bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction: Reading Experimental Writing
Authors: Colby Georgina
Published: September 2020

This book is about reading experimental writing. Specifically, it explores the way in which experimental writing changes reading practices in the contemporary period. The question of how to read is the issue that is in dispute in many works of contemporary experimental writing. In bringing together expert scholars whose works employ theoretical approaches from literary and linguistic, sociological, political, psychoanalytic and economic fields, the book recognises the heterogeneous forms of reading that experimental writing precipitates. Experimental writing today is bound to a politics of reading. The contributors gathered here examine the experimental works’ resistance to interpretation, the issue of ‘reading’ in contemporary culture, and timely questions surrounding the capacity of the works under scrutiny to generate new forms of meaning and voicing. My aim in editing this volume is to harness and present a prevalent view among critics of contemporary avant-garde literature: that it is precisely through the changed nature of reading that experimental writing can intervene in current socio-political discourses....
Reading Happily with John Cage, Lyn Hejinian and Others
Authors: Houen Alex
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses various theories of happiness and gives particular consideration to Sara Ahmed’s suggestion that we need to rethink how the affect relates to the haphazard. Ahmed’s suggestion fits with Lyn Hejinian’s poetic experiments that present happiness as affirming happenings of the happenstance. After considering examples of that in Hejinian’s Happily (2000), the chapter then considers how John Cage used ‘chance determinations’ to make the happenstance happen in a range of his poetic ‘lectures’, including ‘Juillard Lecture’ (1952), ‘Indeterminacy’ (1958), ‘Diary: How to Improve the World’ (1965-82), and ‘Themes and Variations’ (1982). In analysing examples from those texts, the chapter reflects on how Cage’s lectures present and encourage modes of experimental reading that include being happily open to surprising aesthetic and affective possibilities. It concludes by comparing such happy reading to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of ‘reparative reading’.
On Joan Retallack’s Memnoir: Investigating ‘the Experience of Experiencing’
Authors: Kaufman Erica
Published: September 2020

This chapter reads Joan Retallack's Memnoir (2004) as an antidote to the limitations associated with generic memoir. Formal features such as the sparse us of the 'I' and Retallack's use of the page as a unit yields kaufman's comparison between Retallack's work and Dewey's observation that 'experience is omnipresent and ever important.' The poetic form offers a new form of memoir for Retallack, one that calls into question the project of recollecting one's past. Reconceiving the memoir as 'mindful' rather than 'memory', kaufman's close analysis blended with critical experiment reveals new forms of attention to the experimental work. This chapter scrutinises the way in which Retallack's work 'complicates the first person persona and offers an intervention into new forms of memoir that demand a panoply of forms of attention from the reader.
Reading Language Art in Digital Media: Reconfigurations of Experimental Practices
Authors: Cayley John
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines recent digital language art through the prism of Johanna Drucker's recent work, combined with a Derridean exploration of 'grammalepsy'. Reading is renegotiated through 'grammaleptic' reading, which is explored in the chapter in relation to reading experimental digital language art. Analyzing contemporary works by Samantha Gorman, Danny Canizzaro, and Dave Jhave Johnston, the chapter yields and understanding of the importance of 'grammaleptic' reading to encountering such works, and to inhabiting a landscape of emerging digital language art.
Roman Law in its Italic Context
Authors: Clackson James
Published: September 2020

This chapter considers what can be learnt about the origins of Roman law by the examination of texts from the Italian peninsula in languages other than Latin. Through a survey of all the attested legal documents with an Italian provenance (i.e. those written in a language of the Sabellian family, in Etruscan and in other languages including Messapic) the chapter traces commonalities and differences in the language of laws, in the format of their presentation, and in the media on which they are inscribed. Although there is shown to be no single ‘origin’ of Roman law, the chapter shows that the influence of Greek law and Greek traditions of writing law have a continual influence across all the different Italian traditions.
Central Italian Elite Groups as Aristocratic Houses in the Ninth to Sixth Centuries BCE
Authors: Naglak Matthew C , Terrenato Nicola
Published: September 2020

This chapter demonstrates the applicability of C. Lévi-Strauss’s “House Society” model for considering the role of kinship in the early moments of state formation and urbanization in Iron Age Latium and Etruria. After a brief theoretical overview of the model, the discussion focuses on two main axioms which are often overlooked in the model’s application to the ancient world: (1) a physical house does not make a social House, and (2) a single House does not make a Society. This is followed by an overview of how material evidence from sites ranging from Vetulonia to Osteria dell’Osa and textual evidence from the Twelves Tables can be interpreted through the lens of a “House Society” to create new models for the development of complex social systems in central Italy.
Beyond the Pomerium: Expansion and Legislative Authority in Archaic Rome
Authors: Armstrong Jeremy
Published: September 2020

