Late Modernity Research Articles

Visionary or Voyeur: Lionel Wendt and the Contradictions of Late Colonial Modernity in Ceylon

The voyeuristic qualities that permeate the vast oeuvre of Ceylonese photographer Lionel Wendt (1900-1944) are a point of contention within scholarship on his work. Scholars counter claims of voyeurism by underscoring his national belonging to Ceylon, his anti-colonial politics, or the global modernist influences on his aesthetic. Many of these analyses rely on Wendt’s biography to contextualize the formal qualities of his photographs. While his biography is important for establishing his influences and motivations as a photographer, it can overshadow the insight offered by the images themselves. This paper draws on a selection of Wendt’s photographs to chart a dialogue between their formal qualities and the political and cultural context of their production, such as a modernist visual arts movement in Ceylon, and a changing political economy as the island approached independence from colonial rule. I argue for a more robust definition of Ceylon modernism that accounts for its relationship to the social modernity during the late colonial era. I then recalibrate the question of voyeurism through an examination of the most common recipient of Wendt’s gaze: the laborer. I pair a formal reading of Wendt’s photo series Men at Work with a discussion of Ceylon’s labor movement, including its contested and antagonistic relationship to the growing nationalist politics of the period. Through my analysis, I foreground the contradictions so characteristic of late colonial modernity in Ceylon, as well as the limitations of binary anti/post-colonial discursive frameworks in which Wendt has been understood.

From Scapegoating to the Culture of Cruelty: (Mis)Managing Mimetic Desire and Violence in Late Modernity

Due to the ‘civilizing process’ (Elias), the overall level of violence is decreasing; yet its transforming patterns persist. The article aims at examining the contemporary structures and mechanisms responsible for violence control, while also exploring the newly emerging, naturalized patterns of cruelty. Firstly, René Girard’s mimetic theory is overviewed: while in archaic societies, mimetic crisis is controlled by sacrificial rites, modernization reconfigures this paradigm. Secondly, these transformations are mapped: mimetic desire is channelled into the market processes, while mimetic crisis is managed by the state monopolizing violence. Thirdly, the structural transformations of late modernity upsetting the fragile balance of state and market are analysed: secular scapegoating becomes part of the political toolset, while the private sphere is overwhelmed by undetectable new forms of hurting and self-harming. As a culture of cruelty is naturalized, mimetic crisis becomes a continuous threat, which generates a need for the functional equivalents of sacrificial violence control.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE OPTICAL INDUSTRY OF THE USSR IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1940S - MID-1960S UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF TRANSITION TOWARDS LATE INDUSTRIAL MODERNIZATION

The purpose of the research. The purpose of the research work was to study the history of optics as one of the high-tech industries of production and science in the context of the transition to late industrial modernization. The topic is actualized by the modern conditions of the formation of the post-industrial economy and the need for import substitution in the face of sanctions pressure. Results. In the second half of the 1940s - mid-1960s, having carried out re-evacuation and reconversion, the optical and mechanical industry of the USSR expanded its production and scientific base, mastered new types of optical products, and improved optical glass production technologies. The scientific and technological revolution has led to the emergence of new high-tech industries in need of high-tech optical devices (space industry, electronics, photo-film industry). In the second half of the 1940s - mid-1960s. The Soviet industrial modernization in optics was entering its final stage, and the fourth technological order was taking shape, within the framework of which there was a proliferation of conveyor production, laser technology, alignment equipment, and programmable machine tools. By the mid-1960s, the country was well-off in competition with the West in optical technologies, the USSR produced high-precision optical devices for export. The successes of the optical and mechanical industry and science created the prerequisites for the transition of the Soviet Union to a post-industrial economy.

The Defective Image of Man in Modern Drama: A Critical Study of August Strindberg's The Father

As a matter of fact, the "defective male" is a new form of masculinity that appeared in late 19th-century modern drama, while traditional ideals portrayed strong, heroic men driven by reason and duty. Strindberg's The Father introduced complex male characters who faced inner conflicts and social pressures. Captain Adolph struggles hard to establish a male-identity not only as a good father but also as a loyal, sincere husband, hard-working researcher and scholar and eventually a man with strong morality and convictions. His tragic victimization by his extremely dominant wife, Laura, the monstrous mother, and how her domination leads to the madness of the father. Strindberg challenges traditional notions of paternal authority, exposing the helplessness that lies beneath the surface of apparent strength. The purpose of this study is to highlight the negative effect of a mother's dominance over her children and others. It critically examines the portrayal of man and the father figure in The Father by August Strindberg, focusing on the portrayal of defective masculinity and the challenges to traditional gender roles. The play digs deeply into the complexities of human relationships, particularly the breakdown of the paternal figure and the psychological turmoil. The narrative reveals Captain Adolph, a once authoritative and confident father, conflicts with the loss of his identity and the destruction of his reality. It is nothing compared to a father's tormented suffering.

