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1
Extreme poetry: The South Asian movement of simultaneous narration. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
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2
Wickerson, Erica. Performance. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198793274.003.0003.
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Considering moments of theatrical and social performance in narrative is not an obvious way of shedding light on the experience of time. But this chapter suggests that it is a particularly useful theme for consideration because it involves tensions between self and other, between artifice and authenticity. Since we are all always in some sense performing and since performance always involves two distinct yet simultaneous experiences—that of the performer and that of their audience—it poses an interesting challenge for the narration of time. Mann’s The Confessions of Felix Krull, Doctor Faustus, Blood of the Walsungs, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray are compared in an exploration of the narration of simultaneity, ways in which the changing prioritization of multiple perspectives affects the overall flow of time in a given scene, and the effect on time of moments of sexual performance and performative sexuality.
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Joho, Tobias. Thucydides, Epic, and Tragedy. Edited by Sara Forsdyke, Edith Foster, and Ryan Balot. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199340385.013.40.
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Despite initially acknowledging the deep gulf between his concern with the truth and the fanciful compositions of the poets, Thucydides is strongly influenced by the examples of Homer and Attic tragedy. Three areas of influence can be distinguished. First, Homer and the tragedians provide fundamental structural principles: Thucydides adopts Homer’s solution to narrating simultaneous strands of events, follows Homer’s example in heightening suspense, and learns from both Homer and tragedy to generate unity through narrative patterning. By adopting Homeric and tragic features, Thucydides infuses his narrative with a specific tone: tragic irony and reversals create an atmosphere of eerie inevitability, Homeric “Almost episodes” underscore the fragility of human endeavors, the Homeric emphasis on factual precision heightens Thucydides’ tone of objective pathos. Third, Thucydides’ allusions to specific Homeric and tragic episodes, besides demonstrating Thucydides’ engagement with Homer and tragedy, reveal his persisting distance from his poetic models.
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Shepherd, Laura J. Narrating the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197557242.001.0001.
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This history of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, and its articulation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda that grew from its adoption, are as familiar to anyone working on the agenda as the alphabet, the rules of grammar and syntax, or the spelling of their own name. This book encounters WPS as a policy agenda that emerges in and through the stories that are told about it, focusing on the world of WPS work at the United Nations Headquarters in New York (noting, of course, that many other equally rich and important stories could be told about the agenda in other contexts). Part of how the WPS agenda is formed as (and simultaneously forming) a knowable reality is through the narration of its beginnings, its ongoing unfolding, and its plural futures. These stories account for the inception of the agenda, outline its priorities, and delimit its possibilities, through the arrangement of discourse into narrative formations that communicate and constitute the agenda’s triumphs and disasters. This is a book about the stories of the WPS agenda and the worlds they contain.
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Schlarb, Damien B. Melville's Wisdom. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197585566.001.0001.
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This book explores the manner in which Herman Melville responds to the spiritual crisis of modernity by using the language of the biblical Old Testament wisdom books to moderate contemporary discourses on religion, skepticism, and literature. Melville’s work is an example of how romantic literature fills the interpretive lacuna left by contemporary theology. This book argues that attending to Melville’s engagement with the wisdom books (Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes) can help us understand a paradox at the heart of American modernity: the simultaneous displacement and affirmation of biblical language and religious culture. In wisdom, which addresses questions of theology, radical skepticism, and the nature of evil, Melville finds an ethos of critical inquiry that allows him to embrace the acumen of modern analytical techniques such as higher biblical criticism, while salvaging simultaneously the spiritual authority of biblical language. Wisdom for Melville constitutes both object and analytical framework in this balancing act. Melville’s Wisdom joins other works of postsecular literary studies in challenging its own discipline’s constitutive secularization narrative by rethinking modern, putatively secular cultural formations in terms of their reciprocity with religious concepts and texts. The book foregrounds Melville’s sustained, career-spanning concern with biblical wisdom, its formal properties, and its knowledge-creating potential. By excavating this project from Melville’s oeuvre, Melville’s Wisdom shows how he seeks to avoid the spiritually corrosive effects of suspicious reading while celebrating truth-seeking over subversive iniquity.
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Shome, Raka. White Femininity in the Nation, the Nation in White Femininity. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038730.003.0001.
