Foundational Texts Research Articles

Viktor Shklovsky’s Ostrannenie and the ‘Hermeneutics of wonder’

ABSTRACT In this conversation, Tom Gunning and Annie van den Oever return to Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of ostrannenie (making strange), a neologism coined in what turned out to become a modern art theory that was developed by the young Shklovsky in the midst of the great popularity of film shows in Russia in 1913. Tom Gunning is a film historian and a theorist who wrote a series of foundational texts about early cinema that helped establish the ‘hermeneutics of wonder’ as a foundational method for a cultural archaeology of media and New Film History.[For more on Gunning’s foundational work on early cinema, see ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, and his co-authored work with André Gaudreault, ‘Early Cinema as a Challenge to Film History’]. Annie van den Oever is a film scholar who published on defamiliarization and edited Ostrannenie (Amsterdam University Press, 2010), which features an excavation of the seminal Shklovsky text, ‘Art as Technique’, reread within the context of early cinema. Both are Shklovsky enthusiasts and for this special issue they address a series of questions concerning the formal and neoformalist methods, ostrannenie as a method in research and teaching, and ‘wonder’ as a heuristic and creative tool in research and educational practices.

Brahmanism: A Religious Cult in Ancient India

The article on Brahmanism in ancient Indian society will show various aspects of Indian tradition and culture by exploring the foundational elements and prerequisites of it. Brahmanism as a distinct religious tradition in ancient India was largely confined to the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent. The founding texts are discussed by exploring the sruties of ancient India. The article shows that Brahmanism has not only been an active religious tradition in ancient India but it had passed through different difficult phases throughout the historical development of various religions across the country. Brahmanism has a long past in the Indian continent, but at the same time, it has faced many challenges by the other religions as well.

The American West and the World: Transnational and comparative perspectives by Janne Lahti

Reviewed by: The American West and the World: Transnational and comparative perspectives by Janne Lahti Andrew Offenburger The American West and the World: Transnational and comparative perspectives By Janne Lahti. New York; London: Routledge, 2019. In October 2000 at the Western History Association annual conference, then-president Patricia Limerick spoke on the connections between the American West and global history. Limerick described the deep tradition of finding commonalities in pasts of empire, colonialism and environmentalism. “One can… begin as a western American historian,” she said, “and end up attending closely to global processes, from international patterns of colonialism to planetary implications of climate change. The American West affords the historian a key of admission to some of the best and most thought-provoking conversations going on in the world today.”1 This was nothing new for an organization—and a broader network of scholars—who had been comparing American expansion to other European and Indigenous histories in earnest in the 1980s and 1990s; a comparative thrust had linked the West often to locations affected by the British Empire, and if the general public was not yet versed in this American un-exceptionalism, scholars sure were. Since then, a robust and growing field of transnational works has arisen, one that connects the history of the American West with other trans-imperial regions. Readers of this journal and others with an international view of colonialism will be very familiar with this corpus, which has made inroads with scholars of the American West most forcefully over the past twenty years. In The American West and the World, Janne Lahti gives shape and structure to this expansive yet inchoate field, offering a narrative synthesis on the West’s shared history with the world. He draws connections between older comparative work and newer transnational ties. “In some ways,” he writes in the introduction, “transnational history stands as the newest manifestation of an approach that has successively been branded as international, world, or, simply, comparative history. What all these conceptualizations share are attempts of interpretative and methodological realignments contradicting insular narratives” (6). Through examples drawn from previous studies, and through historiographical categorization, Lahti’s work admirably defines a sprawling field. What follows the introduction is a synthesis of secondary works, finding a pattern among the myriad contributions spread across global geographies. Five chapters organize the historiography by chronology and theme, each followed by a full bibliography. “Shared Worlds” (Chapter 1) begins with a story of the Makahs, relying upon Joshua Reid’s The Sea Is My Country, to present a globally entangled world, sustained and caught by imperial and Indigenous interests from Europe to the Americas and Asia, from contact to the early nineteenth century. This “early West,” the author writes, was “international before it became national, and it became known and placed in a global context of empires, markets, epidemics, and knowledge before it was claimed by the United States and its brand of settler colonialism” (17). “Settler Revolutions” (Chapter 2) invokes the paradigm of James Belich to characterize the United States from 1830 to 1900 and beyond, with strong parallels discussed in Indigenous, British, French, Russian, and Spanish imperial lands. The remaining chapters—“Violence,” “Intimacies of Empires” and “Imperial Eyes”—arrange a conversation among scholars of diverse specialties, framed by foundational texts in American transnationalism. This all results in a field-shaping work on the global West and its borderlands. The handling of the historiography is deft and thorough, and this study will be cited often for its ability to articulate the contours of a field still forming in many minds. Scholars of settler colonialism, empire, Indigenous societies, conquest/resistance and postcolonialism will likely nod in agreement in several sections while being pleasantly surprised by unfamiliar connections in others. One simply cannot set down this book and retain any sense of American parochialism, much less triumphalism. Lahti is at his best when attacking exceptionalism by discussing transnational circuits and shared actors along multinational frontiers and borderlands. By virtue of its successes, then, The American West and the World implicitly raises one question (among many) pertaining to comparative and transnational modes of analysis: have previous comparative studies, by allowing for national differences, unwittingly run the...

