Modern Subject Research Articles

The Moral Valence of Intentionality and the Modern Reproductive Subject

ABSTRACT Critical appraisals of adolescent pregnancy invoke the neoliberal valuation of rational action as moral obligation. Adolescents are portrayed as autonomous modern subjects and expected to demonstrate the virtue of responsibility through the use of biomedical contraceptives. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork focusing on adolescent pregnancy in a small, semirural community outside of Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico, I elucidate the moral landscape within which assertions of intentionality might acquire meaning in the context of adolescent pregnancy. I argue that the stakes involved in normative evaluations of female sexuality and reproduction at my fieldsite are shaped by past and contemporary experiences of EuroAmerican imperialism and are superimposed upon moral scaffolds laid by EuroAmerican colonialism.

КАПІТАЛИЗАЦІЯ ОСОБИСТОСТІ В УМОВАХ ІНФОРМАЦІЙНОГО СУСПІЛЬСТВА

The article is devoted to the actual topic, which reflects modern trends in the development of the information society. The author tried to derive the formula of personal capitalization in the system of self-improvement of the subject. Since modern society is influences by rapid information mobility, individuals have to constantly change. The speed with, which information flows actualize modern human activity, cannot be compared, analyzed or even determined. We can only observe certain trends, but as soon as we can focus on them, they immediately lose their relevance. High informatization conditions imposed on constantly changing trends present new requirements for a modern person. They are little perceptible and the subject is in a constant search for personality characteristics that can satisfy the "insatiable appetites" of the information egregor.The theoretical basis of this article, the work of Michel Foucault, «Self-care» is especially interesting. In this work the author anticipated the modern culture, referring to the work of Christopher Lef «The culture of narcissism». The study of postmodern society updated a list of issues: whether individuals need «spiritual exercises», how to form a system in «self-care», in “knowing yourself”, what is behind these transformations – personal growth or manipulative technologies of a consumer society.The author notes that a person located between social networks, between everyday life and its future projection, loses real assessments of what is happening. These “three pillars” determine the economic, socio-psychological, spiritual and cultural portrait of a modern subject in the conditions of the information society. A person, as a hostage of the system, is looking for opportunities to satisfy their requirements. A personal approach to achieving this goal is the most relevant, since it is much easier at the individual level to adapt to information mobility. For this, it is necessary to undertake the capitalization of one’s own personality in order to be able to allocate assets and liabilities, profitably actualize strengths and work out weaknesses in order to increase competitiveness in the human resources market.Such a pragmatic approach is necessary, first of all, for the individual himself. Working on your-self, self-improvement processes are quite difficult. For their implementation, willpower and internal motivation are necessary. The source of such motivation is most often located from outside, attracting additional external resources. The individual scans the reality around us through the information channels, with the possibility of continuous analysis, feedback searching, how it meets the requirements of a modern public.The analysis of health capital, emotional capital, spiritual capital and social capital are presented as part of a systematic approach, where all components are closely intertwined. The relevance of the topic is to develop a system of personal capital to increase the capitalization of the individual in the information society. Understanding this combination will allow a person to use their own resources more comfortably, as well as better understand personal prospects for growth and development.

The ear from nowhere: Listening techniques and the politics of negation in the practice of Japanese interfaith chaplains

This article examines the politics of listening in the work of Japanese interfaith chaplains. It argues that listening is an important but often overlooked aspect of language ideologies and, more specifically, of the formation of modern subjects. Interfaith chaplains are religious professionals who apply principles of clinical psychology to help people in settings ranging from hospices to disaster areas. The desire to help suffering people who do not share the same religious backgrounds as the chaplains motivates them to cultivate what I call an “ear from nowhere,” which is divorced from their respective religious traditions and from speaking-based authority.

Besides Christianity and Commentary: Techniques of the Self, Self-writing, and Genealogy of the Modern Subject

In this piece, I read Foucault’s text “Self Writing” through the lens of technologies of the self. A late addition to the conceptual framework of Foucault’s project, technologies of the self highlight the way in which the subject can transform him/herself, which adds a new component to the analytic of the formation of subjectivity and the genealogy of the modern subject. In Foucault’s discussion of self-writing, techniques of the self illustrate the nature of the distinction between Greco-Roman and Christian practices, the stakes of the distinction in the work of a genealogy of the modern subject, and the way in which writing as a practice functioned across its historical shifts. I highlight two movements to read Foucault’s comparison of Greco-Roman and Christian writing practices: the development of the techniques, and the development of their ethical values. In particular, I suggest the Christian invention of self-renunciation and self-hermeneutics is a crucial distinction in these techniques. In the end, I move to return to literature in the modern context, even despite its inheritance of these techniques, to consider a case in which the text can illustrate other modes of relation to oneself and, as a critical-political movement, expand the conceptual possibilities of modes of being.

