bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Fatal Absences and Female Gazes: Alternative Femininities in Greek Film Noir and the Psychological Thriller
Authors: Poupou Anna
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses the female representations the sociohistorical context of the Greek late 1950s and 1960s cinema, taking also into consideration the reception of US and French films noirs in Greece. The chapter examines not only the figure of the femme fatale, but also a wide the range of interesting female characters that can be found in the Greek film noir. As recent academic work on film noir has shown, such as that by Sheri Chinen Biesen (2005) and Helen Hanson (2007), that continue Steve Neale’s argument (2000), the femme fatale is not an exclusivity of the film noir genre, but it can be equally found in melodramas and other genres contemporary to film noir. The main argument of this study is that women that represent power, enigma, menace and sexual aura are not the main focus of Greek film noir of the classic period. The chapter focusses on on the issue of the female gaze, as it appears in the film O anthropos tou trenou/Man on the Train (Dimopoulos, 1958) and addresses the issue of participation of female professionals in the production of Greek films, and its impact on the construction of female film characters.
Darker Worlds Come in Small Packages: Neo-Noir Sensibility in Greek Cypriot Short Films
Authors: Constandinides Costas
Published: September 2023

This chapter places four live action fiction shorts at the center of Greek-Cypriot cinema’s treatment of neo-noir qualities. The author argues that the themes and imagery of these shorts offer an alternative to the dominant paradigm of Cypriot cinemas, which often focuses on the traumatic past and the ongoing division of Cyprus. Thus, the chapter examines how the ominous portrayal of landscapes and characters in these shorts challenges conventional lens-based representations of Cyprus, and at the same time offers a social commentary on feelings of alienation and loss characterizing a society in a state of uncertainty. Moreover, the author argues that these films display a substantial level of innovation as they explore the stylistic repertoire of a genre-oriented cinema as opposed to the political aspirations associated with the so-called cinema of the Cyprus Problem. The chapter also hopes to contribute to the growth of the study of short films, which currently receives little scholarly attention.
Mediterranean Film Noir: Twilight Falls on mare nostrum
Authors: Broe Dennis
Published: September 2023

Dennis Broe puts Greek (neo-)noir on the European, Mediterranean and international maps, offering a class-oriented historical perspective and retrospective, a valuable unifying narrative that includes various seminal instances of a vibrant style that is read here as a reaction to, and a critique of, various forms of capitalist exploitation, institutional repression and sociopolitical corruption. Broe argues that ‘Greek film noir, in line with its Mediterranean cousins, employs the dark style not only to describe generalised modes of power in the region but […] also to chart the inner feelings and emotions engendered by the specific moment of the debt crisis. In doing so, this variant of a globalised and regionalised form connects to an originary moment in classic noir both in the US and across the world of a frontal attack on workers and equality.’
Bright (1946–9)
Authors: Shingler Martin
Published: September 2023

The main focus of this chapter is on how Diana Dors acquired a distinctive screen persona as a ‘Glamour Girl’, while adopting a number of trademark mannerisms during the late 1940s. This includes a versatile acting technique comprised of posing, exuberant movement and the deployment of small naturalistic yet eye-catching actions. The chapter includes analysis of Dors’ acting in three very different films – Oliver Twist (Lean 1948), Here Come the Huggetts (Annakin 1948) and Dance Hall (Crichton 1950).
Perfect when poised in Steaming (1985)
Authors: Shingler Martin
Published: September 2023

When cast in a pivotal role in Joseph Losey’s film version of Nell Dunn’s award-winning feminist play Steaming, Diana Dors produced a performance that involved glamour and gravitas in equal measure. For her role as the manager of a London bathhouse threatened with closure, she utilized her famous star image, her trademark gestures and understated naturalism, along with a great deal of poise. From the opening to the closing shots, she quietly wove her way through this film, helping to unite a heterogeneous group of women played by very different kinds of actress, including her co-stars Vanessa Redgrave and Sarah Miles. This chapter explores how Dors was able to utilise her glamorous star image, reveal her strengths as an actor and draw directly on a lifetime’s experience as a woman for her curiously central yet peripheral role.
Allegory and Ascent
Authors: O’Malley Austin
Published: September 2023

The Mosibat-nama is ʿAttar’s longest poem and rife with allegorical mappings. Its frame-tale features a spiritual wayfarer, wracked by existential pain, who visits forty beings from all levels of creation seeking spiritual relief. By drawing on key passages in the Mosibat-nama in conjunction with Avicennian psychology, theories of dream interpretation and normative accounts of sufi praxis, O’Malley reconstructs the mystical, Neoplatonic ontological framework under which ʿAttar was operating, and according to which the reading of allegory was not only a hermeneutic act, but itself a process of ascent – a movement from lower sensible forms to the higher divine realm. The poem is thus offered to the reader as a simulated visionary experience, through which they can not only observe the wayfarer from a distance, but also accompany him on his journey, synecdochically performing the sufi path in miniature.
Film, Hot War Traces and Cold War Spaces
Authors: Cinquegrani Maurizio
Published: September 2023

