bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Banality of Addiction: Arthur Miller and Complicity
Authors: Gosizk Grant
Published: May 2018

While much has been written on Arthur Miller’s relationship to the post-war intelligentsia, few critics have explored the influence that intellectual debates on Holocaust complicity had on the author’s 1960s catalogue. Building on the similarities between the theory of the “banality of evil” offered in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and Miller’s Herald Tribune article on the Nazi trials in Frankfurt (1964), this article suggests that the playwright’s interest in emerging theories of complicity became a central concern of After the Fall (1964) and Incident at Vichy (1964). Strongly influenced by Theodor Adorno’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s work on aesthetic responses to post-war guilt, Miller used these plays to dramatize competing responses to the concept of “ubiquitous complicity” for the Holocaust. Using the aesthetic language of addiction spectacle scenes, which a strong tradition of American temperance theatre had popularized, Miller evaluated the mechanics of complicity and offered a dramatic thesis on its importance to anti-fascist activism. I conclude that, in both plays, the representation of addiction became the primary means through which Miller participated in contemporary critical debates on post-war guilt.
Structure of Class Feeling/Feeling of Class Structure: Laura Wade’sPoshand Katherine Soper’sWish List
Authors: Aston Elaine
Published: May 2018

Theatre’s counter-hegemonic resistance to the “demonization of the working class” (Owen Jones, Chavs) is the subject of this article. This resistance is analysed through case studies of two “class acts”: the elite Oxford boys in Laura Wade’s Posh (2010) and the poverty-stricken youth in Katherine Soper’s Wish List (2016). My close reading of these two plays involves a reprise of Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling”: the conjugation of “structure” and “feeling” allows me to engage with and advocate a dual concern with systems of classification as well as the affective, experiential (lived) dimension of being “classified.” Moving between the class-fuelled feelings of entitlement in Posh and those of alienation in Wish List, I elucidate how, under the United Kingdom’s regime of neoliberal austerity, the label “working class” has become “sticky” (Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion) with disgust-making properties (Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction). Overall, what emerges is a critical feeling for the United Kingdom as a class-divided nation and an urgent need to resist the entrenched classifying gaze of the neoliberal imagination.
James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal, eds., The Sixties, Center Stage: Mainstream and Popular Performances in a Turbulent Decade
Authors: Miller Hillary
Published: May 2018

The Sixties, Center Stage: Mainstream and Popular Performances in a Turbulent Decade makes a significant contribution to 1960s theatre historiography by challenging and revising the counter-cultural bias of prior scholarship. Readers seeking alternatives to the pedagogical and analytical paradigms of sixties performance culture in the United States will find the insights of this collection invaluable.
Historicism, Anthropology, and Goethe’s Idea of World Literature
Authors: Klemm Stephen
Published: May 2018

I examine the relationship between Goethe’s understanding of Weltliteratur and his project of universal humanism. I argue that Goethe’s understanding of Weltliteratur cannot be straightforwardly assimilated to his broader project of universal humanism, as the late Goethe grew skeptical of universal Enlightenment principles and shifted toward an anthropological understanding of the human being. I do so first by investigating Goethe’s evolving philosophy of history and locate his usage of Weltliteratur within a larger shift in his historical thinking away from neoclassical humanism and toward a proto-historicism. I then argue that this shift is rooted in the late Goethe’s philosophy of nature and, in particular, his vitalist empiricism and broader naturalism.
Between Homage and Transgression: Cosmopolitan Cultural Practice in Ottilie von Goethe’s JournalChaos(1829–1832)
Authors: Pnevmonidou Elena
Published: May 2018

The distinct cosmopolitanism associated with J. W. Goethe stems from his dual status as both a literary and a cult figure. As a writer, Goethe shaped intellectual and literary discourse on cosmopolitanism, but as a cultural icon, he was the focal point of a culture of refined tourism that gravitated around him but was shaped by the cult of Goethe rather than the person and his literary works. This article captures one moment in the interface of intellectual cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan tourism in the last years of Age-of-Goethe Weimar. To this end, the focus is not on Goethe, but rather on the cultural sphere that was maintained on his behalf in his immediate vicinity, but independently from him, by his daughter-in-law Ottilie von Goethe. The article examines the cultural and aesthetic innovations brought about through the journal Chaos, which Ottilie von Goethe edited and which appeared weekly from 1829 to 1832. Presenting a detailed overview of the journal, its community, the journal’s underlying notion of creativity, and the approach toward cultural identity, the article demonstrates that, instead of serving merely as the expressive medium of a preexisting society, Chaos generated its own community and became the platform for a collaborative creative process that can itself be characterized as cosmopolitan. This cosmopolitanism is furthermore characterized as a radicalized fusion of J. W. Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur with the Romantic notion of creativity. The article also situates Ottilie von Goethe’s Chaos within the broader context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourses on cosmopolitanism and considers what Chaos can contribute to today’s discussions about world literature and transculturality.
From New Anarchism to Post-anarchism
Authors: Kinna Ruth
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines contemporary anarchist critiques of Kropotkin, especially post-anarchist analysis. It argues that science has become a byword to describe Kropotkin's political theory, providing an exemplar for classical anarchism. This theory is described as teleological, based on a particular concept of human nature and linked to a form of revolutionary utopianism that promises the realisation of anarchy. Post-anarchists dissolve the distance between Kropotkin and Bakunin that advocates of his evolutionary theory invented in the 1960s in order to rescue anarchism from its reputation for violence. This repackaging of historical traditions underpins judgments about the irrelevance of anarchism to contemporary politics and political theory. In response, critics of post-anarchism have sought to defend nineteenth-century revolutionary traditions. The result of this argument is that Kropotkin emerges as a political theorist of class struggle. This defence raises significant questions about the coherence of Kropotkin's position on the war in 1914.
The Consonants of Older Scots
Authors: Bann Jennifer , Corbett John
Published: May 2018

