bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Female Stars of British Cinema
Authors: Williams Melanie
Published: January 2018

Film stars are often seen as a predominantly Hollywood creation but this book explores how British cinema developed its own culture of stardom, and how its female stars have been prized by audiences worldwide. Female Stars of British Cinema uses case studies of seven female stars whose careers span the 1940s to the present day – Jean Kent, Diana Dors, Rita Tushingham, Glenda Jackson, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Lloyd, and Judi Dench – to explore how British star femininities have developed over time, and how the image of the British female star has responded to broader social and cultural changes. These ‘women in question’ offer a way into the complexities of British cinema’s culture of stardom which has sometimes espoused glamour and sometimes rejected it, and is entangled with issues of regional, national and ethnic identity, as well as class, sexuality and age. Exploring and investigating the variety of British star femininities over the last seventy-five years, this book also interrogates the omissions and absences from that same cinematic firmament.
‘Blonde Glamour Machine’: Diana Dors in the 1950s and Beyond
Authors: Williams Melanie
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the emergence and long career of British sex symbol Diana Dors, with a particular emphasis on the height of her film career in the 1950s (and her temporary relocation to Hollywood) but also examines her ongoing self-fashioning as a celebrity in the decades beyond her moment as a pin-up.
Edmund Burke, Dissent and Church and State
Authors: Fitzpatrick Martin
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines Edmund Burke’s attitude towards Protestant dissenters, particularly the more radical or rational ones who were prominent in the late eighteenth century, as a way of understanding his changing attitude towards the Church of England and state. The Dissenters who attracted Burke’s attention were those who were interested in extending the terms of toleration both for ministers and for their laity. Initially Burke supported their aspirations, but from about 1780 things began to change. The catalyst for Burke’s emergence as leader of those who feared that revolution abroad might become a distemper at home was Richard Price’s Discourse on Love of Our Country. The chapter analyses how Burke moved from advocating toleration for Dissenters to become a staunch defender of establishment as to have ‘un-Whigged’ himself. It also considers the debate on the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts as well as Burke’s attitude towards Church–state relations.
Was there a Law of Sedition in Scotland? Baron David Hume’s Analysis of the Scottish Sedition Trials of 1794
Authors: Wold Atle L.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines debates over whether the crime of ‘sedition’ had any meaning within Scots law, focusing on David Hume's analysis of the sedition trials of 1794. In 1794, Maurice Margarot of the London Corresponding Society was charged with the crime of sedition. Margarot was one of the very few English delegates who had been present at the so-called British Convention, held in Edinburgh in 1793. Together with his fellow Englishman Joseph Gerrald, and William Skirving of the Edinburgh Friends of the People, Margarot had taken on a leading role at the Convention. It was for this that he had been put on trial. The chapter considers how Margarot's trial initiated a discussion about sedition as a crime under Scots law and discusses the use of ‘authoritative writings’ on Scots law in the trials, along with Hume's views about the trials.
The Posthumous Lives of Thomas Muir
Authors: Pentland Gordon
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the ways in which Thomas Muir was used by political activists, historians and writers in both Great Britain and Australia in the centuries following his death. It analyses Muir's posthumous lives as a case study of how, when and why revolutionary figures of the 1790s have become politically usable. It discusses three important contexts that help explain both revived interest in Muir and changed interpretations of his political significance: one was provided by two global conflicts, the First World War and the ‘age of revolutions’ between 1790 and 1848; the other was provided by the success of the Labour movement in the West of Scotland. The chapter shows how the transnational dimension of Muir's life has been at least partially recovered and his legacy shaped and deployed by an emerging Australian nationalism from the end of the nineteenth century.
The Case for Interculturalism, Plural Identities and Cohesion
Authors: Cantle Ted
Published: January 2018

This chapter begins with the view that multicultural policies, in Europe at least, are not fit for purpose and have slowed, if not inhibited, both integration and the acceptance of difference. This kind of interculturalism is based upon an entirely different conceptual and policy framework and offers a new and progressive approach to how we learn to live with diversity. The chapter sees the Canadian government form of multiculturalism as being closer to the European idea of interculturalism. In this regard, while multiculturalism's focus on inequalities was justified, the chapter argues that it has failed to adapt to ‘super diversity’ and the multifaceted aspects of difference and ‘otherness,’ including those based on disability, age, sexual orientation, and gender — what is otherwise called intersectionality.
‘For the Dead Travel Fast’: The Transnational Afterlives of Dracula
Authors: Smith Iain Robert
Published: January 2018