Film, Hot War Traces and Cold War Spaces investigates the physical locations of eight historical events of the twentieth century and their representation in film through a spatial framework of analysis. The book uses a comparative approach including fiction films, documentaries, amateur and archival footage of events ranging from the First World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall. With a focus on the relationship between history and memory, Film, Hot War Traces and Cold War Spaces reflects upon the impact of past events on present landscapes and articulates geographical connections between its main case studies. Ultimately, the focus of this book is on the aftermath of traumatic events and on the ways in which film can capture the locations of historical incidents at the time of their happening or moments, days, weeks, months, and years afterwards. In order to do so the book draws upon primary sources including: amateur footage of Hiroshima in the 1930s with the building which would later become the Atom Bomb Dome in its heyday, newsreels of the Italian trenches in the First World War and of the battles of the Spanish Civil War, of anti-German propaganda in Latin America and of the atrocities in Eastern Poland during the Second World War, television reports of the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Munich Massacre and the kidnapping of Aldo Moro
Latin Bridge, Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary, 28 June 1914, 11:00 a.m.
Authors: Cinquegrani Maurizio
Published: September 2023

Chapter One opens with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie at the hands of Slavic nationalist Gavrilo Princip on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo. The event which started the Age of Catastrophe is used to introduce one of the battlefields of the First World War, the front at the border between Austria-Hungary and Italy. This chapter investigates the ways in which the northeast of Italy during the war has been captured in a diverse range of films serving different purposes in the different historical contexts of their making. In particular, it focuses on how the same locations were used for patriotic and nationalist narratives during the war and the years of the fascist regime and how the implied values of the films made at that time later gave way to dramas with pacifist and antimilitarist messages. The chapter reflects on the ways in which the sites of battles between Austria-Hungary and Italy saw history repeating itself and considers how filmic space can reveal scars and traces of war.
Hiroshima, Chūgoku Region, Japan, 6 August 1945, 8:15 a.m.
Authors: Cinquegrani Maurizio
Published: September 2023

Chapter Four opens with the moment when Paul Tibbets dropped the atomic bomb codenamed Little Boy on city of Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August 1945 and focuses on the site of a domed building which was located below the hypocentre of the detonation of the bomb. The Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall was largely destroyed by the atomic blast, its ruins eventually preserved and used to memorialise the bombing under the name of Atomic Bomb Dome. The role of this building in the urban fabric of Hiroshima is explored through film in relation to its significance and its altered role from a symbol of Hiroshima’s civic pride and Japan’s imperialism to a monumentalised site of memory of the atomic bombing and an emblem of pacifism. This chapter investigates the image of the building in amateur films made in the 1930s, in newsreels made after the bombing, and in live-action and animated dramas set in Hiroshima in the aftermath of the attack.
Seminar from November 10, 1982
Authors: Castoriadis Cornelius , Vidal-Naquet Pierre
Published: September 2023

This chapter raises the general question of why the Greek world should matter to us and summarizes the philosophical and methodological themes of the forthcoming seminars. Castoriadis emphasizes the importance of examining ancient institutions, historians, and poets (and not primarily or only philosophers) as part of the examination of Greek political and social thought. He interrogates the puzzle of how we are able to understand and assess other forms of social life and argues that not every culture offers the possibility of judging and choosing in the profound sense of those terms. He closes by comparing and contrasting the institution of society, the work of art, and the work of thinking.
Seminar from February 2, 1983
Authors: Castoriadis Cornelius , Vidal-Naquet Pierre
Published: September 2023

The transcript for this seminar has unfortunately been lost (see the Editors’ Introduction).
Seminar from February 23, 1983
Authors: Castoriadis Cornelius , Vidal-Naquet Pierre
Published: September 2023

In this chapter, Castoriadis links broader philosophical observations to the analysis of early Greek philosophers. Anaximander, he argues, reveals a division found constantly in the heart of philosophy between, first, the indefinite qualifications beings may exhibit and, second, a rigid necessity connected to the concept of chreōn. Castoriadis connects the latter to his own notion of ensemblist-identitarian logic and argues that thinking can transcend such rigid determinacy. Following a discussion of the Greeks’ search for a minimal element accounting for the maximum of observables, Castoriadis praises the abstraction achieved by Anaximander for how it allows thinking to make itself into an intrinsic interest and how it correlates the notion of truth with unlimited interrogation. Castoriadis then traces this theme through Xenophanes, with his critique of instituted representations, as well as through Heraclitus’s corpus. Dividing the latter’s fragments into critical and positive themes, he argues that, for Heraclitus, appearing and being are not separated, and everyone equally participates in the logos (a theme which pulls against the typical elitist interpretation). In question-and-answer, Castoriadis addresses problems of language and philosophy, comments further on chreōn and creativity, and argues that there is non-univocity at the foundation of all instituted univocity of being.
National Films, Transnational Monsters
Authors: Rawle Steven
Published: September 2023

