bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Indian Documentary Film and Filmmakers
Authors: Kishore Shweta
Published: May 2020

Independent documentary is enjoying a resurgence in post-reform India. But in contemporary cinema and media cultures, where ‘independent’ operates as an industry genre or critical category, how do we understand the significance of this mode of cultural production?
Based on detailed onsite observation of documentary production, circulation practices and the analysis of film texts, this book identifies independence as a 'tactical practice’, contesting the normative definitions and functions assigned to culture, cultural production and producers in a neoliberal economic system. Focusing on selected filmmakers, the book establishes how they have reorganised the dominance of industrial media, technology and social relations to develop practices that build upon principles of de-economisation, artisanship and interdependence.
Financing and Production
Authors: Kishore Shweta
Published: May 2020

Focusing on documentary financing, two forms of organisation appear, an institutionally managed and a private self-managed mode of production initiated in response to the chronic lack of production support for documentary from the industry and public sectors. Filmmakers take concrete actions to resist an instrumental framing of documentary film under a range of social functions and communication discourses in an ongoing struggle for artistic expression. Independence becomes visible in a series of tactical adaptations where standardised media practice is displaced by the formation of cooperative social alliances, the reduced significance of capital in the production process and non-monetary rewards. These re-worked practices implicate the mode of documentary inquiry, textual aesthetics and political position taking to render possible the expression of representational and semiotic concerns within institutional production environments.
People and Documentary
Authors: Kishore Shweta
Published: May 2020

What does the nature of social associations between documentary filmmakers and documentary participants reveal about the social relations imagined and constructed by the practice of independent Indian documentary. Particularly in the industrial and social context of the NGO-dominated production and distribution environments where governmentality produces specific subject relations and discourses of subject positions (donor, recipient, client, expert), these relationships function as a lens to bring into focus the re-organisational scope of independent documentary practice and its potential to challenge socially assigned identities, relations, functions and thus social relations. In the practice and works of the filmmakers examined, alternate grounds of “interdependent filmmaking” are noticeable, often formed between socially disparate groups by means of reorganised processes such as “negotiated consent”. When projected alongside broader historical practices of documentary, the relationships point towards “interdependent filmmaking” predicated upon horizontal linkages between filmmakers, individuals and communities.
Emigration Aesthetics: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and Catherine Helen Spence
Authors: Shaikh Fariha
Published: May 2020

Chapter Five takes up this reading and interrogates the ways in emigration literature becomes a trope in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and David Copperfield (1850), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854). This chapter asserts that to ask how central or liminal emigration is to the plot of the novel is to miss the point. What is far more interesting is the ways in which the novels discussed here register the effects of emigration. They draw on the familiar tropes of emigration literature, but at the same time, they imagine a world in which emigration literature connects emigrants and their families and weaves them into the larger global network of the British empire. Thus, collectively, the last two chapters of this book demonstrate the hold that emigration literature had over the cultural imagination. Not only does it produce a stock of common tropes that other genres and media drew on, it also becomes a motif in them, a site of interrogation for the interrogation of texts that produced a widening settler world.
Conclusion: Structures of Mobility
Authors: Shaikh Fariha
Published: May 2020

The conclusion recounts the key themes of emigration literature. Although the purposes, audiences and contexts of production and consumption of the genres and media explored in Imaginary Distance differ hugely, in their own ways they all influenced how British people thought about their place in the world and their extending kinship ties across time and space. Emigration literature engages with issues of mobility, flow and circulation of texts, peoples, ideas and things, but crucially, it is also defined by its emphasis on settlement, place and stability.
The Problem of Nature’s Spurious Infinite within the Register of Animal Life
Authors: Furlotte Wes
Published: May 2020

Moving to Hegel’s writings on “Organics”, this chapter develops an acute sense of the paradoxical implications that follow from the fundamental exteriority and indeterminacy characteristic of Hegelian nature. Concentrating on Hegel’s writings on animal life, the chapter reveals that the organism’s self-referential structure is consistently given over to various forms of external determination that analogically reflect the externality permeating the categories of space and time. This collapse into exteriority proves dangerous to the interiority constituting organic life. By extension, such collapse is dangerous to the animal organism’s status as one of the primary upsurges of freedom within the matrices of material nature. The upshot of Hegel’s account of organic life is revealingly significant: nature’s exteriority and indeterminacy function as crucial preconditions for the emergence of freedom within nature and yet they also serve to perpetually threaten the very reality of that same freedom. This paradoxical tension constitutes a fundamental problem which the remainder of the monograph seeks to systematically explore, both in terms of Hegel’s anthropology and political philosophy.
Crime, the Negation of Right, and the Problem of European Colonial Consciousness
Authors: Furlotte Wes
Published: May 2020

