bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘[A]ctively Making One Feel’: Katherine Mansfield, Evolving Empathy and Intimate Influence in Virginia Woolf’s Writings of the 1920s and 1930s
Authors: Macnamara Katie
Published: May 2018

This chapter offers a reassessment of the relationship between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf by exploring how Mansfield’s imitation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ‘underworld’ influenced Woolf’s perspective on Russian literature and on her friend and rival. The chapter charts Woolf’s growing empathy for Mansfield in the years after her death, arguing that this empathy constitutes a form of influence itself, as imitations of Mansfield’s experience are located in Woolf’s diary, criticism, growing feminist sensibility and fiction.
Katherine Mansfield, Nettie Palmer and Critical Influence
Authors: Ailwood Sarah
Published: May 2018

This chapter traces the lodestar role that Katherine Mansfield played for the Australian literary critic Nettie Palmer. Palmer’s literary archive reveals her enchantment with Mansfield as a reader, writer and literary journalist, highlighting the impact of Mansfield’s posthumously published personal writing on her. Mansfield’s presence in Palmer’s archive exposes a thread of literary influence between literary critics and, through Palmer, to an even wider network of literary correspondents. In Palmer’s reviews, letters and notebooks Mansfield alters, chameleon-like, to fit her purpose: the successful colonial writer in exile, the mourned absent contemporary and the incisive literary critic who prompts Palmer to reflect on her own professional writing.
Mansfield, Shakespeare and the Unanxiety of Influence
Authors: Houlahan Mark
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores how William Shakespeare’s literary legacy influences Katherine Mansfield’s personal relationships and professional writing practices, and ultimately frames her own legacy. Examining Mansfield’s notebooks and correspondence, Houlahan reveals that Mansfield and John Middleton Murry enjoyed a generous, three-way literary engagement with Shakespeare, described as the ‘unanxiety of influence’ for the ‘bold, unafraid and explicit’ manner in which Mansfield used Shakespeare without any desire to emulate him. The chapter particularly focuses on Mansfield’s enchantment with these lines from Henry IV, Part 1: ‘But I tell you my lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety', which she recorded in a 1916 notebook, used in the late story, ‘This Flower’, and which Murry, ultimately, placed on her tombstone, enigmatically framing Mansfield’s own legacy.
Writing from the Cellar: Revisiting the Villa Isola Bella
Authors: Magner Brigid
Published: May 2018

This chapter interrogates the memorialisation of Katherine Mansfield and the complex effects of the Memorial Room at Menton for Mansfield’s legacy and for the New Zealand Writing Fellows who have inhabited it since its establishment in 1969. It argues that New Zealanders ‘have found it difficult to understand her writing and have felt unsure about how to celebrate her memory’ because of her expatriate status. Mansfield’s legacy, then, is ‘often understood to be a burden by subsequent writers’. Taking up the idea of the ‘absent-present’ in literary tourism, Magner argues that the Memorial Room forces Fellows to confront Mansfield’s legacy; yet while they frequently claim that they are affected by their residency, ‘their work does not generally reveal traces of Mansfield, showing that literary influence usually fails to occur where it might be anticipated’.
Founding Mothers, Speaking Sisters: Lineaments of Community in History
Authors: Booth Marilyn
Published: May 2018

This chapter focuses on Fawwaz’s portraits of early Muslim women, especially those of ahl al-bayt, the Prophet Muhammad’s family and lineage. It highlights her presentations of Alid and early Shi’i women given Fawwaz’s origins in the Shi‘i region of Jabal ‘Amil, Lebanon. Discussing women’s roles in the rift which led later to the development of sects in Islam, it finds that the biographical dictionary features an unusually high proportion of pro-‘Ali (Alid) and then Shi ‘i women, and that in their orientation these biographies signal a quiet but discernible Shi‘i perspective or allegiance. It then discusses Fawwaz’s emphases in her biographies of Muslim contemporaries: scholarship, literature, and reform, and how her life histories of Arab or Muslim contemporaries parallel those of Europeans.
Writerly Pursuits: A Compiler’s Archive
Authors: Booth Marilyn
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses the biographical dictionary’s indebtedness to a long tradition in Arabic letters of prosopography and exemplarity, and specifically how Fawwaz draws on both the form and the content of this tradition and yet also draws away from it in giving emphasis to particular subjects and pursuits, highlighting women’s ambitions and achievements and minimizing their embeddedness in ancestry. It traces her use of well-known premodern sources. It considers Fawwaz’s own explication of method in her preface and the extent to which 19th-century women could even access sources for history writing, an issue raised by what might seem the puzzling absence of certain leading premodern biographical dictionaries that feature female subjects.
A Beckoning Compass, Circulating Lives: The Bustani Encyclopedia and Other Nineteenth-century Sources
Authors: Booth Marilyn
Published: May 2018

