Close Reading Research Articles

Where do the Pasinetti Rule and the Pasinetti Index Come from?

ABSTRACT The article describes the origins of the Pasinetti index and Pasinetti rule and links both notions to debates over concerns regarding which socio-economic income group in a modern capitalist economy was being hurt and which broad income class was benefiting from the high interest rate policy, especially during the Volcker era of the 1980s. These were statistical constructs as well as distinct normative concepts that resulted from a close reading of Pasinetti’s original writings published in 1980–81. The purpose of the Pasinetti index was to measure and monitor the actual transfer between the rentier and non-rentier sectors of an economy both cyclically and over the long term. As discussed in some detail, both authors of this article had directly participated in those debates and had basically initiated the early discussions around these concepts among post-Keynesians and other heterodox economists. The first part of our article, after the introduction, is primarily focused on what came to be called the Pasinetti rule, while the following section of the article recounts how the different variants of the Pasinetti index came to be constructed and used. We conclude with a discussion of the possible continued relevance of the Pasinetti norm in today’s world.

Voices from the Shadows: Intergenerational Conflict Memory and Second-Generation Northern Irish Identity in England

Recent scholarship has highlighted the heterogeneity of second-generation Irish identities in Great Britain, yet the varieties of self-identification espoused by the English-raised children of Northern Irish parents remain almost wholly unexplored. This article redresses this neglect by examining the relationship between parentally transmitted memories of the Northern Ireland Troubles (c.1969–1998) and the forms of identity and self-understanding that such children develop during their lives in England. Drawing on original oral history testimony and using the concepts of narrative inheritance and postmemory as interpretive tools, it demonstrates the complex correlation that exists between parents’ diverse approaches to memory-sharing and their children’s negotiation of inherited conflict memory as they position themselves discursively within contemporary English society. Based on a close reading of five oral history interviews, the analysis reveals a spectrum of creative postmemory practices and identity enactments, whereby narrators agentively define themselves in relation to the meanings they attribute to inherited memories, or the dearth thereof, as they navigate their tangled transnational affinities and allegiances. The article also explores how these practices and enactments are subtly responsive to narrators’ changing relationships to their narrative inheritances as their experience and awareness of their own and their parents’ lives deepen over the life course.

‘It's all there in the language’—a conversation with Garrett Stewart

AbstractWhat does a famed literary theorist have to say about the interaction between ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’? Well, if he's Garrett Stewart, the celebrated agent of pyrotechnic style in the service of durable insights across disparate disciplines and media, then we have much reason to lean in and listen. Stewart is the author of 20 books that range with uncanny competency across Victorian narrative, contemporary American fiction, written auralities, poetics and prose stylistics, cinematic evolution from silver oxide to screen pixel, book art, scenes of reading in painting, and most recently, the vocal drama of Barbra Streisand. The distances between his disciplinary terrains are as vast as his close readings of them are coordinated and trenchant. Here, sitting down before a shared conversational canvas, Stewart fields questions from David LaRocca, who asks how he, if he, thinks about the program of literature and philosophy. LaRocca, editor of the recent Attention Spans: Garrett Stewart, a Reader (Bloomsbury, 2024) and the forthcoming Bandwidths: Reading Across Media with Garrett Stewart (Bloomsbury), tracks the urgency of our moment—in which literature and philosophy are independently besieged and yet may concede little rapprochement. Where does philosophy happen in literature (a philosopher's question) is turned around by Stewart such that we see literature conjuring philosophy at the level of the sentence. We are not peering ‘in’ so much as looking ‘at’ the art of literature teaching philosophy through refined reading and the analytical inquest of the syllable and the sayable. Anyone who works at the fraught fissure of these realms will benefit from the ways Stewart makes literature and philosophy sensible to one another—even as he productively unsettles the terms and conditions of their affiliation.

In Search of Nature and Consciousness in Andrei Bialobotskii’s Pentateugum: Classical Echoes and Modern Impulses

Through close reading and reference to the philosophies of the time, this paper demonstrates how the long poem Pentateugum (1690s) by Andrei Bialobotskii (ca. 1640-1720) offers us a dynamic picture of the tensions —between Classical and Orthodox cultures and between religious and secularized literatures—leading to the East Slavic Enlightenment. According to Andrei Bialobotskii, culture is vain because such is human knowledge. Simultaneously, culture triumphs because, through it, the subject acquires and expresses their consciousness in a summa that comprises the whole history of humankind. In this context, Classical culture provides a model for writing techniques and functions as the highest instance of punished vanity, while expressing the harmony between nature and the individual.

