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“The uncanny valley” indicates that as a robot approaches a nearly human state, initial positive responses quickly turn to strong revulsion. After reviewing various explanations for this phenomenon, this chapter interprets the uncanny feeling towards humanoids not as a response to a lack of humanness but rather as a response to the inability to fathom and appropriate what makes the viewer of the robot different from the robot, that is, what makes the viewer human. The more technologies become intrusive, the more this inability is intensified, making the technological uncanny a permanent dimension of selfhood. As a result, technology cannot be simply externalized and conceived as an outside factor that can determine or liberate us, nor as something that can destroy or strengthen us. This insight calls for a more sophisticated account of how technology is shaping us, as well as how we would like to be shaped by it.

The conclusion draws together the diverse narrative strands that characterized the 19th- and 20th-century colonial humanitarian project. It reemphasizes the argument of the book by redirecting attention to the colonial ambivalence towards animals. It argues that the colonial project of protection towards animals – a largely unsuccessful one at that – demonstrated how the colonial state, predicated on benevolence, constantly sought to control, subjugate and discipline its subjects – human and non-human. Nonhuman animals became powerful signifiers and markers of identities, and yet remained marginal to the larger project of colonial control, which was bent on dominating human subjects more than nonhumans. Each of the case studies in the preceding chapters – politics of rinderpest control, slaughterhouse inspection, and carters’ strikes are the outcome of the colonial ambivalence. Additionally, the conclusion argues that knowledge produced in the colony was a product of a network of material, social, and scientific relations between and among human and non-human actors.

This chapter discusses the early work of experimental filmmaker and artist Barbara Hammer. Focusing on the first two decades of her career, it demonstrates how Hammer’s working method demands the expansion of the parameters of the idea of feminist queer cinema to encompass the many methods, mediums, and types of experiments a queer artist might employ to capture changing notions of identity and art over time. In her shift from an emphasis on female and, especially, lesbian bodies in the 1970s to an emphasis on places and an exploration of her medium in the 1980s, Hammer illustrates an expansive approach to creativity and queer expressivity within her film art.

Focusing on Early and Middle Byzantine (fourth-to-twelfth-century) objects, images, and texts, this essay explores the tension between, on the one hand, efforts of the Byzantine church and state to discourage and control bodily adornment and modification and, on the other hand, the extensive evidence of widespread and immoderate engagement with these practices. The enhancement and manipulation of Byzantine bodies is considered as both a real and a metaphoric phenomenon. Evidence culled from secular and sacred, written and material sources demonstrates the importance of bodily adornment and modification to our understanding of Byzantine material and visual culture.

This chapter looks at exemplary musicals of the 1940s to show how they can readily be read as “queer” even when they are not openly “gay.” For, despite the predominance of conservative romance plots clinching the future of a male-female couple, many 1940s musicals registered the incoherence characterizing the culture’s understanding of effeminacy in relation to manliness, of homosexuality in relation to heterosexuality, and of deviance in relation to normality. Although today we may see those relations as homologous, in the 1940s they foregrounded fissures in the dominant ideology as it classified sexual dissidence by making it invisible and illegal. The chapter looks at examples of sexual dissidence in show numbers, a military pairing, homosocial buddy pairings, and comedic drag sequences. The films examined are Down to Earth, Up in Arms, Anchors Aweigh, Two Guys from Texas, Road to Morocco, and Bathing Beauty.

This chapter tracks a recent trend in queer narrative films that minimize psychological transparency, leave plot lines unresolved, and make facial close-ups affectively illegible. Such opacities regarding story and character refocus spectators instead on nuanced operations of power within specific cultural milieus. Thus, these films yield stealth versions of political cinema, hailing audiences into complex acts of richly intersectional social analysis and pushing film’s formal capacities to convey “personal” stories in ways that evade voyeurism and deprioritize identification. After opening with the Oscar-winning Moonlight (2016), which stipulates its lead character’s inscrutability to himself and others, including audiences, this inquiry delves further into three lesser-known contemporaries: Spa Night (2016), about a closeted Korean American teen; They (2017), a meditation on gender transition and national exile; and Tomcat (2016), an Austrian parable of the unknowability of humans and other animals.

This chapter begins with a comparative analysis of pain’s importance to three prominent nineteenth-century literary modes: sentimentalism, naturalism, and realism. It then turns to the distinctive aesthetic and ethical priorities of the high realism practiced by William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. It concludes with an extended analysis of Howellsian realism as the first of several examples of the high realist aesthetic. From the outset of his career, Howells explored the idea that a more refined literary sensibility hinges on a subtle sensitivity to suffering of various kinds, emphasizing a view of the elevated individual as possessing a heightened ability not just to experience pain but to manage his or her own reactions to it in a sophisticated fashion. Even in his most socially engaged fiction, Howells evinces a preference for a troubled, ruminative, and restrained affective response to others’ suffering over reactions his works portray as rash, boorish, or at best ill-conceived.

