bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Taming Dissonance: Cognitive Operations and Interpretive Strategies
Authors: Kiss Miklós , Willemsen Steven
Published: September 2017

Chapter 4 addresses how effects of narrative cognitive dissonance incite in viewers an urge to make meaning, and therefore asks how viewers cope with dissonant experiences in narrative fiction. This chapter offers an overview of the different interpretive strategies and hermeneutic manoeuvres that viewers may utilise to ‘tame’ troubling or puzzling dissonances in narrative artworks. Regarding the reception and interpretation of highly complex stories, it aim to answer relevant questions such as ‘How do viewers usually make sense of or assign meaning to contradictory and impossible narrative elements?’, ‘What kinds of interpretive activity do these challenging films evoke in viewers?’ and ‘How do such interpretive activities shape our viewing experiences?’.
Impossible Puzzle Films: Between Art Cinema and (Post-)Classical Narration
Authors: Kiss Miklós , Willemsen Steven
Published: September 2017

Chapter 5 discusses the formal make-up of impossible puzzle films, asking how they regulate viewer responses to their excessive complexities. This section addresses two specific questions: ‘How do impossible puzzle films cue certain sense-making and meaning-making operations over others?’ and ‘How do they keep viewers hooked on trying to solve their ultimately unsolvable puzzles?’. In line with these questions, part of the chapter is dedicated to a comparative perspective on the storytelling mode of impossible puzzle films and that of (modernist) art cinema. Art cinema, as a narrative mode, has used complex means similar to its contemporary counterpart, but, as the chapter demonstrates, has generally done so to different ends. The section argues that impossible puzzle films draw from both the tradition of (modernist) art-cinema and classical narration, but remain fundamentally rooted in the latter by carefully balancing their pervasive complexities with more classical elements of mainstream film storytelling.
Wallowing in Dissonance: The Attractiveness of Impossible Puzzles
Authors: Kiss Miklós , Willemsen Steven
Published: September 2017

Chapter 6 concludes the book’s explorations with an outlook on the reasons why viewers may find narrative complexity engaging or even attractive. By way of an outro, this chapter offers hunches regarding the possible reasons why viewers may be fascinated by such confusing story experiences (hermeneutic, cognitive, ludological, eudaimonic). After all, why would anyone want to engage with complex puzzles that perhaps cannot even be solved? The final aim of this book is to disclose this peculiar appeal – the pleasures and fascinations of engaging with highly complex, cognitively challenging if not confusing experiences of impossible puzzle narratives.
Favelas on Screen
Authors: Krstić Igor
Published: September 2017

The first part of this chapter discusses phases of favela representations in Brazilian cinema through handpicked examples like Rio Zona Norte (dos Santos 1957) or Babilônia 2000 (Coutinho 2001). Together with scholars of Brazilian cinema (Nagib, Bentes, Xavier), the author argues that the favela is one of the most recurring landscapes in Brazilian cinema and favela films some of world cinema’s most memorable ‘local expressions’ of ‘global currents’ like neorealism or Third Cinema. Movements like Cinema Novo and key directors like Nelson Pereira dos Santos have not only produced these memorable films, but they have also stimulated vital ideas on the way filmmakers ought to address the lives of the underprivileged. Building on this, the second part provides an extended close reading of City of God (Meirelles 2002), which narrates three decades of drug trade in a favela on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The author shows how the film builds on previous favela films and so creates an immersive experience of a ‘cinematic city of god’, which, however, disintegrates into a ‘cinematic city of violence’ – and so becomes a modified version of Cinema Novo’s plea for an ‘aesthetic of violence’ in the digital age.
Stresses and Strains
Authors: Robb Thomas K.
Published: September 2017

By 1978, Carter’s foreign policy was in a state of flux. Unsure of how to promote arms limitations agreements with the Soviet Union, balance the energy and economics difficulties that the United States, as well as tackle his increasingly difficult NATO allies, the president looked towards London and the government of James Callaghan for assistance. Carter found a willing partner in Callaghan but as this chapter demonstrates, there were considerable limits to just how useful London could prove in a time of economic malaise and decreased international power.
The Language of Counterinsurgency in Malaya: Dialectical Soundscapes of Salvage and Warfare
Authors: Bloom Peter J.
Published: September 2017

In his chapter, Peter Bloom elaborates on the process of decolonisation in this region and the complex relationships between the coloniser and the colonised that process entailed. In his chapter, he analyses how the mobilisation of official documentary film, radio language and sound effects became a critical site in authenticating the legitimacy of the British-led campaign against the communist insurgency, and the extent to which these also contributed to Cold War realignments during the post-war era.
Figures of Empire: American Documentaries in the Philippines
Authors: Capino José B.
Published: September 2017

