Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 2005"

The Power of the ‘Imaginary’ in Disciplinary Processes:

Abstract: The focus of this article is on processes of social control and the role that images and processes of identification play in effecting such control. The article begins by schematically tracing the history of the new paradigm of control firstly within the managerial literature as a move ‘from control to commitment’, then through critical accounts of ‘employee subjection’, through to more recent discussions of the nature of resistance. This history and its various puzzling inversions are then reviewed through Lacan’s account of the ‘imaginary’, and Butler’s associated re-reading of oedipal identifications. These offer an account both of the constitution of a humanist, interiorized sense of self—of the self as a discrete, autonomous, independent entity—as well as of the illusions or misunderstandings of this humanist conception of the self. It is suggested that the power of the imaginary lies in the power of recognition and the way in which this acts as a lure or trap in which we seek and find ourselves. It ...

Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life

Abstract: What is real about city life? Real Cities shows why it is necessary to take seriously the more imaginary, fantastic and emotional aspects of city life. Drawing inspiration from the work of Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel, Pile explores the dream-like and ghost-like experiences of the city. Such experiences are, he argues, best described as phantasmagorias. The phantasmagorias of city life, though commonplace, are far from self-evident and little understood. This book is a path-breaking exploration of urban phantasmagorias, grounded empirically in a series of unusual and exciting case studies. In this study, four substantial phantasmagorias are identified: dreams, magic, vampires and ghosts. The investigation of each phantasmagoria is developed using a wide variety of clear examples. Thus, voodoo in New York and New Orleans shows how ideas about magic are forged within cities. Meanwhile vampires reveal how specific fears about sex and death are expressed within, and circulate between, cities such as London and Singapore. Taken together, such examples build a unique picture of the diverse roles of the imaginary, fantastic and the emotional in modern city life. What is "real" about the city has radical consequences for how we think about improving city life, for all too often these are over-looked in utopian schemes for the city. Real Cities forcefully argues that an appreciation of urban phantasmagorias must be central to what is considered real about city life.

Third Wave Evangelism and the Politics of the Global in Papua New Guinea: Spiritual Warfare and the Recreation of Place in Telefolmin

Abstract: Third Wave pentecostalist theology envisages a global struggle against satanic forces as 'spiritual warfare.' Here I examine an instance of spiritual warfare that targeted the village of Telefolip as part of a national campaign. Embracing evangelical doctrines of the dependence of 'physical development' on 'spiritual development,' villagers burned ancestral relics and purport to have found 'uranium gas' on the site of a former spirit house. This discovery is held to be full of promise for the future: as a valuable (if imaginary) resource in Israel's struggles, uranium gas offers villagers wealth and a means of asserting local centrality in global terms. I conclude by arguing that an understanding of the conjunction of spiritual warfare's aims with villagers' hopes for a place in the world beyond the village is crucial to analyzing the dynamics of pentecostalist world-breaking and world-making.

Imaginary Companions, Creativity, and Self-Image in Middle Childhood

Abstract: This study investigates 4 questions: First, whether there is a relationship between imaginary companions and creative potential; second, whether children with negative self-images are more likely to have imaginary companions; third, whether there are gender differences among those children who have imaginary companions; and, finally, what aspects of imaginary companions and what characteristics of those who invent them are related to creativity. The measurements used were a questionnaire about imaginary companions, 3 estimates of creative potential, and a self-image inventory. Among the 69 participating 4th graders, 52% reported having (had) imaginary companions. The children with imaginary companions were more creative on 2 of 3 estimates of creativity and had lower self-image scores. The self-image differences were greatest on the subscales measuring psychological well-being and peer relations. It was more common for girls to have imaginary companions. Aspects associated with creativity among the childr...

Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body

Abstract: The objective of this dissertation project is to theorize and understand Black embodiment within the context of white hegemony, that is, within the context of a white racist anti-Black world. I theorize the Black body as a site of lived historicity vis-a-vis whiteness as the transcendental signified or as that which takes itself to be "unconditioned." I theorize how the Black body, under the power of the white gaze, which is linked to cultural, symbolic, and material power, undergoes what I refer to as a "phenomenological return." Examples were taken from the work of Ralph Ellsion, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and others. It is here that the presumption of the plasticity of the Black body, and the fact that it is a site of contested meanings, speaks to the historicity of the Black body's "being" as lived and meant within the interstices of social semiotics. I interrogated the "Black body" as a "fixed and material truth" that is said to pre-exist its relations with a white normative world of anti-Blackness. On this score, I maintain that not only does the Black body defy the ontic fixity projected upon it through the white gaze, and, hence, through the episteme of whiteness, but the white body is also fundamentally symbolic, requiring demystification of its status as norm, the paragon of beauty, order, innocence, purity, restraint, and nobility. The insights of various critical whiteness studies theorists were indispensable. I explore this larger racial Manichaean divide through the use of blending autobiography, history, and philosophical fiction. Through the Middle Passage and enslavement, Black bodies became the site not only of white racist discursive constructions, but the victim of white brutality and inhumanity that literally left the Black body marked, scarred. Through an exploration of Black resistance to the distorted Black imago of the white imaginary, I theorize ways in which the Black body challenged its conceptualization as "docile." White hegemony also interpellated the white body as that which is epistemologically and ontologically "given." In this way, it was necessary to render the unseen of whiteness seen at the site of the quotidian, and explore ways in which whites can disrupt whitely ways of being-in-the-world.

Chinese Face/Off: The Transnational Popular Culture of Hong Kong

Abstract: Jackie Chan's high-flying stunts, giant pandas, and even the unintentionally hilarious English subtitles that often accompany Hong Kong's films are among the many targets of Kwai-Cheung Lo's in-depth study of Hong Kong popular culture. Drawing on current concepts of globalization as well as the theories of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek, "Chinese Face/Off" explores the way in which fantasy operates in relation to ethnic and national identity. The book offers a critical perspective for approaching the question of cultural otherness by problematizing what it means to be Chinese and explaining how Hong Kong popular culture serves as an imaginary screen for its many compatriots seeking to understand what it means to be "Chinese" in a global age. Examining topics including film, newspaper culture, theme parks, and kung-fu comics as well as the interaction of the Hong Kong film industry with Hollywood, Lo uncovers Hong Kong's importantly "transnational" identity defined in terms of complex relationships with mainland China, other diasporic communities (like Taiwan), and the West. Kwai-Cheung Lo is an associate professor with the Department of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Culture, state, and security in Europe: The case of citizenship and integration policy in Estonia

Abstract: In this article, I examine how a territorial imaginary conflating culture, territory, nation, and security allows “elites of statecraft” in Europe to frame citizenship and integration policy as (inter)national security matters. Focusing on post-Soviet Estonia, I argue that this imaginary legitimized the denial of citizenship to Soviet-era Russian speakers and enabled the government's integration policy objective of creating the “Estonian cultural domain.” Drawing on historical, archival, and ethnographic research, I demonstrate how the invocation of national security justified these events and how the territorial imaginary structured the making of integration policy from the 1991 reestablishment of independence to E.U. accession in 2004.

bourgeois bohemians in china? neo-tribes and the urban imaginary

Abstract: this article treats an understudied subject in popular culture studies: the mutual feed between lifestyle cultures and marketing through an examination of the bobo fever in urban china. how did an imaginary class of “bourgeois bohemians” emerge in a country where the bourgeois base is statistically small and where the bohemian equation is non-existent? to shed light on this pop-culture-turned-marketing-fad syndrome, the article introduces the concept of the “neo-tribes” and maps the pathways that link style cultures to consumer segmentation. a couple of critical questions arise from this exercise. first, is the separability of taste from class symptomatic of a “chinese leap of faith”? and secondly, is the hottest market segment today – the “neo-neo-tribes” – preparing us to address the convergence of a global youth culture?

