bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Prolegomenon
Authors: Bouska Penny
Published: September 2023

The readers are introduced through this chapter to Antoinetta Angelidi as a person and as an artist. Following the trajectory of her life it presents parts of her biography, point|ing out the historical, social and political framework within which she developed her creativity. Acknowledging the wide variety of her art expressions and experimentations, it covers various aspects of her work as film director and visual artist. Finally, by linking her work to the Weird Wave cinema- flourishing during the last decade in Greece- it shows how Angelidi’s work still influences young people and artists today. This chapter shows to the readers why Angelidi is one of the most important women representatives of Greek experimental cinema.
From Orchestrated Noise to Elaborated Silence: The Audiovisuality of Antoinetta Angelidi’s Films
Authors: Venaki Electra
Published: September 2023

Electra Venaki in this chapter approaches Angelidi’s work with an analysis of sound aesthetics. For Angelidi, sound is of equal value to images and that is the reason why she constructs meticulous soundscapes, as if someone might hear the film without the images. By contextualising Angelidi’s work in its particular geographical
and historical circumstances, that is, Greece from the mid-1970s to 2001, Venaki identifies the social, political and cultural influences upon her sound choices, providing interesting information on the period’s cinema production.
Change
Authors: Karić Dženita
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the Hajj as a part of modernity, as testified by the struggles over the nature and meaning of the Hajj that were part and parcel of larger debates concerning the renewed role and function of Islam in the modern world. It centers the polemical writings and travelogues of several authors, such as Ibrahim Čokić, Muhamed Krpo, and Ismet Varatanović. Rather than seeing them as conflict between old and new, the negotiations over the origin, nature and significance of the pilgrimage as part of the mediative tension that engendered not only new meanings, but also new sentiments tying Bosnian Muslims to their coreligionists.
Conclusion The Persistence of Devotion
Authors: Karić Dženita
Published: September 2023

This chapter summarizes the findings of the book by focusing on two aspects: writing about the Hajj and the longevity of this practice, and on the relationship between the Hajj and the world. It also tackles the possibilities of the mediation to enrich conversations on diversity in Islam. In this regard, the Hajj literature offers a unique insight into how Bosnian Muslims thought of and experienced their faith through the ritual, making them active meaning-makers who, even if inadvertently, challenge their perceived marginal status in the greater community of Muslims. The chapter finally points to the geographic focus and diachronic depths of the study of Hajj literature and their wider implications for the production of knowledge on Islam.
Virginia Woolf and Christianity
Authors: de Gay Jane
Published: September 2023

Making an original contribution to the emerging trend in scholarship that queries the longstanding assumption that Virginia Woolf was hostile to religion, this chapter characterizes Woolf’s engagement with Christianity as curious, critical, and creative and shows how her encounters with various Christian traditions were important to her feminism, helped shape her modernist aesthetic, and provided impetus for her thinking about divinity. To achieve a more nuanced understanding of Woolf’s relationship with Christianity, the chapter situates her within a landscape where Christian beliefs and practices were becoming increasingly diverse, examining her experience of Evangelical Anglicanism, Quakerism, Anglo-Catholicism, Catholicism, and Russian Orthodoxy. It analyses her engagement with diverse Christian traditions in ‘Modern Fiction’, ‘On Being Ill’, A Room of One’s Own, and ‘A Sketch of the Past’, for example, looking at her response to Catholicism in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Russian Orthodoxy in works by Anton Chekhov and Elizaveta Militsina, and the Evangelical conceptions of vocation and the ‘good death’. The chapter explores how Woolf reframes Christian ideas to present literature as a vehicle for immortality and makes creative use of Biblical allusions in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse to relocate divinity in human lives and relationships.
D. H. Lawrence’s Dark God
Authors: Ferretter Luke
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses the development of D. H. Lawrence’s religious beliefs. After a complex, emotional move beyond the Congregational Christianity in which he was brought up, Lawrence formulates his lifelong belief in “the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect”. He calls this his “great religion”, and expresses it in many ways in The Rainbow (1915). After the cataclysm of the war, Lawrence speaks of a “dark God”, unknowable and unknown to moderns. There have been many ways to this God, including Christianity, but they no longer work, and we need to find a new way to interpret its call which remains as loud as ever in our blood, in our unconscious, physical selves. Lawrence imagines the spread of these religious beliefs throughout society in Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1925). Despite his passionate belief that they are the only hope for modern society, however, he also cannot imagine modern Westerners living by them. In his intimate last poems (1929), Lawrence’s dark God remains where it has always been – at the very center of his thought, feeling, and work.
Harlem’s Bible Stories: Christianity and the New Negro Movement
Authors: Pinkerton Steve
Published: September 2023

