bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Museums, Migrant Labourers and Ethnic Spatiality in the United Arab Emirates
Authors: Wakefield Sarina
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the relationship between museum spatiality and migrant status in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Despite accounting for more than 80% of the resident population and having a long and visible presence in society, migrant labourers continue to remain mostly excluded from official museum narratives and they rarely visit collections. Rather, they prefer to gather outside museums, where they meet to socialise and take pictures. This chapter draws attention to the importance of the outside space for museum research. It also highlights the formidable exhibitionary power of museums, showing how they can be used as stages of alternative heritage practices and discourses for a population that remains marginalised, all the while showcasing its social stigma. As they socialise outside museums, migrant labourers become exhibits for incoming and outgoing visitors; the uneasy reminders of the social and economic discrepancies existing in the UAE.
‘Do I Even Exist?’ Kurdish Diaspora Artists Reflect on Imaginary Exhibits in a Kurdistan Museum
Authors: Eccarius-Kelly Vera
Published: May 2021

In the MENA region state-sponsored cultural institutions such as museums often advanced a unified story of nationhood rather than to account for diverse ethno-linguistic and religious communities such as the Kurds. Visiting museums, Kurds have encountered deep silences, distortions and complete omissions of their lives. During the Baathist regime in Iraq, which controlled the country after 1968, national museums served to enhance the state’s legitimacy. Modern Turkish museums perpetuate a nationalistic narrative that discriminates against ethnic Kurds. To counter colonial and repressive narratives, diaspora Kurdish artists now articulate the need for alternative knowledge production. In this chapter, ethnographic interviews focused on curating Kurdish museum exhibits offer insights into how diaspora Kurdish participants frame their identities. The planned Kurdistan Museum in Erbil is at the center of Kurdish diasporic critique. Cultural activism among Kurdish diaspora artists, not unlike political consciousness-raising, represents a form of resistance to the way in which Kurdish experiences have been manipulated by hostile power structures.
Impure Pictoriality: The Matter of Painting
Authors: Nardelli Matilde
Published: May 2021

This chapter considers how the trope of cinematic purity attached to Antonioni’s 1960s films is intertwined with another persistent critical trope: that he approaches cinema like a painter. Yet, this chapter argue that despite still dominant paradigms of pictorial purity, Antonioni approached painting not only as a concrete, material activity in which he himself was engaged, but also as a category that, around the mid-twentieth century, was itself in profound transformation and often ostentatiously ‘impure’. Impure pictoriality provided Antonioni with the conceptual means to renew, rather than purify, cinema, through an exchange with a form already contaminated by cinema and other forms of mass media culture.
Performing the Mind: Interiority, Television and Artificial Brains
Authors: Nardelli Matilde
Published: May 2021

This chapter addresses the perceived turn to ‘interiority’ in Antonioni’s cinema during the course of the 1960s, often described as an ‘interior neorealism’ or a quintessentially psychological cinema. Such turn, often associated with a breakdown of narrativity and a changed temporal economy, is generally enlisted as another factor fostering increased cinematic purity. Yet I consider how it can be better understood by examining its entanglement with the diffusion of television. In the wake of its mass diffusion in the 1950s, this new medium, transmitting an externally generated ‘flow’ of images inside the home, gave rise to new temporal and viewing economies, as well as preoccupations about its effects on viewers’ interiority: their minds. Starting with a discussion of L’avventura and La notte, this chapter considers how the new temporal aesthetics of Antonioni’s cinema may be both a consequence of and a reaction to the televisual. The discussion then concludes with Il deserto rosso to address how television’s dynamics of interiority and exteriority are in turn connected with the then-emerging fields of cybernetics and early computers, with which Antonioni, like other ‘moderns’, was fascinated.
Introduction
Authors: Montgomery Alan
Published: May 2021

The Introduction summarises the origins of Scotland’s patriotic historiography, highlighting the importance of medieval chronicles and the Renaissance histories of Hector Boece and George Buchanan in laying the foundations of early modern Scottish national identity. In particular, it identifies the long-held belief that Scotland was one of the few places to have successfully resisted Roman conquest. As well as looking at the importance of classical literature and authors such as Cicero and Livy in the development of Scottish scholarship, it also outlines eighteenth-century Scottish attitudes towards ancient Rome, its culture and its imperial ambitions, and explores the importance of the Grand Tour in the formation of early modern interpretations of the classical past.
‘Beyond the Vallum’: English interpretations of Scottish history
Authors: Montgomery Alan
Published: May 2021

