Force Of Imagination Research Articles

Transitioning to adulthood for young disabled people: imagining new futurities while walking-with

From a disability studies perspective, we want to understand how to support young disabled adults to belong in their local community once the postsecondary transition has arrived. The force of imagination in the search for possibilities other than the often-fixed normalised pathways is investigated by looking at some important life events of Wout, a young man with Down Syndrome. The researchers experiment with the method of intuition of Bergson ([1946] 1992) by becoming part of the events shared through ‘walking-with’ Wout. Hereto a tracing-mapping (Lenz Taguchi 2016) exercise is followed to explore the open possibilities in Wout’s future, particularly in connection to employment. A speculative approach offers a conceptual and practical way to build concrete utopias (Bloch 1986) for the inclusive future Wout and his network are shaping.

Emma Bovary Re-Imagined

Abstract What to make of Emma Bovary’s dreaming constitutes a fundamental problem in the study of Flaubert’s novel. The dominant reading of Emma’s dream life adopts a critical stance toward her unwillingness, or incapacity, to accept her everyday reality. Showing how Flaubert’s text challenges our understanding of Emma as a sterile dreamer, this essay seeks to reevaluate her faculty of imagination as a powerful creative force. The argument is developed in two parts. Since no assessment of Emma’s relation to “unreality” can legitimately bypass a careful analysis of her reveries, the first part of this essay offers a detailed reading of the escape from reality that Emma fantasizes in chapter 12 of part 2 of the novel. Emma’s quixotic vision of a flight away from her husband is contrasted here with Charles Bovary’s realistic dream about their future together as a family. While Emma’s reverie seems at first glance only to throw into relief the magnanimity of Charles’s responsible but mimetically limited dreaming, a closer look at this passage reveals a textual complexity requiring further investigation into the mechanisms and implications of Emma’s dream production. This investigation is undertaken in the second part of the essay. Here, the findings that emerge from the analysis of the protagonist’s reverie will be tested against several prominent interpretations of Emma’s dreaming (by Albert Thibaudet, Gérard Genette, and Jonathan Culler). Noting their sympathetic but cautious evaluations of the enigma posed by Emma’s imagination, this essay concludes by suggesting a more radical affirmation of Emma’s force of imagination.

Framing Migrant Memories: Lampedusa's Fragmented Archives

The small island of Lampedusa, a key destination of the Central Mediterranean Route connecting Africa to Italy, offers a special observatory on the contemporary trans-Mediterranean odyssey of migrants, although often transformed into a “border spectacle.” Upon landing, migrants are stripped of their belongings, as these are impounded by the authorities. Such an act of dispossession is intended to deprive them of their histories, family ties and cultural identity. Photographer Mario Badagliacca has portrayed a selection of these lost and retrieved items in his work Fragments (2013). Each object reveals expectations, fears, desires, endurance, but cannot tell a full story. They are fragments of an open-ended narrative that requires to be framed and told, if we wish to gain a better understanding of the Black Mediterranean, its history, and consequences. What remains untold can only be imagined. Writer Maaza Mengiste imagines what lies behind two smudged photographs portrayed by Badagliacca. As always, the force of imagination provides signification, solidarity, and survival in the fractured history of the African Diaspora.

Narrating Desire: Moral Consolation and Sentimental Fiction in Fifteenth-Century Spain by Sol Miguel-Prendes

