Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 167-172
Author(s):  
Emelia Quinn
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Urgent Necessity

The concluding chapter provides a comprehensive summary of the preceding arguments, reflecting on the pervasive presence of the monstrous vegan trope across the past 200 years of Anglophone literature. The Conclusion asserts that the monstrous vegan is more than simply an interesting facet of literary history. The monstrous vegan offers a vital way of re-conceptualizing veganism in the present moment, a way of thinking through the complex coming together of utopianism and insufficiency that inhere in vegan modes of being in the world. The monstrous vegan provides an apt figuration for such complexities, as a composition of hybrid remains that resists fixed or stable meaning. It provides also a way of thinking about veganism through literature, and acknowledges the discursively constructed nature of ethical identities more broadly. The re-conceptualization of veganism through the monstrous is of urgent necessity in a world under threat from ecological collapse.

Feeling Film: Time, Space, and the Third Image

2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110180
Author(s):  
Luke Hockley
Keyword(s):  
Present Moment ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The World

This article explores what it means to feel film. It does so through an exploration of the interconnections between Bergson, Deleuze, and Jung. Central to the argument is the ontological status of the image in these different philosophical and psychological traditions. In particular, image is seen as an encapsulation of coming into being, or what Bergson terms durée. To feel film is to engage with its therapeutic capacity to bring us into being. In the consulting room and in the cinema, this process is embodied and in some way created either between client and therapist or viewer and screen. The elusive present moment is the site at which the past permeates the present, creating as it does feeling toned entry into the process of becoming. Jung thought of this as central to individuation and Bergson as central to being. Feeling film from this perspective becomes a way of finding ourselves in both the world of the film and in our individual psyche.

Tracing the Trace: Photography, the Index, and the Limits of Representation

Shadow Sites ◽  
2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kitty Hauser
Keyword(s):  
Photographic Plate ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Print History ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Past ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
The World ◽  
The Hours

Photography, as is well known, is the image-making technology which specializes in the freezing of time.1 What kind of historiography, then, might photography be said to embody? How can photography, with its ineluctable connection to the present moment, hope to say anything at all about the past—about either the broad processes of history or even the events of the hours and minutes immediately preceding the second in which the photograph is taken? What kinds of knowledge of the past does photography allow, and what does it disallow? How can photography, that most superficial of media, hope to become a vehicle for the archaeological imagination, with its love of immanent depths? If photographic technology is uniquely equipped to record (visually) the present moment, it is also characterized—famously—by its thorough and indiscriminate recording of surface detail. What it lacks in temporal depth it makes up for in this meticulous rendering of appearances; any surface marked by the effects of action or time can be faithfully recorded by this technology which itself produces the marked surfaces of photographic plate, film, or print. History and the passing of time is available to photography only in the form of its traces, the more-or-less legible marks and remnants it has left behind at any one moment in the world. And it is precisely photography’s own nature as a chemical trace (until digitization, at least) that enables it accurately to reproduce these marks and signs of history. As discussed in Chapter 1, since the nineteenth century (at least) historical sciences such as palaeontology, geology, and archaeology have based themselves upon the reading of such signs of the past in the present, and this broad epistemological model could be extended to include military reconnaissance, forensic science, and art connoisseurship. Photography, fixing these signs in an image, has had—unsurprisingly, perhaps—an important part to play in the historical development of these disciplines. Photography meets the archaeological imagination as soon as photographic images are scanned for historical information in these disciplines and practices. In a sense, however, photography cannot help but represent the world archaeologically, since it cannot help but record its objects and landscapes in a temporal context, the traces of the past scattered across their surfaces. Ruskin enthused over this quality of the new medium.

Afterlife

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
The Past ◽  
Poetic Justice ◽  
Way Of Thinking

From classical antiquity onwards, writing about life after death has consistently served as a situation for questions of literary theory. The locations of the afterlife are hypotheticals and counterfactuals; they are the site of theory itself. Questions about authorship, for instance, have been articulated through the myth of Orpheus (in the forms recorded by Virgil and Ovid). The story of Orpheus tells of a poet who must go into the underworld to find the material for a tale of survivorship and loss, raising questions about the sources of creative inspiration, the art of trauma, and the suffering of the authentic artist. Dante’s imagined structures of an afterlife, in which punishments fit crimes with an apt poetic justice, have similarly been enlisted into one of the most important theoretical debates of the 20th century between formalists and historicists. The afterlife as a supplement to life’s time has also been used as a way of thinking about temporality and the implications for narrative as a literary mode that works with and through the philosophy of time. One of the most influential aspects of the literature of the afterlife to resonate in literary theory has been the ghost story. In its greatest manifestations, from Hamlet to The Turn of the Screw to Beloved, the ghost story forces its readers to acknowledge those elements of the past that refuse to be laid to rest, and it has therefore served as a vehicle for psychoanalytic questions about how processes of individual or collective memory are depicted in literary texts. In poststructuralist theory, the notion of the hauntological has also built its concepts in dialogue with earlier literary ghosts and become a way of thinking about language and its uncanny slippage between presence and absence. Subsequent critical work continued to develop hauntology into a way of understanding temporality and cultural history. Finally, the notion of prosopopoeia, or the voicing of the dead through writing, is perhaps the most far-reaching way of understanding the prevalence of dead voices as a literary trope, which reflects something of the processes of reading and writing themselves. The afterlife has therefore been a crucial source of generative metaphors for literary theory, as well as a topic and setting with an important literary history.

