Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 2009"

Complying with colonialism : gender, race and ethnicity in the Nordic region

Abstract: Contents: Introduction: postcolonialism and the Nordic models of welfare and gender, Diana Mulinari, Suvi Keskinen, Sari Irni and Salla Tuori Part I Postcolonial Histories/Postcolonial Presents: Colonial complicity: the 'postcolonial' in a Nordic context, Ulla Vuorela The Nordic colonial mind, Mai Palmberg The flipside of my passport: myths of origin and genealogy of white supremacy in the mediated social genetic imaginary, Bolette B. Blaagaard The promise of the 'Nordic' and its reality in the South: the experiences of Mexican workers as members of the 'Volvo family', Diana Mulinari and Nora RAthzel Stranger or family member? Reproducing postcolonial power relations, Johanna Latvala Historical legacies and neo-colonial forms of power? A postcolonial reading of the Bosnian diaspora, Laura Huttunen. Part II Welfare State and Its 'Others': When racism becomes individualised: experiences of racialisation among adult adoptees and adoptive parents of Sweden, Tobias HA binette and Carina Tigervall Contradicting the 'prostitution stigma': narratives of Russian migrant women living in Norway, Jana Sverdljuk Postcolonial and queer readings of 'migrant families' in the context of multicultural work, Salla Tuori 'Experience is a national asset' a postcolonial reading of ageing in the labour market, Sari Irni Licorice boys and female coffee beans: representations of colonial complicity in Finnish visual culture, Leena-Maija Rossi. Part III Doing Nation and Gender: the Civilising Mission 'At Home': Guiding migrants to the realm of gender equality, Jaana Vuori Institutional nationalism and orientalized others in parental education, Nanna Brink Larsen Whose feminism? Whose emancipation?, Chia-Ling Yang 'Honour'-related violence and Nordic nation-building, Suvi Keskinen Index.

Trouble with strangers : a study of ethics

Abstract: Preface vi PART I THE INSISTENCE OF THE IMAGINARY 1 Introduction : The Mirror Stage 1 1 Sentiment and Sensibility 12 2 Francis Hutcheson and David Hume 29 3 Edmund Burke and Adam Smith 62 PART II THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE SYMBOLIC 83 Introduction : The Symbolic Order 83 4 Spinoza and the Death of Desire 91 5 Kant and the Moral Law 101 6 Law and Desire in Measure for Measure 130 PART III THE REIGN OF THE REAL 139 Introduction : Pure Desire 139 7 Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche 154 8 Fictions of the Real 180 9 Levinas, Derrida and Badiou 223 10 The Banality of Goodness 273 Conclusion 317 Index 327

A Good Story: Children With Imaginary Companions Create Richer Narratives

Abstract: In line with theories that children’s pretend play reflects and extends their narrative skills, children with imaginary companions were predicted to have better narrative skills than children without imaginary companions. Forty-eight 5½-year-old children and their mothers participated in interviews about children’s imaginary companions. Children also completed language and narrative assessments. Twenty-three of the children (48%) were deemed to have engaged in imaginary companion play. Children with and without imaginary companions were similar in their vocabulary skills, but children with imaginary companions told richer narratives about a storybook and a personal experience compared to children without imaginary companions. This finding supports theories of a connection between pretend play and storytelling by the end of early childhood.

Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology

Abstract: Cyberspace is first and foremost a mental space. Therefore we need to take a psychological approach to understand our experiences in it. In Interface Fantasy, Andre Nusselder uses the core psychoanalytic notion of fantasy to examine our relationship to computers and digital technology. Lacanian psychoanalysis considers fantasy to be an indispensable "screen" for our interaction with the outside world; Nusselder argues that, at the mental level, computer screens and other human-computer interfaces incorporate this function of fantasy: they mediate the real and the virtual. Interface Fantasy illuminates our attachment to new media: why we love our devices; why we are fascinated by the images on their screens; and how it is possible that virtual images can provide physical pleasure. Nusselder puts such phenomena as avatars, role playing, cybersex, computer psychotherapy, and Internet addiction in the context of established psychoanalytic theory. The virtual identities we assume in virtual worlds, exemplified best by avatars consisting of both realistic and symbolic self-representations, illustrate the three orders that Lacan uses to analyze human reality: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Nusselder analyzes our most intimate involvement with information technology--the almost invisible, affective aspects of technology that have the greatest impact on our lives. Interface Fantasy lays the foundation for a new way of thinking that acknowledges the pivotal role of the screen in the current world of information. And it gives an intelligible overview of basic Lacanian principles (including fantasy, language, the virtual, the real, embodiment, and enjoyment) that shows their enormous relevance for understanding the current state of media technology.