Reviewed by: Narrating Desire: Moral Consolation and Sentimental Fiction in Fifteenth-Century Spain by Sol Miguel-Prendes Loreto Romero Miguel-Prendes, Sol. Narrating Desire: Moral Consolation and Sentimental Fiction in Fifteenth-Century Spain. U of North Carolina P, 2019. ISBN: 978-1-4696-5195-8. Narrating Desire: Moral Consolation and Sentimental Fiction in Fifteenth-Century Spain brings forth a new framework against which to explore the rise, techniques, and momentum of sentimental fiction. Sol Miguel-Prendes traces the origins of this uniquely Iberian genre to the ars dictaminis, Franciscan contemplative practices, and Catalan penitential consolations, which developed from the former two in the Crown of Aragon. Contrary to a general tendency amongst critics to read sentimental fictions against a courtly background and the materia de amore tradition, Miguel-Prendes highlights their Christian discursive fabric, first noticed by Deyermond. Building on her seminal article "Reimagining Diego de San Pedro's Readers at Work: Cárcel de amor" (2004), she proposes that sentimental fictions participated in a prayer-book mentality that stemmed from the reforms of the Fourth Lateran Council. Narrating Desire unearths a genealogy that goes back to Augustine's Confessions and Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, both of which were at the core of monastic practices of reading as affective meditation and moral conversion. At a time when the spread of literacy had begun to provide a more private and intimate connection with the written letter, these practices reached the laity through the liberal arts curriculum and the evangelizing efforts of the Franciscan order. In their distortion of the rhetoric of consolation due to the force of imagination, Sol Miguel-Prendes concludes, sentimental fictions came to life heralding the modern novel. The book consists of three lengthy chapters, which in their turn are divided into in several sections. Throughout each chapter and its subdivisions, Miguel-Prendes uncovers the intellectual and literary roots of sentimental fiction. She delineates the genre's boundaries, cultural contexts, and motives in light of contemplative lay practices as they translated into Catalan and Castilian literature. Although she doesn't substantially alter the types of narratives traditionally considered as works of sentimental fictions, she redefines the parameters of the genre distancing it from the influence of the Italian triad—Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio—and bringing it closer to late-medieval educational works on virtuous living. Narrating Desire accounts for the uses and recasting of dictaminal compositional techniques (dream vision, pseudo-autobiography, the debate of Reason and Will, among [End Page 240] others) and motives (such as maritime metaphors to signify the violence of desire) in Catalan and Castilian fictions and it traces a multilingual network of influence and exchange. Miguel-Prendes underscores the productivity of allegory, which—in her opinion—allows for the emergence of desire and individuality. In narratives of consolation, the blind seer Tiresias and Lady Philosophy have a therapeutic role, whereas the lovesick Orpheus, like the Muses, stands for the inspired madness of the poetic imagination. As Tiresias is displaced by Orpheus and Lady Philosophy and the Muses by a woman, the balance of desire and conversion tilts towards desire and imagination in ways crucial to the development of sentimental fictions and to the novel in general terms. Drawing from Bakhtin, Miguel-Prendes situates the precursory status of works of sentimental fiction in their disassociation of the moral gaze from the curious glance. Chapter 1, "The Consolation of Schoolmen," focuses on the adaptation of classical authors to Christian ethics in the homosocial school environment, where the Augustinian-Boethian philosophy of contemptus mundi clashed with the violent eroticism of Ovidian and Pseudo-Ovidian narratives. Miguel-Prendes argues that the genre of the lover's consolation came into being as a result of the confrontation between a stoic model of masculinity that championed the rational man's power over his natural impulses and the lurid imagery of classical texts, which most likely prompted young minds towards the delights of carnal reading and of reading for entertainment. This chapter is key to her main thesis that sentimental fiction skewed the ethical reading practices proffered by their school environment. The author explores a wide variety of Peninsular literary consolations rooted in Boethius: among them, Petrus Compostellanus's De...

О практических чувствах: Гегель против Канта

Basing on his own translation, the author analyzes Hegel’s work Faith and Reason, which helps to understand the formation of the Hegelian philosophy. The article is devoted mainly to criticism of Kant’s philosophy, which, according to Hegel, does not go beyond the Enlightenment. Hegel considers Kant’s philo­sophy as “an extension of Lockeanism”. The latter has not been overpassed by Kant, but has been only counterbalanced with apriorism. In the Critique of Pure Reason, sense and reason are linked externally. But, as the author maintains, Hegel underestimates Kant’s transcendental force of imagination, which repres­ents the synthesis of sense and reason. In Kant, imagination becomes ultimately irrational, but the schematism of imagination is, at the same time, a logical form. The author believes that Hegel did not appreciate Kant’s definition of judgment of taste which is provided by education, so this concept overcomes Kantian apri­orism. Kant distinguishes two kinds of sense – sensation (perception) and experi­encing (apperception). Apperception is the moral and aesthetic sense, love, con­science, honor. In Kant, within the practical reason, belief is connected with morality, and the author sees here the preconditions of Hegel’s conception of practical human senses. In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel sublates the opposition between sensitivity and reason in their organic synthesis due to the category of the particular. Hegel exposes the peculiarity of the practical sense, which unites the sensation and experiencing. For instance, a sense of beauty, even if it is not tied to the perception, combines visual sensation, studied by physiology, and beauty as a vision of something inexplicable by physiology, as it is related to the experiencing the world, involved into human activity and communication. The practical sense, as Marx shows, occurs only in the universal practice of human communication, so it is not granted to us at birth.