This chapter explores the principle of legislative authority in early Rome as it relates to the pomerium, the comitia curiata, the comitia tributa, and the traditional powers of patres familiarum. It argues for an ongoing negotiation between various entities within Rome during the first half of the fifth century BC over which held legal authority over which areas. It suggests that, visible in the legal disputes and tensions that mark the early ‘Struggle of the Orders’, there may be an authentic memory of Rome’s early legal evolution which saw the community, under the guise of the comitia tributa, attempting to extend its authority beyond the geographic boundary of the pomerium, which had bound the comitia curiata, and into the traditional sphere of influences of the patres familiarum. Although this early fifth century BC attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, it set the foundation for Rome’s later use of the tribes and comitia tributa as a mechanism to organize and control territory outside of the community’s normal boundaries.
ReFocus: The Films of Pedro Costa
Authors: Barradas Jorge Nuno
Published: September 2020

This is the first English-language study of internationally acclaimed Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, examining the cultural, production and exhibition contexts of his feature films, shorts and video installations. It situates Costa’s filmmaking within the contexts of Portuguese, European and global art film, looking into his working practices alongside the impact of digital video, forms of collaborative authorship, and the intricate dialogue between modes of production and aesthetics.
Considering the exhibition, circulation and reception of Costa’s creative output in settings such as film festivals, the art gallery circuit and the home video market, ReFocus: The Films of Pedro Costa provides an essential critical analysis of this major filmmaker – as well as of the multifaceted production and consumption practices that surround contemporary art cinema.
Renegotiating Circulation: Retrospectives and DVD Releases
Authors: Barradas Jorge Nuno
Published: September 2020

Chapter 6 examines Pedro Costa’s effort to expand the circulation of his films outside the international film festival and arthouse circuits by looking into production and distribution practices conducted by the filmmaker since the mid-2000s. As regards production, the chapter contextualizes the making of Change Nothing, initially a short film released in 2005 and later reworked as a feature film in 2009. Concerning distribution this, the chapter looks at international film retrospectives and numerous DVD and Blu-ray releases from the mid-2000s onwards. It examines the implications of a creative agency which is not confined to authorial practices but also visibly impacts upon consumption. Thus, the chapter explains how Costa maintains a close dialogue between professional endeavour and commercial demand. This is particularly observed in Costa’s participation in special screenings and retrospectives, and in his close supervision of materials for the home video market.
Basic Training
Authors: Evans Dan
Published: September 2020

This chapter adds to an increasing body of work on the embodied sociology of war and militarism by detailing the affective experience of basic training and the insights this provided into the nature of habitus formation within the British Army and how bodies react to and are transformed by military training. Unlike more dramatic insights into the embodied experience of soldiering, however, this account of basic training mainly focuses on the banal, everyday ways that recruits learn what Stephen Atherton calls the domestic element of soldiering – the embodied routine and rhythm of barracks life. The chapter is a reflection on a centrally important part of the author’s own enactive ethnographic research into life in the British Army reserve and the ‘enduring modification of the bodily schema’ (in Loïc Wacquant’s words) that basic training entailed.
Svetlana Alexievich’s Soviet Women Veterans and the Aesthetics of the Disabled Military Body: Staring at the Unwomanly Face of War
Authors: Baker Catherine
Published: September 2020

Aesthetics, embodiment and militarisation are particularly closely joined in representations of and reactions to the military body disabled as a result of war. Against militarised depictions of the vigour and glamour that military training and service bestows on bodies, experiences and representations of disabled veterans become embodied evidence of the other transformations that war inflicts. By investigating aesthetic practices of representing disability and disfigurement in Svetlana Alexievich’s collection of interviews with women Red Army veterans, The Unwomanly Face of War, this chapter views the gendered structures of emotion and aversion projected on to disabled military bodies through the cultural and literary turn in disability studies to explain what is affectively at stake when the military body disabled by war becomes a literary device.
Breaking the Silence: Embodiment, Militarisation and Military Dissent in the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Authors: Jude Sorana
Published: September 2020

This chapter studies the testimonies of violence published by the Israeli veteran organisation Breaking the Silence (Shovrim Shtika) and explores the role of embodiment as a means of military dissent within the Israel/Palestine conflict. These testimonies represent aesthetic practices that describe the violent behaviour of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt) and illustrate soldiers’ embodied experiences of fear, shame, remorse, or empathy for Palestinians during their military service under the occupation. Interested in the political power of emotions within military dissent, this chapter shows that the activism of Breaking the Silence (BtS) is in fact interweaved with the same ideas of power, hierarchy, and violence that it seeks to challenge. It argues that dissenting military practices are fraught with contradictions, ambivalences, and ambiguities that may actually reinforce, rather than destabilise, the militarised discourses that sustain the Israel/Palestine conflict. Despite the best efforts of this organisation in intervening in the dynamics of Israeli militarisation, the aesthetics of BtS activism show that military dissent draws on and discloses embodied experiences which reproduce military masculinity, validate militarism, and may legitimise the further enactment of violence within the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Death Becomes Him: The Hypervisibility of Martyrdom and Invisibility of the Wounded in the Iconography of Lebanese Militarised Masculinities1
Authors: Myrttinen Henri
Published: September 2020

