Imaginable State Research Articles

THE DISCLOSURE OF ‘KUN’: THE RELENTLESS EVOLUTION IN THE PERCEPTUAL THEORY OF ‘KUN’

The present study focuses on the word ‘Kun’ from Quran. In this paper, the discourse of Quran and the conceptual ayah of ‘Kun’ is discussed with reference to exegetical context, the perceptual theory of creation and the reality of the relentless evolution of ‘Kun’ and its possible hermeneutics. The recognition of the ‘intention’ of God has to be unveiled in order to understand the theory of ‘Kun’ and the idea of Creation. The three dimensional design of ‘Kun’ can be seen in the Quran as: the intention of ‘Kun’, when the creation exists in the intention of God; the imagination of God about ‘Kun’, which is the second stage and is related to the imaginable state of the ‘essence’ of ‘Kun’; the final stage refers to the ‘saying’ of ‘Kun’ by God, which unveils the intention of God. The relentless evolution is the reality that every time God says ‘Kun’, it discloses itself with unique creation. The relentless evolution in the perceptual theory of creation of ‘kun’ connects it with the theory of expansion of the cosmos and its evolution. The uniqueness of ‘Kun’ is unveiled in transcendence and immanence through the infinity Himself.

States of productive and reproductive imagination reflected in the local synchronization of alpha and theta EEG frequencies

Healthy subjects (n = 83) performed a task involving reproductive imagination (remembrances): they were asked to remember and to have an imaginary walk along a well-known road (a real walk, the reproductive imagination state, RIS). Then the subjects performed a task involving productive imagination: they were asked to imagine a city that does not actually exist and to have an imaginary walk through it (a fictitious walk, productive imagination state, PIS). The reference values were measured at rest with the eyes open (REO). Monopolar EEGs were recorded from 19 areas of the scalp surface (10–20 system). An increase in EEG power in the α2 frequency range during RIS and even more pronounced increase during PIS as compared with REO were considered to reflect the internalization of attention. We also observed multidirectional dynamics of EEG power in the θ and α1 ranges during PIS and RIS as compared with REO, which suggests the dominance of free associative manipulation of visual images in PIS in contrast to RIS, where algorithmically ordered operations with visual images stored in the memory were dominant.

Imaginative Vividness

ABSTRACT:How are we to understand the phenomenology of imagining? Attempts to answer this question often invoke descriptors concerning the ‘vivacity’ or ‘vividness’ of our imaginative states. Not only are particular imaginings often phenomenologically compared and contrasted with other imaginings on grounds of how vivid they are, but such imaginings are also often compared and contrasted with perceptions and memories on similar grounds. Yet however natural it may be to use ‘vividness’ and cognate terms in discussions of imagination, it does not take much reflection to see that these terms are poorly understood. In this paper, I review both some relevant empirical literature as well as the philosophical literature in an attempt to get a handle on what it could mean, in an imaginative context, to talk of vividness. As I suggest, this notion ultimately proves to be so problematic as to be philosophically untenable.

Manicheizmai ir Czesławas Miłoszas: moralinės vaizduotės tyrimas

[straipsnis ir santrauka lietuvių kalba; santrauka anglų kalba] Straipsnio tikslas – apmąstyti Czesławo Miłoszo Ulro žemę manicheizmo istorijos kontekste remiantis moralinės vaizduotės teorija ir moralinės pusiausvyros koncepcija. Straipsnyje analizuojami viduramžių, Renesanso, romantizmo ir XX amžiaus manicheizmai, diskutuojama su Vytauto Kavolio ir Leonido Donskio samprotavimais šiomis temomis. Straipsnio naujumas: atsižvelgiant į Williamo Blake’o ir Cz. Miłoszo samprotavimus, kalbama apie moralinės pusiausvyros koncepciją ir daromos prielaidos dėl personalizuoto ir depersonalizuoto triksterio vaidmens skatinant moralinių pusiausvyrų kaitą. Straipsnyje siekiama apibrėžti moralinių galių funkcionalumą ir disfunkcionalumą moralinės vaizduotės teorijos ribose.