The Development of Symbolic Coordination: Representation of Imagined Objects, Executive Function, and Theory of Mind

Abstract: Children's developing competence with symbolic representations was assessed in 3 studies. Study 1 examined the hypothesis that the production of imaginary symbolic objects in pantomime requires the simultaneous coordination of the dual representations of a dynamic action and a symbolic object. We explored this coordination of symbolic representations in 3- to 5-year-olds with a modified action pantomime task that employed both a "dynamic action + object" condition and a "hold + object" condition. Consistent with earlier research, production of imaginary symbolic objects rather than body-part-as-objects increased with age, although, even at age 5, children did not perform at adult levels. As hypothesized, children produced fewer body-part-as-object anchors when they were simply asked to hold an object, rather than perform a dynamic action with the object. Study 2 repeated the conditions of Study 1 and examined these conditions in relation to performance on the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task. This...

The notion of ‘the West’ in the Serbian national imaginary

Abstract: This article deals with the imagery of 'the West' in contemporary Serbia. In an analysis of interviews with young Serbian intellectuals, it evaluates how they use the metaphor of the West to construct their self-image. Furthermore, it discusses how Serbian responses to European stereotyping and 'Othering' of the Balkans can function as a form of celebratory appropriation, acceptance and exploitation of these stereotypes. It explores the 'self-exoticization' process as a reaction to the real or imagined western stereotyping that is detected in Serbian narratives, with the overall objective of demonstrating the urgency of critically rethinking the notion that the identity of European remote areas mirrors western interests and stereotypes. Serbian narratives echo the ongoing struggle over the definition and purpose of belonging to Europe in relation to a global economy. Memories, traditions and stereotypes of belonging are not just invented, but also actively encouraged and negotiated within Serbian society. Copyright

Exploring the ‘shopping imaginary’: The dreamworld of women's magazines

Abstract: This paper focuses on the consumer imagination and, more specifically, on the imaginary shopping spaces which women's magazines create. It addresses the anticipatory, imaginary and experiential consumption which this medium invites. The paper explores how women's magazines function as ‘dreamworlds’ of shopping; and how contemporary readers consume these imaginary shopping spaces. In order to illustrate what the authors term the ‘shopping imaginary’, they draw on findings from a study of women's experiential consumption of magazines, which show the multifaceted ways around which imaginary consumption is explored and enjoyed by women. The study suggests that women's magazines, like department stores, are spaces that facilitate and celebrate just looking and browsing, and, above all, they are shopping spaces that address the power of the imagination within them. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

“Different than Us”: Othering, Orientalism, and US middle school students' discourses on Japan

Abstract: This study critically examines the discourses of Japan as employed by young people in the United States. In particular, it analyses the free writings of US middle school students that were collected at three schools with different community environments (rural, urban, and suburban). The study identifies the features and styles of the discourse(s) that occur in the students' writings, examines the ways the discourse of Othering and Orientalism operate in these texts, and explores the specificity of contemporary American identity formation in relation to the imaginary boundary between Japan (“them”) and the United States (“us”).