In the past, scholarly efforts to situate the Harlem Renaissance as a modernist enterprise tended to downplay the movement’s religious contexts and the religious themes that pervade its art and literature. This was a strategic, even necessary move for such scholarship—given that modernism itself was conventionally deemed an inherently secular project, predetermined by God’s supposed death in the previous century. Recent reappraisals of modernism’s religious underpinnings, however, suggest other ways of understanding the modernism(s) of the ‘New Negro’ movement. Exploring both the religious and the modernist dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance, this chapter examines how each of these dimensions informs the other in works by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Bruce Nugent.
Virginia Woolf’s Agnostic, Visionary Mysticism: Approaching and Retreating from the Sacred
Authors: McIntire Gabrielle
Published: September 2023

Virginia Woolf’s modernist literary masterpieces are generally set within a culture and a milieu of modern secularity, with her central characters (mostly) untethered to what she considered to be the restrictive dogma and illusions of traditional religious beliefs. Woolf herself has primarily been understood as an atheist, with a statement she makes in her posthumously published autobiography, “A Sketch of the Past” (1941), that there is “no God,” taken as retrospective evidence and confirmation of a thoroughgoing conviction. Agnosticism might designate her perspectives on religious belief better, though, with both her fictional and non-fictional prose deeply traversed with cautious but persistent explorations of sacred and mystical experience. Woolf celebrates the expansiveness of the “human spirit,” believes in an immaterial “soul,” and conveys intimations of a singular oneness with an inexplicable “real” “behind appearances.” Her work is permeated with visionary, transformative “moments” characterized by quasi-religious feelings of “rapture” and “ecstasy,” while she emphasizes the miraculous and the transcendent in the everyday. This chapter argues that while Woolf regards organized religion as socio-culturally retrograde, often anti-feminist, and sometimes distasteful she nevertheless invites her readers to be open to visionary eruptions of sacred experience and wonder in the midst of the seemingly secular.
Modernism and the Hymn
Authors: Pryor Sean
Published: September 2023

If a hymn is a collective song of praise, framed by its occasion and its institutional context, no genre could seem further from modernist poetry, with its characteristically fractured forms, emphasis on the isolated individual, and searching critique of modernity. This chapter argues that nevertheless there are significant continuities between modernism and the hymn, and that several modernist poets engaged actively with the hymn’s history and forms. The chapter examines the development of both liturgical and literary hymns in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain and America, before considering how a range of poets, from W. E. B. Du Bois and John Rodker to Hugh MacDiarmid and T. S. Eliot, negotiated the hymn’s generic conventions and connotations. Specifically, the chapter argues that modernism turned to the hymn to work through two urgent problems: the difficulty of collective thinking and feeling, and the difficulty of finding someone or something worthy of praise.
Modernist Mythopoeia
Authors: Freer Scott
Published: September 2023

This essay presents a comparative study of D.H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers! (1923) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) to demonstrate that modernist mythopoeia, while a poetic means for expressing non-dogmatic notions of the sacred, foregrounded a problematic relationship between religion, myth, and belief. Modernist mythopoeia, by eschewing the language of certainty and the inherited ideological bind of mythology and religion, was distinctive as a modernist aesthetic. In this respect, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883-92) is a foundational text, through the playful critiquing of parable-speaking prophets (e.g., Christ or Zarathustra) and their derivative metaphoric discourse of Platonic platitudes. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (1890) by also offering a comparative reading of mythology, influenced ‘syncretic’ or ‘genealogical’ views of religion in modernist literature. Birds, Beasts and Flowers! is very much written in the spirit of Nietzsche and Frazer. Lawrence recovers pagan antecedents to both to challenge a dualistic metaphysic and to celebrate the sacred otherness of the non-human world. On the other hand, The Waste Land should really be read as a parody of the comparative method that lent itself to a mythopoeic outlook, one which Eliot aligns to a ‘fallen’ modern condition. The poem also anticipates Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (1931), in the sense that religion is not to be read through the science of myth.
Yeats’s Sacred Grove
Authors: Hewitt Seán
Published: September 2023

Exploring the influence of animistic thought on Yeats’s work, and its complications through modern occultism and esoteric philosophy, this chapter takes a long view of Yeats’s poetic output, from the 1890s through Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) and the verse introductions to his dramatic work. New work in ecocritical studies, along with the ‘new materialism’, invites us to reassess these apparently outmoded ecological philosophies. Yeats, and Yeats’s modernism should be considered key in such a reassessments.
A vision of the ensouled tree was fundamental to Yeats’s understanding of the ‘mask’, of spiritual communion, of a mythic imagination grounded in the earth. His reading in comparative anthropology, pseudoscience, folklore, and his engagement in occult ritual, provided a nexus for his developing sense of animism and its possibilities for both poetry and spiritual-nationalist illumination. Through an exploration of Yeats’s reading across these disciplines, and his poetic invocations of animism, this chapter interrogates the idea of ‘enchantment’ in Yeats’s poetry in relation to the mythic resonances of trees, woods, and sacred groves.
‘Mixed sex cases among goats’: The Modernist Sublime
Authors: Robinson Matte , Banks Lisa
Published: September 2023

