his first novels of the Culture published under the name Iain M. Banks. It examines the way that the central characters are either hostile to the Culture, or else are bored by it, so, right from the start of his career, it suggests an ambivalence about the supposed utopian characteristics of the Culture. The chapter also recounts how, with input from Ken MacLeod, the earliest of his Culture novels, Use of Weapons, became one of the most structurally complex of all of his novels.
Saul Yanovsky and Yiddish Anarchism on the Lower East Side
Authors: Zimmer Kenyon
Published: January 2018

Though virtually unknown today among anarchists and historians alike, Russian Jewish immigrant Saul Yanovsky helped to found Yiddish-speaking anarchist movements in both England and the United States, edited the most widely circulated anarchist newspaper in American history, and was the single most important figure of turn-of-the-century Jewish anarchism. He was a prominent and controversial figure in the Yiddish-speaking world of the Lower East Side, and played no small role in building that world. This essay, relying primarily on Yiddish-language sources, traces the life and influence of this once revered (and reviled) figure. His story is indispensable to our understanding of both anarchism and Yiddish culture in New York’s Lower East Side.
Fired by the Ideal
Authors: Bencivenni Marcella
Published: January 2018

This chapter details the social, political and historical context out of which Italian anarchism emerged in New York City. Embracing a transnational approach, she charts the movement's early roots, its main leaders, geopolitical spaces and distinctive subculture starting from the late nineteenth century when the great Italian immigration to the United States began through the 1920s when the movement started to decline under the blows of governmental repression and postwar nativist calls for 100 percent Americanism.
From Union Square to Heaven
Authors: Klejment Anne
Published: January 2018

This article maps the emergence of Christian anarchism in New York City through the life of Dorothy Day and the first decade of her Catholic Worker movement. As a young journalist during the World War I era, she rejected organized religion and found community among anarchists, socialists, Communists, and Wobblies. A practitioner of “advocacy journalism,” Day joined in demonstrations while researching stories for the radical press. After a conversion to Catholicism, several factors led to her leadership in building a Christian intentional community. While providing the best examples of direct action toward nonviolent revolution, secular radicalism lacked what Day considered an essential element: connection with the spiritual. She identified the Catholic church with the immigrants and workers to whom she wished to dedicate her labors. Uncertain of how to translate her faith into radical activism, she found inspiration from Peter Maurin, an eccentric Union Square orator, whose radical, but somewhat reactionary, vision of society provided her with a blueprint for a Christian intentional community.
Introduction
Authors: Prusin Alexander
Published: January 2018

Delineates the key themes of the book – the effects of German occupation on Serbia, the emergence of the forces of collaboration and resistance, and ensuing civil war. The introduction also sets the book’s chronological parameters and provides the reader with the main historiographical trends on the topic.
Collaborationism
Authors: Prusin Alexander
Published: January 2018

Explores the ideological tenets and actions of the main collaborationist groups in Serbia. Albeit functioning within the limits prescribed by the occupier, the Serbian collaborationists enjoyed a certain degree of latitude in internal affairs. Although driven by different personal dispositions and ideological orientations, the”revolutonaries” (associated by Dimitrije Ljotić) and the”conservatives” (associated with the head of the Government of National Salvation Milan Nedić) perceived themselves as the prophets of Serbia’s national regeneration. In hope to win some concessions from the Germans, both displayed substantial energy and initiative, especially in combating the forces they considered inimical to Serbia’s national revival.
Introduction
Authors: Civitello Linda
Published: January 2018

Chemical additives in food are routine in the twenty-first century, but they were new in the nineteenth when industrialization created American food that was not farm to table, but factory to table. Baking powder is the reason that the expression “flat as a pancake” has no meaning for Americans: it makes the difference between a flat French crêpe and a fluffy American pancake. Feeding a particularly American need for speed, baking powder made baked goods cheaper to prepare and shortened their cooking time radically. Baking powder broke down the dam for the chemical flood in foods that all Americans are familiar with now.
The Liberation of Cake
Authors: Civitello Linda
Published: January 2018

