bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Conclusion
Authors: Wånggren Lena
Published: January 2018

This book has highlighted the essential link between gender and modern technologies as crucial not only to New Woman writing but to early or first-wave British feminism. Locating the New Woman in connection to technologies of the time provides an understanding of how certain technologies come to work as ‘freedom machines’, as visual emblems signifying female emancipation. Throughout the book, the fundamental conflict between technological determinism and feminist criticism has been stressed: the ‘modern’ aspects of late nineteenth-century technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle and medical technologies entail the ways in which they are taken up as symbols of emancipation and ‘newness’ in literary works, as well as in the medical and periodical press. In addition to analysing specific late nineteenth-century technologies, this book has drawn attention to the technology of language itself: the ways in which literary texts work as social and cultural agents. Material objects and institutional technologies, and technologies of self-formation, come together in these fictions through yet another technology; that of the text itself. In this way, New Woman writing that engages with technology partakes in and shapes late nineteenth-century debates regarding both social and literary issues....
Towards a Fairer Scotland? Assessing the Prospects and Implications of Social Security Devolution
Authors: McEwen Nicola
Published: January 2018

Following the Scotland Act (2016), the Scottish Parliament now has significant autonomy over aspects of social security. This chapter examines the scope of the new social security powers and some early decisions on their implementation. It suggests that the focus of the new powers, their interdependence with the UK welfare system, and demographic and financial challenges will constrain radical change.
A More Gender-Equal Scotland? Childcare Policy in Scotland after the Independence Referendum
Authors: McAngus Craig , Rummery Kirstein
Published: January 2018

The independence referendum campaign provided opportunity to focus on and debate a number of policy areas that may have been strongly affected by Scottish independence. One of these policy areas was childcare, with the Scottish Government’s white paper stating the importance childcare provision for the future economic growth of an independent Scotland. Despite the resulting No vote in the referendum, childcare remains a salient policy issue in Scotland. This chapter looks at the role childcare plays in promoting gender equality. Firstly, it looks at what sort of childcare systems promote gender equality and their link to family policy, drawing upon examples from places like Sweden, Iceland and Quebec. Secondly, it looks at the options that the Scottish Government has in the context of further devolution.
Constitutional Change, Social Investment and Prevention Policy in Scotland
Authors: Cairney Paul , Harvey Malcolm , Denny Emily St
Published: January 2018

The prospect of Scottish independence allowed commentators the chance to reconsider the Scottish Government’s social policy choices. The idea of ‘social investment’ grew in importance since it fits well with the vague notion that Scottish independence is a social democratic project, offering an alternative to ‘austerity politics’ and ‘neoliberalism’. It also complements an existing Scottish Government agenda to reduce inequalities and address its decreasing budget by reducing acute public service demand through ‘early intervention’ and ‘prevention’ policies. However, this chapter identifies a limited impact of such developments on government policy. Social investment is rarely properly defined, and prevention often describes a broad aspiration rather than a specific policy agenda. Policymakers are pursuing a vague solution to an unclear problem. This chapter discusses how key actors can take forward this agenda, to learn from international experience and from domestic experiments with ‘evidence based policymaking’.
The Irreducible Remainder
Authors: Das Saitya Brata
Published: January 2018

This chapter presents a reading of Schelling's Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809), which takes up the great philosophical problematic of freedom, a problematic that is rarely mentioned in contemporary philosophical discourse. Taking up the question of freedom anew, and posing it in the context of contemporary thought, it renews the Schellingian thought of an ‘irreducible remainder’ that does not allow itself to be enclosed in the cages of the world. The ‘irreducible remainder’ of the world keeps the world open, immemorially, to the incalculable arrival of the new and of the absolutely heterogeneous.
The Tragic Dissonance
Authors: Das Saitya Brata
Published: January 2018

This chapter presents a reading of Schelling's 1795 epistolary essay Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, where he first raises the problematic of the tragic. It is shown that Schelling's attempts to think the tragic as the belonging-together of freedom and necessity in a manner that already exceeds speculative-dialectical Idealism at the very moment of its institution. Bringing Schelling's tragic thought closer to Hölderlin's tragic ‘caesura of the speculative’ shows that what is at stake in his thought is the sense of a tragic differend that cannot be thought within the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics.
Introduction: Discovering Modernism – Travel, Pleasure and Publishers’ Series
Authors: Jaillant Lise
Published: January 2018

