Mundane World Research Articles

In the Den of the Voice

In the Den of the Voice by Philip Metres The Puterbaugh essay L ook inside,” Dima said, gesturing to me to peer between the slats of a tall gray fence. We were on the outskirts of Moscow, halfway to his mother’s old apartment—what we would come to call “The Den of the Voice,” where we would wrestle with Russian poetry and language and each other. I peered in. Across an overgrown yard, stone plinths and busts of heroic men— some in helmets, some decorated with epaulets—were strewn haphazardly in the dirt, as if tossed away. The factory looked like it had been abandoned, but to my eyes, most buildings in Russia looked either condemned or unfinished. It was the fall of 1992, when everything was either dying or not yet born—not yet post-Soviet, and not really free. “Who are they?” I asked. Just about everything in this country induced a question in me, and that question would produce a further question—a matryoshka situation of questions nesting inside questions. “They used to make statues of Lenin and other Soviet leaders here,” he said, in his clipped, semiposh English. “In the time of the USSR, each city had its own Lenin. In one town, a huge Lenin statue stands, pointing into the distance. If you follow the direction of his finger, you find yourself at another smaller Lenin. He’s also pointing. If you follow his smaller finger and look closely in the nearby bushes, a tiny Lenin stands.” I laughed. “There in the bushes, where a drunkard sits and drinks and sings, a little Lenin sits with him.” I laughed again. “I’m not joking,” he said. His eyes gleamed with wicked delight, a smile widening on his face, as I laughed in wonder at this place. When I’d called him and heard his arrestingly British accent, precise as a razor, I could hear his wit and gentleness and wisdom and knew he would be a door to the mysteries of Russia. He’d been close friends with Tatiana Tulchinsky, whom I’d met in Chicago to work on my Russian. One day, she’d handed me a sheaf of seemingly ancient typescript called Ex Roma Tertia “ Just about everything in this country induced a question in me, and that question would produce a further question—a matryoshka situation of questions nesting inside questions. “In the Den of the Voice” is part of The More You Love the Motherland, a memoir of the author’s year talking with poets in Russia during its most tumultuous years transitioning to capitalism (1992–93), and features Dimitri Psurtsev, a noted poet and translator. 32 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018 (From the Third Rome), a play on Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea). I was instantly pulled in. In his poem “Inhabitant of the Third Rome,” Dima creates a self-portrait in a comic, transcendent mirror: In wintertime, I love to wrap myself till fat and warm, To dress in two pairs of pants, tall boots and mittens, To don a coat of fur – even if its fur’s completely fake – Then strap the earflaps of a wolf-fur hat around my chin. This wind’s so brutal, it’s good I’ve got Polovtsian slits for eyes. Though this cruel frost can’t pierce my Tatar cheekbones, Mymustacheturnswhitewithice,my bloodthickenslikecoldvodka. So here I stand, happy inhabitant of the last, the Third Rome, Reforged barbarian, heir, and – perhaps – future ancestor. I’ve drawn my breath on its quick and eternal air. THE VOICE WAS AT ONCE comic and prophetic; I imagined that the poet who made it loved his mongrel background and his country—all its layers of history, which led him to this cold and eternal moment. I would come to learn, while poring over poems together, that he was as entranced by Russia as I was. For as long as he could remember, he’d been writing poems that found the transcendent in the mundane world around him—waiting for the train in the dead of winter, sitting on long bus rides with babushkas in the country, writing letters to émigré friends, toiling...