Roles of Educational Technology in Consideration of Learner Irrationality

지금까지 학습자는 학습의 과정에서 늘 바람직하며 논리적으로 타당한 의사결정을 하는 합리적인 존재라는 가정하에서 교수학습이 설계되었다. 그러나 현실의 학습자는 비합리적으로 사고하고 자신이 하고 싶은 것을 선택하는 일상의 휴먼일 뿐이다. 미래교육에서 테크놀로지의 역할은 보다 강화될 것인데 이때 학습자 비합리성에 대해 수용하는 입장에서 테크놀로지가 어떠한 역할을 해야 할지 탐색해 볼 필요성이 있다. 이를 위해 본 연구에서는 먼저 인간의 비합리적 의사결정에 대한 두 입장을 고찰하였다. 그 결과 인간의 비합리성은 인공지능이 모사할 수 없는 인간만이 가진 강점이며 상상력과 창의성의 원동력이 되므로 존중되어야 한다는 입장과 이와는 반대로 인간의 비합리성은 오류를 유발하므로 신뢰하기 어렵다는 입장으로 나뉘어 있었다. 다음으로 테크놀로지의 본래적 속성과 학습자의 비합리성을 고려한 교육 테크놀로지의 역할을 탐색하였다. 그 결과 학습자 비합리성을 고려한 교육 테크놀로지는 예술로서의 학습을 지원하는 역할, 이질적 요소들의 연결자 역할, 학습자 신체감각과 정서반응을 해석하는 역할, 합리적 학습주체 역할, 일상 속 무형식학습 환경의 역할을 할 것으로 예상되었다. 이러한 측면에서 테크놀로지는 학습의 주체 또는 비인간 학습자로서의 역할과 비형식적이고 자연스러운 일상학습 환경으로서의 역할이 강화될 것으로 예상된다.So far, the teaching methods have been designed with the assumption that learners have been reasonable people who have always made desirable and logical decisions in their learning process. However, learners in real world have been only human beings who have chosen what they have wanted to do. The role of technology in future education are supposed to be further strengthened. At this point, it is necessary to explore what role technology would play in accepting learners’ irrationality. To this end, this author has initially examined two positions on human irrational decision making. As a result, human irrationality has been divided into two opinions. The one is that artificial intelligence cannot simulate the human irrationality, so that it would be the strength that only humans may have. Thus, it should be respected because it could be the driving force of human imagination and creativity. The other is that human irrationality would not be trustworthy because it has caused errors. Secondly, this author has explored the role of educational technology in considering the nature of techne and the irrationality of learners. As a result, education technology considering learners’ irrationality would be expected to play many roles: a role of supporting art learning, a role of connecting heterogeneous elements, a role of interpreting learners’ physical senses & emotional responses, a role of rational learning subject, and a role of doing formless learning environment. In this respect, technology is expected to strengthen the role as the subject of learning or as a non-human learner and the role as an informal and natural daily learning environment.

A física da literatura: concretude, imaginação e contenção em Antonio Candido

Desenvolvo, neste trabalho, apontamentos sobre Os parceiros do Rio Bonito (1964), de Antonio Candido, destacando a ideia de que a cultura caipira estaria em vias de desaparecimento. Traço paralelos entre tal diagnóstico e a leitura que Antonio Candido faz d'Os sertões (1902), de Euclides da Cunha, considerando especialmente o artigo “Euclides da Cunha, o sociólogo” (1952). Avanço, então, no sentido de alguns questionamentos acerca das funções atribuídas à literatura por Candido, especialmente no que se refere ao contexto latino-americano, marcado pelo subdesenvolvimento, recorrendo a aspectos da Formação da Literatura Brasileira (1959) e ao ensaio “Literatura, espelho da América?” (1995). Pretendo lidar, assim, com os perigos que, para o autor, a própria literatura ocidental se via desafiada a enfrentar. Proponho, enfim, que Antonio Candido entende ser a literatura uma delicada operação que envolve forças diversas, como a da realidade concreta ou corpórea, a da sociabilidade, a força da imaginação e a força das próprias palavras e sua carga simbólica, configurando-se, em minha perspectiva, uma espécie de física da literatura. Para tanto, analiso comentários do autor acerca da zoofilia caipira, dos perigos da masturbação e da imaginação, comentários presentes na “Parte Complementar” d'Os parceiros do Rio Bonito. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n47a1170

An aesthetic of health

If philosophy creates concepts intended to cure both cultural and individual diseases, an aesthetic philosophy, which comes from the force of human imagination, represents an interesting alternative in order to contribute to health. Altogether with bioethics, a bio-aesthetic must be constructed. Not as two autonomous spheres but as one: a bio-ethics-aesthetics. Our proposal is aesthetics towards health and life with dignity.Realidad: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades No. 119, 2009: 169-182

“For know, alas, I’m dumb, alas I love": Rhetoric of disability, female agency and tragedy in ‘The Dumb Virgin’

This essay will focus on the two sisters of “The Dumb Virgin; or, The Force of Imagination,” addressing the crossover between disability studies, feminism and aesthetic theory. It will examine how art has the capacity to manipulate nature and how nature may be improved by the intervention of human industry. With this aesthetic duality, it will suggest that the writer reframes the concept of the ‘normal’ body, establishing a rhetoric of deformity and disability through the characters of Belvideera and Maria, both of whom overcome their natural disabilities by means of personal effort. Lastly, it will investigate the ‘misfortunes’ of several characters, paying particular attention to the educated nature of the two protagonists and how this poses a threat to the established order of society. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that their challenge to the social construct is directly responsible for the tragic climax of the narrative.

Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment by Sarah Eron

Reviewed by: Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment by Sarah Eron Elizabeth Kraft Sarah Eron. Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment. Newark: Delaware, 2014. Pp. xiii + 250. $85. Ms. Eron challenges conventional wisdom regarding eighteenth-century enthusiasm, linking it to a new kind of inspiration created by Augustan writers in response to modernity: a "practice" characterized by secularization and self-authorization rather than "a historical event," she defines enthusiasm broadly as an "ethos." Concentrating on the literary trope of invoking the muses, Ms. Eron finds in the works of Shaftesbury, Pope, Fielding, and Barbauld evidence of "worlding" the texts by rhetorically locating them within the public sphere. These writers employed invocation in order to "appeal to the social other" in the creation of communities of judgment and social exchange. Enthusiasm, as Ms. Eron acknowledges, was the source of much anxiety for eighteenth-century cultural commentators, but she finds that such anxiety produced reformation rather than rejection: "What had hitherto been seen as a religious and metaphysical phenomenon was in the early eighteenth century appropriated by poets and novelists as a means of figuring poetic inspiration." Augustan writers treated enthusiasm as an aesthetic rather than a theological concern and thereby tempered, governed, and transformed disruptive energies in the creation of a vital public sphere. Ms. Eron pursues her argument in five chapters devoted to three Augustan writers (Shaftesbury, Pope, and Fielding) and one late-eighteenth-century / Romantic writer (Barbauld). The heart of Ms. Eron's study, and the strength of her work, resides in her fine readings of Shaftesbury and Pope. The three chapters devoted to these writers (one to Shaftesbury and two, appropriately, to Pope) firmly establish the process and point of the "worlding" of literary discourse. Shaftesbury's treatment of enthusiasm and sympathetic identification in The Moralists and A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm speaks to the general template of Augustan inspiration in that it highlights the "conversational aspects of the public sphere" in its reformulation of the classical invocation to the muse. While the works take opposing stances toward the addressing of the other (The Moralists featuring an interlocutor who tempers enthusiasm with judgment and A Letter relegating that role to the audience of the author's imagination), the emphasis in both is on the "social nature of inspiration" and the "redefinition of enthusiasm" as an aesthetic experience followed (and tempered) by judicious critical mediation. For Shaftesbury, this two-part process is the antidote to blind enthusiasm (which he associates with idolatry); the public sphere of dialogic examination thus becomes the site of "unveiling" in Shaftesbury's terms, or "worlding," to employ Ms. Eron's term. In Ms. Eron's discussion of Shaftesbury (which is also germane to Pope and Fielding) she emphasizes his notion that "[s]atire, or humor, . . . [is] a cure for enthusiastic [End Page 80] disorders." Shaftesbury's address to Lord Somers (his human muse) in A Letter asserts the force and power of imagination and creation while at the same time exhibiting awareness of audience and exchange. In the Letter itself, Shaftesbury imitates "the very thing . . . [he] satirically critiques." In this manner, the way of later Augustan writers, as well, Shaftesbury encourages skepticism, self-awareness, and judgment in his reader as well as himself, forming community by creating his own muse in "the best kind of critical audience." Ms. Eron's treatment of Pope's use of invocation spans two chapters, the first devoted to the muse of The Rape of the Lock and the second primarily to Essay on Criticism, Essay on Man, and The Dunciad. For her, the Rape is a satire on enthusiasm, which, especially in its mock-epic substitution of sylphs for gods, reveals that in the modern world "[d]ivine inspiration no longer serves." It is the poet himself who has the power to move through his "rhetoric and agency." He depends on the reader's ability to judge and critique—unlike Belinda whose enthusiastic excesses and solipsistic desires stand in satiric support of the need for a sociability based on "meaningful language and critical responsiveness." The muses of Essay on Criticism (Walsh), Essay on Man (Bolingbroke), and The Dunciad (Swift) are invoked by Ms. Eron to further her...

The Hunt for Form in Wolfgang Rihm's Ninth String Quartet, "Quartettsatz" (1992–1993)

THE HUNT FOR FORM IN WOLFGANG RIHM’S NINTH STRING QUARTET, “QUARTETTSATZ” (1992–1993) ROBERT A. BAKER INTRODUCTION OLFGANG RIHM’S NINTH STRING QUARTET, “Quartettsatz” (1992– 1993), represents a body of work that has gone largely unanalyzed . Joachim Brügge1 and Rudolf Frisius2 offer good introductions to the quartets, while Richard McGregor’s writing on portions of the Chiffre-Zyklus (1982–1988) provides keen detail into some of Rihm’s pitch language, harmonic progressions, and use of “generative Poles” (generativer Pol), notes or motives that serve as temporarily fixed sounds amidst other fluctuating content.3 But beyond these sources, little more is known about his technical procedures and formal tendencies . Rihm’s own writings and interviews have a largely philosophical tone, and rather than illuminating details of compositional techniques, his comments tend to perpetuate more general experiential reactions. Alastair Williams writes, “The enigma of Rihm’s music is that it possesses immediacy but invokes the idea of an organic wholeness that cannot be completely grasped.”4 Indeed, much of Rihm’s music can be W 198 Perspectives of New Music characterized in this way. Supported by his own assertions of one who “composes with nerve ends,”5 and for whom “the music comes freely from the force of imagination,”6 much has been made of a spontaneous freedom in his compositional process. In relation to his large orchestral work begun soon after the ninth quartet and completed over a decade later, Jagden und formen (1995–2001/2007/2008), Rihm describes the emergence of form as a hunt for itself. He states: “the idea of a form arising from a hunt for form or the idea of a form changing its structure while being hunted . . . remains valid for my thinking”, “The hunt is about form, the hunt is the form.”7 But despite the strong implications of a highly improvisatory compositional approach, Rihm is also acutely aware of the larger structure. He adds: “Macro-form also has to be composed. Music which is strong at every moment, within every one of its micro-forms, but lacks as strong and imaginative a scheme for its overall progress in time, this kind of music disintegrates and may, in an extreme case, become boring.”8 The inherent duality, or perhaps at times opposition, of freedom and spontaneity coupled with a need to organize macro-form, suggests a desire for conscious control over the design of the composition, while permitting some degree of freedom and exploration on the local level. In this article I attempt to reconcile Rihm’s statements on his compositional philosophies with formal qualities found within his ninth string quartet in order to demystify the free and spontaneous compositional method with which he has become associated, and shed light on the notion of form as a hunt for itself. OVERVIEW AND FORM OF THE FIRST MAJOR SECTION, MM. 1–192 The ninth string quartet is approximately twenty-two minutes in duration and can be understood in three major sections played without a break. The 2005 recording by the Minguet Quartet9 indexes the piece as three separate tracks, partitioning the work at mm. 193 and 416. Although cast in a single continuous movement, both of these locations mark logical points in the discourse to serve listening to certain portions more easily. But each point does mark a distinct change in character, the first of which, at m. 193, involves a striking spike in activity, implying a quicker and more vigorous tempo, and involving new and highly distinctive motivic material. M. 416 is less obvious as a sectional partition due to the more transitional nature of the discourse, but the music that follows constitutes a highly contrasting character to the preceding vigor of the middle section with its more static and The Hunt for Form in “Quartettsatz” 199 inward state. Due to the scope of this substantial work and the contrasts described above, the following analysis is concerned only with the first major section, mm. 1–192, and offers a conceptualization of an autonomous musical structure despite not being formally designated as a movement by the composer. Mm. 1–192 can be understood to be in nine regions,10 seven of which use all...

