bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Understanding Twin Peaks: The Return as a ‘Film Reboot’ via Anti-Franchise Discourses Within Media Franchising
Authors: Hills Matt
Published: May 2021

This chapter argues for the status of t Twin Peaks: The Return as film reboot. Drawing upon Derek Johnson’s work on franchising, Hills explores the extent to which The Return is positioned via ‘anti-franchising’ discourses at the very same time that it is contradicted by a logic of franchising. Outlining David Lynch’s discursive ownership of the eighteen-part ‘movie’, Hills writes that The Return offers up a ‘twin challenge’: an imperative to interpret it as an auteurist anti-franchise but one that simultaneously invests in the brand reinvigoration of conventional franchising.
Reboot, Requel, Legacyquel: Jurassic World and the Nostalgia Franchise
Authors: Loock Kathleen
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the ‘nostalgia’ reboot, a serial form that restarts a franchise at the same time that it preserves and celebrates its past. It identifies films like The Force Awakens and Creed as new films in these nostalgia franchises, but specifically investigates the case of Jurassic World, a film that summons its (pre-historic) past and employs nostalgia as its method of renewal. Describing the nostalgia reboot as evidence of a type of Hollywood remake practice that invests in sequelisation strategies that preserve long-term continuity, the chapter outlines nostalgia-driven pleasures and multi-generational appeal of those reboots that maintain continuity and facilitate immersion in an ongoing, already familiar story world.
Illuminated Manuscripts in Late Thirteenth-century Konya
Authors: Jackson Cailah
Published: May 2021

This chapter initially focuses on two manuscripts – a small Qur’an and a monumental Masnavi of Jalal al-Din Rumi. Both were produced in 1278, soon after Rum was formally incorporated into the Ilkhanid empire. After discussing their visual properties in depth, the author uses the manuscripts’ production information to analyse the nature of production and patronage in late medieval Konya. This chapter introduces many key themes that are developed throughout the rest of the book, including the role of the Mevlevis in artistic production, the itinerancy of artists, and cosmopolitan nature of Rum’s towns. Based on the examination of these manuscripts, the chapter contends that several currently unidentified or misidentified manuscripts were also produced in Konya. Through an illuminated copy of Ibn Bibi’s Seljuk chronicle produced around 1282, the chapter also considers the part that Ilkhanid officials played in manuscript patronage in Rum.
Two Manuscripts from South‑western Rūm
Authors: Jackson Cailah
Published: May 2021

Chapter Three discusses two modest manuscripts that were produced for Hamidid beys in the mid-fourteenth century. These manuscripts, both copies of Najm al-Din Razi Daya’s Mirsad al-ʿIbad min al-Mabdaʾ ila al-Maʿad, were produced in İstanos (now known as Korkuteli) in 1349 and 1351. This chapter, which shifts focus from Konya to western, coastal Rum, explores the ‘mirrors for princes’ (nasihatnama) genre in more depth, the cultural and economic characteristics of the immediate area and the possible impact of bubonic plague on artistic production.
‘So complete a change’ (in So Short a Time) – Scottish Romanticism, Modernity and Collective Memory
Authors: McNeil Kenneth
Published: May 2021

This chapter provides an overview of the themes of the book. Largely in response to their own national predicament in post-Union imperial Britain, Scottish writers of the Romantic period brought to the British Atlantic a historiography of collective or cultural memory, which imagined an unprecedented fissure within the flow of time that had rent the present from the past. This sense of an immense gulf between past and present – measured in only one or two generations and imagined to be within reach of, or just beyond, living memory – was attended by deep national anxieties but also by a renewed optimism, of social and cultural reinvention. As it circulated along the routes of the British empire, Scottish history writing of the period made a fundamental contribution to the culture of modernity in the Atlantic world.
John Galt and Circum-Atlantic Memory
Authors: McNeil Kenneth
Published: May 2021

The last chapter is devoted to the transatlantic Scottish writer John Galt. An important contributor to Blackwood’s and a key figure in the early settlement of what is now Ontario, Galt’s writing underscores the complex and often conflicted elements of Scottish post-Enlightenment thinking on the relation between the past and present – and the future – in the modern world. On the one hand, much of Galt’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, partakes of an empirically based ‘statistical account’ mode of regional and national enquiry, adopting the assumptions and speculative stance of a Scottish political economy. On the other hand, Annals of the Parish and his Canadian emigrant novels Lawrie Todd and Bogle Corbet inscribe a complex, and ultimately profoundly unsettling, cultural memory of the circum-Atlantic world. In the ‘annalist’ fiction that recounts the proximate past of the parish of Dalmailing, the ‘theoretical biographies’ of Todd and Corbet, and in other writing, Galt charts the development of a melancholy world-view inspired by a circum-Atlantic memory of constant upheaval and psychic trauma.
Tory Revival in Scotland? Recent Evidence, Future Prospects
Authors: Diffley Mark
Published: May 2021

