Nostalgic Look Research Articles

Looking forward via historic travel and looking back via heritage tourism: an analysis of roads, mobility and imagination of place along the Tōkaidō Road in Edo Period, Japan

ABSTRACT The Tōkaidō Road was the legendary highway constructed during the Edo period (1603–1868) in Japan connecting Edo, the home of the shogun, to Kyoto, the home of the emperor. Along the route were 53 post-stations (shuku) or towns catering to all manner of travellers from the daimyō (lords) and their great processions to pilgrims and later, lay travellers. Publication of period guidebooks, fictional journeys and the woodblock prints of artists like Hiroshige inspired increasing numbers of travellers who looked forward to adventures along the Tōkaidō Road. The heritage of the Tōkaidō Road today remains in the forms of signposts, markers, check points and preserved Edo towns visited by contemporary tourists. This paper examines historical travel along the Tōkaidō through Edo-era literature and art in the context of roads, mobility and imageries of place. Site visits to the preserved post-station of Seki and the reconstructed checkpoint at Hakone explore contemporary heritage tourism offering a nostalgic look back in time to Edo, Japan. Looking forward from the past through historic travel and looking back from the present via heritage tourism reveals the timelessness and popularity of the Tōkaidō Road.

The Pre-Raphaelite city and the trap of modernity

The poetic and pictorial works of the “Pre-Raphaelite galaxy”, as one might call the group formed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and their artistic kindred, exhibit an ambiguous relationship to Victorian modernity and 19th-century technical and political “progress”, especially British urbanisation. As urban-living people, the Pre-Raphaelites were always in direct contact with the modern city and its evolutions, and if the urban context is not their one major topic, the paintings and poems that come to grasp with it from the late 1840s onward are the strongest proponents of what could be called an alter-modern philosophy: the acceptance of some aspects of modern society, combined with the rejection of its dehumanizing and alienating excesses, to form a via media, an alternative to untamed Progress and unchecked urbanisation. The return to Nature they advocate is not just a nostalgic look backwards, but a real way of life based on simplicity, common decency, and the equality of all mankind – a vision which comes to life in the 1880s in William Morris’s socialist pamphlets and proposals for a new city. We shall base our demonstration on a set of four poems: Christina Rossetti’s “The Dead City” (1840) and “Goblin Market” (1862), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Jenny” (1848-1869), and William Bell Scott’s “Maryanne” (1854), and compare them with D. G. Rossetti’s painting The Gate of Memory (1857-1864) and some of William Morris’s essays. This corpus constitutes an ensemble of works answering one another, and openly attacking the alienating artificiality of the modern world and its consequences.This paper will successively focus on three aspects of the Pre-Raphaelite relationship to the modern city. The first aspect is its representation: the city is a fatal beauty which seduces and corrupts, winds its network around the characters, and whose façades hide only death. This criticism opens the way to an attack against urban modernity, characterised by unnatural excess and human alienation. Beings are reified and despised, used and abused, and finally lost in a haze that separates them from any source of meaning – all this the fruit of a capitalist vision of the world. After this criticism comes a proposal: a return to what is the essential part of humanity. The definition of this “human essence” may vary depending on the author, but always centres on intimate knowledge of oneself, God, or others. The modern city is not absolute evil: even its corruption is a thing of beauty. But it is only a half-drawn canvas that the Pre-Raphaelite project tries to achieve, by opening the way for humanity to realize its full potential.

Riding East—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in Hidalgo (2004)

<i>Riding East</i>—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in <i>Hidalgo</i> (2004)

Vacuous Soundings [Microwave Bytes

The author presents a nostalgic look at older technologies, specifically the microwave triode, which in its heyday the term would have been ultrahigh frequency (UHF) triode. The author mentions other older devices that crossed his path: the uA702 op amp, 2C39 (3CX100A5) UHF triode, the 416B triode that was developed in the 1950s for 3 GHz microwave links, and the 2C43 that as a pulsed oscillator could generate up to 3 kW of power.

