Genealogy Of Concept Research Articles

Academic Film Criticism, the Rhetoric of Crisis, and the Current State of American Horror Cinema: Thoughts on Canonicity and Academic Anxiety

Academic Film Criticism, the Rhetoric of Crisis, and the Current State of American Horror Cinema:Thoughts on Canonicity and Academic Anxiety Steffen Hantke (bio) Ask any fans, and they will tell you that American horror film is in a slump. Not that no more horror films are being made; on the contrary, as far as popularity and profitability go, the horror film seems near the top of its game as Hollywood lavishes a steady stream primarily of mid-budget films upon its audience. And yet the vast majority of these films just aren't any good. The current slump, according to many fans, began in the 1990s with the so-called neo-slasher. Successful with large audiences but received with apprehension by fans and critics, Wes Craven's Scream was, depending on who you asked, either the best or the worst thing to happen to horror film. According to the critical voices, Scream's recycling of "classic" precursors transformed the more politically [End Page 191] attuned horror film of the previous generation into self-indulgent postmodern play.1 If this wasn't bad enough, what came after the neo-slasher was even worse—a mindless series of remakes, starting with Joel Silver's and Robert Zemeckis' production company Dark Castle and its remakes of gimmicky William Castle films from the 1950s and 1960s, and leading up to the indiscriminate plunder of Asian horror films like The Ring or The Grudge. While more of these so-called J-horror films were still in the pipeline, Hollywood lowered its sights yet again, from foreign to domestic remakes, churning out new versions of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, Robert Harmon's The Hitcher, or Fred Walton's When a Stranger Calls. While the Craven remake can at least boast directorial hopeful Alexandre Aja, the remake of the Walton film is nothing but a pointless exercise in style—and not a very successful one at that.2 At what must be considered the bottom of the slump, even remakes of remakes are possible now; the recent announcement of a new version of "John Carpenter's The Thing" in The Guardian, for example, omits any reference to Christian Nyby's The Thing from Another World (1951). As the boundary between original and remake vanishes, all concepts of originality, genealogy, or history go out the window as well.3 One wonders how long it will take, after this latest remake has been released, until someone will begin thinking about remaking the remake of John Carpenter's remake of The Thing from Another World. And after that, if the money's right, remaking that one . . . and after that . . . sky's the limit! Not surprisingly, then, the fans complain. "It seems to me that the genre has hit a crisis point creatively," Scott Tobias states. "J-horror is dying off, Hollywood is running out of '70s and '80s horror staples to remake, and surely at some point, the Saw and Final Destination franchises will lose their novelty" ("Crosstalk"). Larry Fessenden sees this slump commencing even earlier: "Recently, horror movies have fetishized [sic] serial killers and clinically gruesome effects, as we become possessed by the arbitrariness of violence and our ability to recreate it in the movies. This is a slump" (Glass Eye Pictures). The fact that horror film web site Bloody-Disgusting.com even hosted a discussion among its readers in the late fall of 2005 in which the basic question—Do you think horror movies are done for?"—itself is indicative of the mood among the fans of horror cinema.4 Speaking somewhat more objectively, even the Wikipedia entry on horror film, while noting recent developments in the genre past 2005, confirms this trend: The start of the 2000s saw the horror genre going into a slump as movies dealing with the supernatural had mild but not memorable success. Even the re-release of a restored version of The Exorcist in September of 2000 didn't quite cause a stir. Also, near-defunct franchises such as Freddy Vs. Jason somehow made it into theatres. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_film) [End Page 192] Academic critics writing roughly in the time period between 2002 and 2006 chime...

Depicting the Dead: Commemoration Through Cists, Cairns and Symbols in Early Medieval Britain

This article develops recent interpretations of mortuary practices as contexts for producing social memory and personhood to argue that early medieval cairns and mounds served to commemorate concepts of gender and genealogy. Commemorative strategies are identified in the composite character, shape and location of cairns and in their relationship with other commemorative monuments, namely Class I symbol-stones. The argument is developed through a consideration of the excavations of early medieval cists and cairns at Lundin Links in Fife.

