Abstract: In the epilogue to the 2002 reprint of her influential study The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon remarks that "the postmodern may well be a twentieth-century phenomenon, that is, a thing of the past. Now fully institutionalized, it has its canonized texts, its anthologies, primers and readers, its dictionaries and its histories" (165). Hutcheon's claim about the pastness of postmodernism has gained support in the years since she made it, as a body of criticism has emerged which takes a determinedly revisionist and historicist perspective on many of the canonical postmodernist texts to which she alludes. Novels such as Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985), now monuments in the American postmodern landscape, have produced a spate of recent readings in this vein. Aspects of these texts that can seem peripheral on a first reading--such as the role of Mexico in Pynchon's novel, or the impact of the Vietnamese and Iranian conflicts in DeLillo's--have been alighted upon as offering an underappreciated historical situatedness to the poetics of postmodernism. (1) In addition, the previously submerged role played by various institutions and class interests in the historical formation of postmodernist styles and forms has become the focus of important interventions in the field. (2) Much of this critical work retains the analytic and taxonomic category of the postmodern, even as the accepted dominance in the texts being read of traditionally postmodern themes and aesthetics is often questioned (whether from a descriptive or political viewpoint). (3) In other work, "postmodernism" itself is undermined as a useful critical designation, in favor of terms such as "long modernism" or "technomodernism." (4) In her short essay "On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary," something of a manifesto for the recently-formed Post-45 group of literary critics who are carrying out much of the work cited above, Amy Hungerford remarks on "the solid dominance of historicism" that informs contemporary critical practice, a dominance that "now scents less a critical movement than a simple assumption about literary-critical work," best figured as "not a wave but a tide, or even just the water we all swim in" (416). And it seems that what we can term the new postmodernist studies has been firmly constituted by this historicist turn, which reacts against the "disabling commitment to theory" that marked the work of scholars of a previous generation. (5) At the same time as this revisionist work on postmodernism has begun to emerge, another prominent critical trend has seen a burgeoning interest in the fiction of a younger generation of American literary writers, those who are taken to follow "in the wake of postmodernism's waning influence" (Hoberek, "Introduction" 233). Whether, in classifying the fiction that began to sui face in the late 1980s and 1990s and has continued into the new millennium, critics favor "hybrid fiction" (Grassian), "American literary globalism" (Adams), "cosmodernism" (Moraru), "late postmodernism" (Green) or "post-postmodernism" (Burn), it is clear that the narrative of "postmodernism, then" is already under construction in the critical stories told about recent American literature. In this scholarship there is understandably little questioning of the validity of postmodernism as a useful historical and aesthetic category: the story being told requires, in the main, that there be a relatively clear postmodern model in fiction which later writers can internalize and react to. Depending on which younger writers each critic is most concerned with, the canon of their postmodern forerunners will shift slightly, but only within certain bounds. The primary interest is in identifying the predominant styles and concerns of the new generation, in naming what it is these new writers are doing in their fiction, and in articulating how they build upon and depart from their canonical postmodern forebears. …

Abstract: "What is Madness?" is Darian Leader's probing study of madness, sanity, and everything in between. What separates the sane from the mad? How hard or easy is it to tell them apart? And what if the difference is really between being mad and going mad? In this landmark work Darian Leader undermines common conceptions of madness. Through case studies like the apparently 'normal' Harold Shipman, he shows that madness rarely conforms to standard models. "What is Madness?" explores the idea of quiet madness - that at times many of us live interior lives that are far from sane but allow us to function normally and unthreateningly - he argues that we must seek a new way to assess, treat and deal with those suffering mental health problems. "What is Madness?" is Darian Leader's radically insightful and masterfully convincing exploration of a painful, complex but endlessly fascinating area of humanity. "A terrific intellectual stylist". (Joseph O' Neill, "Guardian"). "Engrossing and enlightening...Leader is as much a philosopher as a psychoanalyst". ("Metro"). "The mad ...have been segregated and often confined; for fear, perhaps, that they will contaminate the rest of us. But as Darian Leader brilliantly shows, things are never so simple". (Hanif Kureshi, "Independent"). "Provides valuable insights into how psychiatry can help those who have suffered psychosis to rebuild their lives". ("Sunday Times"). "Witty, probing. A myth-busting diagnosis of the method in our madness". ("Independent"). "Leader's insights could have radical consequences for the way we regard madness". ("Daily Telegraph"). "Fascinating. A formidable grasp of psychiatric history and a storyteller's flair for detail. What Leader does so effectively is to give us a sense of what it might be like to live inside the mind of a psychotic. A humane and timely book". ("New Statesman"). "Superb insights, brilliant". ("Observer"). "One of our most important contemporary thinkers". ("Guardian"). Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst practising in London and a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and of the College of Psychoanalysts - UK. He is the author of "The New Black", "Strictly Bipolar", "Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?" , "Promises Lovers Make When It Gets Late", "Freud's Footnotes" and "Stealing the Mona Lisa", and co-author, with David Corfield, of "Why Do People Get Ill?" He is Honorary Visiting Professor in the School of Human and Life Sciences, Roehampton University.

Abstract: Over the past ten to fifteen years, feminism in China has been marked by three closely related characteristics. The first is the introduction of "Western" feminism with "gender" as the core of theory import. The second is the articulation of the "trouble" this import of Western theory has caused. Chinese feminist texts abound with terms such as trouble, difficulty , and clash , which are used to express worries about the consequences of this new orientation of feminism in China. They prove that the import of Western theory and the transition to "gender" as the basic category of analysis are not the logical and unquestionable developments some authors claim them to be. A third characteristic is the search for an identity for Chinese feminism in a global context. Chinese scholars, under the impact of Western theory, turn to spatial definitions of Chinese feminism vis-a-vis international feminism and adopt the notion of the "local" to define their place in the world. This essay highlights the "troubling" effects the import of "gender" has on feminist theory building in China and delineates the various and sometimes conflicting efforts Chinese feminists have made to restabilize feminist theory and identity. These include different translations and definitions of "gender," diverging outlines of the history of Chinese feminism in a global context, various definitions of the "local," differing visions of a regional "Asian" feminism, and more complex models that try to integrate conflicting perspectives. These responses demonstrate that contrary to its universalist claims, "gender" is a specific concept that finds support among particular groups of feminists only. This essay also tries to explain why Chinese feminists insist on the "local" as a site of theory building and identity formation even where they have acquired global horizons.

Abstract: Pnina Werbner (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism, New York: Berg, 2008, 396 pages.The recent "cosmopolitan turn" in anthropology and the social sciences has been marked by international conferences and a burgeoning scholarship that distances a "new" cosmopolitanism from the charges of elitism and Eurocentricism of the Kantian-inspired post-Enlightenment cosmopolitanism that preceded it. The contemporary turn, in the context of globalization, insists upon the plurality of "cosmopolitanisms" to stress the expanded reach of the concept - hence the range of adjectives such as "vernacular," "rooted," "discrepant," "banal," "abject," "demotic" and others, to qualify the "type" of cosmopolitanism that is addressed. Pnina Werbner's edited collection, Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism, is a rich and well-organized collection of papers that makes an important contribution to this growing body of scholarship. The papers in this collection were initially presented at the diamond jubilee conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) at Keele University, U.K. The volume has several strengths but I particularly appreciated its efforts to guard against what Werbner describes as "an over-promiscuous tendency to label cosmopolitan, anyone or anything that is no longer purely local or parochial" (p. 60). Thus, this ethnographically grounded collection of papers goes a long way toward bringing a disciplinary focus to cosmopolitan talk.This book aims to "reposition" the discipline of social anthropology "in relation to an evolving new cosmopolitanism, theorized in political philosophy, sociology of globalization and postcolonial cultural studies" (p. 1). This emphasis is significant because it seeks a conversation with the large and growing body of literature in political philosophy and social theory rather than simply appraising or critiquing that literature with examples "from the field." It is, as Werbner suggests, not the fieldwork encounter that makes the anthropologist but rather the kinds of "creative, collective and cross-cultural conversations" that make for a "dialogical cosmopolitanism" of which the anthropologist is a part (p. 25). This repositioning also opens up an interesting set of questions about the history of the discipline and those who practice it, past and present - for example, were those who gathered to form the ASA 60 years ago themselves "cosmopolitan" in terms of their diverse origins and the degree of "openness to strangers" they displayed? And, what of the cosmopolitan sensibilities of those studied who also had to display some "hospitality and openness" to the stranger-anthropologist among them? The jubilee collection is thus useful for reflection and for contextualizing the present interest in cosmopolitanism in relation to the discipline's past practices and conventions. In this regard, Elizabeth Colson's commentary and "ethnography" (as she describes it) of the founding moments of the association, drawn from her own memory of participating in the initial meetings, is a particularly interesting first-hand history of the association. Reflecting on the significance of those early works and encounters, she reminds us of how the "echoes" of what these pioneers said and wrote are present in the scholarship on popular culture today and have been absorbed into the culture of the globalized cosmopolitan world of the 21st century (p. 45). Colson's bibliographic search confirms her claim. Chris Hann's paper, "Anthropology as a Cosmopolitan Discipline," is a lively engagement with the cosmopolitan nature of some of the established figures in the discipline as he elaborates the idea of a Herderian cosmopolitanism and the East European influences subsumed in the scholarship of Malinowski and GeIlner respectively.The thematic structure of this book usefully sharpens the focus of the collection. Importantly, the theme of cosmopolitanism often comes after the fact - as a concept that is deployed to reflect upon the research (even when the concept itself does not appear in the ethnographic accounts). …

