Horizon Of Expectations Research Articles

De la terre patrimoine à la terre ressource : tensions entre structures foncières héritées et nouvelles perspectives des acteurs paysans en Afrique de l'Est. (From heritage land to resource land : tensions between inherited land structures and new perspectives of peasant stakeholders in Eastern Africa)

There are strong links between the external and internal dimensions of the land issue which, moreover, deals with many stakes : social, identity, political, economic and environmental. Interactions of scale, of time or space, add further to this complexity, giving rise to heterogeneous situations which are sources of conflicts. In East Africa, the agricultural modernization has been imposed on local systems following a process of territorial construction which has gradually developed into a rigid and heterogeneous framework ; the land tenure blockage gave it sometimes a dramatic dimension. Under this process redefining the territories of production and the local identities, rural-based societies are suffering from historical rigidities and are handicapped by the extreme fragmentation and compartmentalization of production units. The attempts made by the producers to be involved in promising markets or in often uncertain agricultural chains redefine a composite and unequal "area of resources", where access to land, to water, to credit, to infrastructures and to information networks is a new comparative advantage. The objective of this paper is to explore some new ideas from specific studies which has been carried out on East African mountains, on the assumption that the diversity and the heterogeneity of the new socio-economical and territorial logics are the sign of the search of a new horizon of expectation, which could better articulate the moral economy of local societies with a project which could offer access to a larger citizenship

Aleister Crowley Reads Inferno: Towards an Occult Reception of Strindberg

Aleister Crowley Reads Inferno Towards an Occult Reception of Strindberg Giuliano D’Amico 1. A Story of Kindred Souls I was awakened to the knowledge that I possessed a magical means of becoming conscious of and satisfying a part of my nature which had up to that moment concealed itself from me. It was an experience of horror and pain, combined with a certain ghostly terror, yet at the same time it was the key to the purest and holiest spiritual ecstasy that exists. (Crowley, Confessions 109) Writing an article about the relationship between August Strindberg and the British writer and occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) may at times resemble an account of parallel lives. If taken out of context, the excerpt above could fit into Strindberg’s Inferno just as well as into the book to which it belongs, the autobiography The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. Crowley’s magical experience, which took place in Stockholm on 31 December 1896, was the first in his life and became a turning point in his esoteric development. Meanwhile in Lund—not far removed and at about the same time—Strindberg was beginning his studies of Swedenborg, who profoundly influenced his mystical ideas (Brandell, Paris 231–2). More generally, it appears that Crowley, even though he was twenty-six years younger than Strindberg and had never met him, went through similar personal, spiritual, and artistic experiences in the decades between the two centuries. Both were born into religious, middle-class families; both experienced wealth and economic trouble; both turned to intense and heterogeneous writing after troubled university studies; and both experienced bohemian life in Paris and enjoyed contacts with the [End Page 323] artistic avant-garde. Both went through personal crises and eventually found a guardian angel, as they each formulated it: Strindberg turned to Swedenborg (Inferno 202) and Crowley to the preternatural entity Aiwass, from which he claimed to have received the Liber Al Vel Legis or Book of the Law in 1904, the text that became the foundation of his esoteric thought, Thelema (Pasi, “Varieties” 156–60). The aim of this article is to investigate Crowley’s acquaintance with Strindberg’s work and to explore its esoteric, scientific, and literary implications. I will concentrate on the review of Inferno (and, to a lesser degree, on that of Son of a Servant), which Crowley published in his journal The Equinox in 1913. These reviews provide important material for understanding the literary and/or esoteric productions of both authors. They offer evidence of the reception of Strindberg’s works in occult circles after the Inferno period. 1 Such a reception based on his occult association invites a reconsideration of his introduction in Britain as a whole. Accordingly, a significant number of the early Strindberg translations were either done or published by esotericists, a fact that strongly affected the horizon of expectations of his readers, Crowley included. Most importantly, Crowley’s review questions Inferno’s reliability as an autobiography—an unusual developement in Strindberg’s early reception in Britain—and invites rather a reading informed by Crowley’s “scientific illuminism” and anti-Victorianism, two currents which were deeply rooted in the avant-garde and radical discourses of the age. 2. Strindberg’s Early British Reception By 1913, when Crowley reviewed Strindberg, Strindberg’s reputation in Britain was based mainly on an isolated translation of The Father and a handful of obscure productions of his plays (The Stronger in 1906 and 1909, The Father in 1911, Miss Julie and Creditors in 1912). A few articles had followed J. T. Grein’s unsuccessful attempt to stage The Father in 1893, which presented Strindberg primarily as a pessimist and misogynist (Rem, “Premature” 151). Twenty years later, this was still the predominant [End Page 324] view when as many as twelve Strindberg translations were issued between 1912 and 1913, possibly capitalizing on the attention surrounding the author’s death in 1912. However, the numerous translations must not be equated with success, since Strindberg’s reception continued to suffer from hostility and accusations of misogyny (Ewbank 7–25; Robinson 10–9). Arguably, Strindberg’s legacy suffered from a lack of committed critics and translators such as William Archer and...