The visual landscape of Lebanon both mirrors and reasserts the country’s complex socio-political, economic and gendered order. Using public memorialisations of the dead in the Lebanese and Syrian Civil Wars as a starting point, the chapter analyses how these reflect Lebanese realities and imaginaries, and how particular militarised masculinities are constructed through them. The chapter then contrasts these visualisations with the invisibilisation of conflict-related disabilities and the war-wounded and what these mean for the reproduction of gendered and other social hierarchies.
Ginger Cats and Cute Puppies: Animals, Affect and Militarisation in the Crisis in Ukraine1
Authors: Mathers Jennifer G.
Published: September 2020

Exposure to affective depictions of soldiers with domesticated animals such as cats and dogs encourages civilian audiences to view soldiers, militaries and even the aims of war with sympathy and approval. This chapter argues that Russia and Ukraine are currently engaged in parallel processes of creating and disseminating such depictions in order to rehabilitate the reputations of their armed forces and garner support for their military operations in eastern Ukraine. This positioning of soldiers’ bodies and animals’ bodies together, most notably in photographs circulated on social media, but also in other representations such as statues, is just one example of the wider phenomenon of digital militarism. State militaries and alliances have become very sophisticated and systematic about the use of digital technologies, especially social media and the internet, to disseminate positive messages and images about soldiers, the armed forces and war. The chapter concludes that the differing degrees of success by Russia and Ukraine can be attributed to factors that are highly dependent on context, demonstrating that militarisation is above all a set of social processes.
Seize the Time!: Military Aesthetics, Symbolic Revolution and the Black Panther Party
Authors: Ongiri Amy Abugo
Published: September 2020

Government agencies like the FBI and CIA and both local and statewide law enforcement agencies would successfully meet the challenge of the Black Panther Party with a military intervention that would destroy its political power, but they were relatively powerless to counteract their successes in the realm of the symbolic in which the Panthers successfully re-scripted a visual language of military might to argue for Black liberation. While most militaries conceive of propaganda as a way of ‘selling’ the violence that they are charged with conducting, the BPP saw propaganda as one of their most primary imperatives. Just as the Panthers used images of the Black body in military poses and formations to challenge ideas of national belonging in the US, the Panthers’ use of a military aesthetic challenges us to think in new ways about the uses to which a militarised body might be put beyond further state sponsored notions of masculinity.
Intellectual Transformations and Elusive Reconciliation
Authors: al-Azmeh Aziz
Published: September 2020

This chapter sketches the course and ambiguities of modern intellectual transformations related to issue of religion and secularism. It takes up perceptions of historical backwardness, and various apologetic strategies in which Muslim Reform attempted to navigate the relations between scripture, tradition and the cognitive and political realities and desiderata of the day, and the relation between Muslim jurisprudence and the requirements of positive law. It discusses the adoption and adaptation of positivism and Darwinism, and the conflicts between secular and religious intellectuals over issues at once cognitive and political. It offers an analysis about the relationship between various currents of thought, and the changing realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter analyses the impasses of apologetic modernism.
Secularism at the Turn of the Millennium in the Context of its Adversaries
Authors: al-Azmeh Aziz
Published: September 2020

This chapter continues some themes started in the previous chapter and examines the attrition of secularism socially, politically and culturally, towards the end of the millennium. It discusses the turn taken by erstwhile left-wing and nationalist members of the intelligentsia, to pander to what was considered to be popular sentiment, and their acceptance of claims to represent society made by Islamist forces, now coming into their own. This period saw an increased prominence of sentimentalist, identitarian attachment to the Muslim past, and a common insistence on the exceptional character of Islam, often in hostile or at least disparaging contradistinction to previous claims to universalism. The chapter discusses the attrition of the state’s secular credentials, and its patronage of conservative forms of religiosity, first against the Left, later as a form of social control.
Trends in the Interaction between Borrowing and Word Formation
Authors: Hacken Pius ten , Panocová Renáta
Published: September 2020

Based on the case studies in this volume, we identify three central themes that reflect the interaction between borrowing and word formation. One is neoclassical word formation. Based on the reanalysis of borrowed words, a new system may emerge, but whether it actually does, depends on the language. A second is internationalisms. Their reanalysis may lead to new word formation rules which show a strong cross-linguistic resemblance. A third theme is anglicisms. Most contemporary borrowings in languages other than English are from English. In some languages, the resistance to anglicisms has led to an increased use of word formation rules to replace them. Two other topics addressed in several of the case studies are the interaction of analogy with compound formation and the need to adapt borrowings to the morphology of the borrowing language by means of word markers.
American Notes and the ‘frightful engine’ of the Press
Authors: Crawford Iain
Published: September 2020

