bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
How broad are thematic roles? Evidence from structural priming
Authors: Ziegler Jayden , Snedeker Jesse
Published: September 2018

Verbs that are similar in meaning tend to occur in the same syntactic structures. For example, give and hand, which denote transfer of possession, both appear in the prepositional-object construction: “The child gave / handed the ball to the dog.” We can call the child a “giver” in one case and a “hander” in the other, or we can refer to her more generally as the agent, or doer of the action. Similarly, the dog can be called the recipient, and the ball, the theme. These generalized notions of agent, recipient, and theme are known as thematic roles. An important theoretical question for linguists and psycholinguists is what the set of thematic roles is. Are there a small number of very broad roles, perhaps with each one mapping onto a single canonical syntactic position? Or are there many distinct roles, several mapping to the same syntactic position but conveying subtly different meanings? We investigate this question across eleven structural priming experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk (total N=2,914), asking whether speakers treat the thematic roles recipient and destination (i.e., location or spatial goal) as interchangeable, suggesting the broad role of goal, or distinct, suggesting two separate roles. To do so, we look for priming between dative sentences (e.g., “The man gave the ball to the dog”), which have a recipient role (dog), and locative sentences (e.g., “The man loaded hay onto the wagon”), which instead have a destination role (wagon). Our pattern of findings confirms that thematic role mappings can be primed independent of syntactic structure, lexical content, and animacy. However, we find that this priming does not extend from destinations to recipients (or vice versa), providing evidence that these two roles are distinct.
Afterlife Beliefs: An Evolutionary Perspective
Authors: Stewart-Williams Steve
Published: September 2018

We are all going to die and we all know it. We have our first glimmerings of this unpleasant fact in early childhood, and we live with it for the rest of our lives. Sometimes it sits at the forefront of our attention; other times it lurks in the background--but it’s always there somewhere, casting a dark shadow across our hopes for meaning and permanence. From a zoological perspective, this is a rather peculiar situation to be in. As far as we know, no other species is aware of its own mortality. It would be strange if they were--but it’s no less strange for us. Stranger still, though, is the fact that so many people, while fully cognizant of their own looming demise, believe that death is not the end.
Ecological momentary assessment of daily stress and blood alcohol concentration in healthy drinkers: A feasibility study
Authors: Clay James M , Parker Matthew O
Published: September 2018

Rationale: Hazardous drinking presents a global health risk and if chronic, can escalate into an alcohol use disorder. The causal mechanisms for the transition from controlled alcohol use to uncontrolled misuse and dependence are complex, and it is not presently possible to accurately predict those most at-risk of misusing alcohol, or of developing AUD. Objectives: We investigated the feasibility of using ecological momentary assessments, specifically related to daily stress and alcohol use, to study risk factors for hazardous drinking. We tested the hypothesis that in a sample of healthy drinkers, risk-taking would modulate the impact of daily self-reported stress on alcohol use.Methods: We characterised impulsivity/risk-taking in 23 participants (12 female; mean age = 24.59 [SD = 5.34]) using a battery of questionnaires and computer tasks. We then collected daily behavioural and physiological data related to self-reported stress levels and blood alcohol concentration consumption for 30 days.Results: Attrition and missing data rates were low, with an overall response rate of 92.6% We found support for our hypothesis, with higher risk-taking and impulsive participants drinking more following daily stressors. However, the picture was not clear, with participants drinking greater volumes of alcohol at weekends, and the interactions of stress x personality trait often differing on weekdays.Conclusions: This feasibility study demonstrated the potential for was the first to demonstrate that using ecological momentary assessments, such as, digital biomarkers to assess risk factors for alcohol misuse is a viable option for investigating the effects of neurocognitive endophenotypes and stress on alcohol misuse on a longitudinal basis.
Pathological Increases in Neuronal Hyperactivity in Selective Cholinergic and Noradrenergic Pathways May Limit the Efficacy of Amyloid-β-Based Interventions in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease
Authors: Pomara Nunzio , Bruno Davide
Published: September 2018

In spite of compelling evidence linking amyloid-β (Aβ) disturbances to the pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Aβ-based treatments have consistently failed to produce any beneficial effects both in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and AD, even with successful reductions of toxic aggregated and soluble Aβ species. Before abandoning both the hypothesis and approach, there is a need to examine some overlooked factors that may have contributed to the lack of efficacy, such as the potential drug-induced increases in neuronal hyperactivity leading to adverse cognitive effects. In particular, we posit that selective cholinergic and noradrenergic pathways will be especially vulnerable to this adverse effect. If confirmed, this idea could help identify a potentially preventable and treatable obstacle for enhancing the efficacy of therapeutic agents in MCI and AD.
Role of Noradrenergic Brain Nuclei in the Regulation of Carotid Artery Blood Flow: Pharmacological Evidence from Anesthetized Pigs with Alpha-2 Adrenergic Receptor Modulator Drugs
Authors: Wirth Klaus J.
Published: September 2018

Background:

Cerebral hypoperfusion and degeneration of the noradrenergic locus coeruleus (LC) occur early in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Cerebral blood vessels are densely innervated by noradrenergic projections from the LC suggesting a functional role for the regulation of cerebral blood flow (CBF). Experimental LC stimulation, however, has provided no clarity as decreases or increases in CBF were reported from different experimental settings and investigators.