"Este maldito linaje": maurofilia o maurofobia en Jorge Toledano, de Lope de Vega

The term “maurophilia” was coined by Georges Cirot in a series of articles pub-lished in the Bulletin Hispanique during the years of the Second World War. Since then, the idealized image of the Moor in the many genres of Golden Age literature has been interpreted as a nostalgic look at the Islamic cultural past, or as an expression of dissenting voices in a space overwhelmed by the ubiquitous surveillance of the Inquisition, the persecution of minorities, and the obsession with blood purity as structuring criteria for social hierarchies. This article revises the concept of maurophilia in light of Lope de Vega’s Jorge Toledano (1595-97), a rarely studied captivity play, in which the idealized relations between Moors and Christians serve as an instrument to exalt notions of lineage and genealogical purity, as well as to repudiate the Morisco communities during the years leading up to the expulsion.

Redemption in ’64: The Champion Cleveland Browns by John M. Harris

Reviewed by: Redemption in ’64: The Champion Cleveland Browns by John M. Harris Jack Patrick Redemption in ’64: The Champion Cleveland Browns. By John M. Harris. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2018. 237 pp. Paper $20.95, ISBN 978-1-60635-343-1.) From a quick glance at the title, readers might assume that this book is merely [End Page 124] a nostalgic look at a successful season that serves to reacquaint Cleveland Browns fans with their proud past. In Redemption in ’64: The Champion Cleveland Browns, John M. Harris offers that and so much more. Harris provides insight into the formation of football’s dominant franchise in the decade following World War II, suggests reasons for its decline by the early 1960s, and explains the unlikely series of events that propelled the Browns back to the top of the football world. Having lost an NFL team when the Rams relocated to Los Angeles following the 1945 season, Cleveland was awarded a franchise for 1946 in the newly formed All-American Football Conference. In the most interesting section of this book, Harris describes how Paul Brown forged the franchise that bore his name. Already a legend from his success as coach at a Massillon, Ohio, high school and at Ohio State University, Brown built his squad primarily with Ohio and midwestern players. He assembled a coaching staff of men he had previously known in Ohio or at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center outside Chicago, where Brown had served as the football coach during the war. An accomplished organizer and innovator, Brown led the team to heights unprecedented in professional football over the next decade: four titles in the All-American Conference followed by three additional championships in the NFL, after the Browns were absorbed into the established league in 1950. Brown treated his players as a disciplined workforce who were expected to follow his instructions without complaint. Accordingly, he called all the plays during a game and ignored any input from the players. He also expected conformity off the field and released players who did not follow his rigid rules. The first generation of Browns players, nearly all war veterans, had accepted that restrictive work environment. But by the late 1950s and early 1960s, a fresh generation of players rebelled at Brown’s restrictions. Compounding the discontent was the failure to capture a conference championship after 1957 and the players’ feeling that Brown’s football schemes had become obsolete, predictable, and easily countered by their opponents. In 1961, a New York advertising executive, Arthur Modell, purchased the Browns and began a strained relationship with the legendary founder. Paul Brown disliked Modell’s appearances at practices and his tendency to associate with the players. Modell was sympathetic to the complaints of disgruntled Browns players, including star running back Jim Brown. After a frustrating 1962 season, Modell fired Paul Brown and replaced him with Blanton Collier. Harris portrays Collier as the driving force that orchestrated a renaissance for the troubled franchise. Collier had been Paul Brown’s key assistant from [End Page 125] the formation of the Browns until the conclusion of the 1954 season, when he had left to become the head coach at the University of Kentucky. He returned to the Browns as an assistant in 1962. During his first season as head coach in 1963, he quickly earned the respect of his players. He incorporated their suggestions into the game plans. He changed the offensive blocking schemes to conform to the talents of Jim Brown. Most significantly, he made Frank Ryan the starting quarterback. A journeyman who combined an NFL career with his pursuit of a doctorate in mathematics from Rice University, Ryan—under Collier’s stewardship—developed into a capable passer and gave the team a viable aerial attack to combine with Jim Brown’s rushing expertise. On December 27, 1964, a cold, windy day in the old stadium along the Lake Erie shore, the Browns defeated the heavily favored Baltimore Colts, 27–0, to earn their first league championship in nine years. Harris suggests that the championship season of 1964 provided “redemption” for four members of the Browns organization. Modell was vindicated for his controversial...