Narrative Voice and Hybrid Style in Burgundian Chivalric Biography

Critics are now generally agreed that the Burgundian chivalric biography known as the Livre des faits de messire Jacques de Lalaing (c. 1470) is a compilation of sources that draws on the conventions of both fictional and historiographical works of the period. Yet little attention has been paid hitherto to the precise narrative means by which the biographer, who was most likely a herald, sought to persuade his readers of the veracity of his account of the hero’s life. Close stylistic analysis of how the narrator uses locutions involving first and second person voice, so as to construct his own voice as author and to create a certain “horizon of expectation” in the reader’s mind, reveals that the Lalaing biographer adopts a hybrid style that owes a far greater debt to the narrative conventions of the chronicle than to those of the romance, but is in fact reducible to neither.

Introduction

Recent anthropological approaches to temporality and spatiality can offer particularly important insights into established planning theories. In this introductory essay, we consider planning as a manifestation of what people think is possible and desirable, and what the future promises for the better. We outline how plans can operate as a particular form of promissory note, and explore how plans may be seen to perform a particular kind of work, laying out diverse kinds of conceptual orders while containing a notion of the state as an unfulfilled idea. The task of the ethnographer is to chart the practices, discourses, technologies, and artifacts produced by planning, as well as the gaps that emerge between planning theory and practice. We consider the changing horizons of expectation and the shifting grounds of government in different phases and forms of neoliberalization that are characteristic of planning in the contemporary world.

‘Más avremos adelant’: Minaya Álvar Fáñez and the Heroic Vision in the Cantar de Mio Cid

This article examines the role of Minaya Álvar Fáñez, the Cid's closest vassal, in the Cantar de Mio Cid, with particular emphasis upon his contribution to the poem's heroic vision. Underpinning the article is a reading of Minaya as a form of literary double whose bond with the Cid reflects the poem's prevalent use of connection and comparison as purveyors of meaning. After tracing the literary development of the partnership, including the possibility of French influence, I address the role of Minaya through three different areas: structural/narrative interactions; connective imagery and the metonymic mode; and subjectivity, where I examine the psychological implications of this quasi-fraternal relationship, drawing on the primitive and mythical origins of the double figure. I argue that Minaya is inseparable from structural and psychological patterns of wish-fulfilment and ambition, and vitally necessary in the institution of these heroic ideals. I conclude that Minaya's continual association with auspice and optimism is a practice of memory which ritually re-enacts the Cid's triumphs, past and present, thereby widening the poem's horizon of expectation. I also assert that Minaya's limitations protect the paradox of proximity and detachment that is the epichero.

I Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe di Brunner, Conze e Koselleck. Acquisizioni e novitŕ teoriche

This article aims to underline philosophical and methodological originality of Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe by Brunner, Conze and Koselleck. In it, history emerges only when temporalization becomes part of experience of world, thereby causing a shift in men’s horizon of expectation in relation to space of experience such that they no longer coincide. Political concepts become historicized as indicators of change. The article reflects also on concept of new time (neue Zeit) in this work and on its relationship to historical concept of the modern age or modernity (Neuzeit). According to Koselleck, late eighteenth century and Enlightenment are true epochal threshold (Sattelzeit), when standard bearers of a genuinely new time used theory of history to co-ordinate various elements which made up concept of modernity.