This chapter develops an acute sense of the contingency that necessarily unfolds in the wake of Hegel’s account of personhood, specifically in terms of the structure of contract. In the pursuit of one’s own interests in terms of property, Hegel’s analysis leads to the inevitability of exchange amongst persons (contract). The chapter aims to demonstrate that because contracts are contingent upon persons’ self-interests they are prone to violation: one may just as well respect their contract as violate it. Right, framed in terms of contract, dialectically mutates into wrong and crime. The chapter that the natural dimension of the individual, understood as immediate drive etc., is crucial to criminal violations of right. Subsequently, the chapter develops a sustained critical reading of Hegel on this speculative rendering of the structure of crime. Drawing from key theorists in postcolonial and critical race studies, the chapter accentuates the problematic colonial impulse permeating Hegel’s position, exposes the ways in which it grounds criminality in the ‘natural’, ‘metaphysical’ depth of the juridical subject.
Conclusion: Freedom within Two Natures, or, the Nature–Spirit Dialectic in the Final System
Authors: Furlotte Wes
Published: May 2020

Concluding, the monograph attempts to address the major objections that might be raised against this rereading of Hegel’s final system. Specifically, it responds to the claim that such a reading conflates the inchoate activity of spirit in nature with nature itself and so proceeds by way of conflation. Resisting this criticism, the conclusion returns to crucial passages from Hegel’s writings on nature that explicitly characterize nature as impotent and radically external—two features antithetical to the concept of spirit. Consequently, the conclusion argues that there must be a reticent independence assigned to the domain of nature that is not the result of misreading Hegel’s mature philosophy. Instead, this reticence is the very expression of material nature and it functions as a problem for the project of spirit, a problem which permeates the entirety of Hegel’s final system, specifically his philosophy of the real (Realphilosophie). The conclusion then highlights three symptomatic expressions of nature’s paradoxical and problematic status. Subsequently, the conclusion also shows how spirit’s project of freedom persistently transgresses two distinct senses of nature.
Insect Ethics and Aesthetics: ‘Their blood does not stain our hands’
Authors: Sands Danielle
Published: May 2020

This chapter tracks the flying and scurrying of disparate unpinned insects, emphasising both their instrumental and intrinsic value, and the necessity of supplementing empathetic with non-empathetic approaches when thinking and writing with them. It examines three figures of the insect: the first, the insect as other other in Damien Hirst’s work, exposes the limitations of empathetic responses to nonhuman life. The second, the queer insect, draws on Elizabeth Grosz’s reading of Darwin, Roger Caillois’s interpretation of mimicry and Lee Edelman’s work in queer theory to argue that the insect provides a figure of the inhuman that counters logics of heteronormative futurity. The final figure, that of the disgusting insect, is generated through Rosi Braidotti’s reading of Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion of G.H. and Derrida’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The chapter concludes by advancing disgust as a useful tool in the development of inhuman ethics.
Conclusion
Authors: Sands Danielle
Published: May 2020

The Conclusion situates the findings of the book in relation to the current environmental crisis, arguing that effective responses to this crisis demand a plurality of approaches to nonhuman life, rather than an empathy which is restricted to certain living beings. It argues that literature is not a protected, apolitical space, but a world-making space, whose tools – metaphor, trope, allegory – should be evaluated as better or worse tools of being-with other forms of life, rather than merely in terms of their representational value. The Conclusion appeals to a mode of ‘noninnocent thinking’ which links the critical and imaginative, and advances ways of cultivating less violence, rather than eradicating it completely.
Microcritique and the Sublime
Authors: Williams James
Published: May 2020

This chapter sets out the method for analysing the sublime: microcritique. The method is inspired by microhistory and the work of Carlo Ginzburg, in particular. The chapter presents the problem of exclusion, whereby methods lead to exclusions of evidence and of different ways of life. To mitigate this problem, it defends a fragmentary and open methodology inspired by large frame and close-up takes, inspired by cinema and the work of Siegfried Kracauer.
Sublime Miseries
Authors: Williams James
Published: May 2020

Starting with a critical reading of Kant, this chapter goes on to consider Žižek’s philosophy of the sublime. The study of Žižek and sublime miseries grows out of an interpretation and defence of Schopenhauer on the sublime. The chapter also considers Adorno and Lyotard on the sublime. It concludes with a positive assessment of Kristeva’s work on the abject sublime.
The Spark Has Been Lit Here in Iraq
Authors: Ostřanský Bronislav
Published: May 2020

This chapter addresses in detail the role of the millennial agenda within ISIS propaganda. Using their primary sources (both in Arabic and Western languages), the discussion analyses, step by step, the specific segments of Muslim apocalyptic heritage that have been utilised in ISIS propaganda as a tool for the justification and metaphysical legalization of their struggle. The main objective of this chapter is to carefully discuss the way ISIS has instrumentalized chosen apocalyptic pointers, either events or trends, which, from their own perspective, have already been fulfilled. They have sought to use these claims as a tool to prove the accuracy of their interpretation of contemporary affairs.
The Realist Turn: Parrhêsia, Character and the Limits of Didacticism
Authors: Hershinow David
Published: May 2020