This chapter shows how American housewives experimented with chemical leavening shortcuts that democratized breadstuffs from difficult to prepare luxuries to easy everyday foods. The precursor to baking powder was pearlash, first mentioned in 1796, in American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, the first cookbook written in the United States. Catharine Beecher and Sarah Josepha Hale also experimented with cream of tartar, baking soda, hartshorn, and ammonia, and used them to create a new American cuisine with new foods like cookies and soft gingerbread, and new events at which they were consumed. However, these revolutionary leaveners also had problems such as adverse interactions with other ingredients and loss of potency.
The Alum War and World War I
Authors: Civitello Linda
Published: January 2018

The alum baking powder companies turned on each other over Calumet’s deceptive water glass test, in which egg albumen foamed up and looked more powerful than other baking powders. President Theodore Roosevelt ignored the Poison Squad experiments by USDA chief chemist Harvey Washington Wiley, and appointed famous scientists to the Remsen Board to investigate the effects that new chemicals in food, such as saccharin and baking powder, had on humans. Wiley continued his crusade at Good Housekeeping, where he withheld the famous “Seal of Approval” from alum baking powders. During WWI, doughboys developed a new appreciation for doughnuts, while Americans used baking powder to leaven rationed gluten-free flours, and baking powder use expanded in the Jewish community.
The Federal Trade Commission Wars
Authors: Civitello Linda
Published: January 2018

Baking powder companies repeatedly attempted to use federal agencies to limit competition. Calumet’s complaint against Royal to the FTC was inconclusive because both sides presented compelling scientific evidence. At the same time, baking powder companies began actively marketing to children, and Calumet created the famous slogan, “Double Acting.” The Hulmans renamed their product “Clabber Girl,” partly to capitalize on the popularity of the New American Woman, and withstood onslaughts from the Ku Klux Klan and new chain stores. At the end of the 1920s, the trade war ended abruptly when Royal and Calumet became subsumed in food conglomerates, Standard Brands and General Foods, respectively.
The Price War
Authors: Civitello Linda
Published: January 2018

The Depression caused a cutthroat price war that turned the baking powder industry on its head. Royal lost and never recovered, while Clabber Girl, through aggressive marketing under its new leader, Tony Hulman, became the industry frontrunner. New Deal policies changed management-labor relations and attempted to regulate businesses in unprecedented ways. Housewives rejoiced in new baking powder products like Bisquick and Jiffy but continued to struggle with baking powder chaos in cookbooks, especially the new Joy of Cooking and racist cookbooks spawned by Gone with the Wind. World War II continued the trend toward purchasing baked goods out of the home.
English Pastoral Music
Authors: Saylor Eric
Published: January 2018

