Dennis Ioffe geeft een overzicht van en biedt inzicht in het culturele verschijnsel ‘zjiznetvortsjestvo', letterlijk ‘leven-schepping' (‘Lebenskunst' in het Duits), dat typerend was voor het Russische modernisme (symbolisme en avant-garde). Door de verheldering van de theoretische en historische basis van de Lebenskunst in het Russische modernisme draagt Ioffe bij aan een beter begrip van de relevante artistieke producten van deze belangrijke periode in de Russische cultuur. Aangezien Lebenskunst de grenzen tussen lichaam en tekst doet vervagen, behoort het verschijnsel niet alleen tot het domein van de literatuurgeschiedenis en literatuurtheorie, maar kan het ook worden bestudeerd vanuit de filosofie, kunstgeschiedenis en culturele studies. Ioffe geeft een interpretatie van de structuur van het samengaan van leven en kunst, van het elkaar doordringen van de sociale en persoonlijke werkelijkheden in de bestudeerde ‘chronotoop' van het Russische modernisme. Zijn belangrijkste doel is het vaststellen van het mechanisme van het geleidelijk verdwijnen van de onderscheidende kenmerken van het priveleven van de modernist, en de geleidelijke verandering van zijn/haar persoonlijke leven in een algemeen sociaal-cultureel model. De bestudering van het verschijnsel Lebenskunst betreft in het bijzonder het onderzoek naar de structuur van excentriek gedrag en naar de somatische (gender)identiteiten van de personen die actief zijn in het culturele leven.

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The poetics of personal behaviour : the interaction of life and art in Russian modernism (1890-1920)

The Anxiety of Ascent: Middle-Class Narratives in Germany and America

This dissertation proposes that Philippine independent urban cinema reveals imaginaries of spatial justice. The works approached as Philippine urban cinema are independently produced and internationally circulated films that heavily feature or reference Philippine slums as setting, with narratives that centre on the lives of the urban poor. The theory of spatial justice as defined by leading urban theorists argues that social justice has spatio-temporal dimensions. Grounded on this foundational premise, this study approaches Philippine urban cinema in its capacity to foreground and represent the complexities of social justice as contextualised in Philippine urban conditions, with local and global trajectories. Alongside the theory of spatial justice, the dissertation draws from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “chronotope” (literally meaning time-space) to formulate a theory of the “slum chronotope” as a foundational concept for analysing the ways by which films are able to imagine issues of spatial justice, with emphasis on character configuration and narrative formation. The chapters are structured according to genres and modalities, where other chronotopes that dialogue with the slum chronotope are identified and examined. In the comingof-age chapter, the study locates “chronotopes of passage”; in the melodrama chapter, the study locates “affective chronotopes” configured by the spatial practice of walking; in the Manila noir chapter, the study locates “chronotopes of mobility”; and in the final chapter, the study locates “chronotopes of in/visibility” in the Overseas Filipino Worker genre. This study offers a novel interdisciplinary framework for analysing Philippine urban cinema, and in the process, makes a case for Philippine urban history as crucial grounds for understanding the global urbanisation of poverty.

The slum chronotope and imaginaries of spatial justice in Philippine urban cinema

In light of their nineteenth-century political economies, why did poor, agricultural Denmark become a leader in public, mass primary education (1814) and a multiple-track education system that included vocational training, while rich, industrial Britain did not create public, mass schooling until 1870, and embrace a one-track, academic secondary-education system? The author argues that literary narratives shed light on these cross-national differences. Danish narratives imagined education as social investment for a strong society; diverse educational tracks were necessary to meet the varied skills needs of the economy. British narratives portrayed schooling as essential to self-development and to cultivating the ideal individual. The author uses a close reading of texts and computational linguistics analyses of 521 Danish and 562 British works of fiction from 1700 to 1920 to document the different portrayal of education in the two countries. Case studies show that writers are crucial political actors in important reforms and understudied political agents in policy development stories. The method allows the author to evaluate empirically the complex relationship between culture and political outcomes, to falsify cultural claims, and to improve on thin, vague, national cultural arguments. The article shows how literature helps to reconcile the contradictions embedded in diverse models of governance. Literature provides a site for reworking cultural symbols in response to societal struggles over exogenous change, and provides a source of continuity at moments of institutional change.

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Imagine All the People: Literature, Society, and Cross-National Variation in Education Systems

This dissertation contributes to studies of Frances Burney’s prose fiction, by establishing the importance of the combined influence of theatrical models and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa in shaping Burney’s novels. Reading the collection of novels by Burney
as a rebellion against the tragic plot into which the acclaimed heroine of Richardson’s second novel is ensnared, it argues that Burney’s works blend together dramatic and novelistic
conventions to produce narratives with ambivalently successful conclusions.

It shows, through analyses of all four of Burney’s novels, that the author positions turning points with sentimental crises and peculiar circumstances within the narratives as dramatic climaxes which allow the heroines temporarily to overlook conventional social
expectations of women to make important decisions to help them make positive changes in their lives before they resign control once again. In allowing female characters these small freedoms to act for themselves, I argue that there is an underlying message in Burney’s fiction that it is necessary for women to become more assertive in order to gain more conscious control of their destiny.

The main thesis of my work is that it is with incremental adjustments in female conduct, and with the blending of the comic and tragic forms, that Burney’s fiction dramatizes the ways in which women make the most of their circumstances and resources to find peace, if not happiness, in a dignified manner in a society which restricts their freedom of choice and expression.

Rebelling against the tragic plot : the novels of Frances Burney

Calling Oscar Wilde's philosophy of art his "most elusive legacy", Julia Prewitt Brown attempts to define Wilde's conceptions of what art is and what it is not, of what the experience of art means in the modern world, and of the contradictory relations between the work of art and the sphere of the ethical everyday. She traces the experimental character of Wilde's thought from its resonance in his own life through its development within the tradition of aesthetic philosophy, ultimately focusing on his sense of the equivocal and diminishing presence of art in the postindustrial world.

Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde's Philosophy of Art

Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and Literary Form

From Robinson Crusoe's cave to Henry Selwyn's hermitage, the domestic interior tells a story about "things" and their relation to character and identity. Beginning with a description of a typical middle-class interior in America today - noting how its contents echo interiors described in literatures of the past - Julia Prewitt Brown asks why certain features persist, despite radical changes in domestic life over the past three hundred years. The answer lies, Brown argues, in the way the bourgeois interior functions as a medium, a many-layered fabric across which different energies travel, be they psychological, political, or aesthetic. In this way, objects are not symbols but rather the materials out of which symbols are made - symbols that constitute the very soul of the bourgeois.In a wide-ranging analysis, moving from works by Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Henry James to those by Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman, John Updike, and W. G. Sebald, Brown shows that what is at issue is less the economic basis of class than the bourgeoisie's imagination of itself. The themes explored include the middle class' ever-increasing desire for more wealth, as well as Victorian women's identification with the domestic interior and the changes that took place when they began working outside the home. Brown also examines the ambivalence of economically determined objects both as repositories of memory and dreams and as fetishized commodities that become detached from everyday reality. Does the bourgeois possess the interior and its objects, or do the interior and its objects possess the bourgeois?

Julia Prewitt Brown

Papers

Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde's Philosophy of Art

Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and Literary Form

The bourgeois interior

The Moral Scope of the English Bildungsroman

A reader's guide to the nineteenth century English novel