This statistical chapter by the respected pollster Mark Diffley analyses the Scottish Conservative Party’s electoral performance since 2010 and establishes whether the independence referendum (or rather its aftermath) had as profound an impact on the party’s fortunes as many observers believe. The chapter also traces shifting patterns of support among the electorate: what sort of voter had come to support Ruth Davidson’s Conservatives in 2016/17 who had not in 2010/11? Did the party manage to make inroads into working-class areas which voted ‘Unionist’ in the 1940s and ‘50s but thereafter supported other parties? Furthermore, is there an electoral ‘ceiling’ on the party’s revival?
“We Can Change the Whole Narrative”: Crafting Play and Nostalgia in Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep and Mood Indigo
Authors: van de Velde Danica
Published: May 2021

This chapter by Danica van de Welde focuses on a “craft aesthetic” of Gondry’s surrealist visual aesthetic. This craft aesthetic features handmade objects as a tool to construct a space of magical realism that complicates boundaries between dreams, nostalgia, fantasy, and real life in The Science of Sleep and Mood Indigo. The Science of Sleep is about the romance between dreamer Stéphane and his neighbor Stéphanie, while Mood Indigo, a surreal romantic tragedy in which a man tries to save his beloved from dying of a flower growing in her lung, is Gondry’s cinematic adaptation of French author Boris Vian’s novel L’Écume des jours (1947). This chapter considers how although craft is often treated as lowly within fine arts frameworks, in these two films, craft and handmade objects take on new value as vehicles of nostalgia and romance.
L’Amour fou Revisited: The Surrealist Poetics of Michel Gondry
Authors: Mitchell Sian
Published: May 2021

Sian Mitchell’s chapter traces the legacy of Frenchpoetic realist director Jean Vigo (1905–34) in Gondry’s work. Drawing on the surrealist theories of André Breton, this chapter argues that early surrealism has influenced not only Gondry’s visual style, but also his thematic interests. This chapter notes how Gondry aesthetically explores the surrealist concept of l’amour fou (mad love), which appears in the way he depicts the intimate relationships of his protagonists as transforming the ontological and temporal qualities of their environments. This chapter examines Gondry’s films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Mood Indigo for traces of this influence and draws connections to Vigo’s iconic L’Atalante (1934), positioning these works in the lineage of cinematic depictions of mad love. This chapter argues that in both Gondry’s and Vigo’s films, l’amour fou is embodied through a love that also challenges normative conceptions of space and time.
Apocalypse Ever After: Lifted Veils and Transcendent Time in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Authors: Sheikh Sheheryar B.
Published: May 2021

In this chapter Sheheryah B. Sheikh examines the narrative organization of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2014)’s love story through the lenses of apocalyptic literary theory and eschatology. Drawing from the writing of Frank Kermode, the chapter argues that the film’s primary narrative problem, the disappearance of Clementine from Joel’s memories, constitutes an eschatological occurrence on a personal scale. However, the film is “apocalyptic” in another sense: while Joel is trying to prevent this cataclysmic event, he revisits his memories and uncovers greater meaning in them, simultaneously revealing these details to the audience, and thus the film “lifts veils from” Joel’s memories, which is the etymological meaning of the apocalypse. Sheikh argues that, through the film, Gondry advocates strongly for the need to revisit and re-assess memory, rather than rejecting memories, even if they are painful.
“It Would Not Be Just visual, It Could Have Words and a Story”: Performance and Narrative in the Music Video Oeuvre of Michel Gondry
Authors: Klug Daniel
Published: May 2021

