Showing papers in "Mln in 2017"

The Climate of the philosophes during the Enlightenment

Abstract: Abstract:The Climate of the philosophes during the Enlightenment The article offers a new approach to the study of the “theory of climates,” by distinguishing between a standard model and a critical model with an environmental dimension. The standard model understands the transfer of physical attributes in geographical spaces to moral attributes in human beings in a pejorative way, as a form of determinism based on the notion of causality. The article argues that a different model can be derived directly from the foundational texts of Enlightenment climate theorists such as Montesquieu. By exploring Montesquieu’s debates with other thinkers (Hume, Voltaire), the author shows that Montesquieu’s climate theory should be understood as a “transactional environmentalism” based on a notion of correlation or connection and deeply tied to a larger theory of method and history, rather than as a form of determinism based on a narrow notion of causality.

The Jesuit Who Wanted to Control the Climate: Père Castel and the Religious Roots of the Anthropocene

Abstract: Abstract:The Jesuit Who Wanted to Control the Climate: Père Castel and the Religious Roots of the Anthropocene In the 1720s, the Jesuit natural philosopher Louis-Bertrand Castel (1688–1757) developed a natural philosophical system that granted unprecedented geological agency to man. An analysis of this system shows that metaphysical assumptions about God, man, and nature, together with theological problems raised by the mechanical philosophy, enabled the emergence of a conceptual counterpart to the Anthropocene long before humanity’s global impact was readily measurable. Put in context, Castel’s system reveals an unexpected path through which the local and regional climate change theories of the seventeenth century evolved into grand ambitions of global, environmental mastery in the late eighteenth.

Pierre Corneille and Military Drama: Power, Potlatch, mérite

Abstract: Abstract:Pierre Corneille and Military Drama: Power, Potlatch, Mérite This article calls for a reappraisal of Pierre Corneille’s career-long treatment of military subjects. I contend that “military drama” represents a missing, yet essential part of conceptualizing his dramatic production, theory of tragedy, and heroic vision. I examine the case study of mérite, a key term in period martial culture indicating a cherished noble virtue and a patron-client relationship between king and grand capitaine . Analyses of Le Cid, Nicomède , and Suréna through anthropological theories of the gift (Derrida, Mauss, Gregory) and historical research on seventeenth-century military culture (Smith, Neuschel, Drévillon) illuminate the significance of mérite as a martial topos and exemplify Corneille’s crafting of military drama.

Reading Simón Bolívar's Delirium: Messianism and its Publics

Abstract: Dreamer, madman, poet, legislator, warrior, coward, visionary, titanic, romantic, despot, philosopher, predestined by God, a man from another world, the Incarnate Word of national redemption, miserable, bastard, prophet, iron-ass, a god sweeping over the future. These adjectives and terms about Simón Bolívar’s life, work, and deeds were produced by figures as diverse as Hugo Chávez, Karl Marx, Miguel Ángel Asturias, José Enrique Rodó, José Martí, and Fernando González. The contrast between the exaltation and condemnation that haunts the aforementioned epithets tells us that national heroes, like cryptic texts, are often the subjects of passionate, even incompatible, readings. In the course of interpretation, these iconic figures and their writings are continuously fashioned and re-fashioned to fit emergent political agendas. Few historical figures have so consistently and intensely captivated the public imaginary as Bolívar, the mythical liberator of Spanish America. With 1,467 titles, Bolívar ranked twenty-six in The Guardian’s 1999 survey ranking historical figures based on the number of books published about them (qtd. in Hart 335). Follow-

Mimesis: Paradox or Encounter

Abstract: “Everything changes.” What does this truism say? It could mark the fact of human mortality, the “brief candle” of the life of an individual who, says Macbeth, “struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/ And then is heard no more” (5.5.23, 25–26). It could also attest to a broader, cosmic tendency toward metamorphosis, as when Ovid’s Pythagoras exclaims “Nothing endures in this world! The whole of it flows, and all is formed with a changing appearance” (527). Nietzsche will affirm a version of this world of ubiquitous, perpetual change: “Do you know what the world is to me? A monster of energy, without beginning, without end ... that does not expend itself but only transforms itself... [A] play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many... a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing” (Will 550). For Pythagoras and Nietzsche, let us note, the monstrous, death-dealing flow is also generative: it is by virtue of a basic tendency toward morphing that mortal life-forms exist at all. Metamorphosis destroys and creates:

