bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Libyan Novel
Authors: Olszok Charis
Published: May 2022

This is the first book in English-language scholarship to introduce the development of the Libyan novel through in-depth analyses of its main authors, and broader reference to many others. It is also the first to engage Arabic literature with the ‘animal turn’ in the Humanities and Social Sciences, reading Libyan fiction through the lens of the ‘creaturely’, understood both through Eric Santner’s interpretation of it as an expression of a particularly human experience of subjection to sovereign power (On Creaturely Life, 2008), and Anat Pick’s reading of it as an engagement with the boundary between human and animal, binding environmental and political injustice (Creaturely Poetics, 2011). Through both readings, the monograph brings new comparative perspectives to modern Arabic literature, as well as highlighting central themes and aesthetics of the Libyan novel. While understanding animals as an allegory for human suffering, the monograph explores how they prompt reflection on the universal vulnerability of all creatures, human and nonhuman, within an uncertain world. With their ‘silence’ expressive of the nation’s international marginality and the denial of fundamental freedoms within it, and their imprisonment and mortality a commentary on the loss of traditional nomadism, as Libya transforms into a dictatorial, rentier state, animals represent multi-layered allegories, all underpinned by an expression of shared vulnerability.
Animal Fable in Novels of Survival
Authors: Olszok Charis
Published: May 2022

Chapter One identifies rural narratives of survival as a particularly defining theme of the Libyan novel. Al-Nayhūm’s Min Makka ilā hunā (1970; From Mecca to Here), widely considered as the first cohesive Libyan novel, published at the dawn of Gaddafi’s regime, is central in introducing this theme, attracting widespread attention on its publication, and exerting a profound influence over the decades. It is read alongside al-Faqīh’s Fi’rān bilā juḥūr (2002; Homeless Rats) and al-Kūnī’s Nazīf al-ḥajar (1989; The Bleeding of the Stone). Like it, both feature prominent sections of animal fable within otherwise realist narratives, and both conclude with scenes of environmental transformation amidst divine agency and encounter, joining human and animal. Through this shared, hybrid poetics, all three question the human drive to excess through an ethics of restraint and subsistence, based in the Qur’ānic notion of ‘rizq’ (sustenance, divine bounty, 11:6). All three are, furthermore, set between the 1930s and 1950s, addressing the struggle against war, occupation and environmental precarity that marks the nation’s past, and hinting at the struggles to follow. Tracing connections between the three authors, I situate their novels within their experiences of exile and censorship.
The Primordial Turn
Authors: Olszok Charis
Published: May 2022

Chapter Two continues its focus on al-Nayhūm, al-Faqīh and al-Kūnī, turning to mythic and primordial imaginings, which reformulate narratives of creation, fall and evolution. I turn to the later work of the three authors, in which the primordial is conveyed through hybrid fiction, challenging the bounds of the novel, and reflecting the authors’ marginality as intellectuals in exile. Al-Nayhūm’s dystopian fable al-Qurūd (1984; The Primates), told in rhyming, rhythmic language, depicts the emergence of power struggles among jungle baboons. Al-Faqīh’s trilogy, Ḥadā’iq al-layl (1996; Gardens of the Night), is set in three worlds: Edinburgh, where a disillusioned student enters a series of destructive relationships; an ancient, utopian kingdom, inspired by The Thousand and One Nights, Sufi wisdom, and the natural world; and, finally, the socially and politically oppressed and oppressive Tripoli. Finally, al-Kūnī’s Anūbīs (2002; Anubis) brings to the geographically and epistemologically marginalised voices of animals in the Sahara the chronologically marginalised realm of deep, primordial time, telling the founding myth of the Tuareg, allegorising human alienation and homelessness. In each, the novel is radically rethought through the poetics of fable and myth, with characterisation shifting to abstract explorations of the primordial impulses of greed, violence and desire.
‘Une histoire de mouche’ : The Libyan Novel in Other Voices
Authors: Olszok Charis
Published: May 2022

In Chapter Six, I maintain my focus on the Bildungsroman, examining novels in English and French, by novelists who left Libya at a young age, but have continued returning to it in their fiction. Through Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men (2006) and Kamal Ben Hameda’s La compagnie des Tripolitaines (2011; Under the Tripoli Sky, 2014), I explore evocations of childhood threatened by experiences of violence and vulnerability. Indicating both authors’ affinities with the novels discussed in Chapter Five, I identify how the novels dramatise the impossibility of growing-up in the ‘country of men’. In La compagnie des Tripolitaines, I explore this through the notion of oral ‘fly tales’ (histoires de mouche), told to the young protagonist-narrator by his aunt, and reframing human history through the paradigmatic ‘other’, which has flourished on its decay. In the Country of Men compounds the difficulty of telling stories about Libya’s past with the precarity of speaking in the present, as the protagonist-narrator confronts the oppressive realities of 1979 Tripoli, and attempts to formulate it into narratives that makes sense, many of which draw on images from the nonhuman world.
Afterword: Breaking Fevers and Strange Metamorphoses
Authors: Olszok Charis
Published: May 2022