Hawthorne’s Distillery: Time and Temperance in “The Birth-Mark” And Other Tales

Abstract Drawing on a wide range of temperance reform literature, this essay examines the temporal dimensions of America’s antebellum crusade against alcohol and their remarkably complex treatment in the tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The inebriates in Hawthorne’s tales are not necessarily drinkers (the writer’s fondness for drink is well known), but rather those reformers and idealists who, in their zeal for perfection, seek to obliterate the past. In his richest portrait of this temporal intemperance, “The Birth-Mark” (1843), Hawthorne portrays the perilous nature and effects of the cultural amnesia that flows from America’s intoxicating confidence in the transformative power of industrial technology. To counter the temporal imbalance of an industrializing nation drunk with the spirit of innovation, Hawthorne’s “temperance” tales ultimately offer a distillation of time that transports the reader into a fluid realm of temporal ambiguity where past, present, and future converge. Reaching far beyond its reformist connotations, “temperance” ultimately proves to be a seminal metaphor for the imaginative state of temporal equilibrium that Hawthorne would achieve as a writer of historical romances.

Documents and Shifting Labor Environments Among Undocumented Migrant Workers in Northern California

AbstractThis article explores the ways in which migrant workers establish particular relations to the state in shifting environments of criminalization and stigmatization that change the geography and nature of undocumented labor in the United States. Centering on Northern California, I address the results of the economic downturn between 2007 and 2009 for undocumented migrant men who had established jobs and paid taxes using fake Social Security cards, but whose labor conditions became unsustainable, leading many of them to turn to informal labor sites. I argue that work environments for many migrants shift to effectively ensure the marginalization of cheap labor, while maintaining their contributions to local economies and accommodating to the political constraints of the moment. I follow accounts of counterfeit identification, mainly fake Social Security cards, in labor practices that inscribe migrant laborers into the “system” they are supposed to be abusing, but to which they actually contribute a great deal through mimetic articulations of citizenship. I show how severing such ties becomes necessary in times of economic crisis and heighted criminalization, and I illustrate the ways in which real and imagined state repression make what Nicholas De Genova (2002) has called “deportability” an effective way to control and maintain an undocumented labor force within the boundaries of the country.

Sidestepping the Political “Graveyard of Creativity”: Polyphonic Narratives and Reenvisioning the Nation-State in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's <em>Half of a Yellow Sun</em>

Although critics of the contemporary anglophone African novel acknowledge its transnational themes, they often associate it with an individualism that is harmoniously reconciled with national responsibility and, therefore, the eventual rehabilitation of the state. These critics’ implicit valorization of the nation-state as a site of shared affective ties overlooks the African novel’s dismantling of a geographically and ideologically determined writerly identity. This essay argues that a narratological approach elucidates the outlines of an imagined state in the African realist novel and the challenges of imagining democracy. Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah links reform to inclusive social dialogue. Half of a Yellow Sun resuscitates this possibility through its structurally complex representation of authorship. Echoing Anthills, Adichie’s novel extends the role of national storyteller to peripheral voices and appears to forecast state rehabilitation. However, this image of inclusivity belies its desire to consolidate, in nationalistic terms, a volatile middle-class identity.

Antrosios Lietuvos Respublikos geokultūrinės orientacijos: etninės valstybės propagavimo atvejis

Kultūrinė diplomatija, pasitelkusi tautinius naratyvus, dažnai reprezentuoja politinę galią, atstovaujamą valdžios elito, ir suteikia užsienio politikai veikimo turinį ir kryptį. Šio straipsnio tikslas yra atskleisti Algirdo Brazausko kultūrinio tapatumo sampratą ir jo santykį su kultūrine diplomatija. Straipsnyje analizuojami Brazausko kultūros sampratos idėjiniai kontekstai, jo tautinės savimonės ir pilietiškumo metmenys bei jo formuoto kultūrinės diplomatijos modelio specifika.

“As a Human to Humans”: The Second Vatican Council’s Understanding of “Self-Revelation” in Context