In his chapter, J. B. Capino demonstrates how a variety of official and private documentary films were deployed to serve American imperialist interests while also documenting the Philipinos’ daily life under direct US imperial rule (1899-1946), and over the post-independence period. This contribution highlights the specific filmic elements employed to both acknowledge and belie US imperialism in the Philippine, and demonstrates how specific documentary forms were influenced by the history of American imperialism in the region and, reciprocally, how non-fiction forms also forged significant aspects of imperialism.
Archives of the Planet: French Elitist Representations of Colonial India
Authors: Deprez Camille
Published: September 2017

In ‘Archives of the Planet: Elitist Representations of Colonial India’, Camille Deprez investigates films sponsored by French patron of the arts Albert Kahn and shot in the princely states of India in the late 1920s. She demonstrates that, at the peak of French colonialism, this idealist project of intercultural understanding and cooperation was supported by strong associations with carefully selected members of the Indian elite and that this led to a staged and biased representation of India. She also argues that the films eventually overestimated the power of the traditional socio-political order of India in relation to that of the British colonisers and of other rising forces of decolonisation in the country.
‘Sufficient Dramatic or Adventure Interest’: Authenticity, Reality and Violence in Pre-War Animal Documentaries from South-East Asia
Authors: Barnard Timothy P.
Published: September 2017

In his chapter, Timothy Barnard explores issues of authenticity and the close relations that always existed between documentary and narrative cinema. Focusing on American films about Komodo dragons shot in Borneo in the 1920s and 1930s, he presents animal documentaries as a popular site where western film-makers showcased supposedly realistic images of animals that ironically led to exotic and fantastic film depictions of animals. He also argues that these films created a space where western (American) desires, cultural tensions and anxieties about the perceived savagery and violence outside of western civilisation could be projected.
Introduction: Reimagining a New Spartacus
Authors: Augoustakis Antony , Cyrino Monica S.
Published: September 2017

This introductory chapter discusses the highly successful television series Spartacus, which aired on the premium cable network STARZ from 2010 to 2013. The story of Spartacus, the historical Thracian gladiator who led a slave uprising against the Roman Republican army from 73 to 71 BC, has inspired numerous receptions over the centuries in a variety of different media, while the figure of the rebel slave leader has often served as an icon of resistance against oppression in modern political movements and popular ideologies. Here, the chapter looks into the production history of the STARZ series and how the series itself treads familiar ground at the same time as it explores new territory.
Introduction
Authors: Webb Peter
Published: September 2017

Arab identity is an intriguing conundrum. It is commonly presumed that Arabs originated as a distinct and essentially homogenous community of ancient Arabian Bedouin who were separate from other populations of the Middle East, yet modern Arab identity is multifarious and resists all scholarly attempts to generalise about Arabness. It thus seems that pre-modern Arabs are too simplistically conceptualised around monolithic stereotypes of Arabian nomadism, and the idea of ancient Arab identity is accordingly in need of new, theoretically grounded and critical scrutiny. The task inspires this book, and the Introduction sets the scene by discussing the problems of interpreting Arab history, and describes the theoretical models that can help resolve these problems. Ancient Arabs have not hitherto been studied as an ethnic group, and the Introduction discusses how anthropological theories of ethnogenesis enable fresh interpretation of textual and archaeological evidence to reorient our understanding of both Arab origins and the rise of Islam.
Pre-Islamic ‘Arabless-ness’: Arabian Identities
Authors: Webb Peter
Published: September 2017

Developing Chapter 1’s findings on pre-Islamic Arabian society, this chapter proposes a new origin point for Arab communal consciousness. Chapter 2 seeks the first groups of people who called themselves ‘Arabs’ and explores how those people can be identified from historical records. We begin by appraising the evidence about Arabic language: when and where did it evolve and to what extent does Arabic-language use delineate Arab communal identity? We evaluate the surprising paucity of pre-Islamic Arabic records, and next turn to pre-Islamic poetry to examine its citation of the word ‘Arab’ alongside the senses of community the poets articulate. Pre-Islamic poetic reference to ‘Arabs’ is also almost non-existent, whereas alternative forms of communal identity are clearly expressed, in particular, a people known as Maʿadd. Marshalling theories of ethnogenesis to interpret the evidence, this chapter sheds new light on pre-Islamic Arabia’s fragmented communal boundaries. Chapter 2 closes with early Islamic-era poetry where poets first begin to call themselves ‘Arabs’, suggesting that Arab ethnogenesis was a result, not a cause of the rise of Islam.
Introduction
Authors: Hau Lisa Irene
Published: September 2017

The Introduction defines the perimeters and terminology of the book. In addition, it offers a brief overview of the role of moral didacticism in historiography from antiquity to the 21st century and discusses the distinctiveness of moralising in ancient Greek historiography compared with other genres at the time. It then offers a narratologically based typology of moralising techniques, which is used throughout the book.
Polybius
Authors: Hau Lisa Irene
Published: September 2017