Objective:

To find out with pharmacological methods whether endogenously released norepinephrine (NE) increases or decreases carotid artery blood flow (CABF) in anesthetized pigs by investigating the effect of centrally acting alpha-2 adrenergic drugs, which increase (atipamezole) or decrease (xylazine) NE in the brain.

Methods:

CABF was measured by a Doppler-flow probe placed around the left carotid artery in pentobarbital anesthetized young pigs.

Results:

Neither current antihypertensive drugs nor pharmacological stimulation of dopamine, histamine, serotonin or acetylcholine receptors changed CABF. The alpha-2 adrenergic-receptor agonist xylazine decreased, while the antagonist atipamezole raised CABF. This rise was abolished by a combined treatment with endothelial NO-synthase inhibitor N ω-Nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (L-NAME) and the non-selective β-receptor antagonist propranolol. Propranolol alone did not decrease CABF in contrast to L-NAME but decreased CABF after L-NAME, surprisingly.

Conclusion:

Pharmacological evidence suggests that NE released in the brain of anesthetized pigs raises CABF involving β-adrenergic mechanisms and nitric oxide. If in awake humans NE released from the LC had vasodilator effects early LC degeneration could be involved in early cerebral hypoperfusion of AD. Moreover, a cerebral adrenergic vascular innervation deficit, possibly resulting from LC degeneration, and systemic endothelial dysfunction together may act synergistically to reduce CBF.
Supplementation of Citrus maxima fruits peel powder improves glucose intolerance and prevents oxidative stress in liver of alloxan-induced diabetic rats
Authors: Ulla Anayt , Alam Md Ashraful , Rahman Mosfiqur , Isha Olive Khan D.M. , Sikder Biswajit , Islam Monirul , Rahman Tarikur , Rahman Nilima , Reza Hasan Mahmud , Jain Preeti , Subhan Nusrat
Published: September 2018

The present investigation was conducted to evaluate the effect of Citrus maxima fruit peel supplementation in alloxan-induced diabetic rats. Diabetes was induced in male Long Evans rats by intraperitoneal injection of alloxan monohydrate (90 mg/kg body weight). Blood glucose level, oral glucose tolerance, and liver enzyme markers were evaluated. Moreover, histopathological examinations were also conducted using in liver sections to examine inflammation and fibrosis in the liver. Alloxan administered animals showed significant body weight loss and poor glucose tolerance. Alloxan administration also increased the liver marker enzymes’ activities and increased oxidative stress parameters compared to control rats. Citrus maxima fruit peel supplementation for 21 days significantly ( p < 0.05) reverted the glucose intolerance and liver enzymes activities to near normal levels. Moreover, Citrus maxima fruit peel supplementation prevented oxidative stress in liver of alloxan-induced diabetic rats. Our investigation also showed that alloxan administration in rats causes inflammatory cells’ infiltration and fibrosis in the liver which is ameliorated by Citrus maxima fruit peel supplementation. Our investigation suggests that Citrus maxima fruit peel supplementation can ameliorate alloxan-induced diabetes and its complications. The antioxidant properties of the fruit probably play a major role in the observed effects.
New Transnationalisms in Contemporary Latin American Cinemas
Authors: Tierney Dolores
Published: September 2018

In the late 1990s and early 2000s Latin American films Amores perros, Diarios de motocicleta, El hijo de la novia, Y tu mamá también, and Cidade de Deus enjoyed unprecedented critical and commercial success in global markets. Benefiting from external financial and/or creative input, these films were considered examples of transnational cinema. This book examines the six transnational directors (Iñárritu, Cuarón, del Toro, Meirelles, Salles and Campanella), who made these and the subsequent commercially successful and mostly ‘deterritorialized’ films (21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful, El espinazo del Diablo, El laberinto del fauno, Blindness, The Constant Gardener, Children of Men, On the Road, El secreto de sus ojos). Arguing against criticism in which these films’ commercial (Hollywood) and transnational features efface the authorial sensibilities of these directors and make them irrelevant to Latin American trends and politics, this book shows how they engage with national, continental and hemispheric politics and identity. Bringing a new perspective to the transnational films of Latin America’s transnational auteurs, including the recent Gravity, The Revenant, Birdman, and Crimson Peak, this book facilitates understanding how different genres function across cultures.
‘From Hollywood and Back’: Alfonso Cuarón’s Adventures in Genre
Authors: Tierney Dolores
Published: September 2018