Thinking in the space between Winnicott and Lacan

Abstract: The author, following Andre Green, maintains that the two most original psychoanalytic thinkers since Freud were Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan. Winnicott, it has been said, introduced the comic tradition into psychoanalysis, while Lacan sustained Freud's tragic/ironic vision. Years of mutual avoidance by their followers (especially of Lacan by Anglophone clinicians) has arguably diminished understanding of the full spectrum of psychoanalytic thought. The author outlines some basic constructs of Winnicott and of Lacan, including: their organizing tropes of selfhood versus subjectivity, their views of the "mirror stage", and their definitions of the aims of treatment. While the ideas of Winnicott and Lacan appear at some points complementary, the goal is not to integrate them into one master discourse, but rather to bring their radically different paradigms into provocative contact. A clinical vignette is offered to demonstrate concepts from Lacan and Winnicott, illustrating what it might mean to think and teach in the potential space between them.

Encountering the Arugula Leaf: The Failure of the Imaginary and its Implications for Research on Identity in Organizations

Abstract: The article reviews research on identity in organizations. It suggests that current research reiterates imaginary constructions of identity by which identity can be defined as coherent or fragmente...

Trollopian “Foreign Policy”: Rootedness and Cosmopolitanism in the Mid-Victorian Global Imaginary

Abstract: Focusing on the prolific mid-Victorian writing of Anthony Trollope, this essay takes present-day theoretical interest in “actually existing cosmopolitanism” for its cue. Trollope's works remind us that from a Victorian perspective, the word cosmopolitan was more likely to evoke the impersonal structures of capitalism and imperialism than an ethos of tolerance, world citizenship, or multiculturalism. Trollope wrote novels eulogizing England's rootedness alongside first-person accounts of colonial travel, making him the arch exemplar of a two-party foreign policy discourse. Whereas Barsetshire novels such as The Warden are archetypes of autoethnographic fiction, Trollope's travel writings construct a transportable mode of racialized Anglo-Saxonness. Evoking the asymmetrical play between two notions of property—heirloom “rootedness” and capitalist “cosmopolitanism”—Trollope's foreign policy imaginary illuminates the difficulties of a genuinely negotiated rooted cosmopolitanism. Exploration of the nineteenth century's actually existing cosmopolitanisms offers the opportunity to historicize the transnational contexts and experiences of an era in which capitalist and imperial expansion was as dynamic as the globalizing processes of our own day.

This Body Which is Not One: The Body, Femininity and Disability

Abstract: In the social system in which we live, the imaginary body is an able body. The able-bodied has established its representations that are the projection of able-bodied subjectivities. In this article, I shall develop a psychoanalytic account of physical disability in order to open up possibilities for physical disability beyond its position as castrated able-bodiedness. Psychoanalysis, to me, is not simply about `sexuality' but can also be used to analyse `physical disability', indeed all aspects of one's subjectivity. I shall propose the appropriation of psychoanalysis to explain the construction of subjectivity, whether it is able-bodied or disabled, in a way that parallels the male/female dichotomy. Within an able-bodied symbolic, in which the able-bodied takes itself as normal, it is impossible to illustrate the multiplicity of the disabled. Following Irigaray's claim that the ambiguity of female sexuality does not conform to male notions of sexuality, I argue that the complexity of the disabled body do...