1. How Speak About Revelation? The basic meaning of the term is to take away a veil, or even more precisely, to retrieve a veil. In other words: something which has not been evident before, because it was covered, becomes visible through a certain action--it is revealed. This point of view departs from a potential object of cognition that is hidden from the eyes of an observer; the reason why the observer cannot see the object is grounded in the object itself, in its concealment, its Verborgenheit (1) or even Verdrehung, as the late Martin Heidegger would say. The American political philosopher John Rawls casts--probably unintentionally--a different light on the concept of revelation: in work A Theory of Justice, first published in 1971, he introduces the idea of a of ignorance, an imaginative state of origin that disables the subject from knowing his place in society, class position or social status, nor does anyone know fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, intelligence, strength, and the like. (2) Behind this of ignorance, people are able choose and determine principles of justice in a way that is not influenced by personal interests, because they do not know about their position in the society and judge therefore in a fair way. For the context of a reflection on the concept of revelation, it is interesting that Rawls in understanding of a of ignorance does not attribute the concealment an object, but the subject of cognition; it is not that the object is unknowable, but that the subject is not knowledgeable. What sounds trivial at first glance offers an interesting perspective on the sense of revelation: revelation does not only mean that a veil is removed from a concealed object, but it also could signify that a veil is withdrawn from the eyes of a subject enable the person see what was already unconcealed in itself, but is still invisible for the subject with the veil in front of eyes. This provides an interesting understanding of revelation which will serve as a preliminary definition for the reflections come: revelation is not primarily a supernatural appearance or a visitation of things, but an empowerment of human beings recognize seemingly ordinary and contingent occurrences as meaningful and disclosing of the question of who God, oneself, and the world is. 2. Revelation in its Conceptual Diversity: The Intellectual Background of Vatican II Christian manifests itself in a visible, concrete, and positive form as a phenomenon. (3) Cultural phenomena can always be considered from different perspectives: one and the same medieval text, for instance, can be interesting for theologians or philosophers, for historians or sociologists, for law scholars, librarians, or scientists who try determine its exact age. A similar observation could be made with regard revelation. One could choose several perspectives: the Existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers asks, for example, whether a revelation destroys what he calls the philosophical faith (4) in God, which has simple assumptions and which, so Jaspers claims, bases itself on reason alone. Together with the Idealistic philosopher Schelling, one could consider whether there are other forms of revelation outside religion, like art or philosophy. (5) Referring the enlightenment thinker Lessing, one could investigate the practical consequences of revelation in the form of the education of mankind, as he called it. (6) All these are possible approaches, but they do not fulfil the Council's primary perspective. On November 18, 1965, the Fathers of the Council voted accept a so-called dogmatic constitution on the meaning of revelation with a majority of 2,344 affirmative votes, and only 4 votes opposed. (7) The initial words of the document already offer a vision and gave the name the entire text, Dei Verbum: Hearing the word of God with reverence and proclaiming it with faith. …

Characteristics and factors related to quality of life in Mexican Mestizo patients with celiac disease.

BackgroundCeliac disease (CD) is a global health problem and its prevalence is underestimated, especially in Latin American populations. Our aim was to evaluate the clinical features, psychological factors, and health-related quality of life (QoL), before and after diagnosis, in a representative sample of adult Mexican Mestizo patients presenting with CD.MethodsA cross-sectional analysis was conducted on patients seen at two tertiary referral centers in Mexico. QoL before and after CD diagnosis was evaluated using the EuroQoL 5D, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), and the disease-specific Celiac Symptom Index (CSI) questionnaires.ResultsWe included 80 patients (80% were women, with a mean age of 48.6 ± 14.1 years). The most common symptoms were diarrhea (86%), bloating (77.5%), and abdominal pain (71.3%). Mean symptom duration was 10.33 ± 6.3 years. Fifty-one patients (63.8%) had a previous diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and 23 (28.8%) had one of functional dyspepsia. Questionnaire respondents rated their health status at 50% before diagnosis (0 = worst imaginable state, 100 = best imaginable state) and there was a significant improvement of 26% after diagnosis. Thirty-nine percent of the patients had a CSI score > 45 and they were the ones that had been previously diagnosed most often with IBS (p = 0.13) or dyspepsia (p = .036).ConclusionsAt the time of diagnosis, Mexican Mestizo patients with CD had poor QoL. Long-standing symptoms and a previous diagnosis of functional disorders were associated with worse QoL. As in other populations, our results support the need for a detailed examination of cost-effective strategies for increasing CD awareness in clinical practice.