Chapter 2 explores the cinematic transnationality of Alfonso Cuarón arguing that genre contestation, and the Hollywood vector in his career are key to understanding the ways in which his avowedly personal films – Sólo con tu pareja, Y tu mamá también and Children of Men – intervene in Mexican/Latin American/ counter mainstream politics. It begins by analysing how Cuarón’s first feature Sólo con tu pareja defines the sexy comedia/ comedia light/romantic comedy genre. It goes on to explore how Y tu mamá también film adopts and adapts two Hollywood genres – the road movie and the teen or youth movie – to Mexico’s political and social transition of 2000. Finally, it explores how Children of Men, subverts the narrative and textual conventions of the Hollywood disaster film and critiques the geopolitical ideologies which underpin the genre’s presentation of disaster and destruction. Throughout the chapter’s analysis of Sólo con tu pareja, Y tu mamá también and Children of Men (Gravity is explored in the Epilogue) it focuses on his contestatory use of genre as a key marker of auteurist practice. The chapter also complicates a non-commercial perspective on auteurism by looking at how, in the case of Cuarón, the auteur as a commercial category is most firmly underlined.
Argentina: Introduction
Authors: Tierney Dolores
Published: September 2018

This introductory section and its account of the significant changes in Argentine filmmaking in the last twenty five years acts as a platform to the director-centred analyses of Juan José Campanella’s films in Chapter 6. It situates Campanella and his filmmaking practice as typical of one vector of Argentina’s changed filmmaking landscape (the ‘industry auteurs’ produced through the neoliberal reforms to the industry in the 1990s and fostered by transnational media conglomerates) but also addresses the vibrant independent filmmaking movement (the New Argentine Cinema) also a by- product of the 1990s reforms and fostered by the government and transnational funding bodies.
Anthropomorphism in Islam
Authors: Holtzman Livnat
Published: September 2018

More than any other issue in early and medieval Islamic theology, anthropomorphism (tashbīh) stood at the heart of many theological debates. These debates were not purely intellectual; they were intrinsically linked to political struggles over hegemony. The way a scholar interpreted the anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the Qur’an and the Hadith (for instance, God’s hand, God’s laughter or God’s sitting on the heavenly throne) often reflected his political and social stature, and his theological affinity. This book focuses on aḥādīth al-ṣifāt – the traditions that depict God and His attributes in an anthropomorphic language. The book reveals the way these traditions were studied and interpreted in the circles of Islamic traditionalism which included ultra-traditionalists (the Hanbalites and their forerunners) and middle-of-the-road traditionalists (Ash’arites and their forerunners). The book presents an in-depth literary analysis of aḥādīth al-ṣifāt while considering the role of the early scholars of Hadith in shaping the narrative of these anthropomorphic texts. The book also offers the first scholarly and systematic presentation of hand, face, and bodily gestures that the scholars performed while transmitting the anthropomorphic traditions. The book goes on to discuss the inner controversies in the prominent traditionalistic learning centres of the Islamic world regarding the way to understand and interpret these anthropomorphic traditions. Through a close, contextualized, and interdisciplinary reading in Hadith compilations, theological treatises, and historical sources, this book offers an evaluation and understanding of the traditionalistic endeavours to define anthropomorphism in the most crucial and indeed most formative period of Islamic thought.
The Narrator and the Narrative: A Literary Analysis of Aḥādīth al-Ṣifāt
Authors: Holtzman Livnat
Published: September 2018

Based on the work of Daniel Beaumont and Sebastian Günther on Hadith and narratology, this chapter analyses three proto-types of aḥādīth al-ṣifāt while focusing on the basic building-blocks of these texts, namely the ‘framing narrative’, the ‘embedded narrative’, and the narrator. The texts reviewed in this chapter are several versions of ‘the ḥadīth of the beatific vision’, ‘the ḥadīth of the sacrifice in favour of the believer’, and ‘the ḥadīth of the divine fingers’. The chapter combines literary analysis with a thorough reading in the biographical sources. This combined methodology uncovers the personal motivations of the narrators of the aḥādīth in question, while demonstrating the effect of these motivations on the shaping of the narrative. This chapter presents the typical features of aḥādīth al-ṣifāt and reveals hidden meanings in the texts while considering two styles of narration: mimesis and diegesis, or showing (performing) and telling (recounting). Among the narrators under review are Abu Burda (d. c. 721-3), son of the ṣaḥābī Abu Musa al-Ashʿari (d. c. 663), and ʿAlqama (d. between 681 and 692) and ʿAbida (d. between 691 and 693), the disciples of the ṣaḥābī ʿAbd Allah ibn Masʿud (d. 652-3).
Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject
Authors: Wang Qi
Published: September 2018

Chapter 1 first provides a succinct account of the representational mechanisms of subjectivity and spatiality found in yangbanxi, the famous model operas (along with their contemporaneous cinematic reproductions) of the Cultural Revolution. It then discusses the screen subjectivities in the 1980s and rediscovers a 1980 film, Night Rain in Bashan, which qualifies as an uncanny harbinger of contemporary independent cinema in terms of its imaging of a borderline subjectivity: a forsaken child. This chapter concludes with an elaborate discussion of the Forsaken Generation whose historical self-portraiture is evidenced by a range of contemporary cultural forms including literature, music, painting, theatre, and cinema.
Performing Bodies in Experimental and Digital Media
Authors: Wang Qi
Published: September 2018