Whereas some religiously themed puppet or otherwise “popular” productions were overwhelmingly successful with Parisian critics and audiences, Maurice Bouchor and Ernest Chausson’s La Légende de Sainte-Cécile and, later, the Théâtre du Vaudeville’s unsuccessful production of Armand Silvestre and Eugène Morand’s Les Drames sacrés (with music by Charles Gounod) were colossal failures both with the critics and with the public by virtue of their dependence on editorial intervention as a means through which to modernize ancient stories. In these cases, critics indicted the works as insincere—a fatal flaw when it came to the representation of sacred subjects on secular stages. Through analyses of these short works, this chapter examines how each work navigated the slippage between avant-garde aesthetics and Catholic tradition and reveals two opposite but closely related processes of critical success and failure: while successful works eschewed the intellectual aura of Symbolism in favor of traditional and “sincere” engagements with Catholic heritage, these failed productions embraced the complexities of modern music and drama—authorial decisions that, in the end, rendered them insincere for Parisian audiences and thus incapable of being perceived as truly religious.

Debates concerning the appropriate nature of sacred music in France persisted throughout the nineteenth century. While many figures within the Catholic Church took the more traditional stance in their proclamation of plainchant as the genre of sacred music par excellence, other priests and church musicians insisted that more modern styles of composition were not only appropriate but necessary for French Catholics. This debate was not limited to the confines of the Church: Republican composers, for their part, also contributed their views on the matter, which largely stated that the realms of sacred and secular were not mutually exclusive. This chapter outlines the debate on both sides in order to reveal how Republican composers absorbed the numerous criteria involved in the composition of sacred music into their secular constructions of French music. It also reveals the discursive slippages between Catholic denigrations of “modern” religious music and “secular” compositional styles: more often than not, modern religious music was strikingly close to the Catholic ideal, even when it was written by a decidedly secular composer for non-liturgical use. A study of Contes mystiques, a collection of twelve mélodies written by such composers as Gabriel Fauré, Théodore Dubois, Henri Maréchal, and Pauline Viardot, reveals how Republican composers absorbed the numerous criteria involved in the composition of sacred music and how this modern music was strikingly similar to the Catholic ideal, even when written by “secular” composers for non-liturgical use.

This chapter demarcates the scope and parameters of the book, first by defining the term “violence,” and then by outlining the three pillars that support the chapters that follow: performance, ethics, and poetics. This discussion is not meant to be exhaustive but rather a foundation painted with broad strokes to allow for the subsequent chapters to go into more detail with respect to the particulars of the plays being studied. The section on performance lays out the book’s theoretical approach and provides some historical conditions of performance, as most of the tragedies studied in the book were performed around their date of publication. The chapter then delineates the connections between ethics and tragedy before revisiting the poetics of sixteenth-century French tragedy and the use of onstage violence as a dramaturgical device.

In a materialist vitalism that emerged, nerve force as a physical energy was assumed to give idiosyncratic shape to organisms, races, and species. Borrowing from evolutionary theory and biometrics, Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests in Elsie Venner that the vital force of the average members of a race or species will prevail, while hybrids at the edges of the vital bell curve will expire, a principle that applies as well to literature, which has its own vital curve. William Dean Howells promotes a naturalized realism of the healthy, national (white, middle-class) average. W. E. B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins take on the task of establishing the African American race as vigorous and empowered rather than enervated—and of eluding constraining racial definition by oscillating between biological and immaterial conceptions of racial force.

Chapter 1, “Drama Uncloseted in Boston,” argues that American urbanity began at home. The cosmopolitanism practiced in elite domestic spaces after the American Revolution signaled an urban future; in opening these homes to a broader public, novels would transform it. But not without serious resistance. Instead of embracing urbanity after the revolution, Bostonians strained to negotiate competing desires for republican equality and cosmopolitan sophistication. This tension found a fitting narrative in a public scandal of incestuous infidelity, pregnancy, and suicide involving Perez Morton, a prominent Boston lawyer and drama aficionado; his wife, poet Sarah Wentworth Morton; and her sister, Fanny Apthorp, whose published suicide notes were widely read. I trace the scandal’s circulation through Boston newspapers, as a subplot in William Hill Brown’s 1789 novel The Power of Sympathy, and in three plays, two by Brown himself, that were printed for private performances in Boston, where public theater remained illegal. These texts offer a fascinating case study of the formally diverse and multivocal print culture in which cosmopolitan culture clashed with new ideas about American urbanity. The epistolary novel emerged as a form concerned not with the past or present, I argue, but with the future—a future that writes out of existence the varied voices, especially female and Black voices, present in the plays, poetry, and papers.

The book concludes with an epilogue, “The Invisible Hand,” that explores the afterlife of Doré’s imagery as it has been subject to creative erasure. The extent to which these images have been appropriated and adapted is foregrounded in the very process of their original creation, as Doré’s designs were transformed into reproducible matrices through the work of the engravers. The examples of cutting and overpainting of Doré’s work with which the book concludes should be understood not as iconoclastic but as entirely consistent with and the inevitable outcome of both the history of the Bible writ large and Doré’s intervention therein.

Nutraceutical supplements have become requisite fare in equine stables across North America and Europe, and a robust marketing engine has propagated the notion that every horse owner has the ability to contribute to the management – and even treatment – of some of the most important health and performance issues facing the modern horse. The voracious appetite of horse owners and managers for these supplements has vastly outpaced research into equine-specific efficacy, safety or toxicity of the majority of available products. Indeed, even government regulators have been left scrambling to accommodate the unique characteristics of nutraceuticals for horses within existing feed and drug guidelines, whilst the groundswell of consumer demand creates a fertile and attractive venue for a myriad of equine nutraceutical products. This presentation will identify peculiarities of horses and horse enthusiasts which define the opportunities and challenges associated with equine nutraceutical products. The current state of scientific inquiry will be explored, focusing on supplements targeting common equine health issues including arthritis, laminitis and gastrointestinal disorders. This critical mass of scientific evidence is then compared with popular marketing of equine nutraceuticals, in order to caliper the distance between science and fiction.