In this chapter, Daniel Klug emphasizes how film and music video director Michel Gondry’s influential and highly acclaimed work in music video crosses boundaries even within the sub-forms of the music video. First, the chapter discusses the general characteristics of music video audio-vision and its relation to film. Secondly, the chapter examines how Gondry’s performance-based videos incorporate heterogeneous narrative elements and examples of audio-visual surplus, such as morphing and multiplication. The chapter identifies stylistic trends in Gondry’s music video work, mentioning several of Gondry’s most well-known videos, including those for Daft Punk’s song “All Around the World” as well as for Kylie Minogue, The Chemical Brothers and The White Stripes. Third, in contrast to performance, it looks at Gondry’s narrative music videos offering an extended analysis of Gondry’s narrative music video for the Foo Fighters’ track “Everlong” (1997). In this analysis, the chapter examines the complex visual storytelling concerning lyrics and musical structures in the music video.
‘More making the best of it’: Living with Liberalism in Mary Ward’s Marcella
Authors: Robertson Lisa C.
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines Mary Ward’s novel Marcella (1894). It explores the ways that Ward’s representation of the titular protagonist Marcella Boyce’s experience of domestic space offers its readers an exercise in liberal cognition. It focuses specifically on the novel’s portrait of the Herbrand Street Peabody Buildings in Bloomsbury, fictionalised as the Brown’s Buildings, and the ways this space is used to facilitate the protagonist’s intellectual development.
‘Vital friendship’: Sexual and Economic Ambivalence in Rhoda Broughton’s Dear Faustina
Authors: Robertson Lisa C.
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines Rhoda Broughton’s novel Dear Faustina (1879), which engages with the conventions of the New Woman novel for the purpose of commenting on the difficult social position of independent women. The novel’s representation of two key forms of new housing, women’ residences (or ladies’ chambers) and settlement housing, uncovers the way that these new domestic spaces made legible the relationship between economic and sexual power. While this novel has often been interpreted as a narrative of inversion or exchange between homosocial and heterosexual relationships, this chapter focuses on the ways that the novel is instead characterised by ambivalence in both form and theme.
‘To make a garden of the town’: The Nineteenth-Century Legacy of the Hampstead Garden Suburb
Authors: Robertson Lisa C.
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the architectural and social origins of the Hampstead Garden Suburb. Initiated by Henrietta Barnett, Hampstead Garden Suburb was radical departure from nineteenth-century town planning in its emphasis on a variety of housing types, integrated green spaces, and various community and social services. Yet its design was not only a clear response to the social problems presented by the nineteenth-century city, but also a synthesis of several models of new domestic architecture that existed in the city itself including model dwellings, women’s residences, and settlement housing. This chapter engages with both visual and literary representations of the Hampstead Garden Suburb to establish its nineteenth-century legacy.
The Errantry of Friendship in Don Quixote
Authors: Gilbert-Santamaría Donald
Published: May 2021

In an essential rejection of the Aristotelian model for perfect friendship, the intensely detailed account of the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza inaugurates a radically new approach to writing narrative friendship. Freed from the determinism of the traditional tale of two friends, the introduction of Sancho Panza into the narrative drives a new poetics of friendship in which hyperbolic genuflecting before the Aristotelian ideal gives way to an interest in verisimilitude now understood as the act of representing the world beyond the text. More specifically, Cervantes’s novel proposes a vision of narrative friendship that is radically anti-exemplary, serving not as the model for some universal ideal, but rather as an expression of the idiosyncratic inimitability—both practical and theoretical—of human relationships in the world.
Female Vampires
Authors: Guarneri Michael
Published: May 2021

The chapter zooms in on the cultural instrumentality of the vampire metaphor in Italy by studying Italian-made vampire movies as struggles for gender definition and domination that reflect the zeitgeist of post-war Italy, when a perceived decline in masculine authority due to the vicissitudes of World War Two, the hardships of reconstruction and the post-1958 neocapitalist consumerism went hand in hand with women’s ever-increasing challenges to traditional gender roles. The chapter argues that the female vampires of Italian horror are not simplistically villainous, power-hungry sexual predators that misogynistic-reactionary narratives put to death as a punishment for attempting to subvert the patriarchal status quo. They also are empathy-inducing characters caught between rebellion and hyper-identification with traditional values: victims returning from the grave to seek revenge against their male oppressors, and tragic lovers dreaming of a monogamous heterosexual relationship that looks strangely similar to marriage.
Music, Meaning and Materiality: Nancy’s Corps Sonore
Authors: Hickmott Sarah
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the role of music in Nancy’s broader sensuous philosophy, focusing largely on À l’écoute as well as his (rarely considered) writings on rock and techno, highlighting the divergent ways in which different genres are approached – Western high art music is often assumed to tell us something about music’s (timeless, universal) essence, whilst popular genres such as rock and techno are more expressly linked to particular social and historical contexts. In À l’écoute, Nancy utilises music to explore the sensuous (and non-visual) domain that philosophy has traditionally ignored or paid scant attention to in order to consider other ways in which we might ‘know’, find or make meaning in the world, and in so doing aims to destabilise binary oppositions that emerge in vision-oriented (phallogocentric) thought. The concluding analysis, however, contends that Nancy’s analysis still depends on a set of hierarchized binary oppositions, with vision and language linked to paternal law and the symbolic, and music and sound linked to the body and emotions, and an earlier pre-symbolic space (that is then mapped onto the maternal-feminine).
Between Fronts
Authors: Raeburn Fraser
Published: May 2021

For foreign fighters, connections with the ‘home front’ could pose particular problems. Not only was separation from loved ones and home a source of anxiety, communication and movement between Scotland and Spain made particularly difficult by the circumstances of civil war. Managing these connections proved to be an unexpectedly complex and challenging for the communist leaders of the British contingent in Spain, who were forced to balance their domestic political position at home with the necessity of contributing effectively to the Republican war effort in Spain. In particular, casualties suffered in battle raised the crucial question of how the families of dead and wounded volunteers were to be supported. Not only did this lead to a distinctive fundraising campaign in Britain, it is argued that the contours of this highly-politicised campaign can shed light on the different ways in which pro-Republican activism was shaped across Scotland and Britain.
‘no human shape’: Unformed Life in The Unnamable
Authors: Heffer Byron
Published: May 2021