The introduction summarises recent scholarship on (1) literary modernism in the marketplace; (2) book history and print culture studies, including the study of publishers’ series. The guiding thread of the argument developed in the book is introduced here: that European publishers’ series made modernist texts available to a mainstream readership – including many non-English native speakers in Continental Europe and elsewhere.
‘Introductions by eminent writers’: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf in the Oxford World’s Classics Series
Authors: Jaillant Lise
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on the introductions that T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf wrote for the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (both published in 1928). Oxford University Press, whose London branch bought the World’s Classics from Grant Richards in 1905, was known for its Bibles and scholarly works, not for literary experimentation. So why would such a staid publisher include an introduction by Eliot, a writer with “a sustained interest in rotting orifices”? Why would a series associated with an old English university value the opinion of Woolf, who repeatedly criticised the patriarchal structure of the academic system? This chapter argues that, by the late 1920s, Woolf and Eliot had become well-known names recognisable by the lower middle class, the self-educated and other readers of the World’s Classics. They lent their growing reputation to boost sales of reprints, and in turn, they benefited from their association with a large-scale publishing enterprise (including access to a wide American readership). The World’s Classics contributed to transforming the image of these modernist writers from infamous avant-gardists to members of the artistic establishment.
Introduction: Chastity and the Question of Value
Authors: Gillen Katherine
Published: January 2018

The introduction demonstrates that chastity discourse resonates strongly with commercial discourses about currency, commodities, and value. It mines mercantile tracts, conduct books, and writings about life in commercial London to show how early moderns interpreted rapidly shifting evaluations of currency, commodities, and selfhood. Readings of several primary texts elucidate the significance of chastity within English national discourse and establishe linkages between the epistemological questions surrounding chastity and those concerning commerce. The introduction also addresses the material conditions of the theatre, as the theatre’s commercial investments and embodied, often cross-dressed modes of representation heighten its concern with questions of value, commoditisation, and economic subjectivity. This opening chapter lays the groundwork for Chaste Value’s central claim that the public theatre engages with economic chastity discourse as a means of working through questions of personal value in early capitalist England.
Foucault and the Force of Power-Knowledge
Authors: Gilliam Christian
Published: January 2018

Foucault’s position is initially developed through a productive misreading of their predecessors; presenting a parodied, misleading vision of French phenomenology as meaning-giving (sens) and using it as a theoretical springboard for his study of discourse, placing the human subject in immanent relations of production and signification. Such relations entail a Nietzschean conception of force, the development of which in Foucault’s thought allows him to account for the conditions under which phenomena are generated, or their ontogenesis. It is argued that this radicalises the decentring of the subject and directly leads to and informs Foucault’s later political engagements, wherein the self is placed in relations of transitive, unstable, virtual forces constituting actual formations of power, carried out by the formed or stratified relations which make up knowledge (as in formed matters or substances) and relating to extensive processes of organisation and strategy (i.e., bio-power). This, at its most basic, refers to the double-conditioning between the micro and the macro, as described earlier. Contra those who wish to read Foucault within a deeply Althusserian conjecture (i.e. Žižek and Laclau), the nature of this network must be understood according to the immanent logic of dispersion and disjunction underpinning discursive formations in Foucault’s earlier work, a logic heavily rooted in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the fold and one that makes strategic possibilities and lines of flight (or lines of escape by which one can exercise a practice of freedom), synonymous with folding, by virtue of being the very excess or discontinuities of the network itself.
Deleuze and the Micropolitics of Desire
Authors: Gilliam Christian
Published: January 2018

Deleuze combines the essential elements of the three previous thinkers to make an improved politics of immanence, which is to a certain extent more perspicuous, by virtue of being consistent and systematic, specifically with its penetrating account of interiority. Certainly, Deleuze overcomes a number of remaining ambiguities, in particular through addressing an affective and ethical issue evident in Foucault – by turning to schizoanalysis and the incorporation of desire as will to power – pushing the politics of immanence to its ultimate. This argument contends with the misleading but no less prominent view that Deleuzian desire is a pre-symbolic libidinal flux, an asocial essentialist category of idealism and bourgeois ethics. It is argued that Deleuzian desire is both instigated by and utilises the ontogenetic conceptual schema of Deleuze’s metaphysics (transcendental empiricism) – as derived from an engagement with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Foucualt – in which thought and desire are construed as immanent to the real that provokes them, such that they can only have a productive nature.
Is Shylock Jewish?
Authors: Coodin Sara
Published: January 2018

What happens when we consider Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Veniceas a play with ‘real’ Jewish characters who are not mere ciphers for anti-Semitic Elizabethan stereotypes? Is Shylock Jewish studies Shakespeare’s extensive use of stories from the Hebrew Bible in The Merchant of Venice, and argues that Shylock and his daughter Jessica draw on recognisably Jewish ways of engaging with those narratives throughout the play. By examining the legacy of Jewish exegesis and cultural lore surrounding these stories, this book traces the complexity and richness of Merchant’s Jewish aspect, spanning encounters with Jews and the Hebrew Bible in the early modern world as well as modern adaptations of Shakespeare’s play on the Yiddish stage.
Introduction: Is Shylock Jewish?
Authors: Coodin Sara
Published: January 2018

