Topic
The Imaginary
About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.
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Journal Article•
TL;DR: In the early nineteenth century, London was transformed from a tiny island to the most powerful empire in the world as discussed by the authors, and Blake's vision of the world as a utopia was transformed into reality.
Abstract: They came up to Jerusalem; they walked before Albion / In the Exchanges of London every Nation walkd / And London walkd in every Nation mutual in love & harmony / Albion coverd the whole Earth, England encompassd the Nations,/ ... From bright Japan & China to Hesperia France & England. / Mount Zion lifted his head in every Nation under heaven: / And the Mount of Olives was beheld over the whole Earth: / The footsteps of the Lamb of God were there: but now no more. --Blake, Jerusalem (24:42-51) (1) WHAT PLACE IS THERE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY FOR EXALTED talk of any country 'encompass[ing] the nations"? For all its religious fervor, this is a dangerous kind of nostalgia. Blake's utopia, rendered as Albion (2) covering the earth, sounds a bit like any other imperialist campaign, and his imagination of "bright Japan and China" just another stop along the Silk Road. There is a fine line between Blake's imagined Jerusalem-at once the holy city and London, at once a temple and a financial exchange--and the imperialism it aims to disavow; it may at first seem there is little room between eternity and global capitalism. (3) Blake is generally saved from charges of imperialism by recourse to his "madness"; a self-proclaimed prophet is not imagined to have much use for the Real World. Though his is a spatial poetry (littered with chasms, voids, abysses, vacuums, and shells--its lands, books, and bodies described in terms of contraction, circumference, and direction), it is easy to read Blake's spatiality as metaphorical and apolitical, "imaginative" in the sense of being impossible. His geographic orientations are materially unimaginable--"West, the Circumference: South, the Zenith: North, the Nadir: East, the Center"--and appear symbolic: the directions are aligned alternately with the senses, the features of the face, and the limbs of the body. This metaphoricity seems to suggest that Blake's spatial interest is in the eternal rather than the "real," the symbolic rather than the material. But what we see in Jerusalem is that these binaries of real/imaginary, lived/symbolic, are themselves inadequate to account for the experience of reading the poem or building the city. Rather than reduce Blake's insistent focus on the material conditions of England and his (equally insistent) use of visionary language to one or the other, either the literal or the metaphorical, I suggest that the imaginary process proposed in Jerusalem is the move by which the visionary city becomes the material city. To the extent that this process makes use of space and reveals the imaginative aspect of spatial experience, we might read Blake as a precursor to twentieth-century spatial theorists, who understand that space is neither Newtonian nor Kantian--is not a thing so much as a practice, what Marcus Doel calls "the event of geography." (4) Blake's insistence on the mutability of space(s)--and on the power of the imagination to transform material space--is what enables him to undertake, in earnest, the building of Jerusalem. And yet Britain's own insistence on the mutability of spaces (spaces that might be conquered, harvested, settled, or annexed) is the basis for another order altogether; the most prominent "event of geography" in the early nineteenth century is the event of imperial expansion, itself a negotiation between imaginative and material spaces. This article aims to understand how Blake sustains a distinction between his own vision of Jerusalem-as-Albion encompassing the earth and England's transformation from a tiny island to the most powerful empire in the world--how, in fact, Blake uses the materials of England's empire to produce an anti-imperial, global vision. Though it is in his preface to Milton that Blake famously calls on his readers to build Jerusalem "In Englands green & pleasant Land," it is the encyclopedia Jerusalem--on which Blake likely worked for sixteen years (roughly 1804-1821)--that synthesizes the national and apocalyptic interests of his earlier prophecies. …
12 citations
TL;DR: The authors examine the construction of Sweden as a racialised spatial imaginary in the emerging transnational networks of far-right media production, and argue that examining the increasing importance of "taboo news" as a commodity form must be integrated into a reading of how these racializing narratives are produced and circulated.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine the construction of Sweden as a racialised spatial imaginary in the emerging transnational networks of far-right media production. Departing from President Donald Trump’s widely reported remarks, in 2017, as to “what happened last night in Sweden”, it examines the racializing discourses through which Sweden is constructed as a dark future to be averted; a failed social experiment in immigration and multiculturalism symbolised by the “no-go zones” held to be dotted, yet denied, in its major cities. While the symbolic production of “problem areas” is a familiar dimension of the politics of immigration, the paper explores why Sweden-as-nation is so insistently and intimately associated with its putative no-go zones in what are termed the “revenge fantasies” of the far-right. Further, it argues that these modes of representation cannot be understood without examining the value of Sweden as a news commodity in the expansive far-right media environment.,The analysis offers the idea of “taboo news” to conceptualise putatively “alternative” news about Sweden which is confirmed through its denial in the mainstream.,It argues that examining the increasing importance of “taboo news” as a commodity form must be integrated into a reading of how these racializing narratives are produced and circulated.,In so doing, it examines the shaping of this racialised imaginary as a digital assemblage taking shape as a commodity in a newly emerging and under-researched field of communicative and ideological action.