This chapter looks at kaijū movies’ origins, and how Gojira (Honda, 1954) established the template for the form moving forward. Discussion examines the roots of the kaijū film and its relationship with the Japanese national imaginary. In so doing, it examines how the makers of Gojira adapted films that largely originated in America, the roots of the genre in special effects supervisor Tsuburaya Eiji’s appreciation of King Kong. Without diminishing the Japaneseness of kaijū, the chapter looks back at some of the films that influenced Honda and associates and the ways in which national films can emerge from transnational origins.Transnational genres can draw significantly upon national figures whilst simultaneously emphasising global cultural flows and their impact on conceptions of national cinema.
Exchanging Monsters: Korean Kaijū
Authors: Rawle Steven
Published: September 2023

This chapter looks at the regional spread of kaijū films by focusing on a case study of Korean monster movies. Korean–Japanese relations have been defined by the latter’s occupation of the Korean peninsula. As such, the production of South Korean variants became a means through which South Korean filmmakers could appropriate material for a popular family film form, even though Japanese culture was banned. The chapter looks at how kaijū movies by South Korean filmmakers, albeit produced sporadically, emphasise aspects of transnational mobility for cultural products and personnel who travelled to work on them. Furthermore, the chapter examines how the kaijū film continued to be a means of exploring cross-border politics and connections as transnational relationships developed across the twentieth century.
Animating a Formula: Disney, Genre and Hollywood Animation
Authors: Benhamou Eve
Published: September 2023

This chapter investigates the transitional phase, at times tumultuous and experimental, of Disney’s history, from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s. It examines how profound industrial changes, both within Disney and in the wider mainstream animation landscape, impacted the studio’s animated output, and most specifically its generic identity and associated formula. Analysing this period provides key context to subsequently address the focus of the book, namely the animated films released from 2008 onwards. The mid-1990s and 2000s exemplify Disney’s continuous efforts to reinvent itself, yet are unique in the company’s history: the studio was being increasingly sidelined within the unprecedently saturated market of mainstream animation. The arrival of Pixar and DreamWorks notably altered Disney: during this period, the studio adopted different approaches towards its own canon, ultimately leading to the double impulse analysed in the rest of the book: self-reflexive parody and nostalgic celebration, generic revision and expansion.
The fashion of east and west in German cinema newsreels (1950–65)
Authors: Lehnert Sigrun
Published: September 2023

Before television was established, newsreels conveyed cultural ideas to a wide audience through moving images in the interludes of cinema’s programming. Whereas in West Germany several newsreels existed, in East Germany only Der Augenzeuge was produced by the state-controlled production company DEFA. These newsreels are characterised by the compilation of various reports and by a montage of cinematic elements. This chapter outlines the topical and aesthetical variety of fashion reports between East and West Germany in terms of image selection, montage, underscored music, as well as the presentation of different kinds of fashion pieces, such as casual, every-day, evening wear, hats and shoes, women’s and men’s fashion. Lehnert ultimately provides an answer to the following questions: how do the newsreels differ, and what was shown about Western fashion designers in contrast to the state-controlled fashion production in East Germany? Drawing on a neo-formalist approach, the chapter investigates aspects of post-war Germany’s social history, in particular representation of gender, and consumer culture.
Documenting fashion in the era of Instagram: a critical reading of Asri Bendacha’s Follow Me and Chiara Ferragni’s Unposted
Authors: Pedroni Marco
Published: September 2023

Marco Pedroni examines the role of influencers through a comparative and critical analysis of two fashion documentaries: Chiara Ferragni’s Unposted (2019) and Asri Bendacha’s Follow Me(2017). Ferragni, a leading actor in the fashion and marketing industry is presented along with Bendacha, a film-maker external to the fashion world. The aims of the documentaries might differ with Ferragni’s will of self-consecration as a pop icon, and Bendacha, instead, semi-ironically unveiling the commodification of digital personae. But both address the commercialisation of the self and the audiences; the monetisation of everyday practices displayed via social media; female empowerment; digital entrepreneurship; the democratisation of access to the fashion world and the commodification of authenticity. These topics, Pedroni argues, become evidence of the power of digital influencers to shape, directly or indirectly, the evolution of contemporary fashion imaginary.
Relocating Bollywood: Gully Boy and the Worlds of Hip-hop
Authors: Gopal Sangita
Published: September 2023