In the Den of the Voice

In the Den of the Voice by Philip Metres The Puterbaugh essay L ook inside,” Dima said, gesturing to me to peer between the slats of a tall gray fence. We were on the outskirts of Moscow, halfway to his mother’s old apartment—what we would come to call “The Den of the Voice,” where we would wrestle with Russian poetry and language and each other. I peered in. Across an overgrown yard, stone plinths and busts of heroic men— some in helmets, some decorated with epaulets—were strewn haphazardly in the dirt, as if tossed away. The factory looked like it had been abandoned, but to my eyes, most buildings in Russia looked either condemned or unfinished. It was the fall of 1992, when everything was either dying or not yet born—not yet post-Soviet, and not really free. “Who are they?” I asked. Just about everything in this country induced a question in me, and that question would produce a further question—a matryoshka situation of questions nesting inside questions. “They used to make statues of Lenin and other Soviet leaders here,” he said, in his clipped, semiposh English. “In the time of the USSR, each city had its own Lenin. In one town, a huge Lenin statue stands, pointing into the distance. If you follow the direction of his finger, you find yourself at another smaller Lenin. He’s also pointing. If you follow his smaller finger and look closely in the nearby bushes, a tiny Lenin stands.” I laughed. “There in the bushes, where a drunkard sits and drinks and sings, a little Lenin sits with him.” I laughed again. “I’m not joking,” he said. His eyes gleamed with wicked delight, a smile widening on his face, as I laughed in wonder at this place. When I’d called him and heard his arrestingly British accent, precise as a razor, I could hear his wit and gentleness and wisdom and knew he would be a door to the mysteries of Russia. He’d been close friends with Tatiana Tulchinsky, whom I’d met in Chicago to work on my Russian. One day, she’d handed me a sheaf of seemingly ancient typescript called Ex Roma Tertia “ Just about everything in this country induced a question in me, and that question would produce a further question—a matryoshka situation of questions nesting inside questions. “In the Den of the Voice” is part of The More You Love the Motherland, a memoir of the author’s year talking with poets in Russia during its most tumultuous years transitioning to capitalism (1992–93), and features Dimitri Psurtsev, a noted poet and translator. 32 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018 (From the Third Rome), a play on Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea). I was instantly pulled in. In his poem “Inhabitant of the Third Rome,” Dima creates a self-portrait in a comic, transcendent mirror: In wintertime, I love to wrap myself till fat and warm, To dress in two pairs of pants, tall boots and mittens, To don a coat of fur – even if its fur’s completely fake – Then strap the earflaps of a wolf-fur hat around my chin. This wind’s so brutal, it’s good I’ve got Polovtsian slits for eyes. Though this cruel frost can’t pierce my Tatar cheekbones, Mymustacheturnswhitewithice,my bloodthickenslikecoldvodka. So here I stand, happy inhabitant of the last, the Third Rome, Reforged barbarian, heir, and – perhaps – future ancestor. I’ve drawn my breath on its quick and eternal air. THE VOICE WAS AT ONCE comic and prophetic; I imagined that the poet who made it loved his mongrel background and his country—all its layers of history, which led him to this cold and eternal moment. I would come to learn, while poring over poems together, that he was as entranced by Russia as I was. For as long as he could remember, he’d been writing poems that found the transcendent in the mundane world around him—waiting for the train in the dead of winter, sitting on long bus rides with babushkas in the country, writing letters to émigré friends, toiling...

Building Up by Tearing Down

This article analyzes mockery sequences among a group of friends to examine how this discursive practice mobilizes categories to manage stances toward differences and to construct group norms and boundaries. Using discourse analysis, I inspect how nonseriously tearing down or jocularly teasing/mocking participants within a peer group manages the practical problem of in-group difference by reaffirming shared stances and norms around masculinity. The analysis highlights some of the ways in which groups navigate difference and identity moment-to-moment in interaction, showing how the moral organization of in-group and out-group assessments are built in the mundane world of conversation.

RELEVANCE OF TEACHING METHODS IN VOGUE IN ANCIENT INDIA IN CURRENT EDUCATIONAL SCENARIO:PEDAGOGICAL REMINISCENCES APROPOS VEDIC AND BUDDHIST PERIOD

The process of teaching and learning encompasses the Teacher and the Learners as its indispensable elements, in which the former imparts knowledge, attitudes, values, interests and skills to the latter by means of communication which is put to effect by way of what is known as Teaching method. The teacher by way of his or her own behavior (teaching) brings about desirable change (s) in the behavior of pupils (learning) according to some pre-determined objectives formulated as per the curriculum designed. Alternatively it can be said that this change is brought about by different methods of teaching. Suffice it to say, Teaching methods are the sine qua non of teaching-learning process. It is not that the teaching methods have been in use recently or since remote past but these have been in vogue since the dawn of education in this mundane world. However the methods kept gradually evolving over the period of time the manifestations of which are evident in the form of paradigm shifts in Pedagogy in the current scenario. Alternatively, the destination (modification of behavior) is the same but the journey has been made different. The present paper throws light on the different teaching methods prevalent in Ancient India besides highlighting the relevance of those very methods in the current educational scenario and giving valuable suggestions pertaining to the use of same in pre-service and in-service education programme.