This chapter argues that Beckett’s antipathy to normative ideas of bodily and aesthetic form derives from his resistance to the Nazi politics of art. It utilises theories from disability studies and the work of Michel Foucault and Roberto Esposito to reconsider Beckett’s post-war aesthetic of deformation, framing it as a response to the inextricable connection between biopolitics and aesthetic form in the Third Reich. It offers a reading of The Unnamable that deviates from critical accounts that cast Beckett’s text as a redemptive moral critique of Nazi biopolitics. Beckett denies the reassuring conflation of degenerate artistry with passive, nonviolent exposure to Nazi violence. The degenerate artist, as figured in The Unnamable, is both victim and perpetrator in a closed circuit of biopolitical violence and aesthetic (de)formation.
‘As if the sex matters’: Beckett, Barthes and Endgame in Love
Authors: Brophy James
Published: May 2021

This chapter reads Beckett's Endgame alongside another prominent work of the mid-century French literary context, Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. It proposes that queer readings of Beckett's play have emphasized queer sexual relations and sexual acts at the cost of attending to the experience of love as itself a potentially queered condition. Emphasizing the relationship of Clov and Hamm as an ongoing dialogue in the sense of that undertaken by Barthes's figure of the plagued Romantic lover, or l'amoureux, this reading finds in Barthes's work precisely the critical vocabulary to make the queer experience and relations of Beckett's play visible.
Beauty in Stoic Theological Arguments
Authors: Čelkytė Aistė
Published: May 2021

This chapter is dedicated to analysing theological arguments in which aesthetic vocabulary plays a role. In these arguments, the beauty of the world is used to make an inference about its rational generation (an argument from design). To be precise, the arguments state that the presence of beauty in the world indicates that the world must have been generated by a rational principle and not by the random motion of atoms (as argued by the Epicureans). The chapter examines how beauty is used to form an inference here and investigates what theoretical implications this usage underpins. The findings here show some coherence with the findings in the previous chapters, especially in regard to the notion of good order or, to be more precise, well-functioning order. Thus, a systematic Stoic aesthetic theory begins to emerge.
Schrader and Style
Authors: Bachman Erik M.
Published: May 2021

This essay relates both Schrader’s criticism and films to the analytic philosophical account of style developed by Nelson Goodman in order to show how Schrader’s style invokes form, content, ideology, and expression all at once. More importantly, however, the function of style in his work means that his films must be considered in terms of his filmography. In particular, any assessment of that body of work must grapple with the contradictory relationships between and among the films of which it is comprised. Ultimately, Schrader
is the preeminent American filmmaker of a peculiar dialectical style, one that is simultaneously culturally specific, personally autographic, and universally humanist, though it bursts the frame of any of his films: no one Schrader film exemplifies his
dialectical style, because this style can only be seen by relating each film to his others. Accordingly, a Paul Schrader film is style-less, yet Paul Schrader films are not. This essay ends with some speculative remarks as to what this implies about the status of the work of art in the case of Schrader’s cinematic and critical output.
Movement and Meaning: The “Unmotivated” Camera in Four Films by Paul Schrader
Authors: Allison Deborah
Published: May 2021

Centres on Paul Schrader’s use of camera movement (or absence of movement) as a means of articulating themes within his films and, furthermore, as a tool with which he expresses himself prominently as an author. His ethos that “style determines the theme in every film,” that “unity of form and subject matter” is paramount and that for a film to succeed artistically its unique style must deliver “the right solution to the right problem” runs through them all. Shows how in many films he makes regular use of “unmotivated” camera movement, which he describes as “when the storyteller imposes himself on the story, when the camera calls attention to itself.” It encourages us to participate actively in the process of viewing and the construction of meanings. The chapter presents case studies of four films from different stages of his career – all of which have very different styles and camera techniques to illustrate these points. Each case study will feature close textual analysis of between two and four scenes: American Gigolo (1980), The Comfort of Strangers, Auto Focus (2002), and First Reformed.
Prophets and Zealots: Paul Schrader’s Adaptations of The Mosquito Coast and The Last Temptation of Christ
Authors: Moulton Erica
Published: May 2021

Focuses on Paul Schrader's process of adapting two novels—Paul Theroux's The Mosquito Coast and Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ. Draws on the Harry Ransom Center's collection of Paul Schrader's papers, Schrader's annotated copies of The Last Temptation of Christ and The Mosquito Coast, the outlines that he created for both films, and the multiple script drafts. Argues there is an inherent dilemma with The Mosquito Coast because the voiceover structure distances the viewer from the protagonist, Allie Fox, instead telling the story through the eyes of his son, Charlie. However, in Last Temptation (1978), Jesus undergoes trials that challenge his followers while remaining the audience's touchstone. The shifting use of voiceover as a technical tool in screenwriting therefore serves as a gauge for demonstrating how Schrader envelops viewers in his characters' worldviews. The last section of the chapter reflects on how Schrader's presentation of such themes is informed by his own critical concept of transcendental film style.
“So I Found Another Form of Expression”: Art and Life/Art in Life in Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Authors: Prasch Thomas
Published: May 2021