Spanish Holocaust through Memory Representation: Fictional Biography of Neus Català

Abstract: It is estimated that 15,000 Spaniards died in German concentration camps. However, the troubling reality that accounted for the repression experienced by the Spanish Republicans in occupied France and Nazi Germany during the Second World War has not been widely studied. Although not particularly well known, there are several testimonies, documentaries, and narratives that focus on the Spanish Holocaust.1 These narratives are especially traumatic because they describe the humiliations suffered by human beings who were stripped of their

"Democrazy" in Spain: Cinema and New Forms of Social Life in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: The term “democrazy” in the title of my essay is not one that I coined myself, but one that I have appropriated from the massive protests that took place in Spain in May 2011.1 The use of English on many of the banners has to do with the fact that these protests were part of what we know as the Occupy Movement. In Spain, the largest demonstrations took place on May 15, 2011, and for that reason they are now known as the 15M movement. This was followed by a three-week occupation of the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, the square at the city’s geographical center, with further occupations in Spain’s other major cities.2 This social revolution should be understood both in the global context, as a result of the 2008 financial crisis which laid bare both the pervasive presence of neoliberalism and the shortcomings of today’s democracy, and as a critique of the Spanish democratic regime first established in 1978. My essay will address this dual nature of the crisis in order to later explain both how the situation has been portrayed by a new generation of filmmakers and how their cinematic practices attempt to create new forms of social life. That is, their ground-breaking cultural output—which includes collective modes of production and experi-

Reizende Aussichten: Aesthetic and Scientific Observation in Albrecht von Haller's Die Alpen

Abstract: Albrecht von Haller (1708–77) defined the field of modern physiology, made significant contributions to botany as well as to the experimental scientific method more generally, and was also widely known in his time as a man of letters for his 1729/32 poem Die Alpen. The 49 stanzas of alexandrine verse were translated into several European languages and broadly captured the popular imagination of the time.1 Also likely because of its ubiquitous readership, the poem became immortalized already during Haller’s life as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s negative example of the splintering, stultifying effects of the over-abundance of description in his 1766 Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie. Haller himself called the condition under which he composed the work a “poetische Krankheit,” and this early poetic effort seems to have been eclipsed by his prodigious natural scientific output, an astounding 52,000 published titles, as he only produced a few more literary works after this early phase of productivity and none nearly as widely read as Die Alpen (Müller-Sievers 348). Haller’s relentless work ethic led him to relegate literary writing to “Reisen, schlaflose Nächte, Krankheiten” so as not to impede his empirical studies (Haller, Gedichte 393). It has even been suggested that his scientific empiricism stamped out his poetic imagination (Shteir 184). Attempts to rehabilitate Haller

Echoing End: Fray Luis de León's "Oda en la Ascensión"

Abstract: A concern with endings has been central to the study of narrative form as well as to inquiries into the cognitive and/or psychological desire for closure. In the stories we read, as much as in the stories we craft from chaotic experience into what we call our lives, “the end” represents a longing for the vanishing point of trauma, conflict, or uncertainty. From Walter Benjamin’s meditations on storytelling to the psychoanalytic-inflected work of Peter Brooks, or Frank Kermode’s classic lectures on the Sense of an Ending, endings have been inextricably bound to the meaning of narrative as such.1 Linked by analogy to our own mortality, narrative endings become for all these thinkers tiny rehearsals in dealing with death. What’s more, Kermode argues, the end not only completes narrative as form but more importantly, it graces the story with meaning. And it is through this retrospection—the Archimedean external point from which the whole can be viewed and comprehended—that literary endings may provide readers with some consolation.2