The introductory chapter of the book begins by acknowledging the long, painful historical legacy associated with Shakespeare’s Shylock, and his character’s deep imbrication with persistent and invidious anti-Semitic stereotypes. Rather than attempting to bypass that legacy, the introduction outlines how the book will delve even deeper into the primary designation the play assigns to Shylock and Jessica -- “Jew,” asking whether Shakespeare endows his Jewish characters with a source of ethical deliberation and moral agency that is more than a mere amalgam of historical anti-Semitisms. If Shylock and Jessica are Jewish in a way that transcends invidious stereotypes, what is it that makes them recognizably so? The introductory chapter outlines the central argument of the book: Merchant’s Jewish characters are constituted via distinctively Jewish ways of reading and interpreting foundational stories, epitomized in the play through Shylock’s citation of the parable of the parti-coloured lambs as he explicates his lending practices to Antonio. The Merchant of Venice deploys Judeo-Christian biblical inter-texts in ways that deliberately call attention to their divergent interpretive traditions, producing a nuanced and challenging point of entry for audiences, who must decide whether and to what degree they are willing to interpret Shylock’s utterances through the lens of his distinctive way of seeing and evaluating the world rather than evaluating him through the eyes of his persecutors.
Rebellious Daughters on the Yiddish Stage
Authors: Coodin Sara
Published: January 2018

Chapter 4 expands on the previous chapter’s discussion of Jessica, exploring how her character was interpreted by Yiddish writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter addresses the ways in which Jewish writers used the biblical Dinah and Rachel inter-texts to develop Jessica’s character within Yiddish-language translations and adaptations of The Merchant of Venice, including Meyer Freid’s 1898 novella Der koyfmann fun Venedig, and Maurice Schwartz’s 1947 play Shayloks tochter. Through appeals to these biblical stories, Yiddish-language writers produced distinctively Judaic re-workings of Shakespeare’s comedy that emphasised Jessica’s unique subjectivity and relocated her – and the experience of young Jewish women situated at the margins of their communities -- at the play’s vital centre. This chapter discusses how these writers’ creative revisions to Jessica’s character echoed a series of concerns shared by nineteenth and twentieth-century Jewish writers, including Sholem Aleichem and Philip Roth, about the changing role and place of women within modern Jewish life.
‘A purse of her own’: Women and Carriage
Authors: Ridge Emily
Published: January 2018

Chapter 2 considers the emergence of the woman’s bag as a subversive emblem for female self-sufficiency from the late nineteenth century. It was an emblem taken up by a number of New Woman writers of fiction and non-fiction, from George Egerton to Nellie Bly. Giving an overview of the historical and rhetorical associations of women with baggage in the context of legal understandings of women’s property rights, the chapter also looks at fin de siècle and early-twentieth-century projections (both in literary works and satirical cartoons) of the disturbance caused by these modern women to traditional chivalry and associated fictional conventions. It asks why women’s portable property was often so pivotal in renderings of this disturbance. More specifically, it hones in on the work of one prominent modernist woman writer, Dorothy Richardson, whose use of a portable model in Pilgrimage goes hand in hand with her reinvention of the female subject. Finally, the chapter reflects on some of the problems faced by women beyond the domestic paradigm, considering the woman’s bag as an object of modernist conflict in texts by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.
‘No one is safe from the beggar’s pack’: Portability and Precarity
Authors: Ridge Emily
Published: January 2018

Chapter 3 traces the progressive alignment of portability with precarity from the late 1920s to the 1940s against a backdrop of political instability. The unfolding crisis of mass displacement across Europe served to reduce earlier literary fantasies of travelling light to nightmarish visions of involuntary exodus. These changing resonances are perceptible in the pointed obfuscations of tropes of tourism, adventure and dispossession in 1930s literature as well as the noticeable intrusion of the figure of the refugee on the artistic consciousness. If luggage becomes a figurative focal point in the works of political exiles and refugees, it is not in aid of a fantasy of creative renewal but of material, cultural and individual preservation. The chapter ends with an analysis of the fictional and non-fictional work of Elizabeth Bowen, with the inclusion of an extended close reading of The House in Paris as an updated version of Forster’s Howards End in a troubled 1930s context.
Conclusion
Authors: Löfflmann Georg
Published: January 2018