Visions in Verse: Writing the Visual in Romantic Dream Visions

Visions in Verse:Writing the Visual in Romantic Dream Visions Anita O’Connell (bio) In Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology the criterion for distinguishing dreams from reality is rational communication (Schlutz 113). Quoting Heraclitus’s dictum, “when we are awake we have a world in common, but when we are asleep each has his own world,” Kant argues that the faculty of fantasy blurs this distinction (Kant, Anthropology 63; see Schlutz 113). Inspiration and original genius are the “involuntary and hence dream-like products of fantasy” (Schlutz 115, see Kant 50–51). Inspired poetry and art sit uneasily, for Kant, between sleep and waking as they rise up out of the world of dreams to communicate their visions within the waking world. For Romantic poets, it follows that art and poetry could also act as an essential bridge between the two worlds, as a means of communicating the dreams and visions of the creative mind with the outside world. They were a representation for the outside world of what lies inside that otherwise exclusive state of the dreaming mind. Some of the best-known Romantic dream visions, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” John Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, as discussed here, attempt to take up this challenge and seek to communicate the inspired visions that lie at the heart of the original creative idea. In The Fall of Hyperion, Keats embraces this role for the poet, claiming “poesy alone can tell her dreams” (8). However, like many Romantic dream visions that reflect on their own creation, the poem is keenly aware of one crucial problem inherent in this process: language. Before the twentieth century, ideas, thoughts, and inspired moments were all thought to be visual, not linguistic. To take creative ideas from the imaginative mind and communicate them with the world through poetry involved a transformation from the visual to the linguistic, from visions into verse. In the Romantic period the creative vision in the mind could refer to the inner experience of any of a range of imaginative states, from thoughts and ideas to the vision that is imagined when reading, composing poetry, daydreaming, in reverie, madness, or sleeping dreams. This is what Alan Richardson refers to in “Reimagining the Romantic Imagination,” borrowing neuroscience’s current terminology, as “the default mode.” [End Page 35] For Richardson, memory, prospective “future thinking,” daydreaming, nocturnal dreaming, and theory of mind or mind reading are linked in Romantic brain science as what scientists might now call defaulting, but which was understood in the Romantic period as various ways of imagining (389). When Romantic poets explore these states of mind, they understand them as a spectrum of liminal imaginative states. Shelley and Coleridge both argue that the imaginative states in this spectrum differ only in degree, not in kind.1 In Speculations on Metaphysics, Shelley claims that: Thoughts, or ideas, or notions … differ from each other, not in kind, but in force. It has commonly been supposed that those distinct thoughts … which are called real … are totally different in kind from those … such as hallucinations, dreams and the ideas of madness. No essential distinction between any one of these ideas, or any class of them, is founded on a correct observation of the nature of things. (59–60) Shelley here claims a similar cognitive process for dreams and hallucinations as for thoughts or ideas, varying only in the degree to which the waking reason has control over the imaginative state. Though they differ in degree or force, they are similar in kind because in each the mind imagines a mental image. A vision in the mind was at the heart of all of these states because the imagination was, in essence, the image-making faculty. From the time of Aristotle one of the primary roles of the imagination was to create and store images within the mind. As Alexander Schlutz explains in Mind’s World: Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism, for Aristotle the role of the “phantasia” (which would later become the imagination) was to allow a mediation between aesthesis (sense-perception) and dianoia (discursive thought). As the ability to...

Beowulf ’s Poetics of Absorption: Narrative Syntax and the Illusion of Stability in the Fight with Grendel’s Mother