Voices of Rousseau and Temporality in Friedrich Hölderlin's “Der Rhein”

Abstract This article discusses the significance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's notion of the conscience Friedrich Hölderlin. In the eighteenth century, the soul was seen as an important source of energy and guidance in the intellectual life of individuals; Rousseau sees these energies as expressions (the voice of conscience) that lead to our moral betterment. Conscience is not only an ethical guide, rather it is also the basis of (self-)consciousness. For Hölderlin, the constituent elements of conscience have two divergent sets of possibilities: in excess, thanatos and eros bring about our ruin but alternatively, they can converge constructively to form conscience that enables us to become autonomous historical agents. Rousseau is a crucial figure for Hölderlin, especially in the poem “Der Rhein,” because in his writings, he finds a way of overcoming the destructive pull of eros and thanatos. Additionally, the reference to Rousseau's affirmation of conscience creates the basis of poetic self-reflexivity in “Der Rhein”: it is the moment that uncovers the temporal and phenomenological affinities between human consciousness and signs of the God in the mundane world. It is in this way that Hölderlin links poetic practice with historical agency.

Souvenirs for the Capital

Abstract Around 1350, a wandering lay priest called Sōkyū (dates unknown) left his home of Tsukushi in northern Kyushu, and embarked upon a journey through what is now the Tōhoku region of Japan. The “East Country”, as Sōkyū and his peers in the Imperial Palace call it, was considered a remote and wild land. It nonetheless held a romantic appeal for certain place names that had long been famous in the poetic canon. These famous place names, or utamakura, provide the basic structure for Souvenirs, and it soon becomes clear that one great motivation for Sōkyū’s journey is to view the landscapes of those celebrated places, and to better understand the origins and history of their names. The journal begins by introducing a man who “turned away from the mundane world”, and then shifts immediately to Sōkyū’s first-person perspective. The journey is here within the realm of formal Buddhist practice. Sōkyū’s determination to “follow into the past the tracks left under trees and over rocks” is founded upon the view that wandering supports ascetic practice and facilitates a purposeful rejection of the comforts of the material world. In the translation that follows, each utamakura is rendered into English, followed by its full Japanese name, only when that name’s meaning is highly relevant to Sōkyū’s poetry. Names of provinces, temples, and shrines, as well as utamakura sites mentioned in passing, are left in the Japanese, with an indication of the type of geographical feature they represent.

Emotions, religion, and morality in Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter

Graham Greene (1904–1991) is critically-acclaimed as one of the best storytellers of the twentieth century. Part of Greene’s distinction lies in his depiction of the ever-conflicted emotions that plague human beings. This emotional complexity is intensified as the Catholic religion conflates with the sensual and sexual values sanctified in the mundane world. Thus, although Greene frequently expressed his irritation at being labeled a Catholic writer, many critics maintain that understanding the close connection between religion, politics, and the theme of betrayal in Greene’s works is crucial. In The Heart of the Matter (1948), Greene presents Major Henry Scobie, an upright assistant police commissioner, who is involved in a triangular love relationship with his wife and a young widow in a West African coastal town. Torn between his sense of responsibility and his passion, Scobie is ensnared in love and guilt at the same time. Scobie’s emotional complexities, coupled with his troubled faith, paradoxically make him a heroic coward with tragic flaws as well as a sinner engulfed in a terrible conflict between passion and faith. This paper aims to discuss the emotional ambiguities of Scobie that arise from the conflations of love and marriage, pity and duty, humanity and divinity, evaluating the morality of Scobie and its implications.