Water is key to human life, both biophysically and socioculturally. Having long been regarded in anthropology as a circumstantial backdrop to human society and culture, water—alongside other nonhuman substances and beings—has received growing attention as a material with specific potentials and histories in the 21st century. This research explores the fundamental connectivity and relationality of water, through which social relations and hydrological flows are often two sides of the same coin, shaping and transforming each other. Watery materiality is frequently characterized by movement and instability, defying control but also intersecting with other social and material processes to create ever new arrangements. Water practices, infrastructures, and experiences participate in the formation and transformation of spaces and landscapes, and may inspire novel theoretical insights on meaning-making, kinship, learning, and space, among other topics. Water’s valuation and the tensions that arise regarding how to govern it emerge in part from its material properties. Ongoing discussions explore the links between these properties, water infrastructures, unequal distribution, and political power. Watery materiality is not a single thing, but has multiple manifestations, including saltwater, ice, and humidity. Some scholars therefore propose studying water and materiality in terms of various forms of wetness or amphibious processes. Research into water and materiality suggests that the material world consists of open processes rather than of fixed objects, and that water’s multiple manifestations and flows actively participate in shaping human lives.

William Shakespeare entertained many ideas about music, some of them conflicting, and he frequently represented these ideas in his plays. Music was a multifaceted art and science in early modern England, and debates over the nature and interpretation of music played out in a variety of contexts: academic, religious, political, commercial, and aesthetic. At the same time, music was a vital part of Shakespeare’s theatrical practice. He made use of his company’s musical resources to include performed music in his plays, and his characters frequently sing and quote popular ballads and songs that would have been recognized by his audiences. The combination of words about music and musical performances gave Shakespeare the opportunity to test various theories of music in complex and original ways. His plays are especially demonstrative of the ways in which certain views of music were connected to other ideological perspectives. Shakespeare’s most modern idea about music is the notion that musical meaning derives from its contexts and conventions rather than from an inherent, universal nature. Taken together, his plays provoke skepticism about unified theories of music. At the same time, they demonstrate that the seeming universality of music makes it an extremely powerful tool for both the polemicist and the dramatist.

As an eccentric outlaw crime film, Terrence Malick’s Badlands employs expressive sensory immersion, eccentric humor, and a concern for the relationship between history and human experience. The past, in Badlands, is a complex ontological ground for the characters’ (and audiences’) senses of being in the world, a temporalized film world akin to a field of pure immanence within the uncanny strangeness of material reality. A film set in the fifties, but far more concerned with transhistorical philosophical questions, Badlands uses the musical soundtrack to explore these existential concerns. Within this musically heterogeneous film, the two most important sources of compiled non-diegetic classical music (the pedagogical music of Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman and the early compositions of Erik Satie) function as active philosophical agents, cultivating embodied states of play and melancholy that strive, albeit ambiguously and inconclusively, to create meaning from the raw immediacy of experience.

This chapter discusses the emergence of the through-song British musical, also known as “pop opera.” This can be dated from the afternoon of March 1, 1968, when parents (mainly mothers) of students at Colet Court School watched an end-of-term performance of a twenty-minute version of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. By 1991, Lloyd Webber and Rice had officially created the first performance in the history of pop opera which was Jesus Christ Superstar (1971). Lloyd Webber's ability to compose consistently in a single voice, or to eclecticize, in other words, to teach the audience to navigate the action through musical signifiers is not appreciated enough. Tim Rice's ease in “conversationalizing” the bigger-than-life figures that pop opera delights in is similarly underrated, because he makes it look easy. The biggest hit in this period of musical history is Les Misérables (1985). This show's saga started when Alain Boublil sees Superstar and decides to write something comparable. It was written with composer Claude-Michel Schönberg.

Part III examines the new importance that Baudelaire attaches, following the trial of Les Fleurs du Mal, to the creative imagination as an instrument of resistance and alternative ‘government’. This chapter analyses his three essays on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, in which Baudelaire sees Poe as exemplifying the power of the imagination both to subvert normative thinking and to confront the destructive effects of melancholy by constructing new worlds. Baudelaire finds in Poe an image—and self-portrait—of the poet as outcast and embodiment of protest, a thinker probing the mysteries of nature in search of new explanatory laws: in short, a writer engaged in what Baudelaire calls ‘conjecturisme’. For Poe, as for Baudelaire’s alternative poet-lawgiver, beauty is a form of justice, and the public value of poetry lies not in overt didacticism but in the carefully crafted articulation of an original moral and intellectual vision.