Reckoning Day: Race, Representation, and Redress in Women's Literature and Film

Reckoning Day:Race, Representation, and Redress in Women's Literature and Film William B. Covey (bio) Hilary Neroni . The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. New York: State U of New York P, 2005. xiv + 203 pp. Judylyn S. Ryan . Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women's Film and Literature. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005. xi + 193 pp. In "Revolutionary Attitude," esteemed feminist and cultural critic bell hooks self-consciously admits, "Even those of us righteously committed to black liberation struggle, who feel we have decolonized our minds, often find it hard to 'speak' our experience" (2). Judylyn S. Ryan and Hilary Neroni confront this struggle in their new books as each speaks out about underrepresented areas of inquiry in literature and film studies. For example, Ryan reexamines liberation theology as represented in contemporary black women's literature and film, and Neroni focuses upon the field of psychoanalysis but through a lens of the violent and tough woman characters of current neo-noir and action films. Both critics employ their own versions of hooks's [End Page 705] "oppositional gaze" concept in order "to develop critical spectatorship" ("Oppositional Gaze" 117) toward each topic. Together, their books reaffirm the importance of female agency in women's art. From the opening dedication to her grandmother, her statement that "the purpose of life is to make more life possible" (v), her focus on black female agency, and her invitation to live an examined, spiritual life, Judylyn Ryan's Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women's Film and Literature delivers kind-hearted and well-intentioned humanism to its readers. Besides the arguably more well-known left liberation philosophies of bell hooks and Cornel West, little recent work focuses on the importance of spirituality to women's cultural texts. Because of her interest in this marginalized field of study, Ryan is a trailblazer even if her book is concise at a length of six chapters. Ryan's introduction to the book sets up the parameters of her study. Invoking a non-denominational, broad-based theory of spirituality as a "life force" (2), Ryan promises to examine specific characters and auteur's visions from a selection of black women's texts in literature and film. While largely on her own in this subject area, Ryan has precursors and is especially indebted to the cultural work of Toni Morrison and the critical work of Barbara Christian whose bedrock ideas underlie her expanded analyses. Ryan's introduction sets up a dual argument: "that spirituality functions as a life-affirming ideology in Black women's art, and that, in the choices informing narrative construction and characterization, Black women filmmakers and writers embrace the role and responsibility of the priestess, bearing and distributing life-force to sustain the community of viewers and readers" (5). To the author, this priestess role is ideological and thus separates Ryan's views of ideology from left-leaning critics like Cornel West. West, for example, employs postmodern theory, specifically Michel Foucault's concept of genealogy, to define how the hegemonic power of white supremacist beliefs negatively impacts black life. To West then the "genealogical approach subscribes to a conception of power that is neither simply based on individual subjects . . . nor on collective subjects . . . but rather a history made by the praxis of human subjects which often results in complex structures of discourses" (49). Whereas West aligns black experience with forces of slave history and hegemony, Ryan chooses an optimistic framework based on the role of spirituality. Thus, West's agenda defines society through postmodern theory while Ryan relies upon humanistic self-redemption. As such, Ryan defines spirituality differently than West from the first chapter entitled, "Interpreting Spirituality" where she recognizes black agency and labels her approach as a "paradigm of growth [that] derives from and reflects specific principles of traditional African religious [End Page 706] cosmology" (15). Ryan sees the individual as in charge of producing their own culture and thus her "paradigm of growth supplants the paradigm of resistance that has prevailed in most theoretical approaches to African diaspora cultural studies" (16). Ryan believes in Romantic "self-perpetuation" (17) because she argues that, "even individuals whose presence is temporally...