12 citations
01 Jan 2007
TL;DR: The authors explored the state and status of the family in contemporary literature, culture, critical and psychoanalytic theory and sociology, and found that the family plot seems to thicken as family ties appear to loosen.
Abstract: ‘Famille, je vous ai (encore et toujours a l’esprit?), je vous aime un peu, beaucoup, ou je vous hais enormement?’ What are families like in contemporary France? And what begins to emerge when we consider them from the point of view of recent theoretical perspectives: (faulty) cohesion, (fake) coherence, (carefully planned or subversive) deconstruction, loss (of love, confidence or credibility), or, even (utter) chaos and (alarming) confusion? Which media revamp old stereotypes, generate alternative reinterpretations, and imply more ambiguous answers? What images, scenes or frames stand out in contemporary representations of the family? Uneasy contradictions and ambiguities emerge in this bilingual collection of approaches and genre studies. The family plot seems to thicken as family ties appear to loosen. Has ‘the family’ been lost from sight, or is it being reinvented in our collective imaginary? This book proposes a new series of perspectives and questions on an old and ‘familiar’ topic, exploring the state and status of the family in contemporary literature, culture, critical and psychoanalytic theory and sociology.
11 citations
Book•
11 Apr 2003
TL;DR: The authors examined the authors and audiences for 20th century Chinese literature, especially fiction, and found that modern Chinese fictions are imaginary in that they do not constitute reliable portraits of Chinese life, they can reveal fascinating insights into the writers themselves and their implied audiences.
Abstract: The authors and audiences for twentieth century Chinese literature, especially fiction, are examined in a fresh light in this book. While modern Chinese fictions are imaginary in that they do not constitute reliable portraits of Chinese life, they can reveal fascinating insights into the writers themselves and their implied audiences. The book also includes substantial reference to poetry, drama, film, and the visual arts as well as to the political and social context in which they appear.
11 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored the place of the animal and animals in Lacanian psychoanalysis, arguing that the standard accounts of Lacan on the animal, including the influential intervention by Derrida, depend almost exclusively on the Ecrits and Lacan's early seminars, overlooking late Lacanian texts and seminars.
Abstract: This article explores the place of the animal and animals in Lacanian psychoanalysis, arguing that the standard accounts of Lacan on the animal, including the influential intervention by Derrida, depend almost exclusively on the Ecrits and Lacan’s early seminars, overlooking late Lacanian texts and seminars. It starts by examining perplexing instances in Lacan’s seminar of “silliness” or “stupidity” – what he himself calls betises. The betise, which Lacan says plays a critical role in clinical practice, is then treated as the way into a discussion of the place of the animal in Lacan’s seminar, and how it changes between early and late seminars. Ecrits and the early seminars consistently locate animals in the imaginary while denying them access to the symbolic, a realm exclusive to the human animal at this stage of Lacan’s thinking. The article then shows how this earlier work rests heavily on ethology, especially key figures such as Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, who disappear entirely from the...
11 citations