This book examines the nature and style of pastoralism, one of twentieth-century England’s most widespread and influential musical movements. Long dismissed as provincial, escapist, and reactionary, pastoral music in fact represents a distinctively English approach to modernist composition during the early twentieth century, adapting and transforming established musical and aesthetic conventions to reflect the experiences of British composers and audiences. Covering a wide expressive range—from songs of praise to symphonies of commemoration, lush Arcadian dramatic scenes to bleak neotonal landscapes—English pastoral music encompasses an array of applications, meanings, and stylistic inflections that oblige us to reassess its cultural and idiomatic significance.
The book opens with a survey of pastoral music’s critical, theoretical, and stylistic foundations before moving on to examine its specific manifestations in the contexts of Arcadia, war, landscape, and the Utopian imagination. Works by well-known figures such as Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and Benjamin Britten are considered, as well as pieces by lesser-known composers such as E. J. Moeran, Ivor Gurney, Constant Lambert, and John Ireland, among others. Their diverse approaches to pastoralism not only reveal the breadth of its stylistic influence, but the depth of its philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings.
The Problem of Pre-Predicative Experience
Authors: Dastur Françoise , Vallier Robert
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the principal problems to be addressed by the total itinerary that Edmund Husserl proposes to follow and that leads him from pre-predicative experience to predicative thought and to general judgment. It begins with a discussion of the relation between the temporal and the supratemporal, arguing that it may be the problem that best allows us to understand the opposition between originary experience and the provision of knowledge. Husserl's concern is to take account of the irruption of the immanent but irreal and supratemporal moment of knowledge, which remains identical across all of its real repetitions. It is the operation of objectification, an active operation of the ego, that creates such an identity in predication. The chapter also considers how Husserl allows us to understand the supratemporality of the objectivities of the understanding as omnitemporality—that is, in the end, as a mode of temporality.
Reduction and Intersubjectivity
Authors: Dastur Françoise , Vallier Robert
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines Edmund Husserl's philosophical reflections on reduction and intersubjectivity. According to Husserl, method and phenomenology constitute an identity without which the reduction might appear to be a mere procedure or simple technique for gaining access to the phenomena that he calls pure and that, once attained, would no longer need the reductive method to become the objects of the new science of phenomenology. But if all authentic phenomenology occurs by means of the reduction, the question that arises is whether we must still consider the Logical Investigations as relevant to phenomenology. Husserl speaks explicitly of the “phenomenological reduction” beginning only in 1907, in The Idea of Phenomenology, but he used the expression “phenomenological reduction” for the first time in 1905. The chapter considers Husserl's proposal to extend phenomenological reduction to intersubjectivity—that is, to introduce intersubjectivity in the “thematic” field of pure phenomenology.
Phenomenology and Therapy
Authors: Dastur Françoise , Vallier Robert
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines Martin Heidegger's claim, articulated in the Zollikon Seminars, about the distinction between motivation and causality and relates it to the question of the other, Husserlian phenomenology, and therapy. If causality is acting and constraining, motivation is by contrast determining and free. The motive can thus act by itself, as does the cause, and it can be a motivation only insofar as it is understood; as such, it is never independent of the understanding that one has of it. The same goes for the doctor: he must not be understood as the efficient cause of the healing lest he remove the human and “communitarian” dimension from the therapeutic relation. He must instead be understood and behave as the occasion for the cure. The chapter also considers how Medard Boss situated the therapeutic relation with respect to what in Heidegger is “the name for the whole unfolding essence of Dasein.”
Conscience: The Most Intimate Alterity
Authors: Dastur Françoise , Vallier Robert
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues that what makes the character of moral conscience paradigmatic as the experience of alterity and passivity is that the dimension of affirmation originally constitutes it and is inscribed directly on it. It first examines Paul Ricoeur's claim that conscience is “the most deeply hidden passivity” in contrast to other passivities that belong to the experience of the proper body and the relation to the Other. It then considers Emmanuel Levinas's argument that the Other is neither “Being” nor a “being” easily grasped by a concept, along with Martin Heidegger's statement that “ontology” is always “practical,” always “engaged,” and therefore always includes an intrinsically ethical dimension. It also asks whether it is possible to think Being and the Other without opposing them before concluding with an analysis of the dialectic of alterity and ipseity that constitutes the most fundamental level of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the self.
Phenomenology of the Event
Authors: Dastur Françoise , Vallier Robert
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the philosophical reflections of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger regarding the phenomenology of the event. It proposes a kind of philosophy that should be able to take account of the very passage of time and its eventality, or structural “eventuality,” and shows that this “true” philosophy is phenomenology. What unites Husserl and Heidegger is the idea that philosophy's object is only phenomenality itself and not some distant “beyond” of a “being-in-itself” hidden and separated from us. The chapter describes an event as the unexpected, which comes-on and happens by surprise, “befalls” us— thus as an accident in the proper sense. The event is thus always a sur-prise, something that suddenly and unexpectedly takes hold of us, and in accordance with the excess of a yet-to-come that will come to us despite any expectation, tension, or intention.
History and Hermeneutics
Authors: Dastur Françoise , Vallier Robert
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the philosophical reflections of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer regarding the link between history and hermeneutics. Ricoeur's reflection on history is principally focused on the status of historiographical knowledge and texts, and in this regard, his theory overcomes conventional epistemology because the relation between historical knowledge and the real past is a “re-creative” or reconfigurative relation. In the case of Gadamer, it was he who most forcefully expressed the linkage of epistemology and ontology in the intermediary dimension of hermeneutics. The chapter also considers a “dialectical” conception of traditionality that can rightfully be maintained only on the condition (which both Gadamer and Ricour observe) of renouncing the totalization of experience in an absolute knowledge.
Phenomenology and the Question of Man
Authors: Dastur Françoise , Vallier Robert
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the philosophical reflections of Jan Patočka and Martin Heidegger regarding phenomenology and the question of human phenomena. According to Patočka, Heidegger is the thinker who realized Wilhelm Dilthey's idea of “understanding the human on the basis of the human” by starting from what separates the human from all other beings, without recourse to anything foreign to humanity. In his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger argues that humanism is a form of metaphysics, yet to understand the human in such a perspective is precisely not to understand the human on the basis of itself— that is, on the basis of a finitude that prevents the human from becoming master of truth. The chapter also considers Patočka's claim that phenomenality cannot be the work of our freedom.
The “Last God” of Phenomenology
Authors: Dastur Françoise , Vallier Robert
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl's concept of God from a phenomenological point of view. Husserl is not content merely to recognize as the “principle of principles” the originary presence of the thing to consciousness; he also excludes the concept of a God who would escape the laws of intentionality. God is not only a limiting-concept for philosophy, but is also what is revealed to religious consciousness as an absolute transcendence. The transcendental reduction bears not only on the whole of the natural world, but also on all the products of culture, and in particular on custom, law, and religion. The chapter explores how Heidegger and Husserl approach the relations between phenomenology and religion.
An Osean of Pre-Occupation and Possibilities: L’orda
Authors: Fiore Teresa
Published: January 2018

