bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Musical Apocalypse: Tom Waits’ Bone Machine
Authors: Jones Angela 
Published: February 2023

Apocalypse derives from the Greek apocalypsis, meaning the act of uncovering, unveiling, or revelation. While the apocalyptic theme or genre continues to inform and inspire a number of different media and discourses into the twenty-first century, the representation of apocalypse within popular music remains a largely overlooked field of enquiry. Therefore in this paper I would like to discuss Tom Waits' 1992 CD, Bone Machine, as a popular musical rendition of the apocalyptic theme, in order to explore what the apocalyptic might sound like, were it to be rendered musically. To do so, I will be drawing on Jacques Derrida's essay "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," in which he formulates an understanding of the apocalyptic as "tone": the "revelator of some unveiling in process." Like Derrida's apocalyptic tone, Bone Machine can be interpreted as registering an idea of the apocalyptic as process and movement, wherein the act of revelation is conceived as a continual, often turbulent and confusing, unveiling. This apocalyptic process is registered both through the album's production - wherein the sounds are continually being stripped back and built on to one another to form unstable, transient song structures - and through its vocal delivery - which foregrounds the way in which tone can subvert and destabilize the meaning of the lyrics. The result is an idea of apocalypse which is not simply an ending to a narrative trajectory, nor which relies on genre-specific imagery or themes, but rather which obscures as much as it reveals, always drawing attention back to itself as a revelatory gesture. Indeed, the apocalyptic tone destabilizes and undermines some of the dominant assumptions central to narrative-based understandings of apocalypse, and as such my analysis aims to foreground the ways in which Bone Machine enables an original and, at times, subversive musical perspective on what has proven to be a remarkably resilient cultural theme.
Moving Like a Ghost: Tarquin’s Specter and Agentive Objects in The Rape of Lucrece, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth
Authors: Angelo Lizz 
Published: February 2023

All good ghost stories strike us as immediately familiar. As Shakespeare’s heirs, we know the story well, but from where? Is that Macbeth we see before us, his hand on Duncan’s door? Or do we spy on Brutus, reading a cryptic message in his balmy Mediterranean orchard? ‘Speak, strike, redress.’ The lightning suddenly becomes a meteor shower raining down on Rome. Perhaps we still misread—we see not Macbeth, nor Brutus, but Tarquin, the last Roman prince, stealing into Collatine’s room to rape his wife. The light dims to a candle flame—but only for a moment, until it falls prey to a cold tongue of midnight air.For four centuries, we have read this way, dissecting Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists backwards, opening first their souls, then their minds, and, finally, their bodies to our critical gaze. More recent scholarship implores us to rethink the reading and writing of history and explore alternative histories, especially the histories of nature, of objects, of things.
Mediating Human-Technology Relationships: Explorations of Hybridity, Humanity and Embodiment in Doctor Who
Authors: Cranny-Francis Anne 
Published: February 2023

The relationship between human beings and technology has been a regular concern of the television series, Doctor Who. Though its titular hero moves through space-time by means of advanced technology and he is by his own admission a technological genius and Doctor 'of everything really', the program nevertheless consistently maps the unease that attends the interaction of humans and the technology - whether through the human characters' horror at the abuse of technology and its power or through characters who incorporate this interaction.The trope of the cyborg, the human-machine hybrid that articulates many contemporary fears (and desires) about the intrusion of technology on the 'human' is enacted and embodied in Doctor Who by the Daleks and the Cybermen - long-term enemies of the Doctor. In the recent new series (2005-2009) featuring Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant both Daleks and Cybermen have returned, to enact contemporary concerns about new technologies. This paper explores the recent Dalek double-episode, "Daleks in Manhattan" and "Evolution of the Daleks" (2007) for its representation of current human-technology relationships.
On Dwarves and Scientists: Probing for Technological Ethics in the Creative Imagination of J.R.R. Tolkien
Authors: Kidwell Jeremy 
Published: February 2023