This chapter provides a summary of the book’s findings. The chapter argues that the geopolitical vision of a more restrained leadership role and more cautious global engagement Obama formulated was reflecting the post-American future rather than the hegemonic past of America’s role in world politics. It assesses that most influential scholars, pundits and policy makers in turn remained embedded in the Washington consensus of hegemony and mired in a unipolar worldview. The chapter identifies a further fracturing of the grand strategy consensus, between elite opinion and the foreign policy establishment denouncing ‘isolationist’ tendencies, and an American public increasingly in favour of non-interventionism and in acceptance of a less singular hegemonic role. The chapter briefly reviews how this conflict was also encapsulated in the contest for Obama’s succession between Hillary Clinton, a quintessential Washington insider and firm believer in America’s role as the world’s indispensable nation and Donald Trump, an anti-establishment populist that had aggressively questioned the elite consensus on US foreign and economic policy.
Outlines of Diachronic Intersystemic Development
Authors: Snir Reuven
Published: January 2018

This chapter presents some outlines of the diachronic intersystemic development of the modern Arabic literary system. The space between the text, its author, and the reader is understood as constituting both an economic environment (e.g. literary markets, publishing) and a sociocommunicative system that passes the meaning potential of the text through various filters (e.g. criticism, literary circles, groups, salons, public opinion) in order to concretize and realize it. All other spaces related to literary production and consumption, including the linguistic, spiritual, social, national, and economic spaces, are also considered, together with looking at the interaction of literature with, for example, religion, territory, state nationalism, language, politics, economy, gender, electronic media, and philosophy, as well as foreign literatures and cultures and examples of reciprocal interference between Arabic and Western literatures in the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first century.
Autobiography and Language Choice
Authors: Suleiman Camelia
Published: January 2018

This chapter studies the writing of Sasson Somekh, Anton Shammas and Sayed Kashua through the lens of their personal biographies, their background and their language choice. All three are native speakers of Arabic, albeit, from three different generations and three different faiths, but they all choose to write in Hebrew. The language choices of these authors help us understand the asymmetrical relationship between Israelis and Arabs, as well as the global linguistic homogenisation and perhaps the effects of collective traumas on the individual. The chapter concludes with a section on the ‘Arab Jew’, and the challenges of maintaining both constructs of this identity in Israel, in the case of the documentary of the ‘Ethnic Devil’ broadcast on Israeli television in summer 2013, and the case of the sociologist and poet, Sami Chetrit, an Arab Jew who does not speak Arabic.
A Sense of Place
Authors: Simone Emma
Published: January 2018

In this chapter, the significance of the notion of ‘place’ throughout Woolf’s oeuvre is explored. Sharing affinities with the Heideggerian perspective, Woolf’s writings both demonstrate and reinforce the significance of place as an essential aspect of the individual’s state of Being-in-the-world. For both Woolf and Heidegger, place becomes the means by which individuals form connections not only with the Other, but also with the past. Throughout her oeuvre, Woolf privileges an existential understanding of place insofar as setting is rarely represented as an inert backdrop or a geographic co-ordinate on a map. Woolf demonstrates that the individual’s everyday involvements are always already inextricably connected to particular physical contexts. Diverging from the focus of Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time, for Woolf, place is understood as both a literal and figurative representation of the prevailing social order.
Historical Dasein
Authors: Simone Emma
Published: January 2018

Chapter 4 details Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of ‘time’, a subject that is a predominant area of concern in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Specifically, attention is drawn to both Woolf and Heidegger’s critiques of the metaphysical perspective that defines time as linear, successive and dominated by a homogeneous present. In contrast to such understandings, for Woolf and Heidegger, time is defined by the heterogeneous unity of past, present and future. It is from this perspective that the individual is viewed as a temporal – and therefore historical – being insofar as the basis of his or her present and future possibilities is founded upon both the personal and collective past. Woolf reflects upon the individual’s average everyday unquestioning immersion in the concerns and preoccupations of the present at the expense of an acknowledgement of his or her inherent temporality.
Film Spectatorship and the Tensions of Modernity
Authors: Kim Dong Hoon
Published: January 2018

The interrogation of film spectatorship and reception continues in the last chapter, expanding the scope of the inquiry. While the colonial experience was one of many historical factors that affected Korea’s modern experiences, Korea’s colonialized status was not the sole force that directed the development of Joseon film culture. Preoccupied with the cinema’s relation to the subjects of colonial exploitation, nationalism, and national identity, however, few scholars acknowledge that colonial film-viewing was a much more compound activity marked by a range of political, cultural, and historical components that defined Korea’s overall modern experiences. In particular, in standard film history, the fascination film fans had with the cinema has yet to find its place. However, the novelty of the cinema, the pleasure of film-viewing, and the liberating effect the cinema could offer were crucial in generating varied social perceptions and debates surrounding the prominent modern culture. This chapter, therefore, explores the manner in which film spectatorship mediated and represented Korea’s complex modern experiences, focusing primarily on the association between the cinema and politics in gender and sexuality, the issue subjected to the most intense form of social discussions in relation to movie-going throughout the colonial period.
Digital Resistance in the Middle East
Authors: L. Wheeler Deborah
Published: January 2018