Auto-thanato-theory: Dark Narcissistic Care for the Self in Sedgwick and Zambreno

Auto-thanato-theory:Dark Narcissistic Care for the Self in Sedgwick and Zambreno Irving Goh (bio) this essay advances what i call "auto-thanato-theory," which I draw from certain aspects of autotheory.1 I am particularly interested in two texts that look toward death, namely Eve Sedgwick's A Dialogue on Love (1999) and Kate Zambreno's Appendix Project (2019). Even though Sedgwick's text predates the announcement of the term "autotheory" in the contemporary theoretical scene, and Zambreno's text has yet to be embraced as autotheory, they can nonetheless be considered to be part of the genre's growing archive. This is because, if we take autotheory to be a genre-fluid mode of writing where a self—in all its history, biography, and psychology—intercalates itself explicitly within a theoretical reflection on a contemporary being-in-the-world, A Dialogue on Love and Appendix Project share these features.2 But at stake in A Dialogue on Love and Appendix Project is a self that desires to be done with existence, if not a self that feels already dead. Such a disposition seemingly goes against the optimistic horizon, or even celebratory intention, of foregrounding the self in autotheory, the aim of which is arguably to give its critique of being-in-the-world a more complex, affective, and perhaps authentic layer, rather than leaving critique at the level of theoretical deftness or rhetorical ruse. And yet, if a self that looks toward death or feels itself already dead finds a discursive space today, I would say that such a space was opened up by autotheory, precisely through its narcissistic dimension, one which arguably gets us to rethink narcissism as a "care for the self" in the Foucauldian sense.3 [End Page 197] As I hope to make clear, there is an important reckoning to be made in the discussion of autotheory with respect to the self that desires its departure from the world. autotheory, or from narcissism to a care for the self Let me first elaborate on the narcissistic dimension in autotheory by turning to two seemingly foundational texts: Maggie Nelson's Argonauts (2015), in which the term autotheory first entered into contemporary theoretical discourse, and Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie (first published in Spanish in 2008 and translated into English in 2013), in which the opening proclamation as "self theory" serves as inspiration for Nelson's own work (11). These autotheory texts make the self an extensive foreground, and they do so by giving equal, if not greater, exposition of the self's experiential engagements and affective responses in their respective theoretical critique of a contemporary being-in-theworld. They also inscribe, explicitly at the outset, the self's queer sexual desires and activities: The Argonauts opens with anal sex between the narrating/theorizing self and the transgender lover while Testo Junkie offers the theorizing/transgender narrator filming himself masturbating while addressing his dead lover. In both scenes, a certain narcissism is depicted. Nelson acknowledges as much through both her allegiance to Eileen Myles, who has disclosed the "dirty secret" that everything she writes is about herself, and her declaration that all the affects she negotiates while being in a queer relationship and raising a child with her transgender partner are nothing short of "the personal made public" (60). Nelson qualifies this narcissism as distinct from the narcissistic performance that is the "instantaneous, noncalibrated, digital selfrevelation" afforded by contemporary social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which Nelson finds alienating (60–61). Her narcissism, she claims, is more deliberative, ethical even, which furthermore has an ontological basis: it exhibits itself as "writing that dramatizes the ways in which we are for another or by virtue of another, not in a single instance, but from the start and always" (60). This is a kind of ethico-political narcissism in the sense of actualizing a veritable queer theory, advanced by a "self-involved thinking," that, in Nelson's view, reaffirms Eve Sedgwick's dictum that the use of the first-person pronoun serves to disseminate and affirm queer subjectivities (41). [End Page 198] As Nelson notes, "Sedgwick once proposed that 'what it takes—all...

The Prayed Francis: Liturgical Vitae and Franciscan Identity in the Thirteenth Century ed. by Marco Bartoli et al.