This chapter offers a thorough analysis of the moral-didactic lessons and moralising techniques of Polybius. It finds that practical, political, and moral didacticism are confluent in his Histories, and that moral actions are often shown to result in practical benefits for the moral actor. It also establishes that Polybius’ moral lessons are largely traditional, except for a lack of interest in piety and a high tolerance for brutal actions of war which are routinely labelled ‘cruel’ by other historiographers.
Diodorus Siculus
Authors: Hau Lisa Irene
Published: September 2017

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the Diodorus source problem and its bearing on the argument. It then offers a thorough analysis of the moral-didactic lessons and moralising techniques of Diodorus Siculus. It finds that Diodorus’ story universe is governed by divine forces, which are largely just, and that this makes piety the cardinal virtue of his historical actors. Diodorus also condemns brutality and cruel behaviour in any context, and especially when perpetrated against civilians or prisoners of war. Throughout, he recommends epieikeia, decent treatment of those in one’s power, as the most moral and most practically beneficial course. The chapter ends with an overview of differences in moralising between parts of Diodorus’ work based on different sources and briefly hypothesises about the moralising of these sources, some of which are going to be analysed in more detail in chapter 3.
Fragmentary Hellenistic Historiography
Authors: Hau Lisa Irene
Published: September 2017

This chapter analyses the fragments of Timaeus of Tauromenium, Duris of Samos, Phylarchus, Agatharchides of Cnidus, Posidonius of Apamea, and Hieronymus of Cardia in order to uncover any hints of moral didacticism in their works. Using the lessons and techniques found and analysed in Polybius and Diodorus as its point of departure, it forms a theory about the moralising of each of the authors discussed, while always acknowledging the hypothetical nature of its conclusions.
Conclusion
Authors: Hau Lisa Irene
Published: September 2017

The conclusion is brief as each chapter has its own part-conclusion. It summarises the argument to the effect that Greek historiography was moral-didactic from its inception, and that techniques developed while lessons stayed largely stable, with individual historiographers having individual quirks and preferences. The stability of the moral messages is surprising considering the time span and changes in political situation and so demonstrates the power of tradition in morality and of imitation in literature. The thorny question of whether moralising meant inventing details and writing poor history is then discussed, and the conclusion is ventured that no historiographer is ever objective and that Moral History was in and of itself no poorer than any other kinds of History. The quality of the history writing was determined by the historian’s handling of sources and ability to analyse them, and not by his, probably unconscious, decision to view the world through a moralistic lens.
Acts of Redemption and ‘The Falling Man’ Photograph in Post-9/11 US Cinema
Authors: Westwell Guy
Published: September 2017

In Chapter Three "Acts of Redemption and ‘The Falling Man’ Photograph in Post-9/11 US Cinema", Guy Westwell, who has written his own monograph on the impact of the 'War on Terror' on American film, Parallel Lines: Post-9/11 Cinema (2014), takes as a starting point one of the quintessential images of the 'War on Terror' era, the photograph of the unidentified 'falling man' taken on 11 September 2001 by Richard Drew. Such has been the impact of the picture, which Mark D. Thompson described as 'perhaps the most powerful image of despair at the beginning of the twenty-first century' (63), it has been returned to in a variety of forms over the years: in art, literature, television and film. Westwell considers how the image (and the World Trade Center itself) has been co-opted by a variety of authors to function as a prism through which prevailing attitudes towards 9/11 have been projected. In a detailed analysis of two such examples, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011) and The Walk (2015), Westwell engages with questions of representation and identity, memory and trauma (both on a personal and cultural level) and argues that, as Mark Lacey suggested, American cinema in the first decades of the new millennium became "a space where 'commonsense' ideas about global politics and history are (re)-produced and where stories about what is acceptable behaviour from states and individuals are naturalised and legitimated" (614).
‘You be very mindful of how you act’: Post-9/11 Culture and Arab American Subjectivities in Joseph Castelo’s The War Within (2005) and Hesham Issawi’s AmericanEast (2008)
Authors: Petrovic Paul
Published: September 2017

Petrovic asserts that The War Within (directed by Joseph Castrello based on a screenplay by Tom Glynn and the Pakistani American actor-writer Ayad Akhtar who also plays the lead role in the film and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for his play Disgraced [2013]) and Hesham Issawi’s AmericanEast are two of very few American films to centralise the experience of American Muslim lives in their narratives and portray their characters with a sense of humanity and cultural sensitivity instead of crudely drawn caricatures.
Traumatise, Repeat, Finish: Military Science Fiction (Long) after 9/11 and Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Authors: Hantke Steffen
Published: September 2017

The collection then concludes with Steffen Hantke's illuminating analysis of Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow from a variety of critical perspectives: discussing elements of self-reflexivity, star persona, the film's distinctly ludological central narrative conceit (on this point he offers an analysis of how this narrative strategy functions as a commentary on the idea of "getting it right the next time") to the melange of 'War on Terror' and 'greatest generation' themes presented throughout the film. Hantke makes the case that while it proved commercially underwhelming on original release, Edge of Tomorrow is worthy of critical reappraisal and analysis.
Introduction
Authors: Fuller Jennifer
Published: September 2017