Chapter four examines English attitudes towards Roman Scotland. It introduces the writings of William Stukeley, one of the most influential antiquarians working in England during the first half of the eighteenth century, looking in particular at the content of his 1720 essay An Account of a Roman Temple. While Stukeley was convinced, like Sir Robert Sibbald before him, that the Romans had conquered and civilised much of Scotland, fellow English antiquarian John Horsley took the view that they had in fact decided against colonising such a barren and inhospitable land. Horsley’s posthumously published 1732 work, Britannia Romana, sets out his pragmatic approach to Scotland’s ancient history and reveals an antiquarian who was far less influenced by patriotism and Romanism than many of his contemporaries.
‘Monuments and delights of the arts’: rediscovering the material remains of Rome in Scotland
Authors: Montgomery Alan
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines eighteenth-century approaches to discovering, collecting and analysing the material remains of ancient Rome in Scotland. It discusses both institutional collections, such as the museum at Glasgow University, and private collections including that of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik. It reveals that, while most ancient artefacts were still being discovered by chance at this time, there are records of some organised searches and excavations, with some antiquarians already referring to this practice as ‘archaeology’. The ways in which Roman monuments in Scotland, most notably the Antonine Wall and the now lost Arthur’s O’on, were examined, recorded and presented are also discussed here, revealing interpretations and conjectures which were often influenced as much by patriotism and admiration for the classical world as by the surviving material evidence.
Introduction
Authors: Jackson Louise A. , Davidson Neil , Fleming Linda , Smale David M. , Sparks Richard
Published: May 2021

This chapter outlines the guiding aims and concepts of the book, locating them in relation to existing historiography and the chronological landscape of the twentieth century. It sets out the methods and sources used, and explains the structure of the book.
The Glasgow Beat Man
Authors: Jackson Louise A. , Davidson Neil , Fleming Linda , Smale David M. , Sparks Richard
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses specifically on the role of the Glasgow ‘beat man’ as well as the group identity and reputation that was forged in the city for ‘robust and ‘tough’ policing, grounded in male physical prowess (as embodied masculinity). It was constructed through the culture of the muster hall, inscribed into everyday life through the performance of policing on the beat, and was recognised by working-class communities (through resistance as much as acquiescence or deference). For those seen as ‘law-abiding’, the work of the police officer incorporated assistance, support and a significant social service role, with chivalric paternalism in evidence in relation to the aged and infirm. A different repertoire was deployed in relation to those viewed as anti-social, where ‘toughness’ spilled over into the routine use of physical force in the first half of the century, justified by the police themselves as necessary to maintain authority. The legal tool of ‘breach of the peace’ was a flexible device across the period to counteract the limitations assumed to arise from the rule of corroboration.
Introduction
Authors: Craig Cairns
Published: May 2021

Muriel Spark has regularly been described as a Catholic novelist, given that her conversion to Catholicism was followed closely by the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, about the struggles of a Catholic convert. However, the intellectual context in which she came to maturity in the years after the Second World War was pervaded by the issues raised by existentialism, issues which surface directly in her novel The Mandelbaum Gate. Existentialism is now associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir as an atheistic philosophy, but it began as a Christian philosophy inspired by nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. It was Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism which shaped Spark’s own ‘leap to faith’ and his ironic style which shaped her own approach to the novel form.
Rethinking the Periodical Medium in the Digital Archive
Authors: Klancher Jon
Published: May 2021

Klancher revisits the researching and writing of his landmark work in Romantic periodical studies, The Making of English Reading Audiences (1987), asking what scholars have gained and lost in shifting from the printed archive to digital databases. Despite the manifest advantages of modern keyword searches, this chapter laments the challenges of browsing old serials in at a moment when they are increasingly being stored away in off-site archives and current online periodical databases have only hit and miss ‘browse’ capabilities. This essay also contemplates questions of periodicity and media format, exploring (a) how periodicity worked during the Romantic age; (b) the effacing of many signs of that diurnal, weekly, monthly, quarterly periodicity when those issues were bound in codex volumes; and (c) the new possibilities of digitally restoring those signs of periodical materiality.
‘A Separate and Distinct Tribunal’: Libel Law and Reviewing in Early Issues of Blackwood’s
Authors: Mole Tom
Published: May 2021

In their efforts to attain the authority to police literary culture, reviewers in Blackwood’s and other Romantic periodicals needed models for making judgments that would stick and offering not mere opinions but verdicts which made further debate impertinent. In other words, they sought the authority to pronounce felicitous performatives, the ability to do things with words. Applying J. L. Austin’s concept of performative utterances to periodical criticism, this essay suggests that one of the models that particularly interested the Blackwood’s reviewers was that of libel law. Libel courts and book reviews, after all, engage in similar projects, aiming to regulate public discourse and define the limits of what it is acceptable to say or write in public. They do this by means of authoritative pronouncements, couched in performative speech acts: verdicts and sentences in the case of libel courts, decisive critical judgments in the case of reviews.
Maga as Medium: Cockneys in Context
Authors: Parker Mark
Published: May 2021