The End(lessnes)s of Infamy: Agamben, Enjambment, and Embodiment in a Cervantine Stanza

Abstract: Giorgio Agamben’s The End of the Poem begins and ends with two readings of Dante. The first, in the chapter entitled “Comedy,” revisits the question of why the Italian poet considered his magnum opus as such, of why he would “abandon his own ‘tragic’ poetic project for a ‘comic’ poem” (1). Unsatisfied with prior scholarly explanations, Agamben interrogates the incipit of the Divine Comedy in order to finally validate, nearly seven hundred years on, the pertinence of its curious generic marker. His argument hinges on a consideration of tragic guilt and comic guilt, as well as the oft-related emotion of shame. Of particular interest to Agamben is the theory of shame that Dante develops toward the end of the Purgatory, when he is abandoned by Virgil in favor of Beatrice as his guide, a theory by which “‘comic’ humiliation” and “the purifying necessity of shame” lead to Dante’s “expiation” (Agamben, End 15). In effect, when with harsh words his beloved first calls out to him near the end of Canto 30, he is immediately ashamed: “My lowered eyes caught sight of the clear stream,/ but when I saw myself reflected there,/ such shame weighed on my brow, my eyes drew back/ and toward the grass” (268).1 It is the sight

Postcards from the Avant-Garde

Abstract: In 1916, the cultural historian and book collector Aby Warburg inherited a small sum of money. The legacy came with strings attached. Warburg had already spent much of his own share of the Warburg family fortune on his library project, but the inheritance was to be spent for his personal enjoyment only. Instead of purchasing printed matter, library supplies, or travel tickets, Warburg invested the money in art. His scholarly research had largely focused on Renaissance art and the afterlife of ancient Greece. Now, however, Warburg bought a painting by Franz Marc, a young Bavarian artist who, together with Wassily Kandinsky, had founded an art movement just a few years earlier, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). Warburg’s new possession did not depict any riders but horses; a purple mare and two young foals painted in vibrant red and blue. Marc had completed the painting in 1912.1 By the time of Warburg’s purchase, this painting was a legacy, too. At the onset of World War I, Marc had enthusiastically joined the army; he envisioned a political renewal of Germany and fought for a renewal of art and artistic experience as well. In March 1916, however, he was killed near Verdun, not in battle, but in a mine-clearance operation. After his death, his widow Maria Marc took charge of his work and all sales.2

The Rise of Italian Literary Historiography in Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract: The history of literary historiography is a field of research that requires further investigation. Its foundations were laid in England and Italy by René Wellek and Giovanni Getto in 1941 and 1942, respectively. Despite not being particularly vibrant, this field of study is still pursued by scholars.1 However, not enough attention has been devoted to the histories of foreign literatures. Studying these works is important because they can better clarify the reception dynamics of single authors and genres abroad, they exemplify the general diffusion of theoretical and methodological tools, and they represent an intermediate step between the still-predominant approaches in literary historiography (which are generally centered around national traditions) and future perspectives in the present global environment. The birth of Italian literary historiography in England was the result of complex dynamics involving multiple factors and different contributions, and extended throughout the nineteenth century. While France had already reached maturity during the 1810s with the works of Pierre-Louis Ginguené and J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi,2

La cólera de la memoria y la gravedad de los cuerpos: Arqueología de las novelas de la crisis de Chirbes

Abstract: Las novelas de Chirbes se pueden concebir como un ciclo narrativo entrelazado, un poco a la manera de Balzac o Galdós, porque en casi todas ellas florece como una pulsión central la necesidad de traslucir la biografía de su generación en todas sus etapas: los efectos de la guerra en su infancia, las fatigas y adversidades de las familias de los derrotados, las militancias antifranquistas o el reciclaje espurio de la Transición. Las dos últimas novelas que publicó en vida abordan los infortunios de la España más actual, en una especie de apoteosis final de su obra creativa. Si Crematorio (2007) iluminaba la ilegalidad consustancial que envolvía el triunfo económico inspirado en la construcción en la España reciente, En la orilla (2013), unos años después, desvelaba los efectos devastadores de la crisis de la burbuja inmobiliaria. Ambas además se ubican en la costa levantina y por ello siempre ha sido tentador entre la crítica periodística estructurarlas en una especie de díptico de la crisis.1 No obstante, son novelas que