In conclusion, I point to new literary trends that have emerged since the collapse of Gaddafi’s regime in 2011, exploring how authors have expressed the frustration of post-revolutionary hopes, and the nation’s increased instability and fragmentation. I focus this on Manṣūr Būshnāf’s novel al-Kalb al-dhahabī (2021; The Golden Dog), which, through its intertextual relationship with Apuleius’ Golden Ass, alongside a range of other intertexts focused on human-animal encounters and metamorphoses, I analyse as a creaturely manifesto for the nonhuman aesthetics of the Libyan novel, and its specific literary brilliance.
Appropriating Multi-histories: The Palestine Archaeological Museum
Authors: Gitler Inbal Ben-Asher
Published: May 2022

Chapter two examines the Palestine Archeological Museum, analyzing its architecture as a British and American articulation of Palestine’s past. I demonstrate how in designing the museum, British architect Austen St. Barbe Harrison (1891-1976), with the aid of American archaeologist Henry Breasted (1865-1935) and with the approval of the patron, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874-1960), implemented new concepts of museum planning and novel architecture intended for archaeological research. The outcome was a sophisticated blend of modernism, historicism, and vernacular architecture. The museum exhibited a didactic sculptural program – created by famous British sculptor Eric Gill (1882-1940) – that presented a seamless historical progression of cultures in the region. Communal participation was enlisted to promote intercommunal relations, yet local communities were excluded from design and managerial aspects of the project. Taken together, the museum’s design elements and its intercommunal construction, expressed a vision of thriving coexistence under British and American custodianship.
Americans Imagining Jerusalem: The Jerusalem YMCA Building
Authors: Gitler Inbal Ben-Asher
Published: May 2022

Chapter three discusses the Jerusalem YMCA building, designed by American architect Arthur Loomis Harmon (1878-1958). Built by a Christian organization, it was assigned an important role within the Christian community, but also provided a venue of modern culture for all of the city’s inhabitants. Intercommunal engagement in this project was more significant than in the Archaeological Museum, and the project’s executives revealed profound concern for the building’s acceptance among Jerusalem’s publics. The building’s explicit multicultural and interreligious design and sculpture were achieved by an articulation of local sources of inspiration, merged with American and European architecture. This unique hybridity contained an obfuscated message of Christian hegemony, which asserted American cultural authority that extended beyond the building’s modern functions.
‘A collier’s son a poet!’: Lawrence’s First Approaches to the Literary Marketplace
Authors: Grice Annalise
Published: May 2022

Chapter 1 sets out to revise the perception that Lawrence took little interest in attaining a professional writing career before Ford Madox Hueffer accepted his poetry for publication in the November 1909 number of the English Review. The chapter examines how Lawrence understood his position in the literary field at the time when he was making his first approaches to representative readers in preparation for submitting his work to publishers. His initial interests were in sentimental and romantic poetry and short stories with regional settings; in Easter 1906 he also began a melodramatic novel, ‘Laetitia’ (the earliest extant version of his first novel The White Peacock). Chapter 1 provides evidence that Lawrence saw writing as a social and collaborative activity and draws attention to his creative practice of circulating manuscripts to an increasing circle of (mostly female) friends and acquaintances.
The Mi’kmaq, the Pattersons and Remembering the Scottish Colonisation of Nova Scotia
Authors: Vance Michael E.
Published: May 2022

Starting with a photograph showing a group of approximately 40 Mi’kmaw men, women and children taken at the 1923 Hector celebration in Pictou, Nova Scotia, the role that the celebration of the Scottish pioneers served in erasing awareness of the presence of indigenous peoples prior to the emigrant ship’s arrival in 1773 is explored in this chapter. The significance of the Mi’kmaw leaders pictured in the photograph and their role in asserting indigenous treaty rights is discussed before examining the representation of Mi’kmaq/settler relations in the scholarship of Rev. George Patterson. The chapter argues that his son, Judge George G. Patterson, ignored this early history and was responsible for branding the Hector as Canada’s Mayflower- this representation led Judge Patterson to deny Mi’kmaq treaty rights altogether.
Derailed: Danish Film During the German Occupation
Authors: Sørensen Lars-Martin
Published: May 2022

From April 1940 to May 1945, Denmark was occupied by German forces. These years were, surprisingly, marked by expansion and progress in all aspects of Danish film culture: import of British and American films was banned, reducing foreign competition. Tracing the machinations of key figures in the industry, this chapter argues that overall, Danish film companies allowed business interests to overrule ideological concerns, and they did so with impunity. A case in point is the feature film discussed in this chapter, Afsporet (Derailed, Bodil Ipsen and Lau Lauritzen Jr., 1942). The female lead in this film noir, Illona Wieselmann, was forced to flee to neutral Sweden after being betrayed by the film’s producer, Henning Karmark, who had joined the Danish Nazi Party. Karmark was nevertheless able to resume his lucrative career as film tycoon after the Second World War.
Social Realism of the 1940s: Between Paternalistic Care and Dignifying Humanism
Authors: Langkjær Birger
Published: May 2022