Chapter 2 offers a new account of literary realism and its origins in early modern drama in order to explain why a crisis of character—both literary and ethical—begins to cohere around the figure of the Cynic truth-teller only in the sixteenth century. It argues that the proliferation of non-allegorical characters in early modern drama is the result of a new development in the protocols of literary didacticism, one in which literature can increasingly instruct audiences in the ethics of self-care by offering up to judgment the actions and outcomes of characters fashioned to be verisimilar to people. Moving into the seventeenth century and beyond, literary realism becomes fictionality’s dominant representational mode precisely because it serves as a virtual arena in which to exercise one’s practical wisdom (phronesis) about the ethical means and political ends of action.
Introduction: Who’s Kidding?— Approaching Elaine May
Authors: Heller-Nicholas Alexandra
Published: May 2020

While not unknown, the films of Elaine May and the importance of her career have been hidden in plain sight. Beginning her career in stand-up comedy with her long-time collaborator Mike Nichols, while he would go on to win major awards for his directorial work, May’s four features — A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1976) and Ishtar (1987) — have until recently spanned from the forgotten to the unobtainable to the maligned. Presenting a fascinating set of challenges for how film history, gender, authorship and other subjects are typically approached, this introduction outlines why May is important, why her work long overdue critical reassessment, and outlines the broader approach of the book ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May.
Hollywood Can’t Wait: Elaine May and the Delusions of 1970s American Cinema
Authors: Smukler Maya Montañez
Published: May 2020

Elaine May began her career as a filmmaker during the 1970s when the mythology of the New Hollywood male auteur defined the decade; and the number of women directors, boosted by second wave feminism, increased for the first time in forty years. May’s interest in misfit characters, as socially awkward as they were delusional, and her ability to seamlessly move them between comedy and drama, typified the New Hollywood protagonist who captured America’s uneasy transition from the hopeful rebellion of the 1960s into the narcissistic angst of the 1970s. However, the filmmaker’s reception, which culminated in the critical lambast of her comeback film Ishtar in 1987, was uneven: her battles with studio executives are legendary; feminist film critics railed against her depiction of female characters; and a former assistant claimed she set back women directors by her inability to meet deadlines. This chapter investigates Elaine May’s career within the lore 1970s Hollywood to understand the industrial and cultural circumstances that contributed to the emergence of her influential body of work; and the significant contributions to cinema she made in spite of, and perhaps because of, the conflicts in which she was faced.
Kneeling on Glass—Elaine May’s A New Leaf (1971) as Screwball Black Comedy
Authors: Deighan Samm
Published: May 2020

Elaine May’s 1971 directorial debut, A New Leaf was a watershed moment within May’s career, but as a film important to the contemporary development of American comedy cinema. This chapter will examine A New Leaf as part of a greater comedic tradition, particularly in terms of pre-code and 1930s/1940s screwball comedy, later black comedies, and romantic comedies about unlikely couplings between unsympathetic protagonists, forging a connection between the theme of romance, finance, and mortality. This chapter argue that A New Leaf represents an important development in this subgenre, and examines A New Leaf in connection to the relatively unsentimental romantic comedies of the ‘60s and ‘70s concerned with unlikely couplings that concern an unlikely romance that develops as the result of a search for fortune.
Mikey and Nicky (1976)—Elaine May and the Cassavetes Connection
Authors: Carr Jeremy
Published: May 2020

Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976) bears an obvious indebtedness to John Cassavetes, not just because of his commanding presence as one of the film’s two primary stars, but in a kindred approach to cinematic form, acting style, and narrative construction. But what makes Mikey and Nicky so original has to do with her own idiosyncratic vision, and how she absorbs and manipulates the Cassavetes persona to suit her ambitions. It is evident May has built the film around Cassavetes, with regards to his particular brand of drama and an unpolished aesthetic he helped popularize. Each influencing and complementing the other, May and Cassavetes revel in a shared penchant for authentic spontaneity and improvisational interactions. It is a candid cinema that hinges on unrestrained, painfully intimate physicality and an audacious desire to push all facets of viewer engagement beyond the norm. The Cassavetes influence is undeniable, but this is an Elaine May film, made by someone with a reverence for the ground-breaking work that came before her, but also by someone who successfully carves out her own niche in American cinema.
Spectral Elaine May—The Later Mike Nichols Collaborations and the Myth of the Recluse
Authors: O’Farrell Tim
Published: May 2020