This essay examines the renowned Cockney School attacks within their most immediate context: the pages of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. It argues that the textual dynamics of Maga are more fundamental to understanding this campaign than either politics or class animus, although these are deeply implicated. Blackwood’s, over time, developed a series of rules of reading for its implied audience, a set of protocols that governs the interpretation of both the formal Cockney School series as well as the occasional references to Hunt, Keats and Hazlitt in other articles.
Read against other contributions to the magazine and in terms of the individual numbers in which they emerge, the attacks on Hunt and Keats take on meaning less critical or political than institutional. The writers of Blackwood’s, at least over the course of the magazine’s first hundred numbers, created an idiosyncratic textual dynamic, which employed dialogism, self-consciousness, contradiction, performative rhetoric, hoaxing and what contributors term ‘bam’. The Cockney School articles, like another infamous extended series in Blackwood’s—the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae’—are a performance best judged by the peculiar textual rules of this magazine.
Crashing the Blackwood’s Boys’ Club: Caroline Bowles and Women’s Place in Romantic-era Periodicals
Authors: Mason Nicholas
Published: May 2021

While Caroline Bowles has long been remembered as a popular sentimental poet of the 1820s and for becoming Robert Southey’s second wife in the late 1830s, she has never received her due in histories of nineteenth-century British periodicals. A largely unconnected, and deeply conservative country gentlewoman, Bowles was as unlikely a candidate as any to be memorialized as a shatterer of glass ceilings. But in becoming, from 1823 forward, the first woman to serve as a regular contributor to Blackwood’s, Bowles crashed what had hitherto been Romantic-era Britain’s ultimate boys’ club. Even more remarkably, in joining this fraternity, Bowles originally appeared not as a sentimental poetess but as the wickedly satirical author of ‘Letter from a Washerwoman’, one of the magazines most merciless parodies of Leigh Hunt, Percy Shelley, and the affected classicism of Cockney School poets.
Mary Prince ‘At Home’ in Blackwood’s: Maga’s Origins and the End of Slavery
Authors: McCracken-Flesher Caroline
Published: May 2021

The 1831 slave narrative The History of Mary Prince caused a particular stir in Scotland. Some of the rankest attacks against Prince’s account came in a series of Blackwood’s essays by James MacQueen, a Scot who had recently returned from the slave plantations of the Caribbean. Much of MacQueen’s spleen was directed toward Prince’s chief abolitionist sponsor, Thomas Pringle, a fellow Scot and one of the co-editors of William Blackwood’s initial house periodical, the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine—when the publication was edited by fellow-Scot, Thomas Pringle.
Emphasizing MacQueen’s perverse deployment of contemporary Scottish discourses of homecoming, this essay interrogates how magazines like Blackwood’s functioned as a key proving ground for late-Romantic theories of race, empire and ‘proper’ domesticity.
Copious Sovereignty in the Henry IV Plays
Authors: Griffiths Huw
Published: May 2021

This chapter demonstrates Shakespeare’s extensive use of the rhetorical figure of copia in the two Henry IV plays. Although copia, as the basis for written and verbal expression, is the archetypal figure of Renaissance eloquence, Shakespeare’s writing often pushes its use towards the outer limits, risking a dissipation, rather consolidation of meaning. In these two plays, the generative capacities of copia take a dark turn, linking images of diseased and damaged bodies to a centrifugal movement away from centres of sovereign power. This chapter argues that the dilatory nature of these two plays – in their language and in their proliferation of diseased body parts, as well as in their plot – underscores a representation of sovereignty that sees it as de-centred and dysfunctional.
‘My kingdom for a horse’: Bestial Sovereignty in Richard III
Authors: Griffiths Huw
Published: May 2021

This chapter offers a conclusion to the book, through a movement away from the human body into the ways that animal bodies are also recruited for Shakespeare’s metaphorics of sovereignty. More than any other of Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard III is dominated by animal imagery. One way to understand this is as a form of moral commentary on the “bestial” state that England has been dragged into by the civil war and, particularly, by the evils of that war as concentrated in Richard himself, a concentration particularly in the image of his body as deformed. However, the slipperiness of metaphor does not allow for the stabilization of sovereignty in any one body, including the stability imagined in the metaphysical conceit of the “kings two bodies”. In this chapter, I offer a final countermand to Kantorowicz’s reading of Richard II wherein Richard’s abdication offers up the Christ-like sacrifice of the king as a concentrated image of divine sovereignty. In place of this, I read Richard III backwards from the moment of Richard’s own brief “abdication” at the end of the play: his willingness to exchange his kingdom for a horse, albeit in the face of death. Whilst not ascribing any revolutionary intent to the character of Richard, this moment affords an alternate insight into the translatable locations of sovereignty. Re-read through its figurations, sovereignty is conceived of as never inalienable; it is, rather, always dependent on the bodies of others including, here, the bodies of animals.
Another Necropolitics
Authors: Bargu Banu
Published: May 2021