The Hunt for Form in Wolfgang Rihm's Ninth String Quartet, “Quartettsatz” (1992–1993)

THE HUNT FOR FORM IN WOLFGANG RIHM’S NINTH STRING QUARTET, “QUARTETTSATZ” (1992–1993) ROBERT A. BAKER INTRODUCTION OLFGANG RIHM’S NINTH STRING QUARTET, “Quartettsatz” (1992– 1993), represents a body of work that has gone largely unanalyzed . Joachim Brügge1 and Rudolf Frisius2 offer good introductions to the quartets, while Richard McGregor’s writing on portions of the Chiffre-Zyklus (1982–1988) provides keen detail into some of Rihm’s pitch language, harmonic progressions, and use of “generative Poles” (generativer Pol), notes or motives that serve as temporarily fixed sounds amidst other fluctuating content.3 But beyond these sources, little more is known about his technical procedures and formal tendencies . Rihm’s own writings and interviews have a largely philosophical tone, and rather than illuminating details of compositional techniques, his comments tend to perpetuate more general experiential reactions. Alastair Williams writes, “The enigma of Rihm’s music is that it possesses immediacy but invokes the idea of an organic wholeness that cannot be completely grasped.”4 Indeed, much of Rihm’s music can be W 198 Perspectives of New Music characterized in this way. Supported by his own assertions of one who “composes with nerve ends,”5 and for whom “the music comes freely from the force of imagination,”6 much has been made of a spontaneous freedom in his compositional process. In relation to his large orchestral work begun soon after the ninth quartet and completed over a decade later, Jagden und formen (1995–2001/2007/2008), Rihm describes the emergence of form as a hunt for itself. He states: “the idea of a form arising from a hunt for form or the idea of a form changing its structure while being hunted . . . remains valid for my thinking”, “The hunt is about form, the hunt is the form.”7 But despite the strong implications of a highly improvisatory compositional approach, Rihm is also acutely aware of the larger structure. He adds: “Macro-form also has to be composed. Music which is strong at every moment, within every one of its micro-forms, but lacks as strong and imaginative a scheme for its overall progress in time, this kind of music disintegrates and may, in an extreme case, become boring.”8 The inherent duality, or perhaps at times opposition, of freedom and spontaneity coupled with a need to organize macro-form, suggests a desire for conscious control over the design of the composition, while permitting some degree of freedom and exploration on the local level. In this article I attempt to reconcile Rihm’s statements on his compositional philosophies with formal qualities found within his ninth string quartet in order to demystify the free and spontaneous compositional method with which he has become associated, and shed light on the notion of form as a hunt for itself. OVERVIEW AND FORM OF THE FIRST MAJOR SECTION, MM. 1–192 The ninth string quartet is approximately twenty-two minutes in duration and can be understood in three major sections played without a break. The 2005 recording by the Minguet Quartet9 indexes the piece as three separate tracks, partitioning the work at mm. 193 and 416. Although cast in a single continuous movement, both of these locations mark logical points in the discourse to serve listening to certain portions more easily. But each point does mark a distinct change in character, the first of which, at m. 193, involves a striking spike in activity, implying a quicker and more vigorous tempo, and involving new and highly distinctive motivic material. M. 416 is less obvious as a sectional partition due to the more transitional nature of the discourse, but the music that follows constitutes a highly contrasting character to the preceding vigor of the middle section with its more static and The Hunt for Form in “Quartettsatz” 199 inward state. Due to the scope of this substantial work and the contrasts described above, the following analysis is concerned only with the first major section, mm. 1–192, and offers a conceptualization of an autonomous musical structure despite not being formally designated as a movement by the composer. Mm. 1–192 can be understood to be in nine regions,10 seven of which use all...

