The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.

The neighboring text : Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson

Abstract: Most medieval texts were not really texts in the modern sense of printed, bound, stand-alone volumes, but were instead scribal productions that circulated in manuscript form, often alongside unrelated writings, thereby producing what seem to be haphazard compilations. In "The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson," George Edmondson argues that we have tended to apply a vertical, linear model of literary history to this late medieval manuscript culture. By contrast, he brings recent work in the fields of psychoanalysis and political philosophy to bear on the question of literary history in order to develop a countermodel informed by a horizontal ethos of "neighborliness."Edmondson analyzes the different ways that three canonical texts--Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde"; its source, Boccaccio's "Il Filostrato"; and its fifteenth-century Scottish derivative, Robert Henryson's "Testament of Cresseid--"treat two figures, Troilus and Criseyde, and how those differences affect our understanding of literary history. He argues that what makes them neighboring texts is their shared concern with the subject of medieval Trojan historiography in general, and their very different treatments of Troilus in particular. At the same time, Edmondson supplements the medieval ideal of neighborliness with the psychoanalytic understanding of the neighbor as a figure both proximate and strange: at once the building block of community and its stumbling block. The result is a repositioning of the three works as a textual neighborhood--one in which the legendary history of Troy is transformed from the basis of imaginary national genealogies to a figure for the aggression and enjoyment, the conflicting gestures of identification and estrangement, that shape the neighbor relation."George Edmondson has authored a major intervention into medieval cultural studies. A brilliant work of criticism, "The Neighboring Text"" "reconfigures how to think about textual relations, opening a space where meanings unfold through contiguity rather than filiation of influence. The book deploys a historically sensitive psychoanalytic mode of analysis that foregrounds the place of the ethical within literary analysis. "The Neighboring Text "is as beautifully written as it is persuasive." --Jeffrey J Cohen, George Washington University"In "The Neighboring Text, " George Edmondson offers a compelling new model for conceptualizing literary relations, and impressive new readings of a crucial set of texts. In Edmondson's deft hand, the neighbor emerges as an important figure for relatedness, one pliable enough to compass historical, spatial, affective, or ethical modes. Immensely exciting and utterly absorbing, his study infuses new life into questions of literary inheritance and historiography that we have long thought settled." --Patricia Clare Ingham, Indiana University"George Edmondson's book marks an innovative and promising approach to the Chaucerian tradition of Trojan historical fiction. This is an incredibly smart and compelling book. Its central idea about reconfiguring genealogical relations between texts into 'neighbor' relations that can complicate the normally linear ideas of cause-effect-revision extends our historical understanding of medieval texts and invigorates a field that threatens to become a rigid and stultified scene of reading." --Elizabeth Scala, University of Texas, Austin"This is the most important recent reconfiguration of medieval English literary history. Edmondson's book reanimates both a rigorous psychoanalytic method and the question of what Chaucer did to "Il Filostrato." It not only demonstrates that Boccaccio, Chaucer, Henryson, C. S. Lewis, David Wallace and Aranye Fradenburg belong in the same neighborhood but that its smart and urgent thinking about what it means to be a neighbor could open valuable new real estate in medieval literary studies generally." --D. Vance Smith, Princeton University

Crime Scenes: Criminal Topography and Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Abstract: In Paris as in other cities, "scenes" play an essential part in the appraisal of crime realities and crime imaginary. In the nineteenth century, the great social and urban changes that can be synthesized as haussmannisation deeply modified the topography of "vice" and delinquency in the capital. This article studies the evidence, the unwieldiness, and the shifting of that topography. Based on a corpus of widely distributed texts (feuilletons, dime and "popular" novels, Parisian columns, broadsheets), it shows how social imaginary adapted to the disruptions and played with the memory of places, pointing out the strong autonomy of Paris representations. A Paris comme ailleurs, les lieux occupent une place decisive dans l'apprehension des realites et de l'imaginaire du crime. Or la ville fut, au dix-neuvieme siecle, l'objet d'amples transformations sociales et urbaines, synthetisees par l'haussmannisation, qui affecterent en profondeur la topographie du Cvice et de la delinquance. Ce sont les evidences, les deplacements et surtout les pesanteurs de cette topographie que cet article etudie. Adosse a un corpus de textes de grande diffusion (romans-feuilletons et Cpopulaires, chroniques parisiennes, fascicules a bon marche), il montre comment l'imaginaire social s'accommode de ces transformations et joue avec la memoire des lieux, signalant ainsi la forte autonomie des representations de Paris.

Murder will out.