Reviewed by: The Prayed Francis: Liturgical Vitae and Franciscan Identity in the Thirteenth Century ed. by Marco Bartoli et al. Michael J. P. Robson (bio) The Prayed Francis: Liturgical Vitae and Franciscan Identity in the Thirteenth Century, ed. Marco Bartoli, Jacques Dalarun, Timothy J. Johnson and Filippo Sedda (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2019), vi + 230 pp. ISBN 978-1-57659-433-9-19. Hagiographical studies have seen significant advances in Franciscan scholarship over the last half a century with new critical editions of central texts being prepared. The fruits of this research have been made available in English translations, from the Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St Francis to the publication of Francis of Assisi: Early Documents in three volumes with an excellent index at the turn of the new millennium. The examination of the life of Francis of Assisi is now gravitating towards liturgical texts in order to gauge the image of the saint projected during the sacred liturgy in the Mass and the Divine Office. There is a growing realization that these liturgical texts did much to condition the friars' perception of the life and apostolate of their founder. The comparative neglect of the liturgical sources is now being redressed by a team of international scholars. This volume is comprised of four substantial chapters: first, a lengthy introduction, secondly, the foundational texts from the Franciscan Liturgy, thirdly, the Liturgical Legends of the order of Minor Brothers and fourthly the Liturgy of St Francis outside the order of Friars Minor. The first chapter, for instance, consists of three sections dealing with the contributions made to the recent research by Professors Jacques Dalarun, Timothy Johnson and Marco Bartoli. Professor Dalarun's indefatigable search for the earliest witnesses to the life of Francis of Assisi through both hagiographical and liturgical texts requires no introduction. His exciting discovery, Thome Celanensis Vita beati patris nostri Francisci. Présentation et édition critique, was published by Analecta Bollandiana in 2015 and has since been translated into various languages. He summarises the quest for the historical Francis, the Francis of history, and from intuition to publication. This survey marks the contribution of Fr Luke Wadding's edition of the writings of Francis of Assisi in 1623 and the enduring legacy of the scholarship of Paul Sabatier. Plans for the publication of volumes based on this research are explained along with the incorporation of Professor Filippo Sedda, who was already working on early breviaries from inside and outside the order and publishing the fruits of his research. Much of this scholarship is contained in his Franciscus Liturgicus: editio fontium saeculi XIII, a text which was published at Padua in 2015 in conjunction with Professor Dalarun. Professor Johnson's contribution contains three sections: first, the theological reflections (poverty, identity and prayer), secondly, anthropological [End Page 300] reflections (memory, ritual and performance) and thirdly, literary reflections (place, genre and institution) followed by an epilogue. His reflections on the message conveyed during the friars' communal prayers turn a welcome spotlight on the liturgical sources which have hitherto received too little attention in recent Franciscan studies. He observes: 'For more than a century, scholars have overlooked or dismissed this "prayed Francis" of the choir legends like Julian of Speyer's Legend for Use in the choir or Bonaventure's Minor life in the search for the ever-elusive historical Francis' (p. 21). One of the benefits of this short study is the light which is shed on the application of the decree of the 1266 general chapter of Paris; it is clear that the Bonaventurean ban did not stifle the hagiographical instincts regarding Francis. Both old and new materials were copied and circulated in the ensuing decades. Indeed, the transcription of some of the earlier hagiographical and later texts suggests that the decree was honoured in the breach. Professor Johnson's recent research has rightly drawn attention to another text which had hitherto received inadequate attention, Bonaventure's Legenda minor, a text which was not translated in the monumental Francis of Assisi: Early Documents. The Legenda minor is more than a summary of the significantly longer Legenda maior. It is anchored in the liturgical realm...

The Christology of Hebrews

The Christology of Hebrews Paolo Garuti O.P. Premises The task of defining the Christology of Hebrews is fascinating and complex due to the presence of three phenomena peculiar to the script.1 (1) Hebrews is an act of hermeneutics: some founding texts of the Jewish messianism of the day are interpreted in the light of the Jesus event as known by its preaching. The Christian proclamation too was already structured in speeches or writings. Therefore, the author's purpose is almost always the interpretation of the texts in their literal meaning, and almost never that of the factual reality.2 (2) Hebrews is the product of a "school" issuing from the Pauline preaching, which elaborates some of its characteristic theologoumena. The letter therefore also operates as a hermeneutic of Paul's thought. (3) It is my belief that Hebrews is the fruit of successive [End Page 1365] rewrites which led to the formulation of a "high" Christology (the heavenly aspect of the priesthood and the sacrifice of Messiah) after contemplating the more human and earthly aspects of the Christic mystery, as a journey toward heavenly fulfillment, passing through the painful ordeal of death.3 Since it is methodologically more relevant, let us start from the third point. To appreciate this phenomenon of rewriting it will be enough to bring two examples of Christological "correction" in verses otherwise very similar:4 2 :17–18 Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. 4:15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted. but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. 5:1, 7, 10 For every high priest chosen from among men is appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. … In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence, … being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek. 8:3–5 For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; thus it is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer. Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. They serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. [End Page 1366] In the first case, 2:17, the expression kata panta ("in every respect") is attributed to the necessary assimilation of Christ to his human brethren, foreseen in the Scripture (Ps 22:23 and Isa 8:18 in Heb 2:12–13), and from which the solidarity in temptation originates. In 4:15, the kata panta is instead attributed, although not very logically, only to the temptation, and the similarity is further limited by the clarification chōris hamartias ("yet without sin"). In the second parallel, in 8:3–4, after briefly resuming the generic definition of every high priest already given in 5:1–4, the description of the priestly offering of Jesus denies all earthly aspects of the priesthood (in both texts the verb prospherō is a technical term), correcting the perspective of 5:7–10.5 Thus, the offering of prayers and supplications is presented as an act preceding the real consecration. Curiously, in the tenth chapter, therefore after 8:3–4, Hebrews contemplates the offering of the "body" of Jesus in our very "world" (kosmos; 10:5). Commenting on the Septuagint (LXX) of Psalm 39:6 ("Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not; but a body hast thou prepared me") the author says: "And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (10 :10). Two Dimensions of Christ's Sacrifice It...