The Openness of Death: (Re)constructing Indigenous Identity in Post–martial Law Taiwan

Abstract This article presents a set of interrelated close readings of works by four Indigenous Taiwanese cultural producers—the Puyuma writer Sun Dachuan, the Atayal painter Anli Genu, the Truku sculptor Labay Eyong, and the Atayal director Laha Mebow. I discuss the important symbolic role Taiwan’s Indigenous population has played in the development of a Taiwanese national imaginary and how this has affected Indigenous cultural expression. I argue that rather than trying to root out the improper intrusion of this ‘outside’ force into Indigenous cultural life, the works of these four cultural producers instead show how Indigenous identity can flourish through an honest navigation of the relationship brought about by that intrusion. They present an understanding of Indigenous identity in Taiwan as convoluted and changing, never fully in possession of itself but not any less authentic for that. My theorisation of this builds on Sun Dachuan’s notion of ‘the openness of death’, which he uses to highlight the need for Indigenous culture to transform itself in dynamic relation to the wider context in which it is embedded.

THE LIVING CITY: CULTURE, TRANSFORMATION, AND THE URBAN ENVI- RONMENT IN N. K. JEMISIN’S THE CITY WE BECAME

The paper examines the process of urban transformation in N. K. Jemisin’s novel, The City We Became. Through a close reading of the novel, the paper analyzes Jemisin’s portrayal of New York as a dynamic and constantly evolving entity that undergoes profound transformations throughout the narrative. Jemisin’s work offers a powerful and imaginative vision for how cities can be understood and represented in literature and beyond. The complex social, economic, and political forces actively shape cities are emphasized by presenting the city as a living and breathing character. The city will be viewed through Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, Edward Soja’s notion of postmetropolis, and Sharon Zukin’s conceptualization of the life and death of cities. Jemisin’s use of magical realism, intertextuality, and metaphorical language contribute to her vision of the city as a vibrant and multifaceted character that challenges and subverts dominant narratives surrounding race, gender, power, and urban inequality. By explor- ing the interplay between culture, urban theory, and literature, this paper offers a comprehen- sive and innovative perspective on the city and its ongoing transformation in the contemporary world.

Provision Grounds, Fruit, and Labour Conflicts in Jamaica, 1830s–1850s

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the scholarly literature on the rent controversy and labour shortages in Jamaica and the moral panic over idleness that attended the ‘Quashee’ stereotype, which proliferated among planters during apprenticeship (1834–1838) and persisted into the 1850s. While critics have previously understood the ‘Quashee’ stereotype popularized by Thomas Carlyle as antithetical to the sentimental discourse of a happy, industrious peasantry espoused by missionaries and abolitionists, this article traces some of their continuities through a lens of food studies. Using close readings of texts that engaged with provision grounds and discourses of idleness, natural bounty, and agricultural improvement from the 1830s to the late 1850s, it recontextualizes the ‘Quashee’ problem in the local and commercial interests in fruit that preceded the rise of the banana industry in the 1870s. The charges of idleness and insolence affixed to the provision grounds and fruit cultivation among the Jamaican peasantry were ostensibly resolved by the transition to large-scale exports, namely bananas. However, the patterns of mixed cultivation that emerged in slave provisioning systems and continued after emancipation laid the groundwork for the growth of peasant freeholds in the 1830s–1850s.

The Prototype and Political Mythical Connotations of “Drowning Death” in Kenzaburo Oe’s Death by Water

This article meticulously examines the interplay of myth and memory in Kenzaburo Oe’s novel Death by Water, with a central focus on the protagonist’s relentless investigation into his father’s death by drowning. Oe skillfully intertwines personal tragedy with the collective consciousness of Japan, invoking the ‘Meiji Spirit’ and the ‘Spirit of Postwar Democracy’ to frame the narrative. The study identifies the ‘drowning death’ as a mythological archetype, analyzing its symbolic representation of life, death, and rebirth cycles within the novel’s context. Through a close reading of the characters’ experiences, particularly the deaths of the father and Daio, the paper explores the multifaceted nature of mythical thinking shaped by historical zeitgeists. The findings suggest that national spirit, or Zeitgeist, exerts a profound influence on societal values and actions, leading to a discourse on the nation’s relationship with the concepts of sacrifice and offering. Employing political mythology, the study delves into the nuanced connection between national identity and the sacrificial ethos, proposing that such narratives reflect deeper cultural and political undercurrents.