This chapter begins a more detailed description of the developments outlined in brief in the introduction. In particular, it details the development of the consonant graphemes that were used in the Older Scots period (1375–1700). The discussion in this chapter considers Older Scots phonology insofar as it impacts on spelling; a much more detailed discussion of the phonological system of Older Scots can be found in Johnston (1997a).
Applying Cluster Analysis to Scots Prose
Authors: Bann Jennifer , Corbett John
Published: May 2018

In this chapter, we apply cluster analysis of the graphemic realisations to prose that contains a substantial element of Scots. We worked with a slightly smaller number of texts for the prose samples, owing to the limitations of suitable material in our broader corpus. The Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing contains a considerable amount of prose material, but the use of Scots in prose largely begins with fiction of the early nineteenth century, and extends to the present day. Our chosen texts illustrate a range of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century literary texts that are at least in part in Scots prose.
Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland
Authors: Coleman James J.
Published: May 2018

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past.
Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery.
Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes
Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’
Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British
Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry
Nationality, Memory and Commemoration
Authors: Coleman James J.
Published: May 2018

At the heart of this book’s examination of the past in nineteenth-century Scotland is the concept of nationality. In its early twenty-first-century definition, nationality tends to signify ‘the status of being a citizen or subject of a particular state’. Nationality is a box ticked on a form, an entry on a birth certificate. One hundred and fifty years ago, however, the significance of nationality ran much deeper. Across nineteenth-century Europe, nationality signified both the collective character of the nation and the right of a nation to address itself as such. It was a potent combination of shared characteristics, identity, institutions and patriotism, more than merely what made the Scots Scottish, the French French, or the Germans German. Nationality was not only what made a nation a nation, it was also what made a nation great – at least in its own eyes. Nationality signified a set of shared national characteristics and an inherited sense of identity, yet it was also a virtue in and of itself, both for the individual and for the nation as a whole.
‘The Highest Position in the Civilised World’: Commemorating John Knox and the Second Reformation
Authors: Coleman James J.
Published: May 2018

The providential-unionist interpretation of the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce might seem unusual in the early twenty-first century, yet few would argue that these patriot heroes are unworthy of a prominent place in the nation’s collective memory. Seen from the perspective of modern Scottish nationalism, the unionist element of the Victorian Wallace is self-evidently ‘wrong’, yet even the most ardent nationalist would agree that nineteenth-century Scots were quite correct to call upon Wallace as one of the founders of Scottish nationality. Wallace, Bruce, Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn still matter; their significance has endured.
‘By the Imprudence of His Ancestors’: Commemorating Jacobitism and Mary Queen of Scots
Authors: Coleman James J.
Published: May 2018

The Scottish national past was the story of the struggle for civil and religious liberty, reaching its glorious outcome at the Revolution of 1688. With their prologue in the proto-Presbyterian Culdees, collective memories of Scottish nationality ran from Wallace and Bruce, through Knox, to the Covenanters. At each stage in this memory, the heroes of Scotland’s past had overcome the threat posed by their antithesis, whether Edward I or Edward II, the Roman Catholic church, or the later Stuart kings. Both explicitly and implicitly, the narrative of civil and religious liberty framed the commemoration of the Scottish past in the nineteenth century, generating a collective sense of what it meant to be Scottish, explaining or justifying present attitudes and national mores. In a sense, the Glorious Revolution marked the end of Presbyterian history, the closure of a centuries-long struggle to achieve full and coherent Scottish nationality with a free nation and a secure Presbyterian church. It was for this reason that union was made possible. The Scots had proved their point, won their battle, and could give up their statehood, confident that Scottish nationality could never be undone.
Contemporary British Horror Cinema
Authors: Walker Johnny
Published: May 2018