Paul Schrader says Mishima, like Taxi Driver’s hero, “is an example of a certain pathology of suicidal glory that transcends education and culture.” But for Schrader his task is “exploration” of such pathology, while critics tend to take it as endorsement. This chapter shows that Schrader’s tactics in Mishima in fact invite misreading, through their aesthetic distance. Although the present tense of the film is carried out in what might be called a near-documentary neutral naturalism, most of the film works in other ways: the biographical flashbacks in more expressionistic black and white; the three segments of adapted novels both in lush color, and presented as deliberately, anti-naturalistic staged, in a kabuki-inflected style. The result of such aestheticizing tactics, in combination with the direction of Mishima’s own life—toward the “final action” as new “form of expression,” toward life as art—in its very Wildean tenor, strikes an “art for art’s sake” tone, suspending moral judgment. This aestheticism tends to bury the real (as opposed to Mishima’s intoned voiceover) final outcome: that this is a failed coup and a deluded act.
Policy, Ideology and Discourse
Authors: McLeod Wilson
Published: May 2021

This chapter addresses a number of overarching issues and themes that have affected the position of Gaelic throughout the modern period. It begins with a discussion of the aims and assumptions of state language policy in Scotland and the wider United Kingdom, and then outlines the principal stages in the development of Gaelic policy. It goes on to consider the relationship between Gaelic and national and group identities in Scotland, considering the varying ways in which it has been framed and interpreted as a national, regional or ethnic minority language. It considers competing ideological interpretations of the value of Gaelic; since the 18th century, Gaelic has been simultaneously valorised and denigrated. It addresses the role of the Scots language in Scotland, which has formed an important backdrop to Gaelic policy even if organising and provision for Scots has been limited. Finally, the chapter gives an overview of he characteristics of Gaelic organisations; generally they have been moderate rather than militant in approach, concerned about limited support in the Gaelic community and the potential for backlash from the Anglophone majority.
Conclusion
Authors: McLeod Wilson
Published: May 2021

IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY the position of Gaelic in Scotland has become increasingly paradoxical. In terms of day-to-day community use, Gaelic is the weakest it has ever been, while the public status of the language and the level of institutional provision increase every year. This situation may well be unsustainable....
Introduction
Authors: Lash Dominic
Published: May 2021

The book's subjects – confusion and disorientation – are introduced via discussion of films including John Boorman's Deliverance (1972) and Carl Th. Dreyer's Vampyr (1932). The approach that the book takes is briefly distinguished from other investigations of disorientation in Film Studies including the cognitivist "puzzle film" approach, certain forms of phenomenology, and Eugenie Brinkema's neo-formalism.
Prospectus
Authors: Lash Dominic
Published: May 2021

This prospectus sets out the project and plan of The Cinema of Disorientation under three headings. First, its topic – "inviting confusions" – is explained. Drawing on eighteenth-century aesthetics (Baumgarten, Kant), two senses of "confusion" which are important for the argument of the book as a whole are distinguished: the familiar affective sense ("I'm confused!") and a sense that is closer to "fusion" or "interpenetration" rather than it is to "muddle". Next, the body of work that the book concentrates on – the group of films that can be regarded as comprising the "cinema of disorientation" – is introduced. Finally, the importance of the concept of figuration in this book is introduced, and illustrated with examples from John Ford's The Searchers (1956). The prospectus closes with an outline of the structure of the book as a whole.
Genres within Genres within Genres: Nested Narrative and Metalepsis
Authors: Lash Dominic
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the relationship between genre and orientation by means of studies of two films with heavily nested narratives that are distinguished by genre: Cloud Atlas (Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, 2012) and The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson, 2015). The more distinct narrative levels a film contains, the more opportunities for metalepsis, and hence for the generation of disorientating effects. But these two films indicate the range of possible ways that complexity and disorientation may relate to one another. Structural diagrams of the two films demonstrate that simplicity of structure by no means necessarily results in ease of orientation for viewers.
‘Disappeared where it’s real hard to disappear’: Three Ways of Getting Lost in INLAND EMPIRE
Authors: Lash Dominic
Published: May 2021

This chapter articulates and defends an account of cinematic figuration. A definition of figuration as "signification that is significantly aligned with articulation" is constructed, defended, and distinguished from some other accounts, such as that of Kamilla Elliott. Like chapter one, this chapter also draws on traditions of French thought. The work on film of philosopher Jacques Rancière (specifically on Nicholas Ray's 1948 film They Live by Night) and of film scholar Nicole Brenez is used to show that figuration, understood in the manner proposed, can be of great help in grasping that disorientation is not simply a negative experience but is, instead, a field of possibilities with its own characteristics which can be distinguished and discussed.
Figuring (Out) Films: Figuration in Narrative Cinema
Authors: Lash Dominic
Published: May 2021