Almost all Pacific histories, ethnographic studies and literary analyses begin by commenting that the Pacific is a very large ocean. To scholars unfamiliar with Pacific studies this seems a rather obvious observation. Why not begin by saying that the Pacific is a very wet ocean or a very blue ocean? As I conducted my own research on the islands, however, I began to understand how this seemingly obvious statement underpinned so many of the choices, both rhetorical and theoretical, that defined my work. The Pacific Ocean covers a total area of over 69 million square miles, almost one third of the earth’s surface, touching multiple continents and containing a constantly changing number of islands with a highly mobile and diverse set of populations. As a result, scholars refer to the ocean’s vastness by way of an apology: ‘Please forgive what I cannot begin to cover; the peoples and places that my account sacrifices to present one study, one viewpoint, one glimpse into a vast and ever-changing area. The Pacific is a very large ocean.’ There are so many Pacific stories to be told; I can only examine a microscopic portion of a vast network that still has many avenues that should and hopefully will be explored. By necessity, this book focuses on a very narrow vision of the Pacific as it attempts to trace the story of British literature produced in the long nineteenth century outside the colonial centres of Australia and New Zealand. By narrowing my project to focus only on the impressions of one country and time period, I unsurprisingly exclude many interesting and important perspectives that I hope future scholars will trace, and in defence of the choices I have made, I offer the following rationale: the Pacific is a very large ocean....
Moving Missions and Novel Settlements: Early British Pacific Propaganda (1796–1866)
Authors: Fuller Jennifer
Published: September 2017

The book begins with the works of the first British visitors to the Pacific, missionaries from the newly formed London Missionary Society. Missionaries argued that the islanders were not “noble savages,” but instead were in desperate need of a “civilizing” education. This mission narrative also appears in fiction of the period, including William and Mary Godwin’s English translation of Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1814). Throughout the novel, the Godwins and Wyss depict the tension between the Swiss family’s God-given obligation to settle the land and its dispassionate scientific interest in new species and experiences. His story offers a fictional example of both the “civilizing” rhetoric found prominently in mission narratives and a scientific interest in the islands and their value as potential new colonies. Instead of viewing the story as a German text, the British adapted the story to support their imperial mission, eventually rewriting the novel to support British control over the original Swiss colony.
Adventures in the Pacific: The Influence of Trade on the South Seas Novel
Authors: Fuller Jennifer
Published: September 2017

The second chapter explores the transition from missionary texts to a more secularized portrayal of the islands in adventure fiction. I begin with George Vason, an LMS missionary who “went native” and lived amongst the islanders, which serves as a transition between conversion narrative and adventure fiction. The emerging genre of “boy’s fiction” emphasized entertainment rather than moral edification, while the works of authors such as Frederick Marryat and R.M. Ballantyne act primarily as propaganda for the growing empire. Marryat deliberately rewrites The Swiss Family Robinson in his novel Masterman Ready both to offer a more “authentic” representation of British trade and to showcase the ways in which boys could best serve the growing empire. R.M. Ballantyne’s first Pacific novel, The Coral Island, also focuses on boys as “men of empire” but, through the character of Bloody Bill, warns against the dangerous implications of Pacific trade. In his later works, Gascoyne, the Sandal-wood Trader and The Island Queen, Ballantyne explores other alternatives for the future of the British presence in the Pacific, transforming pirates into productive traders and evaluating the effect of female leadership on the masculine tradition of Pacific fiction.
Islands of Discovery: Scientific Curiosity in the Works of Darwin, Huxley and Wells
Authors: Fuller Jennifer
Published: September 2017

Intrigued by the descriptions of hitherto unknown species, Victorian naturalists embarked on Pacific journeys to study new flora and fauna. The third chapter follows a young Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley as they develop theories that would challenge the assumed boundaries between “civilized” and “savage” man. Their often overlooked travel narratives, The Voyage of the Beagleand The Voyage of the Rattlesnake respectively, displayed not only emerging theories of evolution and natural selection, but also early biological and anthropological observations that questioned whether Pacific islanders were truly so different from British ones. These radical new ideas, spurred on by later works such as Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man, influenced novelists to use the Pacific islands as a testing ground for new theories of regressive evolution. Capitalizing on the emerging genre of “science fiction,” H.G. Wells imagined the Pacific in The Island of Doctor Moreau not as an idyllic paradise but as a horrific nightmare that reduced all islanders, British and native, to their most bestial forms displaying distinctly Pacific resonances and the changing British perspectives on the islands.
The Islanders Speak: Pacific Reflections in the British Press
Authors: Fuller Jennifer
Published: September 2017