Beowulf ’s Poetics of Absorption: Narrative Syntax and the Illusion of Stability in the Fight with Grendel’s Mother Evelyn Reynolds In Beowulf, the last survivor stands before the barrow in which he has just interred his kin (lines 2236–2246).1 Absorbed in grief, he then speaks his famous lament for his lost people. The poem allows us partly to imagine the survivor and his world as his lament unfolds, but it also bars us from becoming fully affectively engaged with him by positioning him as alone (he has no audience, and he does not address us; we only overhear him) and by setting his elegy in syntactically negative, imagistically sketchy forms (lines 2247–2254). “Heald þū nū, hrūse, nū hæleð ne m(ō)stan, / eorla ǣhte” [Earth, hold now the possessions of earls, what heroes cannot] (lines 2247–2248), the survivor opens, but in this sentence he gives no more precise direct object than “eorla ǣhte” [possessions of earls]. Instead of describing his people’s treasure, he says that “hyt ǣr . . . / gōde begēaton” [good men earlier obtained it] (lines 2248–2249). Beowulf does not allow its audience to picture the treasures or the survivor or his people, and by preventing a full mental picturing, it lessens affective engagement.2 We are thus barred from sympathy with the survivor’s grief at the same time as we hear his expression of grief. The poem focuses the audience’s attention on the survivor, yet denies them their full ability to sympathize with him. This state of imaginative and affective suspension I call the absorption-denial dynamic.3 The absorption-denial dynamic exemplified by the lay of the last survivor characterizes several passages in Beowulf and provides a useful means of understanding how Beowulf ’s formal elements operate on the imaginative and affective states of the poem’s audience.4 As I define it, the absorption-denial dynamic is the way in which a poem immerses its audience while at the same time distancing that audience. We are familiar with the sense of being absorbed in a text—that sense of having our imaginations filled with imagery and emotion. Yet the absorption-denial dynamic makes explicit the paradoxical fact that the artwork also forces its audience [End Page 43] to realize that they are outside its world, ultimately not able to sympathize with or picture its characters fully. One effect of the absorption-denial dynamic is a stilling of time: the audience finds itself suspended between immersion in and separation from the artwork. Often, absorptive pieces represent moments in which something is about to change but has not yet done so—the survivor is about to die from heartbreak; Heorot is about to burn—to enhance the audience’s sense of imaginative or affective suspension with a sense of temporal suspension. In this article, I will focus on a passage in Beowulf that embodies this liminal temporality in a surprising way. This passage is Beowulf’s fight with Grendel’s mother, which runs from line 1399 to line 1569. Depicting Beowulf’s encounter with Grendel’s mother in her underwater cave, the fight scene is an example of an epic set piece. It is an unusual example of an absorptive scene since it is not contemplative or explicitly affective, as is the lay of the last survivor or the poem’s concluding depiction of Beowulf’s funeral pyre. Beowulf and the monster are absorbed in fighting each other; the audience expects a dynamic, quickly moving battle narrative, a narrative that invites complete imaginative immersion in the action. Beowulf’s fight with Grendel’s mother contains syntactic structures that are not present during Beowulf’s fight with Grendel, syntactic structures that might seem aesthetically counterintuitive to a modern audience. Indeed, whereas Beowulf’s fight with Grendel often receives scholarly attention because the poet renders the fight in gripping synesthetic detail, his fight with Grendel’s mother has seldom been discussed in aesthetic terms.5 However, the poem’s linguistic structures here actually slow the narrative’s pace and prevent audience immersion. A reexamination of Beowulf ’s formal elements in light of the way they position the poem’s audience, particularly...

States of imagination

This article recontextualises the way we think of the state, and asserts its continuing importance for the left. It argues that we need to re-imagine the state as a site of contestation and compromise, not a monolithic entity. Social movements and new ideas can lead to new settlements within the state: there are therefore always political possibilities for change. The article draws on a range of newspaper headlines that show something of the current contradictory responses to the changing role of the state, as well as the affective dimensions of those responses. Many of these headlines point to continuing attachments to collectivity and solidarity in insecure times – 'residual attachments', marked by the continuation of questions that cannot be answered in the terms of the dominant market ideology. But they also express newer identifications and politics, and these point to the need for state to also adapt to emergent, more dialogic, forms of engagement.

Violent Modernity: Gender, Race and Bodies in Contemporary South African Politics

In May 2012, an artwork on President Zuma caused a public storm about the relationship between freedom of expression, dignity and the rights of the artist. In subsequent political debates on Brett Murray's Spear, art and politics met in a heightened clash that embodied all the tensions of a country moving imperfectly towards an imagined state of democracy. In that clash, what was said mattered no less than who said it, and the significance of the debate related to the heart of how democracy ought to be understood. This article argues that the question of where gender equality might feature in South African democracy was less widely debated. More specifically, in the angst that characterized responses to the painting and responses to the responses, considerable anxiety was expressed about two aspects of democracy. The first related to whether or not the liberal political norms of the South African constitution were in danger of being eroded by a socially conservative populist movement. The second related to the sense of citizenship: who belongs in South Africa, who has the right to criticize and who is an authentic citizen. There was little attention to a discussion of what is entailed in the making of the postcolonial subject and especially in the way in which gender complicates modern democracy. The article argues for considering race and gender as inextricable. It suggests that the limits of democracy are most clearly visible when bodies become present in the public sphere.

