Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 2000"

Scraps Of The Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia

Abstract: Dystopian narrative is a product of the social ferment of the twentieth century. A hundred years of war, famine, disease, state terror, genocide, ecocide, and the depletion of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life provided fertile ground for this fictive underside of the utopian imagination. From the classical works by E. M. Forster, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood, through the new maps of hell in postwar science fiction, and most recently in the dystopian turn of the 1980s and 1990s, this narrative machine has produced challenging cognitive maps of the given historical situation by way of imaginary societies which are even worse than those that lie outside their authors' and readers' doors.In Scraps of the Untainted Sky , Tom Moylan offers a thorough investigation of the history and aesthetics of dystopia. To situate his study, Moylan sets out the methodological paradigm that developed within the interdisciplinary fields of science fiction studies and utopian studies as they grow out of the oppositional political culture of the 1960 and 1970s (the context that produced the project of cultural studies itself). He then presents a thorough account of the textual structure and formal operations of the dystopian text. From there, he focuses on the new science-fictional dystopias that emerged in the context of the economic, political, and cultural convulsions of the 1980s and 1990s, and he examines in detail three of these new "critical dystopias:" Kim Stanley Robinson's The Gold Coast, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower , and Marge Piercy's He, She, and It .With its detailed, documented, and yet accessible presentation, Scraps of the Untainted Sky will be of interest to established scholars as well as students and general readers who are seeking an in-depth introduction to this important area of cultural production.

Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction

Abstract: Peasants into revolutionaries? - "between camps" during the Algerian War de-mythologising consumer society -class and culture in France, 1962-69 continuity, change and crisis in French higher education, 1964-70 returning to Kabylia - the theory and poetics of practice "an imaginary variation" - the role of Kabylia la distinction - old wine in new bottles? "le nouvel opium des intellectuels" - neo-liberalism and the defence of the universal

Revisiting the Imaginary Audience and Personal Fable Constructs of Adolescent Egocentrism: A Conceptual Review

Abstract: Adolescents are thought to believe that others are always watching and evaluating them, and that they are special and unique, labeled the imaginary audience and the personal fable, respectively These two constructs have been fixtures in textbooks on adolescent development, and have been offered as explanations for self-consciousness and risk-taking However, their characterization of adolescent social cognition as biased has not been supported empirically, the measures used to assess them lack construct validity, and alternative explanations for both ideation patterns have not been explored Despite these issues, the imaginary audience and personal fable constructs continue to be considered prototypical representations of social cognitive processes during adolescence This paper (1) reviews theoretical models of the imaginary audience and the personal fable, and the empirical data pertaining to each model, (2) highlights problems surrounding the two most commonly used measures, and (3) outlines directions for future research, so that a better understanding of the imaginary audience and personal fable, and their roles in adolescent development, may be achieved

Deleuze and Feminist Theory

Abstract: Ever since Deleuze and Guattari provocatively declared that all 'becoming' must go by way of a 'becoming-woman' their work has been the subject of intense feminist interrogation. This volume highlights the key points of this ongoing inquiry, focusing particularly on the implications of Deleuze's work for a specifically feminist philosophy. Deleuze and Feminist Theory brings together the work of some of Deleuze's finest commentators and today's most important feminist thinkers. For Deleuze, reading a philosopher or thinker ought never to be a question of blind allegiance or assessing the correctness of methods. Engagement with a thinker is most productive when considered in terms of what a body of thought can do, how concepts create events and how thinking can mobilise desire. It is in this spirit that the essays in this book engage with the work of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze is neither wholeheartedly embraced as an answer to feminist questions, nor rejected as yet one more masculinist error in the history of reason. Rather, Deleuze presents feminism with a challenge and a question: how to think? The work gathered here responds to this challenge with a series of further questions opened by the Deleuzean project. How might desire be thought positively? What can a body do? How might women become? And how might feminism be thought as an event? Including new work by Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti and Dorothea Olkowski and essays on film, the colonial imaginary, desire and embodiment, Deleuze and Feminist Theory offers asustained consideration of the impact of Deleuze on feminist thought. Key Features *Provides an introduction to Deleuze for those working in feminist theory and philosophy *Includes new work by major feminist theorists *Provides a broad approach to several areas of Deleuze's work, including film, politics, literature and feminism *Relates Deleuze's work to its historical and philosophical context

Thought Experiment: On the Powers and Limits of Imaginary Cases

Abstract: This book offers a novel analysis of the widely-used but ill-understood technique of thought experiment. The author argues that the powers and limits of this methodology can be traced to the fact that when the contemplation of an imaginary scenario brings us to new knowledge, it does so by forcing us to make sense of exceptional cases.