Introduction: The Prosaic Imaginary

This is the introduction to a special issue of Novel, “The Prosaic Imaginary,” edited by John Frow and Vanessa Smith. The editors ask the question: what is the relationship between the novel's prosaic subject matter and novel reading as an everyday activity? Both parts of this question make familiar assumptions about the novel (that it thematizes the mundane world; that its rise is associated with middle-class literacy and, increasingly, with mass literacy), which we want not so much to question as to explore in greater depth and in their relation to each other. Thus we pose a set of corollary questions: How do the forms of attention and imagining that are fostered by the extended form of the novel correspond to the attention and temporality of everyday life? How are the materiality and mobility of the book (typically a small and portable object) bound up with the kinds of object-worlds the novel imagines? And what kind of theory of the novel can best account for its prosaic quality? We talk about prosaic imaginaries in the plural because we take it as given that the novel form develops a plurality of ways of imagining the secular universe; and the concept of the imaginary also helps us to think about the mundane fantasies with which readers invest their activity.

The lit world: living with everyday urban automation

In this article, we develop and advance the concept of the lit world by bringing together literatures about everyday lighting, automation in everyday life and human perception, along with our ethnographic research into people’s experience of automated lighting in Melbourne, Australia. In doing so we formulate and argue for an approach to automation that situates it as part of everyday mundane worlds and acknowledges its entanglement with the emergent and experiential qualities of everyday environments as they unfold. We demonstrate this through the example of automated lighting, understood as a situated technology that has contingent effects and participates in the making of particular ways of seeing and feeling the world. We thereby argue for an account of automation that reaches beyond its potential for the management of human (and other) behaviour, to ask how the qualities and affordances of automated technologies might seep out of their intended domains, and create new perceptual and experiential opportunities. In a context where automation is increasingly prevalent in everyday life, such attention to the experience and use of automated technologies which already exist on a large scale is needed. Urban lighting is an example par excellence of automation in the world because it has a long history beyond the recent association of automated technologies with code and digital infrastructures. As scholars debate how automated technologies will become part of our future digital lives, understanding how people live in a lit world offers a starting point for considering how we might live with other anticipated algorithmic forms of automation.

Watching Weimar Dance by Kate Elswit

Reviewed by: Watching Weimar Dance by Kate Elswit Barbara Hales Watching Weimar Dance. By Kate Elswit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. 252. Paper $36.95. ISBN 978-0199844838. The theme of expressionistic dance (Ausdruckstanz) from Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany has received significant attention in recent scholarship, such as Susan Manning’s study of the implications of Mary Wigman’s dance on nationalism in Ecstasy and the Demon (2006), and Michael Cowan’s interdisciplinary study of body culture in Technology’s Pulse (2011). Dance historian Kate Elswit’s book, Watching Weimar Dance, adds to this scholarship through her focus on expressionistic dance in a state of experimentation read through the context of its cultural-historical moment. Elswit is sensitive to how the spectator creates meaning in the face of the necessary impermanence of a dance performance. Drawing on archival evidence, she broadens the meaning of Ausdruckstanz to include performers such as Wigman, Kurt Jooss, Anita Berber, Valeska Gert, the Tiller Girl troupes, and Oskar Schlemmer. She explains her hermeneutic approach as engaging in “diverse choreographic investigations into the potential of the body, which fed into and grew out of understandings of bodies circulating in the wider culture” (xv). For Elswit, dance is not only a means for a grander artistic narrative, it also reveals a more mundane world of “day-to-day bodies,” which encapsulate the era. Throughout her study, Elswit draws attention to expressionistic dance as a collection of various performances and ideas that defy one single taxonomy. Elswit begins by discussing the work of performers that treat death including Jooss, Gert, and Berber. Elswit notes how these performers’ mystical themes evoke a certain response in their audiences: “a perceptual dance between the physical and the abstract that enabled audiences to watch things happen that were not actually visible” (3). She then discusses how dance as an art form integrated technological properties as may be seen in the work of Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (1922) and in the performances of the Tiller Girls. At a time when machines were increasingly dominating the popular imagination, audiences could easily imagine the rhythmic motions of the dancers as if they themselves were automatons and not human performers (28–29). Chapter 3 investigates the dance of Berber, Gert, and the Tiller Girls in the context of the sexual liberation of the New Woman. Elswit describes how these dancers offered their “private parts, both physical and personal, as objects for public consumption” (62). In an era when women were supposed to dress with modesty and [End Page 218] clearly differentiate themselves from prostitutes, female dancers were heralding a new era by violating this sort of morality code and unveiling themselves on the stage. In chapter 4, Elswit investigates the German reception of Albert Talhoff and Wigman’s multimedia spectacle Totenmal (1930) with the US reception of Wigman’s dance cycle Opfer (1931). Elswit notes how both audiences read the theme of martyrdom; however, while notions of trauma and identity were conjured in the minds of the post–World War I German audience, the American audience perceived the separation between the mystical and mundane worlds (97). She then compares choreographer Kurt Jooss’s 1932 and 1951 stagings of Der Grüne Tisch. In a 1951 court case addressing the issue of copyright infringement of Jooss’s dance, it was argued that the later performance of Green Table shared essential qualities with the dance’s premiere some twenty years earlier. Its “sameness” accounts for its positive reception as a symbolic return home (Heimkehr), a sentiment that allowed West Germany to move on without reflecting on its recent past (141). West German audiences used Weimar dance to negotiate the past while finding a way to express continuity with the past, and at the same time accessing a forum to express a postwar sentiment to break with the past (137). Drawing on various archival and historical documents—cartoons, interviews, letters, photographs, and works of fiction—Elswit grounds her interpretations of audience reception of works of expressionistic dance. She argues that early twentieth-century dance allowed its audiences to work through contemporary issues such as human and machine hybridity, female visibility, and war trauma. Elswit’s Watching Weimar...