Absent parents, sick children, and epistolary relationships in England, c.1640-c.1750

ABSTRACT Through an examination of their personal letters, this article explores the ways in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gentry parents responded to the illnesses of their children. Correspondence was the lifeblood of elite families in this period, as members were increasingly peripatetic and regularly separated from one another. It was also the primary method by which parents communicated with their adult children who had established households of their own. Illness was one of the key subjects of such letters. The paper approaches childhood as a relational, continuous state and uses relative age and social rank, often overlooked in favour of gender in scholarship on early modern sickness and domestic medicine, as categories of analysis. Through close reading and application of literary, sociological, and historical understandings of both letter-writing and experiences of illness, it argues that parental letters about health had specific strategies and implications. Mothers and fathers intervened in the physical condition of their offspring throughout their lives. Their diverse reactions to news of poor health, from concern, advice, and sympathy to admonition and frustration, served various functions at different stages of the life-course. Parents fulfilled their duties, such as protection, discipline, and education, remotely via correspondence about health. Concurrently, they allowed space for negotiation of their own and their children’s identities and emotions, particularly during transitional phases such as young adulthood. By considering the ways in which parent-child dynamics shifted in response to the challenges and opportunities presented by illness, this study untangles one of the many points of connection between family, health, and epistolary culture.

Memory Scripts and Life History in the Shadow of Brazil's Dictatorship

Abstract This article proposes the concept of ‘memory script’ to analyse how, in the aftermath of political violence, memory activists narrate their lives in a way that is practised, repetitive and performative. Through a self-reflective life history of Aluízio Palmar, a Brazilian human rights activist and former political prisoner who suffered intense torture under military rule, this approach seeks to elucidates the personal and political contours of somebody's decision to transform their experiences into a public narrative. A close reading of Palmar's various platforms of memory-sharing reveals the complex moral reckoning of an activist's own trauma.

THE MONUMENTALITY OF GLADIATORIAL GRAFFITI IN THE FLAVIAN AMPHITHEATRE: A CONTEXTUAL APPROACH

The present article offers a new interpretation of the gladiatorial graffiti preserved within the Flavian Amphitheatre from a contextual perspective. Although recent scholarship has set a solid foundation for investigating the role and nature of gladiatorial graffiti, a contextual examination of this epigraphic category represents a major desideratum. The article investigates graffiti within the epigraphic environment of the Flavian Amphitheatre. It examines the juxtaposition of graffiti and official inscriptions, their interaction with spatial and material surroundings and their distinctiveness as visual and material media with which to perpetuate the fleeting arena performances. By combining close reading with a new visual representation of gladiatorial graffiti – created digitally upon autoptic study – the article provides the reader with the first systematic analysis of this exceptional epigraphic record. Challenging critical notions of impermanence and instability, the article explores strategies of memorialization and techniques of temporality performed by graffiti, inviting reflection on the negotiation of and paradoxical takes on the contradictory concept of monumentality in the arena.

Evelyn Waugh's Satirical Masterpieces: A Delightful Blend of Wit and Critique

This study explores the satirical masterpieces of Evelyn Waugh, a renowned British author, with a focus on their delightful blend of wit and critique. The aims of this research are to analyze Waugh's satirical techniques, examine the themes and subjects of his works, and evaluate their impact on literature and society. The methodology involves a comprehensive analysis of Waugh's major novels, including "Decline and fall," "Vile Bodies," and "A Handful of Dust," using close reading and critical analysis. The results reveal the remarkable ability of Waugh to use humor and irony to expose the absurdities and vices of his contemporary society. Through sharp characterizations, witty dialogue, and clever narrative structures, he satirizes various aspects of British upper-class life, modernism, religion, and the decline of traditional values. The discussion delves into the effectiveness of Waugh's satirical techniques, their relevance in today's context, and their enduring influence on subsequent writers. It also addresses the ethical considerations of satire, as well as the potential limitations of Waugh's perspective. Ultimately, this research concludes that Evelyn Waugh's satirical masterpieces offer readers a delightful blend of entertainment, thought provoking social commentary, and a lasting critique of human follies and societal constructs. His works continue to captivate audiences, inspiring laughter, introspection, and critical engagement with the complexities of the world.