The presence of technology in contemporary life has become so pervasive that sociologist, Jacques Ellul has described this age as a "technological society". J.R.R. Tolkien lived in the midst of the ascension of this technological society at the turn of the twentieth-century, and though he is well recognized for the quality of his fiction, the specific treatment of technology in his works has not been fully appreciated. In Tolkien's work this topic may not be immediately obvious, especially given that technology is typically conceived in a narrow economy: freestanding and utterly contemporary. An example of this attitude might be the affirmation of a computer as "technology", but not the edge of a chef's knife. Tolkien casts his vision of technology with a more encompassing definition, treating it as the making of things by creatures. This paper seeks primarily to substantiate the presence of this technological theme, so defined, in Tolkien's work. Accomplishing this will require attention to two fronts: to Tolkien's theory and practice. In unpacking the theoretical basis for his technological commentary, I will first justify the use of "fairy stories" for broader ethical reflection and will draw attention to Tolkien's specific commentary regarding the use of this genre. I will further examine Tolkien's specific attention to the topic of technology, and will clear him of charges that he is anti-technological. I will spend the latter half of the paper explicating specific ways, in practice, that Tolkien deploys the concept of sub-creation in his mythical stories. My analysis in this paper will be limited to ways in which the narrative of the Dwarves in his fiction serves as an analogy for the scientific enterprise. Ultimately, I will suggest that in Tolkien's account the products of technological synthesis (making), are in themselves morally ambivalent. I choose "ambivalent", rather than "neutral", because, as will be developed more fully below, there is always a moral context for technology, either good or bad - but never neither.
Irish voices for Irish visions: Gael Linn’s documentary film projects
Authors: Macdougall Heather 
Published: February 2023

This paper seeks to analyse three important documentary film projects of Gael Linn – the Amharc Éireann newsreel series, Mise Eire and Saoirse? – in terms of the connection that they create between Irish-language cinema and the ideologies of Irish nationalism. Since Gael Linn was founded in 1953 in direct response to a perceived failure on the part of the newly independent Irish state to revive the Irish language, I will begin with a very short overview of the Irish government’s efforts in this direction, followed by an examination of the goals and objectives of Gael Linn when it was founded, before moving on to an analysis of the film projects.
To Speak or Not to Speak: An Encounter with J. M. Coetzee's Foe
Authors: Tansley Laura 
Published: February 2023

For critics and authors, there has always been a tension between silence and voicing experience. My concern, as both author and critic is: What does it mean to speak or to be, not remain, silent; what are the consequences of voicing experience or choosing, rather than being forced, to be quiet? Through J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1988), I hope to interrogate the tension between silence and voice and discover why, sometimes, silence is appealing.
ORAL HISTORY AS POLITICAL RESISTANCE: Posse and Once Upon a Time in Mexico
Authors: Wadenius Adam 
Published: February 2023

In the introduction to his The Western Reader Jim Kitses observes that the Western film, a genre long-heralded as the “cornerstone of American identity,” (16) is itself not exempt from an undertaking of racial and cultural revisionism. He points to a resurgence of films from the 1990’s that, in an era of multi-culturalism, hybridity, and counter-strategies, have functioned to redefine the codes of the traditional Western, bringing to life the postmodern Western. The subversive politics of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), and Maggie Greenwald’s The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), are two such examples.
Plugs
Authors: Connor Steven 
Published: February 2023

Plugs are peculiarly intimate objects. Plugs are archaic things, that belong to an economy of spaces in which what mattered was to seal, to store, to quarantine and dam up flow. But now the plug is used for different purposes, to establish connections, and to draw together places and times. Plugs are scale-transformers: they used to keep proximal things distant, now they bring distant things up close. We use plugs not to keep things apart, but to become a part of them, to plug in rather than plug up. Plugs used to keep things in their place, enforcing a world governed by the prepositions ‘in’, ‘on’ or ‘at’. Now the plug is the enabler of relationships signified by prepositions like ‘through’, ‘across’ and ‘between’. As such, the plug is a prime example of the interference between spatio-temporal dispensations that is so much a feature of the modern world. Perhaps the plug is itself a connector between the archaic and the contemporary.
Metamorphosis and Identity – “Cinetheatrical” Spaces in Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Mâcon
Authors: Turi Zita 
Published: February 2023

In his interviews, Peter Greenaway infamously claims that we have never seen films, only literature or theatre put on screen. He, being a painter himself, mostly characterises his construction of film-narrative as image-centred, a position in opposition to that of traditional plot-centred movies based on verbal narration. He wanted to make a cinema of ideas and not of plots, trying to use the same aesthetics as painting, which always paid great attention to formal devices of structure and the composition of framing (Woods 18). Not only is there a competitive relationship between the plot and the visual narration, but in his films the mediums used also vary. This contributes to the multi-layered structures of his movies, which are not limited by artificially imposed boundaries, but are centred on notions such as the place and space of performance and the self-reflective nature of art. The framework of intermediality, consequently, gains crucial significance within the discourse on Greenaway’s movies. On the one hand, it includes various mediums, allowing the interweaving of late-twentieth century visual arts (cinema and television) with theatre; on the other hand, it presupposes flexibility and a need for artistic fusion, creating a profusion of texts, images, and sounds within the given artistic constellation. This variability of expression requires variable spaces and this paper seeks to substantiate the interrelation between the metamorphosis of locations and identity in Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Mâcon.
“Justified in the World”: Spatial Values and Sensuous Geographies in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Authors: Warde Anthony 
Published: February 2023