War and Migration in the White African Tropics: Lauren St John’s Rainbow’s End

This paper explores voyage and migration in tropical Africa through Lauren St John’s Rainbow’s End, a memoir contributing to debates of white African identity that now include more contemporary renditions of identity in female self-reflective accounts differing markedly from masculine perspectives. In her coming-of-age memoir, St John chronicles her experiences of a privileged 1970s white Rhodesian society at war, and her gradual awareness of racial inequalities that transformed her into a white Zimbabwean. For her parents, voyage and migration take different paths. Her father migrated (with his family) to fight for a white Rhodesia, driven by masculine concerns. In contrast, St John’s mother was an avid traveller who journeyed from the mundane world of tropical farm life to exotic locations in Europe and beyond, escaping both her deteriorating marriage and the dull world of the club, small town gossip and a narrow minded semi-colonial rural environment. St John’s account of white settler identity and racial difference gives us insights into a day in the African tropics, and furthermore speaks to those in other settler countries such as Australia who are debating colonial history and identity, and who are often uncomfortable with aspects of their own settler past.

An analysis of Buddhism on the Hermann Hesse's Siddhārtha

헤르만 헤세의 『싯다르타』는 일반적으로 불교소설로 이해되고 있다. 하지만이 소설이 과연 불교적인가에 관해서는 대답하기가 쉽지 않다. 여기에는 기독교인으로서 정신적 세계에 일찍 눈 떴던 헤세가 ‘인도에서 불교로, 불교에서 중국으로’ 그의 관심을 옮겨갔던 종교적 편력과 연관이 있을 것이다. 또한 『싯다르타』에 나타나는 불교적 특징을 고대 인도의 전통과 묶어서 설명하거나, 중국적 전통과 함께 동양의 지혜로 간주하는 경향과 관련이 있다. 따라서 무엇보다도 불교의 교리적 관점에서 『싯다르타』의 작품세계를 분석해볼 필요가 있다고 생각한다. 소설 『싯다르타』는 정신적 세계와 세속적 세계, 그리고 깨달음의 세계로 가는 3단계로 구성된다. 1부와 2부 사이에는 소설의 내용적 차이뿐만 아니라 현실을 바라보는 시선도 달라져 있는데, 여기에는 세속의 번뇌로부터 벗어나고자 하는 초기불교의 가르침과 달리, ‘세속적 번뇌가 곧 깨달음’이라고 말하는 대승불교의 흔적을 뚜렷이 찾아볼 수 있다. 불교의 교리적 관점에서 『싯다르타』를 바라본다면, 아트만을 추구하던 싯다르타가 자아의 소멸을 위해 고행하며 자아를 부정하는 것에서 불교의 무아사상을 확인할 수 있다. 또한 자아가 있는 것도 아니고 없는 것도 아니라는 중도적 관점도 찾아볼 수 있다. 하지만 싯다르타의 궁극적 깨달음이 새로운 자아의 탄생으로 귀결된다는 점에서, 자아에 대한 관념 자체를 벗어나야 한다고 말하는 불교적 관점과는 차이가 있다. 강가의 깨달음에서 싯다르타는 하나의 돌멩이에서 삼라만상의 모든 것이 걸림 없이 존재하는 단일성의 세계를 경험한다. 그가 말하는 단일성의 세계는 사물과 사물이 상입하고 상즉하는 사사무애(事事無碍)의 화엄법계에 닿아 있음을 지적할 수 있을 것이다.This study tries a Buddhist analysis on Hermann Hesse s novel Siddhārtha. It s difficult to ascertain the religious characteristic with one thing, because of his wanderings from India to Buddhism and from Buddhism to China . Therefore it needs to examine closely through the Buddhist doctrine. Siddhārtha is composed with three stages; the spiritual world, secular world and enlightenment world. Between part 1 and part 2, there exists a significant gap in the viewpoint on the mundane world. Unlike the teaching of Early Buddhism, Mahāyāna Buddhism says that the anguish is not different from the enlightenment. It seems that this teaching of Mahāyāna Buddhism provide mental stimulation to Hermann Hesse, who concerned about the reality of Europe and wanted to find utopia. First as a son of brahman Siddhārtha pursues the self, namely ātman. But he joins with śramaṇa and takes asceticism for the self extinction. Here we can find the doctrine of Buddhism, namely anātman. However his ultimate enlightenment is concluded to the rebirth of self. In this point there is a distinction from Buddhism, saying that it should be rid of the concept of self. Finally Siddhārtha attains an enlightenment, he experiences the world of unity. When he sees a stone in the river, he becomes to penetrate the everything of the universe. It means the realm of unhindered mutual inter-penetration of phenomenon and phenomenon, namely the universe of Huayen.