Contexto social e imaginário organizacional moderno

Abstract: This article analyzes some changes happened in the social-organizational environment and the answers given them by big businesses, mainly ones related to a specific imaginary created in order to legitimate them as a central social actor.

The Jameson reader

Abstract: Introduction. Part I: Paradigms of Interpretation:. 1. On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981). 2. Towards Dialectical Criticism (1971). 3. T.W. Adorno (1971). 4. Roland Barthes and Structuralism (1972). 5. Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan (1977). Part II: Marxism and Culture: . 6. On Jargon (1977). 7. Base and Superstructure (1990). 8. Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture (1979). 9. Marxism and the Historicity of Theory: An Interview by Xudong Zhang (1998). 10. Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism. Part III: Postmodernism:. 11. Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism (1975). 12. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Login of Late Capitalism (1984). 13. The Antinomies of Postmodernity (1994). 14. Culture and Finance Capital (1997). Part IV: Exercises in Cognitive Mapping: . 15. Cognitive Mapping (1998). 16. Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film (1977). 17. National Allegory in Wyndham Lewis (1979). 18. Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism (1986). 19. Totality as Conspiracy (1992). Part V: Utopia: . 20. Introduction/Prospectus: To Reconsider the Relationship of Marxism to Utopian Thought (1976). 21. World--Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative (1975). 22. Utopian and Anti--Utopianism (1994). Bibliography. Index.

Literatures of memory : history, time and space in postwar writing

Abstract: Part 1: postmodernism and the death of the past - history and postmodernity, everyday practices of history, fear of the past the ethics of historical fiction - postmodernism and historical fiction, postmodern history and ethics memory's realism -metamemory in Pat Barker's "Regeneration", identity and trauma, social memory practising spacetime - the relativistic physics of memory - Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye", science and social time, making time for diversity, the spatialization of history. Part 2: staged histories - radical theatre in Britain and America, 1968-1988 - staging history, "Hammering on the Pipes of the Tenement" -David Hare and Howard Brenton, agitprop versus realist history -John McGrath, herstories - Caryl Churchill and Timberlake Wertenbaker, African-American theatre - August Wilson poetry as memory - the autobiographical lyric in contemporary British and American poetry - Sarah Maguire - "Spilt Milk", Robert Creeley -"I Keep to Myself Such Measures", Jorie Graham - "What the End is For", Lyn Hejinian - "Yet We Insist that Life is Full of Happy Chance", from "My Life" histories of the future - American science fiction after the Second World War - the future's relation to the present, governing the future - Isaac Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy" fictional cities and urban spaces - contemporary fiction and representations of the city - architects of theoretical and social space, Thomas Pynchon's urban imaginary in "The Crying of Lot 49", Paul Auster's "The New York Trilogy", simulation city.

The Memory of Trade: Modernity’s Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island

Abstract: "The Memory of Trade" is an ethnographic study of the people of Aru, an archipelago in eastern Indonesia. Central to Patricia Spyer's study is the fraught identification of Aruese people with two imaginary elsewheres - the 'Aru' and the 'Malay' - and the fissured construction of community that has ensued from centuries of active international trade and more recent encroachments of modernity. Drawing on more than two years of archival and ethnographic research, Spyer examines the dynamics of contact with the Dutch and Europeans, Suharto's postcolonial regime, and with the competing religions of Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism in the context of the recent conversion of pagan Aruese.While arguing that Aru identity and community are defined largely in terms of absence, longing, memory, and desire, she also incorporates present-day realities - such as the ecological destruction wrought by the Aru trade in such luxury goods as pearls and shark fins - without overlooking the mystique and ritual surrounding these activities. Imprinted on the one hand by the archipelago's long engagement with extended networks of commerce and communication and, on the other, by modernity's characteristic repressions and displacements, Aruese make and manage their lives somewhat precariously within what they often seem to construe as a dangerously expanding - if still enticing - world.By documenting not only the particular expectations and strategies Aruese have developed in dealing with this larger world but also the price they pay for participation therein, "The Memory of Trade" speaks to problems commonly faced elsewhere in the frontier spaces of modern nation-states. Balancing particularly astute analysis with classic ethnography, "The Memory of Trade" will appeal not only to anthropologists and historians but also to students and specialists of Southeast Asia, modernity, and globalisation.