This chapter considers Fawwaz’s use of contemporary Arabic sources, notably the Arab world’s first modern encyclopedia (produced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century), a world history in Arabic, and contemporary magazines published in Egypt. Her use of these sources challenges scholars’ tendencies to categorise intellectuals of the time according to their origins and religious affiliations, for Fawwaz drew liberally on these works by Syrian Christian writers and reformers as well as briefly on a Turkish-language compilation. The chapter incorporates a study of the Bustani encyclopedia focusing on its treatment of biography as well as its articulated sense of readership, and its use of a modern apparatus of subject organisation and alphabetization, which Fawwaz followed to a large degree, while cleverly maintaining the sense of Islamic priority evident in early biographical dictionaries by placing Muhammad’s mother Amina at the very start of her volume. The chapter continues the analysis of the previous chapter of how Fawwaz appropriated and modified the contents and diction of her sources.
Introduction
Authors: Stead Lisa
Published: May 2018

The introduction established the scope and aims of the volume, and its focus upon the intersection of women and modernity, women and cinema and women and British interwar print culture. It sets up the questions guiding the volume as a whole: What roles did literature play in producing a female film culture from outside the film industry proper? What attention did this literature give to women’s uses of and responses to film fictions, cinema-going practices and cinema spaces? What do literary inflections of a gendered movie culture suggest about the roles that cinema played in informing and structuring notions of selfhood and self-fashioning for British women at this time?
Middlebrow Modernity: Class, Cinema-going and Selfhood
Authors: Stead Lisa
Published: May 2018

The chapter explores the presence of cinema in middlebrow literary fictions, looking at how cinemagoing features in the depiction of middle-class life in feminine middlebrow literature specifically in novels by Winifred Holtby, Elizabeth Bowen, Stella Gibbons and others. It argues that such writings crafted references to cinema fictions and cinema cultures as a tool for constructing a gendered cultural commentary on middle-class life in the interwar period. They used cinema to influence, invoke or challenge readers’ attitudes to questions of British women’s middle-class identities, duties and social place. Middlebrow writers used the act of going to the pictures as a fictional arena for interrogating the real-world impact of cinematic leisure cultures. They did so in a period during which the formation of public and private class-based identities was enacted in part through leisure and consumer activities. Watching the screen, watching others around you and being conscious of one’s self being watched in that space emerges as a recurrent theme in these texts. In this way, writing about cinema-going opened a window on to the complexities and pressures inherent within gendered and class identities by enabling filmic representations to blend and interact with the fictionalisation of being inside the cinema space.
Wander, Watch, Repeat: Jean Rhys and Cinema
Authors: Stead Lisa
Published: May 2018

This explores how modernist literature in the late 1920s and in the 1930s engaged with and conceptualised cinema culture, focusing on Jean Rhys’s early novels as a case study. It first examines her attention to urban geography and female movement, considering how she mapped city spaces through cinema visits. Rhys’s novels use cinema sites to construct a layered geography of memory and present experience for her female characters, mediated through locally specific choices in cinema venues. Second, it considers the relationship between Rhys’s literary style and cinema, considering how her early fiction forged intermedial connections between cinematic and literary techniques to describe these cinematic encounters and interconnect them with wider concerns in her fictions about the performative nature of women’s public bodily presence within the urban environment. Third, it considers Rhys’s use of certain types of cinematic texts and genres as a way of reflecting back on these issues, considering the relationship between genre structures and their modes of cinematic exhibition, and Rhys’s careful structuring of the everyday experiences of her heroines. Here, the chapter explores how Rhys’s references to comedy and serial films especially opened up a unique vantage point on women, visibility and value.
An Early Samanid View of History: The Dating of Naṣīḥat al-mulūk
Authors: Marlow L.
Published: May 2018

By drawing on internal and external evidence, this chapter situates the mirror Naṣīḥat al-mulūk in an early tenth-century context. Providing an account of the Samanid polity in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, the chapter concentrates on the generation of amirs who dominated Samanid politics in the later ninth and early tenth centuries, namely the Amirs Naṣr I b. Aḥmad, Ismāʿīl b. Aḥmad and Isḥāq b. Aḥmad, all of them sons of Aḥmad I b. Asad. The chapter argues for the shaping force of this generation on the political outlook of Pseudo-Māwardī, whose historically sequenced depiction of exemplary rulers it presents. Among Pseudo-Māwardī’s principal reference points are literary texts, such as ʿAhd Ardashīr (‘Testament of Ardashīr’) and the pseudo-Aristotelian correspondence known as Risāla ilā l-Iskandar (‘[Aristotle’s] Epistle to Alexander’). Acknowledging the possibility of a later reworking, the chapter concludes with the proposal that Naṣīḥat al-mulūk was written during the reign of Naṣr II b. Aḥmad (r. 301-31/914-43).
The Afflictions of the Kingdom and their Remedies
Authors: Marlow L.
Published: May 2018

This chapter presents the third chapter of Naṣīḥat al-mulūk, in which Pseudo-Māwardī analyses factors that lead to the ruin of kingdoms and the loss of royal legitimacy and power, and prescribes measures to prevent such developments. The chapter offers translations of this section with references to ʿAhd Ardashīr, an Arabic text of Sasanian derivation that informed Pseudo-Māwardī’s understanding of the relationship between sovereignty and religion. The chapter relates Pseudo-Māwardī’s exposition to conditions in the Samanid domains in the early tenth century and suggests the possible meanings for his audience of his references to dissent, corruption and the activities of viziers. It further relates this section of Naṣīḥat al-mulūk, in which Pseudo-Māwardī stresses the importance of rationality, to contemporary and near-contemporary writings.
Sa‘di on Care of the Self: Ethical Games of Power in Practice of Freedom
Authors: Keshavarz Fatemeh
Published: May 2018