Chapter Three examines Dickens’s American Notes. Interrogating John Drew’s sense that American Notes is largely concerned with ‘the invasive power of the press’ and Juliet John’s claim that it offers a ‘dystopian vision of mass culture’, this chapter and its successor position the American visit in the contexts of both Dickens’s ongoing efforts to find a role for himself in the press and his response to the widespread social unrest affecting Britain in the early 1840s. Showing how he arrived in the United States just as a newly established mass-market daily press was becoming ascendant on the East Coast, chapter 3 explores how American Notes responds to the phenomenon of new forms of urban literacy As with Martineau and chapter 2, this chapter also considers the critical reception of Dickens’s post-American books and the ways in which he in responded to that reception.
The End of Whig History: Dickens, Martineau and the Mid-Victorian Press
Authors: Crawford Iain
Published: September 2020

Chapter Seven examines the after-life of the 1855-56 dispute with a focus upon Martineau and Dickens’s final encounter or, rather, quasi-encounter, an aspect of the dynamic between them that has received no previous critical attention. Focused upon the cultural phenomenon that was Thomas Babington Macaulay, the chapter explores the ways in which Martineau and Dickens’s divergent responses to the great exemplar of Whig historical narrative reveal their own evolving concepts of history and their advocacy for those concepts in their late work in the press. After considering Dickens’s response to Macaulay and the model of history encoded into A Tale of Two Cities, the chapter turns to Martineau’s dispute with William Makepeace Thackeray. Though less overt than the earlier dispute with Dickens, the quarrel shows, first, how she intentionally positioned herself against Dickens’s new project at All the Year Round, and, second, how, through writing extensively about the nursing profession and educational opportunities for girls, she evolved her final roles in the press so as to continue her advocacy on behalf of progressive causes and her support for a vision of liberal social development that remained remarkably consistent with the positions she had first advocated in the early 1830s.
‘Adunation’ of the Nation: Towards a Republican Esprit de Corps
Authors: de Miranda Luis
Published: September 2020

This chapter demonstrates the importance of the idea of esprit de corps, both as a critical concept and as an ideal, in the French process of nation-building. It also demonstrates the ambiguity of Revolutionary thought in what regards the laissez-faire economy and the critique and destruction of communities of labour (‘corporations’). In the second half of the eighteenth century, thanks to the influence of the Encyclopédie and the impact of the campaign against the Jesuits, the phrase ‘esprit de corps’ started to spread in print. A new idea was to grow in influence until the Revolution: a synthesis between the Philosophes’ national-individualism and the Jesuits’ Catholicism, according to which patriotism and devotion to the nation were analogous to a healthier and grander form of esprit de corps, as if passion and partisanship could be redeemed by nationalism.
Introduction: Perspectives on European Unity and Diversity
Authors: Arnason Johann P.
Published: September 2020

The introduction begins with a comment on the different periodizations and temporalities to be noted when reflecting on European integration as a long-term process. This is followed by a discussion of different interpretive frameworks. Comparative civilizational analysis provides distinctive approaches to the European experience, but with significant differences in focus. One school of thought posits a continuity of European civilization from ancient through medieval to modern times, while another prefers the model of a civilisational sequence, culminating in modernity as a new type of civilisation, and a third one regards the Eurasian macro-region as a civilisational zone, integrated through encounters and transfers. All these viewpoints are represented in the book. An alternative perspective stresses the context of global history and relates European transformations, including the most recent ones, to that background. A case is made for combining the two approaches, thus paving the way for closer analysis of Europe’s various regions, whose characteristics and situations are briefly discussed. The introduction then concludes with summaries of the following chapters.
Islam and the European Crisis: Reciprocal Discrimination and Co-radicalisation
Authors: Doyle Natalie J.
Published: September 2020

Tensions around the presence of Muslim minorities in Europe were aggravated when the worldwide wave of Islamic fundamentalism inspired terrorist attacks in Europe, starting with the London bombings in 2005. Events of the last three years in Britain and France have reinforced the fear that Europe faces in Islamism a particularly dangerous form of right-wing radicalism. The discussion of ‘Islamofascism’ has, however, been met by a rival discourse on the intrinsic ‘Islamophobia’ of European societies. Both notions are flawed. Islamism is a novel form of ideological radicalism, and whilst empirical evidence has established the reality of discrimination against Muslims purely on the basis of their religious identity, the failure of some Muslim minorities to integrate and their resultant hostility towards modern European culture cannot be ignored. Since the onset of the crisis of the ‘European project’ triggered by the global financial crisis, this constellation has generated a new risk: a co-radicalisation between Islamism and extreme right-wing political movements traditionally hostile to immigration.
‘We’re Not Policemen’: Espionage and Law in John le Carré
Authors: McCarthy Conor
Published: September 2020