Combining industrial research and primary interview material with detailed textual analysis, Contemporary British Horror Cinema looks beyond the dominant paradigms which have explained away British horror in the past, and sheds light on one of the most dynamic and distinctive – yet scarcely talked about – areas of contemporary British film production. Considering high-profile theatrical releases, including The Descent, Shaun of the Dead and The Woman in Black, as well as more obscure films such as The Devil’s Chair, Resurrecting the Street Walker and Cherry Tree Lane, Contemporary British Horror Cinema provides a thorough examination of British horror film production in the twenty-first century.
British film production and the horror genre
Authors: Walker Johnny
Published: May 2018

Chapter 2 contemplates why British horror was revived at the dawning of the new millennium, and also considers some of the reasons why British horror films produced in the 2000s and 2010s can be viewed as constituting a distinctive aspect of contemporary British cinema. I discuss the establishment of the UK Film Council (UKFC) in 2000 and contextualise the contemporary British horror film in the international film marketplace, drawing parallels between British horror and British film production more broadly, British horror and international horror production, and the audience demographics targeted by distributers and film production companies. This involves examining British horror’s shift from a theatrical genre to one associated primarily with the home video and online market.
Let the quiet ones in
Authors: Walker Johnny
Published: May 2018

Chapter 6 returns to industry, and charts the re-emergence of Hammer Films, which, after thirty years, finally went back into film production in the 2000s. Drawing from primary sources such as the industry trade press and interviews, the chapter reflects on Hammer’s recent history, considering briefly the tumultuous 1980s and 1990s, before assessing the company’s market positioning between its re-launch in 2007 with the web serial Beyond the Rave (Matthias Hoene, 2008), through its theatrical success with the blockbuster The Woman in Black in 2012, up until the release of its lower-budgeted ghost story, The Quiet Ones (John Pogue) in 2014. Ultimately, taking into account Hammer’s prominence in much discourse around classic British horror, I use its millennial incarnation to assess its relevance (or not) to the identity of British horror in the twenty-first century.
Love and the Art Object
Authors: Winning Joanne
Published: May 2018

Chapter 6 examines how lesbian modernists oppose ideas of artistic impersonality through imbricating intimate affects in the production of their art objects. Objects considered here include literary texts, paintings, houses and interiors. The chapter engages both Michael Hardt’s notion of “corporeal reason” and the object relations psychoanalysis of D.W. Winnicott and Marion Milner to argue that Virginia Woolf, Gluck, and Eileen Gray demonstrate an intense concern with the materiality of artistic production. This preoccupation with “stuff” conveys a visceral, affective appreciation of their art, which serves as a realm in which transgressive sexual desires and identities may be safely articulated. From Gray’s lacquered surfaces to Gluck’s plasticine frames, these modernist art objects are saturated with affect, serving as tangible, material expressions of bodily and emotional intimacy.
From Odysseus to Rotpeter: Adorno and Kafka, Mimicry and Happiness
Authors: Haynes Doug
Published: May 2018

Chapter 10 considers an Adornian form of happiness that might be found in the correspondence between the poles of instinct and culture, a happiness that is not a simple return to nature but an appreciation of pre-human animal pleasure that can only be realised from a retrospective lapsarian position of properly socialized reason. This advanced, if indolent happiness is a non-identitarian happiness in alterity that stands in sharp contrast with the forms of modern bourgeois satisfaction anachronistically typified for Adorno and Horkheimer in the figure of Odysseus, who has relinquished primal happiness. The chapter explores the affective intertwinement of nature and reason in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” (1917), which demonstrates the absence of an enlightened sociality that might enable the happiness immanent in nature to be redeemed.
Conclusion: The Crisis Image – Mumblecore and Beyond
Authors: Backman Rogers Anna
Published: May 2018

By way of conclusion and further development of the notion of a cinema of crisis, I will extend briefly this study’s theoretical framework to the work of Harmony Korine, Kelly Reichardt and the ‘Mumblecore’ movement – or, more specifically, the work of Lena Dunham. However, in order to outline these further facets of a cinema of crisis, it is necessary at this juncture to summarise what its salient features are. I argued at the beginning of this book that the dominant and established approach to American independent cinema in critical and scholarly studies is to categorise it in terms of economic, production and distribution strategies.1 While this is important and useful, this focus on the meaning and context of the very term ‘independent’ has resulted in a paucity of material on the aesthetics and poetics of this kind of cinema and its specific effect or affects. By focusing on the themes of crisis, liminality, transition, mutation and transformation, I have tried to emphasise the ways in which American independent cinema appropriates and transfigures the tropes of European ‘Art’ cinema (as set forth in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2) for its own particular purposes in order to challenge entrenched modes of thought.
‘Like a thousand reflections of my own hands in a dark mirror’: Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence
Authors: Ailwood Sarah , Harvey Melinda
Published: May 2018