Connecting Real and Imaginary Places through Geospatial Technologies: Examples from Set-jetting and Art-oriented Tourism

Abstract: Places play an important role as anchoring fictional (books, movies, songs, video games) as well as artistic universes to reality. Conversely, imaginary places affect the way people perceive real places. 'Set-jetting', which transforms film locations into tourist attractions, is a perfect example of the increasing demand for connecting fictional spaces with real places. The interaction of imaginary and real places, which has been for years an operating function of fiction, is increasing both qualitatively and quantitatively. This is not limited to cinema but also affects literature and art. Once located on a map, the fictional place becomes attractive for tourists and a potential source of profit. The connection between imaginary and real places has been transformed by recent dramatic changes in communication and information technologies, and more specifically in the domain of geospatial technologies. These technologies offer more effective ways of georeferencing locations in films, books and art ...

Film theory and contemporary Hollywood movies

Abstract: Introduction, Warren Buckland Part One: New Practices, New Aesthetics 1. New Hollywood, New Millennium, Thomas Schatz 2. The Supernatural in Neo-Baroque Hollywood, Sean Cubitt 3. Man without a Movie Camera-Movies without Men: Towards a Posthumanist Cinema? William Brown 4. Movie-games and Game-movies: Towards an Aesthetic of Transmediality, Douglas Brown and Tanya Krzywinska 5. Saw Heard: Musical Sound Design in Contemporary Cinema, K.J. Donnelly 6. The Shape of 1999: The Stylistics of American Movies at the End of the Century, Barry Salt 7. Tales of Epiphany and Entropy: Paranarrative Worlds on YouTube, Thomas Elsaesser Part Two: Feminism, Philosophy, and Queer Theory 8. Reformulating the Symbolic Universe: Kill Bill and Tarantino's Transcultural Imaginary, Sasa Vojkovic' 9. (Broke)back to the Mainstream: Queer Theory and Queer Cinemas Today, Harry M. Benshoff 10. Demystifying Deleuze: French Philosophy Meets Contemporary US Cinema, David Martin-Jones Part Three: Rethinking Affects, Narration, Fantasy, and Realism 11. Trauma, Pleasure, and Emotion in the Viewing of Titanic: A Cognitive Approach, Carl Plantinga 12. Mementos of Contemporary American Cinema: Identifying and Responding to the Unreliable Narrator in the Movie Theater, Volker Ferenz 13. Fantasy Audiences versus Fantasy Audiences, Martin Barker 14. "What is There Really in the World?" Forms of Theory, Evidence and Truth in Fahrenheit 9/11: A Philosophical and Intuitionist Realist Approach, Ian Aitken Notes on Contributors Index

Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film

Abstract: Curtis’s book, Dark Places, is a wide-ranging study of haunting on film, connecting claustrophobic interiors of haunted spaces on screen with the ‘dark places’ of the human psyche. Curtis examines diverse topics, including the use of special effects to evoke supernatural creatures; the structures, projections and architecture of horror movie sets; and ghosts as symbols of loss, amnesia, injustice and vengeance. Dark Places also examines the reconfiguration of the haunted house in film as a motel, an apartment, a road or a spaceship. Extending beyond a conventional history of a film genre, the book is the product of Curtis’s extensive research into the history of optical and theatrical devices, 'gothic' literature, psychoanalytic theory, and writings on architecture and interiors. The book also results from the viewing and close analysis of over two hundred films from early ghost films to recent productions. The book was widely reviewed: 'In considering the widest possible legacy for the haunted house on screen, and by bringing theoretical and multi-disciplinary sophistication to bear…Curtis has fashioned a noteworthy exploration of one of cinema's unsung icons' (Southwestern Journal of Culture, 2009); 'Curtis' study traces the way that filmed ghost stories have kept pace with technology, drawing on it and using it as a source of inspiration from the invention of X-Rays and the telephone in the late 19th century to present day cyberspace’ (Times Higher Education Supplement, 2009). Curtis was also invited to speak on the book’s themes in a number of different contexts, including a broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland related to the 'Dead by Dawn' Film Festival in Edinburgh (2010); the public programme for ‘The Surreal House' exhibition at Barbican Art Gallery, London (2010); and at 'Once Upon a Place, and Haunted Houses, Imaginary Cities', the first international conference on architecture and fiction, in Lisbon (2010).

