David Mitchell’s Inefficiency

2021 ◽  
pp. 149-183
Author(s):  
Thom Dancer
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
The Future ◽  
Massive Scale ◽  
And Function ◽  
Prior State ◽  
Cultural Force

David Mitchell’s fiction provides an opportunity to reconsider the claims of modesty in the context of globalization. This chapter draws upon the arguments of the previous ones to put critical modesty to its most difficult test. Are minor achievements enough given the massive scale of planetary life and of urgent global problems facing humanity, not the least of which is environmental ruin? I argue that Mitchell’s novels directly face the problems of scaling that cast into doubt the place and function of the novel as a relevant cultural force in the twenty-first century and beyond. Mitchell’s work helps us to reconcile realism as a kind of modest speculation. Where the novel has long been understood as a form that easily scales from the local to the global, Mitchell emphasizes the discontinuity afforded by novelistic thinking. The efficient causality that has subtended literary realism aims to retroactively recreate the events that lead inevitably from the past to the future. Mitchell’s formal investment in discontinuity resists the tyranny of the inevitable by narrating moments of bifurcation in which a new possibility for action suddenly and unexpectedly emerges. Thus, his novels adopt an inefficient causality that give expression to the feeling that things might be different than they are, that inevitability (optimistic or pessimistic) is a dangerous trap. The challenge that Mitchell poses for himself and other novelists is to imagine a disposition modest enough to nurture and shepherd into being these moments of bifurcation when, by definition, there is nothing in the prior state that predicts them.

Gaining a Past, Losing a Future: Web 2.0 and Internet Historicity

2012 ◽  
Vol 143 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Allen
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Web 2.0 ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Web 3.0 ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Or Practice ◽  
The Web

This article explore how, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the internet became historicised, meaning that its public existence is now explicitly framed through a narrative that locates the current internet in relation to a past internet. Up until this time, in popular culture, the internet had been understood mainly as the future-in-the-present, as if it had no past. The internet might have had a history, but it had no historicity. That has changed because of Web 2.0, and the effects of Tim O'Reilly's creative marketing of that label. Web 2.0, in this sense not a technology or practice but the marker of a discourse of historical interpretation dependent on versions, created for us a second version of the web, different from (and yet connected to) that of the 1990s. This historicising moment aligned the past and future in ways suitable to those who might control or manage the present. And while Web 3.0, implied or real, suggests the ‘future’, it also marks out a loss of other times, or the possibility of alterity understood through temporality.

The novel of the Greek civil war in the twenty-first century: (post)memory and the weight of the past

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-318
Author(s):  
Vassiliki Kaisidou
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ethical Commitment ◽  
Literary Market ◽  
Twenty First Century

Between the years 2000 and 2015 novels on the Greek civil war (1946–9) flooded the Greek literary market. This raises important questions as to why the burden of the civil conflict weighs heavily upon generations with no experiential connection to these events. This article begins by offering an interpretation for the literary upsurge of the civil war since the 2000s. Then it uses Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory to illustrate the authors’ ethical commitment to ‘unsilence’ and redress the past through the use of archival evidence and testimonies. The case studies of ThomasSkassis’Ελληνικόσταυρόλɛξο (2000), Nikos Davvetas’ Λɛυκή πɛτσέτα στορινγκ (2006),and SophiaNikolaidou's Χορɛύουνοιɛλέφαντɛς(2012) serve to illustrate my argument.

The promotion of peace and humanity in the twenty-first century — What role for the Red Cross and the Red Crescent?