Since the publication of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula in 1897, the character of Count Dracula has proven to be eminently adaptable, appearing in various guises in over 300 feature films – from FW Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) through to Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D (2012). As with other iconic characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Batman, Dracula has been freed from his roots in a source text and entered what Will Brooker describes as ‘the realm of the icon’. Yet, while there has been a considerable amount of scholarship on the canonical adaptations of Dracula produced in Hollywood, the UK and Germany, very little has been written on the numerous adaptations of the Count Dracula character that have appeared in other film industries. This chapter considers examples of transnational film remakes, including the 1953 Turkish film Drakula İstanbul'da (Dracula in Istanbul), the 1957 Mexican film El Vampiro (The Vampire), and the 1967 Pakistani film Zinda Laash (The Living Corpse). Paying close attention to the variety of ways in which the character is utilised across different cultural contexts, this chapter interrogates the complex issues that this raises in relation to the dynamic interplay of global and local within international popular cinema.
Translating Cool: Cinematic Exchange between Hong Kong, Hollywood and Bollywood
Authors: Richards Rashna Wadia
Published: January 2018

Film historians have long noted the various intertexts of Bollywood cinema, which has historically evolved from the intermingling of Sanskrit drama, folk mythology, Parsi theatre, and ancient religious texts. Comparatively little critical attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which popular Hindi films remake Hollywood films, even though Bollywood films have borrowed consistently from American cinema. Transnational film remakes do much more than reconstruct their narratives to conform to local cultural practices. They engage in intense ideological and aesthetic negotiations, which result in complex performances of resistance, parody, and homage. This chapter explores such negotiations by investigating how Sanjay Gupta’s Kaante (India, 2002) remakes Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (USA, 1992), which is itself a remake of Ringo Lam's City on Fire (Hong Kong 1987). Each version of a heist gone wrong emphasises the performance of “cool.” This chapter explores Gupta's cross-cultural makeover by paying attention to the ways in which the idea of “cool” travels across industries and cultures. Such an investigation steers the remake beyond traditional categories of uncritical admiration or derivative plagiarism and allows an examination of the transnational media flows between Hong Kong, Hollywood, and Bollywood.
Remaking Funny Games: Michael Haneke’s Cross-Cultural Experiment
Authors: Loock Kathleen
Published: January 2018

In recent decades, Austrian director and screenwriter Michael Haneke has become internationally known for disturbing and often brutal films that seek to undermine viewers’ expectations while holding them guilty for the crimes playing out on-screen. When Haneke’s German-language Funny Games premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, it shocked and polarised the film critical community. Yet Haneke has frequently pronounced that he had wanted to address an entirely different – an American – audience. He claims this to be the reason why he eventually decided to direct the almost shot-for-shot transnational film remake, Funny Games (USA, 2007). This chapter extends the idea that Funny Games is founded on the programmatic subversion of conventions and ingrained viewing habits to the mechanisms of cross-cultural remaking. Against the common allegation that US remakes of foreign films are a form of cultural imperialism, Haneke actually uses a Hollywood studio (Warner Bros.) in order to have a wider distribution and to position his auto-remake within American entertainment culture. At the same time, he does not adapt Funny Games to an American cultural context but places virtually the same film into a culturally different environment.
Gatekeepers of (Non-)Knowledge: Aleksei Balabanov’s Morphine (2008)
Authors: Strukov Vlad
Published: January 2018

Balabanov’s Morphine is concerned with cultural memory conceived as a continuum; not as identity but rather subjectivity in construction. The concepts relates to Badiou’s study of subjectivity. It determines existence in a world where the horizon of knowledge is always disappearing and is never available to us in its integrity whereby the subject is barred from the infinite. Different directions and speeds of movement generate the transcendental subject in that the subject is in relation to the variations of the lived. One of such states implies a continuum, or becoming without determination, whilst the other, refers to the imperative to construct knowledge out of the elements of the continuum. Such assemblages, rituals and rites allow the subject to access the ‘beyond’, a different realm, where the elements of the past are positioned towards the future. The transcendence of the subject is coded as an unstoppable flow of imagery—a hallucination—divided into sequences by reiterations and references to the cultural discourse: an introspective vision produces not self-organisation but self-destruction as the subject becomes aware of its own infiniteness. I showcase how Balabanov’s Morphine captures the brutality of such openings and the self-annihilating impact of nothingness.
Non-Knowledge and the Symbolic Mode: Nikolai Khomeriki’s A Tale About Darkness (2009)
Authors: Strukov Vlad
Published: January 2018

I use Khomeriki’s film to demonstrate how the symbolic mode enables signification outside the realm of rational knowledge whereby symbols relate to non-knowledge. In his critique of non-knowledge, Bataille infers that the subjects enters the transcendent whole and realises its own discontinuity (a crisis presented in Khomeriki’s film). The subject wishes to identify with the entirety of being—as a will to know and possess—but can never satisfy this desire because this being is nowhere. Non-being is substituted by non-knowledge, which Bataille conceived of in metaphorical terms, as an image of the night and return to what is there. I explore the concept of non-knowledge not as a matter of representation but rather as a matter that transcends representation through the principle of relation. Representation is always partial while non-knowledge is outside the limits of an individual’s horizon. This is because representation makes claims about the truth, ‘realism’, which gives way to a totalitarian logos, that is, as Derrida pointed out, truth is always an end in itself, the destination, hence ‘truth’ is internalised as a belief. Non-knowledge is about the realisation of self-presence which denies the possibility of determinate meaning, ‘truth’, and about revelation in place of representation.
The World and the Event: Kirill Serebrennikov’s St George’s Day (2008)
Authors: Strukov Vlad
Published: January 2018