Circulating Race and Empire: Transnational Labor Activism and the Politics of Anti-Asian Agitation in the Anglo-American Pacific World, 1880–1910

Abstract: In January 1907, labor leaders and activists from across the Pacific Northwest converged on the city of Tacoma for the annual convention of the Washington Federation of Labor. At the gathering, they discussed and debated issues related to the social and material welfare of the regions working class. The conference attracted, in addition to its U.S. contingent, a number of participants from across the border. One of the convention speakers, the Canadian delegate M. A. Beach, representing the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, spoke on the collective experiences and aspirations of the region's work ing class, explaining how they transcended the boundaries of the nation-state. In his remarks, Beach told the audience that he felt "quite at home here, in your beautiful city, in fact have spent a number of years on this side of the imaginary boundary line. I say, imaginary boundary line, because I suppose from a national standpoint we are divided, but from a wage-earners' standpoint we are not divided." He claimed that American and Canadian laborers were "brothers working for a common cause . . . bettering conditions for the wage-earner," and insisted to the largely American audience that "what is good for you is good for me, and what is good for me is good for you."1 This imagining of a transnational working-class community was, however, not a state ment of universal solidarity but a racialized vision predicated on white racial unity. Beach asserted a transregional white working-class identity in explicit opposition to Asian "coo lie" labor: "We in British Columbia have existing conditions which are very dangerous to the welfare of the white wage-earners of this country, namely the Japanese, Chinese, and Hindoo," he declared. "They are a people totally unfit for the conditions of this coun try." Such anti-Asian sentiment was expressed in politics, especially in organized efforts to curtail and regulate Asian migration to North America. These efforts facilitated the de velopment of a racialized class consciousness among white Euro-American and Canadian workers in the Pacific Northwest borderlands. Beach continued, "We have succeeded in a

Globalisation and social imaginaries: the changing ideological landscape of the twenty-first century

Abstract: The proliferation of prefixes like 'neo' and 'post' that adorn conventional 'isms' has cast a long shadow on the contemporary relevance of traditional political belief systems like liberalism, conservatism, and Marxism. This article explores how the thickening of global consciousness finds its expression in the growing capability of today's political ideologies to translate the rising global imaginary into concrete political programs and agendas.

Fictions of Encounter: Eighteenth-Century Imaginary Voyages to the Antipodes

Abstract: The "imaginary voyage" was an early form of the modern realist novel popular in Britain and France from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, set predominantly in the region of Australasia and the Pacific. As a branch of travel literature, it was linked intimately to the expansion of empire. Through repeated stories of successful colonizing schemes and heroic accounts of cross-cultural encounters between European travelers and the people of the antipodes, these texts allowed European readers to enjoy farfetched fantasies of colonization well before, and during, the period of actual colonial expansion. As in the case of the many better-known examples of literary fiction produced in the later period of European imperial dominance, imaginary voyage fiction helped embed social acceptance of colonial expansion by modeling cultural domination as natural, beneficial, and welcome. Surprisingly, the genre continued to thrive when documentary accounts of actual voyages to the antipodes began to emerge. Now, however, the imaginary voyage receives little attention, and has all but disappeared from public awareness. This essay describes and explores some key aspects of this long-neglected genre, with the aim of showing that it played a more important role both in terms of literary history and in the history of colonization itself than has hitherto been recognized. More specifically, its deliberate exploitation of the shifting boundaries between reality and fantasy casts light on the development of literary realism and especially on the uneasy relationship between fact and fiction that continues to challenge historians and literary critics to this day. Intrinsically linked to this blurring of boundaries was the role of this forgotten genre in the shaping of the colonial imagination. (1) Typically, imaginary voyages are both utopian in their visions of fictional worlds and written in a satirical style that allows veiled attacks on contemporary political figures and practices. Critics trace the genre's origins to forms of literary romance and utopian projection. Although its status as a prototype for the modern realist novel and precursor to the genres of science fiction and fantasy are well recognized, the genre has generally been marginalized or overlooked, mainly on the grounds that the imaginary voyage texts had limited truth value when compared with contemporary accounts of genuine travels. On this basis, the imaginary voyage was seen mainly as a fanciful precursor to documentaries of travel, and as having been displaced by them. But there was another reason, I would suggest, for the lack of critical attention. In terms of genre, imaginary voyages fell between two stools: representing neither history nor romance but a strange marriage of the two. Imaginary voyages reflected and exploited a particular moment in the history of maritime exploration when the edges of the known world were being extended and the public was eager to suspend belief and be part of the process of discovery. When that moment passed, imaginary voyages lost the connection with real history that had served them so well, but had not developed a sufficiently strong identity purely as fiction to claim lasting critical recognition. (2) In retrospect, however, the imaginary voyage genre can be seen as a significant link in the chain of a long tradition, stretching back to very early forms of fictional narrative and forward to the later writers who traveled in their minds to the depths of the sea, to the interior of the earth, to other planets, and to the future. Today most of the writings that form this body of work are almost completely unknown. This essay begins by discussing the colonialist themes and common textual strategies employed by writers of eighteenth-century accounts of imaginary voyages, especially those set in the region of the "antipodes." This is followed by a detailed investigation of the social and literary contexts in which these works were published and received by a reading public eager to learn of newly discovered lands. …

Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction: The Spatial Imaginary of Contemporary British Fiction 1. Landscape and Narrative Aesthetics 2. New Horizons for the Regional Novel 3. Urban Visionaries 4. Cartographers of Memory 5. Island Encounters 6. Epilogue: 'Because Time Is Not like Space' Notes Bibliography Index.

The ‘warm south’

Abstract: For Britons of the Romantic era, the 'warm south' was many things. It may be an imaginary elsewhere of lemon trees and olive groves; a place of refuge and exile; and a sensuous landscape of desire. This chapter plies between literal and literary geographies, taking both the material aspect of crossings between Britain and the Mediterranean and the myriad of crossings undertaken in the aesthetic realm. The Revolutionary-Napoleonic period left Britain's watery contours untouched, but it drastically redrew the island nation's imaginary geography. Don Juan sustains the Romantic regendering of the 'warm south': in lieu of a myth of Italian poet-fathers, one find an allegory of Britain embracing the south as a virile force. In the poems by Hemans, Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron, sympathy describes an ambit that the human object of sympathy, put differently, the human subject, is entirely obscured. During the Regency period, Histoires des Re' publiques Italiennes, the historiography of Italy itself becomes a work of resistance.

Beyond Virtually Jewish: New Authenticities and Real Imaginary Spaces in Europe

Abstract: This essay explores two “real imaginary” worlds in Europe -- the “virtually Jewish” and the “imaginary wild west.” The author describes some of the ways that European non-Jews adopt, enact and transform elements of Jewish culture, using Jewish culture at times to create, mold, or find, their own identities. She also describes a surprising and remarkably multi-faceted Far West subculture in Europe that, stoked, marketed and even created by popular culture, forms a connected collection of “Wild Western spaces.” There are major differences between the “virtually Jewish” phenomenon and the “virtually western” European response to the American Frontier saga. One has to do with a real, traumatic issue: coming to terms with the Holocaust and its legacy of guilt and loss. The other is the embrace and elaboration of a collective fantasy and its translation into personal experience. But in certain ways they can be viewed as analogous phenomena. Both have to do with identity, and the ways in which people use other cultures to shape their own identities. In addition, in both “virtually Jewish” and “imaginary western” realms, the issue of “authenticity” is involved, as well as the distinction between creative cultural appropriation and mere imitation. Both entail the creation of “new authenticities” -- things, places and experiences that in themselves are real, with all the trappings of reality, but that are quite different from the “realities” on which they are modeled or that they are attempting to evoke. The process has led to the formation of models, stereotypes, modes of behavior and even traditions.

Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary

Abstract: List of Illustrations ix Preface xiii Acknowledgments xix Introduction: Art, Asian America, and the Social Imaginary: A Poetics of Positionality 1 1. A Play of Positionalities: Reconsidering Identification 17 2. Othering: Primitivism, Orientalism, and Stereotyping 57 3. Trauma, Social Memory, and Art 120 4. Migration, Mixing, and Place 194 Epilogue: Toward an Ongoing Dialogue 271 Notes 283 Bibliography 321 Index 353

Covering Multiculturalism: Popular Images and the Politics of a Nation as Reflected on the Covers of Maclean's and L'Actualité

Abstract: How have images of immigration and mutticulturalism been depicted on Canadian magazine covers and what do they say about the national politics of immigration and multiculturalism? A discursive and visual analysis of the covers and articles in Maclean's (from January, 1960 to May, 2006), and to a lesser extent in L'Actualite (from 1976 to May 2006), reveals a dualistic pattern depicting multicultural and immigrant representations as either the successful, contributing, and model "other" or the threatening, oppositional, and problematic "other." Our analysis goes beyond this binarism and exposes the intersections of age, class, status, sexuality, and racialization as integral to the multicultural context. Yet, as a concept, multiculturalism has hot necessarily been evident in the public and media imaginary of Canada. Resume Quelles sont les images vehiculees par les couvertures de revues canadiennes sur l'immigration et le multiculturalisme et que disent-elles a propos des politiques nationales sur ces questions? Une analyse discursive et visuelle des couvertures et des textes de Maclean's (de janvier 1960 a mai 2006) et, a un moindre degre, de L'Actualite (de 1976 a mai 2006) revelent un motif dualistique des representations multiculturelles et immigrantes en tant qu'un > presente soit comme un modele de contribution sociale et de succes, soit comme une menace, une opposition et un probleme. Notre analyse va au-dela de ce binarisme et met en lumiere l'interconnection de la classe, du statut social, de la sexualite et de la racialisation comme faisant partie integrante du contexte multiculturel. Cependant, au Canada, le multiculturalisme n'est pas un concept evident dans l'imaginaire public ni dans celui des medias. INTRODUCTION Stuart Hall (1996, 613) has argued that "[a] national culture is a discourse--a way of constructing meanings which influences and organizes both out actions and our conceptions of ourselves" Media plays a central role in producing and reproducing a national culture. Media is often said to "either inhibit or advance the aims of producing more democratic, egalitarian and truly multicultural societies" (Kellner 1995, 10). The discursive relation between national culture and media was clearly articulated in the celebratory centennial edition of Maclean's magazine. Senior Contributing Editor Peter C. Newman (2005, 7) writes about being "struck by the parallels between the magazine and the country. "Both" Newman remarks, "have journeyed from primitive to possible to prosperous to postmodern" (ibid). Characterizing such mutation, Newman states that "[o]nce an impregnable WASP stronghold, the country was transformed into the most multicultural cultures" (ibid). And, according to Newman, Maclean's "has chronicled every leap and twitch of the country's dramatic sea change ... woven into the dreams and memories of its readers" (ibid). Media do not simply chronicle or report events. News is the product of a complex process where "newsworthiness" is established according to the organizational practices and ideological values of the media (Hall et al. 2000). Indeed, national news media do not only attempt to inform the largest possible audience, they also socialize their readers by purveying hegemonic ideals that ascertain a shared national culture (Jiwani 2005). However, a national audience misleadingly conceals and reflects divergent interests and a multitude of regional, cultural, and structural differences. This representational challenge is also compounded by the intense concentration of news and entertainment media into a few conglomerates. A handful of large corporations such as Rogers Communications Inc., CTVglobemedia, CanWest Global, Astral Media, Quebecor, and Shaw hold a wide-range of television, cable television, radio, newspapers, magazines, internet, and/or other communication and entertainment operations. Of particular interest here is Rogers Communications Inc. …