Necropolitics is often used to denote how the living is subjected to the power of death and destruction. Omitted from this conceptualisation is the violence that takes as its object the realm of the dead – the corpse, the act of burial, funerary rituals, the graves and cemeteries as sites of burial and commemoration, and forms of mourning and reverence. In this chapter, I examine different forms of postmortem violence directed at insurgent bodies. I focus on the image of the naked and bloody corpse of a woman, later revealed to be a Kurdish militant and guerrilla fighter known as Ekin Wan, leaked to the press in the period of Turkey’s hung parliament in the summer of 2015. I argue that the circulation of her denuded image after being killed in combat with the state’s security forces was a symptom of the end of the peace process and the beginning of Turkey’s new authoritarianism. I theorise violence that targets the realm of the dead as a distinctive and neglected form of necropolitics and necropolitical violence as the entire ensemble of practices that target the dead as a surrogate for, and means of, controlling the living.
Rethinking the ‘Supersystem’: Film Reboots and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Authors: Herbert Daniel
Published: May 2021

This chapter draws upon Marsha Kinder’s (1991) theorisation of the media ‘supersystem’ – that is, an intertextual, industrialised transmedia network – to examine the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, specifically the television and film reboots produced following Nickelodeon’s acquisition of the IP in 2009. It describes the way in which the post-2009 Turtles rebooted a supersystem, one characterised by textual mutability and overlapping forms of intertextuality, to create new versions of the Turtles and provide opportunity to expand the franchise. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which rebooting creates a major ‘event’ in the serial life of a property: one that appeals to new audiences and generates fresh merchandising possibilities.
World-building, Retconning and Legacy Rebooting: Alien and Contemporary Media Franchise Strategies
Authors: Fleury James
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines reboot efforts within the Alien franchise during the 2010s within the conceptual frame of “transmedia franchising.” Looking particularly at Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, as well as several video games, it analyses how various promotional materials and narrative devices have taken variable approaches toward rebooting this franchise, including retconning and legacy rebooting. The chapter asserts that the Alien universe ‘has not necessarily followed a systematic, planned path,’ and accordingly shows how the franchise’s IP holder (first 20th Century-Fox, now Disney) devised variable ways to appeal to potential audiences.
Anticipating the Reboot: Teasing Top Gun 2
Authors: Grainge Paul
Published: May 2021

This chapter interrogates the ways in which Top Gun’s status as filmic reference point for Hollywood ‘high concept’ of the 1980s has informed speculation around its new millennial reboot, Top Gun: Maverick. With the new film still unreleased at the time of writing, the essay focuses not on the reboot (or even its promotional materials) but on the anticipation of the reboot as ‘discursive project’. Attending to the paratextual arrays that inform and prefigure media events, it focuses on the period in the mid-2010s leading up to the first official publicity still for Top Gun: Maverick to investigate the dynamics of speculation and nostalgia that accompany the ‘anticipation’ of Hollywood reboots.
A Dark Knight on Elm Street: Discursive Regimes of (Sub)Cultural Value, Paratextual Bonding, and the Perils of Remaking and Rebooting Canonical Horror Cinema
Authors: Proctor William
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyses A Nightmare on Elm Street as a remake of the 1984 film and a reboot to the Elm Street franchise. Part of this rebooting entailed establishing a complex authorial identity for the film, aligning it with Christopher Nolan’s work with the Batman reboots and Wes Craven, whose own status as auteur had changed since directing the original Elm Street film. Further, Proctor shows how paratexts situate the reboot as a return to the scariness of the original Elm Street film, disavowing the later more comic films in the series, in such a way that likewise aligns the reboot with Nolan’s Batman films.
Epilogue: Restitution that Doubles the Loss
Authors: Zolkos Magdalena
Published: May 2021

Louise Erdrich’s book LaRose (2016) tells the story of two families belonging to an Ojibwe tribe in North Dakota, whose lives are shattered by the accidental shooting of a child, Dusty, by the neighbour, Landreaux Iron, while hunting for deer.1 The profound rift that the child’s killing causes in the families’ coexistence and in the local Ojibwe community at large can be repaired only through a compensatory ritual, whereby Landreaux’s family performs an act of restitution to their neighbours by ‘replacing’ the killed child with their own son, LaRose. Adopted by Dusty’s parents, Peter and Nola, LaRose becomes a substitutive presence in Ravich’s family, filling the void caused by the killing; he stands in the place of another child, and, assuming a new name, personal objects and identity, ...
Constituent Power from Cultural Practice: Implications from the Malheur Wildlife Refuge Occupation
Authors: Turpeinen Juho
Published: May 2021

Sovereignty as cultural practice can explain the possibility of the people as the subject of constituent power. I transpose Panu Minkkinen’s division of theories of sovereignty onto the cultural plane: ‘Acephalous’ sovereign self-knowledge is not only productive of the framework for a legal constitution, but subjectivises ‘autocephalous’ sovereignty – the people as the subject of constituent power – that can then act on the ‘heterocephalous’ stage of politics. Through a case study of the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, I consider sovereignty’s relationship with land – juxtaposing it with neoliberalism and anti-statism, which threaten to undo the people as a subject of constituent power – and complicate this reading by placing it in the context of post-colonial America. I conclude that sovereignty not only remains a powerful counterforce to neoliberal, anti-democratic projects, but that alliances with the state to construct the people as the subject of constituent power can serve this purpose. At the same time, the post-colonial context undermines these alliances as an emancipatory force.
Claiming Human Rights: The Reflexive Identity of the People
Authors: Gill-Pedro Eduardo
Published: May 2021