Territories of Conflict: Traversing Colombia Through Cultural Studies by Andrea Fanta Castro, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, and Chloe Rutter-Jensen

Reviewed by: Territories of Conflict: Traversing Colombia Through Cultural Studies by Andrea Fanta Castro, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, and Chloe Rutter-Jensen Camilo A. Malagón Fanta Castro, Andrea, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, and Chloe Rutter-Jensen. Territories of Conflict: Traversing Colombia Through Cultural Studies. U of Rochester P, 2017. 309 pp. Colombia's armed conflict, or simply el conflicto, its many intricacies, complexities, representations, and ambiguities have already been amply studied through the lens of the humanities and social sciences. Nevertheless, the editors of this book, Fanta Castro, Herrero-Olaizola, and Rutter-Jensen take another shot at this premise by using the meanings of the conflict further than to merely denote the cultural representations of violence: rather they approach the word conflict, and the title here, Territories of Conflict, as a way of understanding the complexities of contemporary culture without obviously forgetting that, as they state in the introduction, "conflict, in a sense, defines Colombia as a nation and continues to permeate its political discourse and cultural production (almost) to the point of no return" (1). Territories of Conflict attempts to understand how the country's multiplicities—geographical, ethnic, cultural, and political—have shaped and informed the cultural sphere in the last thirty years or so. In fact, one of the key foundational texts discussed in many of the chapters in Territories of Conflict is the Colombian Constitution of 1991 (sometimes mentioned explicitly, and other times certainly lurking in the background): a sui generis text in its own right, that legally protects the ethnic and cultural diversity of Colombia and recognizes the multicultural, multiethnic, and multi-linguistic composition of the country, working to undue the almost two-centuries-long exclusion of indigenous communities, Afro-Colombians, and other minorities, helping them obtain political, cultural, and legal visibility. In light of this new constitution, we can understand the nineteen chapters that make up Territories of Conflict as a collective work that attempts to understand the Colombian cultural sphere, Colombian identity, and the many facets of the Colombian conflict through the lens of the varied racial, gender, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic communities that make up the country. The four parts of this book deal with a variety of cultural phenomena, from school history textbooks to comic books, from memoirs of FARC-EP guerilla fighters to the official discourse of the Uribe presidency, from film and television representations of rural Colombia and the Narco trade to popular, regional, and national musical expressions. The first part, subtitled "Violence, Memory and Nation," discusses the intricate relationship between violence and nation in the history of Colombia and its representations, paying attention to a variety of cultural media that speak of violence in its many forms: from official state discourses to literary representations. Of note in this section is the article "National Identity in Colombian Comics: Between Violence and New Configurations" by Felipe Gómez Gutiérrez, which lays out a short history of Colombian comics, especially those that focus on representing the Colombian conflict, which is certain to pave the way in the small but increasingly growing field of Colombian Comics Studies. [End Page 621] The second part, subtitled "Space, Ethnicity, and the Environment," explores how different types of discourses—including those of race, ethnicity, development, and human rights—have affected the intersection of place and environment and have shaped different cultural practices within those spaces. The chapter in this section by Felipe Martínez-Pinzón, entitled "The Greenhouse Gaze: Climate and Culture in Colombia (1808-1934)," is of particular interest, since it argues quite tellingly that the discourse around environment and climate in the early Colombian Republic created a sociocultural hierarchy that claimed that colder climates of higher altitudes were more apt for the development of a civilized society than the much warmer climates closer to sea level. In turn, this positioned Bogotá, at close to 9000 feet above sea level (2600 meters), as the obvious center for the incipient nation-state and marked many other regions of the country as disadvantageous to creating a modern society—a discourse that also extended to include the supposedly barbaric nature of the peoples found in the warmer climates of the tropic. This greenhouse gaze, as Martínez-Pinz...