It is axiomatic that the Roman emperor attempted to control the city populace through an ideology of ‘bread and circuses’ (free grain and public entertainment). Yet a riot during a food crisis in 189 ce, which began in the circus and spread to the streets, shows that spectators could be the agents of political interaction at public spectacles rather than merely passive participants, that public spectacles could be organizing events for the non-elite population. It has been argued that crowds in order to form require a ‘notion of legitimation’. Indeed, the crowd at this riot was engendered in part through the long-standing conventions of spectatorship at Roman public spectacles, including 1) public spectacles as venues for popular protest and interactions with the emperor; 2) the custom of arranged seating, including claques, factions, and trade guilds (collegia); 3) common forms of spectator response, such as acclamations.

The aims, scope, structure and cultural background of the present volume are outlined here. It aims to present progressive current thought in the field and indicate directions for future work. It also juxtaposes Greek and Roman games and spectacle, to shed light on similarities and differences in the two cultures, and also to suggest parallels in other cultures, including our own. It aims to facilitate research and provoke thinking in particular aspects of Greek sport and Roman spectacle. The focus of the collection is to an extent in the social contexts of games, namely the evolution of sport and spectacle diachronically and geographically across cultural and political boundaries, and how games are adapted to multiple contexts and multiple purposes, reinforcing, for example, social hierarchies, performing shared values, and playing out deep cultural tensions. This chapter also interrogates the terms for sport today and in antiquity, and presents the high value placed on sport by ‘following the money’ in both eras.

Extoling and promoting listening is deeply ingrained in sound art practice and discourse, even on occasion its raison d’être, where listening is understood as a wholly congenial, benign activity. This can be seen through the routine use of affirmative tropes such as, through listening we: connect, locate, are embodied, discern, are immersed or enveloped. And through specific listening methods such as Deep Listening, we are offered ‘expand[ed] consciousness to the whole space/time continuum of sound/silences’ (Oliveros, 2005, p. xxiv). Refocusing from the act of listening to the audiological—the mechanisms related to the sense of hearing—from the findings of the author’s recent research, in particular his review on the noise impact of high-speed hand dryers (Drever, 2013), the author feels obliged to assert that the contrary is a reality for many—hearing, from time to time or incessantly: perturbs, isolates, excludes, disconnects, disembodies, and dislocates, hearing hurts! This will be familiar for those living with hyperacusis, misophonia, and phonophobia, but it can also be the case for those with particular hearing needs such as the partially sighted, hearing aid users or those with sensitive hearing such as infants and ASD. Bringing audiology into the sphere of sound art, this chapter recognizes a prevailing sensitization of hearing in the culture at large, and proposes a paradigm for situating hearing that diverges from a singular, idealized, symmetrical model of hearing, the auraltypical, that has predominated. In its place, we are beginning to enjoy a fluidity and openness to diverse forms of hearing and sensitive hearers in sound art, on embracing the emerging agenda of auraldiversity.

Where does affect reside in a phenomenology of perception? How should we understand ethics when bodies are close? What changes when we are distant? In this chapter, the author illustrates the “aesthetics of proximity,” degrees of spatio-temporal as well as spatio-tactile closeness between sounds and bodies, and the implications for an embodied ethics of response. Using Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “flesh,” which he defines as an element (like water or fire), the author explores the relation of feeling and matter in close encounters, evoking Sufi sounds of worship in Morocco and France, as well as the Black Lives Matter movement during a global pandemic.

Increasing numbers of children’s books on the topic of refugees are appearing in publishers’ catalogues around the world, raising awareness of diverse contexts of forced migration and of the hardships faced by children and their families in this situation. Yet, few studies have analysed in depth how aesthetic and literary strategies work to engage readers with the refugee experience in these well-intentioned attempts. Drawing on a corpus of refugee texts which draw attention to the material, the corporeal and the symbolic aspects of shoes and forced walking, in this article, I look at materiality and mobility (or immobility) and analyse how text and image create three main points of connection between the narrative and the reader: appropriate footwear; physical discomfort/pain and what I have termed as ‘the chronotope of forced migration’. I discuss how calling attention to these connections is used as a strategy to create an ‘embodied simulation’ (Bergen 2016) which encourages readers to ‘walk in refugee shoes’ and adopt a more empathetic stance. Examining these strategies shows how it is possible to engender an understanding of the refugee situation through text and/or image in ways that allow a level of emotional engagement even when young readers have not experienced these circumstances directly. Understanding how these aesthetic and literacy strategies work can help to support the claims made for the role of children’s literature in fostering empathy as well as the pedagogical use of this literature by teachers and other professionals.

There is a palpable difference between Addison’s stimulating and thoughtful remarks on literature or the visual arts and his scattered, unconvincing, and dismissive comments on music. His unease about music, the chapter argues, stemmed from ignorance, disappointment, and a tendency to link musical pleasure with secret or illicit sexual pleasure. By basing his aesthetic theory on sight, Addison was able to make contact with scientific discourse, indirectly express his political ideology, and avoid extensive discussions of music, the art about which he knew least. His attempt at an English opera (Rosamond, 1707) failed, and the libretto does not suggest that Addison gave much thought to what it might be like to set or sing his words. As a young man, he wrote two St Cecilia odes, closely following the conventions established in Dryden’s ode for 1687. Printed in the Annual miscellany for 1694 is his translation of an episode from Ovid that purports to explain ‘the secret Cause’ that makes the River Salmacis weaken those who bathe in it. Something about the power of music, its emotional and sensual influence on the body and the mind, was evidently connected in his mind with secret pleasures that he did not wish to acknowledge or reveal. Same-sex love was probably among such pleasures. While there is no definitive evidence that Addison had strong homosexual feelings, or that he acted upon them, there is reason to believe that he associated such feelings with music, an association which shaped his consciousness and therefore his aesthetics.