Human rights are often presented as constraints on the people. This chapter argues that human rights, rather than constraining the people, can also be presented as co-constitutive of the people. Drawing on Rancière’s image of the ‘rights of man’ as ‘inscriptions of the community as free and equal’ it is argued that human rights are counter claims that we make to the claims of authority to which we are subjected. It is in the act of claiming our human rights that we reflexively identify with the community in whose name authority is claimed over us – that ‘people’ as a community of free and equal persons. But while this act brings into being a ‘people’ in whose name authority can be legitimacy claimed, the question of who that ‘people’ is and what it wants can never be fully determined – the people must necessarily be both present and absent. And it is again the act of claiming human rights that makes it possible for the ‘people’ to remain absent as the sovereign yielding power directly over its subjects.
Populism: Plebeian Power against Oligarchy
Authors: Vergara Camila
Published: May 2021

The term populism has recently gone viral, being attached to disparate leaders and groups appealing to ‘the people.’ While mass media has labelled leaders from Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn to Donald Trump and Marie Le Pen as populists — even if for different reasons — academia has been unable to determine if populism is a democratic or antidemocratic force. This chapter refutes the latest rebranding of populism as an anti-pluralist, exclusionary form of politics, and argues to redraw the contours of the concept against an Arendtian conception of totalitarianism, by understanding populism normatively, as grounded on a plebeian ideology of emancipation. Engaging with republican thought, I propose a normative theory of populism as a form of politics aimed at emancipating and empowering the people-as-plebs against increasing oligarchic domination. I argue that modern populism is an electoral type of plebeian politics born out of the politicization of
inequality and aimed at reforming liberal democracies to increase popular welfare and power within the governing structure. I contrast this republican conception of populism to totalitarianism, arguing that populist and totalitarian forms of politics are two different responses to crisis that should remain distinct.
Aftermaths: Walter Scott and Imagining Collective Memory in the Transatlantic World
Authors: McNeil Kenneth
Published: May 2021

The first chapter examines the phenomenal rise to popularity of Walter Scott’s historical fiction throughout the transatlantic world, in the context of its evocation of collective memory, which was particularly suited to the anxieties of emergent national cultures. In Waverley, Scott employs mnemonic tropes to install a particular mode of modern historical consciousness: the ‘aftermath’, in which the present time is shaped in terms of its proximate relation (measured out in one or two human lifespans) to a moment of historical crux. The time of the Forty-Five is imagined as the catalyst for abrupt and transformational social and cultural change, which not only determined the nation’s present but altered the very pace of history. This chapter shows how Waverley’s example of the ‘aftermath’ provided tropes, models and theoretical frameworks for North American writers for their own expression of national memory. Examples include Washington Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’, John Neal’s Seventy-Six, and Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé’s Les Anciens Canadiens. The chapter also traces the literary development of the ‘aftermath’ in the Scottish ‘memorial’ writing of Robert Chambers and Henry Cockburn.
Memory on the Margins: Anne Grant’s Atlantic World
Authors: McNeil Kenneth
Published: May 2021

Chapter 2 takes up the retrospective writing of Anne Grant, in which she imagines the peripheral spaces of the British Atlantic as the unique enclave of a particular mode of human society and of intercultural exchange. In both the US and Britain, Grant acquired a reputation as a keen observer of so-called primitive peoples. She wrote widely on her life in the Scottish Highlands, and her published letters, poetry and essays were deemed important accounts of Highland culture. In addition, Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady relates her childhood experiences growing up in colonial New York, where her British army officer father was posted. Taken as a whole, Grant’s writing provides a unique account of the transperipheral circuits of movement and exchange in the Atlantic world. She reveals a complex inter-play of national, ethnic and regional identities that are ultimately at odds with her reputation for providing nostalgic renditions of a ‘lost world’ for discrete readerships on either side of the Atlantic.
The Scottish Conservative Party and the Three Unionisms
Authors: Convery Alan
Published: May 2021

This chapter by Dr Alan Convery of Edinburgh University examines the common commitment of all Scottish Conservatives to the Union. However, it argues that there are many ways for Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom and that the party’s unionist thinking has had to evolve to accommodate both devolution and the independence referendum of 2014. Brexit also presents new challenges to conceptions of unionism and the type of union Scotland can expect if it continues to reject full independence.The chapter suggests that Conservative unionist thinking can broadly be split into three camps: the ultra-unionists, the devo-pragmatists and the radical reformers.
I Am Collecting Beautiful Objects: Michel Gondry’s Taxidermy of Emotions
Authors: Pyke Jenny
Published: May 2021