This chapter looks at Sa’di as an ethicist whose perspective on ethics shows an understanding of the pragmatic and this worldly conditions necessary for educating oneself. In this regard, the chapter compares Sa’di’s ethical perspective to Michel Foucault’s “care of the self.”
My Poor Heart Sometimes Runs, Sometimes Whirls: Meet Sa‘di the Comedian
Authors: Keshavarz Fatemeh
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses the light-hearted ways in which Sa’di connects to his readers as a comedian. His goal the chapter argues is to infuse the most sacred and serious moments with laughter. For this purpose the chapter makes use of Sa’di’s long and celebrated poem the tarji’band, and provides the full translation of the poem.
Introduction
Authors: Susato Ryu
Published: May 2018

The Introduction takes up the debate over whether it is preferable to conceive of ‘the Enlightenment’ or several ‘enlightenments’. Through a survey of recent scholarship on this topic this chapter provides a tentative working definition: the Enlightenment is not a single project or agenda, but rather a shared sensitivity to the ongoing project of ‘civilisation’ in Europe and European colonies (including America), and a series of questions and issues based on this historical awareness. It also explains why the term ‘Sceptical Enlightenment’ is adopted to delineate the essence of Hume’s social thought, and how it differs from Forbes’s ‘Sceptical Whiggism’. The concept of the ‘Sceptical Enlightenment’ is necessarily counterpoised to the over-simplistic dichotomy between the moderate and radical Enlightenment claimed by Jonathan Israel, and the ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ reading of Hume by various scholars.
How ‘To Refine the Democracy’: Hume’s Perfect Commonwealth as a Development of his Political Science
Authors: Susato Ryu
Published: May 2018

Along with his lifelong criticism against the priesthood, there is another goal that Hume keeps pursuing: to suppress dangerous political factions. To demonstrate the importance of this goal we must turn to one of Hume’s political writings that has been underestimated: the ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’. Many commentators still tend to consider this essay a mere satire on political reforms, and fail to ascertain the integral connections between it and his other political writings. This chapter analyses this essay through detailed examinations of his other works and his ‘economic’ essays of thePolitical Discourses. This essay should be considered a development of his earlier essay ‘That Politics may be reduced to a Science’ with the purpose of theorising the most stable and liberal constitution. Through careful comparisons with the similar proposals of Harrington, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, this chapter also makes it clear that his plan has much wider links, for example, with his views of elections, his interest in indirect democracy, and his criticism of utopianism.
Conclusion
Authors: Susato Ryu
Published: May 2018

Based on the above arguments, the Conclusion summarises the basic features of Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment by comparing the overall characteristics of his social philosophy with those of Voltaire – who is supposedly categorised as another ‘Sceptical Enlightenment’ thinker. It is true that both philosophes have much in common, though the former’s ‘spirit of scepticism’ permeates even the positive advocacy of modern values such as politeness, refinement, and progress. Unlike the propagandist and militant stance of Voltaire, Hume’s sceptical (allegedly indifferent and detached) posture can be considered an important and unique contribution to the intellectual resources of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers. Despite of Hume’s emphasis on ‘common life’, his sceptical approach is also quite different from the one taken by the Scottish Common Sense philosophers such as James Beattie. This is exemplified in Hume’s popularity among some Postmodernists who aim to find another possible modernity in him.
Military Scotland in the Age of Proto-globalisation, c. 1690 to c. 1815
Authors: Mackillop Andrew
Published: May 2018

This chapter considers the way in which military service acted as an agent of mobility and a means of extending global networks. In the long eighteenth century. The so-called military economy allowed Scots, who were over-represented in the British officer corps, to use existing regional and kinship connections to extend a form of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. Service in the armies of the East India Company provided Scots from the emerging middle class a means for social mobility. The creation of these networks allowed Scottish localities to connect directly to the remotest areas of the British empire.
‘A military fervour akin to religious fanaticism’: Scottish Military Identity in the Australian Imperial Force
Authors: Tibbitts Craig
Published: May 2018

This chapter highlights the long-term influence of Scottish military traditions and identity in Australia, dating back to the arrival of a battalion of the 73rd Highland Regiment in New South Wales in 1810. From the 1860s, several home-grown ‘Scottish’ volunteer militia units were established in the Australian colonies. This coincided with a peak period of Scottish emigration to Australia with some 265,000 settling between 1850 and 1914. With the outbreak of the First World War, Australia quickly raised a contingent to assist the Empire. Several Scottish-Australian militia regiments sought incorporation into the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) but with limited success. This chapter highlights how the existence of Scottish military identities conflicted with the desire of the AIF that its identity be entirely Australian as means of forging the identity of the new Commonwealth of Australia. At the same time, a small number of AIF units managed to maintain some small degree of Scottish flavour about them. Those such as the 4th, 5th and 56th Battalions which had many join en- masse from the pre-war ‘Scottish’ militia regiments, provide examples of how this identity survived and was influenced by some key officers and NCOs of Scots heritage.
Scottish Ethnic Associationalism, Military Identity and Diaspora Connections in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Authors: Bueltmann Tanja
Published: May 2018