Elaine May's documentary Mike Nichols: An American Master (2016) surveys Nichols' life and, in particular, work as a noted Hollywood director. The American Masters series, described on the PBS website as "an award-winning biography series", is designed to produce biographies of leading figures in American culture. May's contribution to the series is at first sight a conventional short form television documentary profile of an artist. However, it repays examination both as an example of May's artistry (the opening includes a signature sly moment, importing archival footage of a blustery Adolf Hitler to reference Nichols German Jewish background, reminding us of May and Nichols' shared heritage) and as a launching pad for dissecting the way May and Nichols' careers have become intertwined in fact and in Hollywood legend. I will frame the documentary's content by considering other May tributes to Nichols (such as speeches at the AFI Life Achievement Awards and at the Kennedy Center Honors) and her early comedy work with Nichols, as well as biographical background to material which is suggested or touched on in the documentary
Introduction: The Gothic in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Wester Maisha , Reyes Xavier Aldana
Published: May 2020

The establishment of the Gothic as one of the prevalent artistic modes of the post-millennial period is not something that could have been easily foreseen in the mid-twentieth century. For a long time relegated to specialist university units on Romanticism and Enlightenment literature, still heavily associated with medieval and revival architecture and certainly not in wide circulation as a term through which to describe contemporary cultural products, the Gothic underwent a seismic change during the 1980s and 1990s. The astounding effect of scholarly work, especially the pioneering books by ...
Contemporary Werewolves
Authors: Franck Kaja , George Sam
Published: May 2020

Twenty-first-century werewolves (following vampires) have become humanised, as identity politics have become mainstream and the Other assimilated. Young Adult fiction and paranormal romance have proved to be where the most radical transformations of the theme have occurred. Two other, related, strands are to be found: ecology has shaped our understanding of creatures which oscillate between nature and culture, and the Ecogothic has generated more positive representations of hybridity and animality. There are now werewolf hauntings and sightings, and a revival of folkloric elements which posit the new werewolf as the spectre wolf. This chapter charts these recent shifts and manifestations. The focus throughout is on literature and contemporary urban myths involving werewolves in the media but similar incarnations of the new werewolf in film, TV, videogames and comics are also acknowledged.
The New Weird
Authors: Sederholm Carl H.
Published: May 2020

The New Weird engages audiences in ways that are dark, terrifying, speculative and fantastic. Despite its essential hybridity – drawing from Gothic horror, science fiction and urban fantasy – the New Weird is largely Gothic in style, particularly through its bleak and terrifying atmospheres, its violence, its extravagance and its suspicion of predominant social and cultural institutions. Further, the New Weird pushes the boundaries of sanity by suggesting that common-sense notions of reality are unstable, that human beings are not the centre of everything and that human cosmology is fatally flawed. To address these themes, my discussion largely turns to a handful of representative texts, including City of Saints and Madmen(2001), by Jeff VanderMeer;Threshold(2001), by Caitlín Kiernan;Perdido Street Station (2000), by China Miéville; and The Etched City(2003), by K. J. Bishop.
Steampunk
Authors: Nally Claire
Published: May 2020

This chapter identifies an intersection between the dark aesthetic practice associated with goth and the more sepia-toned steampunk community. The central argument employs the post-subculture model, which sees subcultures as elective and postmodern in terms of identity politics.Whitby Gothic Weekend, in the UK,is used as a departure point because it has an established steampunk fringe event and has hosted the US steampunk band, Abney Park, as well as other bands familiar to steampunk, such as The Men that will not be Blamed for Nothing. This is noteworthy, as it suggests considerable overlap between the cultures, but it also flags up contentions and debates surrounding authenticity and boundary marking in the goth subculture. This chapter then undertakes a survey of themes in steampunk music, fashion, whilst also theorising the subculture’s relationship to activism, Neo-Victorianism, and postcolonialism.
Wordsworth, Keats and Cognitive Spaces of Empathy in Endymion
Authors: Harris Renee
Published: May 2020