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This book examines how the narrative of white femininity transformed Princess Diana into a simultaneous signifier of a national and global popular. Situating the discussion of white femininity and national modernity in the New Labor cultural scape of 1997 that promoted the rhetoric of a New Britain, the book analyzes the different facets of white femininity that the Diana phenomenon mobilized and stabilized in the production of a (new) national narrative of Britishness in the 1990s and beyond. It also considers a constellation of images of privileged white women in order to illustrate a larger formation of white femininity through which many neoliberal logics of national identity and citizenly belonging were being rewritten in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; how national identity intersects with celebrity culture, cultural politics, and global struggles over (what constitutes) modern subjectivity; and how representations, articulations, and actions of privileged white women of the Global North impact, inform, and intersect with larger geopolitics.
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Scully, Stephen. Hesiodic Poetics. Edited by Alexander C. Loney and Stephen Scully. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190209032.013.10.
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In terms of poetics, the contest between Hesiod and Homer seems simultaneously natural and surprising: natural because both of them composed in the artificial “song dialect” and highly formulaic medium of epea, and surprising because Homer’s long, heroic poetry differed so greatly in voice, theme, length, structure, and style from Hesiod’s much shorter, catalogic narrative poetry or from his didactic poetry. This chapter examines Hesiod’s poetry alongside Homer’s in terms of voice and theme, length and form, and style and genealogical lists. With examples from both singers, I propose that it may be a stylistic feature of catalogic poetry to interweave the personified names in a list with the corresponding lowercase words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) in the surrounding narrative. I also propose that, to a greater extent than Homer, Hesiod, with his fondness for word play and etymological punning, draws attention upon individual words.
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Kahn, Andrew, Mark Lipovetsky, Irina Reyfman, and Stephanie Sandler. Catastrophic narratives. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199663941.003.0037.
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The chapter considers how, beginning with the Revolution and continuing across the centry, new narrative forms in prose and poetry fashion a discourse of national destiny. As narratives conceptualize historical change and convey the meanings of catastrophe, they develop new plotlines, metaphoric systems and mythological visions. The chapter argues that Russian literature on the Great Terror, collectivization, and Gulag achieves a focus on historical and personal trauma comparable to Holocaust literature. Soviet narratives of World War II also form an important trend from the 1940s through twenty-first century, serving simultaneously as the source of social criticism and the sustained attempt to redefine national identity.
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Straus, Joseph. Broken Beauty. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190871208.001.0001.
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Modernist music is centrally concerned with the representation and narration of disability. The most characteristic features of musical modernism—fractured forms, immobilized harmonies, conflicting textural layers, radical simplification of means in some cases, and radical complexity and hermeticism in others—can be understood as musical representations of disability conditions, including deformity/disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, idiocy, and autism. Modernist musical representation and narration of disability both reflect and shape (construct) disability in a eugenic age, a period when disability was viewed simultaneously with pity (and a corresponding urge toward cure or rehabilitation) and fear (and a corresponding urge to incarcerate or eliminate). Disability is right at the core of musical modernism; it is one of the things that musical modernism is fundamentally about. This book draws on two decades of work in disability studies and a growing body of recent work that brings the discussion of disability into musicology and music theory. This interdisciplinary enterprise offers a sociopolitical analysis of disability, focusing on social and cultural constructions of the meaning of disability, and shifting attention from biology and medicine to culture. Within modernist music, disability representations often embody pernicious stereotypes and encourage sentimentalizing, exoticizing, or more directly negative responses. Modernist music claims disability as a valuable resource, but does so in a tense, dialectical relationship with medicalized, eugenic-era attitudes toward disability.
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Hodgkin, Kate. Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Andrew Hiscock and Helen Wilcox. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199672806.013.12.
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Emerging out of the traditions of exemplary lives and self-analysis at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the genre of spiritual autobiography writing is fluid and unstable both textually and generically. The individualism that has often been taken to define the autobiographical project is problematized in these accounts, which tend to foreground self-transcendence over self-assertion, collective over individual identities, and exemplarity over uniqueness. The spiritual framework provides a language of self-narrative and self-analysis, structured around affliction and redemption, and privileging inward over outward experiences. As a mode which insists on the truth of experience, it allows marginal selves (including women and lower-class men) a public voice, above all in the gathered churches of the revolutionary decades and after, while also containing those voices within tight conventions. The simultaneous restrictions and liberations of these various frames offer important perspectives on debates about the early modern self.