The human body as a problem in post-modern culture

The discourse on the body today appears problematic because the uncertain and changing characteristics of our culture, whose postmodern title is by now insufficient and controversial, place it at the crossroads of ethical, political and biomedical issues. In this paper, the theme is articulated around the dissociation between body and freedom, indicated by several parties as one of the characteristics of the modern subject. This dissociation is at the root of the fundamental ambivalence with which one looks at the body: on the one hand it is exalted as an image of one’s own identity, on the other one attempts to control it in its dynamisms, in the name of individual self-determination. This ambivalence also concerns the progress of biomedical techniques: these are acclaimed if considered a resource for the management of one’s body or, on the contrary, rejected if considered an obstacle to self-affirmation. The positive proposal presupposes an integral anthropology, which overcomes both a naturalistic vision of the body and a purely symbolic vision.

Subject, Structure, and Imagination in the Spanish Discourse on Modernity by Christopher Soufas Jr

Reviewed by: Subject, Structure, and Imagination in the Spanish Discourse on Modernity by Christopher Soufas Jr William Viestenz Soufas, Christopher, Jr. Subject, Structure, and Imagination in the Spanish Discourse on Modernity. Palgrave, 2015. 192 pp. The Spanish resistance to the Enlightenment modality of a self-determinant, autonomous subject in Golden Age and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature is the focus of Christopher Soufas Jr.'s welcome study, Subject, Structure and Imagination in the Spanish Discourse on Modernity. Soufas frames Spain's primary contributions to the unfolding of modernity as a dialectical engagement with the primacy of the subjective capacity for reason, and an objection to the repurposing of the imagination from serving as a conduit for a dialogic relation with the world, to becoming a rival of the intellect in the act of consciousness and elaboration of reasoning practices. Through a wide-ranging and convincing exegesis of canonical texts from Spain's Golden Age and fin de siècle periods, Soufas demonstrates that Spanish attitudes towards subjectivity and imagination remained predicated, to varying degrees, on an early-modern epistemology "which assigns greater value to the concrete physical world (the 'body' of nature as opposed to the 'mind' of a subject) and which continues to depend upon a structural model that resists subject-centered discourse" (7). In lieu of proposing that Spanish authors advocate for one model of the imagination over another, Soufas's tenet is that the discourse on modernity in Spain has roots that precede the epistemological and aesthetic notions of Descartes, Burke, and Kant, to name a few frequently cited names in the text. In his elaboration of the emergence of modernity in Spain as a phenomenon to be understood in both historical and philosophical terms, Soufas's study serves, for Hispanists, as a useful companion to Anthony Cascardi's major study, The Subject of Modernity. Cascardi challenges Jürgen Habermas's contention that the specificity of the modern subject can be understood as a function of philosophy and advocates for studying an intersectionality of discourses, some contrasting with, and others extrapolating upon what came before in the Ancient and Medieval periods. Cascardi's approach, though committing considerable space to Cervantes, is amply theoretical, whereas Soufas's work offers an expanded meditation focused on two important historical periods in Spain, and a series of close readings of essential literary texts, which helps scholars distil a more concentrated understanding of how the tensions and contradictions of the discourse of modernity developed on the Iberian Peninsula. Soufas notes that the majority of writers, including Fredric Jameson with his influential work on the intellectual signposts of modernity's emergence, locate the articulation of the Cartesian cogito as one of the primary fault lines in the transition from a subjectivity intimately associated with the physical and sensorial world, to an autonomous, self-reflexive subject. In the first chapter of the book, [End Page 318] Soufas proposes from this approach that Lazarillo de Tormes constitutes not only an exercise in the picaresque genre, but also an interrogation of the negative fallout from the emergence of an autonomous thinking subject, in contrast to a mode of being attuned to pre-modern and early-modern value systems. This chapter, taken together with contributions focused on Don Quijote, La vida es sueño, El burlador de Sevilla, and Velázquez's "Las meninas," comprises the first section of the text, and demonstrates how the pre- and early-modern Spanish authors exhibited an allegiance to superseded value systems in the face of Europe's transition to modernity. The second chapter dedicated to Cervantes's magnum opus asserts the provocative claim that Quijote's madness was a consequence of modernity's emergence and the demand to exert reasoning practices upon the world in lieu of dialoging with external reality via the senses. Madness, then, becomes less a longing for a past, as documented in the books of chivalry, to which the protagonist is famously attached, and more the end result of an imagination that can no longer direct reason, in a predictable fashion, to "physical and moral circumstance" (44). In the following chapter, Soufas interprets the concluding act of La vida es sueño as a disavowal of...

Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism by John K. Noyes

Reviewed by: Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism by John K. Noyes Beate I. Allert John K. Noyes. Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism. Toronto: The U of Toronto P, 2015. 402 pp. In his helpful introduction, John K. Noyes gives an astute account of cultural history during Herder's time in order to document a growing awareness of the [End Page 377] various dimensions of globalization and the development of an anti-imperialist aesthetics. He argues that "although Herder does not use the word imperialism, it is clear that he talks about what Christopher Bayly calls the 'first age of global imperialism,' beginning around 1760—that is, around the time Herder started to write." Noyes also draws from theoretical works by Dimas Figueroa on the three structural conditions that make globalization possible, from Immanuel Wallerstein's description of "the second era of the great expansion of the capitalist world economy," and from Reinhard Koselleck's 1959 Kritik und Krise with the observation that "in the eighteenth century, the modern subject became increasingly defined as encompassing all of humanity," and that its "field of action was the unitary world of the globe." Noyes emphasizes that Herder followed the latest discoveries by James Cook and Georg Forster, and explains how "the changing picture of the world and its inhabitants," due to many scientific advances in geography, biology, ethnography, and anthropology, made the world then more imaginable as a whole, but also less imaginable, considering its infinite complexity, arguing that Herder considered "the threats which unchecked commercialism posed to the global environment—whether we take this as an environment of cultural and linguistic diversity, or that of biodiversity." Noyes maintains that Herder's writings can be interpreted as "an ongoing exercise in crisis management related directly to globalization." While Herder's writings are replete with many interesting and sometimes conflicting observations, Noyes has a talent for making even Herder's most speculative ideas appear to be logical, philosophically stringent, and grounded on materiality and cultural study. Noyes discusses how contemporaneous developments, in terms of globalization, made Herder aware of "the Atlantic slave trade and the decimation of the indigenous population throughout the New World," which he clearly condemned. As Noyes clarifies, Herder also opposed such "ideas as the superiority of European civilization, the primacy of reason, and the progress of humankind," while drawing attention to more complex notions that defy any simplistic interpretation. According to Noyes, Herder also rejected the idea that "artistic expression can be universalized, reduced to a set of a priori rules" as was implicit in the philosophical rationalism of his time and especially in "the academic school that dominated German philosophy at mid-century." As Noyes explicitly states, Herder had "a deep-seated aversion to any form of exploitation or domination of one culture by another," a contention that Noyes, however, then begins to unravel by elaborating on what he calls "several dimensions to his anti-imperialism." Especially striking is Noyes's exploration of aspects of Herder's biography in the context of his philosophical work—in particular, his important sea travels that led to a new methodological approach connecting the movement of the mind with that of the body. Noyes attributes a concept of "embodied thought" to Herder, which I find fascinating, stating, for example, that "Herder speculates on the migration of fish, and he uses the resulting figures of motion to think about the long history of migrating humanity that gave rise to Europe as he knows it." One of Noyes's primary achievements is to show how Herder's approach to aesthetics is extremely relevant to recent debates in postcolonial studies. Noyes explicitly engages with theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present, 1999), A. G. Hopkins (Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local, 2006), and Dipesh Chakravabarty (Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2008), among others, and also addresses the important [End Page 378] book by Vicki A. Spencer, Herder's Political Thought: A Study on Language, Culture and Community (2012), adding important nuances to its interpretation of Herder. In his treatment of Sonia Sikka's Herder and Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism (2011...

Women Readers and Writers in Medieval Iberia: Spinning the Text by Montserrat Piera