Serebrennikov’s film demonstrates that the posthumous subjectivity is always a subjectivity in crisis which destabilises the narrative focus and enables a retroactive reading of the film. The context, or the ‘situatedness’ of each of them within the paradigm of their own beliefs, simultaneously permits and prevents the comprehension of the transcendental in its totality / finiteness. A solution to this problem is an introduction of the notion of ‘the world’ by means of signification in the symbolic mode. This world is always a concept in development, a construct that appears, or is imagined in order to re-position the subject. To echo Badiou, I showcase how St. George’s day places the subject between an event and the world, or in fact, it claims that the subject is the ‘consequence of an event in a world’ (Badiou 2005). The complex structure of the film ascertains our view that the subject is not reducible to the body so it is not part of the world, and at the same time it is not separable from it and so cannot be identified exclusively with the event. I demonstrates how re-positioning of the subject between the world and the event propels temporal disturbances.
The Difficulty of Being Dead: Aleksandr Veledinskii’s Alive (2006)
Authors: Strukov Vlad
Published: January 2018

The dis/appearances of the characters in Veledinskii’s Alive denotes ruptures in continuity (including the continuity of the gaze). The role of the phantom is to overcome the complete break between the living and the dead as well as to overcome the ruptures in discourse. The persistent revenant is an epitome of the return: they become by coming back and in doing so they create a repetitive experience—teleological aporia, a certain inheritance. The phantom is a trace and also a differance (in Derridean terms) in that their spectral effect is in the ideological tendency and the promise of emancipation. In Alive, the phantom resists the totality of representation and so emerges as a method of paralogy: legitimacy of the subject is determined by a denial of the possibility of legitimation. The spectre as a mediation of discourse which lies in between, and in Alive—not between life and death but between death and death. In Alive political agency is the phantom’s expediency whereby the gaze onto the spectator—the pervasiveness of the ghostly experience problematizes the status of the spectator who—in the presence of the posthumous narrator—emerges as a posthumous spectator.
New dialect formation and near-dialect contact
Authors: Millar Robert McColl
Published: January 2018

Linguists have often wondered how ‘new’ varieties of a language come into being. This chapter provides a theoretical discussion of recent research on these developments, paying particular attention to determinism, the founder principle and swamping. Varieties discussed include New Zealand, Newfoundland, Falkland Islands and Australian English, Glaswegian Scots and Scottish Standard English. The last is of particular interest, since it discusses contact producing a written variety. The concept of koineisation is introduced.
New dialect formation and time depth
Authors: Millar Robert McColl
Published: January 2018

Linguists have generally studied new dialect formation in varieties with relatively little time depth. In this chapter greater depth is considered in relation to the development of the Scots dialects of Orkney and Shetland, Irish English and Ulster Scots. While lengthier periods of contact do make analysis of the original impact more difficult, it is shown that essentially the same processes have been at work in these contexts as was the case in more recent contacts. Given their contact with the native North Germanic variety of the Northern Isles, the Shetland and Orkney examples lead us into the themes of the next two chapters.
English in the ‘transition period’: the sources of contact-induced change
Authors: Millar Robert McColl
Published: January 2018

Perhaps the central chapter of Contact, we focus here on the rapid and radical changes English passed through in relation to inflectional morphology (in particular but not exclusively in the noun phrase) in the later Old English and early Middle English periods. Comparison is made to other Germanic languages; the concept of drift is introduced. Theories for why these changes occurred and why the changes took place where, when and how they did are considered, with particular focus on earlier contact explanations. Recent proposals that bilingualism with Celtic languages was the primary impetus for the changes are critiqued. It is suggested that, while Celtic influence should not be dismissed, it is contact between Old English and Old Norse in the North of England which acted as catalyst. This contact is seen as a koine whose origin is markedly similar to that postulated for modern new dialects.
Conclusions
Authors: Millar Robert McColl
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues that the distinction previously made by some scholars between the linguistic forces underlying new dialect creation and those underlying contact between closely related varieties often considered to be discrete is probably misinformed. The changes involved in the contacts fuelling differentiation are, if not the same, essentially of the same type. Koineisation lies as the heart of both.
Radical Romantics
Authors: Ford Talissa J.
Published: January 2018