Part I (Waters) focuses on the liquid space of sea and ocean waters as quintessential migration spaces. It interconnects emigration from Italy and immigration to Italy by linking these waters in the portmanteau of the title and its characterization as a pre-occupied space. The texts addressed in this Aperture as well as the two chapters it introduces contain stories of the perilous voyages and shipwrecks that have silently punctuated the over-150-year-long history of Italian emigration and that are used here as a platform to re-read Italian history at large, especially in light of the current arrivals of immigrants from all over the world. The Aperture revolves around L’orda (The Horde), the best-selling book by Gian Antonio Stella adapted to the stage with the Compagnia delle Acque, which provides an ideal opportunity to bring attention to the tragic nature of migrant voyages, yesterday as well as today. In the Atlantic and Mediterranean waters, one can discern a thick tapestry of forced and chosen migratory routes, and the cultural connections that they have woven over the centuries. The Mediterranean is the prologue to the transatlantic voyage for the Italian emigrants, while the Atlantic Ocean remains an echo or a possibility in almost all the texts analyzed in Part I.
Crossing the Atlantic to Meet the Nation: The Emigration Ship in Mignonette’s Songs and Crialese’s Nuovomondo
Authors: Fiore Teresa
Published: January 2018

The topic of voyages is explored in this first chapter through visual and oral materials in which the emigrants’ regional affiliations espouse an in-progress national formation project during trans-national travels toward “America,” at once a real and imaginary place. Songs made popular by the Queen of the Emigrants, the diva-singer Gilda Mignonette who mixed a traditional Neapolitan repertoire with dramatic songs on emigration and colonial anthems, are read next to Emanuele Crialese’s film Nuovomondo (Golden Door 2006), which foregrounds the role of the ship for the leaving, traveling, and arriving migrants at the turn of the century. In these texts, the pre-occupied space under discussion is the ship, a floating social microcosm in which national fractures and international dreams co-exist on a simultaneously dividing and uniting ocean. The preoccupation over the condition of the emigrants that the ship hosts prompts different reactions in these authors, in turn defining different perceptions and figurations of emigration and consequently a different map of the Italian nation’s formation.
A Multicultural Project in a National Square: The Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio
Authors: Fiore Teresa
Published: January 2018