This chapter examines the emergence and evolution of Scottish associational culture among the different geographical components of the Scottish diaspora, placing particular emphasis on the range of associations and their distinct functions. It focuses particularly on the role Scottish ethnic associations played in facilitating Scottish military identity within a diaspora context during the period c1910 to 1920. It explores the themes of pre-war military recruitment activities pursued by Scottish ethnic associations; the promotion of Scottish regiments; war and post-war relief schemes; and initiatives in support of the war effort. In combination these themes permit analysis of how Scottish ethnic associations actively fostered Scottish military culture to promote a broader spirit of patriotism not only within their respective site of settlement, but also throughout the diaspora and in Scotland itself.
Introduction
Authors: Himsworth C. M. G.
Published: May 2018

This chapter provides an introduction to the European Charter of Local Self-Government (its purpose and content), the Council of Europe, the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, and to the book’s contents as a whole.
Shaping the Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia
Authors: Mazierska Ewa , Mroz Matilda , Ostrowska Elżbieta
Published: May 2018

This collection offers a series of perspectives on the bodies of Eastern European and Russian cinema, a terrain of growing scholarly interest, but one which remains under-researched, for reasons that are both general and region-specific. Our aim is not to provide a monolithic vision of how the body has been configured across this vast geographical area; it is not possible to formulate a single argument concerning the Eastern European and Russian body. Rather, the chapters put forward a series of ‘openings on the body’, to use Shildrick and Price’s terminology, in the cinemas of the region (1999: 1). The kaleidoscopic vision that emerges from these perspectives is of the body, whether individual, collective, symbolic or specific, as a nexus of often-competing forces, affects and ideologies, and as multiple and fluid. We hope that, by making corporeality our focus, we will yield new insights into the material and screen cultures of the countries under consideration: former Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia and former Yugoslavia. With the possible exception of Russia, the cinematic outputs of these countries are marginalised in studies of both ‘European’ and ‘world’ cinema. As Portuges and Hames point out, this is a relatively recent development: between the 1950s and 1970s, these film industries were more widely known and studied; the subsequent decline of interest has meant that ‘a generation of critics and audiences have grown up for whom the cinemas of Eastern Europe are very much unknown territory’ (2013: 3). With our focus on this region, we thus aim to foster a more inclusive vision of material and film culture.
Playing Dead: Pictorial Figurations of Melancholia in Contemporary Hungarian Cinema
Authors: Király Hajnal
Published: May 2018

Contemporary Hungarian cinema has been often coined as "dark", depicting an "ontological melancholia" paired with a preference for the still image. In films by Béla Tarr, Kornél Mundruczó or Benedek Fliegauf for example, tableau-like compositions serve as "interruptions" revealing the single image as a site in-between where figuration happens. These painterly images relate to the narration metaphorically, triggering an aesthetic detachment of a "pensive spectator." This chapter focuses on a corpus of contemporary Hungarian films in which bodies are represented in pictorial compositions evoking either Andrea Mantegna's The Lamentation over the Dead Christ or Hans Holbein's The Body of the Dead Christ
in the Tomb, with the aim to identify 'the figural' that makes sense without a story. Relying on Kristeva's controversial "gendered" interpretation of melancholia, the chapter includes comparative analyses of films by Hungarian female and male directors (Ágnes Kocsis and Kornél Mundruczó, for example).
The Body Breached: Post-Soviet Masculinity on Screen
Authors: Goscilo Helena
Published: May 2018

Whereas the utopian male body of the Soviet Imaginary hyperbolized and recast in steel or bronze the anatomical ideals of classical antiquity (Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘closed body’), post-Soviet cinema typically has featured a male corporeality resembling the open body of apertures and protruberances posited by Bakhtin, but as degraded, marred, and vulnerable (Kenneth Clark) rather than celebratory or regenerative. Thus the indomitable heroes of hypertrophied bulk, brawn, and beauty in Stalinist films such as Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Circus (1936), Mikhail Kalatozov’s Valerii Chkalov (1941), and Mikheil Chiaureli’s Fall of Berlin (1949) have been superseded by the dramatically violated and traumatized physiques of protagonists in recent films confronting war—Aleksandr Nevzorov’s Purgatory (1998 ), Valerii Todorovskii’s My Stepbrother Frankenstein (2004), Aleksandr Veledinskii’s Alive (2006)—and those reassessing the Stalinist era: Aleksei German’s Khrustalev, the Car (1998) and Pavel Livnev’s Hammer and Sickle (1994). Indeed, the latter explicitly deconstructs the forcible transformation of Soviet citizenry into fantastic icons of Stakhanovite virility and its tragic consequences. Similarly, post-Soviet onscreen crime devastates the male body, and nowhere more vividly than in Filipp Iankovskii’s Lermontov-indebted Sword Bearer (2006), which violently imprints all contemporary experience, most of it lethal, on the human form in a world ruled by material values and devoid of communal ideals.
The ‘Chemistry’ of Art(ifice) and Life: Embodied Paintings in East European Cinema
Authors: Pethő Ágnes
Published: May 2018