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Zingesser, Eliza. Stolen Song. Cornell University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501747571.001.0001.
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This book documents the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French. This book also documents the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing songs. Most scholars would find the claim that troubadour poetry is the origin of French literature uncomplicated and uncontroversial. However, this book shows that the “Frenchness” of this tradition was invented, constructed, and confected by francophone medieval poets and compilers keen to devise their own literary history. The book makes a major contribution to medieval studies both by exposing this act of cultural appropriation as the origin of the French canon and by elaborating a new approach to questions of political and cultural identity. It shows that these questions, usually addressed on the level of narrative and theme, can also be fruitfully approached through formal, linguistic, and manuscript-oriented tools.
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Pioske, Daniel. Conclusion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190649852.003.0006.
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Chapter 5 concludes this investigation by returning to the question of epistemology. What comes to light through the previous studies, it is argued, is that the stories told by the biblical scribes were rooted in not one type of memory but multiple instantiations of it that would have often worked simultaneously to shape the material transmitted to them over time. The conclusions reached through this investigation would thus urge caution when likening biblical storytelling with a form of history, or at least an understanding of history that has been practiced and developed during the modern period. What these considerations also indicate is that drawing on the referential claims of biblical narrative for historical reconstructive pursuits requires some sensitivity toward these ancient narratives’ specific epistemic underpinnings.
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Jarjour, Tala. Edessan Christians in Hayy al-Suryan. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190635251.003.0002.
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THIS CHAPTER SETS the foundation necessary for appreciating Urfalli Suryani religious emotionality through essential elements in the local musical experience. It draws on the history of the Syrian Orthodox Church, on Syriac liturgy and theology, and on living Lenten practices rooted in early asceticism, to underscore survival. The chapter locates the Syriac chant of Edessa not only historically in relation to early Christianity but also in the contemporary context of Aleppo and its social space. Through the example of a chant that accompanies daily bowing, the narrative situates living practice simultaneously in the church’s early roots and in its contemporary urban surrounding. Here, the body, and its (in)significance, will emerge as essential to local forms of knowledge, value, and musicality in Hayy al-Suryan, to which the next chapters will turn.
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Gildersleeve, Jessica. Don't Look Now. Liverpool University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781911325482.001.0001.
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Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) has been called “a ghost story for adults.” Certainly, in contrast to the more explicitly violent and bloodthirsty horror films of the 1970s, Don't Look Now seems of an entirely different order. Yet this supernaturally inflected tale of a child's accidental drowning, and her parents' desperate simultaneous recoil from her death and pursuit of her ghost, Don't Look Now is horrific at every turn. This book argues for it as a particular kind of horror film, one which depends utterly on the narrative of trauma—on the horror of unknowing, of seeing too late, and of the failures of paternal authority and responsibility. The book positions Don't Look Now within a discourse of midcentury anxiety narratives primarily existing in literary texts. In this context, it represents a crossover or a hinge between literature and film of the 1970s, and the ways in which the women's ghost story or uncanny story turns the horror film into a cultural commentary on the failures of the modern family.
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Suhail, Peer Ghulam Nabi. Development-Induced Dispossession, Displacement, and Embedded Power Relations. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199477616.003.0005.
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This chapter critically examines the class dynamics of land control and the influence of the elites and absentee landlords who take decisions on behalf of the subsistent peasantry. Yet another layer of control over land, the inter-dependence of the poor on the elites and vice-versa, has been analysed in detail. Simultaneously, the chapter also illustrates the peasant narrative about subordination, subalternity, and powerlessness. It mainly elucidates the peasant’s interpretations of loss caused by dispossession and displacement. It also discusses the viewpoints of the state, the corporate, and the political parties on the concept of the micro picture of who gets what and how. The chapter argues that HEP construction in Gurez has caused destruction of ecology and has adversely impacted the common property resources. Therefore, land-grabbing leads to a phenomenon where land is needed while labour is not.
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Trenka, Susie. Appreciation, Appropriation, Assimilation. Edited by Melissa Blanco Borelli. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199897827.013.009.