To Encounter, to Build the World and to Become a Human Being. Advocating for a Material-Cultural Turn in Developmental Psychology.

Why have material world of daily life and material objects in their conventional features or to say it in other words, why have the mundane world and mundane objects, in which the human beings live and children come to, encounter, experience and develop through, received so little attention from psychologists thus remaining a blind spot in mainstream developmental psychology? Certainly the object has not been totally forgotten (e.g. Piaget's constructivist paradigm) but it has been considered as theoretically determined by the categories of understanding (cf. Kant), and considered as a key to understanding the world in its physical properties by the infant. But the material world and the material objects that are used for everyday purposes (i.e. pragmatically) belonging to material culture, have been totally neglected by developmental psychologists. Reacting to the Kantian agenda of developmental psychology but also to heterodox non developmentalist thinkers such as Gibson who is a growing source of inspiration for developmental psychologists today, we challenge the taken-for-granted mundane world, arguing for the importance of material objects related to material culture in psychological development during the prelinguistic period. On the basis of recent research in early development grounded in the Vygotskian paradigm, we discuss this issue through Marxist Anthropology, Material Culture Studies and Phenomenology. As a consequence we advocate for a material-cultural turn in psychological development in order to place the issue of material world and material objects in their pragmatic and semiotic features on the agenda of developmental psychology.

Beyond the everyday? Rethinking place meanings in tourism

ABSTRACTExisting tourism scholarship on place meanings seems to retain an underlying assumption of a contradiction between tourist places and the mundane world. In contrast, this paper contends that the production of the meanings of tourist places is also closely related to everyday life. To make its case, it interrogates the creation of meanings of two scenic sites of Tianya Haijiao and Nanshan in Sanya, a famous coastal destination in southern China. Although both scenic sites have been recently developed, their significance stems from historical and cultural meanings in traditional Chinese culture, which are frequently communicated in people's daily conversations and practices. Besides, the meanings of the tourist sites are neither fixed by legitimate discourses nor dominated by tourism publicity; they are continuously shaped by wider socio-spatial events in mundane societies and re-interpreted through tourism mobilities in accordance with tourists’ everyday concerns. This paper echoes the ‘new mobilities turn’ in tourism studies and contributes to the discussions of the mundaneness of tourist places.