The essay focuses on the manifold uses and re-conceptualization of the tableau vivant in recent East European cinema through several examples from Hungarian and Russian films directed by György Pálfi, Kornél Mundruczó, Benedek Fliegauf, Béla Tarr, and Andrei Zvyagintsev. The tableau vivant in these films is not conceived primarily as an embodiment of a painting, the introduction of ‘the real into the image’ (Brigitte Peucker), but it appears more like the objectification of bodies as images, and something that we can associate with what Mario Perniola considers the ‘sex appeal of the inorganic’. The author discusses the case of the paradoxical ‘cadaverous’ tableaux vivants (among them the recurring cinematic paraphrases of Mantegna’s Dead Christ), in which a live body is displayed as a corpse, or the other way round, a corpse is presented as an embodied picture, or an object of art made of flesh. By repeatedly showing us bodies dying into art, and ideas reified as images, these films present us with uncanny rituals of ‘becoming an image’, with a yearning for a reintegration into something universal and lasting, and can be viewed in the context of the reconstructive tendencies of contemporary post-postmodern art.
Genres of Blur
Authors: Jay Martin
Published: May 2018

In an influential essay of 1983, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz exhorted social scientists to blur genres and overcome the boundaries of disciplinary isolation. This essay undertakes an examination of the ways in which literal visual blurring occurs – by focal discordances, the inability of the eye to register accelerated speed, or the intersection of two visual orders, as in the phenomenon of anamorphosis – and examines their implications for the ways in which disciplines can interact. Rather than implying seamless integration, the results suggest that unreconciled, albeit productive tensions can arise from the attempt to overcome boundaries in the name of interdisciplinary fusion. Different focal points or non-synchronous narratives, as well as the overlapping of different perspectival vantage points, resist the smoothing over of real contradictions through methodological harmonization or what Edward O. Wilson called ‘consilience’.”
In Praise of the Sound Dissolve: Evanescences, Uncertainties, Fusions, Resonances
Authors: Pisano Giusy
Published: May 2018

Blurred voices, undefined and acousmatic; noise transformed into music; the backdrop of a world of imperceptible yet present sound; gimmicks brought about as quickly as they disappear; the fading of words, noise, and music; reverberations . . . These are the common practices of the mise en scène of sound, both in so-called auteur cinema and in more popular cinema. Yet such practices are more generally attributed to images, while sounds are relegated to the more concrete, enclosed and well-defined. This chapter interrogates the causes of a misunderstanding: the confusion of the principles of reproduction, fidelity and real sounds and the inability of theoretical categorisations to analyse the mise en scène of sound.
The Force of Small Gestures
Authors: Rodowick D. N.
Published: May 2018

In The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze describes sensation as a domain that lies beneath, over, or inside quotidian vision as if in another dimension of intensive qualitative experience masked by habitual perception. Sensation is also a way of grasping the immanence of philosophy to works of art. The logic of sensation is part and parcel of our world as lived; one might say that sensation is immanent to perceptual experience as force is immanent to matter. In Deleuze’s account of sensation, the plastic arts are less concerned with matter and figuration than they are with force and becoming. Perhaps the problem for both painting and cinema is how to see time and force differently, and to release the figural force of sensation in the image. The chapter continues by investigating the logic of sensation in recent experimental video, primarily Ernie Gehr’s Glider (2001), but also two of the author’s own recent artworks, Waterloo and Plato’s Phaedrus. The chapter concludes with an account of Henri Bergson’s lecture on philosophical intuition to argue that there is a continuous dynamic line that runs between intuition and philosophy, Image and Concept
Homo Animalis Kino
Authors: Bellour Raymond
Published: May 2018

In the universe of cinema, there is hardly an anthropological theme more pointed than that of the mutual definition-by-opposition that takes place between humans and animals. This issue is explored in three films, in which the deployment of animal presence is also linked to a setting in motion of technological mutations through which the cinema only appears to survive by transforming itself in enigmatic ways. The films explored are Holy Motors (Leos Carax 2012); Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel 2013); and Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard 2014). In these films, the destiny of cinematic images, and of cinema itself, is interrogated by means of examining the animal dimension of the cinema-machine, which at times brings vision to the limits of representation
An Overview of Individualistic Perfectionism
Authors: Den Uyl Douglas J. , Rasmussen Douglas B.
Published: May 2018