The second part of the book turns to a discussion of extralegality and espionage, beginning with a reading of three novels by John le Carré set against the background of historical events – the construction of the Berlin Wall, the exposure of the Cambridge spy ring, and the practice of extraordinary rendition during the War on Terror. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Alec Leamas is disgraced, abandoned, imprisoned, exiled, and finally betrayed, an abjected figure akin to Agamben’s homo sacer, a figure as excluded as any outlaw. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, George Smiley is a liminal figure, an unconstitutional detective investigating a case of treason within what is, in this period, an intelligence agency unrecognised by law. This chapter concludes with a discussion of extraordinary rendition as outlawry in contemporary form via a reading of le Carré’s 2008 novel A Most Wanted Man. Here we can see the state acting outside of legal constraints via its intelligence agencies, while also seeking to situate particular individuals outside the reach of the law. Together, these forms of exclusion from law constitute new and troubling forms of outlawry that are alive and well in the twenty-first century West.
Introduction: Excess, Illusion and the Border
Authors: Paul Drew
Published: September 2020

The introduction provides historical, theoretical, and cultural context for analysing the relationship between border spaces and literature and film. Beginning with a historical overview of borders in Israel and Palestine, with an emphasis on the recent proliferation of checkpoints and walls, it links spatial transformations to cultural shifts. Specifically, while borders have always featured in Palestinian and Israeli cultural production, their expansion in the 21st century has increased their prominence as crucial literary and filmic spaces. This chapter draws on contributions from the “spatial turn” in critical theory, in order to situate this study within larger transnational trends and phenomena. It argues that in the contemporary era, borders in Israel/Palestine are ubiquitous, excessive, and deceptive, leading to the question that guides much this book: How do these borders shape literature and film, and how do authors and filmmakers respond to, critique, and, in some cases, contest their presence?
Sayed Kashua, the Palestinian Hebrew Novel and the Failure of Coexistence
Authors: Paul Drew
Published: September 2020

This chapter expands upon the notion of proliferating borders as sites of the failure of coexistence. It centres on two novels by Sayed Kashua, a prominent Palestinian journalist and writer who publishes primarily in Hebrew. Building on meditations on the relationship between language, silence, and estrangement by Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida, I trace Kashua’s journey into disillusion and despair, expressed through the silence and alienation imposed by a set of increasingly constricting borders. The novels Second Person Singular (2010)and Let It Be Morning (2004) reveal the failure of coexistence through the persistent re-emergence of the very borders that coexistence seeks to break down or render irrelevant, and the hollowness of strategies of linguistic and cultural assimilation. In Kashua’s novels, these attempts constantly fail at the border, a space that produces myriad forms of alienation and eventually exile. The analysis focuses on the locales of a suddenly blockaded Palestinian village and the divided city of Jerusalem as the twin sites of this paradigm’s failure. Kashua’s engagement with borders reveals what he eventually calls the “lie” of coexistence.
Border Crossings and Stray Narratives of Return
Authors: Paul Drew
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines a literary depiction of the repeated borders encountered on the Palestinian journey of return from exile in Raba‘i al-Madhoun’s Lady from Tel Aviv (2009). While many earlier examples of the common Palestinian literary trope of return, such as Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s In Search of Walid Masoud (1978), either ignore the border or go silent altogether at the crossing back towards Palestine, al-Madhoun’s novel metafictionally reimagines the narrative of the protagonist’s return from London to the Gaza Strip by way of Tel Aviv as a series of encounters with borders that progressively blur distinctions of past/present and real/imaginary. At each crossing, new narrative voices appear, and gradually the lines between characters, narrators, and authors disintegrate, producing a cacophony of voices and an uncontrollable narrative of return. The novel performs and thereby exposes the disorienting effect of the border and its production of an unpredictable, “stray” life in blockaded Gaza. The Lady from Tel Aviv reveals that an unruly multitude of voices can offer a response to the silencing effect of the border.
Conclusion: Physical and Fictional Borders
Authors: Paul Drew
Published: September 2020

The concluding chapter begins with a discussion of some of the anxieties around aestheticizing the grotesque border spaces of Palestine, which are sites both of real physical violence and of representation, imagination, and fantasy. It shows how the analyses in previous chapters seek to balance these concerns, and suggests that many of the works I examine refigure abstractions such as national symbols as tangible objects used to contest the power of the border, suggesting that the border produces a kind of de-metaphorization. Finally, this chapter considers the extent to which this focus on the tangible and the literal exposes the border’s deception and calls into question its rhetorical power.
Afterword: Blake’s Digitised Printed Script
Authors: Levy Michelle
Published: September 2020