Nathanael West's Indian Commodities

Abstract: If the imaginary Indian, from the moment of the nation's founding, served as a flexible figure through which to work out questions of "American" identity, Indianness came to serve in the early twentieth century as a category through which Americans could also define what it meant to be modern. American modernism had nativist and nationalist inflections; American moderns demonstrated their commitment to a national artistic culture through their "Indianness," which was cast as fundamentally opposed to Jewishness. This discussion seeks to address Jewish American literary response to this nativist modernism through a discussion of Nathanael West, whose ambivalent relationship with both Jewishness and aesthetic modernism continues to preoccupy and vex his critics. This essay reads West's preoccupations with Indians, Jews, and the marketplace through the unfixable Jewishness dramatized in his 1934 novel A Cool Million, whose modernist parody of racial and ethnic typologies succeeds in thoroughly undermining them. Way out West in the wild and woolly prairie land, Lived a cowboy by the name of Levi, He loved a blue blood Indian maiden, And came to serenade her like a "tough guy." Big Chief "Cruller Legs" was the maiden's father And he tried to keep Levi away, But Levi didn't care, for ev'ry ev'ning With his Broncho Buster, Giddyap! Giddyap! He'd come around and say: Chorus: Tough guy Levi, that's my name, I'm a yiddish cowboy. I don't care for Tomahawks or Cheyenne Indians, oi, oi, I'm a real live "Diamond Dick" that shoots 'em till they die, I'll marry squaw or start a war, for I'm a fighting guy. Levi said that he'd make the maiden marry him And that he was sending for a Rabbi, The maiden went and told her father, He must not fight because she liked the "tough guy," "Cruller Legs" gave the "Pipe of Peace" to Levi But Levi said I guess that you forget, For I'm the kid that smokes Turkish Tobacco, Get the Broncho Buster, Giddyap! Giddyap! Go buy cigarettes. - 1907 Tin Pan Alley song(1) If the imaginary Indian, from the moment of the nation's founding, served as a flexible figure through which to work out questions of "American" identity, Indianness came to serve in the early twentieth century as a category through which Americans could also define what it meant to be modern. Michael North argues that the "story...of becoming modern by acting black was to be retold over and over;"(2) alternatively, the story of becoming modern by acting "red" was to have specific nationalist and nativist incentives. For Walter Benn Michaels, the emergence of "nativist modernism," which was interested in questions not only of art but of language, citizenship, culture, and race, constitutively involved "the transformation of the opposition between black and white into an opposition between Indian and Jew."(3) Up until the twentieth century, however, Indians and Jews had been imagined by both Europeans and Americans as racially consanguineous. The orthographic slip in, for example, Othello between "Indian" and"Iudian" reflected a real confusion in European minds between Indian and Jew.(4) The theory that the Indians of the New World were in fact descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel was widely popularized in the mid-17(th) century by an Amsterdam rabbi and subscribed to throughout the 19(th) century by Puritans, Jews, and Indians alike, who used it to argue, variously, national, religious, or political legitimacy.(5) This initial historical identification of Indian with Jew is ironized by what seems to be, in the 1907 song reproduced at the beginning of this essay, a union of "grotesque extreme anomalies." Indeed, much Jewish "redface" in twentieth century popular culture -- from Fanny Brice and Eddie Cantor to Woody Allen and Mel Brooks -- relies for its meaning on a profoundly dialectical relationship between Indian and Jew, in which kinship and unlikeness are plumbed in equal parts. …

Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic

Abstract: (2005). Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory: Vol. 80, No. 1, pp. 74-95.

Inclusión-exclusión. Los imaginarios sociales de un proceso de construcción social

Abstract: The historical fashion is our way to be alive. We don't know very well what is the tradition nor the prediction but we felt the emptiness of the always present present time. Our universe is that of the "recurrence"; we needed to discover new concepts that allow us to generate and to respond to the flexibility of the references. To this situation of high complexity it tries to respond a theory in construction: the Theory of Social Imaginary: this one are schemes socially constructed that allows us to perceive, to explain and to take part in each differentiated social system what reality means. Social Imaginary operate like a metacode in the systems socially differentiated, through the code relevance/opacity, and generate forms and ways that validate like realities. The problem to indicate the marginality at different historical times and different concrete social systems consists of protecting the complexity by means of the use of two distinctions: the one of the code "inclusion/exclusion" and the other of the difference between observer of first order and second order. There is a generalized tendency to locate the exclusions "outside" of our direct experience and the inclusions like advantages of our social or familiar, national or world-wide position. With it we forgot something fundamental: the inclusion is an operation of the system, not of the individuals. Finally, it is exposed, as last part of this writing, a simple enumeration of the scopes, the distinctions and the perspective from which it is possible to establish observations of second order that allow to discover the different constructions of reality that propose us to different social imaginary.