Abstract: This thesis is devoted to a selection of six contemporary novels reconfiguring biblical women perceived to be largely confined to the gaps of the Scriptures: Michele Roberts’s "The Wild Girl" (1984), Margaret Atwood’s "The Handmaid’s Tale" (1985), Michele Roberts’s "The Book of Mrs Noah" (1987), Emma Tennant’s "Sisters and Strangers" (1990), Anita Diamant’s "The Red Tent" (1997), and finally Jenny Diski’s "Only Human" (2000). It shows how, in the selected corpus, each female protagonist gives herself a voice through which she can define herself as speaking subject, a voice that not only rests on language, but also, crucially, on silences. After succinct theoretical prolegomena in which the two fundamental concepts of "voice" and "silence" are defined, the first part of this doctoral research, entitled “The Silenced Feminine?,” concentrates on the common starting point of the six novels. It shows that all the selected biblical rewritings are rooted in the same two fundamental forms of silence – the "implicit dimension" and "silencing" – and adopt a complex, ambivalent approach to the Scriptures and the Judeo-Christian tradition, both feeding on them and challenging what is perceived as their almost systematic confinement of women to the silent background. Brief first explorations of the novels foreground the various ways in which the protagonists’ freedom of expression is depicted as drastically threatened or limited. The second, and most substantial part, “Voices Draped in Silences,” describes the way in which each heroine, as an answer to her silencing, strives to define herself by playing on the infinite possibilities offered by language and silence. It is divided into three sections presenting the case studies in pairs to better emphasise how two novels based on the same forms of silence exploit them in unique ways. The first section is devoted to "The Red Tent" and "The Wild Girl," where the protagonists’ struggle against their silencing is tightly interwoven with a celebration of the goddess, whose name is equally in danger of being forgotten, and where silence – in the form of the "ineffable" for "The Wild Girl," and of "eloquent silence" in both "The Wild Girl" and "The Red Tent" – is described as a path to the other and to self-knowledge. The second section concentrates on "The Book of Mrs Noah" and "Only Human," which hinge on "voice blurring" and "spectral silence." The third section focuses on "The Handmaid’s Tale" and "Sisters and Strangers," which are exploited as examples of the silence called "reticence." Finally, the third part, “Closing Silences Voicing Openness,” examines to what extent the biblical women truly make their voices heard or if the silences that they choose, or that are newly imposed on them by the end of their tales, risk silencing them again. It reveals striking similarities in the denouements of the selected works, based on the motif of the granddaughter who hears and transmits her female ancestor’s – partly – lost or buried voice. By revealing the six selected novels’ elevation of silence to a highly effective means of meeting and communicating with the other, and, as importantly, of self-definition, this thesis is meant to contribute to the (re)instatement, as a profoundly meaningful and relational phenomenon, of silence, which is too often overlooked or rejected on account of its conventional status as the opposite of language in the binary oppositions structuring Western thought.

Abstract: This is an introduction of an academic means for critical analysis of film adaptations. Critical questions specific to film adaptations need to be not only developed but established. And, these questions, these approaches, need to be accessible to students, who are not yet educationally sophisticated enough to digest purely theoretical material. "Analyzing Literature-to-Film Adaptations: A Novelist's Exploration and Guide" signifies an exploration into film adaptation from a novelists' perspective, from the author working with a screenwriter, embarking on a journey to understand the implications of literature-to-film adaptation and the complexities and problems it raises. Using well-known adaptations ("Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," "Children of Men," "The Handmaid's Tale," "The Hours;" "The Cider House Rules," "Beloved," "Atonement;" "No Country for Old Men" and "The Road") this book will put forth an understanding of film and film analysis, as well as address literary analysis; though the crux of the book will be the introduction of an academic means for critical analysis of film adaptations. It will focus on literature-to-film adaptations, or literary narratives (novels, novellas, short stories) being adapted to film.

Abstract: In the present article, I begin by inquiring about the relative inability of Brazilian evangelical Christians to utilize "culture as a weapon". While agents of other religions - and in particular Catholics and members of African-Brazilian religions - have negotiated a certain subordination of the "religious" to the "cultural" as a strategy of increasing their ecognittion and social legitimacy by including themselves in the set of "cultures" which make up the nation, Evangelical Christians have ended to develop extenalist relationships with the cultural policies proposed by the state and by transnational secular agencies. Based on ethnographic data, the present article suggests that the hesitations and ambiguities of the Evangelicals with regards to these politics are related to a more basic engagement with the production of "partial universalisms". In other words, I argue that is a constituitive part of Evangelical Christian culture to maintain tense linkages of acceptance or rejection with those visions of the world that are conventionally accepted within this context.

Abstract: The story of the book (or scroll) discovered in the course of the temple restoration at Jerusalem holds a central place in the description of Josiah's reform (2 Kings 22-23). In a dissertation written in 1805, W. M. L. de Wette identified the "Book of the Law" as the Book of Deuteronomy and pointed out the close correspondence between the Deuteronomic laws and the cultic reform carried out by Josiah. He therefore argued that the "discovered" scroll had been composed not long before its "discovery."1 Following his suggestion, an enormous amount of literature was dedicated to the analysis of the episode and its historical significance. The seventhcentury date established by de Wette for the "Book of the Law" (Deuteronomy) was accepted by the majority of scholars, who considered the "discovery" a manipulation to push forward the execution of the reform.2 The scope of the "discovered" scroll is hotly disputed today, but the term "Book of the Law" must have referred to a pre-Deuteronomic early work, the so-called Urdeuteronomium.3 Recently, however, Katherine Stott has argued that the "Book of the Law" never actually existed outside the pages of the book of Kings, and that its mention is a literary stratagem to bolster the credibility of the story within its literary context.4 Was the "discovered" scroll a virtual work, with no such document in fact existing? Stott presents three Hellenistic and Roman episodes that relate how authors who tried to give credibility to their innovative historical works invoked ostensibly "discovered" old works on whose evidence their innovations rested.5 Yet how does Stott know that the three "discovered" books were virtual artifacts? After all, an author who claims to have discovered an unknown ancient source that contradicts the currently known evidence might expect the request to present it for examination by experts, and would naturally prepare a copy of the "discovered" text. The majority of scrolls, tablets, and books "discovered" in antiquity were real artifacts that were presented to the audience.6 Stott's suggestion that the three "discovered" sources are in fact artifacts that never existed is no more than guesswork. Further, the legitimation of a historical book is quite different from that of a historical event. The story of Josiah's reform relates how the "book" was discovered, presented to the king, and later read in public. The story mentions the "book" eleven times, under different names (2 Kgs 22:8, 10, 11, 13, 16; 23:2, 3, 21, 24). The narrator's emphasis on the reality of the scroll as the force that moved forward the sequence of events and its decisive role in the legitimation of the cult reform is in marked contrast to the suggestion that the book was a virtual artifact. History is replete with episodes that can serve as analogies to almost any possible theory; the presentation of analogy in itself does not prove anything. Stott brings no evidence that proves the relevance of the three Hellenistic and Roman episodes she presents for analyzing the account of Josiah's reform. Hence, we may dismiss her claim, tak- ing as a point of departure for this discussion the commonly held assumption that the "discovered" scroll was a real artifact presented to the king and literati of Judah.7 In what follows I will examine in detail three important points pertaining to the finding of the scroll and the function of the "discovery" in the story of Josiah's reform: first, the distribution of "discovery" stories in the ancient Near East and its bearing on the biblical story; second, the verification of discovered artifacts by way of a divine oracle; and, third, the legitimation the scroll bestowed on the cult reform. I. The "Discovery" of Scrolls and Tablets in the Ancient Near East The manipulation of texts for political and propagandistic purposes as well as the "discovery" of texts in order to legitimize a present claim were well known in the ancient Near East long before Josiah's reform. …