From Luck by Chance through Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara to Dil Dhadakne Do, Zoya Akhtar has been meditating on what happens to a popular cinema when its address (and audience) shifts from the ‘masses to the classes’, and her approach until Gully Boy has been to anatomise through satire and humour Bollywood’s aspirational aesthetic and consumerist drives. Having lost its place as the demotic medium par excellence, Bollywood in the last three decades has been engaged in a radical process of reorganisation at narrative, stylistic and industrial scales, and Gully Boy processes these changes, marking a new and less self-reflexive turn in Akhtar’s filmography. Focusing on the film’s staging of hip-hop as an autonomous entertainment order not only through the narrative staging of rap battles and other moments of ‘musicking’, but also through its elaboration of a world of music that does not originate in or get absorbed by the cinema but rather is the object of its representation, I will show how with Gully Boy, Akhtar demonstrates that the subject of Bollywood cinema is no longer itself.
Sabka Time Aayega : Language and the City in Gully Boy
Authors: Sharma Kamayani
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy (2019) to examine the urban geography of Mumbai and its relationship to language, particularly poetry. The contemporary Indian metropolis is articulated through the neoliberal logic of global capital that excludes its most vulnerable occupants, who then must develop vernacular forms of expression that can both record and resist their socio-political disenfranchisement, while also celebrating the city’s emancipatory facets. Gully Boy captures this tension between the city and its citizens within the framework of popular cinema, with all its ideological limitations and conservatism, at once positing the possibility of a radical politics but necessarily effacing it in favour of industrial cinema’s appropriation of subaltern angst. In doing so, it discharges the role of popular cinema as a site for public fantasies and anxieties to play out. This is examined through two aspects of Akhtar’s film: the figure of the subaltern hero-as-poet and his navigation of the urbanscape of Mumbai.
Self-made vs Self-respect: The Politics of Belonging in Zoya Akhtar’s Films
Authors: Kumar Vijeta
Published: September 2023

In this chapter I will examine how Akhtar puts men and women through both similar and dissimilar challenges to ‘make’ themselves. In her portrayal of men, Akhtar shows that even though men in society are granted a certain gendered power, other social factors impact that power and lead to different journeys of self-realisation. Following this line of argument, the first section explores the father–son relationships in Akhtar’s work and observes how they are bound by caste and class realities to the ideas that the fathers in these films pass on to their sons about success and being self-made. The second section focuses on Akhtar’s female characters who stand at the periphery because of gender but are motivated by a desire to belong and explores how her approach to women separates her work from the range of ‘women-centric’ films that Bollywood produces. Though these struggles may be dissimilar at the surface level, Akhtar shows how both men and women, even if they seem to belong, must actually go through their own journeys in their fight to belong.
The Monotheisation of Pontic-Caspian Eurasia
Authors: Feldman Alex M.
Published: September 2023

The stories of medieval conversions have been told many times and frequently focus on the story of the individual ruler’s conversion; the process is usually set in Europe and couched in terms of Christianisation. Yet similar processes occurred further east, as dynasties such as the Sāmānids or Almušids chose Islam in central Asia, or the Khazar Āšīnà dynasty chose Judaism. Each dynast had his reasons of political expediency for making his choice which was later mythologised. For all of these dynasties, however, the process of adopting one brand of monotheism of another involved widespread constitutional change, which sealed the security, legitimacy and wealth of the ruling dynasty in perpetuity. Focusing on Pontic-Caspian Eurasia during the eighth to thirteenth centuries, this book explores the growth, development and consequences of monotheism. It compares the bottom-up and top-down conversions of the Khazars, Volga Bulgars, Magyars and Rus’ (and the refusal of monotheism by the Pečenegs and Cuman-Qıpčaqs), demonstrating that these were rarely individual affairs, but usually collective, generations-long processes of domination and resistance. Rejecting the arbitrary (and Western-centric) distinctions between the Late Antique and Medieval periods, the book demystifies understandings of ethnogenesis and state-formation across Central-Eastern Europe and Western Eurasia and reveals how what we today call the ‘Migration Age’ continued up to the Mongolian invasions and perhaps beyond.
Presidents and Midterm Loss
Authors: Rudalevige Andrew
Published: September 2023

This chapter offers an analysis, within both historical and institutional context, not only of the reasons for the ‘iron law of midterm loss’ for the president’s party but also of the implications of this loss for the final years of a presidential term. It does so in particular through an investigation of the 2018 elections, when Republicans experienced significant losses, especially in the House. Whereas economic factors, often understood as key in explaining electoral outcomes, were fairly positive, approval of Donald Trump was weak, and turnout among anti-Trump voters was relatively high; Trump himself stressed issues, such as immigration and the Supreme Court, where his popularity was low. The results confirmed a trend towards an increasing correlation between presidential evaluations and generic party identification, with evaluations of the president important in shaping midterm outcomes. The losses were significant for the Trump administration, which resorted increasingly to executive orders and regulations that did not need legislative enactment, while the focus of Democrats switched to oversight of the president. The chapter looks ahead to the 2022 elections as a likely measure of the new trends in midterm elections, also noting the significance of institutional factors such as redistricting.
Accountability Regimes, Partisanship and Midterm Mandates: Midterms in Contemporary America
Authors: Hilliard Nadia
Published: September 2023