The Slow Intimacy of Necropolitics

Human beings seem to have a fascination with pictures of death or what can be called ‘necrovoyeurism’. Circulating pictures of dead bodies has become easier with the use of social media. Necropolitics or the politics of death relates to the careless treatment of the lives of the marginalised, destitute and the ones without voice, the precariat. In late modernity one of the shadow sides of democracy is necropolitics, using processes of social exclusion and devaluing the lives of the poor and the ones in need through the desire to ‘keep them out’ – to curb mobility through the brutality of borders that often leads to death. This article concerns itself with the slow intimacy of necropolitics – how, through looking at pictures of death and redistributing them by retweeting, appropriating, decontextualising and recontextualising them we slowly become acquainted with the intimacy of death that may prevent an authentic empathy or desire to change the conditions of the marginalised.

Перемен требуют наши сердца. Образ рок-музыканта в позднесоветском кинематографе

The article analyses the image of a rock musician in the late Soviet and modern Russian cinema. Having appeared on screen in the mid-80s, a rock musician character type immediately had a cult following. The image represented a hero of the then-new time, a singer of freedom, a bearer of a different, “correct” pro-Western worldview, starting from the appearance and ending with the philosophy of life, and a symbol of disagreement not only with the generation of fathers but also with the then-existing, “wrong” world order in general. A rock musician in the perestroika cinema was a typical rebel character who appeared in the world cinema at the turn of epochs. The author of the article formulates the cultural codes behind the representation of such a character type on screen, traces its transformation, and comes to the conclusion that the meanings behind a rock musician character type are gradually losing their immediate relevance in modern Russian cinema.

후기 현대영어 시기(1700-1900)의 영어 규범 용법(Prescriptive Usage)의 발달에 관한 연구

후기 현대영어 시기(1700-1900)의 영어 규범 용법(Prescriptive Usage)의 발달에 관한 연구

Late Modern Projectivity and Existentialism

The article addresses the issue of the relationship between existentialism and late modern projectivity interpreted in terms of project work and of biographical projectivity. It does so from the perspective of transformations of subjectivity in modernity and late modernity, and, therefore, from the perspective of the process of individualization. The objective is to answer the question of the belonging of existentialism to one of these sociocultural formations. For these purposes, some major categories of existentialism such as project, anxiety, and temporality are analyzed. Their analysis leads to the conclusion that there is a close, structural correlation between existentialism and sociocultural structures of modernity as well as that existentialism, in contrast to late modern projectivity, has some emancipatory potential related to its alienating status in modernity. The article refers to the methodology of qualitative sociology.

Late Modern Individualization in Light of Critical Theory (the Frankfurt School): An Essay

The article describes the dialectic of the process of individualization in modernity and late modernity from the perspective of critical theory, particularly in its classical form (Frankfurt School). This dialectic consists in the transformation of individualization as a medium of emancipation into individualization understood not only as an ideology but most of all as a productive force of neoliberal capitalism, as a principle of its functioning. The article discusses the social-cultural determinants of this transformation, and subsequently the way in which late-modern individualism in the form of self-realization is functionalized by the market and subjected to the requirements of profit and efficiency in individual areas of economic and social life in the neoliberal world. The article refers to the methodology of qualitative sociology.

The Current Discourse of the New Biographism in the Contemporary Cinema

The article is devoted to the actual problems of the biographical genre in cinematography. This genre arose at the very beginning cinematography and developed in the 1920s. However, the first classic examples of it were created in England in the mid-1930s by Alexander Corda (in particular — «Rembrandt»).Soon, the totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union, Italy and Germany began to actively use it with varying degrees of success. We can see the paradoxical flowerishing genre in the 1950s when it underwent final academisization and codification, but lost touch with real life (despite some successes, par example, the film «Taras Shevchenko» by Ihor Savchenko). The follow years demonstrate a variety of undividual options, both in the works of artists of «poetic cinema» («Dream» by Volodymyr Denysenko) and artists of late modernism («Dante`s Inferno» by Ken Russel, «Portrait of Rembrandt» by Jos Stelling). For the first time, artists of naïve direction (Pirosmani, Chontvari) become heroes of feature films. But the genre really changes already at the turn of the century. It draws attention to artists with disabilities, marginals, representatives of national and sexual minorities. A typical example is Frida Cahlo, a heroine at least three films. Finally, the image of female artist — a dissident (Alla Gorska in «Forbidden» by Roman Brovko) or a simple village woman (Katerina Bilokur in «Mad Woman» by Victor Vasylenko) appears in Ukrainian cinema. And even in the realm classics, the most popular characters remain artists with victim fate: Van Goht, Modigliani, Goya, and again Rembrandt. We have, of course, Taras Shevcenko.