Building Jerusalem in North Malaita, Solomon Islands

AbstractAmid a variety of ideas of Israelite genealogies for To'abaita speakers in North Malaita, Solomon Islands, ‘Holy Land’ features as a utopian fantasy of a just nation, not in Israel but grounded in the ancestral soil of the island. I analyse this mimetic gesture as part of attempts to reconcile kastom (custom) with Christianity and as evoking a sense of an essentialised group identity. In particular for followers of the All People's Prayer Assembly (APPA), the idea of an essentialised group of To'abaita as a nation in the canonical ‘Table of Nations’ in Genesis 10 is quite prominent. This dialectic between ‘religion’ and ‘nation’ explains the ways in which people claim to have found authentic To'abaita foundations for a nation unifying distinct lineage groups, with a religious form at the centre, namely: Jerusalem. In this article I will show that APPA's theology weakens the claim of the ‘secular’ state while strengthening the force of religious imagination and ideas about local sovereignty and a related notion of nation.

Form of Life and Landscape

The reflection on modernity thinks from the place of human beings in the world or universe, and is prone to criticize the role of objective thinking or of objectification in representation and in the metaphysics of subjectivity. Life, being no less a ground than a connection of self-relation, cannot be absorbed in the forms of knowledge and power; it is a starting point for questioning. By adapting the concept of form-of-life proposed by Agamben, this paper links the problematic of landscape to the conditions of life. Not only is landscape now considered from a different perspective, but life finds its inseparable form in the existence of landscape. The rhythmic formation of landscape refers to a fundamental and powerful potentiality. Through the force of material imagination, the landscape extends its formal expression to reveal an inner transformation animated by the vital dynamism of the formation of the world. Life itself is tightly inscribed in this process, and so landscape can picture the existential condition of human beings. In this way the coexistence of human species with other species or other material beings will open the cosmic dimension of life itself.

Ficción, sexualidad y raza en The Dumb Virgin y The Unfortunate Bride de Aphra Behn

Trabajo que pretende estudiar la representación física de los personajes Belvideera, María y Celesia en las obras de Aphra Behn "The Dumb Virgin: Or the Force of Imagination" y "The Unfortunate Bride: Or the Blind Lady a Beauty". Tiene como objetivo interpretar la importancia de los defectos físicos de las jóvenes heroínas basándose en Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times de Shaftesbury. El artículo relata en primer lugar la ficción de las historias feminocéntricas de Behn en relación con los tratados de moral de Shaftesbury, que dividen y malinterpretan la imaginación maternal como algo defectuoso y monstruoso. Posteriormente, argumenta que la autora da mayor relevancia al tema de la misoginia, dotando a sus jóvenes protagonistas femeninas con una doble deformación, en la que la maternidad imperfecta da a luz a una segunda generación de hijos imperfectos, mientras la feminidad deformada en los mismos sucesos de defectos se entremezcla con las implicaciones exóticas y raciales de la degeneración y el mestizaje. Las historias de amor de la autora, amparadas en el sexo y la raza, son trágicas, mientras que las de Shaftesbury sobre sexualidad y raza emanan del vicio de la monstruosidad y están diseñadas para la perpetración de actos monstruosos. Mediante la dotación de características monstruosas femeninas y raciales, como se explica en el siguiente trabajo, Behn crea una historia para inventar un narrador como resolución dialéctica a la construcción binaria de oposiciones de Shaftesbury en su instrucción moral. Aunque la narradora de Behn cede su poder autoría y se presenta como una mera relatadora de historias, su pluma femenina ejerce su autoridad haciendo justicia a sus personajes y sus fantasías literarias, reconociendo así a la escritora femenina como una artista, una creadora de ficción. Desde el punto de vista de la trascendencia dialéctica, la narradora de las ficciones románticas no solo evita la jerarquía socio-sexual y la dicotomía entre sexualidad y raza, sino que también señala de forma tácita un avance en el dominio discursivo patriarcal generalizado.

Mathematical and Elemental Coordinates: The Role of Imagination

Both in Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (2000) and in his very recent Logic of Imagination: The Expanse of the Elemental (2012), John Sallis enacts a reconfiguration of the relationship of geometry to elementology, which might be regarded more generally as a rethinking of the relation of mathematics to philosophy. The paper will trace this reconfiguration in two ways: (1) as it lies present but concealed in the history of philosophy, for example, in Descartes’ so-called “dualism” and in Kant’s pure productive imagination, and (2) in its present creative evolution in fractal geometry, as Sallis interprets it. Sallis draws together the mathematical affinity with a fundamental aesthetic drive, likening mathematical patterns to choreographic ones. I conclude by following this strain as it points to specific dance companies, and to my own sense of aesthetic homecoming as presented in my Imagination in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.