Lacan and the Question of the Psychotherapist's Ethical Orientation:

Abstract: This article addresses the thorny issue of the psychologist or psychotherapist's values or ethical orientation. The suggestion is made that certain aspects of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical theory provide the resources to overcome the obstacle of arbitrariness or relativism faced by psychotherapists who unavoidably have to take an ethical stance - implicitly if not explicitly - in relation to clients' or analysands' lives and decisions. The dilemma faced by the psychotherapist is recontructed and specific aspects of the poststructuralist psychoanalytical theory of Lacan are addressed. These include the function of the subject's position in the symbolic register (in contrast to the imaginary register of the ego), the role of the unconscious as the 'discourse of the Other', of narrative and of repressed signifiers as ethical 'anchoring points'. Crucially, however, the implications of the register of the 'real' for the ethics of the psychoanalyst as psychotherapist are added. These, offer invaluable means of overcoming the dilemma of ethical relativism faced by psychotherapists.

Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture

Abstract: AcknowledgmentsIntroduction 1 From the Shadows of the Spanish Fantasy Heritage to a Transnational Imaginary 2 "No Cultural Icon": Marisela Norte and Spoken Word-East L.A. Noir and the U.S./Mexico Border 3 The Politics of Representation: Queerness and the Transnational Family in Luis Alfaro's Performance 4 Translated/Translating Woman: Comedienne/Solo Performer Marga Gomez, "Sending All Those Puerto Ricans Back to Mexico," and the Politics of a Sexualized Location 5 "'Soy Punkera, Y Que?": Sexuality, Translocality, and Punk in Los Angeles and Beyond 6 Bridge over Troubled Borders: The Transnational Appeal of Chicano Popular Music Epilogue: "Call Us Americans, 'Cause We Are All from the Americas": Latinos at Home in Canada NotesBibliography Index About the Author

The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis

Abstract: C. S. Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably the most influential Christian writer of his day. Yet among his poetry, literary history and criticism, novels, and Christian apologetics stands a unique, delightfully imaginative children's series called "The Chronicles of Narnia", which has become an enduring classic. Alan Jacobs takes this imaginary world of Narnia that has captivated children and adults alike for years, and uses the themes and stories found within to explore the imaginative life of C. S. Lewis. Few things are more interesting to human beings than trying to figure out how another human being (especially a profoundly gifted one) works. Not just a conventional, straightforward biographer of Lewis, Jacobs instead seeks a more elusive quarry: an understanding of the way Lewis's experiences, both direct and literary, formed themselves into patterns - themes that then shaped his thought and writings, especially the stories of "Narnia". It is in the Narnia stories that we see the most of Lewis, and this illuminating biography delivers a true picture of the life and imagination of the Narnian.

From Utopian Worlds to Utopian Spaces: Reflections on the Contemporary Radical Imaginary and the Social Forum Process *

Abstract: Even from afar, the degree to which many activists have invested emotionally in the social forum process (SFP) is startling. At one level this far from surprising. The social forums are the primary and perhaps sole ‘moment’ when what is termed ‘the movement’ (or, more realistically, ‘movement of movements’) comes together as a totality – or where the ‘totality’ is made present to itself. It occupies a place in the contemporary political imaginary in a way in which many other kinds of events no longer do. In addition, whilst activists have their particular passions and interests when it comes to the social forums, they are – or can be – put to one side in search of something larger, in search of something shared. However, the much-documented tensions over the organisation of social forums bear witness to some deep underlying fault line that separates the whole, reminding us that for all the talk of ‘processes’ and ‘movements’ we are discussing an assemblage that is deeply ambivalent. This is not just a question of ideology. We know there are many different currents and positions within the movement, some radical and others much less so (Tormey, 2004a: 235-8). Nor is it just a question of cultures of organisation, some ‘horizontal’ and others ‘vertical’. The terms horizontal and vertical are at one level mere descriptors for ways in which collective action is organised – the manner by which decisions, tactics, strategies are to be arrived at (Robinson and Tormey, forthcoming).

The beach of 'The Beach' - the politics of environmental damage in Thailand.