Randomness and Narrativity: A Cognitive Reassessment of Fortune and Nonsense in Montaigne's Essais

Abstract: When Montaigne visited Rome in 1580 he presented the first two books of the Essais to Roman censors for their seal of approval. Surprisingly, the censors’ first and chief misgiving upon the second review of the Essais, the only misgiving that Montaigne actually mentions, and mentions twice in his Journal de voyage, pertained to the pervasiveness of the notion of fortune in the Essais (Journal de voyage 119 and 131).2 To the censors’ mind, apparently, Montaigne’s repeated ascription of fortune to inferential causality was the most threatening challenge to the metaphysical edifice upon which Catholic dogma stood, and not,

Undoing—Creation—Anew: On Else Lasker-Schüler's Der Siebente Tag and the Neue Gemeinschaft

Abstract: Before the avant-garde movements with which Else Lasker-Schüler would be associated during and after her collaboration with Herwarth Walden on Der Sturm, she participated in the Neue Gemeinschaft, a collective that should have been, as its members repeatedly proclaimed, at the vanguard of a new life, and at a nigh-immeasurable distance from the political and physical spaces of contemporary Wilhelmine Germany.1 Gustav Landauer begins his speech “Durch Absonderung

La Mirtilla: Shaping a New Role for Women

Abstract: In a time when women who were performing in the commedia dell’arte were demonized and accused of immorality, the life and example of actress and playwright Isabella Andreini showed that it was possible for an actress to be a pious and virtuous woman, a firm believer in the sanctity of the marital bond, and the mother of seven children raised according to the Christian values of her time. Andreini was not only extremely talented in the performing arts, but clever, learned, eloquent and literarily accomplished.1 The combination of these talents and achievements made her a compelling advocate in the defense of the female character, as she chose to use the medium of pastoral drama— which her male contemporaries used to display denigrating female stereotypes—to introduce her audiences to a new kind of woman. Andreini’s pastoral, La Mirtilla,2 focuses on the intelligence, determination, feelings and morality of its female characters in a way never

The Generation Game: Javier Cercas, Podemos and the (Im)Possibility of Progressive Politics in Spain

Abstract: The general elections held on December 20, 2015 were the most unpredictable and bitterly fought in Spain since 1979. This was the cause and the consequence of the rise of new political parties, most noticeably Podemos and Ciudadanos, who have translated into political currency the discontent and energy of the "15-M"movement, a shorthand for anti-austerity movement(s) that references the occupation of major squares throughout Spain by the so-called "indignados" in May 2011. The writings on and by Podemos frequently speak of "una segunda Transicion," a challenge to the "regimen del 78" that midwifed the Transition from Francoism to a liberal monarchical democracy. This article employs Javier Cercas's historical novel, Anatomia de un instante, about the failed coup attempt of 1981, as a means to contextualize and critically engage with the Podemos platform at a time when the Spanish political scene appears to be divided at least as much on generational as on ideological grounds.

Rites of Holy Terror: Sadean Governmentality in France's Les Dieux ont soif

Abstract: Abstract:Rites of Holy Terror: Sadean Governmentality in France's Les Dieux ont soif Les dieux ont soif seems, at first blush, to endorse a centuries-old cliché: the Jacobin club trafficked in ideological abstraction, thus dooming their project to “failure.” Reading more closely, we find an altogether different set of concerns. In his stereotyped cast of characters, in the leitmotifs of nature and monstrosity, and in an interlocking grid of references, which the current article explores at length,France encodes the paradox of sovereignty. Beyond the juridical order and at its very core, his Jacobins lay bare a zone of transgressive force, where norm and anomaly pass through one another, and the exception grounds the rule. Finally, the conte “Crainquebille” extends this regime to the grind of daily life, thrusting starkly into view its backdrop of well-regulated terror.