No One Is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel (review)

Reviewed by: No One Is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel Helga Lénárt-Cheng Ramona Ausubel. No One Is Here Except All of Us. New York: Riverhead Books (Penguin), 2012. 410p. Ramona Ausubel’s first novel is the magical story of a tiny Romanian village at the beginning of the Second World War. Sensing the impending catastrophe, members of this remote Jewish community huddle together. They stop the mail service, bury the radios, and create a make-believe world in which only God and they exist. “… once upon a time, tomorrow was the first day of the world. The very, very first. The earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (31). Echoing the voices of the Old Testament, they reinvent a world where “the past [is] no longer a place” (57). They relearn the meanings of their words, their commitments to each other, and even the shapes of their own bodies. Remembering is a choice that they do not consider. “And what of the things I remember? my mother asked. “You don’t,” the stranger said…(33)” They decide that this new world is “about hopes more than events” (38), which [End Page 68] helps them cope with their fears. They work so hard to believe in their story that they become convinced that the old world was the make-believe one. Willpower, of course, was not enough to reinvent the world. What they needed was the power of words, the power of storytelling. “If we wanted to survive in this story, we had to tell it that way” (32). So they start a new story, with a new beginning and infinite possibilities. And this is the story that Ausubel is writing. The little girl at the center of this story—the author’s grandmother—is enchanted by this endless new world, until she is given away to a rich uncle and aunt who force her to act like a baby. Having to reinvent herself in an already reinvented world, she struggles to remember herself. “I said that I hoped there was a little room left for myself, just a small cave somewhere between the imprinted feel of walking across wet grass and the precise tension of an apple giving way under a knife” (81). The unbearable lightness of a life without a past weighs so heavily that she has to fill page after page with lists of words of everything she knows. “Spit, babies, snot, spoon, death, dogs, saddle, horse, rain, anger, howl” (95). Telling stories and repeating words like a mantra helps her to remember who she is—at least temporarily, for a couple of years. But one day the “forbidden world stirs” (193), news of the outside world reaches the village, and the shared dream cracks. The real begins to “mate” with the dreams (249), and the fury of the world carries away both the villagers and their stories. The little girl—by now a mother of two—survives by the power of words, repeating to her sons who she is and who they are. And when she is forced to give up her only surviving son, she tells him: “This is just a story. I will always be your mother,” … “In this chapter Natalya is your mother. Nothing is changing except what we say” (323). Of course the child sees through this double-edged consolation. He knows that “nothing is changing except what we say,” but also that what we say can change the world. Ramona Ausubel’s novel is as unpredictable and alive as the reinvented world was on that first day. The sheer force of imagination that almost saves the village saves this ambitious novel as well. This is just a story, but it changes everything. Helga Lénárt-Cheng St. Mary’s College of California Copyright © 2014 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association

The force and logic of imagination: on elemental self-showing

The force and logic of imagination: on elemental self-showing

Sallis on Deuteros Plous: The Philosopher as Voyager

ABSTRACT Among the recurrent themes of John Sallis's Plato interpretation, the Socratic deuteros plous or “second sailing” occupies a major place. First treated by both Plato and Sallis in the Phaedo, the “second” acknowledges the impossibility for humans of a first voyage that would disclose the causes of all things in their originality. This essay is divided into four sections: (1) Sallis's reflections on the Phaedo, in which Socrates calls eikē phuro, “random mixing,” his only method; (2) his incorporation of Derridean themes into his reflections on deuteros plous, leading to his insights into a destabilizing in the very nature of logos; (3) his treatment of deuteros plous in Chorology, where he attests to the closing of access to a “first” beginning; and (4) his treatment of a nature in Force of Imagination and Topographies that remains inaccessible in its “first” form but occurs as immense and monstrous. In the conclusion, I return these interpretive developments to another of Sallis's guiding themes.

The Cinema of Jan Å vankmajer: Dark Alchemy. Second edition. Directors' Cuts by Peter Hames (review)