The Afterword provides a brief consideration of the unique method of printed script developed by William Blake in his attempt to fuse the media of script and print, drawing and engraving, and thereby collapse the divide between handwriting and typography, word and image. Blake’s attempt to unite script and print aligns with one of the chief objectives of this study and inspires its methodological attempt to deconstruct the problematic separation between the two media, a division that owes itself at least in part, as this book has sought to demonstrate, to Romantic-era debates. This last chapter turns to Blake as a summation of the aims and methods of the book as a whole, which urge a more integrated and holistic approach to the study of literary culture.
The Metaphysics of Worldlessness
Authors: Végső Roland
Published: September 2020

The first chapter provides an overview of Martin Heidegger’s works by tracing the way he defines the world and worldlessness at various stages of his career. The first half of the chapter examines the role the concept of worldlessness plays in Being and Time and the existential analytic of Dasein. The second half of the chapter examines Heidegger’s later works and his critique of modernity. The chapter argues that Heidegger starts with the assumption that the stone is worldless but ends up concluding that Being is worldless. Thus, the objective of Chapter 1 is to trace the trajectory of this shift from the lifeless object to Being itself as the site of worldlessness. The chapter concludes by examining the political stakes of the Heideggerian definition of worldlessness.
The Science of Worldlessness
Authors: Végső Roland
Published: September 2020

The chapter examines the role of worldlessness in the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The first half of the chapter concentrates on Freud and the way the worldlessness of life becomes the central problem of his metapsychological reflections. This inquiry allows us to define the Freudian unconscious as the location where the worldlessness of life and the worldlessness of thought meet. The second half of the chapter traces the idea of worldlessness in the works of Lacan. It focuses on Lacan’s discussions of the signifier, psychosis and anxiety. It concludes by arguing that Lacan defines psychoanalysis as the science of worldlessness.
Making Armenians Lebanese: The 1957 Election and the Ensuing 1958 Conflict
Authors: Nalbantian Tsolin
Published: September 2020

Chapter 4 investigates Armenians’ stance in the 1957 elections and in the ‘general’ Lebanese and the intra-Armenian mini-civil war of 1958. Armenian parties participated in, and contributed to, political tensions in Lebanon. Simultaneously, they used their position in the Lebanese political system to jostle for power within their own community – a development that turned violent and ended only in December 1958, almost two months after the Lebanese mini-civil war had ended. This tension and violent confrontation between Armenian parties and their armed men had a crucial spatial effect: it unprecedentedly territorialized certain neighborhoods of Beirut. Whereas parts of Lebanon were organized by sects and classes, by relative contrast, it was according to political party affiliation that in 1957/1958 many Armenians of Mar Mikael, Sin el Fil, Bourj Hamoud, and Corniche el-Nahr were re-sorted and relocated, often by force.
Lebanese Armenians aligned along the right-left fault lines that divided Lebanese politics and society— more than other confessions, indeed. Vice versa, the Lebanese state was Armenianized, as it were, in that it started to pay more attention to Armenian matters than before, intervening directly and by military force in Armenian neighborhoods in order to finally end the internecine Armenian confrontation.
Ismāʿīlī Rulers and the Judicial System
Authors: Lev Yaacov
Published: September 2020

This chapter treats the Fatimid period (10th-12th century) as a whole, and relies on documents pertaining to the appointment of supreme cadis in the Fatimid state of late tenth and early eleventh century. It argues that in the Fatimid administrative-political vision the supreme cadi was perceived as administrator fully integrated within the state administrative fabric. The chapter also presents an integrative discussion of legal issues and their administrative ramifications.
The Law of the Market
Authors: Lev Yaacov
Published: September 2020

The chapter examine the nature of the hisba institution and early hisba manuals. Although the hisba law belongs to the realm of customary law, the Islamic concept of ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’ had been grafted onto the hisba law. This mechanism provided an Islamic aura for the market inspector’s actions. The chapter also examines the grain economy of Fustat-Cairo and how the famine of 1024-1025 was handled by the market inspector and the regime. They handled the crisis at the political level, irrespective of doctrines related to fixing of prices.
Judicial Autonomy: Medieval Realities and Modern Discourse
Authors: Lev Yaacov
Published: September 2020

The chapter examines the notion that personal rather than territorial law prevailed in medieval Islam and discusses the tension between communal autonomy and governmental interference. The meaning and the limits of the so-called ‘dhimmi judicial autonomy’ are also discussed.
Palestinian Novels In Israel, 1948−1967
Authors: H. Makhoul Manar
Published: September 2020

The period covered in this chapter is dominated by the military rule years (imposed until 1966). This was a crucial period for Palestinians in Israel, as these were years of adaptation to the new reality created during and after the 1948 War and the establishment of Israel. Palestinians who remained in Israel became a minority in a matter of a few months, having the social, cultural and political fabric of their society completely shattered as a result of the destruction of hundreds of villages and the consequent exodus of the majority of Palestinians. Palestinian novels in this period provide a documentation of some of the events of the Nakba (in Haifa), as well as some aspects of Palestinian life during the military rule. However, novels in this period register the powerful effects on Palestinians in Israel of modernization discourse, which became prevalent during the 1960s.
Postmodernisations, 1967−1987
Authors: H. Makhoul Manar
Published: September 2020