Bits and Pieces: A History of Chiptunes, by Kenneth B. McAlpine

<i>Bits and Pieces: A History of Chiptunes</i>, by Kenneth B. McAlpine

TEXTUAL TRIAGE AND PASTORAL CARE IN THE CAROLINGIAN AGE: THE EXAMPLE OF THE RULE OF BENEDICT

The sixth-century Rule of Benedict became a foundational text for the practice of Christian monasticism in medieval Europe, but its utility extended outside of the monastery as well. In the Carolingian period church prelates repurposed parts of this influential monastic handbook for the purpose of pastoral care. In the decades around 800 CE, excerpts from the rule appeared in several composite manuscripts made for the instruction of parish priests and by extension their lay audiences. Benedict's fourth chapter on the “Instruments of Good Works” was deemed particularly useful in the context of preaching to lay people not only because of its ecumenical message to love God and one's neighbor but also due to its formulaic and repetitive idiom. This study examines the redeployment of extracts of the Rule of Benedict for the cura animarum in Carolingian parishes with particular attention to the role of Bishop Theodulf of Orléans (ca. 760–821) in disseminating Benedict's teachings beyond the walls of the cloister.

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature ed. by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer

Reviewed by: The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature ed. by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer Kaylee N. Henderson (bio) Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer, eds., The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. xii + 540, $224 hardcover. This extensive collection, carefully compiled by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer, provides an ample overview of the theoretical frameworks and topics pertaining to the study of Victorian literature. The companion's forty-five chapters are organized into six themed sections: "Genres and Movements," "Media Histories," "Victorian Discourses," "Formulations of Identity," "Science and Spirit," and "Spatiality and Environment." Each section contains chapters written by top scholars from around the globe, often the very scholars who wrote the foundational texts for their subjects. Each chapter provides a thorough overview of the topic, discussing both [End Page 462] pioneering texts and the most recent scholarship. Additionally, each chapter details the current challenges facing scholars and outlines directions for future research, often in relation to other topics and disciplines. Denisoff explains in the introduction, "We asked our authors not to write encyclopedic summaries of their subject but instead to use their own voices and styles to consider what somebody new to a field should know about the history of scholarship on the particular subject" (7). The authors represented in this collection clearly were mindful of this request, and despite the many voices, it never feels disjointed. Rather, the companion is an accessible and invaluable tool for scholars of Victorian literature. Denisoff notes the driving questions behind this collection: "What does Victorian studies engage with today, and how is it doing so?" (7). While he admits there are myriad responses to these compelling queries, the editors have worked to ensure that "in addition to addressing nineteenth-century values and concerns, it is a collection of twenty-first-century issues, critically positioning Victorian studies within the current social and political climate" (8). For example, in "Victorian Digital Humanities," Karen Bourrier explains that "new technologies were often first developed as aids to the disabled, only afterward finding broader use among the general population" (129). She notes that "the exchange also worked in reverse, with technologies for the able-bodied being adapted by the disabled," highlighting the influence of disability studies on the digital humanities through a shared goal of accessibility (129). Lynn Voskuil, in "Why Victorian Ecocriticism Matters," draws on the Victorian garden to introduce prevalent issues in Victorian ecocriticism, including "the role of empire in prompting both ecological innovation and environmental degradation; the acceleration of anthropogenic climate change during the nineteenth century; and the emergence of global perspectives to grasp the planetary scale of the ecological legacy we inherited from our Victorian forebears and the challenges we continue to share with them" (506). Linda K. Hughes's chapter on "Periodical Studies," the only one to focus solely on Victorian periodicals, details three major phases of periodical studies and the ongoing evolution of research methods and challenges within the subject. However, nearly every chapter in the collection touches on periodical studies and print culture in some way. For example, in "Short Forms: Serialization and Short Fiction," Susan David Bernstein proposes that "studying excerpts and abridged editions of long Victorian novels, to evaluate the experience of reading and design of writing short formats, even if one form—the serial installment or a chapter—is part of a larger text," can help us to avoid fetishizing wholeness and lead to "a theory and practice of Victorian short forms" (43). In "Feminism and the Canon," Talia Schaffer details the decades-long dominance of the canon wars and feminist criticism and their subsequent absence in work on Victorian [End Page 463] literary studies. She posits that "the feminist/noncanonical victory meant that its precepts could be taken for granted, its core assumptions remaining stubbornly unarticulated" (278). Arguing that critics must move beyond recovery work focused on biological females to instead "aim for feminist goals that benefit everyone regardless of their relation to female identity," Schaffer asserts, "'Feminism' ought to name our method, not our objects" (281). She explicitly points to the ways we can apply this "feminist strategy for reading" to areas like digital humanities and periodical studies. Andrew M. Stauffer...