This chapter provides an overview of the essentials of individualistic perfection—specifically, the view of human good and ethical obligation. Not only are the notions of objectivity, inclusivity, agent-relativity, individuality, self-directedness, and sociality vital to this understanding of human good—which is called “human flourishing”—but further human flourishing is described as “the exercise of one’s own practical wisdom.” The insights of practical wisdom are crucial to both the creation of an integrated self and the determination of ethical obligation. Finally, this chapter notes that self-perfection is a matter of continual disclosure (and thus must be considered an open-ended process) and is not passive or static.
The Search for Universal Principles in Ethics and Politics
Authors: Den Uyl Douglas J. , Rasmussen Douglas B.
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses the difficulties and limitations in finding universal ethical and political principles. Its central concern is to point out the underlying problems in Kantian-inspired ethical theorizing regarding the nature of ethical principles. These problems have to do with a failure to appreciate not only that ethical knowledge is not the same as theoretical knowledge but also that universality is neither necessary for objectivity nor a replacement for it. Finally, it is argued that ethics is not essentially legislative, but a tool for successful living. Once this insight is achieved, then the importance of a liberal order whose fundamental structural principles are individual basic negative rights (which are described as “metanorms”) is readily discernible.
Tethering I
Authors: Den Uyl Douglas J. , Rasmussen Douglas B.
Published: May 2018

This chapter starts by considering what the authors call the “Nussbaum Problem”—that is, “Why do we need a comprehensive approach to politics (and indeed ethics)?” Here the views of Martha Nussbaum, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, and (to a lesser extent) Hilary Putnam are considered. Overall, it is argued that so-called non-comprehensive political doctrines have the most difficulty in appreciating the points made about universality in chapter two—thus creating a tendency to conflate the ethical and the political. They do so because their theories fail to recognize any basis for discriminating forms of universalism, which in turn makes it difficult to see any alternative approach to ethics, such as the one the authors advocate. As a result, there is a tendency to truncate ethics to a narrower band of concerns than is appropriate or desirable. The opening pretense of independence from comprehensive foundations results in a kind of dogmatism, where only one type of approach to defending liberalism is permitted.
Tethering II
Authors: Den Uyl Douglas J. , Rasmussen Douglas B.
Published: May 2018

Not all approaches to liberalism are equally so insistent about avoiding comprehensive foundations. This chapter examines two prominent examples: Gerald Gaus and Steven Darwall. Their chief problem is the direct politicization of ethics. Where with Nussbaum, Rawls, and Sen the tendency was to lose ethics in liberalism, here there is a tendency to lose liberalism in ethics. The result is the same, but it is necessary to do battle in both directions. Overall, the argument is that foundations matter, and Den Uyl and Rasmussen are working from, and offering one, that provides a viable alternative to standard models employed by Gaus and Darwall and others. Individualistic perfectionism is an alternative that does not require sacrificing either liberalism or ethics.
The Perfectionist Turn
Authors: Den Uyl Douglas J. , Rasmussen Douglas B.
Published: May 2018

This chapter argues against the claim advanced by Daniel Haybron, Daniel C. Russell, and Mark LeBar that human self-perfection is ultimately based on notions of well-being and human flourishing that we bring to our understanding of human nature and in favor of the idea that it is human nature itself that ultimately grounds our understanding of human well-being or human flourishing. In doing so, the question of whether there is some gap between (a) what it is to be a good human being and (b) what is good for a human being is addressed. It is shown that the arguments on behalf of a such a gap fail and that the version of perfectionism that is advanced—that is, individualistic perfectionism—is ideally suited to not only avoid such a gap but also to display their unity, especially when perfection is understood as a process of living things and not as some cosmic or metaphysical process.
Toward the Primacy of Responsibility
Authors: Den Uyl Douglas J. , Rasmussen Douglas B.
Published: May 2018

This chapter contrasts individualistic perfectionism with constructivism. Each section of this chapter considers a version of constructivism as developed by a prominent contemporary thinker: (1) Deontologist—Stephen Darwall; and (2) Virtue ethicist—Mark LeBar. Though each of these thinkers is considered in some detail, it is noted that they share a common assumption that constitutes the chief appeal of constructivism. This assumption is that we must be authors of our own moral universe in order to preserve the reality of human agency or self-direction. But it is argued that a commitment to the reality of human agency or self-direction does not require the adoption of a constructivist point of view—be it conceived in terms of the second-person perspective or the judgments of practical reason—and that it is possible for human agency or self-direction to be real and nonetheless have a natural telos or ergon. The truth or falsity of a normative judgment can be grounded in reality apart from moral thought without destroying human freedom.
Afterword: Big Morality
Authors: Den Uyl Douglas J. , Rasmussen Douglas B.
Published: May 2018

This Afterword considers whether individualistic perfectionism is sufficiently robust theoretically for dealing with the kind of evil or good that transcends particular circumstances and times and places?  It is argued that individualistic perfectionism is up to the task of dealing with either global evil or goodness, because it is personal responsibility that best explains both phenomena.
Joseph in the Life of Muḥammad: Prophecy in Tafsīr (Exegesis), Sīrah (Biography) and Hadith (Tradition)
Authors: Kennedy Philip F.
Published: May 2018