Part II (Houses) is a cultural mapping of the spaces where immigrants live/d, that is, residential buildings that have been or are intrinsically linked to the migration experiences from/to Italy as well as so-called ethnic neighborhoods. The Aperture that opens this part focuses on an area of Rome, Piazza Vittorio, which has come to represent the immigrant hub of the capital. It explores the square—a quintessential Italian space—both for its role in nation building and for its several layers of immigrant occupation. Through the analysis of Agostino Ferrente’s 2006 documusical The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, which recounts the creative project of forming a multi-ethnic orchestra in this piazza, the chapter highlights an interesting example of how preoccupations over the presence of immigrants can be substituted by new visions. In an area where the very meaning of “ethnic neighborhood” can be mapped at a trans-national level (multi-multi-ethnic) given the diversity of the immigrants’ origin, Ferrente’s documusical reflects a post-national scenario of cultural co-existence within an ethical vision that interestingly offers, especially in its final climax, a “success” story.
Displaced Italies and Immigrant “Delinquent” Spaces in Pariani’s Argentinian Conventillos and Lakhous’s Roman Palazzo
Authors: Fiore Teresa
Published: January 2018

In addressing residential spaces through the lens of de Certeau’s concept of “delinquent space,” that is, a space that creatively defies social norms and stereotypes, Chapter 3 looks at the conventillos as described by Laura Pariani in her novel Dio non ama i bambini (2007) and at a residential building (palazzo) inhabited by locals and immigrants in the same Vittorio Square, as depicted by Amara Lakhous in his novel Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2006). Despite the different locations of these buildings and the different time periods of the stories (turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires versus contemporary Rome), the two novels successfully render the challenges and possibilities presented by the co-existence of people from different backgrounds. In part for their captivating employment of the detective genre, in part for their innovative narrative structure, the novels suggest the need to investigate immigrant societies with new questions in order to find new answers that challenge the norm.
Labor on the Move: Rodari’s Construction Workers and Kuruvilla’s Babysitter
Authors: Fiore Teresa
Published: January 2018

Part III (Workplaces) shifts attention to the theme of occupation in terms of working in a space and re-maps Italy along the routes of its outbound and inbound migrations. Of all the numerous job sectors related to Italian emigration abroad and foreign immigrants in Italy, two are chosen for their specific relevance in the historical and contemporary scenario: construction labor and domestic help. The Aperture introduces the topic through texts that focus on bricklayers (Gianni Rodari’s nursery rhymes from Favole al telefono) and baby-sitters (Gabriella Kuruvilla’s children’s story Questa non è una baby-sitter). The apparently light tone of these texts written for a young readership conceals a very subtle discussion of the abusive work conditions and prejudices that migrants face on construction sites and in domestic environments, and to which they react thanks to their ability to endure and question.
Introduction: Figural Moorings of Hospitality in Sodomscape
Authors: Gallagher Lowell
Published: January 2018

The introduction sets up the book’s conceptual and methodological parameters by laying out two intersecting avenues of inquiry. First, it establishes the link between the biblical account of the flight from Sodom and the ethical conundrums the Sodom legacy bequeaths to hospitality theory. Second, it argues for a fresh understanding of Lot’s wife – traditionally the exemplar of moral obduracy and female unruliness -- as an ethically provocative figural mediator between Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the “flesh” and Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of dispossession before the “face” of the Other. Through this critical lens, chapter overviews show the far-ranging impact – across millennia and a wide variety of art forms – of Lot’s wife’s legacy as a mutable figure of reparative witnessing and ethical resilience.
Avant-Garde Lot’s Wife: Natalia Goncharova’s Salt Pillars and the Rebirth of Hospitality
Authors: Gallagher Lowell
Published: January 2018

Chapter four shows how the innovative treatment of the flight from Sodom by the avant-garde Russian painter Natal’ia Goncharova (1881-1962) presents a figural merger of messianic expectation and cosmopolitan hope in the artist’s experimental hybridizing of secular and sacral components to aesthetic practice. The strangely oneiric and mortified landscape conveyed by Goncharova’s proto-cubist vocabulary in Salt Pillars (ca. 1909) assembles a prescient image of Hannah Arendt’s notion of natality, which Arendt draws from Augustine’s definition of the human as inherently endowed with the capacity for gratitude and the ability to begin again in the midst of uncertainty. Put simply, the painting gives figural expression to the fundamental ambiguity of Arendt’s notion of natality, its backward- and forward-looking turn toward givenness and new beginnings. Through this gesture, Salt Pillars presents a patient attentiveness to the complicity of worlding and unworlding gestures in the rhythm of being with others.
Soundings in Sodomscape: Biblical Purity Codes, Spa Clinics, and the Ends of Immunity
Authors: Gallagher Lowell
Published: January 2018