Daily life and family in an Ottoman urban context: Historiographical stakes and new research perspectives

The Ottoman history of the family and of everyday life is presently experiencing deep theoretical and methodological renewals. Following the discovery of new archival resources, and the application of new questionings to previously known resources, the field is the object of an intense research investment. The horizon of expectation has enlarged, as renewed interpretations on tradition, Islam and their influence on everyday life, family, communal, urban and gender relations are the object of intense speculations in the contemporary intellectual panorama. The object of this article, conceived as an introduction to a thematic issue of the journal guest-edited by the authors, is first to draw a panorama of the existing literature on everyday life in an Ottoman context, with an attention to the successive methodological approaches and theoretical elaborations of which the field has been the support of, and then to identify the main stakes for today's research. The authors also argue that, in the present international panorama of research on those themes, not only is the Ottoman Empire an interesting application field for innovative methods, but might also be at the heart of a deep renewal, with at stake the discussion of the heritage of culturalist visions of history and of paradigms such as center/periphery relations and modernization.

Lars and the Real Girl

The 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl challenged viewer’s expectations, not simply through its unusual premise (a man having a relationship with a doll), through its consistent refusal to resolve the plot’s various conflicts through verbal or physical violence. Instead, the plot resolves in a way consistent with what peace researcher Johan Galtung has termed positive transcendence, a means of coming to a resolution that meets the needs of all parties. Although the film’s far-fetched plot makes direct practical application of the characters’ actions unlikely, the film performs a more important role in helping to expand moviegoers’ “horizons of expectation.” By prompting its audience to accept an utterly nonviolent, nonconfrontational resolution to the central conflict of the plot, Lars and the Real Girl subverts the notion that satisfying cinematic endings must involve winners and losers. It helps make room for a greater acceptance of nonviolent resolution of problems in popular film.

El divino y el fénix abofetean al bardo de Toledo: Aldana, Lope y Garcilaso

Employing such concepts as Bloom’s “anxiety of influence”, Jauss’ “horizon of expectations”, Freud’s “unheimlich” and Derrida’s “grammatology”, I develop an analysis of two sonnets by Francisco de Aldana and Lope de Vega that deploy the theme of the “slap to the lady,” relating them to the works of Garcilaso de la Vega, and transposing the Toledan poet’s idea of carnality and physical contact amongst lovers to the moment of writing in these two sonnets.

Anthropology and decision making

This article, part of a set of three articles, calls for a critical reexamination of a plethora of phenomena relating to choice and decision making, occasionally addressed by anthropologists, but more regularly studied by economists, political scientists, psychologists, and organization scholars. By means of a bird's-eye research overview, we identify certain weak spots pertaining to a formalistic unicentral view of human rationality, and argue that ethnographic approaches casting light on cultural contexts for thought, reason, and action can explain how choices are framed and constituted from horizons of perceptions and expectations. A positive account of socially and culturally embedded decision making heralds a mode of anthropology with a broad, integrating capacity to address public policy and administration and their interactions with everyday experience and practice.

From Compliance to Concordance and Beyond

This commentary begins with a brief overview of recent developments in healthcare policy and practice in the UK. Particular attention is paid to the demise of the concept (and practice) of compliance along with and rise of the concept (and practice) of concordance. Analysis suggests that despite considerable changes in the organisation and delivery of healthcare there remains a clear gap between rhetoric and reality. Drawing on insights from qualitative health research issues of identity, embodiment and self-care are explored and synthesised in a single descriptive framework. Neither compliance nor concordance alone adequately captures the reality of patient experiences in everyday life. The framework of understanding proposed here contextualises compliance and concordance and their corollaries within distinct horizons of expectation. For a truly user-driven healthcare it is not a question of either/or but both and more and asking, in reality, what can a body do?