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The black-cast backstage musicalStormy Weather(1943) is the first Hollywood film to explicitly celebrate black achievement. Featuring key figures of African American dance and more black dance numbers than any other mainstream musical, it testifies to the versatility and—crucially—the hybridity of jazz dance culture. This article analyzes dance inStormy Weatherby addressing questions of appreciation, appropriation, and assimilation in the context of both film and dance history.Stormy Weather’s panoply of styles and stars negotiates several contradictory processes: white appropriation of “authentic” black talent, black assimilation to “classy” white styles, but also black adaptation and appropriation of hitherto white domains of performance. Through its self-referential narrative of dance history—and through some omissions—it simultaneously chronicles the history of black performers and racial stereotypes in white Hollywood, and thus reveals the industry’s strategies in the exploitation of black talent.
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Mayer, Peta. Misreading Anita Brookner. Liverpool University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789620597.001.0001.
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Anita Brookner was a best-selling women’s writer, Booker Prize winner and an historian of French Romantic art. However she is best known for writing boring, outdated books about lonely, single women. This book offers a queer rereading of Brookner by demonstrating the performative Romanticism of her novels to narrate multiple historical forms of homoerotic desire. It draws on diverse nineteenth-century intertexts from Charles Baudelaire to Henry James, Renée Vivien to Freud to establish a cross-historical and temporal methodology that emphasises figures of anachronism, the lesbian, the backwards turn and the woman writer. Delineating sets of narrative behaviours, tropes and rhetorical devices between Brookner’s Romantic predecessors and her own novels, the book produces a cast of Romantic personae comprising the military man, analysand, queer, aesthete, dandy, flâneur, degenerate and storyteller as hermeneutic figures for rereading Brookner. It then stages the performance of these personae along the specified narrative forms and back through six Brookner novels to reveal queer stories about their characters and plotlines. This new interpretation offers ways to think about Brookner’s contemporary female heroines as hybrid variations of (generally male) nineteenth-century artist archetypes. As a result it simultaneously critiques the heterosexual and temporal misreading that has characterised Brookner’s early reception.
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Harford Vargas, Jennifer. Forms of Dictatorship. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190642853.001.0001.
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An intraethnic study of Latina/o fiction written in the United States from the early 1990s to the present, this book examines novels that depict the historical reality of dictatorship and exploit dictatorship as a literary trope. This literature constitutes a new subgenre of Latina/o fiction that the author calls the Latina/o dictatorship novel. The book illuminates Latina/os’ central contributions to the literary history of the dictatorship novel by analyzing how U.S. Latina/os with national origin roots in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America imaginatively represent authoritarianism. The novels collectively generate what the author terms a “Latina/o counter-dictatorial imaginary” that positions authoritarianism on a continuum of domination alongside imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, neoliberalism, and border militarization. The book reveals how Latina/o dictatorship novels foreground these modes of oppression to indict Latin American dictatorships, U.S. imperialism, and structural discrimination in the United States, as well as repressive hierarchies of power in general. The author simultaneously utilizes formalist analysis to investigate how Latina/o writers mobilize the genre of the novel and formal techniques such as footnotes, focalization, emplotment, and metafiction to depict dictatorial structures and relations. The author builds on narrative theories of character, plot, temporality, and perspective to explore how the Latina/o dictatorship novel stages power dynamics. The book thus queries the relationship between different forms of power and the power of narrative form—that is, between various instantiations of repressive power structures and the ways in which different narrative structures can reproduce and resist repressive power.
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Wildman, Wesley J. Ground-of-Being Models of Ultimate Reality. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198815990.003.0005.
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Ground-of-being models regard ultimate reality as holy or sacred (unlike subordinate-deity models) and reject the idea that ultimate reality is an aware, agential being (unlike agential-being models). Ground-of-being models are radically anti-anthropomorphic, resisting the Intentionality Attribution, Narrative Comprehensibility, and Rational Practicality dimensions of anthropomorphism simultaneously. They are strongly amenable to the scientific study of religion and to apophatic metaphysical frameworks, within which ultimate reality surpasses the complete cognitive grasp of any possible creature. They offer a compelling and natural solution to the problem of religious diversity. They are and have always been relatively less popular than agential-being and subordinate-deity ultimacy models but it is not impossible to imagine a civilizational transformation after which ground-of-being models would become the dominant religious outlook. Variations, strengths, and weaknesses of the ground-of-being class of ultimacy models are discussed.
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Poehler, Eric E. World of the Mulio. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190614676.003.0007.