Geography has seen a rebirth of interest and appreciation of the ruined and abandoned spaces of industrial modernity. This work has often considered such ruins largely in terms of the phenomenological or affectual experiences of material decay, disorder, and blight. This chapter is an investigation into ruined spaces that do not have materiality or temporality: digital ruins. Existing in a kind of eternal present, such spaces do not decay, yet still demonstrate many affective and phenomenological experiences of what we understand to be ruin. Using ethnographic research of three abandoned and nearly abandoned virtual worlds, these landscapes provide a unique opportunity for a critical analysis of digital ruins as spaces of disconnection: particularly in their relationship with time, their algorithmic disconnection from the social imaginary of the Internet, the phenomenological disconnection one experiences in these places, and their founding premise as spaces of utopian disconnection from the limitations of materiality.

While Strawsonians have focused on the way in which our ‘reactive attitudes’—the emotions through which we hold one another responsible for manifestations of morally significant quality of regard—express moral demands, serious doubt has been cast on the idea that non-blaming reactive attitudes direct moral demands to their targets. Building on Gary Watson’s proposal that the reactive attitudes are ‘forms of moral address’, this chapter advances a communicative view of praise according to which the form of moral address distinctive of the praise-manifesting reactive attitudes (approbation, gratitude) is moral invitation. Like moral demand, moral invitation is a species of directive address presupposing its target’s possession of distinctive agential capacities and, when valid, provides its addressee with reason to give the addressor’s directive discursive uptake. While blame’s demands issue imperatival reasons for compliance (e.g. to acknowledge wrongdoing, apologize), praise’s invitations provide discretionary reasons to accept credit in jointly valuing the significance of the act for the praiser. In addition to its phenomenological plausibility and contribution to the already fecund Watsonian-cum-Strawsonian program, the invitational view helps renders intelligible the power of our praise practices to facilitate the formation and enrichment of our interpersonal relationships.

Unlike the other sections in this book, Part IV presents a mix of exercise types: some require musical instruments; some are to be done only in the imagination; some are acted aloud; some are for groups; others may be done by an individual. These exercises belong together because they all explore creativity and imagination in terms of dreaming and thinking. This concept is first examined at the start of the chapter in an essay exploring analytical and intuitive thought and what it might mean to understand music, and then in the series of exercises designed to amplify those ideas. The exercises include experiments with conscious dreaming (or directed daydreaming) and deliberation, comparing these approaches, and looking for balance. The balance of dreaming and thinking—including improvisation vs. composition as well as talking spontaneously vs. editing—is at the heart of this series of explorations.

The Introduction explains the purpose and method of the book: to improve the musical imagination through creative, fun exercises based on improvisational theater games that have been reimagined for musicians. A sense of playfulness and spontaneity is central to this approach. The primary goal of developing the mind’s ear is to improve the ability to imagine and remember music in silence and to be able to hear in the mind music that is printed on the page without the aid of instrument. It is essential to attend to the musician’s inner life, to explore emotions in relation to musical expression, rather than only emphasize the physical challenges of instrumental technique. Strengthening emotional memory as actors are trained to do, as well as deliberately exercising the imagination and the mind’s ear will lead to more meaningful performances, more personal compositions, and will enrich the listening experience. The introduction also addresses related concepts in subsections: Something to Say; On Interpretation; On Performing New Music; Hearing in Silence.

At the very beginning of Fight Club, the Platonic critique of art and everyday life is echoed when the nameless protagonist, the Edward Norton character, says that with insomnia “nothing’s real. Everything’s far away. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy.” With that clear invitation, this chapter argues that Fincher intends a conversation with the Platonic critique of appearances. Fight clubs—in their retreat from the world and providing for meaningless but intense feeling—are to be understood as allegories of works of art in a consumer society that enable temporary release from it through pain induced enlivenment. Fight Club goes on to track how a political aesthetic can topple into fascist aestheticized politics. Finally, enlisting T. W. Adorno’s “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” the chapter argues that the bond between the charismatic Tyler Durden / Brad Pitt character and his fascist followers is deeply akin to that between Donald Trump and his followers.

Emigration, which had been such a marked feature of Irish history since the nineteenth century, accelerated through the 1950s, creating the sense of an emptying countryside. Leaving the land is represented as alienation in Frank O’Connor’s story ‘Uprooted’, a tragedy to be resisted at all costs in M. J. Molloy’s play The Wood of the Whispering, while the plight of the stay-at-home sibling when all the others have left is the focus of William Trevor’s ‘The Hill Bachelors’. Nostalgia for a pre-modern rural landscape features in the work of Michael McLaverty, John Montague, and Maurice Riordan. In the fully urbanized Ireland of the twenty-first century, there is a sardonic take on modern farming in Kevin Barry, but the remaining connections to the land of contemporary society are still very much present in novels by Belinda McKeon and Anne Enright.