Genealogy as Theory, Genealogy as Tool: Aspects of Somali ‘Clanship’

Genealogy is both a tool for organizing people on the day to day political level, and an intellectual scheme for understanding human history. This article looks at the conception of genealogy that the Somalis have inherited from their past and examines the ways in which it has been rejected, manipulated and theorized in recent times, especially since the civil war.

Introduction—development and phylogeny of the arthropods: Darwin’s legacy

In the present essay, I first recall the genealogical concept of classification settled by Charles Darwin in the "Origin of Species". Darwin tightly linked what we now call phylogeny and development. He often insisted to take into account embryonic and larval characters, most often using as examples his favourite animals, the cirripedes. Then I discuss remaining problems, and also perspectives, to address the link between phylogeny and development in the modern terms of molecular and cladistic phylogenetics and of molecular and genetic developmental biology.

The Historiography of Gender and Progressive Education in the United States

This article examines the feminist historiography of the progressive education movement over the past 25 years using the Foucauldian conception of genealogy and the theoretical approach of critical feminism. Gender has largely been ignored as a significant category of historical analysis in the historiography of progressive education in the United States. The defining history of progressive education in the United States is still Lawrence Cremin’s 1961 work, The Transformation of the School. For Cremin, gender is not a significant question. Later historians of the progressive education movement have tended to follow Cremin’s approach and have failed to address the gendered nature of progressive ideas of citizenship and democratic education. Early responses to this historiographic tradition by feminist historians of education influenced by the women’s movement sought to rescue and celebrate the women of the progressive education movement. They followed what might be called the ‘women’s recovery project’. This body of work has made an important contribution in uncovering the contributions of women educators but in many cases these studies have taken an uncritical and even romantic approach to their subjects. Moreover, they have tended to replicate a kind of individualistic biographical history, focusing on the achievements of individual women and ignoring the ways in which male/female binaries have worked to create difference and gendered structures of power. Although there are some significant exceptions to this feminist approach, much feminist history of education has failed to consider this process of difference‐making or to challenge an empiricist model of history. This article examines the way historians have examined gender in the progressive education movement by looking at two areas: the role of gender in John Dewey’s life and work and the lives and work of progressive women school leaders. It argues that gender difference, like race and other subject positions, should not be understood as referring to fixed categories and unchanging reality, but as reflecting the work of difference‐making. This entails looking not only at how difference is constructed in the institutional practices of the state and the legal system, but also how it is called forth in the scholarly interpretation of the past. The article suggests that historians of education need to go beyond the recovery project of writing the stories of those who have been ‘hidden from history’, in Sheila Rowbotham’s words, to an analysis of the process of gendering – in the educational sites we study and in the writing of history as an intellectual enterprise.

Foucault, Critique and Rights

This paper outlines Foucault's genealogical conception of critique and argues that it is not inconsistent with his appeals to concepts of right so long as these are under stood in terms of his historical and naturalistic approach to rights. This approach is explained by reference to Nietzsche's account of the origins of rights and duties and the example of Aboriginal rights is used to exemplify the historical character of rights understood as internal to power relations. Drawing upon the contemporary ‘externalist’ approach to rights, it is argued that the normative force of rights can only come from within historically available moral and political discourses. Reading Foucault's 1978-1979 lectures on liberal governmentality in this manner suggests that his call for new forms of right in order to criticise disciplinary power should be answered by reference to concepts drawn from the liberal tradition of governmental reason.