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Chapter 7 is the story of Sabinus, the fictional cart driver (mulio), from the Casa del Menandro. Sabinus is a narrative device invented to help imagine what the archaeological evidence cannot reveal: how traffic at Pompeii operated day-to-day and how as a system it was maintained. Although a fiction, the image of what Sabinus sees and encounters in the Pompeian street is a culmination and enlivening of the deep archaeological detail of preceding chapters. Importantly, Sabinus is also a means to explore the more speculative aspects of traffic management while simultaneously signaling the hypothetical nature of such exploration. The potential management mechanisms through which traffic information flowed are (1) the social networks that connect local drivers to civil authorities, (2) the observation of the environment and other drivers, and (3) direct contact with such information proxies as inscriptions, maps, and hired guides.
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Bojar, Abel, Theresa Gessler, Swen Hutter, and Hanspeter Kriesi, eds. Contentious Episodes in the Age of Austerity. Cambridge University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781009004367.
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Based on extensive data and analysis of sixty contentious episodes in twelve European countries, this book proposes a novel approach that takes a middle ground between narrative approaches and conventional protest event analysis. Looking particularly at responses to austerity policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2008–2015), the authors develop a rigorous conceptual framework that focuses on the interactions between three types of participants in contentious politics: governments, challengers, and third parties. This approach allows political scientists to map not only the variety of actors and actor coalitions that drove the interactions in the different episodes, but also the interplay of repression/concessions/support and of mobilization/cooperation/mediation on the part of the actors involved in the contention. The methodology used will enable researchers to answer old (and new) research questions related to political conflict in a way that is simultaneously attentive to conceptual depth and statistical rigor.
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Schliesser, Eric. Adam Smith’s Foundations for Political Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190690120.003.0007.
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This chapter sketches Adam Smith’s political philosophy, which is the activity of a citizen belonging to a particular community at given time and place. This project is neither exclusively descriptive nor only focused on what is commonly thought attainable. For Smith, the historical baseline of one’s time has normative significance. He does not resist changes from the status quo, but whatever changes he proposes are constrained by existing institutional arrangements. Part of the philosopher’s task is to offer visions of society that, while not impossible, are more just and more reasonable. One way in which such a vision can be offered is via historical narrative, which reveals the nature of that baseline and makes visible a second-order reflection on the ways it might be altered. In doing so, the philosopher offers an image that may speak simultaneously to one’s own society and those in others, including future ones.
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Barrett, Chris. Time River Body. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198816874.003.0003.
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Relying on sustained, relentless personification, Drayton’s chorographical epic Poly-Olbion retains the ethical work of The Faerie Queene’s allegory in restoring to the national narrative the embodied immanence of the people within it; but Drayton’s poem takes personification as its dominant representation mode. The poem explores and exploits the paradoxical nature of personification, a device that is simultaneously evocative and anti-mimetic. The case of personification demonstrates the ways description distances itself from its subject, and Poly-Olbion uses its personified topography to interrogate the very possibility of representing space—in cartographic image or topographical text—by troubling the temporal assumptions underlying the cartographic and problematizing the relationship between description and detail. In doing so, the poem generates a mode of descriptive writing reliant on the generative distortion of its subject, ultimately positing an anti-mimetic program—one that lays bare the limitations and fictions of the cartographic—for the representation of space.
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Pasha, Mustapha Kamal. Decolonizing The Anarchical Society. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779605.003.0006.
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Are claims for redistributive justice reconcilable with the demands for order? This question remains as significant today as it was articulated in The Anarchical Society forty years ago. This essay explores its aporetic nature against the horizon afforded by spectrality—the ghostlike presence/absence of justice in Bull’s account of the international. The problem of justice in this alternative decolonial narrative occasions three interrelated components: (1) an acknowledgement of particular (exclusionary) historical settlements that have shaped the contemporary international order; (2) recognition of racially differentiated space (or ‘coloniality’) as a durable feature of past and present international order; and (3) exposure of some of the more potent effects of this differentiation on the capacity or power of (unequal) actors (sovereign states in Bull’s formulation) in the international system. In Bull’s case, it is the haunting presence/absence of coloniality (embedded in his concerns for redistributive justice) that is simultaneously repudiated and embraced.
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Alworth, David J. Site Reading. Princeton University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691183343.001.0001.