Radical Romantics engages with the critical frameworks of cultural geography, cartography, and the burgeoning field of oceanic studies in order to reformulate theories of colonization and empire in the Romantic period. In so doing, the book poses fundamental questions about our understanding of both territorial and imagined space. What are the means by which people can conceive of geographical space without resorting to the terms of nationalism? Is it possible to imagine a space beyond territory, as movement itself? How can we articulate the overlap between mapped and lived space? Rather than offering a single answer to these questions, Radical Romantics expands outward, as if from the centre of a compass, tracing the myriad ways in which authors resist the imperative of colonial and imperial conceptions of space. In studying texts that range from William Blake’s visionary poetry to prophetic pamphlets, from Lord Byron’s Eastern romances to travel narratives about Jerusalem and Africa, this book explores moments where imaginative space and territorial space overlap in the service of radical geographies.
Alchemical Transformations? Fictions of the Nuclear State after 1989
Authors: Grausam Daniel
Published: January 2018

James Flint’s novel The Book of Ash (2004) is a book concerned with the toxic legacy of the Cold War and the literary challenge of representing the security state inherited from Thomas Pynchon. The plot concerns Cooper James, a computer programmer employed by the US military at Featherbrooks, an RAF outpost in North Yorkshire, and his search for the truth about his father. The figure of the father is inspired by the real-life American sculptor James Acord (1944–2011), the only private citizen in the world licensed to own and handle high-level radioactive materials. In 1989 Acord moved close to Hanford, site of US plutonium production and the most polluted nuclear site in the US, where he sought to create something like a nuclear Stonehenge as a long-term memorial to the nuclear age, and to develop artistic practices for transmuting radioactive waste into less harmful substances. Acord imagined his own aesthetic practice to be a kind of alchemy, and The Book of Ash is precisely in this same style, making alchemical transformation a literary subject but also a literary technique: it is a radioactive novel in its subject matter and the way it transmutes novelistic style and content over time.
The justice of the Indians
Authors: Stoneman Richard
Published: January 2018

This chapter starts with the report by Ctesias (early fourth century BCE) that the Indians are a very just people. This prompts various questions, for instance on the sources of his information and their quality, and on whether what he meant by 'just' corresponded to any Indian reality or terminology. This leads into an investigation of Greek writing on India from Homer to the Alexander Romance so as to ascertain what Greeks imagined to be the components of Indian justice, and to a comparison with Indian texts that include the Rgveda, Upanishads, Arthsastra, Dharmasutras, and Laws of Manu. A conclusion is that the Greek texts are more reliable than is sometimes supposed.
Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England
Authors: Deutermann Allison K.
Published: January 2018

Early modern drama was in fundamental ways an aural art form. How plays should sound and how they should be heard were questions vital to the formal development of early modern drama, and particularly to two of its most popular genres: revenge tragedy and city comedy. Simply put, theatregoers were taught to hear these plays differently. Revenge tragedies by William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd imagine sound stabbing, piercing and slicing into listeners' bodies on and off the stage; while comedies by Ben Jonson and John Marston imagine it being sampled selectively and according to taste. Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England traces the interconnected development of these two genres and auditory modes over six decades of commercial theatre history, combining surveys of the theatrical marketplace with focused attention to specific plays and to the non-dramatic literature that gives this interest in audition texture: anatomy texts, sermons, music treatises and manuals on rhetoric and poetics.
Sound in Mind and Body: Hearing Early Modern Revenge Tragedy
Authors: Deutermann Allison K.
Published: January 2018

This chapter traces how revenge tragedy took shape on the early modern stage, outlining the model of violent, invasive hearing on which the genre would increasingly depend. Many late-sixteenth century plays delight in sonic excess, combining cannon fire, trumpets, and alarums with the rumbling thunder of bombastic speech. In these productions, loud noises are often associated with violence, and particularly vengeance. Revenge is said to ‘thunder’ into bodies, or to ‘shriek’ and ‘cry’ out; noise itself becomes a weapon. Contemporary anatomy texts support such thinking, as do early modern theories of theatrical influence and effects. Increasingly, revengers’ speeches become weapons to be wielded precisely -- that is, directly into the ears of specific, intended victims --rather than released indiscriminately into crowds of hearers. Through Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy andShakespeare’s 3 Henry VI and Titus Andronicus, this chapter argues that revenge tragedy is intimately bound up in thinking about what sound can do to listeners both on and off the stage. The theatrical form proves explicitly invested in the question of what it means to hear plays in performance.
The Eye-deology of Trauma: Killing Anna Karenina Softly
Authors: Leving Yuri
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on depictions of the death of the heroine of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in adaptations ranging from the silent film era to the present day. It argues that the various cinematic hypertexts have altered the way we view Anna’s suicide, the focal point of the novel for many readers, creating a new visual language to represent her death. Also discussed is a new cinematic hypertext, not present in the novel, but included by many of the filmmakers: Anna’s eye, which the author traces back to Dziga Vertov’s mechanized depiction of the human eye in Man with a Movie Camera. Such cinematic influences, along with the novel’s transportation to different times and countries in its adaptations, demonstrate that the novel has acquired a new vocabulary, in addition to that of Tolstoy’s novel.
Introduction: Filming Russian Classics—Challenges and Opportunities
Authors: Burry Alexander
Published: January 2018