This book argues that Internet diffusion and use in the Middle East enables meaningful micro-changes in citizens’ lives, even in states where no Arab Spring revolution occurred. Using ethnographic evidence, and conversations with Internet users in the Middle East, collected between 1996 and 2014 in Kuwait, Jordan, and Egypt, and a handful of short term research trips to other Arab states, including Tunisia (2000), Morocco (1997), UAE (1997; 2010-13), Oman (2004), Qatar (2011-2013), and Saudi Arabia (2012-13), this manuscript presents a grass roots look at how new media use fits into the practice of everyday life. It explores why citizens leverage social media to digitally route around state and other forms of power at work in their lives. As state capacity for buying public loyalty wanes throughout the Middle East, any increase in citizen civic engagement, supported by new media use, offers the possibility of a new order of things, from redefining patriarchal power relations at home, to reconfigurations of citizens’ relationships with the state, broadly defined. For reasons explored throughout this manuscript, new media channels offer pathways to empowerment widely and cheaply in the Middle East.
IT 4 Regime Change: Networking around the State in Egypt
Authors: Wheeler Deborah L.
Published: January 2018

This chapter takes as a starting point Gene Sharp’s observation that, “the exercise of power depends on the consent of the ruled who, by withdrawing that consent can control and even destroy the power of their opponent” (Sharp, 1973, p. 4). While this observation applies across the three case studies at the core of this book, in the Egyptian state in particular, Internet use allowed citizens to experiment with withdrawing their consent, in ways that were destructive to the status quo over time, but subtle enough to go relatively undetected until the 25 January revolution. Having a voice, both online and off, resulted in, “the exchange of ideas, information and models” which “created an active citizenry” (Bayat, 2010, p. 247). Throughout the Egyptian case study, explanations for an empowered citizenry linked in part with new media use are considered.
No More Red Lines: Networking around the State in Jordan
Authors: Wheeler Deborah L.
Published: January 2018

Ch. 3 seeks explanations to Jillian Schwedler’s observation that in Jordan, “There are no more red lines” (Schwedler, 2012). Why did King Abdullah and his wife Queen Rania in 2012 become sources of increasingly public critiques by members of Jordanian society. Specifically, what role did Internet use play in promoting new levels of social and political awareness, and collective demands for change. These questions are considered in light of ethnographic insights and Internet user testimonials, which reveal subtle forms of empowerment and enhanced voice among citizens in the practice of everyday life.
Conclusion
Authors: Wheeler Deborah L.
Published: January 2018

Democracy will not come

Today, this year

Nor ever

Through compromise and fear.

(Langston Hughes)

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen....
Introduction
Authors: Gardner Colin , MacCormack Patricia
Published: January 2018

In spite of becoming-animal being a key concept in Deleuze and Guattari, this is the first volume to address the ambiguous idea of the animal as human and nonhuman life infiltrating all of Deleuze’s work. Contemporary applications of animality in Deleuze in film, television, music, gaming and art are collected alongside critical issues of ethics, activism and ecology in consideration of the future of our understanding of life and the animal as both the kingdom of which the human is part and the first dividing line of identity within the anthropocene. The Introduction provides summaries of all 16 chapters, tying them to common threads in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings as well as establishing innovative trajectories for future readings of animality in Deleuze in a variety of fields.
Louis Malle’s Kleistian War Machine: Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Woman, Becoming-Imperceptible in Black Moon (1975)
Authors: Gardner Colin
Published: January 2018

Framed through an analysis of Kleist’s molecular war machine in his play, Penthesilea, in which Achilles and Penthesilea form a new assemblage of affective war, this chapter explores Louis Malle’s Black Moon (1975) where the battle of the sexes becomes the catalyst for a new series of becomings. The film takes the form of a waking dream as a teenage fugitive, Lily is led through a series of depersonalized movements by a unicorn to a secluded Dordogne farm where Kleist’s utopian “mad duality” is manifested though a strange, non-Oedipal family dynamic in which a mute brother and his sheep-herding sister – both also called Lily – live with a group of naked children and a bedridden elderly woman whose companion is a talking rat and where the animals are treated as equal agencies in the narrative. Although by film’s end Brother and Sister Lily become caught up in the ravages of a gender war, teenage Lily inherits this ‘deterritorialized velocity of affect’ by adopting the role of the breastfeeding mother to the unicorn, all in relation to the becoming multiplicity of the pack: in short, a true war machine that envelops both protagonists and spectators alike in a transformed zone of indiscernibility.
Un/Becoming Claude Cahun: Zigzagging in a Pack
Authors: hoogland renée c.
Published: January 2018