The final chapter looks at the works of Pacific islanders that were published and circulated by the British press and that have remained almost invisible to literary critics. While influenced and edited by the British, the stories of Lee Boo, Ta’unga, and Queen Emma provide a small glimpse into the ways in which Pacific peoples viewed the British and how the British, in turn, conceived of islanders. The History of Lee Boo, while lacking historical accuracy, presents the islanders as complex individuals unable to be categorized simply as “noble savages” or in need of a superior civilizing force. Instead, Lee Boo shows islanders as having the desire and ability to improve their own societies. Ta’unga’s writings provide a very different perspective on missionary enterprises. While Ta’unga agrees with the Christian missions, his account shows the tensions between understanding and respecting Polynesian traditions and his desire to spread the gospel. Finally, the legend of Queen Emma undermines the British narrative of white male colonial superiority over the islands. With her mixed heritage as well as her gender, Emma flaunted tradition and presented a new vision of agency.
Introduction: The Return Statement
Authors: Lambert Gregg
Published: September 2017

Most books are written with a clear statement in mind, usually in the space of a few years, as if to emulate a thought that unfolds as a continuous and unbroken element. This book is not among them. Rather, it has been patiently assembled from a series of public lectures, articles, essays, and chapters either written or delivered over the first decade of the millennium, falling roughly between the spring of 2002 and fall of 2012, all of which address the internal logic of what I call “the return statement” in contemporary philosophy....
“What’s Love Got to do With it?”
Authors: Lambert Gregg
Published: September 2017

This statement takes up John D. Caputo’s seminal work of “weak theology,” The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (1997). In addition to calling into question a careful reading of Derrida on the subjects of faith and reason, the author also critiques the elision of both skepticism and psychoanalysis as possible epistemologies.
Philosophical Fundamentalism Today
Authors: Lambert Gregg
Published: September 2017

This statement returns to Heidegger’s earliest seminar on the relationship of faith and philosophy in order to contrast the contemporary philosophy in which not only can Christian philosophy be possible, but there is also a dominant return to first philosophy.
The Coming Community?
Authors: Lambert Gregg
Published: September 2017

This statement returns to the writings of Jean Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille and the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben on the theme of community in relation to the contemporary political conservatism around immigrants in Europe and the United States.
Conclusion: The Return Address
Authors: Lambert Gregg
Published: September 2017

This final and concluding statement addresses the role error in determining the different “regimes of truth” in the history of philosophy, proposing that much of contemporary philosophy is reacting to the same species of error identified with a previous tradition of post-Cartesianism and a Kantian subject of Critique.
Diodorus’ Sources
Authors: Stronk Jan P.
Published: September 2017

In this chapter, firstly the sources Diodorus himself used -about 144 different authors can be recognised as sources for the Historical Library- are examined. Next the reception of this work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is discussed. Finally, an investigation in Diodorus’ style and use of words follows, also paying attention to the question whether he was an original author or a mere copyist.
The Persians and the Greek Wars
Authors: Stronk Jan P.
Published: September 2017

After a brief introduction, in which some attention is paid to Persian peculiarities, the rule of subsequent Achaemenid kings is related. The reigns of Cyrus II the Great, Cambyses II, Darius I the Great, and Xerxes I are referred to by Diodorus. A special role in this chapter is preserved for the Greco-Persian Wars. Diodorus’ version of them differs in places from the best-known version, that by Herodotus, and therefore adds to our understanding of these wars (or at least questions the absolute trust at present frequently placed in Herodotus’ account).
Revolt and Sedition
Authors: Stronk Jan P.
Published: September 2017

The reign of six Achaemenid kings is related. Succeeding each other feature Artaxerxes I, Xerxes II, Sogdianus, Darius II, Artaxerxes II, and Artaxerxes III. Amongst others attention is paid to the revolt of Cyrus the Younger, supported by a Greek mercenary force, against his brother Artaxerxes II and the role Queen Atossa, the mother of both Artaxerxes II and Cyrus the Younger, played during the occurrences. The relation between the Persian rulers and several Greek poleis is another important element in the narrative. The revolt of several satraps is also discussed as well as the secession of Egypt and the efforts of Artaxerxes III to subdue the country, together with its Phoenician allies, foremost of all the city of Sidon, again.
From Persepolis to Babylon
Authors: Stronk Jan P.
Published: September 2017

Having learned that King Darius was murdered by his relative Bessus, who himself subsequently proclaimed to be the rightful Achaemenid king, Alexander III the Great started the pursuit of Bessus. After Bessus’ death, Alexander marched further east, entering ‘India’, in fact the Punjab. After an encounter with one of the kings of this region, King Porus, Alexander moved south over the River Indus to the Indian Ocean. From there he finally returned to Babylon (overcoming many hardships) and died there, either from natural causes or due to having been poisoned.
Semiramis’ Legacy
Authors: Stronk Jan P.
Published: September 2017