'You are entrapped in an imaginary well': the formation of subjectivity within compressed development - a feminist critique of modernity and Korean culture

Abstract: (2000). 'You are entrapped in an imaginary well': the formation of subjectivity within compressed development - a feminist critique of modernity and Korean culture. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 49-69.

Writing the Imperial Imaginary@@@Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War

Abstract: 1. The war at home 2. The concentration camps controversy and the press 3. Gender ideology as military policy - the camps, continued 4. Cannibals or knights: sexual honor in the propaganda of Arthur Conan Doyle and W. T. Stead 5. Interpreting South Africa to Britain: Olive Schreiner, Boers, and Africans 6. The imperial imaginary: the press, empire, and the literary figure Notes Works cited.

Culture, Imaginary, and Rationality in Regional Economic Development

Abstract: This paper outlines some key terms in a cultural analysis of economic systems. During empirical research I have concluded that radical geography in the tradition of political economy must employ cultural terms such as symbol, imaginary, and rationality. These terms link the material, through experience and interpretation, to the mental—consciousness, intentionality, and rationality. I argue that culture understood as symbolic practice is compatible with historical materialism in the tradition of Gramsci, Thompson, and Williams. The paper applies cultural materialism to the explanation of economic rationalities and developmental logics by drawing on Weberian sociology. These ideas are exemplified by a brief account of the New England moral economy. The paper concludes by calling for a new type of critical inquiry called cultural economy.

Literary geography: Joyce, Woolf and the city

Abstract: Are cities in literature essentially 'imaginary spaces' or, rather, representations of material realities? Jeri Johnson explores these alternative conceptions–with reference to the metropolis as discussed by Benjamin and Simmel–in the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. For both writers, Johnson concludes, cities were both 'insistently themselves and persistently something other' (including utopian openings towards 'the possibility of charitable action as a stimulus to social cohesion').

Advertising the Archive: Nostalgia and the (Post)national Imaginary

Abstract: In theorizing the emergence of a "global cultural economy," Arjun Appadurai relates a postmodern, commodity sensibility based on nostalgia to a "complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes."1 He is concerned with the cultural flows that move between and across national boundaries in a newly globalized world and comments on the possibility of "nostalgia without memory." This locates the Jamesonian nostalgia mode, understood as a form of pastiche, in a culture of world image systems. Appadurai suggests that: "The past is not a land to return to in a simple politics of memory. It has become a synchronie warehouse of cultural scenarios. . . ."2 One consequence of the past existing in this way, as a cultural style within advanced global capitalism, is the possibility for people around the world to consume images that belong to a cultural past that has no relation to their own. With images circulating in a newly heterogeneous and transnational public sphere, Appadurai suggests that nostalgia can be experienced for a past that has never been lost in any culturally specific or referential sense.

Conversations with Salman Rushdie

Abstract: ""If there's an attempt to silence a writer, the best thing a writer can do is not be silenced. If somebody is trying to stifle your voice, you should try and make sure it speaks louder than before."" Acclaim, success, and controversy follow every one of Salman Rushdie's writings. His novels and stories have won him awards and made him both famous in the literary world and a catalyst for protests worldwide. For nearly a decade after publication of The Satanic Verses, he faced a bounty on his life. Although Rushdie has participated in a great number of interviews, many of his most revealing conversations were published in journals and newspapers throughout the globe -- not only in England and the United States, but also in India, Canada, and across Europe. Conversations with Salman Rushdie, the first collection of interviews with Rushdie, brings together the best and some of the rarest of the interviews the author has granted. Though many know Rushdie for his novels, what most do not realize is the breadth of Rushdie's writing and thinking. There are many other Salman Rushdies -- the travel writer, the crafter of short stories, the filmmaker, the ""children's"" story writer, the essayist and critic, and the unflinching commentator on contemporary culture, particularly on race and inequality. ""The speaking of suppressed truths is one of the great possibilities of the novel,"" he tells the Third World Book Review, ""and it is perhaps the main reason why the novel becomes the most dangerous of art forms in all countries where people, governments, are trying to distort the truth."" Rushdie talks extensively about the creative process, about his views on art and politics, and about his life before and after the fatwa. Articulate, witty, and learned, he shows the side of himself that sparks such controversy. While not necessarily seeking to provoke, Rushdie shows how controversy is often inseparable from the politically charged situations and issues that compel him to write. Rushdie takes risks in his writing, pushing both the novelistic form and language to its limits. ""Dispense with safety nets,"" he says in Imaginary Homelands. These interviews reveal a man with a powerful mind, a wry sense of humor, and an unshakable commitment to justice. Michael R. Reder is director of the Roth Writing Center and an instructor in the department of English at Connecticut College.