From the epistemology of a narrative paragon, Joseph in the Qurʾan, we move on in this chapter to consider three case studies, one from each of the following genres: tafsīr, sīrah and hadith. These are all still emphatically religious textual corpora. The aim is to evince how echoes of the Joseph story inflect each of the three examples – the stories of Zayd ibn Oārithah, Salmān al-Fārisī and the slander against ʿĀʾishah, which are centred on prophecy, the early mission of Muaammad, revelation and the ethics of communal conduct.
Introduction
Authors: Brazil Kevin , Sergeant David , Sperlinger Tom
Published: May 2018

‘It’s a question of form’ (1993: 418). So declares frustrated writer Anna Wulf, in what remains Lessing’s most celebrated novel, The Golden Notebook. As this volume shows, the attempt to find forms which might record, model and engage historical change and all that it entails is one that persists throughout the six decades spanned by Lessing’s writing. The chapters that follow attend to the full weight of Anna’s statement: when Lessing’s writing turns towards history it is not simply a question of finding the literary form that might best represent it; rather it involves questioning the very relationship between form and history, as they are brought together afresh in each new work. These questions might be common to literary criticism, but the chronological breadth of Lessing’s career, and its sheer variety and productivity, makes them both particularly pressing and particularly enlightening in her work. As she moves from colonial Rhodesia to post-war Britain, and from war-torn Afghanistan to our posthuman future, her work employs the full panoply of techniques, modes, genres and effects that we refer to as forms: short stories, realism, serial fiction, documentary, drama, jokes, Sufi tales, reportage – and more....
Early Lessing, Commitment, the World
Authors: Guy Adam
Published: May 2018

This chapter begins by looking at the notions of writerly commitment formulated in Lessing’s essay ‘The Small Personal Voice’ (1957). Lessing’s ideas on commitment are then compared to those emerging from Jean-Paul Sartre’s post-1945 writing, which became an important frame not only for Sartre’s actions as a public figure, but also for the work of contemporaries such as Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon. Despite Lessing’s critique of Sartre in ‘The Small Personal Voice’, she is shown to share an emphasis on the place of the committed writer within a broad and unfolding world-system; she also shares with Sartre the same rhetorical means to establish such an emphasis. Lessing’s 1963 short story, ‘A Letter from Home’, is then read against the background of her notions of commitment and their Sartrean resonances. Tracking Lessing’s ideas about commitment from her non-fictional to her fictional writing, a consistent problematic is detected, of the manner in which a global location for the writer might be conveyed. In particular, Lessing addresses this problematic through frequent use of number. For Lessing (as for Sartre), number is less a means of enabling measurement and accuracy, than a gestural means to convey enormous scale.
From The Grass is Singing to The Golden Notebook: Film, Literature and Psychoanalysis
Authors: Marcus Laura
Published: May 2018

This chapter discusses the place of cinema in Lessing’s early work, focusing in particular on The Golden Notebook (1962). Cinema first appears in Lessing’s work as a gendered site of communal spectatorship and distraction in The Grass is Singing (1950), in common with the work of other mid-century women writers such as Jean Rhys. But in The Golden Notebook, cinema and filmic consciousness increasingly acts as a privileged metaphor for the description of dreams and visions, influencing the novel’s striking descriptions of dreams and dreaming – a formal achievement of Lessing’s work often over-looked. This chapter suggests that this conflation of dreaming and cinematographic consciousness bears comparison with the work of psychoanalytic theorists such as Ella Freeman Sharpe, Bertram Lewin, and Didier Anzieu, and their concepts such as the ‘dream screen’ and ‘projection,’ and with the work of psychoanalytically-inflected feminist film theorists such as Laura Mulvey. Additionally, it explores the resonances of the descriptions of some of The Golden Notebooks imagined films with the techniques of postwar nouvelle vague directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni.
Lessing and Time Travel
Authors: Punter David
Published: May 2018

This chapter focuses on Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), with the science-fiction novels Shikasta (1979) and The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980), in order to assess her involvement with the future, which underlies all her work. Lessing is constantly involved with thinking the future – with, we might say, how the future presents itself, how it irrupts into the present, destabilising our assumptions, always making the present different from how we might expect it to be. We see something of this in Lessing’s remarks on science fiction, or ‘space fiction’ as she also terms it, exploiting a productive ambiguity in the word ‘space’ – as she considers not only the ‘outer’ space of both realism and conventional science-fiction, but what might happen to our understanding of space, spatiality, as we extend ourselves into the imagined, predicted, unpredictable, preordained future. What shall we remember? Or, what shall we ‘re-member’, in the sense of putting back together the shards and fragments of history? The chapter concludes by questioning whether this notion of accommodating the future, which we might refer to as a variant of time travel, has to do with telepathy, a concept to which Lessing was greatly attracted.
Lessing’s Witness Literature
Authors: Maslen Elizabeth
Published: May 2018