We look at the way some modernists explored new ways of experiencing sexuality—ways that reassessed monogamy’s role in culture, gender and its attendant roles, and queerness. Such queer lives were often complemented by these modernists’ attempts to live spiritually rich lives, wherein they often engaged occult traditions. As distinct from the mystical, the occult promises a kind of spiritual agency that conventional religion does not allow; the experimental and at times risky business of occultism was well suited to a generation of aesthetic and sexual experimenters. This chapter examines the notable ways in which esotericism and sexuality coincide to help inform and nuance complex modernist texts. It considers the wide variety of forms such coinciding experiments can take with an eye to interrogating and illuminating the experimental texts that the era produced. The uncanny coincidences in Ulysses guide Bloom along a reiterative journey of sexual awakening; the interposing of a timeless dimension upon quotidian life offers a meditative stillness in Eliot’s work but makes possible a millennia-long love affair in H.D.’s; communities living in what would now be called polyamorous arrangements collaborate to produce experimental text, film, and art and pool their resources to provide opportunities for newer, aspiring artists, all the while trying to lead spiritual lives.
What Art Can Do ( Malpertuis by Jean Ray)
Authors: Verschaffel Bart
Published: September 2023

Jean Ray's novel Malpertuis. History of a Fantasy House (1943) tells how the sailor Cassave captures the surviving Greek gods and heroes and brings them to a macabre gothic house in Ghent, how the gods are kept there while threatening the mortals who interact with them. One can read this story as an allegory of what literature and art does: keep track of what we no longer believe in by locking it up in fiction, alongside the 'real' reality. But that entails, equally, risks.
On The Pleasure Of Finding What Is Hidden ( With Hidden Noise By Marcel Duchamp)
Authors: Verschaffel Bart
Published: September 2023

All variations of hide-and-seek are exciting: interest in the game of searching and finding is an anthropological constant. It organises religious and erotic experience, and also defines art. It can be amazing and incomprehensible that an artist has been able to create something. But many works of art seem 'enigmatic' or mysterious themselves: they seem to hide a deep truth. Marcel Duchamp, as a 'retired artist', has subverted the pretensions of the artwork by showing how to make shallow artistic riddles with his semi-ready-made 'With Hidden Noise'.
Memoria : Memory Work and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’
Authors: Verschaffel Bart
Published: September 2023

This essay distinguishes two types of knowledge: (a) knowledge that is applicable and translatable into engineering and social technology, and can be thoughtlessly operated and used from the outside, and (b) knowledge that exists only as 'text'. This knowledge requires reading, attention and time, it therefore becomes part of a person's life and substance: it forms the memoria. The importance and value of the humanities (and the arts) lies not in useful results, but in nurturing the Conversation of Mankind (Michel Oakeshott), i.e. the conversation about what is - in the light of our mortal existence - worth remembering and living with.
On Laughter, Opinions and Artistic Freedom
Authors: Verschaffel Bart
Published: September 2023

This essay discusses, in light of the attack on the Cataplan in Paris, the nature of laughter and the importance and limits of parrhesia or speaking frankly and irreverently in public, of ridicule and caricature, and the insult. First, it situates parrhesia within the Greek cynical tradition, and defends that the right to speak freely is absolute, included in the tradition of reason. Free speech and tolerating it is an important exercise in acquiring a democratic habit. This presupposes, though, that the speaker does not take himself seriously, and parrhesia fails when the object of ridicule is merely offended. Secondly: 'freedom of opinion' differs fundamentally from 'artistic freedom', since a work of art is not a 'message' and does not express an opinion. One cannot legitimize stupid political action as 'art'.
On Splendour and Modern Beauty
Authors: Verschaffel Bart
Published: September 2023

The vocabulary and variety of aesthetic experiences is wide, and the (philosophical) interpretive appreciation of types of beauty shifts over time. Following the (ancient) beauty (of splendour) and the post-structuralist cult of the sublime, this article re-examines Baudelaire's notion of 'modern beauty'. Understanding beauty as the experience of 'splendid newness' gives it a special ontological status: not as a characteristic of things, but as a moment, as an event or something that happens to things.
On the Aesthetic Gaze, Beauty and the Two Sources of Ugliness
Authors: Verschaffel Bart
Published: September 2023