Continuing both the examination of the materiality of objects and the employment of frameworks from contemporary art, this chapter by Jenny Pyke uses a comparison with taxidermy as an art form to explore the way that Gondry creates objects infused with affect, not because of what they represent but because of how they are constructed. Like examples of taxidermy, these objects both contain a material history and generate sensation through their feeling of hapticity. This chapter explains how objects in The Science of Sleep function not only as containers of emotion but also as points of connection between the lovers Stéphane and Stéphanie, who communicate and share their way of seeing and imagining the world through objects and build relationships in tandem with their construction.
The Cost of Whimsy in Mood Indigo and The Grand Budapest Hotel
Authors: Hilson Mica
Published: May 2021

Mica Hilson’s chapter employs a new formalist framework to compare the elements of “twee” and “whimsy” in Gondry’s Mood Indigo and contemporary auteur Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). This chapter argues that Gondry’s use of whimsical excess to self-reflexively address themes of over-consumption stands in opposition to Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. This chapter furthermore considers that the fetishization of luxury items in Anderson’s film contrasts with the do-it-yourself, craft aesthetic of Gondry’s work. This comparative chapter illuminates both the aesthetic tendencies that Gondry shares with some of his more eccentric contemporaries and the qualities that set Gondry’s work apart. This chapter’s analysis asks the reader to consider whimsical aesthetics in their socio-economic context, rather than assuming that style negates substance.
Memory à la Americana: From Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Be Kind Rewind
Authors: Hsieh Yu-Yun
Published: May 2021

This chapter analyses Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Be Kind Rewind (2008). In the former, Joel has his memory of his ex-lover Clementine erased before deciding to try to reverse the process by hiding her in memories where she does not belong. In the latter, two bumbling video-store clerks in Passaic, New Jersey produce “sweded” versions of popular films after the VHS tapes of these films are accidentally erased. When the clerks are forced to stop their productions due to copyright infringement, they decide instead to enlist the whole town in the making of a film about the legendary jazz musician Fats Waller (1904–43), who in the film is erroneously believed to have been from Passaic, when in reality Waller was born in New York City. Author Yu-Yun Hsieh compares the exploration of personal memory in Eternal Sunshine with the production of collective memory in Be Kind, noting that in both cases “fictional” or “inauthentic” memories are created to preserve a relationship, whether between Joel and Clementine in the former or between the inhabitants of Passaic in the latter. In both films, memories are open to revision but preserve an essence of truth.
Toward a Poetics of Friendship
Authors: Gilbert-Santamaría Donald
Published: May 2021

This introductory chapter traces the origin of the poetics of friendship to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and, by extension, Cicero’s De amicitia. Aristotle’s definition of the perfect friend in static categorical terms presents significant challenges to narrativization, that is, to a mode of literary expression based in conflict and change. Following Ullrich Langer, the chapter explores how Aristotle’s largely static categorical framework is filtered through the discourse of spiritual friendship in the Middle Ages, exposing the key problem of the perfect friend’s ultimate unknowability. Alternatively, following Cicero’s more fluid dialogical exploration of the problem of friendship, the chapter traces a second trajectory for a poetics of friendship that draws on Kathy Eden and Nancy Struever’s work on the more recognizably modern notion of intimacy. Taken together, these two genealogies provide the foundation for an evolving poetics of friendship in the narrative prose and dramatic works of early modern Spain.
Plotting Imperfections in La Galatea
Authors: Gilbert-Santamaría Donald
Published: May 2021

As with Boccaccio’s tale in the previous chapter, the story of Silerio and Timbrio from Cervantes’s pastoral novel, La Galatea, circulates around the notion of the test of friendship. In contrast to Boccaccio, however, Cervantes revels in upending the formal pretentions of the conventional paradigm for writing perfect friendship. Hinting at the enhanced subjective complexity of modern novelistic discourse, the narrative repeatedly disrupts the determinism of the traditional tale of two friends, the scripting of narrative outcomes in the interest of preserving the conceptual purity of the Aristotelian ideal. Thus, while the narrative superficially complies with the basic structural requirements of the tale of two friends tradition, there persists a powerful awareness of the contrived basis of that tradition that undermines the credibility of the narrative’s plotting.
Introduction: ‘Unforgotten’
Authors: Raeburn Fraser
Published: May 2021

Despite the death of the last Scottish participant in the Spanish Civil War in 2012, and the absence of sustained scholarly interest, Scottish involvement in the Spanish Civil War has never been forgotten. This memory has been preserved through ongoing grassroots efforts to write about, commemorate and celebratethe activists and volunteers who gave their time, money and lives in defence of the Spanish Republic. Rather than recovering an otherwise ‘forgotten’ history, this book instead aims to offer new explanations and analysis of this passion for Spain that so clearly lives on today. As well as offering a new assessment of how far a particularly ‘Scottish’ response to the conflict existed, it contextualises this story within much wider narratives: the wider ideological struggle between fascism and anti-fascism, the transnational nature of interwar communist politics and culture as well as the modern phenomenon of foreign war volunteering.
Thinking and Acting
Authors: Raeburn Fraser
Published: May 2021

