Israel Potter; or, Hither and Thither History

2018 ◽  
pp. 154-181
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Insko
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Israel Potter ◽  
Central Claim

The present is social: this is the central claim of Chapter 5, the book’s final chapter, which reads Herman Melville’s novel Israel Potter (1855). Formally peculiar, the novel’s erratic telling of history thus mirrors Israel’s wanderings. Both are, as the narrator says at one point of Israel, “repeatedly and rapidly …planted, torn up, transplanted, and dropped again, hither and thither.” My reading proceeds by way of an exploration of the novel’s varying uses of narrative prolepsis, its movement away from a foreshadowing that knows that is certain, and toward one that doesn’t, but that hopes. Alongside its critique of nationalist posturing, Israel Potter imagines the conditions for a kind of hopefulness, which it glimpses in forms of sociality that reside in an unspecified, perhaps even queer, “as yet.” In doing so, it anticipates the possibility of a renovated and renewed social world.

Reading Beyond the Code

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Communicative Acts ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Code Model ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Central Claim

This book explores the value for literary studies of relevance theory, an inferential approach to communication in which the expression and recognition of intentions plays a major role. Drawing on a wide range of examples from lyric poetry and the novel, nine of the ten chapters are written by literary specialists and use relevance theory both as an overall framework and as a resource for detailed analysis. The final chapter, written by the co-founder of relevance theory, reviews the issues addressed by the volume and explores their implications for cognitive theories of how communicative acts are interpreted in context. Originally designed to explain how people understand each other in everyday face-to-face exchanges, relevance theory—described in an early review by a literary scholar as ‘the makings of a radically new theory of communication, the first since Aristotle’s’—sheds light on the whole spectrum of human modes of communication, including literature in the broadest sense. Reading Beyond the Code is unique in using relevance theory as a prime resource for literary study, and is also the first to apply the model to a range of phenomena widely seen as supporting an ‘embodied’ conception of cognition and language where sensorimotor processes play a key role. This broadened perspective serves to enhance the value for literary studies of the central claim of relevance theory: that the ‘code model’ is fundamentally inadequate to account for human communication, and in particular for the modes of communication that are proper to literature.

Responsibilities

2020 ◽  
pp. 126-156
Author(s):  
Rosie Lavan
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Conor Cruise ◽  
University Setting

Rooted in the poetry and prose of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and drawing heavily on unpublished material, this final chapter, Chapter 5, finds Seamus Heaney in another university setting, this time in Oxford. Taking its cue from Heaney’s own interest, in The Redress of Poetry, in the question of responsibility, it examines the complex intersections of the imagination with the challenges of contemporary society and the burden of history. It brings Heaney into dialogue with figures as diverse as Coleridge, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and Raymond Williams, and it charts the development of two key poems, ‘The Diviner’ and ‘Markings’, in order to illuminate his various expressions of the fraught but necessary interactions between the private artist and their social world.

Why Horror Seduces

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Clasen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Theoretical Account ◽  
Horror Literature ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Central Claim

This book explains the appeals and functions of horror entertainment by drawing on cutting-edge findings in the evolutionary social sciences, showing how the horror genre is a product of human nature. It is the first book to integrate the study of horror with the sciences of human nature and to offer a sustained analysis of the ways in which our evolutionary heritage constrains and directs horror in literature, film, and computer games. The central claim of the book is that horror entertainment works by targeting ancient and deeply conserved neurobiological mechanisms. We are attracted to horrifying entertainment because we have an adaptive tendency to find pleasure in make-believe that allows us to experience negative emotions at high levels of intensity within a safe context. This book offers a detailed theoretical account of the biological underpinnings of the paradoxically and perennially popular genre of horror. The theoretical account is bolstered with original analyses of a range of well-known and popular modern American works of horror literature and horror film to illustrate how these works target evolved cognitive and emotional mechanisms to fulfill their function of absorbing, engaging, and horrifying audiences: I Am Legend (1954), Rosemary’s Baby (1967), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Jaws (1975), The Shining (1977), Halloween (1978), and The Blair Witch Project (1999). The book’s final chapter expands the discussion to include interactive, highly immersive horror experiences offered through horror video games and commercial haunted attractions.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kent Eaton
Keyword(s):  
Variable Structure ◽  
Institutional Capacity ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Ideological Conflict ◽  
National Governments ◽  
Causal Variable ◽  
Central Claim ◽  
Structural Significance