Statius has fully embraced complicity as a generative principle for his Siluae. This chapter explores a grammar and syntax of the verse world that he conjures: core objects, gestures, and themes can be detected. The poetic project is characterized by an aggressive modernity. Not only is Domitian himself superlatively great, but everything in his world is fantastic. This is the best time to live, a fantastic time to write, and this top-quality verse attests to the same. The poetic project is strikingly irreverent when it comes to old values and hierarchies, including the traditional gods. An arch, ironic, self-aware world of artists, artistry, powerful people, and beautiful things emerges. Meanwhile freedom, faith, sincerity, happiness, and frankness all come under systematic assault in the name of the clever innovations of the here and now. After furnishing a sense of the lay of the land in the Siluae, the chapter explores six specific poems where the aforementioned issues can be further developed. In particular, these are poems that celebrate the pleasures of submission. They also sing of the rich rewards that come to those who embrace the hierarchical structure of Roman society and cater to the capricious tastes of the powerful. Tamed animals, beautiful slave boys, and the emperor’s eunuch boyfriend are emblematic figures within this praise of submission. Poetry’s ability to make and to do and to innovate celebrates power’s ability to make people do or say now this and now that.

The Greek word harmonia refers to “joining,” “fastening,” “attunement,” and “agreement.” While various authors used the term, Pythagoreans are credited with giving it special meaning, in the context of mathematics and music. Pythagoras (born mid-sixth century BCE) and his followers were known for their view that numbers underlie the composition and structure of the entire world....

Chapter 2 sets the compass through a work that seems to have little to say about sampling. 4’33” (four thirty-three) by John Cage is based on no (performed) sounds, no flashy pyrotechnics in its execution, nor reverence for the notion of music as a singular, individual creative act, or performance. The chapter considers Cage’s evocation of “silence” as the sampled material that is at stake in this iconic piece. I consider how silence, and silencing work in the context of censorship and social control given that the timeframe for the inception of 4’33” resonates with post-World War II, mid-twentieth-century United States during the Cold War. Engaging with this work can also tell us something about the role of censorship in public arts life half a century later, in the US shortly after the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001. As I argue, when regarded as a material of music, and thereby as a source from which to “sample” silence, 4’33”offers both a sonic and “sound-less” baseline for the four case studies to follow. “Silence” as rendered in Cage’s work, its wider connotations and evocation of the sensation of sound-filled stillness also serve as a signal for instances of domination, of how oppression can take place quietly, without fanfare. Considering silence as a geocultural, socio-musicological matter allows us a moment to retune our ears and minds by encountering the broader (in)audible domains through, and from which sampling practices take place.

Disappointing results from the last two chapters for alternative metatheologies can serve to make Worship-Worthiness Theology quite attractive, or at least more attractive than some would initially think it to be. On this approach, it is not merely a good idea to worship God, but it is our required response. Given this normative understanding of the nature of God, the question to be asked concerns the extent to which this viewpoint can sustain the starting points of alternative accounts, and here I will argue that Worship-Worthiness Theology does a far better job at sustaining the starting point of Perfect Being Theology than it does of Creator Theology

There are three main modes of appreciation of aesthetic objects. The first is the appreciation of aesthetic pleasure, most often beauty. A simple account of the experience of beauty is the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure. A more complex account assumes that there are two levels of aesthetic pleasure, a shallow one based on low-level experiences like fluency, and a deep level where disfluency leads to interest. The second mode of appreciation pertains to emotions experienced in response to an artwork, as illustrated by the distancing–embracing model of aesthetic emotions. The final mode of appreciation includes understanding an artwork. Cognitive models of artistic understanding assume that processes of perception, memory, and interpretation determine cognitive mastery. From the humanities tradition, cognitive models have been criticized because they neglect the historical context of the creation of the artwork as an objective component to understanding. A recent model combines art-historical context with cognitive processes and claims that such artistic understanding is essential to aesthetic appreciation.

This chapter explores the use of collage structures in Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996), in which the use of intermedia, comprising different types of image and text, results in ever more complex configurations that gesture to new technological possibilities. The film places frames within frames, disturbing the linear cause-and-effect logic of sequence. Collage operates in the film as a complicated montage, disrupting linearity and replacing it with overwhelming simultaneity. This articulation results in a semiotic eccentricity in which frames compete for attention. Criticism has often dismissed the film’s central character Nagiko as too insubstantial to hold the pieces of this articulation together, but this is to mistake her function. She is a cipher, and her erotic writing on the skin of others is just one element in an unsutured and indeterminate collage that displaces narrative. Offering skin-deep characterization, the film plays with the proliferating complexities of intermedia.

The assumption that conceiving or pregnant women may harm their fetus by uncontrolled imagination originated in many cultures. Antique authors assumed visual impressions and fantasies of both parents at the time of conception or during coitus. In the late Middle Ages, only maternal, no longer paternal imagination was believed to harm the fetus, whose alleged vulnerability extended over the entire gestation. Whereas malformations were previously believed to result from untimely, adulterous, satanic, or bestial intercourse, the imagination doctrine now rendered the birth a misfortune rather than a crime, sparing maternal life and honour. In the 17th century, Fienus, Descartes, Helmont, and others developed sophisticated theories on its alleged mechanism. Systemic skin disease was related to visual impressions, local birthmarks to desires and touching her own body, and malformations were believed to result from terror with no role for the maternal hand. The imagination doctrine was discredited by the advent of teratology in the 18th century. However, it survived among the public and contributed to prejudging females as inferior, and to feelings of guilt and self-blame in mothers who gave birth to a malformed infant.