Chapter 5 examines experimental documentaries by women and queer filmmakers such as Tang Danhong, Shi Tou, and Cui Zi’en, as well as various experimental videos and digital media projects by Wang Qingsong, Feng Mengbo and other contemporary artists. All discussed works blur the boundary between self and other and between camera and performance, making it clear that subjectivities are actually imagined, contested, and produced in close and conscious relation to representational media and the particular historical moment, in this case, postsocialism. Shaping forth from this complex interplay of historical energy, media appropriation, and subjective interventions are some of the most sophisticated critical subjects of contemporary China. Documentaries under close analysis include: Nightingale, Not the Only Voice; Women’s Fifty Minutes; The Narrow Path; Night Scene.
Contexts and Influences
Authors: Dousteyssier-Khoze Catherine
Published: September 2018

This chapter seeks to contextualise Chabrol’s extensive filmography; reassess its place and significance in French Cinema; and shed light over key influences on Chabrol’s aesthetic. The detailed analysis of his first four films, Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins, A Double tour and Les Bonnes Femmes, helps to understand the formal inventiveness and diversity of his overlooked Nouvelle Vague palette whilst offering key insights into recurrent Chabrolean motifs: the gradual blurring or undermining of realistic / naturalistic modes of representation; expressionistic mise en scène; self-reflexive structures and theatricality; voyeurism; oppressive relationships and family dynamics. Whilst the influence of Lang, Hitchcock and Renoir on Chabrol is already well established, in this chapter Balzac’s pragmatic aesthetic is identified as pivotal: beyond the numerous diegetic references to Balzac, Chabrol draws on Balzac’s ‘mosaic’ approach in order to conceptualise his œuvre. It is argued that the Balzacian strategy of the recurrence of characters (see the recurring trio of Charles, Paul, Hélène) helps Chabrol to turn contemporary material into ‘myths’ and build his own dark Human Comedy.
Chabrolean Spaces as Heterotopias of Crisis
Authors: Dousteyssier-Khoze Catherine
Published: September 2018

This chapter argues that, far from functioning on a purely realistic mode, Chabrolean spaces are key loci in which inner conflicts and tensions often acquire a symbolic dimension. Houses, gardens or functional buildings (the hospital in Le Boucher) become places in which generic battles take place and the real and the virtual come to a head. Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is used to illuminate these unstable and overcoded Chabrolean topographies through the following case studies: the boarding house and park in La Rupture; the crystal house in Juste avant la nuit; the hotel room in Violette Nozière and the Gothic houses in Poulet au vinaigre and La Demoiselle d’honneur.
Conclusion: Towards an Aesthetics of Visual Opacity
Authors: Dousteyssier-Khoze Catherine
Published: September 2018

Chabrol’s filmography greatly gains in depth and significance by being examined as a whole. Following in Balzac’s footsteps, Chabrol subscribed to the idea that an œuvre is above all a mosaic, made of pieces that may very well be uneven in quality but that, ultimately, provide an overarching structure and a unifying vision. So what exactly is this ‘very precise vision of things’...
Digital Film Production People
Authors: Atkinson Sarah
Published: September 2018

This chapter presents a critical examination of the wider context of
the film industry using Ginger & Rosa as a lens through which to examine the three main professional working frameworks that film industry professionals operate within - the network, the department and the project itself, the film.
Drawing on interviews with established film professionals, the chapter examines these three distinctive, yet overlapping spheres, their intersections, their challenges and their moments of contradiction.
The chapter extrapolates the organisational structure as specific to the Ginger & Rosa ‘project’ and examines in detail the structures and working relationships of three different departments–Camera/Electrical, Assistant Director (AD), Production and Post-production.
These discussions draw out the complex interplay between, on the one side, a highly craft-based, traditional classical narrative film production, and, on the other, a production shaped by new digital technologies and interstitial work specific to the film-to-data moment.
Through the mapping of a Personnel Structure and Working Relations model, the chapter examines how Sally Potter manages to nurture innovation and experimentalism within these seemingly inflexible structures through ‘collaborative’ and ‘transitional’ auteurism.’
Digital Film Production Time
Authors: Atkinson Sarah
Published: September 2018

This chapter explores the notion of digital film production ‘time’
By examining the various different temporalities of film production.
Drawing primarily upon the case-study materials of Ginger & Rosa, the chapter maps the 2012 moment of transition from working with film to working with data, and the hybrid practices and protocols that manifested as a result.
It examines how the introduction of new technologies and digital processes challenged the orthodoxies of long-established film industry production practice including how workflow patterns were effected with the advent of the digital in film production.
The chapter includes the proposition of a ‘Creative Core’ Structure of Production model with which to understand the determinants and impacts of on-set workflow, illuminating the emergence a specific aesthetic of production which is referred to as ‘workflow-warp’ and ‘workflow-weft.’ The former refers to the temporal bending of the traditional film structure and pace out of shape, and the latter – the process of weaving together a complex blend of the film and the digital into an inextricable tapestry.
Digital Film Production Space
Authors: Atkinson Sarah
Published: September 2018