Towards a Genealogical Feminism: A Reading of Judith Butler's Political Thought

Judith Butler's contribution to feminist political thought is usually approached in terms of her concept of performativity, according to which gender exists only insofar as it is ritualistically and repetitively performed, creating permanent possibilities for performing gender in new and transgressive ways. In this paper, I argue that Butler's politics of performativity is more fundamentally grounded in the concept of genealogy, which she adapts from Foucault and, ultimately, Nietzsche. Butler understands women to have a genealogy: to be located within a history of overlapping practices and reinterpretations of femininity. This genealogical understanding of femininity allows Butler to propose a coalitional feminist politics, which requires no unity among women but only loosely overlapping connections. For Butler, feminist coalitions should aim to subvert, not consolidate, entrenched norms concerning femininity. Butler has been criticized, however, for failing to explain either how subversive agency is possible or why the subversion of gender norms is desirable. Reviewing these criticisms, I argue that Butler offers a convincing explanation of the possibility of subversive agency, but that the normative dimension of her political thought remains relatively underdeveloped. I explore how the normative aspect of Butler's thought could be strengthened by recasting her notion of genealogy along more thoroughly Nietzschean and materialist lines, in terms of an idea of active and multiple bodily forces.

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era by David Finkelstein (review)

768 Reviews in principle, these are hardly even defended (cf. Grimes, Lacoss, Natov): myths are reassuringly self-explanatory, to the point of turning Harry into Jesus: 'Harry began his life as myth, as magic infant, the force that alone kept evil at bay. Throughout the first four books, he has struggled to become a human boy' (Cockrell, p. 26). This Jesus-Pinocchio also fulfilseight out ofthe ten archetypes suggested by Grimes, for whom it is not yet clear at this stage if Harry Potter's mother is a virgin, thus preventing Harry from fulfillingthis particular Messianic requirement (p. 107). Farah Mendlesohn's contribution is the only essay which attempts to critique some of the volume's tenets. Her cultural analysis of the internal contradictions of concepts of genealogy in Harry Potter goes against the idea that 'biologically, genetically, an embryonic hero is likely to come from appropriately strong roots, good DNA (Pharr, p. 54). Her discussion of 'fairness' also sits uneasily next to the well-meant claims about 'Rowling's abhorrence ofthe class system' (Natov, p. 133). Similarly, her view on gender clashes not only with the enthusiastic 'Harry is no wimp' (Pharr, p. 62) but also with Dresang's critical efforts. Even though at times simply reversing the logic it criticizes and failing to question the role of the author (whom Mendlesohn occasionally chastises, thus failing back into the position of the critic-as-moralizer shared by other contributors), Mendlesohn's essay is a critical argument. This volume is full of good intentions, which exert their commonsensical power; The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter fails, however, to work as a critical analysis of a cultural phenomenon. University of Salford Daniela Caselli The House ofBlackwood: Author?Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era. By David Finkelstein. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2002. viii + 199 pp. $55- ISBN 0-271-02179-9. Founded in 1804, the Edinburgh publishing firm of William Blackwood & Sons is best known for its role in nurturing major literary talents such as George Eliot and Joseph Conrad. Blackwood is already the subject of two histories commissioned by the house, Margaret Oliphant and Mary Porter's study of 1897-98 and Frank Tredrey 's house history of 1954. David Finkelstein's The House of Blackwood is one of a number of recently published texts that consciously set out to reinvestigate and revise the 'official' history of print culture. As Chapter 1 makes clear, officialhouse histories tend to concentrate upon famous authors and literary texts while ignoring the collaborative process between author, editor, and printing house that allowed these texts to be produced in the firstplace, and the role of the publisher in distributing and marketing them once they had left the press. Chapter 6 helps to redress this imbalance by documenting William Black? wood' s struggle to get Oliphant and Porter to produce a coherent author-centred 'representation ofthe firm's self-image' (p. 128) in the 1890s, and two general chap? ters (2 and 5) covering the economic history of the business draw attention to the way in which Blackwood's involvement in the production of a wide range of non-literary texts, including atlases and dictionaries, helped the firm to survive in the volatile world of Victorian publishing. These general chapters cover the periods 1860-79 and 1880-1912 respectively and draw upon a wealth of new archival material deposited in the National Library of Scotland that even the previous 'ofncial' historians of the firm were unable to call upon, and Finkelstein must be praised for extending his interest to the later period, when the firm 'began aiming more directly at its steadiest customer base: the colo? nial audience' (p. 101). However, it is unfortunate that the attention given in the MLR, 99.3, 2004 769 earlier chapter to 'production and the shop floor' (pp. 38-42) and 'distributing and marketing texts' (pp. 42-46) is not repeated in the chapter on the later period. Chap? ter 2 concludes with the statement that 'the labor strikes of 1872-73 resulted in a de-unionizing policy that was to remain in place until the turn ofthe century', but at least something should have been said about labour and...