The Cannibal Ogre and the Rape of Justice: A Contrapuntal View

The article employs a cultural studies approach to counterpose the infamous 'Rape of LadyJustice' cartoon produced by the South African cartoonist, Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro) on 7September 2009 against a cartoon produced 190 years before, to the day, by the 19th centuryBritish cartoonist George Cruikshank. The article employs the notions of 'transsubjectivetexts' and 'horizons of expectation', derived from Hans Robert Jauss, as a vantage point fromwhich to view these cartoons as cultural products which, despite the two centuries thatseparate them, are connected by visual continuities that have something to tell us about thecontinuing encounter between Africa and the Western world. Drawing upon the notion of'contrapuntal reading', derived from Edward Said, the article proposes that these cartoonsshould be examined not only in terms of the discourses that they include, but also those thatthey exclude. An Appendix provides selected excerpts of statements in response to the 'Rapeof Lady Justice' cartoon by South African leadership figures, journalists and members of thepublic.

Constructions of Death in Young Adult Fantastic Literature

Most fantastic texts are, in the first place, stories of adventure: the risk of being injured or killed is a predetermined part of the plot. This article analyses representations of death in fantastic juvenile literature and the horizons of expectation associated with the genre and the particular motif. In non-realistic narratives death often serves as a framework for culture contact highlighting differences and similarities between fantastic communities and the environment of the audience. The portrayal of death likewise acts as a key marker of personhood by using the motivations and circumstances under which a character kills – or dies – as a feature distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. The article also discusses magic as a tool that provides extended means to heal, to evade death or to bring back the dead. This last issue brings significantly into play the morals and ethics of protagonists as well as antagonists. Referenced texts are, among others, The Neverending Story, the Ink-Trilogy, Harry Potter, the Inheritance quartet and Lord of the Rings.

'Comparisons are Odious'? Revisiting the Metaphysical Conceit in Donne

This article seeks to locate the metaphysical conceit in its original contexts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century arts of discourse: rhetorical elocutio and inventio, and the language of place logic that supplies material for poetic comparisons. I begin by analysing the cultural and aesthetic assumptions that underpin two foundational responses to the metaphysicals, those of Hazlitt and Johnson. Both discussions depend upon a model of literary topography that classifies the metaphysical conceit as stylistically and affectively remote: it is associated with foreign poetic tastes and recondite analogies too distant from the reader’s horizons of expectation. I then turn to early modern taxonomies, which have no place for the term conceit, but instead deal with exotic similitudes through the figure of catachresis, a stylistic transgression consisting of ‘far-fetched, incongruous speeches’ (Prideaux). Catachresis is evidence of a mind ‘that must wander into the confines’ (Hoskins) and gravitates towards remote corners of the poetic map. The topographical dimensions of early modern comparisons also emerge in Renaissance logic manuals, which cast the process of invention as a journey of exploration to distant topoi or places. I conclude by mapping the discourse of far-fetched comparisons on to Donne’s valediction poems. These lyrics work by imagining the two lovers in different places, and in extreme states of feeling. Catachresis, characterized by Hoskins as ‘somewhat more desperate then a Metaphore’, uniquely captures this register of grief and longing, but also provides a temporary fiction of connectivity, as the lovers’ minds converge in the remote logical places that constitute Donne’s conceits.

Selective Identification, Quiet Distancing: Understanding the Working-Class Response to the Nordic Daycare Model

In Norway, our empirical case, enrolment of children under three years old in formal daycare has increased rapidly during the last 5–6 years, especially among the working class. This has happened despite working-class parents' traditional reluctance to use such childcare services for the youngest children. As a pedagogical project, formal daycare mirrors middle-class cultural traits that seem to clash with traditional working-class notions about young children's needs. Drawing on a longitudinal qualitative study, this paper explores this new element in working-class parenting. The analysis suggests that working-class parents' response to daycare unfolds as a dual process; it involves participation and identification as well as distancing and separation. This pattern of selective identification and distancing is interpreted as a type of boundary management that structures working-class childhoods in particular ways. To facilitate a discussion of the wider cultural context that working-class parents' response both reflects and potentially reproduces, we contrast it to middle-class parents' ways of relating to daycare. Koselleck's (2004) analytical concepts of ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ are used to explore such linkages.