Abstract: Tourism-related environmental politics in Thailand are examined in a case study of the controversy surrounding the shooting of the film version of he Beach,' a hook on a backpacker commune on an undiscovered 'island paradise' by Alex Garland (1996). The article focuses on the paradox of the film-maker's insistconco to transform Maya beach, a spectacular pristine beach located in a national park on Phi Phi Lae island in Southern Thailand, to suit the stereotype of a 'tropical island beach' on Garland's imaginary island. The various stages of the protracled struggle between the opponents of the project, and the producers of the film and the authorities who permitted the changes to Maya beach are described The composition of the contending camps, their motives and interests are examined, as well as the discourses and counter-discourses by which they presontrd their case. The changing strategies of the opponents of the project, from protest, to appeals and finally lengthy litigation, leading from initial failures to eventual partial success, are detailed. The permanent damage to the teach, despite efforts to reostitute it after the filming, are assessed. The authorities policies after the event to 'regulate' tourism to the teach are noted. In conclusion, the manifold absurdities, of possibly wider significanet', invok L''d in the transformation of a 'real' pristine beach to suit an imaginary 'ideal' one are expounded.

Contemporary Japanese thought

Abstract: AcknowledgmentsIntroduction, by Richard F. Calichman1. Ehara YumikoThe Politics of TeasingA Feminist View of Maruyama Masao's Modernity2. Kang SangjungThe Imaginary Geography of a Nation and Denationalized NarrativeThe Discovery of the "Orient" and Orientalism3. Karatani Ko JinOvercoming ModernitySoseki's Diversity: On Kokoro4. Nishitani OsamuThe Wonderland of "Immortality"5. Naoki SakaiTwo Negations: The Fear of Being Excluded and the Logic of Self-Esteem6. Takahashi TetsuyaJapanese Neo-Nationalism: A Critique of Kato Norihiro's "After the Defeat" DiscourseFrom the Hinomaru and Kimigayo to the Symbolic Emperor System7. Ueno ChizukoIn the Feminine Guise: A Trap of Reverse OrientalismCollapse of "Japanese Mothers"8. Ukai SatoshiColonialism and ModernityReflections Beyond the Flag: Why Is the Hinomaru Flag "Auspicious/Foolish"?GlossaryList of ContributorsIndex of Names

Imagining Welfare Futures

Abstract: Imagining Welfare Futures explores possible futures of welfare by considering different types of relationship between the public and the state through which social welfare may be organized beyond the millennium. By drawing on contemporary debates about the 'citizen', 'the community' and 'the consumer', the book explores what each of these imaginary figures might mean for the next generation of welfare users.

From the Imaginary to Subjectivation: Castoriadis and Touraine on the Performative Public Sphere

Abstract: Neither Habermas nor his communitarian and poststructuralist critics sufficiently explore the non-linguistic, playful, and performative dimensions of contemporary public spheres. I argue that the approaches of Castoriadis and Touraine can inform a theoretical understanding of the history and current resonance of this public sphere of performance. Their concepts of the social imaginary, the autonomous society, and subjectivation highlight the role of fantasy, images, individualism, and other non-rational factors in late modern public life.