The chapter starts with a discussion on the historical characters that may have contributed to Diodorus’ imaginary picture of Semiramis. The chapter also make clear that Diodorus combined different elements -or story-lines- in his account. First, the idea of ‘Continuity of empire’, sc. that there was a logical succession of the various empires discussed. Second, and related to the first, the concept of the need of ‘world domination’, if not in fact than at least in claim, present in the empires and houses of (almost) all rulers discussed. Third, Diodorus’ Stoic beliefs, in the Historical Library notably focusing on aretê, commonly translated as ‘virtue’, and, as regards Persian history, on truphē, best translated as ‘luxuriousness’. These qualities, or the lack thereof, can -and in Diodorus’ view did- make or break an empire.
Chronic S(t)imulation
Authors: McQueen Sean
Published: September 2017

This chapter analyses David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983), which seems emphatically able to demonstrate and augment either Baudrillardian or Deleuzian theoretical positions. Whilst the earliest Baudrillardian readings focus on simulation, critics have linked it to Deleuze's schizoanalysis. Videodrome, as this chapter argues, is becoming-Deleuzian, since these interpretations share the same disavowal of Baudrillard. From here, the chapter suggests two things: first, that the film stages the breakdown of the sensory-motor scheme and the opsigns and sonsigns of Deleuze's time-image; second, that both Deleuze's and Baudrillard's revisions of Freud, Masochism and Seduction, offer new interpretative and complementary strategies.
Seducing-Machines
Authors: McQueen Sean
Published: September 2017

This chapter turns to the 1973 J.G. Ballard novel Crash as well as its 1996 film adaptation by Cronenberg. It aims to make careful distinctions between Deleuze and Baudrillard and show why they gravitate to Crash. The primary focus in the novel is a cult of bored, middle-class professionals who feel alive only after modifying their bodies via staged car crashes. From here, the chapter reveals that Crash is notably quite flexible and can be subjected to many theoretical approaches, at times producing contradictory readings as a result. While Crash the novel might be a distinctly Baudrillardian creature, for example, Crash the Cronenberg film appears to lean more toward Deleuze.
Coda
Authors: McQueen Sean
Published: September 2017

This concluding chapter reflects on the next step in the ‘-punk’ subgenre as the cyberpunk of late capitalism gives way to the biopunk of the biotech century. It argues that becoming-Deleuzian demands a thorough reappraisal of Baudrillard's place in SF studies and, combined with the mutations of the genre, a need to rethink cyberpunk as the literature and cinema of late capitalism. Many of cyberpunk's once-progressive impulses have proven as technologically naïve as they are politically harmful. Deleuze and Baudrillard, this chapter asserts, have more to offer this discourse than unlicensed desire and revelries in virtual reality. Beyond Deleuze and Baudrillard, however, the chapter considers the crucial perspectives science fiction offers on the analysis of capitalism.
The (Difficult) Universality of Economic and Social Rights
Authors: Loriaux Sylvie
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that there are strong reasons to be concerned with the universality of economic and social rights. The main reasons are that, firstly, the existence of human rights cannot be determined without reference to concrete conditions of life, and that, secondly, concrete conditions of life are today not sufficiently similar across the world to justify all human beings possessing the economic and social rights asserted in human rights doctrine. The chapter also raises some concerns about the emphasis placed by political approaches on the role that human rights are intended to play in global political life. Underlying this emphasis is the idea that universality is a necessary but not a sufficient existence condition for human rights: in order for a right to qualify as a human right, it must not only be universal, but it must also be important enough to justify an international response.
Toward Another Kind of Development Practice
Authors: Culp Julian
Published: September 2017

This chapter examines the Discourse-Theoretic Rationale, presenting it as a novel moral rationale for certain forms of international development practice. This discourse-theoretic, internationalist moral rationale agrees with theorists of global distributive justice that participation in certain forms of international development practice can count as a demand of justice instead of solely a demand of humanity. Yet it also rejects their view that the moral rationale for international development practice is to further realize an ideal of global distributive justice. Rather, international development practice can contribute to establishing certain domestic socio-political structures that are required by global discursive justice. This is because, by fostering in various ways of democratic practices at the domestic level, certain forms of international development practice help to satisfy the intranational conditions of a fundamentally just global basic structure.
Three Approaches to Global Health Care Justice: Rejecting the Positive/Negative Rights Distinction
Authors: DeMartino George F. , Moyer Jonathan D.
Published: September 2017

This chapter presents three cosmopolitan approaches to global health care justice: Thomas Pogge's negative duties based approach, Gillian Brock's minimal needs view, and Henry Shue's model of basic rights. While these approaches share a common focus on attempting to justify the existence of global duties to aid, held by the wealthy and owed to the global poor, each offers a distinct interpretation of why such duties exist and suggests a range of options for fulfilling them. Importantly, while the chapter argues that Shue's approach to global duties is the most effective of the three, it considers that they all offer important insight into the problem of global poverty and provide a variety of possible practical solutions to this problem.
Narrow Versus Comprehensive Justification in Humanitarian Aid: A Case Study of the CERF
Authors: Brown Alexander
Published: September 2017