Making things present: Tim O'Brien's autobiographical metafiction

Abstract: Beginning with its front matter, Tim O'Brien's collection of interlinked short narratives The Things They Carried (1990) raises fundamental questions about the nature of truth _and narrative authority. Published as a "work of fiction," the book includes a fairly standard disclaimer that "[e]xcept for a few details regarding the author's own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary." Yet the book is also "lovingly dedi cated to the men of Alpha Company"?a statement that elevates these imaginary characters to the level of real people worthy of a dedication. Such slippery negotiation of fact and fiction continues with the epigraph, taken from John Ransom's Andersonville Diary, which reads, "[t]hose who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest." Thus even as the copyright page provides a legalistic disclaimer specifying that The Things They Carried is a work of imaginative literature rather than a historical document, the front matter encourages "inexperienced" readers to appreciate the text as a "statement of actual things," as a work of "truth." If the epigraph reads like an attempt to authorize the use of fiction in order to write history, O'Brien's narrator also makes liberal use of history (his story) to develop and organize the fiction. Indeed, despite the collection's self-consciously fictional status, O'Brien incorporates undeniably autobiographical elements, such as a char acter named Tim O'Brien who is a writer and a Vietnam vet, a writer, like O'Brien himself, who went to graduate school at Harvard and then published a novel entitled Going After Cacciato

Toward a grammar of the blogosphere: rhetoric and attention in the networked imaginary

Abstract: This dissertation explores the rhetorical imaginary of internetworked societies by examining three cases where actors in the blogosphere shaped public deliberation. In each case, I analyze a trope that emerged organically as bloggers theorized their own rhetorical interventions, and argue that these tropes signal shifts in how citizens of networked societies imagine their relations. The first case study, on the blogosphere's reaction to Trent Lott's 2002 toast to Strom Thurmond, examines how bloggers "flooded the zone" by relentlessly interpreting the event and finding evidence that eventually turned the tide of public opinion against Lott. Flooding the zone signifies the inventional possibilities of blogging through the production of copious public argument. The second case study, focusing on the 2003 blogging of the Salam Pax, an English-speaking Iraqi living in Iraq on the precipice of war, develops the idea of "ambient intimacy" which is produced through the affective economy of blogging. The ambient intimacy produced through blogging illustrates the blurring of traditional public/private distinctions in contemporary public culture. The third case study, on the group science blog RealClimate, identifies how blogs have become sites for translating scientific controversies into ordinary language through a process of "shallow quotation." The diffusion of expertise enabled by the interactive format of blogging provides new avenues to close the gap between public and technical reasoning. The dissertation concludes by examining the advent and implications of "hyperpublicity" produced by ubiquitous recording devices and digital modes of circulation.

Bodies of Christ in seas of change: The relationship between ecclesiology, politics and practice in the conditioning of twentieth century Roman Catholic responses to violence

Abstract: This thesis examines how Christian interpretation is shaped by, and also shapes, the political contexts within which the Church is situated. The ecclesial identification of, and response to, sites of political violence serves as this thesis' primary point of reference. It argues that ecclesiology, the imaging of the Church as the Body of Christ, constitutes the central node that shapes the Church's reading of the political signs of the times generated by other social bodies. Because the central investigation necessarily implicates both theology and social theory, this thesis begins by identifying frameworks of sociopolitical analysis that properly correlate the two fields. It will critique approaches shaped by the assumptions of Modern social science, whose obsession with autonomous and strategic self-maximization, together with what is only scientifically verifiable, lead to a deliberate a priori exclusion of 'irrational' religion. It will also critique seemingly 'postmodern' analyses that betray lingering Modern influences, and argue for a more thoroughgoing postmodernism in which individuals, communities, materiality and transcendence operate harmoniously with one another. It will then employ Graham Ward's cultural hermeneutics as the framework that not only exhibits this thoroughgoing postmodernism, but also engages all aspects of this thesis' inquiry. Through the lens of Ward's cultural hermeneutics, this thesis will show how ecclesiology emerges from practical engagements between the Church as a social configuration with other social configurations. It will explain the implication of corporeal practices and the imagination in the formation of such configurations, or social imaginaries. It will then demonstrate how the recruitment of bodies into communal practices in turn either weaken or strengthen one imaginary vis a vis another.;However, in the course of these shifts in corporeal configurations around the Church, the thesis will also show how ecclesiologies themselves will slowly lose their persuasive power. This creates with the Church a need for communal reconfiguration to facilitate a reading of the contemporary signs of the times. The next four chapters outline how political change grounded in overlapping corporeal and communal practices conditioned three twentieth century Roman Catholic ecclesiological archetypes: the ""Perfect Society"", ""Mystical Body"" and ""Nuptial Communion"". This analysis will take place by reference to four key historical episodes: the European liberal and industrial revolutions, the age of the dictators in Germany and Italy, post-war Latin America and late-Soviet Poland. In each episode, this thesis will show how the image of the Body of Christ became conditioned by a specific combination of practices operating within political, intellectual and ecclesial sites of power. It will also outline how that image in turn conditioned the practices that engaged the sites of political violence, and show how and why each image, and the practices that sprung from it, eventually desiccated. The thesis concludes with a critical reflection, via a set of thematic constants, on the implications of the historical data for ecclesiology and the Church's evangelical mission in light of its contemporary context. Focal points include the need for ecclesial vigilance in light of the imaging of the Body of Christ by reference to non-Christian contexts, attention to the recruitment of bodies as evangelical practices, the ubiquity of deference to authority and the stubborn allure of defining the political realm by reference to statecraft.;It will then look to contemporary processes of ""descularisation"" and the increasing recognition of the salience of ritual and show how desire and liturgy can act as avenues for the emergence of new forms of ecclesial politics, where credible claims of the Gospel can be advanced without being beholden to the distortions that proceed from the assumptions inherent in Modern cultural forms.