Abstract: Introduction The image of two walking together, invoked by the Trinity Institute as one of its themes for its conference on "Reading Scripture through Other Eyes," resonates with the Contextual Bible Study movement. The work of the Bible movement in Brazil, coordinated and facilitated by the Centro de Estudos Biblicos (CEBI), draws directly on the image of the two disciples in Luke 24:13-35 who are making their way after the death of Jesus from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus. The narrator tells us that they were "talking with each other" as they walked. CEBI uses this story as an example of "popular education" in their programmatic book The Walk to Emmaus.1 Like so much of CEBIs work, the idea of using this biblical story as a programmatic resource and the details of the contextual Bible reading methodology that this story demonstrated emerged from a communal process. During a workshop in Sao Paulo in August 1991 contextual Bible reading practitioners met together, "examined the theory of popular education, clarified concepts and engaged in extensive discussions." One of the fruits of these discussions was the recognition of "the similarities that we found between the text of Luke 24:13-35 and the issues of popular education." The workshop reflections on diese similarities were then written up by Carlos Dreher, who drew upon "many other experiences" and experimented with the emerging methodological framework, reworking it as he went along. In introducing the book he makes it clear that his contribution is part of a larger movement and that this contextual Bible reading "method" is "that which we do along the way"2; method is not something fixed but something that is "done" as part of the process of action and reflection, as one moves from practice to theory, and then from theory to practice, and then from practice to theory, in an endless cycle of praxis. Dreher discerns a seven-step process in CEBIs Contextual Bible Study method, each of which is echoed in the story of the walk to Emmaus. The method begins with a recognition of "the culture of silence" which encompasses these disciples and so many of the oppressed, then shifts to the role of Jesus or the contemporary facilitator who draws near, walks together with the oppressed, listens to their perspective, asks questions, establishes trust, equalizes power relations, and enters into a analogical process of "speaking with." The third step in the methodology emphasizes the disciples' knowledge, their own analysis of reality, taking the knowledge of the oppressed as the starting point and "ground" of conversation. The fourth step is the recognition of the role of Jesus as a "popular educator," who engages in a re-reading of Scripture together with the disciples, adopting a "pedagogical posture" that interrogates both the received scriptural tradition and local understandings of reality in a dialogical and collaborative manner.3 Dreher s exploration of this fourth step is rich and complex, recognizing both its pivotal role in the contextual Bible reading process and its controversial dimensions. How much of a role the CEBItrained pedagogue plays depends on how One understands domination and resistance, and to what extent the oppressed have become ideologically "captivated" by the ideologies of the dominant.4 The fifth step acknowledges the importance of dialogical and collaborative practice in opening the eyes of the disciples and the oppressed. Re-reading Scripture is an element in this practice, but shared activity, including ritual activity like die Eucharist, and especially collaborative work, is the vital component for tran$formation and empowerment to take place. The sixth step involves "the courage to disappear," as Jesus does and as the CEBI-trained animator must, for we must believe that disciples and the oppressed generally "are capable of taking their history into their own hands." "Anything else," argues Dreher, "would be to educate for dependence. …

Abstract: Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion. By Ann Taves. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, Pp. 232. $26.95, cloth.) Religious Experience Reconsidered is the tiiird and most recent book by Ann Taves, professor of American religions and recent past president of the American Academy of Religion (2010). In this fundamentally interdisciplinary work, Taves speaks and thinks across a broad chasm: she labors skillfully, logically, and methodically to hammer out a set of analytical tools and theoretical vocabularies that will allow scholars of religion to converse with the sciences, in particular with cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. This is particularly pressing at the moment, as there is a growing interest among neuroscientists in ethical and even "religious" thinking; that is, in how the brain "on faith" works (91). As Taves prepares us to participate in such trans-disciplinary conversations, in particular to engage the recent scientific literature on religion and the mind, she urges us to reconsider and even relinquish some of those interpretive categories that have been fundamental and foundational for the study of religion. This will make the text challenging for those who are thoroughly disciplinary in their thinking, or who are defensive or protective of the categories that currently bound and define the field of religious studies. But then I imagine this challenge is very much Taves' intention. The category of "religion" is the first to come under scrutiny. For Taves, the terms "religion" and "religious," used to designate sui generis phenomena, have become obstacles to productive interdisciplinary conversation. In some sense they are territorial markers with little inherent meaning, setting "the study of religion apart from all other forms of knowledge . . . rather [than locating] it in relation to them," (14). Taves strives to shake our sentimental attachments, explaining that "religion" is an "abstraction" that we use, "to allude to webs of overlapping concepts" (165) but not a "thing" in itself. She also rejects the attendant adjectives "numinous," "sacred," "mystical" (17). Rather than "religion" or "religious," Taves prefers the term "special things" or "specialness" as providing a more generic and inclusive interpretive net (26-28). In a related move, Taves severs the near sacred pairing of the terms "religious" and "experience" so that "religious experience" is no longer a category unto itself. …

Abstract: THE RIGHT TO USE AND APPROPRIATE URBAN SPACES SUCH AS SIDEWALKS, STREETS, squares, and parks is permanently contested in capitalist cities. In this essay I argue that the notion of "public space" is not useful for describing these conflicts, but is a strategy used within them. My starting point for making this point is a conflict related by Homer in Ulysses. I then discuss the idealistic pitfalls in Jurgen Habermas' twofold "bourgeois public sphere," followed by a sketch of how the weaker point of this concept usually structures the current use of the notion of "public space." From this theoretical basis, I argue that given recent changes in the hegemonic meaning attributed to the notion of "public space" in the United States and Germany, it might be better to refrain from using it when striving for social justice and radical change. This claim is grounded in a discussion of urban debates and practices concerning the treatment of racialized bodies, the poor, and other undesirables whose exclusion and expulsion from urban spaces are legitimized with reference to the quality of "public spaces" in the context of "broken windows" policing. 1. Public as Strategy In Ithaca, around 800 BCE, Telemachos is very dissatisfied. His father, Odysseus, has been missing for 20 years, and for the last three years suitors for the hand of his mother Penelope have been besieging his house. The uninvited guests are threatening to eat him out of house and home--his own private space! The suitors' behavior can only be described as blackmail. Their spokesman, Antinous, declares: "But we are not going back to our own lands / or some place else, not until she marries /an Achaean [Greek] man of her own choosing" (2, 171-173). (1) In this situation, Telemachos convenes the first people's assembly in Ithaca in 20 years. In this agora, a term that originally referred solely to the assembly of the male freemen of the polity and only later described the location of this assembly in the polis (Kenzler, 1999:31), he is faced with a problem: the assembly can only confer on issues of public interest. For this reason, he is asked at the start of the assembly if it is "public business / he will introduce and talk about" (2, 38-39)? This he must answer in the negative: The issue here is my own need, for on my household troubles have fallen in a double sense. First, my noble father's perished, the man who was once your king and my kind father. And then there's an even greater problem, which will quickly and completely shatter this entire house, and my whole livelihood will be destroyed (2, 57-65). All modern knowledge about the early Greek agora before the middle of the seventh century B.C.E. is drawn from Homer's epics, from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Their suitability as historical sources is the subject of a long, drawn-out dispute (van Wees, 1992: 5-23). The dating of the action, the political structure of the polities described in these works, and the role of their agorai as "public spaces" are also contentious (Holkeskamp, 1997; Holscher, 1998; Kenzler, 1999: 22-30). However, researchers generally agree on one issue: with the one exception described here, it is true that in the Homerian agora "the themes discussed ... are always of general interest" (Kenzler, 1999: 34). This is obviously not the case here. It is only by means of his speech in the agora that "the private plight of Telemachus has become a public injustice" (Thornton, 1970: 69). He thereby offends the established government ideology, whereby a "distinction between public and private affairs" is recognized (van Wees, 1992: 36). He makes his private problems public in order to pursue his private interests. However, it can also be argued with good reason that Telemachos' private interests already had a public dimension before they were discussed in the agora, and that Homer depoliticizes the issue when "the threat to Odysseus' house . …

Abstract: Media ecologist Neil Postman once remarked that "A medium is a technology within which a culture grows; that is to say, it gives form to a culture's politics, social organization, and habitual ways of thinking." To what extent has the current "new media" (TV, print, and social and Internet media) created a common globalized media environment and culture? If one thinks of media in their everyday life, patterns emerge that validate the late Neil Postman's hypothesis--we all have heard variations on the following: "Have you got Facebook?"; "all the news sites are saying ..."; and the ubiquitous "have you heard about so-and-so in the blogs?" Superficially, these examples seem like banal excesses of a leisurely culture with an overabundance of free time to spend on entertainment. However, probing further, it underpins a certain truth that Postman and his colleagues in the Media Ecology Association and scholars frequently cite--that new media technologies do not just add to a culture, they transform it completely. In doing so, the old ways can only be comprehended in what Marshall McLuhan called "the rear-view mirror." Throughout the history of our species, humans have sought to "conquer time and space through speech, art and architecture, through writing and printing, and through various forms of transportation." (1) Through humanity's advancement through technology, we have also made vast changes that have had global repercussions. In the nineteenth century, the Western world, at the very least, gained access to instantaneous communication technology: the telegraph, the first ever electronic (electrically powered) method of telecommunications. This evolved and expanded with the invention of the telephone, fax machines, radio, television, and innovations such as copper and fiber-optic cable, and satellite communication--all part of the pre-computer mediated communication (CMC) revolution carried over into the "new" media culture that forms an integral part of our modern experience. (2) In the late 1980s, personal computing became more affordable and with it, telecommunications were integrated with this new technology. From this watershed, French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul proposed that the convergence of media and communication technologies (print, video, audio, and telegraph) on the computer has ... set up networks in society that have nothing whatever to do with ancient networks or traditional structures ... We cannot continue as before. Simply because the computer is there, we cannot ignore it. When the railroad and the automobile came on the scene, those who wanted could still travel by horseback. But now there is no choice. A businessman cannot acquire a computer just because he likes progress. The computer brings a whole system with it ... the technical system has become strongly integrated ... offices, means of distribution, personnel must all be adapted to it. (3) The computer has penetrated the lives of almost all people on the planet, arranging them into an interconnected, "retribalized human community within which sight and sound are global in extent," as media scholar Marshall McLuhan noted, which he termed the "global village." The mediation "space" is often now referred to as "cyberspace." (4) This global village has thrust mankind into a new "information age" or era in which human communication is "growing so fast as to be in fact immeasurable," and as media ecologist, communications scholar, and Catholic priest Walter J. Ong professed, "making human consciousness something other than what consciousness used to be" instead "moving into ... a situation where, in principle, everything that is known or has been known can be made accessible to everyone everywhere everytime." (5) If this phenomenon is truly global and we take the premises of Postman's axiom as true-to-fact, then there indeed exists a globalized culture, which these new mediums are shaping and re-shaping from day to day and even hour to hour. …