On the Morals of Genealogy

The article describes how an intellectual community of those following French trends in the academy have, for the past forty years, been offering a mistaken reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of genealogy. The essay shows how Nietzsche mocks moral psychologists by calling them genealogists, contrasts Nietzsche's work with that of genealogists, and then documents how subsequent academics, encouraged by the work of Gilles Deleuze and, in turn, Michel Foucault, created a revaluation of genealogy's meaning, thereby fetishizing their own scholarly authority.

IMPERSONAL EXISTENCE: a conceptual genealogy of the “there is” from heidegger to blanchot and levinas

(2002). IMPERSONAL EXISTENCE: a conceptual genealogy of the “there is” from heidegger to blanchot and levinas. Angelaki: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 131-142.

A Conceptual Genealogy of Fragmentation Research: From Island Biogeography to Landscape Ecology

A Conceptual Genealogy of Fragmentation Research: From Island Biogeography to Landscape Ecology

Genealogical Self and a Confucian Way of Self-Making

This paper is a discussion of three approaches popular in contemporary studies of confucianism for undertanding the relationship between the self and others. I argue that all three of the influential conceptions of self that are prominent in these accounts (the universal self, the organic self, and the relational self) still stand in the shadow of the Indo-european metaphysical traditions of self or are insuficient for going beyond that shadow. Based on the ways in which Chinese charaters are generated genealogically, I propose an alternative understanding of the confucean conception of self as a genalogical self. Finally, I shall show how this genealogical conception of self leads us to understand confucian ethics as exemplary and communal rather than absolutely individualistic and normative.

Raza, linaje, familia y casa-solar en el País Vasco

In the light of the correlation established by E. Todd between varieties of family structures and kinds of racism, this article analyzes the way in which Sabino Arana's «Basque race» has its roots in a «genealogical concept» of race. This concept was elaborated within a «religious protorracism» related to the Spanish Inquisition's antisemitism, so that, as a consequence, authoritarian family, purity of race and Catholic religion appear as three complementary pillars of the traditional Basque society, whose mythical return is the aim of Sabino Arana's racism.

A Genealogy of Short-Termism in Capital Markets

The paper reviews a series of recent UK empirical studies of short-termism based on rational valuation formulae to clarify the distinction between short-termism in the form of underweighting and excessive discounting of expected returns, and short-termism in the form of investor myopia. A brief genealogy of concept of short-termism is provided which traces its development from the writings of John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith on the management of joint-stock companies, Karl Marx on the contradiction between forces and social relations of production, and Max Weber on the difference between formal and substantive modes of capitalist rationality, to the modern interpretations of Kelvin Lancaster and others based on implicit contracts and game-theory. These modern perspectives are interrogated in respect to the role played by social institutions, norms, and conventions in facilitating implicit contracts between owners and managers, managers and workers, and borrowers and lenders. Alternative approaches to short-termism are then considered, including those based on Myopic Loss Aversion or Prospect Theory, Schliefer and Vishny's Noise-Trading Model, neoclassical models of liquidity premia, and Keynesian notions of liquidity preference. Policy implications are also considered along with options for further research.