American Victorian Poetry: The Transatlantic Poetic

Abstract: IN A SPEECH GIVEN AT A FORMAL DINNER IN 1868 FOR SAMUEL BREESE MORSE (THE American portrait painter who invented the electric telegraph), William Cullen Bryant began by speaking "in behalf of the press" as a New York City newspaper editor and ended by giving a bravura performance of the transatlantic imaginary he had become famous for as a poet. "My imagination goes down to the chambers of the middle sea," Bryant mused, to those vast depths where repose the mystic wire on beds of coral, among forests of tangle, or on the bottom of the dim blue gulfs strewn with the bones of whales and sharks, skeletons of drowned men, and ribs and masts of foundered barks, laden with wedges of gold never to be coined, and pipes of the choicest vintages of earth never to be tasted. Through these watery solitudes, among the fountains of the great deep, the abode of perpetual silence, never visited by living human presence and beyond the sight of human eye, there are gliding to and fro, by night and by day, in light and in darkness, in calm and in tempest, currents of human thought borne by the electric pulse which obeys the bidding of man. That slender wire thrills with the hopes and fears of nations; it vibrates to every emotion that can be awakened by any event affecting the welfare of the human race. (1) As a member of the press, Bryant stressed the telegraph's speed of transmission; as a poet, Bryant transfigured electric cable into a lyric impulse, a "mystic wire" that "vibrates to every emotion" on both sides of the Atlantic, a fantasy of "living human presence" where there is none, "currents of human thought" circulating around the detritus of culture and nature alike. This poetic notion is the real communicator: an idea of expression much more capacious than expression itself, however transmitted; not the news itself but the vibrating cords that will unite nations, that will affectively perform "the welfare of the human race" that (alas) over-water politics may have failed to sustain. (2) As the essays in this special issue amply demonstrate, Bryant's fantastic elaboration of this transatlantic poetic was symptomatic of what we now call "Victorian Poetry"--a phrase coined in New York rather than in London, and one which now finds itself strung not only between continents, but between notions of "poetry" that themselves seem whimsical responses to the technology of modernity: colorful, humanistic, and (already, in 1868) somewhat pathetically out of date. In recent issues of this journal both parts of the journal's title have come up for discussion: What was or is it to be "Victorian"? What does and does not count as "Poetry"? Last year, in "Whether Victorian Poetry: A Genre and its Period," Joseph Bristow responded to Linda K. Hughes's introduction to a previous issue on the future of Victorian poetry studies ("Whither Victorian Poetry?") by suggesting that "if the poetic genres produced in the period known as 'Victorian' have a future, then their future resides in a present moment that is increasingly motivated by the belief that the forecast for this area of study remains exceptionally promising because the field itself belonged to a technological age whose fascination with material progress nonetheless anticipated our own interest in virtual technologies." (3) For Bristow, as for Bryant, the question of technology is really the question of transmission: how do old poetic genres travel across an ocean and a century to become living poetry (or live-feed poetry), how is our current sense of what that poetry was determined by our current sense of what poetry is, and what connects those senses to one another? For contemporary scholars of Victorian poetry, as for Bryant, the idea of "poetry" does a lot of cultural work: it transcends particular genres (ballads, say, or elegies or odes), and it even represents technological progress, the "electric pulse" that might connect literature and literary study, one century to another and now to another. …

Del diagrama de Venn al Nudo Borromeo: recorrido de la planificación en América Latina

Abstract: Venn's diagram and borromean knot are used as examples of growing complexity than can be applied to the development of planning, beginning with its critic in both the technical and political sides. The three registers: real, imaginary and symbolic, after Lacan, are compared with the "worlds" one, two and three, after Popper, describing its modifications and interactions and its transformation and complication. With that background, the course of planning is examined in Latin America, long four last decades and through the three registers. The need of deepen the dialog is concluded, emphasizing the symbolic component and its imperative integration with the others components of the problem.

An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840–1920

Abstract: In his highly theorised and original book, Roger Ebbatson traces the emergence of conceptions of England and Englishness from 1840 to 1920. His study concentrates on poetry and fiction by authors such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Richard Jefferies, Thomas Hardy, Q, Rupert Brooke and D.H. Lawrence, reading them as a body of work through which a series of problematic English identities are imaginatively constructed. Of particular concern is the way literary landscapes serve as signs not only of identity but also of difference. Ebbatson demonstrates how a sense of cultural rootedness is contested during the period by the experiences of those on the societal margins, whether sexual, national, social or racial, resulting in a feeling of homelessness even in the most self-consciously 'English' texts. In the face of gradual imperial and industrial decline, Ebbatson argues, foreign and colonial cultures played a crucial role in transforming Englishness from a stable body of values and experiences into a much more ambiguous concept in continuous conflict with factors on the geographical or psychological 'periphery'.

Posição do estágio do espelho na teoria lacaniana do imaginário

Abstract: Jacques Lacan, while finishing his doctorate thesis in 1932 – and as a consequence of the problems he had been analyzing –, announces the purpose of guiding his research towards the elucidation of narcisism. Among the productions that took part in this project, there is “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I” (1949), a text directly dedicated to this emergent notion that showed original strength in his thought. This paper analyzes in detail the presentation of the mirror stage accomplished in this text relating it with other contemporary Lacanian papers aiming to indicate its general contextualization in the theory of the Imaginary.