1994 ◽  
Vol 34 (303) ◽  
pp. 595-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques Moreillon
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Impossible Task ◽  
Twenty First Century

Dealing with a question of this breadth may seem an impossible task. Furthermore, it would certainly not be intelligent to claim to have found the solution to the problem of peace and humanity. The first mark of intelligence is precisely knowing one's limits, and it is clear that we can only try to guess at potential answers to such a vast question; to do this we would need to look at the past so as better to understand the future.

scholarly journals Leading Beautifully: The Creative Economy and Beyond

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-39
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Adler
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Creative Economy ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Passionate Commitment ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Traditional Structures ◽  
First Time

<p align="right">Only by investing in the artistry of our humanity <br/>will we create a peaceful, prosperous planet</p> “These times are riven with anxiety and uncertainty” asserts John O’Donohue.<sup>1</sup> “In the hearts of people some natural ease has been broken. … Our trust in the future has lost its innocence. We know now that anything can happen. … The traditional structures of shelter are shaking, their foundations revealed to be no longer stone but sand. We are suddenly thrown back on ourselves. At first, it sounds completely naïve to suggest that now might be the time to invoke beauty. Yet this is exactly what … [we claim]. Why? Because there is nowhere else to turn and we are desperate; furthermore, it is because we have so disastrously neglected the Beautiful that we now find ourselves in such a terrible crisis.”<sup>2</sup> Twenty‑first century society yearns for a leadership of possibility, a leadership based more on hope, aspiration, innovation, and beauty than on the replication of historical patterns of constrained pragmatism. Luckily, such a leadership is possible today. For the first time in history, leaders can work backward from their aspirations and imagination rather than forward from the past.<sup>3</sup> “The gap between what people can imagine and what they can accomplish has never been smaller.”<sup>4</sup> Responding to the challenges and yearnings of the twenty‑first century demands anticipatory creativity. Designing options worthy of implementation calls for levels of inspiration, creativity, and a passionate commitment to beauty that, until recently, have been more the province of artists and artistic processes than the domain of most managers. The time is right for the artistic imagination of each of us to co‑create the leadership that the world most needs and deserves.

Investing in Fictions: Faith, Abstraction and Materiality in Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-281
Author(s):  
Eoin Flannery
Keyword(s):  
Financial Burden ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Credit Crisis ◽  
Celtic Tiger ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Finance Capitalism ◽  
The Relationship

One of the central contentions of this essay is that Paul Murray's novel, The Mark and the Void, addresses questions of faith, fictionality, literary form and the relationship between abstract finance and material sociality. The novel engages with and exposes the arcane vernaculars of finance capitalism, while at the same time registering the inalienable materiality of their effects in terms of impoverishment, displacement and terminal indebtedness. As we shall detail, for Murray, the purpose of ‘finance fiction’ is neither to confirm nor further mythologize the transcendental fictionality of high finance. In crafting such a literary critique of Celtic Tiger Ireland, Murray invokes an increasingly common trope – the zombie. In doing so, The Mark and The Void partakes of a figuration that acknowledges ‘the deadliness of financialized debt and credit crisis’. In a sense, enlisting the metonymic figure of the zombie speaks to the undead nature of indebtedness, and it is an apt figuration of the past that continues to haunt in the present and into the future. As the narrative suggests, debt is the financial burden that refuses to die, and the literary zombie represents communities of Celtic Tiger debtors metonymically.

‘We will change’

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-412
Author(s):  
Christy Tidwell
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural World ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
Glacier Change ◽  
New Combinations ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Western Values ◽  
The Many

One of the many threats accompanying climate change is that of deadly viruses being revived or uncovered when the permafrost melts, as in the 2016 uncovering of anthrax in Siberia. Blood Glacier (Kren Austria 2013, originally Blutgletscher) addresses this in creature feature form, telling the story of something nasty emerging from the natural world (in this case, microorganisms emerging from a melting glacier) to threaten humans and human superiority. Blood Glacier reflects a larger twenty-first-century creature-feature trope of prehistoric creatures emerging from thawing ice as well as an expansion of ecohorror beyond familiar nature-strikes-back anxieties or fears of humans becoming food for animals. Instead, the microorganisms discovered within the glacier change people (and other animals), causing mutations and leading to the creation of new combinations of species. The film juxtaposes these environmental concerns with one character’s past abortion, which comes to represent another, more personal, challenge to Western values. As a result, the film asks questions not addressed by other similar creature features: Which life has value? What does the future look like, and who decides that? The film therefore addresses the ethics of bringing life into being, gesturing toward the responsibilities inherent both in bearing children and in choosing not to bear children. These questions are addressed in the end of the film, with the birth and then adoption of a mutant baby. By bringing these issues of reproduction and environmental futures together, the film asks us to consider how our past and current choices help shape the future - both personal and planetary. The conclusion of the film serves in part to reinforce heteronormativity and reproductive futurism, both of which stake the future on the replication of the past through traditional relationships and by reproducing ourselves and our values through our children. Simultaneously, however, it gestures toward new possibilities for queer, nonhuman, mutant kinship and care.