This chapter presents an overview of the history and process of transposing classic Russian literature into film, surveying the progress recent scholars of adaptation studies have made in overcoming fidelity criticism. Borrowing Gerard Genette’s concept of “hypertextuality,” it offers an approach to studying films of Russian literature based on cross-cultural communication, in which literary texts undergo semantic shifts as they enter different temporal, spatial, social, and historical contexts when they are transformed into film.
The Logos of Potency: A Theoretical Introduction
Authors: Castrucci Emanuele
Published: January 2018

This first chapter examines the metaphysical hypothesis of a “Being permeated by the Logos”, witnessing at once the clash “at a distance” between two giants of modern philosophy: Leibniz and Spinoza. Their solutions to the metaphysical problem in question are radically different, but equally representative of the highest levels on which the problem can be posed. At the end of this chapter an interpretive hypothesis is set forth, which could be defined as “neo-Spinozist”, and which underpin the entire framework of this essay. According to this hypothesis, potency has its own autonomous, immanent logic, not artificially delimitable by pre-constituted external entities, as would be the case of the objective existence of a logos as ontological, normative measure.
Rhetoric of Ethical Universalism: Jürgen Habermas and the Dissolution of Political Realism
Authors: Castrucci Emanuele
Published: January 2018

Today there is in vogue a humanitarian religion that regulates the expression of people’s thoughts, and if by chance someone defies it, he seems monstrous, just as in the Middle Ages anyone denying the divinity of Jesus would have seemed monstrous.

(V. Pareto, Cours de sociologie générale...
A Thousand Antiquities
Authors: Greenstine Ryan J. , Johnson Ryan J.
Published: January 2018

Greenstine and Johnson, the contributing editors of the volume, set the scene for the collection with the ancient tales of Thales, Heraclitus, Pyrrho, and Lucretius. These four tales convey the force of metaphysical thinking, a force that overwhelms everyday life. The raw thought, pensée brute, of pure metaphysics is the shared site of the volume’s eighteen contemporary encounters with ancient metaphysics. After framing the work within continental philosophy, the essay concludes with a survey of the contents of each essay.
The Muses and Philosophy: Elements for a History of the Pseudos [1991]
Authors: Cassin Barbara
Published: January 2018

Barbara Cassin’s “The Muses and Philosophy: Elements for a History of the ‘Pseudos’” (1991; translated by Samuel Galson), investigates Plato’s attempt in the Sophist to distinguish the philosopher from the sophist. Cassin pinpoints the slippery operation of the pseudos through the texts of Parmenides and Hesiod. Yet Parmenides’ rejection of not-being allows the sophist to claim infallibility. Plato’s Eleatic Stranger shows that Parmenides’ rejection of not-being is self-refuting (thus the Stranger’s famous parricide is just as much Parmenides’ suicide). Further, although the Stranger ultimately fails to find a criterion for truth or falsity, he nevertheless establishes a place for the pseudos in the distinction between logos tinos (speech of something) and logos peri tinos (speech about something). Ultimately, Cassin argues that reality of pseudos is a condition for the possibility of language, and indeed involves the very materiality and breadth of language.
Does It Matter? Material Nature and Vital Heat in Aristotle’s Biology
Authors: Trott Adriel M.
Published: January 2018

Adriel M. Trott’s “Does It Matter? Material Nature and Vital Heat in Aristotle’s Biology” questions whether the difference between form and material in Aristotle is itself a formal or material distinction. Trott, framing her investigation with a discussion of the feminist critiques of the form/matter binary, argues that form and material, rather than being mutually exclusive, are distributed on a gradient, as contraries. Aristotle’s account of vital heat shows how the two-sex model slides into a one-sex model whose difference is located on a continuum: if woman is defined in terms of distance from man, a fluidity exists between these positions, whereby the difference between them is not a difference of form or kind, but a difference in heat, one of degree. Through this reading, Trott criticizes the myth of a link between femininity of matter (without devaluing the status of either), and shows that matter is rendered always-already meaningful for Aristotle.
Lucretius and Naturalism [1961]
Authors: Deleuze Gilles
Published: January 2018