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This book offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites—supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums—that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid-twentieth century. Against the traditional understanding of setting as a static background for narrative action and character development, the book argues that sites figure in novels as social agents. Engaging a wide range of social and cultural theorists, especially Bruno Latour and Erving Goffman, the book examines how the literary figuration of real, material environments reorients our sense of social relations. To read the sites of fiction, the book demonstrates, is to reveal literature as a profound sociological resource, one that simultaneously models and theorizes collective life. Each chapter identifies a particular site as a point of contact for writers and artists—the supermarket for Don DeLillo and Andy Warhol; the dump for William Burroughs and Mierle Laderman Ukeles; the road for Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, and John Chamberlain; the ruin for Thomas Pynchon and Robert Smithson; and the asylum for Ralph Ellison, Gordon Parks, and Jeff Wall—and shows how this site mediates complex interactions among humans and nonhumans. The result is an interdisciplinary study of American culture that brings together literature, visual art, and social theory to develop a new sociology of literature that emphasizes the sociology in literature.
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Lustig, Doreen. Veiled Power. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198822097.001.0001.
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This book presents a historical study of the international law of the private business corporation. The literature on corporations and international law typically concentrates on the failure to regulate corporations. This book challenges this ‘failure’ narrative and presents an alternative historical reading: a history of its facilitative role in constituting an economic order. This study draws inspiration from scholarship on the history of international trade law, international investment law, the history of global governance, and political economic analysis of international law, and connects these specialized fields in a single lens: the corporate form. The point of departure for this history is the simultaneous emergence of international law as a modern legal discipline and the turn to free incorporation in corporate law during the last third of the nineteenth century. The book demonstrates how the sovereign veil of the state and the corporate veil of the company were applied in tandem to insulate corporations from responsibility. Nevertheless, less powerful states invoked the same prevailing conceptions of the corporation, the sovereign state, and the relation between them, to curtail corporate power in struggles associated with decolonization. Reacting to these early victories, capital exporting countries shifted to a vocabulary of human rights and protected companies under a new regime of international investment law, which entrenched the separation between market and politics.
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van Leeuwen, Evert. House of Usher. Liverpool University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781911325604.001.0001.
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Despite being the product of Roger Corman's AIP exploitation studio, House of Usher enjoys a high standing. But while the impact and cult status of Corman's Edgar Allan Poe cycle is often discussed in histories of gothic, horror, and exploitation cinema, no extended analysis and critical discussion has been published to date that explores specifically the aesthetic appeal of House of Usher. This book provides a complete study of the aesthetic appeal of Corman's influential first Poe picture. The book explores the underlying narrative structure borrowed from Poe's original story and shows how closely Richard Matheson's script followed Poe's theory of short fiction. It goes on to explore the formal techniques of allegory and symbolism employed to represent the house as a monster before focusing on Corman's imagery, showing how the use of specific camera angles, lenses, colors, and sound effects create and sustain the simultaneously morbid and beautiful atmosphere of gothic decay. Finally, the book situates horror icon Vincent Price's performance as Roderick Usher in the context of the nineteenth-century Romantic misfit and the postwar countercultural antihero, two closely related cultural identities.
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Decker, Gregory J., and Matthew R. Shaftel, eds. Singing in Signs. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190620622.001.0001.
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Singing in Signs is a collection of essays from prominent opera scholars that explores the rich interplay of symbols in the operatic genre, while simultaneously providing perspective on the state of opera study. Each author, whether explicitly or implicitly, uses the powerful tools of semiotics (the study of signs) to construct interpretations and discover relationships among music, lyrics, and drama. Authors in this collection use a combination of traditional and emerging methodologies to engage composer-constructed and work-specific music-semiotic systems, broader sociocultural music codes, and narrative strategies. Many of the essays have implications for performance and staging. Singing in Signs answers the call—through the lens of semiotics—to embrace opera on its own terms and to engage all of its constituent elements in interpretation. The purpose of the present volume is to “resurrect” serious musical study of opera—not because it has not been taking place—but in a larger sense as a multifaceted, interpretive discipline, by collecting some of these efforts in one volume. The essays here focus on the musical, dramatic, cultural, and performative in opera and demonstrate how these modes can create an intertext that informs interpretation. Operas explored in this volume span the late Baroque period through the present day, including composers from Handel to Wagner to Britten.
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Al-Hassan, Hawraa. Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba'thist State. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474441759.001.0001.