This chapter consists of a close reading of Leos Carax's 2012 film Holy Motors. The consistency of the film's diegesis – or the lack thereof – is explored in order to defend the proposition that it is less useful to describe a film as either being coherent (or not) than to see coherence as something that a film can achieve (or fail to do so). Coherence is distinguished from cohesion and consistency, and it is argued that – contrary to what is often assumed – narrative or diegetic inconsistency need not result in the emotional alienation of the viewer. The chapter concludes that Holy Motors represents, among other things, a serious investigation of grief, and that (despite its many contradictions, inconsistencies and moments of apparent incoherence) one of its most significant achievements is that it does not thereby fundamentally disorientate the viewer.
Distinguishing the Indistinguishable: Figures of Imperceptibility and Impossibility in Lost Highway and Caché
Authors: Lash Dominic
Published: May 2021

This chapter develops the account of figuration constructed in the previous chapter by means of an exploration of a particular figurative operation which it dubs "figurality by indiscernibility". Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (1957), Michael Haneke's Caché (2005), and David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997) all contain images that are visually indistinguishable but which we come to understand to be in some sense distinct. The work of the art historian James Elkins on different kinds of "impossible" image is drawn upon in order to demonstrate the richly disorientating potential of this particular mode of figuration.
Sink or Swim: Immersing Ourselves in Jean-Luc Godard’s Adieu au langage
Authors: Lash Dominic
Published: May 2021

This chapter consists of a close reading of Jean-Luc Godard's 2014 3D film Adieu au langage. It explores the different immersive qualities of the film (including those generated by its 3D technology) and their relation to the questions of orientation and disorientation that this book has been investigating. It is argued that the film's bewildering surface can mislead us into thinking it is less concerned with narrative than is in fact the case, and that – considering that in some parts of Switzerland "adieu" can mean "hello" as well as goodbye – Adieu au langage need not only be read as a dismissal of language and narrative but also as Godard's way of welcoming them, albeit in a qualified and deliberately confusing manner.
Mingled Yarns and Hybrid Worlds: ‘We Taste Nothing Purely’, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well
Authors: Platt Peter G.
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on both authors’ exploration of the blended and hybrid nature of the world and compares “We Taste Nothing Purely” (2.20) with Shakespeare’s notoriously mixed, “impure” plays, Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. Exploring playworlds that are “mingled yarns” of “good and ill together,” these plays blend comedy and tragedy as well. They seem intimately connected to Montaigne’s “We Taste Nothing Purely” (2.20), both intellectually and formally. Indeed, they seem to be dramatic explorations of the opening sentence of Montaigne’s essay: “The weakness of our condition causeth that things in their natural simplicity and purity cannot fall into our use. The elements we enjoy are altered, metals likewise, yea gold must be empared with some other stuff to make it fit for our service.”
Introduction
Authors: McInally Tom
Published: May 2021

The introduction provides a background to the calls that have been made by scholars over the last half-century for a detailed biography of Strachan. The greatly increased interest in the history of the interaction of the West with eastern societies has caused a number of researchers to regret the lack of information on a scholar that many have come to realise was an important early contributor to European understanding of Islamic culture and eastern languages.
The difficulties caused by the paucity of Strachan’s own description of his life and works are explained and the wide range of archives requiring to be consulted is covered – Papal, Carmelite, Jesuit, English East India Company records as well as accounts of other travellers in the East. Particular attention is given to Strachan’s album amicorum (book of friends) and collection of manuscripts in Arabic and Farsi
The Humanist Scholar
Authors: McInally Tom
Published: May 2021

Using the entries in the album amicorum and references to Strachan’s published works, this chapter illustrates the recognition he received as a humanist scholar of note while pursuing a career at the University of Paris. His persistence in seeking patronage gained him financial and academic support from Cardinal Maffeo Barberini (later Pope UrbanVIII) who was papal nuncio in Paris. Strachan acted as informer on British matters to Barberini after the cardinal’s return to Rome. Their relationship soured and financial support was withdrawn.
Strachan could not remedy the change in material circumstances that this caused. His attempts to gain patronage from James VI and I in England (in which he was aided by his friend Thomas Dempster of Muiresk) and Henri IV of France failed and, at the age of forty, and almost on impulse after a conversation with the eastern traveller, William Lithgow of Lanark, he decided to travel to the Holy Land to learn eastern languages.
The Efficacy of ACH in Mitigating Serial Position Effects and Confirmation Bias in an Intelligence Analysis Scenario1
Authors: Whitesmith Martha
Published: May 2021

Chapter three provides details of an experimental study conducted in 2016 to provide an evaluation of the efficacy of ACH in mitigating the cognitive biases of serial position effects and confirmation bias using the scoring systems of credibility of information and diagnostic value of information. The study is based on a disguised version of the intelligence case for both the biological and nuclear weapons capabilities of Saddam Hussein’s regime that was used to support the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003. The study shows that the version of ACH taught by the PHIA to the UK’s intelligence community between 2016-2017 has no statistically significant mitigating effect on the occurrence of serial position effects or confirmation bias.
Reducing the Risk of Cognitive Bias in Intelligence Analysis
Authors: Whitesmith Martha
Published: May 2021