Elections are the most fundamental form of political accountability, and midterm elections provide an opportunity for citizens to participate in a single moment of collective accountability for the president. Yet midterm elections represent not only a judgment on the past performance of the president and his party. They also provide an opportunity to put in place a sub-federal accountability regime that oversees the president’s actions – a regime comprised of governors, state attorneys general, and mayors. It is this regime, reaching from city halls to the Capitol building, that carries with it a ‘midterm mandate’ to redirect the president’s agenda. By reinterpreting, refusing to implement, or directly challenging federal policy, these actors – often elected in midterm election cycles – complement Congress’s oversight function of the president. This chapter surveys the growing importance of midterm elections as an opportunity to instate a cohort of actors across federal levels that supply new sources of executive oversight. It considers governors, attorneys general, and mayors as political actors of increasing salience, and documents recent changes in midterm campaign strategy and donations that reflect this growth. Ultimately, the mandates earned by this regime of sub-national actors are transforming the significance of midterms on the national level.
Swing Time: The New Deal Midterms of 1934 and 1938
Authors: Morgan Iwan
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the importance of the midterm elections of 1934 and 1938 for the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the consolidation of the Democrats’ status as the new majority party, and the political success of New Deal liberalism. Sweeping Democratic gains in 1934 in defiance of historic trends that a president's party lost seats at midterm laid the foundations for FDR's second hundred days burst of reform in 1935. In 1938, conversely, Republican gains at the expense of liberal Democratic legislators and the corollary enhancement of conservative Democratic influence in the congressional party's ranks, boosted by the failure of FDR's attempted purge of three Southern senators, halted the legislative momentum of the New Deal. Nevertheless, this outcome influenced Roosevelt's decision to seek an unprecedented third term in 1940 in order to guarantee a liberal succession in the presidential wing of his party.
The Domestic Politics of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 1942 Midterm Elections
Authors: Johnstone Andrew
Published: September 2023

At first glance, the 1942 midterm election results seem unsurprising as they saw defeats for the party of the president. However, the context of the 1942 midterms was anything but normal, and the elections were defined by their wartime context. The Democratic defeats were the result of a combination of reasons relating to the war, including Franklin Roosevelt’s limited political interaction with the campaign, the low turnout, and dissatisfaction with the war both at home and abroad. While the results were a Democratic disappointment, they were not inevitable and were deeply affected by the specific nature of the war and the home front at the very beginning of November 1942. Had the elections come a few months earlier, or a few days later, the results could have been very different.
The Favourite Son’s Favourites: Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Home-State Effect in the 1982 Midterm Elections
Authors: Johnson Richard
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores whether a president’s home state is less punishing to the president’s party in midterm elections. Nearly every newly elected president in the post-war era increased the popular vote in his home state, often to a greater extent than the shift to his party in the national popular vote. This chapter finds that this effect holds into midterm elections, with presidents often losing relatively less share of the vote in their home states. Using the case study of California in the 1982 midterm elections, the chapter uncovers some of the reasons for the phenomenon. President Ronald Reagan, former California governor, appeared with reasonable frequency on the campaign trail. All four top-tier statewide candidates – Republicans and Democrats – attempted to cleave to President Ronald Reagan’s positive reputation in California. This chapter finds that a ‘favourite-son’ president can provide other resources, especially fundraising prowess, in expensive home state contests. Presidents can sprinkle ‘star dust’ on their state’s electorate, but they cannot cause voters to overlook important background factors, such as the condition of the economy, entirely.
The 1986 Midterms: The End of the Reagan Revolution?
Authors: Ryan-Hume Joe
Published: September 2023

As the sun set on November 4, 1986, retiring House Speaker Thomas O'Neill gleefully declared to the press that the midterm election results had produced one clear message: ‘If there was a Reagan Revolution, it’s over.’ Certainly, President Reagan had framed the 1986 midterms as an ideological contest, yet heavy Republican losses that day handed the Senate back to the Democrats, with a majority of 55-45. By detailing the story of grassroots organising behind these midterm elections, this chapter reveals how liberals developed sophisticated mobilisation strategies to energise key demographic groups, particularly women and minorities, to turnout in increased numbers on election day. It highlights how, in an era of supposed conservative ascendancy, these liberal voters provided the winning margins in enough contests to hand the Democrats the keys to Capitol Hill, and with far-reaching consequences for Reagan’s mandate. In doing so, this chapter explores the 1986 midterms as part of a wider reassessment of the Reagan years that challenges the predominant historiographical view of this period as one of liberal decline and conservative triumph.
The Reader's Joyce
Authors: Corser Sophie
Published: September 2023

The Reader’s Joyce engages with core issues of literary studies by rethinking accepted literary, critical, and theoretical notions of the relationships between author, reader, and text. This monograph describes and queries the activity of reading prompted by the intertextuality and narrative of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), focusing on in-depth readings of the novel and its interactions with other texts from classical and contemporary literature to criticism, theory, and biography. The Reader’s Joyce presents an innovative approach to issues of reading by marrying new, close textual analysis of Ulysses with critical and literary reception studies. Central to this approach are new analyses of the now commonly underplayed significance of Homer’s Odyssey to Ulysses, and of how authority functions in the developing critical reception of Ulysses since its publication. Through the prisms of Ulysses and ‘the Joyce industry’ this monograph provides new perspectives on the author-reader-text triad in the wider field of literary criticism: diving into layered histories of concepts, challenges, and retreats in order to ask how we read now.
Introduction: Against Joyce
Authors: Corser Sophie
Published: September 2023