La desconexión sistémica, las miradas centrípetas y sus efectos nostálgicos

Decía Ortega que “la reabsorción de la circunstancia es el destino concreto del hombre”, pero ¿qué sucede cuando esta se percibe tan hostil que torna inviable todo proyecto de vida? En el presente artículo reflexionaremos sobre las posibles respuestas a una circunstancia tal; dónde buscamos refugio y dónde hallamos amparo para seguir creyendo en la posibilidad de un proyecto de vida. Entre otras opciones, el sujeto actual parece tender a buscarlo en el pasado, en la mirada nostálgica a los recuerdos y a la tradición. Pero esto no sucede sin riesgos. En tanto pasado, idealizado, cuando pretende afirmarse, ha de vérselas con esa circunstancia y el choque resultante da expresión a muchos de los actuales conflictos sociales.

A nostalgic look back 40 years after the discovery of receptor-mediated endocytosis.

The concept of receptor-mediated endocytosis was proposed 40 years ago in a seminal review by Joseph Goldstein, Michael Brown, and Richard Anderson. Not only their hypothesis but also the lessons learned that guided their discovery have stood the test of time. I recount some of these herein, while also looking back nostalgically at a forgotten era of scientific communication.

A nostalgic look back at library hi tech(nology)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to reflect on the history of information technology and computers in libraries over the last 50 years.Design/methodology/approachThis paper represents a personal perspective and reflects the views and opinions of the author. It is not intended to be an authoritative reporting of this history.FindingsThis paper suggests that libraries were generally too shortsighted in their application of information technology and computing and submits that there are significant challenges facing libraries today.Research limitations/implicationsNo research was conducted.Practical implicationsThe author identifies several issues that libraries must confront in order that the automated systems being implemented add value for staff members but most importantly for users of library systems and services.Social implicationsThe paper suggests that libraries are facing a number of challenges based on a historical review of how libraries have adopted and adapted to information technology over the past 50 years.Originality/valueThis paper, due to its personal perspective, reflects an original viewpoint.

Teaching with Film and Photography in Introductory Middle East Courses

Some years ago, a colleague from another institution told me how much she was looking forward to screening Nasser 56 in her introductory Middle East history course. Students had just finished reading about the Nasser era, and the screening of Muhamad Fadel's stylish biopic starring the charismatic film star Ahmed Zaki would serve as an enjoyable way to round out the unit. I was surprised, not at my colleague's use of the film in her class, but at her timing. Released in 1996, Nasser 56 is very much the product of the Mubarak era. It offers rich opportunities to discuss the particular challenges Egypt faced in the 1990s and how this nostalgic look back at a triumphant moment in Gamal Abdel Nasser's (Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir's) presidency was marshalled to animate an economically and politically fraught period. Its celebration of ʿAbd al-Nasir as an effective and caring patriarch to the nation could be interpreted as an endorsement of Egypt's authoritarian political system. However, the film is less useful as an explication of ʿAbd al-Nasir as a political figure, or of 1950s Egypt.

Michelle Tea’s Mission District Frontier: Nostalgia, Gentrification, Valencia

In this essay, Gano argues that while Michelle Tea’s Valencia records and celebrates the particular, oppositional social practices of the Mission’s queer community as its members successfully create and claim space in the city, it also presents the reader with a Mission conspicuously cleansed of the racialized struggles of Latinos and people of color more broadly who were, in this very time and place, being pushed out of the neighborhood. Gano situates this novel within two primary, entwined generic contexts: the urban frontier narrative and the “American neoconfessional” memoir. Gano first shows that the novel engages with a kind of frontier nostalgia, most powerfully expressed by Frederick Jackson Turner and commonly deployed in the rhetorics surrounding late twentieth-century gentrification. This particular form of nostalgia simultaneously romanticizes and mourns the passing of a wild and wooly space of opportunity and personal freedom; in Valencia, this is the transitional space of San Francisco’s Mission district in the early 1990s. Michelle, the book’s protagonist, heroically navigates the mean streets of the Mission in her search for love; as is typical of what Leigh Gilmore has called the neoconfessional memoir, Valencia emphasizes the protagonist’s success in overcoming personal hardship while minimizing a broader historical and social contextualization of individual struggle. After all, there are winners and losers on the urban frontier: this nostalgic look back at the exhilarating San Francisco punk dyke scene depends particularly on the overt occlusion of the racial dimensions of gentrification. Drawing on the work of cultural geographer Neil Smith, Gano argues that the whitewashing of the urban frontier in Valencia is not only central to its generic success but is an important element that helps to enable a heroic narrative of gentrification process more broadly.