Considered odd, obscene, a genius nonetheless, at the time she created her best-known works, French photographer and writer Claude Cahun (1894-1950) cuts a particularly unruly figure in literary criticism and art history. Her recalcitrant faux autobiography Aveux non avenus, [Disavowals, or, Cancelled Confessions] (1930), a book of essays and recorded dreams illustrated with photomontages, have encouraged the artist’s association with High Modernism and Surrealism while her photographic self-portraits have been claimed for an affirmative (feminist) gender politics. However, the proliferous and mercurial nature of Cahun’s disavowed confessions and self-stagings defy easy “domestication.” Instead she constructs a continuously shifting configuration of fragments and collages: assemblages of singularities that are always in a multiplicity, in a pack. Escaping dominant forms of expression, Cahun’s work has nothing to do with recognition or imitation, nor does it constitute a relation of representation. The chapter argues instead that Cahun presents us in both her writing and in her photographic work with the successful experience of becoming in the absence of any final term or form. A becoming-animal that moves beyond destruction into the zone of indiscernibility where a work, or, perhaps, an oeuvre comes into view—an oeuvre that nonetheless remains decidedly outlandish.
Bridging Bateson, Deleuze and Guattari Through Metamodelisation: What Brian Massumi Can Teach Us About Animal Politics
Authors: Gardner Colin
Published: January 2018

This chapter turns to the seminal work of the English anthropologist/ cyberneticist, Gregory Bateson (1904-80) as a crucial ecological and ludic foundation not only for the work of Deleuze and Guattari – the pair coined the term ‘plateau’ as a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities from Bateson’s study of Balinese culture – but also Brian Massumi’s more recent exploration of the supernormal tendency in animal play as a metacommunicative model for a new form of political metamodelisation based on Guattari’s advocacy of an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Drawing heavily on Bateson’s 1955 essay, ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, Massumi stresses how, for example, a play fight between wolf cubs entails the staging of a paradox, whereby a cub bites and at the same time says ‘This is not a bite, this is not a fight, this is a game,’ whereby the ludic stands in for the suspended analogue: real combat. Massumi calls this level of abstraction game’s ‘-esqueness,’ its metacommunicative level which self-reflexively mobilizes a vitality affect that generates a trans-situational process that moves across and between intersecting existential territories. The latter entails the construction of a third dimension, the ‘included middle’ of play and combat’s mutual influence, which Massumi calls ‘sympathy’.
Meditation on the Animal and the Work of Art
Authors: Lambert Gregg
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the notion of “becoming-animal” as a process of “creating a relation to territory” in reference to the artist and the writer. For Deleuze, the animal has a privileged and very specific relation to the notions of territory and world, one that is based on a relative number of affects and on a process of selection (i.e., the extraction of singularities from a milieu or an environment [Umwelt]). The animal entertains a relation to its world that is produced in terms of a relation to distinctive territory, whereas the human is found to have a relation to world, but no proper territory of its own). However, for Deleuze, the writer and the artist are often described as beings who enter into a process of becoming where the subject loses its own proper identity as an individual or a human being and enters into a process that closely approximates the animal’s “captivation” by an environment, to employ Heidegger’s term, even though the artist or the writer produces a specific world by extracting lines, fragments, colors, visions or scenes from its external environment in order to compose a territory that is expressed by the work of art.
Becoming-Animal Cinema Narrative
Authors: Rothermel Dennis
Published: January 2018

This chapter connects distinctive animal territories to specific uses of film language through a series of case studies, most notably Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966), Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte (2011), Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011), and Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012). Significantly, becoming-animal cannot be represented by conventional point-of-view and shot-reverse-shot editing (the structural mainstay of filmic suture), because it ties the animal to the conventional (and thus delimiting) human vectorial space of Deleuze’s action-image. Instead, inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s seminal essay, ‘The “Cinema of Poetry”’, the chapter notes that all four filmmakers resort to a form of free-indirect discourse, whereby animality fills up the film from the inside as formative of the representation rather than rendering the subject within the structure of representation. Not unlike T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative, where the character’s subjectivity is presented objectively in and through the mise-en-scène as well as individual focalisation (in this case the character is also on-screen), animal perception is able to be expressed by a form of camera self-consciousness, what Deleuze calls ‘cinema a special kind of cinema where the camera makes itself felt.
Becoming-Wolf: From Wolf-Man to the Tree Huggers of Turkey
Authors: Pekerman Serazer
Published: January 2018

Focusing on the May 2013 anti-government demonstrations in Turkey, widely known as the “Gezi Park Resistance”, this chapter uses Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-animal” and Freud’s “Wolfman” case study to explore the damaged memories of all its participants. During and after the protests, independent from being in denial or in defence, both the protesters and the police often claimed that they did not remember what actually happened. In some cases, they had a difficult time acknowledging that they committed certain acts despite seeing themselves in videos and pictures. This reminds us of fictional werewolf characters, who are accustomed to wake up and find themselves naked under a tree, feeling afraid or guilty, with bruises, scars, and no memory of how they got there. Thus the chapter explores how and why the Gezi Park protesters have common characteristics with the werewolves (of myth and fiction), how it is also connected to the Government's brutal response and how these resemblances might help us understand the resistance, in other words, start seeing the order of the chaos: How “becomings-animal” of people open up places and spaces of resistance and how they are actually unstoppable on a Deleuze & Guattarian plane of resistance.
The Parasites of Parricide. Living through the Other when Killing the Father: Interpassivity in The Brothers Karamazov
Authors: Pfaller Robert
Published: January 2018