This introduction opens the monograph with a discussion of reading and not reading Joyce: how famously unread Ulysses is; how this involves a certain reading of ‘Joyce’ and of ‘Ulysses’; and how these readings sit alongside the booming industry of Joycean tourism and a calendar of conferences, symposia, workshops. The remainder of the introduction sets up the scope and key terms of The Reader’s Joyce and its position in critical and theoretical debates, outlining and differentiating the monograph’s argument for a return of focus to the activity of reading and authority of the reader. The introduction closes by suggesting a mode of writing ‘against Joyce’ (resisting, preparing for, leaning on, supported by).
The Homeric Question
Authors: Corser Sophie
Published: September 2023

This chapter is an analysis of how the Odyssey is rewritten in the sixteenth episode of Ulysses, ‘Eumaeus’, and how this is relevant to questions of authorship. Arguing that the episode’s narrative plays with not only the Odyssey but with Homeric scholarship, this chapter unravels how the ways in which we read ‘Eumaeus’ form a further rewriting: namely a repetition of the authorially seeking, never-answered Homeric Question. This investigation takes in ideas of orality, classical scholarship by F. A. Wolf and others, the pseudo-academia of Samuel Butler, and contemporary short stories by Zachary Mason, while developing a close reading of ‘Eumaeus’ (particularly the use of ‘sic’) to discuss a hitherto overlooked aspect of Ulysses’ relationship with its Homeric precursor. Finding Samuel Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey and its response to Homeric scholarship between ‘Eumaeus’ and the Odyssey exposes ways in which the episode plays with oral and written performances of narrative and of authorship.
‘Victory to the critic’? The Critics and Joyce, 1970 to Today
Authors: Corser Sophie
Published: September 2023

This chapter takes a broad look at Joycean criticism from the 1970s to the present, focusing on the boom of ‘the Joyce industry’, the belated impact of literary theory, and the field’s current proclivities. The chapter pays particular attention to the mixed reaction of the discipline to poststructuralism and deconstruction, but also to a more general idea of ‘theory’ as yet another provocation for Joyce studies to pay attention to its own activity and method. It also addresses how later Joycean criticism has understood the relationships between author, reader, and text – and offers an account of how Joyce studies has turned away from such topics. This chapter tracks how the author has been perceived, invoked, promoted, and constructed as a source of authority in Joyce studies, and examines if and how alternatives have been explored. This discussion ranges from the chatter of conferences to canonical critical publications, asking what the trends and tendencies of the field of Joyce studies can tell us about how and where critics situate authority.
‘Champion Mixed Metaphors’: Graduating to The Dial and Poetry
Authors: Bratton Francesca
Published: September 2023

Chapter Three advances a theory of creative-critical editing work, relating to Moore’s editing of Crane at The Dial and Monroe’s framing of his work at Poetry. I bring to light two pseudonymous reviews by Crane in The Dial. Here I foreground how the Decadent ‘aura’ of Greenwich Village affected his uneasy reception at The Dial and Poetry in the mid-1920s. Crane’s restrained early submissions to The Dial and the wide acclaim of ‘My Grandmother’s Love Letters’ as his first supposedly mature poem are considered, a brief entente which is lost as Crane’s more recognisable style of associative, juxtaposed metaphor was met with consistent rejections. Crane’s difficult relationship with The Dial is encapsulated in Moore’s notorious and dramatic edit of ‘The Wine Menagerie’, which undercut Crane’s ‘logic of metaphor’ in a fundamental misapprehension of the workings of his poetry. Reading Moore’s edit alongside Monroe’s ‘A Discussion with Hart Crane’, I suggest that such interventions established a critical language for discussing Crane’s poetry. Crane’s own letter of defence is reclaimed as a vital deflection of Moore’s and Monroe’s critiques, noting his suggestion that Monroe’s appraisal of his poetry is rooted in a simple category mistake (that logic is not the concern of metaphor).
‘A Scattered Chapter’: Publishing The Bridge
Authors: Bratton Francesca
Published: September 2023