In this chapter Mapes elaborates on the rhetorical strategies of historicity, simplicity, lowbrow appreciation, pioneer spirit, and locality/sustainability. She turns to a data set of 90 corresponding Instagram (@nytfood) posts, documenting the multimodal tactics by which food media writers and users perform a kind of acceptable or “palatable” eliteness. One such tactic is the framing of “rough” and “refined,” and the juxtaposition of various forms of supposedly low and highbrow cultural artifacts or practices. These tactics, in turn, help establish two interdependent strategies or rhetorics for manufacturing status in capitalist society: fetishism and condescension. She argues that these two processes support the production and maintenance of elite authenticity and class privilege.

Writing is an emotional process and it works when it makes us feel, both as writers and readers: it has the power to move—movere. Yet a certain emotional distance is necessary when one writes poetry with the language of oppression, especially when one has been the victim, and offers a historical as well as an artistic testimony. What kind of liberties can one take with the material? What constitutes appropriate artistic utterance when one navigates the territories of poetry about the hard truths? Translating screams of pain and anger into poetic expression, which shows the effect of oppression on the inner landscape of feeling, is what poetry offers as an art. But writing that courts the sympathy of the reader gratuitously, arouses anger, sermonizes, or is imbued with a sense of self-pity, represents a failure of the art. The healing aspects of writing (not only in terms of healing the writer, but also in terms of healing the language itself) form a significant part of this chapter.

This chapter begins with an explanation of “elite authenticity” in full, including a definition of the five rhetorical strategies of which it is composed: historicity, simplicity, lowbrow appreciation, pioneer spirit, and locality/sustainability. Using theories pertaining to media discourse and mediatization, the author presents an analysis of the New York Times food section, relying on a corpus of 259 articles (including restaurant reviews and top-viewed articles). Throughout her analysis she demonstrates how the aforementioned interconnected rhetorical strategies are not only indexical of what is considered “authentic” in contemporary society, but also essential to the construction of status based on a purposeful distancing from traditional markers of eliteness. In sum, this chapter sets the groundwork for the simultaneous (dis)avowal of distinction which is integral to contemporary class maintenance.

This chapter considers the relationship between divine revelation and digital religion by exploring how revelation of divine or religious truth is presented and negotiated on the internet and within digital culture. Revelation is a fundamental component of religious practice and experience and has long been studied in its relation to mediation. Digital culture offers unique resources that allow individuals to receive, engage, and share in divine revelation in digital contexts. The multiplicity of digital contexts and their blended ties to offline practices in worship practices have become known as digital religion (Campbell 2013), which can be likened to a bridge which connects and extends religious practice online into offline religious spaces and contexts. This chapter will consider how revelation is understood and enacted in different spaces of digital religion by providing an overview of Digital Religion Studies and looking at Campbell and DeLashmutt’s (2014) research on multi-site churches to offer insights into how churches structure and negotiate their digital worship practices to assist people in engaging with divine revelation. In particular, we emphasize questions of presence and authority that churches ought to consider in regard to how their use of digital technology may impact views on divine revelation in digital contexts.

Writers have always been conscious of the contribution that clothes can make to their work—as material objects, as outward signs of inner character, and as metaphors, especially for language itself. In the early 20th century, however, a time of rapid technological change, as well as of industrialization, globalization, and urbanization, literary interrogations and descriptions of dress evolved to respond to the new ways in which garments were designed, made, marketed, and sold, and to fashion’s increasing pervasiveness in society. Particularly sensitive to these changes were many of the writers associated with modernism, who shared with the nascent fashion industry a preoccupation with questions of novelty and the presentation of the self. Russia was no exception, and there poets, playwrights, and novelists explored and exploited the meanings of clothes and fashion in order to address the urgent questions concerning sex, gender, and race that were thrown up by life in the modern city. Moreover, as elsewhere, these explorations were not limited to the page; rather, writers’ own wardrobes played a part, especially among those who styled themselves as dandies. In other ways, however, Russia diverged from the European norm in its relationship to clothes and fashion and, therefore, in their intersection with literature. First, the habit of appropriating motifs and styles from non-European cultures, which was further galvanized by the modernist turn away from 19th-century culture, had a very different significance in Russia. The long history of ambivalence about Russia’s place in European culture meant that Russians were capable of finding the exotic in their own backyard, leading, for instance, to a vogue for peasant poets. Second, Russia experienced a particularly intense craze for masquerades in the first two decades of the century, which was both reflected in contemporary literature and, in part, a product of an obsession with the connection between inner essences and outer appearances that also manifested itself in modernist poetry. Third, Russian writers of the time were more inclined than most to see their work as part of a wider transformative mission; this often took the form of an attempt to overcome the perceived division between life and art by infusing the everyday with creativity. Clothes, both on the page and in the streets, were an important front in this battle. Finally, the upheaval caused by the revolutions of 1917 and the emergence of the socialist state had profound effects on the organization of fashion as both industry and discourse. Some writers responded by imagining the post-fashion future; others by involving themselves in reconfiguring what socialist commodities might look like; still others by criticizing a surprisingly resilient consumer culture, at least until the Stalin-inspired reorganization of many aspects of society, including fashion and literature, in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Conversation is a topic of burgeoning interest in the context of educational theory and as a prospective means for conducting empirical research. As a nonformal educational experience, as well as within the classroom, or as a means to researching various aspects of educational practice and institutions, research on or through conversation in education draws on a range of theoretical resources, often understanding conversation as analogous to dialogue or dialectic. Although only brought into this research context in the early 21st century, the philosopher who has engaged most extensively with conversation is Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003). His text, The Infinite Conversation, originally published in French as L’Entretien infini in 1969, responded to and took forward many elements of what would go on to be described as poststructuralist or deconstructive thought. Blanchot’s notion of conversation (in French, “entretien”) is distinct from those reliant upon philosophical conceptions of dialogue or dialectic. Itself the subject of philosophical research, Blanchotian conversation has been interpreted variously as either not sufficiently taking into account the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, or else expanding beyond its more limited scope. Some of these interpretations stress the ethical and political implications of conversation; however, none engage specifically with its educational implications. Blanchotian conversation allows for contradicting and contrasting thoughts to be voiced without being brought to shared consensus or internal resolution. Its “lesson” is not only in the thought that it produces but also in the ethical relation of sincerity, openness, and non-imposition that it develops. Unlike some recent applications of conversation to educational context, Blanchotian conversation does not re-entrench the subject to be educated but rather deprioritizes the subject in favor of the movement of thought and the ethical “between” of conversation itself. This notion of conversation has corollaries in political thought, notably with Jacques Rancière’s understanding of “dissensus” and Karl Hess’s thought of an “anarchism without hyphens,” as well as the politically informed educational ideas of Elizabeth Ellsworth and the educational practice and research of Camilla Stanger.