No One's Land: Australia and the Philosophical Imagination

Abstract: Drawing on the work of Michele Le Doeuff, this paper uses the idea of "philosophical imagination" to make visible the historical intersection between philosophical ideas, social practice, and institutional structures. It explores the role of ideas of "terra nullius" and of the "doomed race" in the formation of some crucial ways in which non-indigenous Australians have imagined their relations with indigenous peoples. The author shows how feminist reading strategies that attend to the imaginary open up ways of rethinking processes of inclusion and exclusion. Feminist philosophy, not surprisingly, has been centrally concerned with issues of gender and sexual difference. Perhaps it is now time to stand back from that familiar content in order to get a clearer idea of what might have emerged as distinctive about the practice of feminist philosophy, and to ask whether that practice might appropriately be broadened to take account of other pressing issues of contemporary societies. This paper traces just one route through this terrain by reflecting on what feminists have made of the exercise of rereading texts from the history of philosophy from a standpoint of concern with contemporary issues. It is a route that passes from gender to race as a fundamental issue of concern. In that respect, this paper expresses the preoccupations of contemporary Australian politics. But I think broadly similar, though no doubt in detail very different, transitions can be traced in other countries where feminists have attempted to challenge and re-construct the agenda of mainstream philosophy. My discussion will center on the idea of the "philosophical imagination" as a form of response to the present, a response that is both philosophical and political. This emerging philosophical practice has, for contingent reasons, had close connections with the development of feminist philosophy. But it is

Imagination under Pressure, 1789-1832: Aesthetics, Politics and Utility

Abstract: Introduction 1. Burke and the civic imagination 2. Paine's attack on artifice 3. Wollstonecraft, imagination and futurity 4. Hazlitt and the sympathetic imagination 5. Cobbett's imaginary landscape 6. Coleridge and the afterlife of imagination Afterword.

Fantasm: The triumph of form (an essay on the democratic sublime)

Abstract: This essay attempts to counter the dreariness of postmodern critique and culture by locating the vital force of phantasy, rhetoric, argument, hope, and memory in contemporary public affairs. More particularly, it engages recent controversies about collective memory and the FDR memorial statue especially to generate a greater sensitivity to the fact that we are agents (and not just dupes) of history. The body, symbolic and material, is a core site for the history, theory, and practice of democracy, I argue, and is the hard kernel of collective identification and division. Methodologically, the essay fuses Aristotle and Lacan's ideas about phantasy as a perceptual device, which gages and creates public and personal desire, as an analytic frame for the study of public discourse.

Political Perfectionism and the `Anti-System' Party

Abstract: This study provides a `positive' definition of the `anti-system party' as a party seeking a standard of perfection derived from its commitment to an imaginary rather than real civil society. The example of Israel's `New Force' party is then discussed.

The Politics of Play: The Social Implications of Iser's Aesthetic Theory

Abstract: ing about the social functions of literature. The Fictive and the Imaginary, the culmination of his reflections about the art of representation, does not explicitly engage the question of the politics of literature, and its emphasis on the value of "play" and the "as if might seem to disengage the aesthetic experience from worldly concerns. What Iser means by "play," however, is a profoundly important social activity that would facilitate productive uses of difference to create forms of community among decentered human beings whose dissonances and dislocations resist unification. As an instrument for staging various kinds of open-ended exploratory interactions, Iser's notion of literature offers a model of the emancipatory uses of power in the service of communicative democracy. The politics of Iser's theory of nonmimetic representation foregrounds the role of the "as if in producing, questioning, and overturning different forms of life. The playful, nonteleological functioning of fictive acts of staging in turn makes possible the reciprocal but nonconsensual exchange of power on which democratic mutuality depends. The Fictive and the Imaginary engages the question of power in representation in order to affirm the liberating and community-building capacities of literature in a perpetually unstable, decentered world. It is thus an important response to the political challenges of our time. The Fictive and the Imaginary moves beyond Iser's earlier concern with reading to offer a general theory of textuality in the service of what he calls "literary anthropology." Two questions drive this anthropology: Why do human beings seem to need fictions? And what does the capacity to make fictions reveal about the being of human being? Iser approaches these questions not by undertaking a transcendental phe nomenological reflection but by looking for patterns in several histori cally and culturally specific domains that he thinks provide especially illuminating examples of how human beings have made and thought