This article argues first of all that the aesthetic gaze is not natural and easy: the isolation of and the concentration on the ‘first appearance of things’ presupposes special attention. It can be disrespectful and socially inappropriate if it does not envisage 'aesthetic objects', or objects that are somehow presented to the aesthetic gaze. It is then argued that beauty and ugliness are not opposites, but are both distinct from and opposed to the 'ordinary', both in a different manner. The beautiful is a surprising and unlikely enrichment of reality; the complex and threatening experience of ugliness activates the repressed awareness of the monstrous or of the disgusting. The argument is developed on the basis of texts by Paul Valéry.
Turn and Face the Strange: Changing Faces in the Cinema of Lynch
Authors: Outzen Mads
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores the mystery of physiognomy in David Lynch’s cinema. It argues that Lynch’s manner of playing with and making strange the face is one of the most distinctive and disconcerting forces in his filmography. This chapter explores both a special mode of intermediality, namely the relationship between the medium of film and the medium of the face, and a specific form of a visually representative network that addresses the interrelations between affects and ethics. In this sense, it starts from a particular idea of aisthesis, or that our sensuous encounters with cinematic faces open a sensibility in perception that comes before and goes beyond our logical comprehension. It will further introduce some of Emmanuel Levinas’s ideas about ethics and the face and Gilles Deleuze’s ideas on affects and the face in film, before considering what a difference a face makes in the specific cases of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.
‘Is it future or is it past?’ Visual Effects in Twin Peaks: The Return
Authors: Müller Jannik
Published: September 2023

This chapter aims to categorise different types of visual effects in Twin Peaks: The Return by approaching the series from the perspective of film and animation studies. Situated within the discourse of realism in computer-animation, it examines the visual phenomena audiences perceive as realistic and unrealistic with attention to the aesthetic conventions and technological tools generating them. In this context, the influence of mainstream animation technology can be understood as pervasive not only in blockbuster productions, but also in auteurist productions associated with a distinctly un- and surrealist visual style such as those by David Lynch.
‘Two Birds, One Stone’: Transmedia Storytelling in Twin Peaks 1
Authors: Hassler-Forest Dan
Published: September 2023

This chapter describes the ways in which Twin Peaks employed transmedia storytelling forms to enhance its narrative world and foster active and long-term participation amongst the series’ fans. This chapter will show how transmedia expansions combined contemporary forms of merchandising with innovative forms of storytelling. As the only major serialised storyworld in David Lynch’s career, these media-industrial experiments also shed light on the work of an artist and cinematic ‘auteur’ figure who has inspired tremendous speculation amongst fans, especially in the connections between different works and across different media. Finally, by contrasting the original series with the expansions that accompanied the return of Twin Peaks a quarter century later, the chapter will shed light on changing possibilities and limitations within specific media-industrial periods. In order to map out the key transmedial connections within this rich and surprisingly diverse franchise, the chapter will first offer terminology to navigate basic forms of transmedia multitexts, before moving on to a more detailed analysis of the transmedia forms that have come to surround, enhance and enrich Twin Peaks in its different incarnations and historical periods.
The World Spins: Transmedia Detours and Cinematic Configurations around Twin Peaks
Authors: Rauscher Andreas
Published: September 2023

The chapter deals with the aesthetic experience of Twin Peaks and its configurations as a dialogue between the audience and cinema. In revisiting the three seasons of the series (1990-2017) as well as the reevaluated film Fire Walk with Me (1992) this chapter considers different points-of-entry and routes for transversing David Lynch’s open-ended oeuvre beyond traditional narrative structures. In regard to transmedia worldbuilding these entrances include soundscapes and atmospheric ecologies of affects. In contrast to cognitive collections of narrative cues these approaches take on a momentum of their own. Their detours from straight storytelling open up intersections across different media. They create new gateways for narrative as well as philosophical and cultural associations. Starting with the implications of cinematic television and revisiting the contexts of postmodernism the text evaluates the creative synergies of different transmedia frameworks, from television and cinema to accompanying records and literary paratexts. In Twin Peaks – The Return the different layers of cinematic configurations allow for narrative closure as well as philosophical reflections on being haunted by the series’ own mediated past.
Leaving Lynchtown
Authors: Rauscher Andreas , Hartwig Marcel , Niedermüller Peter
Published: September 2023

The transmedia networks surrounding David Lynch’s art world operate on the level of associations that are reconfigured by different contexts and the specifics of different media. Instead of going for narrative coherence their separate units can take on meanings of their own, in the art gallery as well as on prime television, on the concert stage as well as on the cinema screen and on record. This conclusion discusses further perspectives implied by an expanded transmedia approach and its implications for a broader understanding of cinema.
The Pressroom and the Clubroom: Working Women and Idling Men in Jerome K. Jerome’s Tommy and Co.
Authors: Fiss Laura
Published: September 2023

Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr, the Idler’s editors, each wrote a novel about women journalists that presents the profession as much more fun and accessible than do their female Idler colleagues, such as Ella Hepworth Dixon and Evelyn Sharp. The eponymous Tommy achieves surprising gender fluidity for the period, especially from a politically middle-of-the-road figure such as Jerome. Her gender non-conformity is what makes her the centre of the “company,” which contains a number of professional women. Jerome and Barr both struggle to reconcile their professional women with the marriage plot.
Introduction
Authors: Robaszkiewicz Maria , Weinman Michael D.
Published: September 2023