This chapter extends the theorisation of literary influence beyond arguments put forward by Harold Bloom (around anxiety) and Bonnie Kime Scott (around modernist coteries) by asserting that it is blind to temporal, spatial and cultural boundaries. It argues that revisiting influence as a driver of literary creativity is critical as literary theory seeks once again to situate texts and think about the author. Katherine Mansfield is an apposite study for influence in a variety of registers - including ambivalence, exchange, identification, imitation, enchantment and legacy - because of her rich engagement with her literary predecessors and contemporaries, and the degree to which she impacted inheritors across time and place.
‘Where is she?’ Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen
Authors: Gildersleeve Jessica
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the absent presence of Katherine Mansfield in Elizabeth Bowen’s personal and fictional writing to demonstrate how loss, desire and mourning might constitute a particularly female mode of literary influence. It explores Bowen’s ambivalent perceptions of Mansfield as a literary influence throughout her career, on the one hand protesting against her influence and defending her own originality, and on the other recognising her innovation and mourning her as a ‘lost contemporary’. Gildersleeve argues that the literary relationship between Bowen and Mansfield eludes both the Bloomian model of destroying the predecessor and the model of matrilineal heritage preferred by feminist literary critics. Instead, influence between Mansfield and Bowen registers as a ‘desire for kinship, and resentment that this bond does not exist’.
The Meeting of Katherine Mansfield and Eve Langley
Authors: Cassidy Bonny
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores the synergies between the life and work of Katherine Mansfield and the Australian novelist Eve Langley. Mansfield and Langley shared similar life experiences and artistic concerns, as well as a mutual sense of psychological and sexual ‘otherness’, underpinned by their dual enchantment with Oscar Wilde. It argues that the captivating influence of ‘Oscar’ on both writers also framed the nature of Mansfield’s influence on Langley: ‘a scenario of “doubled” influence, whereby Mansfield acts as a medium for the values Wilde represented’.
The ‘Burden’ of the Feminine: Frank Sargeson’s Encounter with Katherine Mansfield
Authors: Wilson Janet
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines Katherine Mansfield’s legacy for the development of a New Zealand national literature, as reflected in the social realist short stories of Frank Sargeson. It contests the conventional view that Mansfield’s metropolitan impressionism was ‘inimical’ to Sargeson’s ‘ambitions for a cultural nationalism’, arguing that Mansfield’s legacy is not only a burden to be overcome but an ‘intertextual presence’, as the two writers share a critique of colonial culture and its normative gender constructions and key techniques of literary modernism. Focusing on ‘The Canary’ (1923) and ‘A Man and his Wife’ (1939), Wilson argues that Sargeson adapted Mansfield’s ‘techniques of impressionism and impersonation’ to render masculine homosexual vulnerability and unrequited love in a homophobic society. Mansfield’s influence on Sargeson, then, suggests ‘continuity across the decades of New Zealand’s cultural nationalism’.
Pearls Scattered: An Introduction
Authors: Booth Marilyn
Published: May 2018

This chapter introduces the book at the centre of this study, a mammoth biographical dictionary of 453 world women published in Arabic in Cairo 1893-6 at Egypt’s government printing press; and its author, Zaynab Fawwaz, an immigrant from southern Lebanon to Egypt who wrote on gender politics in the press and also wrote two novels, a play and some poetry. The chapter places this book in the context of scholarship on gender politics, feminism, nationalism and anti-colonialism, and early feminist discourse in the Arab region and especially Egypt. In that context, the fin-de-siècle interest in ancient history – Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Semitic – evident in Egypt’s and Arabic Ottoman publications, receives attention as it relates to Fawwaz’s outlook on women’s history.
Off to the Pictures: Cinema, Fiction and Interwar Culture
Authors: Stead Lisa
Published: May 2018

The chapter outlines the critical and contextual foundations for the case study chapters that follow, establishing in greater depth the three interlocking contexts of moviegoing, print culture and modernity in interwar Britain. It offers an overview of the interrelationship between key framing contexts that inform the coordinates of the study, considering British cinema culture alongside the interwar publishing industry for women’s writing, read in relation to the changing texture of women’s everyday lives in British modernity alongside a more detailed consideration of the intersections between critical explorations of film reception and intermediality.
Afterword
Authors: Stead Lisa
Published: May 2018

This section offers a detailed conclusion to the volume as a whole suggesting that the case studies within reveal the centrality of processes of negotiation, or ‘offsetting’ in women’s encounters with cinema culture. Again and again in short stories, novels, criticism and serialisations, both cinemagoing characters and the creators of film fictions use cinema-going as a vehicle for working through a variety of pressures and conflicts in women’s interwar experience. The pleasures of popular culture are offset against the problematic and restrictive representations that this culture contained. Equally, the social and physical freedoms that cinemas as public leisure spaces offered women are offset against the ways in which cinema-going conversely regulated their movement, made their public presence spectacular and produced new pressures to conform to standardized modes of gendered, class-inflected and regional subjectivities. The afterword draws these ideas together, suggesting new directions in further research into interwar literary cultures of cinemagoing.
A Liminal Setting: The Location of Naṣīḥat al-mulūk
Authors: Marlow L.
Published: May 2018