Abstract: "The Most Human Human" by Brian Christian is a mind-blowing piece of reportage that will appeal to readers of Jon Ronson's "The Psychopath Test", and an inspiring riposte to John Gray's classic "Straw Dogs" - a book that will change your whole understanding of what being human actually means...AI is on the brink of a new dawn. And so are we...Telling the difference between humans and computers used to be easy. But artificial intelligence is now so advanced that it is capable of behaving, and even thinking, in ways that have long been considered exclusive to humankind. The time has come to rethink what being human actually means...In "The Most Human Human" Brian Christian meets the world's leading artificial intelligences, finds out what they're capable of - and what makes us unique. The result is a funny, shocking, inspiring, deeply humane and intelligent book that reaches into every aspect of our lives. "Tremendously entertaining". ("Metro"). "Excellent ...a fascinating explanation of what it means to be human". ("Financial Times"). "Remarkable. A philosophical joyride. The day that a machine creates work of such wit and originality, we should all be very worried". ("The Times"). "An epic tour of philosophical, linguistic and scientific discovery. We stop off in places as far-flung as existential anxiety, predictive text and Gary Kasparov's defeat by Deep Blue". ("Time Out"). "Lively, thought-stirring, entertaining, invaluable ...compelling insights". (John Gray, "New Statesman"). At the age of twenty-six, Brian Christian has lectured at the LSE, Royal Academy, Bristol Festival of Ideas, Microsoft and Google, been interviewed on "The Daily Show", BBC and in the "Paris Review", profiled in the "Guardian", featured in "The New York Times", the "New Yorker" and on the front cover of "Atlantic", and has made numerous appearances at universities and in online videos speaking on his subject. He holds a dual degree from Brown University in computer science and philosophy, and an MFA in poetry.

Abstract: It was 1997, and the editors of a new collection on the history of the Russian "Orient" were excited. For years they had been forced to make do with published sources or whatever materials their archival handlers would allow them to see in Moscow and Leningrad, but now the USSR had collapsed and it had suddenly become possible to venture out to the "erstwhile borderlands" and "experience what only being there can provide." The "famished," as they described themselves in their introduction, were finally sitting down to the "smorgasbord." Imperial Russia was being "revisioned." Scholars were being "reborn." (1) Oh, yes, those were the days. As a graduate student at the time, I remember feeling some of the headiness myself. The Party was over, the world was young. Of course, looking back now, one cannot help but feel a little naive. Important changes were indeed taking place in the field, but it is not clear how much of this was related to access to new archives or even to the seemingly magical "paradigm shift" of the end of the USSR. A new interest in tsarist Russia as a multinational empire had appeared somewhat earlier, along with funding to support it. (2) Yet, regardless of exactly when or how it happened, Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzerini were right that a new era was dawning. Even then, there was a sense that a boom had begun, which, for better or for worse, still continues today. As Stephen Kotkin put it not long ago, only half tongue in cheek, "Apply for a grant on 'borderlands,' and you get the grant even before you hit the send button." (3) The study of the eastern regions and peoples of the Russian Empire has been central to this ongoing "imperial turn." In this essay, I survey the literature on the "East" and offer some reflections on what we have gained as well as what still seems to be missing in the field. On the one hand, the situation is clear--research on the tsarist empire and on the eastern borderlands in particular has grown exponentially over the last 20 years, both in volume and in terms of depth and sophistication. Yet it is also true, much as with most rapid expansions, that the growth in the field has been uneven, with enormous concentration on some periods and questions--perhaps too much--and not enough on others. Indeed, it's worth asking how exactly our knowledge has changed since 1991 and especially over the last decade or so as the boom has intensified. Despite the sense that we have somehow ended up with a "new imperial history," there is no single school or normative interpretation of the empire to speak of; nor is it entirely clear what the "new imperial history" actually amounts to. (4) Is it simply a focus on the empire that draws on more sources and perspectives, in particular a wider range of non-Russian, nonmetropolitan views? Is it work that prioritizes the methodology of "the new cultural history" over more traditional political and social historical approaches? Or is it a way of approaching the empire that reaches beyond "the limits of the national paradigm" to examine "political, social, and cultural actors" and the "spaces" of their activity, while offering an "archeology" of "empire" as a construct and acknowledging the unique "blend of modern and premodern identities" that defined the course of modernization in Eurasia? (5) We know more about tsarist Russia's eastern empire than we did 20 years ago, but do we understand it any better? What more do we need to know? Background to a Boom Though historians in the West studied aspects of the empire's past prior to the 1990s, there was no field of Russian imperial studies to speak of, much less a special concentration of interest in the empire's eastern borderlands and peoples. Instead, the focus was on what could loosely be called "nationalities studies," which generally meant the study of national groups other than Russians. According to the wisdom of the day, the Russians were the norm and the presumption was that we knew a lot about them already. …

Abstract: Since the "screwballs" of the classical era, romantic comedy or "romcom", in one form or another, has remained one of the most durable of Hollywood's genres. In 1934, Frank Capra's crowd-pleasing It Happened One Night famously became the first film to bag the "big five" (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing, Best Actress, Best Actor) at the Academy Awards, a feat which underlines how historically at least the genre managed to secure both critical and popular esteem. Yet the critical weight afforded to romcom in more recent times has often seemed to be inversely proportionate to its box-office pull, since the romcom has increasingly come to suffer from a reputation for trite, sentimental and conservative storytelling. In her absorbing account of postfeminist culture, for example, scholar Diane Negra argues that, "The romantic comedy that has flourished since the 1990s has shown itself to be extraordinarily adept in pigeonholing the perceived truths of women's experiences ... [speaking] from and to a neoconservative cultural context." (1) It is not just in academic circles that the romcom has often fared badly. Writing on film.com, Laremy Legel has gone as far as to suggest that, "Critics HATE romantic comedies." In an interesting albeit brief survey, Legel examines two sets of figures relating to a series of successful romcoms drawn from 2003-2008 (including such titles as 50 First Dates (2004) and The Break-Up (2006)), comparing their box-office receipts with the ratings they received on film critic website rottentomatoes.com. He notes that in contrast to their evident popular success (the two titles above made $239m between them), the films average a critics' score of just 46%, with only six romcoms in this period meriting the favourable rottentomatoes rank of "certified fresh" (ie rating 75% or more among 40 critics). (2) Legel concludes, "A critically loved "true" romantic comedy that scores at the box office is becoming non-existent." However, there has long been a co-existent school of thought in scholarly writing which argues that the romcom's maligned reputation doesn't tell the whole story. This suggests instead that with its focus on romantic bargaining, the sexual economy and shifting cultural standards, the genre is ideally placed to reflect on and critique the nature of changing values and relationships, and continues "to negotiate and respond dynamically to the issues and preoccupations of its time." (3) From this perspective, the narrative concerns of the genre can enable it to hold an instructive light up to the prejudices, fears and assumptions that too often inform our emotional and romantic entanglements. In this essay, it is this more liberal interpretation of romcom that I take further. Specifically, I want to explore how the socially critical, even subversive, potential of romcom can be seen at work in a particular body of films or "sub-genre" that has gained momentum in recent years; classical style films in which the romance centres on the desires of and for an "older" woman. (4) The absence of "women of a certain age" from cinema screens has long been one of the most grievous criticisms levied against the industry, a key instance of how, unlike their male counterparts, older women in our cultural landscape are systematically rendered invisible, spent, obsolete, as they age. For Margaret Tally, the lack of good film roles for women in mainstream cinema as a whole can be attributed to the fact that, "Men still predominantly hold positions of power in Hollywood"--with "younger men [occupying] more decision making positions ... than ever before"--executives who are driven by the belief that (other) young men are the most important audience to pursue. (5) As Tally's comments underscore, for many years, Hollywood in particular has been charged with being "youth-obsessed", chasing younger audiences by putting their likeness on-screen and, barring a handful of tired stereotypes such as the "interfering mother", virtually removing an entire demographic group from representation in the process. …