War of the Worldviews

486 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) no one with a serious interest in one of the most accomplished of all sf writers will want to miss this volume.—Carl Freedman, Louisiana State University War of the Worldviews. Richard Grigg. Science Fiction and the Imitation of the Sacred. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. viii+151 pp.£90.00/$120.00 hc, £28.99/$39.95 pbk., £31.30/$35.95 ebk. Grigg’s approach to past scholarship on science fiction, theology, and religious studies is to appeal to the handful of thinkers he finds useful and ignore the rest. This style of scholarship gives him the freedom to advance his argument without critical resistance and with great creativity and efficiency; however, it simultaneously limits its use for other scholars. SFS readers may find its lack of engagement with sf scholarship frustrating, but a subset of scholars who teach courses on “religion and science fiction” could find Grigg’s work interesting and pedagogically useful. The primary value of this work lies in the classroom discussions it might enable, and it is written with the classroom in mind. Unlike the trajectories that contemporary sf studies have taken (looking at global sf, queer sf, Afrofuturism, and so on), Grigg’s text assumes a normative liberal, Western perspective. Christianity is the prototypical traditional “world religion,” with light engagement with an idealized Buddhism, and the primary questions are those of a (post-Christian) theology actively engaged with the contemporary world. To be used responsibly as a foundational text for a class on “religion and science fiction,” one should encourage students to read this text critically, actively engaging with how categories such as the “sacred,” “secular,” and “world religions” have been constructed. Such a class would also do well to interrogate Grigg’s definition of “science fiction” in terms of technology (for an example of Grigg’s running up against his own definition, see 77-78). One of the still-prominent approaches to the study of “religion” regards a certain kind of experience as distinctively characteristic of the phenomenon: a sui generis sense of the “sacred,” “numinous,” “transcendent,” “divine,” “incalculable,” “sublime,” “Other,” “eternal,” and so on. This experience is regarded by relevant members of the phenomenological, perennialist, or experiential school as temporally and geographically panhuman and innate, immediately given to consciousness as opposed to socially constructed and contingent, and lying at the heart of all the “world religions.” This is not the place to go into the details of the critical literature on this subject, but its existence is relevant because of Grigg’s extensive dependence on the category of the “sacred.” Experiences are generated in an interplay of bottom-up and topdown cognitive processes; with the neurotheological authors whom Grigg cites, one can acknowledge a substratum of relatively consistent bottom-up input accessible to at least most humans, while also noting that every experience will be constituted in culturally contingent ways using distinctive attributional systems. Science Fiction and the Imitation of the Sacred assumes a robust metanarrative of secularization that prioritizes ideas of loss and nostalgia, and 487 BOOKS IN REVIEW that assume secularization’s success and God’s nonexistence; in this context and given Grigg’s use of the concept of “imitation,” it would have been nice to see him engage with the literature on the relationship of concepts such as simulation, hyperreality, spectacle, and virtuality to conditions of secularity and postmodernity. That said, Grigg’s critical attitude toward the notion that the imaginative art of science fiction gives access to the sacred or transcendent, as reflected in his insistence on its being an “imitation,” is a refreshing, if only partial, turn away from the virtually universal romanticism under the influence of which most other studies of “religion and science fiction” are developed. Grigg uses the concept of “imitation” to indicate the non-reality of the “sacred” supplied by science fiction; it is not “genuine” (3). His text assumes that past humans experienced a sacred or divine that was given to them without mediation, a sacred that possessed all the attributes described in their sacred texts. He does not seem to think of ancient peoples as engaging with their own experiences and narratives in...

“Don’t go picking apples with the devil”: the myth of Faust in the works of Eduardas Mieželaitis

This article analyzes the reflection on the myth of Faust in the work of Eduardas Mieželaitis (1919–1997). The author’s initial hypothesis that the interpretation of this myth can be used as another argument for revealing the poet’s dramatic feelings and self-reflection of inauthentic Soviet existence is tested. Together with other signs of existential self-abuse (such as the metaphors of “the ringed bird” and “the masked word”), this could help answer the question of whether the description of the 1920s generation (Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas, Bronius Krivickas, etc.) as “tragic” would fit Mieželaitis. Intertextuality is the best way to describe the nature of the analysis and socio-criticism would describe the interpretation of the results.E. Mieželaitis was (and still is) one of the most intertextual Lithuanian authors. The use of the “alien word” in his texts was a conceptual position of the poet’s creative consciousness. For him the world’s culture has become a central topic, and his texts have been occupied by the masters of arts and sciences of antiquity, Renaissance, or New Age, as well as modern European authors, Oriental classics, Bible quotations, paraphrases, allusions and other forms of culture. For the poet, Goethe’s Faust is one of such foundational texts, even if the Soviet era did not favor the “myths of the great contemplation” (Vytautas Kubilius). The forever relevant myth of Faust raises a fundamental question of person’s life choice – what one is prepared to sacrifice for one’s purpose, and what the results of that “sacrifice” are. But in the Soviet times Mieželaitis did not focus on this myth as a “symbol of the duality of human’s nature” – his human is rather one-dimensional and monolithic, full of positive energy directed towards technological progress and an absolute belief in the cognitive powers of man. This is the exact aspect that Faust embodies in Mieželaitis’ works, as if it was his “new man”, the product of the Enlightenment era. Mieželaitis did not care about the moment of negotiations between Faust and Mephistopheles – for him there could easily be no Mephistopheles. However, in late works (Postskriptumai, 1986; Gnomos, 1987; Laida, 1992), where the poet reflects on his life and creative path, there are many signs of disillusionment with the myth of human omnipotence as the results of his labor have turned against him – he wanted to create a heaven, but got a hell in the form of Hiroshima. It is at this point that Mephistopheles dominates the duet with Faust, but in general they have both become a “common place” and their function is limited by the text’s aesthetic figurativeness.My conclusion is that eventually the rich allusions to Faust in Mieželaitis’ works did not translate into reflections on the essence or meaning of being – he was not concerned with the problematics of human’s choices, duality, or contradictions. Thus, my initial expectation that the interpretation of the Faust myth may be another argument for revealing the poet’s dramatic feelings and self-reflection of inauthentic existence in the Soviet times was essentially not confirmed. And that could have been another argument for adding him to the social group of the 1920s.On the other hand, looking from the distant present, it is my opinion that Mieželaitis is still a part of the tragic generation, as the whole generation – whether they retreated to the West, or remained in Soviet Lithuania, collaborated or resisted – became hostages of the Second World War and the Soviet occupation.