Eighteenth-century medicine provided an anatomical basis for the belief that our skin is not a barrier against but a channel to the feelings of others. Mutual adoption of the term ‘sympathy’ in medicine and moral philosophy exceeds metaphor to speak to the way Enlightenment and Romantic-era culture understood the body’s openness to external influence. While Romantic writers conceived of reading as an embodied social interaction between writer and reader, contrasting sentiments surfaced between those who celebrated the possibility for radical interconnectedness and those who feared the vulnerability of a penetrable self. William Wordsworth and John Keats experimented with poetic form to find how best to manage a reader’s engagement with the text and thereby shape their sympathetic faculties. Examining acts of reading in Wordsworth’s Prelude and Keats’s Endymion, I apply Giovanna Colombetti’s work on enacted spaces of empathy to show how Keats’s theory of feeling challenges Wordsworth’s and goes beyond Enlightenment models available to them to envision a more revolutionary model of social cognition. For Keats, poetry enacts a co-emergence of aesthetic experience where cognition and composition seem to occur between acts of writing and reading at the site of text.
Cognitive Scaffolding, Aids to Reflection
Authors: Savarese John
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines how Samuel Taylor Coleridge pictured thinking as a distributed process, using as a case study his devotional handbook Aids to Reflection (1825). Coleridge explicitly framed Aids to Reflection as an assistive apparatus, and depicts ‘reflection’ as both an inner activity and a skilled interaction with a set of external tools. The chapter argues that we might usefully read this aspect of Coleridge’s thought in light of the notion of ‘scaffolding’ in embedded and extended accounts of cognition. It begins with Coleridge’s account of distributed thinking in his early approach to philosophical method, then considers Aids to Reflection’s account of education and mental development, and concludes with Coleridge’s broader treatment of information management systems, in particular with his anxieties about thought’s dependence on material apparatuses. Ultimately, the chapter concludes, Coleridge is an important figure in the history of distributed cognition because he experimented with different ways of understanding the relationships among mind, language and information technology.
Distributed Cognition and Women Writers’ Representation of Theatre in Eighteenth-Century England: ‘Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind’
Authors: Ballaster Ros
Published: May 2020

Readers in the mid-eighteenth century were increasingly invited to translate their knowledge about the social extension of mind learned in the experience of theatre to ‘new’ prose forms of the periodical and the novel. Women writers in these forms found opportunity to present women as cognitive agents rather than affective vehicles. Four works by women serve to illustrate this case: Eliza Haywood’s The Dramatic Historiographer (1735), Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry: a new dramatic fable (1754), Charlotte Lennox’s Shakespeare Illustrated (1753-4), and Frances Brooke’s The Old Maid (1755-6). These printed prose works invoke memories of performance – the co-presence of the real bodies of audience and actors. But they often do so to claim the superior cognitive experience of the reader’s engagement through print with a fictional persona in the ‘mind’. The prose work is imagined as a repository of socially extended mind for its audience, an opportunity not only to recreate the experience of communal consumption of the artwork which theatre affords, but also to provide a more sophisticated form of narrative scaffolding. Distance and reflection are enabled by the absence of the performer’s body and the judicious authority of a framing narrator.
Introduction
Authors: Dickson Melissa
Published: May 2020

Opening with an examination of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century modernity, the introduction argues that, faced with profound structural shifts, commentators of the period frequently deployed the language of magic and the Arabian Nights in order to communicate and make sense of their new, urban, industrial environments. Outlining the history of the arrival of the Arabian Nights in Europe and its remarkable propensity to proliferate, it establishes the temporal and structural openness of this story collection, which invites diverse application in multiple locations. In the case of nineteenth-century Britain, it argues, the tales were used to reflect and refract new materials and ideas, offering different ways for British readers to interpret and to frame their experiences. While engaging with questions of imperialism and Orientalism, the introduction draws recent scholarship on thing theory into the history of reading practices, in order to register the potentially transformative powers of reading in the context of the emotional, psychological and material relationships forged with the Arabian Nights in nineteenth-century Britain. Alongside the more familiar narrative of its prevalence as material with which to manage the Orient, it points to moments of exchange, immersion and receptivity to the realm of the other, and to narratives shared and adapted across cultures.
Introduction: Textual Performances in Levinas and Film
Authors: Lamberti Edward
Published: May 2020

The introduction begins by exploring how Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy has been taken up by film theorists to date. Much of this scholarship centres on Levinas’s theories of the Other as found in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961), particularly the ‘face’ of the Other, which theorists have discussed in relation to visualre presentation. Levinas developed his ethics, in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), into a performative account of what it feels like to be responsible for the Other. Accordingly, Performing Ethics through Film Style takes a similar approach with film, linking the performativity of Levinas’s writing style with the capacity of films to perform a Levinasian ethics of responsibility for the Other through their styles. The introduction brings in performativity theory – including J. L. Austin’s speech acts, Jacques Derrida’s originary performativity and Judith Butler’s theories of language in the socio-political sphere – to enhance this study of performativity in Levinas and film. And it sets up the subjects of the chapters to follow: the films of the Dardenne brothers, Barbet Schroeder and Paul Schrader. Studying these directors in relation to Levinas shows how films can perform ethics through a wide variety of styles.
Introduction
Authors: Lamberti Edward
Published: May 2020