This chapter scrutinizes the literature on constitutional identity, within which eternity clauses are viewed as repositories of the constitution's core values. It analyses unamendability as the site of constitutional expression and eternity clauses as capable of defending against attacks on the integrity and identity of the entire constitution. It also highlights serious problems with importing the sociological concept of identity into constitutional theory's arsenal. This chapter shows that the concept relies on particular understandings of both liberal constitutionalism and pluralism, as well as on a presumed pacified and coherent constitutional ethos. The concept obscures the deep and continuous contestation of the core constitutional commitments rendered unamendable. The chapter also discusses the rise of constitutional identity review as a form of resistance to supranational integration in Europe.

This chapter looks at a trend that seemingly contradicts the global rise of eternity clauses: popular participation in constitution-making processes. It discusses whether the deeper democratic embeddedness of constitutions as pursued through participatory processes can help address democratic anxiety about eternity clauses. It maps several processes of constitution-making that can be characterized as participatory, with a view to determining whether unamendability was incorporated into the final constitutional drafts, how it was debated, and why alternative design choices have been adopted. This chapter seeks to test empirically those theoretical arguments about eternity clauses that view them as repositories of constituent intent. It also explores eternity clauses as the high point of the battle between rigidity and openness in constitutional design.

This entry inserts feminist critiques of traditions of thinking time and temporality into major strands of philosophy to reveal underlying connections from this critique to themes discussed in materialist and postcolonial philosophy. The Greek contrast between chronos, time as date, and kairos, time as turning point, as transmitted, splits philosophy into physics and ethics, natural philosophy and politics, which for feminist purposes must be reunited around a single account of time, and temporality, history and materiality. Analyses of differential embodiment, pregnancy and sterility, disability and chronic illness, reveals difference where oversimplified phenomenologies of the body seek a single unified body in question. The same holds for time and history, as this account of feminist temporalities seeks to show. A philosophical fixation with death, as opposed to analysing births, helps keep in place a one size fits all approach to bodies, deaths and time, which feminist critique seeks to disrupt.

Death was a Blockade constant, the dead a new anchor of valence. Perceptions and practices of the meaning of the dead, and of proper disposal, depended on social distance between the dead and an actor’s habitus (dispositions) and field. In the field of power (state and Party), officials perceived the dead as threats to the political order to be counted and disposed of expediently. In the field of labor and implementation, cemetery workers coded the dead opportunistically and entrepreneurially as commodities and objects of gain: e.g. negotiating prices (in money or kind) for disposal and commemoration. In the field of intimacy (kith and kin), actors close to the dead were guided by a moral economy of a dignified subject. Yet this logic faced a brutal contradiction: providing a dignified farewell required resources that could be invested in survival. This contributed to a sense of powerlessness and passive resistance to dehumanization.

This chapter offers an innovative interpretive analysis of Rousseau’s literary and political works, highlighting how his formulation of popular sovereignty as the immediate expression of the people rests on a critique of the theater’s conspicuous artificiality. Contrary to the established reading, Rousseau’s alternative to the theater is not the public festival, which he finds unpredictable and fragile due to its performative nature. Rousseau models his conception of politics on a different form of aesthetic experience, which he develops in Pygmalion—a monodrama that depicts the encounter between a sculptor and his work of art. The Social Contract embodies this aesthetic experience whose paradigmatic example comes from plastic arts. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the antidemocratic implications of this turn to plastic arts, which resurfaces in the works of contemporary theorists who share Rousseau’s idealization of the supposed immediacy of spontaneous action and his desire to remedy its fragility and unpredictability.