Un corps qui fait images: le rituel de la crucifixion (Liban)

Every year, on Good Friday, Catherine, a Maronite mystic, wife and mother of three, relives Christ’s sufferings in the course of a ritual known as insilâb (crucifixion). She unveils the wounds on her body to a crowd of worshippers gathered around her. Although this ritual is in keeping with a long imitatio Christi tradition formalized and theorized over the centuries, as well as following a predetermined and predictable ‘script’, it entails moments of disorder. This is because the insilâb is centred on an ‘enigma body’ which ‘condenses’ the Virgin and her Son, the saint and her believer. As a living icon offered to the sight and touch of hundreds of worshippers, her body blurs the border between the divine and mundane worlds; the sacred and the profane; female and male; parent and child; past and present; image and living person.

Ghosts and their contemporary return: the case of Yu Hua’s The Seventh Day

This essay notes the return of ghosts to the contemporary literary landscape and argues that contemporary literary ghosts are primarily historical ghosts, illustrative not of awe for the unknown, or concern over individual morality but of awareness of the problematic of modernity and anxiety over dispossession and moral responsibility. This essay analyzes Yu Hua’s ghost fiction The Seventh Day (2013) and argues that it not only evokes familiar elements of the zhiguai genre, such as issues of rites, boundary and time, but also reworks these elements responding to a new historical context and addressing new concerns. Ghosts in The Seventh Day neither abide to the historical time of development nor enter the cyclical time of reincarnation. Their final place of rest, the land of the unburied, evinces a utopian impulse, which must be understood in connection with the dystopian vision of the mundane world.

Police and the Post-9/11 Surveillance Surge: “Technological Dramas” in “the Bureaucratic Field”

In the last decade, the United States has invested considerable resources into an expanded intelligence apparatus that extends from the hyper-secretive federal intelligence community down to the more mundane world of municipal police. This paper investigates the effects of the post-9/11 surveillance surge on state and local policing. It presents original research on interagency intelligence centers New York and New Jersey and deploys Pfaffenberger’s “technological drama” as a process animating the neoliberal constitution of what Bourdieu calls the “bureaucratic field.” Despite seemingly dramatic changes, there exists powerful continuity in the profession of policing. Before or after Snowden, the day-to-day reality of criminal intelligence remains shaped by the immediate demands of investigations and the small politics of interagency rivalries, insulating policing from dramatic reforms and swift change. What reformers see as dysfunction is better understood as a technological drama in the bureaucratic field that paradoxically provides a degree of autonomy and slows the pace of change. This paper builds on and contributes to the tendency within surveillance studies that emphasizes the ways in which human agents and organizational cultures mediate surveillance.

On standards and values: Between finite actuality and infinite possibility

This article explores the relation between subjects and standards in a way that is informed by a process orientation to theoretical psychology. Standards are presented as objectifications of values designed to generalize and stabilize experiences of value. Standards are nevertheless prone to becoming “parodic” in the sense that they can become obstacles to the actualization of the values they were designed to incarnate. Furthermore, much critical social science has mishandled the nature of standards by insisting that values are nothing but local and specific constructions in the mundane world of human activity. To rectify this problem, this article reactivates a sense of the difference between the idea of a finite world of activity and a world of value which points beyond and exceeds passing circumstance. Resources for the reactivation of this difference—which is core to a processual grasp of self, memory, and value—are found in the thinking of A. N. Whitehead, Max Weber, Marcel Proust, and Søren Kierkegaard.