Catalogs and responds to the various ways that Arendt has been classified: as a critical theorist; a reluctant modernist; a phenomenologist; an anti-feminist; a feminist ally; a democratic theorist; a republican theorist; a Heideggerian; a nostalgic or critical Hellenophile. The authors use the introduction to clarify these perspectives in two ways. First, we recognize that one can legitimately derive all these positionings from one or another of her writings; second, we insist nevertheless and precisely because all these approaches play some role in her work that her readers ought to follow her own claim that she ‘does not belong to any club’. Instead, we introduce her works as exercises in political thinking, treating her as a dialogue partner, whose judgments and opinions remain open for reflection and discussion.
Action!
Authors: Robaszkiewicz Maria , Weinman Michael D.
Published: September 2023

Paves Arendtian paths in small steps: from one notion to the next, illuminating the fragile framing of her theory. The authors draw from The Human Condition but go beyond it, to the numerous books and essays where she returns to these abstract concepts to discuss them more thoroughly, add new meanings to them, or put them into different concrete contexts. This chapter introduces what Lisa Disch (1994) describes as Arendt’s “new lexicon of politics.” Our guideposts are natality, plurality, acting, freedom, power, promising and forgiving, the private and the public, the social, and storytelling. These terms are interconnected in Arendt’s theory and partly define each other. We need them all to get a grasp of the Arendtian world.
Exercises in Political Thinking
Authors: Robaszkiewicz Maria , Weinman Michael D.
Published: September 2023

Engages Arendt’s unique perspective on the practice of reflective judgment and Arendt’s suggestion on how to acquire, improve and exercise one’s ability of judgment. Arendt argues that reflective judgment needs to stand in for any firm orientation in political practices. Judgment remains an activity of the mind, political thinking, situated between the past, which that cannot give us firm guidance and the future, which we cannot foresee. Judgment’s relevance is thus universal and the authors here suggest that Arendt’s approach to politics consists in thinking about and rethinking political questions, and for this reason, the fact of her theory of judgment being unfinished is less a problem than an invitation to continue practicing reflective judgment as she outlined it.
The Philosopher and Politics: The Roots of Arendt’s Critique of Philosophy
Authors: Robaszkiewicz Maria , Weinman Michael D.
Published: September 2023

Focuses on Arendt’s critique of theunworldly, anti-political, philosopher, to which Martin Heidegger serves as a paradigmatic example. Philosophers, Arendt argues, tend to refuse to assume political responsibility and are incapable of judging in political matters, or even abstain from judging. They are egocentric in their singularity and do not care about the common world they share with others. They incline towards narcissism. And when forced to take a political stand, they behave opportunistically. The starting point of the analysis are fragments from Arendt’s correspondence with Karl Jaspers, since it is in their letters the two thinkers expressed their opinions concerning Martin Heidegger in a particularly sincere and clear manner.
Eichmann, Mass Democracy, and Israel
Authors: Robaszkiewicz Maria , Weinman Michael D.
Published: September 2023

Presents Arendt’s central claims in Eichmann in Jerusalem and the very public controversy that it spurred, noting the emphasis that Arendt herself placed on her ironic tone in the work, rather than the specific claims, as the true source of the tempest. Emphasis is placed on the famous private, later public, exchange between Arendt and Gershom Scholem, specifically on what it means to miss Arendt’s irony as Scholem did and what happens if we actually grasp that irony. Contextualizes Arendt’s main argument in Eichmann by examining related claims Arendt makes in Origins of Totalitarianism concerning the chilling similarities between political communication and the erosion of individual responsibility in public life under conditions of totalitarianism and mass democracy.
Social Justice and Feminist Agency
Authors: Robaszkiewicz Maria , Weinman Michael D.
Published: September 2023

Explores how Arendt, when speaking of equality, is not thinking of substantial equality with its social or economic dimensions as do those who call for distributive justice, choosing to limit the scope to formal, political, equality. Yet, political equality is a quasi-substantial freedom that she sees as power: the capacity to act in concert and speak on an equal footing in the common world. In this way, even though social injustice remains a part of contemporary democratic life with which Arendt’s thinking as originally formulated seems unwilling and/or unable to address or redress, her particular way of yoking equality and freedom in the capacity to act in concert and speak on an equal footing in the public sphere, provides the resources with which one can, through some of her central convictions, develop an intersectional feminist account of agency that points a way toward a different resolution of Arendt and feminism. relation and, more importantly, to innovative approaches to the practice of enhancing freedom and seeking justice.
Human Rights and Popular Sovereignty
Authors: Robaszkiewicz Maria , Weinman Michael D.
Published: September 2023

Examines two contemporary controversies that strike the general imagination as both pressing and necessary to consider in consultation with Arendt: first, claims concerning the rights of migrants, especially forced migrants, be they asylum seekers or refugees; second, and the populist impulse often unleashed within democratic societies in their wake. Many works available that address statelessness discuss Arendt extensively. There is a similarly robust literature on the relevance of Arendt for our analysis of populist tendencies under conditions of popular sovereignty, especially as displayed in the electoral politics of the past decade and its controversial use of the plebiscite, most strikingly in the case of Brexit. The authors argue that these two elements of Arendt’s work must be read more consistently together, expressly in order to better understand Arendt’s relevance for contemporary politics.
The Hidden Treasure of Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy
Authors: Robaszkiewicz Maria , Weinman Michael D.
Published: September 2023