The final chapter concludes the book in two ways. First, it summarizes the central claim that structural significance, institutional capacity, and coalitional dynamics together explain whether subnational officials can advance successful subnational policy challenges. This part of the chapter also assesses the more general theoretical implications of the research findings for each causal variable (structure, capacity, and coalitions). Whereas most of the book examines how decentralization has empowered territorial actors to shape ideological conflicts, the second half of the conclusion reverses this focus by exploring how ideological conflict over the market also shapes territorial outcomes, most significantly through the redistribution of authority and resources between levels of government. The chapter ends with representative examples of recentralization in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru; these show how ideological conflict over the market has led national governments in each country to recentralize authority and resources in the attempt to undercut subnational policy challenges.

The Contribution of Enrique Pichon-Rivière: Comparisons with His European Contemporaries and with Modern Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Scharff
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
George Herbert Mead ◽  
Analytic Thinking ◽  
Family Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Original Family ◽  
Kurt Lewin ◽  
Social Applications

Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a pioneer of psychoanalysis, worked and wrote in Argentina in the mid-twentieth century, but his work has not so far been translated into English. From the beginning, Pichon-Rivière understood the social applications of analytic thinking, centring his ideas on "el vinculo", which is generally translated as "the link", but could equally be translated as "the bond". The concept that each individual is born into human social links, is shaped by them, and simultaneously contributes to them inextricably ties people's inner worlds to the social world of family and society in which they live. Pichon-Rivière believed, therefore, that family analysis and group and institutional applications of analysis were as important as individual psychoanalysis. Many of the original family and couple therapists from whom our field learned trained with him. Because his work was centred in the analytic writings of Fairbairn and Klein, as well as those of the anthropologist George Herbert Mead and the field theory of Kurt Lewin, his original ideas have important things to teach us today. This article summarises some of his central ideas such as the link, spiral process, the single determinate illness, and the process of therapy.

The United States and the Iranian Nuclear Programme

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Hurst
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nixon Administration ◽  
Comprehensive Plan ◽  
The Us ◽  
Nuclear Issue ◽  
The Relationship

The United States, Iran and the Bomb provides the first comprehensive analysis of the US-Iranian nuclear relationship from its origins through to the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015. Starting with the Nixon administration in the 1970s, it analyses the policies of successive US administrations toward the Iranian nuclear programme. Emphasizing the centrality of domestic politics to decision-making on both sides, it offers both an explanation of the evolution of the relationship and a critique of successive US administrations' efforts to halt the Iranian nuclear programme, with neither coercive measures nor inducements effectively applied. The book further argues that factional politics inside Iran played a crucial role in Iranian nuclear decision-making and that American policy tended to reinforce the position of Iranian hardliners and undermine that of those who were prepared to compromise on the nuclear issue. In the final chapter it demonstrates how President Obama's alterations to American strategy, accompanied by shifts in Iranian domestic politics, finally brought about the signing of the JCPOA in 2015.

Variations of the Mixed Discourse

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Jaquet
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
States Of Mind ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Shed Light

Lastly, on the basis of this definition, the author shows how affects shed light on the body-mind relationship and provide an opportunity to produce a mixed discourse that focuses, by turns, on the mental, physical, or psychophysical aspect of affect. The final chapter has two parts: – An analysis of the three categories of affects: mental, physical, and psychophysical – An examination of the variations of Spinoza’s discourse Some affects, such as satisfaction of the mind, are presented as mental, even though they are correlated with the body. Others, such as pain or pleasure, cheerfulness (hilaritas) or melancholy are mainly rooted in the body, even though the mind forms an idea of them. Still others are psychophysical, such as humility or pride, which are expressed at once as bodily postures and states of mind. These affects thus show us how the mind and body are united, all the while expressing themselves differently and specifically, according to their own modalities.

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