Swashbucklers: The Costume Adventure Series by James Chapman, and: The Middle Ages on Film: Critical Essays ed. by Meriem Pagès and Karolyn Kinane, and: Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms: From Isaac Asimov to A Game of Thrones ed. by Helen Young, and: The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre ed. by Helen Young

THE FAIR FIELD OF MEDIEVALISM-THE RECENT HARVESTJAMES CHAPMAN, Swashbucklers: The Costume Adventure Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Pp. xiii, 279 (with 27 stills). isbn: 978-0-7190- 8881-0. $110.00.MERIEM PAGES and KAROLYN KINANE, eds., The Middle Ages on Film: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015. Pp. vi, 219. isbn: 978-0-7864-7941-2. $40.00.HELEN YOUNG, ed., Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms: From Isaac Asimov to 'A Game of Thrones.' Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2015. Pp. viii, 230. isbn: 978-1-60497-896-4. $104.99.HELEN YOUNG, ed., The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2015. Pp. viii, 231. isbn: 978-1-60947-897-1. $109.99.Helen Young is indefatigable. She has published, almost simultaneously, two excellent complementary edited collections of essays that discuss many of the subfields of medievalism. The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre offers nine essays that engage what Young calls 'the multiple Middle Ages' (1). Young eschews dividing this collection into discrete sections-she calls each essay a 'chapter'-better to reflect the 'impossibility of neatly categorizing contemporary medievalisms as well as the tendency of genres to bleed into each other' (4). Chapters are clustered to reveal overlaps rather than boundaries.The first four chapters cluster around issues of gender roles and agency. Clare Bradford and Rebecca Hutton look at the ways in which recent film and television retellings of the Arthuriad have used female protagonists, though that use is neatly circumscribed in a way that denies the protagonists real agency. Judy Ann Ford sees a similar restriction on agency for the protagonists in the films Red Riding Hood and Brave. Geneva Diamond argues that this pattern-a sort of one step forward, two steps backward approach that results in unrealized agency-continues offscreen in the romances of Julie Garwood, where a medieval setting 'allows a hypermasculinization of courtship' (5) not found in Garwood's non-medieval romances. In contrast, Robin Anne Reid notes how Nicola Griffith's 2013 historical novel Hild offers an eponymous hero who successfully counters 'popular neo-medieval fantasies of the twenty-first century' (84). The novel is at its heart a political statement determined to re-envision the distant past in terms of contemporary notions of gender-neutral activism.Alana Bennett's essay changes genre once again as the chapters in this volume move from the big and small screens to print and now to music, specifically the ways that neo-medieval music raises questions about cultural identity. Accuracy of performance is not essential to such music-it is in some ways antithetical to it. Neo-medieval music 'deliberately re-creates and repurposes' medieval music and instruments, coupling them with spectacular stage effects 'to signal and enable an escape from the mundane world into the reclaimed past' (6).Similarly, the video game Assassin's Creed, as Elisabeth Herbst Buzay and Emmanuel Buzay demonstrate, while bearing all the trappings of the medieval, uses those trappings as a backdrop for discussing a variety of contemporary issues, specifically present-day tensions between Christianity and Islam.Carol Robinson surveys issues of gender and sexuality in the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson and the Matrix film franchise of the brothers Wachowski. Anne McKendry pairs the quest of the modern detective with that of the medieval knight by looking at the medievalist crime fiction of Ellis Peters, Peter Tremayne, and Bernard Knight and finds that both medieval and post-medieval questers seek a common ground-the establishment of social order.The final essay brings this collection back full circle to the Arthuriad, as Molly Brown examines how the art of telling a story, not nostalgia, informs Kevin Crossley- Holland's 2001-2003 Arthurian trilogy and Catherine Fisher's 2002 novel Corbenic. …

The cleansing of the temple in early medieval Northumbria

AbstractWhile the attitudes of Stephen of Ripon and Bede toward church-buildings have previously been contrasted, this paper argues that both shared a vision of the church as a holy place, analogous to the Jewish temple and to be kept pure from the mundane world. Their similarity of approach suggests that this concept of the church-building was widespread amongst the Northumbrian monastic elite and may partially reflect the attitudes of the laity also. The idea of the church as the place of eucharistic sacrifice probably lay at the heart of this theology of sacred place. Irish ideas about monastic holiness, traditional liturgical language and the native fascination with building in stone combined with an interest in ritual purity to give power to this use of the temple-image which went on to influence later Carolingian attitudes to churches.