The second period stretches until the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987, witnessing major social and political transformations in Palestinian society in Israel. Above all, Palestinian novels reflect Palestinian efforts to deal with the implications of their modernization in Israel. Themes regarding social differentiation (individualization, break-up of family structure, and abandoning social and religious institutions) are paramount. Moreover, the renewed contact with the Palestinians in the newly Occupied Territories (the West Bank and Gaza Strip) placed Palestinians in Israel in a perplexing situation. Despite the social reunification of both parts of the Palestinian nation, living on both sides of the Green Line, the two parts mutually acknowledged their distinctive political orientations, thus resulting in excluding Palestinian citizens in Israel from the Palestinian national struggle.
From Karbala to Damascus: A Relic with Multiple Shrines
Authors: Talmon-Heller Daniella
Published: September 2020

This chapter presents several accounts of the martyrdom of al-Husayn at Karbala, and the vicissitudes of his severed head. It also lists the sites that commemorate the voyage of this relic to Umayyad Damascus, and to its final – disputed – abode.
Excursus: al-Husayn and Saladin in Palestinian Lore
Authors: Talmon-Heller Daniella
Published: September 2020

This excursus offers a brief glimpse into annual celebrations (mawāsim) at the sacred site of al-Husayn's head by the ruins of Ascalon, 1875 - 1947. These began with a procession from the nearby town of Majdal, and included, besides a visit to the shrine (which was reconstructed in the late 19th-century) also various festivities in the plain known by the Qurʾanic appellation Wadi al-Naml. The figure of Saladin was prominent in these events, bound with rising Palestinian nationalism.
Excursus: The Founding of an Islamic Rajab Under Fatimid RuleLunar Calendar
Authors: Talmon-Heller Daniella
Published: September 2020

Addressing the pre-Islamic custom of the Arabs to use intercalation for adjusting their lunar calendar to the solar annual cycle, the Qurʾan and the Prophet's farewell sermon are said to forbid the nasīʾ. This excursus brings the explanations of the medieval scholars al-Biruni and Ibn Taymiyya and of western scholarship for the creation of a unique Islamic calendar.
Excursus: Istighfār (Seeking Divine Forgiveness)
Authors: Talmon-Heller Daniella
Published: September 2020

This short excursus elaborates on the central role of istighfār (pleading for forgiveness) in Islamic prayer rites, especially during the sacred months, when God is particularly merciful, and the shafāʿa (intercession) of angels readily available. It is largely based on the work of Constance Padwick.
Excursus: Arabic Treatises in Praise of the Sacred Months
Authors: Talmon-Heller Daniella
Published: September 2020

This excursus is a preliminary list of 18 Sunni and Shiʿi works dedicated to the merits of Rajab, or to those of the three sacred months (Rajab, Shaʿban and Ramadan), or to all meritorious times (Faḍāʾil al-Awqāt). It is arranged in chronological order of the date of the authors’ death, from the tenth to the fifteenth century.
Examining Whitehead’s ‘First Lecture: September, 1924’
Authors: Bogaard Paul A.
Published: September 2020

A quick comparison of Whitehead’s manuscript for his first Harvard lecture and the notes of his Harvard and Radcliffe students reveals that the manuscript does not exactly reflect the lecture that he actually delivered at Harvard on September 25, 1924. Paul Bogaard, the editor of the first year of Whitehead’s Harvard lectures during the academic year 1924-1925, undertakes a thorough examination of the manuscript and the notes of Winthrop Bell and Louise Heath and draws some conclusions which help explain the differences between these different sources. The manuscript was likely a little long to be delivered within the allotted time on the day, and it seems that Whitehead made some adjustments of the fly, including the removal of British anecdotes with which Americans would have been less familiar.
Some Clarifications on Evolution and Time
Authors: Teixeira Maria-Teresa
Published: September 2020

Maria-Teresa Teixeira examines the concepts of evolution and time as they appear in the Harvard lectures and Whitehead’s The Function of Reason five years later, noting Whitehead’s influences and the ways in which his philosophy shifted. Unsurprisingly, in the Harvard lectures Whitehead’s views on evolution were still developing, and he did not yet associate it with reason as its guiding force. He was eventually led to ‘an original theory of evolution that emphasised time, the dialectical symbiosis between beings and their environment, and the overall importance of the environment.’
Reply to Desmet
Authors: Herstein Gary L.
Published: September 2020