Recommendations for future research and best practice for intelligence analysis.
Ageing in Traditional Neighbourhoods: Conformity and Transgression
Authors: Aghacy Samira
Published: May 2021

This chapter reads ageing within traditional families and local communities. It examines novels by Fuad al-Takarli, Alia Mamdouh and Inaam Kachachi. These works present the ageing process as shaped by paternalistic and hierarchical structures where family support is high. The emphasis is on social and religious values, where the male patriarch retains his social and economic position and his power as head of the household. The women are sedentary creatures who place no priority on sex or physical appearance and remain generally passive and marginal. The body is disregarded in favor of the cultivation of the spirit where personal needs are virtually nonexistent. For these women, agency is achieved in nurturing and service to the family and community. While the degree of freedom the women possess varies, they attain agency within the narrow precincts of family and environment.
Senile Masculinity: The Male Body in Crisis
Authors: Aghacy Samira
Published: May 2021

The novels in this chapter concentrate on works by al-Habib al-Salimi, Hassan Daoud and Rashid al-Daif that represent a diverse group of men who subvert stereotypes of manhood and view older men within a gendered perspective. It exposes images of men who are no longer certain of their autonomy and sexual performance. Unlike traditional female characters who generally avoid allusions to sexuality, men’s works are fraught with libido and complaints about sexual potency, cognitive decline, and physical impairment. In a world of shifting values, they come to the realization that they are gradually becoming more feminized, and more vulnerable to the youthful gaze of younger men and women.
Conclusion
Authors: Aghacy Samira
Published: May 2021

Owing to the silence regarding ageing in the region, the study paves the way for further research on the subject especially that it involves a rapidly growing number of people. The book has included an array of novels that represent ageing in the process of transformation and change, fluctuating between active and passive, urban and rural, modern and traditional. Changing historical, demographic, and socio-economic factors are producing varied constructions of agedness that challenge a single paradigm.Given the wars and the wide-ranging political and social problems in the region, one expects the ageing process in the Arab world to take different directions from in the West as local and regional challenges necessitate different strategies and different forms of survival.
Bare Life, or Becoming-Animal
Authors: Fraunhofer Hedwig
Published: May 2021

Arguably moving beyond the anthropocentric “dramatic” tradition in both form and content, Brecht’s early theatrical work explores the setting beyond its function as décor. Instead, as Brecht writes, the “environment acquires the quality of a process”, becoming an integrated, constantly changing mesh of agentive biological and more-than-biological bodies. Brecht’s first full-length play, Baal, enacts the human title character’s transgressive unity with this environment. The dynamic formal structure of the play intra-acts with the play’s enactment of a live natural ecology or bare life from which the title character comes and to which he returns. In contrast to Brecht’s later, more didactically oriented work, the play’s structure is a non-linear productive assemblage rather than a receptacle of “content.” Providing an alternative to the trajectory towards twentieth century immunitarian fascism, Brecht’s early theatrical work puts in play the ontological status of the human, in a paradigmatic shift beyond the mere representation of the characters’ ontological anxiety in Strindberg, and in a theatrical vision pre-figuring absurd theatre and contemporary eco-drama.
Flies vs. the Fetishisation of Consciousness
Authors: Fraunhofer Hedwig
Published: May 2021

The conceptualization of human consciousness in Sartre’s early work continues the anthropocentric subjectivism of the Cartesian tradition. In Sartre, in order to become truly human, the human must break from his origin in the natural-material world. The fetishization of consciousness in Sartre’s existentialism is an attempt at redemption, an attempt in other words to imagine the human as the master of his metaphysical destiny and of the material conditions and agents that surround, drive and form him. Sartre’s dualistic world view blocks the impersonal, more-than-human energy that traverses the human self, the “contagion” brought on, for instance, by the title characters of Sartre’s most famous play, The Flies. This phobic blockage --- together with a restrictive definition or biopolitical caesura of what or who qualifies as truly human – is reminiscent of fascism, pointing to the dialectical implication of even antifascist critiques in fascist psychic structures.
Instructive Speech Among Bosnian Muslim Women: Sermons, Lessons or Guidance?
Authors: Raudvere Catharina
Published: May 2021