This chapter disentangles the deeply ingrained celluloid practices of digital film production.
Through the examination of embodied practices, onset processes and protocols, including considerations of filmmaking iconography in hardware design, software and interface aesthetics. The origins of the often perplexing film and celluloid skeuomorphs are also traced.
The chapter considers the reasons for the persistence of these practices which conversely seek to simultaneously erase the analogue whilst at the same time mask the use of the digital medium.
In its close textual examination of Digital Film Production Space, the chapter includes detailed considerations of the attendant ‘production apparatus’ of Ginger & Rosa (which is the same apparatus used by the film industry in a diversity of national contexts) and the manifestation of the film in digital and virtual representations – proposing a ‘Production Aesthetic’ which visually characterizes the making of the film.
The chapter includes a consideration of ‘celluloid pedagogies’, and how the various practitioners on Ginger & Rosa learned their crafts, and how they describe them through material practices and tactile experience.
Digital Film Production Preservation and Access
Authors: Atkinson Sarah
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines digital film production preservation and access in the moment of the ‘Digital Dilemma’and the attendant challenges to the archiving of digital film which are summarised as reliability, vulnerability, volume and data complexity.
Different archival paradigms are considered including film, born digital and hybrid, and the associated archival aesthetics, drawing from various branches of enquiry within archival studies. This includes considerations of Sally Potter’s own online, interactive archive SP-ARK – whereby all film/analogue was digitised – and the archival structure developed by the Deep Film Access Project (DFAP) – designed to accommodate both film, data and hybrid assets.
The chapter contends that archival structures support and replicate auteurism leading to omissions and occlusions of both personnel and practices. Evidence is provided to demonstrate that the way in which an archive is conceived, shaped and organised captures the various ‘aesthetics of production’ and ‘Production Aesthetics’ of a moment in time, as well as its concomitant ‘production legacy aesthetics’, ‘archival legacy aesthetics’ and embedded paradoxes of representation.
Political Theology
Authors: Diamantides Marinos , Schütz Anton
Published: September 2018

Ridding modernity of Christian political theology — and thus of the sort of false universalisms theology makes possible — requires a recognition that although this theology lies in ruins it is precisely our love of these ruins that makes us err by seeking a glorious sense of responsibility from within and for our contingent history. Modernity is thus mystified as consisting of a rupture with the medieval/traditional — even a rupture that gives rise to a parthenogenesis of a new human being and history. In this book we set aside the imaginary overcoming of tradition by modernity and, rather, suggest that tradition-in-ruins is where we find the contingent encounters of what has come to pass and what not, of the actual and the potential. Further, we argue that any attempt to ‘overcome’ our present situation through sovereign decision and action is to succumb to the temptation to take up the traditional western game of a ‘see-saw’, an never-ending oscillation between glorious but impotent sovereignty and mundane but actual implementation.
Much of our book was written before the Greek anti-austerity referendum (July 2015), most of it before the Brexit referendum (June 2016), all of it before the Trump-election and the referendum on the Catalonian independence (January and October 2017). "Populism", the catchword associated often with one, some, or all of these events, was thus mostly absent from the reality that we had the occasion to observe at work in establishing the claims of our book. However, by December 2017, the situation has undergone a dramatic change that will let appear our general point, and even some of the associated, mostly historical points, in a changed and far sharper light.
From Sovereignty to Negeschatology
Authors: Diamantides Marinos , Schütz Anton
Published: September 2018

In this chapter we argue, first, that, since early modernity and its political innovation (absolutism), the model and basis of any sovereign power that has been taken as just and trustworthy is built upon a precisely circumscribed postulate: the double fixture between a mundane potential to reign in emerging challenges and a spiritual belief that this super-power happens to be in the right hands, or on ‘the right side of history’. Secondly, we show how this occurred in a manner directly informed by the medieval religious canon's outline of the events due to take place at the end of times (eschatology, the doctrine of the Last Things). Comparing with the situation at the beginning of the 21st century, we find that this correlation has been done away with and, in its place, another, secularised paradigm has been put into place: one of permanent crisis and of mere coping with contingency by momentary measures accepted even before their specific features have been elucidated. Everything looks as if this new paradigm revoked the previous eschatological promise of something that holds out beyond the present horizon.
The Religion of Progress
Authors: Diamantides Marinos , Schütz Anton
Published: September 2018