This second part of the book takes the study of Emmanuel Levinas and film further into uncharted waters, by looking at Levinasian ethics in relation to films directed by Barbet Schroeder. Schroeder has made films in many different countries – such as France, Uganda, the United States, Colombia and Japan – on several different topics, and whereas the Dardennes have a recognisable style that they vary slightly from film to film, there is no such thing as an easily identifiable ‘Schroeder style’. This chapter reads this as a highly Levinasian dimension to Schroeder’s work: it argues that Schroeder’s lack of a consistent filmmaking identity initiates a highly flexible approach to his subject matter, his shifting styles responding open-mindedly and generously to the demands of different Others, and that his films therefore can be said to perform a Levinasian ethics through their different uses of film style. This introductory section sets up the discussions to follow on four Schroeder films: Maîtresse (1975), Reversal of Fortune (1990), Terror’s Advocate (2007) and Our Lady of the Assassins (2000).
Maîtresse: Direction without Domination
Authors: Lamberti Edward
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at Barbet Schroeder’s French-language film Maîtresse (1975), a film about sadomasochism that is also a love story. Schroeder films this potentially sensational subject matter in a matter-of-fact way, his camera calmly – though never coldly – observing the actions of the dominatrix (Bulle Ogier), her clients and her lover (Gérard Depardieu). The calmness of the visual style in this film speaks to what I am reading as a Levinasian openness to the idiosyncrasies of human behaviour, a calmness that performs an ethical acceptance of the Other. The chapter also explores Schroeder’s views on the power of the director and how he does all he can to refuse that power, and relates this to questions of directorial identity. It argues that Schroeder’s lack of an overt directorial identity is a part of what makes him a Levinasian director; in sacrificing his own sense of identity, he allows himself to be open, in a Levinasian way, to the Otherness of his filmic subjects.
The Ethical and the Juridical in Reversal of Fortune and Terror’s Advocate
Authors: Lamberti Edward
Published: May 2020

Chapter 5 considers Barbet Schroeder’s English-language American true-life drama Reversal of Fortune (1990) and his French-language political documentary Terror’s Advocate (2007), two films about lawyers and legal systems. Desmond Manderson refers in his collection Essays on Levinas and Law: A Mosaic (2009) to the ‘mosaic’ of a Levinasian approach to the law, as, sceptical of legal systems but devoted to justice, Emmanuel Levinas posits an ethics that refuses to crystallise into a prescriptive view of how the law should work in respect of the Other. I argue that these two Schroeder films, with their multi-faceted, ‘mosaic-like’ styles and structures, perform this fractured Levinasian refusal to settle on a fixed, simplistic definition of the law’s purpose. I analyse Reversal of Fortune for its multiple story strands and the different visual styles Schroeder deploys to delineate them, along with elements of performance – especially from Jeremy Irons as Claus von Bülow – that complicate questions of otherness. In discussing the documentary Terror’s Advocate, I draw on Stella Bruzzi’s work on performative documentary (2006) to explore how Schroeder uses film style to perform both the bravado of the film’s protagonist, the real-life criminal lawyer Jacques Vergès, and the Levinasian ‘mosaic’ of the legal situations he surveys.
Introduction
Authors: Lamberti Edward
Published: May 2020

Part 3 considers the work of director Paul Schrader. Schrader is not as intuitive a fit for Emmanuel Levinas as the Dardennes or even Schroeder: many of Schrader’s films focus on a lone figure struggling with his relationships with other people and with the world. As these relationships are so often violent, destructive or denied, ethical concerns often seem to be far away, and Schrader’s filmmaking – by turns visually dazzling, overtly stylised, and more low-key and contemplative, often within the course of a single film – muddies the ethical waters further, as it is unclear whether Schrader wants to stimulate our senses, excite us with violent drama or draw us into passivity. But this approach, the book argues, invites the audience to remain alert and involved, and, in doing so, kindles ethical awareness. Thus, Schrader’s uses of style, as much as those of the Dardennes and Schroeder, are examples of style performing ethics, just as Levinas does in his prose. This introductory section sets up the discussions to follow on five Schrader films: American Gigolo (1980), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), The Comfort of Strangers (1990), Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) and Adam Resurrected (2008).
Conclusion: Levinasian Films in the World
Authors: Lamberti Edward
Published: May 2020

The Conclusion sums up how studying Emmanuel Levinas and film in terms of style and performativity can expand our appreciation both of Levinas’s ethics and of the work of these significant filmmakers. This study of a range of films directed by the Dardenne brothers, Barbet Schroeder and Paul Schrader helps open up the different ways in which film style can perform ethics. This opening-up shows that there is no such thing as a singular ‘ethical style’ or ‘Levinasian style’ and no such thing as a singular ‘Levinasian topic’. Rather, the power and importance of Levinas’s ethics can be detected and explored in a range of subject matter and performed through a range of film styles. This realisation paves the way for other studies into ethics, performativity and film.
Arabic in Modern Hebrew Texts
Authors: Ahmed Mohamed
Published: May 2020