The chapter analyzes teaching traditions among Muslim women in Bosnia and how Islamic knowledge is transmitted, embedded in practices such as prayers, Quran recitation, singing and teaching. A case is provided of some Sarajevo women’s recitation gathering (mukabela) at the end of Ramadan which included instructive speech of some length. A young preacher (vaiza) made use of the common genre elements for a Muslim sermon and moved with confidence between comments on the Quran, paraphrases of narratives from the hadith and moral stories set in the present. The vaiza’s legitimacy to speak in the mosque was based on her formal education, reputation of personal piety and knowledge of local prayer and song traditions. Hence the audience accepted the preacher’s authority to give ethical guidance and included her interpretations of contemporary Muslim life with their conceptions of national heritage.
Friday Sermons in a Secular State: Religious Institutionbuilding in Modern Turkey
Authors: Ozdalga Elisabeth
Published: May 2021

By virtue of its secularism (laicism), Turkey holds a unique place in the Muslim world concerning centralization and state control of religious life. Less secular-oriented Egypt and Jordan, have increasingly entered a similar path, and in that context Turkey offers a telling example of the dynamics involved in such processes. The chapter’s focus is on Diyanet, the institution charged with the implementation of religious streamlining, but it also addresses questions related to official Friday sermonizing, where central control has created its own dilemmas. What happens when very different mosque audiences are addressed with the same hutbe (Friday sermon)? What about the unifying impact on the national community of discourses produced by an increasingly powerful and distant religious agency? Such issues are discussed in the light of the tensions encountered, when religion and official homiletics are subordinated to the aims of a secularism-oriented Muslim nation-state.
Imposing Identity: Death Markers to ‘English’ People in Barbados, 1627–1838
Authors: Evans Nicholas J.
Published: May 2021

The headstones and epitaphs marking the death of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish settlers on the Caribbean island of Barbados provide one of the earliest and most complete examples of British death culture overseas. Whilst the island was dominated by plantation slavery during the period in question, the surviving memorials from this period reveal little trace of the chattel slavery that made the island of great geopolitical importance to the British Empire. Instead the memorials examined here demonstrate a deep attachment to the ‘English’ identities of those who died in diaspora. The chapter compares such death culture with that of Jewish settlement on the island, a stream of evidence that demonstrates the island was a sanctuary for Jewish men, women and children from numerous countries during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Scottish Gravestones in Ceylon in Comparative Perspective
Authors: McCarthy Angela
Published: May 2021

In the nineteenth century, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was acclaimed as a ‘Scotch’ colony due especially to Scottish influence in the coffee and tea enterprises. Yet if Scottish ethnicity was hailed for economic prowess on the island, signs of origin were far less likely to feature on migrant headstones. Instead, noting occupation and cause of death were more prevalent ways of commemorating the deceased. What though, explains the general absence of Scottish ethnicity on Ceylon death markers and do they resemble the general disinterest in remembering the ethnic origins of the dead of various other national groups in Ceylon? How did such headstones compare with their compatriots in Australasia? This chapter draws on research emanating from several cemeteries in Ceylon to explore reasons for the presence and absence of ethnicity on the gravestones.
Documents in Stone: Records of Lives and Deaths of Scots Abroad and in Scotland
Authors: MacKenzie John M.
Published: May 2021

It is a striking fact that imperial peoples seem to have a powerful desire to commemorate the dead as grandly as possible. This was certainly true of the British Empire as some grandly overblown cemeteries in India and South-East Asia amply testify. This chapter discusses why this might be true – examining the influence of exoticism, a sense of heroic lives (often cut short since the exotic is also dangerous), a search for immortality, in some cases a desire for racial distancing, plus the fact that materials and labour were perhaps cheaper than at home. Some memorials, notably in cathedrals and churches, were however produced by some of the most notable sculptors of the day and were exported at considerable cost. As far as Scottish graves are concerned, it is an extraordinary fact that many families seem to have had a desire to commemorate the deaths of relatives overseas, even although their bodies were buried in distant places. Thus, a scattered family might be brought together on a single stone. This chapter is illustrated with examples of both these phenomena and discusses why diasporic imperial deaths were noticed so prominently.
Assembling La nueva novela: Juan Luis Martínez and a Material Poetics of Relation
Authors: Kosick Rebecca
Published: May 2021

Chapter 3 examines the material poetics of relation that contribute to the Juan Luis Martínez-assembled 1970s artist’s book La nueva novela. It is constructed from such diverse parts as: visual maths problems in which, for example, a painting of Rimbaud and a military jacket minus a shoe, a boot and a sock equals suspenders, a spat and a sock; metal fishhooks taped to a page; riddles and circular problems of logic; other people’s poems; musical scores; drawings, for example, of a pipe split in half (titled ‘Meditations on René Magritte’ and dedicated to Foucault); among many other things. This chapter turns to Édouard Glissant’s ‘poetics of relation’ and Manuel DeLanda’s elaboration of ‘assemblage theory’. By bringing together these texts, which both draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, this chapter demonstrates poetry’s condition of being is as a ‘multiplicity’, one that, as Martínez says, ‘operate[s] permanently in every direction’. By comparing how the book’s contents work to both bind it together as a whole and unbind it into a near-infinite network of pieces that can and do belong to other assemblages, this chapter makes a case for understanding books and their contents as bound by relations of exteriority.