European Literature: Simply a Higher Degree of Universality?

2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pascale Casanova
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The Body ◽  
European Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Europe ◽  
Literary Devices

One of the most difficult and uncertain areas of research offered the historian of literature today is the attempt to define ‘European literature’ as a corpus and an object of literary and/or historical analysis. The various efforts of the past few years – in the form of anthologies as well as histories of literature – usually remain torn between a unitary presupposition that seems to be the only acceptable political-historical way of justifying the body of European literature and an irreducibly composite – not to say heterogeneous – reality that is not amenable to the representations of Europe as reduced to this superficial unity. If we are to reflect on the modalities and specificities of such a historical undertaking – which has so few equivalents in the world that it is all the harder to model – and shake off political models and representations, it seems to me that we need to work from another hypothesis. One of the few trans-historical features that constitutes Europe, in effect, one of the only forms of both political and cultural unity – one that is paradoxical but genuine – that makes of Europe a coherent whole, is none other than the conflicts3 and competitions that pitted Europe’s national literary spaces against one another in relentless and ongoing rivalry. Starting from this hypothesis, we would then have to postulate that, contrary to commonly accepted political representations, the only possible literary history of Europe would be the story of the rivalries, struggles and power relations between these national literatures. As a consequence, rather than a unity that remains if not problematic at least far from being achieved, it would no doubt be better to speak of an ongoing literary unification of Europe, in other words a process that occurs, occurred and is still occurring – paradoxically – through these struggles. This upside-down history would trace the models and counter-models, the powers and dependences, the impositions and the resistances, the linguistic rivalries, the literary devices and genres regarded as weapons in these specific, perpetual and merciless struggles. It would be the history of literary antagonisms, battles and revolts.

Presentism

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Joshua Mozersky
Keyword(s):  
Present Moment ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World

Is there more to the world than the present moment? This question is one of the most basic one can ask about time. This chapter discusses presentism: the doctrine that everything is present—that, and only that, which is present exists—reviewing a quite different attack on presentism. Called the “truth-maker” or “grounding” objection, the idea is that the presentist's temporally impoverished resources are insufficient to allow him or her to say that statements about the past or future are truth-evaluable. So the presentist faces a quandary: the claim is true, yet there is nothing that makes it so.

scholarly journals The times and spaces of transplantation: queercrip histories as futurities

2021 ◽  
pp. medhum-2021-012199
Author(s):  
Donna McCormack
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Multiple Selves ◽  
Environmental Disasters ◽  
The Past ◽  
Loss Of Self ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Times

With a focus on Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu, this article explores how transplantation is part of the ongoing transformation of being in a body that is of the world. That is, it examines how we may require other ways of thinking bodies as constituted by histories, spaces and times that may be ignored in the biomedical arena. The Tiger Flu, I argue, calls for an intra- and inter-connected way of thinking how we treat bodies, and thereby ways of working with bodies affected by environmental disasters (both acute and ongoing capitalist and colonial projects), multiple selves and time as more than linear. I turn to queercrip as a way of defying a curative imaginary that dominates transplantation and in so doing examine the colonial, capitalist violence of present day living. I move through Eve Hayward’s and Karen Barad’s work to examine how the cut of transplantation is a transformation, as integral to the ongoing experience of having a body in the world and yet potentially unique in its force of bringing inter- and intra-relatedness to the fore of one’s existence. Rather than sick or cured, I argue that transplantation is a transformation that captures our bodily changes, how the environment constitutes the self, how parts may feel integral to the self or easily disposed of, how viscera may tie us to others, and how the future may only be forged through a re-turn to the past (of the donor and a pre-transplant self). Transplantation is not about loss of self or gaining of an other, but rather about rendering apparent our multispecies, multiworld ties, and thus how we are bound by the histories we forge and the futures we re-member.

scholarly journals (Post)colonial Chronopolitics and Mapping the Depth of Local Time(s) in Global Literary Studies: an Itinerary to Guinea-Bissau