Western Christianism has been in the cross hairs of inquiries into the political and social identity of the West for several decades now. It has shaped centuries, at least, of politico-theological interrogations. Even so, it is barely ever considered otherwise than as one more "religion". This attitude – which we explore in more depth in the following chapter – was typical in Christian Western Europe after the French Revolution until the threshold of the 20th century, for the simple reason that during this period Christianism had finally acquired an intra-social outside: society no longer thought of itself as exclusively rooted in religion, but rather in emerging secular fields, such as science and knowledge, industry, trade, rights. Two unintended collateral casualties resulted: First, other religions were conceived as comparable to Christianism (if less enlightened); secondly, and partly explaining the interest in ‘political theology’, deficiently secular human consciousness reacted by ‘deifying’ two function systems, politics and law, just as economy and the media are today 'deified' before, eventually, becoming aware of the religious nature of the preference for politics-led law or/and economy-led deregulation that they stand in for. Taking into account a vast and growing literature, we ask especially how politics replaced religion in the job of preaching the ' gospel of progress' as a prelude to political action, before being replaced in its turn by the supremely fake evangelism of economics.
The Transition from Secularism to Post-secularism
Authors: Diamantides Marinos , Schütz Anton
Published: September 2018

Modernity has been forcing upon the entire world population a mercilessly uniform presto-accelerando tempo resulting in a de-regulated march towards ever more condensed rhythms of adaptation, competition, decision, transformation and, most decisively, self-transformation. It is a movement in which the adagio rhythm of human existence, understood as a matter of generations and inter-generational transmission, has been giving way to the feverish rattling of technogenous, e.g. micro-informatic-driven, innovations. In this chapter we first show how this process, far from stemming from a rupture with the medieval world, spans from origins in religious rituals and dogmas all the way to the moving target of secularization. In this regard we try to make graspable the differential social-cum-governmental techniques that set off, for a millennium and more, the Christian-cum-post-Christian West from the Byzantine East, and, specifically, the game of ‘hide and seek' forever underlying the relation between ‘glorious’ politics and oikonomia/management that was perfected in the Occident. We argue that this occidental-cum-universalist dualist machinery has, no doubt foreseeably, been fated to grind to a halt once the horizon of a boundlessly successful continuation of its ambitious logic elicited the first signs of its long-term un-sustainability, i.e. of its incapacity of providing endless further sequences of increase or escalation.
Introduction
Authors: Burnetts Charles
Published: September 2018

Schindler’s List, the 1993 film by Steven Spielberg, tells the story of a businessman and member of the Nazi party who finds moral purpose through the discovery of his altruism towards Jews in wartime Poland both before and during the Holocaust. It was a film that famously divided the critics, particularly its tearful ending and its alleged descent into bathos and sentimentality....
The Sentimental Chaplin: Comedy and Classical Narrative
Authors: Burnetts Charles
Published: September 2018

Chapter Three focuses on the critical functions of comedy in relation to sentimental narrative structures in the early and classical Hollywood eras, focusing on how humour is both celebrated and critiqued in terms of its counter-balancing, compensation for, or even negation of the sentimental in film. Charles Chaplin’s early work is analysed with reference to the critical opposition to his features on the part of intellectuals wedded to a more ‘naturalistic’ cinema or to Chaplin’s more ‘anarchic’ deployment of slapstick, such as the American writer Gilbert Seldes and the early work of Siegfried Kracauer. The discussion turns to the classical genres of Hollywood’s 1930s and 1940s period, using sequences from John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) as an exemplary negotiation of sentiment and slapstick. Focus is maintained on the way that such categories are influenced by sentimental codes, particularly in terms of the persistence of genteel sensibilities and/or moralistic narrative structures. The chapter draws in such respects on key theorists of film comedy of that era, such as Stanley Cavell, Henry Jenkins and Lea Jacobs.
The Sentiments of War in Spielberg and Tarantino
Authors: Burnetts Charles
Published: September 2018

Chapter Five’s examines two ‘post-classical’ examples of Hollywood’s war/combat genre, examining their problematic negotiation of sentimentality as fundamentally melodramatic films. The ‘camp’ appropriation of violence and identity of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) is conceived in such respects as an apparent rhetorical antidote to the ‘New Sincerity’ of Steven Spielberg’sSaving Private Ryan (1998), a negotiation that is problematised by its own reliance on gendered discourses of action and resistance as adequate responses to trauma and memory. The chapter draws on ideas examined in previous chapters regarding the functions of irony and violence as countrapuntal registers to sentimentality, contextualising the two films as tonally different responses to US militarism in the post-Vietnam era.
Sentiment and the ‘Smart’ Melodrama
Authors: Burnetts Charles
Published: September 2018

Examines the ‘camp’ sensibility of two contemporary art-films, Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Todd Solondz’ Palindromes (2004), focusing in particular on their respective treatments of melodrama as a genre attuned to the experience and suffering of women in US society. Meditating on the problem of gender and childhood in pastoral America, the analysis seeks to explore the negotiation of sentimentalist conventions borrowed from traditional film genres like the musical and the ‘maternal melodrama’, focusing in particular on issues of ‘play’ and camp performance. The discussion thus raises problems introduced in earlier chapters with regards to the self-reflexive bracketing of sentimentality as a discourse of sincerity and ethical subjectivity, emphasising its ambiguous presence in the art-film as a mode of fantasy and self-reflexive mythologizing.
1968: A Year of Protest
Authors: Halliwell Martin , Witham Nick
Published: September 2018