In Chapter Four I explore the periodical contexts of The Bridge. This is the first sustained and critical examination of the complicated genesis and publication of Crane’s long poem. Here I show that he deliberately split the poem into fragments published across seven different journals on both sides of the Atlantic. The form of The Bridge is seen as a fertile exchange with Crane’s various periodical cultures, an experiment with the literary fragment and processes of reassembly. Crane’s publishing practices, I argue, constitute an aesthetic programme for The Bridge: the poem finds its form through dissemination and reconstitution via little magazines. Its rejection of linear, narrative progressive structure in favour of a collaged, Cubist repetition of fragmentary images and rhythms is contextualized not only in terms of its dissemination in multiple periodicals, but Crane’s longstanding interest in collage and fragment forms. The status of The Bridge as an incoherent, if grand failure is excavated as a critical truism propagated in magazines (such as Poetry) by critics Allen Tate and Yvor Winters, and highly influential on subsequent criticism of the poem.
‘They’re going to let us die’: trust in found footage horror
Authors: McMurdo Shellie
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the theme of trust in in a post-9/11 world within found footage horror cinema. Quarantine (John Erick Dowdle, 2008) features as the case study film for this chapter, and attention is drawn to the visual and narrative connections that can be made between this film and the historically significant documentary artefact that is 9/11 (Naudet, Naudet, and Hanlon, 2002). This chapter approaches Quarantine as a remake that reculturalises the Spanish specificity of the original film Rec (Balaguero and Plaza, 2007) and how emphasis on various elements, such as the image of the heroic firefighter, may have resonated in a post-9/11 American context. This chapter introduces the concept of ‘inadvertent witnessing’ within the subgenre, where the camera operator captures extraordinary events by accident or chance rather than by design and discusses the role of editing and crisis censorship within Quarantine and 9/11, before moving to situate the camera as a tool both metaphorical and literal within found footage horror cinema.
Poems in Praise of the Prophet ( MADĪḤ ) as a Citizen of the Literary World
Authors: Ghali Walid
Published: September 2023

Poems in praise of the Prophet (al-madāʾiḥ al-nabawīyya) is an important literary genre in Muslim cultures. One of the significant examples of this genre is a poem known as al-Burda written by al-Būṣīrī's (d. 1249). In addition to being the most popular piece, al-Burda has also received much scholarly attention, but remains understudied in the discussions of World Literature. Therefore, this chapter aims to shed light on the significance of madīḥ as a literary genre on one hand and its contributions to Muslim cultures on another. It also argues that madīḥ holds its character as part of World Literature. The chapter therefore questions why it is not considered in the corpus of World Literature.
Friedrich RÜckert (1788–1866) and his Poetic Translation of the QurʾĀn
Authors: Tamer Georges , Yıldırım Cüneyd
Published: September 2023

Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866) was a prolific German poet who was at the same time a scholar of Oriental philology. He was part of an orientalising tendency within German Romanticism, which even the famous Goethe, by writing his West-Eastern Divan, strongly promoted. Rückert’s treatment of Islam and the so-called Orient is multifaceted. He wrote original pseudo-orientalist German poetry like Die Weisheit des Brahmanen (Wisdom of the Brahmin), as well as translations of ancient Arabic poetry and rhymed prose, such as Abū Tammām’s Diwān al-Ḥamāsa and al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt. Furthermore, he translated major parts of the Qurʾān quite accurately into German rhymed prose, imitating the original Arabic verses in length and structure. Pointing at the context of this literary as well as scholarly work will reveal that the oeuvre of Rückert was embedded in the German cultural project of creating World Literature.
A Fine Romance: Translating the Qissah As World Romance
Authors: Khan Pasha M.
Published: September 2023

From the 17th to the 19th centuries, French and British Orientalists such as Claude Saumaise, Pierre Huet, Richard Hole, Stephen Lewis, Duncan Forbes, and W.J. Clouston created a genre on the basis of the Western European romance. This genre, conceived as worldwide, encompassed such as the qissah, hikāyat, dāstān, kathā, etc., which were construed as "Oriental romances." The Orient was thus understood as the ancient source of the genre, and consigned to an unchanging antiquity. This essay lays bare the chrono-Orientalism that made possible the concept of the world romance, with special emphasis on the contrarian role of the 18th-century thinker Clara Reeve. It offers some tentative ideas regarding both the "world" and the "literature" in "world literatures" regarded as Islamic.
Indonesia’s Sastera Profetik As Decolonial Literary Theory
Authors: Bahrawi Nazry
Published: September 2023

While proponents of world literature have lobbied for greater engagement with non-Western texts, this epistemic shift has not been extended to the practice and pedagogy of literary theory. Responding to Revathi Krishnaswamy’s call to expand theory to include non-Western poetics, this chapter turns to Indonesia to explore the ‘worldliness’ of sastera profetik, or prophetic literature, a concept fashioned by the late author-academic Kuntowijoyo. It tests the limits of the of sastera profetik lens’s universal applicability by appraising it in light of selected short stories of Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. The chapter also argues for the centrality of theology in the construction of sastera profetik by situating the lens within the larger frameworks of two abstractions of Islam, decolonial Islam and Islam Nusantara.
Empathy on Set
Authors: Leberg Dan
Published: September 2023