Abstract: In the late 1980s, historian Hayden White suggested the possibility of forms of historical thought unique to filmed history. White proposed the study of "historiophoty," an imagistic alternative to written history. Subsequently, much scholarly attention has been paid to the category of History Film. Yet popular concerns for historical re-presentation and heritage have not fully addressed aesthetic effects of prior history films and emergent imagistic-historiographic practices. This dissertation identifies and elaborates one such alternative historiographic practice on film, via inter-medial study attending to British and American history films, an instance of multi-platform digital historiography, and an animated film - a category of film often overlooked in history film studies. Central to this dissertation is Gilles Deleuze's development of varieties of the Movement Image. Deleuze's Movement Image includes the "discursive image," a form which has not yet broken the coherence of sensori-motor connections between the object perceived and the affective response of the viewer. Related to the "discursive image," I propose that the "descriptive image" can capture what the larger category "representation" and the cinema-specific "spectacle" cannot. Drawing from literary and art-historical conceptions of the differences between "descriptive" and "narrative" forms, I propose that in the history film, the "descriptive image" functions as a meta-critical aesthetic, insisting that viewers perceive naturalized relationships as instead contingent. I argue that, rather than a "mature form" of realism, the "descriptive image" is a form of critical realism. Descriptive images are characterized by: long takes of long shots; the co-presence and co-equivalence of objects; a point of view neither neutral nor attributable to a character; and expressions of scope or forms for framing that assert that the given view is only one view from the set of possible views. Thus I examine exemplary texts that demonstrate a difference between "narrative understanding" and "descriptive understanding." These texts, despite their material differences, similarly present mixed historiographic forms, and enable us to see what studies of history on film, in their interest in re-presentation over presentation, have often missed: "descriptive images" allow us to differentiate the event of the film from an inadequate copy of an historical event.

Abstract: Why is it so hard to say anything about politics from outside politics? Why can there be no discourse about politics that is not itself political? --J. M. Coetzee (Diary 9) What are we to make of J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year? One of the first things to note is that it is an unconventionally structured text, to say the least. Consisting as it does of different sections that are generically quite diverse, it is of a piece with Coetzee's other recent "novels"--if we can call them that--in being marked by what Michael Marais has called their "perfunctory treatment of narrative" (193). (1) Though the "novel" is divided into two parts, "Strong Opinions" and "Second Diary," the connection between them is not immediately apparent. Not only is the second diary undated, but a first one appears to be missing, while "Strong Opinions"--which does not really look much more like a diary than the undated "Second Diary" does--is dated ("12 September 2005-31 May 2006"). Even more immediately striking is the architecture of the pages and the challenges this poses for the reader. Most pages consist of initially two, later three, parallel sections: essays in political philosophy, letters, a fictional narrative. Thus "Strong Opinions" starts with a philosophical essay on the origins of the state (3) while the second section of the opening page, which appears below a line subdividing it, is written in a different mode entirely, seeing that it concerns the as-yet unnamed narrator's encounter with a "quite startling young woman" wearing a "tomato-red shift" that is "startling in its brevity." As the juxtaposition of these sections suggests, the division of the text on individual pages appears to be between essays of political philosophy and commentary on political events on the one hand and, on the other, self-reflexive literary narrative below the line--an opposition that, as is already apparent on the opening page, also juxtaposes mind and body, argument and desire. Given these generically diverse sections and their combination on particular pages, how is one to read the text? What is the text suggesting about the relation between politics and literature, or political philosophy and literary writing? And how might we understand the conjunction here of the serious and the playful, perhaps even the sublime and the profane? These questions are lent particular urgency by the fact that Coetzee--or rather, "JC," as the putative author of the opinions collected in the texts signs himself in a letter to Anya (Diary 123), the owner of the red smock whom he subsequently engages as a typist--explicitly presents the text, or at least the parts of it made up of primarily political, essayistic opinions, as "a response to the present in which I find myself" (67). (2) How does the peculiar form of the text, and the problems of reading that it poses, relate to its status as a response to the present, to such issues as the "permanent state of exception" (as Agamben might say) and the war on terror (e.g. Diary 21, 37); the abrogation of the rule of law (e.g. 17-18, 39) and the torture of enemy combatants (e.g. 171-72); the systematic maltreatment and slaughter of non-human animals (e.g. 63- 65); the "shameful" fate of corporatized universities (35), and the brutality of an economic order founded on the assumed necessity of competition as the "sublimation of warfare" (80)? What is the relation between the forceful, direct, "strong opinions" articulated in response to the present on the one hand, and the underlying narrative on the other? As I shall show, one way of approaching Diary of a Bad Year is to recognize that it addresses, and attempts to negotiate, a longstanding worry of Coetzee's concerning the relation between politics and literature: if the text, or at least its political-philosophical sections, is in part an attempt to respond to the present, then the political character of this engagement renders it vulnerable to the predations of those in power, namely politicians. …

Abstract: The "implied author" (IA) as first proposed by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) has become "a household word" in the critical discourse on narrative fiction (Nunning, "Implied Author" 239). Due to the lack of agreement about what the term actually designates, it has aroused heated critical debate (for recent summaries, see Phelan 38-49; Kindt and Muller 63-121; Richardson 114--33; Nanning "Reconceptulizing" 91-97; Booth "Resurrection"; Shen "Booth's" 171-76; Schmid; Shaw). The debate "shows no signs of letting up," and some theorists predict that still more discussion is very much in order (Richardson 115; see also Nunning "Implied Author" 240). Summarizing the debate in the Routledge encyclopedic entry "Implied Author," Ansgar Nunning says, "Most objections raised against the implied author concern potential theoretical contradictions in Booth's formulation of the concept. For example, it seems to be a contradiction in terms to define the implied author as the structure of the text's norms and thus to conflate it with the text as a whole, and at the same time cast it in the role of the addresser in the communication model of narrative." ("Implied Author" 240) Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Muller also see contradiction or inconsistency in Booth's own formulation of the concept which "leaves open the question of whether the implied author is (1) an intentional product of the author in or qua the work or (2) an inference made by the recipient about the author on the basis of the work" (7--8). They assert that a "sensible" explication of the implied author "must not try to explicate the concept as the contradictory whole that it is, but should seek instead to elucidate its individual components separately from one another in order to identify what, if any, possible explications for them emerge" (12, see also 151-82). But if we examine Booth's own words carefully, we'll find that Booth's own formulation is quite logical and coherent, basically free from the theoretical contradictions alleged by many commentators. Such contradictions are primarily attributable to other critics' misinterpretation of an expression Booth quite consistently used, though in varied forms, namely, the real author's "creating" the implied author. Revealing the essential meaning of this key expression in its varied forms is a crucial step in getting at the true referent of the "implied author." In what follows, I'll first explore what the "implied author" actually refers to and reveal the major reasons underlying previous misunderstandings of the concept. Then I'll discuss the relevance and significance of the concept in today's critical context. The True Referent of "Implied Author" To grasp the essence of the implied author, we have to find out, first of all, what the term "create" means in Booth's claim that the novelist creates the implied author as he writes the text: To some novelists it has seemed, indeed, that they were discovering or creating themselves as they wrote. As Jessamyn West says, it is sometimes "only by writing the story that the novelist can discover--not his story--but its writer, the official scribe, so to speak, for that narrative." ... it is clear that the picture the reader gets of this presence is one of the author's most important effects. However impersonal he may try to be his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner.... his di f ferent works will imply different versions, different ideal combinations of norms. Just as one's personal letters imply different versions of oneself depending on the differing relationships with each correspondent and the purpose of each letter, so the writer sets himself out with a different air depending on the needs of particular works. (Rhetoric 71; my emphasis) Despite various unwitting 'mystifications' of the "implied author" by later critics, as far as the encoding process is concerned, the "implied author" in Booth's own formulation is no other than "the writer [who] sets himself out with a different air" or the person "who writes in this manner. …