Reviewed by: Women Readers and Writers in Medieval Iberia: Spinning the Text by Montserrat Piera Connie L. Scarborough Piera, Montserrat. Women Readers and Writers in Medieval Iberia: Spinning the Text. Brill, 2019. 483 pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-40037-5. In this ambitious project, Piera focuses on women’s production and reception of texts and on how women’s interaction with other forms of material culture has, or has not, been woven into the historical record. From the outset, the author recognizes the complexities of studying women’s participation in the literary as well as the socio-economic spheres due to the nature of the documentation and sources available. Despite this acknowledgement, she skillfully navigates existing materials and presents a coherent thesis. The book is divided into two main sections: women as readers and women as writers. The latter consists of two subsections: women writing in the court and those writing in the convent. In the first part, Piera points out that reading for women heretofore often has been viewed as a challenging endeavor due to the widely-accepted paradigm of the virgin-prostitute dichotomy so prominent in literary texts. But she disputes this divide, noting that women were capable of seeing this dichotomy as an abstract one and she examines other material sources available to them, such as oral instruction or the visual arts, which would have presented them with more nuanced forms of knowledge. While the author devotes an extensive chapter to the works of preachers and moralists, she focuses on the fact that not all women would have internalized their teachings about the inferiority and rightful place of women in society. In discussing their interaction with secular texts, for example, works of courtly romance or querrelles des femmes, she notes that women readers would have been exposed to the principle of sic et non and thus would have participated in active engagement with these texts —intellectually questioning, criticizing, and resisting them. In the section on women writers associated with the court, Piera devotes one chapter to the writings of Violant de Bar, Queen of Aragon, and another to Leonor López de Córdoba. She asserts that they “could be as close to [the] epicenter of power as men and that they were capable of employing a variety of tactics to ensure that they would remain in that valued position . . . writing was one of the most advantageous and indispensable of such tactics” (176). The author’s analysis of Violant’s writings and other performative acts calls into question some earlier evaluations [End Page 181] of the queen as vain, overly ambitious, or meddling in the affairs of state. In her study of the Memorias of López de Córdoba, she challenges the usual interpretation of this work as female autobiography and places it in its historical context, participating in revising Trastamaran efforts to legitimize the reign of Enrique II and seeking to obtain her own political and social advancement. The author’s reassessment of the Memorias highlights one of the central purposes of her book —to recognize the resistance element in women’s writing and in their interaction with written texts and other forms of cultural production. Turning her attention to women writing in the convent, Piera examines Constanza de Castilla’s Libro de devociones y oficios. Rather than simply analyzing Constanza’s treatise as a private devotional or as a spiritual aid intended for the nuns of the convent Santo Domingo el Real, she sees it as part of larger sensorial and emotional experiences that included illuminations, songs, and reenactments. The author also postulates new readings for two works by Teresa de Cartagena —Arboleda de los enfermos and Admiraçión Operum Dey. With regard to Arboleda most critics have evaluated it as autobiography and as a consolation text in the tradition established by Boethius and Pedro de Luna. She stresses that Teresa is not “writing about her own self as a modern subject might in an autobiography but to bond with her readers and listeners, particularly those who suffer illnesses, which, incidentally, is what gifted preachers would also do in order to emotionally reach his listeners . . .” (334) Admiraçión, in which Teresa defends...

Between Cairo and the Volga-Urals: Al-Manar and Islamic Modernism, 1905–17

Between Cairo and the Volga-UralsAl-Manar and Islamic Modernism, 1905–17 Roy Bar Sadeh (bio) In 1905, a student protest erupted in the Islamic seminary (madrasa) of the Muhammediye (est. 1881), one of the most important institutions of Islamic learning in the Volga-Urals city of Kazan. The protest was led by the Reform Society (Islâh Cem’iyeti; est. 1904), which advocated reform of the madrasa’s curriculum and further instruction in modern subjects. The demonstrations ended in the resignation of 82 students following the expulsion of 4 of their schoolmates.1 Observing these events from Cairo, the Syrian-born Islamic scholar (‘alim) Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935) published several letters by and articles in support of the protesters in al-Manar (The Lighthouse; 1898–1935), a renowned Arabic journal circulated throughout Muslim communities worldwide. [End Page 525] Al-Manar’s articles on the Muhammediye events signaled more than passing interest in a piece of news; they marked increasing interactions between Islamic scholars in Cairo and the Volga-Urals during the revolutionary turmoil of 1905–17 in Russia. In particular, al-Manar’s publications on the Volga-Urals demonstrate not only how proponents of “jadidism,” the multifaceted modernist movement of Islamic reform across the Russian Empire, became a subject of significance for enterprises of Islamic reform in Cairo, but also how jadids utilized Arabic journals to display and project their views and experiences to readership beyond the Russian Empire.2 Al-Manar was established in Cairo in 1898 by Rida, who had immigrated to Egypt from Ottoman Syria following the press censorship ordered by Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909).3 Supported by his Egyptian [End Page 526] mentor, Shaykh Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905), Rida initially established al-Manar as a bimonthly journal, later switching to monthly publication. The journal covered various themes such as politics, theology, education, sciences, economics, poetry, and history. The journal’s main message was a call for Islamic unity alongside educational and socio-political reforms based on the mastery of Arabic. Advocating the use of independent reasoning (ijtihad) alongside an emphasis on the compatibility between Islam and reason, Rida rejected what he viewed as “blind following” (taqlid) of the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence (madhahib), considering them a major obstacle to progress.4 He sought to promote this message of Islamic reform through the fatawa (legal opinions) he published in al-Manar in response to inquiries from Muslims living across Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.5 Comprising nearly 14 million subjects (according to the 1897 Russian imperial census), Muslims living under Russian imperial rule were one of the most important target audiences for al-Manar.6 Although the journal touched on and corresponded with Muslims living under tsarist-governed regions such as Crimea, Dagestan, and Turkestan, its articles and interactions with Muslim subjects of the Russian Empire centered on the Volga-Urals, especially during the period between the 1905 and October 1917 revolutions. As Stéphane A. Dudoignon has shown in his pathbreaking study on the utilization and circulation of al-Manar’s ideas in the Russian Empire through the Orenburg-based Turkic biweekly Shura (Council, 1908–18), the popularity of Rida’s journal among Islamic reform enterprises in the Volga-Urals was tremendous. Islamic scholars in the Volga-Urals adopted al-Manar’s message or used the journal’s publications to reinforce and affirm their ideas, while modeling their journals’ organization on that of al-Manar. However, as Dudoignon has himself noted, even after the short-lived liberalization of the Russian press in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, Muslim journals in the Russian Empire remained under the tight control of the tsarist state, whose officials feared the appearance of any so-called “Pan-Islamic” or “Pan-Turkic” ideas among the empire’s Muslim subjects. Thus Dudoignon suggests [End Page 527] that the “intellectual borrowings made by the new Muslim press of Russia from al-Manar, and from other periodicals of the external Islamic world, took place during a relatively short period, and were restricted to questions which would not arouse the concern of censors.”7 Dudoignon’s assumption concerning the restriction of al-Manar and other non...