Exploitation of Pigs during the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period in Croatia

This study investigated the historical consumption of pork in Croatia through a comprehensive analysis of pig bones from six medieval archaeological sites, comprising three castles and three monasteries dating from the 13th to the 16th century A.D. Employing a detailed morphological analysis of pig bones and teeth, the study quantified the number of identified specimens (NISP) per site. On bones and teeth, identification of sex and age was performed, and butchery patterns were documented. The results revealed a significant presence of pork in the diet of castle and monastery inhabitants, with pig bones being the most abundant animal remains. Age analysis suggested a prevalence of juvenile pigs, predominantly males. The findings implied that from the 13th to the 16th century A.D., pork was a staple in the diet of castles and monasteries in continental Croatia, sourced from pig breeding outside these sites. Typically, male pigs aged under two years were delivered for consumption to these establishments.

Cross-linguistic Dependency Length Minimization in scientific language

Abstract We use Universal Dependencies (UD) for the study of cross-linguistic diachronic syntactic complexity reduction. Specifically, we look at whether and how scientific English and German minimize the length of syntactic dependency relations in the Late Modern period (ca. 1650–1900). Our linguistic analysis follows the assumption that over time, scientific discourse cross-linguistically develops towards an increasingly efficient syntactic code by minimizing Dependency Length (DL) as a factor of syntactic complexity. For each language, we analyse a large UD-annotated scientific and general language corpus for comparison. While on a macro level, our analysis suggests that there is an overall diachronic cross-linguistic and cross-register reduction in Average Dependency Length (ADL), on the micro level we find that only scientific language shows a sentence length independent reduction of ADL, while general language shows an overall decrease of ADL due to sentence length reduction. We further analyse the syntactic constructions responsible for this reduction in both languages, showing that both scientific English and German increasingly make use of short, intra-phrasal dependency relations while long dependency relations such as clausal embeddings become rather disfavoured over time.

The plague, the skill-premium, and the road to modern economic growth

Abstract When bubonic plague arrived in Britain in the mid-14th century, it caused dramatic economic and structural change. Within 50 years, the skill-premium was reduced by half, and another 50 years on, agriculture’s share of the labor force had declined by more than 20 percentage points. This paper develops a two-sector pre-industrial growth model and draws on recent data sources covering Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain to explain these and the ensuing developments. Our main findings are that the skill-premium’s decline was related to the guild and apprenticeship system and that it and the other post-Plague adjustments were crucial determinants of the British trajectory toward industrialization. In particular, prior sectoral transformation and the skill-premium’s determination were important when the Early Modern population boom (1525–1654) threatened to reverse the adjustments caused by the Plague.

Opportunity or burden? Shifting femininities and women’s experiences in a pre-professional business leadership setting

In this exploratory study, I analyse women’s experiences in a pre-professional business leadership setting. I adopt a perspective of structural contraints and conceptually draw on the construction of the ‘ideal’ female subject in late modernity and ‘new’ femininities. I argue that, although they are shifting, femininities persist to be a structurally rooted burden for assuming leadership roles for the women in this study. I develop my argument based on four interviews with women from an entrepreneurship programme in the United Kingdom. These women experience a double-bind in being a woman and being a leader and, importantly, anticipate further experience of such double-bind in the future. This creates a tension between their constructions of self, in which the women draw on ‘post-feminist’ discourses, and their experiences of inequalities. This research, hence, improves our understanding of women’s experiences in busines leadership settings by looking at the early-career stage, a perspective which is currently underdeveloped in the literature. This research also links women’s experiences in business leadership settings to the construction of the ‘ideal’ female subject and ‘new’ femininities by drawing on empirical data. The essay builds a starting point for further research by providing initial insights into these topics.