Reflects on earlier analyses of Arendt’s writings as exercises and the importance of sharing the emphasis she placed on their propaedeutic and political function as invitation to further debate. Understanding Arendt’s thinking politics not as a body of arguments to be found in her collected works but as ongoing exercises, her judgments retain their potential to reshape conversations about contemporary politics in ways that have been neglected or underdeveloped. Recasting this work this way displays the true relevance of her writings, not in this or that specific finding but in the constant insistence on the two key features identified above: the plurality of opinions and the unity of the common world in which those opinions can be expressed, exchanged and heard.
Expertise in Liberal Political Theory: Problems and Discrepancies
Authors: Grygieńć Janusz
Published: September 2023

The chapter shows just how casually, if at all, liberal theorists approach the issue of expertise and the role of experts in political decision-making. Analysing the works of Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson, Thomas Christiano and Hélène Landemore, among others, it identifies three approaches to the lay-expert relationship dominant in liberal thought and their undergirding methodological assumptions. The first sees citizens as capable decision-makers and considers their competence sufficient for most political decisions. The second assumes that although citizens are often ignorant, if put through the right educational process they can become competent decision-makers with relative ease. The third claims that citizens don’t need to be involved in decision-making at all because experts and politicians can pursue desirable social goals on their behalf. The chapter holds that although each of these approaches is based on a different set of methodological assumptions, liberal theorists routinely mix them up. This puts them at risk of theoretical inconsistencies.
Laymen, Experts and Epistemic Dependence
Authors: Grygieńć Janusz
Published: September 2023

Chapter III is devoted to the concept of epistemic dependence. It discusses two most popular interpretations of this kind of dependence. The first, more radical one proclaims that experts and laypeople cannot communicate or understand one another, and that even expert-to-expert communication is impossible. This vision undeniably deals a blow not only to liberal theories of democracy, but also to the concept of epistocratic government. According to the second interpretation, epistemic dependence is only a problem in areas in which there are no indirect expert evaluation criteria.
The chapter analyses five such criteria proposed by Alvin Goldman: four of epistemic and one of non-epistemic nature. It claims that the epistemic criteria will always be controversial and will never help overcoming epistemic dependence. Only the non-epistemic strategy of searching for proof of the expert’s bias, will allow the layperson to avoid the pitfalls of epistemic dependence.
Denis Villeneuve, Québécois and Citizen of the World
Authors: Ransom Amy J.
Published: September 2023

This chapter analyses Denis Villeneuve’s specificity as a Quebec director, an identity that shapes his oeuvre both aesthetically and thematically, from his earlier, Quebec-made films through to his more recent Hollywood genre films. The author engages with Deleuzian notions of territorialization and deterritorialization to show how the characters in Villeneuve’s work, from the short ‘Le technétium’ in the anthology film Cosmos (1996) through to Dune: Part I (2021), achieve new epiphanies by undertaking identity quests and leaving the safety of home. The continuity throughout Villeneuve’s filmography is linked both to his québécitude and a form of universalism that is informed by his double identity as a Québécois and a citizen of the world.
Shortening the Way: Villeneuve’s Dune as Film and as Project
Authors: McCrossin Trip
Published: September 2023

This chapter puts Denis Villeneuve’s remake of Dune (2021) in conversation with all six of Frank Herbert’s novels, and with Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson’s two sequels, situating his contribution to the Dune universe as part of a greater project. The author investigates the intersections between tragedy and optimism in Villeneuve’s film and Herbert’s novels, focusing specifically on the scene in which the Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit tests Paul Atreides to see if he is indeed the Kwisatz Haderach. Villeneuve’s reimagining of the scene suggests new layers of hope and a new visioning of the ‘shortening of the way.’
From Slaughter to Snuff : The Origins of a Cultural Myth
Authors: Previtali Giuseppe
Published: September 2023