"Ja sam neko ko bi trebalo da bude ja" - identitet (post)humanog subjekta u romanu "Nula K" Dona De Lila

The isolated space which the protagonists of Don DeLillo's novel Zero K inhabit proves to be a site where the (re)configuration of human evolution takes place, therefore providing the grounds for the analysis of the concepts of both human and posthuman subject. The analysis of the novel in reference to the posthuman theories, which prove to be as divergent and multiple as the posthuman subject itself, serves to examine the essence of the posthuman subject's identity formation, given that the plot portrays two different conceptions of the modern human subject. The examination of the relevance of technology in the interaction between humans and machines serves to corroborate the claim that the technologically generated isolation of cryonically suspended subjects does not necessarily imply the birth of a posthuman subject. Given that its roots can be traced within the Cartesian tradition, the transhumanist vision portrayed in the novel reconstructs the hierarchically structured framework. The posthuman thought, therefore, emerges out of the interconnected, unremitted game generated by the never-ending quest for the image of a unified self. The aforementioned posthuman thought, however, does not arise from the amalgamation of the material world and a genderless, bodiless, numb statue, but it emanates as a blend of materiality and a dynamic, intertwined, embodied consciousness.

Historicism and Modernity in the wake of Provincializing Europe

Focusing particularly on Provincializing Europe (PE), this essay is cast as a close and critical engagement with the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty over almost three decades. To begin with, I trace how Chakrabarty’s provocations have pointed toward post-coloniality and modernity as necessarily contradictory, contended, and contingent procedures and perspectives. Second, the essay tracks pathways that PE haltingly intimates and partially illuminate but mostly routes that the work chiefly shies of treading, in order to open up instead the different registers of historicism, the hermeneutical, and the analytical, including their mutual interplay and formidable entanglements, as formative of modern knowledges. Finally, these steps help foreground my own explorations of modernity. Braiding together analytical impulses and hermeneutic sensibilities, theory and narrative, these efforts have distinguished between historically located subjects of modernity as bearers of heterogeneous reasons/understandings, on the one hand, and routine representations of the modern subject as insinuating a singular rationality, on the other, which together carry wide implications.

Романтизам y гвозденом кавезу робних значења

Romanticism is not just a passive observer of the formation of the commodity-based society. There is a deep discomfort in romanticism about the tendency of an independent economic domain. This orientation can be followed in the case of such phenomena like money, measure, fiction, vitalism, or nature. These issues are now involved in the transformed context of economization, and there is a deep disturbance on this occasion in romanticism that appears to be a paradigmatic case of crisis-ridden subjectivity. Based on this, we can discuss the involvement of romanticism in relation to the phenomenon we designate the commodity-loop that includes the set of objective and subjective determinations related to the commodification.Some interpreters state that the novel of the 19th century (and romanticism, as well) “naturalized” the economy. The „naturalization“, however, here does not imply the connection to nature, but transforming the economy into a “natural fact” in the sense of an ideological normalization. The term “facts” comes together with the modern economy. “Naturalization” is actually a process that separates modern man from “nature”, that is, this term does not imply the inexhaustible creativity of nature. We believe that the position of literature and romanticism is much more ambivalent in relation to this figure: the mentioned commodity loop contains different responses of the emerging modern subjectivity in relation to objective determinations. Literature in romanticism stands in profound ambivalence: it cannot be indifferent to an autonomized economy but is far from being a pure reflection of it. We argue that romanticism, in fact, denaturalizes the commodity-mediated economy and reveals the historical determinateness of capitalism.