Wittgenstein in the Moonlight

Abstract Wittgenstein’s claims against private language and the existence of riddles have consolidated his reputation as a philosopher of the ordinary. This article makes a case for Wittgenstein as a thinker of enigma. His understudied remarks on riddles configure the ordinary and the transcendent in a novel and counterintuitive dynamic. This constitutes Wittgenstein’s most significant contribution to the study of the ordinary: a demarcation between language as the domain of the ordinary and mystery as the realm of meaning. The intricate interrelationship of these realms animates Wittgenstein’s abiding interest in the “limits” of knowledge and his pursuit of finely calibrated modes of analysis. The leitmotif of the riddle leads us through an exploration of Wittgenstein’s mottled oeuvre and serves as an occasion to ponder the question of “the question” in philosophy (as a matter of discursive form) as well as philosophy’s approach to “answers.” Acts of reading and interpretation, associated etymologically with “riddling,” are imbued with a special urgency in Wittgenstein’s thought, which this article brings to bear on recent debates on surface reading and close reading. To scholars of the ordinary, this article offers a critical reappraisal of Wittgenstein’s contribution, and to Wittgenstein scholars a (perhaps unfamiliar) moonlit Wittgenstein.

Rewriting the Narrative of Modernisms

Abstract: After Modernism is a collection of essays that in multiple ways intends to decentralize the concept of modernism. The volume includes analyses of art and literature as well as history and philosophy. Through close readings and viewings, the authors re-imagine and re-position how modernity is constructed and conceptualized, with the result that modernity must be understood as modernities , and modernism as modernisms . The titular concept of after is used as "both repetition and difference, both homage and critique," which means that canonical works, such as Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway are read with both love and scepticism, and placed next to analyses of works that has previously been ignored—mostly the work of female Black or indigenous artists. The result is a multifaceted and fragmented volume, where the format mirrors the central argument: that there can be no single modernism, placed in a single space or time, but always multiple and moving modernisms.

An Englishman abroad: Evening Land and the struggles of Peter Watkins within Scandinavian film culture of the 1970s

This article analyses Aftenlandet (Evening Land), a film made for the Danish Film Institute in 1976 by Peter Watkins, one of the world’s most politically radical directors and a pioneer of docudrama. The aim is to provide a detailed historical account of the life cycle of a key but hitherto critically neglected film in the director’s career: his last to be professionally funded for nearly 25 years and one that saw Watkins working within the very particular milieu of Denmark, investigating, often controversially, the perceived political fault lines of Danish society during the 1970s. The article traces how this English-born filmmaker came to be working in Scandinavia, details the production of Evening Land and provides a close critical reading of the film’s various themes and techniques as well as considering its reception and aftermath. Correspondence and production files from Watkins’ own personal archive reveal the difficulties the filmmaker clearly experienced as something of ‘an Englishman abroad’ attempting to find a place for himself within Scandinavian film culture of the period. The article asserts that this experience eventually contributed to Watkins’ decision to quit Scandinavia altogether following the completion of Evening Land, a decision that would inadvertently propel Watkins out of the world of professional filmmaking for nearly a quarter century. The article argues, however, that Evening Land, a film long obscure and critically neglected, still has cultural resonance and applicability to our own times in the twenty-first century.

The Image of the Patriot and the Enemy of the People in Selected Documents from the State Security Archive

The paper explores the linguistic devices and strategies used by State Security collab-orators to characterize the personalities and actions of targets of operational interest. On the one hand, the text examines documents from the State Security archives (re-cruitment offers and recruitment reports) that describe the ways in which new collabo-rators were recruited. On the other, the descriptions of the subjects of the reports in the reports are of interest. The research focuses on the communicative language pat-terns used and described in the relevant documents. As a source of excerpted material for scientific analysis, we used the book "Pastors Agents of the State Security Service" by Angel Pilev. Through an applied combination of research methods - lexical-semantic and discourse analysis, we search for lexical means with connotative load, as well as characterizing lexemes, building the opposite images - of the patriot informer and the enemy of the people reasons. By applying the close reading method, we aim at explicating the reader's point of view with minimal historical context. The linguistic material shows that the documents of the State Security build a very negative image of the enemy of the people. The strategy of the recruiters is also analyzed, emphasizing patriotic feelings, patriotic duty, expression of love for the motherland, and the noble deed to be done by the agents. The text emphasizes that it is to linguistics, along with other humanities that expectations are addressed for an objective, publicly accessible, and convincing interpretation of the era of socialism.