The motives of foreigners who fought in the Spanish Civil War has long fascinated historians. While recent work has been able to explore the complexities of individual motivation, efforts to explain the scale of mobilisation still hinge on the anti-fascist beliefs of the volunteers. As well as exploring new ways of understanding the nature of volunteers’ anti-fascist beliefs, this chapter seeks to adapt and expand these frameworks, arguing that the best explanation for the scale of these mobilisations lies at the intersection of local and transnational communist political cultures. Not only did the belief systems of interwar communism lend themselves to these kinds of mobilisations, the nature of the recruitment process led to social as well as political impetus towards enlisting, leading to the dense recruitment among certain social-political networks observed in the previous chapter. This, it is suggested, offers a model for understanding the key pre-requisites for large-scale foreign fighter mobilisations.
Narrating Disruption: Realist Fiction and The Politics of Form in Watt
Authors: Davies William
Published: May 2021

Samuel Beckett’s Watt is, in some obvious sense, a war book. However, it is often read in eccentric relation to its historical context. Citing both Ireland’s neutrality policies and Beckett’s encounters with Nazism, James McNaughton (2018) reads the novel as a sustained interrogation of modern mechanisms of propaganda and state control. If the Irish setting displaces any immediate wartime connections, the absurd reasoning Watt deploys offers a frightening allegory for the barbaric logics of fascism. This essay both extends and complicates this reading by looking back to the critiques of realist fiction that Beckett developed over a decade earlier in his lectures on the history of the novel at Trinity College, Dublin, and in his own first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. In doing so, it explores the extent to which Watt represents a culmination of formal experimentation that was put in train at the beginning of Beckett’s career, a process which gained dramatic political urgency in a world at war.
Beckett’s Safe Words: Normalising Torture in How It Is
Authors: Walker Dominic
Published: May 2021

Samuel Beckett excused himself from his affair with Pamela Mitchell with a syntactically evocative phrase: ‘It is I the hurter of the two’. The definite article is telling: How it is (1964 [1961]) universalises one cruel, asymmetric, pseudo-amorous relationship, deducing from it ‘billions’ of similarly helpless, prostrate, mud-bound ‘creatures’, exchanging roles as torturers and victims in a leniently egalitarian distribution of suffering. Titled ‘Pim’ from 1958 until its publication, Beckett’s last, long, prose-like work happened to coincide with the Algerian War of Independence, during which the French authorities tortured captured revolutionary fighters with scant concern for the European Convention on Human Rights. Their pretext was semantic: a novel legal category was invented, ‘pris les armes à la main’, or PAM—a likely homophone both of How it is’s protagonist and of Beckett’s recent ex. Using contemporaneous news reports and recent feminist historical scholarship, ‘Safe Words’ argues that the author’s biographic reminiscences have been transposed onto documented examples of state-sanctioned torture of Algerian women in particular. The essay tentatively concludes that everyday, prosaic acts of gendered domination might not be quite as qualitatively different from official violence as certain readers would wish to believe.
Economic Theory as Morality: Europe’s and the World’s North and South
Authors: Stråth Bo
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores how the issue of historical debt and guilt was a core dimension of a moral message and how this message historically provided preconditions for bridging or deepening the two North-South divides, the European and the global. The chapter shows the connection between the European and the global divisions. It investigates the period since 1945 with a focus on the introduction of the euro. The two competing economic theories Keynesianism and neoliberalism constitute the backdrop of the chapter. Each of them had a hegemonic status for a specific period, with the 1970s as the divide. Although both argued that they were value-free economic theories, they were value-loaded with moral implications.
Europe’s Debt Denied: Reflections on 1989 and the Loss of Yugoslav Experience of Direct Democracy
Authors: Nedimović Svjetlana
Published: May 2021

A conscious political erasure of the legacy of socialist revolutions and politics followed the regime changes in Eastern Europe in 1989. The transition moved away from the initial demands for the democratization of socialism, towards capitalism and procedural democracy. In the process, the political experience of the democratic practices of socialism was obscured, as well as the anti-fascist resistance and revolutionary experience of a century-old struggle against authoritarian tendencies and for equality, which was also the driving force of the movement behind the 1989 uprisings.The chapter looks into the case of Yugoslavia and the mechanisms of erasure to argue that a political debt to the socialist past of Europe has been incurred by a deliberate politics of oblivion and discreditation both nationally and supranationally, within the EU institutions. The Yugoslav example is particularly significant given the direct democratic practices it developed despite the bureaucratization of the Communist party in its final decades. The debt thus incurred is however making itself felt in present-day Europe through its political crisis of the so-called democratic deficit and the rising Far Right.
The Use of the Past under Conditions of Disorientation and Instability: The Spanish–Catalan Political Conflict
Authors: Rosich Gerard
Published: May 2021