Gender, "Aliens", and the National Imaginary in Contemporary Malaysia

Abstract: Over the last few decades, Malaysia has welcomed foreign workers into those sectors of the economy that have suffered chronic low-skilled and semi-skilled labour shortages. Coming from Malaysia's poorer neighbours (particularly Indonesia, Bangladesh, and the Philippines), these migrants occupy an ambivalent place in Malaysia's national development. This paper argues that not only is contemporary Malaysia refashioning its national identity in response to "new outsiders", who are deemed the new "undesirable aliens", as argued by others recently, but this reconstituted national imaginary is profoundly ethno-nationalist, class-based, sexualized, and gendered.

Men, women and “Japanese” as outsiders: A case study of postcards with Ainu images

Abstract: The depiction of the Ainu in photography, as created and circulated in Japan starting from the Meiji era, provides us with a case study to investigate how gender and ethnic differences are related to the construction of self/other relations in modern Japan. I consider the imaginary relations between Japanese viewers and Ainu images ranging from paintings to photographs and, in doing so, make use of metaphorical meanings and imaginary mythical structures for the analogy of contentious ethnic relations from the age of mechanical reproduction, as Walter Benjamin suggested. I will examine the different images of Ainu men and women interwoven with an imaginary Japaneseness regarding the cultural meanings of insider and outsider within the process of colonization in Hokkaido during the Meiji era. Likewise, with the notion of stranger‐king political transformation emphasized by Marshall Sahlins in his Fijian studies, this article serves as a challenge to discern the construction of Japaneseness in terms of mythi...

California & the fictions of capital

Abstract: These essays on California's economy, culture, and literature between the 1880s and 1920s show how rural places were made over in the image of capital. The story told here is of the real and imaginary spaces that capital occupied, including its encounters with the realities and representations of race, gender, and class. Beginning with the geography and political economy of agrarian capitalism, Henderson moves on to examine the celebratory, if fretful, ruminations on economy in novels by Frank Norris, Mary Austin, and many other writers drawn to rural California before John Steinbeck redefined the scene in the 1930s.

Aesthetics and Politics of Violence in Central Africa

Abstract: The BaKongo and other Central African peoples understand the place of violence in their lives in ways that resist translation into English because they seem to be both 'real' and 'imaginary.' In the nineteenth century, imagined violence was represented in the rituals of chiefs and in the complex forms of, fabricated objects which could be invoked to inflict retribution on others. The imaginative representation of occult violence in these objects and in the insignia of chiefship has earned many of them a place in the world's art museums. In recent years, vividly imagined violence has been central to the popular understanding of national politics, in Congo/Zaire as in many other African countries; it can in fact be regarded as a theory of political life, and compared as such with Western theories concerning the social ordering of violence.

Coming Out of Exile: Dante on the Orient(alism) Express

Abstract: THE INVITATION TO COMMENT AS A MEDIEVALIST on the impact of Edward Said's Orientalism twenty years after its publication reminded me of my exhilarating first encounter, when a colleague in eighteenth-century French history chose Said's book for our reading group. Orientalism introduced me to the different cultural and institutional ways in which Europeans constructed the Occident by assigning and hierarchizing boundaries between "East" and "West." Orientalism unmasked the process whereby "Europe" fabricated itself on a "theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe."2 Its critique of imaginary racialized geographies hooked me. Said's attention to the cultural politics of reprQsentation helped me, as a budding medieval economic historian, make sense of what I perceived to be sharp contradictions between archaeology and economic history during the early 1980s. Medieval archaeologists were then busy inverting the famous "Pirenne Thesis," which credited the Islamic takeover of the Western Mediterranean in the seventh century with producing the conditions of "isolation" that guaranteed the emergence of Charlemagne and, indeed, "Europe." Archaeologists, meanwhile, were uncov-