Imagining the post-apartheid state: an ethnographic account of Namibia

List of Figures List of Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1. Imagining States Chapter 2. State Imaginings PART I: GOVERN-MENTALITY IN KAOKOLAND Chapter 3. 'How Do You Feeling about Freedom' Chapter 4. The Art of Being Governed PART II: COURTS, LAWS, AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE Chapter 5. In the Matter of The State v. Custom Chapter 6. Judicial Statements Chapter 7. Legal States of Imagination and their Effect PART III: CHIEFSHIP AND THE POST-APARTHEID STATE Chapter 8. Making Politics, Making History Chapter 9. 'Tradition', Authority and the State in Northern Kaokoland Conclusion Chapter 10. Towards an Ethnography of the (Namibian) State Notes References Index

Is Imagination Introspective?

The literature suggests that in sensory imagination we focus on the imagined objects, not on the imaginative states themselves, and that therefore imagination is not introspective. It is claimed that the introspection of imaginative states is an additional cognitive ability. However, there seem to be counterexamples to this claim. In many cases in which we sensorily imagine a certain object in front of us, we are aware that this object is not really where we imagine it to be. So it looks as if in these cases of imagination, we are aware of the mere appearance of the imagined object, and hence introspection is a constitutive part of imagination. In this article, I address this contradictory state of affairs and argue that we should classify at least some forms of sensory imagination as introspective. For this purpose I use the appearance-reality distinction as a central notion for introspection. I also defend the thesis of introspective imagination against the objection that young children imagine without yet understanding the concept of experience.

Homeless Houses: Classifying Walker Evans's Photographs of Victorian Architecture

In the December 1933 issue of the Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, Lincoln Kirstein announced a small exhibition of thirty-nine photographs of Victorian architecture by Walker Evans that he had assembled in the museum's Architecture room.1 He provided a pithy analysis of the work and a meditation on the medium itself: Photography is in essence a scientifically accurate process for the reproduction of objective appearances, a stationary magic that fixes a second from time's passage on a single plane. Its greatest service is documentary. Walker Evans's photographs are such perfect documents that their excellence is not assertive. In his series of American Federal and Victorian architecture … he is providing illustrations for a monumental history of the American art of building in its most imaginative and impermanent state. These wooden houses disintegrate, almost, between snaps of the lens. Many shown in these photographs no longer stand.2

RecentPhilosophicalWork on theConnection betweenMusic and theEmotions

ABSTRACTThis study asserts that philosophical interest in the connection between music and the emotions lies in the light it could throw on the nature of expression. Expression in turn is interesting because of the light it could throw on the nature of understanding and of value. Three different sorts of theory are considered: those that rely on experienced resemblance, those that rely on some imaginative state and those that rely on an aroused feeling. It is suggested, following Malcolm Budd, that room might be found for all these accounts.

Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (review)

Reviewed by: Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh Gerard Carruthers Ian Duncan , Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Pp. xix, 387. $39.50. Ian Duncan's book confirms the fact that Scottish fiction in "the Age of Scott" is now a site of mature critical enquiry. For too long, Scottish critics tended to read Walter Scott as simply and fatally codifying a Unionist ideology in his writing. For its part, Romantic criticism tended to see work by Scott, James Hogg, and John Galt as rather too Scottish—and thus of peripheral concern to the main agenda of nationally transcendent Romantic creativity, where in any case poetry took center stage. Since the 1990s, however, much has changed. Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism (1997) saw the novel in the British Isles of the early nineteenth century as essaying states of development in British civilization and its residual forms of primitivism in ways that made the novel as multivalent as any poem and far from simply (as in much previous criticism) a cheerleader for Whig historical progress. In the Scottish and Irish contexts, Luke Gibbons, Cairns Craig, Leith Davis, Ina Ferris, Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Duncan himself, and a host of others, have now established a formidable body of critical writing in which the "historical," "national" narratives of nineteenth-century novels are also interpreted as response to the challenges of modernity. Scott's Shadow brings into focus, the title signals, the way in which tradition and modernity compete with one another in the novel as conceived in Edinburgh in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The opening chapter, "Edinburgh, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," very wittily points to the way in which the publishing firm Blackwood's (prominent among several such companies) arguably made Edinburgh the cultural center of the English-speaking world for a time, as well as the way in which Edinburgh not only produced much cultural capital through printed books and periodicals but also made itself anew as a "national" capital suited to a new imperial "British," or [End Page 333] (more neutrally) a new international, age, in which it was part of an economic and political unit that was far from simply "Scottish." At the same time, "Scottishness" became a new kind of commodity. As Duncan puts it: "The national obsolescence of Scotland, its consignment to a 'classical' antiquity, [could] be prevented by cultivating that past, by converting the foundation of national identity from politics to culture" (17). In one manifestation of Scottish cultural transformation, Duncan provides the best critical analysis of John Gibson Lockhart's Peter's Letters to His Kinsfolk (1819) yet published, using it to examine the formation of a Tory Romanticism. Lockhart's idea of Scott as rarefied "Wizard of the North" tended to sever Scott from his Enlightenment and even Whig-tinctured cultural roots. At the end of his chapter, Duncan's depiction of Lockhart's romantically grotesque transmogrification of his father-in-law into a kind of zombie is both hilarious and astute. What Duncan is essaying is Lockhart's long influential projection of Scott as gothic spirit of the age par excellence disembodied from the contemporary and also truly historic concerns of the nation. Duncan's third chapter, "Economies of National Character," provides much welcome new material on Elizabeth Hamilton's The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808) and Susan Ferrier's Marriage (1818) as especially informing the implicit debate in novels of the period as to whether the stock Scottish character should become a satirical or heroic figure—both of these types having complicated implications in terms of what they signal of Scotland's imagined state of economic development. Which way was the Scottish novel to go in this period? Was it to pursue pawky regional humor or sublime national heroism? Duncan, in his next chapter, answers that it does both. In his astonishing reading of Scott's Rob Roy, he demonstrates by way of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, that "modernity, far from abolishing the difference between civilization and barbarism, preserves it—produces it—inside itself, in a relation of perpetual violence" (107). With this more complex interpretation, which begins to rescue...