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The book examines the trajectory of the state sponsored novel in Iraq and considers the ways in which explicitly political and/or ideological texts functioned as resistive counter narratives. It argues that both the novel and ‘progressive’ discourses on women were used as markers of Iraq’s cultural revival under the Ba‘th and were a key element in the state’s propaganda campaign within Iraq and abroad. In an effort to expand its readership and increase support for its pan-Arab project, the Iraqi Ba‘th almost completely eradicated illiteracy among women. As Iraq was metaphorically transformed into a ‘female’, through its nationalist trope, women writers simultaneously found opportunities and faced obstacles from the state, as the ‘Woman Question’ became a site of contention between those who would advocate the progressiveness of the Ba‘th and those who would stress its repressiveness and immorality. By exploring discourses on gender in both propaganda and high art fictional writings by Iraqis, this book offers an alternative narrative of the literary and cultural history of Iraq. It ultimately expands the idea of cultural resistance beyond the modern/traditional, progressive/backward paradigms that characterise discourses on Arab women and the state, and argues that resistance is embedded in the material form of texts as much as their content or ideological message.
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Wills, David. Killing Times. Fordham University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823283521.001.0001.
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Killing Times starts from the deceptively simple observation— made by Jacques Derrida—that the death penalty mechanically interrupts mortal time, preempting our normal experience of not knowing when we will die. The book examines more broadly what constitutes mortal temporality and how the “machinery of death” exploits and perverts time. It first examines Eighth Amendment challenges to the death penalty in the U.S, from the late nineteenth-century introduction of execution by firing squad and the electric chair to current cases involving lethal injection. Although defining the instant of death emerges as an insoluble problem, all the machines of execution of the post-Enlightenment period presume to appropriate and control that instant, ostensibly in service of a humane death penalty. That comes into particular focus with the guillotine, introduced in France in 1791–92, at the same moment as the American Bill of Rights. Later chapters analyze how the instant of the death penalty works in conjunction with forms of suspension, or extension of time and how its seeming correlation between egregious crime and painless execution is complicated in various ways. The book’s emphasis on time then allows it to expand the sense of the death penalty into suicide bombing, where the terrorist seeks to bypass judicial process with a simultaneous crime and “punishment”; into targeted killing by drone, where the time-space coordinates of “justice” are compressed and disappear into the black hole of secrecy; and into narrative and fictive spaces of crime, court proceedings, and punishment.
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Lewis, Cara L. Dynamic Form. Cornell University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501749179.001.0001.
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This book traces how intermedial experiments shape modernist texts from 1900 to 1950. Considering literature alongside painting, sculpture, photography, and film, the book examines how these arts inflect narrative movement, contribute to plot events, and configure poetry and memoir. As forms and formal theories cross from one artistic realm to another and back again, modernism shows its obsession with form—and even at times becomes a formalism itself—but as the book states, that form is far more dynamic than we have given it credit for. Form fulfills such various functions that we cannot characterize it as a mere container for content or matter, nor can we consign it to ignominy opposite historicism or political commitment. As a structure or scheme that enables action, form in modernism can be plastic, protean, or even fragile, and works by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein demonstrate the range of form's operations. Revising three major formal paradigms—spatial form, pure form, and formlessness—and recasting the history of modernist form, the book proposes an understanding of form as a verbal category, as a kind of doing. It thus opens new possibilities for conversation between modernist studies and formalist studies and simultaneously promotes a capacious rethinking of the convergence between literary modernism and creative work in other media.
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Nette, Andrew. Rollerball. Liverpool University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781911325666.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Rollerball, the Canadian-born director and producer Norman Jewison's 1975 vision of a future dominated by anonymous corporations and their executive elite, in which all individual effort and aggressive emotions are subsumed into a horrifically violent global sport, remains critically overlooked. What little has been written deals mainly with its place within the renaissance of Anglo-American science-fiction cinema in the 1970s, or focuses on the elaborately shot, still visceral to watch, game sequences, so realistic they briefly gave rise to speculation Rollerball may become an actual sport. Drawing on numerous sources, including little examined documents in the archive of the film's screenwriter William Harrison, this book examines the many dimensions of Rollerball's making and reception: the way it simultaneously exhibits the aesthetics and narrative tropes of mainstream action and art-house cinema; the elaborate and painstaking process of world creation undertaken by Jewison and Harrison; and the cultural forces and debates that influenced them, including the increasing corporate power and growing violence in Western society in late 1960s and early 1970s. The book shows how a film that was derided by many critics for its violence works as a sophisticated and disturbing portrayal of a dystopian future that anticipates numerous contemporary concerns, including ‘fake news’ and declining literary and historical memory. The book includes an interview with Jewison on Rollerball's influences, making, and reception.