Slaughter, co-directed by Roberta and Michael Findlay in 1971, offers a portrait of a Charles Manson-like cult guru inflicting pain and punishment on his followers, and in doing so adheres to the fading embers of the exploitation film genre they helped pioneer in the 1960s. Producer Allan Shackleton bought the film and attached a new ending (shot by a different director), releasing it in 1976 as Snuff, the title under which it took on notorious cultural status, spurred anti-pornography protests, and solidified the “snuff” genre purporting to show actual human death on camera. This chapter focuses on the earlier, unreleased, and typically neglected film, arguing that Slaughter has much to offer toward cultural understanding of the time period, exploitation films, and both the longevity of and meanings associated with the snuff film genre emerging from the film’s later incarnation.
“This is a Farce”: Satire, Pseudonyms, and the Impact of Collaboration in Early Walter Sear/Roberta Findlay Films
Authors: Gaskill Derek
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the film collaborations between Roberta Findlay and the recording engineer Walter Sear, her life and business partner and with whom she made 20 adult films. Examining her films before their collaboration, as well as his early solo efforts, this chapter argues that a distinctive style emerges from their partnership that can be distinguished from Findlay’s earlier work. Efficient, economical, and often absurdist, the Findlay/Sear films might not have been up to the same level of quality that can be found in Findlay’s earlier body of work, but they illustrate the ways in which adult films of the 1970s were often made quickly and with very few resources but were nevertheless profitable.
Roberta Findlay’s Bronx Tale: Notes on Game of Survival
Authors: Jackson Neil
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines an outlier from Roberta Findlay’s filmography: Game of Survival (aka Tenement, 1985). If Findlay’s career tracks as exploitation, softcore, hardcore, and, finally, horror, Game of Survival stands out as something different, a brutally violent, urban, action-thriller set in the South Bronx area of New York City. Arguing that it nevertheless conforms to the closer-to-the-mainstream efforts of the latter part of her career, the chapter offers a detailed textual and industrial analysis of the film that situates it within a variety of contexts. Race, place, politics, authorship, and genre are all examined, as are the economic imperatives behind the film’s production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Ultimately, this outlier, this chapter argues, may very well offer much to understand Roberta Findlay, exploitation film, and the conditions in which it was made and seen.
By the Numbers: Roberta Findlay, Home Video, and the Horror Genre
Authors: Walker Johnny
Published: September 2023

Roberta Findlay’s association with horror cinema rarely extends beyond the Manson-inspired exploitation film Snuff (Michael Findlay, 1976). Consequently, her directorial efforts in the horror genre—four films made between 1985 and 1989, The Oracle (1985), Blood Sisters (1987), Lurkers (1987) and Prime Evil (1988)—are all but ignored in scholarly discourse. Analysis of the films in relation to contemporary trade publications and associated promotional materials enables a broader understanding of the economic context that birthed them and, by extension, leads to a fuller understanding of the industrial history of US horror cinema in the 1980s.
Introduction
Authors: Lyons Sara
Published: September 2023

This introduction clarifies how a new scientific concept of ‘intelligence’ emerged in the wake of phrenology in the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain. It explains how Alexander Bain attempted to theorise the idea of general mental ability; how Spencer concurrently developed the idea of general ‘intelligence’ and posited it as an evolutionary adaptation; and how Galton attempted to render general intelligence measurable and open to statistical modelling. It also discusses Galton’s efforts to prove the heritability of intelligence and the foundational status of the concept for the eugenics movement in Britain. The chapter then uses Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to examine how the scientific model of intelligence both shaped and was shaped by other cultural and political developments in the period, especially the rise of mass education, the competitive exam, and the ideology of meritocracy. The final section turns to critical debates about the bildungsroman formand argues that it came to be a genre of failure and disillusionment in the late Victorian period. Drawing upon the work of Jacques Rancière, this section also clarifies how the bildungsromane under examination are designed to pose questions about merit, social inequality, and the nature of human intelligence.
George Eliot’s Moral Intelligence
Authors: Lyons Sara
Published: September 2023

This chapter explains how George Eliot’s close engagement with the works of Herbert Spencer and those of her partner George Henry Lewes made her alert to the implications of the new scientific construction of intelligence. It argues that Eliot was especially troubled by the way this paradigm threatened to transform the intellect into an objective, morally neutral category. It reads The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Daniel Deronda (1876) as feminist efforts to demonstrate the essentially social and emotional nature of intelligence. The chapter also explores how Eliot uses the genre of tragedy to re-moralise the intellect in the wake of nineteenth-century evolutionary psychology and the rise of the meritocratic ideal.
Thomas Hardy and the Value of Brains
Authors: Lyons Sara
Published: September 2023

This chapter reads Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895) as ambivalent responses to the new conception of human intelligence that emerged from Victorian psychology and evolutionary theory. Although these novels reflect Hardy’s endorsement of the new biological model of intelligence, they also register his resistance to what many late Victorians assumed to be its corollary: that mental worth can be an object of scientific measurement, classification, and ranking. The chapter clarifies how these novels challenge the scientific reification of intellectual inequality and attempt to vindicate overlooked and stigmatised forms of intelligence.
‘Sunshine isn’t Enough’: Hollywood Gothic Origins
Authors: Murphy Bernice M.
Published: September 2023

This chapter outlines the reasons why the business which has played such a seminal role in Southern California’s cultural and economic development is also so often associated with moral corruption, madness and murder. It begins by outlining the factors behind Hollywood’s establishment as the centre of the global movie-making industry. It is then argued that Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust is a paradigmatic literary example of the ‘Hollywood Gothic’ because it is saturated with an awareness of Hollywood’s seductive, insane, over-arching ‘dream-life’, and a sense that life even on the margins of the industry is inescapably chaotic and subject to the terrifying whims of the mob.
‘It’s a Gateway Part!’ Twenty-First-Century Hollywood Gothic
Authors: Murphy Bernice M.
Published: September 2023