Cruel Vibrations: Sounding Out Antonin Artaud's Production ofLes Cenci

This article examines the sonic elements of Antonin Artaud's 1935 production ofLes Cenci, Artaud's infamous attempt to realize his proposed ‘theatre of cruelty’. The aim is to qualify the critical opinion that Artaud was a failed theatre practitioner by analysing the conceptual complexity and potential effectiveness of the sound design for this production. Artaud utilized new sonic technologies and an aesthetic arguably derived in part from Balinese gamelan music to affect audience members on a physiological level, prefiguring the vibrational force and ultrasonic ambitions of modern sonic warfare. This analysis engages a range of primary and secondary materials, including an extant recording of music and sound effects used for the production, and is situated with reference to an estimated acoustic ‘horizon of expectations’ of Artaud's audiences and to neuroscientific conceptions of how the brain processes auditory input.

The Formulaic Revolution

AbstractThis article presents a historical reconstruction of the formation of Makonde “revolutionary singing” as genre of memorialisation of the Mozambican Liberation Struggle; tracking the “descent” of formulas and watchwords produced by the revolutionary elites into popular orality. Along this trajectory, we will encounter wartime genres that were later forgotten or foregone, which refer to moments when the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation” of the Struggle were still filled with uncertainty and the sense of possibility. Progressively, these singing expressions were reorganised around socialism’s nodes of meaning; while ideological tropes, elaborated by Frelimo’s “courtly” composers, were appropriated in popular singing.

Odisseias do conceito moderno de história: Necrológio de Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, de Capistrano de Abreu, e O pensamento histórico no Brasil nos últimos cinquenta anos, de Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, revisitados

This article seeks to reflect on the tensions internal to the modern conception of history through two important texts concerning Brazilian historiography and the writing of Brazilian history: Capistrano de Abreu's Necrológio de Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen (1878) and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda's O pensamento histórico no Brasil nos últimos cinquenta anos (1951). Considering both in the light of the modern conception of history, as representatives of a new experience of time, characterized by the difference towards the past, and by a new horizon of expectations about the future, which changes the way history is written, we see them both marked by tensions such as particular studies and synthesis, theory and empirical work, objectivity and subjectivity, still relevant to historians.

Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance (review)

Reviewed by: Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance Roger Nicholson Whetter, K. S., Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008; hardback; pp. 218; 12 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £55.00; ISBN 9780754661429 Keith Whetter's ambitions in Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance are large, if we trust his title; their actual reach encompasses both less and more. For the most part, he discusses genre as it bears on medieval English romances. But, although not mentioned in the title, Morte Darthur also proves significant – taking up almost a third of the book – perhaps suggesting it is Whetter's real object all along. In his compact account of genre, based in Frye and Fowler – representatives of different approaches – Whetter questions whether genre, as textual contract, is socially or formally established, and tackles important breaks like those between genre and mode, theory and history. He argues that genres are properly established by reference to actual texts, within periods, in line with practices recognized by composers and consumers, making up what he terms a 'community of users'. He denies that they necessarily relate to social experience, by social or ideological function. Yet, although sympathetic to Frye's semantic, modal typology, he insists on the historical specificity of genres, but prefers to define them in formalist, syntactic terms, like Propp's fairy tale. Where Propp's analysis of fairy tale is essentially structuralist, however, Whetter places his version of romance in diachronic relationship with earlier and later narrative forms, specifically novel and epic. If Whetter's romantic essentials – 'love, ladies, adventure and the happy ending' – relate to Propp's actants and plot functions, they also distinguish romance sharply from epic. His reading of romance as genre, then, recalls Jauss' important study. Both wish to break down the Aristotelian notion of genre as a universal, literary class, by introducing history as the locus of generic change. Transformation [End Page 261] is more important for Jauss than for Whetter, but the latter does insist on the specificity of medieval romance against other forms. For both, too, history is an extra-textual aspect of the text; the historically determined 'horizon of expectations' to which genre relates, according to Jauss, looks more abstract than Whetter's 'community of users', yet the latter is similarly extrapolated from meta-textual elements of self-referentiality and parody. If discussion of genre has ancient beginnings, discussion of romance is comparatively modern, but reaches back to the nineteenth century and includes numerous significant contributions. Whetter's own concern with particularizing the genre in terms of essential components means that much of his discussion simply illustrates the presence of his sentimental matrix. I have no doubt that a sense of romance is crucial to understanding texts, but worry when genre analysis seems to complete critical performance, diverting readers from other critical business. Whetter's own developed readings of texts like Havelok and Gawain and the Green Knight miss so much that the question of generic function can seem mismanaged. In many respects, Whetter's account of medieval romance accords closely with those of other scholars, in emphasising love and adventure, but, where most are reluctant to define the genre by eliminating texts on the ground that essential components do not figure, Whetter is not. 'Family resemblances', Wittgenstein's approach to language categorization, will not do, however attractive to others, because it proposes the relational role of overlapping similarities, rather than fixed, key components. Whereas Davenport, for example, argues that medieval terms for narrative forms never seem 'to have very sharp edges', Whetter sees the edges as very sharp indeed. Love and adventure are necessary; so are women and happy endings. In an important argument, then, he claims that where the happy ending is lacking, despite the presence of other typical characteristics, what we face is not a romance, but a generic hybrid, mixing romance and tragedy. What is most valuable for Whetter in the modern debate on genre is recognition that generic structures are binding, but inevitably open to adaptation. Since this permits him to argue that Middle English romance is a specific form, he can establish a strong base for reading Malory. Morte Darthur not only exemplifies the principle that texts are...