In this short chapter, Gary Herstein replies to Ronny Desmet’s critique of his earlier chapter, arguing that his discussion of the fifth Solvay conference highlights the underestimated maelstrom of confusion in physics at the time, and that it is not clear that Bohr even understood or adequately responded to Einstein’s arguments, and that his interpretation is based on a wilful acceptance of incoherence at the base of reality. He also argues that Lewis Ford, not being a mathematician, was heavily ‘reading in’ the concept of temporal atomism into Whitehead’s philosophy without any clear understanding of Whitehead’s mathematical habits of thought.
Diagrams and Myths
Authors: Allan George
Published: September 2020

In this chapter, George Allan attempts to clarify Whitehead’s statement in the Harvard lectures that metaphysical philosophy is ‘not the mere handmaiden of Science’, but rather ‘stands as near to Poetry as to Science, and needs them both’. Both poetry and science are crucial to metaphysics because they offer methods to help grasp the ungraspable. With this understood, the chapter examines the use of diagrams and myths as abstract surrogates in Whitehead’s lectures, and particularly the metaphor the ‘shadow of truth’ as giving us crucial insight into Whitehead’s metaphysics.
How ‘Eternity’ Got ‘Thrown Forward’ Into ‘Perishing’
Authors: Jones Jude
Published: September 2020

Jude Jones argues that eternity haunts Whitehead’s 1924-25 Harvard lectures, a concept which Whitehead claims is explicit in most of our mental operations. In Whitehead’s metaphysics, the entire past is, for any occasion, part of the standing condition of valuative potential out of which that occasion will emerge, the realisation of value in particular, noneternal things or processes which nonetheless have standing value as expressions of and relations to that Eternal. But perishing is its necessary mirror; the achievement of relational value requires radical finitude in the form of realised limitation by perpetual perishing in order to be real. Value and grief become two sides of the same coin, a paradox revealing the nature of ecstatic individuation.
Writing Shame
Authors: Mitchell Kaye
Published: September 2020

Writing Shame examines the intersection of shame, gender and writing in contemporary literature. Through readings of an array of recent texts – literary and popular, fictional and autofictional, realist and experimental – the book maps out a contemporary, Western, shame culture. Shame is presented here as an emotion of self-assessment, a peculiarly social experience, and a culturally pervasive affect with particular pertinence for understanding contemporary constructions of gendered subjectivity, expressions and experiences of sexual desire, the complexities of embodiment, and social processes of othering.
The book, then, unpicks the complex triangulation of shame, gender and writing, and intervenes forcefully in feminist and queer debates of the last three decades. Starting from the premise that shame cannot be overcome or abandoned, and arguing that femininity and shame are utterly and necessarily imbricated, Writing Shame examines writing that explores and inhabits this state of shame, considering the dissonant effects of such explorations on and beyond the page.
Introduction: Beginning with Stigma
Authors: Mitchell Kaye
Published: September 2020

The Introduction begins by mapping shame’s definitional connections with selfhood – suggesting that, within contemporary Western culture, we organise our (increasingly fractured) sense of self around and through shame, and that the popular cultural realm is marked both by displays of apparent shamelessness and by public acts of shaming, on and offline.
After detailing various philosophical and psychoanalytic accounts of shame, the Introduction sets out the historical associations between shame, femininity, and women’s perceived sexual impropriety. This apparent imbrication of shame and femininity is employed as the starting point of a stronger argument concerning the constitutive role of shame in the social production of femininity – an argument that will run throughout Writing Shame.
The Introduction then documents the existing scholarship on shame’s treatment in literature, noting the tendencies to treat shame as a theme, and to figure the writing of shame as a redemptive or therapeutic act. By contrast, the objectives of Writing Shame are, first, to move beyond thematic analysis to a consideration of questions of form, reception and shame’s unpredictable transmissibility; and second, to investigate literary explorations of shame that resist that redemptive impulse. Finally, the Introduction outlines more precisely the contents of the subsequent chapters.
The Shame of Being a Man: Humiliation and/as Heroism
Authors: Mitchell Kaye
Published: September 2020

Chapter 4 discusses recent fiction and autofiction by canonical male authors, considering the relationship between masculinity and shame, and highlighting the persistent association between shame and femininity in works by male authors. The textual analyses of Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal (2001), Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (2010), and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle II: A Man in Love (2009/2014) suggest that, too often, men’s writing of and on shame seeks to disavow that shame, to project it onto female bodies, and/or to make of its confession a kind of heroism.
The Roth and Amis novels are read as displacing male shamefulness (particularly, but not only, sexual shame) onto vulnerable female bodies – bodies that are sometimes also racially othered. The reading of Knausgaard then shows how that text, despite evincing an unusual perspicacity on the subject of masculine shame, ultimately transforms its ‘struggle’ with shame into a literary struggle for ‘authenticity’ and leaves intact the association of shamefulness and the feminine. An analysis of Knausgaard’s critical reception considers also how his positioning as (exceptional, paradigmatic, Proustian) Author counters his narrative of shame and failure with one of literary ‘greatness’, remasculinising him in the process.