Dostoyevsky’s novel Brothers Karamazov contains, as Sigmund Freud has perspicuously noted, an utterly paradoxical and psychologically most interesting scene - one that immediately calls for attention from the perspective of the theory of interpassivity: Why can one be relieved and grateful to someone else for having killed his father - even if they are not brothers? By what psychic mechanism does the parricide of the other allow one to renounce one’s own? Is it identification? Or love? Or something else?
Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods
Authors: Hudson Dale
Published: January 2018

This book proposes that vampire films and series constitute a different way of understanding Hollywood and the United States. It explores the movement of transnational Hollywood’s representations of the vampire, between low-budget quickies and high-budget blockbusters and franchises, even as it appropriates visual styles from German, Mexican and Hong Kong cinemas. Vampires allow us to refocus on Hollywood as plural, US history as transnational, and race as having afterlives. The book proposes three overlapping contributions: (1) reconfiguring Hollywood historiography and traditions as transnational in terms of film, television, and web production, distribution, and exhibition/transmission; (2) offering fresh interpretations of vampire film and television as a transgenre (rather than subgenre of horror) and transmedia site for political contestation; and (3) situating constructions of race in/and the United States as constitutive of nation. At the intersection of migration and commerce, vampire films and series are examined for the textual meaning of their stories, characters, styles, and performance and the political economies that determine their production, distribution, and exhibition.
Conclusion: History and Hollywood, Mashed-Up
Authors: Hudson Dale
Published: January 2018

The conclusion pulls into focus the interplay of aspirations about democratizing media and realities of democratizing the United States as they coalesce on race and the presidency by focusing on the viral video Barackula: The Musical (2008) and theatrical feature Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012). In them, US presidents or future-presidents are represented as vampire hunters and enduring icons of US exceptionalism. Amateur and astroturfed grassroots internet memes demonize the first and only nonwhite president of the United States by employing the animalistic and dehumanizing iconography of Nosferatu, thus signaling afterlives of race in self-authorized acts of racism that can now be distributed via social media to larger audiences than classical Hollywood ever dared imagine.
Introduction: Cavernosis Anfractibus
Authors: Barbour Charles
Published: January 2018

Some time before we arrive at the famous Allegory of the Cave, a passage to which The Republic is perhaps too often reduced, Plato tells the story of another cave – one in which the main character goes down into the earth, rather than emerging from it, and becomes, not transparent and visible, or awash in the penetrating light of the sun, but invisible, concealed, or hidden from the realm of phenomena and appearance. The story in question is sometimes called the Myth of Gyges, or the story of the Ring of Gyges, and it is recounted by Glaucon in Book Two. And while it is obviously well known, or at least familiar to anyone interested in philosophy and ideas, it rarely receives the attention I think it merits or deserves....
Under Oath: Secrecy, Perjury and the Social Bond
Authors: Barbour Charles
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues that secrecy is a condition of the social bond. It develops a close reading of Derrida’s later engagements with Levinas and Lacan in particular, as well as an extended consideration of Simmel’s treatments of secrecy and society.
Novelty and the Market: Edith Wharton
Authors: Plock Vike Martina
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses Edith Wharton’s critical assessment of modern consumer culture, whose ascendancy she associated with standardised sartorial and literary tastes. By showing her indebtedness to Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theories, it argues that she was suspicious of fashion’s imperative for ‘newness’ and thought that its cultural dominance was detrimental to cultural and artistic progress. Alongside essays such as ‘The Vice of Reading’, ‘The Great American Novel’, ‘Permanent Values in Fiction’, and ‘Fiction and Criticism’ as well as unpublished material from the Edith Wharton Collection in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the chapter focuses on novels such as The Touchstone (1900), The Custom of the Country (1913), The Children (1928), Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and The Gods Arrive (1932).
Uniforms and Uniformity: Virginia Woolf
Authors: Plock Vike Martina
Published: January 2018