The History of the Future

Looking back recently at my professional career, I was struck by fact that, excepting my season as a graduate student and my current appointment at Columbia, I have been in departments of Romance languages or Romance studies and was even chair of one such department for rive years at University of Pennsylvania before coming to this campus. I am convinced that I am a better scholar for it: if nothing else, relativization of one's own discipline through frequent contact with other fields that are structurally related to it both formally and historically keeps you from fetishizing preconceptions and rituals that define it, which is a salutary state of affairs. Nevertheless, in my intervention in a conference titled Return to History and Future of Romance Studies, I would like to argue that, precisely because of to history, there is no future for Romance studies, and that this development is to be neither mourned nor resisted. I could engage in a fairly run-of-the mill and perhaps even predictable reading of phrase the return to in order to evince an essential ambiguity at its core; in fact, I have not managed to resist temptation to do so. On one hand, expression refers to a disciplinary praxis centered on history as ultimate context of study, as against a previous practice which return to history is supposed to have displaced or superseded, that is, linguistic in which almost everyone in this audience--including me--was both formed intellectually and went on to contribute to as a scholar. This is probably sense in which organizing committee intended it to be understood by audience: that is, as recent troping away from language and text to either materiality or ideology that bas been subsumed under capacious mantle of term cultural studies. On other hand, there is a somewhat hortatory, vaguely ethical reading of phrase the return to that appears to carry within it an injunction to reinscribe ourselves and our practice once again in history after a season of having turned our back to it; that is to say, to acknowledge historical determinants of our profession and corresponding contingency of what we do--the equivalent of Jameson's famous imperative to always historicize now applied to our own intellectual and academic praxis. Now these two meanings are discontinuous with one another and may even be antithetical. The turn to may be seeking to provide a description of what is our current critical praxis or its horizon of expectations, but second acceptation of expression reveals that very praxis to be a historically contingent affair. In other words, contemporary to history described by first meaning is immediately rendered suspect when considered from directive to return to a historically inflected understanding of our activity. Hence, phrase seems to enjoin us both to engage in practice of turning to history as final horizon of what we do and to simultaneously challenge practice by underscoring its historical contingency. The constant oscillation from description to prescription in possible interpretations of phrase are not auspicious, for a constructivist outlook has unfortunate tendency to temper enthusiasm required to engage wholeheartedly in any activity. If we look at our own metier from perspective of suspicion required by directive to historicize, another question forces itself on us: How does one return to history? Or better yet, when were we ever out of history? The linguistic that return to history is supposed to have displaced was itself a historically conditioned event, and recent enjoining to return to history is historically conditioned as well. Hence, we should perhaps dwell not on what is most intellectually rigorous way to return to history in our critical praxis, but rather on what are contemporary historical circumstances that make it feel like a peremptory assignment. …