Under the canopy of cultural geography, Chapter five draws on the resources of critical medical studies and landscape architecture to show how the deep memory of the Sodom story reissues the hospitality question (what are you willing to give up to protect what you think you value most?) in the region historically known as Palestine, even as that very question is currently being subsumed into the engines of biopower promoting the crush of industries in the fragile ecosystem along the southwestern shores of the Dead Sea. The notable symptom of this operation takes shape, perhaps surprisingly, in the region's robust investment in the skincare industry-in particular, the therapeutic regimens for psoriasis, the disorder whose biosemiotic profile and biomedical history quietly point up the shared socio-ethical borders of community and immunity in the figural mooring of Sodomscape.
Out of Africa: Albert Memmi’s Desert of Allegory in The Pillar of Salt
Authors: Gallagher Lowell
Published: January 2018

Chapter seven examines the prospect of unhoped-for discovery that colonial discourse analyst Albert Memmi brought to the figure of Lot’s wife in his first published work, The Pillar of Salt (1953). The novel presents a scrupulously confessional report on a life wrecked in the colonial endgame in the Maghreb and rehabilitated by a dream of flight to Argentina. The novel’s critical interest turns on the missed rendezvous between the boy’s conscious assent to the virulent legacy of Sodom and the critical rejoinder figured by the boy’s intuitive and gradually immersive contact with the forgotten face of Lot’s wife. This is the face that testifies, through action, to the ethical awakening born of intimate familiarity with the difficult edge joining home to homelessness. In essence, the novel presents a laboratory for thinking how Arendt’s critically willed hope in natality’s reparative power may speak to the risk and promise of kenotic hospitality at the heart of Levinas’s ethics of vulnerability. Crucially, the novel figures this thought as an echo of Augustine’s Confessions—the text that famously worries over the wounding conflict between the narrated and narrating self, and absolves the conflict through an ecstatic embrace of allegory’s world-making and world-repairing powers.
Introduction
Authors: Bugbee Henry
Published: January 2018

Philosophy must begin where we are with an appeal to what we experience. Philosophical reflection need not commence with technical jargon, indubitable foundations, metaphysical abstractions, or any “meta-level” order of discourse; philosophical reflection must begin with a consideration of things themselves: “[L]et the sense of being reaffirm its significance in human experience.” Leaping trout in Montana, the chapel bell ringing in Harvard Yard, a kamikaze pilot crashing in the South Pacific now become intensive indices of the intensive panorama of being. The questions remained whether “the profession” of philosophy – what William James so aptly referred to as the “Ph.D. Octopus”– would be willing to tolerate an experiential approach of such magnitude?
In Demonstration of the Spirit (Selections)
Authors: Bugbee Henry
Published: January 2018

Bugbee earned a Bachelor’s degree with High Honors in Philosophy from Princeton University in 1936 with a thesis entitled “In Demonstration of the Spirit.” The thesis criticizes academic philosophy’s failure to address “the crying need of the whole man.” The thesis also exhibits a striking religious tone. Three of the four chapters begin with biblical epigraphs and the epilogue concludes with a quote from Saint Paul: “To this effect I have not spoken ‘with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God’.” The salutation “Amen,” immediately followed by Bugbee’s signature, leaves a sense of witnessing a “demonstration” of profound significance in terms of the author’s spiritual development.
Thoughts on Creation
Authors: Bugbee Henry
Published: January 2018

Thoughts on Creation discusses the importance of being reflexively self-aware while acting in the capacity of both “patient” and “agent” within the process of creation coming to pass.
The Possibility of a World
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc , Jandin Pierre-Philippe
Published: January 2018