This chapter situates Naṣīḥat al-mulūk’s first composition in the geographical-cultural context of the Samanid domains. It discusses late ninth- and tenth-century conditions in the regions of Transoxiana (location of the Samanid capital Bukhara), Khurasan and Tukharistan. On the basis of contextual factors, such as the establishment of Persian as a lingua franca and the region’s Buddhist heritage, and the cultural, linguistic and geographical indications contained in the text, the chapter argues for Naṣīḥat al-mulūk’s likely provenance in Tukharistan, and more specifically Balkh, close to the Oxus River. It also explores the (somewhat less likely) possibility of the mirror’s composition in Samarqand.
Intermediaries and Networks
Authors: Marlow L.
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores Pseudo-Māwardī’s treatments of groups beneath the level of kings and their immediate assistants. Offering translations of several passages of Naṣīḥat al-mulūk, the chapter traces Pseudo-Māwardī’s presentation of the khāṣṣa and the ʿāmma, respectively the individuals closest to him and the groups further removed from his person, largely coinciding with categories bound in personal service to the ruler, and categories whose support of the ruler was voluntary. The chapter reads Pseudo-Māwardī’s treatment of social categories, defined in economic and professional terms and including the land-owning dihqāns as well as office-holders, as descriptive of the Samanid amirs’ dependence on networks of intermediaries, who exercised power in local settings and whose co-operation was indispensable to the maintenance of Samanid rule. The chapter concludes with aspects of Naṣīḥat al-mulūk that reflect the multi-confessional society in which Pseudo-Māwardī lived.
The Religious Sensibility of Naṣīḥat al-mulūk
Authors: Marlow L.
Published: May 2018

The concluding chapter to this volume explores the evidence in Naṣīḥat al-mulūk for Pseudo-Māwardī’s religious-intellectual orientation. It discusses his emphasis on the themes of (1) ethical responsibility, expressed in part in observance of the divine law; (2) the indispensable nature of rationality in the pursuit of religious understanding; and (3) an austere way of living in the world, with an abiding sense of its transience and relativity. The chapter situates the mirror Naṣīḥat al-mulūk in the context of a milieu in which philo-ʿAlidism, the intellectual orientations of the Ḥanafiyya and the Muʿtazila, and practices of renunciation featured prominently.
At the Brink of Writing: Which Doors to Open First?
Authors: Keshavarz Fatemeh
Published: May 2018

The chapter opens with the author’s earliest encounter with Sa’di’s poetry developing into an academic project over time. The main topics include the city of Shiraz in Sa’di’s time, his decades of travel, and the diversity of his poetic legacy. The reception of his work in his own time, as well as in the modern times, is also discussed.
Epilogue: Leaving the Garden Already? Here Are a Few Things I Hope You Take Along
Authors: Keshavarz Fatemeh
Published: May 2018

This short chapter looks back at the process of writing the book and the issues that came up. An example is finding a way to explain the experience of love as an act rather than a passive state of being.
‘Refinement’ and ‘Vicious Luxury’: Hume’s Nuanced Defence of Luxury
Authors: Susato Ryu
Published: May 2018

This chapter deals with the issue of luxury, which is another crucial topic for Hume as an Enlightenment thinker. The Humean defence of luxury is significantly different from the ways in which Mandeville, Rousseau, and Adam Smith deal with the issue. The widening gap between reality and appearances is one of the characteristics of Augustinian thought that is often considered to be allied with Epicureanism in its understanding of civilised societies. However, Hume is unique in his complete silence on the issue of hypocrisy in refined societies. Hume’s Epicureanism is, therefore, characterised as one devoid of this Augustinian element. By combining both elements of Epicureanism and Shaftesburian Stoicism he attempts to demonstrate how to refine social intercourse through the enjoyment of luxury. This chapter also sheds some new light on an aspect of Hume’s thought that, so far, has been relatively neglected: his distinction between ‘innocent’ and ‘vicious’ forms of luxury, as well as his acknowledgement of the possibility of the emergence of the latter in the modern commercial world.
Human Society ‘in Perpetual Flux’: Hume’s Pendulum Theory of Civilisation
Authors: Susato Ryu
Published: May 2018