Abstract: A 1974 showing of more than 200 oils and water colors at the Tate Gallery, London, has led to a revival of interest in the 19th century English painter, Richard Dadd (1817 to 1886). In 1843, Dadd killed his father, cutting his throat, because he believed him to be the devil in human form. On a trip to the Near East, Dadd became deluded that the Egyptian god Osiris was directing him to eliminate the devil's influence. Four months after he returned to London he murdered his father, and was institutionalized for the last 43 years of his life. We advance the hypothesis that one particular painting. 'The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke,' symbolically re-enacts the murder and makes talion restitution. The painting shows minute attention to detail and altogether occupied the artist for 9 years. He also made a water color copy of it entirely from memory, and wrote a 22-page poem explaining the picture with the title, 'An Elimination.' We suggest that this hints at the same theme of undoing. Some art critics have seen in Dadd's other art works a projection of his inner feelings, especially a series of more than 30 water colors entitled 'Sketches to Illustrate the Passions,' amongthem 'Murder,' 'Anger,' 'Hatred,' 'Grief,' and 'Melancholy.' We construe these to support the thesis of redoing and undoing following the trauma of murder. We also mention Dadd's reminiscing, visible in his art, and its usefulness in reaffirming his self-identity. In the art work of Dadd's last 25 years, violent scenes are remarkably absent. Instead, imaginary landscapes and seascenes--the subject matter of his earliest adolescent art--reflect an inward absorption in and continuity of lifelong interests. We suggest that the long process of painting 'The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke' recapitulated and made restitution for the murder, encapsulating it so that compulsive expression of violent ideation was largely reduced, allowing other memories and activities to be engaged and expressed.

Witches write history : remembering the Old religion and constructing a historical imaginary

Abstract: Contemporary Goddess worship (also known as feminist witchcraft1) is a small but expanding neo-Pagan spiritual path. Practitioners believe in an immanent female deity (the Goddess), they consider the earth to be sacred, and they celebrate the female body and its cycles. As a result, the religion is womanand nature-centred. Goddess worship emerged from the broader counter-cultural milieu of the 1960s and 70s. Writers of Goddess texts (referred to as Goddess writers) conceptualise their movement's origins in prehistoric, pre-patriarchal times, with the advent of patriarchal polytheistic and monotheistic religions signifying a "fall". During this imagined period, formerly peaceful, civilised, matricentric societies became hierarchical, violent, and patriarchal. Vestiges of the pre-patriarchal Goddess religion, however, managed to survive underground for millennia until the atrocities of the early modem European witchcraft persecutions. In recent decades the Goddess has been awakened from dormancy and the Goddess religion is (re)emerging. It is this narrative, from prehistory through to the present and future, that is the focus of this study. This thesis furthers academic scholarship on contemporary Goddess worship by presenting a perspective from the history of ideas in which the Goddess writers' construction of the past is examined for its meaning and purpose. Focusing on three myth-historical time periods, which are termed the "Golden Age", the "Fall" and the Goddess "Renaissance", the Goddess writers' overall narrative is viewed as a "mythistory". It is elucidated in relation to the twin themes of gender and ecology that is, in regard to the emphases placed on women and nature. The underlying argument of this thesis is that history is fundamental to Goddess worship. Engagement with the past occurs through written texts, archaeological artefacts, pilgrimages to sacred sites, seasonal festivals and viewing/producing art. Goddess writers' conceptualisation of the past provides devotees with origins, authority, meaning, inspiration, and identity. Understanding the Goddess writers' construction of the past is essential to understanding this new movement. 1 As the term "feminist witchcraft" is used to refer to Goddess worship, the term "witches" is commonly employed by Goddess writers to refer to Goddess worshippers.

Lacan: the mind of the modernist

Abstract: This paper offers an intellectual portrait of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, by considering his incorporation of perspectives associated with “modernism,” the artistic and intellectual avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century. These perspectives are largely absent in other alternatives in psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Emphasis is placed on Lacan’s affinities with phenomenology, a tradition he criticized and to which he is often seen as opposed. Two general issues are discussed. The first is Lacan’s unparalleled appreciation of the paradoxical nature of human experience, together with his treatment of paradox as (paradoxically enough) almost a criterion of truth. These points are illustrated by considering Lacan’s conceptions of the self and of erotic desire. The second issue is Lacan’s focus on the “ontological dimension,” on overall styles or modalities of what might be termed “transcendental subjectivity”: namely, what he calls the registers of the “Imaginary,” the “Symbolic,” and the “Real.” By emphasizing the incommensurable yet (paradoxically) interdependent nature of these modalities, Lacan offers a synthesis of dynamic/conflictual and formal/ontological dimensions of the human condition. This paper offers an encompassing portrait of Lacan’s major ideas that is at odds with the widespread assumption that Lacan is somehow a deeply anti-humanist thinker who derides the subjective dimension. Lacan’s most distinctive contributions are fundamentally concerned with the nature of human experience. They show strong affinities with (and the influence of) hermeneutic forms of phenomenology inspired by Heidegger, a philosopher who focused on ontological modes of Being and considered paradox as a mark of truth.