Pacific Coast Iris species delimitation using three species definitions: biological, phylogenetic and genealogical

Morphological characters are used to discriminate the five Oregon species of the Pacific Coast irises (Iris series Californicae). In nearly every case, fixed differences were found between species, revealing that they are good phylogenetic species. However, when the biological species concept is applied, the whole series is found to be one biological species. Sequence data were generated from the chloroplast DNA region between the atpbeta and rbcL genes. For this 700 bp region, the maximum divergence observed in the series was one percent. These sequences, together with three restriction site characters, were used to produce a cladogram for multiple individuals of all species in the group. On the resulting consensus cladogram, the different individuals from each species do not cluster together. This could result from either introgressive hybridization or the retention of ancestral polymorphism. When the genealogical species concept is applied, only one species can be identified: the whole Series Californicae. There are therefore two natural levels at which taxa can be defined. It is recommended that the phylogenetic species be used as the taxonomic species in this group.Copyright 1998 The Linnean Society of London

Discourse, Foucault, and Critical Medical Anthropology

One of the major research interests of critical medical anthropology is the examination of Western biomedicine. The concepts of discourse and genealogy elaborated in the writing of Michel Foucault are particularly useful in this task. In addition, the notion of discursive structure defines a unit of investigation well suited to the anthropological examination of complex society. This paper reviews some of these theoretical and methodological possibilities, and then looks at the case example of borderline hypertension in 20th‐century American culture drawn from the author's dissertation research.

The Duhemian historiographical project

Duhem regarded the history of physical science as carrying a twofold lesson for the practicing physicist. First, history revealed the slow, groping, yet continuous development of physical theory toward a true description of the relations among natural entities. Second, history also unmasked false explanations and metaphysical beliefs that might seduce the unwary scientist into following an unfruitful line of research. This paper brings forth the central images underlying Duhem's historiographical project and uses the papers by S. Menn and W. A. Wallace to ask what Duhem's enterprise actually meant in practice. I argue that the main question is the following: What is to count as the proper space of historical meaning and explanation? ‘Strong’ Duhemians, such as S. Menn, purchase the longue duree at the cost of making historical agents into completely passive transmitters of conceptual homologies; ‘weak’ Duhemians, such as W. A. Wallace, shorten the temporal distance between agents and permit thereby a modicum of conflict and negotiation within physical theory while still seeking to preserve long-term conceptual genealogies. Both positions, it is argued, allow insufficient room for actors' categories to determine the space of cultural analysis.

Temporality as Historical Argument in Bertolucci's "1900"

In Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 the relations of tense-defined by narratologist Gerard Genette as order, duration, and frequency-convey a complex historical argument, serving as analogues to such traditional historiographic techniques as cause and effect analysis and linking of the particular and the general. Moreover, in delineating the mechanisms of the historical process chiefly through codes of temporality embodied in narrative form, the film essays a mode of historical causation that may be called genealogical or archaeological: the analysis and narrative ordering of historical occurrences not as an immutable order of events but rather as if they were episodes in an unfinished plot whose meaning is not fixed; the past apprehended as open and responsive to the present and the future, conceived as containing the conditions of possibility leading to the film's utopian resolution. In employing the concept of genealogy to describe the film's historical method, I am adopting the modified account of Michel Foucault's model set forth by Fredric Jameson and Hayden White. Emphasizing the narrative trajectory of the historical process in a way that departs from Foucault, this modified genealogical approach retains the critical aim of working against the idea of the past having imposed a predetermined form on the present, opposing the finality, the suprahistorical perspective of traditional history, which, as Foucault writes, assumes the existence of immobile forms, and which reduces the diversity of time into a totality.' Rather than the past appearing as an established, known, and conclusory order which has evolved ineluctably into the present-a genetic approach characteristic of many historical films-1900, consistent with its Marxian orientation, comprehends the historical past as a particular set of possibilities that can be fulfilled in the future. As Hayden White explains: human beings can will backward as well as forward in time; willing backward occurs when we rearrange accounts of events in the past that have been emplotted in a given way, in order to endow them with a different meaning or to draw from the new emplotment reasons for acting differently in the future ... we can regard this change in perspective as a causal force in history, effecting changes in past ages' conception