In this series of interviews, Jean-Luc Nancy is invited to review his life’s work with Pierre-Philippe Jandin. But like Schlegel’s historian—“a prophet facing backwards”—Nancy takes this opportunity to rummage through the history of art, philosophy, religion, and politics in search of new possibilities that “remain to be thought.” This history of Nancy’s thought is interspersed with places and events and deeply personal details. The result is at once unpretentious and encyclopedic: concepts are described with remarkable nuance and specificity, but in a language that comes close to everyday life. As Nancy surveys his work, he thinks anew about democracy, community, jouissance, love, Christianity, and the arts. In the end, this is a book about the possibility of a world—a world that must be greeted because it is, as Nancy says, already here.
Community
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: January 2018

Nancy extends his discussion of a “world” into a discussion about “community.” While Nancy is asked to discuss the possibility of shared or collective affects, much of the focus of this chapter is on Nancy’s relationship to Marxist and post-Marxist thought. His timely comments on Rancière, Hardt and Negri, and non-hierarchical movements will be of particular interest to political philosophers.
Politics and Religion
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: January 2018

Nancy and Jandin discuss Schmitt and the history of sacrifice in Christianity and in Constantine in particular. The broader focus of the chapter is on how the philosophical, the religious, and the political interconnect. The chapter concludes with Nancy’s comments on the bodily or corporeal nature of an intellectual.
The Present, Presence
Authors: Nancy Jean-Luc
Published: January 2018

Nancy is invited to speak about time and the concept of “presence.” The chapter is at once a discussion of Heidegger and Derrida and a recapitulation of Nancy’s philosophy of time. Nancy reintroduces his notion of the “coming about” or “coming to pass” and says that this notion “remains to be thought.”
Introduction
Authors: Yusin Jennifer
Published: January 2018

The introduction describes the conceptual contexts for the composition of the traumatic event as it is developed in psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies. It offers an analysis of the analytic strategies of postcolonial critiques that identify and resist so called Eurocentric biases within the field of trauma studies. Unveiling that such critiques owe to the same ideological tendency that assumes priority of the symbolic over the material dimensions of life advanced by the field, this chapter situates the traumatic event as the point where psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourses meet. In so establishing, it demonstrates the necessity to transform the concepts of trauma and event.
Rwanda Transforming
Authors: Yusin Jennifer
Published: January 2018

This chapter turns upon the relation between trauma and memory in the context of post-genocide Rwanda. Paying special attention to the case of the Bisesero Memorial site, known as the “National Resistance Memorial,” it shows how the imperishable character of the vivacity of memory in psychical life is a return of nature that realizes a neutral time without proper destination. The politics of memorializing the genocide in Rwanda challenges us to think the self-transformative tendency of life, which overwhelms the assertion of the character of the postcolonial condition as the repetition of legacies of colonialism. With reference to Nietzsche’s idea of “active forgetting,” the chapter proposes the development of forgetting as a new conceptual habit that impacts upon and frustrates the idea of messianic.
After Word
Authors: Yusin Jennifer
Published: January 2018

The conclusion considers the question of how contemporary forms of geopolitical violence demand an articulation of a new form of the psyche, one that is susceptible to transformation and destruction. Paradoxes in Derrida’s concepts of differánce and the universal urgency of memory are unveiled in order to elaborate a new form of responsibility and meaning of response that does not depend on the motif of transference. To restore back to the other their pain without taking their place: such is the ethical and political demand of responsibility of our time.
Members of His Body
Authors: Stockton Will
Published: January 2018

Through readings of Shakespeare and Paul, Members of His Body protests the Christian defense of marital monogamy. If the Paul who authors 1 Corinthians would prefer that unmarried believers remain single, the pseudonymous Paul of the epistle to the Ephesians argues that marriage affords the couple membership in the body of Christ. For neither Paul is plural marriage the antithesis of Christian marriage. For the Paul of Ephesians, plural marriage is rather the telos of Christian community. Building on scholarship regarding early modern sexualities, as well as on political-theological conversations about Pauline universalism, Members of His Body argues that marriage functions in The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale as a contested vehicle of Christian embodiment. Shakespeare’s plays query the extent to which man and wife become “one flesh” through marriage, and the extent to which they share that fleshly identity with other Christians. These plays explore the racial, religious, and gender criteria for marital membership in the body of Christ. Finally, they suggest that marital jealousy and paranoia about adultery result in part from a Christian theology of shared embodiment. In the wake of recent arguments that expanding marriage rights to gay people will open the door to the cultural acceptance and legalization of plural marriage, Shakespeare’s plays remind us that much Christian theology already looks forward to this end.
The Ecology of Adultery: Flesh, Blood, and Stone in The Winter’s Tale
Authors: Stockton Will
Published: January 2018