This chapter contrasts two sets of common on-set actorly habits for soliciting all three empathetic connections, which this study labels as “Dinicol’s Jazz” and “Lisinska’s Tears”. Both sets of habits reflect the ecumenical nature of on-set production culture, and force the actor to develop a compelling metaphor for the camera as a trusted co-collaborator. In Dinicol’s Jazz, the actor prioritizes her Intersubjective connection with her fellow actors in the hopes that the camera will adequately capture the iterative loop of sincere reactions between the performers. This approach is particularly resonant with actors who actively embrace Meisner’s Method. Inversely, Lisinska’s Tears prioritizes the overlap between the actor’s Intrasubjective connection and her Performative solicitation by actively using all on-set circumstances and resources – including the camera. In a sense, Lisinska’s Tears is the logical extension of audition performance techniques to full-fledged screen acting: as long as the actor can establish enough of an Intersubjective connection with her scene partner to complete the verisimilar illusion, she can focus on her Performative address to the camera.
Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation
Authors: Parkinson Isabelle
Published: September 2023

Exploring the politics of the right to write in Gertrude Stein’s practice and its reception, this book examines how conceptions of authorship intersected discourses of democracy and rights in the period 1909-1933. The persistent debates across a broad range of publication contexts over Stein’s legitimacy as a modernist author provide an instructive example of the way literary culture operated as a site of discursive contestation with complex ties to parallel discourses of democratic rights and national belonging. This investigation of Stein’s authorship is grounded in the premise that, just as equality in the public sphere more generally is based on membership of a group, so the right to authorial equality is founded on the recognition and legitimisation of a writer in a specific literary and artistic unit. This study of Stein and her milieu is a study of the corresponding processes of cultural inclusion and exclusion that shape her work and define her authorship. The book explores the way Stein reconfigured her authorship in response to rapidly changing political and cultural conditions and examines how arguments over her authorial validity reproduced debates about who should participate in public life, refracted an emerging discourse of human rights, and echoed fears about the consequences of mass democracy as political franchise was extended. This is an important analysis because it offers insights into the relations between literary and political discourse at a troubled moment in the history of modern democracy.
Modernism’s Abject: Geography and Plays and Stein’s Contested Authorship
Authors: Parkinson Isabelle
Published: September 2023

Chapter 3 traces the seepage of the popular discourse of Stein as illegitimate or aberrant into modernist literary culture of the 1920s. It focuses on an extensive debate about the validity of Stein’s work, prompted by the publication of Geography and Plays, the serialisation of The Making of Americans and the appearance of Composition as Explanation in the Woolfs’ Hogarth Essays series. The debate occurred through the 1920s in the NewCriterion, The Dial and The Little Review, in the pamphlet series To-day and To-morrow, and across a number of monographs which seek to identify and characterise modernism. In the context of extra-literary anxieties around democracy and rights, many of the louder voices in this literary culture insist on individual authorship as opposed to collective practice, and on the assertion of a normative model of authorship that enacts the identification and exclusion of those ‘others’ who had begun to participate in authorship during the pre-war period. The chapter ends with a reading of Stein’s portrait of T.S. Eliot, ‘The Fifteenth of November’, as a perception of and response to the apparent closing of modernism to a certain kind of authorial subject.
The Birth of the English Essay
Authors: Stewart Alan
Published: September 2023

Francis Bacon’s short, aphoristic Essayes, first published in 1597, were soon hailed as the founding text of the essay genre in England, a reputation they have yielded today to Michel de Montaigne’s radically different Essais. This chapter first tracks the processes by which Bacon wrote and rewrote his Essayes, from his notebooks through manuscript drafts to later printed versions (1612, 1625), and even translations in Italian, French, and Latin. It then shows how many other writers copied, adapted, and appropriated Bacon’s essays to their own ends throughout the seventeenth century. It proposes the point of these essays is precisely their availability for reiteration and revision, and suggests that we might see them as offering an alternative history of the essay in England.
The Thing of the Essay
Authors: Plunkett Erin
Published: September 2023

This chapter considers the essay’s ‘occasional’ nature, namely, essay writing as a commitment to lingering with things as they are found. It offers a philosophical framework for understanding this receptive or responsive dimension of the essay, drawing from the work of Heidegger and others. This reading challenges the notion that essays are essentially subjective and explores a more sophisticated positioning of self and world within essayistic writing. Finally, it examines the value of these features of the essay for moving beyond habitual or orthodox ways of seeing.
Essay, Fiction, Truth, Troth
Authors: Childs Jason
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the relationship between the essay and the
world. To do so, it problematizes one of the very few generally agreed upon definitions or categorizations of the essay: its being classifiable as a form of nonfiction. Childs argues that thinking of the essay as ‘nonfiction’ is paradoxical in view of another frequently identified characteristic of the essay, its indeterminacy. Childs thus proposes
thinking of the essay in terms of the ‘as if’, a way of conceiving writing that we tend to associate with fiction. However, for Childs, relating the ‘as if’ – whether in the essay or in that which we unproblematically associate with fiction, like the novel – is not to be understood in terms of something ‘sealed off’ from ‘the real world’ but as something central to ‘human thought and knowledge’ and thus fundamental to the world.