During the 1940s, social realism emerged in Danish cinema, making the trivialities of life into dramas of the everyday. The German occupation (1940-45) had boosted Denmark’s documentary output, with hundreds of state-commissioned short films informing the public about institutions and society. Directors, writers and cinematographers worked across documentary and fiction filmmaking, infusing the social realist feature films with aspects of documentary style such as on-location shooting, voice-over, rhythmic montage, and an interest in contemporary social issues. Another influence was the long-standing tradition of critical realism in Danish literature and theatre. These so-called problemfilm (‘problem films’) explored dilemmas such as abortion rights, child neglect, alcoholism, abusive relationships, and social welfare, positing power relations and social inequality as the culprits. Drawing on an amalgam of stylistic features and combining didacticism with sentimentality to engage audiences, these films espouse a critical-humanist social realism that heralded Denmark’s welfare state in spe.
Rural Dreams: Landscape, Family, Sexuality and Queerness in Homeland Cinema
Authors: Henrik Hartvigson Niels
Published: May 2022

Like the German Heimatfilm, homeland film is also a popular and enduring tradition in Danish cinema. Often criticised as reactionary or regressive, homeland films flourished from the 1950s onwards, bringing images of the national landscape to cinema screens. Adaptations of popular novels by Morten Korch formed the backbone of the genre, and production was dominated by two women filmmakers: Alice O’Fredericks and Annelise Reenberg. The films tend to narrate identity-related struggles, set in a place of origin such as a farm or village, and they balance melodrama with comedy, lyricism, and the occasional supernatural element. Interconnections between cinematic landscape, human and animal are crucial, and kinship extends far beyond the nuclear family to encompass cultural outcasts, the unmarried, the childless, the old and orphans. Indeed, this chapter argues that homeland films often centre on a crisis of sexuality, and feature some form of queer couples or queer nurturing.
Pornography and Censorship
Authors: Thorsen Isak
Published: May 2022

In the summer of 1969, Denmark was the first country in the world to legalise visual pornography. This chapter outlines the history of film censorship in Denmark, examining how socio-cultural change led to gradual testing of legal limits. The immediate impact of the lifting of censorship was a short-lived ‘porn monopoly’, gaining the country an international reputation as uniquely licentious. The chapter addresses how mainstream Danish feature films of the late 1960s and early 1970s incorporated and commercialised the transgressive potential of sex and pornography in three main ways: in porn films proper, in documentary-like films, and in the highly popular national sex comedies.
Welcome to Denmark: Immigrants and their Descendants in Danish Cinema
Authors: Jørholt Eva
Published: May 2022

This chapter discusses the representation of immigrants and their descendants in Danish film and the extent to which the ‘official’ Danish attitude towards immigrants and their descendants is reflected in the ways they are portrayed in the country’s cinematic output. The chapter provides a brief historical overview of what might be termed Danish ‘immigration cinema’ since the 1970s, noting the various character tropes that have developed around the non-Western immigrant. The chapter suggests that these politically incorrect films, made by Danish filmmakers with no personal experience of migration, can be criticised for bolstering the same kinds of xenophobic stereotypes at the heart of the widespread Danish opposition to immigration, and demonstrate the need for diversity in the film industry. The chapter then examines more recent films from the 2000s made by Danish filmmakers with an immigration background, which provide nuanced and inclusive depictions of Denmark’s immigrant communities, departing from the current, increasingly hateful political discourse against immigration and ‘foreigners’ in Danish politics.
Feminist New Materialism and Literary Studies: Methodological Meditations on the Tradition of Feminist Literary Criticism and (Post)Critique
Authors: Skiveren Tobias
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines the potential embedded in feminist New Materialism for transforming established methods, conceptualizations, and attitudes within feminist literary criticism. It sketches a chronological outline of feminist theory and feminist literary criticism in order to situate feminist New Materialism as the latest cross-disciplinary transfer in an ongoing history of dialogues and appropriations from (1) second wave feminism, (2) French feminist theory and (3) queer theory. Drawing on ideas from Mayra Rivera, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and others, the chapter argues that the lines of thought promoted by these figures are best adopted to literary criticism by engaging literature as an affective and imaginative site for witnessing what it feels like to live as a specific carnal configuration, subjected not only to the powers of discourse, but also to the recalcitrant materiality of the flesh, thereby revitalizing the emphasis on affect and experience also characteristic of the gynocritical approaches of the 1970s.
Dry Ontology and Finance Capitalism: A Material–Affective Reading of Financial Crisis Fiction
Authors: Pedersen Martin Karlsson
Published: May 2022