Hume’s avowed endorsement of a cyclical view of civilisation has been considered one of his most significant differences from the French philosophes’ upholding of ‘Progress’ and ‘Reason’. Some have used his divergent position to paint the image of Hume as the alleged forefather of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ thinkers. As a result, Hume’s endorsement of a cyclical view has not been considered compatible with his vindication of civilisation, causing a dilemma for commentators. Through close examinations of Hume’s texts and comparisons with those of his predecessors and contemporaries (such as William Temple, Fontenelle, and Turgot), this chapter makes it clear that Hume’s cyclical view of civilisation is not limited to the issue of fine arts, but extends to commerce and manufactures. Hume’s vindication of a cyclical view of human history is also closely related to his criticism of the notion of providence, which Josiah Tucker evokes for his defence of perpetual progress in the so-called ‘rich country-poor country debate’. Nevertheless, Hume’s support of a cyclical view of civilisation does not contradict, but rather buttresses, his robust commitment to the values of refinement, liberty, and humanity. Hume is peculiar in keeping a cool head with regards to the possibility of continued progress, while believing in and supporting modern values.
Introduction
Authors: Forsyth David , Ugolini Wendy
Published: May 2018

This introduction provides an overview of the phenomenon of military Scottishness in four key nations: Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, as well as the often neglected ‘near diaspora’ of England. It highlights the potency and successful export of Scottish martial identity since the latter half of the nineteenth century, they also explore how the outward expression of military Scottishness related to competing national and cultural identities within the new areas of settlement. It also illuminates the close ties between Scottish military identity and Scottish associational culture.
Performing Scottishness in England: Forming and Dressing the London Scottish Volunteer Rifles
Authors: Allan Stuart
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines expressions of Scottish difference through the dress and activities of ‘the London Scottish’, a volunteer corps established in 1859. It addresses its connections with the Caledonian Society of London and the Highland Society of London, a revival of links between Scottish associational culture and military volunteering established in London during the late Georgian era. The evolution of the peculiar grey highland uniform worn by the London Scottish from 1859 is traced as an accommodation between competing conceptions of what London-based Scots could offer a citizen army, between an ethos of modernity, camouflage and marksmanship filtered through the elite highland sporting interests of founding-figure Lord Elcho on the one hand, and the desire of the middle-class membership to perform a more traditional Scottish military role on the other.
South Africa and Scotland in the First World War
Authors: Hyslop Jonathan
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses the powerful and long-lasting impact Scottish military symbolism on the formation of military culture in South Africa. Drawing on the work of John MacKenzie and Jonathan Hyslop’s notion of ‘military Scottishness’, this chapter analyses how Scottish identity both interacted with the formation of political identities in South Africa, and ‘looped back’ to connect with changing forms of national identity in Scotland itself. In particular, it addresses how the South Africans’ heroic role at Delville Wood, during the Battle of the Somme, became a putative symbol of this racialised ‘South Africanism’. The South African Brigade included a battalion of so-called ‘South African Scottish’ which reflected the phenomenon of military Scottishness. Overall, the chapter looks at the way in which the representations of the role of the South African troops involved an interplay between British empire loyalism, white South African political identities, and Scottishness.
Geographies of Carnality: Slippery Sexuality in Wiktor Grodecki’s Gay Hustler Trilogy
Authors: Williams Bruce
Published: May 2018

In the years following the fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia, and the Velvet Divorce between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Polish-born director Wiktor Grodecki explored the world of teenage males in Prague’s burgeoning sex trade in a trilogy comprised of two documentaries and one feature. While Not Angels but Angels (1994) documents the underworld of young hustlers, Body without Soul (1996) focuses on under-aged boys in the porn industry. The feature film, Mandragora, combines the two themes. Grodecki ties these sexual dynamics to both the socio-economic dynamics of post-communism and the unique geographical positioning of the Czech Republic on the divide between East and West. All the while lying further west than Vienna, Prague is viewed by the international sex-trade clients as an exotic realm where there are less restrictions on sexual pleasure than in Western Europe.
Partying in The Great Gatsby: Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime
Authors: Vernallis Carol
Published: May 2018

The first party sequence in Baz Luhrmann’ s The Great Gatsby (2013) counts as one of the most opulent, densely articulated, and extravagant in film history. On its release critics noted its ‘frenetic beauty’, ‘orgasmic pitch’, and ‘Vincente Minnelli-style suavity with controlled vertigo’. Décor, costuming, sound, movement, and colour come to the fore because the sequence’s spatial layout can’t be determined until its end. The mélanged soundtrack itself refuses to grant the viewer a sense of ground. What distances might this musical sample brook? Who’s performing and who isn’t? To which period and community does this music speak? Why this snippet against that? Sounds’ sources and imagined spatial locations seem to cross and overlap with elaborate vectors. This analysis plumbs the ways nineteen aural and visual techniques pull the viewer affectively and proprioceptively in different directions, helping, with the aid of digital technologies, to construct an extravagant rhetoric appropriate for our unfortunate gilded age. Considering Gatsby provides a way to further understand audiovisual aesthetics, the newly emergent role of soundtracks, contemporary cinema, and our time.
Conclusion
Authors: Kennedy Philip F.
Published: May 2018