In the late 1950s, Iraqi Jews were either forced or chose to leave Iraq for Israel. Finding it impossible to continue writing in Arabic in Israel, many Iraqi Jewish novelists faced the literary challenge of switching to Hebrew. Focusing on the literary works of the writers Shimon Ballas, Sami Michael and Eli Amir, this book examines their use of their native Iraqi Arabic in their Hebrew works. It examines the influence of Arabic language and culture and explores questions of language, place and belonging from the perspective of sociolinguistics and multilingualism.
In addition, the book applies stylistics as a framework to investigate the range of linguistic phenomena that can be found in these exophonic texts, such as code-switching, borrowing, language and translation strategies. This new stylistic framework for analysing exophonic texts offers a future model for the study of other languages.
The social and political implications of this dilemma, as it finds expression in creative writing, are also manifold. In an age of mass migration and population displacement, the conflicted loyalties explored in this book through the prism of Arabic and Hebrew are relevant in a range of linguistic contexts.
The Use of Arabic Between Authors and Novels
Authors: Ahmed Mohamed A. H
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyses the diachronic development of Arabic use. The novels are categorised into three main corpora to trace Arabic use from early to late Hebrew novels. In this chapter, the style of each of the three authors is also analysed independently. This means that the style of each of the three authors is investigated according to the model developed in Chapter 2, and other linguistic and literary features of each author associated with Arabic/Hebrew are also discussed.
Final Remarks
Authors: Ahmed Mohamed A. H
Published: May 2020

This chapter concludes the study with two sections. The first section discusses the employment of place as an iconic element in the nine Hebrew novels of the study, looking at the mutual relationship between the geographical location of the narrative setting and the use of Arabic in the novels. The second section constitutes a general summary of the book with its main results.
Migrants
Authors: Gutman David
Published: May 2020

This Chapter traces the origins of the large-scale migration of Armenians to North America beginning in the late-1880s. It provides a detailed explanation for why most Armenians who departed for North America in this era originated from in and around the dual city of Harput/Mezre in east central Anatolia. It also explores the dynamics behind the Ottoman state’s decision to ban Armenian migration to North America, focusing on Istanbul’s belief that migration was inextricably linked to the nearly simultaneous emergence of Armenian revolutionary organizations.
Edinburgh and Paris
Authors: Jenkins Bill
Published: May 2020

Paris was the most important centre for evolutionary speculations in Europe in the early nineteenth century. Two of its most influential evolutionary thinkers, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire both worked there in the city’s Museum of Natural History. This chapter explores the impact of these French thinkers’ theories in Edinburgh and the close connections that existed between natural history circles in the two cities. It was common for students and graduates of the medical school of the University of Edinburgh to spend time studying in Paris, where they imbibed many of the exciting new ideas being discussed there. Two of the key figures discussed in this book, Robert Grant and Robert Knox, had both spent time in Paris and were deeply influenced by the theories they encountered there. The chapter also examines the impact of the key writings of Lamarck and Geoffroy in Edinburgh.
Conclusion
Authors: Jenkins Bill
Published: May 2020

In this final chapter the various threads of the argument for the importance of Edinburgh as a centre for the elaboration and transmission of evolutionary theories in the early nineteenth century are drawn together. It argues for the importance of Edinburgh as a conduit for the transmission of evolutionary ideas into Great Britain, where they would influence both the development and the reception of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection.
Meschonnic’s Poetics of Society
Authors: Pajević Marko
Published: May 2020

By systematically establishing what Meschonnic called a poetics of society, this chapter explores the connection between a theory of language and a theory of society. Meschonnic makes use of the old debate between realism and nominalism to criticize a language theory exclusively based on the sign. The particular accent system of the Hebrew Bible represents for Meschonnic an alternative model for thinking language, changing our ideas about poetics and subjectivity, with ethical and political consequences. This article sheds light on this political dimension of Meschonnic’s poetics, making the case for the cultivation of language awareness, for poetic thinking as a socially and politically formative activity. It contends that a different approach to language is a different approach to society, which entails that literature is of general social importance and poetics concerns much more than a narrow conception of literature.
Conclusion: On Endings and New Beginnings
Authors: Devereaux Michelle
Published: May 2020

The conclusion of the book revisits the issues and ideas put forth in the introduction, specifically focusing on how the individual films address them. It considers the idea of postmodern ‘indeterminacy’, posited by theorists such as Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson, and suggests the films relation to it results in what Patricia Waugh refers to as a ‘radical fictional sense of truth’ and a questioning of absolutes through a Romantic lens. But this questioning also results in the need to fight against the solipsism that so frequently attends it—an integral theme of the films featured. Finally, the conclusion describes how the resurgence of emotion in the films results in a form of transcendence that aligns clearly with the Romantic project.
Adaptation in Adaptation in Adaptation in Adaptation
Authors: Moss-Wellington Wyatt
Published: May 2020