Lord Hervey (1696-1743) and the «English Malady»: Vulnerability and Power of Modern Subjectivity

Lord Hervey (1696-1743) and the «English Malady»: Vulnerability and Power of Modern Subjectivity

Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life by Emily Steinlight

Reviewed by: Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life by Emily Steinlight Sophia Hsu STEINLIGHT, EMILY. Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018. 278 pp. $55.00 cloth; $26.99 e-book. Emily Steinlight's compelling first monograph, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life, begins with what she concedes is a "fairly obvious premise: that the social worlds assembled in nineteenth-century literature are phenomenally crowded" (3). But from this commonplace statement comes her original and important argument: that this literary overcrowding "gave form to what can now be called the biopolitical imagination" (3). In shifting the focus of novel criticism away from questions of the individual to questions of population, Steinlight reorients what critics, for a long time, have claimed novels do. Rather than serving as an instrument of social control that disciplines modern subjects through methods of surveillance, the teeming nineteenth-century novel "creates a problem discipline cannot solve" (14). While England's population more than tripled during the century, the congested narratives of this era's fiction do not simply reflect demographic change. Instead, as Steinlight powerfully contends, they turn that reality into a pressing political problem that exposes the limits of social and political institutions to contain, manage, and care for the biological life of the populace. By making a case for the importance of the population in the history of the novel, Steinlight's book joins recent scholarship that has identified the social mass as the central subject of Romantic and Victorian literature. Like Alex Woloch, John Plotz, Nicholas Daly, and Audrey Jaffe, Steinlight explores how fiction makes sense [End Page 107] of the large social aggregates that modern individuals come into contact with every day. Previous studies, however, tend to analyze how literature opposes the one and the many, that the relationship between the individual and the mass is an antagonistic one in which the individual becomes a distinct figure because he stands in sharp relief against the undifferentiated throngs. Populating the Novel, by contrast, destabilizes the concept of the individual by showing how writers developed literary techniques that blur the line between individual and mass. As Steinlight demonstrates, the surplus bodies of Romantic and Victorian novels are just as likely to be the seemingly individuated protagonists as the unnamed, innumerable multitudes that haunt the edges of these texts. The introduction to Populating the Novel lays out the historical, political, and formal stakes of Steinlight's methodology. Here, she carefully explains how the idea of the population became significant in the nineteenth century because of intertwined developments in industrial capitalism, the life sciences, and popular politics after the French Revolution. This historical foundation grounds Steinlight's theoretical exploration of major twentieth-century biopolitical thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito. It also sets the stage for her later readings that deftly weave together concepts from political economy, demography, public health, hereditary biology, sociology, and psychology, among other disciplines. Yet even with this impressive range, literature remains the focus of Steinlight's book, as she "takes seriously the particularity of literature and its divergence from other types of discourse" (17). As Steinlight shows, the paradigmatic shift from the individual as a purely political subject to the population as an embodied collective that has political agency because of its creaturely qualities corresponds with a shift in the reception and purpose of literature. Viewed as both "mass media and serious art" (10), the nineteenth-century novel acquires significance as the genre of mass appeal and the genre that represents and comments on social life. This duality affords the novel the capacity to give the population new narrative and political meaning. For Steinlight, then, Romantic and Victorian fiction gained importance by making the burgeoning population feel excessive, a feeling of excess that made literature aesthetically and politically exceptional as the only genre that could uncover the inadequacy of existing social structures. Populating the Novel devotes its first, second, and third chapters to illustrating how nineteenth-century novels take as their subject a demographic surplus they both engender and try to control. Mary Shelley's Gothic...

How We Got to CRISPR: The Dilemma of Being Human.

This article considers the existential and eugenic risks of gene editing with CRISPR-Cas9. It brings forward epistemological and phenomenological questions concerning what CRISPR technology suggests about the limits of being human. By illuminating the paradoxical relationship between our "then self" and "now self," it considers the fragility of our individual and collective future-making endeavors. To do this, the article offers an overview of the existential dilemmas facing modern subjects, a history of eugenics and the ideology of health, a meditation on the limits of human knowledge, and an explication of the cultural work of metaphor. It argues for the benefits of human variation for individuals and communities and concludes by calling for an attitude of humility and restraint to guide the development and implementation of humane technologies rather than genetic manipulation technologies that aim to control future outcomes through present actions.