This chapter highlights a shared ontological interest in the human and non-human encounter under finance capitalism between a realist strand of contemporary financial crisis fiction, particularly Alex Preston’s This Bleeding City, and the post-anthropocentric side to Maurizio Lazzarato and Franco Berardi’s theories on semio-capitalism. Through a dialogue between Preston, Lazzarato and Berardi, the chapter underlines a common understanding of how financial reality works and what it does: how a non-referential agency of finance money-signs is co-shaping financial subjectivity and how this affective interaction produces a ‘dry ontology’ of bodily and emotionally isolated and detached subjects. They all thereby highlight how the reality of financial capital violently reproduces an affective and experiential level of the ideological ideal of an atomized economic subject. In order to approach the novel in this way, the chapter likewise utilizes Fredric Jameson’s concept of literary realism and the contradiction between affect and narration. The chapter thereby wants to maintain that an affective approach to the realist financial novel must capture and foreground the aforementioned ontological reality of finance capitalism while at the same time avoid losing sight of the novel’s narrative ambition and the all too human desire of wanting to make sense of this reality and find a kind of closure.
Binge-Watching Audience Typologies: Conclusion
Authors: Perks Lisa , Steiner Emil , Pierce-Grove Ri , Mikos Lothar
Published: May 2022

Since 2012, binge-watching has transitioned from niche behaviour to one of the the primary modes of television viewing. After a decade, its scholarship has reached a point of saturation sufficient to construct a useful taxonomy of binge-viewers behaviour. Drawing on that binge-watching literature, this chapter presents the first such taxonomy, organized by viewer motive, practice, and outcome. We plot binge-watching across multiple spectra: attentive to inattentive, intentional to unintentional, stable trait vs. situational occurrence, solo to social, and fixed content vs. shifting content. Our taxonomy also catalogues the variety of binge-watching outcomes found in the literature, including regret, satisfaction, nostalgia, and deeper character engagement. Through such an organization of this now ubiquitous media phenomenon we hope to offer future scholars a foundation on which to develop more nuanced and useful understandings of binge-watching and contemporary television consumption.
National, Transnational, Transcultural Media: Netflix – The Culture-Binge
Authors: Stolz B. G.
Published: May 2022

National, Transnational, Transcultural Media revisits the terms surrounding cultural belonging in their uses in cultural and in television studies, explores definitional shifts and potential issues in application where global players such as Netflix are concerned. Netflix in particular has built their reputation not only on Binge Viewing as a cultural phenomenon, but also on transcultural values transmitted to and bestowed upon its viewership. It’s cultural power on a global scale in terms of affecting television habits is central to the debate.
National TV as Transnational ‘Cinematic’ Object: How Binge-Consumption Frames the Critical Vocabulary
Authors: Watts Robert
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines the transnational critical reception of British TV dramas acquired by Netflix, in the contexts of both their weekly domestic broadcast on the BBC and their reframing as bingeable ‘Netflix Originals’ in the US. Through case studies of Happy Valley (BBC 2014-) and The Fall (BBC 2013-16), it considers the role of TV critics in framing points of national and local difference, focusing particularly on the impact of binge-consumption on the critical positioning process.
Traditions of popular TV criticism organised around serialised episodes - appraised as open ‘in-progress’ texts for an imagined national television audience - are contrasted with a singular ‘big picture’ analysis, as encouraged by the binge-watching frame. This critical mode both feeds into the existing legitimation discourses of ‘cinematic’ television, as well as allowing the critic to manage expectations of the relative importance of culturally specific details to the non-native viewer’s overall experience. Critics are here understood as helping to construct a particular kind of elite ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 1990) - one that positions the text as a cinematic 'prestige' object, whilst facilitating the transnational assimilation of textual elements previously deemed as obstructively ‘national’ in their appeal.
Digressions and Recaps: The Bingeable Narrative
Authors: Kozak Lynn , Zeller-Jacques Martin
Published: May 2022

This chapter introduces the section on textual analysis. This happens via establishing concepts of ‘bingeability’ and questioning how the ‘bingeable’ text recaps narrative events via narrative digressions. The focus here is the Netflix series Stranger Things as example for the way previous events are ‘remembered’, thus structuring series memory in a specific way.
‘Next Episode in 5 …’ – Binge-Watching and Narrative in Streaming Television Comedy
Authors: Hemingway Tom
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines a recurring trend in streaming comedy television regarding narrative structure and its relationship to binge-watching, concluding that original comedy programmes created for streaming services have adapted their narrative to better suit the presumed viewing habits of their audience. This is demonstrated through an analysis of two Netflix original comedies, the fourth season of Arrested Development (Fox 2003–6; Netflix 2013–) and Love (Netflix 2016–18). A text-based methodological approach is applied to this study in order to underline the extent to which these narrative changes not only affect the overall structure of the texts but have also resulted in changes to comedic style.
Materiality and Aesthetics in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry
Authors: Lather Amy
Published: May 2022