This chapter provides a more comprehensive justification of the UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) by supplementing conventional justifications with one of two fundamental principles of global morality: the Principle of Global Minimal Concern and Respect or the Principle of Global Equal Concern and Respect. Although CERF only accounts for around 4 per cent of total annual humanitarian funding, it represents a significant innovation in the way humanitarian aid is financed. The CERF is a standing fund of $500 million annually that can be called upon by UN frontline agencies and partner organisations to tackle humanitarian emergencies. While it is widely agreed that the CERF has made advances toward the objectives of timeliness, predictability and equity in emergency relief, questions remain unanswered about these objectives.
Global Justice and the Mission of the European Union
Authors: Van Parijs Philippe
Published: September 2017

This concluding chapter argues that any conception of justice relevant today must combine two elements, both strongly rooted in European traditions, but neither of them exclusive to them: equal respect for the diversity of conceptions of the good life that characterises pluralist societies and equal concern for the interests of all members, present and yet to come, of the society concerned. This concern, moreover, must be responsibility-sensitive — distributive justice is not a matter of outcomes but of opportunities — and it must be efficiency-sensitive, a fair distribution need not be a strictly equal distribution, but rather one that sustainably maximises the condition of the worst off. Justice, in brief, means real freedom for all, the greatest real freedom for those with least of it. Therefore, justice means global justice.
Learning Greek: The Woman Artist as Autodidact in May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life
Authors: Thornton Elise
Published: September 2017

May Sinclair’s reimagining of the late-Victorian poet in Mary Olivier: A Life examines the obstacles facing the artist-heroine in her quest for intellectual freedom, self-definition and artistic autonomy at the turn of the century. Very much constrained by her life at home by her mother, who defends the ideals of the cult of domesticity, Sinclair’s artist-heroine spends the majority of the novel trying to escape the oppressive forces of Victorian society, and Mary specifically challenges many of the period’s patriarchal standards concerning women’s right to an education as well as masculinist definitions of appropriate forms of female creativity. One of the main influences guiding Mary towards her artistic fulfilment is her desire for knowledge, and Sinclair questions the boundaries of acceptable female education in Victorian England by focusing specifically on Mary’s interest in Greek studies—a traditionally masculine subject.
Crucially, this essay examines Sinclair’s presentation of Mary’s autodidactism and explores how education influences not only the development of the woman artist, but how it impacts her own understanding of her creative potential as Mary’s theories about language and the translation process shape her burgeoning Imagist style at the turn of the twentieth century.
Architecture, Environment and ‘Scenic Effect’ in May Sinclair’s The Divine Fire
Authors: Mullholland Terri
Published: September 2017

Published in 1904, The Divine Fire was May Sinclair’s third novel and the one that was to make her name. Ironically, as Suzanne Raitt notes, ‘The novel which made her both famous and relatively wealthy [is] a critique of the bookselling industry in which she was now earning her living’. Sinclair’s novel is, in fact, an astute engagement with the commercialisation of modern life and consumer culture. In this chapter I examine how Sinclair uses carefully staged representations of architectural space in order to highlight the play between illusion and reality, exterior and interior, and the commercial versus the domestic. Throughout The Divine Fire Sinclair wants us to look beneath the surface of her textual realism, to realise that what is seen should not necessarily be believed.
Sinclair was writing at a time of rapid change, and in her use of the imagery of modernity – the commodities, the dazzling lights, the decor – Sinclair reveals society’s growing obsession with surface illusion and ‘the new’. But alongside this, Sinclair also reveals an alternative world that holds art, and the spiritual values it represents, in high esteem; a world she hopes can survive the bright lights of commercialisation now dominating modern life.
Transgressing Boundaries; Transcending Bodies: Sublimation and the Abject Corpus in Uncanny Stories and Tales Told by Simpson
Authors: Drewery Claire
Published: September 2017

This chapter traces an early-twentieth century cultural change in perceptions of the nature and representation of reality, the breakdown of the dominant Victorian discourses of humanism and realism and the concurrent Modernist reconstitution of the human subject. I examine this epochal shift through a consideration of May Sinclair’s engagement with contemporary philosophical and psychoanalytical discourses, her personal crisis of Anglican faith and her growing interest in philosophical Idealism.
The theme of guilt, this chapter will claim, is closely associated in Sinclair’s writing with the Modernist re-examination of both physical and textual bodies in the light of burgeoning contemporary discourses – both philosophical and scientific – surrounding subjective identity. Guilt is constantly evoked through an emphasis on spirituality and mystical themes and their frequent juxtaposition with psychoanalytic theories of sublimation.
Deleuze and the Adventure of Ideas
Authors: Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2017