Theotonio Dos Santos (1936–2018): The Revolutionary Intellectual Who Pioneered Dependency Theory

Theotonio Dos Santos (1936–2018): The Revolutionary Intellectual Who Pioneered Dependency Theory

AAD-69

No ano em que a Análise Automática do Discurso, de Michel Pêcheux, completa cinquenta anos, foi de fundamental importância examinar o modo como o autor produziu essa obra fundadora que estabeleceu um novo objeto de análise no campo dos Estudos da Linguagem. Este artigo vai acompanhar o duplo movimento teórico empreendido por Pêcheux: por um lado, demarcar seu objeto dos demais objetos que compõem a área e, por outro, formular e teorizar o novo objeto de análise - o discurso.

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

Heroicidad, conquista y el Nuevo Mundo rioplatense. El vacío heroico en el poema épico "La Argentina" (1602) de Martín del Barco Centenera

La Argentina (1602) is the one and only Renaissance epic poem from the River Plate. The author Martín del Barco Centenera provides with his epic poem one of the foundational texts of this region. Nevertheless, it does not belong to the traditional corpus of epic texts from the Siglo de Oro; an ever-increasing number of studies have been published only recently. Although this epic-heroic poem lacks the figure of a central hero, the decision to write an epic poem is not accidental. By means of a rhetorical and semantic analysis, this paper argues that the lack of epic heroism (vacío heroico) generates potential to discuss the question of heroism in times of the conquest. Barco Centenera wittingly combines this discourse with the topos of the marvellous of the New World. An analysis of the narrative discourse with a special focus on its reflexivity complements the argument.

Tearing down the ‘buckskin curtain’: domestic policy-making and Indigenous intellectuals in the Cold War United States and Canada

ABSTRACTNorth American Indigenous peoples remain overlooked in Cold War scholarship, despite being tangibly impacted by this global conflict. This article presents a study of four foundational texts, to argue that the Cold War shaped the introduction of new destructive Indian policies in the United States and Canada, which aimed to eradicate the special legal status of Indigenous peoples. Moreover, Indigenous activist intellectuals like Vine Deloria, Jr. and Harold Cardinal successfully embedded their writing in the Cold War context of decolonisation and anti-communism to challenge harmful federal policy and the image of the United States and Canada as upholding ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’.

‘Feel the Knife Pierce You Intensely’: Slayer’s ‘Angel of Death’—Holocaust Representation or Metal Affects?

This article tackles a well-known but little-studied phenomenon: the importance of Holocaust themes to heavy metal. The fascination of metal bands with evil and death has until recently been met outside the scene with such reactions as moral panic, disgust or indifference. In the last ten years, however, scholars in an emerging discourse of Metal Studies have attempted to engage more critically with the social and musical dimensions of metal, in order to contextualise and understand its lyrics and imagery. Although a number of writers have touched upon the recurrence of Holocaust imagery, no one has dealt at any length with extreme metal as a form of Holocaust memory. My article focuses on what might be called the founding text of extreme metal, Slayer’s ‘Angel of Death’, which lived up to the sub-genre’s name by pushing both its musical form and its lyrical content beyond previously maintained limits and taboos. It considers the song’s mobilisation of affective intensities as involving problematic politics, but also a challenge to conceptions of Holocaust representation. I consider how affects are evoked by ‘Angel of Death’ through offering readings of the song itself as well as of ways that its reception have been recorded on social media, in concert videos, and reaction videos uploaded to YouTube.