Gilles Deleuze’s “Lucretius and Naturalism” (1961; translated by Jared Bly) is the first version of an essay that would later appear in an altered form in the appendix to Deleuze’s 1969 Logique du Sens, “Lucrèce et le Naturalisme.” Here Deleuze shows how Lucretius, in the first truly noble deed of philosophical pluralism, articulates his atomism as a means to determine the speculative and practical object of philosophy as “naturalism.” To distinguish, in humanity, what belongs to myth and what belongs to nature; to distinguish, in nature, what is really infinite and what is not: such is the practical and speculative object of naturalism. One of the most profound constants of naturalism is to denounce everything that is the cause of sadness, everything that requires sadness in order to exercise its power. Atomism accomplishes this through the concepts of the clinamen and simulacra. From Lucretius to Nietzsche, the same goal is pursued and attained: to transform thought and sensibility into affirmations.
On Causality and Law in Lucretius and Contemporary Cosmology
Authors: Webb David
Published: January 2018

David Webb’s “On Causality and Law in Lucretius and Contemporary Cosmology” argues that the laws of physics, rather than being immutable, must instead be subordinate to and coordinated by local regularities of causality. Webb develops this idea through a reading of the contemporary cosmology of Unger and Smolin, who seek to address problems of contemporary physics by undermining the presuppositions of scientific absolutism. Webb finds these ideas in Lucretius, who postulates that the motion of atoms is fundamentally a matter of chance. Law-like regularity indeed emerges, but only through the chance coming into being of systems that exhibit stability and a degree of recursion. This stability is never universally binding, but itself may fall apart at some time. Webb concludes by considering Michel Serres’ reconceiving of physical laws as neither universal nor immutable.
Insoluble Questions (1932–1935)
Authors: King James
Published: January 2018

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1932 to 1935. In an attempt to sort out the problems in their marriage, Roland and Valentine travelled to India at the end of 1932, where their friend, Cuban-born archaeologist Vicente-Marcelino-Julio Galarza Pérez Castañeda had taken up a professorship in Arabic philosophy at the University of Calcutta. Although they were largely sheltered from them, the Penroses nevertheless felt themselves assaulted on a daily basis by the harsh realities of everyday life in India. Roland's sense of natural justice was further battered when he witnessed the treatment of the Indian people at the hands of their English rulers.
The Uninvited Guest (1966–1984)
Authors: King James
Published: January 2018

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1966 to 1984. By the mid-1960s, Roland used his Sussex home as a refuge from his lecture tours, meetings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and other London-based activities. As a result, he paid more attention to the garden and filled it with sculptures. Although he kept in touch with the ICA, Roland had lost touch with its day-to-day activities during his Picasso years. He had expected Herbert Read to carry on in his place, but when Read died in 1968 Roland felt duty-bound to rekindle his formerly close relationship with the Institute. Finding new quarters for the ICA — and raising funds to accomplish this — became Roland's preoccupation. In 1973, Picasso died on 8 April, in his ninety-first year. In 1977, when he served on the committee selecting the Picasso works that would constitute the dation en paiement (death duties) payable to the French government, Roland felt he was burgling an old friend's house.
Husserl’s Concept of Passive Synthesis
Authors: Rölli Marc
Published: January 2018

It is not meaningless sense-data as the stuff of experience that are immanent, but phenomenological impressions that organise themselves passively and become noticeable. Experiences imply a genetic substratum of passive syntheses and hyletic mergings. This leads to being affected by something that we haven’t yet perceived. Deleuze says sense thresholds tend not to be where they are sought but are found where they aren’t. A certain mobility of experience can be detected that he contrues in the concept of intensity.
‘A lightning that illuminates the banal’: Violence and the Everyday
Authors: Taylor Alison
Published: January 2018

Chapter one establishes and justifies the link between a compelling tendency towards extremes in violence erupting out of the everyday in recent European cinema. It argues that while it is the nature of the everyday to be a kind of backdrop – taken for granted, imperceptible, and uneventful, it is in fact a crucial and under examined aspect in several extreme films. This is evident in terms of the films’ subject matter and setting (the prevalence of family, home, school, workplace), and/ or aesthetics (the Bressonian paring back of performance and playing down of the eventful). Drawing on the notorious instant of graphic on-screen suicide in Haneke’s Hidden, chapter one highlights what the book takes to be a central dynamic present in varied ways across the body of films under examination – an aesthetic strategy that attempts to provoke an experience of discomfort by preventing viewers from containing moments of violence with a coherent meaning or motivation. This introductory chapter argues that by attending to the ordinary as well as the extreme, we might better understand the affective grip of these films.
Neither Substance Nor Process II: Two Modes
Authors: Cogburn Jon
Published: January 2018

Chapter V begins by rehearsing the distinction between substance and process philosophies and how Garcia attempts to avoid problems with both. Of particular relevance is Graham Harman’s claim that Garcia’s characterization of an object in terms of its difference from that which it comprehends and from what comprehends it ends up, actually in the characteristic manner of process philosophies, having the object depend on these very things. Changing any of the comprehended or comprehending things would change the precise difference in question, resulting in a different object. Worse, since the object is comprehended by all of the relations that it has to every other object, Garcia seems to be committed to the view that the object’s identity is a function of everything in the universe, a position which easily veers into the (British) Hegelian affirmation that there is only one thing. Discussing Garcia allows me to pose this problem in a novel way, via what I call the Putnam/Parmenides argument.
Neither Substance Nor Process III: Events, Time, and Life
Authors: Cogburn Jon
Published: January 2018