Intermediality and Hispano-Argentine Experimental Film: Subverting Media, Transgressing Borders with Super 8

In 2010, MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires) held a retrospective of 1960s and 70s Super 8 films by Argentine experimental filmmakers Claudio Caldini and Narcisa Hirsch, in what seemed an anachronistic move or a nostalgic look to a past technology. On the contrary, the rebirth of Super 8 proves critical to understanding the dissolution of the concept of medium brought on by an increasingly intermedial approach to the arts—a dissolution linked to the current status of experimental film as diasporic and post-national. Just as their predecessors in the 1960s, contemporary Argentine filmmakers living in Spain (such as Daniela Cugliandolo) are engaging with Super 8 in increasingly intermedial ways, creating radically hybrid films that blur the analog-digital divide and raise questions about memory, indexicality and transnationalism. By remediating Super 8 footage through digital editing, these young Hispano-Argentine filmmakers signal not film’s imminent death, but rather its (affective) afterlife, its extension into a new experimentalism. Additionally, the Internet has become a home in the diaspora for these filmmakers, a place where the local and global are bridged, where filmic memories might be archived, and where a new community of Argentine filmmakers, regardless of where they may live, can gather and reinterpret what those labels (“Argentine,” “filmmaker”) mean in an increasingly post-national, post-medium age.

Patrick Modiano: a nostalgic look at the past

The author continues to study the modern French literary process, in particular, his attention revolves around the literary work of the Nobel Prize winner of 2014 - Patrick Modiano. Much attention is paid to his nostalgic feelings, which relate to the past, to memory and places, primarily to Paris.In P. Modiano, memory as a dangerous factor haunts the characters, sometimes makes it impossible to feel the full present. Unlike M. Proust, he does not endow his heroes with the happiness of "found time".

Julie Taymor, Sony’s Digital Dream Kids, and the Marxist Labor Theory of Value

Julie Taymor is an exemplary artist who has successfully made the transition from avant-garde director of live theatre in the 1980s to become a Broadway director for Disney Corporation with The Lion King, and, more recently, a film director with Sony’s nostalgic look at the music of the Beatles in Across the Universe. Highlights of her career—spanning the latter half of the twentieth century—offer excellent examples of the changes in the economics of creativity and artistic labor for a case study in cultural and aesthetic values under global capitalism. Through interviews, newspapers and financial annual reports, specific moments in Taymor’s oeuvre reveal key distinctions between cultural and intercultural values, between aesthetic and financial exchange values, and highlight themes and limitations in the legacy of the Marxist labor theory of value.

Disyuntiva entre ciencia universal y ciencia nacional. Vinculación academia-sector productivo durante el desarrollismo

El presente trabajo pretende recuperar los debates, discursos y las acciones que atravesaron los años 60 y 70 en la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales (FCEN) de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina) cuando la definicion de una politica cientifica en torno al desarrollo de la “ciencia nacional” implicaba un posicionamiento respecto del binomio ciencia-ideología. Por medio de una indagación documental, entrevistas y principalmente una revisión bibliográfica procuramos reconstruir escenario de disputa en torno a debates contextuados en la historia, pero que se encuentran pendientes y tensionan las definiciones de política cinetífica. A partir de la falta de vinculación entre producción de conocimiento y desarrollo en la impronta de la FCEN, las críticas al flujo de conocimientos científicos y tecnológicos transferidos desde afuera, y la informalidad en las acciones particualres de vinculación y la firma de los primeros contratos por parte de la FCEN procuramos destacar con aportes originales y documentos inéditos una revelación válida y crítica respecto de la nostálgica mirada sobre la “edad deoro” de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales de la Universidad de Buenos Aires.

Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

The Ambivalence of Socialist Working Women’s Heritage: A Case Study of the Jugoplastika Factory

This article focuses on the segment of socialist modernization connected with the industrial production of plastics, which developed largely as a result of women’s achievements, i.e. as the symbiosis of the early socialist culture of competition, (self-)discipline and (self-)correction of human flaws, and the patriarchal heritage that praised female virtues, such as readiness to sacrifice and to take responsibility for the prosperity of family and community as a whole. As early as the late 1950s, the rivalry between the two collectivist projects – patriarchal and communist – that, each in its own way, disciplined, socialized and used the female workforce and reproductive ability, found a common interest in reinstating the discourses of femininity and domesticity. The transition from penury to relative abundance, alongside the beginning of mass production of domestic appliances and consumer goods, synthetic materials and plastics, was accompanied by the passivization of the woman as a political subject and the commodification of her image in the mass media. This ethnographic study of women employed in the Split factory Jugoplastika (1954–1991) and those working in its plant on the Dalmatian island of Solta (1959–1991) discusses the ambivalent heritage of socialist emancipation. For most women, regular work at the plant fundamentally changed their everyday lives, gender relations within the families, their living standard and the way they perceived their own abilities and competency. Their narratives reveal a selective view and evaluation of their lives in socialism; a lack of critical reflection on their own ideological position within the local and national context, a nostalgic look back at the economic empowerment they experienced and pride in the skill with which they performed their working tasks. These experiences are contrasted with those from the period of dependence on the island’s traditional economies (agriculture, fishing, lime production), as well as with the recent focus on natural resources and tourism, based on the reactivation of the traditional way of life, where women have little opportunity for (self-)affirmation. Key words: women’s heritage, Jugoplastika, socialist working women

The Back Page: My Favorite Lesson: Sliding through Logarithms

One of my favorite lessons involves a nostalgic look at the past, in the years BC (Before Calculators). The properties of logarithms are readily reinforced using an ingenious tool from the past—the slide rule. Developed in the seventeenth century by William Oughtred and others, who built on the emerging work on logarithms by John Napier, the slide rule was used to multiply, divide, and find square roots and cube roots, among other arithmetic operations. Before the advent of the pocket calculator, it was the most commonly used calculation tool in science and engineering.

Wnt/β-catenin and its Diverse Physiological Cell Signaling Pathways in Neurodegenerative and Neuropsychiatric Disorders

Wnt signaling is a fundamental pathway in embryogenesis which is evolutionary conserved from metazoans to humans. Much of our understanding of Wnt signaling events emerged from key developmental studies in drosophila, zebra fish, xenopus, and mice. Considerable data now exists on the role of Wnt signaling beyond these developmental processes and in particular its role in health and disease. The focus of this special issue is on Wnt/β-catenin and its diverse physiological cell signaling pathways in neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders. This special issue is composed of six reviews and two original articles selected to highlight recent advances in the role of Wnt signaling in CNS embryonic development, in adult brain function, in neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, NeuroAIDS, and in gliomas. The finding that β-catenin can translocate to the nucleus where it binds to TCF/LEF transcription factors to regulate target gene expression was a seminal observation that linked β-catenin/LEF to T cell development and differentiation. We also provide a nostalgic look on recent advances in role of Wnts in T cell development and maturation. These reviews highlight the extensive body of work in these thematic areas as well as identify knowledge gaps, where appropriate. Understanding Wnt function under healthy and diseased conditions may provide a therapeutic resource, albeit it a challenging one, in diseases where dysfunctional and/or diminished Wnt signaling is a prominent player in the disease process.

French costume drama of the 1950s: fashioning politics in film

When political and civil unrest threatened France's social order in the 1950s, cinema provided audiences a seemingly unique form of escapism from such troubled times: a nostalgic look back to the France of the nineteenth and earlier centuries, with costume dramas set in the age of Napoleon, the Belle Epoque, the Revolution and further back still to seventeenth-century swashbuckler adventures and tales of mystery and revenge. Film critics, have routinely dismissed this period and this genre of cinema, overlooking its importance in terms of political cultural history. French Costume Drama of the 1950s redresses this balance, exploring a diverse range of films including Guitry's Napoleon (1955), Vernay's Comte de Monte Cristo (1953), and Le Chanois' Les Miserables (1958) to expose the political cultural paradox between nostalgia for a lost past and the drive for modernization.