This chapter takes as its starting point World War One, its traumatic effect on Lessing’s parents, and the ongoing effect of their traumas on Lessing herself; and goes on to explore how these issues are channeled into literary form in The Wind Blows Away our Words (1987), Mara and Dann (1999), The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005) and Alfred and Emily (2008). In exploring the effects of trauma on survivors and their children, it refers to the theories of a psychologist specialising in war trauma, Robert Jay Lifton; to Holocaust scholars such as Michael Levine; and to the philosopher Susan Brison. The chapter demonstrates how Lessing’s early experiences influenced her contribution to what is termed ‘witness literature’, developing techniques in her work that encourage readers to engage with the most challenging issues of her time, and to expose the ways in which language can be manipulated. Lessing’s thinking is contextualised with reference to other writers such as Herta Müller, Nadine Gordimer, Storm Jameson, Attia Hosein and Kamala Markhandaya, whose work is haunted by the effects of war and violence, and who all insist that personal experience cannot be divorced from the Zeitgeist.
A Catastrophic Universe: Lessing, Posthumanism and Deep History
Authors: Hanson Clare
Published: May 2018

This chapter explores the shift in Lessing’s work from social realism to an experimental approach to genre and argues that it is inseparable from the expansion of the scope of her later fiction, from the specifics of contemporary history to a concern with evolutionary and planetary time. A recurring tension in her writing is identified, between a trans-humanist ethos (expressed through the protagonists’ engagement with the prospect of ‘enhancing’ humanity) and post-humanist perspectives that offer a radical challenge to human exceptionalism. Taking the figure of the evolutionary ‘throwback’ in The Fifth Child (1988) as a starting point, the chapter argues that the novel opens up a landscape in which ‘the human’ in its current incarnation is no longer the structuring norm. It goes on to consider the relationship between humans and other animals in Lessing’s work, charting an emerging critique of anthropocentric ideology and an innovative mapping of inter-species subjectivities. Drawing on the neo-vitalist philosophy of Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, it argues that a post-humanist perspective is articulated in Lessing’s fiction, but that it is complicated by a transhumanism which is in part impelled by her continued commitment to Sufism. The chapter concludes by locating Lessing’s space fiction and late fables such as Mara and Dann (1999) in the context of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of ‘deep history’, an approach that he argues is mandatory at a time of planetary crisis.
Alain Badiou: Formalised Inhumanism
Authors: Watkin Christopher
Published: May 2018

This chapter probes the limits of Badiou’s “formalised inhumanism”, arguing that it is wrong to characterise the figure of the human that emerges in Badiou’s thought as radically new. For both Badiou and his antagonists the human is irreducibly composite: it cannot be what it is without a constitutive relation to an instance of inhumanity or non-humanity outside itself. Badiou’s split anthropology of the “human animal” and the “immortal” faces a major structural and ethical problem, arising from the way in which he seeks to understand the relation between the animal and immortal: he makes fidelity to a truth, and therefore humanity in its full sense, contingent upon an individual’s possession of the capacity for affirmative thought. Such thought functions for Badiou as a ‘host capacity’, a boundary marker of the uniqueness of humanity among animal, organic and non-organic entities. Despite exploring several creative ways to overcome the problems caused by this ‘host capacity’ account of humanity, the chapter concludes that it casts a shadow over his claim that “several times in its brief existence, every human animal is granted the chance to incorporate itself into the subjective present of a truth”.
Quentin Meillassoux: Supreme Human Value Meets Anti-anthropocentrism
Authors: Watkin Christopher
Published: May 2018

This chapter continues exploring the contemporary permutations of the ‘host capacity’ account of humanity through a close reading of Quentin Meillassoux’s transformation of the human. The place of the human in Meillassoux’s thought is complex. On the one hand, he maintains a strong and consistent rhetoric of anti-anthropocentrism, and his fundamental philosophical project can be summarised as an attempt to break free from what he sees as the anthropocentric straitjacket of Kantian and post- Kantian ‘correlationist’ thought. On the other hand, however, Meillassoux can evince a very high view of the human indeed, not hesitating to call his philosophy a ‘humanism’ and asserting the value of the human as ultimate. The first part of the chapter argues that Meillassoux’s humanism is less humanist than he thinks and the second part shows that his attempt to disengage from anthropocentrism is more anthropocentric than he thinks. As in the case of Badiou, it is Meillassoux’s insistence on tethering the value of humanity to its capacity for thought that lies at the root of many of the problems of his anthropology.
Catherine Malabou: The Plastic Human
Authors: Watkin Christopher
Published: May 2018

The transition from Badiou and Meillassoux to Malabou leads us away from thinking the human in terms of a ‘host capacity’ and proposes instead a ‘host substance’: the brain. The first half of this chapter argues that Malabou manages to avoid a host capacity account of the human by developing a notion of plasticity not as a uniquely human trait but as the possible transformation of all traits. This position harbours an irreducible ambiguity, however, between an escape from the host capacity approach and its hyperbolisation, and so what Malabou offers us can be construed as nothing less than a host meta-capacity. The second half of the chapter explores Malabou’s determination to initiate a new plastic encounter between philosophy and neuroscience, eschewing both the ‘cognitivism’ of neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux and the ‘Continental’ resistance to neuroscience of Paul Ricœur in order to elaborate her own ‘neuronal materialism’ in terms of ‘destructive plasticity’. In an attempt to develop this neuronal materialism in a way that avoids plasticity becoming one more defunct metaphor of the human, the chapter concludes by offering a reading of ‘the self’ in Malabou not as a metaphor but as a movement or tension of metaphoricity.