It is tempting to contrive a conclusion for a book on anagnorisis with a recognition scene: to declare, somehow, ‘this is what anagnorisis tells us, against expectation, or this is what it all turns out to be about.’ Such a conclusion would be possible if this study were exhaustive, but it is not....
The Politics of Form: The Golden Notebook and Women’s Radical Literary Tradition
Authors: Kennedy-Epstein Rowena
Published: May 2018

In A Proper Marriage (1954), Martha Quest wants to ‘break the nightmare of repetition’ that has shaped the twentieth century — the seemly unending cycle of patriarchy, nationalism, war, colonialism, and rigid political ideologies. In The
Golden Notebook (1962), Lessing enacts this disruption through an experimental crossing of genres, documenting, as if fulfilling Virginia Woolf’s wish in Professions for Women (1931), the ‘sexual lives of women’ in the context of collective histories. Through her combination of fiction, documentary material, political theory, and memoir, Lessing offers a nuanced reading of the connections between state violence, sexual hierarchies, and political crises. Using textual hybridity to resist closed formal and political structures that reinscribe authority, Lessing writes women as central narrators and subjects of twentieth-century politics and history, subverting the boundaries of gender and genre. However, Lessing’s radical textual and political project is not a singular one. This chapter considers new ways of reading Lessing’s text alongside works by Virginia Woolf, Muriel Rukeyser, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Arundhati Roy, and Claudia Rankine, arguing that the The Golden Notebook is not only better understood within these networks, but is pivotal for understanding the formal and political possibilities of hybridity in the hands of women writers.
Lessing and the Scale of Environmental Crisis
Authors: Sergeant David
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores how Doris Lessing’s fiction might provide an unusually strong vehicle for thinking through some of the questions of scale which have become important to theoretical responses to environmental crisis. It traces how a split response to the problem of scale - for instance, how to bridge the gap between individual and larger community - becomes evident in The Four-Gated City (1969), and shapes how Lessing’s fiction develops from this point. The chapter argues that the turn to a concept of storytelling late in Lessing’s career, in novels such as Mara and Dann: an adventure (1999), is a result of her grappling with scalar difference, and a symptom of her ultimate pessimism about the chances of humanity adequately meeting the challenges it poses.
French Philosophy Today
Authors: Watkin Christopher
Published: May 2018

After the humanism/anti-humanism debates of the 1940s and ’50s, and after the ‘death of man’ in the linguistic philosophy of the late twentieth-century, French philosophy today is laying fresh claim to the human. This is not to be mistaken for a return to previous ideas of the human, nor is it posthumanism, strictly speaking. It is a series of fundamentally independent and yet strikingly simultaneous initiatives arising in the writing of diverse French thinkers to transform and rework the figure of the human. This book brings together these new figures of the human for the first time, offering the a critique of this contemporary trend in terms of the three categories: the human as ‘capacity’ (Badiou and Meillassoux), as ‘substance’ (Malabou) and as ‘relation’ (Serres and Latour). Tracing these varied transformations of the human makes visible for the first time one of the most widespread, surprising and potentially transformative trends in contemporary French thought.
This book draws out both the promises and perils inherent in today’s attempts to rethink humanity’s relation to “nature” and “culture”, to the objects that surround us, to the possibility of social and political change, to ecology and to our own brains, arguing that the stakes of this project are high for our technologically advanced but socially atomised and ecologically vulnerable world.
Introduction
Authors: Watkin Christopher
Published: May 2018

French philosophy today is laying fresh claim to the human. This is not to be mistaken for an exercise in winding back the clock, nor is it a return to previous ideas of the human, much less a coordinated ‘human turn’. It is a series of fundamentally independent and yet strikingly simultaneous initiatives arising across the diverse landscape of French thought to transform and rework the figure of the human. Whereas the latter decades of the twentieth century adopted a decidedly critical and cautious approach to the question of ‘the human’, imprisoning it within the iron bars of scare quotes and burying it under caveats warning against its false universalism and dangerous totalitarianism, now we find ourselves entering a new moment of constructive transformation in which fresh and ambitious figures of the human are forged and discussed, and in which humanism itself is being reinvented and reclaimed in multiple ways. These new figures of the human take diverse and sometimes mutually antagonistic forms, but what unites them all is that they cannot be plotted on the spectrum running between twentieth-century humanism and antihumanism. Each in its own way rejects the assumptions that humanism and antihumanism share. By tracing these varied transformations of the human we can discern one of the most widespread, most surprising and potentially most transformative trends in contemporary French thought....
Michel Serres: Universal Humanism
Authors: Watkin Christopher
Published: May 2018