The Utopian Function of Affect in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café

Despite the prevalence of social themes in her fiction, Carson McCullers has not acquired a reputation as a writer with a progressive social vision. One reason for this view of McCullers's work is that her oblique approach to political matters of race, gender, and class has led many readers to view her work symbolically. A survey of McCullers criticism in the decades following the publication of her final novel would indicate that she exposes unhappiness that is spiritually, not historically, derived; that her works are allegorical depictions of loneliness and longing belonging to everyone; that her interest in socially and politically marginalized characters serves primarily to illustrate a universally tragic human condition. Changes to this critical approach to McCullers have been a long time coming. Since the 1970s, feminist critics like Elaine Ginsberg and Louise Westling have worked to recover the historical dimension of her work by foregrounding its exposure of gender roles, and now McCullers's cast of oddballs and freaks is often taken as a model of diversity and heterogeneity that is at least quasi-political in nature. The pall of tragedy, however, has for the most part remained. Only recently, with the 2003 publication of Sarah Gleeson-White's Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers, has a critic attempted to introduce a more affirmative view of McCullers, celebrating her menacing and ultimately transgressive vision, and its emancipatory and empowering (10). Given the heavy emotional tones of suffering and frustration that surround most of McCullers's characters, the relative lateness of this kind of appraisal is not surprising. Yet there are other elements in her work that suggest that tragedy is not her only mode of operation. True, her characters almost invariably suffer, and the worlds they inhabit are dim. But they are also frequently dreamers whose most consistent trait is the capacity to project themselves into some anticipated and variously imagined state of incipient togetherness. It matters little that the content of their respective visions often leaves them isolated or at odds with each other (as evinced in the explosive meeting between Jake Blount and Benedict Mady Copeland, Marxist visionaries both, at the end of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter). The presence of so many dreamers under one sky is a sign of untapped utopian potential which the failure of each individual only seems to emphasize. If McCullers's work traditionally has not been identified with hopeful affirmation it is only because the personal tragedies of her characters have clouded readers' perceptions of the utopian nature of her vision, a vision that is attuned to the social potential inherent in the collective, even while it seems to insist on the tragedy that besets individuals. The key to recognizing the utopian dimension of McCullers's fiction is to consider the conditions that impose limits and create possibilities in her characters' lives. In her fiction as well as in her expository writing, McCullers identifies these conditions with affective states. In a passage from her 1949 essay Loneliness... An American Malady, for example, she emphasizes how affect (in this case love) has the capacity to engender social as well as personal possibilities: Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the lyon, and there is a paradox about personal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: Who am I? Why am I? Where am I going?--and having cast out fear, can be honest and charitable. (Mortgaged 260) In what follows I am going explore the social extension of the we to which McCullers refers, especially in light of her comments about love opening new relations between the personality and the world. …