This book formulates a novel way to comprehend the relationship between materiality and cognition by demonstrating how descriptions of objects in archaic and classical Greek texts reveal distinctive ways of conceptualizing human thought and perception. The readings center on the concept of poikilia, a richly multivalent term in Greek aesthetics that is used to characterize artifacts as well as mental activity. By delineating patterns of interaction between living and inorganic beings through the lens of this aesthetic concept, this book maps a body of canonical texts onto the new critical terrains comprised by the new materialisms and cognitive humanities and reveals the points of intersection between cognitive processes and the material entities produced by them. The result, an innovative contribution to both Classics and New Materialism studies, uncovers the intimate and reciprocal interaction between minds and matter as central to ancient Greek aesthetic experience.
The Protean Shape of Lyric Poikilia
Authors: Lather Amy
Published: May 2022

This chapter turns to the archaic lyric genres to investigate why poikilia looms so large in this relatively small extant corpus. It will argue that the complexity of poikilia’s meaning (and in turn, the complexities of the phenomena it denotes) makes poikilia a phenomenon that is pleasurable not only to experience firsthand, but also to imagine. Each example will demonstrate how the word aids in the construction of highly vivid and highly particular imaginative scenarios because of the variety of sensory features that the terminology of poikilia can encapsulate. In the first section, passages from Sappho, Alcman, and Anacreon will place poikilia in the context of erotic and sensuous allure, where this word recurs in conjunction with glamorous objects and people. As the following sections will show, however, Pindar presses the conceptual richness of poikilia to an extreme by deploying this term in unusual and novel ways that heighten attention both to the imaginative process itself and to the poet’s role in generating such projections. This chapter will illuminate how poikilia is as scintillating and lively a word as the desirable objects and phenomena it purports to describe.
Mētis and the Mechanics of the Mind
Authors: Lather Amy
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines the relationship between poikilia and the specific brand of cunning termed mētis, “cunning intelligence” and argues that there exists a unique relationship between this form of cognition and ordinary objects, including the most familiar material of all: the human body. It is thus the purpose of this chapter to delineate how each of the figures termed with this epithet–Prometheus, Hermes, and Odysseus–merits this appellation through their skilful manipulation of their physical and bodily environments. In this way, Prometheus, Hermes, and Odysseus each typify different strategies of thinking in and through things and so reveal a conception of the mind as a concrete, material entity. Drawing on Lambros Malafouris’ theory of material engagement and Andy Clark’s extended mind hypothesis, this chapter demonstrates that a fundamental aspect of mētis is the extension of cunning into the material world, most notably in the form of lies and traps, doloi.
Introduction: Scots Influence on the Dutch Reformed People of South Africa
Authors: Müller Retief
Published: May 2022

This lays out the historical context, setting the stage on which the rest of the narrative unfolds. It discusses some of the complexities of society in the 19th century Cape colony and the ways in which divergent groups tended to view one another. The role of diaspora Scots within the British Empire and especially in this South African society is discussed. Particular attention is paid to the religious context within the colony and the implications of the missionary identity of Scots who were to join the Dutch Reformed Church as ministers.
Afrikaner Volkskerk Ideologues and the Scots Afrikaners
Authors: Müller Retief
Published: May 2022

Here the focus is on the ways in which 20th century developments in Afrikaner nationalist theology, which increasingly became mainstream, led to an ostracization and villainization of the Scots legacy in the DRC. The attacks against the Scots Afrikaners, particularly Andrew Murray jr. and his sphere of influence, did not only emerge from DRC circles but also from other Afrikaner Reformed circles such as theologians connected to the ultra-Reformed, Gereformeerde Kerke. It starts with an early 20th century publicized disagreement between Murray and future Prime Minister of South Africa, D.F. Malan on the relation between Christianity and politics. Then it develops to subsequent detractions to the ecumenical mission interested stance of the Murrays from the side of Afrikaner nationalist Reformed disciples of the Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper.
Conclusion: The Scottish Legacy in Afrikaner Religiosity Reassessed
Authors: Müller Retief
Published: May 2022

In this concluding chapter, the narrative ties together and briefly synthesize several of the themes that recurred throughout the book. One theme concerns hybridity and the extent to which this could be indicated as a factor within the identity formation of the Scots Afrikaners. Another theme elaborates on the extent to which the Scots in the DRC might have seen themselves as missionaries to the Boers/ Afrikaners and how this influenced their own policy decisions over time and ultimately led to their defamation within nationalist Afrikaner circles.
Introduction
Authors: Saxton Libby
Published: May 2022

The introduction outlines the critical and theoretical debates about icons, stillness and movement to which the book contributes and which inform the subsequent analyses of individual images. It explores why accounts of iconic power in photography studies, media studies and the philosophy of images have typically privileged still pictures and relegated moving ones to a merely supporting role. But critics and scholars of film have also discussed iconic images from a wide range of perspectives. The introduction goes on to consider how the history of the emergence of the photojournalistic icon intertwines with those of photo-cinematic theory and particular political struggles.
The Double Life of the Gestapo Informer
Authors: Saxton Libby
Published: May 2022