In contrast to the conventional division between "early" and "late(r)" works, the development of Cormac McCarthy's oeuvre is typically described in geographical terms, with critics subsuming his first four novels under the heading "Appalachian Works" and his subsequent novels under the title "Western Works". Far from merely constituting a convenient categorising or framing device, these positional terms reflect an increasing concern with space and place in McCarthy's novels.[2] In this article, I address spatial concerns that are specific to McCarthy's 2006 novel, The Road, demonstrating how the protagonists' desire for positionality and directionality is both heightened and hampered by an apocalypse that has reduced the world to dust and ashes.Like many of McCarthy's previous works, The Road employs mapping motifs to explore the distinction between space and place, and to represent protagonists' struggle to both master and move through space. In the post-apocalyptic world of the novel, however, maps are associated with a visual, abstracted and purportedly objective understanding of space that is shown to be both illusory and wholly inadequate.[3] In place of traditional cartography, The Road asserts a more holistic human or sensuous geography, a manner of constructing space that highlights the interaction (and interdependence) of the human body and its surrounding land, rather than the dominance of the former over the latter.
Creating Oneself as a Mother: Dreams, Reality and Identity in Doris Lessing’s the Fifth Child (1988)
Authors: Casablancas i Cervantes Anna 
Published: February 2023

"With a few symbols a dream can define the whole of one's life, and warn us of the future, too" (Schlueter 71).In this extract from an interview by Jonah Raskin in 1969, Doris Lessing explained the importance of dreams in her major work, The Golden Notebook; but it could just as easily be applied to a large part of her extensive novelistic corpus. Throughout her diverse literary output, Lessing uses traditional narrative methods such as tales and fables "as a creative vehicle to examine the states of consciousness of the human soul" (Galin 23). Through use of all these fantastic elements, she endows several of her novels, such as The Fifth Child (1988), with a dreamlike atmosphere in which reality and imagination merge. If dreams can define one's entire life, they will also provide the clues to one's own identity, illuminating areas that we do not have access to in conscious life. Identity is a major issue in the novels of Doris Lessing, especially those dealing with female protagonists trying to define their own selves amongst the different roles they perform in life. The subconscious, through dreams and imagination, plays an important part in this quest, since a person's identity is built up by both conscious factors and subconscious forces.The aim of this paper is to show how Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child can be read as a valid representation of a failure in the construction of identity; the novel dramatises the way in which the dreams and fantasies of the subconscious can destroy or fatally interrupt the identity-building process. The Fifth Child, which is described by Jones in the New York Review of Books as "a horror story of maternity and the nightmare of social collapse" (30-31), combines dreaming, imagination and a sense of female identity which is endangered and comes close to disappearing. A closer look into The Fifth Child and its multi-layered treatment of identity as a form of troubled self-creation will help us to appreciate its integral role in the Lessing canon.
Preface to FORUM Issue 12: Authenticity
Authors: Milnes Tim 
Published: February 2023

Like many ideas forged in the Enlightenment, ‘authenticity’ has lost much of its lustre. The product of an eighteenth-century culture fascinated with the past, with notions of origins, essences, and depths, it was endowed by twentieth-century existentialism with a numinous quality that many theorists saw as ripe for deconstruction. Indeed, the traditional rhetoric of authenticity is emphatically un-postmodern in its auratic essentialism and its concern, in the absence of rational foundations, to locate some kind of centre for what is genuine and real. Such metaphysical earnestness is apt to cause embarrassment today, which is perhaps why commentators not bent on dismantling the notion of the authentic have approached it with circumspection. Among these, Lionel Trilling, whose 1971 study Sincerity and Authenticity remains essential reading, worries that ‘authenticity,’ like ‘irony’ and ‘love,’ is ‘one of those words [...] which are best not talked about if they are to retain any force of meaning [...]’ (120). More recently, Geoffrey Hartman has conceded that ‘“Spirit” and “authenticity” are word concepts that cannot be saved from their own pathos. Perhaps we should not even try to sober them up’ (1). The temperate critic, it would seem, is well advised to handle authenticity with care.
Mammary Landscapes and Mother's Figure: Vengeance and matrilineal legacy in the poetic drama of W.H. Auden
Authors: Campbell Andrew 
Published: February 2023