Abstract: Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe, eds. Christotainment: Selling Jesus through Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Westview Press, 2009. 306 + xiipp. $40.50 (CAD). ISBN: 978-0-8133-4405-8 That religion and culture in Western society have long been wed comes as no surprise. Likewise, religion and the state, despite the high wall that separates them, also have a long history together that continues into the present time. For example, John McCain and Barack Obama both publicly claimed to be Christians during the last presidential race in the United States. It is the political and ideological underpinnings of this relationship between Christianity and culture, or Christotainment, which Christotainment sees as the hostile takeover of culture and politics by "Dominionist Fundamental Christians" that it seeks to examine and understand (7-11). The book is a collection of essays written by various scholars in the fields of education, cultural studies, and communication. Each essay aims to examine some aspect of the relationship between "evangelical" Christianity and culture or politics. Chapters one and two, "Selling a New and Improved Jesus" and "Christian Soldier Jesus," written by Kincheloe, one of the book's editors, examine the role of "Domininionist Fundamental" Christians in American politics and the "Dominionist" takeover of Christian media. Each of these essays charges this particular group of Christians with exploiting media and politics for its own aims. Chapter three, "Onward Christian Drivers," examines the particularly Christian overtones in NASCAR, paying special attention to the evangelistic efforts of the drivers themselves. Chapter four, "The Gospel According to Mel Gibson," offers a critique of the popular movie The Passion of the Christ, arguing that it presents a fundamentalist, biased, and factually incorrect version of the Passion narratives. Chapter five, "Convertoons," offers a balanced review of the animated Veggie Tales series that chronicles its attempt to break into the mainstream market. Chapter six, "Screening Jesus," looks at Christian film and television, arguing that Christian film lacks any significant entertainment value. Its popularity by culture is primarily a reflection of the infiltration of religion into the everyday lives of people. Chapters seven and eight, "The Battle for the Toy Box" and "Faith Talking Toys and Other Youth Purity Makers," look at the various ways in which Christian companies offer alternative versions of secular toys and thus develop ways for Christian youth to mark their identity. …

Abstract: IN A PREFATORY LETTER TO GEORGE AND GEORGIANA, KEATS CLAIMS TO have written the Ode to Psyche because he is "more orthodox tha[n] to let a he[a]then Goddess be so neglected" (1) In its most apparent sense, this pose of Hellenic orthodoxy sounds typical of the "Cockney classicism" that has increasingly come to define one aspect of Keats's literary practice Situating Keats in the "Cockney school" has helped to illuminate the worldly and oppositional character of poetry that previously seemed aestheticizing or escapist In particular, Nicholas Roe and Jeffrey Cox have reemphasized the oppositional use to which Greek antiquity was often put (2) By aligning himself with history's victims--specifically that "old religion" made obsolete during the Augustan age, but arguably also its modem counterparts--Keats positions himself against the geopolitical power he often refers to simply as "Christianity" (3) But criticizing Christianity may not be as radical or as simple a posture as is sometimes assumed A number of scholars, most recently Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, have argued that Christianity and secularism have more in common than Cockney classicism would suggest Challenging "subtraction stories" of secularization, in which the emergence of "secular" values like liberal pluralism and autonomous state institutions is characterized as a removal of religion, Taylor has argued that such values can be understood as developments of a specifically Christian logic (4) On this argument, Keats's secularist program, which often seems to give him his subversive edge, may in fact be substantially continuous with what it claims to be critiquing Moreover, recent critiques of secular politics, from scholars like Talal Asad, Gil Anidjar and others, pursue the more dramatic possibility that the "invention" of the distinction between secular and religious has served the interests of a state power bent on the management and coercion of its subjects That distinction has been conditioned, they argue, by the governmental interests of colonial expansion, as well as the Orientalist scholarship that underwrote that expansion Anidjar offers perhaps the most stringent version of this critique when he proposes that the secular is not just religion's continuation by other means, but that both "the religious and the secular are terms that have persisted historically, institutionally in masking the one pertinent religion,"--that is, Christianity (5) To the extent that Keats's paganism remains caught up in a critique of religion, it is open to the challenge that secularism "is a name Christianity gave itself when it invented religion, when it named its other or others as religions" (6) Keats may call Hunt's Examiner a "Battering Ram against Christianity," but both Hunt's Religion of the Heart and Keats's Ode to Psyche would, on Anidjar's argument, be examples of Christianity carrying on in the form of "secularized religion" (7) If this is right, and the interests of the secular are still those defined by Western Christendom, it raises a substantial problem for the Ode to Psyche Even if we follow Mark Canuel in tracing an evolution in Keats's thinking from an early, wholesale critique of religion as "vulgar superstition" into a strategy of "logically symmetrical alliances with opposing beliefs," such "toleration," however much it helps articulate the politics of the Ode's gesture toward its marginalized fellow-travelers, may not escape the challenge raised by Anidjar: namely, that such oppositional toleration is itself part of Christianity's own mis-recognition (8) Keats's "more orthodox" posture cultivates a rhetorical alliance with Greek paganism, but may fail to recognize the various ways in which this alliance sequesters Greek religion within the interests of Christendom At stake here methodologically is what we might call a "genealogy of the secular," an analysis to which Keats's poem is vulnerable insofar as its critique of religion proceeds by challenging Christian history and attempting to recover a pagan past which that history overwrites, a past understood to be more "tolerant" and "progressive …

Abstract: The assignment to write a historiographical article on "Rulers and Ruled" in Russia led me to reflect on a vital aspect of Russian history, arguably one of the most significant paradigms of our view on the Russian past. The lessons of the traditional state school and the judgmental concept of a despotic autocracy have to a large extent been left behind. (1) Yet, while it appears to be pretty clear what lies behind us, it is much less clear where we are headed. This is, to be sure, not a bad thing, although it can be vexing. Fifteen years ago, the title suggested by the editors for this essay might have been "State and Society," or "Autocracy and the People," or perhaps even "Autocracy versus Society." Such a title would have implied that the Russian past was genuinely problematic and pointed to the same old question: "What went wrong with Russia?" By contrast, "Rulers and Ruled" opens up a wide range of intriguing new questions. Does this conceptual pair imply a dichotomy or rather an integrated entity; does it suggest tension or harmony, separateness or interaction? Who exactly are rulers, and who belongs among the ruled? What existing paradigms in the field can help us grasp this pair? The answers to these questions depend strongly on the object of our focus. In political terms, historians often translate the words "rulers and ruled" into "emperor and elite." In this binary opposition between emperor and elite, the latter often appear to play the progressive role, struggling for more individual rights and less autocratic arbitrariness. For instance, noble interest in property rights in the 18th and 19th centuries is generally understood in a liberal context. (2) Yet the seemingly progressive nobility quickly adopts the role of the oppressor when the historian's perspective shifts. If we examine the relationship between nobles and the enserfed peasantry, the nobility's enhanced property rights stand for increased administrative and personal power over humans. "This essay is not going to deal with the history of serfdom or serf owners. But the ambiguous position of the Russian nobility as subjects and masters demonstrates the fluidity of power-based relationships. "Rulers and ruled" is a relative concept. Arguably, this is one of its advantages: it promises a more flexible approach than the traditional dualism of "autocracy and society." Historians' perspectives on "rulers and ruled" have also shifted due to the complexity of imperial relationships. Although I do not focus on the results of research in any detail here, it has been widely acknowledged that all power relationships in Russia were necessarily influenced, sometimes reinforced or at times transformed, by the dynamics of ethnic and cultural hierarchies? Finally, chronology is of the essence. Even if the period covered by this article can be categorized simply and consistently as "imperial Russia," scholars divide it up among themselves quite strictly. The 18th century, only rarely spilling over into the reign of Alexander I, provides one era of specialization, while the early 19th century is usually distinguished from the post-1861, "late imperial," period. I believe that the questions mentioned above will be answered differently, depending on the time frame. The relationship of "rulers and ruled" appears differently to historians of the 18th century than to those of the late imperial era. For this reason, I structure this article according to the generally accepted periodization and begin with the 18th century. The 18th Century: The Challenges of Enlightenment The 18th century is generally considered to be a time when enlightened discourses dominated a narrow intellectual elite. From Peter I to Catherine II, rulership was conceptualized in the frame of the modern state and enlightenment, and the administration endeavored to include all subjects into the project of a "well-ordered police state." (4) This universal inclusion can be considered progressive or coercive--or a mixture of both--but it suggests a concept of integration rather than fragmentation. …

Abstract: The aim of this article is to show clearly what the terms "object" and "objectivity" as used over the centuries of modern philosophy — from the time of Descartes down to the time of Wittgenstein and Husserl, i.e., from early modern Rationalism and Empiricism to late modern Phenomenology and Analytic philosophy — have obscured. Objectivity, far from being "the ability to consider or represent facts, information, etc., without being influenced by personal feelings or opinions; impartiality; detachment, " as the OED would have it, is fundamentally the condition of occupying the position of the significate in a triadic relation the foreground element of which is a sign vehicle conveying that significate to or for some third. Simply put, an "object" is a significate, a fact that common usage has come to obscure by sedimenting the influence of modern philosophy's reversal of the meaning of the terms "subjective" and "objective, " where the former has come to signify "private opinion" in contrast to "the way things are. " But this sedimentation to the level of common usage of modern solipsistic epistemology is precisely a usage that semiotic analysis of the linguistic sign overcomes, showing that in the expression "object signified" the qualification "signified" is redundant, for an object is nothing other than something signified! Thus "significate," a term that modern dictionary makers resist, says clearly what the term "object" says obscurely; and a great deal of mischief in philosophy over the centuries after Descartes has been the result of this distinctively modern obscurantism in philosophy.