Like the ‘Falling Soldier’, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s image of a deportee allegedly unmasking the woman who denounced her to the Gestapo (1945) has fuelled discussion of the unique properties of photography, especially its capacity to sum up seismic historical events. Yet this approach neglects the double life the ‘Gestapo Informer’ has led in and around cinema, both as part of the cast of Cartier-Bresson’s Le Retour (The Return, 1945) and in images promoting this documentary, since the photograph initially circulated in the guise of a film still. This chapter builds on previous scholarship on the interdependence of photography and cinema in Cartier-Bresson’s work by reappraising his celebrated picture from the perspective of iconic image studies. It develops two linked claims: that the pathos of gestures that survive from art historical images links photojournalistic icons to cinema’s bodies in motion; and that the iconicity of the ‘Gestapo Informer’ has as much to do with the moving crowds in Le Retour as with her accuser’s frozen rictus of rage.
The Unmaking of Homo Faber : Beckett and the Exhaustion of Technē
Authors: Weller Shane
Published: May 2022

The impact of new technologies, particularly in the fields of communication, transportation, and armaments, is evident in the work of numerous twentieth-century writers and philosophers, from the Italian Futurist F. T. Marinetti’s celebration of speed, to Walter Benjamin’s championing of mechanical reproduction, to Martin Heidegger’s reflections on the ‘question concerning technology’. Samuel Beckett’s engagement with this question is distinctive in a number of respects. In his early work, he suggests that modern technologies have a revelatory power, and he goes on to take advantage of the potentialities of various technological means in his later works, including tape-recording, radio, film, and television. However, he also insists upon a relation between technology and death, one that goes beyond the familiar idea that certain modern technologies have unprecedented destructive potential. For Beckett charts the exhaustion not only of various modern technologies, but also of technē as such. Locating Beckett’s engagement with the question of technology within its historical context, this chapter identifies the place of technology within Beckett’s negative aesthetics, before exploring some of the ways in which that aesthetics is realized, particularly in Beckett’s post-war works.
‘a medium for fleas’: Beckett, Mitrani and 1950s–1960s French Television Drama
Authors: Kiryushina Galina
Published: May 2022

In January 1963, the French television channel RTF aired Michel Mitrani’s adaptation of Beckett’s radio play Tous ceux qui tombent (All That Fall). Despite the wide critical acclaim it received, Beckett deemed Mitrani’s telefilm ‘disastrous’, which led to his subsequent refusal of similar proposals for his works to be adapted. However, rather than rejecting its execution on technical and artistic grounds, it seems that Beckett was above all displeased with the altered meaning the radio piece acquired by its visualisation.
The chapter situates this rarely discussed telefilm, and Mitrani’s work in general, in the context of the transformations of the television medium in France in the 1960s – the period which coincided with Beckett’s first attempts to write for the small screen. Since Beckett directed and supervised the filming of his TV plays outside of France (with the exception of Dis Joe, also directed by Mitrani), the developments in French television broadcasting during its peak period have been overlooked as a possible source of inspiration. By exploring conceptual and formal parallels between their work, the chapter ultimately proposes that Mitrani’s experimentation in the medium contributed to Beckett’s revaluation of television as a medium suitable for creative expression.
Beckett’s Multimedial Authorship: Language of Technology in the Genesis of Play and Film
Authors: Beloborodova Olga
Published: May 2022

Beckett’s short play Play and his only film Film are both named after their medium and were composed at the same time. By bringing these two works together, this chapter attempts to sketch Beckett’s emerging multimedial authorship that began to take shape in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The chapter argues that Beckett’s multimedial authorship was the consequence of his increasing reliance on technological rather than textual means to convey his message to his audience. In Play, the ‘cinematic’ montage technology of the spotlight subverts the speeches’ coherence and thus substantially reduces their intelligibility. In Film, bereft of speech from the outset, the camera is the only guide for the audience to make sense of it. Such a shift in Beckett’s modus operandi had repercussions for the geneses of these works, and the most significant effect of Beckett’s ‘technological turn’ was the greater need to explain his ideas to the production teams. This need manifested itself in the emergence of explanatory notes throughout the composition process of Play and Film. Bearing in mind the importance of such notes, this chapter also investigates their ambiguous status in the genetic dossier and the publication history of both works.
Making and Remaking Samuel Beckett’s What Where
Authors: Asmus Walter
Published: May 2022

With the help of his diary entries from 1985, the author revisits his work with Samuel Beckett and the technical crew at the Süddeutscher Rundfunk in producing a televisual version of the theatre play What Where (1983). The chapter charts the practical and technological challenges the team had to overcome, detailing for example the various solutions found by the cameraman Jim Lewis. This work is then compared with the author’s directing of the play’s digital version in 2015 in Sydney. In both cases, the productions’ ‘[team]work in progress’ involved similarly unfamiliar, though different, technologies, revealing the inherently transmedial nature of the piece itself.
Media Use of Russian Speakers in Germany
Authors: Tikhomirova Olga
Published: May 2022