Taming the Journal Monster—Building Bibliographical Bridges

The idea of rounding up our special issue in this way came to us while harmonizing all the bibliographical entries into one pattern. We have tried as best as we could to double-check each single source. Sometimes, names that we have never heard before appeared over and over again, in multiple contributions. Somewhere on this planet, different scholars had come across the same readings. We simply wanted to underline this complex, interwoven net of border-crossing–border-creating literature. As editors from different fields, we have learned of many intriguing discourses that were unknown to us before. Quite often, shared literature lists make visible certain symptoms of academic echo chambers, copy-paste works, or self-referencing networks. Shared foundational texts serve as sense-making tool kits to the members of so-called ‘fields’, and give a hint at somehow negotiated vocabulary within them. Yet, what we have in front of us is an example of an interdisciplinary collaboration of writers. Since our special issue had an ‘open call’, many of our collaborators do not even know each other personally. Yet, in the end, it was possible to build bibliographical bridges between all of them—every single contribution has at least one theoretical link to another article. This way, it is possible to theoretically unite our work, and consider it as (part of) a whole.&#x0D; A Meta Bibliography of Some Sort—Bridging MaMo’s BibliographiesIn short, we consider as a bibliographical bridge the shared bibliographical reference to a particular work or to a particular person by at least two of our issue’s authors. If some of our authors refer to ‘writer A’, an imaginary bridge is being created between their contributions—oftentimes unconsciously. These bridges become even more intriguing when noticing that numerous authors independently investigated the identical ‘work B’, without even knowing that another contributor did so as well. Our overview is based on a close examination of all roughly 1000 bibliographical entries in this special issue. It may not be free from errors. For the detailed references, see each contributor’s bibliography individually.

Anna M. Nogar, Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present (2018) and Anna M. Nogar, Enrique R. Lamadrid, and Amy Córdova, Hermanas de azul: Sor María de Ágreda viene a Nuevo México / Sisters in Blue:

Reviewed by: Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present by Anna M. Nogar, and: Hermanas de azul: Sor María de Ágreda viene a Nuevo México / Sisters in Blue: Sor María de Ágreda Comes to New Mexico by Anna M. Nogar, Enrique R. Lamadrid, and Amy Córdova Elizabeth McDyer (bio) Anna M. Nogar, Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present. University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Pp. 474. Anna M. Nogar, Enrique R. Lamadrid, and Amy Córdova, Hermanas de azul: Sor María de Ágreda viene a Nuevo México / Sisters in Blue: Sor María de Ágreda Comes to New Mexico. University of New Mexico Press, 2017. Pp. 88. In Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present, Anna Nogar takes her readers on an astonishing transatlantic journey through the centuries. She uncovers María de Ágreda, the at-times-forgotten or narratively limited Spanish nun historically identified as the protagonist of the [End Page 219] US Southwest "Lady in Blue" folkloric tale. According to the tale, de Ágreda bilocated, miraculously appearing to Indigenous populations in what is now the US Southwest to prepare them for Christianity and colonization although she never left Spain. As Nogar notes, scholars have largely ignored the Lady in Blue story except as a regional legend, disconnected from its larger historical context. In contrast, Nogar inserts the story of the Lady in Blue within its transatlantic context of Spain, New Spain, and the missionary zeal of what is now the US Southwest. By examining Lady in Blue narratives contextualized by historical, cultural, and oral sources, she argues that the staying power of the legend stems from de Ágreda's popularity as a spiritual author in Spain and New Spain. In so doing, she affirms María de Ágreda's preeminent role as a female colonial figure. To do this, she examines the miracle narrative over four centuries and the transatlantic circulation of de Ágreda's writing. After her well-crafted introduction, Nogar leads us through the history of the Lady in Blue narrative on the one hand, and the biography of María de Ágreda, including the diffusion and societal role of her spiritual writings, on the other. The first four chapters trace the narrative history alongside Sor María's biography and writings during the colonial era. Chapter 1 examines the foundational texts of the Lady in Blue narrative, with special attention to their writers (evangelizing missionaries) and their respective audiences. In chapter 2, Nogar establishes Sor María's importance in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spain as a spiritual author and confidant to King Phillip IV, which allowed her most famous text, Mística ciudad de Dios, to circulate broadly. Chapter 3 details how her prominence in Spain led to her role as an influential spiritual author and religious figure in New Spain, with wide publication of her works that made her ideas accessible to large swathes of colonial Mexican society. Sor María's popularity in Spain and New Spain formed a transatlantic devotional community. In chapter 4, Nogar turns her attention specifically to Northern New Spain (New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California). She shows that through Franciscan friars and Jesuits, de Ágreda's writing preceded and paved the way for the Lady in Blue narrative, which in turn became a foundational [End Page 220] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Illustration from Hermanas de azul: Sor María de Ágreda viene a Nuevo México / Sisters in Blue: Sor María de Ágreda Comes to New Mexico. Amy Cordova © 2017. Courtesy: University of New Mexico Press. story, "cited from both written and collective memory" and "an essential episode in the exploration and colonization" (7). The last two chapters span transformations of the Lady in Blue narrative from the nineteenth century onward. They contrast significantly with the first two centuries of the Lady in Blue narrative's history that intertwined María de Ágreda's authorial...