Imaging Authority, Authorship and Mortality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Imaging Authority, Authorship and Mortality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

No Such Thing as Free Speech? Performativity, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in the UK

AbstractThe relationship between academic freedom and freedom of speech features prominently in public and political discussions concerning the role of universities in Western liberal democracies. Recently, these debates have attracted increased attention, owing in part to media framing of a ‘free speech crisis’, especially in UK and US universities. One type of response is to regulate academic expression through legislation, such as the UK’s 2023 Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. This article offers a critical analysis of the assumptions concerning the performativity of speech in this kind of legal intervention. It extends Judith Butler’s discussion of the concept of ‘harmful speech’ as reported by Butler (Excitable speech: a politics of the performative, Routledge Classics, London, 1997) to conceptualize speech-acts as performative not only when it comes to populations, but also when it comes to institutions. Reconceptualizing universities as producing as well as being constituted by speech-acts, the article argues that the effects of free speech legislation need to be considered in the context of the transformation of universities and other political actors (including governments and student unions) in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It argues that legal enforcement of free speech at universities further obscures the distinction between negative and positive liberties identified by Isaiah Berlin (Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1958), and considers this shift as part of the reconfiguration of political ontology in late modernity.

Insufficient Cold Resistance as a Possible Reason for the Absence of Darkling Beetles (Coleoptera, Tenebrionidae) in Pleistocene Sediments of Siberia.

The level of diversity and abundance of darkling beetles (Coleoptera, Tenebrionidae) is the main difference between the late Pleistocene and modern insect faunas of arid regions. In the Pleistocene assemblages they are extremely rare, whereas in the modern ones they predominate. It is assumed that the reason for their rarity in fossil entomological complexes is their lack of cold resistance. The supercooling points (SCP) and low lethal temperatures (LLT) of adults from five species of Altai darkling beetles that overwinter in the soil and larvae from one such species were measured in the laboratory. All beetles supercooled at negative temperatures but could not survive freezing, with the average SCP of the most cold-resistant species between -25.7 and -21.7 °C (Bioramix picipes, Anatolica dashidorzsi, and Penthicus altaicus). However, 50% of the individuals from different species in the experiment died after exposure during two days at temperatures ranging from -22 to -20 °C. The focal species are distributed in parts of Central Asia with an extreme continental climate, and the temperatures measured in the soil of these natural areas turned out to be lower than or close to the limit of cold resistance of the beetles. Overwintering of darkling beetles is therefore only possible in areas with deep snow: in hollows, under bushes, and under large cereals. Darkling beetles with poor cold resistance could not have existed in the colder climate of the late Pleistocene, which explains their absence from fossil fauna.

Возвращение в Уэльс: поэзия Линетт Робертс 1940-х годов

The paper examines the poetry of Lynette Roberts (1909-1995), one of the most significant but little-studied authors of the late modernism era. A native of Argentina and Welsh by birth, in the 1940s, Roberts carried out a creative experiment, trying to reconstruct the Welsh heritage in her lyrical poetry based not only on traditional myth, but also on direct personal experience. This project resulted in the 1944 collection “Poems” analyzed in the paper. The aim of the research is to determine the specifics of Roberts’s 1940s poetry in the context of the poet’s search for her national identity. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the research is the first Russian work to provide a brief overview of the poet’s biography and writings. It is the first time that the key features of Roberts’s poetics have been identified by analysing the most significant texts from her 1944 collection “Poems”. The research findings showed that there is an unusual synthesis of the modernist and the traditional folk perception of reality in Roberts’s poems. The dual nature of the persona’s view is also explained by her contradictory position: she is inside the Welsh tradition as its heir, but at the same time, she observes it from the outside as a person belonging to a different culture.

The Liturgical Movement in Context of Secularization: Late Modern Developments

The article highlights secular influences in contemporary understandings of liturgical participation by exploring the relationship between visions of the early modern liturgical movement and contemporary ways of understanding participation in the Church of Sweden. The constructs opine, understand, and do are used in the comparison as are the concepts participatio plena, participatio conscia, and participatio actuosa in Sacrosanctum Concilium. An overall reflection based on the analysis is that secular ideologies and trends not only influence liturgical form but tend to erode theological language itself. Religious individualism, combined with “internal ecclesial secularization,” tends to imbue the very understanding of church and of liturgy. A new phase in the liturgical movement called the “late modern liturgical movement” is discussed. The church appears here as the “church of the individual” and the liturgy in the sense of ordo is seen as an “open” order and framework, rather than as juxtaposition and sacramental event.

Alternations (at) that time: NP versus PP time adjuncts in the history of English.

The present paper investigates variation between nominal and prepositional adjuncts of time as in, for example, [on] that day, they left. The main goals are (i)to assess potential changes in the distribution of these variants in the history of English, specifically from Middle English to Late Modern English (1150-1914), and (ii) to test which factors most strongly impact the choice between the two variants, with a focus on the impact of different complexity measures. To address these questions, the paper makes use of data from the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpora of Historical English (PPCME2; PPCEME; PPCMBE), explored by means of logistic regression modelling. The results suggest that there is no dramatic, sweeping change in this abstract alternation over time, but that this variation may mainly plays out on lower, noun-specific levels.