"Che fronte di uomo di genio!": Woman, Genius, and Modernity in Haydée's Faustina Bon

Abstract: The aim of this essay is to draw critical attention to Faustina Bon, Romanzo Teatrale Fantastico (1914), a forgotten novel by Haydée, nom de plume of the Jewish writer Ida Finzi (1867–1946), one of the most prolific women writers working in Trieste at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Trieste was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Although almost completely forgotten today, Haydée was during her life a well-known journalist and author of plays, novels and irredentist pamphlets that became very popular in the wake of the first World War. A convinced believer in the irredentist cause, after Trieste’s unification with Italy she became a fervent supporter of the fascist party and wrote regularly for its official newspaper, ll popolo di Trieste. She remained uncritically faithful to the regime until the issuing of the racial laws that prohibited her to publish. She died, forgotten, in 1946.1 However, Faustina Bon is a surprising novel for a writer who would embrace Fascist ideology without any reservation. The book (winner of the Società degli Autori prize) is an original and irreverent novel that rewrites the story of Goethe’s Faust, from a fin de siècle proto-feminist perspective and, in so doing, indirectly undermines Otto Weininger’s misogynistic and anti-Semitic theories about geniality. Although much has been written on how turn-of-the-century Triestine writers such as Italo Svevo, Scipio Slataper, Umberto Saba and Carlo Michelstadter express the crisis of modernity in their texts,

Reading the Visible: Else Lasker-Schüler's Early Prose Texts and the Small Form

Abstract: When Kurt Hiller said of Else Lasker-Schüler that her work lacked “das Mentale,” that is, a level of reflexivity that exceeds merely sensual and sentimental expression, he was trying to set the record straight after a disastrous encounter with Wieland Herzfelde, who had slapped him in the face at the Café des Westens in 1915 for making disparaging remarks about his revered poet-friend.1 Hiller’s sour comment about Lasker-Schüler’s lack of reflexivity struck at an aspect of her public persona that invited both praise and controversy from contemporaries, who marveled at her fearless self-presentation as a radical performance artist whose biographical self was all but indistinguishable from the characters she developed. Lasker-Schüler played this role in a literalminded way that foreclosed conventional forms of mediation, whether identificatory or allegorical. Her apparent disinterest in reflecting on or gaining distance to this performance, if only to be able to describe her poetics to others, would seem to support Hiller’s assertion that Lasker-Schüler was generally unconcerned with metapoetic reflection. In this essay I take Hiller’s concern seriously but reframe it by assuming that Hiller missed the reflexivity in Lasker-Schüler’s work because it did not look like anything he would recognize as such. This poetological moment unfolds via Lasker-Schüler’s engagement with the protean non-genre of the “kleine Prosa” propelled by the proliferation

Shame in Ethical Discourse: Vichian Echoes in Bernard Williams

Abstract: The affinities between the thought of Bernard Williams (1929–2003) and Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) have been well noted by scholars of Vico, who have stressed the similarities in their treatment of sensus communis and the emotions.1 Although Williams rarely cites Vico, the fact that such strong correspondences exist is most likely the result of Williams’ intellectual debt to Isaiah Berlin, who led the revival of interest in Vico’s thought in the second half of the twentieth century.2 This article argues, however, that the points of contact between Vico and Williams run deeper than mere passing resemblances and structure their respective responses to the rationalist assumptions of their contemporaries. Both thinkers eschew reductive attempts to ground human society upon a stable rational foundation and instead insist upon considering the contingencies in which justice emerges. Importantly, the emotions figure prominently in their respective accounts. While theorists before Vico such as Machiavelli and Hobbes had already stressed the constitutive function of emotions, especially that of fear, Vico anticipates Williams by reflecting upon the positive role that shame can play in inculcating stable and enduring ethical principles which fear is unable to provide on its own. Although Vico’s treatment of the mechanisms underlying the experience of shame is rooted in

