Writing as if for Life: Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019)

Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-278
Author(s):  
Chris Louttit
Keyword(s):  
Personal History ◽  
History Of ◽  
David Copperfield ◽  
As If

LT: Yes, I think so. You move between and among all those different states. In a way desire, libido, that sort of drive, that energy— without it you probably wouldn’t do anything. But when you have it, when you’re experiencing it very, very strongly, so that it’s pushing you in all sorts of ways, you’re also at its mercy. You can feel content, maybe, in the moment when you’re not feeling that, but you’re also in a static state. You may have a period of equilibrium but you’re always going to head toward a state of disequilibrium. PN: There are several moments in Cast in Doubt where Horace finds himself ‘without or separate from desire’; ‘Indeed I felt blank’, he says (C, 141). LT: Yes—a desire not to desire. I’m working on a story now in which a woman likes to watch pornography. But to say ‘I like this’, or to say ‘I want to see this’, means that those things are not in her life. That’s the implication. That’s why nobody wants to be caught wanting. We’re filled with desires, but you’re not supposed to say that you have them. Because if you have them, it means that you’re lacking. At the ICA panel on Straight Sex, Lynne Segal in November talked about female heterosexual agency in so-called straight sex that everybody agrees is not so straight. Later all I could think about was that implied in the term ‘I desire’ is its own negation, a negation of agency. If you desire then you have a problem. But you can always say, ‘I wanted him and I got him.’ PN: But he wasn’t good enough! LT: Then I wanted someone else! PN: Can we go back to your first book, Haunted Houses? I gather the title comes from a passage in H.D.’s Tribute to Freud where she says that ‘We are all haunted houses.’ At the end of the novel that haunting is described as ‘A bad feeling that someone or something is never going to let you alone’ (H, 206). What kind of someone or something were you trying to get at in this novel? LT: I guess it’s a question of personal history, psychological history, of one’s family, which never leaves you alone. The idea that you can be completely free of that is bogus. Moving from personal history into public history, your present is always inflected by your past. I believe one can move, with a lot of psychological work, further away from the neurosis of the family, but perhaps never completely. PN: There’s certainly a lot of interest in this first book in forms of recollection and repetition. The young women in the novel fear they will repeat the lives of their mothers, and it’s as if the

2005 ◽  
pp. 53-53
Keyword(s):  
Young Women ◽  
Public History ◽  
Personal History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Static State ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Haunted Houses ◽  
As If

Out of the Whirlwind Reconsidered

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Michael Berkowitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Holocaust Literature ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mutual Accountability ◽  
Union College

This article argues that Albert Friedlander’s edited book, Out of the Whirlwind (1968), should be recognised as pathbreaking. Among the first to articulate the idea of ‘Holocaust literature’, it established a body of texts and contextualised these as a way to integrate literature – as well as historical writing, music, art and poetry – as critical to an understanding of the Holocaust. This article also situates Out of the Whirlwind through the personal history of Friedlander and his wife Evelyn, who was a co-creator of the book, his colleagues from Hebrew Union College, and the illustrator, Jacob Landau. It explores the work’s connection to the expansive, humanistic development of progressive Judaism in the United States, Britain and continental Europe. It also underscores Friedlander’s study of Leo Baeck as a means to understand the importance of mutual accountability, not only between Jews, but in Jews’ engagement with the wider world.

Figurines

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Material Concept ◽  
As If

This book concerns figurines from cultures that have no direct links with each other. It explores the category of the figurine as a key material concept in the art history of antiquity through comparative juxtaposition of papers drawn from Chinese, pre-Columbian, and Greco-Roman culture. It extends the study of figurines beyond prehistory into ancient art-historical contexts. At stake are issues of figuration and anthropomorphism, miniaturization and portability, one-off production and replication, substitution and scale. Crucially, figurines are objects of handling by their users as well as their makers—so that, as touchable objects, they engage the viewer in different ways from flat art. Unlike the voyeuristic relationship of viewing a neatly framed pictorial narrative, as if from the outside, the viewer as handler is always potentially and without protection within the narrative of figurines. This is why they have had potential for a potent, even animated, agency in relation to those who use them.

A DEFENSE OF THE CAROLINGIAN “DEFENSE OF MEDICINE”: INTRODUCTION, TRANSLATION, AND NOTES

Traditio ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 87-125
Author(s):  
JOEL L. GAMBLE
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Imitation Of Christ ◽  
History Of ◽  
As If

The “Defense of Medicine” prefaces the Codex Bambergensis Medicinalis 1, a Carolingian collection of medical texts. Some scholars have dismissed the Defense as an incoherent patchwork of quotations. Yet, missing from the literature is an adequate assessment of the Defense's arguments. This present study includes the first English translation accompanied by a complete source commentary, a prerequisite for valid content analysis. When read systematically and with attention to the author's use of sources, the Defense is limpid and cogent. Its first purpose is to defend the compatibility of Christian faith and secular medicine. Key propositions include the following: God made nature good, so the natural sciences are reconcilable with divine learning; scripture respects medicine; God expects the sick to avail of physicians and deserves honor for healings done through physicians. Counter-arguments used by the Defense's opponents, who rejected medicine on principle, can also be reconstructed from the text. Two further purposes of the Defense have hitherto been explored insufficiently. After justifying medicine, the Defense addresses sick patients. It encourages them that illness can be spiritually healthful, an instrument for curing their souls. The Defense then addresses caregivers. It tells them why they should succor the sick, even the poor: not for gain or fame, but in imitation of Christ and as if treating Christ himself, whose image the sick bear. The Defense thus contributes to the history of ideas on medicine, health, sickness, and the ethics of altruistic care.

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