Abstract: The Garden of God: A Theological Cosmology. By Alejandro Garcia-Rivera. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009. Pp. 157. $22. Cosmological concerns abound in the world today. In this year, the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks in the United States, ideological fighting has manifested itself in continued war in the Middle East, debilitating political infighting in the United States, terrorist acts worldwide, and an "Arab Spring" that have shaken the stability of the human community, the environment, and our ability to see the world as it is, especially, its potential beauty and goodness. Traditionally, theologians have waded in the dangerous cultural conversations about war, human suffering, and oppression. In recent years, theologians have added environmental science (specifically, theories about climate change) and biology (specifically, ideas about evolution) to their reflections on God, the world, and the relationship between the two. Theological attempts to join scientific conversations have been challenged from a cadre of atheistic (Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) and "antitheistic" (Sam Harris) scientists. This group has developed a new canon of literature which challenges belief in God and theological attempts to use science to develop a modern cosmology which also serves as a faith-based foundation for moral living. In the midst of current and future struggles and debates about the synthesis of science and theology for a theological cosmology, Alejandro Garcia-Rivera suggests that we garden. In a way reminiscent of Gandhi's suggestion that his compatriots spin thread, Garcia-Rivera suggests that we should all come to appreciate the cosmos as a "garden of God" in this, his last book written before his death. Garcia-Rivera contrasts this metaphor with Augustine's "city of God." His use of the metaphor also is meant to foster reflection on the central Christian garden story, the story of the Garden of Eden. This metaphor, however, is used to do much more. Garcia-Rivera synthesizes theology and science through the work of Charles Darwin and, in a unique way, Teilhard de Chardin and Hans Urs von Balthasar, to argue for an understanding of the cosmos as an "entangled bank" of beautiful, interdependent realities that is similar to a garden. This metaphor is helpful, Garcia-Rivera argues, because gardens require a "creative receptivity," an approach to the world that involves an appreciation of and respect for the given, gift-like, objective quality of the cosmos. Garcia-Rivera's proposal for attending to the realities that threaten the cosmos is for a creative, "disciplined spiritual technology." By "technology," Garcia-Rivera means human creative activity which he believes should be "as much art as it is craft." The mission of this technology, furthermore, should be the creation of a "garden of God," a "life-giving place for human becoming" that addresses "our human frailty" (125-26). Garcia-Rivera's work is part of a new tradition of theological aesthetics that has developed in the wake of the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar.1 In chapter four, Garcia-Rivera outlines an argument that utilizes his particular use of von Balthasar's notion of "form." Garcia-Rivera offers a synthesis that involves an explanation of evolutionary theory based not on efficient causality but on his understanding of formal causality, that is, on an appreciation of "natural" or "living" forms. Garcia-Rivera distinguishes his notion of form from that found in "classical philosophy or art theory" (84). "Living form," he explains, "is form that cannot be pinned down in any absolute way. It is form that is contingent, dynamic, and even kenotic" (84). Garcia-Rivera uses this understanding and appreciation of natural forms to identify the experience of "nonequilibrium thermodynamics" in the physical sciences as an experience of a (quintessential) form of beauty, one that helps us to appreciate the beauty of the rest of the cosmos (84-5). …

Abstract: Geoffrey P. Miller argues that the narratives from "Genesis" to "Second Kings" present a sophisticated argument for political obligation and for limited monarchy as the best form of government. The Hebrew Bible, in this sense, can be considered as one of the earliest political philosophies of the western world. The Garden of Eden story identifies revelation, consent, utopia, natural law, ownership, power, patriarchy, and justice as bases for political obligation. The stories of life after the expulsion from Eden argue that government and law are essential for a decent life. "The Genesis" narratives recognize patriarchal authority but also identify limits based on kinship, higher authority and power. The book of "Exodus" introduces the topic of political authority, arguing that nationhood strictly dominates over other forms of political organization. "The Sinai" narratives explore two important sources of authority: revelation and consent of the governed. The book of "Joshua" presents a theory of sovereignty conceived of as the exclusive and absolute control over territory. The book of "Judges" examines two types of national government: military rule and confederacy. It argues that military rule is inappropriate for peacetime conditions and that the confederate form is not strong enough to deliver the benefits of nationhood. The books of "Samuel" and "Kings" consider theocracy and monarchy. The bible endorses monarchy as the best available form of government provided that the king is constrained by appropriate checks and balances. Contrary to the view of some scholars, no text from "Genesis" to "Second Kings" disapproves of monarchy as a form of government.

Abstract: "INNATE TALENTS ARE, we think, a fiction, not a fact."1 Psychologists Michael Howe, Jane Davidson, and John Sloboda threw down the gauntlet with this bold statement that summarized the gist of their provocative target article, "Innate Talents: Reality or Myth?," published in 1998. The authors' opening salvo was hardly controversial. It is widely believed that the likelihood of becoming exceptionally competent in certain fields depends on the presence or absence of inborn attributes variously labeled "talents" or "gifts" or, less often, "natural aptitudes."2 But they then proceeded to completely debunk the notion they branded "the talent account," concluding that: Even people who are not believed to have any special talent can, purely as a result of training, reach levels of achievement previously thought to be attainable only by innately gifted individuals.3 They further defended their takedown of the talent account by citing its importance in educational and policy decisions, and the observation that belief in this account is especially ubiquitous among those who instruct, pursue, and support musical training: teachers, students, and parents. Within the accelerated timeline of cognitive science, 1998 is in the far distant past, yet the strong contemporaneous responses provoked by the Howe et al. title question still reverberate. In the interim, the popular press has seized on both the talent account and what it really takes to achieve success, particularly in professional sports and marketing. Books like Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers codified the so-called "10,000 Hour Practice Rule,"4 and the title of Daniel Coyle's The Talent Code foreshadowed his thesis: that the "code" can be cracked (with a little help from recent research in cognitive science).5 The talent account demands reconsideration, not just by academic psychologists or for-profit motivational speakers, but more urgently by practitioners who actually work with those deemed to possess (or not to possess) that most intangible of attributes, talent. THE CRITICS SPEAK: PSYCHOLOGISTS "Innate Talents: Reality or Myth?" roused a variety of strong responses from among reigning luminaries in cognitive science at the time of its publication. August cognitive psychologist Robert J. Sternberg weighed in with a response whose snarky title presaged his opinion. In "If The Key's Not There, The Light Won't Help," Sternberg declared "deliberate practice" as patently obvious "for proficient levels of competence," and charged Howe and company with citing studies that were "almost all irrelevant to the issue."6 (Indeed, one study proffered the ability of seasoned cocktail waitresses to "regularly remember as many as 20 drink orders at a time" as proof that it is training that accounts for success, and not talent.)7 Another researcher allowed that even though the Howe et al. article demonstrated "little evidence for the talent account," he still wasn't buying "training and early experience" as the only factors that can account for individual achievement.8 This author's plaintive plea, "Might we adopt the learning-related account instead of the talent account?," and his subsequent suggestion that there are "problematic social implications" in stressing hard work alone, "especially in cultures in which effort is emphasized," revealed his own biases: the late Giyoo Hatano was a professor of cognitive science at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan, a country that suffers one of the world's highest suicide rates among industrialized nations.9 The causes for suicide are varied and complex, but most experts attribute Japans epidemic suicide problem to the toxic result of personal failure within a culture that values extreme effort. Several respondents stressed the importance of industriousness, basically agreeing with the authors' contention that talent is a myth, in part because "emphasis on innate talent as the basis for outstanding achievement underestimates the importance of hard work. …

Abstract: African Americans became increasingly mobile during the early twentieth century, as exemplified by the Great Migration that began around 1910. Reflecting the general anxiety about such racial mobility, the March 2, 1911, issue of The Independent included an article about racial passing, "When Is a Caucasian Not a Caucasian?" Referring to the downfall of a "white" family whose part-black ancestry, unknown even to themselves, accidentally became public, the anonymous author discusses the "stupidity" and "cruelty" of the one-drop law and advises "all white negroes" to leave the South and live as "white people" so that, "as the bleaching process goes on, the conundrum will cease to concern them, When is a Caucasian not a Caucasian?" Despite the author's insight into the precarious nature of racial categories, the article's logic is predicated on the assumption of stable whiteness. On the one hand, along with its title, the article's rhetorical question "Who knows where ... it [the family's tragedy] may strike next?" emphasizes that any white person can really be nonwhite. On the other hand, to highlight the "stupidity" and "cruelty" of white supremacy, the writer must posit an unquestionably pure-white man as the society's representative. Thus, concerning the husband who annulled his marriage to an unwitting passer under Louisiana's "infamous law against intermarriage," the article states that "[t]here was no question that he was a full Caucasian" (479) despite its ongoing claim of the endless questionability of pure whiteness. One finds such simultaneous refutation and affirmation of clear-cut racial classification in James Weldon Johnson's novel about passing published a year later, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). As Samira Kawash points out, the novel's scrutiny of the racial binary even problematizes "the simple 'black passing for white' logic of passing ... and its attendant model of race as the expression of a prior, embodied identity," so that the "Ex-Coloured Man's relation to blackness is shown to be as inauthentic as his relation to whiteness; rather than being 'both black and white,' he is in fact neither black nor white" (70). At the same time, the novel seems to contradict its own racial investigation when it draws plot development, dramatization, and closure from the essentialist and binary-predicated assumption that the Ex-Colored Man looks white but is actually black. (1) Indeed, though the character, with his endlessly fluid identity, cannot but feel he has "never really been a Negro" (Johnson, Autobiography 153), his narrative only suppresses this indeterminacy by beginning with a confession of "the great secret of [his] life" as a passer (1), featuring those scenes that revolve around his alleged blackness (e.g., his dramatic first recognition of not being a "white scholar" at elementary school [11]), and ending with a regret for abandoning black identity as his "birthright" (154). (2) I argue that while the Independent article's tacit belief in pure whiteness undermines its own racial critique, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man utilizes the narrator's same belief--and his resulting self-identification as passing-white, that is, deviation from real, pure whiteness--to show how white hegemony reproduces itself by limiting one's ability to speak outside of the white/black binary opposition. (3) In other words, Johnson configures the text so that, while the Ex-Colored Man's white body can put the idea of whiteness into question, (4) the character-narrator fails to convey this subversive potential because the white-dominant system of order and hierarchy controls his approach not only to race but also to storytelling itself. Johnson signals this interconnection between racial hierarchy, narrative order, and white-dominant discourse through the way the Ex-Colored Man fictively stabilizes his indeterminate race--and, accordingly, the story itself--to accommodate the white audience he (the Ex-Colored Man) has in mind. …