This chapter is based on a survey conducted by the Boris Nemtsov Foundation in August and September 2016. It examined patterns of media consumption of Russian-speakers in Germany in relation to their age, time of immigration and language proficiency. On the basis of the outcomes, the chapter suggests two different typologies of Russian speakers in Germany, according to their degree of integration and their political outlook. Against the backdrop of recent debates about these groups’ alleged affinity to rightist and populist political positions in Germany, preferences in Russian-language media consumption within these groups are correlated to their voting patterns in recent German elections. Although these voting patterns do not deviate significantly from those of the average German electorate, the German government on the one hand, and the German populists on the other, have started to woo the Russian-speakers. Both seem to view the Russian-speakers as a homogeneous group, largely ignoring the significant diversity in outlooks among German Russophones.
Deleuze in Children's Literature
Authors: Newland Jane
Published: May 2022

This study invites Deleuze into the genre of children’s literature and explores how Deleuzian concepts can enhance and invigorate our readings of this literature, whose implied readership masks much paradox. The study focuses on children’s texts by some of the authors who fascinate Deleuze, including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, André Dhôtel, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio and Michel Tournier. These authors recur across Deleuze’s work and shaped his literary writings. With chapters on pure repetition, becoming, cartographies, stuttering and nonsense, this study demonstrates how these concepts, central to Deleuzian philosophy, can invigorate readings of children’s literature. Bringing together Deleuzian thought and contemporary scholarship in children’s literature, this study provides a novel and timely insight into readings of children’s literature in the twenty-first century.
Introduction: Situating the Politics of Muslim Identities
Authors: Lumina Iulia
Published: May 2022

The study of Islam and Muslim societies in Western scholarship often revolves around theoretical and analytical frameworks that either essentialise or reduce Islam and Muslim identities to false dichotomies. Addressing the diversity of Muslim conduct and Islamic practices, scholars have paid particular attention to what constitutes Islam as an analytical category and how to carry out studies of Muslim societies across the many disciplines within the social sciences. Before introducing the chapters and the intersecting themes that draw attention to larger – transnational, regional and global – processes that influence the politics of Muslim identities, this introduction outlines the key conceptual insights that have led to the historical and anti-essentialist study of Islam and Muslim societies in order to better situate identities in their social and political contexts.
‘Turning Sheep into Tigers’: State Securitisation of Islam, Societal Insecurity and Conflict in Xinjiang, China
Authors: Finley Joanne Smith
Published: May 2022

In Xinjiang, Northwest China, upwards of one million mostly Muslim Turkic and other minority peoples are extra-judicially detained in internment camps for political ‘re-education’, serving long-term prison sentences, or in situations of forced labour. This chapter analyses the contemporary human rights crisis and how the Chinese state came to this policy juncture. Turkic Uyghurs have been disproportionately targeted because of its special status as a peripheral, linguistically and culturally separate people, with a history of two independent states prior to the establishment of the PRC in 1949. While the Chinese government has routinely represented this group as a ‘terrorist’ and ‘extremist’ threat since the onset of the US-led ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWoT) in 2001, in reality it perceives the Uyghurs as a dissident, anti-colonial force which it seeks to suppress by means of state violence and, in the past four years, state terror. The state’s ultimate goal is to protect the territorial integrity of the Chinese nation, shore up CCP regime legitimacy, and stabilise and secure the northwestern frontier for the purpose of achieving the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the global infrastructure development strategy promoting a China-led Eurasian integration that sits at the centre of Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream’.
Leaving the Weapons without Losing the War: Understanding the Transformation of the FMLN
Authors: Álvarez Alberto Martín
Published: May 2022

The chapter analyses the causes that led to the Salvadorian civil war, with an emphasis on the formation and expansion of the revolutionary movement. Secondly, the main transformations experienced during the war by the major political actors are explained. The focus here is on the changes within US policy on the conflict, the position of the allies of the armed left, the structural transformations of the economy and the interests of the Salvadoran elite and the internal dynamics of the armed left. The chapter ends with some concluding remarks on the transformation from a coalition of guerrilla organisation to a political party.
Introduction: ‘I Am a Good Republican’
Authors: Caporali Riccardo
Published: May 2022

In the opening lines of the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione–one of Spinoza’s unfinished works, composed on the way towards the Ethics–Spinoza appears to outline the relationship between metaphysics, ethics, and politics on the basis of some very precise deductive logic. Having argued that human perfection amounts to the knowledge of the mind’s union with ‘the whole of Nature’, he then adds:...
Gender and Seriality
Authors: Sulimma Maria
Published: May 2022

The notion of seriality and serial identity performance runs as a strong undercurrent through feminist theory, gender studies and queer studies. Defining gender as a serial and discursively produced entanglement of different practices and agencies, Gender and Seriality argues that serial storytelling can offer such complex negotiations of identity that the ‘results’ of televisual gender performances are rarely separate from the processes that produce them. As such, gender performances are not restricted to individual television programmes themselves, but are also located in official paratexts, such as making-of documentaries, interviews with writers and actors, and in cultural sites like online viewer discussions, recaps and fan fiction. With case studies of series such as Girls, How to Get Away With Murder and The Walking Dead, this book seeks to understand how gender as a practice is generated by television narratives in the overlapping of text, reception and production, and explores the viewer practices that these narratives seek to trigger and draw on in the process
Circulating Bodies: Retelling the Trauma of the Algerian War Through Photography and Art
Authors: Hubbell Amy L.
Published: May 2022