Rethinking of cultural heritage of the peoples of Khanty and Mansi in the objects of the modern subject environment

Rethinking of cultural heritage of the peoples of Khanty and Mansi in the objects of the modern subject environment

ПРОБЛЕМА ПРЕДМЕТА СОЦИАЛЬНОЙ ПСИХОЛОГИИ

The article defines the relevance of revising modern ideas about the subject of social psy-chology in the direction of post-non-classical rationality in the context of paradigm dynamics. Interpretations of the subject of psychology by leading Russian methodologists V. A. Mazilov, I. A. Mironenko and V. E. Klochko are considered. The paper reveals the main foreign socio-psychological theories that studied social representations, social identity, etc. phenomena that explained one or another part of the socio-psychological reality. The article contains interpretations of the subject of social psychology as a branch of scientific knowledge by B. D. Parygin and G. M. Andreeva. The authors formulate the problem of defining the modern subject of social psychology in terms of recognizing the ideas of multi-subject and contextuality introduced into psychology in connection with the orientation to post-non-classical rationality.

Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality in France: From Rousseau to Art Deco ed. by Heidi Brevik-Zender

Reviewed by: Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality in France: From Rousseau to Art Deco ed. by Heidi Brevik-Zender Kathryn A. Haklin (bio) Heidi Brevik-Zender, editor. Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality in France: From Rousseau to Art Deco. State University of New York P, 2018. 236 pages. ISBN: 978-1-4384-7235-5. By virtue of the stylish triad “Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality,” Heidi Brevik-Zender’s recent edited volume solidifies the intellectual import of fashion within French Studies. Featuring chapters penned by nine prominent voices in the field, Fashion, Modernity, and Materiality in France: From Rousseau to Art Deco investigates the entwined threads of couture and culture in a range of sources—including narrative fiction, the visual and decorative arts, poetry, popular theater, magazines and newspapers, advertisements, and guides to the Universal Expositions. Summoning an eclectic cohort of experts, the publication constitutes not only a major contribution to a rapidly expanding body of criticism on fashion, but also to French Studies more generally. Arranged chronologically, the ensemble of essays addresses fashion’s connection to modernity, defined as “the era beginning with the philosophical interventions of the Enlightenment and lasting through the postwar 1920s” (2). This temporal designation provides a broad scope for the study of dress, yielding an expansive view of modernity wherein a collection of snapshots focus attention on several sub-periods, rather than on a single moment or artistic movement. As editor, Brevik-Zender convenes an impressive group of scholars who tackle questions related to social class and mobility, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, as well as fashion’s relationship to the nation, memory, and technological progress. Though some contributors (Hiner, Brevik-Zender, Potvin) have been at the forefront of the burgeoning subfield of French fashion studies for the past decade, others (Saint-Amand, Green, White) have not typically published under such a label. Bridging disciplinary gaps between literary studies, art history, and cultural criticism, the anthology foregrounds fashion’s interdisciplinary function by uniting a variety of methodological approaches under the same cover. [End Page 986] However, interdisciplinarity is not merely the result of assembling the diverse contributors; rather, it is implicit in the very materiality of fashion itself, as the volume makes clear. Whereas fashion has remained indissociable from modernity since at least the time of Balzac, the third titular component of materiality brings nuance to these intersecting issues. Defined as the way in which “objects of dress are ‘things,’ as Bill Brown might term them” (2), the materiality—or the object-ness of fashion—positions objects from the physical world as the mediators through which the relationship between fashion and modernity is negotiated by individual subjects. Viewed as such, fashion’s materiality pertains to the tangible forms and physical presences emanating from the attire, whose relationship to the modern subject is explored in each essay. Appropriately, the beautifully illustrated publication by the SUNY Press bolsters the distinctive material detail of the objects studied. The opening chapters frame the fashionable and their accoutrements as social phenomena whose eighteenth-century prototypes modulate in dynamic ways in their nineteenth-century counterparts. The initial essay by Pierre Saint-Amand (and translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage) studies representations of the petit-maître—“the paragon of fashion in the eighteenth century” (11)—in texts ranging from La Nouvelle Héloïse to the Encyclopédie. Foregrounding the unstable and changing identities of this ostentatious figure across time and in different sociological contexts, Saint-Amand delivers on the stated objective to “restore [the] precedence of makeup and artifice in the male” (17). Shifting to the nineteenth century, Susan Hiner sheds light on representations of marottes, or hat-maker’s dummies, in print culture and vaudeville plays. Rightfully evoking the eighteenth-century poupées de mode as significant predecessors, Hiner marries visual readings with theoretical concepts from Marx and Freud to illuminate how labor and femininity intersect in the marrotte’s uncanny presence. Next, Anne Green explores the symbolism of gloves in the nineteenth century by establishing a historical foundation rooted in eighteenth-century works. Green charts the evolution of gloves from the Encyclopédie to the Physiologie du gant (1841), pivoting away from the accessory’s utilitarian use to highlight its...