734 SEER, 88, 4, OCTOBER 2OIO schemesbecometracings ofan unprecedented potentiality', and goes on to assertthat,exceptforSacrifice (1986),'each ofhisfilms is profoundly "Soviet" in itspointof departure - in its theme,storyand characters. However, theSovietbackground ofhisfilms is onlytheframework forthemoreuniversal projectof exploring new modes of attending to theworld'(p. 49). Bird identifies here a fundamental pointabout Tarkovskii as an artist, namely thathisprojectwas an aesthetic one, an ongoingexperimentation withthe instruments ofcinemato 'imprint and record'reality, through thecreation ofhisinimitable 'cinematic texture' (p. 9). The different stories ofthefilms, and indeedofhistheatre productions and variousunrealized projects are on one leveljust the raw materialforthisattemptto createa reality which extends farbeyondthephotographic in itsevocationofthatelusivesenseof 'contingency and potentiality' (p. 9). Chapterson sound and atmosphere in the filmsprovidean interesting commentary on Tarkovskii's methodforachieving thiskindofrich,multiple realityon screen.Bird arguesthat,as withhis use of colour,'over time Tarkovsky increasingly employedsoundto punctuate and inflect theimages in unexpected, complexways' (p. 156).In Tarkovskii's practice - even in themakingof his finalfilmSacrifice in Sweden- of dubbingin all sound afterfilming, Bird sees a 'consciouspoeticsof desynchronization' at work rather thana Soviethabit.In releasing theimagefromitsusualfixedaural associations, he enablesitto becomemoreuniversal, moremultifaceted and moresuggestive of'thatwhichliesoff-screen and beyondthegaze' (p. 209). Birdcomesdownfirmly on thesideofthosewhoseeTarkovskii as a 'great practioner', rather thana 'greatthinker'. In thisnewbook,withitsemphasis on thedetailofTarkovskii's method,he presents a convincing case forthis view. UCL SSEES Chiara Mayer-Riegkh Hames,Peter(ed.). TheCinema of JanSvankmqjer: DarkAlchemy. Secondedition. Directors'Cuts. Wallflower Press,London and New York,2008. vii + 247 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Filmography. Bibliography. Index. £16.99 (paperback). Peter Hames's The Cinema ofJan Svankmqjer is the second editionof his Dark Alchemy: TheFilms of JanSvankmqjer published byFlicksBooksin 1995,and thesecondoftwovolumeseditedbyHames on Czech cinematobe reprinted byWallflower Press.The first, TheCzechoslovak NewWave (Berkeley, CA, 1985) appearedin 2005.The factthatWallflower has reprinted theseworks testifies to Hames's highstanding as a specialist in Czechoslovak/ Czech and Slovak cinema.He has been themain authority on thistopicin theWestforthe lasttwenty years,and is one ofthemostrespected specialists in theCzech Republicand Slovakia.He has a vastknowledge and inexhaustible curiosity aboutold and newCzech and Slovakfilms, and hiswriting style, whilst free reviews 735 ofjargon,revealssignificant theoretical andhistorical competence. As a result, practically anyonewhobeginsanyresearch intoCzechoslovak - and Czech and Slovak- cinemahas to start withHames'swork.Atthesametime,this 'recycling' of Hames's workindicatesthe generallack of sourceson this. Despite the factthat,in its heydayduringthe 1960s,filmsmade in the BarrandovstudiomarkedthehighpointofEuropeancinema'shistory, and thatevennowCzech and Slovakcinemaisthriving, thisisnotreflected inthe quantity ofworkpublished in thisarea. The book consistsof fivemain chapterswhich discusskey motifsin Svankmajer's work;two of themwritten by Hames himself, as well as an extended interview withthedirector conducted byHames,as wellas various 'additions'. Together, theyfulfil a numberoffunctions. First, theylocatehis oeuvre in a numberof contexts, ofwhichthemostimportant is Surrealism. Svankmajer was a memberoftheCzech Surrealist Groupand drewheavily on a specifically Czech versionofthisparadigmwhilst, inevitably, entering into dialoguewithotherversionsof Surrealism.The Surrealiststrandis announcedbytheverytitles ofthechapters, suchas Michael O'Pray's 'Jan Svankmajer: A ManneristSurrealist' and Frantisek Dryje's 'The Force of Imagination', and is thefocusoftwochapters, written respectively byRoger Cardinaland PeterHames, on objectsand puppetsin Svankmajer's films. The questionof Svankmajer'sversionof Surrealismis also raised in an interview in whichthedirector describes hisworkas prompted byhisdesire to 'rendertheaudience'sutilitarian habitsunstable'.Perhapssurprisingly to someviewers, he also admitsthat'thereis moreoftheconceptof"ideology" in themthan"convulsive beauty'"(p. 118). The secondpurpose ofthebookistoaccountfor thechanges inSvankmajer's longcinematic career.Bornin 1934,Svankmajer was at collegebetween1950 and 1958,and began makingfilms in 1964.His latestfilmwas producedin 2005. Hence hisartistic biography spansalmostall theimportant moments in Czechoslovakia's post-war history: fromStalinism, through therebellious 1960s, thecolourless 'normalization', thetransition todemocracy and,eventually ,thebreak-upof Czechoslovakiaitself. However,althoughthe authors point to the stylistic and thematicchanges in Svankmajer'scinema,for examplethechanging roleofpuppetsand peopleinhisfilms, thereadergets theimpression thatforthem, continuity ismoreimportant thandiscontinuity, or eventhattheysimply regardhiscinemaas consistently, evenobsessively, focusing on a smallnumberof motifs, such as the impossibility of human communication. Thirdly, thecollection attempts to explaintheSvankmajer phenomenon, namelywhatmakeshim such an important figure in Czech/Czechoslovak and Europeancinema.Followingtheend oftheCzechoslovakNew Wave, he hasbeentheonlydirector whoseworkhasattracted significant recognition intheWest.Certainly, themainreasonsforthisarehistalent and originality. Butnotevery brilliant film-maker becomesa well-known film-maker. Another reasonis thathe drawsheavily on thepearlsofEuropeanliterature, suchas Alice in Wonderland, and reworks Europeanmyths, suchas thoseofFaustand 736 SEER, 88, 4, OCTOBER 2OIO Don Juan. Despite its 'Czechness',Svankmajer's cinemathusappeals to a universal sensibility. At thesame time,Hames admitsthatSvankmajer was very lucky tobe discovered and promoted bya groupofdynamic enthusiasts, including fellowanimators theQuay Brothers...