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Falck, Susan T. Remembering Dixie. University Press of Mississippi, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496824400.001.0001.
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Nearly seventy years after the Civil War, Natchez, Mississippi, sold itself to Depression-era tourists as a place “Where the Old South Still Lives.” Tourists flocked to view the town’s decaying antebellum mansions, hoop-skirted hostesses, and a pageant saturated in sentimental Lost Cause imagery. Organized by the town’s female garden club, the Pilgrimage created a popular culture experience that appealed to 1930s tourists. This book traces how the selective white historical memories of a small southern community originated from the hardships of the Civil War, changed over time, and culminated in a successful heritage tourism enterprise still in business today. Simultaneously, this study examines the ways in which Natchez African Americans contested this selective narrative to create a short lived but distinctive post-emancipation identity. This book demonstrates that southern memory making was never monolithic or static but was continuously shaped and reshaped by the unique dynamics of a community’s class, gender, racial, and social complexities. In the course of revealing how historical memory evolved in Natchez, this book contributes new insights on the periodization of Lost Cause ideology and the gendering of historical memory. Covering the period from the tumultuous early post-Civil War years through the economic hardships of the Great Depression, Remembering Dixie reveals that historical memory is often a contested process. Perhaps most importantly, this study helps to reclaim some of the earliest post-emancipation black memories that were nearly erased when white males reclaimed political power in the late 1870s.
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Simmons, Caleb. Devotional Sovereignty. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190088897.001.0001.
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This book investigates the shifting articulations of kingship in a wide variety of literary (Sanskrit and Kannada), visual, and material courtly productions in the South Indian kingdom of Mysore during the reigns of Tipu Sultan (r. 1782–1799) and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III (r. 1799–1868). Tipu Sultan was a Muslim king famous for resisting British dominance until his death, and Krishnaraja III was a Hindu king who succumbed to British political and administrative control. Both of their courts dealt with the changing political landscape of the period by turning to the religious and mythical past to construct a royal identity for their kings. With their use of religious narrative to articulate their kingship, the changing conceptions of sovereignty that accompanied burgeoning British colonial hegemony did not result in languishing. The religious past, instead, provided an idiom through which the Mysore courts could articulate their kings’ unique claims to kingship in the region, as they attributed their rule to divine election and increasingly employed religious vocabularies in a variety of courtly genres and media. What emerges within this material is an increasing reliance on devotion to frame Mysore kingship in relation to the kings’ changing role in regional politics. The emphasis on devotion for the constitution of Indian sovereignty in this period had lasting effects on Indian national politics as it provided an ideological basis for united Indian sovereignty that could simultaneously integrate and transcend premodern forms of regional kingship and its association with local deities.
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Tomlinson, Jim. Managing the Economy, Managing the People. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198786092.001.0001.
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The volume provides a distinctive new account of British economic life since the Second World War, focusing upon the ways in which successive governments, in seeking to manage the economy, have sought simultaneously to ‘manage the people’: to try and manage popular understanding of economic issues. In doing so, governments have sought not only to shape expectations for electoral purposes but to construct broader narratives about how ‘the economy’ should be understood. The starting point is to ask what goals have been focused upon; how these have been constructed to appeal to the population; and how far the population has accepted these narratives. In its first part, the volume analyses the development of the major narratives from the 1940s onwards. This part covers the notion of ‘austerity’ and its particular meaning in the 1940s; the rise of a narrative of ‘economic decline’ from the late 1950s, and the subsequent attempts to ‘modernize’ the economy; the attempts to ‘roll back the state’ from the 1970s; the impact of ideas of ‘globalization’ in the 1980s and 1990s; and, finally, the way the crisis of 2008/9 onwards was constructed as a problem of ‘debts and deficits’. The second part of the volume then focuses in on four key issues in attempts to ‘manage the people’: productivity, the balance of payments, inflation, and unemployment. It shows how in each case governments have sought to get the populace to understand these issues in a particular light, and have shaped strategies to that end.