Chapter VIII shows how, just as the de-determined world of the thing must be buttressed by the world of the object, the extensive world of (n)either/(n)or must be buttressed by an account of the intensive world of more and less. For Garcia events are facts that are present, time is a result of events indexed by intensity of presence, and life is a result of the intensification of the intensity of the difference between that which an object comprehends and that which comprehends and object.
Medical New Women I: Nurses
Authors: Wånggren Lena
Published: January 2018

The fin de siècle involved not only a technological modernity, but also a medical modernity: the position of the nurse changed, female doctors set up practice, and new medical technologies and systems of knowledge came into use. The fourth chapter considers the medical New Women who, through new diagnostic tools as well as their admission to the institutional technology of the hospital, entered new spaces and roles as nurses. It locates the figure of the New Woman nurse as a fin de siècle figuration of the earlier Nightingale New Style nurse. Reading Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade, A Woman With Tenacity of Purpose (1900) as an intervention in a debate on hospital hierarchies, the chapter explores the role of modern medical technologies in the formation of notions of gender, knowledge and medical authority.
Medical New Women II: Doctors
Authors: Wånggren Lena
Published: January 2018

The fifth chapter examines the debates surrounding women’s entry into the medical sphere as doctors, examining gendered debates around medical authority and professionalism. While New Woman nurses were figured as especially feminine, the New Woman doctor was – similarly to her typing and bicycling counterparts – posited as an ‘unsexed’ or ‘unwomanly’ creature. Noting the role of female doctors in the fight for women’s access to higher education and in the wider women’s movement, the chapter moves on to consider the role of literary texts in debates around female doctors. Reading Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1894) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ (1894), the section describes the harassment faced by early female doctors.
The Political Theology of Schelling
Authors: Das Saitya Brata
Published: January 2018

This book rigorously examines the theologico-political works of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, setting his thought against Hegel's and showing how he prepared the way for the post-metaphysical philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig and Jacques Derrida.
Introduction
Authors: Das Saitya Brata
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This study makes manifest the ‘eschatological’ or ‘messianic’ spirit in Schelling's work that insists on the ‘structural opening’ of the world to a radical exteriority, to the excess un-enclosed in the immanent rational foundation of the world. This ‘outside’ of the world — not another world as opposed to this world but an outside of the world as such, keeps the world open to the event of pure futurity: eschaton means for Schelling nothing but this idea of exception that explodes the continuum of the world-history to its outside. The historical Reason of the world is torn open from its foundation to the eschatological event of redemption to come. This makes impossible not only the representation of this eschatological event in any earthly sovereign figure, but also attempts to translate such an event into the rational-secular structure of metaphysical propositions.
The Beatific Life
Authors: Das Saitya Brata
Published: January 2018

This chapter presents a reading of the much-neglected novella Clara. It presents Schelling as offering an imaginative-creative expression of what may be called the ‘beatific life’, a life that is moved not by the power of the law but is released from the cages of the law. Beatitude, then, is the fundamental attunement that, by releasing life from the foundation of the worldly nomos, attunes it to the eschatological advent of the holy: the result is a political theology that destitutes sovereignties in the worldly order. Our exposure to the gift of our very existence, the gift that wounds us in the outpouring of an unconditional beatitude, is not mere life at the disposal of the law but the being which exists just ‘like a rose, without a why’.
The Non-Sovereign Exception
Authors: Das Saitya Brata
Published: January 2018

This chapter reads the Stuttgart lectures of 1810 to show how Schelling is concerned with elaborating an eschatological conception of being. The lectures show Schelling understanding eschatology in terms of infinite disclosures of the divine that constantly open us to a future to come that refuses to embody itself in the immanence of the world-historical potencies. These world-historical powers thereby lose their autochthony and autarchy, their legitimacy and sovereignty, their power to elicit from us absolute obligation. They can at best be understood as belonging to the order of ‘passing away’, as the impoverished attempts of mankind to supplement the Fall (Abfall). Such a Fall, with which the history of mankind itself is inaugurated, will henceforth mark the world-historical powers with an indelible caesura that can never be redeemed by these powers themselves. This caesura will forever haunt any attempt to construct a strict analogy between the political and theological, the divine, and the profane.
Conclusion
Authors: Jaillant Lise
Published: January 2018