The chapter begins with a consideration of a more recent take on the ‘embittered aristocrat’ trope: David Cronenberg’s 2014 film Maps to the Stars. The first major variety of cinematic Hollywood Gothic narratives depicts forgotten Golden Age stars, whilst the second focuses upon the dire physical and psychological transformations undergone by those have yet to ‘make it’. Beginning with a brief discussion of David Lynch’s neo-noir classic Mulholland Drive (2001), it then discusses a more recent film in which key Hollywood Gothic tropes such as the doomed ingénue, bodily transformation, and the self-destructive quest for fame are dramatized. In Starry Eyes (2014) Hollywood is a place that creates, then worships and then ruthlessly discards its ‘stars’. What differentiates this film from earlier treatments of this formula is its outright supernaturalism. Here, there the exploitative older white men who secretly control the ‘star factory’ entered in to by the damned protagonist really do belong to a Satanic Coven. The chapter then briefly considers the film’s overlap with a Hollywood Gothic adjacent movie which also has notably occult resonances: Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon (2016).
‘The dwelling-place of a mighty people’: Travellers beyond Copenhagen
Authors: Duffy Cian
Published: September 2023

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a proliferation of extended accounts of travel in Denmark, often by writers famous in their day like William Coxe and Edward Daniel Clarke, whose names are still familiar to scholars today, as well as by others, also well-known in their day but now forgotten. This chapter focuses on three key areas of British travel writing about Denmark beyond Copenhagen in which we can see, most visibly, the articulation of the idea of a common, Northern cultural identity shared by the two countries and rooted in the Classical Scandinavian past: descriptions of prehistoric monuments in Denmark, which would later play a key role in Danish Romantic nationalism; descriptions of Helsingør [Elsinore], famous in Britain on account of its association with Shakespeare; and the travel writing of the Danish anglophile Andreas Andersen Feldborg.
‘The brothers of Englishmen’: British Reflections on the Danish National Character
Authors: Duffy Cian
Published: September 2023

This chapter surveys the surprisingly extensive body of British writing about the Danish national character, taking its point of departure in the droll dialogue on the subject between a group of nuns in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s (1775-1818) notorious novel The Monk (1796). The increasing articulation in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British writing of the idea of a common ‘Northern’ culture shared by Britain and Denmark was premised not just upon the sense of shared values inherited from the Classical Scandinavian past but also upon claims for an ethnic and racial relationship. Following a survey of the major currents of eighteenth-century philosophical enquiry into national character and the influence of that enquiry on the emergence of Romantic nationalism, the chapter turns to the specifics of British writing about the Danish national character – a body of writing which, as I argue, was often (and inevitably) as much concerned with defining the British as the Danish character.
‘No trifling kingdom’: Anglo-Danish Politics beyond the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
Authors: Duffy Cian
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores British eighteenth-century and Romantic-period writing about Danish politics, domestic and foreign. The chapter focuses is on British responses to those aspects of Danish political life and foreign policy that were not directly connected to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, politics, we might say, beyond the circumstances surrounding the two British attacks on Copenhagen, in 1801 and 1807, which are discussed in Chapter 1. This chapter has three areas of interest: the development of British assessments of the nature and impact of absolutist rule in Denmark; British responses to the marriage and divorce of Caroline Matilda to Christian VII; and British writing about the Danish West and East Indies, as well as Denmark’s early move to abolish the trade in slaves.
Politics in Edinburgh
Authors: McCrone David
Published: September 2023

How has formal political power evolved in Edinburgh? What sort of people have governed this place, and how has that changed over time? How are social and economic interests represented on the Council? How did we come to be governed as we are? The chapter explores the long hegemony of ‘political parochialism’ which laid down the rules and frameworks for ‘who got what’ in the city. Lying behind Edinburgh’s politics is its economy, or, rather, economies. Its political economy was diverse, in which manufacturing was important but never dominant. Its transformation into a ‘city of culture’ has largely airbrushed its industrial past. Edinburgh, however, remains a city in which a high proportion of its population live within a few miles of the city centre, making it feel a ‘liveable city’.
Are You One of Us? Status in the City
Authors: McCrone David
Published: September 2023

This chapter identifies elites of Edinburgh, a world of social castes, based on wealth but discretely manifest, underplayed and often under-spoken. This is a world of clubs, associations which you do not join without an invitation. If you have to ask, then you are not their sort of person. It is also, at least historically, a highly gendered world in which women were only allowed to participate as ‘ladies’. Edinburgh was a firmly patriarchal society; women had ancillary, walk-on, parts. The chapter examines issues of status, social and cultural power, vis-à-vis social class, money and wealth, and asks how the two are aligned, or perhaps not. To many, Edinburgh is still a secretive place in which what matters is who you know.