The final chapter queries how the resurrection of Hermione from stone answers to Leontes’ paranoia about his wife’s infidelity. Sourcing the play’s creaturely imaginaries to Genesis 1 and 2, as well as to Paul of Tarsus’s typological conjunction of Christ and Adam in 1 Corinthians, I argue that Leontes operates on the premise that the human flesh to which he has joined himself in marriage is constitutively adulterated. Turning the resurrection scene, this chapter further argues that Leontes’ reaction recalls the Corinthian controversy over eating meat sacrificed to idols, and thereby signals that his anxieties over the purity of his wife’s flesh have not abated. Whereas numerous recent readings of The Winter’s Tale concern themselves with the faith that Paulina makes a requirement of Hermione’s resurrection, this chapter finally contends that Shakespeare’s romance is similarly ambiguous about faith’s connection to redemption. Instead of taking a Protestant, Catholic, or even secular approach to faith, Shakespeare’s play stages a series of redemptive possibilities – among them the possibility that marriage alone, not faith at all, offers the unbeliever membership in the body of Christ.
God’s Word and Human Speech
Authors: Sokolowski Robert
Published: January 2018

In this chapter, Robert Sokolowski outlines a phenomenological approach to scripture, as both God’s word and human text, in a Roman Catholic theological context.
Introduction
Authors: Pourciau Sarah M.
Published: January 2018

The Writing of Spirit revises a crucial aspect about the rise of the “natural sciences” by reinterpreting the historical development of modern system theories within the paradigmatic realm of natural language. Pourciau argues that the process through which twentieth-century linguists first successfully purged their systems of soul has long been misunderstood precisely because it has never before been conceived primarily as a process, and thus also as an ongoing confrontation with its own nineteenth-century preconditions. Much exciting work has been done in recent years, and is currently being done today, on the relevance of a new “organicist” understanding of system for the radical transformation of German thought around 1800, in domains such as life science, literature, and philosophy. Less attention has been paid, in this context, to the domain of language science, despite its exemplary status for the time period in question, and still less to the relationship between the spirit of early nineteenth-century systems and their spiritless twentieth-century successors.
Language Ensouled
Authors: Pourciau Sarah M.
Published: January 2018

Chapter One traces the 19th century development of a new way of thinking about language structure, and about systematicity more generally, in the work of German linguists like Jacob Grimm, Franz Bopp, and their successors. It argues that this new perspective grows out of a widespread backlash, prepared and supported by Friedrich Schelling’s “nature-philosophy,” against the Kantian understanding of system. The most significant German scientists of the period presuppose, as Kant does not, the extra-human reality of the orders they analyze, and thus also the extra-human reality of analyzable structure per se. In the realm of Idealist philosophy, the result is a new theory of History, writ cosmically large. In the realm of language science, the result is a newly rigorous etymological methodology, designed to render writeable the laws of empirical language change, and by doing so, to articulate the essence of a teleologically-unfolding “language spirit” or Sprachgeist.
Afterword
Authors: Pourciau Sarah M.
Published: January 2018

The Writing of Spirit traces the genesis of the twentieth century’s best-known and most influential such principle, arguing in the process that it has been widely and deeply misinterpreted, in ways that fundamentally distort its contribution to the debate about how systems, in general, get formed. In the afterword, Pourciau supplements this historical account with a brief look at two of the most significant contemporary solutions to the language-as-interface puzzle, in the hope that doing so will provide a clearer picture of how the structuralist proposal still challenges us to think differently today. Pourciau’s goal is rather to illuminate the present-tense import of the unfamiliar conceptual terrain toward which the structuralist project, alone among its peers, seeks to direct our attention.