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-83
Author(s):  
Ewa Lukaszyk ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Local Time ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Past ◽  
Guinea Bissau ◽  
Sao Tome And Principe ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Belonging ◽  
Time Awareness

This article is an attempt at deconstructing the chronopolitics inherent to the (post)colonial way of thinking about the world. As it is argued, what should replace it is a vision of multiple, overlying temporalities and forms of time awareness, reaching deeper than a literary history reduced to the cycle of colonisation – decolonisation – postcolonial becoming, originating from just a single maritime event: the European exploration and conquest of the world. The essay brings forth a choice of interwoven examples illustrating the variability of local time depths, associated with a plurality of origins, narrations, forms of awareness and cultivation of cultural belonging. It shows the lack of coincidence between the dominant and non-dominant perceptions of the past in such places as the archipelagos of São Tomé and Príncipe, Maldives, the Gambia, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Their ways of living the global time, as well as embodying significant texts (rather than simply preserving them) stretch far beyond the frameworks created by competing colonial empires, such as the Portuguese or the British one.

STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN. A MIRACLE IN THE BUDDHIST PILGRIM’S WORLD OUTLOOK (5TH - 7TH CENTURIES)

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-48
Author(s):  
Natalia V. Aleksandrova ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
World Outlook ◽  
Decisive Importance ◽  
Sacred Objects ◽  
The World ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Remote Past

Miracle tales are often found in the texts of Chinese pilgrims who visited India in the 5th – 7th centuries. The role of “miracle” in the world outlook and the text of Buddhist pilgrim looks also structurally determined. One can trace a certain consistency in “embedding” stories of miracles into the overall structure of the text. Being associated with various sacred objects these stories form stable relationships with them and each category of shrines (stupa, statue, cave, etc.) has its own stories about the miracles. The obvious function of “miracles” marking the places of events of the sacred past is to “overcome” the length of time which separates past and present, what looks typical for mythological way of thinking. Miraculous phenomena connect the devotee with the sacred time of the tradition, include him in the attraction zone of deeds of the remote past, make it possible to tangibly feel an impact of the past. In that impact, the degree of holiness of the doer of ancient deeds recognized by the adept as well as the degree of his approach to a world of the true, are of decisive importance in this influence. The possession of “supernatural powers” (ṛddhi) is one of the topics on which attention is also focused in the narratives of the pilgrim.

Memory, Migration and Literature

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 509-522
Author(s):  
Svend Erik Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Huge Amount ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Globalized World

More often than not, memory is taken to be the storehouse of past experiences situated in a local context. However, recent theories have moved the focus to the process of memory which, in any present moment, allows the past, collective or individual, to emerge as a construction that works as a strong driving force of identity formation. In this perspective the memory process selects features of the past and turns them into more or less coherent structures, which then will have to be checked out with others in order for them to exercise their role as valid interpretations of the past and building blocks of present and future identity. Memories are therefore dialogical phenomena shaped by discussion, or more broadly by exchanges in various media, concerning the selected features, their configuration and the identities they promote. Today, the globalized flows of migration open up a new set of problems for the understanding of memories and their functions. When migration becomes a dominant experience across the globe, the concepts of locality and of local experiences changes and raise a new question: can we imagine and attach any meaning to globalized memories? Today, a huge amount of literatures from all corners of the world takes issue with this question, the so-called literatures of migration, where the literary imagination suggests answers to the open question of what memory might mean in a globalized world. To address this question, the Greek-Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas’ novel The Slap (2008) and the Australian context will serve as my point of reference.

A basic introduction to image processing using NIH-Image as a model

1994 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 392-393
Author(s):  
John Mansfield
Keyword(s):  
Image Processing ◽  
Digital Image ◽  
Image Acquisition ◽  
Digital Instrument ◽  
Novice User ◽  
Nih Image ◽  
The Past ◽  
Digital World ◽  
The World ◽  
Instrument Control

Advances in camera technology and digital instrument control have meant that in modern microscopy, the image that was, in the past, typically recorded on a piece of film is now recorded directly into a computer. The transfer of the analog image seen in the microscope to the digitized picture in the computer does not mean, however, that the problems associated with recording images, analyzing them, and preparing them for publication, have all miraculously been solved. The steps involved in the recording an image to film remain largely intact in the digital world. The image is recorded, prepared for measurement in some way, analyzed, and then prepared for presentation.Digital image acquisition schemes are largely the realm of the microscope manufacturers, however, there are also a multitude of “homemade” acquisition systems in microscope laboratories around the world. It is not the mission of this tutorial to deal with the various acquisition systems, but rather to introduce the novice user to rudimentary image processing and measurement.

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