Cervantine Criticism since 2000 and into the Future

2021 ◽  
pp. 647-680
Author(s):  
Bruce R. Burningham
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Current Century ◽  
Critical Perspectives ◽  
The Way

The past two decades have seen an explosion in Cervantes scholarship. Indeed, it would perhaps not be an exaggeration to suggest that the last twenty years arguably represent the Golden Age of Cervantes criticism: slightly more than half of scholarly works written since 1888 have been published during the last two decades. In other words, during the last twenty years, the body of Cervantes knowledge has more than doubled, greatly expanding our variety of critical perspectives along the way. This chapter discusses the ‘across the centuries’ trend resulting from the various anniversary celebrations related to Cervantes, the ‘Cervantes and the Americas’ collections, Cervantes’s treatment of Islam, and the modernity of the novel, among other trends that have expanded Cervantine criticism since the turn of the current century.

The Global Religious Configuration. Realities and Forecasts

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-178
Author(s):  
Gabriel-Viorel Gârdan
Keyword(s):  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Future ◽  
Religious Image ◽  
The Church ◽  
Global Population

"Based on recent research, we aim to present the current global religious configu-ration, the religious demographic evolution during the twentieth century, and the main trends for the first half of the twenty-first century. From a methodological point of view, we chose to present only those religions that register a share of 1% of the global population, among which we paid increased attention only to Christiani-ty and Islam. The only exception to this rule is Judaism, the reason for advancing this exception being the desire to compare the evolution of the three religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The purpose of this presentation is to provide a more nuanced picture of the geographical distribution of each religion and, on the other hand, to illustrate the global religious diversity. From a chronological point of view, the landmarks are the years 1910, 1970, 2000, 2010, 2014, 2030, and 2050. The data collected for the years 1910–2014 is the basis of the forecasts for the years 2030 and 2050. The former ones describe the religious realities, while the latter two open up perspectives on the trends in religious demography. We would like to draw attention to the potential of religious demography in deciphering the religious image of the world in which we live. On the other hand, we consider that exploring the global religious profile and the way it evolves, as well as the factors that bring forth change, is not only an opportunity generated by the organic development of religious demography research but also a necessity for rethinking the pastoral and missionary strategies of the church. Religious demographics provide valuable data about the past together with nuanced knowledge of the present, helping us anticipate and even influence the future. The church, at any time, assumes the past, manages the present, and prepares the future. From this perspective, we believe that a strategic pastoral thinking, regardless of religion or denomination, can be organically outlined, starting from the data provided through the means available to religious demography. While religious demography provides specific data, it does not explain the phenomena behind this data; it notes and invites questions, debates, and explanations about religious affiliation, religiosity, and religious behaviour. Keywords: religious, demography, agnostics, atheists, Christians, Muslims."

Old Ideas for New Times: Radical History in International Political Economy

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory P. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
State System ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
The Future ◽  
Radical History ◽  
Radical Political Economy

AbstractThis article suggests that the field of international political economy (IPE) would benefit from greater engagement with radicalism. Radical political economy (RPE) continues to be a relevant counterweight to moderate forms ofIPE. Radicalism is portrayed in this work as a vision of history, distinct from static and evolutionary interpretations of the past. And, like their moderate counterparts, radicals are divided as to what will happen in the twenty-first century. Some scholars believe that the capitalist nation-state system will stabilize, while others predict it will transform into some type of post-capitalist and post-national system. By pairing visions of history with expectations for the future, this article offers a typology of six distinct world-historical opinions. It concludes that radicals offer an important alternative perspective to the writings of moderates and yet, in being split about the future, are remarkably similar to others wrestling with questions of transformation.

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