A far cry from greatness: Christian fundamentalism, liberty porn and the ‘good people’ of Trump’s America in Far Cry 5

This article offers a close reading of Ubisoft’s Far Cry 5 (FC5) (2018) in the context of apocalyptic rhetorics and evangelical Christian nationalism during the Trump Era. Building upon my previous work with video game chronotopes (2021) and Sören Schoppmeier’s analysis of the retrotopic, ‘nostalgia time’ in the game (2022), I analyse the doubled temporality of nostalgia time and apocalyptic time as deployed spatially in the game in combination with the game’s wanton use of ‘liberty porn’: undisciplined appeals to liberty and freedom through narrative, iconography and cutscene to instil respect and favour for the largely imagined plights of the right-wing inhabitants of the game’s fictional Hope County. Drawing heavily on examples of right-wing violence, attacks on civil rights and Christian fundamentalism during the Trump Era, this article draws concerning parallels between FC5’s rhetorical achievement and Trump’s embrace of white supremacist narratives – like ‘replacement theory’ – and militia groups, fashioning them as ‘good people’, a rhetoric similarly deployed throughout the game. Ultimately, this article argues for more corporate responsibility among game studios when it comes to deploying right-wing narratives and a bolder refutation of such reactionary games by game studies scholars, especially when parodic value is limited or largely absent.

Introduction

This issue gives a brief but poignant consideration of the ways the unfortunate election of Donald Trump played out, as it were, in and through contemporaneous games. The games, their reception and in some cases their implementation, were ineluctably informed by the extremist and rambling ‘MAGA’ agenda. The articles offer close readings of particular games, practices and approaches to give insights into how this occurred and what it means going forward.

Sufficient Magic: Queer Prison Comix as Liberation Praxis

ABSTRACT: Prison art has many functions, from representation to healing to rehabilitation, and it can make use of many different kinds of media, including comix. For prison abolitionists, prison art is most powerful when it is connected to larger struggles against the criminal punishment system, and comix offer unique affordances to abolitionist movements. From cells to movement blur to the gutter, comix enable artists to interrogate carcerality and gendered oppression simultaneously. Through close readings of comix and correspondence with artists and organizers, this article examines the world-making praxis of incarcerated trans artists who are creating and distributing original comix with the abolitionist organization ABO Comix. While most scholarship on prison art explores state-sanctioned programs, ABO Comix is independent from the prison system, producing alternative possibilities as well as unique challenges for artists and organizers. In comix by trans artist Krysta Morningstarr* as well as other artists, incarcerated LGBTQ artists use comix as a form of world-making, mutual aid, and collective praxis within and beyond the prison borders.

Modernism as Liberation: J. Max Bond Jr. at Mississippi’s Mary Holmes College

Abstract From early in his career, J. Max Bond Jr. (1935–2009) brought the civil rights movement to bear on architecture, insisting that modernism live up to its promise to build a better world. Exemplary of this effort was the first completed work of Bond Ryder Associates, the Neigh Dormitory (1968–70) at Mary Holmes College in West Point, Mississippi. This article offers a close reading of this overlooked project in the context of Bond’s own encounters with modern architecture as an African American, the realities of Mississippi in the 1960s, and the experiences of the students who made this dorm their home. It contends that Bond Ryder shaped a liberatory modernism here especially focused on the freedom and self-determination of the dorm’s Black residents amid ongoing racial violence. In doing so, the article provides a novel perspective on the role that architecture played as a force for racial equality and that, in turn, the long civil rights movement played in shaping architectural modernism. While modern architecture had caused much harm by midcentury, this dorm’s history reveals an unexpected source for the rejuvenation of modernism’s social promise: the long struggle for racial justice.