The Third Citizen: On Models of Criticality in Contemporary Artistic Practices*

Abstract: OCTOBER 129, Summer 2009, pp. 85–112. © 2009 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Canonical historical accounts of Conceptual art offer important insights into its critical premises, as well as its “blind spots.” Benjamin Buchloh, for one, has argued that by mimicking and in fact internalizing late-capitalist positivist and instrumentalist forms of rationality, Conceptual art liquidated the “last remnants of traditional aesthetic experience” and “succeeded in purging itself entirely of imaginary and bodily experience, of physical substance and the space of memory.”1 Alternately, Stephen Melville has pointed out that such work is underlined by “political fantasy dreams of a telepathic community,” that is, by a community that shares privacy “apart from the mediations of language and institutions that constitute the public sphere in general.”2 He thus insists that any critical consideration of the legacy of Conceptual artistic practices will inevitably need to address the tension between its dream of a “telepathic community” and the idea of a community as an intrinsically mediated and fragmented social formation.3 How, then, to consider the legacy of Conceptual art in the face of contemporary practices that are informed by its models of criticality yet, at the same time, mobilize precisely what was often left out of these models, namely the imaginary and fictional? In what way do the notions of sociality and community evoked by

Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650–1950

Abstract: When Americans today think of the Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers, they may picture the smiling figure on boxes of oatmeal But since their arrival in the American colonies in the 1650s, Quakers' spiritual values and social habits have set them apart from other Americans And their example - whether real or imagined - has served as a religious conscience for an expanding nation Portrayals of Quakers - from dangerous and anarchic figures in seventeenth-century theological debates to moral exemplars in twentieth-century theater and film (Grace Kelly in High Noon, for example) - reflected attempts by writers, speech makers, and dramatists to grapple with the troubling social issues of the day As foils to more widely held religious, political, and moral values, members of the Society of Friends became touchstones in national discussions about pacifism, abolition, gender equality, consumer culture, and modernity Spanning four centuries, "Imaginary Friends" takes readers through the shifting representations of Quaker life in a wide range of literary and visual genres, from theological debates, missionary work records, political theory, and biography to fiction, poetry, theater, and film It illustrates the ways that, during the long history of Quakerism in the United States, these 'imaginary' Friends have offered a radical model of morality, piety, and anti-modernity against which the evolving culture has measured itself

Nación e identidad en los imaginarios visuales de la Argentina. Siglos XIX y XX

Abstract: The construction of symbolic regards and itineraries referring on the “Nation” in Argentina begins in the years following the emancipation of the Rio de la Plata in 1810. The eyes of foreign and argentines artists will focus on the nineteenth century on representations of the Pampa, the indigenous and gaucho as symbols of identity, forming an imaginary that is updated in different contexts and using differents art languages in 19th and 20th century. Cosmopolitism and nationalism are two lines through which transmitted the positions, debates and visions on the Argentine identity, forging an hegemonic imaginary focused on what was produced and enshrined in Buenos Aires, with little or no participation from regional productions.