The introduction discusses the book’s four major themes – the memories, forms, ideologies, and geographies of protest – within the context of the most volatile year in modern American history. It examines the historical forces that impinged on the events of 1968 and considers how both domestic politics and foreign policy played pivotal roles in shaping protest movements. The introduction looks at the national and international historiography of 1968: a year that has been claimed and reclaimed by different groups in the decades since. Its ten-year commemoration passed with little recognition in the US, but in 1988, 1998 and 2008 radical and conservative voices have emerged that both celebrate and denounce this key year in the broader history of protest, activism and dissent.
1968: A Pivotal Moment in Cinema
Authors: Monteith Sharon
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines how various versions of 1968 in this cultural context provided creative opportunities for social comment in a changing media culture, focusing primarily on American film. Attention is paid to films that proved exceptions to what had become a tentative norm by the mid-1960s such as The Graduate, Wild in the Streets and Easy Rider. As the counterculture found its way on to the screen, Hollywood was slower to see the financial merits of civil rights themes. More revealing is how civil rights issues were used suggestively in different genres, including the big budget musical Finian’s Rainbow and the low budget horror film Night of the Living Dead before finding more explicit dramatization in the early 1970s. The chapter argues that in the late 1960s dissent was more likely to be couched or exploited as melodrama than transformed into high-quality political cinema and box office success.
1968: End of The Civil Rights Movement?
Authors: Tuck Stephen
Published: September 2018

1968 is commonly seen as the end of the classic era of modern civil rights protest: a year when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, when violence seemed endemic in urban black communities, when Black Power groups fractured and when candidates opposed to further civil rights legislation made giant strides at the ballot box. 1968 seemed to usher in a decade bereft of major civil rights activity, ahead of a resurgence of conservative politics. And yet a look behind the headlines tells a different story in the post-1968 years at the local level: of increasing civil rights protest, of major gains in the courts and politics and the workplace, of substantial victories by Black Power activists, and calls for new rights by African American groups hitherto unrecognised by civil rights leaders. This chapter argues that in many ways 1968 marked the beginning of a vibrant new phase of race-centred activism, rather than the end, of the modern civil rights movement.
Gay Liberation and The Spirit of ’68
Authors: Hall Simon
Published: September 2018

This chapter considers the historical significance of 1968 for the gay rights movement in the context of the Stonewall Riots of June 1969. The gay rights movement of the 1970s embodied the animating spirit of late 1960s activism, with its emphasis on the revolutionary potential of personal politics; embrace of direct action and street theatre; commitment to building alternative institutions; and idealistic faith that a more equal world was possible. For a time, gay liberationists echoed the activists of 1968 by denouncing American imperialism and calling for revolution. Yet, within months of the Stonewall riots, such militancy was already on the wane, as groups like the Gay Activists Alliance emerged to lead the fight for full equality and first-class citizenship rights. This more liberal, integrationist stance has, in many ways, come to define the gay rights movement in the years since Stonewall, and helped deliver some of its signature triumphs. As well as charting this post-1968 moment, the chapter also considers those who still hold true to the revolutionary values of 1968.
Organizing for Economic Justice in The Late 1960s
Authors: Lewis Penny
Published: September 2018

Shortly before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched the Poor People’s Campaign that aimed to highlight the links between economic and racial injustice. Although t 1960s are usually characterized as a period in which race, gender and sexuality were the key identity issues for American protest, this chapter brings to the fore issues of class and poverty. From SCLC to labor unions to coalitions of African American single mothers, a range of activist organizations waged their own wars on poverty, putting into action the poverty tours that Robert Kennedy conducted in the mid-1960s and accounts such as socialist Michael Harrington’s influential 1962 book The Other America. These organizations worked at the intersections between economic and identity politics. Their successes and failures account for the new, often regressive contours of political action, discourse and policy around class and poverty in the following decades, and the re-emergence of a progressive vision in contemporary protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street.
Los últimos de Filipinas: The Spatio-temporal Coordinates of Francoism
Authors: Yarza Alejandro
Published: September 2018

Los últimos de Filipinas (Last Stand in the Philippines, Antonio Román, 1945) is one of the most popular Spanish films of all times. Drawing from Henri Bergson’s notion of temporality, this chapter argues that the film revolves around a politics of time both informing and informed by totalitarian kitsch aesthetics. The film’s portrayal of a besieged colonial church standing defiantly against a Tagalog rebellion in the small town of Baler during the Spanish-American War in1898 transformed the colonial reality of the Philippines into political myth; a myth which, I argue, condensed to perfection Francoist kitsch ideology.
Surcos: Neorealism, Film Noir, and the Puppet Master
Authors: Yarza Alejandro
Published: September 2018