The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment by Tita Chico

Reviewed by: The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment by Tita Chico Richard C. Sha Tita Chico, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2018). Pp. 256. $60.00 cloth. Tita Chico's learned and eloquent book leverages the superior status of literature over science in the Enlightenment by thinking about how literature made natural philosophical knowledge itself possible. She submits that "representing natural philosophy occasions a deliberation about its efficacy and shortcoming, particularly in contrast to the insights and truths conveyed by literariness" (1). Chico argues that because science requires literary representation, "the representation of early science persistently discloses its literary status—not merely in the tropological nature of scientific writing and practice, but also through the metaphorics of science that allow writers to posit alternative models of authority and evidence" (1–2). For Chico, science is a "literary trope" (5). With this canny reversal of the expected hierarchy between literature and science, we are off to the races. The chase she sets in motion is nothing less than invigorating, and although I have misgivings about how her argument relies upon textualism—science and natural philosophy involve practices beyond language—the chase is worth it. To be fair, she does deal with the collecting of scientific instruments. To put my objection more sharply, this literary history of science gives literary critics more to cheer about than it might scientists, though she is right to insist that these categories were in flux. The quality of thought in this book is very high. Chico's deft recognition of the period's capacious understanding of something like literariness transforms what we think we know about literature and science. Chico argues astutely that "literariness enables a whole-scale imagining of the proper object of natural philosophical inquiry as well as the proper subject to carry it out" (13). Building upon Schaffer and Shapin's famous concepts of "literary technology" and "virtual witnessing," Chico considers how the imagination facilitates the telling of the scientific story through literary technologies that construct both the modest witness and the observed particular.1 In short, the witness to scientific experiment constructs him or herself into an urbane modern subject, with an attention to the present (23–25). She carries out this argument's promise by examining how satiric representations of science enables the identification of a kind of immodesty that foregrounds self-interest. Chico then pursues the degree to which fancy is necessary to understand abstractions like Newtonianism, Cartesianism, and Copernicanism. Consequently, she offers the concept of "scientific seduction" to think about how science compels [End Page 750] belief. She concludes this study by attending to poems like Pope's "Rape of the Lock" and James Thomson's The Seasons, which argue for the superiority of literariness over science. All in all, then, this is a book no scholar of the two cultures can afford to ignore. Chico confronts science's devotion to "natural" and unrhetorical language by highlighting how scientific language itself does this through tropes. She thus highlights how Boyle converts the telescope into a trope for clarity (27), and how scientific texts embrace tropes to translate scientific knowledge. Having deconstructed the relation of scientific to literary language, Chico explores how the two are inextricable. Boyle's challenge is to convey his discovery of the elasticity of air in literary language that will translate his scientific discovery (29). As she puts it, "literariness produces visibility, which, within an optical regime, connotes knowability" (32). She adds that selecting a metaphor reproduces the problem of producing an observed particular: the naturalist thus presents a singularity while suppressing the "imaginative process behind the scientific sense of a singular instance" (34). She offers a reading of Hooke's Micrographia which considers how the technology of the book and its illustrations represents the "instrumentation of a microscope" (35). In a compelling chapter on immodest witnesses, Chico explores how the gimcrack and the coquette enable good science to be separated from bad, and how these tropes facilitate the development of scientific observation. She insists that "gimcracks ignore society and social demands in favor of studying insects. And coquettes refuse to...

The subject of education in the information society: cognitive identity of a media culture carrier

The article substantiates that the temporality of being of the subject as synchronization of communicative, cognitive demands on a person with dynamic changes of information reality, is the basis for the development of media education. It is justified that the formation of competencies of the carrier of modern culture is a difficult task, since such traits as critical thinking, free possession of judgments about content quality, preventive measures in guarantees of dangers of communicative activity and others, fall into the scope of the main threats “ leveling of important conditions of cognitive activity, multiplicity of models of communicative interaction, complex of semiotic systems of media culture, etc. Identified symptomatic cognitive features of the modern subject of information activity indicate the need for an urgent educational response, which means the formation of requirements and criteria for media literacy, a balanced approach to the consideration of temporality, procedural thinking in terms of knowledge, memory, self-identification. It is stated that mastering the semantics, topology, and navigation of the basics of audiovisual communication is an important vector of media education. The article emphasizes the importance of a comprehensive response from the education system to the civilizational challenges of the transition to the information society.