In foregrounding fashion’s involvement with nationalist and corporatist political movements, this chapter on Virginia Woolf focuses on her 1930s writing—especially The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938), as well as related material in the Monks House Papers—to analyze Woolf’s engagement with fascist interventions in identity politics. In focusing on the depiction of women’s sartorial items in her writing, it shows how Woolf examines the relationship between the individual and the collective that fascist movements threatened to restructure by introducing increasingly uniform clothing. But while she revealed the dangers inherent in following regulations that aimed to standardize behavior and clothing, Woolf, this chapter shows, simultaneously embraced other forms of uniformity: her own rise to literary stardom in the 1930s, advanced by the Hogarth Press’ introduction of Uniform Editions of her work, provides a striking counterpoint to her critique of the standardized cultural productions of her time.
Numerical Investigation on Windback Seals Used in Aero Engines
Authors: Flouros Michael , Cottier Francois , Hirschmann Markus , Salpingidou Christina
Published: January 2018

Seals are considered one of the most important flow elements in turbomachinery applications. The most traditional and widely known seal is the labyrinth seal but in recent years other types like the brush or carbon seals were introduced since they considerably reduce the sealing air consumption. When seals are used for sealing of aero engine bearing chambers they are subjected to high “bombardment” through oil particles which are present in the bearing chamber. These particles mainly result from the bearings as a consequence of the high rotational speeds. Particularly when carbon or brush seals are used, problems with carbon formation (coking) may arise when oil gets trapped in the very tight gap of these seals. In order to prevent oil migration into the turbomachinery, particularly when the pressure difference over a seal is small or even negligible, significant improvement can be achieved through the introduction of so called windback seals. This seal has a row of static helical teeth (thread) and below this thread a scalloped or smooth shaft section is rotating. Depending on the application, a windback seal can be used alone or as a combination with another seal (carbon, brush or labyrinth seal). A CFD analysis carried out with ANSYS CFX version 11 is presented in this paper with the aim to investigate this seal type. The simulations were performed by assuming a two-phase flow of air and oil in the bearing compartment. Design parameters like seal clearance, thread size, scallop width, were investigated at different operating conditions.
Current Status of Single Particle Imaging with X-ray Lasers
Authors: Sun Zhibin , Fan Jiadong , Li Haoyuan , Jiang Huaidong
Published: January 2018

The advent of ultrafast X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) opens the tantalizing possibility of the atomic-resolution imaging of reproducible objects such as viruses, nanoparticles, single molecules, clusters, and perhaps biological cells, achieving a resolution for single particle imaging better than a few tens of nanometers. Improving upon this is a significant challenge which has been the focus of a global single particle imaging (SPI) initiative launched in December 2014 at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, USA. A roadmap was outlined, and significant multi-disciplinary effort has since been devoted to work on the technical challenges of SPI such as radiation damage, beam characterization, beamline instrumentation and optics, sample preparation and delivery and algorithm development at multiple institutions involved in the SPI initiative. Currently, the SPI initiative has achieved 3D imaging of rice dwarf virus (RDV) and coliphage PR772 viruses at ~10 nm resolution by using soft X-ray FEL pulses at the Atomic Molecular and Optical (AMO) instrument of LCLS. Meanwhile, diffraction patterns with signal above noise up to the corner of the detector with a resolution of ~6 Ångström (Å) were also recorded with hard X-rays at the Coherent X-ray Imaging (CXI) instrument, also at LCLS. Achieving atomic resolution is truly a grand challenge and there is still a long way to go in light of recent developments in electron microscopy. However, the potential for studying dynamics at physiological conditions and capturing ultrafast biological, chemical and physical processes represents a tremendous potential application, attracting continued interest in pursuing further method development. In this paper, we give a brief introduction of SPI developments and look ahead to further method development.
The Dynamical Linkage of Atmospheric Blocking to Drought, Heatwave and Urban Heat Island in Southeastern US: A Multi-Scale Case Study
Authors: Dong Li , Mitra Chandana , Greer Seth , Burt Ethan
Published: January 2018

Atmospheric blocking is a long standing structure stalled in the mid-troposphere which is often associated with extreme weather events such as droughts, heatwaves, flood and cold air outbreak. A striking atmospheric blocking is identified to persist over the US during 13–17 August 2007, exacerbating the existing drought over the Southeastern US. This pronounced blocking event not only intensified the concurrent drought conditions, but also led to a record-breaking heatwave over the Southeast of the US. The excessive heat observed during this heatwave is attributable to the subsidence-associated adiabatic warming as well as the dry-and-warm air advection over Alabama and the neighboring states. At the local scale, we choose Birmingham, AL, as the study area for exploring the blocking influence on urban heat island. Based on the remote sensing data, the surface (skin) urban heat island is found to be 8 ∘ C in this area on the block-onset day. This provides partial evidences that the surface urban heat island intensity is likely amplified by the blocking-induced heat waves. The present work provides a unique case study in which blocking, drought, heatwave and urban heat island all occur concurrently, and interplay across a spectrum of spatial scales. We conclude that atmospheric blocking is capable of reinforcing droughts, initiating heatwaves, and probably amplifying the urban heat island intensity during the concurrent period.