This chapter begins with Deleuze's theory of immanent problems or ideas. Examining the ways in which the two main theorists of ideas — Plato and Kant — shape Deleuze's own theory, this chapter shows that ideas are the problems of the world, and the various actualised individuals we experience are the divergent solutions to these problems. The Deleuzean idea, as for Plato and Kant, is characterised by three dimensions, which are called the ‘three-part problem-structure of ideas’: firstly, the undetermined elements are, secondly, reciprocally determinable through differential relations, which are organised by, thirdly, the determination of singularities. Unlike the idea in Plato or Kant, though, an idea for Deleuze is not a transcendent unified identity but is instead a truly generative and immanent ontological structure.
The Atomic Idea
Authors: Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2017

This chapter turns to atomic metaphysics as it appears in Lucretius' De rerum natura, using Deleuze's ontology as a way to construe Lucretian atomism as a formulation of the atomic idea. The central focus of this chapter is how the thinking of atoms and void influences Deleuze's thinking of ontological genesis. Rather than differential elements, differential relations and singularities composing the Deleuzean idea, this chapter shows that the three parts of atomic idea are atomic elements, atomic relations, and the clinamen. To make the atomic idea as vivid as possible, the chapter concludes by turning to the famous analogy between atoms and letters in order to develop an extended atomic grammar.
The Encounter in Sense and Thought
Authors: Johnson Ryan J.
Published: September 2017

This chapter turns to the thorny issues of thought, consciousness, and human subjectivity. As naturalists, Lucretius and Deleuze do not assume the existence of a subject, but instead attempt to account for the ways in which the subject itself emerges out of the natural world. The task of this chapter is to show how Lucretian atomism and Deleuze account for the production of a thinking and conscious being (a subject) through the violent encounter with simulacra and what Deleuze calls ‘the being of the sensible’. The production of thought and knowledge is hence another instance of actualisation, like all things — albeit this time the result is thinking.
Distribution
Authors: Nordlund Marcus
Published: September 2017

Chapter 4, entitled ‘Distribution’, explores some tonal and interpretative consequences of the large-scale distribution of insides within and between Shakespeare’s plays. Particular attention is paid to how Shakespeare guides audience sympathy for his characters through the selective distribution of insides: that is, how some characters are given copious private speech while others are denied it altogether, or how insides are distributed differently according to variables like gender or class. I show how Shakespeare’s distribution of sympathy and his distribution of insides are closely intertwined and inflected according to gender and class in three plays from three different phases in his career: The Taming of the Shrew, All’s Well that Ends Well, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Mrs Dalloway: The Spirit of Religion was Abroad
Authors: Morris Pam
Published: September 2017

In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf’s hostility to an idealist consensus, elevating revered abstractions above material reality, focuses upon the use of religious, nationalist and scientific rhetoric to subordinate those perceived as troublesome. Idealists of various kinds, in the text, illustrate the dangerous madness that results when vision disconnects from facts. What these many idealists desire is order and disciplined bodies, an agenda veiled by a spirit of religion. The text is structured upon recurrent references to cars and flowers, things that, in Bruno Latour’s phrase, act as ‘gatherings’, conjoining substantive social forces. So, cars, in the 1920s, point to the inception of ‘Fordism’, the imposition of a radical new regime of industrial discipline. Innovations in horticultural productivity and plant breeding offered ‘scientific’ authority to eugenics as a means of engineering an idealised national identity. Only a materialist perspective, Woolf suggests, can challenge the visionary madness that licenses conscription of fleshly life.
The Years: Moment of Transition
Authors: Morris Pam
Published: September 2017

In The Years, Woolf foregrounds the private house as materialised geography of multiple force fields of change and conservatism. The house constitutes the interface between the biological necessities of embodied creatures and the regulatory, reiterative codes of gender and class that produce identity. Woolf attends to a moment in the 1930s when large scale public provision of housing and the necessary infrastructure of utilities extended the public terrain into what had previously been the private domain. The potential convergence of class values and life style, brought about by extension of plumbing and wiring, however, came into conflict with demand for home-owning consumerism and privacy. Woolf brings into visibility and audibility the common life of London streets and the shared realm of the physical world in opposition to the regulated individualism sheltered in the family house.
Conclusion
Authors: Morris Pam
Published: September 2017

The foregoing chapters trace a profound literary response to a redistribution of the perceptible, a socio-cultural turning away from the tangible experience of existence to forms of abstraction. Drawing upon eighteenth-century empiricism, both Austen and Woolf oppose individualism and regimes that assert mind over matter. Disembodiment of experience, they show, veils our shared creaturely existence, awareness of which underpins the common life and fellowship. For both writers, embodied self, things, others, culture, and physical universe are inseparable from the compound existence that is life. Things constitute self, a shared world and the infrastructure of national and global reality. Neither Austen nor Woolf is revolutionary; they do not seek a redistribution of wealth or the social order. They articulate a redistribution of the perceptible. The experimental worldly realism, they practice, especially the innovative use of focalisation, evokes horizontal, mutually determining relationships between embodied people, things social and physical universes, an egalitarian writerly space in which potentially nothing is mute or invisible.