The diaspora of former French citizens of Algeria, known collectively as the Pieds-Noirs, often seek to reattach themselves to each other and to their lost homeland by circulating images and texts from home. While the postcard-perfect images of Algeria that initially dominated community remembrance still circulate freely, since 2005, traumatic images from the Algerian War for Independence have multiplied. This chapter explores the effects of recirculating photographic images of dead, living and surviving bodies in art by Nicole Guiraud, who survived a famous bombing in the Algerian War. Response to the repeated images ranges from denial, shock and recognition. Relying on theoretical works on photography of traumatic events and the work of memory, the chapter examines how images of traumatised bodies are circulated and integrated into Guiraud’s art with the aim of understanding how individual suffering can be integrated into collective memory and whether repeating images intensifies or mitigates trauma for the artist and her spectators.
The Arabic Prose Poem
Authors: Fakhreddine Huda J.
Published: May 2022

When the modernist movement in Arabic poetry was launched in the 1940s, it threatened to blur the distinctions between poetry and everything else. The Arabic prose poem, qaṣīdat al-nathr, is probably the most subversive and extreme manifestation of this blurring. The term was first introduced in 1960, as a translation of the French phrase «poème en prose» and is the first example of non-metrical Arabic poetry. This book examines this “new genre” as a poetic practice and as a critical lens which gave rise to a profound, contentious and continuing debate about the definition of an Arabic poem, its limits, and its relation to its readers. It examines the history of the prose poem, its claims of autonomy and distance from its socio-political context, and the anxiety and scandal it generated. It takes as case-studies several understudied and unstudied poets, such as Salim Barakat (b. 1951), Unsi al-Hajj (1937-2014), and Muhammad al-Maghut (1934-2006), who are important in their own right and who exerted great influence on the poets who succeeded them. The book also sheds light on the works of more recent poets, such as the Egyptian poets of the nineties and younger poets whose careers launched in the twenty-first century and who have not hitherto been studied in English.
Introduction
Authors: Fakhreddine Huda J.
Published: May 2022

Because skill at playing the game is no longer enough now; the question that keeps coming up is: can this game be played at all now and what is the right game to play? (Wittgenstein)

The game of poetry is transgressive by nature. Poetry has little patience for rules and prescriptions. It is a game in which guidelines and limits are merely challenges that beg to be overcome in some fruitful, unexpected way. If meter and rhyme are the most easily recognisable skills, they are surely never enough. The great masters of the Arabic ...
Muhammad al-Maghut and Poetic Detachment
Authors: Fakhreddine Huda J.
Published: May 2022

This chapter examines al-Māghūt’s intervention as instrumental in paving the way for the subsequent prose poem, although he himself was not an invested prose poet. Without engaging directly in the polemics of form in Arabic poetry, the Maghutian text, particularly in its attitude towards language and subject matter, was instrumental in opening up the Arabic poetic register. And it is with this taunting of the established poetic aesthetic that al-Maghut contributes, even if unintentionally, to the prose poem as subversive and expansive interrogation of the limits of poetry in Arabic. His legacy translates in the works of younger poets, particularly the Egyptian poets of the nineties such as Imad Abu Salih (b. 1967), Iman Mirsal (b. 1966), and Usama al-Danasūri (1960-2007) and their poetics of detachment. Diverging from the theoretical motivations of their predecessors, these poets set out to write poetry against poetry as it had thus far existed in the Arabic tradition.
Mahmoud Darwish as Middleman
Authors: Fakhreddine Huda J.
Published: May 2022

In chapter 5, I study Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s (1948-2008) courting of and contribution to the prose poem. He never wrote a prose poem but was closely involved in the critical debates that surrounded it. I examine Darwish’s intentionally generically evasive writings which he chose to label ‘naṣṣ’ (text) or ‘yawmiyāt’ (diaries) as well as his poetic dialogue with Edward Said and fellow poet Salim Barakat in which he contemplates the meaning of poetry and the genre limits.
Spinoza, the Epicurean
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: May 2022

Through a radical new reading of the Theological Political Treatise, Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that the major source of Spinoza’s materialism is the Epicurean tradition that re-emerges in modernity when manuscripts by Epicurus and Lucretius are rediscovered. This reconsideration of Spinoza’s political project, set within a historical context, lays the ground for an alternative genealogy of materialism. Central to this new reading of Spinoza are the theory of practical judgment (understood as the calculation of utility) and its implications for a theory of democracy that is resolutely positioned against authority.
Vardoulakis provides a reading of the Theological Political Treatise from beginning to end. This will be useful both to students who first encounter Spinoza’s book for the first time and who are looking for assistance to understand particular passages, and to Spinoza scholars who will find an alternative way of interpreting a familiar text.