This article will focus on The Ascent of F6 (1936) and work back to Paid On Both Sides, as both plays explore the psychological malaise of the protagonist and the domineering influence of the mother to striking effect. These dramas find their central protagonists grappling with the malignant influence of mothers who compel the climactic acts of revenge through the neurotic anxiety they have engendered within their sons. The first act of vengeance examined is figurative and illusory as the mother of the Ransom brothers pits her neurotic sons against each other in an Oedipal battle for glory or favour in F6. The second, more formative, action to be examined is literal and physical, as the matriarchs of Paid's Nower and Shaw families demand that their remaining sons commit acts of murderous revenge for slain fathers and brothers. Both are undoubtedly responses to the psychic deprivation and distress caused by the mother characters and their divided affections for their sons. While much work remains to be conducted in gendered approaches to the study of these texts, this article will explore the significance of vengeance and matrilineal legacy in W.H. Auden's poetic drama and locate this theme within the context of his poetry from the late Twenties to the late Thirties. This study anticipates further discussion of the role of matriarchal figures and gender debates arising from post-war literature.
The Violation of Representation: Art, Argento and the Rape-Revenge Film
Authors: Heller-Nicholas Alexandra 
Published: February 2023

Considering the moral controversies surrounding films such as I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarch, 1976) and Baise-Moi (Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh-Thi, 2000), the rape-revenge film is often typecast as gratuitous and regressive. But far from dismissing rape-revenge in her foundational book Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), Carol J. Clover suggests that these movies permit unique insight into the representation of gendered bodies on screen. In Images of Rape: The 'Heroic' Tradition and Its Alternatives(1999), art historian Diane Wolfthal demonstrates that contradictory representations of sexual violence co-existed long before the advent of the cinematic image, and a closer analysis of films that fall into the rape-revenge category reveals that they too resist a singular classification. Despite the broadness of the rape-revenge category, however, these films predominantly involve some kind of visceral skirmish between victim/villain, good/evil, female/male and right/wrong, and the desire for vengeance upon which their narratives rely provides a widely shared melodramatic foundation. The ideological leanings, thematic cores and moral messages of any given text hinge upon its representational mechanics-in this instance, how film formally constructs meaning-and can thus shift radically from text to text, despite the uniformity of the trope itself.
‘Numinous’ and ‘Negatively Numinous’ in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Authors: Linforth Lucy 
Published: February 2023

This paper seeks to explore the representation of both the numinous and negatively numinous presence in a late nineteenth century Gothic novel which occupies the complicated borderland between the supposed binary oppositions of the sacred and sacrilegious, holy and profane, of good and evil: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).
Editorial Introduction: The New Materialisms
Authors: Er, Co-editor Yanbing 
Published: February 2023

The role of matter has been marginalised in much of historical and philosophical thought. Its proximity to the inertia of the physical, and its imbrications with the more basal nature of things, has cultivated a preference for an understanding of the world formulated as a flight from the tiresome weight of the material itself. Matter, as it seemed, has been a mere platform from which the exploration of more significant elements that characterised our experience as human beings could take off. This article explores the rise of new materialist strands of thought as a critical revisiting of the notion of materiality, and situates it within the increasing demand for contemporary paradigms of knowledge.
The function of small tools in Europe during the Middle Pleistocene: The case of Marathousa 1 (Megalopolis, Greece)
Authors: Guibert-Cardin Juliette , Tourloukis Vangelis , Thompson Nicholas , Panagopoulou Eleni , Harvati Katerina , Nicoud Elisa , Beyries Sylvie 
Published: February 2023

Small flake industries are a commonly identified component of Lower Paleolithic archaeological assemblages in Eurasia. Utilized as blanks for tools, at many sites, their functions are often poorly understood. Here we present a preliminary traceological analysis of lithics from Marathousa 1 (MAR-1; Megalopolis, Greece). MAR-1 dates to ca. 400-500 ka BP and is one of the oldest open-air sites in South-Eastern Europe. It has yielded a lithic assemblage made almost exclusively of small-sized flakes found in direct association with diverse megafauna including elephants, hippo and deer.
For this preliminary study, a total of 223 artifacts were sampled for a taphonomical analysis and 13 for a functional analysis. The lithic artifacts from MAR-1 are exceptionally well-preserved and are only slightly affected by chemical alterations. They are therefore ideal for a techno-morpho-functional analysis. Use-wear traces confirm on-site butchery. Our results also confirm that plants were worked at the site, whereas technological traces, rarely observed on lithics from this age, can also be seen on a number of specimens. Whereas both retouched and unretouched tools contribute significantly to the MAR-1 toolkit, shapes are varied, and at this phase of the study do not appear morphologically or technologically standardized. However, backing (natural or retouched) opposite to a sharp edge can be observed on numerous specimens. When compared to the sparse functional data available on small tools from Lower Paleolithic Europe and the Levant, small flake tools include a wide variety of techno-functional types. To fully begin to understand this diversity, lithic toolkits must be considered in relation to the rest of the assemblage and the accompanying contextual data, including information from technological, archaeozoological, and palaeoenvironmental datasets.