Critically acclaimed as a milestone of Spanish cinema, Surcos (Furrows, J.A. Nieves Conde, 1951) is the film that single-handedly revolutionized Spanish cinema by introducing the spirit of Neorealism and Film Noir. Through a comparative analysis of the famous boarding sequence of Citizen Kane and few examples from Roberto Rossellini’s early films, this chapter argues that the film’s apparent appropriation of Italian neorealism and also Film Noir and, particularly, its internal strife between its progressive neorealist aesthetic and its fascist message, comes into sharper focus when seen through the lens of kitsch aesthetics. Despite its neorealist and noir appearance, Surcos is in fact a kitsch film that encapsulates Spanish fascist ideology even more insidiously than the previous ones precisely by not being an overtly propagandistic film.
Viridiana: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil
Authors: Yarza Alejandro
Published: September 2018

Viridiana is a critically acclaimed film directed in 1961 (made with special permission by Franco himself) by world-renowned director Luis Buñuel. Buñuel’s film was the official entry representing Franco’s Spain at the International Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the Palme d’Or. Vigorously denounced by the Vatican’s newspaper as blasphemous, the film was immediately banned in Spain until Franco’s death. This chapter reads Viridiana allegorically as a film that undermines Francoist kitsch aesthetics from within. By means of its intricate mise-en-scène of the gothic, decadent mansion of its perverse protagonist, a subtle portrayal of Franco himself, the film insightfully depicts Francoism as a rarefied ideology, as a sublimated space suspended in a kitsch melancholy bubble lost in time and space.
Under the Sign of Saturn: The Labyrinth of Moral Choices in Francoist Spain
Authors: Yarza Alejandro
Published: September 2018

Linking the figure of the labyrinth, often associated with the history of Spain, to the famous Goya painting of Saturn Devouring his Son, this chapter examines the foreign language Oscar nominee, El laberinto del fauno (Pan´s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro, 2006). It argues that the film aims to undermine Francoist kitsch notion of melancholic temporality. Goya´s painting is often read as an allegory of the brutal repression of Spanish Liberalism by Fernando VII during the second and third decades of the nineteenth-century. As in the painting, which references Cronus, the Greek God of time, in the movie, Francoist political repression is also associated with the obsession with time of Captain Vidal, the film’s fascist villain. The notion of a ‘lost’ historical time devouring itself is linked in the film to the notion of labyrinth as a historical loop and mystical space with Captain Vidal, as the Minotaur lurking at its center, devours its victims over time, much like Cronus, Ferdinand VII, or Franco himself. The film symbolically ends this repressive cycle by rescuing Captain’s Vidal newborn baby from his fascist grip.
Unparalleled Drudgery and the Deprivation of Freedom
Authors: Brace Laura
Published: September 2018

This book insists on the connections between freedom, belonging and labour for understanding the politics of slavery. This chapter seeks to show how constructions of race and labour were inextricable from one another, and how thinking about slavery as a labour system is inseparable from understanding freedom as a contested concept, forged out of experience and struggle. Part of that struggle was about trying to find and define the limits of enslavability, and its location in a constellation of concepts of self-possession, labour power, race and property. Labour as a moral and political category was caught up with ideas about autonomy, morality and honour that were deeply contested, and the mobile borders between free and unfree labour, labour and capital, persons and property were inseparable from questions about who belonged, and who was eligible to be incorporated into civil society. Through a focus on slave hiring and slave provisioning grounds, this chapter explores how and why the abolitionist arguments about freedom, rationality and shared humanity could not help them to escape the sheer adaptability of bondage, as it resurfaced in questions about the command over labour, trustworthiness, the appearance of inferior capacities, and the division between the industrious and the idle.
What Perec Was Looking For: Notes on Automation, the Everyday and Ethical Writing
Authors: Bassett Caroline
Published: September 2018

This chapter considers Perec’s interest in the infra-ordinary, on the one hand, and questions of the machine and automation, on the other. Investigating different ways in which the micro-scale emerges in Perec’s work raises questions around life in relation to (computational) machines – particularly machines that are getting smaller (at once more discreet, and less discrete) – that are becoming ever more important today. This chapter examines the complex relationship between questions of life (the infra-ordinary life with its embedded habits) and questions concerning classification – here understood as a form of automation, as they are raised (and develop very differently) in Perec’s work on the self, the space, the object, and the language game.
‘Things That Should Be Short’: Perec, Sei Shōnagon, Twitter and the Uses of Banality
Authors: McCosker Anthony , Wilken Rowan
Published: September 2018

This chapter reconsiders Twitter as a ‘machinery that produces banality’ and the criticisms this attracts, by approaching it via the work of Georges Perec, and his enduring interest in the musings of the late tenth century Japanese courtesan, Sei Shōnagon and her The Pillow Book. Perec identified in her work two specific elements that became crucial in his own writing: (1) an attentiveness to the inner workings of the everyday; and, (2) an appreciation of the uses and value of list-making. ‘Sei Shonagon does not sort; she lists and begins again. One theme sets off one list, of things or of anecdotes,’ he writes. In this chapter, we aim to present an account of both these strands of Perec’s work in order to suggest that, through them, we can gain insight into why the banalities of the everyday, as experienced via Twitter in particular, are both engaging and vitally significant.