Michel Serres seeks to elaborate an account of the human that accommodates both determinate qualities (like Badiou and Meillassoux) and de-differentiation (like Malabou). His aim is to marry singularity and determinacy with genericity and plurality, yielding neither an undifferentiated and abstract notion of humanity nor a diversity of individuals with nothing in common. Humanity is best understood, for Serres, as part of the ‘Great Story’ (Grand Récit) of the universe, a story not only about, but also told by, the natural world. The combination of Serres’s Great Story and his introduction of the two figures of multi-coloured Harlequin and all-white Pierrot gives him a multi-modal account of humanity (capacities plus narrative), and this makes the figure of the human that emerges from his work richer, as well as more situated in its landscape and its history, than the one we find in the accounts considered in chapters 1-4. There is, however, a danger that Serres’s Great Story becomes a ‘host story’ for his account of the human, forcing all humans into a single narrative mould in the same way that a host capacity or a host substance routes all discourse about the human through one single characteristic or quality.
Bruno Latour: Translating the Human
Authors: Watkin Christopher
Published: May 2018

Chapter 6 considers the figure of the human that emerges in Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence and his ‘Facing Gaia’ lectures. Latour neither repeats nor discards previous notions of humanity but translates them in a gesture that can be traced all the way back to his doctoral work on the theologian of demythologisation Rudolf Bultmann. In his attempts to elaborate a figure of the human that follows neither the emancipation narrative nor the structure of modernity, Latour (like Serres) develops a multi-modal approach. The human is an amalgam of multiple modes of existence and cannot be isolated within any single mode. Latour also avoids the problems inherent in a host capacity approach by distributing both capacities and substance across human and nonhuman actors in unatomisable collectivities. Whereas the host capacity and host substance approaches seek to understand the human by looking within, Latour insists that the human only becomes comprehensible when we look outside and around. His 2013 Gifford Lectures both develop and challenge themes from the Modes of Existence project, reasserting the centrality of the human now in terms of a non-modern anthropos defined by its limits and its multiple attachments to the world.
Good governance in MENA countries
Authors: Ojeda Raquel , Cavatorta Francesco
Published: May 2018

This chapter analyses the state of good governance following the main indicators elaborated by the World Bank in the MENA region. International institutions have been criticised for having unrealistic or unreliable criteria in relation to good governance; however this chapter argues that they do sufficiently represent what good governance should be about and in what kind of environment it should occur.
The contention here is that the lack of good governance in the MENA region is not a story of poor achievement related to criteria or adaptability, but a much broader failure of international institutional policies in the developing world, but at the same time, local MENA political actors greatly contributed to such failure.
There are a number of factors that explain the failure of good governance policies in the Middle East and North Africa and they are related to both structural weaknesses in the way in which they were thought out – erroneous theoretical assumptions – and to contingent issues related to their implementation on the ground.
Finally, various studies on the state of governance and its indicators over the last decade, including the Arab Spring period, have demonstrated that the political, economic and social situation is no better than before the uprisings.
Public rights and liberties
Authors: Melián Luis
Published: May 2018

A key issue in the study of political change is the situation and development of rights and freedoms. Specifically, this chapter studies the impact that the eruption of the Arab Spring has had on these liberties. In order to meet this objective it analyses primary sources, legal reforms and frameworks, and databases and research reports. The question this chapter addresses is whether political changes in the MENA region reflect deepening liberalisation processes through de iure modifications of the civil liberties legislative framework; and the extent to which these changes have had a de facto impact on regimes. In sum, it assesses whether these changes have been sufficient to represent an advance or regression in the democratic character of the region's political regimes. After the analysis, it can be concluded that the situation of civil liberties in the region is either precarious or alarming in the majority of the MENA countries. Furthermore, with the exception of Tunisia, the Arab Spring has not led to a substantive improvement despite the reformist ambition of some countries, and has even led to a significant deterioration in various cases.
Successful and failed transitions to democracy
Authors: Szmolka Inmaculada
Published: May 2018

This chapter studies the democratic transitions following the fall of the authoritarian rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. The chapter shows that the only successful democratisation occurred in Tunisia thanks to agreements between political actors, concessions from a dominant party and a strong and participative civil society. On the contrary, despite the Egyptian transition taking place in a similar scenario of polarisation between Islamist and secular parties as in Tunisia, Egyptian transition failed because of a lack of agreement between political forces, an exclusionary process led by the Islamists, and the interference of the army in political affairs.
Democratic transition also failed in Libya, due to the lack of prior institutional architecture and of experience of party participation and political groups.
Finally, the model of democratic transition that was carried out in Yemen was favourable to the achievement of democracy. It sought a broad social and political consensus for the new state before holding elections and approving a constitution, and had the involvement of the international community in the design and implementation of the transitional road map. However, empowerment of old regime elites in the transition process, the exclusion of revolutionary movements, the lack of consensus to satisfy the demands of the independence movement in the south, and antagonism between political forces and their regional backers have doomed the democratic transition to failure.