Abstract: How should one go about addressing the politics of prosody? In recent years scholars of Victorian poetry have tended to choose among three alternatives. The first is what we might call the "reflective" model. In this school of thought, poetic meter points us to the temporal patterns of social life, mirroring or enacting a historically specific shaping of experiential time. Herbert F. Tucker, for example, reads the meter of Barrett Browning's "Cry of the Children" as revealing the uncomfortable disjuncture between the embodied time of human life and the jolting experience of factory labor. "Nauseatingly ill-proportioned to human measure," Barrett Browning's "stop-and-start versification mimics the strain and clatter of steam-driven machinery." (1) Similarly, Ivan Kreilkamp suggests that Victorian poetry could be read in a newly "super-charged realm of electricity, speed, heat, and light," offering up metrical experiences of social "shock ... mobility, acceleration, discontinuity, the transitory, the elusive and the ephemeral." (2) One of Kreilkamp's most vivid examples comes from Aurora Leigh, a passage when Aurora flees "southward in the roar of steam" (VII.396). Barrett Browning emerges here as ambivalent, torn between excitement at the "velocity and eroticized power" of the train and horror at its "frightening bath of sound in which individual voice and thought are submerged and overwhelmed" (p. 608). The reflective model, then, is a way of reading metrical forms for their mirroring of lived temporalities, allowing us access to the power and pain of contemporary modes of production. (3) The second general way of reading the politics of meter, which we might call the "expressive" model, is one that takes prosody as a purposeful expression of political positions or convictions. Jason Rudy, for example, draws attention to the difference between the metrical patterns of Victorian ballads and those found in Spasmodic poetry. Rudy explains that ballads in the 1850s were simple, widely accessible national songs which, by popular demand, kept to strictly predictable patterns, "offer[ing] insistent regularity as a model for cultural stability." (4) "Through their formal regularity, ballads insist on 'law' rather than 'anarchy,'" he writes (pp. 591-592). And yet, Rudy explains, the same period saw the Spasmodic poets opting for violent, abrupt, jerking rhythms, deliberately repellent to conservative readers. Metrical forms thus express positions on a political spectrum that range from an embrace of unity and stability to radically unsettling conflict and lawlessness. Perhaps the most venerable tradition of reading the politics of literary form--and one that still wields considerable persuasive power--is the Marxist model. Here, critics read literary forms as struggling to contain or repress the reality of social conflicts and contradictions. Garrett Stewart writes, for example, that "in contriving to secure its formal symmetries," a literary text may offer "a formal recompense for totality's absence from any other life sphere." (5) Thus the resolutions achieved by a text's prosodic patterns appear as vain but compelling attempts to cover over the terrifying impossibility of achieving real social resolutions. In this light, Tennyson's "sad mechanic exercise" (In Memoriam V.7) is indeed numbing; the comforts of metrical regularity dull our access to the real pain of loss, though rather than the private or intimate loss of a beloved friend they numb us to the very possibility of collective social relationship. In practice, these three models are not mutually exclusive. Isobel Armstrong's magisterial Victorian Poetry moves in astonishingly complex ways among the ideological, the reflective, and the expressive. A poet such as Tennyson emerges in Armstrong's study as both highly self-conscious and deeply ideological, fully intending to resolve social contradictions through myth and yet, in his brilliant lyrics, also exposing the material conditions of social life and the temporal patterns of industrial labor. …

Abstract: I. Introduction: The Limits of Reanimation When Robert Browning published his 1868-89 book-length "murder poem," The Ring and the Book, his reputation as a poet "with special gifts of intellect and originality" that were at the same time put in the service of a poetics of great "crudity" and "jolting violence" seemed once again confirmed. (1) "I felt ... like a creature with one leg and one wing, half hopping, half flying," Browning's friend William Allingham said after reading the poem's first volume, while others characterized the poem as "incongruous materials" incapable of forming a "harmonious whole," or as simultaneously "life-like" and a "morbid anatomy." (2) These friends and reviewers, torn as they were between awe at the poem's intellectual ambition and disgust at its aesthetic execution, envisioned their ambivalence as states of bodily transformation and incomplete states at that: halfway from legs to wings, from parts to a whole, from life to death. Without acknowledging directly the grotesque corporeality so prevalent in many of Browning's most well-known dramatic monologues, these readers nonetheless see the almost-changed body as a metaphor for Browning's poetic strangeness: a strangeness characterized by the formal tension, as the historian Thomas Carlyle would have it, between "an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines" and a long dramatic monologue, or, as Browning himself wrote in his "Essay on Shelley," between poetry that "reproduces things external" and poetry that is the "radiance and aroma of [the poet's] personality." (3) In Browning's dramatic monologues, as in the responses above, the changing body--specifically, in the monologues, the once-dead body, the almost-alive-again body--is a locus for aesthetic experimentation that both critiques poetry's inevitably subjective relation to facts--historical facts, observable facts, and the facts of literary influence--and uses that relationship as the basis for generic innovation. The reanimated body, whether appearing in poems like The Ring and the Book or in shorter dramatic monologues like "Porphyria's Lover" and "My Last Duchess," becomes a figure through which Browning considers the fraught relation between unassailable historical materiality and original aesthetic practice--between the dictates of what has come before and the desire to create something new out of it. The dramatic monologue, in its dual capacity functioning as a critical and always-ironic foil to the multiple projects of aesthetic "resurrection" so in vogue during the nineteenth century--the Arthurian revival in art and literature, the vogue for museum exhibitions that recreated ancient tombs, and phenomena like magic lantern shows and spirit photography--as a form becomes both a self- conscious vehicle for poems of reanimation and a mode of reanimation itself. While critics have argued that we can see the dramatic monologue as "a form of verbal resuscitation of the dead, a quasi-Spiritualist voicing of dead men and women," (4) and Victorian reviewers especially found in Tennyson's dramatic monologues "the secret of the transmigration of the soul," dramatic monologues in which the dead come to life in turn call our attention to the limits of the poet's reanimating power by exposing the inherent subjectivity of any resuscitative poetic project. (5) These monologues embody the fictive and necessarily inventive nature of aesthetic resuscitation: nothing can come back from the dead unless the poet reanimates it. Browning uses his dramatic monologues to draw an analogy between corporeal reanimation and poetic practice, and in doing so probes, critiques, and reinvents the process by which new, "living" poetry can emerge from the intransigent bodies of the past. His "necropoetics" bring long-dead voices back to life, but not with the expectation that his monologists will speak truth. Rather, the inalterable fact of their deaths creates the condition necessary for Browning to scrutinize and to relish the imaginative truths his own poetics of aesthetic resurrection could reveal. …

Abstract: This article examines, through several ethnographic examples taken from my empirical multi-sited fieldwork, the logics and the mechanisms of the global circulation of a specific music-based "youth subculture": hardcore punk. More broadly, it proposes a shift of perspective in the examination of similar phenomena by adopting (1) a stance that refuses to consider entities such as "cultural areas", "subcultures", "cultural" and "subcultural identities", "local" and "global" as taken-for-granted analytical concepts, but rather considers them as the result of continual actions by social actors who create and maintain such loci of action; (2) a method that allows us to focus on the mechanisms of circulation themselves rather than on the modalities of "delocalization" and "relocalization", mainly by tracking ideas, conventions, people and material objects. From this perspective and on the basis of my ethnographic material, I demonstrate to what extent and under which modalities the hardcore scene takes the form of a global network bounding different units of social situations.