The chapter discusses the field of tensions that shaped the new conditions under which a meaningful use of the past could be performed in the historiographical disputes pertaining to Spain. It develops a different perspective by highlighting novel contemporary elements that are too often neglected by historians themselves. It shows that the ‘professionalisation’ of history and the subsequent and recent debate on the Catalan question are intermediate situations that both try to avoid confronting the issue that a historian’s perspective is always influenced by the ongoing transformations. It argues that the ‘primacy’ given to a present that is already past in the debate on the Catalan question is both a consequence of a lack of orientation for future action and a way to disregard the normative and epistemic consequences imposed by the novel conditions under which history writing in the Spanish state presently takes place.
Beauty and Its Problems: Introduction
Authors: Čelkytė Aistė
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses various philosophical problems that form a relevant background for studying Stoic aesthetics. It starts with W. Tatarkiewicz’s claim that the Stoic concept of beauty is one of three distinct ways of understanding beauty in European history. Second, Paul Oskar Kristeller’s famous claim that there was no aesthetics per se until the 18th century is discussed, arguing that some of the issues that preoccupied the Stoics are also dealt with by contemporary aesthetics as well. This is followed by a discussion of some general philosophical issues concerning beauty, especially focusing on topics of the relationship between moral and aesthetic values and the possibility of metaphysical unity of all the manifestations of beauty. The chapter concludes with an explanation of the scope of this study and detailed summaries of chapter content.
The Beautiful and the Good
Authors: Čelkytė Aistė
Published: May 2021

This chapter starts with the argument that the ancient Greek term to kalon (and its Latin equivalent honestum) can be read as having an aesthetic meaning. This discussion leads to the discussion of the argument ‘that only the beautiful is the good’ (μόνον τὸ καλὸν ἀγαθὸν εἶναι‎). The reconstruction suggests that, despite the fact that different interpretations of this argument are given in the doxographical material, the syllogism which accompanied the argument in the original Chrysippean version points to a very specific idea. In this argument, beauty plays the role of a distinguishing sign peculiar to the true good. Beauty signifies true goodness and makes it distinct from only apparent goodness. It supports the Stoic tenet that virtue is the only genuine good by claiming that beauty distinguishes true good from other, only apparent, goods.
Historical and Sociolinguistic Background
Authors: McLeod Wilson
Published: May 2021

This chapter gives a historical overview of Gaelic in Scotland, including an analysis of its spread to different parts of Scotland in the Middle Ages and the trajectory of demographic decline and language shift since the 18th century. Gaelic became the language of the first Scottish monarchy (the kingdom of Alba) and was widely spoken across Scotland, but then began to decline in the 12th century and became confined to the mountainous northwest of the country (the Highlands). The language became stigmatised as a language of barbarism and the Gaelic community was economically and socially marginalised. Traditional Gaelic society was shattered in the 18th century, with the repression following the Battle of Culloden (1746), followed by the Highland Clearances of the 19th century, which involved large-scale removal of population. Since the 18th century there has been steady language shift in the Highlands, now reaching the last Gaelic communities. The future of Gaelic as a community language has become very uncertain.
Aleppo
Authors: McInally Tom
Published: May 2021

Strachan’s stay in Constantinople with his friend, the French ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Achille de Harlay, provided the Scotsman with his first opportunity of examining eastern texts in the ambassador’s personal library. However he could not find employment or engage in serious discourse with Muslim scholars. His next destination in Ottoman territory was Aleppo.
The importance of Aleppo to Strachan was as a trading centre with a sizeable contingent of European traders. He was able to stay at the Franciscan convent in the city and met with a Flemish friend who was practicing as a doctor to the European community. Using the Venetian postal service, Strachan wrote to a friend in Paris saying that he intended staying for two years but that changed when he gained employment as the personal physician to Emir Feyyād Abū Rīsha, leader of the Anazzah tribe of Bedouin Arabs.
Strachan’s Library
Authors: McInally Tom
Published: May 2021

The range of subjects and titles available to Strachan in eastern libraries is covered by reference to the library of the Ashrafiya Madrassa in Damascus. The affordability of manuscripts is also discussed in this chapter. Strachan’s choice of poetry and Islamic studies for his collection is contrasted with the dearth of these subjects available in Europe to scholars such as Erpenius.
In manuscripts which have a date of purchase, an analysis of the Latin glosses entered by Strachan is used to assess his progress in understanding the Arabic language and eastern culture. The chapter concludes with an explanation of how Strachan’s manuscripts came to make a profound contribution to the work of later European scholars, especially Marracci.
The Efficacy of ACH in Establishing Epistemic Justification and Mitigating Cognitive Bias
Authors: Whitesmith Martha
Published: May 2021

The chapter examines the ability of current versions of the structured analytical technique, assessment of competing hypotheses (ACH) to provide theoretically valid methodologies for establishing justified beliefs in intelligence analysis, to cope with the higher risk of epistemic complexity in intelligence analysis, and to mitigate or reduce cognitive bias. It argues that no current version of ACH provides a theoretically valid mechanism to establish justification for beliefs, or to cope with epistemic complexity, but that the method can be adapted to do so. It also argues that no current version of ACH provides a theoretically valid mechanism to mitigate the risk of cognitive bias, but that the method could be adapted to make the occurrence of some cognitive biases visible to peer review.