This chapter offers a close analysis of Adaptation and its treatment of Darwinian themes. It uses the film to think through some issues in literary and cinematic Darwinism, prompting questions regarding evolution’s use in the humanities: what is the explanatory power of evolutionary biology, and how can we transform evolutionary thinking into meaningfully new information, information that might affect subsequent storytelling or behaviour in the world? Like the film, this chapter is concerned with identifying original thinking—how do we know when we have created something hermeneutically new?
“I can’t sleep. I’m losing my hair. I’m fat and repulsive”: Crises of Masculinity and Artistry in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation
Authors: Levinson Julie
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores how Adaptation borrows, repurposes and subverts some of the concerns of the male melodrama. Nina Baym’s notion of “melodramas of beset manhood” is applied as a framework to describe Adaptation and its relation to a spate of comedies across the past twenty years that present beset manhood in comic form. Levinson works through the ways in which Adaptation’s particular perspective on midlife masculinity gets realized through – and, perhaps, finds an analogue in – its fractured narrative structure.
Cross-border Family Issues in the EU: Multiplicity of Instruments, Inconsistencies and Problems of Coordination
Authors: Calabuig Rosario Espinosa
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyses challenges in the family law sphere, examining EU case law to assess the success of EU private international law regulations in the fields of divorce, matrimonial property, maintenance obligations and cross-border rights of access to children. It points to the difficulties facing judges, national courts and legal professionals in the application of EU regulations in this sphere.
Judicial Cooperation: Resolving the Differing Approaches
Authors: McClean David
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at two aspects of international judicial co-operation: service of process abroad and the taking evidence abroad. Common law and civil law traditions have very different approaches. Common law countries see both as matters for the parties, with only limited assistance from State authorities. Civil law countries see them as matters for State action and see direct action by agents of the parties as an interference with their judicial sovereignty. The approaches have been successfully reconciled in two Hague Conventions and two European Union Regulations which build on the experience under the Hague instruments. The developments have seen as move from slow and very formal procedures to more informal approaches, direct contact between actors in the two States replacing elaborate procedures involving both courts and diplomatic personnel. More recently this new approach has expressed itself in the creation of judicial networks and liaison magistrates, with direct communication between judges in different States.
Facing Nature
Authors: Epstein Hugh
Published: May 2020

This two-part chapter initially places Hardy and Conrad within the context of later nineteenth-century scientific conceptions of ‘Nature’. Both writers are shown in their letters and essays as equivalently committed to facing indifferent nature in a manner similar to leading contemporary scientists and cultural thinkers. However, in their search for ‘underlying’ truths both authors exhibit a powerful strain of subjective idealism which is entwined with the materialist and objective writing largely claimed for them in this study. The second half of the chapter explores the similarities and equivalences in how, with a fidelity to mood and sensation, Hardy and Conrad ‘face nature’ in their richly descriptive writing. Their ‘peculiar relation to realism’ is seen to value a sentience that is more comprehensive in scope and less cerebral than the human consciousness depicted by other nineteenth-century realist writers.
Identity and Margin
Authors: Epstein Hugh
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the three great mature works in which Hardy and Conrad most fully explore the indeterminate sensory boundaries between individual organisms and their circumambient world. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Nostromo are seen to create margins within which the conventional relations between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds are reimagined. The Mayor is shown to provide two ways of finding identity in the world – that of Elizabeth Jane and that of Henchard – which is illuminated by G. H. Lewes’s discussion of Vorstellung and Empfindung. The intensity of Tess’s sensory participation in the energies of the world of Talbothays is seen to correspond to the revolutionary study of physics and the senses conducted by Ernst Mach. The tragedy of Tess lies in the extinction of this plenitude by the atomising mechanised forces of modern society. In Nostromo, individual identity is called upon to face nature’s silence, and the chapter examines the different courses of Nostromo and Decoud in doing so. Whilst Hardy is drawn to propagation of energies, Conrad’s novel concerns resistance to disintegration, but both authors are shown to establish a new relationship between psychological and material space.
Minding the Senses
Authors: Epstein Hugh
Published: May 2020

This final chapter discusses why reading Jude the Obscure and Under Western Eyes is a different experience from that provided by the earlier novels, but why they are essential novels with which to conclude a study of the senses. In Jude the focus changes from sensory to mental experience: in scenes of ‘mutual distress’, Jude’s and Sue’s idealising tragically loses or denies the moments in which the senses and the mind might be reunited. Razumov is depicted as an even lonelier figure as he seeks to exert mental control over his senses, which are driven to re-enact scenes of a hallucinatory intensity. Whilst, in the changed epistemology of these novels, the protagonists’ minds are seen to be inhabited by words and the careful watching of them, in both novels it is bodily gesture that is finally required to declare the truth. In the short Postscript which follows, the fundamental empiricist affinity between Hardy and Conrad is re-affirmed, and their distinctiveness from other realist novelists is re-visited in terms of the scale of their vision and the centrality of the word ‘existence’ in their lexicon.