A Transparent Veil: The Secret as Tragic Spectacle in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron (1559)

Abstract: A Transparent Veil: The Secret as Tragic Spectacle in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron (1559) This essay begins by exploring the fundamentally triangular system of power relationships and rhetorical strategies proposed by Andreas Capellanus's De Amore (1186) and Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (1528). While both authors recognize the need for secrecy, their theoretical constructs contain fundamental ambiguities and contradictions, which authors such as Marguerite de Navarre exploit to full effect. The essay thus turns to the novella 70 of the Heptameron (1559) as a case-study of how Navarre manipulates the triangular construct of secrecy to maximize the pathos of her tragic tale revealing an authorial stance akin to sprezzatura .

Ghostly Embodiments of Migration: Jarmila Očkayová's Aesthetics of Estrangement and Transnationalism in L'essenziale è invisibile agli occhi

Abstract: A strange sickness haunts the protagonist of Jarmila Očkayová’s L’essenziale è invisibile agli occhi (1997).1 The novel uses this sickness as its central symbolic imagery for encoding the estranging effects of migration and addressing the protagonist’s psychic trauma. In the novel, accounts of various physical symptoms interrupt the narrative and impose themselves as moments of inarticulate rupture. The protagonist, whose name is Agata Jakub, is an Italo-Slovakian journalist who finds herself unable to grasp the source of her malattia. Yet, her anxious questioning leads her on a journey to recover her multiple belongings. She begins to recall not only her stunted formation as a woman, but also years of repression that hint at a need for reconciliation with the idea of a transnational self.2

The Birth of the Poetess from the Spirit of the Avant-Garde: Else Lasker-Schüler's Die Nächte Tino von Bagdads

Abstract: Else Lasker-Schüler’s Die Nächte Tino von Bagdads (The nights of Tino from Baghdad) is an iridescent work, combining prose and poetry, the sublime and the grotesque, and the autobiographical and the fantastic. Critics have often regarded it as an immature early work. One of the first doctoral theses on the poetess remarked that one could indeed “write a commentary on the Nächte as on Faust,” but that “such a commentary would be unnecessary for literary studies” (Goldstein 12).1 What is considered “necessary” changes with the times, however, and already implies an interpretation: whereas the postwar period “needed” the restorative eternalizing of the poetess as a conciliatory figure of redemption, the seventies demanded the debunking of this mystification, and the eighties required a reading of her works as an example of feminist writing. Currently, as context-oriented cultural studies presents a challenge to the close study of literary texts, it is timely to see her work as a display of innovative poetics in which the power of literature unfolds its critical and creative potential. In this perspective, the Nächte, in which a self-reflexive writing style meets a performative autopoiesis, proves to be an early manifestation of the avant-garde that is as subversive of aesthetic conventions as it is selfcritical of the avant-garde’s own revolutionary confidence. The work

Olivier Rolin's Le Météorologue: Vicarious Witnessing and the Gulag

Abstract: Abstract:Olivier Rolin’s Le Météorologue: Vicarious Witnessing and the Gulag This article is a study of Olivier Rolin’s Le météorologue (2014), a documentary work that advocates for a recalibrated understanding of twentieth-century totalitarian oppression. Rolin’s text traces his investigation into the arrest, detainment, execution, and legacy of Alexeï Vangengheim, Stalin’s chief meteorologist who was falsely accused of sabotage and espionage in 1934. This analysis aims to show that reading Le météorologue as vicarious testimony reveals intertextuality among narratives produced in response to totalitarian oppression. Such a reading recasts memory of the Gulag into a broader historical and narrative context, one that takes into account both Soviet and Nazi political repression and mass murder. This study draws on comparative analysis of Rolin’s work and noteworthy testimonial texts on the Second World War. It furthermore explores Le météorologue in the context of Rolin’s other recent texts on the former USSR. Finally, it situates Rolin’s project within contemporary debates on the memory and postmemory of twentieth-century atrocities.