The Travellers’ Library, Phoenix Library and Albatross Modern Continental Library were discontinued during the Second World War, at a time when issues such as paper rationing and distribution problems affected all publishers. An attempt to revive them after the war did not succeed. This is surprising for two main reasons. First, the academic study of modernism was by then on the rise. And across the Atlantic, the Modern Library series was more popular than ever, despite the competition of paperback series. The conclusion answers the following questions: why did European series associated with modernism fail to find a public in the years that followed WW2? In what format did readers encounter modernist texts – at a time when modernism was institutionalised in the university system?
Chastity and the Ethics of Commercial Theatre in Measure for Measure, Pericles and the Revenger’s Tragedy
Authors: Gillen Katherine
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the ways in which chastity is invoked to designate representational, economic, and ethical legitimacy. Antitheatrical tracts often depict the theatre as a brothel that commoditizes people and as a deceptive seller of cheap, corrupt wares. Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure, Shakespeare and Wilkins’s Pericles, and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy reproduce these antitheatrical arguments, presenting prostitution as a synecdoche for economic exchange that commoditizes bodies and sells them using theatrical artifice. Each play invokes the figure of a chaste woman to trouble this association between the theatre and the brothel, interrogating the imputation that the theatre, like the brothel, traffics in human bodies and in excessive, supplemental, and therefore disingenuous forms of representation. Although the plays reach disparate conclusions about the possibility of creating an ethical commercial theatre, they collectively illuminate the problematics of theatrical chastity, as it is used to interrogate the theatre’s commercial and representational investments.
Mediterranean Markets, Commoditised Masculinity and the Whitening of Christian Chastity in the Merchant of Venice and the Renegado
Authors: Gillen Katherine
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the commodity potential of white Europeans in multiracial trading environments. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Massinger’s The Renegado register anxieties about Eastern trade, invoking the specter of captivity to explore the racial, religious, and sexual effects of commoditizing Christian bodies. Both plays resolve crises of personal commoditisation by discursively removing chastity from the commercial realm, a development that mitigates the potentially miscegenational circulation of Christian women and works to reclaim the intrinsic personal value of Christian men. The tragicomic trajectory of each play depends upon transforming chastity from a potential commodity to an inherently Christian—and increasingly white—virtue. As such, the plays’ redefinition of chastity informs their articulation of racial whiteness, which emerges as a repository of intrinsic personal value that exempts certain subjects from the most objectifying aspects of the market, leaving others even more vulnerable to its commoditising energies.
Merleau-Ponty and the Fold of the Flesh
Authors: Gilliam Christian
Published: January 2018

The second chapter turns to Merleau-Ponty to see how, working through a number of issues with Sartre, phenomenology, and modern thought more generally, he deepens Sartre’s engagement with immanence and elaboration of the subject-body and perceptual consciousness as the condition of meaning, negativity, and action. Through tracing this development, the chapter elucidates the way in which it sets basis for Merleau-Ponty’s later work. In moving away from the subject-body or an exploration of the phenomenal body to a more direct ontological enquiry into the appearing of the visible-tactile (the actual) field itself, the later works develop an anti-humanist ontology that locates perceiving bodies within a meaning-generating flesh, where the reversibility of Being as ‘flesh’ establishes a generativity which is always immanent to it and as such beyond any notion of a metaphysical transcendent Outside or transcendent Other. It is here that the Outside/Other is first construed as a disjunctive fold of immanence itself. Critically, through this, Merleau-Ponty provides a conceptual language that avoids the theoretical snares of the traditional dualist language evoked by Sartre, and lays much of the groundwork for the ‘pure’ immanence of Foucault and Deleuze.
Renaissance England and the Jews
Authors: Coodin Sara
Published: January 2018

Chapter 1 discusses historical evidence regarding how Jews or ‘Hebrews’ and were imagined, represented, and encountered by Englishmen in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This chapter considers English attitudes towards Jews as well as Hebrew, the language most closely associated with the Jewish people; and argues that these encounters reflected complex, morally ambivalent responses that are not easily dismissible as flatly anti-Semitic, as some influential recent scholarship has insisted. Among the evidence this chapter discusses is Henry VIII’s solicitation of rabbinical opinion on the Great Matter of his divorce, the Classicist Robert Wakefield’s text Oratio de utilitate trium linguarum, English writers’ prefaces to their translations of Classical texts, and the inventor Simon Sturtevant’s instructional text Dibre Adam, or Adams Hebrew Dictionarie.
Introduction
Authors: Löfflmann Georg
Published: January 2018

This chapter highlights the conflict of competing grand strategy discourses under the Obama presidency, which are identified as hegemony, engagement and restraint. It provides an overview of the political significance of grand strategy and its treatment in the academic literature. The chapter describes the political and expert debate of American grand strategy under the Obama presidency and briefly introduces the theoretical-methodological framework that has guided the research into competing discourses of American grand strategy under Obama. The chapter offers an alternative definition of grand strategy from the conventional literature, identifying it as discursive link between geopolitical identity and national security.